Como se Dice Yo No Entiendo [The Skin of my Soul 9]
Taking Spanish classes in 2006 wasn’t easy. I had to leave my friend behind. My friend, my magical power, my lifeboat. The English Language. I had to agree, for an hour at a time, to get out and walk. To know nothing. (Or very little.) To be quiet. Or I didn’t have to agree to be quiet. But for once, there was no other choice.
LAW, while designed to create and maintain order (and so manifest an aspect of Truth) is sometimes, and by necessity must be, a cruelly powerful and unjust weapon.
Like language.
Did you like that first sentence? I can do things like that with the English language. I can do many things with the English Language. I can roll it into a flashlight shape or smooth it into a soothing taste or pack it up into a tiny grain of deadly poison that smells like green apple Now & Laters. I can stretch it out into a ropeladder or whittle it down to an awl. I can hollow it out and pump it up into a vehicle that can navigate canyons. I can drive it into a hole.
Taking Spanish classes in 2006 wasn’t easy. I had to leave my friend behind. My friend, my magical power, my lifeboat. The English Language. I had to agree, for an hour at a time, to get out and walk. To know nothing. (Or very little.) To be quiet. Or I didn’t have to agree to be quiet. But for once, there was no other choice.
I learned that there is an ongoing process in my mind. My brain files with rapid speed, chooses between phrases and words and word usage, compares adjectives, discards cliche, seeks original combinations, checks them against ones previously used, and ultimately chooses the best way to say what it is I have to say.
This process brought me to a halt in Spanish class.
The rule in Spanish class was to Just Say It. Say it in the most awkward way you can, say it wrong, but just say it. That way maestra could quickly correct us, and get the sound in our brains right.
My process was catching at nothing, gears were spinning, teeth were whirling, files were being checked and summarily declared invalid. I could not arrive at the Best Way to Say It…because I had no choice. There was no Best Way and I knew it. I only had the Fumbling Way, the Incomplete Way, the Inarticulate Way, the Foolish Way.
I could not remember the last time in my life I had to choose those ways. I don’t do that. If The Process can not choose the Best Way, then I don’t bother.
Is that being Cool?
I read recently about how the birth of cool was with blacks in the USA. How “Cool” was a way, basically, of keeping pride and self-worth in the face of threat. That made sense to me right away.
I remember one time a kid said something he thought was funny and that I thought was insulting to me. And I looked at the kid and said “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” I mean, I was little. I was a kid, too. And the kid’s mother (who knew me) laughed and said “[Nezua] is cool.” I wasn’t sure then if she was laughing at me or laughing with me.
All I was doing was keeping a lid on myself. Or on the moment. Because I didn’t know how to react to the threat. To the poking. And rather than bat back or freak out, well….have you ever known people who couldn’t shake off their mad until they made someone else cry? Like, people who hit kids with a belt or something and just aren’t happy until the kid breaks down and cries? I’ve known people like that. They feed on that reaction, on that indication of pain. It lies somewhere on the same continuum where you’ll find people digging at you verbally to get a rise out of you. So a kid can learn how to be “cool” at a young age, maybe, given the right set of threats.
But I wasn’t young in Spanish class. I was in my thirties. I showed up knowing a handful of words, knowing how to almost count to 100 (dieciséis always slips away from the memory!), and being able to replicate the sounds of the Spanish accent, as I had heard them at a very young age. But along with my magical stepladder, I had to leave my Cool behind, too. I had to expose my unknowing, my ignorance, my inability, my vulnerability, my desire to be more than I was at the moment.
I took away much more than new verbs to conjugate, or new phrases I could string together. But it was not easy.
I remember when I first walked out on the mat at my dojang. I was about 27. I talk about my training and competing days with Tae Kwon Do as if I’ve done it all my life. I haven’t. And the intensive part of my training was only about 2.5 years. But it was something I wanted to do all my life. Ever since I was a young kid. And fighting became something I was terrified to do. Because since the beginning, “fighting” really meant violence delivered one way in a very lopsided match. Even walking out on that mat, with pads on and sparring a friend. My mind was in high alert mode. I could think of nothing more terrifying, given my own life experiences, than actually walking into a fight, looking fists in the eye and deciding you could move quicker, or withstand the punch. I could see flying into a fury. I could see losing my temper, and I’d stood my ground with a few different instruments in my hand against someone much larger.
But walking onto that mat was a whole other story. In fact, walking up to the dojang that first day was not so different.
Nor was calling that number for Spanish Classes the first time.
