Tag Archives: English

Summer 2020 Issue XVI: Language Stories

An Autobiographical Reflection on My Name

August 20, 2020 Kaya Spencer Frith

Kaya is the name I got – my mum agreed to it because of an ancient Sanskrit meaning: spirit made flesh, the body. It is also a name derived from ekhaya, a zulu word for home or household. Most say it is a word for “shelter,” which sounds more poetic, but I get confused when I first look it up in Google Translate because the world for shelter in zulu is indawo yokukholesa, a string of syllables nothing like my short name. I must consider whether my name is really what it is supposed to be and has a real meaning, or if it is a Western made up thing. But I find it on some website down the list, explaining the sound i-kaya, ekahaya.

There are more translations of my name in various spellings that I know; it is a common sound. Sister, stone, rich, ocean, yew tree. Really, I am called this name after the Bob Marley song, ‘Kaya,’ which is how most people have heard it – it is a word for herb, and often used to refer to ganja. My mum likes that meaning too, because it is strongly connected to our homeland, Jamaica. My mother, Tara, tells me, “Your name continues to grow in meaning for me as my own name does for me too. Our names are old old sounds that echo in various cultures around the world.” When I look it up on the internet, the first thing I see is Marley’s face and the lyrics to his song: Got to have kaya now, for the rain is falling. I am interested to see what comes up on the image search of kaya, bob marley. I find a promotional T-shirt with my name on it, from Marley’s tour. The shirt costs four hundred and fifty dollars. I am interested so I search more and find a picture of Marley playing soccer. He is wearing the T-shirt.

I laugh a bit to myself. It seems comical that someone would sell a T-shirt for almost five hundred dollars with my name on it and nothing else. Of course, it is not about me, it is about him: Bob Marley the ever-living legend. But it’s funny all the same. Briefly, I recall that my mother met him once, in a doctor’s office. She tells me he greeted her. It was long ago, but she has not forgotten. She has not forgotten patois either, though it seems faded at times. She has forgotten French, although she used to dream in French and sing French children’s songs to me. Patois is almost her mother tongue, but not quite.

When my grandmother, Beverly Dunlop, was a young woman, Jamaica was still under firm British rule. It is still true, but it was then especially that patois, “bush talk,” the language of the people, was firmly frowned upon, and the queen’s English was the privileged standard. My mother was born seven years after Jamaica’s independence from Britain. Although my rigorously Christian grandmother did seem to love all things English, she also loved Jamaica. She has hardly ever left. She calls me on WhatsApp sometimes, and though she pretends my queerness doesn’t exist and goes on about every failure of the supermarket that week and bashes Obama for legalizing gay marriage, and though I roll my eyes and often don’t remember to return her calls, her strong Jamaican accent is a comfort of sorts on the rare occasions that we do speak.

When my grandfather, Garth Spencer, left his family – his wife and two children – my mother was only six years old. He is the one who loved English most of all – that “higher” language – so he left for good. Went to England, to speak English. He rarely speaks of the darker-skinned, curly-haired six-year-old daughter he left in Jamaica. I don’t meet my grandfather until I am sixteen years old. He is tall and elegant. He has a British accent and articulates each word in each sentence so nicely. He gives me the best gift he can think of – a set of four English dictionaries: the Oxford Compact collection, which, as he proudly notes, is not nearly enough to cover the breadth of the extensive and complex English vocabulary.

I take the set of dictionaries home to Maui, no ka oi. My parents tell me to leave it in England with a friend, but, adamant, I hold the set to my chest like a precious child. I lug it through the airport because it is too heavy to put in a suitcase, knotting my small shoulders. The dictionaries go on the short bookshelf in my room, taking up the space of ten normal sized books. The dictionaries do not do well in an island climate. The hot humid air makes them prone to wrinkling pages and developing mildew even with the dehumidifier I place in my room. A year later, at seventeen years old, I don’t take them to college with me.

At college, people think I am Latinx but are confused by my accent. I seem to switch between North American, British, and some unpinnable, Caribbean twang. Although my comprehension and learning in my Portuguese and French classes are average at best, I find that adapting accents is far less difficult for me than most. This frustrates my professors, as I can read any sentence from a piece of paper and can listen to a language fine, but cannot easily regurgitate vocabulary or practice grammar and sentence structures. Visitors in my Portuguese class think I am Brazilian; in my French class they ask if I am from Guadeloupe.

