I'm currently trying to prove that Britannicus was not allergic to horses, or at least that there is no evidence that suggests he was and I'm having some issues (AHHHHHHHHHH)

Over-Dubbed:

How to Lose a German Character by Making them Speak German

(I've never posted on Tumblr before, and this essay is longer than I intended. Hopefully the formatting works okay.)

Getting lost in the translation

When people say something was “lost in translation,” they are speaking of incorrectly or incompletely rendered meaning—a joke that doesn’t land, a pun that doesn’t work, a reference no one knows. But there is another kind of loss. The paradoxical loss that occurs when a translation creates meaning from incomprehensibility.

I went to see Anatomy of a Fall last week on a whim, in a German theater, in Germany, where I live. I didn’t know anything about it going in except that it was about a murder case and had won awards. And I will confess, I grew nervous when I saw the wall of French text that precedes the film. It was unsubtitled, which I thought was a bad sign. And it was, just not in the way I anticipated. Soon a voice started speaking German and I relaxed. For a while.

Now first, let me say that the dubbing was excellent. Germany has a long-established dubbing industry and the translators, voice actors, sound mixers, et al. are good at their craft. Side note: Let me also thank the German marketing department for recognizing what a gift they had in the title translation (Anatomie des Falls) and letting it stand. There always seems to be a strong urge in German cinema to tack on a superfluous secondary title. The film could have easily ended up called Anatomie des Falls: Tot in den Alpen.* The voice actor for Sandra, the main character, does a wonderful job—she is calm, she is desperate, she is sometimes enraged. She stumbles and hesitates and sometimes seems to search for words, and the sounds of the hesitation markers are well-timed to the visuals. At no point did I feel—as I often do when watching German dubs—that the actors were struggling to get all the syllables out in the time it took the original actor to say the same thing in their language. But there is also another reason the voice actor does such a great job.

*You should also be proud of me for not titling this essay "Anatomy of a Fail"

If you have seen this film or read about it, or if you are aware of the main actor, Sandra Hüller, you will know that she is German. She’s dubbing herself. I did not know who she was, and so I began the film assuming she was French and so was her character. Not long into the movie, however, I began to feel like I was missing something. Something more than the usual flattening of character that takes place when actors with various regional accents and speaking patterns are all dubbed into flawless Hochdeutsch. It took me a while to pin down what was going on. It wasn’t until midway through the film, when Sandra looks over at a court interpreter before she starts speaking, that I realized that all of this immaculately overdubbed German was masking something important: Not everyone in this movie speaks the same language.

The film gives you a few clues in the dialogue that point to her being a foreigner, but they are easy to miss. And why not? To anyone listening to the original voices, it’s abundantly clear. Possibly there is some crucial information in the opening conversation between Sandra and an interviewer, but I couldn’t hear most of it over the booming music that is the real point of the scene. At one point in the film, she mentions that she had been happier living in London with her husband. She also says something about “starting in a little German village and ending up in a little French village.” She surely wasn’t speaking German, though, because that’s what I was hearing and her mouth didn’t match. So I figured she was probably English.

If you aren’t an experienced lip reader—and I’m not—it’s not easy to pick out what language someone is speaking underneath a dub. You have to translate backwards in your head very quickly, try and get slightly ahead of the script, and then watch to see whether the person’s mouth matches the words you think they ought to be saying. I definitely missed some visual details in the courtroom (apparently they had a big tapestry of Justice in there?) because I was staring intently at Sandra’s mouth. 

But eventually I was able to determine she was speaking English. Okay, I thought. Presumably she’s from England and prefers to speak her first language in a courtroom. Understandable. So would I. I must have misunderstood the line about Germany. Perhaps that line was changed in the dub script to reduce cognitive dissonance, since everyone listening would be hearing her speak perfect, accent-free German, the same as every other character.

This mystery solved, I moved on to the next: When is she speaking English? In court, obviously, but how about at home? Is she speaking English to her lawyer, who’s clearly an old friend? To her son? Did she and her husband communicate in English? Reader, I couldn’t tell. For one thing, it’s distracting and exhausting to spend the whole 2 ½ hours reverse-engineering English dialogue in real time (there’s a reason I’m a translator, not an interpreter), and for another, much of the dialogue between Sandra and her husband is reported speech, recreated through re-enactments, retellings, and audio recordings. There was no way to know how many layers of translation were involved.

Translation as theme

I’d like to pause for a moment (and I will!) to discuss some of the themes of the movie. If you haven’t seen it, don’t worry—I won’t spoil the ending. Sandra is accused of murdering her husband after their mostly-blind son finds him dead in the snow outside their home in the Alps. The film follows the investigation and trial, slowly revealing the secrets, struggles, and private grudges of the household. Sandra and her husband are/were both writers—one more successful than the other. They live in the village of his childhood. They argue about normal things: angst, guilt, feelings of inadequacy, who has sacrificed the most, what’s best for their child. At one point Sandra’s husband accuses her of stealing his ideas for her books.

In court, Sandra is tasked with interpreting these arguments for a hostile audience. A great deal of the runtime is spent clarifying feelings, relationships, moods, tones of voice, volume levels, et cetera. The media following the trial seem to find her interesting, but largely unsympathetic. In a flashback, her husband points out that she rarely smiles. Did she kill him? The film stubbornly refuses the audience access to unmediated facts. Even when we know there is more evidence, we have to wait to find out from an analyst in court like everyone else.

So: this is a film about translation. How do we translate observations into evidence? How do we translate our private lives for an audience? If you’ll permit me to wear my nerdiest of translator hats: In essence, all communication is translation. When you speak to someone, you are translating your thoughts into a new medium—spoken words—and hoping the listener will succeed in translating these words into thoughts that approximate yours. The fact that this is an imperfect process is evidenced by all the ways we misunderstand each other. Every layer of mediation results in a slightly altered reality. This is a crucial and often misunderstood aspect of translation: the translator’s job is not to recreate the same words in a new language or medium, it’s to recreate, as much as possible, the same effect upon the audience. That’s why your favorite foreign songs sound lame when you throw the lyrics into Google Translate: Only a fraction of a song’s power lies in the literal meaning of the words. When translated as prose, they turn into rhythmless husks.

Pass the language, it’s my turn

If you ever played the game “telephone” as a kid, you know how hard it is to send a simple message around a room in one language. Sending a message through multiple languages is what’s known as “relay translation,” and while it is sometimes necessary, it is never ideal. Have you ever amused yourself by putting the same text through a translation machine a dozen times? Professional human translators are better than machines, but there’s only so long you can stretch a chain of translation before the ends start to look very different.

When Sandra, who, by the way, is explicitly a translator—it’s stated in the film that she earns extra income through translation, although she does not say which languages she works in—has to explain her arguments with her husband in court, she is translating not only her own thoughts, but also what she believes his thoughts to have been. This is then translated again through the court interpreter, and then AGAIN, separately, in the dubbing process. (For simplicity’s sake, we’ll skip all the additional translation layers external to the film: writing the script, reading the script, acting, voice acting, filming, editing, the medium through which the film is played, etc.) The chain of translation, as I understood it while watching, looks like this:

Diagram 1: Translation chains*

Before you think I’m here to condemn dubbing as a practice, the chain for an audience reading subtitles would be just as long. That’s just what happens when a film reaches international audiences.The reason I’m illustrating the different routes meaning must travel to reach these audiences is because language does not exist in a vacuum. Our interpretations of words depend heavily on context. You may be wondering why I’ve included the court’s thoughts in this diagram. Well, the knowledge that the court is hearing Sandra’s words through an interpreter informs the way you listen to her. A French-speaking audience is aware that some of the people in this film are hearing Sandra differently, but they themselves are forced to interpret her through the medium of a language they may not speak fluently or at all.**

*Since we are shown Sandra speaking, I assume this split trajectory is present in both the undubbed and dubbed versions—that the audience hears her words rather than the court interpreter’s. In case you were wondering, if I tried to explain the husband’s motivations to you, you would be Audience C, three more steps and another language shift down from Audience B.

**I would be interested to know whether Sandra gets subtitled when this film plays to francophone audiences. I found one French review complaining that she wasn’t, but I don’t read enough French to search adequately.  

Context is everything

Imagine for a moment you are walking down the street in some American small town and you pass a clothing store with t-shirts hanging in the window. Each features a design and a phrase, and all the phrases are nonsensical. The context of this store tells you this is on purpose—this store markets to people who enjoy the absurd. You may read the shirts, laugh, take a picture. Lol, look at this: [photo of shirt with an image of a ghost and the words “bump of chicken”]. You would then carry on with your day. Now imagine you walk past this same store in Japan. You could of course react the same way—Japan is equally capable of absurd humor—but now another option presents itself. After a few moments spent pondering the chicken shirt, it clicks: Goosebumps. Not an attempt at absurd humor but a casualty of mistranslation. The shirt has not changed; it is the context that prompts you to read deeper. Awareness of translation affects its interpretation.

It’s time for my grand reveal that is not a reveal to anyone familiar with the movie or who read the title of this essay: Sandra the character is not English. The line about the village was not changed—like the actor, the character really is German. I discovered this because I looked up the film during the bus ride home from the theater, not because I was able to tell at any point while watching it. What does this mean? It means this is a film about translation in which the main character is German, her husband is French, and she communicates in English both with him and with the court. Remember when I said there’s another reason the voice actor is so good here? It’s Sandra Hüller—she’s dubbing herself.

If we return to our chart, Audience B is aware that they are watching a French film. This means, when interpreting the plot, they can take it as presented in German, or try to put themselves in the shoes of Audience A and interpret it as they believe a French audience would. However, without the benefit of hearing Sandra and her husband speak, this is a difficult task.

Diagram 2: Audience A as imagined by Audience B

Depending on which languages you assume each person speaks, this chain may be as simple as French-French-French-French-French-German, as complicated as French-English-German-English-French-German, or anywhere in between. I believe Sandra’s careful deliberation of her words is meant to add ambiguity to her character. Is she simply struggling to explain her relationship, or is she using the time to come up with lies? By having her speak a language foreign to both her and the audience, the filmmakers make the situation even harder to judge. Audience A is hearing her speak English with a German accent, a constant reminder of all these layers of mediation. Audience B is hearing her speak German with a German accent, the same as every other character.

Hey, you dropped your accent

When I say “the same as every other character,” I mean that not only is everyone in the German dub speaking German (obviously), no one has an accent. Or rather, they all have the same accent, which amounts to the same thing. Accents and other dialectical features tell us a lot more than simply whether or not someone is foreign. In fact, they tell us more when the person is not foreign, because we are more attuned to minute differences in our own native language and dialect. Often, the first few words out of a character’s mouth tells us not only where they grew up, but also their social class, how they view themselves in relation to the person they’re talking to, and how they wish to be perceived: Are they trying to sound more or less educated than they are? Are they putting on a particular accent to blend in? Does their way of speaking gel with our expectations based on their physical appearance? Is it supposed to? Can we the audience even understand what they’re saying? Is their incomprehensibility meant to be funny or tragic?

When dubbing over a performance, we must return to our question of effect: To what extent can we replicate the effect of these dialectical markers on the new target audience? This is obviously a difficult task, and would necessitate looking critically at stereotypes and prejudices both at home and abroad. But I would respect the German film industry a lot more if they would even make an attempt.

Again, this is not a condemnation of dubbing as a practice. In fact, dubbing creates an opportunity here that is not present when subtitling. We cannot expect a foreign audience to pick up on dialectical cues in a language they do not speak, but we can replace them with similarly-weighted cues in their own language when those exist. German voice actors sometimes put on silly voices or use odd inflections to spice up a performance, but there is a stubborn resistance to using regional accents and dialects. Which is a shame. Like any language that evolved across a wide area for hundreds of years, German is secretly 47 languages in a trenchcoat, pretending to be the same thing for the purposes of national identity. Imagine if, in every British movie, all the actors were forced to speak in BBC English regardless of who they were and where they were from. Imagine if Jack Sparrow, Oliver Twist, Tony Soprano, and the cast of Bridgerton all sounded like they went to the same high school. How much of their identity would be lost? All of these characters are native English speakers. And none of their stories are about them struggling to defend themselves before a court in a foreign country.

As always, it comes back to effect. Not every character needs a regional accent. But sometimes their regional accent is important, and their actions and relationships make less sense without it. Many of the same associations exist internally between various German accents as exist among speakers of different types of English or French or Arabic. It doesn’t have to be a 1:1 equivalency. But why not make the effort to convey something? Am I saying all Texans in German dubs should have Bavarian accents? Yes.

So what?

I want to head off some criticism from people who will say I’m reading far too much into this, that no one is thinking about chains of translation while watching a movie about a murder trial, that dubbing is such a long-established practice in Germany that most Germans are hardly aware of it and consume films as if they were written and filmed in German. Perhaps. But this is also a problem. Not necessarily for all films—that’s a matter of taste—but certainly for this one.  I read every non-professional German review I could find, and not one of them mentioned that German actor Sandra Hüller speaks English throughout this entire film. Three people did suggest it was better to watch it undubbed. Everyone else, even those who praised the film’s dialogue, did so without any acknowledgment that the film is bilingual. One German reviewer on Amazon seems to think this is a German film.

As I write this, Anatomy of a Fall has 4 stars on Amazon.com, 4.1 on Amazon.fr, and 3.8 on Amazon.de. Many of the German reviews there and elsewhere complain that the movie is boring. And why not? It’s slow-paced to begin with, and then, chances are they were only allowed to hear half the story. And how ironic is it that Hüller’s primary performance as a German actor playing a German character is inaudible in German theaters? Give the woman some more awards—she had to make this movie twice.

Germans’ over-reliance on dubbing accidentally erased the German identity of a character. If everything is always dubbed, a film could contain half a dozen languages and you wouldn’t even know. It’s easy to assume that underneath the German lies another monolingual script. Maybe you’ll wonder why, in a brief scene, Sandra’s son is making her repeat nonsensical phrases. To be honest, I feel the translation is partly at fault in this scene. I don’t remember the German phrases emphasizing any particular phoneme. I think it was nonsensical French for the purposes of speaking practice translated into nonsensical German for the purposes of nothing. This is a classic example of meaning-based rather than effect-based translation.*

*This is another difficult case, since normally you could focus on a particular German phoneme that is difficult for non-native speakers, such as /ü/. However, since Sandra is supposed to be German, we run into a recursive translation problem where, in order for the scene to make sense on its face level (Sandra is practicing her accent), it has to be illogical on another (Sandra is practicing her accent in her native language). Any solution is going to be imperfect, but I’d argue that it’s more important to understand what is going on in the scene.

Other ways this could have been handled

The obvious solution

Subtitle everything. This is an obvious answer, but not my favorite. For one thing, it risks driving away much of its potential German audience, who are used to dubs and generally prefer them to subtitles. For another, it implies that dubs are inherently inferior, which I do not believe is the case. They are both important translating tools and have different strengths and weaknesses.

My favorite solution

Dub the French parts, but leave the English parts in English and subtitle those. This is my favorite option. Why limit yourself to one tool? It doesn’t shorten the chain in Diagram 1, but it brings audiences A and B closer together by clarifying Diagram 2. Plus, are we to believe that German audiences are any less capable than French audiences of handling a bit of English?

The one I would love to see that will never happen

Dub everyone, but give all the other characters French accents. I think this is often considered hokey, but I personally love it. If I can’t hear the original language itself, at least give me some of its flavor.

