Bilingualism and Identity

So far all the posts on our blog regarding bilingualism have been to do with the positive aspect of speaking two languages. So I thought I’d try and be a bit controversial and shake things up a bit, as it were! Whilst researching for my topic I came across quite a few differences within the world of bilingualism. Some people had chosen this way of life for their children, whereas others had unfortunately been forced to become bilingual due to political or economic problems in their own countries forcing them to move on and find a new life and a new language elsewhere.

Therefore, for some people, bilingualism is a choice, a happy way of life where they are lucky enough to belong to more than one culture. For others it is their worst nightmare. I find it very interesting how some people embrace the idea of adding another string to their bow as it were, and how others are sometimes physically and mentally forced into rejecting their original culture and embracing their new one.

In Peru I found a strong element of this even 400 years on. Before the Spanish arrived and conquered the Inca capital of Cusco in the 17th Century, the main language was Quechua. The way of life was very different then. The Incas worshipped the mountains, they sacrificed llamas, alpacas and quite often children in order to pray for a good harvest the next year. However after the Spanish conquest all of these cultures and rituals were rejected and the prevailing language was Spanish. I was amazed when I walked into my school on the first day and found (to my slight horror) that hardly any of the children spoke Spanish, only Quechua! It amazed me how the language is still spoken, considering that until recently if a Spanish official caught you speaking Quechua in the street you would be automatically shunned by the rest of the village and town. It was to say the least a very hushed language, only spoken in whispers in your own home, everyone was living in fear of being over heard. And yet, after 400 years of Spanish dominance the Quechuan language is still being spoken and even more amazingly the rituals are still being practiced throughout the Andes.

This led me to thinking about how important our language is to us. As demonstrated by the Peruvians, it is our identity, our soul, our life, something that we will not easily give up if forced to do so. So when we talk of bilingualism are we talking of people who have two identities? One article which I read on the web stated that “bilinguals have split personalities”. The article then went on to say that they often suffer from identity problems. It is this idea of being stuck in the middle again. This leads me to the point of homesickness. Does a bilingual person ever really feel homesick? Where is their home? Is it possible to feel homesick for both cultures and countries? One quote I read on the web highlighted this point: “A child who learns two languages won’t feel at home in either of them. She’ll always feel caught between two cultures.” Anyway just some ideas to think about before our next class. I thought there could be some interesting character developments through this topic.

Kim Varvell

The Wanderers

Just thought I should give an update on my Gypsy research. I really wanted to research into this area because I've had a fascination with these people for a long time. It stems from the fact that deep down not only do I greatly respect them, but in a way I want to possess their ideologies and their beliefs. They are wanderers of the earth, not chained down by social conventions or capitalist desires. They live their life day to day and are reluctant to set down roots.

• The origin of the Gypsy people can be traced to India. During its migration through Europe and Asia this language was to become enriched with words from the different countries in which it was present, giving rise to various dialects of Romany. I found this a lovely notion of a language made up of all the places they had visited.
• In Gypsy culture the dominating structure is the family or family ties. Traditionally the gypsy people have been organized in lineages or patrilineal clans which may group up to five generations around the patriarch.
• Their religion is rich in detail and form, something akin to mythology sprinkled with multiple superstitions. They are able to unite the fantastic and the practical like few others can do.
• Origins of these nomadic people - They are descendents of Cain who was outlawed by God to be a 'wanderer, a fugitive on earth', for murdering his brother Abel.

I found these facts interesting and I hope you do too!

Julia Angeli

There's No Place Like Home

(Somebody stole the 'hat' lyric...)

Sitting this evening, researching homesickness, I was reading through the symptoms and recognising many of them in myself. For example:

• Homesickness means you miss your family, your friends, your house.
• A preoccupation with home-focused thoughts
• Beginning life at university naturally generates… homesickness
• A grieving …over the loss of what is familiar and secure: most often it is about the loss of people - family and friends - but it is also about the loss of places and routines

Being the independent, resilient person I am, I would normally never admit to being homesick; oh the shame of wanting to be with you family, I should be loving university, getting drunk every night, and generally having fun, although I know that deep down I am homesick.

