The Cat-Head Bird, and other Language Monsters

By Beth Green

One of the great joys of travel, for me, is exploring the way one group of people can take a fairly simple thing and look at it in a completely different way than their neighbors.

You can get a glimpse of this, without learning another language, simply by traveling and reading translated signs.

My oldest memory of how quirky languages can be dates to when I was about six and my family lived in Puerto Rico.

Photo by missteee

We’d gone to San Juan for a short trip—I can’t remember why—but I remember the sign in the ferry cabin: “Lifeguards under seats.”

In Spanish, the words for “lifejacket” and “lifeguard” can have the same base word: salvavidas.

Much later, when I’d moved to Europe to be an English teacher, I collected various idiosyncrasies, wrote them in notebooks and hassled my students with them by calling them “learner errors.” It is, of course, an error for a student of English to refer to going to “the nature,” instead of simply “the countryside.” But saying, “this weekend I was in the nature,” brings me a completely different—and richer—mental picture than does “this weekend I was in the countryside.”

My students weren’t the only ones making errors, either. More than once in the Czech Republic I made waiters laugh out loud by ordering “kočka”—cat—soup instead of “čočka”—lentil—soup. (In Czech, the č makes a sound like the English “ch”.)

Photo by Doug88888

But my appreciation for just how much lateral thinking there is between languages and in translation blossomed when I moved to China and began to study Mandarin. Because of the way the language is structured—most often with one- or two-syllable blocks, each syllable conveying a meaning—the definition of a word is often quite literal.

Take owl, for example. These nocturnal birds are found all over the world, but only in China are they referred to as “cat-head birds.” (Mao tou ying, 貓頭鷹). The ever-lovable panda’s name is also a literal mash-up of the cat and another animal: xiong mao,熊猫, or “bear-cat.”

In English, when we name a new invention, we often pull names from Greek or Latin roots, or perhaps add an abbreviation to it (e.g. e-book.) In Chinese, they often just make a new combination of already existing words. Train is “fire vehicle,” airplane is “fly machine.” Telephone is “electric talk,” while mobile phone is “hand machine.” You can imagine some of the headaches people must go through when trying to find a new, suitable, name for an invention. And, later, the problems translating it.

Photo by jeffbalke

I don’t mean to poke fun at these languages for having amusing words—we in English have enough trouble communicating among ourselves sometimes. A few years ago my partner, who is Australian, came with my parents and me on a road trip in the Western US. We had just come from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’d been introduced to a lot of new Americana. The next morning we stopped at a diner in California before heading farther north. We all selected something from the breakfast menu, and were eating happily (I thought) when Dan put down his fork and knife with most of his food uneaten.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’m worried about my food,” he said. “I ordered chicken fried steak, but this doesn’t taste like chicken.”

Born Into The Cultural Divide

By Heidi Noroozy

As the child of a German immigrant mother and an American father who grew up in an ethnic Swiss community in Boston, cultural roots have always been a fascinating subject for me. How much does the culture of a person’s childhood shape attitudes later in life? Quite a lot, I think.

Growing up, I always had a keen sense of my German-Swiss heritage, reinforced by trips to visit relatives in Germany and holidays at my Swiss-American aunt’s house in Boston. Her home always felt more European than American, with its small rooms crammed with heavy furniture, lace antimacassars on the backs of chairs, and letters she’d read aloud to me from Swiss cousins, translating as she went along.

Although English, not German, was the language spoken in our home, learning German came easily to me when I studied it in high school and college. That’s what “mother tongue” really means, I thought. The language was in my blood.

It wasn’t until years later when I moved to Germany for a while that I realized just how American I really am. The way people thought and interacted with each other did not come as naturally to me as the language had. The formality of social interactions and the obsession with rules and Ordnung (order) irritated me at times—not to mention those little old ladies with sharp umbrellas who liked to butt in line at the grocery store. To this day, I’m still never sure at what point in a relationship one moves from the formal you (Sie) of an acquaintance to the informal one (Du) of a friend.

Some years ago, a conversation with an Iranian friend confirmed my belief that we are shaped by the culture we grow up in. My friend was born in Tehran but moved to California with her family when she was just a year old. On a trip to Iran as a teenager, she discovered just how American she was. “Everyone expected me to know exactly how to behave,” she complained. “But I was clueless.” She found the experience quite disconcerting.

