Second Language Learning and Identity: Cracking Metaphors in Ideological and Poetic Discourse in the Third Space
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Second Language Learning and Identity: Cracking Metaphors in Ideo ...

Chapter 1:  Autobiographical Self
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Majestic eagle

In gilded cage, her wings clipped

Her spirit sundered

One summer evening in Japan, my second daughter, who was 22 years old at the time, and I were sitting side by side watching a beautiful sunset. Feeling the soft sea breeze and witnessing the sky become tinged with an orange hue, I was moved to reflect on my life. In expressing myself, I told her that I had sacrificed my life for the sake of my children. Following the announcement, I expected her to console me. But she said that because I did not have the courage to be independent, I chose to endure an unhappy marriage. I began to cry, as my daughter had cut all my excuses in two with a single stroke of her sword, —, ittouryoudanni. Once I had finished crying, I began to consider the ways in which my daughter had cut away all my burdens, obligations, and socially constructed excuses by criticizing me. I felt as though I was trapped, suffocating in my marriage, an unspeakable ordeal in that patriarchal society in which I was unable to feel that I existed.

Now it happens that in this country (Japan) the empire of signifiers is so immense, so in excess of speech, that the exchange of signs remains of a fascinating richness, mobility, and subtlety, despite the opacity of the language, sometimes even as a consequence of that opacity. The reason for this is that in Japan the body exists, acts, shows itself, gives itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, but according to a pure—though subtly discontinuous—erotic project. (Barthes, 1970, p. 10)

Barthes described the implicit and ambiguous Japan beautifully. But when I lived in Japan, I felt as though this empire of signifiers explicitly coerced women into silence, into discarding the words with which to voice objection with the role into which they were and still are subjugated. I struggled to find women’s words in a male-centered society. As Sartre (1956) saw the human condition as “condemned to be free” (p. 439), English became my wings with which to fly.