Inés Garcia: 'Grief Embodied'

The psychoanalytic process works through the defamiliarisation of emotions, mental states, and the words we use to describe them through fastidious attention to language. It is not necessarily true, then, that examining your head in a second language is more difficult than doing it in your mother tongue; linguistic encounters with the self are troubling and complex often beyond words.

There is, however, a different kind of troubled iteration when one revisits life, past and present, in a second language. The mother tongue finds its way through inadvertent bodily forms. In the same way, perhaps, that grief remains alive, with memories untold.

The paradox of a psychoanalytic treatment is that while no material is new, since everything is already within you - consciously or not - the attention you pay to your words exceeds your communicative abilities and renders those 50 minutes both extremely awkward and familiar. Doing psychoanalysis in your second tongue is but an enhancement of this phenomenon. How do you talk about yourself if your history is stored in your mother tongue and your mother tongue does not take place in the psychoanalytic process? Words are undeniably novel, but the narrative is an old one. Or so we think. Months into the treatment, I decided that a mother tongue is not only the words you spoke first; it is the ways through which you learned to be in the world, and is always irredeemably present. Sometimes to your own disadvantage.

At times, the tongue tries desperately to translate whatever belongs to you in the back of your head – as if it was actually inside you. This sense of retrieval can feel like taking care of a vestigial organ whose decline would threaten the overall health of your organism. You would think that the mother tongue comes naturally to the mind, so it could be expected that lived experiences in the language you grew up with transpire easily. Retelling a story using the language through which it unravelled should restate it – except it doesn’t. Repeating a specific memory renders it spurious - like when you say a common word out loud, over and over until it loses its meaning, with the sounds we took for granted rolling off our tongue one by one.

But ideas do not come to me in my mother tongue and wait to be translated; memories do not queue, even when an alien syntax demands restructuring. There is another kind of translation that is not necessarily, or not simply, from my primary to my secondary language: it is that which transforms my bodily affectations into words that, regardless of their newness, feel no less ________. Sometimes my tongue tries to access memories that turn out to be pre-linguistic, like when ______________________________________________. I don’t know if I couldn’t hear them because of the waves breaking on the shore or because they were silent. [What was I doing there?] Both the descrip- tion of the scene and my questions around it are begotten in English. Constructing these is by neces- sity an act of faith on the brain. If the crystal-clear scene in your head has never been verbalised, how can you be sure that it took place, that you are not making it up like the dream you’ve been having since you were 6? [But are dreams something we make up?] Except that the scene is not crystal-clear.

It escapes the same way the shadow escapes its owner.

There is also the case of evident non-existent memories, expressions of affection and intimacy that should have taken place but didn’t. There is no space in the mind for both rejection and hope; there can only be one tyrant. Such realisation will come in your second tongue, restating the ___________ of memories that are not.

A dear friend of mine once told me that the effects of psychoanalysis take place between sessions, not during the sessions themselves. Most times I disagree. Therapy is about one’s relationship with the therapist, especially transference focused psychotherapy. Or so my therapist says. Admittedly, with-out much motivation I recently remembered my mother taking some nerve-soothing tablets called “Lyrica.” Medical specifications read that pregabalin is used to treat pain caused by nerve damage. Was the damage beyond repair, the pain the only part of the body it was possible to treat? Did she die from genetic self-expression, or its unresolved attempt?

Spanish is not my mother tongue. My mother tongue is my mother’s gestures and postures. My mother tongue is present when I speak English because I speak like her, because my lips learned to be pressed from looking at her, just as my legs learned to be twisted to the limit-twice down from the knees to the ankles. My mother tongue is her body, echoed in an attempt to relax that makes the neck breathe, opened in reflection for an instant, only to snap back to a geometrical second thought. My mother tongue is my mother’s body language. And my body/language is but an echo of my mother’s death.

Inés García (Mexico) is a neurodivergent writer, translator, and third-year PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London. Over the past three years, she’s been studying autotheoretical practices in women’s contemporary writing. Since a few years ago, her love of language and literature from an academic point of view has been transformed into her own writing, which attempts to dive into the complexities, limitations and possibilities of writing in her second language.