Coming out of this week's lecture I commented to Claire that I was feeling very ‘humm’, an expression which I can only describe as meaning ‘I miss my mum.’

I’m very close with my family, but particularly over the past few months we’ve had to bond, so being away is hard, and I may be speaking for myself, but after seeing everyone’s longing gazes in the exercise we did in class, I think everyone here can definitely relate to missing someone or something that is not at university with them.

Our collective (for want of a better word) sadness, makes our class a very pensive one, but hopefully it will help us create a very moving final production.

Annie Rook

Sick of Home # 2

I just wanted to add to Annie's point about being sick of home. Ever since I was a child I have wanted to travel. I would often sit at home and imagine the places I could be at that moment in time, which left me frustrated. I felt like there was a whole world to explore but I was stuck in 'boring old Wetherby'. I began longing to be anywhere but home.

On my gap year I travelled around India and Sri Lanka which was amazing, every day I would visit somewhere new, see beautiful sights, experience new things, not to mention a whole new culture and I never imagined I would miss home. And I didn’t until a few months into travelling when I started to miss the weirdest things ... bacon sandwiches ... dressing gowns ... baths ... being able to walk down the street without being stared at (!) ...

However I never really expected to miss my family. That might sound harsh but I guess I just thought that they would still be there when I got back and I didn’t want to spend all of my time out there getting upset about being so far from home. And every time I called home everything sounded exactly the same, nothing much had happened at work and the cats still missed me ... But anyway what I'm trying to say is that for me it was the creature comforts that drove me to come home (and go straight for the frying pan).

Also a little thought about for our piece, I too like the idea of liminal spaces. However I then began to think about the spaces that you travel through, and about Airport. When I was in Waterloo Station on Saturday I was thinking about all the people around me. I love the atmosphere in train stations, how they are always full of people but never properly inhabited, and how everybody is going somewhere. Also I often think about who those people are, whether they have travelled this way to work for the past 25yrs or whether this is the first time they have stepped off the train here and how this affects the space. Does anybody have any similar thoughts?

Rachael Smith

Liebeskind on Home

"So where is home? I inquired. 'It's somewhere in-between,' he replied. 'It's not here or there, it's a kind of journey and when you have arrived, you're already on the way somewhere else. In the end the work is home. People identify some piece of ground, some place, but it is illusory because the world is global'"

From an interview with the international architect Daniel Liebeskind, whose work (the Holocaust Museum, Berlin, Ground Zero, Manhattan, the controversial V&A 'Spiral', London, etc.) has taken him all over the world.

Rachael Smith

From Drapes To Drama

Aren't there a lot of decorating programmes on the TV of late?! Either decorating or finding a new home. When purchasing a new house, you're always informed to look beyond the décor and at the potential of our house and what you as a person can do with it. Through researching my topic of "Interior Design" I stumbled across the question as to whether interior design is necessary. Is it simply a luxury or is it vital in shaping a house so that we can call it "home"? If we take the idea that it is a way of making "home" then how can we allow people to decorate our homes for us? Does this imply that the feeling of "home" can be inflicted upon us?

I don't know about anyone else, but when I came to RHUL, I really thought about taking the right items with me that I could decorate my room with in order to make things homely. But when it came down to it, it was my mum who put things up for me, so she put the homely touch on my interior. For some reason, knowing that she had done it made the décor "right" and "homely". I know that if Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen came into my house and decorated the place, it would not feel right to me, because personally, I think interior design is about adding your own special touch to your surroundings and not simply decorating in the "up-to-the-minute" colours.

Perhaps as some interest for a performance idea, we could explore the struggle between the ideals of "home" and those which are inflicted upon us.

Claire Stainer

Bilingualism at First Hand... The Original

This is my first post on 'BILINGUALISM'. (well, since it became my research project, anyway!)

As I said before, I am bilingual. Even though i was born in Serbia, English was my first language. I never went to a Serbian school; I went to an American school in Serbia, 5 seconds away from my house. Age 6 we moved to Austria (International school), then came to London aged 7.

