On an Aspect of Foreignness

By Hintha - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11570695

Whilst watching the situation in Myanmar, I saw a shot of a hospital ward sign in Burmese, subtitled in English as 'Male Ward'. The Burmese alphabet reminds me of bubble clusters settling on the page (or the sturdier medium of signage...) - there's something light and beautiful about it, yet a sense of purpose and tangibility the same as any other writing system. In the middle of the scene of devastation I was watching, the particular likes of which we don't see happen in 'the west', it felt odd to me to see this little translation, this bit of recognisable English.



http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Airport+Sign/Clive+Owen+Airport+Germany/ZLZz4J8sBoz

I got thinking of airports. I've been lucky enough to get abroad a couple of times in the last few years, and by and large, English has drawn these spaces together, on signage and often in dialogue, too. Obviously there are benefits. It's nice to be able to be understood when you 'don't have the words', but I feel guilty because I know why English has this status, and when I'm in a different country, I want to show respect by speaking the native language, and having English spoken back to me tends to smother the moment. It's no 'biggie', but it leaves me pondering the nature of foreignness. When language is so essential to identity, and to deeper concerns surrounding 'reality', its use impacts heavily upon one's experience - in short, one feels, in a way, like one is not 'properly abroad'. One feels as if the body has moved, but the mind isn't sure if it has kept up. Something like that...

Anyways, here comes the turn. The 'interesting bit', if I may be so bold as to say. I was recently booking some tickets from a French website. French happens to be the language I am most fluent in, after my mother tongue. However, the verbs alone in the usually habitual process of online shopping were alien to me. My school-taught stuff didn't cover the essential units of what I was grappling with. I made a couple of educated guesses, based on what I thought would be the etymologies of the unfamiliar words, because it's reasonable to think that a word that looks very similar to one you know would have a similar meaning, right? Well, after checking with a translator (and a good friend of mine who's a language whizz), I found out I was wrong with most of my attempts.

There were three phrases I stumbled on quite badly. "Ajouter au panier" was the first. I thought it meant 'return to something'. I was confident of 'ajouter', but didn't know what 'panier' meant. It turns out 'ajouter' means 'to add' - so I was wrong on that - and 'panier' is 'basket'. As someone who has grown up around bike enthusiasts, I should have known this, as it's so similar to 'panniers' - only one letter away, indeed - the bags bikers use on the back of their behicles. Second phrase was "je continue mes achats." If I'd thought about this a bit more straightforwardly, the 'je continue' bit must mean 'I am continuing', and I knew 'achats' must be my purchases ('acheter' means 'to buy'). Instead, I abstracted it a bit more to mean 'continue to payment', which is a perfectly normal thing to expect, so much so that I ignored linguistic logic - at my peril! The last thing was 'terminer ma commande'. 'Terminer', I thought, was 'terminate' in the sense of 'get rid of', y'know, 'delete', but in many contexts in English, even, 'terminate' means 'complete' - to terminate an order, or a train terminating at its destination. Let's just say, I didn't want to risk clicking this until I was absolutely sure what I was doing.

It was all a little bit scary. For all I knew, I could've been clicking on the 'charge me a million Euros for a can of French fog' button ('me chargez un million d'euros pour une canette de brouillard français', in case you ever need to know). It was frustrating, too, especially when I thought I knew what I was reading, but the things I was clicking took me to the 'wrong' part of the website. I was blaming technology before I began to think that I might have got it wrong. Also, contrarily, it was fun.

Finally - foreignness!

NaNoWriMoWeUp3

Day Fifteen: 746. Just can't muster any more effort. I'm in such a bad habit at the minute with staying up all night watching YouTube videos and generally not sleeping, so by now I'm way too tired to reach my goal. Never mind, though. I'll get there.

Day Sixteen: 2,939. I'm happy to be writing at a more reasonable time today. Could be better, like, but there's tomorrow for that.
   Felt really bad about the fundamental quality of all that I've written so far, especially with respect to 'show don't tell', one of the most basic basics of writing. I've actually been scared when I think of how useless it all is.
   But I'm trying to stop such thoughts. Not only have there been some passages I'm proud of, but I could well be over-exaggerating the bad bits and, plus, there's the vital component of editing yet to come. I know I'm not great at editing, but this is a good chance to get going. No-one said this has to be a masterpiece. Come on! Enjoy!

Day Seventeen: 277. Started well-ish, y'know. Found myself an hour before the footy.
   But then a sneezing fit struck. Then I had a headache. Then the screen started making my eyes bounce. So I stopped.
   The footy was good entertainment, and thankfully a drama-free testament to humanity's resilience in the face of intolerance. Feel somehow guilty that England won, though...
   Then, I got so drunk that I had a hole in my memory and absolutely no hope of carrying on writing.

Day Eighteen: 0. I felt so shit that I didn't want to get out of bed, or even live, and I answered the question 'what's the point?' with 'NO!'.

Day Nineteen: 2,430. Climbing the mountain back to 'normality'. Not bad stuff. A bit 'all over the place' in places, but then some places had good parts.

Day Twenty: 534. I was very lucky to have a replenishing social engagement. Although it left me short on writing time, I penned some stuff on the bus on the way in, and even got an early bus back with the plan of doing more later. Alas, I was too tired by the time I got home, but I'm satisfied with the dedication there :-)

Day Twenty-One: Nice to get support from Aunty S who's been keeping up with the blog during this period :-)
   A light has flickered on that's probably about as strong as a candle on the Morecambe seafront, but since I'm recording it here, there'll be a reminder in the future. I've spent a lot of time worrying about how inferior this draft is and will be, but, though I've already touched on how it'll be good editing practice, it's also going to give me impetus to move even further [whether that's in terms of word count, re-forming or whatever], to really get to the end of a novel [because fifty-thousand words is an arbitrary aim, not necessarily a natural end]. Now I'm over half way, this thought is even more exciting than when I'd started it in the first place.
   Also, I've had more people asking about NaNoWriMo itself, its 'proper' aims and customs, so I'm going to address that briefly. Basically, I'd advise you to forget about the idea of the 'proper' way, because the best way is your way. I didn't sign up on NaNoWriMo.org, I'm not going to get a certificate of completion [which is, however controversially, a major focus for some of the people undertaking this challenge], but I am going to complete my purpose. My purpose for NaNoWriMo was to generate material, to experiment with application, to look at the possibility of spirit. I was never going to be bothered about being under fifty-thousand words, because even one-thousand would've been something I could either use directly, put in a drawer for later and/or learn from.
   So if you do have questions, first off ask yourself. What do you want? What do you think it's all about? What will the audience [however futuristic] think?
   Peace, love and light, folks!