In the 15th century, Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci undertook many a voyage—navigating rough seas for months, sometimes years, between Europe and the New World.

There’s nothing I would change about that sentence.

Alas, today I read and hear about students “navigating” their way through college, executives “navigating” their way through corporate politics, and pretty much everybody “navigating” their way through lives replete with deadlines, inflation, and stress.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear America’s most colloquially abused marine metaphor. “All hands on deck” is a distant second.

My writerly antennae perk up every time I hear these words and phrases. When a writer moves from another country—in my case, India—to this one, she is met with new pathogens, new allergens, new words, and new ways of using old words. Or, to borrow a Silicon Valley term, she finds new “use cases” for certain words she thought she knew.

Thanks to American TV and Hollywood, both of which are wildly popular in urban India, I’ve long known that “breaking a leg” has nothing to do with fractures, “cutting cheese” has little to do with lactose, and “a piece of cake” is not about baking. But my journey of discovery runs deeper than acquiring a working knowledge of such phrases.

As I approach the English language in a whole new context, I’m tempted to riff on a concept from the Turkish author Elif Shafak, who speaks of ferrying words from the shores of one language to another. Now that I’m writing in, for, and about a new country, I too ferry words from one shore of the English language to another. They both lose and gain meaning in the process.

Moving from India, a British colony until 1947, to the U.S., which is its own insular galaxy apart from the rest of the English-speaking world, is linguistically jarring. Assimilating here means replacing dustbins with trash cans, and footpaths with sidewalks. Accepting redundant prepositions like sending things “over” or swapping stuff “out.” Stifling the urge to say, “No, you didn’t literally die after hearing that joke.” Knowing that “perfect” has little to do with perfection.

Assimilating also means adopting a whole new socio-psychological lexicon. I think I know what UC San Diego cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky means when she says that language and words shape our thoughts, and consequently, our reality. It’s hard not to wonder what a new vocabulary does to one’s voice, personality, and being.

Here’s an everyday example. In the U.S., when the friendly lady behind the sandwich counter asks how my day is going, she expects me to respond with a culturally approved “Good, how’s your day going?” or “Not bad”—my husband’s standard response. Or at most, with a comment that deflects attention from my subjective, inner experience toward something external, something neutral, a shared reality such as the traffic or weather.

Despite my extroversion, my appetite for small talk is … small. Telling the sandwich lady that my day is going fine and absently inquiring about hers seems shallow. It’s an unlikely conversation in India, where it’s not considered rude to ask a shopkeeper for an item you need, take it, pay him, and leave without so much as a smile. Despite India’s famed warmth and hospitality, everyday social interactions involving money tend to be transactional.

But when this sort of vacant chitchat occurs frequently, as now it must, I feel socially assimilated but psychologically inauthentic. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always responded with the truth when I’ve been asked how I’m doing—sometimes I’m doing all right, sometimes I’m not. I once stirred the pot by saying, “My day’s going terribly, how about yours?” to a colleague, after which a meaningful exchange ensued. We let strangers consume our interiority on social media. Why can’t we do the same in real life while someone bags up our burrito?

I also worry about the semantic dilution of words like “please,” “thank you,” and “sorry,” and how it will impact meaningful interactions in my life. I love how polite people are here, but if I punctuate every other sentence with “thank you,” what will I say when I really want to express gratitude? I’m used to uttering “sorry” and “thank you” as expressions of apology and gratitude, respectively. If “sorry” becomes a prefix to every request—asking someone to make way for me to pass through a narrow space, or to repeat what they just said—what will I say when I really want to apologize? The words will come, I realize. But will that mean I have changed in some fundamental way?

This psychological transit between continents has me discovering new aspects of myself. Migration has changed my choice of self-identifying words; I take an outside-in view of myself, almost as if I have become a spectator to my own existence. In India, it’s common to speak at least two to four languages. I speak English, Hindi, Marathi and a bit of Telugu. In the U.S., I make it a point to tell people I’m a polyglot. In India, for 37 years, it was something I took for granted.

I’ve become more acutely aware of my race. I used to be a South Indian from South Mumbai; as of 2022 when my plane touched down in San Francisco, I “became” South Asian, learning that identifying simply as “Asian” came with entirely different racial connotations.

From being just a regular woman—no more, no less—I am now a woman of color. Moving has given me a whole new view of the same face in the mirror. In India, a land rife with colorism, I’m considered fair-skinned and therefore attractive. It’s both humbling and liberating to use a different set of adjectives to describe myself in America—dark, colored, brown, tan. I am amused each time I check the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) box on forms, not least because I wasn’t aware of this acronym 18 months ago.

And then there is my writing life. Salman Rushdie once said every writer has their own relationship with the language they write in. As I recalibrate my love story with English, I worry about losing some of the creative magic I’ve cultivated over the years. It’s like coming close to mastering an art form and then being told the rules of engagement have changed.

At the same time, I’m letting my amusement with everyday Americanisms reshape my thoughts, a process that makes me feel creatively unmoored—and excited. This sense of loosening the reins of control over my craft has pervaded other aspects of my work, too. I find myself experimenting with new styles all around. My poetry, which has always had rigid rhyme and rhythm at its core, now runs amok into free verse.

Maybe I’ll find new, better ways of expression, working my way through a whole new universe of literary and personal nuance. I’m keeping an open mind on this journey. But I’ll be leaving the navigating to the sailors.

The post ‘Navigate’ Is an Overused Metaphor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderón initiated the country’s War on Drugs, which she describes as “a military crackdown on the brutal narcotrafficking gangs that had presumably maintained pacts of stability with previous regimes.” Its toll is estimated to be 360,000 homicides and more than 60,000 disappeared. Rivera Garza refers to it not as the drug war but the guerra calderonista—the Calderón war.

Violence has changed not only life in Mexico, Rivera Garza argues in The Restless Dead, but also how authors write and understand themselves as creators. In recent years, the country has seen the emergence of a writing style that foregrounds the ways that a community has collectively produced a text—a literary transition from the individual to the collective that, she observes, mirrors how Mexican society is resisting violence through community-based activism. Together, in a context of profound loss, these new literary devices and activist approaches are creating new vocabularies and practices that help victims’ families both grieve and claim justice for their loved ones.

Today, most murders in Mexico go uninvestigated, creating an ambiance of impunity that has increased violent crime, including feminicides, and that has left victims’ families to investigate their own cases. Cristina Rivera Garza’s family is one of these searching families, though their loss occurred before the war began. Rivera Garza’s most recent book, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, which was released in Mexico in 2021 and appeared in English—rewritten by Rivera Garza herself—from Hogarth Press in 2023, is her personal contribution to the body of literature and activism of Mexico’s unresolved murders.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer details the story of Liliana Rivera Garza, the author’s sister, who was a 20-year-old college student when she was murdered on July 16th, 1990, by her ex-boyfriend, Ángel González Ramos. In a way, it’s a detective story. But it’s one in which the process of discovery is imperfect and only possible through collective storytelling.

At the opening of the text, Rivera Garza tries and fails to locate her sister’s case file. Like many other cases in Mexico, it turns out that her sister’s murder has no official record. She has to find other ways to piece the story together.

