DV PAL, 3 min., 2005
languages: german, english, tagalog
Dealing with the project Relearning my Mother Tongue, I was generally interested in what migrating subjects are losing moving from one country to another in this time of a fragmented world: the language of one owns country. As an artistic tool I
am putting myself into a dialogue with my mother. The act of vocalization through my mothers’ body, listening to how she speaks out her Mother Tongue gives a glimpse of her whole background. Watching her how she shapes her mouth and moves her face shows an essence of the story of our ancestors and the story of a whole country, simply transmitted though interfacial mimicry from mother to daughter and her daughter again etc. Brought up in Germany, I was always aware to learn German perfectly but later I got lost in historical disorientation. In the search and longing for those familial rootedness through my “original” Mother Tongue, I was confronted with an absence of homeland. What was left to me were only images of family photographs of my first years in the Philippines. As Atom Egoyan says: “There is…a nostalgia for a world which exists as image, and which has itself as referent. You can always go back to an image. But you can’t just go back to a land.”(1997a, 215).
For me, my mother represents the first generation of a migrated person. I, the “daughter” represent the second generation, integrated in social and economical structures in the mother’s chosen country of emigration. The focus of my video is to show the ambivalent relationship between mother/teacher and daughter/student: There is a gap between them not only through time and age, although sitting in the same space, but different in their relation to the home country. Up to now the mother is still bonded through keeping in contact with relatives at home and through memories of “real” experiences in the homeland. She represents the “authentic”and “exotic” other, a cultural ambivalence, which can’t be clearly identified. After several approaches to relearn my Mother Tongue I ended up hindered by ambivalence of the title itself: A Mother Tongue cannot be relearned, either it is your Mother Tongue, which is still in use or not. Although Pilipino was my Mother Tongue in the fi rst 8 years in my life, the gap of time and geographical and social space created a wall of forgetting which leads me to find myself now as a new person with the identity of the “foreign” country.
The realization to change the term “Relearning” to “Learning” a new language helped me to step out of my position of “in-between”. To see my former Mother Tongue as a new language which I can learn changed my attitude to this project. Looking back was not anymore important than looking forward, the interest lies in changing the roles, being myself the Teacher/Mother gained more importance followed by questioning the role of motherhood itself in our society, but maybe this is another story.
