Read Online Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee - Free Book Online Page B

am at odds with you over the question of mother tongue (though I note that you tend to eschew that rather feeling-laden phrase in favor of “first language”). I agree that one’s weltanschauung is formed by the language that one speaks and writes most easily and, to a degree, thinks in. But it is not formed so deeply that one can never stand far enough outside that language to inspect it critically—particularly if one speaks or even just understands another language. That is why I say that it is possible to have a first language yet nonetheless not feel at home in it: it is, so to speak, one’s primary tongue but not one’s mother tongue.
    This phenomenon is more widespread than one might think. In Europe, for instance, before the arrival of the nation-state and the triumph of national languages, Latin—which was no one’s mother tongue—was the currency of intellectual life. The same situation exists in Africa today vis-à-vis English and (to a lesser extent) French and Portuguese. In Africa it is not practically possible to be an intellectual in your mother tongue; you can’t even be much of a writer. In India and Pakistan, where it is the home language of only a minuscule minority, English is the medium of much of literature and all of science.
    You point out that there is such a thing as American English or Indian English, and imply that these “Englishes” have mother-tongue status in the United States and India respectively. But the truth is that on the page (leave aside in the mouth or in the street ) these differ from English only in trivial respects: the odd locution or idiom here and there, not the elemental vocabulary (which has such determinative power over the speaker’s epistemology) or the syntax (which dictates the forms of thought).
    As I said, I started thinking about the subject of the mother tongue after reading Derrida. I began to feel my own situation more acutely after moving to Australia, which—despite the fact that within its territory there are scores of Aboriginal languages still clinging to life, and despite the fact that since 1945 it has encouraged massive immigration from southern Europe and Asia—is far more “English” than my native South Africa. In Australia public life is monolingual. More important, relations to reality are mediated in a notably uninterrogated way through a single language, English.
    The effect on me of living in an environment so saturated with English has been a peculiar one: it has created more and more of a skeptical distance between myself and what I would loosely call the Anglo weltanschauung, with its inbuilt templates of how one thinks, how one feels, how one relates to other people, and so forth.
All the best,
John

July 6, 2009 *
    Dear Paul,
    Last month I visited your country for the first time in five years, to see my brother, who lives in Washington, D.C., and has been ill.
    Before embarking I very deliberately thought through the question of first impressions and what I was going to allow to count as first impressions; in particular, whether I was going to allow your immigration service, recently rebranded as Homeland Security, to play any role in forming them.
    For, as you know, I have a long and largely unhappy history of relations with U.S. Immigration, which I won’t rehearse. I was not eager to be plunged back into that history and have my mood touched by its sourness.
    In the event, the immigration interview at Los Angeles airport was as bad as I had feared. I was escorted out of the line and taken to a back office, where for an hour I waited my turn among the mail-order brides and students with papers from dubious colleges, before being quizzed by a poker-faced officer: Who was I? Had I visited the U.S. before, and if so when? The interrogation went on and on, in circles. “If you will just tell me what the problem is,” I said at one point, “then I can perhaps try to solve it for you.” “Sorry, sir,” replied the officer,