Language

“Our language is the reflection of ourselves. A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.” CESAR CHAVEZ

“Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and the imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.” MICHAEL GOVE

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.” CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

“Yankees don’t understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.” LEWIS GRIZZARD

“Even in the deepest love relationship - when lovers say ‘I love you’ to each other - we don’t really know what we’re saying, because language isn’t equal to the complexity of human emotions.” DUANE MICHALS

“Welsh is my mother tongue, and my children speak it. If you come and live in this community you’ll work out pretty quickly that it’s beneficial to learn the language, because if you’re going to the pub or a cafe you need to be a part of the local life.” BRYN TERFEL

“We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.” MANGOSUTHU BUTHELEZI

When traveling throughout Italy, I found it to be a curious matter that English was not as universal throughout the country as I thought it would be, even in larger cities such as Rome and in particular, Naples. For me, this was a welcome challenge - a thorn on the rose stem, so-to- speak - as I navigated my way down the meandering pathways one takes to explore the diverse gardens of foreign language. At times it is uncomfortable and even tiresome, but it is mostly rewarding.

My quest to become proficient in several tongues apart from my native one began years ago when I had a Canadian tutor, Ms. Agnes Manbourdon, who taught me French. I would meet with her at her apartment near the water at the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Jackson, Mississippi and over café au laits we would conjugate French verbs and exchange common French expressions for approximately an hour. Afterwards, I would go to my second job at St. Dominic Hospital to transcribe radiology reports - medical terminology is a language to learn in itself.

Before meeting with her, I had an early morning job at the Jackson International Airport working as a ticket agent, and it should be mentioned that at this time I had begun to take pilot lessons, so I was also learning the language of aviation. After some time, Ms. Manbourdon went on her annual trip back to Canada for a month or so, and we lost track. I never saw her again. Later that same year, I began taking Japanese lessons with Ms. Eiko Tashiro, who became my sensei for a little while. We would meet at her house for a lesson in Japanese language and a Japanese tea ceremony. Sometimes we would practice origami. Along with learning her language, I was learning her culture. Again, due to certain circumstances which I do not remember, we also lost track, and I never saw her again either.

Two years ago, I began taking French lessons formally at the university level. I have since traveled to France to study abroad for several weeks and am most likely going to pursue French for my college minor. While in France, I discovered that there is more to learning a language than memorizing vocabulary and verbal conjugations, and it is not enough to merely practice vowel sounds. There is a cadence and a rhythm to being French that is sensed in more than the language and speech itself; it is embodied in the culture of France, and the sooner one picks up on that rhythm, the easier it will go for them to learn the language.

I found this to be the case also while I was in Italy for several months and because of the lessons that were ingrained while learning French and being in France, I found that picking up Italian came much swifter to me. I embraced the nuances of the language and the cultural rhythm of Italian daily life which varies throughout Italy. The fact that the majority of my ancestry is French and Italian motivates my enthusiasm to learn both of these languages the most, because I want them to be considered part of my identity.

There was a young man I met from Ghana, Africa in my last few weeks of being in Siena, Italy named Mr. Nartey. He specialized in International Relations and Language and was working on getting his Master’s Degree while in Tuscany. He shared a paper with me that he had written about Pidgin English, which is commonly spoken in Ghana. He explained to me that Pidgin English lacks inflection but is a more efficient language. Where standard grammatical structure and inflection for past tense in a verb has been dropped, it has evolved to become a more simplified language to get the point across. For instance, instead of one saying “I went there,” they might say “I go there.” This has been found to be a growing trend particularly in schools in Ghana. In order to avoid grammatical errors, students will resort to using Pidgin. It is a more straightforward English. I inquired as to how Pidgin English was developed and why it started to be used in Ghana. He explained to me that “those who write the books” - or the history of Africa - threw out tradition when Africa was colonized. The colonial masters decided to document certain things down. They claimed that the language was simplified. This is the way he put it to me: “The person doing the writing will write it in a way that you expect it to be written.” Over the years, it was almost as though there were two languages in Ghana: the language that was taught, and the one that was acquired. The first language is the one you use to reflect certain ways you were influenced (British colonialism). Pidgin was acquired to reflect a language that is closer to the native tongue. During a military regime, students also observed soldiers in the streets using Pidgin English and therefore they began assigning machoism, aggression, and power to the usage of Pidgin. Therefore, the trend of students in Ghana using Pidgin began to grow and increase as a means of adopting an identity and also to defy the performance pressures put on them to use proper English.

