Translated by: María Cuiñas Insua (Master Degree on Translation and Post-graduate at International Studies by Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) - maria.ci22[at]gmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
<<While I was sinking into my past, into a mud of unrealised illusions, dreams and lies, I felt pity of myself, and I became a slave. While I lived wishing for a better future, in which luck would be on my side and my dreams would become true, my own fantasies left me fascinated, and awaiting my chances, without realising that they were as slippery and timid as a sea snake. Now I have faith in the present, even if I cannot tell its start or ending point, and I still wait and look suspiciously at my past. I am alert, full of energy and ready for whatever may come, waiting for the time when the wax will melt and come to life>>
One of deepest emotions I went through while I was experiencing life in another country was to reconcile with time and expectations, thanks to all my colleagues and friends who have been with me through the so called process of becoming adult or maturing: in other words, letting go of the carefree and magic paradise of childhood, which will become just a wax figure, more or less cold, inside the museum of our memories.
*
You decide to leave behind your home, your town, your country or even your continent. Some do it slowly, step by step; first, they leave the maternal nest, then, the ease that their friends and the streets they have walked a thousand times produced them, to end up having enough courage to spread their wings and fly. Others, they do it abruptly, eager to break at once the chains of education, fear or the conformism that kept them tied to ordinariness. “Throwing caution to the wind”, we go away as far as possible, in order to find new ideas and different customs, to which add the challenges involved in the first stage of coexisting with strangers. For the first time, we feel independent and self-sufficient.
I have met some European volunteers who thought of EVS as training for extremely dramatic and necessary volunteering activities, such as those developed in Africa, or in distant depressed areas of the Third or Fourth World. Some arrive to Spain, coming from “Welfare State” countries, whose societies have allowed them to undergo the process of achieving sensible maturity smoothly, and also to pursuit and assimilate their own freedom and maintenance. They get ready to gaze new horizons from the “other side of the world”, once they have lived with other strangers, in other countries, and decided to follow their dreams and work for a world of justice: free beings’ justice, the gift we give each other by working hand by hand.
Those youngsters have learned the language of Cervantes, not the one spoken by Spaniards, who have a wide range of dialects and accents, but one equally diverse, spoken by our Latin-American comrades, with whom we share a language evolved from that imposed and left by our past colonists. Nowadays, despite coming from the “other side of the Pond”, these people are not afraid of crossing the Atlantic Ocean and living in Europe, for the sake of improving their quality life. The less rich show an amazing initiative, something announced as a fundamental virtue in rich countries. However, in the upside down world in which we are living now, such ability shows up and turns much more effective among the less instructed on market ideology, and also among those who leave their home countries for their lack of opportunities, only because they were less fortunate in the distribution of welfare.
*
- Listen, young fellow, would you like the idea of staying a few days in an exotic Mediterranean island with people like you, coming from different countries, where you all can do lots of activities, while having a great time and enjoying the sun and the beach?
- Sure I do! But how can I get all that?
- You just need to have enough courage to put into practice the poor English you were taught at school, and which I’m sure you’ll improve considerably after this experience.
- Me, speaking English? No way on earth! Besides, it all sounds pretty expensive... There’s no way my parents would pay for it.
- You’re totally wrong, Europe would help. You’d just have to pay a small part of the travel expenses; for that, you, your friends and all the other boys and girls could sell raffles, t-shirts... the usual stuff. The remaining amount would be paid by the European Commission. You know, when you really want something, money should be the least of your worries, shouldn’t it?
- Well... You might be right, but... I better say no. I’ll be more comfortable at my home village, like every summer.
This is a quite usual situation in countries like mine, happening every time you try a group of youngsters get a move on, think about the existing prejudices against their European neighbours, or criticize the ideas they have been taught on what must be done in a world of black or white, winners or losers, fate and fortune.
