Writing to inhabit, and why this website

Writing has always been for me a way of inhabiting, of recognize myself: thus inhabiting a language necessarily implies writing in it. Writing is an exploration, a way of appropiating the foreign language. And the opening to the second language revitalises my writing: the impossibility of counting on it was a desolate loss, that I was not willing to face. As usually happens, what seemed like a difficulty is an opportunity to strengthen and develop my writing skills.

As a traveller advances into a territory not yet fully explored, I trace itineraries, geographical analyses, knowing that danger is hidden behind that rock, inside a drop, in the most insignificant places. I know the traps of my own territory; words and uses that are ungraspable to a non-native speaker, the forced grammar, the little incongruities. Writing is always risky; writing in a second language, just a bit more so.

I admire the fluency of those who belong to two languages -beyond the complexity of individual and collective history-. As the Mapuche activist and university teacher Lorena Cañuqueo, whom effortlessly moves from Spanish to Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, and simply explains the link between racism, land concentration and transnational capital in Argentinian Patagonia (season 10, episode 1, TV series Historias Debidas, Canal Encuentro, Argentina).

Anyway, the more I write in English, the more I realise that, at the end, writing is always writing: there is a breath in the text and there are internal rhythms. Respecting that inner life is the real skill of the writer, and this sensibility is given by the habit of writing sustained over a long-period of time. The craft can be extrapolated to another language because at some point it is independent of it (of course, once you can move in the language with some fluency).

Every language is a huge territory and needing some help in finding the right word or checking grammar doesn´t seem to be a problem, more in an age of artificial intelligence, and where tecnology permeates all spheres of our lives (why not a text?). Correction is always present, even in your native tongue, and translators don´t give you the ability to write.