She begins with Liliana’s numerous letters and the notes she wrote throughout her brief life on notebooks, diaries, and loose papers. But even with that source material, Rivera Garza soon realizes that she cannot make sense of Liliana’s papers alone. She needs the help of people close to her sister—especially those who were close to her in the months before her murder.

The text transforms into a collective endeavor—a community archive documenting Liliana’s life. Alongside Liliana’s letters and diary entries, Rivera Garza brings together news clips from tabloids about Liliana’s murder, testimonies from Liliana’s friends and family, and her own reflections and memories of her sister. The community effort is also present in the graphic design of the book: The front cover of the Spanish-language edition of the book bears a photograph of Liliana taken by her friend Othón Santos Álvarez, while Liliana’s college friend Raúl Espino Madrigal designed the font used for Liliana’s notes based on her real handwriting.

Liliana Rivera Garza’s murder took place before homicide and feminicide had become an epidemic in Mexico. At the time, there were few outlets for support to which Rivera Garza could turn. For almost 30 years, she and her parents grieved Liliana alone and in silence, lacking the words to name what happened to Liliana or the tools to demand justice. “Faced with the unimaginable, we did not know what to do. So we shut up … resigned to impunity, to corruption, to the lack of justice.”

In the decades following Liliana’s murder, feminicides multiplied. “Dead women multiplied in our midst,” Rivera Garza writes. “The blood of so many rained all over Mexico as a misnamed war, the so-called War on Drugs, devastated entire villages and cities, clearing the path for … more death.” As deaths increased, so did the number of families grieving murdered loved ones.

Gradually, the mourners organized to grieve together and seek justice. In Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, for instance, mothers of victims of feminicide formed grassroots organizations, including Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for our Daughters) and Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (Bring our Daughters Home), to take on the work neglected by corrupt and indifferent authorities, such as conducting investigations and searches and even developing their own forensic methods.

Like Rivera Garza’s family, these families faced the challenge of lacking the words to name what happened to their daughters. So, as scholar Tricia Serviss argues, they created a novel vocabulary to denounce misogynist violence, express their pain and anger, claim justice for the victims, and support their public protests.

One of the most basic words the families lacked was a term for the crime that had taken place. Together with scholars such as María Marcela Lagarde y de Los Ríos, the collectives organized for Mexico to adopt feminicidio (feminicide) as a crime classification. According to Lagarde y de Los Ríos, femicidio (femicide, lacking the middle syllable) means solely “the homicide of women.” The families of murdered Mexican women needed a term for the systemic nature of the murders—“the ensemble of violations of women’s human rights, which contains the crimes against and the disappearances of women.” In 2012, feminicidio was added to the Ley General de Acceso de las Mujeres a una Vida Libre de Violencia (General Act on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence), defined as a form of “extreme gender violence.”

The family activists also brought a term for their own work into the public sphere: coadyuvante, a family member of a victim of a crime who actively participates in the crime investigation. Naming their key role enabled them to further their searches for justice: In 2008, Article 20 of the Mexican Constitution was amended to give coadyuvantes the right to participate in official investigations.

Rivera Garza and her family watched the grieving of other families of victims of feminicide in silence, until one day the others’ activism gave them the strength to break the silence and seek justice for Liliana. She writes: “The day finally arrived and, together with others, thanks to the strength of others, we were able to conceive, even fathom, that we too deserve justice … That we could fight, aloud and with others, to bring you here, to the language of justice.” The collective activism of other families provided her the vocabulary to claim justice for her sister, and taught her that grief is not an individual and shameful issue but a collective process of healing.

Since Rivera Garza published her sister’s story, Liliana Rivera Garza has become a symbol of collective activism against feminicide. The English version of the book includes photographs documenting the book’s presence in activism throughout Mexico and Latin America. One woman, dressed in white, raises a placard that reads, “Liliana Rivera Garza, murdered 1990, JUSTICE.” Another shows a group of women in a protest in Mexico City, with Liliana’s name graffitied behind them on the metal security shutter of a jewelry store. Readers have also organized collective readings of the book honoring Liliana’s memory.

While writing about Rivera Garza’s book in the U.S., I can’t avoid thinking that Liliana’s Invincible Summer offers a powerful message about collective organizing that transcends borders and applies to different national contexts. Here, homicide and feminicide aren’t often named as social crises. Yet the frequency of mass shootings and hate crimes attests to the ways that violence is also integral to U.S. society. Liliana’s Invincible Summer offers an example of how to start imagining ways to name collectively the forms of extreme violence our society suffers and to use the vocabulary of justice coined at the grassroots to grieve and claim justice for the victims of genocidal, gun, racial, and gender violence in the United States, too.

The post In Mexico, a New Vocabulary for Grief and Justice appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first time I immigrated, 34 years ago, I was a toddler brought to the United States by my parents from our native El Salvador. A year ago, I immigrated again, becoming a Salvadoran American living in the State of Israel.

This is my second time learning a new culture, language, and rules. And it’s been entirely different.

As a child, I quickly integrated, took part in the school system, and made friends. Joining English-speaking society didn’t feel like work. It was my environment, my home, my life.

Today, as an adult, it’s taken me some time to get my bearings, and to adjust to the culture and norms in Israel. I also have a new perspective on my parent’s journey into American culture. I have started to embrace lessons from their American acculturation to help me overcome the challenges I am experiencing today.

My husband and I decided to emigrate from Los Angeles to the state of Israel, his birthplace, because we wanted to give our boys independence to roam free without typical city concerns. Despite the heavy L.A. traffic, a typical concern was getting to scheduled activities on time. We had to drive both boys everywhere. Today, our kids ride their bikes to get to activities independently. It’s a small, yet life-changing action that teaches them responsibility and accountability, two things my husband and I value. We also wanted quality time with my husband’s parents.

We moved to a kibbutz, a rural communal settlement, near the Golan Heights. At first, in the summer months, Israel felt carefree and exciting. The fall gave way to bountiful colors. This visually striking scenery encouraged fresh adventures and sparked motivation to enjoy every bit of the experience. Then winter rolled in, and the cold weather, gloomy days, and frustration robbed the happy feelings of summer and fall. Disorientation and uneasiness followed me.

At first, I didn’t understand why. Soon, I realized it was because the initial excitement of the move had faded away. Eventually, I understood that the feelings were the beginning signs of culture shock, and a typical trajectory of cultural adaptation for people subjected to an unfamiliar culture, set of attitudes, and a way of life.

For the first time in my life, I was experiencing immigration as my parents had when they journeyed to the U.S. in 1989. When they arrived, being in a new country, with a new set of rules, created an emotional rollercoaster for them. My parents faced similar emotions because of two significant challenges. First, they did not have legal documentation to work. Second, finding work took longer than they anticipated, which caused our family to go through a financial crisis. Throughout those early years, our family struggled financially. My travails weren’t exactly the same, but the challenges somehow felt familiar. It was surreal.

