Tag Archives: French

Double and Not Half

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.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Parles-tu français ?

Parles-tu français ? !” “Mais oui, je parle français !” Every time I open my mouth to utter a few words in French, this is the reaction. It’s always been important to me to communicate not only in English but in other languages that were not mine from birth. My mother tongue is English, but I often find myself teetering between “proper” English and Geechee, a language spoken in South Carolina and Georgia by descendants of slaves. My identity is based largely on the languages I speak and the ways in which I interpret different cultures. Through these languages, I connect with the world around me, my family and culture, and I challenge myself linguistically when possible. French has encompassed all three of these aspects, but to better explain the role of French in my life, I need to go back to my roots.

Since my family is from the South, my parents have tried their hardest to keep our connections to our past alive. My mother is from South Carolina while my father is from Georgia and they both have families that speak Geechee, a language developed by slaves brought over during the Middle Passage. Geechee meant that the slaves were connected, that the White man could not take everything away from my people. At first, I was ashamed to speak this language, but as I have grown older, I have learned the importance of this language and the importance of not being proper or “speaking White”. Through my journey to embrace Geechee, I have gained the ability to code-switch, the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation, depending on my surroundings. I use it as a way to protect the most vulnerable part of me: my familial roots. Remembrance is key in the Black family, especially when society tries to say otherwise. I honor the family members who have gone before me through our language, through our perseverance. This perseverance has added to my determination to become proficient in another language: French.

When I reached the ripe age of five, my world started to change in terms of language: I was now beginning to learn not only English but French as well. At the private school I attended, I chose French because my older sister was also learning French in school and my grandmother spoke some at home. I began learning simple phrases like “hello,” “goodbye,” and “my name is.” I did not know it at that moment, but this language would change my life and put me on a path marked by travel and self-discovery.

In seventh grade, I moved from my tiny Catholic school to an independent school where I somehow made it into the advanced French class that prepared students for Honors and AP levels in high school. This was the first time I was thoroughly challenged in class. I remember arriving with my palms sweaty and my legs unwilling to carry me. I knew that most of these kids had been speaking French for the same amount of time I had, but for some reason, it seemed as if they could speak more eloquently and could understand everything the teacher said. I soon realized that other students had tutors or had parents who were from France and spoke the language at home. I felt as if I had hit a plateau in terms of my learning. Somehow I made it through that class and went on to study French in high school.

My first two years of high school were even harder. I can think of countless occasions when teachers belittled the work I had turned in, my test performance, or my uncertain responses in class. To say I was discouraged is an understatement. I can still recall a day in my junior year when my French teacher handed back my test on the subjunctive and said, in front of the rest of the class, “You probably don’t want to look at that now,” as she rolled her eyes. I am not sure if my teacher thought I was incapable of learning French because of my race – which would not have been an unusual reaction at my school – or if she did not believe I belonged in her class because my level of understanding may have been lower. Due to the backhanded comments from my teachers, I vowed to continue speaking French in college and to possibly even major in the language. As I reflect on my time in Montclair Kimberley Academy’s French classrooms, I believe that my teachers’ refusal to invest in my academics as they did for other students who had French tutors while I learned on my own, is the reason I pushed myself to continue learning French at Smith.

My first college French course was Madame Métral’s French 220: High Intermediate French. It was the first time I felt as if I could keep up with the rest of the class and could make mistakes without being ridiculed. When I walked into class, I was not paralyzed with anxiety to the point where I could not utter a single word. It was the first time I could see myself benefitting from the language and its instruction. Although I had been learning French for over ten years, it finally clicked in that first college class. French began to roll off my tongue with an ease I had never experienced. I began to think and dream in French when school was not even in session. I had finally unlocked a hidden part of myself. I could finally be myself not only in English but French as well.

