Tongues with no Mother. Lost and Found Belongings in the “New” Languages of Storytelling

Abstract

The title develops a concept drawn from Vicente Rafael’s Motherless Tongues (2016) and examines how, in the context of forced dislocation and migration, language tends to become the cornerstone of personal and collective identity. Exiles, asylum seekers, or nomadic subjects often find themselves navigating a liminal space between different forms of belonging. In most cases, they are denied even the possibility of identifying their own mother tongues as markers of identity. When resorting to art, they tend to create texts that display fractures and breaks, and use translation as an operation that goes far beyond the simple switching from one language to another. The feeling of being “torn between ways” (Gloria Anzaldúa 1987) sometimes becomes both an artistic resource and a political tool aimed at acknowledging (and accepting) the lack of purity as a form of power. The article considers several case studies, all produced by a new generation of artists working in creative fields that are often dismissed as marginal. Focusing on the artistic production of Saint Levant, Shirin Neshat, Giacomo Sferlazzo, and Mounira al Sohl, it shows how pop music, photography, documentary film, and theatrical performance can create new grammars and codes for an increasingly hybridized world.