With a Woman's Voice: Folklore of Early Childhood

By Beatriz Sanjuán

Translated from Spanish. The original is here: Círculo Hexágono

The voice sings and builds. The voice of a woman fabricates enchantment while another one clings to the weft as it reaches for its warp. It matters that it is these women: the mother, the one who has always been there, her kingdom and her curse; and the writer, who has just found the freedom of being, touched by wars that did not end.

The voice sings a lullaby, recites a finger play, rocks the creature: and with this folklore, it builds a body, a world, an identity. It begins by working on its own fabrics: blood, milk, and tears (the other one asks herself: should she rather ride, like a warlord on the battlefield?). She's just severed from the fruit of her womb, and a new umbilical cord is stretching across the sky.

And there are choruses, cherished or not. Voices that follow her own, community.

There is an internal and an external tuning pitch, coincidences and disagreements between the tones and rhythms of the creature that gives birth and those of the one who is born; between life inside the womb and life under moon and sun, dreams and hunger, minute clocks with sharp teeth.

The singing voice is a mother.

Biological mother? Wet nurse? Stepmother? How not to tinge the song with such powerful fates?

The singing voice is a mother.

Grandma? Two times mother. Midwife? So much does she bring to life. And let's not forget Agar, the slave, the maid that Margaret Atwood revives in her writings.

Why does a mother’s voice sing? It has always? Which part of it is instinct? What message is an intimate secret? What hints come from the social contract, instead of from nature it(her)self?

In the midst of this chaos, I draw my name. Years of this double sight pile up on my eyelids: from being a mother who breeds with her voice and from accompanying others in the same task. Could I be the ambidextrous mind that lives and observes life, who exercises the right to tell the story, both central and sidetracked, about the human creature being built by the voice of early childhood?

In any event, we must be ourselves. The time is coming when, maybe for the first time, we'll realize that we are protagonists, and we'll do it as artists and scientists, using all of the human languages and everything they convey. Female musicians and primatologists, female neurologists and poets, female anthropologists, filmmakers, mathematicians, I turn to you.

Two instances can be found at the root of this call. On one hand, there is Lorca’s Lullaby (as it is known) and the conference he dedicated to the issue in 1928, entitled “Añada. Arrolo. Nana. Vou veri vou” (which can be found here, in Spanish). Lorca gathers and mentions popular texts passed around in women's mouths throughout the Spanish land. He listens, admires and interprets them beautifully, aware of his own subjectivity but not of the secondary role he plays in the scenes he shows. It does not occur to anyone that a woman would be able to explain or entertain an opinion on what he sings.

Similarly, the stories the Grimm brothers drew from oral tradition by way of numerous female informants, stories that endured as examples of Germanic imagination and character, are ususally called Grimm's Fairy Tales. Women transmit them. Men interpret and canonize.

Is there anything to regret about treasuring the popular collections that were built in both cases? Just a statement of fact: it is only the arrival of men in a field traditionally thought of as feminine, domestic, that lends it some importance. With their presence and interest, they change the territory into an androcentric one which then acquires the possibility of being philosophical, philological and even openly scientific.

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Late considerations from a sleepless translator

And yet, it may well be that the interpreter must observe things from afar (to gain 'perspective' so they say). This would require those women to move away from singing & telling and into something like the academy. Would it be a good move? Instead, perhaps we should be fighting to change the legitimate ways through which we acquire knowledge to include the view from the inside, to really prize what becomes visible when we position ourselves on the inside of the matter. On the side of what it matters. 

Focusing on the scope of what our tradition considers to be feminine is also very relevant. Women shouldn't be asked to choose between worlds. Instead, and in order to really change things, the domestic realm must be regarded as something valuable, a place that generates value (and which should also generate income), in which men and women share tasks and responsibilities.

Finally, there will be times when we find ourselves unable to access the original version of a story (or understand the language in which it was elaborated). On such occasions, the interpreter proves him or herself essential. Not all human experiences are directly accessible to all of us—with no prejudice to Terence's saying ('nothing human is alien to me'). On account of humanity's richness and diversity, sometimes we depend upon interpreters and mediators to reach each other's meanings. Let's not deny them our appreciation.

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