Coming soon: A (hopefully shorter) post wherein I complain about subtitling practices

Heritage

I oppose Folkism. I understand Folkism to represent a very ugly parody of the pre-Christian religions that neopagans have been working to revive. I understand neopagan paths to be open. When the old gods call Black or Asian followers, we should let those people answer the gods’ calls.

The reason why I made those statements up-front is that I’m about to delve into a topic whose discussion will require much nuance. I’ve made an effort to write this in such a way as to keep my intentions consistently clear. However, there could still be a possibility of taking many of the following statements out of context, whether by Folkists wanting validation, mainstream people who don’t know much about neopaganism, or Christian-Right propagandists. I’m about to discuss old spiritual heritages of people of European descent.

I may need to touch upon what Folkism is before going on with that discussion. Folkism, in the most basic sense, is the notion that certain old European practices and religions are the sole provinces of their associated cultural groups, whether Celtic or Slavic or, most notoriously, Germanic. It derives from the Volkisch movement which purported to revive Germanic traditions and the people’s connections to their lands. The Thule Society, in particular, laid the groundwork for Nazism. The Nazi regime retained the occultic influences—though I should note they weren’t the dominant strain and the party rose to power by appealing first and foremost to Christian culture (which is yet another historical fact that raises hard questions of what Christianity looks like in the real world).

Today’s adherents of Folkism exploit the discourse around cultural appropriation, though in a mendacious and vulgarized form. Sometimes well-meaning allies do unintentionally vulgarize said discourse as well. One part of appropriation is swiping elements of other people’s cultures willy-nilly—though there are two other key aspects that should be kept in mind. First is the fact that elements of cultures are often taken with little acknowledgement of or gratitude towards the originators. More importantly, there is a context of colonization, marginalization, and erasure.

Even if you haven’t followed me for a while or read my journal entries before, you may be aware of the elements of Asian, African, Native American, and even Jewish spiritualities within the New Age movement. It’s quite clear that a number of people, disenchanted with historic Christian culture for any number of reasons (including extremely serious ones), look elsewhere to find genuine spirituality. Actually, those trends were also present in Europe during the peak of modern imperialism in the nineteenth century, evidently influencing today’s New Age movement.

To my understanding, Buddhists and Hindus are very willing to share elements of their spiritualties—but too often those elements are half-understood, ripped out of context, and watered down anyway. Native Americans have seen their spiritual practices outlawed until fairly recently, which is why they resent those practices being commercialized or taught outside the proper contexts. The Jewish people have faced persecution for many centuries and similarly seen their mysticism suppressed—and they resent mangled or incomplete versions of Kabbalah floating around metaphysical circles.

You may recall the interest that I actually once had in Kabbalah. I did genuinely want to learn from the Jewish people. I had abandoned Catholicism and wanted to learn from its Jewish roots (though I probably underestimated how far Christianity deviated). I was actually ready to start delving more deeply into Kabbalah after reading introductory texts of admittedly varying degrees of quality. I was under the mistaken impression that Kabbalah was now being opened up (though in fact Kabbalah is still considered a closed practice, due mainly to requiring an intensive grounding in Jewish scripture and practice). However, some Jewish users on Tumblr and PillowFort convinced me to rethink my interest. I soon decided that Judaism in general wasn’t for me, much less Jewish mysticism. I didn’t think I could even devote myself to the religious law (however different movements within Judaism interpreted it).

I also had some interest in my own Northern European heritage. That is part of what led me to examine Heathenry in more detail. What finally led me to devote myself to the Heathen path was animism, or a relationship with nature as well as the spirits within and the very powers of life. Sometimes, spiritual practitioners of color heartily exhort white seekers to look into their own ethnic heritages to find their own gods, medicines, rites, and modalities. What ultimately prompted this essay is a video from a healer who goes by “heart of Hamsa” on Instagram; they (I’m using the apparent preferred pronoun) are of Vietnamese and French descent.

They speak of the need for greater respect towards and gratitude for Asian practices. They speak of how they delved into their own heritage. They touch upon the distinctions among cultures and peoples—most certainly not in any exclusionary or purist sense, but in the sense of deepened understanding and appreciation. They speak of a need to give back to the peoples who inspire us, especially in light of colonization, with Vietnam as a prominent example that they cite.

Hamsa goes on to speak of white people who are ashamed or fragile (often understandably, giving rise to the “white guilt” that neo-Nazis maliciously mock) and chase after what they view exotic and foreign, only to fail to do justice to reiki and ayahuasca and the like. They essentially ask people to restart by looking into their own ancestors and uncovering histories. They exhort viewers to set roots and share their own inheritances before looking outside, much less making smorgasbords. Basically, Hamsa asks people to remember who they are and be themselves first and foremost.

How does that apply to a man of Northern European descent born on a land that was stolen from indigenous people? Occasional tweeters will remark that white people have no culture except for banal capitalism and arrogant colonization. Irish, Italian, and German immigrants eventually assimilated into the hegemonic American culture after facing their share of prejudice (my father’s family actually used to be named Koch before becoming Cook during the First World War). The old Christendom may have initially been a union of different Christianized peoples, but at some point (I can’t say exactly when) it became a more-or-less homogenized bloc of Christian colonizers. If even the Irish faced domination at the hands of Englishmen, the Christian European powers were sure to dominate other peoples in worse ways.

Hamsa does speak of “blood” and “bloodline”, which admittedly can raise hackles for good reason. Folkish neopagans also speak of “blood” as in “blood and soil”. Obviously, as you can see from the above context, Hamsa is using “blood” in a subtly though crucially different way. Perhaps, then, Folkism is a distortion of a truth—that truth being a rootedness in personal bloodline and heritage. The kind of “meta-genetics” that people like Stephen McNallen and Stephen Flowers promote is indeed Nazi-leaning bunk—otherwise, learning about the pre-Christian past would not be so difficult or involve so much ambiguity and guesswork. I can accept that white supremacy has influenced the pagan revival to some extent, particularly in its early stages. Did the original Volkisch movement deal with the trauma of enforced Christianization (and the later rise of an increasingly ruthless capitalism) in a very unhealthy way? I don’t have enough historical education to really answer that.

In any case, I’m very pleased to see neopagans seriously work on disentangling that influence. Improved historical scholarship in recent times has been a blessing. Perhaps European-Americans who take the time to learn from such scholarship as well as experienced practitioners might find many boons. It’s possible that the old gods of Northern Europe called me back into their embrace. Indeed, as I began to seriously consider training myself to be a magician working with Odin and Freya, I began to get a sense of a homecoming. My Scandinavian, German blood, and Anglo-Saxon bloodlines ultimately aren’t major factors, but they still are factors in a homecoming. While figuring out a spiritual path, I increasingly wanted to work with divine power as a magician—it turned out that I wouldn’t do so through Kabbalah but through animistic Heathenry.

The question of what a settler is supposed to do among the many settler communities on a continent stolen from its original inhabitants remains. I most certainly have a responsibility to those who lack what privileges I have. I hope to find stronger opportunities to aid the indigenous communities, especially those within the Great Lakes, the region of Turtle Island where I live. For that matter, I hope to find stronger opportunities to aid other communities.

In general, I understand a need to participate in the work of decolonization in some manner. I understand a need to take part in breaking down what has become whiteness. Those who think that they are being broad-minded in taking from so many cultures (and I would have also thought so even a few years ago), it seems, unintentionally contribute to colonization and white privilege. Maybe I will start learning from other peoples after gaining a very firm grounding in a revived Germanic magic, though maybe they will tell me to keep up with that. There are indeed many different paths for people to take to the divine. Some of them are closed (or at least require formal initiation) for very good reasons. Kabbalists and Jewish mages deny that Judaism is for everyone—they might speak of other gods who call to their peoples while the presence of the supreme Godhead remains with the gentiles. People like Hamsa speak of honoring and reinvigorating diversity among the human shards of divinity within today’s world. Thus, demagogues who fearmonger over the One World Religion for the New World Order show themselves to be paranoid fools. There certainly isn’t a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world!

I will take my time in building relations with Freya and Odin, contemplating the runes, training myself to connect to Yggdrasil, and looking forward to meeting elves and various ancestors who have walked my path before. I hope to be of great service as a Germanic magician among the Great Lakes. I also wish to gradually build up stories of diverse people seeking truth, goodness, beauty, joy, and spirituality as a novelist (and possible comic artist). I struggle with lethargy and a troubled heart, but I do believe that I have a calling. You are all welcome to support me and, perhaps better, find your own mystic paths.

On Japanese Loanwords in Okinawan

In my article on the different philosophies in learning Okinawan, I’ve touched up on the relatively low amount of Okinawan vocabulary and the language’s need for loanwords. I intend to get into more detail on this here. I was hoping for this article to be more structured, but it ended up being much more of a stream-of-consciousness venting of frustrations. And you know what? It’s a cluster of thoughts I think are worth sharing.

The Okinawan Language Dictionary is the preeminent and most definitive lexicon of the Okinawan language. The OLD lists 14,549 words in the Okinawan language. This is an incredibly low count, especially when you consider the (admittedly ranging) vocabulary count of other languages with English coming in with 350,000 words, the influential Chinese coming in at around 370,000 words, and Okinawan’s own relative Japanese ranging at around 500,000 words.

What this means is that to have even a basic conversation in Okinawan, you will need loanwords. The Okinawan language is without words that, while not so significant during Okinawa’s relative isolation from the rest of the world, are crucial to today’s society. Okinawan lacks words for the days of the week, any number larger than ten (up until one thousand), animals not native to Okinawa, most countries, inventions after, say, the 16th century, and, as far as I can tell, how to tell the exact time (if you look up the Japanese phrase “何時/nanji/What time?” in the Okinawan Language Dictionary, it redirects you to the Okinawan word “いち/ichi” which is the cognate with the much more vaguer Japanese word “いつ/itsu/When”). And so on.

And, obviously, that’s not to say modern Okinawans are unfamiliar with these concepts. Most (and, frankly, likely all) Okinawans speak the Japanese language natively, more so than the Okinawan language. Native Okinawan speakers still speak or at the very least can understand the Japanese language. There are so many concepts that they are used to doing in Japanese that can make conversation in pure Okinawan difficult if not impossible without switching to the Okinawan dialect of Japanese.

So, it’s only natural that when Okinawan doesn’t have a word, you loan the word you’re looking for from Japanese, even if that word is in and of itself loaned from another language like Chinese, English, or Portuguese. But then that raises the question of how do you loan a word from Japanese?

In European languages like English, words are loaned from other languages pretty much how they are. German terms used in the psychology field or French words in many more contexts come to mind. They can even be pronounced with their native German or French pronunciations though they often take on a form closer to the English pronunciation system. Anything is fine thanks to the versatility and wiggle room for interpretation in the alphabet.

East Asian languages tend to be different. When Chinese, Korean, or Japanese loans a word, these words must fit the stricter and often unique pronunciation systems and writing scripts of these languages. Korean uses a phonetic system that the loan word needs to fit into. Chinese breaks down the sounds of the loaned word and prescribes certain characters with similar sounds to it. Japanese has a whole writing script devoted to foreign loan words in the form of katakana but it still follows a phonetic system that the loan word must fit into. Things can get more complicated when the three mentioned languages loan words from each other in which the loaned word is less of a breakdown of the word’s native pronunciation to fit the loaning language’s system and more of a loaning language’s reading of the Chinese characters used to write the loaned word. The Chinese word for China is Zhongguo but the Japanese word for China isn’t ジョンググオ/jonguguo, but 中国/chuugoku as the characters for zhongguo are read that way in Japanese.

So relating that back to Okinawan, when Okinawan loans a word from Japanese, do we: A) Take the Japanese word and alter the phonetics to meet the Okinawan phonetic system OR B) Take the Japanese word as it is, complete with bringing over the Japanese phonetic system for that word.

I wish I had an answer for you. In fact, this very question has been one of the greatest hurdles in me learning Okinawan as the answer appears to be both.

Take the word 琉球 for example. It originated as a Chinese word, liuqiu. When the word was brought to Japanese, 琉球 had to match the Japanese phonetic system so it shifted into ryuukyuu. When the word was then brought from Japan to Okinawa, it had to meet the Okinawan phonetic system and so it was read as ruuchuu in Okinawan.  

But meanwhile, we have the Japanese word 新型コロナウイルス/shingata korona uirusu, the term most often used to refer to the COVID-19 virus. 新型 literally means “new form.” While there is no equivalent for 新型 listed in the OLD, 型 is used in the Okinawan language and it can be read as gata in the same context as Japanese. 新, on the other hand, is a different story as it is never pronounced as shin in the OLD. Instead, 新 is given the reading of mii in the Okinawan language for the same context as when it is pronounced shin in Japanese. Could we loan the word 新型 into Okinawan? If so, would it be read as shingata or would it be read as miigata?

Well, the COVID-19 virus is, as you can imagine, a pretty big deal and is being spoken about in several Okinawan sources including the Hougen News broadcast as well as on blogs in the Okinawan language. The ゆんたく物語 blog calls it 新コロナウイルス/mii korona uirusu. This is interesting as it does not loan 新型. Rather, it simply uses the prefex version of “new”, 新 with the Okinawan reading. Instead of saying “the new form of coronavirus,” it’s saying “the new coronavirus” He was able to talk around the word that would have been loaned which is an important lesson to learn — You can avoid the loanword oddities if you talk around the word you need to loan.

However, the Hougen News Broadcast simply loans the term from Japanese, Japanese reading and all. Hougen News Broadcast says 新型コロナウイルス/shingata korona uirusu even in the context of the Okinawan language.

Can you hear my head blowing up in confusion?

To use another example from ゆんたく物語, the blog translates the Japanese phrase “同じ価値観/onaji kachikan/Same sense of values” into “同ぬ考え/I nu kangee/Same thinking.” Is having the same sense of values the same thing as having the same way of thinking? It is interesting that, despite Okinawan being so strongly related to Japanese, the amount of abstract thinking and vocabulary required to translate sentences is much higher than you would think.

Of course, unless you take the other approach of loanwords like how Hougen News used 新型コロナウイルス. Modern day Okinawan and Japanese share a special relationship where everyone who speaks Okinawan also speaks Japanese and Japanese is more comprehensive in nearly every scenario. The number of loanwords you can take from Japanese without even changing the pronunciation is impressive but then you get the question of how many loanwords can you use before you’re just talking Japanese with Okinawan grammar?

Meanwhile, we have the textbook 沖縄語の入門. Like I said before, there are no words for the day of the week listed in the OLD. However, 沖縄語の入門 loans the word “土曜日/doyoubi/Saturday” from Japanese and changes the reading of the characters to be duyuubi.

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?

沖縄語の入門 is pretty much the most reliable text for modern day Okinawan so I’m not keen on handwaving this away as a mistake. But it makes me wonder what the other days of the week are. Is it Getsuyuubi (or does the tsu change to a chi or a ti or something?), Kayuubi, Suiyuubi, Mukuyuubi, Kinyuubi, and Nichiyuubi or am I missing something?

Although, that being said, 沖縄語の入門 does use the wrong words for “11, 12, 13” and so on. It uses the Okinawan words “tuutiichu, tuutaachi, tuumiichi” and so on when they should be “juuichi, juuni, juusan”, etc. Multiple texts and native speakers corroborate that the counting system from 11 onwards (until 1,000) is identical to Japanese. Is duyuubi another one of these mistakes? Hougen News uses doyoubi from Japanese. I think. It can be really hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Things like this have been what’s been keeping me from updating this blog in a while as I’m having a hard time finding out when its appropriate to use a loanword and when it is not, as well as when the loanword keeps its Japanese pronunciation and when it receives and Okinawanization.

