Introduction by Olivia E. Sears
Our first attempt to possess something on our own, something that is not
thrust into our hands or our hungry mouths, is in the acquisition of language. "Infant" (from in
fans) means "unable to speak." As St. Augustine observed in
397 AD, language is born from desire: we want to make our wishes known to
those who might satisfy them. Acquiring the power of speech thus marks the
end of infancy. Language empowers us to express what we want -- and want
to possess. Translation itself is a gesture of possessing literature -- physically
importing it into a new country and forcibly bringing it into a new language
to make it accessible to one's own people. But words possess us too: translation
is often inspired by the experience of being possessed by literature.
We and our linguistic skills are under the spell of writings we feel an urgent
need to translate. It is not only the desire to appropriate those words we
have been possessed by, but also to share them with our fellow countrymen.
Yet who are our countrymen? Languages do not locate us. In this issue, we
were interested in issues of colonization and domination. We expected tales
of occupied nations, and the resulting narratives of personal dispossession
and social unrest, but we didn't expect what now seems inevitable: a preponderance
of colonization at the very level of language. Clearly, the colonized often
write in the colonial tongues, even centuries after the marauders have been
chased out or have moved on (or moved in). (Few industrialized nations in
the world speak the tongue of the land's natives anyway -- whether we remember
their colonization or not -- and perhaps this is inevitable due to the mutability
of language through time: even an isolated indigenous people may speak a
language different from that of their ancestors a millennium earlier.) In
addition, the dispossessed often write from exile, in an adopted tongue,
or relocate to a foreign land where their own language is spoken, though
perhaps marginalized.
At first glance, the best-represented geographical area in this volume appears
to be the European Mediterranean, but in fact many of the languages named
for the "first world" nations which codified them are here spoken
by Africans and Latin Americans. The names of half of the languages contained
in this volume do not indicate the nationality or homeland of the author:
Spanish does not signify "the language spoken in Spain," but the
language spoken where the Spanish have been; only one Spanish work here was
written by a Spaniard, and he lives in and writes about Marrakesh. The name
of the language itself, recording invasions and occupations, signifies
possession.
Our entire nation recently became possessed, even obsessed (literally,
haunted and besieged) with a single man running amok: in his apparent attempt
to possess a woman and in his subsequent trial. To possess means to sit in
power, and many languages locate this power specifically: the Greek pósis is
spouse; Sanskrit páti means lord, possessor, or husband. The
Malay word amoq -- engaging furiously in battle -- was first used
in English 334 years ago, altering the meaning to describe a mad Malay in
a homicidal frenzy. The possessed are often those with a mad desire to possess
-- that infant desire for empowerment gone awry. The individual is caught,
trance-like, between the desire to possess and the impossibility of real
possession -- control over bodies, hearts, or minds, over land or objects.
Whether attempted through "love" or force, the behavior is indistinguishable.
In some cultures, possession is ascribed to spirits literally sitting in
power within the individual. In many villages of Nepal, possession is remedied
by shamans who induce a state of spirit-possession in themselves in order
to master the interloping spirit, to appease or unseat them. In particular,
the Limbu believe human envy or jealousy leaves an individual or family vulnerable
to "attacks" by witches or evil spirits. Possession is thus cause
(possessed through envy), effect (possessed by a spell), and cure (the shaman's
spirit-possession).
In "rational" Western cultures, we speak of psychology, pathology,
and altered states of consciousness: sleep, daydreaming, drunkenness, temporary
insanity, psychosis, hallucination, dementia, amnesia, dissociation, even
blind rage. And yet we deny possession. Spirit-possession itself, however,
is not unknown in the West: possession by the Holy Spirit is a central rite
in certain sects of Christianity. The ever more popular tales of alien abductions
reveal our need to understand possession no matter how strongly we place
our beliefs in science or God.
While the many languages of the world are learned out of the desire to express
desires, all people speak in tongues, incomprehensibly, when possessed.
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