Hope, Cycling etc.

It is as if you imagine it as your mother. You don't lose your mother by taking on a foreign language; in fact you expand her! So that she begins to be identical to the world and, yes, that's the moment of hopeful crisis too. It's like riding a bicycle -- you have that moment of crisis where suddenly you are riding and before that you were falling. It's that moment of crisis that is the beginning of hope, that you are going to be able to negotiate with the other in her mother tongue, as if it were yours. You don't have to know it perfectly -- it is an attitude thing, you know what I'm saying?

†'The Rest of the World: A Conversation with Guyatri Spivak', from Hope: New Philosophies for Change, by Mary Zournazi, pg 174.