Tag Archives: Identity

Spring 2018 Issue XI: Every Picture Tells a Story

Dr. Martens: like a Fênix

February 13, 2018 mrodrigues

We left Rio de Janeiro to travel to Belém, then to São Paulo, to Los Angeles, and to San Francisco. We thought that, together, we would go back to Rio within three months. We never did.

An unexpected sense of freedom extended our stay. San Francisco turned into a sanctuary, an ocean in an infinite state of intensity. Our new experiences, from a Bernal Hill first kiss to a camping trip to Big Sur, brought us deep feelings we could never imagine before. Each step taken was a new self-discovery. In 2014, we got lost looking for something we could not name. We fell in love with the rainbows from Castro street.

Oh, San Francisco! We didn’t know you would treat us so well. We challenged the capitalist systems that almost kept us away from the most important explorations of our lives. We challenged the people we left behind, our família, and our own belief system. We could not go back; we had to stay.

We learned English.
We learned that intimacy with a woman is what we have wanted the most.
We found our most valuable resource: therapy.
We went to our first gay pride parade.
We worked as an assistant producer for a short film.
We took placement tests.
We signed up for real college-level classes.
We took acting classes.
We were afraid of taking a risk bigger than ourselves.
We worked hard.

We learned about sexual health education, social psychology, neuroscience, and HIV prevention. We learned how intersectionality impacts the sex-gender system. We worked as a social media manager, sex educator, and English tutor. We read Anzaldúa, Lorde, hooks. We worked for a moving company, dog sitting, and tutoring a high school kid.

We faced the ups and downs of being an activist and dedicating our life and soul to a cause we believe in. We were called white, brown, you belong, you don’t belong. We were excluded when all we wanted was to fit right in. We felt alone around many people. We felt overwhelmed by ourselves.

We achieved the unachievable. We broke the unbreakable. We graduated from a community college as the commencement speaker of our graduation. We earned a full ride to an elite American college. We were homeless, jobless, feeling-less for a whole summer. We explored the complexities of our identities. We started to understand the injustices of this world from multiple perspectives, including one of experience.

We started a new life on the East Coast. Who would have thought we would end up in New England? After questioning all of the consequences of colonization and refusing to be part of the colonizer’s legacy, we ended up in the colonizer’s land. Church, church, church, church.

Hi, Massachusetts! Within all of your amazing opportunities, we felt lost. We struggled. We cried one, two, three, uncountable times. We were scared. We are still scared. We met a lover who made us believe in the most genuine feeling that can ever exist. We got to see the leaves turn: the fall season and all of its beauty. We went biking, we explored Western Massachusetts, and sometimes we forgot that we came from Rio. From Belém. We felt the snow.

We, my pair of white converse sneakers and I, crossed a milestone. We crossed the borders of the state, of love, sex, intellectuality, and intimacy. We found the transcendental. Three months turned into three years. We never went back. We don’t want to.

Is it a new era? Is it an end to a beginning? Is it a change of the seasons?

The rain takes away, refreshes, and cleans everything in the purest way.

It’s 2018 and my steps are still an exploration. A new one. A pair of black Dr. Martens: like a fênix.

Marcela Rodrigues is a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar and a Neuroscience student at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. As a sexual health educator and a human rights activist, she aims to combine science and social justice in order to create meaningful changes and a more just society to all.

Special Issue: Cultural Encounters

Waiting for the Train

May 3, 2017 crlee

Could telling my story and finding the right metaphor be the bridge connecting the differences I experienced living and studying in two very different cultures ?

Cassiopeia Lee ’17 is a graduating senior with no immediate plans and a general love for learning and exploring. At Smith she cultivated her passions for languages, human rights, justice, and global perspectives, and knows that she’ll only learn more in her future endeavors.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

TRANSITION, verb

April 15, 2016 tnehls

I remember the exact moment I realised that I wasn’t cisgender. It was on my way back home in Germany, a couple of weeks before I was going to leave for Smith. I was just getting off the train and as I climbed up the stairs from the platform, I thought, “I am not a woman.”

I wasn’t and still am not able to understand what exactly that means, and I have since realised that figuring out my gender identity is a process that is likely to be never-ending. This is often frustrating and scary, but ultimately I hope that I will be able to see it as freeing. The pressure to conform doesn’t stop with stepping outside of the gender binary. Even as I came to identify as trans, I was irritated at myself: how could I say I wasn’t one gender or another, when gender is a social construct? What would make the gender I identified with any more real than the one I was assigned at birth? I’ve never subscribed to gender roles anyways, so on what basis do I even define gender?