“Mayotte Capécia: Reprendre l’identité de la femme martiniquaise de Frantz Fanon” is the research project that I had the chance to conduct through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship during my last two years at Smith. I used this project as a way to find out more about people who look like me and eloquently write their histories in the French language. Not only did I feel seen by their works, I also felt as if I finally belonged in the French language. Through my research project, I began to understand that French is not solely for the White philosophers that I was made to think represented the entirety of French literature. French clicked for me at this point because I finally saw myself and understood what writers like Frantz Fanon and Mayotte Capécia were trying to articulate because it was also my struggle in America. The way I honored my ancestors through Geechee is the same way Capécia and Fanon used French and Creole in Martinique.

Trials and tribulations seem to be part of the narrative for people like me. People who are not meant to be in White, intellectual spaces but somehow still persevere. People who are meant to meet adversity but somehow do not let it break them. This is the narrative of my people, the Geechee. This is the story of other Black students who are told they cannot accomplish anything in academia but prevail by any means necessary. So, when someone asks if I speak French, I proudly answer that I do.

Kimani Freeman is a recent graduate from Smith where they studied French and Sociology. At Smith, Kimani had the chance to create their own research project through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which helps foster diversity in academia. For the next two years, Kimani will be teaching seventh grade English/Humanities in Springfield, Massachusetts, through Teach For America. They hope to continue their love for the French language well after undergrad.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Attempts to Exceed the Language Binary

I identify as nonbinary and use they/them pronouns, primarily because those are the most succinct ways to describe my current relationship with gender. That’s not to say they are the best or most accurate terms. No matter what the options are when I need to select my gender on a survey or form, I always end up feeling a bit uncomfortable, a bit unsatisfied. I can describe my gender as such: When I’m asked to choose between male and female, I choose female. When asked to choose between male, female, and nonbinary, I choose nonbinary. When I’m able to select one or more, I will select female and nonbinary. But, if given the option, I will always turn to my old friend, “Prefer not to say.” Because the truth is, I don’t know how to describe myself, at least not with one or two checkmarks. I’d rather just not say anything, than say something incomplete.

I was born in the United States and grew up speaking English with my family. When I was in first grade, I had to make the choice between learning French or learning Spanish for the foreseeable future. I chose French because my older sister had, and it became my second language as simply as that. I learned French in a classroom setting for twelve years, and I still try to review it from time to time in conversational settings to keep my skills sharp. Since I was about five years old when I started, I had absolutely no knowledge of nonbinary identities, much less my own. Therefore, I was fine with being referred to as elle and with the feminine forms of nouns and adjectives. This lasted throughout my formal education in French, as I did not start using they/them pronouns until around the end of my final year of French classes. However, my nonbinary identity has definitely affected my thoughts about returning to French in the future.

The possibility of taking more classes in French and developing my fluency in the language is tempting, but also fraught with complications. How will I ask others to refer to me? Neither elle nor il feels particularly comfortable, and both forms of they are gendered as well. There have been movements to create gender neutral pronouns in French, but none have become as widespread as they in English, and I have no guarantee that a future French teacher would respect my right to use them. Furthermore, it’s unclear how I could refer to myself using other words. I am aware of the new convention of nonbinary French speakers adding “(e)” to the ends of adjectives in order to demonstrate their gender fluidity, but this is not always something that can be translated into the spoken language. I also don’t know how it works for nouns or adjectives with more complex transformations from masculine to feminine. It’s an imperfect system at best. Ultimately, it feels as though I may have to choose between losing my French and being misgendered, and neither of these options is desirable.

My second foray into learning a new language gave me slightly different options. It happened during my sophomore year of high school, after I discovered the Norwegian TV show SKAM and decided to learn Norwegian on Duolingo. Norwegian is also a gendered language, with masculine, feminine, and neuter forms. However, there are a few dialects of the language that ignore the feminine markers and use masculine markers for both feminine and masculine nouns, distinguishing only between neuter and “common genders.” You can write the nouns using either form on Duolingo. Norwegian is also the only language that I’ve studied in which speakers have gathered around a single gender-neutral personal pronoun, hen. Unfortunately, this pronoun is neither widely used nor accepted. Similarly, according to a friend who is fluent in Norwegian, most speakers still use the traditional feminine, masculine, and neuter forms of nouns. The language is far from moving past its gendered structure, although it has taken more steps than French has. I never had enough experience speaking Norwegian to figure out which pronouns I prefer, as I dropped the language after about six months. However, the presence of a gender-neutral pronoun and less gendered language definitely makes the possibility of returning to it in the future feel more promising, less painful.

