I have a vague recollection of elocution lessons in my childhood. I remember — or think I remember — being taken out of kindergarten class or first grade to sit with a teacher who instructed me on the proper pronunciation of English words. I can still picture the oaktag-colored top of the desk and something of the light that fell across its surface. My parents have no recollection of my receiving any kind of remedial instruction. In those days, the school wouldn’t have needed to get the parents’ permission to take a child out of regular classes. And, in any case, my mother and father always insisted my accent was perfect.
It’s true that I don’t have a Greek accent when I speak English; nor do I have an American accent when I speak Greek. But the very fact of my growing up in a Greek-speaking home, the only child of parents who had emigrated from Greece in their early 30s, calls my linguistic authenticity into question. At least it always has in my mind. I have a sense, as a bicultural and bilingual person, of never quite belonging where I am. To me, it feels as if two languages are always at the ready in my brain, jostling companionably enough, but not ensuring that the wrong one won’t step forward at any moment.
Once, in the Shannon, Ireland airport transit lounge, on the way home from the annual summer’s trip to Greece, I asked the saleswoman how much a Matchbox car cost. With the certainty of an eight year old, I assumed that the airport staff was trained to speak the language of each flight that stopped there to refuel. So I asked the price in Greek. In Irish-accented English, the saleswoman responded to me that, alas, she knew no Spanish, but she would find someone who did. Moments later, I stood mutely, listening as she explained in English to a Spanish couple that I needed help shopping. The Spaniards made no headway with me, and explained, in Spanish-accented English to the Irishwoman, that I must be too shy to answer them.
That day in Ireland, in that stew of accents and languages, I chose the wrong language. And though I got it right before my flight for Boston took off (I still have that Matchbox car), it wasn’t the last time I would make the wrong linguistic choice. Usually, this happens in English, when Greek reasserts itself to send me on a strange syntactical journey, or when idioms baffle me and lead me to inventive new diction — of cats swallowing pajamas or of hatches being buckled down. I did it memorably once in Greek, when I inadvertently swore at my grandmother during a chess game instead of venting a mild exasperation. And another time, when I stressed the wrong syllable in the word for sultan after a visit to an Ottoman museum. My great-aunt still teases me about that, and I hope this means my mistake was so rare that she felt comfortable in her gentle mockery.
I realize that the fact that I can enumerate these instances indicates some deep-seated anxiety on my part. Whenever I have to name my most embarrassing experience, I always go to that episode in the Shannon airport. This anxiety is surely my own concoction, born from experience and psychology and who knows what. Aleksandar Hemon, by contrast, feels no such anxiety about his use of any language — native or acquired. In an email to me, he once said “I own the language I write in. It is not given to me by generous native speakers. I have it and I use it as I see fit.” All the same, to cut myself some slack (I use the idiom with triumphant correctness), my anxiety does make some sense. Speech is the password, the shibboleth. It’s how we know right away whether someone is or isn’t from here. I remain more in line with the Ukrainian-American writer and editor Askold Melnyczuk, who told me once that while speaking English he feels a “pervasive anxiety that [he] will get it wrong.”
While speech that marks you as a stranger can be a curse, it can also be a blessing. Though I’m focusing here on the moments of embarrassment that reveal my outsider status, the truth is that those two languages jostling in my head have made my writing richer. When I’m writing and I’m stuck for a word in English, I think of what I want to say in Greek. Then I translate, sometimes going to my Greek dictionary and sometimes to the Greek-English dictionary that’s left over from a friend’s classes. Either way, I feel I end up linguistically where I want to be, forming a sentence through a detour away from English and back again.
There’s a building-block approach to words at work here — and I would argue that that approach is inherently Greek. Greeks handle their own language like Legos. They break it down to its constituent parts and fashion new words and phrases. They play with the language. Oftentimes, the trending jokes in Greece will be extended word games. There is a longtime favorite that involves coming up with Greek sentences that sound like other languages. If you speak Greek, try it: say “It’s shallow! Come on in!” and see if it doesn’t sound as though you’re speaking German. A more recent linguistic game involves creating fake Turkish versions of Greek words, often using Greek words whose etymology is already Turkish.
Greek makes you aware of its grammatical construction, even as your sentence is under way. This comes in part from the fact that Greek is both conjugated and declined — like Latin and German, to name just two languages — and in part from the fact that the syntax of the language involves, I think, a sort of Brechtian unveiling of its grammatical machinery. There are certain prepositions with which you cannot end a sentence in Greek.
