Every other Wednesday, at the unlikely venue of Bigfoot BBQ, the Italian language students meet for conversation. The air is abuzz with questions and answers: “Dov’è la cucina?” “Non lo so.” “Che cosa hai mangiato?” “Non lo so.” For those who have never set foot in Italy, as well as those whose visits number in the dozens, the exercise is the same: Learn the language of a country in order to bring curiosity and courteous conversation to a place where you are a guest. This is how we extend ourselves in friendship to others. This is how we melt borders.
There is, as you may have noticed, a fight going on in this country about borders. I am going to suggest a solution to it that does not cost billions. I am going to suggest that the cause of this internal dispute is our ignorance of culture, our lack of language, our inability to converse in Spanish or almost any other tongue besides American English and thereby know our neighbors. Our linguistic horizon is so close off the bow of the boat it appears to us the world is flat.
Europeans are generally multi-lingual. Their countries are small and in close proximity. Languages naturally leak across borders. Here in the United States we have oceans on two sides, plus Canada and Mexico. Along our northern and southern borders language and culture leak, but elsewhere, across the great middle where the overwhelming majority lives, we can and often do lead a circumscribed existence.
I grew up in New York City. My school was only blocks away from Spanish Harlem yet we did not learn Spanish. In third grade we studied French. We sat in a circle on the floor and sang Frère Jacques and made simple sentences about les chats et les chiens. By high school we were reading Camus and Molière in French and listening to Monsieur Richardson regale us every Monday with stories of le weekend. As we left the classroom he’d bid us au revoir with the words “Soyez sage, mes petites.” Be wise, be careful.
I never ventured to France, but I did go to Norway to work a summer job on a farm near Lauvstad, a beautiful little town on the steep side of a fjord. Because I assumed English was spoken at every crossroads in every hamlet of the world, it was only by chance I stuck a Norwegian-English dictionary in my pocket as I left home. I arrived to find myself linguistically marooned. I set out to learn 10 Norwegian words a day until finally I could speak a few sentences to the 3-year-old in the family. We babbled genially. Then the grandfather began to speak to me as we dug potatoes together or hung the fresh-cut hay on racks to dry. His Norwegian was rough and mumbled, and mine was stuttered baby talk, but at the end of six weeks I was able to name every food I ate and even describe the incident at Chappaquiddick. The family was fascinated by the Kennedys, and I tried to do justice to that particular piece of history. We parted as respectful friends, and I spoke my goodbyes in Norwegian.
In college I studied Italian for no particular reason except I loved the sound of it. My mother spent the early years of her life in Italy, and she and her mother spoke it as a secret language around us kids. Perhaps I wanted to crack the code. In the end I majored in Italian Studies, the history, art, language and literature of Italy. I lived in Rome for a semester and started to dream in Italian. I loved the feeling of immersion in another set of grammatical rules, the way the words rolled in the mouth and the many ways the language opened wide the doors of Italian culture. Years later, studying Navajo language and what are called “handling verbs,” I had a parallel understanding. I was teaching poetry at the time to elementary school students in Leupp and Tuba City, and my Diné students all used unusually precise adjectives in their poems. They had words for texture and size that other students couldn’t come close to. Studying the handling verbs I realized that because the ending of those verbs depends on what size, shape or texture the handled object is, Navajo speakers have to be familiar with these subtleties. They naturally identify and classify these distinctions and are able to put them into words. Language again opened the door to culture; this time an understanding and respect for the richness of the Diné culture.
When a close friend went deaf, I went to Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. and studied American Sign Language. There I learned what a formal and fast-moving language it is, highly sophisticated with strict rules of word order and other points of grammar. Much of the grammar is indicated by the features of the face. The rise and fall of eyebrows differentiates between simple yes-and-no questions and questions that begin with who, what, when, where, why or how. The space in front of the body works as a kind of stage. Deaf have a great fondness for puns and jokes, and interestingly a love of homonyms.
The care with which we address one another, the words we use and the emotion behind them, is eroding. The struggle in our country right now is between those who want to rebuild and those who want to replace; to replace careful communication with a physical structure—what we’ve come to think of as The Wall. I’m a rebuilder. I believe in language and its power to settle disagreements and change outcomes. I believe in its power to redeem. Throughout human history we have shown ourselves capable of the act of attention, and that act of attention has proven critical to our survival.
I believe we can rebuild our botched relationship to the south, to Mexico, and here’s the less-than-billion-dollar solution: teach Spanish. To all Americans. Teach the culture of Mexico. And on the northern border, where French-speaking Canada rubs up against the United States, just in case relationships take a turn for the worse, teach French. Encourage groups like those hardy students of Italian who enter the fragrant Bigfoot cave on Wednesdays, bringing with them their misgivings, their social anxiety, their embarrassments of pronunciation. After a few minutes the air is filled with the rolling sounds of a language that was once, perhaps, the secret language of mothers and grandmothers, but is now the territory of the intrepid.