The most recent language I’ve decided to learn is German, and I recently completed the elementary German course at Smith College. I chose this language because my family is German, and I thought it would be a nice change from French. Like Norwegian, German has a gendered system with feminine, masculine, and neuter forms. Unlike Norwegian, however, there hasn’t been any movement to consolidate gendered nouns in German, and there is no unified movement around a single gender-neutral personal pronoun.

Fortunately, at this point I have not been in many situations in which someone has had to refer to me in the third person in German, or in which I’ve had to describe myself using adjectives or gendered nouns. When those situations do arise, I’ve adopted the French method of adding the feminine endings in parentheses. If people ask me how they should refer to me in the third person, I generally just tell them to use sie, which is the German word for she. However, the main reason I’m comfortable with this is because it’s also the German word for they, just with a different verb conjugation. This works well enough to address my complex relationship with nonbinary and female identities. It’s possible that this will change as my German develops, but that’s where I’m at now.

However, what I’ve realized throughout my journey is that no matter how many new words are created for me to use, or how many modifications of adjective endings I find, it’s only a temporary fix. Even if a language has begun to adopt more gender-neutral language, it’s only a small step towards trying to capture an experience that’s very difficult to pin down in such a simple way. I use the word nonbinary to describe myself, but there are many aspects of my life that have led to my decision to identify in that way, and that are inseparable from how I experience gender. One word cannot encapsulate the levels of self-reflection and personal history that have formed my gender identity, and therefore using only that word tells an incomplete story of myself.

Creating more inclusive terms is definitely an important step. But we need to go further. Changing language is one thing, but it means nothing if people are unwilling to put those changes into practice, or unable to do so without serious backlash. It is the beginning of acceptance, not the end. It does nothing if it is not accompanied by a distinct movement towards furthering the rights and voices of nonbinary people in other ways. Only by creating a safer, more open, and accepting environment will people feel the freedom and safety to be open about their experiences with gender and to tell their whole story.

Zoe Koeninger ’23 is a rising sophomore at Smith College, and hopes to double-major in theatre and Russian studies.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Tongues

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.
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Reactions to Trump from Austria

Boy was there egg on my face. I had spent my first three months in Vienna assuring my new friends that there was no way in hell Donald Trump would be elected president. On election night I lay awake until 5am, perpetually refreshing the newsfeed on my phone, only falling into a fitful sleep when it looked as if I had been wrong. I awoke to find that I certainly had been wrong. That morning I bumped into a [French] roommate on my way to make coffee. As we made eye contact he burst out laughing and I burst into tears. He thought I was kidding. He assured me that in France their president was also a “clown” and that it was only an election. He had no conception of the U.S. Presidency holding any weight internationally. Such is the pinnacle of idiotic bliss. We should all be so lucky.

The day after the election most of my classmates were tactful enough not to mention the results to me, but then again I didn’t know any of them all that well. My close friends from Paris where I lived for two years before coming to Vienna sent me condolence emails, something that I had not been expecting. I didn’t receive just one or two but nearly 10. Another friend, upon seeing me, without saying a word, gave me a very long, silent hug. They behaved as if I were in mourning.

It was a hot topic at the Green party headquarters the evening of the Austrian elections, where I accidentally found myself in attendance at the official Van der Bellen victory party. My still burgeoning grasp of the German language forces me to confess to being an American quite early on in any conversation which is a regrettably perfect segue into discussing Trump. “Did you vote for him?” people asked me. At first I was offended but I soon realized that they weren’t asking because they thought I seemed like I shared the same ideals as our President Elect, but rather because they were so baffled as to why anybody would vote for this man and they were hoping I might explain it to them.  As it turned out we were mutually perplexed. Ultimately, however, all anybody expressed was relief that the Austrians had defied the politically conservative trend sweeping the Western world. I understood their relief but all I could feel was jealousy.