So when you speak or write in Greek, you are very much aware that you are Making Language, in a way that I don’t quite think you are in English. English is the language of craft, of work. Our plentiful Anglo-Saxon derivations give us a vocabulary that can be easily snatched up and dropped into a sentence. And so often, our English words come to us already reduced to their essential form; instead of Legos, they’re more like those smooth wood blocks that would have been scattered through my kindergarten classroom and that are now returning to the curricula of stylish preschools everywhere. You can assemble with them, but you can’t connect them.
Many would argue that English is every bit as plastic as Greek, and that formations like crantastic or frappucino are evidence of the Lego-like possibilities of English words (or of the ingenuity of advertisers). Or that there’s nothing stopping us from attaching old suffixes — like monger — to new words. If there is a fishmonger, why not a shoemonger, or a breadmonger, or a wifimonger? But while such wordplay tends to be the province of a literate and literary demographic in America, in Greece, it is part of the mainstream. I don’t say this to establish that Greek is better than English. The languages are simply different. And I know that when I write, I reap the benefits (or try to) of both the handiness of Anglo-Saxon and the machinery of Greek. Writing affords me the time to make the best of the sometimes fractious linguistic politics in my brain.
I do wonder, though, about that early memory of the oaktag-colored desk and the repetition of certain sounds until I got them right. I wonder if the way I speak now came about because of some teacher’s diligent work to purify (and I use that fraught word deliberately) the sound of my voice. It’s a strange thought, to consider yourself in some fundamental way the product of correction. Then again, is this different from the buck-toothed or pigeon-toed or lazy-eyed child who undergoes a physical correction? I would argue that it is. Because the crooked teeth stay corrected (the drift of all teeth notwithstanding), and the old smile simply becomes the new smile. An accent, on the other hand, isn’t ever completely gone. It reasserts itself from time to time in a stray sound or an errant word or a wandering syntax. You are always aware of that correcting force still at work, its residual energy still applying itself to the bits that need to be made right.
It occurs to me that my English style is in fact a corrected style. I might form my sentences as if I were using Legos, as if I were fishing through a toy bin for the best piece to use. But the language I end up with is not by and large playful. I’m not a writer of experimental fiction. I try to play with form and structure, but I come back to the standard narrative arc. Rather than playful — in the way that Hemon’s work is playful — I tend to write a kind of English that is, if anything, fairly normative. This is because, unlike Hemon who feels that “No writer is a foreigner in literature. All storytelling comes from the homeland of stories,” I write with the zeal of the converted, the zeal of the immigrant trying to pass. This is why a mistake in the airport or in casual speech feels so costly to me, even now.
In my experience of English, the anxiety of getting it wrong and the correcting force push against each other constantly, the errant linguistic behavior always curtailed in some way, marshaled. I admire Hemon’s ability to create an innovative and challenging fusion of his languages, his cultures, his selves in his work. He manages to occupy two spaces at the same time (at least), writing neither Bosnian books nor American books, but books that are both and neither — at once and in alteration. Looking at my own work as objectively as I can, I see that I handle one culture at a time. To question and investigate the issue of bilingualism and bicultural identity, I place a character in the position of choosing between seeming binaries. I explore the problem of holding two ways of being simultaneously from the point of view of a character who prefers to choose just one. That she fails to do so, and that she does by novel’s end discover a way to embrace both ways of being doesn’t alter the fact that the narrative itself works to keep those two ways of being apart.
When I am looking at a map of Greece, or reading an article in English about the Greek economic crisis, or cooking a Greek dish, I will, without thinking, mutter (as one does in those idle moments) in Greek. I don’t do this consciously. A switch seems to flip. All it takes for that switch to toggle over from one language, system of gestures, intonation, body language, personality even, to the other is the sight or thought of something Greek. Every time this happens, I’m surprised anew. And it keeps happening, the Greekness coming at the slightest prompt. It’s as if the force of correction doesn’t have time to notice and the foreign behavior slips through.
In addition to surprise, though, I feel a bit apologetic. It seems a little suspect to me that I would slip into Greek so readily. I am wary of my behavior as I am wary of people who adopt an English accent after mere months of living in the UK. There is an inauthenticity in such actions, and I wonder who is being fooled: the listeners or the speakers themselves. So, too, do I wonder about my own authenticity when I have my Pavlovian Greek moments. Never sure of my authenticity as a speaker of American English, there are moments when, except for the fact that they usually occur when I’m alone, one might say my Greekness is being put on as some kind of show. (I just did it again: taking a break to read an article about the Greek Civil War, I reacted to a disputed fact by wagging my head in precisely the way one does in Greece.)