But then, on my most recent trip to Iran, a new acquaintance poked a big hole in my theory. At a dinner party in Tehran, I met a woman who’d been born in Iran and moved to the States at the age of 17. When I met her, she was back in her home town visiting relatives and confessed to feeling disconcerted when people treated her like a foreigner. “Everyone can tell I’m not from here,” she said. “Taxi drivers, shop keepers, bank tellers—they all ask me where I’m from, and they don’t mean what part of Iran.” Okay, maybe this issue is more complicated than it seems.

As a writer, the question of cultural identity fascinates me so much that I’ve been exploring it in the fictional life of a bicultural woman who was born in Tehran and grew up in California. I constantly ask myself how she’d feel in one situation or another. Is she more Iranian or more American? How does she juggle the expectations imposed by one culture with her need to make a life for herself in another? And what will happen if I send her back to the country of her birth after spending half her life in another culture?

While I still believe that our original culture has the biggest influence in shaping who we are, I think that every new culture we experience more than just in passing also leaves its mark. So what does that make me? An American with German, Swiss, and Iranian layers.

What about you? Did you grow up in more than one culture, or have you lived in another country? If so, how has it changed the way you view your own identity?

Made in Trinidad and Tobago

Please welcome our guest today, Sangeeta Nancy Boondoo, an attorney with the government of Trinidad and Tobago. She is filling in today for Supriya. Sangeeta first wrote for Novel Adventurers in February.

When you live in a country like Trinidad and Tobago, it’s difficult to talk about cross-cultural art forms or blends because the country itself is a cross-cultural blend. There is so much to say that you don’t know where to begin. In the end, I decided to spotlight three cross-cultural facets of life in Trinidad and Tobago. I hope you enjoy.

Our music is one of our finest cross-cultural art-forms. In an earlier post on this blog, I wrote about chutney and calypso/soca music. Chutney has its origins in the Indo-Trinidadian population while calypso/soca originated from the local Afro-Trinidadian population. 

In the past, you would not have seen or heard a mixing of the two, but that has changed. Anyone can sing either chutney or calypso/soca; even better, we now have chutney soca, wherein the rhythm of soca and the melody of chutney have blended to present a new and unique sound. One of my favourites is “Bring It” celebrating a Trinbagonian love for rum and partying:

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Venezuelans migrated to work on cocoa estates in Trinidad and brought with them their version of parang music, which over the years has absorbed aspects of local African and French creole culture. The instruments used indicate the cultural blend: a four string guitar, maracas, and marimbola (an Afro-Venezuelan instrument), the box bass (a wooden instrument native to Trinidad), and other more conventional instruments. The lyrics can be entirely in English, Spanish or a mix of both.

Parang is Christmas music, and similar to carolers, paranderos (parang musicians) move from house to house on Christmas Day serenading their neighbours with the lovely music for the small price of something to eat and drink. It is not Christmas now, but I believe that anytime is a good time for good music. You can listen to the late Daisy Voisin, the undisputed queen of parang, singing of her delight for the birth of Jesus:

Another cross-cultural aspect of Trinidad and Tobago society is the Spiritual Shouter Baptist faith, an indigenous religion which grew from the multi-cultural nature of the country. The origins of this religion are unclear; what we do know is that the religion developed within the African-Caribbean community and it reflects elements of Protestant Christianity and African religious doctrines.

The difference between the Baptist faith practices in Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean countries may result from the influx of the “Merrikens,” African-American soldiers who fought for the British in the American War of Independence and were given freedom and land grants in southern Trinidad, a British colony. The Merrikens brought their Baptist faith with them and they, along with the Anglicans who came to Trinidad, are thought to have influenced the local Shouter/Spiritual Baptist faith. Whatever its origin, this part of our culture is a beautiful combination of African rhythms and sedate Christianity.

 

The island of Tobago itself is a cross-cultural blend, and the Tobago Heritage Festival celebrates this diversity. The island bounced around as the colony of several European nations. This European influence, along with that of the native Amerindians and the Africans led to a unique culture which is different from Trinidad’s.