LAW is like a language all unto itself. It is English, but the rules all change. You can’t just use words the way you normally would. You can’t just talk your way through something. The words have to come at the right time and in the right shape or they mean nothing. They mean worse than nothing, the become contempt. They become considered extremely dangerous. They can be met with violence. They can be met with an entire army.
There is a hearing I must attend. A paper came in the mail that told me this. It was signed by a judge and by lawyers. Normally, I relish the thought of dueling with letters. I just shake up my language bag and grab a few words, pinch and stretch them into plutonium gossamer, weave up a dew-studded summer spiderweb, stretch it across an indigo moonbeam. But law is not the same English.
In fact, it makes even the smallest conversations very difficult.
I called up the lawyer and told him I wasn’t going to be in the state that day. Nor for a few days. But I was happy to attend the hearing later. He had no problem with that, but it wasn’t that easy. I had to file a paper with the city court. I had to use the right words in the right order. I had to say it the right way and bring it to the right people in the right amount of time. And I did not know any of these things. And everyone told me they were “not allowed to give legal advice.” And there was no way I could afford a lawyer, nor would I want to for such a small thing.
I said to the woman in the city law library “You’d think it would be easier to simply ask to postpone a hearing.” She agreed. I scanned those fat books and hardly knew how to read them. And they were in English.
After talking to a friend and asking many people small questions and consulting with Google I put together a form in Photoshop that I had adapted from a related form. I made it look just how it was supposed to look. I typed it up and signed it and brought it to a city court clerk.
I felt pretty fine that day. I felt pretty damn competent. I had amazed myself, even—no easy task!
The LAW, always around you, always over you, always able to whisk you away and keep you hidden forever it it came to that, and here I had grabbed a piece of it. I had made it work for me. I had walked out on the mat. I had learned a new way of speaking, or at least a few choice phrases. I felt pretty powerful.
There, in the city court building, at the window ahead of me was what looked like a Mexican family. Well, I’m sure they were Mexican American, but there are communities here that have not been in the country long. There are gente, and these were some, who have an appearance and lack of English that puts them in danger of being hassled and considered aliens in today’s racist and xenophobic climate.
The man had gotten some kind of parking ticket, but couldn’t understand or speak English well, so a woman was translating for him. She may have been his wife, or maybe just a translator. They left the booth and I walked up and took care of my business. Filed my Motion for Postponement.
It didn’t take long. And then I was at the elevator.
In front of me was the man I had just seen at the window and his son. The man shook his head. In a strong Spanish accent, he said,
“Man. You have trouble here, too?”
I smiled. “Yeah.”
“Man,” he said, and shook his head again. Smiling. Then he turned to his son, who was busy with his Nintendo game. The man pointed to the stairs and doors, the ones I look at longingly each time I’m in that building. It looks like a quick and simple easy way back onto the street. But you are not allowed to leave through those doors. You need to walk downstairs and through the metal detector and then outside.
The man’s son wouldn’t look up and the man didn’t understand why he had to wait for the elevator when there were stairs and a sunny glass door right there.
In my mind I frantically reached for the best way to tell him that you couldn’t leave through those doors. Then I just looked for any way at all. I couldn’t believe I couldn’t remember. This always happened to me.
Salir? Salida? …Solo, Solamente? How do you say ‘enter”???? I can’t remember ‘enter!’
I just smiled and made a weird scrunchy motion with my finger that was intended to mean “You can’t actually leave through those doors, you can only enter through them” and probably looked more like “I now scrape the halo off of this invisible angel hovering beside me.” Even I didn’t understand what the hell that motion was supposed to mean.
We rode the elevator in silence. Well, near-silence. The giddy sounds of Nintendo filled the small space. Nobody made small talk.
And then, on the first floor, I walked out the doors and into the sun again. I felt on top of the world. Master of my own fate. I smiled. And for once I didn’t feel a helpless molecule under the crushing tide of law….or fate…or other people’s unjust wielding of the law.
The Mexican family walked by just as I was getting into my car. I smiled at the man.
“Suerte!” I said.
He looked confused. Surprised? Puzzled. He smiled.
I drove away.
Tags: Cool, English, Español, Language, Law, Spanish, Tae Kwon Do, TKD
Posted in The Skin of My Soul
I grew up in white suburbs, but raised by Spanish speakers, so I have a somewhat different experience than you. I still struggle with it. When I was a kid, Spanish was like, “the grownups’ language” within my family, and I was an avid reader (in English) of sci-fi and fantasy novels. I was shy and never communicated well with adults in any tongue, but I learned to mostly understand Spanish. And then I just decided not to become the kind of grownup they wanted me to be, and didn’t work particularly hard to hang onto the language. Formulating a complete sentence was and still is next to impossible, but now I find myself wanting my kids to have more understanding of Spanish than I did.