So I have been speaking English and Serbian my whole life. I speak English better than Serbian; I'm guessing that's because I have been studying in English my whole life. My Serbian is fluent but I find I am sometimes lost for words and revert to English. The funny thing is that I found a book from when I lived in austria and the english is so funny; i am learning it and its all wrong... like 'I mejd' (I made) I dunno! It's funny to think that I once spoke Serbian better! hhaha.

As I said, I feel neither here nor there, accepted 'fully' by neither culture. The reason I mention this is because I have been researching, reading the book Third Culture Children and it talks about this stuff, about being in the middle. So I learned to accept it, but I must admit the older I get, the more I want to belong to Serbia, the more I wanna know about it, the history, the people, I want first hand experience.. so I've decided I need to live there a bit and maybe one day I will feel like I belong. I came across terms such as 'BILINGUALIST', 'MONOLINGUALIST', 'SEMI LINGUALIST' and I thought it was funny, interesting the way they group people. I thought it would make an interesting idea to integrate into our play, ridiculous 'labels', seems they've completely separated them.

Anyway, my first post is just about my own experiences as a bilingualist :) Stay tuned for some interesting facts and figures about the little thing called love.. i mean, bilingualism!

Dana Karic

Wherever I Lay My Hat

I found this week's lesson really interesting. I've been home since our class last week and found it really strange. The first person to actually refer to my room here in Royal Holloway as 'home' was my boyfriend, Alex, and I remember thinking, where does he mean? However, seeing my room as it is now makes me feel like my home is in fact here. My house felt unlived-in as my mum spends a lot of time away and it was also tidier than I left it. It brings me to the conclusion that your home is wherever you inhabit at the time.

Philippa Thomas

Bizarre Concepts

I didnt get a chance to say this in class but I found it a particularly bizarre concept that in Lament the actors were being asked to speak about themselves as people rather than characters. At times they must have felt incredibly vulnerable because this was being played whilst they were onstage.

Personally, when performing, I like detaching completely from myself as a person allowing me to become the character, however, in the aforementioned scenario this would not be easily achieved. This leads me to think that the final performance will be a lot more personal that anything else that I have been involved in before. An interesting concept!

Philippa Thomas

Learning English

Just a funny little note about being 'bilingual'. English is my native language and I have never been fortunate enough to learn another, however after my first few weeks here I am beginning to realize that I will be bilingual before my year at Royal Holloway is up. On leaving the states all of my friends were ragging on me and saying that I was going to come back with a British accent. While I most certainly will not be changing my accent (if I did attempt one it would be such a mosh of the different accents from the various areas of the UK that you all would end up laughing hysterically), I have already begun adopting some of the words you use. Some out of necessity, others because I just like them.

Everyone has been wonderfully patient with me every time I have to ask what something means and usually we all have a good laugh about our odd language barrier. I caused quite a commotion one night at dinner when I told one flat mate that I liked her pants. No her underwear was not showing, but I did like her trousers. As soon as I had said it I knew laughter was sure to follow. I still say line - queue will take some getting used to - and every once and a while something costs five dollars instead of five pounds, but I'm working on becoming as bilingual as possible. My nasal American accent will be with me forever, but I think adapting to the language differences is important. I think it is a part of accepting my new home.

I know that the UK is similar to the US in that different areas have different speech patterns, colloquialisms, phrases and accents. It might be interesting for us to think about how that makes us feel about home. How do you feel when you hear someone who has the same accent as you do? What about someone using a phrase that is only common to your area? I know it makes me think of home, how 'bout the rest of you?

Lauren Abend

Class: Week Two

We got through a great of material today, pursuing the subject of home and being away from home. We began by recapping on the piece of simple choreography produced by your own personal migration patterns. We repeated this at different speeds and in differently-sized spaces. Then - anticipating the structure of Timeless - we continued counting through the years to project an imaginary set of further migrations taking you up to your seventies. It was interesting to see the patterns in your imaginary migrations: there was a large exodus to America in your twenties; there was another large mid-life migration in your forties; many of you - perhaps obviously - saw your future home as tied up with family commitments. It was striking how little movement there was in the years 50 to 70. Perhaps you imagine you'll be settled by that time?