I once wanted to change my name to Kate. I adjusted my accent and straightened my hair. Refused to let my mother lay down the baby hairs on the side of my face. I liked light lipstick (though it never looked right against my complexion). I curled in the shade while my peers sunbathed. Yet, despite my resistance to my differences from the children I went to school with, I began to discover that each thing that I suppressed was something that I could use as a weapon to protect my individuality – especially when I found myself probed and questioned by those I tried to align myself with. My poorly hidden selves were indicators of my strength, of my mother’s, of our great-grandmothers’. I began to learn from my switching accent, from the waves and spirals of the dark hair I’d wanted to dye blonde or make straighter or curlier – anything besides their confusing textures. They simply needed a different comb to be untangled. My accents teach me I can find home in myself. My voice is riddled with places where I belong – places that claim me, a reminder of un-aloneness. And Kaya teaches me, too, her multi-origin sound reminding me of the commonality of humanity, and especially of the hills of Jamaica that promise to embrace me on my return home.

Kaya Spencer, class of ’21, is a comparative literature major interested in examining, learning, and recalling culture. As a reader, writer, and one-day filmmaker, her interests lie in narratives that center and uplift queer Black women, multiculturalism, and self interrogation and identification.

Summer 2020 Issue XVI: Language Stories

Warm Hospitality

August 20, 2020 Sage Theune

When people ask me how I got interested in Japanese, I usually tell them it was my love for Japanese literature, sparked in my senior year of high school. This isn’t a lie; it was after discovering author Haruki Murakami that I decided to dedicate myself to the language in order to close the gap between the English translations I was reading and the original texts that felt so unreachable.

The fact of the matter, though, is that my interest in Japanese was sparked much earlier. My older sister liked manga growing up, so I also came to like it through the osmosis of siblinghood. This childhood interest exploded into an embarrassing anime phase in middle school, and my insistence on watching shows in the original Japanese allowed me to pick up on a few words from the subtitles. I remember bragging to a friend how, while watching a show, I’d learned the Japanese word for “liar”: usoda. With only my ears and the subtitles to guide me, I didn’t realize that uso was the word for “lie,” not “liar,” and da was a conjugation of the verb desu, “to be.” Still, despite my fragmented understanding, the sound of the language stuck with me—and when I had a chance to study a new language, those butchered phrases that lingered on my tongue pushed me back to Japanese.

It’s an embarrassing origin story, I’m aware—and it’s common. I know now that the popularity of anime and manga in the United States is no accident; the Japanese government has worked hard to cultivate their unique pop culture into a consumable international product. From my middle school’s obsession with Death Note to the tremendous impact that films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell have left on American sci-fi, it’s impossible to quantify the pop culture impact of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

That’s what it’s called now: an alliance. The use of the word here feels a bit euphemistic, carrying the same weight as an offer you can’t refuse. American history books tell the story hurriedly, like someone trying to guide their houseguest past the room they forgot to clean: the bombs fell, the Japanese gave up their military, and then America and Japan became friends. It’s a very American story: a “bad guy” country being reformed by our intervention. If a little bit of occupation was necessary for that, and if that occupation still continues today at the expense of Japan’s most vulnerable populations, well, Japan got rid of their military (completely of their own volition, of course), so all of our military bases are just keeping them safe. It’s only fair they stay on our side, right? I’m no expert at foreign policy, but I do have to wonder: what does the word “alliance” mean when your supposed ally has a gun to your head?

You might be wondering what this has to do with me. The answer is: a lot more than I’d like, unfortunately. Because when you seize control of a sovereign nation, chances are you’re going to need translators. And the question of who were becoming translators in those critical postwar years has significant ramifications for the legacy of Japanese studies in the United States.

Once I declared my Japanese major in college and began to take more classes, I noticed a pattern amongst the translators lauded as “Japanese studies pioneers.” For one, they tended to be men. Second, they were almost always white. Third, many of them were born in the 1910s or ’20s. Japanese-Americans were commonly recruited as translators during the war, but when it came to the postwar period, white American men were the ones responsible for selling Japan to the American public. It went about as well as you’d expect. I will never forget the translation I read in one of my literature classes, where one of these pioneers translated “Chinese noodles” as “spaghetti.” He knew it was wrong, but accuracy was sacrificed for the goal of making Japan palatable to a country that had split its time between depicting Japanese people as rats in propaganda posters and sending Japanese-American families to internment camps. It was a balancing act between humanizing Japanese people and grooming them for their role in America as the fascinating but safe other. It’s how we’ve gotten where we are now: Americans speaking confidently on Japan’s conformity and racial homogeneity, spinning wild tales about oxygen bars and panties in vending machines, and praising orientalist works like Memoirs of a Geisha that have come to supersede even inaccurately translated Japanese texts as prime examples of what Japan is.

