Writing in tongues: Chantal Akerman's News From Home

Abstract

My mother wrote me love letters, and that was marvelous. With her own words [...] my mother didn't learn to write, she quit school at 11, [...] She writes as she can, she formulates her feelings in an unsophisticated way, they really reflect her. If she were more sophisticated, she wouldn't have dared to ask me all the time 'When are you coming back? You know very well that we love you, you know that we miss you'. She wouldn't have dared, she would've said it by way of a thousand 'detours'. But she's not sophisticated, she used the words that she had, [... ] Chantal Akerman, Camera Obscllral J'nime 9 1>oiis écrire; je parle à 1>oiis, je callse avec zoits (I like to write you; I speak to you, I talk with you) Marie de S6vign6, in a letter to her daughterz 2