Coming to terms with questions like these is especially difficult in a society that generally doubts your gender identity even exists. I was fortunate to enter Smith and find a place where I could think about gender in a different way than I could have in Germany. It might seem ironic that I would distance myself from being female while at a women’s college, but it turns out that when you take gender out of the equation, there is more freedom to it.* Sure enough, Smith is far from representative of the rest of the United States (although I am not aware of any women’s colleges in Germany), but one part of the wider culture has been incredibly significant in my understanding of trans identity: the language.

While identifying as non-binary in Germany, the way I conceptualised it was to add a male alter ego to my established female identity. English, a language without grammatical gender that has the option of using they as a non-gendered singular pronoun (however frowned upon it might be stylistically, it is established), provided me with the resources to think and express myself outside of the gender binary. Our language shapes our thoughts and thus our worlds. A language without gendered pronouns, for example Turkish, would help us understand the world in yet another way.

Language is a fundamentally social phenomenon. It shapes our communities and they shape it. I understand now that while, yes, gender is a social construct, that doesn’t make us, as people living in society, free of it. As people who exist in relation to one another, the way we are perceived by others will always be a significant part of who we are. As an individual, I have no problem with my gender identity at this point; I just am who I am. It is when others perceive me in a certain way that does not conform to my self-image that the problems arise.

While transgender awareness is slowly growing when it comes to transgender women and men, most people are not aware that it is a spectrum, and even when non-binary is included, it is often as a third category in addition to the binary extremes. Defying gender roles and wanting to be recognised as non-binary/trans is a balancing act. Even though I know that neither activities, nor clothes, nor makeup, nor haircut have an inherent gender, presenting in a way that is socially construed as feminine will result in me being immediately read as female and erase my gender identity. It often feels that in order to disrupt this, I have to present in a way that is especially masculine, or even identify as a transman in order to not be assumed cis.

As long as we live in a society that upholds gender roles and the gender binary, not conforming to those will be a struggle. But even in this society we can find a community that supports us, in which we can discuss the issues and questions that arise out of this tension, and encourage each other to keep challenging the status quo.

Transition might be read as a noun, but for me it is a verb first and foremost. Life and all that comes with it is unfathomably complex, and there will always be more to discover and figure out. What stagnates will wither, and change is the only constant.

*I am aware that not everyone’s trans identity has been met with love and respect at Smith, but fortunately I have only come across encouragement.

TL Nehls is originally from Hamburg, Germany and has lived in Chile and Northern Ireland before coming to Northampton. Asking them about historical linguistics, memes, or local geology will likely result in a lenghty, albeit enthusiastic, discussion, so be prepared. When not sitting in front of mostly empty word documents, they can be found performing theatre or folk music, or both.

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.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

Engaging with New Perspectives on Gender in Multilingual Space

April 15, 2016 dlensingsharp

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.

Dinah 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.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

Spanish Flowers in German Soil

April 13, 2016 nmartinez

I tend to be a little nervous when I’m meeting a native Spanish speaker. I get flustered and stutter over my Spanish—even with the words I’ve said so many times that they’re second nature to me. Depending on the evening or my amount of carefree disregard, complete thoughts and sentences unfurl with the ease of my English fluency. It’s a feeling I want more of in my life, and theoretically I know how to achieve it. I need to speak more Spanish, listen, and engage with the language despite its difficulties. It’s about improvement as opposed to a flawless performance; I just need to start small and close to the earth. I want my language to flourish with the vibrancy of the rural Honduran countryside that my mother came from, and the musical energy of my father’s small town not too far from hers. I would tend to my Spanish like delicate seedlings in my greenhouse, awaiting the seasonal shifts of blooming fluency.

martinez_2016-04-05-essay-image I asked for a tutor in my Spanish literature course in Hamburg because I wanted to improve. It was frighteningly difficult and embarrassing to ask for help with Spanish; I didn’t want to reveal the gaps of language that were allowed to go unbridged in my upbringing. But I had spent too many years feeling embarrassed, and my German had a structure that my Spanish sorely lacked. I wanted them to be even.

I was to meet my tutor at the library; I didn’t know what she looked like. She was from Venezuela, a native speaker of Spanish, educated in the language and capable of cultivating articulate thoughts with a delicacy I could only imagine. I wondered how I would greet her. Would I approach her in English, for ease? In German, for practicality? Or in Spanish—for what, I couldn’t really say.

