My second tongue

Carla Bruni is an Italian that writes and sings in French. Julie Delpy is a French that writes and sings in English. This, in addition to the easiness I have expressing myself in English makes me wonder what is it that makes writing (personal stuff or not) in another language so compelling and eventually so effective as well…
Could it be that this way one can take some distance from the emotionality our own mother tongue is usually packed with, and moving away from that we can be more accurate in what we want to say? In Greek I am inclined to pretend to write with various literary mannerisms, whereas in English I cannot do that. In English it’s just me and my clumsy thoughts. I can be honest: words carry no weight, for me they have no more meaning than what I give them on the very moment I use them. In Greek, I am tragic, I write heavily, I make no sense. I am lost in my literary aspirations to be a novelist, to write the perfect sentence that I will read afterwards and weep. In English I am ok however, I aspire nothing, I only want to say the truth.
Julie’s French accent is nice, it carries over a distance from her songs that although they are so personal and tragic (“My heart will stay yours until I die” for example) you cannot believe she means everything as tragically as she puts it. And this does not mean that she is insincere or that her songs are phoney, it just means that she is detached from them when she sings them and therefore they seem more believable. She doesn’t seem to have written to them on the spur of the moment, they don’t seem emotional songs. So people, I can take them seriously: they are not the songs of a fragile, passionate, weeping woman. They were written after a certain amount of thought. They seem songs that stemmed from heavy emotions but they were written and performed in cold blood. She wrote them with a cool head, that’s why they are so good, and she wrote them with a cool head that’s why they’re in English.
In praise of the second language then, don’t write in your mother tongues people or you’ll be soppy. Detach yourselves. C’est cool!
July 2005