Mumbo-Jumboising the Foreign, or, The Many-Veiled Reality

Thinking of certain things I remembered Martin's post about "mumbo-jumbo", which may have occurred in this group. How "mumbo-jumbo" gets applied to things (languages, cultures, people) we don't understand, what role the language plays in rendering the environment transparent.

Imagine you live in a foreign place whose language (and everything that radiates from it--culture, tradition, history...) is opaque to you. At best you know a few phrases, a word here and there. You can communicate fully only with individuals who speak YOUR language.

It seems to me this is a dreamlike state. Granted that we don't know what's going on most of the time under the best circumstances ("life is all clues and no answers"--I forget who gets the attribution), this seems to me a particularly bizarre situation, like existing swaddled up, like a baby or a lunatic in a straitjacket, ears stopped and what comes through the eyes only heightening the confusion.

It must be frightening too. I think that's where the disparagement comes in, contempt used to reduce the terror. So the foreign language becomes mere mumbo-jumbo, the culture and society insignificant (because they signify nothing to YOU), the place nothing better than a bus stop for your ass, and the natives are nearly (or completely) dehumanised to buzzing mosquitoes or chattering monkeys.

In a way it's worse than Kaspar Hauser. In Hauser's isolation, not only the language doesn't exist--neither do the people, and because of the physical confinement, neither does the world. No place, geography, culture, there's simply nothing at all.

But to be without language IN the world, that means to be crippled, it is to suffer one's mind being blind, deaf and mute.

but the land of dreams is infinitely more interesting because it is beyond understanding. if i travel alone i live in a dream. i will walk along the river at twilight and be a stranger to the voices and the smells and the glimpses of beauty and that is dreaming. better than living.

Unfortunately, in order to dream one must first exist, i.e. survive in the dimension the general consensus describes as "reality". ;)

I am thinking of concrete situations, of what it means to live in an environment you can't access through language (or can't access without mediation, with all its attendant frustrations, deficiencies and noise).

you are being practical. i was being romantic. the worst kind of dream is the one where you are trying to do something and are thwarted at every turn.

Agreed! Now imagine if that were not a dream at all!

Our brains do not accept this state of affairs, though, Lola. They insist on making patterns and making judgments even though they don't know how to interpret the data. This leads to the common pattern of stereotyping "foreigners" when traveling in their countries. Or at least "exoticizing" that which we don't understand. If we could either accept being in a dream state (accept not understanding, and quit trying to) or if we could be better prepared beforehand (learn the language, read up on the country, talk to people from there, etc), we would act less like people fresh from Plato's cave.

i'm suggesting we stop trying to do things in dreams.

And even when able speak the language of the other, we are at a disadvantage, as we are not linguistically on a level playing field. Not blind, or deaf, or mute, but impaired nevertheless. In a world of great disparities in power, in resources, in access to information, and in a world with only one monolingual superpower, how humanizing it would be to adopt and utilize a shared, neutral inter-language for use between nations and peoples! Check out Esperanto at www.uea.org, www.esperanto-usa.org, and www.lernu.net.

this reminds me of something baudelaire said about forgetting to look down at the gutter.

#6

Exactly. You must have observed many radical misunderstandings in Western news and views of the Near East, Anna. Sometimes the smallest things cause greatest discrepancies between what "is" and what is merely imagined. A highly flattering gesture interpreted as one of utmost contempt, for instance, and everything that ensued from that misunderstanding. In this case not only did the "non-speaker" not know what the gesture meant, he was also eager to substitute his own opinion of what the underlying attitude MUST have been.

#8

The problem is that language is like rabbits--it breeds. Theoretically you could enforce Esperanto (or anything) as a medium of global formal communication, but you could never make it local. And wherever one lives one lives locally, in the embrace of the local dialect.

Deaf in court and prison from Mother Jones magazine. It's hard.

Robert

this problem can be viewed from so many perspectives, it is dangerous to join in now for fear of offending.

>1 LolaWalser:
Lola, you are describing what happened to me when I first came to Taiwan before I began to learn Chinese. it does mean to be crippled, you are right, but in a strange way it also is tremendously liberating. One is not forced to listen to the stuff going one around you simply because you can hear it.

when I go to the Uk, I am always struck by how the linguistic environment forces itself on my inner life in a way that doesn't happen in Taiwan, where I can filter things out more easily coz I don't understand them.

To me it looks like the ultimate prison. It's liberating only like going mad is liberating. And how does one decide what to filter out or what isn't worth taking in without language? But I doubt you're a mumbojumboiser, Murr, in any degree. For one thing, you don't seem to be lazy, body or mind.

1. dream

2. madness

3. disappearing up one's arse, i.e. substituting one's "inner world" for the larger one

are all states conducive to the mumbojumboisation of the foreign.

#11

That's terrible, Robert, poor guy has been drawn and quartered inside his body all his life.

>1 LolaWalser: I can't say that such a situation doesn't exist, where the foreigner, disdaining the disadvantages of being foreign, such as not knowing the language, despises the host, but it is an incredible perversion when it does. I've been in that circumstance quite often--the foreigner without much of the language if any, and I find that what is worst is how praiseworthy any attempt to mutter a few local words is found to be--I can only accept it is as apt condescension--for my, for instance, few words of Tamil are but the least I can do. One must learn hello, good bye, excuse me, thank you, sorry...at the very least.

As for the peace of not HAVING to understand, it depends on the circumstances of the visit. Settling here in Slovenia, there is a coming to grips with not understanding, but no peace until I finally can (I am better at Slovene than those who think I'm bad, and worse than those who think I understand everything). Lately, though, I have heard many Slovenes long for a life without understanding what they hear; I'm sure they mean it as a sort of vacation, yet the number of times I've heard it recently is astonishing.

Finally, I've found that without the language, for instance when once in Hong Kong, knowing just the few words so as to be polite, the degree of opacity depended entirely on me. Many fine moments occurred through sheer mutual good will and interest. I remember Henry Miller was great on this phenomenon in Colossus of Maroussi.