Category Archives: cultural immersion

Materiality and nostalgia

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Last week, I spent a few days in Coventry city centre. It’s not a particularly pleasant or pretty city, but I had reason to be there and some time on my hands. Seeking refuge from the excessive noise and busyness of the city, I took myself to Coventry Cathedral and, later, to The Herbert Museum.

Having wandered around the shell of the old cathedral, St. Michael’s, which was bombed almost to oblivion by the Luftwaffe on 14 November 1940, I proceeded to the new cathedral, also St. Michael’s, which opened in 1962. From the first time I visited this cathedral, twelve or more years ago, I have loved its modernist architecture, sharp edges and industrial style, so unlike the medieval cathedrals one is more likely to encounter in British and other European cities.

I was already in a reflective and somewhat melancholic mood when I entered the cathedral, and the sparse grandeur of it moved me even more. The Peace Chapel, to the left of the entrance, caught my attention. I saw, through the open doors, long strings of colourful origami tsuru (orizuru), paper cranes, hanging almost to the floor. I was drawn to them, nostalgia for Japan rising in me as I walked across the nave of the cathedral towards them.

The small side chapel had chairs arranged in a circle, with the altar and the hanging strings of tsuru completing the circle. I reached out and ever so gently ran my fingers through them, and I was swept back a quarter century to Japan, to first learning to make tsuru with my students, to visiting shrines and temples with my friends and colleagues, with my kind taiko teacher and his wife (whose names, I am ashamed to say, now escape me – Lisa McClintock, if you’re reading this, please remind me), and to visiting the memorials at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Waves of nostalgia washed over me and suddenly tears were streaming down my cheeks and my throat was constricted around sobs desperate to get out. I sat on one of the chairs in the circle, overwhelmed by a sense of loss for a part of my life that is no more. I have no great yearning to return to Japan, although I would love to take my daughters there some day. This was not a nostalgia (or natsukashii, as they say in Japan) brought about by a longing to be in that place again in the future, but rather to be back in the past, in a place and at a time to which I can never return.

I composed myself, spent some more time sitting in reflection in the nave of the cathedral, and then walked the 50 metres to The Herbert Museum. I knew the museum well, having often taken Lily and Katie there when we visited their grandad in Coventry when they were younger. The museum was a little shabbier than I remembered it, some of the exhibits a little worse for wear. I made my way upstairs and into the permanent Elements exhibition, only remembering it as I walked through it. It contains some beautiful natural objects – shells, crystals, fossils and, against the back wall, mounted vertically and side-by-side, two narwhal tusks. Like the tsuru in the cathedral, I was drawn to the tusks. I stood in front of them, running my hand over the swirling lines, reveling in the cold hardness of them.

I’ve never seen a narwhal, alive or dead, but they are so indelibly connected with the Arctic, that they swept me away to the winter sea ice of Hudson Bay, to Arvia’juaq and Huluraq, to beluga whale hunting in summer with Arden and Frank, to arctic char fishing with my ataata Pemik. Once again, I was a blubbering wreck, clinging to the larger of the two tusks like a drowning woman. Again, nostalgia for a time and place overcame me and I was momentarily grief-stricken. Unlike Japan, Nunavut (and, specifically, Arviat) is a continuing presence in my life, through my research, my on-going relationships with people there (one of the great positives of social media), through my daughter’s name, and through the way my lived experiences and academic research of Inuit life have changed forever the way I interact with humans and other animals and with the world around me. But the Arviat I knew has changed. Some of the people most important to me are no longer there – passed on or moved on – and I too am changed.