For example, in Israel, little things became hard for me—such as driving. Israel’s two-lane country roads take you through beautiful nature with views of farms and free-range livestock, but they require patience. Getting stuck behind one slow-moving vehicle or semi-trailer truck can quickly turn your hour-long drive into a dreadful slog. Unlike the States, where roads have passing lanes to let slow-moving vehicles give way to others, here, the only option when you’re stuck behind someone is to speed up, cross into the oncoming lane, and pass them. Locals execute this maneuver at almost unimaginable speed, putting themselves and everyone near them in danger. Israel’s cities have a lively European-like vibe, but their roads can be tight, and their aggressive drivers make even the most confident American driver feel unsafe and anxious. At times, it seems like disregarding rules is the rule.

Customer service is not a priority in Israel, or at least not in my area. There have been times when I feel like I am both a customer and an employee. For instance, if I want to purchase an item, but it doesn’t have a scan code, I need to make sure I find it, because it’s not the cashier’s responsibility to find it for a customer, and there isn’t a system yet in place to facilitate that aspect of the shopping experience. Experiencing this scenario a few times while waiting in line can easily become frustrating. Navigating the school system has been tough, too. It has its own norms that I didn’t quite understand when I tried to engage with my children’s learning. I had been an involved parent at our Los Angeles school, and I felt left out of matters at my kids’ new school in Israel. I was further agitated by a wide range of unreasonable and inconvenient rules. For example, Israel limits mail-order purchases to $75 U.S., subjecting anything more valuable to a hefty fee to cover the expense of a mandated security inspection. This inflexible measure is supposed to assure safety, as Israel prioritizes and values security above anything else. I found it too annoying to accept.

There are days when I wonder why I moved. Why did I choose to replace comfort with the uncomfortable? Then I remember that travel, new experiences, and being comfortable with the uncomfortable have always been part of my personality, my true persona. I see my boys happily integrating into a community that has accepted them and embraced them wholeheartedly. In these moments, I recall the ease I felt when I moved from El Salvador to the U.S.—and I remind myself how much effort my parents exerted, over a long period of time, to feel at home in the U.S.

My parents chose to overcome their personal frustrations. They took action. They attended an English class at the local community college, and they started to use English as they looked for work that would help them integrate into the culture of Los Angeles. They became solid English speakers and established career goals. Today, my dad works for the city of Los Angeles, and my mother is currently caring for her health.

I’ve decided to follow my parents’ example and take action. I started to practice Hebrew with locals and have committed to learning the language daily. I am joining community events to connect with others who have had to adapt and have had similar experiences. I am volunteering at the kibbutz’s cultural events, La Leche League Israel, and participated in a cool archaeological project this summer to connect with native Israelis and kibbutz members. I am choosing to drive without looking in the rear-view mirror, focusing on my driving and safety rather than the behavior of others. I choose to stay calm despite the passive-aggressive drivers surrounding me.

The emotions of cultural adaptation are intense. My parents managed it reasonably well. I aspire to do the same. Overcoming challenges to become part of a new culture is a choice, every day.

In the end, Israel is a melting pot, a multicultural country, just like the United States—and becoming aware of similarities between the two places is helping me move in the right direction.

I’ve been asked about safety in Israel, especially considering all the bad news about internal struggles and violence here. I lived in Watts, Compton, East Los Angeles, and Lincoln Heights for most of my Southern California childhood and teenage years. To afford rent, we moved a lot—and we didn’t have much choice but to live in areas with shootings, domestic violence, and gang-related activity. At night, I often felt scared and unsafe. However, during the day I was carefree, out and about with friends riding bikes or rollerblading. As I grew up, I started noticing the dangers around me, realized my neighborhood was not a place to thrive, and found motivation to get ahead and not look back. This chapter in my American life came with its own obstacles to overcome to move toward a sense of safety.

Living in Israel, there is always the potential for a neighboring country or internal conflict to wreak havoc. The difference is that here, a common threat brings unity and a shared goal: to keep Israel alive and thriving. This purpose has led to years of security planning and disaster preparedness. There is always a plan, and we all know about it. We all have a Mamad, a protected space in our homes, if the time calls for its usage. This brings me a feeling of safety I have never felt before. I’m not naïve—I know the potential risks that come with living here at the kibbutz—but still feel safer than I ever did growing up. The current political situation in Israel may concern many people, but I choose not to take either side and generally don’t participate in political matters. Regardless of the problems that surround me, I still feel safe.

Repeat experiences of moving between cultures and absorbing the surroundings—my own, and my parents’—have prepared me to find home wherever I am. Making a happy life here as a Salvadoran-American-turned-Israeli is a balancing act between cultures, but it’s possible. This summer, I celebrate a year of full immersion into a culture that is showing me how to be a better citizen of the world, no matter where I go.

The post Three Generations, Two Immigrations appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Feeling decisive one morning during my sophomore year of college, I picked my major: Russian. I had been studying the language and was excited for the opportunity to read literature, learn about another part of the world, and become bilingual. I updated my student profile on the university’s website and marched triumphantly to the cafeteria for lunch.

There, I ran into an acquaintance and told him the news. He looked at me quizzically, then scornfully. “You realize it’s not the Cold War anymore, right?” he said.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago and with divisions over democracy, authoritarianism, and control of resources resurfacing, many have warned of a “new” Cold War. But ironically, as Russia once again dominates headlines as a geopolitical foe of the United States, Russian language enrollments have hit historic lows.

Americans are responding to conflict by closing themselves off from an adversary, rather than trying to learn about it. But by “canceling” Russian, the U.S. isolates itself from a world that extends far beyond Moscow—a vast geography that isn’t Russia, but where Russian remains the lingua franca. Learning to speak Russian isn’t just about negotiating with one large country ruled by a stubborn dictator. It’s about understanding that swath of the world where Russian is a common first or second language, about getting to know the diverse life experiences, desires, and philosophies of people who once lived under a socialist empire, and about better understanding both other cultures and our own in the process.

Foreign language study in the U.S. as we know it grew out of the Cold War. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, leaders in Washington worried that the U.S. lagged in scientific advancement and that it lacked expertise about the rest of the world. To close the knowledge gap, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958.

Among other initiatives, the law created Title VI “Language Development” programs that provided grants for institutional study centers, and scholarships for individual students, recognizing that mastering a language requires resources beyond what traditional college courses can offer. Though the act’s wording prioritized national defense, in practice it has funneled resources to undergraduate and graduate students conducting all kinds of study, from literature to musicology.

Language study got a further boost after a 1979 presidential commission reported that foreign language education in U.S. schools was falling behind once again. In 1976, only 17% of 7th through 12th graders were studying a foreign language; Russian had suffered the most precipitous decline, dropping by 33% from 1968.

It makes sense—Russian’s alphabet is strange, its grammar intricate, and its vocabulary hard to memorize. The payoff is far slower than that of the Romance languages. In response, in 1983, Congress created another set of appropriations, known as Title VIII, to fund language training and research specifically in what is now the former Soviet Union.

Since 2002, the annual Survey of Enrollments in Russian Language Classes—which was created by Congress and is now administered by the private School of Russian and Area Studies—has tracked Russian enrollments. In general, they have fluctuated along with university enrollments, peaking in 2011 and declining during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in 2022, things took a turn. Enrollment numbers had never been so low and had never dropped by more than 20% in so many programs. The average university Russian program now counted 37 students. (In 2013, when I graduated, that number was 50.)

