sexual identity? category 4

living in Yoko Tawada's EXOPHONY

Maximillian Klewer, THE FANATIC (Self-Portrait) / Der Fanatiker, 1919

Over the past few weeks, I have read Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, continuing my obsession with all things written by Yoko Tawada.¹ In the last post I wrote about her work, I focused on Tawada’s skill in manipulating perspective and time in fiction. Milena Billik responded, sharing her particular love of the essays in Exophony, so that was my next choice.

Essays about venturing outside one’s native language seemed like good preparation for my imminent immersion in daily 4-hour German language classes. I read the essays out of order, picking whatever interested me at the time, and somewhere in that mix of excitement, a friend came to visit us in Cologne to see another friend’s stage design for a moving and hilarious theatrical adaptation of Don Quijote, “¿QUÉ PASA EN LA MANCHA?” If you live anywhere near Cologne, I highly recommend seeing it; among my favorite moments was an actor’s a cappella rendering, in Spanish, of Radiohead’s Creep.

The premiere of this production was not only fantastic, but was followed by an equally fantastic premiere party — which ended with the entire cast and crew and whoever was left standing (yours truly!) singing to Radiohead together on the dance floor.²

I am not a person who has had a specific roadmap for life, and my attempts to set a path have often gone disastrously astray. My decision to study Italian in college, for example, is almost laughable in hindsight, because I now live in a country that murders the word “schpah-ghetti” on a daily basis³. But sometimes winding up where I least expected has been better than anything I could have imagined or planned. Belting out the lyrics of my adolescence with friends who grew up to the same song, an ocean away? A very good break in the time-space continuum.

Here are a few moments from Tawada’s essays that have had some bearing on my everyday life, now that I am studying German every day. Let me know in the comments if you can relate to any of these!

category 4

One of the first essays I read, I have since recounted to so many friends that, when I could not easily find it among my many annotations, I began to believe I had dreamed it up. It would not be unusual, I think, to invent a Yoko Tawada essay in my sleep!

The chapter “Gainesville; World Literature, Reconsidered” struck me as hilarious because it includes an anecdote about a 1990s conference in Berlin where Tawada was slotted into “Category 4” on the fourth day. The first day was heterosexual literature, the second was homosexual, the third I kept forgetting, and the fourth day, Tawada’s day, was “Category 4.”

“What exactly,” I remembered Tawada recounting someone asking, “do the people in Category 4 do?”

Now that I’ve found the essay and know I didn’t make it up, what I DID make up is “Category 4” as a label — turns out the third day was “Fetishes and Sadomasochism” (make what you will of the fact that I forgot that!) and the fourth day was, as Tawada writes:

simply called “Other.” I was invited to read on the fourth night, probably because I am an animist who experiences objects, trees, and letters as erotic. On the night before the festival, someone called the venue and asked: “What kinds of things do people in the ‘Other’ category do?

“Am I in Category 4?” I asked Markus.

“You do have a lot of feelings about paper,” he said.

on living in another language

People tell me that I’ll have reached a threshold of fluency once I’ve started dreaming in German. The other night, I dreamed that I could not figure out how to say what I wanted to say in German. This was not creative or fantastical; it was my everyday experience. Does that count?

Even Yoko Tawada has been asked about dreaming in German; her response was an excellent case of using what plagues you to fuel your writing:

…I was so annoyed by the question about what language I dream in that it prompted me to write a novel, Bioskop der Nacht (Night bioscope), about a girl who dreams in a language she cannot understand. (34)

And then there is my Mutterspräche, showing up either as a false friend (words that sound the same but have different meanings) or just plain invader. In the 1990s, Tawada stopped mentioning “cds” in her written work, not because she knew the tech would soon be dated, but because she did not want English “loan words” in her German writing.

English, Tawada says, is a “shallow business language that can be understood anywhere” (30). She notes, perhaps with a hint of jealousy, that “France now regulates the official number of English loanwords that can be used in French” (54).

I have only been to France in 2018, but I’ve heard/read that there is a lot more English there now, what with the soft power of culture (do I sound nostalgic??) as well as the hordes of Americans who moved there. I’m almost afraid to go back, but I also cannot believe I haven’t been back already — Cologne is a 3 hour, high-speed train ride away.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME that I have not returned to Paris!? To quote a very old internet sketch, Look at my life; look at my choices.⁴ None of my choices are IN PARIS. But they COULD BE!⁵

on the self

Markus has been working in English and I have been studying in German and that has led to both of us not having all the words. I would register us both for early Alzheimer’s testing if I did not know for a fact that it is sheer exhaustion that leads us to rely on the word thing. A frequent theme of our attempts to communicate in either language is this game: describe what the thing DOES! Who cares what it’s called?!

Much of our existence here rests on the humor of gesture. I read this Tawada passage to Markus, so I’ll share it with you:

When you are immersed in a foreign language for several years and are taking in a new language system, part of the theoretical basis for your mother tongue breaks down, changes form, and a new self is born. Some writers strongly dislike this immigrant condition, in which one’s “original self” gets broken down…What is casually beautiful might break along unexpected fracture lines, and may no longer appear natural.

I dislike this term “natural” wherever I see it, owing to many factors, not least of which was a woman in Brooklyn screaming at me at my (former) place of employment:

I BOUGHT THIS ALL-NATURAL PERFUME FROM YOUR SHOP ONLINE AND I GOT A RASH.

Lady, I wanted to say, have you ever heard of poison ivy? Au naturel, BITCH, au naturel!!!

Anyway, what I mean to say is, I am always suspicious of whatever is labelled “natural” but I am highly guarded about this thing I think of as my “original self.” PARTTIMELADY took a long time to build and she’s a rare model! And despite the fact that I relish the lack of fucks given about things like bras or make-up or stylish footwear in Germany, I do not relish the idea of my self breaking down.

But a person can’t eat all this bread and not change a little now, can she?

1. Tawada is an award-winning writer who came to Germany as a student from Japan, and has lived here for most of her adult life, publishing books in both German and Japanese.

2. No, it is not a dance song, but when in Rome…or Cologne…

3. If you are in any way, shape, or form Italian, or of Italian extraction, and for some reason want to induce vomit, google image search “Spaghetti Eis.” WHAT WILL THEY THINK UP NEXT.

4. It was 16 years ago and I was teaching high school English; this was (IS?!) my motto: I THINK YOU’RE FOURTEEN AND YOU’RE AN IDIOT. Slow down, crazy, slow down!!

5. Yes: from RuPaul’s Drag Race. “It’s not Christmas. BUT IT COULD BE!!”