I had asked you to bring in items from your room that made it homely. You produced a terrific collection of objects, hard and soft, big and small, old and new. As we toured round, I was struck by some resonant, sometimes cryptic statements about these objects. I note only a very small selection of the pages of notes I took down:

• I have a problem that I don't feel at home at home.
• It's nice knowing they're somewhere on your wall, boxes ticked, it makes it home. It feels like it's been around for a very long time.
• Everywhere I go in the world I have to buy a pair of ear-rings. This place I went and every village I just had to get some.
• Elephants are majestic and strong and family-oriented and beautiful.
• Before I left I went round knocking on everyone's door to take a picture of them. They think I'm mad.
• It almost attracts people to my room cos they come in and hold it. I have quite got a pillow thing.
• Coming back from Turkey it's like 'ooh my coat'.
• My room is like a museum of frames. I don't go looking for them; it's an of the moment type thing.
• Toothpaste and floss and stuff he gets supplies and we just take that out of the bag but the toothbrushes he brings me personally.
• We made a flask of tea and took some biscuits to this deer park he had at the end of his road. He wants to be a driving instructor.

I only offer these to show that already there are some lovely little glimpses of story, experience, memory and language. Some of these fragments - when taken out of context - have a very attractive almost poetic quality. You'll see that I've sometimes cut two phrases from the conversation together to try out the strange effect that the juxtaposition creates. We'll be producing more of this kind of material as the course goes on.

We then discussed homeliness, thinking about place, time, smell, atmosphere, all the things that create a cosy sense of home.

You began looking at developing simple physical movements that you might associate with your object and by extension your room. I then asked you to swap 'rooms' and we started building up a performance sequence of (a) performing the 'homely' physical/gestural movement associated with your home object (b) giving some expression to a sense of not being at home, exploring the new/unfamiliar object, and (c) randomly cut in, I asked you occasionally to try to create, just with your eyes, a link back to your old room: I hoped we would begin to start visualising homesickness on stage.

There was some nice work here. The first two things - (a) and (b) - were promising, though they need a stronger sense of composition before they'll start working on the larger scale needed for performance. The 'looks homeward' were very interesting; I expected rather dramatic expressions of longing, but far more effective was what you all did. Everyone more or less just turned and focused their eyes back home. It was the minimalism of the gesture, combined with everyone doing the same thing, that made it work for me.

I asked you to introduce language into the moment, saying 'I want to go home' in the group's variety of languages. The vocalization didn't add very much to me, in fact distracted from the clarity of the glance. We will, however, look further at using the different languages in the group (we had some basic level of competence in 17 languages, from Afrikaans to Welsh!) over the next couple of weeks.

After the break, I asked you to 'brainstorm' jobs that might involve people resettling across the world. We got a long and imaginative list. I'm interested in this because I want us to be thinking about possible stories and - though I didn't say this in the class - it might make for some interesting characters if you looked at what the experience might be of being an international footballer's daughter, or the child of an ambassador, or the family of a group of economic migrants, and so on. I may pursue this next week.

We then discussed Timeless. You offered some very clear comments on the structure and tone of the text:

• You discussed the wit and humour of the interrelations between the characters.
• The complexity of the time structure.
• The gaps that the audience had to fill in to understand the development of their relationships.
• The thematic evocation of 'perfection' in the challenging third scene.

Watching the first quarter of an hour of the final act, the aims of the scene became clearer. The 'future' being depicted (as the first scene is the present, and the second the past) is the imaginary, wished-for, ideal future of each of the characters. It became clearer that each character is imagining how the future might go and the other characters at various points are projections of their imagination. So throughout the scene we see all four characters represented in the imaginations of all four characters; although it would never strike you like this, we effectively see sixteen different characters on stage. Their isolation from each other is emphasised in the lighting, enclosing each actor in their own pool of light.