Desperate venting of confusion over.

Only three days left until the big EU wide protests against the new copyright reform on the 23rd of March!

Please continue sharing the petition and the demonstration date! We already reached almost 5 million people to sign the petition and ten thousands of people already openly protested out in the streets!

This is more than just a fight for free speech and against uploadfilter.

We are fighting for our understanding of democracy!

We are fighting for our view of the European Union!

We are fighting so our generation and all the ones to come after us can grow up with an internet that is free for everyone!

We are fighting for an internet where everyone can openly state their opinions on certain content while showing parts of that specific content!

We are fighting for our internet culture which consists to big parts of memes, parody and satire that would be filtered out by an uploadfilter that wouldn't understand humor or our creativity!

We are fighting for an internet where even beginners will be able to use quotes of copyrighted content or critically say their opinions on news topics without the fear of getting filtered out before their content could even reach a single person!

We are fighting for our understanding of democracy where politicians listen to what their citizens want and not to what big corporations and copyright holders want!

We are fighting against politicans who call us bots and say we where bought by google!

We are fighting against politicians who say we are fake news and we are spreading fake news and unnecessary panic!

We are fighting against politicians who openly lie in our face and later on in secret do something completely different than what they publicly said they would do!

We are fighting against politicans who already moved the final decision date of a crucial debate forward by almost a month and then wanted to move it forward even more because they got scared of our protest and wanted to evade us having a chance to fight for our opinions! (Yes the final decision was first said to be in April but was very quickly moved forward to the end of March and two weeks ago they wanted to quickly move it forward even more to last week!)

We are fighting against politicians who say they want little creators to get more money from big corporations but then set rules that will make it even harder for those small creators to create and spread content while making it even easier for the big corporations to gain money!

We are fighting against politicians who say they want small website providers to have a chance at the game while setting rules that will force millions of small providers to close their websites because they don't have the resources to make their own or don't have the money to buy uploadfilter from the big players and the ones that do have this money will only further the fortune of the big ones instead of freely growing to compete with them!

We are fighting against politicians who say Wikipedia is using terroristic measures when they join us in our fight by completely closing off their german website for one day on the 21st of March!

We are fighting against politicians who say we are just small children who don't read the texts even though they themselves don't know what exactly those texts consist of!

We are fighting against politicians who don't publicly share those texts so we have to trust news outlets to share them with us!

We are fighting against politicians who want to move the final decision forward so fast that other politicians don't even have the text they have to decide upon!

We are fighting against politicians who want to move the final decision forward so fast that the translators weren't even able to finish their work!

We are fighting against politicians who call us mob after we peacefully but loudly protested!

We are fighting against politicians who don't properly argue but instead say they have more follower on Twitter during a debate with citizens!

We are fighting against politicians who say they have to force this through now because if not it would take another 3 years to get a new law on the way!

We are fighting against politicians who want to force the internet back into the 20th century instead of making the law fit the already existing internet of the 21st century!

We are fighting for what is right!

We are fighting for our internet!

And we are many!

The internet does not forget!

The internet does not forgive!

We will especially remember this situation in May during the next EU election!

We will remember it the next time we vote for our representatives!

Since tumblr doesn't properly show posts with links in them in the tags I will reblog this post once with a lot of sources for further information about the petition and the protests. I will also share whatever articles or videos I can find that further and also better explain the situation, what this new copyright reform means and what exactly is so problematic about it.

If you reblog this post (and I really, really hope you do) please only do it by reblogging the version with the links so everyone can easily access them. ;)

request: “so I’ve read all of your pregnancy scenarios and I was wondering if you have enough 2p! italy. I’m a whore for mafia luci and I wanted one where she runs away and he looks for her and after a year, he finds her with the baby and he decides to win her back? fluff ending tho, thanks!” 

luciano vargas (2p! Italy) x fem! reader

fandom: hetalia (Requests open)

You weren’t supposed to be wrangled into the mafia life. It wasn’t your intention at all but you had met Luciano by accident. You were out shopping for stuff that you needed for your house and met your soon boyfriend.

Luci was charismatic, funny, stoic yet approachable. You were also someone he didn’t want to let go just yet. Considering what he did for a living and how well he did it, Luci was hardly around people so innocent. He was able to tell that you weren’t exactly in tune with your surrounding and he was going to use that. 

“Amore, what do you say about dinner tonight?” Luci said as he kissed your hand. “I’ll have the best of my men prepare us dinner tonight. Say what you’ll want and I’ll have it done.” 

Luci noticed that you hesitated but a smile appeared on your face, “Sure, I’ll give you my number and text me for a time.” You whipped out a sharpie from your purse and wrote down your number on his arm. You finished the signature with a heart which made Luciano’s heart flutter. 

//

After a few more dates, you started putting bits and pieces together. Luciano hardly took you out on dates in the public and if he did, he’d do it with multiple people around the two of you. You didn’t want to believe that Luciano ran the fucking mafia but it would be ridiculous of you to turn a blind eye to it. 

You were getting a lot of expensive things in the mail and things that the normal commoner wasn’t able to afford. Depending on the dates, Luciano would have his brother, Flavio, make you something cute and sexy for a date. You would blush at how revealing some of the dresses were but you complied and wore them. 

Finally after the thought would not leave your head, you finally decided it was time to ask him. 

You had a date with Luciano at his house. It was planned for really late in the evening and while you didn’t mind it, you weren’t exactly in the mood to be staying up until a random hour in the night. 

You put on one of Luciano’s favorite dresses. It was a deep red dress with a slit down the middle. You paired it with black heels and dark makeup. You knew with the conversation that you were planning to have, you knew it wouldn’t be exactly right to have bright colors on. 

One of Luciano’s men drove you to his house. You were beyond the point of getting blind folded and even struck up a friendship with one of Luciano’s right hand man. He was a german boy with an accent that made it very hard to comprehend what he said at times. 

Once you got to the Vargas household, you were escorted to higher level in the house. It was the same details although this time, he was holding the date in a different room. The view outside was beautiful and you were immediately mesmerized by the sight. 

“Bella, is something wrong?” Luciano asked as he held your hand. “I could see that you hardly have touched your food.” 

You sighed, “Luciano, I really like you but I have a question. I hope it isn’t disrespectful nor rude but do you run the fucking Italian mafia? I have theories that you may considering all of the measurements you have to do to keep yourself safe in the public. This doesn’t change anything but I just can’t get the stupid thought out of my head.” 

He belted out a laugh as he stood you up, “It is something that needs to be brought, no?” 

Luciano walked you down a few flight of stairs, being a gentleman that he was, he gave you his shoes once he realized that you were getting tired. You got to the basement and noticed multiple men dressed in black suits doing various things. 

“If you’re going to be mine, you should know what I do.” And with that, he told you about EVERYTHING. How you ran the biggest mafia in Italy, what he exactly did, and now that the two of you were serious, you had a lot of secrets to hide. 

From that point on, he would take you to meetings, dates in other countries, all of that. Luciano didn’t mind having you sit down on his lap during meetings, basically as a show to other men and what they were missing out on. You found it a bit embarrassing but it did amuse you at times 

The sex was banging. He showed you sex that your ex’s wish they could have shown you. Every time it was different and it usually ended with you passed out asleep as Luciano had a cigar hanging loosely from his lips. 

One night, the two of you were celebrating a huge deal that Luciano had closed. He was over the moon excited and he ran immediately to you. The night was filled with passionate love-making and sweet nothings. It was one of the best nights of your life and Luciano was able to say the same. 

A month had passed and you were sitting on your bed as tears prickled your eyes. The pregnancy test read positive and you knew your pregnancy gut feeling was right. You did love Luciano, you really did, but you didn’t know if you wanted to raise your child in a household filled with mafia members. 

You had spoken to a wife of a mafia member and asked for her help. She told you that when she was pregnant with her first child, she left her husband for a year to raise the baby. The first year was crucial to an infant and considering the lifestyle the two of you were in, you should leave for a year. 

You followed the advice and ran away. You left a note explaining everything to Luciano along with the pregnancy test and left. The first night after not sleeping with Luciano was the hardest. 

//

You woke up to your twins crying from hunger. You kissed both of their heads and trudged down the stairs with them as you had already pre-made their milks. The house you were living in was complete shit compared to how you were living with Luciano but you knew the lifestyle didn’t fit the life you wanted for your babies. 

“I need to get food.  We’re almost out of vegetables!” You said as you strapped on the double-sided baby carriers. You plopped your son on the front and your daughter on the back. “We need to make the trip quick, it looks like it may rain.” 

You ran to the store around the corner and seen the familiar store manager. She waved you a good morning as you grabbed the shopping cart. For a while, you were doing your usual routine, grabbing fruits and veggies before you heard a squeal from the manager. 

You snuck around the corner and seen very familiar faces. The town knew what the mafia could do and everyone in the store as well as outside had petrified looks. 

“We mean no trouble but have you seen this woman?” Luciano’s silky voice said as he whipped out a photo of you. The manager shook her head no but you knew if you continued to hide, they’d tear down the entire store looking for you. 

You gave a big sigh before revealing yourself, “Vargas, did you really need to bring all of them?” 

Luciano ran to you and immediately kissed you. The store manager sighed in relief and slowly got back to what she was doing. Luciano immediately noticed the babies on your body and knew they were his. They both had the familiar curl and darkened colored hair. 

“Follow me.” You stated as you put the basket on the belt. As you were about to take out your card, Luciano being the clown he was, took out the wad of cash and gave the clerk more than enough money. 

As you walked out of the small store, Luciano snapped his fingers and his men grabbed the bags from your hands. By the time you made it back to your tiny apartment, your babies had fallen asleep. 

You silently laid Luciano and Laura in their respective cribs before heading back to Luciano. He was scanning the photos on the furniture. Most of them were of you and the kids but the one that struck him was the photo of you and him. He couldn’t remember when the photo was taken but he was holding you by the waist and kissing the top of your forehead as you were smiling. 

“How did you find me?” You said quietly as you shoved a small cup of coffee to him. “I never gave anyone my address.” 

Luciano laughed, “Mi amore, I know more than you think but why? Why did you leave me?” 

“Luci, you really think that our children should be raised that way?” You asked as tears threatened to escape. “Our babies deserve be surrounded by love. Not by guns and men who could snap at any moment.” 

Luciano ran a hang through his hair, “Amore, they’re my children too. I deserve to see them just as you get too.” 

Luciano had a point. You went to sit down but before he could, he pulled you down on his lap. He started to kiss down your neck knowing this always made you weak. You quietly moaned but before he could do anything else, you pushed away. 

“Luci, no. We need to talk about this.” Luciano nodded as he tightened his grip on your waist. “What if we build another house. Next door to ours and it’s strictly for our little ones. No men, just you and I. How does that sound? We could even put up a private fence.” 

You knew you were going to cave because it didn’t sound like a bad deal. You thought about it some more and as you were going answer, Luciano started to kiss your neck. 

“The babies, they’re going to wake soon and they’re going to be hungry.” You said as you jumped out of his lap and went to make them milk. Luciano wrapped his arms around your waist as he seen you pour the powder. “What are their names?” 

You smiled, “Our son, the first born, is named Luciano. Our daughter, born five minutes after, is named Laura. They’re going to be three months soon.” 

You were able to tell that Luciano was getting teary eyed on the thought that you named his son after him. Hearing the cry of your daughter, Luciano darted to the second room and seen the fragile baby crying. He picked her up, making sure the neck was stable enough, and shushed her as you got into the room. 

You gave Luciano the milk as you grabbed your son before he could start crying. Luciano looked at the three of you and smiled internally. He might have not had the ideal job for someone like you but he loved you. He was never going to let you go and now knowing that you had gave birth to his children, he was more than sure he would never let you leave again. 

“We can move your things back to our house tomorrow and get a contractor to start building us a new house as well.” Luciano stated as he carefully bent down to give you a kiss. You nodded and leaned into him as you felt your own eyes drifting off to sleep. 

-ALITA

Lee’s Writing Tips #1

Hi! To those of you who don’t know my blog or simply don’t know me, i’m Lee, your friendly writer next door with a constant creeping terror of not getting her writings perfect every time.

Today i bring you some of the writing tips i’ve picked up writing from my experience.

English is not my native language, but i have been introduced to it when i was 3 by a relative who gradually taught me English alongside my native language, therefore i do make mistakes and sometimes i happen to fall in the traps of multiple language errors so please be patient with me. I started my writing journey when i was 10, being attracted by short flash fiction English texts in class which lead to me writing a lotta stuff, and here i am 18 and still not entirely proud of my writing skill.Also feel free to suggest me more things and let me know what you think!

BUT HEY we all learn so today i’ll give you some of my tips into:

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT 101

I will add some of my favorite links at the end of this post so you can check them out but my best advice, and the first one, is to simply pile up on resources on your own. Don’t just expect information to come at you. You have this huge platform called Google which will introduce you to the magical world of research.

*They=official pronoun accepted when we’re talking about no specific gender of a being,as in he/her or anything in between

Before beginning these steps I will assume you have already picked the most basic things about your character such as : gender, race etc.

First things first: Let’s pretend your character has been just created into a very empty world, like you’re playing some kind of creator game and you shape your own beings after yourself. Make sure that you first pick a purpose for your character. What should they be like? Are they a bright, cheerful person with a bubbly personality and joyous laughter who always know how to make people smile? Or are they rather a social introvert, with a mysterious aura engulfed within a severe persona? It is all up to you what you choose. Just think up of a few basic personality types and pick one for your character. Let us pretend this drawing is your current character:

So they are a very basic shape, no colors, no personality, nothing that will identify them. Well it’s all up to you after you have picked your personality to fiill it in. This will consist of 100% of their base. Let us pretend mine will be a Friendly character. I will fill them in with pink:

-Secondly, after you picked out the full coverage of your char you will have to create a mindmap or whatever lets you keep track of things, of their main traits. This means you will have to do some research on what traits belong to which personality. I will leave that up to you.I have picked out a few for my character: Peaceful, Friendly, Calm, Helpful, Joyous, Childish. Keep in mind that these will mean probably the next 70% of their personality, although you do not have to restrict yourself to one type only. Not all personalities are the same and one person can be both extremely shy but also outgoing among friends. They can be super friendly but also very grumpy under certain circumstances and so on. You have to be creative, and this is the keyword here. Do not stick with one persona only.Make sure you give your character BOTH good AND bad traits. They have to balance themselves. Think of as many as possible. For example my character will be clumsy, shy, supportive and understanding. 

I gave a bit more colour to my human, according to what i thought would match their shaping personality.

-After figuring out all of these things i suggest making a list of all the personality tests and things that can help you study more about your character. MBTI test, Zodiacs in multiple cultures, enneagram types, mental illnesses,disorders, the temper, their harry potter house if you want too, generally whatever test will determine their personality. Once you do as many of these in their boots, gather the results and google them all: research is extremely important again, this will help you define what your character’s personality truly is, and you will be able to nitpick from these results whatever you like/dislike and shape your character. These  will help you find results on who they are and then yo're able to read more stereotypes/characterisations of that personality.

I’m gonna pick some random results as an example for you: My character is a gemini and a rising scorpio with an INTP mbti, phlegmatic temper, enneagram type 3.

