TONGUES

"I wanted to write ‘The Prophet’ ever since I was a lad of 18, when I began writing it in the Arabic language. However, my mother discouraged it, imploring me to wait until I had become older. This I did, and the next time I set my hand to do it I was studying art in Paris. But the atmosphere seemed not just right for it, so again I put it aside and it was not until I reached America that I began work on it in earnest, this time seeing the whole thing in English.”

"It is becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothing-ness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman A mask (…) Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved?"

"I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that's about all."

"Man is not a finite, static, crystallized unity. He is fluid, in a constant state of flux, evolution, reaction and action, negative and positive. He is the purest example of relativity."

"The distinct aspects of the monolingual paradigm (...) ultimately indicate that, rather than being a seamless whole, the “mother tongue” is an aggregate of differential elements, all of which are subject to historical and social configuration. 

They reveal that what is called the “mother tongue” combines within it a number of ways of relating to and through language, be it familial inheritance, social embeddedness, emotional attachment, personal identification, or linguistic competence. Contrary to the monolingual paradigm, it is possible for all these different dimensions to be distributed across multiple languages, a possibility that becomes visible only in multilingual formations or when the monolingual paradigm is held in abeyance. Multiple origins, relations, and emotional investments are possible and occur daily (...)  

This means that we need to reimagine subjects as open to crisscrossing linguistic identifications, if not woven from the fabric of numerous linguistic sources. Such multiplicity breaks with the monolingual premise so often hidden in the notion that language correlates to identity. Languages do indeed relate to identities, but not in any predetermined, predictable way (...)"