I composed myself for the second time in so many hours, continued my exploration of the museum and then sat in the museum café with a pot of tea and toasted crumpet. As I sat, I reflected on how the materiality of those objects had drawn out this nostalgia in me. Two objects, one removed from its cultural setting and the other from its natural setting, and set in a different context thousands of miles away. The cultural distance the tsuru had travelled was, perhaps, less great, as these delicate paper cranes have come to symbolize peace, the anti-war movement and nuclear disarmament throughout the world. But, just as the tusk of an Arctic marine mammal was far from the place and context of its origin, so too, the tsuru, placed in an Anglican cathedral in the middle of England, had been decontextualized from Japan’s long history of origami and other delicate crafts. It was the sudden and unexpected encounter with these objects out of place that caused them to grab me by the wrist and pull me back to the places of their origin, places that, for half of my life, have had meaning for me.

But my encounters with those objects also caught me at a moment when I was feeling particularly melancholic. Another day, in a different mood, nostalgia brought about by the tsuru and the narwhal tusks might have caused me to laugh aloud with joyful reminiscences of the same times, places and people. I was reminded of this a few days later when, back home again in Sanlúcar de Guadiana, I caught the smell and texture of spring in the air, and it brought me back to the springs of my childhood in Ireland. This time, in a buoyant mood, I grinned from ear to ear.

Snow memory

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I remember this time of year about a decade ago. We were living in rural Cambridgeshire, about four miles from Cambridge. It had snowed heavily overnight and the flat southeast English landscape was blanketed in white. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go for a walk. I left by the back gate and headed across the fields. The land around our house was owned by Trinity College, one of the Cambridge University colleges. It was heavily cultivated and, although the fields were accessible, walking was restricted to signposted tracks or to field perimeters. As I walked, the sky grew more overcast and it started to snow again. After twenty minutes I was well out of sight of my house and the quiet country road on which we lived.

Instead of the joy I had anticipated feeling at being out in the snowy landscape, I felt unease. This walk along the familiar hedgerows was one I took regularly, and it was not uncommon for me to encounter a hare or a deer. Indeed, on this particular day I found fresh hare prints in the snow. But, somehow, I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I was on a circular walk and at this point I was equidistant between going on or turning back.

I was aware that I had quickened my pace and I was perspiring under my winter clothes. I had the sensation of being a hunted animal as I kept furtively glancing around. Suddenly, the reason for my fear became clear to me – polar bears! There, in the bucolic, highly-managed, symmetrical landscape of rural Cambridgeshire, something had subconsciously brought me back to the Kivalliq. It wasn’t simply the snow. I had been in the snow at least a couple of times since I had last lived in Arviat, and I hadn’t feared an encounter with a bear. But that day, there was a certain quality to the light, a certain texture to the air that tricked my brain into thinking there might be a bear around.

Despite being in a landscape where the largest carnivore I could possibly encounter was a badger, I found myself feeling the way I had that spring day seven or eight years earlier when I had walked out to Huluraq. Arviat was more than a 40 minute walk behind me and all around was the flat west Hudson Bay landscape, where the undulating snow-covered land reached a snow-covered finger, Huluraq, out onto the frozen seascape of Hudson Bay. As I turned to make the slow snow-hampered walk back home I saw two sets of prints in the snow – a mother polar bear and her cub. My blood ran cold. I was unarmed – although I doubt that, armed, I would have stood any better chance. I had no idea how old the prints were. They looked fresh enough, clearly defined and without an accumulation of blowing snow.

The walk back to Arviat was the longest of my life. I expected at any moment that the last sound I would hear would be the fluey-sounding grunt of a mother bear coming up behind me, turning me into a meal for her cub. I walked as fast as my cumbersome clothes and boots and the terrain would allow me. There had been other encounters with bears, some where I’d felt threatened and some where I’d felt awe and gratitude for being in the presence of such a creature. But no encounter was as frightening as that non-encounter that day near Huluraq.

And then, years later, what should have been a pleasant walk across a snowy English landscape turned into an anxiety-filled power walk, as I raced to escape from my subconscious fear. I realized at the time how ridiculous I was being and I forced myself to slow down, relax, bring myself back into the moment. But in a very short time I found myself once again anxiously speed walking towards my little chocolate-box English cottage.