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to be the key factor in this decline. “Many students have reportedly sought to distance themselves from anything Russia related,” wrote the authors of the survey’s 2022 report. Instead of approaching conflict by learning as much as possible about Russia, this time around Americans wanted nothing to do with it.

The problem is symptomatic of an increasing narrowness in the U.S.’s approach to the world, visible in declining support for the humanities, social sciences, and education at large, and in blinkered “America First” politics. And while the most immediate consequences of this solipsism will show up in diplomacy between Washington and Moscow, its impact extends far beyond those cities—and beyond politics.

My experience speaks to this. Since graduating from college, I’ve almost exclusively used my Russian outside the metropole, communicating with people educated under the Soviet Union who are not ethnically Russian. In 2014, I spent a year in Kyrgyzstan on a Fulbright fellowship, and honed my skills drinking tea late into the night with my roommate. When I moved to Mexico in 2019, one of the first people I befriended was from Belarus; we, too, communicated in Russian. Later that year, a friend who works as an attorney called on me to translate for pro-bono clients of hers—Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik families seeking asylum in Mexico.

Today, I maintain my Russian in weekly Skype sessions with a tutor in Kyiv. When Putin first invaded Ukraine, we “canceled” Russian in our own private way, switching to a beginner Ukrainian textbook. I welcomed the opportunity to diversify my knowledge of Slavic languages. I thought often of Russian poet Polina Barskova, who has said she considers translating from Ukrainian into English—and thus sharing Ukrainian culture with a broader audience—her anti-colonial duty. But it was draining repeating basic dialogues without having the time to commit to thorough study of a new language. The spark fell out of our weekly sessions; we missed being able to chat with each other and read literature. We switched back to Russian, but with a commitment to read books that were geographically marginal, feminist, anti-war.

In my solitary time, it’s those writers at the geographic and political fringes of the former Soviet Union that keep me attached to Russian. Though my college classes favored Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, the writers that I pore over slowly in bed in the morning, battling to remember verb prefixes, turning to my phone’s Google translate app for help, are those who capture life in the provinces—Andrei Platonov, Chingiz Aitmatov—and women: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva. Some, like Svetlana Alexievich and Oksana Vasyakina, occupy the center of the Venn diagram. They’re important to me because, more than any Anglophone writers I know, they speak to the way that humans nourish their spiritual and interpersonal needs under repressive political regimes—a question I find myself considering more frequently as the U.S. increasingly undermines the democratic processes it once invested so much in creating.

In Voices from Chernobyl, Alexievich’s polyphonic novel about the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, one character narrates (in Keith Gessen’s translation):

Picture us, with a three-liter bottle of moonshine…having these endless conversations. There were teachers and engineers among us, and then the full international brigade: Russians, Belarussians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians…I remember discussions about the fate of Russian culture, its pull toward the tragic…only on the basis of Russian culture could you begin to make sense of the catastrophe. Only Russian culture was prepared for it.

When Alexievich’s narrator refers to Russian culture, he’s referring to something far more expansive than Putin and his supporters. Those who are making sense of the catastrophe are working people from all corners of a crumbling empire, using a shared tongue to philosophize together. Those perspectives enrich the world and help us understand it. We lose access to them when we can’t understand their language.

The post What We Lose When We ‘Cancel’ Russian appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For her Zócalo Sketchbook, You offers us a psychedelic aquarium of fish that expand and reveal themselves to symbolize her name. “In Chinese, Zhi means wildflower, Yu means fish. So I combined and expanded these two symbols to create this series,” she tells Zócalo.

The post Flowering Fish appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d moved to Portugal after securing some remote freelance work. My plan was to add a language to my lopsided resume—I already spoke Spanish passingly and knew that the modest difference between the two would enable me to achieve a baseline of fluency in a matter of months, rather than years—but there were also sentimental reasons for the move: except for my mother, all my matrilineal relatives live in Portugal. I wanted the chance to better understand my family, who, for most of my childhood, had existed as faceless names on the other end of pricey international calls, and to better understand where I came from.

Portugal is also a favorable country for those looking to immigrate: between its aging population, a small existing foreign-born population (just over 5 percent of the country’s 10 million residents, compared to 15 percent of neighboring Spain, and 12 percent of France), and a brain drain, authorities know that the country needs young foreigners serious about establishing roots, and has accordingly lax immigration policies. Just the “promise of a work contract” is enough to secure residency. What I didn’t know was how the connection between those policies and my love for basketball would come to define my life in Lisbon.

The best court, I’d been told, was located at the top of a 10 square-kilometer nature reserve called the Parque Florestal de Monsanto, just outside the city center. The bus ride from my apartment took the better part of an hour, and the hike up to the court added another 20 minutes. The view was beautiful, overlooking Lisbon’s famous 25 de Abril Bridge, but the height meant constant wind, which made for a uniquely poor basketball experience. The empty court, the long trip, and the suboptimal conditions confirmed what I already knew: Portugal isn’t big on basketball. I resigned myself to the idea that the sport wouldn’t be part of my life here.

Then I took a shortcut that changed everything. Running late to meet up with some friends at a reggaeton bar in Bairro Alto, I decided not to risk waiting for the metro and began to cut haphazardly across the residential labyrinth situated between the blue and green metro lines. As I made my way through the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria park, I noticed a few young men playing basketball.

The Campo dos Mártires da Pátria park itself is not especially remarkable: there’s a duck pond for young parents to bring their children, a small gazebo to buy coffee. It’s a speck of green in a city known neither for its shade nor its verdure. But its basketball court—a vibrant, multicolored mosaic of geometric shapes and patterns—is a work of art. I couldn’t resist. Despite being dressed in chino pants and a short-sleeve button-up (in preparation for a night of drinks and dancing), they welcomed me in to play. By the time the game was over, the Campo already felt like my second home. This wasn’t only because the Campo was clearly the court for basketball in Lisbon, but also because most of the players it attracted were, like me, foreigners.

Everyone had a story about how they’d ended up in Portugal. Agnelo, the de facto administrator of the Campo, was a thirty-something Angolan who’d come to Lisbon as a teenager. I thought at one point that he worked in construction because one of the other players kept calling him “o pedreiro mais famoso de Lisboa”—the most famous bricklayer in Lisbon—but I later realized that this was a literal translation of an English-language insult for someone who can’t make a shot: “Brick!” Agnelo could dish out the trash talk just as well as he received it, but it was his peacekeeping that I remember most. Even from the other side of the park, you could hear his pleas to get the game going again: “Play, man! Let’s just play!”

Over sweaty post-game beers, I talked literature with Amsfgoro, a Cabo Verdean man who’d come to Lisbon for a master’s degree and then decided to stay. We bonded over a shared love for the quiet, muted intensity of South African author J.M. Coetzee’s prose, and Amsfgoro introduced me to the work of José Eduardo Agualusa, the first Portuguese-language author I felt comfortable reading in the original. Yuri, who’d come from Cabo Verde on a student visa, gave me invaluable advice for navigating the perils of Portuguese immigration bureaucracy and taught me that I was not the only one feeling quagmired. I had been told to extend my tourist visa for an additional three months while I waited for my citizenship application to process, for instance, but the wait time for such an appointment was almost as long as the length of my original tourist visa: 88 days. It turned out that countless basketball friends had found themselves in this semilegal purgatory: technically legal in Portugal, but worried or unable to leave for fear of negative visa repercussions. Knowing that I wasn’t the only one gave me some solace.

