Got dat Kiswahili on fast recall when I'm using it in simple contexts like bargaining, or asking directions, or swapping niceties with friends. I wouldn't say those conversations are superficial, but they're essentially scripted. If you're not trying to articulate new thoughts, it's easy to sound fluent.
In sharp relief, I have one friend here who I sensed was a kindred spirit the moment we met. In our first ten minutes of conversation, we hit these daunting language barriers because of the complexity of the things we wanted to talk about. I was suddenly speaking Kiswahili like a three-year-old -- the only words I seemed to know were dry, simple, unspecific. Those higher-order relationships are the best and most tiring ones, because you're constantly straining toward a point of understanding: reading extralingual clues, and trying out new words all the time to maintain some thread of connection. It takes more than two engaged minds to reach understanding; you need two effortful spirits to fill in the gaps between insufficient words, to intuit attempted meanings. Yesterday I learned some new words like tai-samaki is fish-eagle and mikoko are mangrove trees and mapinduzi are revolutionaries, and to describe a coup you say haki haitapatikani ila ncha ya upanga (or something, sijui), and I learned the words for hypocrite (mnafiki) and principled (kanuni), and we made up a new Kiswahili word for the sand-dollars we found on the ground: dola wa mchanga.
But for every moment of surprising clarity, we met with an aching lack of language.
The couple I rent from are Zimbabwean and Irish. There are also two Malawian women who work on the compound, and both are pretty fluent in Kiswahili as a second language, and we all communicate in this weird amalgam of Kiswahili and English. The other renters are a Hungarian family who don't really know either language. They move around the house, strange and silent. The wife smiles and points at things and tries to communicate; the husband keeps his eyes on the ground, pretending there are no other humans around. He doesn't know any English or Kiswahili -- not a word. Every time I look at him, he seems utterly trapped inside his own body, horribly mute.
The other night, I went to a music event that was well-frequented by expats from all over Europe. Everyone was mingling between songs, and I found that with most of them, regardless of where they came from (Spain, France, Sweden), Kiswahili was our natural linguistic meeting-point. I finally understand, experientially, why Kiswahili is such an effective trade language: it's an ideal common ground, an easily-acquired, politically-neutral tongue.
Another guy I met this week (at the music event) was the exact counterpoint to the mute -- he was fluid and alight and played easily with three languages, making jokes in Kiswahili, Spanish and English, feeling the pulse of each individual tongue as he spoke it. He was such a free being, so easily expressed. Later on, I found out he knew another language: he played the guitar with his eyes closed, Marley and Los Lobos, strumming and humming on a wooden tabletop, slipping into his fourth and most divine tongue. I know there are other reasons those two men are the way they are, but the Hungarian's silence and the other's absolute liberty confirm what I've always thought: that language sets you free.
I had a creative writing professor in college who told me I should read Ryzard Kapuscinski's translated works, that I could learn a lot from him. He said that my prose had similar characteristics, sounding as if it had been translated from another language, containing foreign cadences, and word choices that were just wrong enough to sound like poetry. I remember feeling so happy that he heard another world thrumming beneath my writing, one far away from Harvard. Whenever I write, I hope to tap into the old-forgotten, once-learned rhythms of the land I love madly, and am afraid, always, of being shut out of those rhythms permanently, of losing my memory of them, my access to them.
I'm finally reading Kapuscinski this week, his travelogue Travels with Herodotus, and he has a paragraph on language that astounds me. In the book, he has just arrived in India, and cannot speak the local language. He writes: "I understood that every distinct geographical universe had its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, the universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it. I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I had been able to name: For example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know. I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture."
what a great quote! gonna need to check out that book!
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