-After reaching this point it should be really easy to have a main idea of the personality. What i would do after is start shaping them with different hobbies, passions, activities that tell you what they like or dislike doing. Develop minor things like the way they talk,act,react, write, how they walk or what facial expressions they give in : all of these sound easy to do but if you do your research properly you'll be able to develop a very well shaped character. A lot of the things listed tell a bunch about a person. If you dont believe me just do your research. You will know what i’m talking about after that. 

-Go in depth: get a character sheet and gather as many questions as you can. Answer them all, find all the small and big things about them: why they don’t like coffee, what planet they are from, when do they go to bed, what do they have in their pockets, do they love their mom? These will add all the fine details you need to outline minor things about your character. 

-Background: backstory, relationships,family, interaction with other beings and their surroundings: CRUCIAL elements which define who your character is. Remember when a baby is born it will grow up and be educated according to the place it grows in. All of the items listed above influence their behaviour, temper, reactions, personality etc. A very well defined background will tell other people who your character is, without having to know them well.

-Their name. To you a name may not mean too much, but i am DESPERATE about names. Names to me are everything about a character. Keywords, acronyms, puns and wordplay will always be present in my characters’ lives, and why not pick it up yourself as well? Search for names, save them in a list, take time to pick a name for your characters as if they were your children.

-MOST IMPORTANTLY: DO YOUR RESEARCH. I cannot stress this enough. People simply do not research. They think that cresting a character is fun and then abandon them after a week and complain they are boring. That’s because you don’t put effort into them. Look at yourself first: how old are you? How many years did it take you to get where you are now? If you look back one year ago will you realize you’ve changed? If so then think about how your character has shaped with time. If you give them a certain age to start off with, who were they until that point in time?were they different from who they are now? Do not simply create a character just to slap them into a world and leave them die. No human being stagnates in the same state for their whole life,without changing at least one thing about themselves. So do not expect your character to transform radically every day. It takes time, just like it would take you to do it.

-Research their race/nationality. If it hasn’t hit you until now, every country in this world has different people and mostly they have “stereotypical” things about these nations. We’re not talking about stupid things like germans drink beer and americans don’t like sport, no. Those are simply stupid things made up by people. I’m talking about their cultural traits. It really gets on my nerves when people slap on a nationality on a character without doing the littlest bit of research beforehand. Look up into the culture of that nationality: what are they like? what is their religion/belief? How do they interact with others? Minor things like these are often seen unimportant but trust me they matter.

-Make your character interesting and relatable. If the reader does not engage or emphasize with the character in any way it will simply make them not find that character interesting enough to be cared about. What makes them special?What makes them relevant? What do they have in common with other people or characters?What are their morals,beliefs? What makes them good/bad?

-My BEST BEST BEST tip is to STUDY!!STUDY!!STUDY!! If you don’t do your research before creating a character then it’s pointless. You cannot simply KNOW stuff without STUDYING it at least somehow. Be it as simple as how being a vegan would influence your character’s lifestyle to how their actions could turn the entire world upside down. It doesn’t matter. If you’re unsure on a matter, and even if you know it decently well, make sure you do your research properly before assigning them a trait,a lifestyle, a belief or anything else.

-Don\t play God. Don’t make your character unkillable, without weaknesses or weak points or flaws or simply overpowered. Doesn’t matter if they’re superhuman or not. If your character lacks flaws then it’s simply a pointless superhero prototype. There’s no reason to have your character be the god in their universe and make everything really boring. Think very well about what makes them weak, what are their low points?

-Keep references close, save up all the stuff you can, bookmark websites and resources, make your own masterposts. Get an inspo blog and look up everything you need when you lack the motivation to shape your character. If you leave them like that,without drawing inspiration from the real world you won’t get far with them. You will lose motivation and won’t be able to develop them anymore.

Some REALLY helpful websites, but again,personal preference and it’s up to you to gather more ;)

Psychology

What should your character do?

Character types that should be more often used

How to build your character

Building your character’s personality

Flaws

About realistic characters

Avoid stereotypes

Thesaurus | Dictionary 

Do you have recommendations for beginners getting into philosophy?

‘I’ll assume here that you mean Philosophy proper and not Political Philosophy? In that case i would recommend you begin first of all with the Dialogues Of Plato and The Republic. Western Philosophy begins in Ancient Greece, and its most seminal figure is the thinker  Socrates. Socrates himself taught orally and we only know of his teachings through the writings of his students, the most important of which was Plato. Plato originally aspired to be a dramatist until he met Socrates and was captivated by the field of Philosophy. Thus Plato in his writings presents Socrates'  ideas in the form of short plays or dramatic dialogues in which Socrates is the star and communicates his philosophical ideas during intense debates with various other personalities on important topics. You can start with the easier dialogues: Meno, Gorgias, Euthyphro and move on to the rest.

Now Plato went on to found his own school called the Academy, which is considered to be the first university in the history of the Western world; and his most important student was the Philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle, one of the most influential men that have ever lived,  was a jack of all trades who explored and wrote on many subjects. Now none of the fields of modern human academic study had been separated off yet. Physics, Biology, Psychology, Logic, Grammar  etc. were all simply called “Philosophy” at the Academy  (Infact as late as the 18th century science was still referred to as “Natural Philosophy” in the Western world. Isaac Newton’s famous work on gravity was a work of “Natural Philosophy ”).  Of course Aristotle also wrote on “pure Philosophy”, and is most known for this today. Works you may want to tackle from his library are Metaphysics, The Politics and  The Nichomachean Ethics.  

After this comes the Roman period of  Philosophy which was not too eventful when it comes to original ideas. You can just find a book or reference work  to provide you with a general summary of it (although you should check out the writings of Marcus Aurelius  and Boethius). Next is the Philosophy of the Middle Ages (the era of Scholasticism) which revolved primarily around an elaboration and defense of the Christian faith using philosophical reasoning. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are the most important writers of that era. Beyond them you might want to again, just read summaries of, and commentaries on the period unless you eventually decide to become a serious student of Philosophy. The final period before the modern era is Renassiance Philosophy. It is the most ignored period in the entire discipline (perhaps justifiably).  Again, find some reference work on it.

The modern era of Philosophy begins in the 1600’s with the Frenchman Rene Descartes. His work Discourse On Method is required reading for a basic knowledge of Modern Philosophy. Other important and accessible works are John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and  Bishop George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The German Immanuel Kant becomes the most crucial figure in Philosophy after Descartes passes from the scene, but he is influenced by another , the Englishman named David Hume. With Hume and especially Kant, the language in Philosophy starts to become rather difficult for the average reader to parse, and the texts start to become voluminous . You should acquaint yourself with the authors by reading a little of the text, but read summaries and commentaries to get a real grasp of their ideas.  

So that will give you a good start.  

Nothing better than similar friendships

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination Harvard Commencement Speech 2008 by J.K. Rowling (Text as delivered)

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives. Thank-you very much.

Ideas Our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.

MEMORY METHODS “No pain, no gain” also applies to memory tricks. ROTE AND WRONG The most effective memory methods are difficult—and that’s why they work

By Miles KimballAugust 8, 2018 Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder In the 2014 book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, authors Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel describe which learning techniques work, and which ones don’t. I can distill their message into one sentence:

If it isn’t making you feel stupid, it isn’t helping you learn.

Since most people like to feel smart, they run away in terror from learning techniques that make them feel dumb. Instead, they mistakenly focus on methods that give them the satisfaction of feeling like they’re improving in real time. Some of the most common ones are:

rereading a textbook underlining and highlighting key themes burning an idea into your memory by going over it again and again and again in a single intense session waiting until you fully understand an idea to try to apply it or explain it But unfortunately, any improvements made evaporate quickly with these methods.

What makes knowledge and understanding stick in the long run is studying in a way that guarantees that you fail and fail and fail. Testing your knowledge and understanding in ways that make you realize what you don’t know is the rocky path to genuine learning. The details are in a battalion of studies the authors cite—many in which they participated. These studies make the key points: testing your memory, mixing things up with different kinds of concepts, establishing memory cues, and generally making things hard on yourself are crucial.

It’s a no pain, no gain philosophy. After all, real life is hard—it taxes your memory, mixes things up, and rarely gives you multiple choice options. Any approach to learning that isn’t hard won’t match what you experience in real life.

There are three key activities that effectively sear what you want to learn into your long-term memory:

Doing things in real life, or in a simulation as close to the real thing as possible. Flashcards done right. Building your own picture and story of the ideas. Let’s dig into each of these in turn.

“Practice like you play, and you’ll play like you practice.” This is a key bit of folk wisdom endorsed by the authors of Make It Stick. The military conducts war games. Pilots train on simulators. Footballers practice scrimmages against second-string “scout teams” who mimic the strategies of their next opponents. If you only run the drills in optimal, predictable conditions, you’re never going to be prepared for a curveball. (Quite literally in the case of baseball—practicing hitting unpredictable pitches has been shown to do a lot more good than concentrating on hitting one type of pitch at a time.)

If you are a student, you need to do practice exams under conditions that are as close as possible to the real ones. If you aren’t allowed notes on the real exam, don’t allow yourself any notes when you do a practice exam. If you have to write an essay on the real exam, force yourself to really write an essay for the practice exam. Most importantly, do the practice exam under exactly the same time limits as the real exam. That way you can learn whether you get flustered by time limits and if there are things you get right but can’t do fast enough yet.

In non-academic settings, you can’t expect to learn much by just watching. For example, you can drive to the store 20 times while relaxing in the passenger seat and still not know the route yourself. But once or twice driving there yourself—making your own mistakes along the way and correcting them—and you’ll have the route nailed.

In the modern era, we’re often in the driver’s seat physically, turning the steering wheel, but rely so heavily on directions from our smartphones that we still don’t learn how to get from point A to point B. If you are sure a crutch will always be there for you, then using it counts as “practicing like you play.” But practicing with a crutch doesn’t prepare you well for a time when the crutch isn’t there.

The work counterpart to having someone else drive is letting the IT department just fix your computer problem rather than first trying fix it yourself. It is awfully hard to learn how to do something without doing it, however messy or unsuccessful your attempt.

Recall a piece of information repeatedly Most of the information we absorb in a typical day is not only forgettable: It should be quickly forgotten. Do you really want to remember forever all the menu items you didn’t choose for lunch or what all the strangers you passed today on the sidewalk were wearing?

So how does your brain know whether something should be put into your long-term memory or not? Research finds that that attempting to remember an item repeatedly over an extended period of time is what puts it into long-term memory.

This means you need to intentionally try to retrieve items from your memory repeatedly to make them stick. The catch is that you can’t wait too long, nor try to solidify it too fast. If you try to remember too late after the fact, the original memory will be nowhere to be found; but if you wait only a few minutes to try to remember something, it’s too quick for you to signal your brain to put it into long-term memory. The key is to space out the attempts to remember in just the right way. The extensive references in Make It Stick include quite a bit of detail, but those results aren’t likely to be as useful as experimenting with the frequency and spacing that works best for yourself.

Done right, flashcards, whether they’re physical or virtual, are a great way to do memory retrieval practice. This is because they help space out attempts to remember an item, and you can come back to them easily periodically. But flashcards require some discipline in order to help. The number one principle is that you need to guess the answer before looking at the back of the card. Even if you think it is hopeless for you to remember, try. Sometimes you will surprise yourself. But even when you guess hilariously wrong, that effort of guessing carves out a space in your mind for the real answer to go—and you’ll definitely remember that’s not the right result next time.

The second principle is that you need to make it hard. Wait long enough between practice sessions—or put enough flashcards in the deck—that by the time a card comes around, you have to struggle to remember it. Third, cards you think you have down can be put in a slower rotation—but they shouldn’t go out of the rotation entirely. (Cards you make a mistake on can be put in a faster rotation.)

Another way to make memory-retrieval practice harder and really get your brain working is to shuffle in different kinds of tasks. The benefit of “interleaving” is one of the most surprising results from the research on learning, but it has been verified over and over again, such as in the batting practice study.

For example, if you are studying German vocabulary, have half the cards with German on top so you have to try to remember the English equivalent, and half the cards with English on top so you have to try to remember the German.  If you are using an app, choose one that switches between different types of challenges—like Duolingo, which tests you on verbal, aural, and text-based examples simultaneously—or go back and forth between apps on different subjects.

Teach what you are learning—if only to yourself If you want to learn something you were taught or heard about, write about it in your own words, from memory, after the fact. It is great if you can find someone else to teach what you are learning to, but this principle works even if you just pretend to teach it.

If you had to explain things without notes, based only on your memory, what would you say? What are the most important ideas? How do they hook together? Why should your listener care about the ideas? Trying to figure out how to teach something not only involves a lot of retrieving things from memory—it also involves putting things together in a structure that creates a lot of memory cues. This creates hooks to hang the memories on and drag them out of hiding when you need them.

Another great way to teach yourself this structure-building skill is to try to guess where a teacher or manager is going next when they’re explaining a concept. Here you are harnessing the power of surprise and your competitive spirit to imprint things on your memory. If you made the right guess, you won; if not, it was a surprise. Either way, it will be more memorable.

The same technique will help you understand someone else’s point of view. In conversation, instead of trying to think of what you are going to say next or interrupting when you think you already know where things are going, say silently to yourself exactly what you think the other person will say next—then notice where you guessed wrong. Not only will you perhaps learn something you didn’t know—you’ll also be a better conversation partner.

ideas, science, education, gfk, school

READ THIS NEXT There’s one key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t October 27, 2013Quartz

Here, let me take a break from ranting about cults to talk about something nice and uncontroversial (ha): homeschooling.

And by “talk about homeschooling,” I mean “copy/paste a comment from Ozy’s blog, because it got sufficiently long to be maybe worth sharing on my own.”

I was homeschooled much like this! And so have Many Thoughts. Apologies for the absurdly long comment.

(Well, my parents would never describe themselves as “unschoolers” in a million years — they’d say “classical/eclectic” if asked — but “classic homeschoolers who pay serious attention to the child’s interests” and “unschoolers who pay serious attention to the three R’s” probably converge at some point.)

I had a very very positive experience with homeschooling overall (and am happy to expound on it at length; my parents are very Into educational theory, and included me in the discussions as I got older).

(Braggy data on success thereof, which I blush to include, but: I ended up graduating at 16, attending a college in the top 20 in my field, and recently getting accepted to a good grad school with tuition waiver, TA position, and fellowship. On the non-math side, I double-majored in honors liberal arts, and was nationally competitive in fencing in high school. My 13-year-old sister is auditing her first college class (discrete math), regularly runs local 5- and 10Ks and places top in her age group, and wants to be a surgeon. The 10-year-old is on Suzuki book 3 for cello, and one of the top students in the local string project. All of us were reading at two, reading chapter books at three, and won various impressive things in lots of math competitions as well as the private-school-equivalent-of-UIL.)

So from that experience, some thoughts:

(1) The sleep thing is so so so true. Easily the #1 thing my non-homeschooled friends were jealous of. (#2 was not having to take the state’s standardized tests.) Possibly this is outdated science, but my understanding is that teenagers are actually just biologically wired to go to bed later and sleep in later than adults.

(2) Exercise, yes! Homeschooling and exercise and free-range kids all fit very nicely together. I did lots of biking and swimming and hiking and roller-blading and just running about wildly; it definitely contributed that by the time I was in double digits I was allowed to ride my bike anywhere within about a ten-block radius (the boundaries were defined by the nearest streets busy enough to be dangerous), so I got lots of exercise just getting around.