I don’t really remember how I picked her out among the other people at the library’s cafe; there was simply a moment of recognition for a mutual purpose. I stumbled into an energetic greeting in Spanish, and she stopped me. She asked me where I was from.

I told her that I was from the United States, but my family was Honduran. There was such kindness in her at my response; she heard the accent when I spoke. It was evident.

I eased very happily into my conversation with her then. Occasionally I felt silly and clumsy; I recalled that I didn’t know how to say whatever I wanted, and that I couldn’t arrange my sentences into neat rows like beautifully planted gardens. It’s a skill my mother has; her ease with Spanish came naturally to her because it was the native language she cared for and cultivated all her life. Spanish was my native language, too; it merely shared space with an invasive species I couldn’t tame.

My tutor helped me cut down the weeds and organize my thoughts. It was lovely to remember that Spanish was as rightfully mine as it was hers. It was the beginning of a place of confidence for me. I planted my Spanish flowers in German soil and watered them with German water. I never expected it would be just the thing I needed.

Nancy Martinez speaks at least three languages (the fourth is debatable): English, Spanish, German (and Italian). She studies literature in a desire to draw out the human experience in the structure of narratives, and couples that with her language studies to access the structures of thought in different literary traditions. She looks forward to translating her memories into different languages and perhaps working with the publication of scholarly texts after graduation.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

To be Seen

April 6, 2016 atoo

I think of my friend Iriza. She is half Burundian and half Rwandese and grew up in Italy but now lives in France, and she attended high school with me in Singapore. This is my scant attempt at scraping the top of her identity; she is a fine example of the pots we talk about, the ones in which all cultures melt.

I thought leaving for Singapore would be an easy process. I was going to get on a plane for the first time, so who could turn down that offer? Honestly, that is beside the point (Still, this was the first time I would board a plane — QR 535 to be exact). I was joining the United World College of South East Asia for the two-year International Baccalaureate program. There are certain stages in travel preparation where one moves from uneasy nerves, to excitement, then numbness kicks in and finally the nerves strike a blow again. I did not escape this metamorphic cycle, and as a self-acclaimed expert I can confidently speak on this topic. My nerves experienced an unsparing uprooting with each mention of “passport,” “visa,” “Asia,” and “travel well.” “Miss u, <3” messages from my friends were undoubtedly the worst. These texts left me with a sense of incompleteness, a state of “unbeing,” as if I was betraying them by leaving Kenya. Yet the adolescent and unnerving spelling of “u” remained uninspiring, so I did not cry. My stomach was not full of jittery butterflies; they had morphed into a swarm of sadistic bees that jabbed and poked at my insides, leaving me pained by the fact that I would be leaving my family behind in Kenya. But, true to the cycle theory, I returned to the excitement stage soon enough.

Singapore was humid. Singapore is humid. My face was constantly sticky, and soon I learned that my modest clothes covered too much skin to compete with the vicious heat. I got used to the concept of “Air Con” everywhere, and back sweat did not disgust me; it was an accepted way of life. I began to respect traffic lights, because those are merely decorative on the streets of Nairobi. I learned to call all the elders in the community “auntie” or “uncle,” and decorating my sentences with “lah” became the norm while I was out in the city. I ate way too much Laksa and later learned that’s where all the calories had been hidden. I drank Teh Tarik every Sunday after attending church service. I assimilated, yet with all this, I still stood out.

I often wondered how Iriza coped with having so many facets to her identity. And by identity, I mean basic descriptors. She was black, French, Rwandese, multilingual and so much more. And here I was, struggling with fitting into this one culture. I have always been just Kenyan, and that is all I had ever known. In Kenya, I disappeared in crowds, and looked like every other 19-year-old girl around the corner, give or take a few kilos. I grew up in a black world, and have never stood out by virtue of my color. Soon I found myself in unpleasant situations where my complexion was the topic of conversation for minutes. Minutes. My hair! Ah, how I learned that hair is truly political. It was as if I had signs jutting out of my head reading “Touch this,” “Free petting,” “Tug and see reaction.” Unperturbed, I read this as innocent curiosity from my non-African peers, but the questions concerning my hair care process, once from a bald, Japanese man, soon left me feeling beleaguered.