I am much more comfortable in English, like you, and almost became an English major in school (but settled for marrying an English major instead). I’m told the best way to work your skills is to read. A lot. I’ve gone through a couple Sin City graphic novels in Spanish, and ground to a halt halfway through Harry Potter. Hard to keep up the momentum, but you gotta try.
i do much better when i’m not anxious! i get uptight about sounding dumb or saying the wrong thing and my brain locks up, like suddenly i cant remember ENTRAR for crying out loud. again, goes back to this weird unfamiliar feeling of language not coming naturally to me. but i think that’s been good for me, as i’ve been trying to get across in this series, which mostly focuses on what a power i’ve found language to be in my life and how naturally it normally does come to me. in this 9th installment, i focus on a slightly different angle…not having that power. there are also other implications in this post, but i dont want to go yanking them all out clumsylike and leaving them gasping on the dry page.
for me, hearing Spanish spoken is best. i pick up very quickly. reading for me doesnt work as fast, tho i’ve heard the same thing. hearing it spoken cues me in without doubt and fast, to usage, context and pronunciation.
UPDATE: I have to add some nuance here. Hearing the USAGE in play teaches me very quickly as to usage. Reading about usage leaves me doubtful. Hearing language in action tells you how people use it. Books seem to describe rules that m ay or may not apply. BUT, I understand Spanish much better when I read it. When people speak, it still blurs by me too fast. I’ll get better! And to me that’s important. Not to all of course, even those in similar positions, lifewise. But to me, it is.
i appreciate you sharing your own story here, Pablo.
It’s funny when you end up in a situation where being smart just doesn’t help. Spending your childhood in school is deceptive, because being smart almost always helps in school. I’ve been thinking these kinds of issues over a lot lately, thinking of that scene in Fight Club where Tyler tells Jack he’s clever, and asks how being clever is working out for him. Being clever is pretty fun, but it’s not working out all that well for me lately. I’ve had a brain injury and it’s affected my ability to do my job, but left me still very articulate and funny and charming, which makes it hard to tell exactly what’s wrong. I *seem* fine, and feel good, but in the end, I’m not exactly fine.
geez, i feel the same.
eh, i don’t mean to make light of your situation. your words actually really hit me hard. which means its a good time for a joke, i suppose. i’m not sure what to say. but i feel for you, my friend. and then, i totally relate to a lot of it.
yeah. “how’s that working out for you?”
word.
You continue to blow me away.
I grew up between Tulare and Visalia (California). The central valley is plurality latin@. Tulare also had a fairly large Portuguese population, with somewhat more Laotian and Hmong than Visalia, iirc…
Growing up, I would always hear (white) adults lament that knowledge of Spanish was becoming a necessity around there. These were the people who were shocked and outraged to hear other people talk to each other in Spanish in public. They hardly masked it: they feared the brown people were taking over their world.
I chose to learn Spanish as I entered high school, having gleaned from those folks the message that learning it would be a responsible, pragmatic thing to do. But I was also curious. I was falling in love with language (I would later enter college intending to double-major in graphic design and linguistics) and it seemed to be a language and culture I would enjoy knowing.
My sophomore year I entered the class of Señor Torres. He is a Madrid native who retained his Spanish citizenship, voting in every election. He was a weird guy — some of it was surely cultural, but he had a personality all his own. It was universal: he had every student scared silly for their first year as his pupil. I watched him reduce several students to tears in class. But after that first year, those who remained were able to leverage their familiarity for level footing in the student-teacher relationship. And that relationship was a deeply rewarding one.
There was no English in his class that was not preceded by the words “¿Cómo se dice …?” English was checked at the doorway. Once you stepped into his classroom, you spoke Spanish and Spanish only — beginners and masters alike.
You stumbled, you grasped at empty air, you fell on your ass. But it’s amazing what you learn when you spend one full hour, five days a week, ten months a year speaking exclusively in a second language. Our classmates under other teachers completed word searches and worksheets on grammar and syntax, but they couldn’t form the simplest of sentences in speech. We came to know those same rules intuitively, continually refining our understanding, adding nuance, expanding vocabulary.
I still cherish those three years (sophomore through senior) in his classroom. He is, by far, the most impressive and memorable secondary teacher I have ever, ever encountered.
I am out of practice by now, four years later. I can form basic sentences, fumbling for the right words. But I remember when he boasted to another teacher that I had a native’s accent. (With one exception — I never have been able to roll my r’s.)
