Hourig Attarian

Department of Integrated Studies in Education

McGill University

Canada

Working with autobiographical art-based methodologies has led me to an exploration, through narrative inquiry, of the life stories of mothers, daughters and granddaughters. Anchored in the blurred genre of life story, autobiography and autoethnography, my work is informed by the feminist scholarship of Behar, Cixous, Nielson, Sizoo, and Stanley among others. 

Translation is a pervasive metaphor we engage with in our self-reflexive process as researchers. Apart from the literal juggling between languages and world views we encounter in our daily lives, the challenge lies in finding a language to describe our experiences without fragmentation. 

As Eva Hoffman writes “it’s only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge” (1990, p. 272). I live in translation often as an (immigrant) (diasporan) woman, who aspires to change, create, learn, teach. In so many instances, the language I speak is a foreign “other,” even in my own community. “Mother/tongue” signifies for me both speaking with and to the tongue of the mother. 

Sometimes feeling there is a dichotomy between the two, I face the dilemma of keeping my loyalty to both, while being careful not to lose my autobiographical voice in the process. My mother tongue, Armenian, lies solidly at the cornerstone of my identity. Yet, I also inhabit a duality of self and voice manifested in my two lived languages, English and Armenian. My self, the sum of my lived experiences in Armenian, is revealed through my voice which theorizes these experiences in English. This convenient duality helps create a certain detachment to name and word the experience. 

Experimenting with "mother/tongue" in Armenian, I learned to reverse the process of "self" and "voice", of "living" and "theorizing". In Armenian, mother tongue is [mayreni lezou], maternal tongue. Most often, [lezou] is dropped and we use [mayreni] to signify the concept of mothertongue. In addition, "autobiography" [ink'nakensapatoum], translates as "telling the story of the life of the self". This is a concept I inhabit easily, with its resonance of life history/story. Telling the story of the life of my self is giving birth to my voice. My [ink'nakensapatoum] is not only about making my self visible through my voice, but essentially about writing myself as a woman. 

The concept of the mother/tongue becomes a holistic approach to look at both perspectives of speaking with and to the tongue of the mother as complimentary positionalities. The stories of mothers, daughters and granddaughters I recount in my presentation are manifestations of this understanding of mother/tongue. They are also an attempt to heal, to come to terms with the memories of war and genocide as well as the pain of loss and dispossession that is strewn across the matrilineal lifepath of my family. Hoffman, E. (1990). Lost in translation: Life in a new language. New York: Penguin Books.

About Hourig Attarian