An ode to May

To the month that was and to all that it can be

Today’s dispatch is a short one. It is an ode to the month of May, in a sense, to some of the things that make me who I am, and some of the small pleasures that allowed the past month to end with my cup running over in many ways.

May is a month of rebirth because it’s the month that closes with my birthday. By that account, any month can be a month of rebirth, for one reason or another, someone will say, and I wholeheartedly agree. But for me, it is May. And even more so this year, as this has been a month of trying to be a little more conscious of bad habits and of trying to break away from them, of trying to create new habits and new patterns, of relearning how to breathe in, breathe out, breathe more fully.

I may be very allergic, but how can I be grumpy or gloomy when things look this pretty?

Interestingly, this month began with a stretch of books in their original languages, including four Lusophone authors. Looking back, it felt like my brain wanted to reconnect with something I seemed to have pushed a little to the side in the shuffle of days. But the experience was not just one of familiarity, it was also of strangeness. Grammars and vocabulary I know on a rational level, but that nonetheless will catch me off guard and give me pause. Suddenly, I started to realize that to some degree I was experiencing there what I had once experienced with English. Were all the jokes about losing an intimate connection to my mother tongue truly becoming a reality? Was this a choice? Or was it just a consequence of the ebb and flow of life in the US for almost ten years now?

Thinking about languages, what they do for us, and what it means to live in between them is not a new topic for this space: back in October of last year, I wrote about the concept of “exophonic writing,” how that helped me find a reference to what I did in this space (and had done for years in other spaces), and how I dealt with reading literature from my mother tongue in translation. The short of it is: it is a relationship full of tension, at all times, but one that I chose to continue because, to me, it meant rekindling a kind of joyful living in the text that had escaped me for quite some time. To claim English as a language of speech and especially of writing, a language that had brought me many struggles but also so much fun, was a personal exercise in resilience. Or, as I put it back in October:

“At this point, it is hard for me to separate the writer from the language. To take myself out of English to express ideas in long-form writing. Not because I have forgotten Portuguese (I haven’t, even if I have lost touch with most of current slang). But because I have become a person-who-writes primarily not in Portuguese.”
“In the in-between of languages,” Juliana, cronista, 8 October 2022.

But now I find myself revisiting Portuguese not just as a consumer of literature. It is in Portuguese that I have resumed writing in my journal, and it is with Portuguese words that I struggle to find my deepest meaning when, pen in hand, I try to make sense of feelings and sensations that populate my day. At the beginning of my notebook, the entries were an Anglophone collection of random notes, remarks on exhibitions, and favorite meals in new and old restaurants. “I should keep practicing so I don’t forget it.” Now, Lusophone long-form writing fills pages on the most banal days, as I reach for the most convoluted adverbial construction possible. I love my adverbs, after all. They remain within me, no matter what language, as I feel them in my heart before I know them in my brain—indelibly, intrinsically, intimately, passionately.

If Annie Ernaux surprised me early in the month with her tiny and potent Simple Passion, the middle of the month was marked by the one-day reading and multiple days mulling over Ágota Kristóf and her The Illiterate (trans. Nina Bogin).¹ Another tiny memoir, one that packs in under fifty pages a whole world of meanings constructed and destructed by and through Kristóf’s experiences with language, as a Hungarian speaker who, as a refugee in Francophone Switzerland, finds herself having to rebuild her sense of communication and thus of self as she learns a new, strange, unnatural language (in which she would go on to become a celebrated writer). In her own words: “I know I will never write French as native French writers do, but I will write it as I am able to, as best I can. I did not choose this language. It was imposed on me by fate, by chance, by circumstance.” (The Illiterate, p. 59). If she sees herself as an illiterate at the time of writing this memoir (decades after achieving popular and critical acclaim), it is perhaps because exophony is not simply about adopting a new language—it is also inserting an unsolvable problem in her relationship to her mother tongue, which always forever remains the parameter to what “feels right” or “natural” or even “adequate.”

And this seems like a good point to leave this reflection, let it sit here and bloom into whatever it will in the coming weeks, months, years.

A tiny book, yet so big.

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Along with tickets to watch a soccer match next weekend (let’s go, Gotham!), I got myself some books for my birthday. All serendipitous purchases in a way, since I had no plans of purchasing them but they kind of just happened to fall in my hands, one way or another, as used copies. The Reader seemingly out-of-print that I first saw in early April and had been thinking about since. The collection of Woolf pieces that was sitting next to it on the shelf. One more number of Freeman’s for my little collection (now only missing California and Love). And to wrap it up, Gell’s book, that was just one of those texts I read during coursework for the PhD and completely changed the way I thought of people and things, a foundational book for my dissertation project that I had only read borrowed from the library. They might not be the most exciting purchases, nor do I plan on reading any of them soon. Gell might in fact go into the category of books I purchase as a type of emblem of where I have been intellectually, sort of like a postcard or fridge magnet people bring back from trips.

Happy birthday, me.

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To all the cups of lavender and chamomile tea, to all the funny reels and videos of pet grooming, to all the stumbles and all the falls, to all the books read and yet to be, to all the songs that have made me cry and laugh, to all the people who don’t even know how important they are to me, to all the bruises physical or emotional, to all the dungeons explored and Pokémon caught, to all my works-in-progress and projects abandoned: thank you.

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May wrap-up

• Liana Ferraz, Um prefácio para Olívia Guerra

• Sérgio Rodrigues, A vida futura

• Annie Ernaux, Passion Simple

• Mia Couto, As pequenas doenças da eternidade

• Machado de Assis, Esaú e Jacó

• Natalia Ginzburg, Valentino & Sagittarius (trans. from Italian by Avril Bardoni)

• Ágota Kristóf, The Illiterate (trans. from French by Nina Bogin)

• Margaret Oliphant, A Beleaguered City and Other Stories

1. A quick reminder that I do not make any money from the Bookshop.org links, but they help support my local indie bookstore!