tongue-tied

There's nothing more frustrating than trying to speak in another language when your thoughts are more complicated then your vocabulary. I always tease my 102 classes that the reason they say:

"I was like, so...so, you know!"

or

"I was like, well, like..." (while making furious hand gestures mimicking some activity in lieu of vocalising)

is because they can't finish a simile; since they don't READ and they don't THINK they have only a 6th grader's vocabulary because they never learn new words after that age. I feel the same way in French these days, which is unforgiveable after I spent two years really focusing on the language, culminating in 6 weeks in Rouen a couple years back. After a year of neglect I'm having trouble formulating complex ideas and keeping my tenses straight. Today we were discussing Duras and I wanted to say that I was sure she'd read Frantz Fanon's "Les Damnes de la terre" and Virginia Woolf, but what came out was more like "I think so that he, uh she has reading been books like/by/from Fanon and Woolf." My brain has the proper French locked inside, but without several glasses of wine I can't get it out! I did manage to just relax and say in French at the end of class "I found this book much more complicated than I expected, having heard so much about it over the years--I'll have to read it several more times to GET it." I even nailed the subjective case! Mostly the problem is a lack of surety and a tendency to second-guess myself into failure. Just let it go!

Duras was seduced and laid by a Chinese businessman in Vietnam at age 15, and this went on for quite some time, until she moved to France. The novel/memoir is not graphic, but it is very intimate and shocking and troubling. I'd like to write about this book in terms of Fanon's analysis of African colonialism--how the French torturers and their victims were in need of psychoanalysis, and the strange kind of relationship which develops between colonizer and colonized. Duras puts herself on the couch, and details how she was colonialized and exploited by her lover, her mother, her older brother--and political repression remains implicit in the setting of her book and in the origins of her lover's vast fortune (though she rarely explicitly discusses politics. Beauvoir made clear that the road from adolescence to adulthood=the discovery of sexuality, then the discovery of politics. Duras is more veiled, but perhaps agreed. There's one memory of a woman named Betty Fernandez who ran a fascist salon in Paris during the Occupation [again mirroring the colonial] that she used to attend regularly--and she herself was a Communist!). Duras also tells us frankly that she writes only to be known, to make money. She thinks the past is empty, memory is meaningless, the person she was in the past is non-existent. And yet...