The bombing and occupation of Japan fundamentally shaped modern Japanese studies in the United States. It feels obvious now, but when I first committed to learning Japanese in 2016, I never would have made the connection. I would not have understood how this idealized portrayal of Japan had, in some ways, led me to the language. If I was incapable of having that epiphany myself, how can I know that I wasn’t influenced by the exoticizing gaze that has led so many white Americans to the language, either via pop culture or by the portrayals of geisha and samurai in American works deemed classics? It is difficult to reconcile with the immense joy I’ve obtained through learning the language—and while I certainly try to be more conscientious now, I’ve accepted that I will always be unlearning these perceptions.

That being said, there’s a fine line between self-awareness and self-flagellation—and the latter, when discussing dynamics of power and marginalization, runs a high risk of turning conceited. As I’ve deepened my studies and connected with more people who have a relationship to Japanese, a major guiding light I’ve found is the realization that learning a language is a communal experience. From my classmates to my professors to the older couple who took care of me during my semester in Kyoto, I can say with confidence that the relations between Japanese and English speakers do not have to be unequal, and that to assume so runs the risk of taking agency from the former. To paint myself as an intruder in the language is not only pessimistic, it erases the plethora of Japanese and Japanese-American people invested in Japanese-English translation for reasons that have nothing to do with me. So rather than condemn myself as an infiltrator, I prefer to think of myself as a guest; there is a place for me here, as long as I am willing to accept the limits of that place’s hospitality.

And what is a guest’s role? That’s something I’m still trying to figure out, and I don’t think that it’s a static role. But I think that, in general, it follows the code of any guest etiquette: Follow the house rules. Don’t go into private rooms without permission. Acknowledge that not every resident will have the same boundaries. Apologize for plates accidentally dropped, or carpets accidentally dirtied. And most of all, be thankful for the welcome.

Sage Theune is a junior at Smith College. They study English literature and Japanese.

Summer 2020 Issue XVI: Language Stories

Double and Not Half

August 20, 2020 Mika Holtz

Mixed-raced children are called hafu in Japan, from the English word “half.” When I was younger, being a hafu felt like a benefit wherever I was. My friends in the U.S. were interested in learning about Japan and my family was part of a Japanese community. I was the center of attention with my Japanese friends and relatives because they had never met a foreigner. I spoke both English and Japanese fluently, and didn’t doubt my identity or abilities within those languages.

As I grew up, I started noticing when I would be treated differently in Japan because of my appearance. I used to enroll in a Japanese elementary school for a few weeks every summer. One time, there was a teacher who clearly did not like me. He would make comments on my appearance and call me a gaijin, a slur for foreigners. On my last day at the school, the teacher sneeringly said that he was glad I was leaving. Another time in Japan, my mom and I went shopping and an old woman walked up to me to say, kuni ni kaere, go back to your country. I didn’t fully comprehend what was happening, but I started doubting my sense of belonging in Japan.

When I was nine years old, my family moved to a more rural part of the States. I lost my hafu friends, and we didn’t go to Japan as often. I spent more time being exposed to English-language education, entertainment and friends. I lost my ability to think and speak fluently in Japanese. I became self-conscious of the way I spoke Japanese, and felt ashamed of losing my sense of Japanese culture. I was deeply connected to this language, but I doubted myself because I saw how I was different from a “normal” Japanese person. I acquired a strong sense of insecurity about my cultural identity.

Furthermore, my naturally reserved personality intensified my self-doubt. As a child, I would talk sometimes, but I was often really shy and I kept my thoughts to myself. Language was a means toward introspection and interpreting the world around me rather than communicating with other people. My identity and worldview, the thoughts in my head, were developed by the two languages I grew up in. But, I got to an age where it became necessary for me to speak to other people to establish my identity and social belonging. Being forced outside of my comfort zone and noticing my embarrassing mistakes when speaking Japanese reinforced my fear of not being Japanese enough.

During this time, I started learning French in school. It felt weird and uncomfortable, but different from English and Japanese. When learning French, I was forced to speak in order to gain fluency. With English and Japanese, I could say what sounded right to me. That didn’t work with French. I didn’t know what sounded right or wrong. I just had to physically say something to notice mistakes and improve my fluency. Learning this new language put me outside of my comfort zone in a new way. Speaking French didn’t feel comfortable (and still definitely isn’t), but it felt liberating because I had no personal connection to the language. There was no mental barrier of doubting my identity. When I went on a cultural exchange program to France in high school, I was shocked by how comfortable I was saying what came to mind and not worrying so much about making mistakes. My host family welcomed me and treated me with kindness regardless of what I said. This felt so different from the shame I felt when I spoke Japanese in Japan. It felt refreshing to learn a language and culture that wasn’t my own.

