GUANTAMAMERA

OTHER SEPTEMBERS MANY AMERICAS
By Ariel Dorfman
"...Indeed, the first bilingual experiences, at the origin of our species, must have flourished in the intersections between groups that had already evolved divergent and mutually incomprehensible linguistic systems. The intersection of trade, certainly, the bartering of goods that had to be accompanied, at some point, by the bartering of words and the dawning discovery that anyone who knew both tongues would be able to sell and buy, swap and acquire, in far better terms, trading stories first and then desires and finally goods. And that other intersection, the dire intersection and crossroads of battle, when captives were taken as booty and warriors were spared and enslaved and women were brought back for breeding and pleasure. I think of those captives as the first non-voluntary bilinguals of history and pre-history, though they may also have been the first to educate their captors in the delights of another language and another viewpoint, Scherezahades of the forked tongue. And then, the ultimate intersection, the intersection of languages due to the sweeter intersection of love and reproduction, the biological and cultural and personal and epic need for exogamy, the need for the other, the age old impulse towards mixture and miscegenation, cells that want to fertilize by expanding, the need to leave the suffocating inner circle of what is familiar and plant yourself in the wider world. And languages were there, had to be there, in those love affairs at the beginning of time, one language for the man, another language for the woman, coupling the bodies and coupling the minds and coupling the tribes.

Languages, two of them, both of them, there, at the very start of the first journey out of Eden – an immediate, almost automatic, way of challenging death, telling us still today that we need not excavate the cemetery as those mythical villagers in Colombia did, we need not carry the physical bones with us into the future, to stay in touch with the origins and dispute death’s rule over us. If this vision of the bilingual origins of our humanity is correct, then the chances of our living simultaneously in multiple lingustic systems may not only be daringly contemporary but could presumably have its roots in our most ancient mirrors. If language is, finally, in its deepest essence and meaning, our first and last attempt to defy and defeat death, then perhaps a bilingual humanity is the best way of fooling death when it comes for us, fooling it not once, but twice and perhaps even three times and more, perhaps before we disappear from this earth we can at least force death itself to speak all our tongues..."
http://www.adorfman.duke.edu/