While reading foreign words the concept of association of words with a time and place in my life became more evident.  I cannot say that I connected with the author as he narrates the pain of loosing his father and how that experience served both as a catalyst as well as a filter for his perception of his experiences as the story moved along.  The connection I felt in the story was in his association of words to time and places in his life. He mentions how the same word in a different language, in his case French and Greek would mean the same thing but  to him the meaning would be different because he experienced the words at different points in his life. I could relate to this in my own experiences; when I came to this country I was fluent in Spanish. While the grammar is different in English, they do have some commonality in words. As I began to learn English I would easily see the similarity in some of the words such as doctor, invisible, local, municipal, social. But it was in the words that were not common were the connection to different points in my life became important. The word to love in Spanish is “Amar”  I can associate this word to my early childhood and to my mother, the person I would use the word the most. It was both very natural and very caring for me to say the word. Now when I learned the word in English it really held no special meaning at first since I would barely use it and if I was to use it in a meaningful way it would be in Spanish. It was in my early teens were the English version of the word began to have importance.  To love became an expression of my private preferences, the word became a tool that would help my teenage rebellion. With it I could define my self and define what others meant to me. What I loved became a private affair, to love a person became a burning desire. I did not really know love in itself was, but I wish to understand it and have more than anything else.  Even now as an adult the word invokes different emotions and different points in my life.

From the very beginning of reading Foreign Words I felt a strong connection to the book because I was able to relate to much of what he was writing about. My mother passed away one month before I became legal and a soon as I got those documents I knew I had to go back to my roots and learn as much as I could about where she grew up and where I was born. I learned a lot about myself and my mother from visiting with my cousins, who were not much younger than my mother because she was the baby of the family. They knew her very well and wanted to share everything they knew with me. I was very pleased with this because she did not talk about her family too much and when she did I was probably too young to understand or really listen. This was a very important month long adventure for me and just like Alexakis I was looking for a distraction, something new and wonderful to take my mind of things and yet something that would teach me more about myself and where I came from.

I wanted to see as much of Europe as possible and learn as much as I could, maybe even find a new place to live. I started my trip with four days in Amsterdam, which was the most beautiful city I have ever seen and probably will ever see. I then went through Belgium to France, a country I had been obsessed with all throughout high school and whose language I studied. Just like for Alexakis speaking it was so much harder for me than writing it so I was scared of communicating. Most people in France seemed to speak English but hate it so I was forced speak it and remembered much more than I thought I would. I  had a couple of days in Paris, a couple of days in Digne, and almost a week in Nice because of poor planning on my part. I then traveled through Germany to Poland and saved the best for last.

I went to as many museums as possible, relearned the French language, spoke to many different people and learned a lot about how each country viewed people from other countries including Americans. I had to tell everyone I was from New York City to avoid dirty looks and find some common ground. Everyone loves New York. The most surprising part of the trip was finding out that almost anywhere I went there was a stronger hatred for the British than there was for Americans. Apparently they travel Europe with their pounds and find cheaper places to get drunk. I was told Poland and other places put up “No British Allowed” signs because they often got too rowdy. Before I was told any of this I saw countless British people in their late teens to late twenties getting off the train in Nice half-naked, dressed like they were going to prom, often very drunk and louder and more obnoxious than I had ever seen a group of Americans be. I was pretty happy that there was a group of people more obnoxious than Americans traveling Europe. Even I could not stand how disrespectful and loud they were and I like loud people. I felt much better about being an American after hearing about the way the British are treated. After that I felt no need to immediately tell everyone I met that I was from NYC.