I’ve often thought of that snowy day in Cambridgeshire and the subtle sensations that caused my mind and body to subconsciously make connections between past and present. We all subconsciously make these connections all the time as our senses trick us into time travel. The smell of a 2-stroke engine immediately transports me to the west coast of Hudson Bay; the theme music to BBC Sports Roundup puts me back in the busy little kitchen of my childhood at 5pm on a Saturday evening, me, my cousins, our parents, aunt and granny and the smell and texture of fried bread; tin-foil wrapped ham sandwiches take me back to the Canal End of Croke Park.

It’s not simply memory or nostalgia. Rather, it is a triggering of the senses that awakens reaction, muscle memory, feeling, sensation, emotion. Perhaps it’s the closest we get to time travel as we are transported backwards through time to catch glimpses of what were, perhaps, the moments that defined us. We may not have known at the time but those would be the moments that would remain, imprinted on our souls.

Yo soy Manuel

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Last week I wrote about the joys of multilingualism and it would be remiss of me to not follow that up with some of the pitfalls of attempted bilingualism. Having lived in Spain since 2014, I feel true empathy for Manuel in Falty Towers. In fact, at times, I am Manuel. Learning another language opens one up to making all sorts of unfortunate mistakes. I have two particular favourites that I’ve heard from other people.Manuel

One is about a young woman from New Zealand who was the youngest and only female crew member of a yacht that was about to set sail across the Pacific from Peru. The young woman was given the task of provisioning the boat with enough beer for a crew of six or seven, for up to two months at sea. With her pockets bulging with cash, she went to the nearest supermarket and bought tray upon tray of cans of beer with a name that seemed, to her eyes, quite wild. She duly bought the beer, brought it back to the yacht and stowed it, in preparation for setting sail. It was only with 60 miles of ocean separating the yacht from the Peruvian coast, when the first cans of beer were cracked open, was it realized that she had bought sin-alcohol, or, in English, alcohol-free, beer. While the sailing may have been improved, the onboard atmosphere was not.

My other favourite story was told to me by a Welshman who lives on the opposite side of Andalucia. It’s very easy to mix up similar sounding words with dire consequences. This guy met his next-door neighbor one day and, instead of telling her he had been to visit her cuño (brother-in-law), he told her he’d been to visit her coño (pussy). Lucky for him, his neighbor has a good sense of humour, but he’s never lived it down and is reminded of it every time there is a neighbourhood get-together.

I’m not above making gaffes myself. I once went to a birthday party and mixed up the words regalo and regla. I arrived to the 3-year old’s birthday party with Lily and Katie, only to discover we’d left the present aboard Carina. As I sprinted down the hill I turned to the child’s mother and the three or four women she was chatting to. Instead of saying ‘I forgot the present’, I told them all ‘I forgot my period’.

My most recent major gaffe was one of misunderstanding and I sincerely hope the person I was talking to didn’t catch my gaffe. It happened about three months ago. We’d been having ongoing problems with our boiler. I’d phone the landlady, she’d phone her insurance company and they’d send a boiler repairman out. He’d fix the problem only for the boiler to stop working a few days later. This happened three or four times. During all of this, my landlady communicated with me via my next-door neighbor, who lives with her 97-year old mother and who happens to be my landlady’s cousin. It’s generally easier to communicate face-to-face in a second language than over the phone.

That morning we had the latest boiler breakdown and I phoned the landlady. I taught English that afternoon and came home, frazzled. My leg ached and I’d just had an awful hour with a bunch of 3-year olds. Lola kept sneezing out long viscous streams of disgusting snot that I had to wipe up. Irene asked to go to the toilet and when she didn’t return after 10 minutes I went to investigate. She’d done a poo but didn’t know how to wipe her bottom, so I had to do it for her. While I was busy wiping her arse all hell broke loose in the classroom. I didn’t sign up for this when I agreed to teach English to these kids.

