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amceposting
"This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.
–A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
...which i am aware is not strictly applicable to me. Dutch/European culture, to which i belong, is rather on the devouring than the devoured side. still, i can't help but think of the way i can't help but switch to English every other sentence when talking with a friend who prefers to speak Dutch. and i think of queer communities and experiences, which i have only ever gotten to know in English, which i hardly know how to talk about in other languages (except, amusingly enough, French; i assume because of the easy use of cognates in queer lexical domains). i think of how strange Dutch feels in my mouth these days, even though i have stopped trying to distance myself from it and unlearn it; how i feel like i'm pretending when i speak Dutch.
and i can relate to alternating between trying to fit in as well as possible and exaggerating my foreignness, depending on the point i'm trying to make. i speak six languages, but i don't sound the way a native speaker is expected to sound like in any of them. the one i am most comfortable using is not one i identify as a native language. i suppose with six languages, i can always pretend more or less convincingly to be from somewhere else.
–A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
...which i am aware is not strictly applicable to me. Dutch/European culture, to which i belong, is rather on the devouring than the devoured side. still, i can't help but think of the way i can't help but switch to English every other sentence when talking with a friend who prefers to speak Dutch. and i think of queer communities and experiences, which i have only ever gotten to know in English, which i hardly know how to talk about in other languages (except, amusingly enough, French; i assume because of the easy use of cognates in queer lexical domains). i think of how strange Dutch feels in my mouth these days, even though i have stopped trying to distance myself from it and unlearn it; how i feel like i'm pretending when i speak Dutch.
and i can relate to alternating between trying to fit in as well as possible and exaggerating my foreignness, depending on the point i'm trying to make. i speak six languages, but i don't sound the way a native speaker is expected to sound like in any of them. the one i am most comfortable using is not one i identify as a native language. i suppose with six languages, i can always pretend more or less convincingly to be from somewhere else.