After graduating high school, I was able to direct more of my self-exploration. I wanted to regain what I had lost from my Japanese identity. For the first time, I planned a trip to Japan by myself and reconnected with my Japanese friends who see me as I am. Throughout my adolescence I had been feeding my own self-doubt. Slowly, I learned to appreciate the wisdom and worldview I gained from being a hafu and the two cultures I grew up with. Stepping away from my insecurities with French also helped me have a growth mindset with language. I was always making mistakes and facing challenges, which caused me to let go of my fear of speaking.

Until recently, I’ve had a difficult time feeling secure in my identity, and felt like two sides were fighting for power over each other. I now know that it’s more of an integration, and that my identity can be a mix rather than a conflict. Lately, the word hafu itself is starting to be considered a negative slur in Japanese. My parents now like to use the word “double,” not “half,” to reinforce the fact people aren’t missing anything by being “half,” but instead gaining twice the benefit by being “double.” This usage isn’t very common yet, but I hope more people start replacing hafu with labels that are more representative of the benefit of having multiple cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

It has become clear to me how each language I know has contributed to who I am. English is the language that helps me think critically. My dad was always the one I would consult to solve problems and talk about the state of the world. As it’s the language of the country I grew up in, I feel at ease and confident with English. Japanese is the language that defines my values. My mom taught me to take care of myself and my surroundings with respect. I learned to value the small joys in life and the present moment from Japanese culture. And French taught me to let go of being perfect. I learned that using a language is a life-long process and that my relationship with language changes constantly.

Through my experience with several languages, I learned to be verbal and express my thoughts and identity. I still have a reserved personality, but don’t feel as shy and scared to speak as I did before. Each language that I know has contributed to my identity and helped me grow in different ways. I think in one way or another I will always have difficulties finding a balance among languages and cultures, but now I know how to have more confidence in my voice. Having gone through challenges with my identity has given me wisdom and new perspectives. I hope in the future to keep learning how to use my linguistic abilities to my advantage. I’m excited to keep learning French (and maybe other languages), and see how becoming more fluent in French adds another side to my identity. My linguistic background has made me a better person, and I’m proud to call myself a “double,” or a “triple” in progress.

Mika Holtz ’22 is a junior at Smith College, majoring in neuroscience and French studies. Her hobbies include dancing and traveling, and the places she calls home are Burlington, Vermont and Nagoya, Japan.

Fall 2017 Issue X: Immigration

Tongues

October 27, 2017 Patience Kayira

When I think of language, I think of foreignness. I think of who gets to decide what is foreign and what is domestic. What is foreign? I am foreign. I am foreign because of the dark tint on my face. I am foreign because of my last name, of only six letters, that causes a raucous of confusion for messy high school librarians with an inclination to call anything different weird.

They ask, over and over again:“Kay-yir-uh? Kai-year-ah? Key-air. It must be Key-air”

I am foreign because of my parents’ strange English or thick accents, as some might say. Yet, that thickness and strangeness remains unbeknownst to me.

I want to yell at the girl my sister invited over to our house. The girl stomped on the olive branch my sister extended.

She whined in her sing-songy voice: “I have to spend the day with your parents? But it’s so hard to understand them.”

I want to yell at her, but that would be impolite so the Cheshire cat of Keene holds my tongue. And so begins the narrative of a foreign girl in a Western land.

When I was four-years-old, my family departed from the orange-clay dusted roads of Malawi. You cannot trust my narration as the days of my first four years flicker like a tiny flame fending off wild winds. The memories remain submerged in the deep Indian Ocean of my subconscious. On and off. On and off.

Yet, I remember the threads of our departure. We, my mom, sisters, and I sat on tan leather cushions of a van. I held a smile across my lips, bemusing my aunt, who sat across from me. She asked: “Patience, what are you smiling about?”

My reply flutters away like a bird in migration. The car morphed into a plane, and the plane became Heathrow airport, where I begged my mother to buy me a British doll with curly blonde hair. Eventually, Heathrow transformed into a first-level Victorian-esque apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, yet the airport never left.

44 Lawrence Street. At night, a ginger tabby cat hid underneath the porch. My four-year-old self would speak to the creature in an invented tongue of “let-me-entertain-myself-by-talking-to-the-cat.” Yet, talking to cats in broken English proved not to be ideal. From early on, my parents lectured me and my two older sisters on the value of English.

“Practice speaking English to each other. Speak up! Be a leader and not a follower.” These were some of the many lessons our sponge-like minds absorbed, almost too well.

