What does it take to truly communicate? In this essay, Claire Jacobson takes us on a journey from language classrooms to the souqs of Morocco, exploring the narrative frameworks that create culture. Read on to discover the differences between learning a language, and the narrative identities that language use is built on.
Humans are inveterate storytellers. We narrativize our memories, use allegory and metaphor to communicate complex ideas, and search for meaning in suffering by placing it in the narrative arc of our lives. “When someone asks you who you are,” writes Richard Kearney, “you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations. You interpret where you are now in terms of where you have come from and where you are going to.” Or, as Paul Ricoeur says, “Selfhood is a cloth woven of stories told.”
But it’s not only individuals, Kearney writes. “Communities come to know themselves in the stories they tell about themselves.” When families gather, we always tell stories, sometimes new ones but mostly the old ones over and over—these stories are part of what makes us family. No Christmas celebration in my home is complete without reading about shepherds and wise men and the sociopolitical implications of the term “messiah” in first-century Palestine. These stories are part of what marks us as people of faith and also total nerds. A few weeks ago, my boss told me about the day we went from one bookmobile in town to two, traveling around to neighborhoods without access to the public library—this is one of the many stories that place me firmly in Iowa City, the only city I’ve ever known where you can find inter-bookmobile competition drama.
We tell stories about ourselves in order to know who we are. The collection of stories we have in common with others forms what we have named “culture,” underpinning how we make sense of the world and how we move within it.
For example, I’m currently reading Shaharuddin bin Maaruf’s Concepts of a Hero in Malay Society, in which the author examines contemporary Malay society through the lens of the traditional Malay tale Hikayat Hang Tuah. He begins with the observation that “what [people] consider as great feats can be very indicative of a host of other interconnected ideas […] What is their ideal of excellence and what do they consider as great achievements? What are they proud of and what do they feel the Malays should aspire to? […] What is the meaning they impute to their existence?”
All these things are to be found in the stories they tell.
One reason it can be so jarring to experience another culture is that we have to figure out our place in other people’s stories, which are often quite different from our own. When I first spent a semester at a Moroccan university at nineteen, it wasn’t the language that caused me the most trouble, but the fact that I had no idea how to conduct myself in this context. In the classroom, I was startled and put off by the fact that my professors gave their grades and feedback publicly, including when one of them yelled at me for not writing a good enough presentation proposal. In my friend’s home, I discovered too late that I was the only one who found silence awkward, and kept clumsily and needlessly trying to fill it. I’m still not comfortable bargaining in the souq, and I may never be.
My Arabic classes, much as I loved them, had not prepared me for the reality of any place where I would actually need to use the language. If you were to open my first Arabic textbook expecting to find narratives or systems of meaning, you would think that all Arabic speakers think and talk about is the United Nations (al-umum al-mutahida) and international politics and the military, which I learned to discuss long before I learned how to ask for directions or even find a bathroom. When we weren’t learning vocabulary words of dubious practicality that I’ve since forgotten, we were too often breaking down and numbering verb forms and memorizing case endings that only exist on paper. I could not live in that language. It was only when I experienced the concrete, day-to-day realities of Arabic from sunup to sundown that I felt the distance between myself and its speakers diminish, bit by bit.
In language classes, we are taught to be linguists. We analyze a language, reducing it to phonemes and morphemes and labeling its components the way a botanist observes a plant’s root structure under a microscope and labels the different types of cells. But language learning ought to be an apprenticeship rather than a purely academic enterprise, training in the craft of living and breathing and working and loving within someone else’s matrix of meaning. That training begins long before students ever set foot outside their community, when they start to engage with the narratives that may one day help guide their steps. Though there is no substitute for language immersion in pursuit of fluency, you don’t need to leave home to encounter someone else’s story; all you need is a book.
When I was a student of both French and Arabic, I learned more from reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis clos, Charles Perrault’s versions of popular fairy tales, abridged chapters of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, and, much later, a Hoda Barakat novel than I ever did from language textbooks and lectures. Stories were a place to not only practice reading and encounter new vocabulary and grammar structures in context, but also to gain insight into the shared narratives in which these languages would someday allow me to participate. And even today, though I am no longer a student, I am still an apprentice of French, an apprentice of Arabic, learning the art of living day to day in a system of shared narratives that is not mine.
When I translate fiction, I try to communicate not only the story itself, but also the framework of shared narratives that dictate how that story must be understood by its intended audience. If I have not done that, then my translation is missing something at its heart. As a language teacher, I confront the same challenge of engaging students in both the language itself and the narratives in which it invites them to participate, in hopes of fitting flesh and blood into the barebones frame of mere language-as-academic-venture. If a liberal arts education is supposed to teach students how to think, then translation and foreign language education are both ways to teach students how to think like someone else, which is essential for navigating a world as multifaceted as our own.
I am still working out how to do that within the four walls of a classroom when I would much rather just take my students on an extended field trip. But short of hopping on a plane, perhaps literature is a way I can bring them closer to experiencing a native speaker’s mind and imagination, a more holistic approach to this language apprenticeship. As an experiment, last week I assigned my Arabic students a couple of folktales to read (English translations, of course, since we’re still deciphering the alphabet), and those stories served as a starting point for introducing ideas like power distance, what counts as wisdom, and how a society imagines and determines what is good and what is not. Another regular assignment I’ve given is to read and share headlines from an English-language newspaper from the region (like Al Jazeera, Morocco World News, or Egypt Today) so they can follow current events in the region while we study the language, and every day they bring stories of war and violence and destruction from places like Syria and Yemen and Gaza. Perhaps I hoped that by reading something other than the news, like a story, they would catch a glimpse of the rich and beautiful humanity that doesn’t always make it into the headlines. I like to think that it did, just a little.
It’s easier for me to imagine how I would do this in terms of my own matrix of meaning. When I start my new job this fall teaching English in France, how will I communicate not only how to speak my language, but also understand how those who speak my language, specifically Americans like me, move through the universe? I’ve thought of taking with me my copy of The Crucible, which brilliantly narrates one moment in American history in order to explain and critique another. Every dystopian work from Brave New World to The Hunger Games plays on contemporary fears of a hypothetical future, and what we are afraid of at any given time says a lot about what we value most. But how about the exploits of the Lone Ranger or folk heroes like Johnny Appleseed, and what does it say about us that no matter how many Ph.D.’s Bruce Banner gets, he wouldn’t be one of the Avengers if he weren’t also the Hulk? Why are these the stories that we continue to tell, and what might they say about what it is we love?
This is one reason, for instance, people in every corner of the United States have been trying to take down Confederate monuments in recent months; it was never about the simple presence or absence of statues, but about who we choose to honor and celebrate as the heroes of our shared history and how that shared history continues to influence the present. It matters, and it deeply affects the stories we tell about ourselves, which may be different from the stories we would like to tell about ourselves. In the end, how vehemently we insist on telling and teaching our own version of the story may determine who gets to count themselves as part of “us” at all, and we’ll see that the same stories that have the power to unite whole cultures might also have the power to break them.
Claire Jacobson is the Assistant Interviews Editor at Asymptote. She studied Francophone literature at the University of Iowa, and now works as a teacher, writer, and Arabic translator.
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