(3) Something of a follow-up on that last: if your kids are going to be running around unsupervised outdoors during school hours, you should probably make sure you’re clear on the local homeschooling laws, and then coach them on how to talk to a policeman. My parents did that for me, which was good, because it did in fact happen a few times that a policeman stopped me and asked some very pointed questions about whether I was playing hooky.

My instructions were: be polite; say “yes, officer, no, officer”; explain that I was homeschooled, and it was my recess [we didn’t have anything that formal, but easier to say that than explain your entire homeschooling philosophy]; if they insisted on taking me to the station, comply and then ask for my parents until they were provided.

The last stage of that never in fact came into play; the policemen always went “oh, okay. My sister homeschools! Do you like it?” and let me go (once with instructions to go get a better lock for my bike).

(4) I absolutely approve of homeschooling as “hey, let’s test out our kooky educational theories!” That’s exactly what my parents did. (My dad’s pet theory is that algebra should be introduced alongside arithmetic, and slopes alongside fractions. All three of us turned out super-math-y. Just saying…)

(5) One of the best things about homeschooling is a 1:1 (or close to it, if you have multiple kids) student:teacher ratio. Take full advantage of this.

(6) Yes, the math thing! A depressing number of homeschooled kids end up with poor math skills. It doesn’t help that it’s usually the mom homeschooling, and women seem to have even more of a tendency to go “oh, I can’t do math, it’s scary” than men. (Not claiming that women are inherently worse at math or anything; this seems to be pretty clearly a response to cultural pressure.)

Hiring grad students is a good idea; they’re interested in the subject, have some teaching experience, are usually lonely for their own families/younger siblings, and will work for dirt cheap. My family did a lot of that for me.

Beware of Khan Academy and various other “teach your kid math for you” services; these tend to prey on this phenomenon. Parents will pay ridiculous amounts of money for canned math curricula, because they’re so nervous about their own abilities; and while I know a lot of public-schooled people who used Khan Academy on their own after school and liked it, it really doesn’t substitute for an actual math teacher, especially for kids who aren’t inherently super-math-gifted. If you want a math curriculum, consider looking into Art of Problem Solving.

(7) A common unschooling failure method is: the kid spends twelve hours a day playing minecraft, the parent decides this is Probably Educational He’s Learning About Architecture Or Something, at eighteen he still can’t read or multiply. (My parents tend to refer to this as “nonschooling.”)

Making the three R’s less optional will probably help with that. Also, it seems like there’s something to be said for helping kids do things that they first-level don’t want to do but second-level do want to do. Plenty of adults use things like leechblock, or accountability to a friend, to serve the same function; a kid can’t reasonably be expected to have mastered using those tools, so a parent reminding them to turn off the computer and go work on their exhaustively detailed pyramid replica they love seems like a good thing.

C. S. Lewis actually brings something like this up in the Screwtape Letters (as part of an analogy for spiritual growth, but whatever). He points out that reading children’s versions of Greek myths is fun, and learning the first handful of Greek words is fun; and that being able to read Hesiod in the original is also fun; but in between, there’s a lot of drudgery with memorizing paradigms and struggling through translations. Even a kid who’s really passionate about Greek may need to be nagged a bit on a day-to-day basis to go review their verb tenses; it seems hard on a twelve-year-old to require them to have the intrinsic motivation to do that without any authority figure nudging them.

In my family, what this looked like on the day-to-day level was: my parents would tell me things like “no, go do your translations before you play” or “don’t forget you need to spend 30 minutes working on chemistry at some point this evening.” (Not very unschool-y, I admit.) But they’d be flexible about it, if I’d gotten really into researching the mathematics of swarming behavior or something.

And if some subject was consistently a cause of misery for me — not just “ugh, organic compounds, whyyy” but genuine “I hate this, it’s boring, I don’t want to do it,” every time over a period of days or weeks — they’d discuss with me whether I genuinely wanted to quit the subject. (It was really really clear that this was actually an option, and I wouldn’t be in trouble for choosing it or anything, which was crucial.)

I nearly always, given some space to think about it, decided that I wanted to keep working on the subject. Sometimes we’d decide to put it on the back burner for a while and come back to it next semester, or to skip to a different part of the subject and come back to that one another time, or try a different textbook, or find a tutor. Occasionally I did decide I was done with the subject, and they respected that.

I think this worked out really well. The only two subjects I can think of that I decided to totally quit were piano and Latin, and in retrospect both were absolutely the right call. Piano I quit after a year, and I recall absolutely none of it; I’m profoundly unmusical and was a disaster at it and hated it, and don’t wish in the least that I’d kept trying. Latin I quit after eight years and an audited university class; my parents and I had a serious discussion, and agreed that while I was glad to have studied Latin I wasn’t interested in pursuing it at a higher level, and that “took a class on the Aeneid in Latin” would be a good milestone for having mastered it to a casual-reading-of-Latin-texts level, and so I did that and then quit. I’m a little rusty, now, but given a dictionary and grammar can still read Latin texts fairly comfortably.

(8) I think you’re overestimating the difficulty of learning a foreign language. I had a friend growing up who was German/English bilingual, as was his mother; my mom tutored him in literature in exchange for his mother spending an hour or so a week talking with me in German. Afterwards my friend and I would hang out, and were encouraged to talk in German.

In addition, I did Rosetta Stone (pricey but effective, immersion-based) and later the Foreign Service Insitute’s course (free online if you can find it, or cheap to buy; immersion-based; meant for diplomats who are told ‘okay, you’re going to Germany in a month, be ready.’) (I also did another online course at one point, but it wasn’t very good.)

By the time I graduated high school, I was able to (with reference to a dictionary) read genuine literature in German; Goethe and Rilke were my favorites. My accent was apparently very good; I was asked more than once if my parents were native speakers (e.g. by the instructor in the not-so-good online course). I got a 4 on the German language AP test, which exempted me from all foreign language requirements in college (which I’m very grateful for; college language classes are super-intensive).

And — in some sense, the most important — when I spent a semester abroad, I was comfortably able to get around Vienna for a week or so speaking to people in German. (It helped in Hungary, too; Hungarian is hard and I learned very little, but nearly everyone spoke either English or German.)

I think key elements in that were: I started early (I was seven when I met my friend); I spent a good amount of time with a native speaker; and everything I did was immersion-based. The not-so-good course I took wasn’t mostly immersion-based, and I actually found that very frustrating, because I had to keep switching languages in my head; eventually I convinced the teacher to just talk to me in German all the time, which everyone else found very impressive but made it much easier for me.

(9) What you’ve said about the social issues all sounds right. I think the value of just escaping the social pressures of middle school isn’t to be underestimated; I know a surprising number of people whose parents homeschooled them /just for middle school/.

I got to spend my early teens dressing however I felt like (frequently ridiculously), wearing no makeup, hanging out with boys as friends, and not being at all self-conscious about any of it. My friends in public school were constantly worried about their appearance and their weight — and I don’t mean this as “I was a better person than them” or anything like that, I mean that other girls made nasty remarks to them constantly, and I escaped that. I’m very glad to see my sisters getting the same benefit.

(10) Also: bullying. Or, rather, not. The vast majority of my friends who were in public school were bullied, at least at some point; many of them still deal with ongoing trauma from that.

I encountered bullies — twice, total. The first time was in elementary school, in a homeschool group, and my mom promptly picked up on it and got the bully kicked out — she was able to both notice and do something about it, neither of which parents of kids in school can usually do. The second time was in middle school, in my fencing club; I took it to the instructor promptly, because I had spent my whole life with authority figures who listened to me and trusted me and acted productively on that. She had a very stern talk with the much older teenager in question, and he left me alone from then on.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure the bullying issue alone justifies homeschooling.

An Open Letter to the Tate Liverpool

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE TATE LIVERPOOL

I write this paper as a Jewish Artist. I write this paper as a South African Artist. I write this paper as a British Artist.

As someone with an acute interest in, and having studied, both History and Art History (the former in the broader and world sense)…I was interested when I saw on their social media page, that the Tate museum, specifically the one in Liverpool, England, had begun advertising an exhibition currently running until October this year, titled ‘Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919 – 1933’. After reading online this exhibition’s ‘synopsis’ I had immediately felt it in my bones to formulate some kind of response. Just as an artist I felt this need. My demographic had nothing to do with this need so much as my studies of history and artistic nature did. The rest only aided my feelings. The main issue I have with this exhibition from what I have seen of its advertising trappings so far has two main parts. The first is the title of the show. I will go into this after discussing the second part, which is the subject matter of the show. These two form the basis of any exhibition and do always need to be considered hand in hand. One cannot be irrelevant of the other, unless that is the purpose of an exhibition in a more dada-esque fashion. But this isn’t, there is some kind of attempted correlation. 

Here I feel it necessary to stipulate, maybe in just thinking of future readers, that no I have not seen this exhibition. So I do not intend this to be a critique of the exhibition nor a review. It is a face value response to the marketing of it, which I have so far seen, which alludes to the exhibition and it’s run itself. After reading the title I scrolled down the online page to see which artists were selected to be shown in order to highlight this highly fragile and contentious time in history. My disappointment was immediate. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against Otto Dix and August Sander or their work. On the contrary I think they are great artists, who produced great and necessary work. They stood up against the Nazi regime (after the time period of this show) when their repressions, including that of artists and art, began. It is important to note that Otto Dix was considered a ‘degenerate artist’ (amongst many great artists included in the Nazi’s famous ‘degenerate’ art exhibition, a show that had it’s intention backfired), lost his job under the regime, had some of his work burned and was forced to, like all ‘artists’ who were not persecuted, join the Nazi government’s chamber of fine arts. During his time under this chamber he did continue producing work, which was deemed degenerate and criticized the Nazis. 

The other included artist, August Sander, had a rough time during the Nazi regime as well. His work was also destroyed, his son lost to the regime for his political beliefs, and his studio destroyed. Sander didn’t continue his photographic practice after World War II. And so it is because of this that his work highlights the importance of this time in history. The Weimar Republic. Of course I do think Otto and August’s work should be included in any show about the Weimar Republic. Otto Dix’s work ‘Metropolis’ is a necessary inclusion in any show about this time period, German or not. Photography and painting form an interesting juxtaposition of art that is meant to have some kind of social commentary or reaction to the streams of life at the time. But the inclusion of these two and these two only simply is not enough. Not with a show of this title. The Western canon of Art history, and knowledge production in general, (by Western here I mean the USA and the UK) has always had an uncanny way of sweeping information, as integral as it may be, under the carpet. To be hidden. Who knows how many school and university students, let alone the general public, will leave the Tate Liverpool thinking that Otto Dix and August Sander hold the sole artistic integrity in history for representing this aforementioned fragile and repressive time in history? A show of this magnitude and at an institution such as the Tate has to be more considerate and think about the implications of what they exhibit, and what they call it. Don’t get me wrong here. I love the Tate. I have visited the Tate Modern and Britain many times upon my visits to London. Showing, albeit digitally, my work in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in June 2016 has been crucial in my developing career as a young artist, and seeing my name on it’s wall a dream come true. It is thus all the more reason that I am disappointed at this attempt of displaying artworks from just two German, Anglo-Saxon artists. This at a time where I know that the Tate is trying to put to the forefront previously marginalized artists and art movements. Why just about to open is the Tate Modern’s much anticipated ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the age of Black Power’ exhibition. (Note here the inclusion of the word ‘Nation’ in both of these exhibition titles.) I have not seen the late Barkley Hendricks’s work in person, as much of a fan of his work as I am; I was devastated when he passed away this year as I had studied his work from various publications. However, as long as some ‘nations’, as they like to call them, continue to be ignored and pushed under the carpet of Art History, any other attempt at fore fronting diverse and previously marginalized artists will continue to fall short as a shallow attempt to ‘keep up with the times’ and appear ‘with it’. It will be a success. They will charge ticket entry for this anticipated show and sell fridge magnets of Barkley Hendricks’s Icon for My Man Superman in the giftshop as you walk out of the exhibition’s particioned-off-from-the-permament-collections-walls. So Tate, you want to talk about the Weimar Republic? Well… let’s talk about the Weimar Republic.

The Weimar Republic was the state of Germany as partinioed by the West, and Russia, after the Germans lost World War One. This was done at the Treaty of Versailles. But we know this washed explanation. And yet there probably is still, as I type this today, a vinyl explanation in text of it’s ‘beginning’ plastered onto the walls of the Tate Liverpool. No…let’s talk about the Weimar Republic. This state took over the German empire, which, like most Western European countries, decided to colonize nations and Empires on the continent of Africa. This empire campaigned to exterminate through genocide, the Herero and Nama people of Namibia. Using racist eugenic pseudo-science as their reasoning. Shark Island a main site of this crime against humanity. I won’t mention a name here for fear of reigniting my own psycological and historical trauma, but one of the German ‘doctors’ that conducted medical experiments on these people from modern day Namibia, later was recruited to do the same experimentation on Jewish people in Nazi concentration camps. He was called merely because of what he had already done to Africans in the name of Germany. This is a man who’s practise predated, maintained, and succeeded throughout the duration of the Weimar Republic. Modestly put, Germany was a violent colonial presence in Africa and the establiishment of the Weimar Republic caused little positive effect to the African people in the South-West, West and East of the continent. As much reperations that Germany later provided financially to the Jewish people and the state of Israel, when will the Herero and Nama people who remain in Namibia receive a similar gesture? As far as my knowledge extends only skulls of victims, taken to Germany for study of white supremecy, have been returned. The western powers simply ‘took over’ the German ‘colonies’ in Africa during this period. Africans living in Germany during this time were of course not seen as German citizens, and therefore the depression of the Weimar Republic caused tenfold the burden on Africans living in Germany and African Germans. Resistance groups that were set up in Paris, Cameroon and other places to combat German impostion on their land now had to direct their focus to Belgium, England and France amongst others. Such was the struggle against European colonialism. No matter how much these powers fought each other in Europe, the African and Arab remained under their collective foot, stamping down on them for decades yet to come. The Weimar Republic, and the ‘depression’ experienced by all of its citizens, and non-citizens (As previously mentioned, African Germans were never officially granted this status.) are what ultimately led up to Hitler’s popularity and the rise of the Nazi regime into power. It is because of this, that one thing only happened because of what happened before it, that you cannot separate The Weimar Republic and it’s conditioning of people, including artists, from the Nazi regime, which followed it. Germany’s intentions for ‘its empire’ have more than one example of ideology continuity from before and after The Weimer Republic and it’s depression. The depression caused a rallying cry and scapegoating which lead to the Nazi party’s popularity and rise, after all they did win an election to obtain governmental power. What I am alluding to is that the establishment of The Weimar Republic and its depression, if anything, resulted in the strengthening of Germany’s empire’s intentions and quest for supremacy. An exhibition of this nature needs to therefore include artists, because there were these artists, that are not merely white Anglo-Saxon, ‘aryan’ if you will (although I hate that term) male artists who, although later ‘criticizing’ the Nazi regime, did little else to fight it other than paint degenerate art. You may argue how these men ‘suffered’ when the regime destroyed their work and studio, and possibly livelihood. But this suffering was a dream of suffrage in comparison to the suffering faced by Jewish artists, continent-wide. Their ordeals too painful and individual for me to provide examples here. For those not physically persecuted, there have always been artistic ways around this repression of work that faced Dix and Sander under the Nazis. Malevich signing his working-class-depicted oil paintings, which appeased the Soviet regime that repressed his constructivist work, with his famous black square just an example of this. One can go further into European art history to look at how Da Vinci and company kept their passions alive even though the Church repressed art depictions just for further examples. Therefore the Nazi repression of their work and practice stands little to me as a face of adversity. Basically any artist who did not paint romantic Germanic countryside’s, architecture, or blonde and blue-eyed white people were considered degenerate. Even artists who liked the Nazi’s faced disappointment at the regime considering their work ‘degenerate’. I confer little sympathy on Dix and Sander’s friction with their country’s regime, as opposed to it as they were. They after all lived. They lived because of their race, and died in their own beds. 

