With Mis Dos Voces. Linda Rodriguez has given us a meditation on identity, language and arrival that will forever change how newcomers are perceived. This is the tale of three women, two from Columbia and one from Mexico, who left their homes for Canada. They tell tales of violence, domestic abuse and trauma. But we, the audience, don’t see any of it. Nor do we even see the women. What could have been a run of the mill documentary about the trials nd tribulations of women fleeing their homes in search of a better life is here presented as a serious and reflective work of art.
The most obvious way to make this film would have been to have shots of these women telling their stories intercut with footage of drug dealers shooting people and angry husbands smashing things. Instead, we only hear the women’s voices for most of the film. And visually we are presented with the strange spectacle of a camera panning slowly over a condo building, household objects. a sink full of dishes. As one woman describes the cold-blooded murder of her neighbours and friends, the camera points out the window of a school bus as it rolls through some placid and leafy Canadian suburb. Is the idea here to show how peaceful Canada is compared with Columbia and Mexico? Perhaps in part. But the truth is, as tragic as these stories are, we’ve heard them before. Rodriguez isn’t primarily interested in telling these stories for their own sake. She’s interested in telling the audience something they’ve never heard before about themselves.
They key to understanding this film and its unusual visual character is the title: My Two Voices. On a surface level, it is simply a fact that individuals often speak differently in different languages. My wife, for example, grew up in Italy. She’s perfectly bilingual. But when she speaks in Italian, she speaks more loudly and the character of her voice is different. I would go so far as to say that a different part of her personality comes out when she speaks in Italian. This is one part of what’s going on in Mis Dos Voces. These women gradually learned English, and one remarks that now it’s as if she had two voices. But this superficial observation hides a deeper reality that Rodriguez is wrestling with. Let’s take a step back to think about what’s at stake when it comes to immigrants arriving in a new land where the language is not their own.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once said that language is the house of being. By that he seems to have meant that the way you ‘are’ in the world, the way you relate to the world and understand it, is intimately linked to your language. German speakers, the argument goes, see the world in a fundamentally different way than Spanish people simply because of the structure and character of their respective languages. We wouldn’t want to push this idea too far since it would lead us to believe that speakers of other languages are, to some extent, inscrutable ‘others.’ Pushed a bit further, this theory would inevitably lead to dehumanizing those who do not share one’s language.
On the other hand, this sort of dehumanization-based-on-different-language is something that immigrants like the women in this film face from English speakers all the time. The casual xenophobia many Canadians feel towards newcomers is to a large extent the result of the language barrier. The stories newcomers tell about themselves are, to many, simply lacking in reality. The lack of fluency in English is taken as a clear sign of lower intelligence. This may sound harsh, but beneath a friendly exterior, I would wager that this is a common phenomenon.
This is why the approach Rodriguez takes with Mis Dos Voces is so brilliant. We have to listen to these women’s voices for a long time before we get a glimpse of them. Only slowly, over the course of the film, do we begin to ‘see’ what these women look like. This visual approach is an allegory for getting to know these women. They begin as disembodied voices the same way that people we’ve just met aren’t really real to us and the same way those who don’t speak the same language in some sense don’t seem entirely real. It is only gradually, with more conversation and more contact, that the other person begins to seem real. It is only then that we hear their real voice. At first we don’t really see these others and we don’t really hear them either. We begin with a kind of myopia and only gradually are we able to pull back and see the whole person. Rodriguez mimics this visually in her film.
And, fascinatingly, it is only once we catch glimpses of these women visually that we start to hear what they really think of their new home. One tells us that she doesn’t fully trust Canada. To the ears of someone born in Canada to the anglo-majority as I was, this is a surprising statement, following as it does these women’s descriptions of death and destruction back home. The cultural barriers are also real. Coming from a country where community is a bigger part of life, one of the women exclaims that she doesn’t understand why Canadians are so uptight when asked for favours. In Canada, one might be living in a house that’s been divided into five apartments. Each tenant will have their own hammer and be annoyed if someone asks to borrow theirs. In Columbia, in a similar house, there would be one hammer and everyone would share. This is more logical, since only carpenters need their hammers all the time. But Canadians don’t like to be disturbed. And this, to these women, is disturbing.
The trajectory here is quite remarkable. We go from experiencing these women as unknown others. Gradually we get to know them and to see them. And by the end, they’re making us rethink some of the sillier aspects of our own culture.
One of the traits of a real work of art is that it makes its audience see the world differently. In this, Linda Rodriguez has succeeded.