In the United States, there are similar debates and differing opinions on what is or should be considered proper standard English and what has evolved into deviated versions of it. I recall reading a passage of critical theory written by Lois Tyson regarding Black Vernacular English (BVE, also called Ebonics or African American English), which fulfills all the grammatical criteria of a genuine language but is still dismissed by many white and some black Americans as substandard or incorrect English rather than recognized as a language in its own right; a language that may have evolved due to what is known as double consciousness or double vision, the awareness of belonging to two conflicting cultures: the African culture, which grew from African roots and was transformed by its own unique history on American soil, and the European culture imposed by white America.

It has occurred to me that a regional or local language can evolve into more than mere vocabulary from the root words it shares with the original language. For example, even though each region in Italy has its own pride and claim to what is “the best” - “Napoli has the best coffee and pizza,” “Liguria has the best pesto and anchovies,” etc. - it is common opinion that Tuscany boasts the usage of the pure Italian language. Whereas a native Tuscan might use the formally taught phrase “Sono di Firenze,” a Roman would shorten the phrase a bit to a more efficient “So di Roma” to express where he or she is from. Recently, I grappled with the choice of whether to use the spelling of “favourite,” which is the proper English way to spell the word to express my preferred flavor, versus “favorite” which is the more popular American spelling. Although I was tempted to use “favourite” as my preferred spelling of choice, I instead went with “favorite” so as to not falsely identify myself as British when I am, in fact, American. So language - by way of spelling, inflection, gesture, nuance, rhythm, and pronunciation - is the foremost way of identifying oneself and, in some ways, his or her worldview.

In a way, it almost seems as though Pidgin is used in some measures in Ghana to defy the colonial influences and to reclaim their native tongue and therefore their culture. Mr. Nartey’s opinion is that though Ghanians speak Pidgin, English is their official language, and it should not be compromised. At the same time, he reflected that someone else’s point of view might be that Pidgin English is part of a Ghanian’s identity and that they need to be proud. Indeed, after I said goodbye to this intelligent young man, I observed him walk to his bus stop with a quick long stride as efficient, straightforward, and proud as the hybrid makeshift English language he had described. 

Dark Star Safari

I have very mixed feelings about this book. For starters, I wasn’t able to complete it; I got about halfway through it, with detailed notes in the margins, but unfortunately I left the book in my apartment the day that I left to return back to the United States. So for the purposes of this short reflection, I will try to recall the highlights of what stood out to me from my reading of this novel.

One thing that I can definitely say about this book is that it is a page-turner. I found it to be a lot more interesting to read than the other two travel writing novels I read while in Italy - Perseus in the Wind by Freya Stark and certainly more than Italian Hours by Henry James. Paul Theroux gives a riveting personal tale of his journey from Cairo to Cape Town with a dry, sometimes cynical, humor. I laughed at some accounts and shook my head at others.

This book is a bit controversial and maybe even problematic for some to read, which is expected to be the case when you have a white American or European author describing his experiences of traveling throughout the countries in Africa, especially with the tone of being an “authority” without having actual lived experience. No matter what he encountered while there, he speaks from the vantage point of a privileged older white male and cannot separate himself from that nor could his reader. I recall a classmate saying “I would like to read a book like this that had been written by someone else.” (In other words, not a privileged white male.) I couldn’t help but think to myself “If someone else had written this book word-for-word, verbatim, even in the exact style that Paul Theroux wrote it, your reader-response would likely be different and maybe even more accepting.”

This novel is a great text for critical analysis using reader-response or even deconstruction theory. I feel almost certain that the people who felt a negative response to Theroux’s text, to the point that they found it problematic, were influenced more by the fact that they could not separate Theroux himself from his text rather than his writing delivery. But that is my reader-response on the people themselves who read this book, which is why my thoughts are subjective and neither right nor wrong, just like Theroux himself and others who read his accounts.

All of the above having been said, here are some of the things that I did question about Theroux’s judgements on what he and others may find problematic about Africa. One of the issues Theroux brings up frequently throughout his book is that of the aid programs in Africa which are monuments to European and American failure. (I did not put that phrase in quotes, because I cannot remember if those are his words or mine, but that is the implication that I got from Theroux when I read his accounts.) He rants and makes sardonic comments about aid workers in “white cars playing loud music” who don’t offer to give him rides. (He mentions this a couple of times when encountering other white travelers from Europe or America.) Theroux talks about the failure of aid programs as though he is an authority; however, unless he brings it up later in the book, which I only got through half, I don’t believe he ever mentions even visiting one of the aid projects or program offices.

