Its Marie’s birthday today. Birthdays are wonderful – they’re the day we began. The day we begin to be formed through cultural influences, family ties, history and genetics. The beginning of the search for personal identity. Serendipitously today, through a booklet Marie sent me I googled Alsace in France, a place of meaning for Marie. And wow – to come from a land that is so ancient, that its current population has blood strains going back to 1500BC – that for me is amazing, coming from South Arica where everything is SO NEW in comparison!
And her work, it echoes this. It speaks of the language struggles resulting from a complex history. A heavy history.
Just in the 19th – 20th centuries alone the land and people went back and forth four times between France and Germany. Complex times for sure.
She writes that her grand parents were German, then French then German, then French again. From one day to another they were not allowed to speak their native language anymore. The result? A crisis of identity. A human induced Babel. Confusion.
Language painted out, hidden, layered, treasured in books so old time has aged their pages.
"We did not dare to believe the extermination… the pain was so deep and so sharp it was necessary to hide it, to prevent oneself of expressing it, in order to be able to live” (Extract from a letter to Jean Claude).
The denial of language use. By force. Today, just because, for no real reason, we shorten and chop and deny Language its proper use. We cut it and curtail it and ignore it, decimating it - to what?
Marie’s conclusion :
Le Particularisme
The Sense of Identity.
What more will be lost?
Comment
You can't see it but I'm blushing now...
Thank you!
It IS so this! brilliant choice!!
(and thanks Bruno)
Marie - another extract from the book (I dont know it at ALL!) Modeling the Stellar Environment :
"Life was beginning again for us in 1944 and if our county invited us to find again our place in the society, we were still dazzled as if going out in full light after a long path in a tunnel."
Just sounds SO THIS!!!
Bruno - I ONLY know DRAMATIC Portuguese people!!! They're FAB!!! An excess of identity??? A historical weight? Sounds .....
DW, Thank you mon cher :-))
Cheryl, what a wonderful B-day present! Thank you... In a way I feel more Alsacian than French, even if I am both. Do I have two or even three identities? :-o OMG :-)) Maybe a mixture of all this.
You got it absolutely right, Alsace is probably the Babel of Europe!
Oh, and the pics look fab too with that dark halo!!
happy birth day cb
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