My favourite part of the festival is the Ole Time Wedding, which follows traditional European courtship codes. It features a procession of dashing gentlemen dressed in formal black and white suits, top hats, bow ties, and white gloves. They carry large umbrellas to shade their “brides.” The women dress in 18^th and 19^th century dresses, platform shoes, decorated wide-brimmed hats or fascinators, and gloves. The wedding procession winds its way along the street, dancing the “brush back,” a tap dance variation, to the enchantingly sweet sounds of the tambrin and fiddle, stopping along the way to enjoy cake and wine.

Trinidad and Tobago has a rich culture, born from the many that have made their homes on these islands over the centuries, and while it is not perfect, I think it is beautiful.

IRUS Art - Fostering Cross-Cultural Dialogue

By Heidi Noroozy

Life & Lines
by Negin Ehtesabian and Elizabeth Henrichs

Cross-culturalism is a world I know well. Raised in America by German and Swiss parents, I always felt like I was living in several countries at the same time. I spent my childhood in New England, but the stories my parents and relatives would tell of life in Germany and Switzerland inspired my imagination and made me feel part of a larger, global community. As a translator, I am constantly moving between two languages, and my marriage to an Iranian added another culture, language, and (best of all) cuisine.

Because of this tricultural background of mine, there is nothing quite as exciting as learning about the world in all its great diversity. The more exotic the community, the better. And yet, fascinating as this diversity is, what interests me most is not the ways in which people around the world are different, but the ways in which we are ultimately the same.

Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian-born artist living in the United States who expresses a similar transnational interest in her work. In 2007, she became the driving force behind a cross-cultural art project that bridges the geographic and cultural gap between Iran and the United States. Known as IRUS Intercultural Collaborative Art, the project established a community of twenty artists, half of them in Tehran and the rest in Denver, who collaborated on artworks in various media, including painting, video art, drawing, photography, software, street art, and design. The finished pieces were exhibited in a show titled Dialogues, which was held in Denver and Chicago in 2009. Plans for an exhibition in Tehran fell through due to the political protests that followed Iran’s 2009 presidential election.

In an interview with the Denver University student newspaper, The Clarion, Morehshin described the concept behind IRUS (whose name is a blend of Iran and United States). “We are a community interested in breaking down the cultural stereotypes of Muslims and Middle East. We wanted to make art without seeing each other as members of nations but as individuals and human beings.”

Finger Quotes
by Morehshin Allahyari, Bailey Ferguson
and Sahar Bardaei

The collaboration began online with a blog, where the artists worked out the concept for Dialogues and decided on what media each artist would use (with Morehshin translating between Farsi and English). After they finalized the details, the artists in each country began creating their pieces. They then exchanged their work with counterparts in the other country, who either added to the original artwork or created new pieces based on the same concept.

In working this way across a cultural divide, the artists not only learned a great deal about the opposite culture, but they also had to invest a certain amount of trust in each other. The collaboration demanded faith that people with vastly different cultural experiences could understand each other’s views and perspectives. And it turned out that they could.

This intercultural trust was likely the easy part, compared to the logistics of shipping physical pieces of art between Iran and the United States. Since it is not possible to drop a package in the mail and expect it to arrive in the other country without problems, the IRUS artists mailed their work to Istanbul, where someone from Iran would pick them up and carry them across the border into Iran. Shipments in the other direction used the same process.

Dialogues is divided into several sections, or galleries, each centering around a specific theme and featuring collaboration between two or more artists. The one that captivates me as a writer is the Scheherazade and Mark Twain Wall, named after two storytellers who reflect the essence of Persian and American cultures. Scheherazade, you may remember, was the fictional princess from the Arabian Nights, who saved her life by telling 1,001 stories (one each night) to the king, who married a new virgin every day and beheaded the previous day’s bride. Mark Twain needs no explanation, but his tales of life in the American Midwest though novels such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are as American as apple pie. And yet both Scheherazade and Mark Twain are part of world literature, also crossing cultural divides.

Sharzad and Mark Twain
By Negin Ehtesabian, Paris Mahtosh, Saeed Ensafi, Neda Azimi
Bailey Ferguson, and Majid Kashani

The collaboration on the Dialogues exhibition is completed now, but many of the artists in the IRUS community have remained in touch with each other. And so Morehshin’s idea of breaking through the cultural boundaries that divide us and finding the humanity that we all share is apparent on multiple levels – through the art works themselves and in the personal lives of the artists. 