It should come as no surprise that the Campo was also the site of my biggest Portuguese breakthroughs. As we were packing up one summer evening, I got to talking with João, a Brazilian exchange student studying engineering. After I stumbled over the Portuguese word for it—enghenharia—he started laughing. “Oh shit, you aren’t Portuguese! I always figured you were from here.”

Some of João’s mix-up surely had to do with the kind of Portuguese required for pick-up basketball. It’s easy to disguise an insufficiently nasally diphthong or an overzealous shhhh sound at the end of a word when the only phrases one really needs are jeers like Lança! Vamo jogar, então? and Tás a brincar comigo ou que? But his accidental vote of confidence made me feel like I’d achieved what I’d set out to do. Though my preference for rougher, more physical play and my tendency to “travel” (according to European rules, at least) might still quickly give me away as being from the United States, my speech now revealed that my connection to Portugal was more complicated.

Several years later, after I’d returned home to California comfortably fluent in Portuguese, I made the trip back to Lisbon. When I arrived, I found many of my non-basketball friends had moved on—Europeans to their home country, Portuguese to the sleepy coastlines of Setúbal or rainy Porto, digital nomads to chase Germany’s elusive freelancer visa or try to get in early on Estonia’s burgeoning startup scene. But when I showed up to the Campo on a random Wednesday evening, I was greeted by the same familiar faces, now with a few extra gray hairs, and more knee sleeves to keep temperamental ACLs warm. There were new faces, too, but returning a few days later, I could already understand who preferred to roll to the basket and who stayed behind the three-point line.

The beauty of the Campo is this continuity: turnover happens, but the community endures. It’s a wonderful feeling, knowing that you can return to a place and, if you’re willing to wait until next game, there’ll be a spot for you. In some way, this describes my relationship to my family in Portugal, too. Even as younger relatives graduate from high school and older ones retire, and as those pricey international calls have been replaced by WhatsApp, someone familiar will always be on the other end of the line. A shared language means the relationship will endure.

As Portugal continues to shift and evolve—post-dictatorship, post-recession—one thing feels certain to me: the Campo’s stability and its open-doors policy. As the group’s Facebook page reminds players: “Convidamos TODA A GENTE a APARECER,” EVERYONE is invited to SHOW UP.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> The Best Basketball Court in Lisbon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m an audiovisual translator, which means that I—and others like me—help you understand the languages spoken on screen: You just click that little speech bubble icon in the bottom-right corner of your preferred streaming service, select the subtitles or the dub, and away you go. These scripts are all written by someone like myself, sitting quietly at a computer and spending day after day trying to figure out, “What are they actually saying here?”

I decided to become an audiovisual translator because it allows me to combine cinema and French culture, my two favorite things. But there is also something about the anonymity of the work that appeals to me, which is the name of the game for our craft. As Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at New York’s Film Forum, put it in The Art of Subtitling, “Good subtitles are designed to be inconspicuous, almost invisible.”

Of course, it’s impossible to be truly invisible. Translating film and TV always involves some form of compromise. But we do our best, carefully dissecting what is being said in the source language, then reassembling it in the target language so that you have the same viewing experience as a native speaker, and may even forget you’re watching a “foreign” film. Whether working (as I do) from French into English, from Spanish into German, or Japanese into Swedish, the process is always the same: We pay close attention not only to the meaning of the words, but to the actors’ emotions, the cadence of their speech, their body language, the themes and narrative structure of the script, the historical period, and the social context. Together, these cues provide a host of tiny hints, all of which add extra layers of meaning and must be accounted for in the translation. Translating all these layers is a bit like solving a Rubik’s Cube—it’s easy to do one side, but what about all of the others?

Say I’m dubbing a ghost story set in a bourgeois Parisian household in the year 1850. The French grandmother stands in a doorway and whispers, “A tout de suite, mon petit.” How would you dub that into English? I might try, “See you in a minute, my darling,” but that doesn’t sound stuffy enough for the 19th-century bourgeoisie. It needs to be more uptight, more formal. So what about, “See you in a moment?” The issue there is the cinematographer has lit the scene so the actor casts a sinister shadow into the room. She’s not just standing there, she’s lurking, and if I were a grandmother trying to lurk in a doorway, I wouldn’t say, “See you in a moment.” However, I might say “See you soon.” That could work—especially when you consider the spooky quality about the alliterative s’s and the ghostly “ooh” in “soon.” “See you soon, my darling” perfectly fits the atmosphere of the scene. Except this introduces a new dilemma: “my darling” doesn’t sync with the actor’s lip movements. Her mouth is closed for the “p” in “petit,” whereas the “d” in “darling” would require it to be open. In dubbing, the end of a sentence is one of the most important parts to get right: If the last word is poorly lip-synced, it sticks out like a sore thumb and risks distracting the viewer. In an ideal world, I’d find a new term of endearment that syncs with “mon petit.” “My petal,” perhaps, though it is not nearly as good as “darling”—it makes the grandmother sound too affectionate. But in this case, a compromise is necessary. At the end of the day, a loose translation is less distracting than bad lip sync.

At times, I also must compromise when it comes to personal taste. For example, I might be subtitling a rapper renowned for Eminem-style punchlines, like: “C’est le retour de la légende de Jimmy, même si j’peux craquer à tout moment comme Djibril.” With these lyrics, they’re making a tasteless joke, comparing themselves to Djibril Cissé, a French footballer who has broken both of his legs. I don’t find broken legs especially funny, nor is it a joke that I would ever make myself. Still, this sick humor is a key element of their controversial persona, and the English-speaking audience deserves to understand what they’re saying so they can make up their own minds. A translator must never censor the source material: I must put my own opinion to one side and render the translation as faithfully as possible. It’s a challenging task, but also an instructive one.

In this case, since most Americans are unlikely to have heard of Cissé, I start by “translating” his name into that of another famous sportsman, a popular figure that an American audience would recognize by name. In order for the punchline to work, I need someone who would have suffered some kind of terrible injury. A fairly gruesome Googling session suggests the late basketball player Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash. Now I need to reverse-engineer the scenario. At first, the rapper pretends to be arrogant (légende), then undercuts themself by admitting they’re scared of failure (craquer… comme Djibril). After looking for an arrogant-sounding phrase that rhymes with “Bryant”—eventually settling on “rap giant”—I must find a way to describe Bryant’s accident that also acts as a metaphor for failure. This produces the solution: “It’s the return of the rap giant, even if I might crash any minute like Kobe Bryant.” The offensive punchline leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but because it leaves the same bad taste as the original French, it feels like a faithful translation.

