Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yōko Tawada

“everything from yesterday disappears, then yesterday into long ago transforms.”

Breathing in several grammars, she was melding them together inside her body, and then exhaling them as sweet breath.

Most people’s handwriting isn’t fit for the eyes of a professional calligrapher, so what’s wrong with drawing pictures a real artist would consider worthless? Europeans must think of handwriting and drawing as two completely separate things. If not, why are they so ashamed of a lousy picture when their terrible handwriting doesn’t bother them at all?

when people are always on the move, our language becomes a mixture of all the scenes we’ve passed through on the way.

When you think about it, since we’re all earthlings, no one can be an illegal resident of earth. So why are there more and more illegal aliens every year? If things keep on this way, someday the whole human race will be illegal.

I have always felt somehow that my heart must be made of red silk embroidered in gold. If I could only read the story woven in that golden embroidery, I’d surely know my destiny.

“When experts decide whether what people speak is independent language or just dialect there’s almost always a political agenda behind it — you see that, don’t you?”

“And are you a Buddhist?” I asked her. “No, I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a linguist.” “Is that a religion?” “Not really, but languages can make people happy, and show them what’s beyond death.”

“So you can change your sex, but not your caste,” Knut said, suddenly bringing up a topic he hadn’t even touched on until now. “That’s right,” I said, a little flustered. “Our bodies are always changing, from moment to moment. In these baths the ancient Romans surely felt that. They’d have unwanted body hair plucked away, get their hair and nails cut, enjoy a massage to loosen their muscles. The body changes when we sweat in the sauna or drink water. And that’s not all. Even our brains change sex every second — depending on the book we’re reading, we become men or women. There was a library here in the great bath, and a room where you could hear lectures as if you were at the university.”

I don’t want to even think about a person’s country of origin if I can possibly avoid it. It seems to me that people who have to know where everyone is from have no confidence in themselves. But the harder I try not to think about it, the more I find myself wondering who comes from which country. There are so many pasts: one that starts out, “I come from X.” Or in the country where a person went to elementary school. Or in a colony. There must be something wrong with me, asking for a name to learn about the past, when it should be the beginning of a new friendship, heading into the future.

If I come across a word I can’t get out of my head while I’m reading, and end up taking it into the bedroom with me, it will sometimes flit around the room all night like a mosquito, keeping me awake.

People think that airplanes are just machines, metal plates and screws put together by human hands, but didn’t this beautiful shape come from the spirits of birds playing with human beings, guiding them to make airplanes in their own image? Of course human beings believe they invented a machine with the best shape for flying, by their own will. But maybe an airplane is really a mythical bird, come to save us.

Learning a new language that would give me a second identity at the same time was much more fun.

“When the original no longer exists,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do except look for the best copy,” which sounded to me like some sort of riddle — such a scary one that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what it meant.

I made this language by gathering threads just strong enough to get my meaning across, but now I was afraid its beauty would be trampled by the sheer force of authority.

There must be languages with no punctuation for a full stop. Like a journey that never ends. Or a sentence that doesn’t have a subject. A trip when you don’t know who started out on it, or who keeps on going, traveling to some faraway country. I wanted to go to a place where adjectives have a past tense, and prepositions come at the end of the phrase.

There are two kinds of silence, wet and dry. Someday I want to study silence, its temperature and humidity, though I’m not sure it’s a suitable topic for linguistic research. My mother’s silence was now, slowly and steadily, boring into me.

The brightness of the sky makes us feel lonely because it doesn’t seem to need human beings.

Some people assume that the language of a native speaker is perfectly fused with her soul. And some still believe your native language is wired into your brain from the time you’re born. Of course that’s a myth you can’t even dress up in the invisibility cloak of science anymore. There are people who think everything native speakers say must be grammatically correct, when all they’re doing is faithfully copying the way most of the people around them talk, which isn’t necessarily correct usage. Still others say a native has a better vocabulary. But most native speakers are too busy to think much about language, and tend to use the same words and phrases all the time, whereas non-natives, who move back and forth between two languages, are always looking for new words and expressions — so who’s more likely to have a bigger vocabulary?

I once read about a strange theory that says there are very few words you actually meet for the first time, that most of the new words you learn you’ve actually come across somewhere before, and they’ve left tiny nicks in your brain. When you see a word again the nick is activated. So when you learn a language you shouldn’t see it as something entirely new. You should tell yourself you’re remembering a language you used to speak a long time ago.

native speakers so ordinary, non-native speaker equals utopia.”

I hadn’t lost my languages after all. Only my voice was gone.

But if your silence keeps on this way, don’t you think it might lead to death? Imagine tens of thousands of people who never talk, living on an island. They have enough to eat and clothes to wear. They have games and porn, too. But without language, they decay and die.”

People say a weakling like Hiruko was born because the goddess Izanami spoke first, luring Izanagi into having sex with her. I’m a woman, too, but if I don’t open my mouth the past will stay buried forever, and I won’t be able to see what’s ahead, either.