So, it has been a while since I've written anything on here. Admittedly this year has been a little rough on me. Not that I am burnt out entirely, but after switching classes this year and completing a second "first year" in a row....blogging about it is the last thing I want to do. Still, I find myself drawn to doing it at times, but it feels overwhelming when it has been a long time since my last post. I've decided to go ahead and tell you what is on my mind now, and then later backtrack to tell you about the last few months. Seeing as how this Monday will be my last day of coaching basketball for the season, I anticipate a lot more blog posts in the future.
I've had some odd experiences recently. I wrote on twitter the other day about one of them: "Subbing for a class with Americans, Italians, Koreans, and Turks watching a Japanese cartoon in Spanish with English subtitles." This morning I came to school where the Korean families spend Saturdays training their children in Korean, an impressive display of discipline on both sides. The Korean families seek to acclimate their children to Turkish culture and learn learn English (a requirement for our school), but also to keep their own Korean culture and customs in the forefront of their children's minds. I come in on most Saturdays to do some work and always speak to a group of Korean fathers in broken Turkish. We speak in Turkish because that language is syntactically and grammatically similar to Korean. Many Koreans and Americans choose to converse in Turkish since it is the strongest "common tongue". Then, I ran into the mother of one of my students. She is an Iranian "refugee" in a sense, coming to Turkey to allow their child a chance at learning outside the religious conservative dominating the Iranian political state. This mother of my student (who is brilliant and has learned English incredibly fast) doesn't speak English, as they speak Farsi in their home. However, she and I studied French in college and so we have an odd relationship here, where we might be the only two people in all of Turkey forced to speak French in order to communicate (other than the French expats or those doing business in the French embassy). I gave her some directions, we both laughed that our French accents were an abomination to such a beautiful language, and went our separate ways.
In French there is a common idiom that might describe this situation: "C'est la vie". An approximate translation is "that's life" or "this is life" which speaks of a somewhat frustrated experience that you can't change. In a way this is similar to Vonnegut's "So it goes", the repeated refrain from Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse-Five, which is notable not only for its unique wording but also for how much emotion—and dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. This may the perspective and translation I would have used for "C'st la vie" when I first moved here. Speaking in other languages is often difficult, and makes your brain ache. It is inconvenient and frustrating, pointing you to your own intellectual ineptitude more than anything else that I have ever experienced. Often here, I have experiences where cultural differences or language frustrations make me want to put my fist through a wall, or just go into the woods and yell my lungs out until I have all of my frustration our of my system. I had one of these this week when our internet went out, and after I walking to school so that I could get online and translate the Turkish error message - I find out that the English version of the help website is in Turkish.
And still, despite these frustrations, I see these things as a "slice" of heaven. A heaven on Earth in which we live in a society in which people don't care about skin color and nation, and concern themselves with loving others. This is something I've wanted and observed living in the American south, a place steeped with a frustrated and frustrating relationship and history with race. This is something that is close to my heart, as my family is multi-racial. I want to see the broken things mended. I want to see the good things that have been "bent" by the world made straight. I want to see our differences not define us as humans, but an allowance of defining differences to be celebrated at the same time. Still, I have become completely accustomed to the beautiful sounds of numerous languages going off simultaneously in one room. Where this cacophony of sound used to be agonizing and confusing, sounding like rush hour traffic - it now sounds like musical harmony, where each language is a note or tone that does not clash, but rather achieves a beautiful synthesis where each is making the other more beautiful. I love seeing people of numerous ethnicities every day, and watching them appreciatively interact with one another. It is a portrait of redemption.
In my American Literature class we have been studying the Harlem Renaissance. It's great since my kids can potentially identify with some of the themes of this unity: a frustrated identity, a problem of place, the attempt to identify the self through art. And still, understanding the period and the perspective of these black, early 20th century writers necessitates an understanding of the racial history and racial intolerance that has defined America in so many ways. It is nuanced, while also being fairly plain in some ways. Due to the numerous races in that class, I figured they would latch on to these ideas quickly. And yet, they looked back at me with blank stares as I tried to explain the racial intolerance towards black people at the time. They simply didn't get it. Sensing my frustration, a student of mine raised her hand and said "I mean, I get that they were slaves. I get that it was wrong, and I can't really understand that it was ever possible. This [ed - the 1920s] is like, 75 years after that - and right now is like 75 years after that. How are people still this confused that we are all the same? I just don't get it." I stepped back, and realized that my class was somewhat despairing. They couldn't wrap their minds around the systematic injustices I was speaking of. They are so post-race that they actually have difficultly entering an understanding in which people are treated differently based on ethnicity. I realized the irony, that this girl that "doesn't get it" might one of the few who gets it in a redemptive and eternal sense.
My class read Langston Hughes, who in his poem "The Trumpet Player", portrays a man who with a trumpet pressed to his lips, stands before a bar and channels a history of hatred towards black people into something beautiful. It is the substance and inspiration for his art, jazz. And all this brokenness is re-contextualized, coming out as gorgeous (I'd go as far as to say redemptive): "trouble mellows to a golden note".
Like my view of language here, once frustrated and irresolute, something amazing is created. A "harmony" representative of numerous nations, creeds, tongues, and perspectives informing and potentially sanctifying one another - out of brokenness redemption is forged. And so, I see that my view of "C'est la vie" has changed here. "This is life" now means that a portrait of goodness has been painted for me that I cannot shake. I need this racial synthesis in my life forever. It is a portrayal of active redemption on earth and a preview of heaven.