France had been nothing like I pictured it and I didn’t like it a much as I thought I would. When I finally got to Poland  it was also nothing like I pictured from my mother’s stories and yet I felt right at home. I learned that I was far more like my mother than I ever thought. I came from a family of mostly women, very strong willed women. My cousins were spinster sisters and that made me so happy because all my life I found spinsters to be really fascinating and brave. I was born in Lublin, where my mother was a seamstress and where they currently lived but the rural area where my mother grew up with her sisters was just a forty minute drive away and so I got to see the house she grew up in. The farm I had heard about all my life was the size of an American backyard. Most of the farms in Poland are actually quite small; they were nothing like the huge farms we have in America. When I told my cousin I pictured a bigger farm in my head they weren’t surprised because everything in America was bigger they said, the trees, the farms, the animals. It was funny but it was true America is huge. I also realized pretty quickly that my Polish was nowhere near as good as I thought it was and that I often translated English into Polish in my head rather than speaking Polish correctly. I felt like an idiot outsider but luckily everyone understood me and actually thought my Polish was very good. Everyone found it so fascinating that I lived in America and wanted to know everything. My accent was compared to that of the Polish “Gorale” or Gorals which translates to “highlanders.” These highlanders are a group of indigenous people that live in the Tatra mountains in Poland, as well as other neighboring countries. I used to perform their dances in a Polish school I attended in Greenpoint. I know Polish people love Gorale and their culture so I’m still not sure if it was good or bad that I had their accent.

Interestingly enough, and luckily for me, I found various points of connections with Alexakis’s Foreign words and my memoir paper. What connects Alexakis and I is more his experience with Sango and his journey in Bangui rather than his personal life and his quest to reinvent himself.

On one hand, there is a correlation with Haitian Creole and Sango in the sense that both languages are spoken by the population as a whole but they are banned in favor of French Language. This, clearly , is the aftermath of years of colonization. Both the people carry the  the stigmata of colonization. The struggle faced by Haitian who only speak Creole are beating. To think that people who only speak Creole are sometimes considered pariahs is very striking. Growing up, Many times the question posed by the ambassador’s wife recured in Haiti as well  :”Is Creole a real language’? this again leads us to the question what are the benchmarks to weight  a real language? It is measured by how many people who speak the language or how many books are published in Creole. The rare books published in Creole are the New Testament and some poetry by authors like Georges Castera who wants to promote the language and show its beauties. In fact to understand the Haitian culture, one must understand the people and one way to get to the people is through Creole. When I went to school, the Fables I learned was Lafontaine’s Fable. But the Creole folktales I learned  were tales counted to me at home  in “clandestinity” at night  not at school .

On the other hand, I sometimes do find myself in Alexakis’s shoes when I go back to Haiti for the holidays per example, the Haitian people do not alway consider me essentially Haitian, in creole they say ” Ayisyen natif natal” . They consider me as ‘diaspora” because I live abroad and I speak other language. In fact, it is very disturbing to see that because I speak English and French, people approach me a different way. It is very intriguing to see how language refers to status; and unfortunately in Haiti the more one strays from Creole, the more status  he or she has. Just like Marcel Alingbingo resents it when it comes to Sango, I resent that the language is being suppressed by not only French but by also English.

These are the correlations with Foreign Words and my memoir.

The way that I was able to connect with FOREIGN WORDS was the way the Alexakis connected with a completely different country and what he was able to learn about himself and his own family. During my trip to El Salvador I was able to learn a lot about my own culture and family. I was able to see things very differently and had a new appreciation about what parents have been through in order to give me a better living. On page 31 it states, “not only do the words I have already studied encourage me to keep going, so do those I don’t know yet. The objects surrounding me are a constant reminder that I still don’t know their names in Sango…..I find myself in the middle of unknown words that are constantly calling out to me.” In the same fashion that Alexakis was not able to get enough of Sango and wanted to continue to learn more, I felt the same way about El Salvador so that I could learn more about where I came from and about my family.

An important theme in Foreign Words is a search for some sort of truth.  Alexakis begins a journey with the help of Sango; a journey in which he is unsure of what he is looking for or how exactly to obtain it.  He allows the mysteries of this language to act as his guide and eventually realizes his journey relates to his family, or more specifically, to his father.  Alexakis and I relate because I too am in search of a truth.  When it comes to religion, there is a void in my life which I am unable to fill.  Most would assume I know what I’m looking for; anything to believe in, they would say; but the truth is I really have no idea.  Like Alexakis, I believe I will know it when I see it, and until then, I sort of just allow my experiences and the personal feelings they evoke lead me towards my next resting stop.