Friday, January 02, 2009

Becoming Foreign

Ah … Bonjour, mes amis!  You have caught me in conversation with my new friends for the New Year, Luc, Julienne, and others.  Yes – I mean, Oui! – I am stumbling my way back to a rusty second language, after not having spoken French since the freshman classroom.  Hence, my repetitive conversations about catching trains and shopping with my patient textbook amis from France.

I have been a Francophile since grammar school, maybe because we were shown the surreal French film, The Red Balloon, nearly every time we had indoor recess due to severe Colorado weather.  That half-hour 1956 film by Albert Lamorisse immerses the viewer gorgeously in the texture of French culture.  Shot in Paris, with its ornate and forbidding stone buildings and ancient cobbled streets, but from a child’s wondering perspective, it seemed more than a world away from the new tract homes where I grew up on the scraped front range of the Rockies.  Like the little boy in the film who is carried away, finally, by a sympathetic bouquet of balloons over the tiled Parisian rooftops, the film was my first fantasy passport to another culture.

Language, of course, contains any culture’s logic, poetry, and power, which is evident in the long, brutal history of using language as a tool to dominate colonized populations.  Greeks derided non-Greek speakers as mere babblers – as “barbarians” – from the “bar-bar-bar” noise they heard in foreign tongues. The English outlawed Irish language in hopes of stamping out Irish culture – ultimately as big a failure as the attempt to keep those defiant Irish feet from dancing. Most of us are not so xenophobic as to believe our own language is supreme, but English speakers, in particular, can certainly get through life and a good amount of world travel without humbling ourselves in a new language.

This is a shame, because a new language lets us try on an alternative logic, both strange and estranging—where, for example, one no longer calls a spade a spade, but rather “un chat, un chat” (In French, one calls a cat, a cat.).  Every January I attend the lively student production of a Molière play at the University of Notre Dame, where I love catching unexpected nouns, dredged from my memory and falling around me like ornate snowflakes: “Mouchoir”: Handkerchief!  “Avocat”: Lawyer!  Those words don’t take me far down the road of grasping French culture, but for two hours I am on an unfamiliar path, another grammar settling around me like a borrowed cloak.  New words open up new worlds; when we bravely leave our mother tongue behind, we can be born anew as a foreigner, bewildered and open.

Starting with nouns reminds us that being a foreigner is to become an infant, first simply naming immediate objects of desire:  Mama; milk; blanket; cookie. Any language-learner knows it’s the verbs that force painful growth, and for good reason. Explaining to ourselves – let alone to others—what we are doing, much less what we’ve done in the past, or what we hope to do, or, conditionally, WOULD do if, you know, conditions permitted – well, how well do most of us pull this off in our native tongues?

This is the key:  Learning a new language reminds us that our own native expertise is itself an illusion; that we are always partial knowers, and that fluency is the ruse we often use to imagine ourselves more confident than we should ever be, really. In fact, a vow for the New Year might be to swim willingly in the waters of estrangement, to live conscious that when we are most fluent, we are often the most blind. When I had my passport photo taken, not long ago, I had to remove my glasses because of the glare, and as a result I look both lost and hopeful, which seems just right – a foreigner, wondering, even in my native land.

The folk singer Greg Brown wrote a witty song about receiving letters from traveling friends who are in love with the “weirdness” of other countries. The chorus goes, “We said we know it’s weird here, but it’s weird there, too.” I hummed this song when the recent ice storm forced my family off the toll road and through unfamiliar Indiana towns, where we saw, among other wonders, a two-story plexiglass chicken, numerous jokey church signs, and four crosses in a ditch crowned with Santa hats.  Who can make sense of the whimsy and sorrow of any culture?  It’s a puzzle – une énigme, un mystère.  In any language, that much, at least, makes sense.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on January 02, 2009
Customs & Rituals • Education • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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