Perhaps it’s better to say that moments like these reveal the wall between my linguistic identities to be threateningly porous. Growing up, we knew some people who said words like fourkouti as a Greek form of fur coat or carro for car when gouna and aftokinito were the proper Greek terms. I viewed this practice with the scorn of my adolescent self who considered it vital to be at all times culturally correct. But with a deeper fear, too, that if I were to adopt these locutions myself, they would mark me as not belonging.
I think of this as a philosophical question: can an identity that expresses itself in two separate ways — through two languages and in two cultures — be said to be authentic? If your identity flickers between Greek and American, what exactly is your identity, and how do you designate it? Is it hyphenated, to indicate balance and parity? Or is it combined in some other way, represented by some other form of punctuation, like a slash? Perhaps it’s a kind of quantum-level notion of identity in which the self flickers among multiple positions in a way that doesn’t matter until and if one looks closely enough. And even then, that flickering only matters as it affects the unique characteristics of that self.
The notion of linguistic purity is a charged one these days. When the French ban the use of certain English terms, we view it as a risible overreaction to globalism. When our own politicians advocate an English-only America, we consider them motivated by fear and insecurity. Thankfully, it is no longer important, in most places, to pass for American — no longer necessary to conceal an accent or a different cultural background. So why do I care?
I care because I grew up wanting to pass not just as American, but as the only daughter of two happy parents in a happy marriage. I wanted to convince myself and the world that an unhappy home was as foreign to me as another country. Correction was vital — as a force to wield on wayward parents and as a force to wield on the moveable pieces of the facade we were creating. When I write in my fiction about the challenges of assimilation and the difficulty of forming a bicultural identity, I am at heart writing about deception. The deception of others, but self-deception too. I return to this theme again and again in my work, creating characters who wrestle with the lies they tell themselves and the lies they tell the world.
The effort to assimilate creates a kind of lie — a small one for some, a larger one for others. For me, it produced a sustaining lie that enabled me to live in a world of binary distinctions. Inside my family, and the world outside. The turbulent reality and the calm false front. The Greek self and the American self. To blur one of these distinctions would have threatened all of them, and too much was at stake for me to see that project through.
What I have learned, as a person and as a writer, is not to blur the distinctions but to sharpen them while acknowledging the multiple identities they define. What do we do as writers but explore a multitude of selves in order to create fiction we hope will speak a truth? In finding our voices, we gather our own vocabularies, our own styles, and the only measure of our authenticity is whether the story we have put on paper has the power to move others.
I go back to Hemon’s concept of the homeland of stories in which everyone is a citizen, and I see that I was missing the point all along. If all languages are spoken in the homeland of stories, then even my own normative style is welcome. This is no Shannon airport where you can choose your language wrong. You don’t need a visa or a passport to enter. Or, actually, it is the Shannon airport. It’s where you can understand some of what some of the people are saying, and you can speak to some of the people, and, best of all, you can find the right words to get what you want and to say who you are.
And indeed, what could be beautiful or romantic about a woman with the violent upper hand, the muse forcing herself on the artist—never mind that the gendered inverse (see: Scheherazade’s dilemma) is the stuff of literature? A story about woman holding a man against his will, especially if she seeks to exploit his creative labor…Well, that’s just crazy. And for women, crazy, as we all know, is not a Good Look.
Such a legacy may sound like a curse—but then, Close does crazy so well. This spring, she returned to Broadway to reprise the starring role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, and she’s as captivating onstage as she is in her best movies. Once more, she takes on Norma Desmond, the silent film actress fixated on her past glory from the shadows of obscurity, still ready for her closeup decades after the world has moved on to talkies (and to younger leading ladies). The plot ignites when Desmond hires screenwriter Joe Gillis to doctor the script that she’s convinced will spell out her big comeback, and though his capture isn’t quite as obvious as the one masterminded by Misery’s Annie, his gradual (co-)dependence on his new benefactress proves to be just as deadly.
Serendipitous that this essay appears today, so soon after yet another deflection from the issues via attack on a woman”s mental state by #45.
I an not the only one who has made this observation, but this very website’s comment section is rife with a slew of such attacks against women with the temerity to disagree with certain prolific commenters’ opinions. Among other terms that have been used to describe me, that can think of off the top of my head:
Obsessive-compulsive, hysterical, determined to find offense, humorless, and the good old all-purpose medical term: “Nuts.”