In case you finally manage to convince, thanks to the novelty of the project, the boys and girls that had already enough courage and willingness to take part on an international youth exchange, you may come across with something harder to solve, quite common in self-centred countries: the harmful over protectionism of their parents, who want for their children a home full of steady wax figures, over a place ruled by communication, curiosity and learning. Thus, an example of this sort of one way conversation could be:
- What!? My daughter plans to go all alone to party abroad?
- Hold on a second... Who organises this? Who’s the person in charge? Do the authorities know about it?
- They’re nuts if they expect me to hand my daughter over to some strangers!
Such worries would vanish if this outlandish initiative was not proposed by an enterprising young man, or a small local or youth association -the ones who tend to benefit more from this kind of events-, but by a public institution. In the latter case, they would most efficiently contract the services of a private enterprise, in which, for the sake of the benefit, transparency would be non existing; or, perhaps, they would rather trust everything to a private school, where high values are taught and where, as long as academic results are good, they tolerate any mistake or indifference from their teachers.
After daring to take part for the first time in activities of this kind, which are impossible to experience through travel or language agencies, many young people think of them as one of the best days of their life, due to the emotional and intellectual impact hey have been through, which, in most cases, will last for the rest of their days. This reality, already known by youth workers all around Europe, is now being reassured by academic studies that try to measure the long-term effect of intercultural exchanges on youngsters. So far, they have found out that those boys and girls only never forget the experience, but also that, thanks to it, they gathered enough courage to travel more, to become more curious about other cultures and languages, and to widen their geographic and personal horizons.
*
Once you have been trapped, you will be able to leave your bubble, and the familiar wax figures will start to melt.
Some will become addicted to the possibility of discovering the life and culture of different countries. In the middle of the way, others will settle down in places they would never have imagined, helped by the boost of love, as it happens so often in the ERASMUS world. A few ones will be seduced by the promises of more stable countries, which ensure them a place where to build their future, so uncertain now, and which they hope to find by changing their residence, immersing in other culture and denying their past, which they regard as a burden.
Your life will be changing little by little, or all of a sudden, and you will live with unrestrained emotion what your family will just accept with resignation: the breaking of the heavy chains of maintenance and upbringing.
Your motto will become “Seize the moment!” You will not want anymore to live quickly and leave a nice corpse, you will rather live intensely and sleep just when death occurs.
Personally, I think that the existence of different languages is a disadvantage of human beings, rather than their distinctive virtue. What distanced people at the Tower of Babel was, precisely, linguistic diversity.
The barriers conformed by languages sharpen one’s wits and one’s capacity to interpret the body language that verbal language´s hegemony doesn’t let us go more deeply. Different languages complicates human communication, although they are part of it. Some people talk about the singularity of the Hungarian language, which is not related to any neighbouring language, like the reason why many Hungarian emigrants seem to have brought more things to humanity, in terms of sciences or music, than by being in their homeland in terms of arts, due to the fact that the few readers of Hungarian push the authors to talk and even write in other languages in order to increase their creative outcomes.
The story of the Tower of Babel, or the academic attempts to decipher universal grammar, source of all human languages, point out puzzlement caused by linguistic variety. Considering it as cultural richness, this fact can just fully benefit few linguists or gifted polyglots, instead of native speakers or learners of each language.
Undoubtedly, even most disparate languages have found ways to be translated from one to another by bilingual speakers. Love stories usually prove that, in many cases, this phenomenon occurred due to the communication necessity they created. For example, conquerors of new worlds try often to understand and form alliances with the people they intend to subjugate, and that is when they are helped by beautiful native girls whose excessive curiosity for the newcomers ends up captivating them by the knights of shining armours. On the other side, warriors succumb to the females’ wild exoticism. To draw a conclusion: the existing non verbal communication makes easier for each party to understand the other one’s vernacular language.
The next example, more personal this time, comes from a useful pocket guide of Hungary. It told foreigners that the best way for learning their singular language –which they considered to be the third most complex one of the world– was to get sentimentally involved with a local.