I could be seen. My dark skin, dreadlocked hair, wide hips, and foreign accent were visible. I felt especially out of place in crowds where I was the only black person. Little kids stole glances at me, yet their mothers did not reprimand them because they found themselves staring too. Outside schools, the black population in Singapore is very small. As a result, there were special moments when I would spot a black person on a train and feel a gush of familiarity that made me crave home, crave to be engulfed in a sea of likeness.

But I must admit, I grew to love the questions. Speaking about my hair, skin, and continent made me realize how special I am and I learned to appreciate the vital space I occupy in this world. I inspired a Swazi friend to get dreadlocks and taught my roommate from Timor-Leste how to undo braids (that is a whole other story). Life became a series of exchanges, rather than the monotony of fitting in. I do not want to fit in. I want to be uncomfortable. To be visible even when I do not want to stand out. To be driven to share myself because through me so many people can learn. I want to be a fruitful vessel. I grew fiercely patriotic during my time in Singapore since I learned to love all the glorious things that make Kenya so wonderfully unique. The same process happened internally, and I find special things within me always. To be seen is not so bad after all.

Anita Too is a first year student studying Comparative Literature and Italian. In “To be Seen,” she hopes to present a tale of visibility and invisibility.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

Calling Home

April 6, 2016 iirele

“Idia, pele, how are you?” My mother says, and I want to tell her that I am tired, and stressed, and that my brain hurts, but I don’t.

“Hi Mommy. I’m fine. Are you busy?”

“No o. Ibo lo wa?” She says, becoming worried, because she senses the tension in my voice. It’s funny how she always seems to know how I am feeling without my having to say a word.

Calling home is what keeps me grounded in a world where I often feel like my feet have just hit the ground seconds before being uprooted once again. It is the pit stop of comfort that breaks up my constant state of cultural and linguistic transition. It is the recharge at the end of the week. A refreshing reminder that I am who I am, and we are who we are, and no explanation is needed.

My family and I have always straddled the ideological border between several cultures. My sisters and I joke that if you asked all of us where we are from, none of us would say the same place. Lagos, Calabar, Ibadan, Dublin, Paris, London, Columbus, Cambridge. These are just a few of the places that we have called home. Yoruba, Efik, French, English. These are just some of the languages that we speak. And we never decide to choose only one, because every single one of them contributes to who we are.

Our last name, Irele, means “we have arrived,” and I don’t think that there could be any other last name that fits us quite so accurately. When people ask us, “Where are you from?” We say, “Good question.” When people ask, “What is your mother tongue?” We say, “Whichever language she chooses to speak.”

Our tongues are fluid. They are not restricted by borders or labels. Our language is not a language, but a compilation of expressions and sayings that only we understand. A not-so-secret code that cannot be completely translated into anything.

I sometimes feel like I know exactly who I am. I switch codes as seamlessly as I slip my U.S. Passport into my purse and take out my Nigerian one at the airport border control. Other times, I feel lost. I feel like no matter how I choose to identify myself to people, I will never quite be telling the truth. Even a simple “I’m a dual citizen” does not seem to tell the whole story. During those times, those brief moments of exasperation and loneliness of the perpetual outsider, a call home is all I need to center my balance.

We sometimes choose to simplify ourselves for the sake of other people’s time and capacity to understand our seemingly complicated collective identity. But wherever we are in the world, all it takes is that familiar soothing voice, that familiar switch of tongues, and it is all clear. There is no word that describes our home, but in that moment, through those wires and cables and telephone channels, we feel it.

“Ça va?” says my Dad. “How is your research going? Ṣe ti finish awọn…chose la? The essay you were working on.”

“The paper is finished.” I tell him, “I handed it in yesterday.”

“Ku ṣe!” he says, and my entire heart fills with pride and relief, and motivation to do even better next time. These are feelings that a simple “good job” just cannot evoke.

I wonder if I will ever feel as though I can call one place my home. Whether I will ever be able to narrow down the options and choose a place where I feel the most like me. I am not sure that I will ever come to a conclusion, but I am sure that home will be wherever I hear my parents’ voices calling me, laughing with me, scolding me, congratulating me on the minor accomplishments of my often hectic life. ‘Kaabọ,’ they will say, ‘you are welcome.’ And just like that, I will be home.

Idia Irele is a senior at Smith College, double-majoring in Government and Spanish. A child of Nigerian expatriates and a citizen of the United States and Nigeria, she hopes to dedicate her life to the promotion of cross-cultural interactions as a pathway to peace. After graduation, she will begin this journey by teaching English in the small country of Andorra as a Fulbright scholar.