It was beneficial. There is no doubt about that. It was an incredible experience, not only being part of his class, but being allowed a glimpse into a culture saturated with meaning, a language that is so beautiful and so satisfying as it rolls off the tongue — or fingers.
I miss it.
thank you for that story! wow. that was fantastic.
yes, that was my class, too. no english allowed. lots of ¿cómo se dice….?
i can roll r’s (hooboy with my last name its a gooood thing!)…what i loved when i came back to spanish was how my brain remembered the sounds. they came to me as if i had been practicing them for years, it was beautiful. even the aspirated sounds or things like the soft ‘th’ of the ‘d’ leapt right to my tongue. it was like a magic trick.
but its dangerous. of course having good pronunciation (as i’m sure you’ve found) makes you sound better at the language then you are. and then people begin riffing while you stand there stupified until you stutter out “hable mas despacio, por favor!” jeje.
thanks for adding so much to the page.
I love reading these stories of language. I lived in Korea for 2 years where I learned Korean by submersion and though I could never be mistaken for Korean once looked at, had a few instances of the stuttering – hanguk mal chokum arratda (I know only a little Korean (and said like a child)) – after calling out for a shopkeeper who was often in the back room.
I currently live bilingually. When I am really tired I can become tongue-tied in French. Actually, that’s often an indication to me that it is time for a break (or to go home to bed! Good barometer for those late nights…)
These stories of language and understanding I’ve been reading lately, here and on Jose’s blog, remind me of that movie Babel. Speaking the same language doesn’t always mean we speak the same language. The most poignant communication was between two people who did not, linguistically, understand each other. It needs to come from a place of caring to be understood.
beautiful!
i’ve had a few close korean friends. you remind me of them now when you speak of this.
and is it true you learn a language faster by being held under water? sounds sort of like how someone tried to teach me to swim once.
(i’m joking on “submersion”, while we’re here talking language!)
Submersion does give an urgency to learning language that has helped me out when I might have otherwise lost my breath! So yes
nez, I’ve been trying to make my situation as light as possible, so I apprecite the effort. But holy shit – I sat down and let a complete stranger cut a hole in my head. On purpose.
When I was doing my best to learn Spanish on the street and on the job {and my wife would make me speak it at home too} so I would be able to work and not starve I had a headache all the time. And I very early discovered why so many expat gringos don’t do the work to learn. The native speakers laugh at your accent and your mistakes and your grammar, just as they would laugh at their own children, just as we in the US would laugh at the funny way our children speak. That was my greatest lesson. As soon as I got past the laughter part it was much easier to learn. And many of the things I said in the early days {1979} were hilarious, to the listeners. I didn’t get the joke because I was coming in for a landing from another planet, Planet English.
So, US English native speakers: just say it and laugh along with those who are laughing. They really mean no harm. They’ll be happy to correct you. I swear, and Suerte!
I think it is a sociological crime that all US citizens, indeed all citizens of the world are not trilingual by the age of 10. This is something that could be accomplished in less than one generation {10 years is a 1/2 generation}} and it could cost next to nothing.
Uh-oh, excuse me! I’m ranting. Peace.
I finally got around to reading this…glad I did
My mom is or at least has been fluent in Spanish in the past (she minored in college)…I think she’s getting rusty now…
I’m the same way with the getting flustered and no words come out bit. It’s like I need a faster chip in my head. Wendy encourages me, like your teacher, to blurt it out even if it’s not perfect. Her folks have adopted me as the tall white guy who sort of speaks Spanish from time to time. Cheers.
jeje. a faster chip. thats good.
you are a word artist. beautiful.
i know the feeling of the tae kwon do sparring ring. i too took it for 2.5 years,(in my thirties). i too had visions of, but stuck with kata or the forms. i too can not speak, write, translate the leagalize of life depending law vocabulary. i have a friend, who speaks a beautiful eloquant traditional spanish, that is (currently in a usp-hazelton) on a life sentence, (possession and sales), trying to format a 2255 appeal. we scrap and hustle to find someone who can effectively communicate the sound reason and argument for this appeal. i am in a probation and parole waiting room, while a “client” translates in spanish to a mexican man there (this in a northwestern state, where mexicans were once native, i think)…what he says – i don’t know. i do not speak spanish, but when working last summer on a construction site (and being female) with a mexican crew, i sure wish i did know, je-je. maybe i will still make it to the class room to learn spanish. i find it a very strong and sexy sound. if i diversify then that around me can to?
this post hit my heart in a few ways. just wanted you to know, i guess. you do say what you know how to say so well.