When I arrived home, I went straight to the bedroom to change my clothes, as I always do at the end of the day. When I was half-dressed, I heard an insistent knock at the door. I hopped to the door (on my bad leg), half in-half out of my clothes. My friends and their giant puppy were standing at the door. I invited them in and said I just needed a minute to get dressed. They said they’d wait outside, on account of the dog. So, I returned to getting dressed. A moment later, there was another insistent knock on the door. ‘What do they want now?’ I wondered and opened the door again. My friends were still standing there, but they hadn’t knocked. Instead, it was a woman I recognized as someone who regularly visits my neighbor and her 97-year old mother. You’ll have to understand, I was quite wound up by now and probably in need of a strong cup of tea, so I didn’t quite take in everything the woman was saying to me. I caught the words ‘pain’, ‘doctor’, ‘4 o’clock tomorrow afternoon’. I put 2 and 2 together and came up with, erm, about three hundred and five.

With my friends and their giant puppy looking on, I put my hand on the woman’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m very sorry’. She looked at me strangely.

‘Is she in hospital or at home?’ I asked.

‘At home’, the woman said, and seemed very confused.

‘I’ll definitely be there tomorrow’, I said. ‘4 o’clock, right?’

Why was she looking at me so strangely?

‘Was she in much pain?’ I asked. ‘How’s Manoli?’ (for that is the name of my next-door neighbor).

By now the woman was looking at me so strangely, that I knew I had very seriously got the wrong end of the stick.

‘I’m sorry’, I said. ‘Can you explain all this to me again. I don’t understand’.

The woman then slowly and carefully explained that Manoli had a toothache and was in pain and didn’t want to leave the house. And she had asked this woman to convey to me that the boiler repairman would come at 4 o’clock the next afternoon.

Rather sheepishly, I thanked the woman for conveying the news. I sincerely hoped she didn’t catch my gaffe and couldn’t see the machinations of my brain as I considered what I would wear to the funeral at 4 o’clock the next day and what ingredients I had in the house to make a cake to bring around to the wake.

I really need to improve my Spanish.

Tower of Babel got a bad rap

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Those of us who live in predominantly monolingual English-speaking parts of the world are particularly poor when it comes to speaking other languages. We make excuses, such as ‘I don’t have an aptitude for languages’ or we convince ourselves that we can’t do it. The fact is, we have the luxury of speaking an international language, and that makes us lazy and scared. Our language is the majority language of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK, and an official or minority language in large parts of Africa, India, Oceania and elsewhere. In addition, many northern Europeans speak English as a second language. And let us not forget the millions of indigenous peoples worldwide who have been forced to adopt English to the detriment of their own languages. From our privileged position, we English speakers tend to view monolingualism as normal. But it is a one-sided privilege. When we travel abroad, we expect others to communicate with us in our language, without realising that our dogged monolingualism necessitates others’ bilingualism.

Far from people having or not having an aptitude for languages, bilingualism and multilingualism are the norm. South Africa, for example, has 11 official languages and recognises 8 other regional languages. I have met South Africans who can fluently speak five or six languages and have a smattering of three or four more. This is common. Papua New Guinea has over 850 indigenous languages, many from unrelated language families, and yet, the majority of Papua New Guineans are multilingual. I have friends from mainland Europe who can easily converse in Swedish, Dutch, German, English and French.

We are all born with an innate ability to speak language, but the form that language takes is moulded by our culture. There is nothing in our DNA that makes us capable of only speaking one language. One of the driving forces behind our decision to settle in Sanlúcar was our desire to give our children the opportunity to learn a second language. When we moved here, I had a poor grasp of French, an even poorer grasp of Japanese and Irish, and a smattering of Inuktitut. Julian had a similar grasp of French, Spanish and German. Neither of us were in a position (as home-schoolers at the time) to instil in our children a solid grounding in any language other than English.

The opportunity to enrol the girls in a small rural school, where they would be immersed in Spanish (Andalucian) language and culture, was not one to turn down. The girls were five and six years old when they started school and they didn’t speak a word of Spanish. They’re eight and nine now, and are pretty much fluent. Lily is equally comfortable in either language, while Katie finds it easier to read and write in Spanish.