Another thing that stood out to me was the text Theroux uses to try to convey the tone and pronunciation of the way someone from Egypt or the Sudan would talk to him. For instance, if someone said “There is no work here,” the text Theroux would provide to the reader would be something like this: Dey eez nuh wuk heah. (That is my best attempt to give an example since I do not have the book here in front of me to transcribe exactly as it is written; that is just my recall.) I made a connection to how Europeans and Americans perceive people from Africa based on the communication delivery and grasp of English language when I met a young man from Ghana who is living in Siena to finish earning his master’s degree. He specializes currently in the study of the trend of using Pidgin English in Ghana and how he believes it is compromising the official standard English among students there. He expressed to me that he feels it is lowering the intellectual potential of Ghanian students who use Pidgin English shortcuts to avoid the grammatical constructions of standard English.

I wish I could have gotten further with the book, and I may continue to read it and maybe finish it at a later time, but one quote that stood out to me was the expression “not yet” which I came across while reading. It made me think of a scene in the film Gladiator when the supporting character, played by Djimon Hounsou who portrays a hunter from Africa, tells the main protagonist, played by Russell Crowe, that Crowe’s character will see his family again in the afterlife but “not yet.” I feel like this has been a running theme for Africa, in general, for the centuries of colonization and imperialism it has endured. It has so much potential with the mineral resources, the vastness of the continent, and the intelligent minds that have emerged from there, such as the young man I met while in Siena. Perhaps one day Africa will have its time to flip the script on the western civilizations that have colonized it for centuries and emerge as a superpower in its own right but not yet, it seems...not yet. 

COMBATING MODERN SLAVERY

Despite the fact that slavery still exists globally and is a major issue on four continents, many people are unaware of just how prevalent it is. There are approximately 27 million or more people who are entrapped in real slavery, meaning that they are unable to walk away due to threat of violence. That is double the number that existed during the entire Atlantic Slave Trade.

The look of modern slavery is a depressingly familiar sight: people forced to work in dangerous and demeaning conditions and who are often subjected to abuse, such as whippings. The highest concentration of slavery exists in South Asia, where there are approximately 5 million or more people who are enslaved. South and Central America, as well as Africa, also have high numbers of people who are enslaved, with numbers between 500,000 to 5 million. Even in North America and Europe, there exists situations of slavery, with numbers of up to 500,000 people who were discovered to have been enslaved. The only countries in the entire world where there are no reported/discovered situations of slavery are Iceland and Greenland.

It is frightening to note that the majority of slave laborers are forced to corrode the natural environment by destroying the coastal ecosystems in South Asia, cutting down trees in the Amazon of South America, ravaging forest areas in West Africa, and mining and spreading mercury around in Ghana and the Congo. There is a harrowing connection to be made to what is happening to the environment and what is happening to human rights.

There are multiple factors that are involved, which are not necessarily causal, but they are supporting. These factors include:

1. Population explosion - The world went from 2 billion to more than 7 billion people in the last 50 years.

2. Extreme poverty and vulnerability caused by civil war, kleptocratic (exploitive) government, climate change, natural disasters, etc.

3. Corruption (especially police corruption.)

In regard to the final factor of corruption, one fact that stands out as a primary contributing factor to an area becoming problematic for slavery is the absence of the rule of law. Where there is no fear of impunity, ruthless individuals and companies feel free to use violence against vulnerable people to force or manipulate them into slavery. The most common means of manipulation and trickery that has been reported by people who had become victims of slavery is being asked if they "wanted a job." The victims are poor people who are desperately lacking food and medicine for their families, and despite their suspicions, they feel they have no choice. When they try to leave the situation, the hammer comes down, and they realize they are trapped.

One thing that is remarkable about modern slavery, as opposed to historical slavery, is the complete price collapse of human things. In some places, such as India and Nepal, a slave can be bought for as little as $5 or $10. Once they are used up, they are considered disposable. Considering the fact that slavery is considered to be an endless supply, and that there is global demand for it, there is little surprise that business programs - particularly private equity - have an interest in exploiting this situation.

I feel that the first and primary way of combating contemporary slavery is to become informed and to confront denial that slavery does not exist or is not that big of a problem. People, including myself, should get curious, do their research, and contribute to global awareness of modern slavery. I believe that the greed and competitive nature of capitalist countries, which is fed by excessive consumerism, contributes to the epidemic of slavery. The constant need for cheaper laptops, computers, smartphones, jewels, clothing and the like means that global businesses selling these commodities are going to be looking for cheaper ways of harvesting and resourcing the materials for them so that they can still make a profit. They will continue to cut costs by using cheap labor from exploited human beings.