But by all means! By all means include Otto Dix and August Sander in a show about the Weimer Republic! They were not free of suffering in that depression before the Nazi’s took over. Include them. But also include the others. This is what I am getting at. And yes…they can and should all be German artists. German artists who lived under this republic. One example of an artist you cannot have a show like this without is Max Liebermann. Liebermann was a German-Jewish artist who was one of the leaders of German Impressionism. He died in 1935 in Berlin, in his own bed. He was not a victim of Hitler’s holocaust. And so one takes the Nazi factor to rest for now with him, a German artist who practiced and pioneered during The Weimar Republic. He was president of the Prussian Academy of Arts from 1920 until 1933, exactly the duration of this exhibition. He was granted a solo exhibition during this time and fostered many German artists, irrelevant of their political ideals. He was a true Cosmopolitan German, but also a Jew. In 1933 he resigned when Jewish artists were no longer allowed to hold such positions. And such again is an example of how one cannot separate the Weimar Republic from the regime that followed it. During his lifetime, even before the turn of the 20th century, he received anti-Semitic criticism to his work. This at a time when the Berlin conference saw Germany and others literally cut up Africa for their own consumption. His work was not even considered ‘degenerate’ as was Dix’s and Sander’s. So his paintings from this time period should hang side by side with his fellow German contemporaries. Why not? Another incredible marginalized artist who should be included in this show, unlike Liebermann, did not die in his own bed. This is where I introduce Felix Nussbaum. A surrealist painter. Nussbaum’s incredible work and career, like many artists whose work has hung in the Tate, was not recognized during his lifetime. During the Weimer Republic was when Nussbaum studied Fine Art. He studied the greats and continued pursuing his education so far as his political situation at the time allowed him. As Hitler took power, he dropped out of Berlin Academy of Arts. A significant moment which lead to the stifling of what would have otherwise been a promising career for a German Surrealist. But his homeland did not view him as a German, but a Jew. Felix Nussbaum’s work provides an incredible and haunting glimpse into life of a single Jewish artist and man on the run. His work is striking, surreal and showcases the immediate aftermath of The Weimer Republic and it’s end. Any show that contains a time frame within its title needs to provide context, and possibly work, from both before and after the said time frame. In order to properly ‘frame’ it. Nussbaum’s work, at least a portrait or two, would have provided the most intimate and raw sign off in the last room of a show with this title. Felix managed to hide his work while on the run but was eventually captured. Along with the rest of his family, Germans from birth, he did not survive the holocaust. Felix Nussbaum died in Auschwitz in 1944, after painting and leaving behind the most damning series of work from a German artist. Even more haunting than any German Expressionist work, which is so praised in art and painting history. Though I have begun to name artists that should be included in this exhibition, Jewish and cultivated by the Weimar Republic as they may be, I cannot be serious with myself in writing a paper like this about inclusion and exclusion in art spaces if I neglect to mention any women artists. And so I should do just that. Another name and body of work, which cannot be excluded from a show like this at the Tate Liverpool, is that of Charlotte Salomon. Charlotte was a German and Jewish artist born in Berlin. Although her artistic study and practice only began when the Nazi’s were already in power, she was sixteen in 1933 when the Nazi government signaled and end to the Weimer Republic, she has become most well known for an auto-biographical series of paintings titled ‘Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel’. This consists of over seven hundred individual works, all made while she was on the run from the Nazis. An autobiography for her, in any form, means life under the Weimer Republic. Her childhood was precisely this, and it is this history of the Weimer Republic, which conditioned her and her practice. Some of those works, stunningly beautiful as they are, contrast Nussbaum’s haunting work, and made at a similar time while both on the run, would also be a fitting end, along with Felix’s work, in the last room of the Tate Liverpool’s dedicated galleries for this exhibition. Charlotte Salomon also died at Auschwitz, a few months before Felix did. Her fate all the more tragic, having been gassed to death while pregnant with an unborn child. It is unknown if Felix and Charlotte, as well has her unborn child, lie in a mass grave at Auschwitz or if the Nazis had their bodies burned. Either way they both left something behind, incredible bodies of artwork, which cannot be ignored. Ah! But there exists the Felix Nussbaum Haus in his hometown in Germany as a platform for his work to be shown you say. Well a similarly named Otto Dix Haus museum also exists in Germany, so save me that spiel. Another German, female and Jewish artist who could have work contributed to this exhibition is Else Lasker-Schüler. One of the only women who was affiliated with the German-Expressionist movement, which arose simply to express life under the Weimer Republic. She trained as an artist but became famous a poet, which lead to her representation in the expressionistic movement. Famous for her poetry and bohemian lifestyle in Berlin, she won the Kleist prize, Germany’s leading literature prize to this day, in 1932. (A year that falls into the timeframe of this exhibition) After this, she was harassed by the Nazi’s and escaped a fate similar to Nussbaum and Salomon’s by fleeing to Zurich. She eventually settled in Israel where she passed away in 1945. Her poetry could be a fitting companion as wall text next to the works of these great German artists in the Tate Liverpool. Mostly written during the Weimer Republic, there is no reason as to why not. 

I am not merely suggesting that Jewish artists be included in this show. Where is Hans Bellmer’s work? That of Jean Arp? Whose very identity was shaped by the politics that lead to the Weimer Republic? Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose career took off before and during the Weimar Republic and shaped modern art, as we know it today? He could not even sell his work as the Nazi’s took over. It was branded ‘degenerate’ and he eventually took his own life in 1938. How his work is not included in a show of this title dumbfounds me. Earlier I mentioned the Prussian Academy of Arts, of whom Max Liebermann was president. I also mentioned the necessity to include woman artists. Well Käthe Kollwitz, a non-Jewish German was the first woman ever elected into this academy. Her work defined realism, and later experssionism in the Weimer Republic through various media. It too was despised by the Nazi regime. It makes no sense for her to be written out of the narrative of an exhibition like this. I also feel the need to reiterate here that, of all the Jewish artist’s who I have suggested should be in this show, they are all Germans. It is not simply a cry for inclusion of Jewish artist’s work, of whom it’s creators were persucted by a German fascist regime across Europe. No, that list would be too long to mention. I myself am of Lithuanian descent. I say again, all these suggested artists were German. This is a need to highlight the importance of the various walks of life that lived and practised, or began their practise, in the Weimer Republic. England in itself is not so innocent in the aforementioned atrocities I attributed to Germany’s history. They used Concentration camps in South Africa against Black and Afrikaans South Africans way before the Germans did so in Namibia and Europe, ‘owned’ many more colonies in Africa than the Germans did, let alone in other continents. Winston Churchill, whose face sits on the new ‘indestructible’ five-pound note, which will no doubt be used to purchase entry tickets for these shows, himself an active colonizer on South African soil and despite British role in fighting the Nazis as allies and liberating concentration camps, denied surviving Jews entry into the British controlled Port of Haifa, by intercepting the Exodus 1947 ship with the Royal Navy. A photograph even exists of these passengers holding a loft the Union Jack, with the Nazi logo attached on a flag. I wonder when Ruth Gruber’s photographs will be shown in the Tate. I move on now to the first part at hand. The show’s title “Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919 – 1933”. If the intention is to praise and display the work solely of just Otto Dix and August Sander, as this exhibition is using the framework of two ‘solo’ exhibitions by each of these artists at the Tate Liverpool (the interesting juxtaposition of their contrasting mediums I mentioned earlier probably not even curated), then by all means. But you cannot name it ‘portraying a Nation: Germany’. As I’ve stated, I have nothing against these artists or their work. So essentially it is the little which bothers me, and should bother any art historian or artist. A more fitting title for this show would be something along the lines of “Germany: A Nation Portrayed by Two Artists’ or ‘The Weimer Republic through the lens of August Sander, and the brush of Otto Dix’. The title has made an otherwise great show problematic. It reminds me of a recent and local example that brings me back home to Johannesburg. In 2016 Wits Art Museum put on a show entitled ‘Black modernisms in South Africa (1940 - 1990)’ (notice the dates in the title). The show rightly received a lot of criticism, in addition to the fact that it was put on by white curators (a paper critiquing the show was called ‘Black modernisms and white saviors’) and co-opted a Black academic involved in the research process as a ‘co-curator’ to avoid the very criticism they ended up receiving, the show only contained work from the museum’s own collection. You simply cannot put on a show with the title ‘Black modernisms in South Africa’ if you only use artwork from one collection. Many great Black modernist artists were excluded from this show for that very reason. Ernest Mancoba is one example of an artist who should have been included, left out. He, during his exile from Apartheid South Africa, was interestingly interred by the Nazi regime in a POW camp, being a ‘Subject of the British Empire’ in Paris at the time. Any South African art historian knows that Mancoba was part of the Danish ‘KOBRA’ movement, yet in many Kobra art history books his name and work is not even included. Yet he remains in all the photographs of the members. You cannot take that out. He was there. A member, like the rest. An example of how the western canon of art history can sweep marginalized peoples under the carpet. And so, similarly to the Black Modernisms show at Wits Art Museum, the title of this Tate Liverpool show cannot be used along with the work that is being shown. One or the other may work, but they need to correlate. The title of the anticipated show at the Tate Modern due to open soon brings to my attention, in comparing it with this Tate Liverpool title, another problem. I want to insert the names one above the other below for you to compare and read before I go on: Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919 – 1933Soul of a Nation: Art in the age of Black Power Why has the word ‘soul’ been used in the latter referring to Black Power, Black Art, Black Artists and Black History, whereas the White Germans are simply ‘Portraying’ a nation? I am not denying that Black people, especially in America, do have more ‘soul’ than white Germans of the twentieth century, but it seems a little belittling to the artists and their race of the Tate Modern’s upcoming show. Can they not simply ‘portray’ their ‘nation’ as the Germans have so done? Why must a ‘spin’ using a word that connotes rhythm and uniqueness be used for art in the age of Black Power? If anything, Barkley L. Hendricks PORTRAYED his contemporaries, friends and associates as he saw them. As they dressed. Is this not what portraying means? I will not further critique the Tate Modern’s upcoming show until I have seen glimpses of it. I look forward to seeing many of my London contemporaries’ Instagram stories of the halls of this exhibition; I cannot say the same for the show in Liverpool. The difference is this, the Soul of A Nation exhibition will no doubt showcase more than just two artists. I wonder now about the integrity of the Tate Britain in deciding to recently include a work by the late Khadija Saye, who tragically did not survive last month’s Grenfell Tower fire in London, on their walls? One of her magnificent photographs is shown along with a flower that sits next to it in remembrance of her young life, taken from us too soon as a result of the mismanagement and care of housing mostly populated by poorer communities in London. How long would it have taken the Tate Britain to include a work by her, had she not passed away in the blaze? There is little site specificity to either of these shows being shown in the island of England. I’m not saying there should be, foreign art should be accessible anywhere, but without proper consideration and research in naming these shows, as naming contains power, it can lead to these metaphorically violent shows that perpetuate stereotypes and exclusion in culturally sensitive landscapes of history. Unlike the Black Modernisms show of Wits Art Museum last year in South Africa, or in the 1980s with the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s problematic ‘"Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” exhibition, I am not sure that this Tate Liverpool show will garner that much, if any, public criticism. Such is the English way of ‘knowing that some form of tax goes into the ‘great’ art institutions and museums of Britain and therefore how can they show us something that is problematic or exclusionary’.  In fact the very gallery in question, Tate Liverpool, in 2010 ran an exhibition titled ‘Afro Modern: Journeys Through The Black Atlantic’. Any criticism garnered by this show has not had the same kind of ‘damning’ avail as received by the MOMA or Wits Art Museum in the immediate and recent canon of Art History. Perhaps because it was, and claimed to be, ‘inspired’ by a book. In fact the show was probably very well researched, endowed and exhibited. I admire many of the artists shown in that particular exhibition and it’s intention probably successful, however I wonder what mention or correlated link between having a show in Liverpool about ‘The Black Atlantic’, as it so states, and the fact that Liverpool itself served as a Slave port for the Atlantic Slave Trade was. Their website’s archive of the show’s press neglects to mention anything about the town’s own history and the African slaves who arrived there. The shows will probably garner high praise for the most part, but I as a British Citizen, and South African Jewish visual artist, who does admire the Tate monopoly in the United Kingdom as well as the opportunities that they have and do provide to young emerging artists, myself included, will not stand idly and respect anything that goes on their wall just because it is within their realm of planning, or what they deem necessary to showcase. 

I felt it necessary to write this open letter. I am not calling for a boycott of any kind or any show. I merely wish to highlight why this show and its title form a problematic nature of art, museum and exhibition showing. I am not even sure if anybody from any kind of Tate institution will read this, and if they do if they even have any power of what is shown or not. Expression through writing remains terribly important to me, even just as a way to formulate my own thoughts on the artistic sphere that I engage with. Maybe I will make an artwork as a response to this text, and maybe that artwork will one day…hang in the Tate. 

May the work of Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and any other artist that has perished as the result of an atrocity, live forever. Kaddish.  

If I may request a simple but fun idea- How do you think the OW crew sing karaoke? Up to you on how to interpret this, either separately with each character or if they had a group afternoon session to chill after a hard mission.

It’s Fareeha who comes up with theidea, when she looks out over the group after the mission, allsitting by themselves except for her and Jesse.

“Not what you imagined?” Jesseasks, following her gaze from underneath his hat. No, she wants tosay, and neither is working with him. As a young girl she beggedGabriel to let her tag along on a mission, she’d have givenanything just to sit in the aircraft on the way there, promised she’dbe quiet as a mouse. In her head it was all one glorious adventure, afellowship like no other forged in the heat of battle. But thesepeople barely know each other and Jesse, who should remember theglory days, doesn’t make any attempt to befriend them. “It’slike this is just another job,” she says and can’t chase thedisappointment from her voice. Working and living first for the armyand then for Helix Security she’s learned that war isn’t all thatthe movies make it out to be, but Overwatch has always stood for morethan that. It used to be full of ideals, of hope for a tomorrow thatis better than today. But even Jesse, who remembers, whowalked among giants the same as she has, takes his paycheck andleaves at the end of each mission.

“What’d you expect? You gottabelieve in the people if you wanna believe in the cause. And thesefolks,” He waves at Symmetra buried in a magazine on sustainablearchitecture, at Lúcio with headphones in his ears napping thestress away, at Hana texting a friend at home, and Mei who’s tooshy to make the first step. “They don’t know each other.”

It’s a well thought out conclusionfor a man wearing chaps but Fareeha has long since stoppedunderestimating Jesse. He watches and smiles and sees that nothingexcept a paycheck ties these people together. And if that’s whathas to change, Fareeha decides, that is what will change.

Most ‘agents’ of Overwatch, and shebarely can call them such in this state of affairs, don’t live atthe watchpoint. They have their own homes and lives to return to, canbarely be bothered to answer their comms when their help is needed.Apart from Winston only Mei, Reinhardt, Brigitte and Hanzo live here,because they have no other place to go or because they used to liveout of a van smelling of currywurst.