We see you.
Moe
My understanding was that Close derided the portrayal of a women unhinged in Fatal Attraction, as she recognized years later the ramping up or exaggeration of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder (or hysteria long ago), a severe non psychotic illness which causes great suffering and is engendered by early neglect and abandonment, and often sexual assault. This neediness caused by abandonment is scorned – to be deemed needy is the worst and yet to need is to be human. A reminder: women with borderline personality disorder are capable of great compassion and empathy, despite what Harvard proffesor Dr. Baron Cohen states in his book (can’t remember title) where he lumps women with BPD in with anti-social personality disorder and incapable of empathy. Excellent essay though.
Well, change comes slow. Misogyny and sexism are monstrous, certainly, but where is the data about just HOW prevalent they are? If anything, the world of 2017 is vastly improved over the world of 1917, or 1947, or 1977, and we’re moving in the right direction on gender equality. Is it perfect yet? No, far from it, but I just wish the ID politics crowd could step out of the vacuum of the now and add a little historical context, or to show me some evidence that this problem is doing anything but getting better. It’s almost like they want women to continue be oppressed (or be perceived as every bit as oppressed as they were a hundred years ago) in order to validate their own worldview.
As for Glenn Close, her legacy isn’t determined just by a showy role in Fatal Attraction. Damages continues to grow in regard as a critically acclaimed moment in the development of prestige TV, and her reputation as a film actress with over 50 credits, including fine work in Nine Lives, Cookie’s Fortune, Reversal of Fortune, The Natural, and The World According to Garp, is far closer to the hearts of cineastes than boiling rabbits (though I do think Adrian Lyne is a provocative European-style filmmaker whose body of work is impressive in its own right). Close also stops mid-play and tells people to put their damn phones away, so kudos to her for preserving the sanctity of the theatrical experience.
@SeanH @SwogHolllow
Just going to recycle a little Swog Hollow from an earlier piece on Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. I am confident you will deem Swog one of that fine cohort of “clear-headed white male empiricists.”
I believe this pretty much covers the waterfront.
[Sean,
Still “I refuse to think that somehow by mere dint of one’s status as a woman or a POC, they are somehow more fit to judge the objective reality of a situation than an objective, clear-headed white male empiricist”
Is something you should think hard about. Women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC. Try listening a little more and being turned off by the messaging a little less.]
“End Swog Hollow”
Sean – good point re Close’s legacy not determined by one film.
Moe – fight the good fight. xo
Hey Moe,
I’m all for taking criticism as well as dishing it out, but what’s wrong with being a clear-headed empiricist? I simply do not think that “women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC” because THERE IS NO SUCH THING as “what it’s like to be a woman or POC.” There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be gay. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc. This universalizing is the basis of racism, sexism, bigotry, and discrimination. To say that because someone is a member of a group that they INHERENTLY are a certain way, that’s racism. To say women are more emotional. To say blacks like fried chicken. To say that whites can’t dance. There is no universal experience of what it’s like to be ANYTHING.
“There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman.”
Well, bless your heart.
Moe Murph
Over and out on this thread
@Sean
Much of what you’ve written up there (against Essentialism) is Spot On… BUT (there’s always a but): look to the definition of “Empirical”. Doesn’t it privilege direct experience over observation-at-a-remove and hearsay? In other words, in discussions of Sexism/ Racism, wouldn’t Women and POC function as better “Empiricists” on the topics than Het White Fellers? Which is not to say that Women or POC *own* these conversations, but their (our) contributions, empirically speaking, are going to be more relevant than yours.
As a Het male POC, I wouldn’t dare to presume to relativize the suffering/ Othering/second-classing of Women… for two reasons: 1) the Relative intensity of a pain is meaningless to anyone in Pain (ie, being drawn-and-quartered has got to hurt worse than a serious tooth ache, but tell that to someone with a serious tooth ache, in lieu of giving them morphine) 2) how would I know, from direct experience, how bad Sexism is now, compared to “then”, and should anyone be grateful that an absolutely unnecessary (but convenient) Evil has eased somewhat in a century? Surely there will be an urgency about making *all* of the Evil disappear? Especially if the Evil impacts one directly.
But (again): it doesn’t impact *you* directly; from your distance, things appear to have gotten so much better that you feel people with complaints are exaggerating. You aren’t in possession of enough Empirical Evidence to judge; as a good Empiricist, you should be able to admit that.