You made some very comments on the way that Nick Powell's score worked with the performance; each instrument in the quartet became attached, at times, to a particular character. During moments of obsessive gestural repetition on stage, the music would underscore that, the sombre strings adding to the feeling of melancholy in these moments where the characters long to shed their physical inhibitions and be 'remarkably casual' with one another. This awkwardness is represented in a series of gestural movements: Ian putting his hand out only to withdraw it and rub the back of his neck; Veronica putting her hand to her throat; Stella holding her hands to her cheeks. The string quartet, however, also offers us a vision of the reconciliation of these characters; even though they are isolated from one another by their awkwardness and theatrically by the lighting, they reach a kind of harmony in the music, where the four instruments do wor harmonically together. The gestures too pass from person to person, finding resolution in the repeated motif about 'the beach we went to that one time'...

At the end of the class I gave out the text of Airport. Please note that this will be a difficult read for some of you (except the person who speaks some Spanish) and you'll need to spend some time working on it before the class. In the class we'll look at some video of the original production.

Finally, we gave out research tasks. I allocated to you, in pairs, one of the following themes:

• bilingualism*
• nomadic peoples
• migration*
• tourism*
• interior design*
• homesickness
• non-spaces

(The asterisked topics are the ones I'd like you to report back on next week (week 3). Note: this is a change from what I said in class.)

I'd like you to post reports on your research to the blog, but over the next two weeks, we need brief reports on what you've discovered. While I'd like you to be fairly rigorous in your research, this is of course a creative project and I am in interested in things you may discover that trigger a creative response.

Dan Rebellato

Homesickness isn't down to the cake......

When the video first began in our lesson last Monday, I really did not know what to think. I suppose it was a mixture of intrigue and confusion as we watched Mainstream and Lament unfold before us. But then as the discussion began there were ideas coming to the foreground which made the plays meaningful, rather than simple collages of what seemed like snippets of random dialogue. I really enjoyed the idea from Mainstream of unstated genders of each of the characters and perhaps this could be incorporated into our performance.

To link this to the idea of "Homesicknesses", it struck me how unstated the idea of "Homesickness" is as well. For example, what is Home? How do we distinguish and define our home? And then, what is Sickness? Everyone suffers from different symptoms of any illness so can we pin point what exactly the sickness of the absence of home actually is? Is it physical or mental sickness that we intend to explore?

I find the idea of Homesickness confusing and thought that this could be reflected many ways in our performances by using the techniques that we saw from Suspect Culture. For example, the seemingly random answers in Lament created an erratic and confused feeling for the opening of the piece which again (for me personally) would reflect my response to the whole concept of "Homesickness". For me, I feel as though I need to develop a personal definition of "Homesickness" and then bring it to the group and see other ideas for defining it.

• "Most people will have felt homesick at some time in their lives, perhaps when they were younger, and it is easy to forget just how overwhelming it can be."
• "Research on homesickness amongst British university students shows that 35% of new students experience some homesickness, and that between 5% and 15% describe the experience as frightening: a few will go on to develop depression."
  (University of Cambridge Counselling Service Website)
  
• "Homesickness isn't the same kind of sick you felt after you had too much cake that time. It's also not like having a cold or the flu. Nothing's really wrong inside your body, but you still might have a headache or a stomachache. And it will probably hurt inside, the way it does when you're scared or sad. You might even cry, and that's OK."
  (Kids' Health Website)

Claire Stainer

Peruvian Homesickness

I just wanted to make a comment regarding the idea of bilingualism and incorporating it into our piece. I really like Dana's suggestion of using different languages as a way of relating to the work of Suspect Culture. For example if we were talking in different languages, the audience would continually be having to play 'catch-up' as it were. Just like how we all felt whilst we were watching the opening of Mainstream. I have experienced that feeling of being alienated from the world due to the language barrier whilst I was living in Peru. When I first arrived I did not speak very fluent Spanish, just enough to get by on. However by the end of my 6 months there my Spanish had improved immensely and so had my Quechua (the native Indian language). Even though I wasn’t living with anyone who spoke any English I still managed to feel very much at home there and I am currently experiencing the strange sensation of feeling homesick for Peru, not for my home in England! Anyway I really think this could be an interesting avenue to explore for our project. What does everyone else think?

Kim Varvell