And its one, two three, what are we writing for?

Today’s headlines - "Another Eight killed and five wounded in US mall massacre" – "The woman described the killer's behaviour as bizarre, including his shooting the stuffing out of a teddy bear". – I wonder if it was the bear called Mohammed.

Connections. Last night I read a magical passage in a book by Nancy Huston, Le Journal de Création, which Françoise lent me. It was about being in the middle of writing a novel and on a kind of semantic plateau where everything makes sense, where every detail is highly significant. I immediately felt pangs of nostalgia for that feeling. I don’t have much time to write at the moment. Fascinated by the prose of an Anglophone woman who writes in French, I started to look for information and found an article about one of her books:

“focusing on language, especially bilingualism (broadly understood as the capacity to communicate in two languages) as a site where trauma is expressed and mediated.”

In a recent personal crisis I felt supported by my mother’s words which came to me in French. Apart from a few songs she learnt from the Free French soldiers stationed in her village during the war and the ability to order a café au lait and a croissant on her frequent trips to visit me in France, she does not actually speak French. Why, then, were the words that provided me with comfort in a foreign language?

“Ta force c’est dans ta capacité de travail”.

I remember the day she said this to me, in English of course. I do not remember the exact words. I mentioned this to my analyst and mentally pinned it on the wall inside my cave to take a closer look at sometime. It seems to me that it is a sign of something not being straightforward in my use of language or affect or emotion… my immediate impression was of a crossed wire or a snag in a circuit.

Also, when she said it, I was hurt. I did not want to be told I was a good pack horse, I wanted to be praised for my wit, intelligence, beauty or something else exceptionally meritorious. The same thing happened near the beginning of analysis when BM congratulated me on being a good translator and I felt crestfallen. What possible good could it be to anyone to be good at their job? I thought at the time. Feels like a million years ago…

Semantic-Pragmatic Disorder (SPD) is a developmental disorder that many experts believe is closely related to autism and Asperger's Syndrome. The name refers to the fact that people with SPD have special challenges with the semantic aspect of language (the meaning of what is being said) and the pragmatics of language (using language appropriately in social situations).