The Bern Books - 2nd Installment

This story starts with a child about to lose his mother tongue, never to find it again.

It starts with a kid. A five year old kid in the entrance of a school, a Chinese public school. Tossed at the fence of this school completely alone and about to face fears he didn’t know he had, but most definitely did. Some hours later this kid is in a classroom, a classroom where his image differs from that of everyone else around him, he is now the image of an unbindable difference between himself and all of his classmates. In the middle of the day -during a class- this kid will get up and walk to the middle of the classroom and will try to communicate something to a teacher that cant understand him, pointing his hand to his pants in an effort to make his silenced need be heard so he can find the fastest route to the closest W.C. around. Fast forward a year and this child has managed to communicate with everyone around him, peeing and shitting his pants all the way to an unimaginable fluency, unfearing his body and transforming it into that of a Chinese fluent Venezuelan kid. He is at that moment an image of a Chinese speaking Venezuelan mutant.

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Language binds after it separates, language makes strangers. Language builds the solid rock of strangeness. Language makes community without assuring it.

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Image binds best, image binds harder.

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This story continues with a child about to lose his father tongue, ever to look for it again.

It continues with the same kid. A nine year old kid in the entrance of a school, a Venezuelan private school. Tossed at the door of this school and about to face fears he never thought he would have to face again, but most definitely will. Unable to transform himself back from a Chinese alien into a normal Venezuelan kid that doesn't know how to speak his language, the never ending image of an outsider in his own land. A foreigner in his territory forced to learn the rules of a language spoke at home, but not yet embraced as his own. A language adopted by necessity, the ever chasing need to fit in where one -wishes to- belong(s). Some days later in a corner of the classroom he hears the laughter of his entire classmates laughing out loud his -stolen- diary entries in a language they couldn't understand.

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Language names while discriminating, language chews apart what it wants to digest and incorporate into its system.

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Image shows, image disappears.

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At ten I went back to a country that would not recognize me as its own just in time to be recognized by the one that adopted me, Language cradles and it shakes; at twelve I made myself a mask and let other people decide my name since it was easier for all of us involved. I got my name back some eight years ago, sadly not everyone involved abides to it.

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The kid is now 40 years old, he is at the entrance of a language school. Tossed by himself at the door of this school and about to face fears he knows he built himself to endure. Besides himself and the teacher, everyone else in the classroom shares the same language: a community that comes and goes together trying to learn a language that doesn't promise anything, but -at least to them- it's free[1]. Yet again the isolation, the palpable solitude felt while being squeezed between two communities that don't share a language, but share the goal of mutual inclusion; the constant noise created by the language he is trying to learn and the other two that already live in his head as they bounce off of the dialect that makes his entire context; the learning curve driven fast, faster, Tokyo drifted to a safety space where a community unbound by language is built before another rift is made, cracked at the center of his efforts to blend in while holding his name and self altogether. This child -this 40 year old child with a beard- just moved into a country that is officially fluent in 4 languages and is bedazzled by the fact that this land, this place known for its höflichkeit, would not speak in the only language they share with him when invited to dinner. A decision is made, a radical decision that by means of separating others will keep him together. People were from then on separated by the language they use to communicate with him: the ones that join his effort to learn their language and are patience thru out his -somehow embarrassing- attempt at it; those with whom older relationships where stablished in different languages; those too lazy to meet in the middle, them who wont make any effort towards a proper communion. The capacity to behold[2] the vulnerability and the shame publicly displayed in a broken language has once more decide his place, his outsiderness of it all. The auslanderness of him all.

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Language builds and destroys relations, language will tear you apart. Again.

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Image is first, image unbound.

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I met a person that -knowing it well- would not speak to its partner in its language just to Powerplay. This person taught me that love must be spoke in its common tongue.

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If language is the motherland then this child has a mother in many lands: a Venezuelan in China and a Chinese in Venezuela; a white boy in Latino America and a latinoamerican in “America”; a sudaca in Spain and a fake spaniard to the Schengen. A no-land man able to travel, the never ending pain of compulsory transit, the image you’ll make of him not knowing what he is. The intriguing new animal in your city's zoo.

;)

We are in bed now looking at each other, maybe searching out that image we believe we are to one another, chiseling our desire sculpture, trying to find a way under the sheets where image and language confound and merge to disappear each other. You speak out and ask me: “what does it feel to be a Latino?”

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I freeze, unable to word out any answer.

The truth is I don't really know, I mean…

How could I know?

“What is an image capable of? It is a question they never stop asking”.

Kodwo Eshun

[1]kostenlos.

[2]behalten.