What I didn’t anticipate when we made the decision to enrol our children in school in a small Spanish village was how multilingualism would become the norm for them. We are not the only immigrants to this beautiful part of the world. Here on the Rio Guadiana, we have friends and acquaintances from Holland, Lithuania, Germany, France, Belgium and Japan. The river separates Spain and Portugal. I’ll never forget Lily’s birthday party last year, where eight little girls ate pizza and played on the beach and between them spoke Spanish, French, Dutch and English. Their waiter was Portuguese. My children are often in the homes of their Dutch, Lithuanian or Japanese friends, immersed in the language of those homes. It’s a wonderful thing.

I’m not expecting my daughters to become fluent Lithuanian or Japanese speakers any time soon. Rather, their immersion in those environments normalises multilingualism. They become used to and comfortable with being in spaces where their language does not dominate. They accept that people change languages depending on to whom they are speaking and the topic of conversation. They understand that, when someone is speaking a language they do not understand, they are not doing so in order to exclude. And they are learning that language expresses culture and some things are not easily translatable from one language to another.

Language is a powerful and beautiful human trait. And every language opens up a new window on the world. We made a good decision when we dropped anchor in this multilingual little corner of the world.

The view from the window

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God knows, there are worse views. From high up in the village, our house looks southwest over the orange village rooftops and beyond. Below us lies the whitewashed church, perched on its own hill in the centre of the village, and beyond, up on the next hill, two picturesque windmills and the green field below where white and chestnut horses peacefully graze. I can’t see the river, but the hills of Portugal are almost within touching distance and the river runs between them and the village.

Home Feature

It’s like a scene from a Hollywood movie, a cardboard cutout of an idyllic southern European village. Imagine Mama Mia, or Chocolat, or Jeremy Irons in the final scene of Damage.

It’s just as well that it’s such a pleasant view. Since September I have been staring at that view for more time than I ever could have imagined. To coincide with moving into the house (indeed, because of moving into the house) I slipped a couple of discs in my lower back, leaving me severely incapacitated. I can’t walk very much, I can’t do most of the things I love to do. All those things that draw me to life in the village and the things that make me feel part of village life are, for the moment, out of reach. It’s a strange and unpleasant feeling to be in the village and yet not in the village.

But I have the view. Despite the picture postcard quality of the place, I know this is no cardboard cutout. Behind those pretty whitewashed walls and under those orange roof tiles there is love and laughter, joy and sorrow. And in the hills beyond, the seasons bring change, there are lambs and rock roses and wild flowers.

I am reminded of (though in no way compare myself to) Seamus Heaney’s poem Field of Vision* as I sit looking out on the view from my office desk or from the sitting room. For almost six months I have watched the seasons change, the parched sun-baked golden brown of summer giving way to the bright rain-fed greens of winter and spring. I’ve watched the sky, the bright blue empty sky, and the immense clouds sometimes bringing torrential showers of rain. These mornings I look down on fog, an inversion over the river, like steam rising from a witch’s cauldron.

The changing life of the village is harder to observe from this remove. Like those subtler changes in the landscape, one has to be in the village, rather than observing it from afar, to understand and appreciate its changing moods. I cherish those rare occasions these days, when I get out, when I feel sociable enough to be a part of village life again for an hour or two.

I long for a time when I can once again take a carefree stroll down to the bar and have a coffee or beer with whoever happens to be around, chat with my neighbours when we pass on the street, be spontaneous in my socializing. And I long to get beyond the village, to take long walks in the hills again, to be nose-to-nose with wild flowers, to row across the river in my little red dinghy and walk the smuggler’s trail in Portugal.

I am optimistic that all those things will come my way again. I expect I’ll appreciate them all the more for the months I have spent merely observing life through the frame of my front window.

*Field of Vision
Seamus Heaney

I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate —
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.