She bullies Winston into helping her gothrough a five year old inventory detailing everything Overwatch leftbehind when its people scattered to the winds. Somewhere between 480bathing suits (A box is missing, Fareeha notes, and Winston admits heneeded them for a project. She decides it’s wisest not to ask.) andan old maypole used for Overwatch’s last cultural festival, shefinds what she’s been looking for.

Brigitte helps to set things up, frompicking the lock to the common room the key to which Winston lost atsome point in his exile of half a decade to impromptu repairs on theelectronics. She likes Brigitte. They share a passion for powerarmour engineering, even in the year 2076 a niche profession, andoften spend their free afternoons comparing notes. She was around inthe old days, apprenticed to the Ironclad guild, but never made itinto the inner circle that Fareeha grew into. Now she’s right inthe thick of it, so far undecided if that is a good thing. She hopesthat with this event she’ll sway her to a favourable opinion.

And then, after facing the newOverwatch’s low budget issues and illegally downloading a selectionof titles, it’s finished.

The team bonding machine. Thefriendship device. Humbling the great and empowering the meek.

If the new Overwatch won’t be friendsby themselves, she’ll make them sing karaoke until they are.

The real challenge, it turns out, isgetting everyone to participate. Fareeha’s the first to write inthe Overwatch team chat in several weeks and that too stings withnostalgia, when she remembers the servers in the old days, full ofgroups for every member. She even remembers the language filter hermother got after Jesse joined and how long it took her to get aroundit (three weeks, after which she learned a plethora of new words thathave come in handy since).

Fareeha A.

Keep your schedules free on the 16thnext month.

Lena, predictably is the first toanswer. She may be the only one as attached to Overwatch as Fareehais.

Tracer Big mission???

No, Fareeha writes, but that attendanceis expected and she’s not taking no for an answer. Apart from Lena,only Mei and Winston acknowledge they read her message at all. Shedidn’t expect more, although she’s still disappointed when shechecks her phone again and finds nothing new. She knows for a factTalon has infiltrated this channel and finds little solace in thefact they must be as frustrated with the lack of participation as sheis. It’s time for a more personal approach.

“I think not.” Hanzo says, alreadyregretting leaving the safety of his room for a quick late nightsnack and slowly backing away through the door. Fareeha has beenlurking in the kitchen for hours waiting for him to emerge. She’snot about to let him off the hook.

“To bond as a team, the whole teammust be present.” Fareeha says, following him down the hallway.

“I am not part of any team.”

“You’re not making any effort tochange that.”“I don’t want to change that,” Hanzo stopsin front of his room, fishing for his access card. “My purpose isto find redemption, not to engage in frivolities with a band ofstrangers. Good night.”He slams the door shut, but if he thinkshe can get away that easy he doesn’t know what she’s prepared todo to complete her mission.

“If you don’t agree I’ll tellGenji you’re giving away the Nepali sweets he makes for you.” sheshouts against the closed door.

He has it open in record time.

“You wouldn’t dare.” he says butthere’s clearly no decency in a woman blackmailing him at two inthe morning. In response she takes out her phone and makes a show ofselecting Genji’s number from her list of contacts.

“Dear Genji,” she says aloudas she types the words. “I thought you might like to know thatyour brother gives away the anarsaa you put so much effort intomaking to anyone who can stomach being complicit in such acold-hearted, cruel-”“Fine, fine! I will attend yoursilly function.” Fareeha grins and puts away the phone.

“16th of next month, 6pm, the commonroom on the third floor. Snacks and drinks are available. Dresscasually.”

The next on her list is easierpersuaded.

“Of course I will come!” Reinhardtsays and promptly provides her with an exhaustive list of titles he’dlike to sing. Fareeha, loving the man like her own grandfather butknowing his taste in music, filters out the more unbearable songs sheoccasionally hears him belt under the shower. While she updates thekaraoke library and soothes her guilty conscience by telling herselfmost of the artists on Reinhardt’s list have been dead close to ahundred years and won’t mind missing a few dollars, she gets answerto a message she sent days ago.

Karaoke???? The text only reads,but it’s to be expected. The sender did so ‘from my MEKA／(˃ᆺ˂)＼'and the location puts her somewhere in Australia, undoubtedly in themech fighting domes in and around Junkertown. This is where D.Vaspends her free time when she’s not training for tournaments orwith her MEKA strike team. Through the attention she gets wherevershe goes Junkertown has received an influx of aid, from treatment forradiation sickness to basic goods like water and food. Fareeharealises more than ever that for many of Overwatch’s new recruitsthe organisation isn’t and never will be their only option to causereal change. As much as she wished it were otherwise for people likeD.Va Overwatch is a side job.

Yes, karaoke, Fareeha writes andlaunches into her pre-written speech, our conflict with Talonstretches the limits of our abilities. In order to use thoseabilities most effectively we need to build a strong unit cohesion-

While she’s still writing D.Va’snext message comes in.

When’s the party?

She’s so surprised she only deleteshalf of what she’s written in her haste to answer.

… abilities in order to usethoseyou’re saying yes?

A shrugging emoji is all she gets forhalf an hour while D.Va launches into another battle against a Junkerbuilt mech she decimates with a lot of flashy and unnecessary move.Although, Fareeha supposes as she watches the livestream, they arenecessary to rake in as many donations as possible. It’s a battletactic, even if the battle is fought in people's minds.

As the fight ends Fareeha can see Hanatexting without looking while she and her mech bow to the audience.

I make my guys do stuff like thatall the time in the MEKA program. New guys always complaining but inthe end they love it. I’ll be there

With six definite okays under her beltFareeha gets a little too optimistic. When she calls Torbjörn sheexpects him to be enthusiastic like Reinhardt and forgets for acrucial moment that he left Overwatch of his own volition.

“No,” he says and just like thather mood shatters. “You’re a good kid, but there’s nothinggetting me back in that boat.”“But ... “

Children arguing in the backgroundbriefly distract Torbjörn who deals out a few choice words inSwedish. He may have been reprimanding them, may have told them ajoke. She can never tell. While her German is passable and herSpanish approaches fluency, her Swedish has always been spotty. Theonly word she knows by heart is godis, because her seven yearold self made sure to learn to ask for sweets in every languagespoken on base.

When Torbjörn returns to the phone shehears in his voice that to him the conversation is already over.Still she owes it to herself to try.

“Reinhardt has been asking if you’llcome. He’d be happy to see you again.”

“Sentimental old lug. You can tellhim I’ll drop by sometime to deliver the new security systemWinston asked for. But don’t expect me to play babysitter for thatmovie night or whatever it is you’re planning.”“Karaoke.”“Yes,that. Too many new influences aren’t good for a man my age, child.Besides, I’m busy with a new project. Well, technically she’s anold project, but either way I can’t leave even if I wanted to. Theymight scrap the poor thing after all.”

He makes up this project purely to endthe discussion, evidenced by his ridiculous excuse that his ‘project’has followed a squirrel up a tree and can’t get down, to end thephone call. Fareeha indulges him, because she respects Torbjörn’sdecision and also because she doesn’t have anything with which toblackmail him. Win some, lose some, and with that mindset she moveson to the next on her list.

“I have sensitive ears.” is Lúcio’shalf-cooked explanation why he really can’t join the team forkaraoke night.

“Suck it up, choir boy, you’recoming.” Fareeha pokes the screen and Lúcio, several thousandmiles away, actually flinches back. It’s no secret she can beintimidating and she milks it for all its worth. If it gets everyonein the same room on karaoke night she will not hesitate to bully themthere.

“Even if I wanted to, I can’t. I’mbusy,” he tries again and lists all the pressing matters he has toattend to. “There’s the tour, and my manager is riding my assabout the new album, I’m so far behind and I need every second tocatch up. Then there is the peace march in Timor Leste, and the RoundSquare conference in the Netherlands. I’m a guest speaker for thegraduating class at the UFRJ and I haven’t even startedwriting that speech-”“You’re free on the 16th.” Fareehainterrupts because it doesn’t look like he’ll be done anytimesoon.

“You have no way of knowing that.”he says, but a hint of uncertainty steals into his voice. She savoursthe moment, lets it breathe like fine wine until she delivers thekilling blow.

“I do, because I talked to your agentand she promised to keep your schedule free.”

His look of betrayal is nothing shortof hilarious.

“You talked to my agent?Behind my back!”

But as much as he grouses andcomplains, the deal has been sealed.

Genji and Zenyatta are in the middle ofa strike to better working conditions for omnics when Fareeha stalksup to them, jet-lagged and wanting nothing more than a hot shower andthree days of uninterrupted sleep. For almost two weeks she’s donenothing but run after every wayward child of the once again fledglingOverwatch and at this point she’ll just be glad when this madnessis over.

“It sounds like a lovely occasion,”Zenyatta says and it might just be her imagination but she swearshe’s subtly trying to push her forward and in front of the cameras.A respected member of the human community seen at a pro-omnic eventwould do them some good. Helix Security doesn’t like their peoplemaking political statements but if it helps karaoke night she’llgive the cameras her best angles. “But I’m afraid I can not joinyou. More pressing matters demand my attention and our work onhuman-omnic relations must not be interrupted.”

She counted on something like this.From what she hears on the news, the people Zenyatta supports areclose to a breakthrough. But she gets a promise out of him to make anappearance the next time she plans something like this and Genji,acting as a silent shadow to Zenyatta, doesn’t need much to bepersuaded to join.

“I always refused partaking in theseevents before,” he says, “and always regretted it. It will be mypleasure to be there.”

Symmetra is less than enthusiasticabout the prospect of spending several hours in the company of peopleshe barely knows and, in some cases, actively dislikes. She switchesbetween talking to Fareeha and guiding her team of architechs ontheir latest project, a vertical farm in the outskirts of Ecatepec.After their recent loss in Brazil Vishkar has directed its attentionto the war torn North and Central America. Fareeha is no stranger tothe places outside Native territory in desperate need of food tosurvive. Surprisingly Symmetra doesn’t argue her lack of time toget out of this endeavour.

“I do not want to,” she simplysays, followed by something shouted in Telugu sounding suspiciouslylike a curse. “Overwatch’s ideals are commendable, but I do notfavour the kind of people it attracts. I will not associate withthem.”

“You like Winston.” Fareeha pointsout, but the truth is, even if she spares some passing sympathy for afellow scientist, Symmetra has no reason and less motivation to makefriends with people who are fundamentally different from her. Theonly person she regularly talks to before and after missions is Lúciobut not in the manner Fareeha tries to encourage with karaoke.

But it gives her an idea.

“No, you know what? I understand,”she says and notes Symmetra’s surprise at her seemingly easyvictory. “Lúcio didn’t like the idea either. He said it’s awaste of time and that he’s much too busy to do some sillyteam-bonding.”

She watches out of the corner of hereyes and counts the seconds. Symmetra can resist the urge to gossipabout Lúcio half a minute.

“Yet more proof how little thisstreet ruffian knows of the world. A strong team can tip any battlein their favour, it is a well known fact.”

“That’s what I told him!” In theback of her mind some mean part of Fareeha rubs its tiny handstogether in manipulative glee. She’ll show them to deny her karaokenight, she’ll show them all. “But he was all like ‘it’s notgoing to work, no one will show up’. I hate to think he may beright-”“He is not.” Symmetra interrupts and looks outacross her half-finished project like a benevolent mother about toleave her children alone for the first time. “I will attend yourfunction and ensure its success. We must not let fools thinkthemselves superior.”

And indeed, they mustn’t.

After her resounding victory withSymmetra, she doesn’t take it too hard when Zarya provides a goodreason not to come, what with the impending doom of her country and awar tipped in the omnics' favour. One more name gets crossed off, butthe next one isn’t as cut and dry.

She sits in her quarters on thewatchpoint, this small place feeling more like home than herapartment in Egypt ever did, and hovers over her mother’s contactin her phone. They talked before, in the days and weeks following herreturn from the dead, but most of these talks have turned intoarguments or cold silence. How could you do this to your owndaughter, Fareeha has asked but every answer her mother gavesounded just as hollow as the condolences she received after herdeath.

Should she invite her? Try and mend thebroken bond between them if she can barely look her in the eye? Evenher father isn’t at that point yet. They have both grieved for hermother, have tried to move on with their lives as best they could.Fareeha remembers waking up in the middle of the night to her fathercrying, trying to stay silent, to appear strong in front of hisdaughter, but breaking down little by little at the loss of the womanhe loved more than life itself.

Fareeha crosses her name off the listwithout calling. Not now. Maybe never.

But her foray into the past has givenher another name to fall back on. Jack’s long suffering sigh whenhe picks up the phone tells her he has heard of her crusade.

“Reinhardt told me,” he answers herunspoken question. “And I appreciate what you’re trying to do,god knows this lot can improve on their teamwork, but leave me out ofit.”

Back in the old days Jack would havebeen the first to agree. More, he would have helped her organise thewhole thing and made homemade snacks to go along. This more thananything drives home just how much has changed, how little of the oldguard remains even when they have returned to join the fight.

“You’re just as much part of thisas anyone else,” she insists. “You came back for a reason, Jack.Some part of you believes in what Overwatch can be. Don’t be astranger.”

But his answer stays the same. He sayshe can’t and that he shouldn’t. Says he’s too old to make newfriends, too bitter to offer anything of value. She leaves him withthe date and the place, urges him to at least consider it. Hepromises but she can’t help feeling he does so only to do her afavour and that he will put it out of his mind the moment she hangsup.

Three days before the grand event, theculmination of all her hard work to get a dozen people who barelyknow each other in the same room to sing awkward songs, Jesse strollsinto the watchpoint, a bag of dirty laundry over his shoulder andbounty hunters on his tail. He drifts, even though Winston hasoffered him permanent residence on the watchpoint, claims he’s afree soul who can’t be tied down by obligations. Fareeha knowsbetter. He’s not so different from Jack in that regard.

“Heard about your plans,” he sayswhile they solve crosswords in the laundry room waiting for thewashing to be done. “Mighty ambitious of ya, gettin’ everyone toplay along.”

“I didn’t get everyone.”

“Yeah,” Jesse pretends to beutterly oblivious to her tone, ponders another word for ‘failing toseize an opportunity’. “Torbjörn was never hot on singing, don’tget caught up over it.”“Jesse ... “

He puts the crossword aside, looks ather with his big brown eyes.

“Y’know I don’t like imposing.”And then he does that thing where he reaches behind his ear for acigarillo he stopped carrying there years ago. It’s the sameaborted motion he made everytime he was afraid he messed up,everytime someone reminded him of the gang he left behind. Everytimehe felt like before the end of the conversation someone, evenhimself, would tell him he didn’t truly belong. It’s his safetyblanket, the sharp smoke of home grown tobacco, the flick of alighter, something to steady his hands and keep him grounded.

She takes his hands in hers when hedoesn’t find the cigarillo.

“You can’t impose on your ownhome,” she says and continues before he can argue. “This is whereyou belong, you’re like a brother to me and I shouldn’t even haveto ask you to come. If Overwatch is ever going to take off again, weneed you. You can make people come out of their shell, you can makethem talk. Without you Genji would still be sulking in the clinic,Lena would never have asked Emily out, Jack would still-”Jesselaughs, holds up his hands in defense.

“All right, shortstuff, I get it. IfI’m the only one who can save this motley crew, you got my support.No need for a speech.”