In ’95, I came back to America after a long absence and stayed with married friends in a lovely house by the lake. My old (White) friend had her own dog-walking/ sitting business and asked me, one morning, to check on dogs in two different houses (masters away on vacation). Doing this for her would have entailed letting myself into nice big houses in largely-White neighborhoods at the crack of dawn. Hilarious, right? I’m a Black guy of six feet tall… even wearing white tie and tails wouldn’t have helped. I had to beg off the request. My old friend thought I was being paranoid. She lectured me that there had been lots of “changes” in the US since I had left (remember, this lecture came to me in ’95) and that I had to “face these changes” and “move on”. Racism, she told me, was becoming a thing of the past. Nothing I could say could convince her otherwise.
Don’t be like *that*, Sean! laugh.
PS “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc.”
But there is definitely such a thing as what it’s like to be persecuted/ degraded for being “black etc. etc”.
I mostly hear where you’re coming from, Steven (and thanks as always for an articulate response), but there is such a thing as letting one’s life be too muhc governed by fear. If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?
Also, empiricism can cut both ways. I understand and fully agree with your point about direct observation (in a Masters & Johnson sort of way; you can’t just ASK people what they do in the bedroom, you have to literally observe and record stuff). But that said, certain experiences bias people. Are people who have lost children to drunk drivers really capable of being empirical about DWI laws? Should the widows of people who were killed on 9/11 be in charge of anti-terrorism policies? Too little experience is bad for empiricism, but so is too much.
Sean!
Ugh, as they say. Seriously: ugh. This is borderline loony (and a new kind of magical thinking, possibly):
“If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”
Sean, how will we put an end to Nigerian email scammers if *you’re* too risk-averse (and cowardly, even), to engage with them? More importantly, how will women put an end to domestic abuse if they keep selfishly leaving abusive households instead of sticking with it and taking beatings in the name of eventual progress that will come, after all the abusive husbands and “lovers” are simply worn out from beating them, posthumously?
Well, I tried.
Signed,
Articulate Black Guy Steven
PS And no, I will not “hijack” this thread with an off-piste cluster of responses to more and possibly equally absurd rejoinders. I have to mow the lawn, or something, instead. But, yeah: ugh.
Come on man! You’re better than that, Augustine. You’re totally distorting what I say with limp analogies. If you’re going to use domestic abuse as an analogy, what you’re saying by refusing to water plants for a white family in a rich neighborhood is: “Because some women get beaten by their spouses or boyfriends, why bother dating at all.” Show a little gumption, man.
Or look at it from the other side; what you are saying is that, by your logic of irrational fear, you would encourage a white person to reject a black friend who lived in “the ghetto” who asked the white guy to dogsit/be in such a neighborhood at a perceived “dangerous” time. How is that not furthering the problem? America (and the first-world west in general) is WAY safer than it’s ever been, and even taking into account that the request you received was 20 years ago, it still was recent enough to be a pretty safe activity. People live in fear because of the media. Crime is a fraction of what it was in the 70s. America is safe as hell and there’s very little violent street crime.
Do black people sometimes get harassed by the cops in wealthy, largely white neighborhoods where there are hardly any black people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. Do white people sometimes get harassed by the natives in lower class urban neighborhoods where there are very few white people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. But to give up on interraciality or to just assume you will be the victim of violence if you “cross lines” is too fearful for me to support as being anything remotely approaching a logical or empirical approach to living one’s life.
Sean
Steve didn’t distort what you said. You said:
“If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”
This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I have no words for this stupidity.
Congratulations.
This line is just classic. I can’t get over it. You have to break your brain in order to process the logic in this.
“Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists.”
Somebody should create a meme. The opportunities are endless.
“Is it more dangerous to drive a car into a brick wall? Yes, but the dudes who do so in spite of the risk are the real car enthusiasts.”
“Is it more dangerous to inject fentanyl? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real daredevils.”
“Is it more dangerous to eat 12,000 calories per day? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real foodies.”
“Is it more dangerous to jump down a mineshaft? Yes, but the kids who do in spite of the risk are the real athletes.”
(har!)
Toad,
You just compared walking alone at night to driving a car into a wall. How am I the one with logical flaws in my rhetoric?
Really, think about it. All your comparative examples are ridiculously dangerous. A woman walking alone at night is the essence of “take back the night,” it is the absolute essence of feminism–that a woman has every right to walk by herself at night that a man has, and that she should do so with just as much freedom and ease, and without fear of reprisal or harassment.
You don’t have to break your brain at all to see the difference between my examples and yours.