“The inescapable truth is that a language both binds and excludes,” she writes, and she wanted to bind herself to the new. “This is, for me, where all the heat and light can be found.” (As if to underscore her rejection of black-and-white distinctions, the word šedivý, in Czech, means “gray.”) When it comes to our identities and our sense of belonging, language is the natural place to start.Īs a child trying to fit in with her new surroundings, Sedivy quickly forgot much of her Czech. “I’m drawn, like a moth flinging its body against a light bulb, to in-between spaces and intersections, to hyphenations, to situations in which there will always be two sides,” she writes. For these writers the forgetting, remembering, and relearning of language is one of the most binding and alienating elements of their immigration experience: binding because of the pressing requirement both writers felt to achieve fluency in English, and alienating because of all the ways their native languages continued to hold claims over them, marking them out from peers and neighbors.Ī childhood between two places has led Sedivy to feel most comfortable among junctures and transitional spaces her book describes how she found herself discontented with the study of pure linguistics and with the study of psychology, but at home in a field that borders the two disciplines, able to harvest the insights of both. De Meijer moved from the Netherlands at the age of twelve. She writes of the “clutter” of languages that had introduced themselves before she began to learn English at school: German in preschool, Italian with friends, French in the streets of Montreal. Sedivy, who now teaches in Calgary, arrived in Canada before the age of six from Czechoslovakia via Austria and Italy. Both writers moved to Canada as children, and though their books are very different, both examine their complicated relationship with their adopted language: the gifts of bilingualism, but also the visceral sense of unmooring they experienced as each lost touch with what Ghita El Khayat called the “milk language”-the language of lullabies and nursery rhymes. At the same time, I had the strong sense that, were I permitted to stay on in Italy a few years, speaking only Italian, it would be English words that would begin to recede through lack of use-not that they’d be entirely forgotten, but they’d be overlain with Italian constructions and vocabulary used more often in day-to-day life.įor my trip to Trieste I had packed perhaps the most appropriate reading material possible for someone living and moving between two languages- Memory Speaks by the academic psycholinguist Julie Sedivy and Alfabet/Alphabet by the poet Sadiqa de Meijer. It had been more than two years since I’d last been in the country, and the Italian I use at home was too domestic to explore the concepts of the book I was there to discuss. I heard myself utter the phrase “that plastic that goes around electric wires” instead of the Italian word for “insulation,” then “that mythical island that sunk” instead of the word for Atlantis. Conditional tenses slipped away from me, and circumlocutions crept in. I’d rehearsed what I would say, but as my presentation progressed I began to lose words, phrases, grammatical constructions. There was a ripple of indulgent laughter from the audience, who also seemed relieved after two years of Covid to have foreigners return to speak in their town-even a town renowned for its international research institutes and its proximity to borders. I learned Italian from my wife, who grew up in Lombardy, and my presentation at the festival began with an apology for my accent-a bizarre amalgam of the flattened vowels of Lombard dialect with the rolled r’s of my native Scots.
#Canon image garden where does it save images free
After World War II it was a free zone administered by the US and UK, and rejoined Italy only in 1954. The city was “Tergeste” to the Romans, founded on the site of a former settlement as a fortress against Illyria, and it has been variously dominated by Frankish, Venetian, Balkan, Italian, and Austrian influences in the centuries since. At its center is an old Austro-Hungarian port some of its street signs are bilingual, in Italian and Slovenian.
A few weeks ago I was invited to the book festival in Trieste, in northeast Italy, a city of divided loyalties and complicated history.