“Gun Bubbles”
Margrét Ann Thors, 2022
Originally published in Creative Nonfiction
Editor’s Note: The excerpt in this chapter is included on the basis of fair use.
Hashtags
#multilingual, #family, #personal narrative, #trauma, #conditional, #body, #death, #immigration, #lost in translation
Frame
ET: Unlike Yiyun Li’s “To Speak Is to Blunder,” Margrét Thors’s “Gun Bubbles” takes a direct and raw approach to the first-person personal essay. Even the translations of Icelandic to English are unapologetically literal. Despite that directness, what comes through as compelling is its use of repetition—relived trauma, collage-like echoes of themes, and compounded language sounds—and immersion, so that language evokes a closeness and distance from the violence and uncertainty in the narrator’s life.
Excerpts
The Icelandic word for dinosaur is risaeðla, which means giant lizard. Bergmál, the word for echo, means language of mountains. To say wedding, you use brúðkaup, which means to buy a bride. Quotation marks are goose feet, bras are breast-holders, and planets are wandering stars. If I tell you I’m in love with a guy with gray-blue eyes and an accent, I’m really saying I am imprisoned by affection.
Many summer nights, this guy—my husband—and I sit on a patch of damp grass in a suburb of Reykjavík, watching the midnight sun smolder and bouncing between languages. Half-Icelandic and raised in the United States, I have forgotten many of the words I knew as a child, and I laugh as if hearing them for the first time. Sometimes I get carried away, taking some poetic license. A penguin is a blubber-goose. An idea is a picture in the mind. A cello, a knee-violin. “Do you remember what a sloth is?” he’ll ask, and although I have an inkling—a sniff of sight—I don’t risk the guess. “Remind me.” He smirks. “Letidýr.” Lazy animal.
Icelandic is like this: blunt, beautiful. The land itself is striking and extreme, marked by glaciers, rumbling volcanoes, black-sand beaches made of cooled lava. Winters are practically without daylight; summers, nightless. Hot water shoots up from the earth, warm tap water smells like rotten eggs, and in winter, snow swirls so fiercely that the whole island is chalked white. There are elves here, known as hidden people, huldufólk, who live behind brightly painted doors in the mountains and, if you believe the stories my parents tell me, routinely swap well-behaved children for evil imposters. “The elves stole my good son and daughter,” my mother would say when my brother and I fought. “I don’t know who you two are.”
A marshmallow is a sugar-pillow. A rocket, flying fire. A hangover is a man made of wood.
Placenta is a womb-cake. To breastfeed is to give the gift of your boobs.
Translated literally, abortion is fetus-deletion. Bullets are gun bubbles.
* * *
What if he had shot me, and I had been pregnant?
You wouldn’t have been. The doctor told you.
But what if, if I were pregnant, I wouldn’t have deleted a fetus or put my pregnancy on hiatus?
It’s not about you. It’s the principle.
Then why risk shooting at someone like me, what principle did that prove?
It was for the babies.
If I wanted a baby and couldn’t have one. Isn’t that the opposite, the antithesis of what you’re killing people for.
It’s not about you. It’s the principle.
You may access the full text here on Creative Nonfiction’s website.
Text Version
Wide Shots:
- How do you make repetition interesting? When have you found it appealing? Haunting? Boring?
- Arguably we all need approval or validation. In what ways is this encouraging or empowering? And how does this become a power dynamic that may even “imprison” us?
- After reading this piece, what is an image you viscerally remember feeling? On the other hand, where did this essay provoke you to think more deliberatively or intently?
Close Shots:
- Read the tenth section of the article that starts “We call her spud, our little sweet potato.” It’s largely about etymology and word association through shared roots for the word “earth,” “native soil,” or “fósturjörð.” Find a sentence in another section of the essay that echoes an idea or feeling from this section. How do they resonate with one another?
- In the paragraph that begins “Icelandic is like this: blunt, beautiful” consider how that paragraph attempts to describe an entire country and its langauge. What seems definitive of Iceland and Icelandic? What more might be there that Thors doesn’t speak to?
- Gather the direct translations Thors provides from Icelandic to English. What point does she try to make in about Icelandic, English, and translation in general in her direct and literal approach to translation?
Mid Shots
- See “Emotion in Language” for a close-reading prompt about how language can evoke distance.
Possible Transitions
JS: To further explore ways of finding language for and around moments of violation, especially when gendered and racialized, I would pair this with Sofia Samatar, “Skin Feeling.” To further explore the connections of language and place, this piece can be put in conversation with Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.”
DU: I’d pair this Bassey Ikip’s “Connecting the Dots” and highlight the effective use of first person in each essay. Then, I’d transition towards a personal essay writing assignment to guide students around point of view.
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
“Gun Bubbles”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
"To Speak is to Blunder"
“Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson"
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
Translations Across and Within Languages (exploration)
a nonfiction genre where the author and narrator are one
See:
"Asters and Goldenrod"
"Connecting the Dots"
“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive”
“Gun Bubbles”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
"Saving a Language You're Learning to Speak"
“Skin Feeling”
"To Speak is to Blunder"
Critical Learning Reflection (exploration)
Poetry and Science: Epistemology through Language (exploration)
examines or uses the conditional mood in significant or interesting ways.
See:
“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive,”
“Gun Bubbles,”
Emotion in Language (exploration)
See:
"Connecting the Dots"
“Gun Bubbles”
“Skin Feeling”
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