Language is the heart of a culture, the cover under which a group of people shapes its own vision of the world. That is the reason why some argue that just being capable of speaking a second language, even if it has the status of vehicular language (lingua franca), does not necessarily mean they have also adopted, as if by magic, its natives’ cultural vision. Only an approach motivated by love will turn us in bilingual, both in the ability of using the language, and also in the mastery of realising, in relation to our mother tongue, the cultural differences of its vocabulary and usage, even though this is a quite hard task.
*
To tell briefly the story of Babel, there was a time when humanity had reached Utopia. All ethnic groups and cultures lived peacefully and in perfect harmony, and they spoke a single language, understood by everyone. This ancient mankind decided to gather forces to develop an ambitious project: the construction of a tower so elevated that it reached heaven. Such plans did not please God at all and, as he thought that it was possible for humans to actually achieve their goal, he resolved to prevent it by making each culture speak a different language. Thus, men were incapable of communicate, and consequently they had to stop the building of the tower.
Nowadays, humanity is still doomed to separation due to language diversity.
The division and curse of the Tower of Babel become more evident in relation to the degree of hostility which different human groups have reached. An example of this could be the entanglement of languages and their uses in the former Yugoslavia, or the linguistic ocean in which African and Amazon tribes are immersed.
Despite all difficulties, the unfinished project of Babel still exists, transformed now into human common aspirations to conquer space, or to create and try to promote uniting artificial languages, easy to learn, which contrast with international vehicular languages upon history.
Speaking about vehicular languages, the historical use of certain languages as connectors between disparate cultures is quite distinctive in our present world, due to cultural and human migrations. In this way, as a result of economic and political vicissitudes, Spanish flooded the American continent; German, Central Europe; Russian, the former soviets and their satellite countries; French, certain regions of Africa; and English, all commercial and scientific exchanges.
Contrary to what it could be expected, in the majority of cases the spread language is not precisely the Spanish from Madrid, the German from Bavaria, the Russian from Moscow, the French from Paris or the English from London. That is, English gets its grammatical rules simplified by no native speakers, it leaves aside exceptions and bizarre idiomatic expressions, and it is embellished by all possible accents. This is the English that even Londoners must learn if they wish to be understood by the majority of us, speakers of English as a second language. Here you have more evidence to prove that necessity generates the strategies needed for being able to communicate with others, instead of heading us towards separation.
Language has made us the only surviving human species, conditioning to a large extent the way of thinking and behaving of the culture it unites. Maybe that is the reason why language tricks us in really twisted ways, making us forget about non verbal, and even emotional, communication, both fundamental for humans to treat each other equally, ideally, under those feelings which we call friendship, and even love, used in their widest sense.
*
After all that has been said, there are two things I would like to make clear. On the one hand, human beings communicate to each other in the language of the senses: we can appreciate different culinary tastes, several kinds of clothes and fabrics, musical styles and scents from exotic gardens. On the other, that being able to speak a foreign language does not necessarily mean we can also understand the funny part of its jokes, whereas a sentimental approach to other culture, even when its language is unknown, can make us get the cultural meaning of the same jokes after having them translated by a third person. We, human beings, live under the feeling of belonging to something or someone, something that gathers us in societies, no matter what that feeling is, where that something lies, who that someone is or how does he or she look like.
All our basic instincts, and love, can make some people look desirable, while others may just see them as enemies to defeat. Is perhaps that fight against us, the ones who object, the medley of existing languages and the multilingual tongue twister in which society lives nowadays?
What happens when an adventurous dream drives you to move to a country whose language and culture you do not know at all, where you do not have the slightest idea of how it is human possible to speak that way, and where you manage to understand something just as if by magic? Your brain needs to work at 120% capacity. Everything looks different, when it is not influenced by the rational veil of words; when you have to trust your intuition to be able to put two and two together.
They say we only use a derisory part of our brain and cognitive total capacity. If that is the case, the brain is normally doing something forgotten by this profligate, counter natural human kind: saving energy to achieve a sustainable thinking. If we always used our brain at its full capacity, we maybe would need to have a catheter constantly providing it glucose, and hats equipped with refrigeration systems, to avoid neuronal overheating. The brain seems to reserve its extra functions only when they are absolutely necessary, so we can feel powerful and euphoric while we explore new worlds.
