Foreign languages have been thrust into my experience lately. And for as much as it intrigues me, the idea of learning whole new languages, there is an almost thrilling fear that all but stops me from struggling through a conversation in a language I barely know. Suddenly I’m a toddler, just beginning to connect words with concepts, ideas, wants, needs. The ubiquitous foreign has always engaged me. But in a way not so much compelling as necessary. It’s been like a discipline for me. A practice. To embrace the other, learn the other, move towards the other both in myself and among people and places in the world.
There’s a group that gets together every other week to converse in American Sign Language. It’s composed of both deaf and hearing people, but unless, like me, someone is so severely handicapped with the language as to be unmistakably hearing, you wouldn’t know who can hear and who can’t. Because the rule is silence. I have gone the past two times, and with the astonishing patience of the other person, have had brief yet full conversations in ASL. It’s a puzzlement that I’m so slow to catch on. I grew up with ASL. My grandparents were both deaf and my mom has always signed fluently. Yet I was never fluent. I was once much more capable that I am now, though. I moved away from my mom–therefore the deaf community–and the prolonged lack of exposure robbed me of what little I knew. Although I find the language beautiful and the culture compelling, although I ache to know it and be in it more deeply, I am afraid to go again. Or maybe not afraid. Maybe it’s the anticipation of a small but perceived heartbreak that happens when the barrier of what I don’t know prevents me from engaging in full, free expression with another person.
That one was elective rather than thrust upon me, I know. But this other was legitimately the latter. A woman appeared at a meeting last week who spoke very little English. She’s from Mexico City and has been in Phoenix only three weeks. She understood very little of what I said and I understood even less of what she said. I found myself flatly embarrassed for not knowing Spanish by this point in my life. It’s such a widely used language in this country. I have always wanted to learn it, or rather to speak it, skipping the learning process altogether. Anyway, I ended up giving her my phone number, offering it up as a new connection for her, extending my availability for friendship. I know what it’s like to move to a new city and have to do the awkward, vulnerable dance of making new connections and building new friendships. I did not expect her to call, as we didn’t understand each other at all, but she called. We met for coffee. We sat there across the table from each other, each with a translation tool in her hands, and asked questions, me in Spanish and her in English. I practiced her language while she practiced mine. We fumbled through a conversation, cracking up periodically at something I tried to say in Spanish that just came out wrong. It reminded me of similar experiences I’ve had in France, Spain and Russia. Travelling to parts of the world that speak differently and entering that challenge with a sincere desire to embrace the other, learn the other, move towards the other.
What I realized just recently is that although I have an affinity for foreign languages and cultures, I often fear or shun foreign opinions and concepts in people, often those I know and love quite well. The other day, I was with a woman I’ve known for a while, a woman with whom I have enjoyed a very strong connection. I’m not a political person, but I do have definite opinions aligned with my personal values that I suppose I feel quite strongly about. The woman I was with shares many of my core values and beliefs—I know because we’ve had long conversations about these. When I discovered that her political affiliation or belief is opposite mine, I was surprisingly hurt. Or was I afraid? Or again, slightly heartbroken. Here was a barrier I didn’t know existed. As I stood there, feeling near tears, speechless and full of revulsion at this discovery, she looked at me and asked simply, “does it matter that much? Does it really change anything?”
Maybe it does. Maybe, like the inability to freely and fully exchange ideas and express with another person whose language I don’t know well, it prevents a certain level of understanding, of relating. But maybe it does not have to be a personal affront. Rather, maybe it’s as natural and neutral as different languages, skin colors, genders, ages. Never have I been offended by someone who doesn’t know English well enough to have a full and easy conversation with me. Why would I shun a foreign set of political views? And aren’t these differences fundamentally the allure of the other? There are places we all overlap—those are the parts that create the draw—and there are places we don’t, which offer the opportunity to learn. To be challenged and to grow. Perhaps I should approach those areas of conflicting ideas and opinions that I discover in others with a similar spirit of intrigue, curiosity and the desire to learn, to grow.
I see now; this experience of entering into the unfamiliar has always been the undercurrent, the leitmotif, of my life. In ways small and large, the world introduces me and reintroduces me to my fears. And each time this magician world performs a little trick–I never quite catch the motion–a flick of the wrist? A thing with mirrors? Some sleight of hand that at the last minute manages to tilt the image, cast it in a new light, so that nothing is quite as I had pictured it. The world looks different, changed, more full of possibility, even, than it was before.
There remains for me an indefinable sadness to all this, but it is a sorrow touched by lightness, or by light. The connotation of heartbreak is that it’s all sorrow, something best avoided. But what if the fissures are necessary? The only way for new light to shine through?
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