 

After graduating from Smith in 2014, Sophia Wise received a fellowship to study at the Ecole Normale Supereure in Paris. She remained abroad and is currently completing her Master’s degree from the Sorbonne with an exchange year at the University of Vienna. She will begin law school in the fall of 2017.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather

Engaging with New Perspectives on Gender in Multilingual Space

During the fall semester of my year abroad in Hamburg, I took a class on the poetry of French Renaissance writer Louise Labé which involved readings in French and class time conducted in German. This made me nervous because I found it difficult to speak the two languages at once, but I hoped it would help me become more comfortable moving from one language to another. To be more confident switching between French and German, I would have to participate in class discussions in which both languages were spoken over the course of a single sentence. Though I had never taken a course conducted in two different foreign languages before, my experience in literature courses in French and German at Smith helped me to adapt to this new hybrid model.

lensing-sharp_2016-04-05-essay-image
Dompteuse, 1930. Hannah Höch. Photocollage.

As I navigated the course’s multiple languages, my command of German improved significantly more quickly, as it was the dominant language in the classroom. I gave an oral presentation on the introduction to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which I first read in English, then referred to the German translation in order to convey the concepts to my classmates. This constituted what was essentially my first engagement with theory in a literature course, although some of the basic concepts in Gender Trouble were familiar to me thanks to the open discourses about gender and sexuality at Smith. However, I was fairly surprised when most of my classmates had difficulty understanding the concepts I was discussing, such as the difference between gender identity and biological sex.

Part of the problem seemed to lie in the language itself—any vocabulary used to describe gender was either basic or borrowed from English. In German, Geschlecht means either gender or sex, unless you extend it to Geschlechtsidentität, which specifies gender identity. In a presentation for which I had to distinguish explicitly between gender and sex, I was advised simply to use the English terms as I explained the theory to my classmates in German. Explaining the different components of phallogocentrism (Phallogozentrismus), or the male-centered quality of language, resulted in more confusion. Having attended Smith for two years made me forget that not all or even very many universities encourage conversations about these issues the way Smith does. It surprised me, too, because we often assume that Europeans are much more progressive than Americans with regard to social and political issues. One might think that Germans in particular would have a more open view of gender based on the fact that their language includes a third, neutral grammatical gender. In our class discussions, however, it became clear to me that their engagement with the material began and ended with the theoretical.

This presentation was important to me as a linguistic and intellectual exercise, but was also personally meaningful in a way that didn’t seem to resonate with my classmates. While issues of gender identity have played a significant role in my own inner life and the lives of many of my friends at Smith, the concepts we discussed in this course seemed limited to the abstract for my classmates, who may have only been taking the course to fulfill a major requirement. In comparing discussions I’ve had in German with discussions in English on gender identity, it seems to me that English is a more inherently flexible language, particularly with regard to lexical invention and introduction of new words into everyday speech. This quality has made it easier to facilitate conversations about unique identities, pronoun usage, and other subjects for which a new vocabulary simply must be created.

In the end, it made me more grateful to return to Smith where I would be among like-minded classmates, but it reminded me, too, that there is much work to be done in other less welcoming spaces when I leave. Language certainly shapes the way we view the world, but I realized that that view might not always be more expansive simply because the grammar is. If I want to engage in deeper discussions of gender and sexuality in new cultural and linguistic environments, I’ll need to make the effort to search for the communities where these concepts are treated on a discursive level closer to my own.

 

lensing-sharp_2016-04-05-author-imageDinah Lensing-Sharp is currently a senior at Smith, enjoying the last few weeks of college with their friends. They are finishing up an honors thesis in Comparative Literature entitled “Sensational Internationals: Gender, Sexuality, and Foreignness in Ruth Landshoff-Yorck’s Die Vielen und der Eine,” which entails a partial translation of the novel as well as an interpretation of its themes informed by critical literary and queer theory. In Fall 2016, Dinah will begin studying for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather