Loading ...You could be me. Any human being on earth could end up in my situation – that of an (im)migrant. I am not talking about tourists who give up their daily life at home to try living somewhere else for a time. I’m talking about people who pack up their lives and move to a country that is so foreign that they have to mobilise all their resources – which might, in some cases, not be enough. Grouped together of their own free will, expatriated at random or refugees forced to flee, how can we live in a country whose language we do not speak? Listen to incomprehensible words whose sounds have more weight and meaning for the spirit than their actual sense? Decipher words which for a long time you can only identify when written down? After a few weeks of this kind of isolation – unless blessed with the gift of languages – you find yourself deaf and mute in the face of thousands of eyes in a world that is as invasive as it is fascinating, because of its unfathomable “otherness”. I have often wondered about the enjoyment I would get from offloading my catalogue of overblown visions, like water bursting from a dam, onto other hapless victims.
When the moment finally came, I found myself having to face up to the blinkered gaze which I had mistakenly thought would release me from solitude. “What are you talking about? You’ve seen it and taken it on board, but you haven’t understood anything”. This is the brilliant result of a short-circuit between my optic nerve, my native culture, and the culture that has welcomed me, obstinately refusing to meet my expectations … The reciprocal ignorance between these two cultures sometimes has comical repercussions in everyday life: getting on a bus not sure of the destination even though it is written in large letters on the windscreen; living in the cold and dark for two days because you can’t work out how to pay the electricity bill; eating only the food that’s on display and ending up buying soft cheese instead of fresh cream. In spiritual terms, the social or political quid pro quo can be far more serious: the implicit protection in the condition of “idiot” is extinguished in ways that are hard to interpret.
The feeling of living behind the world in which you wake up and go to sleep clings to your skin.
An interpreter, “someone else who understands me despite the difference” is often essential if you want to move beyond this state of mere survival. But this assistance does not lift the veil, of varying thickness, of your inability to communicate with others. As an intermediary, he underlines a distance rather than a union.
In terms of interfacing, I thought I had found an area of common ground when it came to communications technology. On/Off is the same in any language. With their unbearable cacophony of local media, my telephone, computer and TV did nothing but amplify my listening problem. So many fumbled telephone calls, cartloads of illegible emails – and 120 TV channels out of 210 were completely inaccessible. The more a country develops, the more these voices multiply. Being able to understand them is an “open Sesame”, an essential password to enter their world. It is not an innate process: you learn, you build. You won’t forget it again – not even you.
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