Multifarious Beast

When I was a child growing up in the Soviet Union on the brink of perestroika, my father taught me a poem titled, sentimentally, ‘The Swans of Motherhood’. The poem, composed by a leading Ukrainian Soviet poet of the mid-fifties, Vasyl Symonenko, is a kind of exhortation to a male person of indeterminate age (the speaker calls him ‘son’). The message (this is a poem with a message) is that ‘you cannot choose a Fatherland’ just as ‘you cannot choose a mother’. The word for ‘Fatherland’ is a feminine noun, and placing it in the same sequence as ‘mother’ creates a metonymic connection, autochthonous myths of origin superimposing on natal determinism. What the poem does not say is that you cannot choose your language. Despite implicitly conforming to the homogenizing ideology of the Soviet project, whereby all the citizens of the twelve sister republics share a common tongue, this omission did not save the poet from getting brutally beaten up by the Soviet police in 1962, an event that is widely thought to have hastened his death the year after.

Is language a home, an origin, and a mother? Or is it an other, a lover, a stranger you learn to embrace and give in to, as a matter of choice? I came to wonder about this while I was growing up, every year a little more polyglossal, the umbilical cord which, presumably, tied me to the source stretching and separating in multiple directions, like a strange multi-headed beast, each with a split tongue of its own. There was something undisciplined and wild about this proto-Platonic creature, as if its existence made it difficult for a soul ...