My job is always easier when I’m working on a story that I really care about. If I’m hooked by the plot and can empathize with the characters, then I can produce a deeper, more intuitive translation because in that moment, I am that character. When my wife gets home from work and asks how my day went, my first impulse is not to tell her about myself, but about the imaginary colleagues on my computer screen. I spend my days listening, empathizing, and listening some more, until eventually I lose myself in whatever I’m translating, and become invisible. When the process is flowing well, it’s both relaxing and satisfying, like being in a meditative state in which I’m channeling the emotion of every scene. There have even been a few times over the years, when I’ve been working on something especially good, that I was so immersed in the story that translating a single line of dialogue left me breathless or moved to tears. It can be quite jarring to reach the end of the working day and suddenly have to emerge from this fictional world, to open my mouth and speak my mind again, to remember who I am.

This line of work is not really suited for those with big egos. Most of my colleagues—the actual, real-life ones—are modest, sincere, and soft spoken. And even though these qualities are the very things that make us good at our job, I do wish that we could sing our own praises a little louder, and bring some more attention to our invisible craft.

Especially because these days, though there are more films and TV from around the world than ever before, in many countries (such as the UK, where I live, or Spain, where my colleagues assure me the situation is even tougher), rates are falling and deadlines are getting tighter. This has inevitable repercussions on quality, not to mention our livelihoods. It can be hard to publicize our achievements because we usually sign non-disclosure agreements, and more often than not, filmmakers regard us as an afterthought, something to be rushed through at the distribution stage. Thankfully, many of the best filmmakers realize how important the translation stage is and are closely involved in the subtitling and dubbing process. They also pay fairly, so that we can take our time getting it just right.

It’s possible for subtitles and dubs to be so seamless that they feel invisible without pushing audiovisual translators ourselves out of sight. I’m proud of what I do, and I want the world to know how much care and consideration I, and thousands like me, put into our work. That being said, there is still a certain satisfaction in being the hidden conduit between cultures, the solitary name that appears in a film’s credits after everyone has left the cinema. It is precisely our invisibility that allows a family watching Netflix in Chicago to empathize with a bourgeois grandmother in Paris or an edgy rapper in Caen. Translation is about helping people to understand each other, and it feels good to be able to do that on a daily basis.

So the next time you click on that intriguing Polish dystopian thriller, or the latest award-winning Italian gangster series, spare the briefest of thoughts for all the people behind that little icon in the bottom-right corner. Then please, forget all about us.

The post Hello (<em>Bonjour</em>) From Your Friendly TV Translator appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

since feeling is first 
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things 
will never wholly kiss you; 
—e.e. cummings

As usual, e.e. cummings was on to something. We feel before we think. Words are a process built to describe—to translate—those feelings into thoughts with agreed-upon meanings. So far, so good. But feelings are anything but a zero-sum game; there is always a remainder, a residue, that most words cannot fully describe. Feelings are not mathematical, and even math has amounts left over after computation.

Feelings are more complex than the systems describing them. Sure, feelings might begin with the initial electric impulses fired from neuron to neuron within our brains, but soon enough the nuance of personal experience kicks in, way before any of us can think of the words to describe why. And when we do find the words, we tend to crop the edges, lop off the remainders that elude precise description, preferring thought packages that over time we have considered more easily digestible and translatable between us. But too often such translation sacrifices the ineffable gold of difference that resides just beyond what we choose to define. 

These remainders—at least in an America that prizes straight talk and bottom lines—elude our simple expression and become trash, discarded by our baked-in moral urge to adhere to category and function, and left to blow away in the wind. And that’s OK. Even better than OK. Yes, we need clarity to build an IKEA bookcase, but not everything is IKEA furniture.

And not all of those remainders are trash.

It’s good that some of the residue resists translation. And as our world changes, some of it now feels like treasure. Our current sea of cultural consciousness shows us that meanings can slosh over definitions and other divides—and our culture is the better for it.

Otherness was once something untranslatable in polite company, but things change—and when they do, language is often found wanting. For example, binary and cisgender pronouns have given way to they/their. Of course, they/their feels and sounds awkward, precisely because the grammar is a vestige pointing to an outdated worldview. Sooner rather than later, syntax will catch up with new inventions or more relaxed meanings. Language ought to fit us—not the other way around. 

It’s not hard to find examples of our idioms falling short of how we really feel. Our past heroes, who were speaking for us and fighting for our freedoms, were contending with outdated syntax in their own times, and the stakes were high. Perhaps they are our heroes precisely by nature of the way they demanded a more distinctive, edgier, and more profound picture of their identities—not just the thought, but how it really feels. 

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “[t]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Thankfully, we’re two decades into a new century. But reminders of old categories remain in the idioms and their long-ascribed meanings that we still use, and that still trips us up in unexpected ways. Even in the above quote, there’s that pesky use of “men” instead of people or humans. We know what Du Bois means, but it still rankles a bit. If he were alive today, I believe Du Bois would massage the knots out of his strained syntax.

Time and again in his masterly prose, you can feel Du Bois fighting against the constricting idioms of his time, describing his racial identity as 

born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (“Strivings of the Negro People,” The Atlantic, 1897) 

The cisgendered, male-centric realities of yesterday give way to new angles on such idioms today, in this case not just two-ness but triple consciousness, thanks to current thinkers redefining identity for Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC), transgender people, and others outside old categories.

Syntax changes because language is alive—at least as long as we are. Changes can cause irritable reactions, grumpiness, and curmudgeonly responses in the short term. But over time, my money is on multiple consciousness when speaking about race, gender, and the million other feelings that identify us.

Read this essay as a plea, or a plug, for the untranslatable in our lives. The urge to explain, to categorize and label every single thing under the sun, to amass not only data but metadata about our world and ourselves, would seem transcendent and seemingly unescapable. Yet the power of mystery remains, as difficult to detect as dark matter, emitting neither light nor energy, coexisting with what we know (or think we know), refusing to behave according to known labels or categories. And when you add it up, there is way more remainder than sum. 

I would argue strongly for the embrace of the untranslatable in all things great and small. We bump up against untranslatable words when moving from one language to another and finding that we are not able to find the right word or to have its sense satisfactorily expressed. But we really don’t have to leave our own language to run up against the same sensation.

“Tradutore, traditore,” is an Italian saying than connects translation to betrayal. Perhaps we are traitors to even try to translate the feelings that outdistance our thoughts and break longstanding syntactic rules. But we have to try, and we can’t let stand the closefisted reactions of those who would ignore the residue, the remainders and the leftovers. We mustn’t be traitors to what we truly fear, desire, and keep secret. 

Back to e.e. cummings. If indeed feeling is first, then the spoken and dramatic arts show us where words are not enough, where actions speak, where pictures are worth a thousand words, and where nothing (thankfully) is pure. Poets and playwrights and troubadours use the language to its fullest extent and beyond, and when they come to the rim of the well the real fun begins. 

The poet Pablo Neruda knew this, writing:
 

Si cada día 
dentro de cada noche 
hay un pozo 
donde la claridad está encerrada. 
Hay que sentarse a la orilla 
del pozo de la sombra 
y pescar de la sombra 
y pescar luz caída 
con paciencia.