*
Many European volunteers talk about the exhaustion they felt every time they finished their daily tasks and got home at night, after many hours of experiencing plenty of new things. During the first month, a period of cultural shocks, the new stimuli and the constant search of references to live in the new environment tire out all senses. If, when the necessary adaptation period is over, your body and your soul have managed to survive, you will be ready then to spend the next days conquering that new land. At this stage, you will see the good and the bad side of this kind of experiences; in other words, the good and the bad side of life. The brain goes back to its normal state; you go back to your usual self, trying to think and feel with more calm and realism everything you still plan to do, know and try during the rest of your life.
In Spain, we have a strong tradition of telling jokes that nowadays would be labelled as politically incorrect, since they make fun of physical handicaps, foreign customs, sex war, sexual minorities, and so on. Whether we like it or not, those jokes are really funny and witty, showing to a great extent how one particular culture feels and thinks.
My favourite ones are those referring to customs of people from different countries, and how they behave under the same circumstances. Contrary to what it could be expected, those jokes do not intend to show the superiority of one way over the others, but for criticising cultural stereotypes. They usually start with the tag “A Frenchman, a German and a Spaniard are inside a train”, making possible to combine different countries and scenarios, in which cultural influence over individuals’ actions comes to evidence.
It is frequently said that, in order to understand one culture, it is essential to know its language. However, if you grasp their sense of humour, you will certainly understand those who laugh because of it. Humour has always acted as a tool for people to judge themselves, and the others, in a more frank way; like medieval jesters, they are capable of telling people to their face what they truly think, even if it is politically incorrect or not very advisable to say aloud.
*
I enjoyed the idea of a Frenchman, a German and a Spaniard inside a train. When I had the opportunity of experiencing it myself, it made me feel comfortable. Some people say that, on top of the command of a common working language, some special communication abilities are also required for avoiding any trouble that might arise when people from different countries or cultures are gathered. According to my personal experience, if, like in love and hate at first sight, stereotypes and personal incompatibilities are left apart, working or living within a group formed by people from different cultures and countries will be regarded as enrichment, instead of a hindrance.
The strangers who find themselves outside their own land are usually conscious of the additional effort they need to make for thinking about what they want to say and how to express it in an understandable way. In a context different to their own national one, either the language or the expressions that each of them employs automatically, without even thinking, to communicate in their homelands, will be no longer valid. At this point, it becomes really necessary to listen carefully to each and every word said by others in order to understand them, something really uncommon in present human communication.
When we get close to somebody, being from other cultural environments or from next door, we tend to put completely aside this listening strategy. As the Spanish saying goes, <<It sucks when there is enough confidence>>. When we master communication strategies in our environment, we make no more an effort to understand each other, but try to impose our wishes and needs before everybody else. That is when problems arise, and sometimes we even appreciate more the momentary solidarity of strangers, who have nothing to lose at helping us. The wrongly called “civilization clash” would correspond more precisely to the clash between individuals; so it would have nothing to do with cultural differences, but more with selfish similarities.
*
While you try to understand and get used to the peculiar things you see, you will always think how crazy some foreigners are for not hanging curtains on their windows, like if they do not care about intimacy. It is easy then to forget the real reason for us Spanish to have them: to prevent sun light from entering our homes, a problem that ironically many other countries would love to have. That is why some prefer not having curtains, to allow sun warmth to enter their homes, and enjoy sun rays without worrying about snoopers.
At Social Science faculties, the behavioural and mental emic/etic window popularised by Marvin Harris for analyzing a culture is quite well-known. Cultural explorers must register how one culture describes itself and how it behaves, and add to these data his or her own thoughts on its conduct and its self-conceptions. Whatever the case may be, it is natural that the different socialization in which each of us is raised, hampers our attempts to understand other customs. We will always be amazed by things you cannot explain, like for example the fact that in some countries ice is not used for cooling drinks, whereas you were used to put it in every glass you shared with your friends.