With each year, the syllabic taste of my mother tongue in my mouth became odd. Do these sounds really belong to me and my lingual history?

At Malawian get-togethers, family friends greeted me with, “Mulu Bwanji, (How are you).” My palms sweated tears of discomfort as I muttered quietly, “I’m fine.” It became a running joke that “Patience was not patient enough to learn the language.” Speaking English like an American child was not a sin, but forgetting my own mother-tongue was something else.

I grew to resent the title of “immigrant” or “non-English” speaker. I wanted my speech to flow effortlessly like a ribbon in the wind. When my family moved to Canada, the distance between me and my history grew. Hearing my friends chat about their French grandmothers who urged them to practice their French, I developed a keen interest in French.

In my childlike innocence, I would reply: “Oh, that’s neat. I want to practice my French too.”

My friends would raise their eyebrows and blink rapidly for 15 seconds, reminding me that “French” is not my own language and to stick to my own culture.

Familial fingers across the globe blame my parents. Somehow, that trans-atlantic stream of judgement does not seem fair. Yet what really matters is what is outside the child’s window each morning: the bus stop; the school where children snicker at the African girl’s attempts to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; at soccer practice where someone asks, “If you’re from Africa why don’t you sound African?”; at a friend’s house where a friend asks, “How do you understand your parents?”; at a hipster teahouse where the barista asks, “So where are you originally from?”; and at a library where the librarian says, “Your last name is one of those weird ones, isn’t it?

These experiences repelled me from embracing my mother tongue, a decision that disheartens me each day as I type on my resume, “Patience Kayira, Majors: English & French, Concentration: Translation Studies.” I guess I am not too ashamed to say that I am proud of my shame.

Patience Kayira ’20 is originally from Malawi, but she has lived in the United States and Canada for the past 15 years. For the majority of her formative years, she has lived in different places, so she considers herself a global citizen. Patience is currently a double majoring in English and French, and she hopes to pursue a career in journalism or professional writing after Smith.

No Fields Found.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

Connection and Disconnect in Translation

April 15, 2016 vgilliga

My sensei, which means teacher or mentor in Japanese, has known me since I was four years old. While he understands English, he always writes to me in Japanese, in his exceptional calligraphy, difficult for me to read because it is a style I am not familiar with. When I was younger I delayed returning his letters because I was insecure and shy about my language ability. As I grew older I found it even harder to express myself and my ideas because I was not in full control of the language. This motivated me to develop my Japanese language skills when I entered college and began my linguistic transition.

In the winter of 2012, my sensei and I went to Tokyo Station, after the completion of its 5-year renovation to restore it to pre-World War II condition. Going with my sensei held deep meaning for me, because I have always admired the rich history of the station, with its mix of Western architecture and Japanese railway design. With its red brick and circular dome, the building itself symbolized my cultural and linguistic experience learning English and Japanese. It was the West and the East, two opposing forces that would normally clash, coming together to create something unique and beautiful.

Although I grew up bilingual in America, and did not have the Japanese background the rest of my family had, our miscommunications were dismissed as cultural difference, and I felt my family often did not try to understand my ideas or me as an individual. “You’re American, you wouldn’t understand,” they would say, to end any conversation in which I struggled to follow or simply expressed disagreement. My elders would treat me as something foreign, despite the blood relation, and I wanted them to know who I was as a person, and to make a connection with me. Through my efforts to translate the complex thoughts I was having in English into Japanese, I came to understand that translation is not perfect. I realized that you cannot fully capture the meaning of a thought in the language in which it was not thought, and that oftentimes in instant translation, the challenge is to get as close as you can.

At the same time, I discovered aspects of my personality that could only be expressed in Japanese, and that words and concepts exist in the two languages that do not have equivalents in the other. I connected better with my family, but not in the way I originally thought I would. I know that there will always be a part of me that is foreign to them, as well as to others who identify solely as Japanese. And yet, I feel closer to them now, in a way that differs from the closeness I have with English speakers.

This combination of connection and disconnect is what fascinates me about translation. My racial and cultural background demanded linguistic and geographical transitions from a young age, but this personal linguistic transition lead me to realize my love for translation, a significant part of my identity. My hope is that through translation I can recreate the harmony of the Tokyo Station building that I visited with my sensei, and to act as a bridge between two cultures and languages.

Victoria Gilligan is a student of government and language, and is fascinated by the interplay between the two studies. Her academic interests include translation in all forms, but her projects have focused on the exploration of linguistic identity by biracial or bicultural people. Her nonacademic interests include rock climbing and all things outdoors. She is a 2016 expected graduate with a double major in Government and East Asian Languages and Literatures, and a Translation Studies Concentration.