(If each day 
falls inside each night 
then there is a well 
where clarity is locked within. 
One must sit on the rim 
of the shadow of the well 
and fish the penumbra 
and trawl the fallen light 
with patience.*)

There is a clarity of feeling locked within the well of shadows. Our fears, desires and secrets are our own, often invisible not only to others but to ourselves. When we use language to trawl the fallen light, we are bound to get some—but not all—of what’s there.

That’s why I, as a playwright, feature the untranslatable whenever possible. And that’s why the living body interprets best, opening itself to, and bumping up against, an immediate present; our flesh feels the pinch of limitation as well as the occasional satisfaction of an exact fit. I like it when words can’t quite comprise the feelings I’m trying to express, precisely because I need bodies on stage to add dimension and impact to the collision between meaning and what remains. When character is revealed, there needs to be more than just a psychological solution to a human problem. There is a lacuna, or lexical gap, where mystery resides and where no quantized or fully defined equivalent can be found.

Still, when faced with lacunae, I have a choice: I can fill the gap with action, movement, dance, or song. I can invent a new word to attempt to comprise and represent the remainders (Shakespeare did this many, many times). Or I can leave the gap for what it is: unfilled, missing, and open for meaning. 

When I ponder it now, I realize that these are the moments when I love playwriting the most. In such moments, we are doing our soul’s work. 

The untranslatable lives every day in dreams and wakefulness. We feel it when there are obstacles placed in front of what we desire, when we must confront our fears, and when we feel that our deepest secrets might possibly be outed somehow, some way. It will always be there beyond the frame of our vista, just out of bounds in the field of our lives’ play. Some feelings aren’t simply untranslated, but untranslatable, in the immediate present of our realities. But even if they can’t be rendered, they can be mined toward a new language of the future. The nuance of how we live our lives when old phrases won’t suffice is not as scary as the curmudgeons and reactionaries would have us believe. Our language is supple, and changeable. Our feelings are free, have a life of their own, and happen at the speed of light. 

*The author’s own translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Si cada día cae”

The post In Defense of the Untranslatable  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then you have encountered Rotwelsch, an ancient language of the road, spoken by vagrants and refugees, merchants and thieves since the European Middle Ages. This tongue was based on a combination of German, Yiddish, Hebrew, a smattering of Romani (the language of Sinti and Roma, pejoratively known as Gypsies), Czech, and Latin—and was incomprehensible to all but initiates.

I was inducted into this strange language during my childhood in Southern Germany. My earliest memories were of strange figures, dressed in long coats that had lost their original colors, who showed up at our door with bags slung across their backs. When it rained, they smelled, and my mother wouldn’t let them inside the house. “I know what you want. Wait. I’ll be right back,” she would say.

Lingering near the door, I would hear noises from the kitchen, my mother fixing open-faced sandwiches. While they ate, she remained standing on the threshold, guarding the house, trying to make conversation. I had trouble understanding them because they spoke a strange dialect, mixed with words I didn’t know. When they had finished, my mother would take the empty plate from their hands and close the door, relieved that the encounter was over.

“Who are they?”

“They don’t have a home. We’re giving them something to eat.”

That didn’t answer my real questions. I wanted to know why: Why didn’t they have a home; why were we giving them something to eat; and why did they have such a strange way of talking?

Later, I asked my father about these men and their language. “They are Travelers,” he said.

I didn’t understand. “Where are they going?”

“They are people of the road, escaping to nowhere.”

My uncle eventually figured out why these travelers kept showing up at our house. One day, he found a sign discreetly carved into the foundation stone, a cross with a circle around it, which meant that there was bread to be had here. The signs were called zinken, a word derived from the Latin signum. But the language was Rotwelsch, also known as kochemer loshn, an adaptation of the Hebrew khokhem, which means a wise person and loshn, tongue, or language.

It was a language of those in the know, the lingo of the wise guys. These signs and words pointed to an underground of traveling people; a world hidden away from view. Over centuries, outcasts had developed this secret world, with its coded lingo, to protect themselves from a world hostile to strangers (Rotwelsch means beggar’s cant). Their special language bound migrants together, because it distinguished those who belonged to the road from those who didn’t.

My father taught me some of their words. A barn was a stinker, and prison was shul (ironically derived from the German word Schule, or school). And then there was my favorite Rotwelsch expression, “being in a pickle.”

As an idiom, it didn’t make sense. A pickle was a delicious snack, so why should it have anything to do with being in trouble? The answer to that question: Because there was a Rotwelsch expression for “having a difficult time,” that sounded, in German, like Saure Gurken Zeit, which was taken to mean “being in a pickle” and assimilated into German (and later, into English). This is how you, too, have been speaking Rotwelsch without knowing it.

When I emigrated to the United States in the 1990s, I was surprised to find that Rotwelsch had preceded me. I got a first inkling when I came across hobo signs, which I recognized as being derived from Rotwelsch zinken, including the one that had drawn travelers to my childhood home. Central European vagrants had probably brought these Rotwelsch signs with them in the 19th century, a time of renewed immigration from German-speaking lands.

But the high tide of hobo zinken came during the Great Depression, when the signs were used in much the same way that Central European itinerants had used them: to navigate the difficult life on the road. The signs were adapted to suit the needs of their new users; a sickle, for example, would warn fellow hobos of dishonest farmers, who would hire you for a day and then cheat you of your wages. American hoboes sometimes walked the road, but they also sneaked rides on trains, which is why a sign emerged, that of a rudimentary train engine, to mark a good place to hop on a train.

Along with Rotwelsch zinken, Central European immigrants also brought their distinct way of speaking to the U.S. Once I started to look for traces of the language, I found them hidden here and there. The Jewish gangs of New York called a whorehouse nafke bias (a blend of nafke, Aramaic for difference; nekeyve, woman and; bayes means house in Hebrew), a thief gonef, just as Central European Rotwelsch speakers had done. They were also accustomed to going to school, meaning prison.

I have been thinking about Rotwelsch while stuck at home during the coronavirus lockdown, contemplating movement and mobility and how we talk about it. Only relatively few Rotwelsch words and signs made it to America, but the existence and persistent of the language raises questions that connect with today’s American political struggles. How much mobility are we willing to tolerate from those who seek to cross borders? To what extent will we accept people who don’t talk like us? How do we police vagrancy and homelessness? Rotwelsch has so many words for police, for prison, and for being arrested because of the increasing criminalization of mobile populations that continues to this day.

Throughout the 700 years of their history, Rotwelsch speakers have been persecuted by police, who didn’t appreciate their itinerant lifestyle and secret words. Countries and communities across Eurasia erected borders and invented passports to control the movements of people, which made the itinerant lifestyle even more difficult. At one time or another, Rotwelsch speakers have attracted the ire of every kind of oppressive ideologue in the modern world, including anti Semites, due to the Yiddish influence in their language.

If you’re looking for the ultimate outsiders, the ultimate scapegoats, Rotwelsch speakers, who numbered in the thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands at a time, would fit the bill. They were not ethnically defined (despite the anti Semitic attacks, which made them the first to land in Nazi concentration camps). All they had in common was the life of the road, the rejection of settled society—and their mysterious language.