Three of the IRUS artists (two Iranians and one American) are now working on a new collaboration titled Your Night/My Day, a multi-part series that illustrates the dysfunctional dialogue between Iranian and American cultures with the aim of reaching a better understanding through art.

Check out the IRUS Intercultural Collaborative Art website for more photos from the Dialogues exhibition, along with statements by the artists. More information about Morehshin Allahyari and her work can be found here.

Bridging the Distance

Though I grew up in an Indian home, with a heavy dose of Indian culture, I was born and raised outside India. As a result, writing about that country sometimes makes me feel like a fraud. I’ve worked hard to overcome that insecurity, but it doesn’t mean I keep an open mind about non-Indians who write fiction set there. I mean, come on!

That's why when Life of Pi was climbing the bestseller lists then parked there for months on end, I didn’t even consider reading it. Not even when the novel won the esteemed Mann Booker prize in 2002. After all, Yann Martel is Canadian, and the first part of his book is set at a zoo in Chennai. Moreover, it’s about a boy and a tiger stuck on a long boat ride together. Doesn’t sound very realistic, but what could a native Canadian write about a complex city like old Madras?

Then a friend called to gush about it. A must read, it seemed. And when I did read it, well, it blew me away. I knew from the get-go that the author did his research, because page one starts in Matheran, a small, little-known hill station, essentially a mountain resort town, just outside Mumbai. That the author worked this sort of obscure setting into his intro impressed me, kept me reading, later, about zoo life in Chennai, and cleaning out lion cages and feeding the monkeys. I was transfixed. The book also has one of the most stunning endings you’ll ever read.

A few years later, I was excited to pick up a crime author writing about an Indian theme. Karin Fossum, Norway’s “queen of crime,” has written 14 novels, of which 10 fall under the Inspector Sejer crime series.

 
 

Her fourth Inspector Sejer novel, aptly named The Indian Bride, takes on the premise of the first Indian immigrant to a small Norwegian community. Since I’m not very familiar with Norwegian culture, I wanted to see how she melded the two cultural themes together, one I am familiar with, the other I’m not.

Fossum begins her tale from the point of view of two characters—Gundar and his sister—whose lives are about to change drastically, then later from Inspector Sejer’s viewpoint as he investigates a bewildering, ghastly crime that the community that doesn't believe any of its citizens could have committed.

Simple Gunder Jomann, who sells farm equipment in his sleepy rural town on the coast of Norway, is a lonely, middle-aged bachelor who spends much of his time daydreaming about his future wife, wondering when and where he’ll meet her. He knows everyone around, so there aren’t any opportunities for him to meet women, and the ones who know him just aren’t interested. After browsing through a travel magazine about India, he admires the lovely women with the big dark eyes and elegant saris who grace its pages. It occurs to him there are probably plenty of lovely, eligible women in the hugely populous country who would be interested in marrying someone like him, a good person with a steady job and a comfortable home. And so, to the chagrin of his concerned younger sister, Gunder prepares to take his first trip outside of Norway to find a bride in India, even shopping for a diamond ring before he leaves. Once in India, we experience all the chaos of Mumbai through Gundar. Before long, he meets and marries Poona. (Wait’ll you read how he finds her!) He returns to Norway alone, informs his very worried sister that he’s now a married man, then prepares to welcome his young bride to her new home.

But when Poona is due to arrive at the airport, Gunder’s sister meets with  a horrible car accident and Gunder has to send someone else to pick up his new wife. Only problem is, she’s not there. Not long after, the badly beaten corpse, that of a woman, is found elsewhere in town. Coincidence? That’s when Inspector Sejer is called in to investigate.

I won’t tell you more—finding out where this all leads is highly compelling, one of the strongest portions of the book. (And don’t read the reviews—there are a lot of spoilers out there!)

The book is relatively small, quiet, and satisfying. Fossum kept me turning the pages but not so fast that I couldn't get to know these well-drawn characters and enjoy the growing psychological suspense along with the whodunit factor. The character development is strong, subtle, and packs an emotional punch.

As Publisher’s Weekly commented in its starred review of The Indian Bride:

“Fossum may not be well-known outside a select circle, but that could change with the publication of this outstanding contemporary police procedural…. The ending is not one most readers will expect, but it perfectly suits the tale of sad, little lives and the tragic consequences of chance.”

Well put.