don't trip on the baggage

"the world is, after all, an endless battle of contrasting memories." - murakami, 1Q84

i'm grateful for the thoughts you shared on my language post last week. both in the comments and via email. the post was some initial thinking about some situations i've found myself in of late and all of your ideas have helped me sort out a bit further what i'm feeling about this issue. it is to an extent, as jessica suggested, a question of whether you feel you belong or not. and the ever-present (if you're me), resistance to belonging fully.

in one of the settings, i've made an active decision not to belong anymore and tonight will be the last time i put myself through what has become a nearly painful evening. the decision to withdraw from that group has more to do with pony abuse, tho' it's also connected to language abuse, than with not feeling like myself. mostly, i think tho', it's a clash of values - or perhaps culture. in my model of the world, it matters more to do all you can than to righteously follow arbitrary rules. i also value good arguments and "that's how we've always done it" is simply not a good argument. once i've lost respect for a person or a group, it's over for me. quite probably my own shortcoming, but nonetheless true. i just hope that i can hold my tongue tonight.

with the other group, i hold back because i'm new and i'm getting the lay of the land. i can also see that my purpose for being involved is different than what the group is currently preoccupied with. but i think it will be ok, as there's room for both my purpose and their preoccupations. but i definitely do hold myself back because it's all in danish in a way that i wouldn't if i could speak english in that context. however, that's not all bad.  it's a good lesson for me to learn. and a bit like taking your husband's last name when you get married, it's a way of starting with a fresh, clean slate. and life doesn't present us with that many chances to do that.

but back to language and the way it constructs us. how we articulate, the words we choose, the history and weight behind those words (both our own and linguistically) - it all matters. we use language to include and to exclude - think of the way doctors speak so that patients can't understand or how when you join a new company and don't yet know all of the acronyms - language is both a way of marking who belongs and perhaps more importantly, who doesn't.

but things do get interesting when the intersections of language involve other languages and other histories and other memories and other baggage. or maybe i'm just preoccupied with all of this because reading murakami makes me even more introspective than usual.

yes, i have an accent

like most people speaking a foreign language, i speak danish with an accent. danish has three extra letters - æ ø å - which have been designed to make it nearly impossible for a non-native to sound like a native. when combined with some letters like a soft d (which sounds like an L in my ears), danes can produce shades of sounds that my ear is simply incapable of discerning from one another - sod sød sy ud øl - i could go on, but seeing them on the page doesn't have the same effect as hearing them. the differences are subtle and often, to my ear, more a difference in pitch than pronunciation. and i don't always catch the nuance of which word was meant in the course of a normal conversation (for years, when husband's girls were small, i thought they were asking for beer (øl) in the car, when really they were asking to get out (ud)).

but i go blithely along, speaking danish in my own unique accent, which i'm told is a hard-to-place combination of native english speaker/slav, which probably has to do with my years of studying russian. and i was quite content with this. until recently.

there's someone who i'm around several times a week who has begun mocking my accent. to my face. which is awkward in meetings or when you're standing there, trying to talk to the vet. every time i contributed to the conversation at a meeting last evening, this person answered me in a mimicking funny accent.  i'm not sure if it's a socially awkward attempt at amusing or if it's genuinely mean, but i'm definitely not finding it all that funny. he also oddly repeats words to me in swedish if i didn't catch what he said. i can't even begin to guess what that's about.

if you think about it, EVERYONE has an accent. no one is accent-free. my mom always claims that the area i grew up in south dakota is accent-free because tom brokaw grew up there and he "doesn't have an accent." i always thought that it was because his fargo-like original accent (because the accent where i grew up is pretty much identical to the one in the coen brothers film) had been beaten out of him so he could be a news anchor.

but let's face it, our speech, no matter the language, is colored by regionalisms and ticks and odd pronunciations. and yes, it's fun to make fun of accents and regionalistic tics - it's what makes fargo such a hilarious film or the canadian eh at the end of many sentences that bob and doug mackenzie effectively exploited for comic effect. but comedy has its place and if you're going to mock someone (which i love to do, don't get me wrong), you have to know them well and you have to have earned the right to mock them. you have to know where the line is and not constantly find yourself on the wrong side of it. because if you don't, it borders on something like that seems a lot like racism.

i was telling a friend about this whole situation and she was the one suggesting it was a bit racist. i'll admit i balk at that word, but it is something like racism. if i were indian and he were mocking me in an indian accent, it would be more obvious. but can it really be racism when a person of the same race mocks your accent? perhaps it's a racism born of xenophobia, but a belittling experience in much the same way as more obvious racist acts. whatever else it is, it's definitely unpleasant.

i guess i ultimately feel that i could take the mocking of my accent if the person doing it had earned the right to do it - by knowing me well enough and by being someone i respect and who i felt respected me. i fear that's what's missing here.