When we emerge from the lockdown, a world that was already experiencing high levels of migration will see even more migrants, perhaps more than 100 million, many of them forced on the road by climate change and economic displacement. The future thus promises an ever-larger class of wanderers, many forced to live underground. Inevitably, some will develop new words and even languages as a protection against the police and as a source of identity.

What if Rotwelsch wasn’t a historical curiosity, but a harbinger of the future?

The post Is a Secret Ancient Language of Wanderers a Harbinger of Our Future? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of my favorite philosophers is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is widely regarded as the foremost philosopher of language. Wittgenstein was fascinated by how we can share the meanings of words, and communicate with each other, and learn to use language to describe the world and our experience in it. In his book Philosophical Investigations, he said, famously, “In most cases, the meaning of a word is its use.”

Wittgenstein would have been engrossed by the arrival and rapid introduction of terms that have come to dominate everyday discourse in 2020. At the end of last year, words and phrases such as self-isolation, lockdown, and social distancing were all relatively unknown. Now they’ve become the main topics of our conversation. With this comes the realization that, much of the time, what one person means when they say “self-isolation,” for example, is not the same as the meaning that another understands when they use that same term.

Wittgenstein can offer insight into why this might be. The philosopher described language as rule-following behavior; we learn the shared use of a term or phrase through contact with others. What enables us to share a language, Wittgenstein proposed, was not that we formally comprehend grammar and definitions, but that we share the underlying “forms of life” (his famous phrase) that a particular language describes. A form of life can be understood as a way in which those who share a language make sense of the world, their world. Shared forms of life lie beneath language and are what enables us to communicate and understand others.

We are used to acclimatizing ourselves with new terms through a wide range of sources, but many of these opportunities are not available due to the necessity of social distancing. Part of the stress of the pandemic is having to employ a new and evolving vocabulary in our dealings with other people at a time when those interactions are much fewer, and in many instances, radically altered. The terminology that describes and articulates our new situation now often comes to us through news media, official declarations, and electronic communication rather than witnessing the words and actions communicated together, in-person, with real-time approval and confirmation.

Take the words “lockdown” and “self-isolation,” for example. Some friends have considered themselves “in lockdown” while permitting themselves visits to relatives’ homes, family gatherings, a long trip to a distant beauty spot. Others I know have enforced a virtual total exclusion from the world.

Conversations I have both overheard and participated in reveal confusion and conflict: “When you say you are in self-isolation, does that mean you have symptoms?” or “I do wonder sometimes about what certain people consider to be an ‘essential journey’ in the present circumstances.”

Wittgenstein might tell us that these experiences are to be expected in times of rapid change. They are how we come to grips with a new way of living, through social interaction and the experience of submitting our understanding of new vocabulary to the checks of others. “Getting it wrong”—failing to exhibit in our actions a full understanding of the terms used to describe our new situation—seems to indicate carelessness, lack of appreciation at the gravity of our shared situation, and perhaps even selfishness.

Selfishness—and individuals’ lack of concern for the common good—are a common topic of discussion right now. Recently, British newspaper editorials have directly referred to a betrayal of the social contract, implying that they are identifying not just wrongdoing but the wronging of the rest of us and our efforts to follow rules and contribute our best efforts to this common cause. The concept of the social contract emerged at another time of great social upheaval, the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Thinkers who influenced this period of history, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, each developed a variant on the concept that citizens of a society agree to surrender some freedoms in order to achieve a greater good which they want and which they understand organized society can provide. Thomas Hobbes described the aim as to be protected from what he described as “war of all against all.”

It is too early to state categorically what the current crisis means for the sense of belonging to society and agreeing to projects undertaken with shared responsibility and contributions demanded of us all. Just as scientists are quick to point out when pressed for hard facts about the future of the pandemic that it is newly encountered and time is needed for research, those of us in the humanities must admit that the changes which will result from this period of history will have to reveal themselves over time.

Confined indoors for much of the time, it has been easy to look on this moment as a temporary pause before a return to “the old normal.” The skies are noticeably clearer, and while walking in my nearby park, the air is perceivably fresher. Roads are clear, trains restricted, empty buses pass. It seems we are already in a new London.

The very circulation of people, now hesitantly emerging from lockdown, is what has historically given strength to London as one of the great metropolitan centers of the world. Richard Sennett, in his book Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, noted how the circulation of people in the city underwent a revolution in response to popularization of the discovery of the flow of blood by the physician and medical researcher William Harvey in the 17th century.

Harvey explained how it was the heart (and not the lungs as previously had been believed) which was responsible for blood pumping through humans. This was heralded and explored by a number of thinkers, who (according to Sennett) came to associate rapid and free-flowing circulation with health. Once of these thinkers was Adam Smith, who extrapolated this new image of the healthy human body to argue that the unimpeded circulation of labor and goods was also essential for, as he termed it, The Wealth of Nations.

In the century that followed, the Victorians expanded on this association of rapid circulation of people with the vitality of the city. Improved travel in London did not just mean workers journeying efficiently to their places of work; the Victorians placed value on citizens traveling to enrich themselves, and to enjoy cultural experiences, galleries, and parks.

The return to “Victorian values” has become a disparaging comment over the past few decades, usually referring to long-discarded conceptions of class, morality, and the hypocrisy with which these were upheld. This year has seen Londoners yearn for our theaters, museums, cinemas, and galleries, while also enjoying the city’s many parks and open green spaces—all of which are also the Victorians’ legacy to our century. I am not sure what form, if any, a reappraisal of the Victorian era will take, now that our complacent faith in the superiority of our own epoch has been shaken so severely.

Similarly, I have been asked by friends overseas about “the British response” to this global pandemic. I am at a loss to describe how the reaction in this country has been unique or particularly different to that of the rest of the world. Or how, at a time when the issues of national identity posed by our vote in favor of leaving the European Union in June 2016 are experienced if anything ever more deeply, that response might be characterized as “uniquely British.”

As London tentatively emerges from lockdown, the debate over what kind of city its inhabitants want to have, and what they are going to get, will emerge from much discussion. I cannot help feeling that this period of isolation, change, and recovery calls out for reflection and contemplation. Many of us now have only tentative answers to the questions that have started forming within us during these challenging times.

The realm of philosophy is uniquely placed to discuss these questions. Of course, speaking from experience, we are not likely to find in philosophical debate everlasting and entirely convincing answers, but my experience also tells me that much of the enjoyment of the debate is the articulation of views the owner might not realize they held, however fleetingly. I would like to hope Londoners who might not have been attracted to philosophy before will consider engaging with the discipline in the search for answers to the questions of 2020.

Philosophers are traditionally portrayed as insular hermits who spend much time in solitary thought and have little need of interaction with our fellow humans. But the best thinkers I have encountered relish exciting listeners through the understanding of complex and historically significant ideas. I personally depend on a live and physically present audience to give a really good lecture, one I take pleasure in giving. I need to tailor jokes appropriately, based on audience reaction, to see if the material is being digested. I look forward very much to the return to my pub philosophy sessions, once pubs are able to play host once again.

The post A Letter From London, Where a Philosopher Ponders Self-Isolation, the Social Contract, and When the Pubs Will Reopen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.