But Fareeha knows it did him good tohear it.

And then the big day is there. After amonth of careful planning, of using everything from emotionalmanipulation to outright blackmail to get people to attend, it feelslike much more than a simple get-together. She puts Reinhardt andBrigitte in charge of snacks and they have the good sense to returnwith the van filled to the brim. The booze she bought days ago andretrieves it from its various hiding places, still finding thatsomeone found and raided at least one of her stashes. BetweenReinhardt, who thinks foreign beer counts as soda, and Hanzo, whodrinks to forget the fact he’s drinking, there are a few likelyculprits. Just today, though, there won’t be any reprimands.There’ll be enough tension to dissolve as it is.

As if on cue she hears the aircraftland, the pleasing hum of Vishkar’s jets and Symmetra disembarks infront of Lúcio, Lena and Emily who play an impromptu hockey game inthe hangar bay.

“Glad you could make it!” Fareehasays before the cold glares exchanged between Lúcio and Symmetra canturn the game into ice hockey.

“Of course,” Symmetra says as shefloats past like she’s on the red carpet, rather than an oversizedgarage smelling perpetually of cold pizza and engine grease. “Iwould not miss such an important team-building event.”

Lúcio misses the glance she throws himand Fareeha sends a prayer up in thanks. While she shows Symmetraaround the base, barely believing she’s run half a dozen missionsfor Overwatch and never seen it, the other guests trickle in. Theypass the gardens and listen to Hanzo assure Genji he loved his latestbatch of sweets. Fareeha winks at Hanzo and gestures with her fingeracross her lips, vowing she’ll keep them closed. But other than thebrothers the people she invited are spread out, barely talking to oneanother. It’s time to get this show on the road.

“All right, who wants to go first?”Fareeha asks with fake cheer at the not exactly overwhelmingenthusiasm. Even Hana, who assured her she knows how important it isthis evening goes well, pops some bubble gum and stays on her phone.Lena saves her life.

“Emi and I will!”

Emily looks like she doesn’tappreciate being volunteered but would do just about anything tosupport her girlfriend. Even singing a cheesy pop song in front ofstrangers with varying levels of deathglares.

The lyrics are simple, and theirenthusiasm infectious. Lena serenades Emily offkey on her knees, sorife with theatrics even Hanzo is seen hiding a smile.

Fareeha goes up next and watches, asshe sings a soulful ballad, her guests begin to relax and mingle.Lúcio, Reinhardt and Emily chat about the ideal ratio of dip todorito, Hana shows Genji something on her phone that makes them bothlaugh, and Jesse has taken on his assigned role as oyster shucker andworks to get Mei out of her shell.

After the last chords of her song fadeout she hands the microphone to Winston, knowing he’ll be toostartled to decline and too polite to pass it off to someone elseonce he’s taken it. He chooses a song rife with science puns lessthan a handful understands, but the refrain makes Mei laugh so hardsoda comes out of her nose. Fareeha jumps to her aid and whileWinston still apologises for a mishap he’s only indirectly to blamefor, she has promised Mei she’ll go up on stage with her if shewants to sing. Together they sing the lines to a tune from a Disneyfilm it turns out everyone remembers fondly. A few even sing alongfrom their seats and applaud heartily when Mei gives a shy bow afterher performance.

At some point between Reinhardt beltingModern Talking’s Sexy Sexy Lover, a song rightfully committed toobscurity a hundred years ago, trying to convince everyone to join inand not letting it curb his enthusiasm when they don’t, and Genjiand Hana laughing more than singing through the main theme of theirfavourite video game, Fareeha slips out to get more snacks and findsmost everyone has found their own little group to engage in. Peoplewho before couldn’t be bothered to exchange two words are nowinvolved in deep discussion if you really can’t love a memory.

She’s still swaying along toReinhardt’s song, mentally congratulating herself on how well thisevening is turning out even if it comes at the cost of havingterrible songs stuck in her head, that she doesn’t notice Jackuntil she runs straight into him.

“Jack!”

“Careful!”

Between them they save the tray ofempty bottles, juggling each toppling piece until they’re all inone way or another deposited on the kitchen table. He plays with abottle cap, places it on the table, then picks it up again to traceits edges, while Fareeha can only stare. Him showing up is almostmore surprising than when he returned from the dead.

“You, uh, said I should think aboutit and ... “he trails off and while she’s dying to know what madehim reconsider after all she doesn’t press. Instead she pulls twomore bottles of alcohol out of the pantry and pushes them into hishands, arming herself with a load of snacks. Brigitte and Reinhardtbought enough to feed an army and it may not be enough.

“They’ll be happy to see you,”Fareeha says in lieu of a grand speech of family and homecoming. “Andyou better think about what song you’re going to sing.”

“I’m not going to-”“Everyonesings.”

The truth of that becomes evident whenthey return to a friendly argument centering around Hanzo.

“I will not sing.” he maintains.“No one said participation was required.”“It’s karaoke,brother.” Genji says and though most of the group have only thebest intentions, trying to include Hanzo in this setting, it’sclear that he only seeks to make a public embarrassment of hisbrother.

“I am well aware of what it is and mypoint stands. I will not sing.”

Jack can slip in almost unnoticed whilethe attention lies on Hanzo’s steadfast refusal to stretch hisvocal chords. Only Jesse gives him a two-fingered salute beforeturning his attention back to the matter at hand.

“Give it a go, darlin’, we promisewe won’t laugh.”

“Do not call me that,” Hanzo snaps.“And I would like to remind you that you also have not sung.”

Fareeha intervenes before the argumentcan get serious. She leans on the backrest of the couch behind Hanzoand says, so low only he can understand her: “Sing or I may getbored and decide to talk to your brother for a bit.”

A moment later Hanzo’s on the stage,frowning as he scrolls through the music selection. He choosessomething slow and mournful, a song from a movie Fareeha rememberswatching years ago. Two lines into the song everyone has stoppedtalking. They stare open-mouthed at Hanzo who falters under theattention, but catches himself quickly to continue what just may bethe most beautiful thing Fareeha has ever heard. Genji’s eyestwinkle with joy at his friends’ bemusement. He wasn’t looking toembarrass his brother after all.

While Jesse pretends to die frominstant love Hanzo ends his song with the words “This shouldsuffice.”, steps over the smitten cowboy and returns to his seatlike nothing happened. He will not take any inquiries into hismiraculously beautiful singing voice and hands the mic to Lúcio whoby some miracle has managed to get out of singing without anyonenoticing. He slinks up on stage like a beaten dog and Fareeha swearsshe can hear him praying under his breath. Not without reason as itturns out.

Where Hanzo may have become a musicallegend in another life, Lúcio proves once and for all that justbecause one is a world-famous musician one is not necessarily good atholding a tune.

“Oh God ... “ Hana whispers inabject horror as Lúcio and everyone else in the room suffers throughhis song. Well, almost everyone suffers.

Satya’s shoulders shake but what atfirst look like tears of despair, turns out to be barely containedlaughter. Lúcio glowers at her, clearly intending to speak achallenge once he’s done - if you think you’re so good, do itbetter -  but he doesn’t need to. He has barely finished thesong, somehow managing not to hit a single note throughout, when shewalks up, takes the mic out of his hand and picks a song with thecertainty of someone who has calculated exactly where to find it fromthe moment she saw the machine.

No master singer is lost on Satya butcompared to Lúcio, currently licking his wounds and being cheered upby Reinhardt and Emily, she’s more than good enough.

The more extroverted members of thegroup go on stage again and again as the evening draws and andeveryone gets progressively more drunk.

Jesse refuses to sing karaoke but canbe persuaded to sing an old country song by himself, something sweetand full of homesickness that makes everyone rethink their opinion oncountry. Half a bottle of whiskey later he goes up for karaoke afterall and makes everyone re-rethink their opinion on country music.

Genji accompanies his next renditionwith a drunk lapdance for Mei who blushes feverishly red and lookslike she doesn’t know if she should cry or proposition him. Winstonsaves her by dragging her and Satya up on stage to sing the Elementssong together. She stumbles hopelessly over ‘praseodymium’ andSatya somehow manages to passive-aggressively sing the noble gases atLúcio who sticks his tongue out and steals the last cinnamon bunfrom her plate.

Jesse, once sufficiently drunk, canbarely be kept from the stage for a few minutes and proves his skillsof persuasion when Hanzo finds himself by his side, singing a duetfrom a popular musical together.

At some point during the night Brigitteshows up and, drowned out by Reinhardt’s bellowed greetings,apologises for her work keeping her away until now. She’s promptlydragged into a top volume rendition of Night Rocker and can only getaway when Reinhardt catches Lúcio humming along.

It’s long after midnight when thefirst start to drag out the mattresses Fareeha kept ready, and cuddleup there and on the sofas, blankets spread liberally all around.Hanzo tries to excuse himself to his rooms but has his escapethwarted by a seemingly sleeping Jesse holding onto his sleeve. Hesettles down in the small space between him and Emily and Lena,muttering something about not being here to get attached,metaphorically and certainly not literally.

Hana has fallen asleep in her armchairsome few minutes ago, the snack bowl in her lap tilting precariouslytowards the floor where Winston has set up, drifting off to the lowconversations around him.

And then it’s just a handful leftawake, the casual insomniacs drifting into that liminal space duringa sleepover when it all quiets down but the energy of the eveningstill hangs in the air like smoke. Fareeha makes herself comfortablein a nest of blankets between Satya and Genji and looks to Jack whosits at the table an arm’s length away and gives her a tired butsincere smile.

“You haven’t sung yet.” she says,just to acknowledge him, to let him know she watches and notices.He’s not the ghost he fashions himself to be and if the way helooks at her is any indication, he doesn’t want to be anymore.

Mei blinks when he starts to sing, halfasleep and probably thinking she’s dreaming as she snuggles closerto Lúcio who throws an arm around her and pulls her closer.

Jack’s song is one Fareeha has hearda hundred times throughout her life. She doesn’t know its name orwho wrote it, but her earliest memory is of her father and himsinging it to her. Her mother sang it long before, when it turned outit was the only thing getting her to sleep. Reinhardt maintains hewas the one who chose it first but it was Gabriel who sang it best,crooning low and deep to her from the days of her earliest childhoodto the day they all sat at her bedside, her father and surrogatefathers, singing it to chase away the grief of losing her mother.

She falls asleep to it, the songechoing in Overwatch’s halls long after the last note has faded. Itis as it should be and she is at peace.

Under the cut because of a long answer. 

Do you feel comfortable wearing tube tops? Yikes.

Has something someone said today annoyed you? Not today, no. My brother in law is notorious for that, and he said something yesterday that annoyed me. We were talking about my crazy neighbor and he was like “you need to stay away from him.” and I was like um, yeah I know that. And then a minute later he was like “I’m not telling you that because I am your elder, I am telling you that because I care.” I HATE when people who are only slightly older than me tell me they are my “elder” FUCK THAT. And also, no, the tone in his voice definitely made it feel like he was telling me that because he didn’t think I understood the situation THAT I AM IN. God I fucking hate him. 

Can you hear the crickets chirping at night? Sometimes in summer. 

Do you like listening to new music, or just sticking to your favorites? I like both. Just depends what I’m in the mood for.

Did you ever feel that there was something you couldn’t tell anyone? I can’t really tell my brother in law what a fucking pretentious asshole he is because I feel like it would fuck things up between me and my sister and my niece and that baby is my life so I don’t want that to happen. Maybe when they inevitably get divorced I’ll tell him the fuck off. 

Do you tend to gossip, even if you don’t mean it to cause harm? I’m definitely prone to it sometimes. I love being petty, haha. 

When was the last time you were bitten by a bug? Recently. Basement apartments are fun. 

Have you ever gotten your hair permed? Nope. At least I don’t think so. What is the actual definition of a perm? I’m just picturing like ridiculous poofy curls or something. 

Do you have a pair of sunglasses that are worth over $200? My most expensive pair of sunglasses I own were $15 and they were my moms and I never actually wear them haha. 

Would you ever go on a trip to Europe? Perhaps. 

Are you brave when it comes to trying new foods? Oh yes. I love food. There are only a handful of things I don’t like, and they are pretty random. 

When was the last time you saw your significant other? I can see him from where I am right now. 

If you see a piano, are you tempted to go over and play a little something? Nah. 

Has anyone teased you with the “K-I-S-S-I-N-G” song? Probably.

What time is it where you are? Exactly 2pm.

Have you ever owned a beanbag chair? Yeah. We are actually thinking of getting one to create a little reading nook when we get our big bookcase. 

If you own a laptop, do you have a case for it? If I need to carry it I usually put it in my Bob’s Burgers tote bag. 

What was the last movie you purchased on DVD? Oh man, I have no idea. I was going to buy Moana yesterday for my niece and I to watch while I babysat her but my sister said I could stream it on the Firestick. It ended up being $20 to do that so we definitely did not end up watching it. The DVD probably would have cost the same, but I would have kept it for my collection. 

Do you do your own laundry? I haven’t done it here yet but I’m actually gunna take some to my dad’s in a bit because the washing machine here is SO SMALL and costs a dollar. 

Have you ever used pastels? Yeah, in an art class. 

Would you be considered to be knowledgeable about World War 2? Definitely not, aside from basics. 

Will you bother having a party for your next birthday? I might have a small gathering with some close friends. Our wedding celebration is a few weeks after that so I don’t wanna do something huge. Which reminds me, I need to make an e-vite so people can start thinking about booking rooms. I also need to figure out some place to go to eat for a dinner. 

Do you currently have a job? I do.

Are you one of those people who can eat anything and not gain a pound? That would be fucking amazing. 

Do you know who you’re planning to ask to your grad prom? I have no idea what a grad prom is, but I’m out of school, so it’s irrelevant anyway. <---Yeah.

Are you having one of those days where you feel unattractive? Not really. 

Do you like hot dogs? I was born and raise in Chicago. Most of my blood is made of hot dogs. 

Have you been in any sort of physical pain today? My feet hurt when I woke up this morning, and I keep getting a kink in my back I need to crack every 10 minutes. 

Have you ever heard of the German movie Das Boot? Yes, but only because of a reference to it in Home Movies.

Do you ever go on PerezHilton.com to get all the celeb gossip? Nope. 

Do you wish your bedroom was bigger? It’s actually a great size. 

Have you ever killed a car battery by leaving your lights on? Yup, oops. 

Have you had the caramel flan latte from Starbucks yet? I don’t think I ever tried that one.

Have you ever dated a Ben? Nope.

Have you ever dated a ginger? Nope.

Have you ever dated someone outside of your race? Yes. 

Do you prefer to text or call? Call if it’s urgent, text if it’s not.

What was the last TV show you watched? Nature Cat with my niece, haha. 

Do you watch American Horror Story? I couldn’t get into it. 

Have you ever lied to get out of a relationship? I may have when I was “dating” people on the internet years and years ago, haha. 

Are you 21 or over? Yes. That reminds me, I was at Jewel yesterday and the cashier in the checkout next to the one I was at asked this guy if he was old enough to drink and the guy said yeah and he just rang him up without asking for ID. 

Do you or have you ever had a fake ID? I didn’t.

Who is the last person you hugged? Mark.

Where was your first kiss? Under someone’s porch. 

Have you ever had a crush on a teacher? Yeah, nothing major though. 

What color are your nails? I still have specks of black on them from 2 months ago, haha. 

Can you separate love and sex? Yeah. I don’t need to do it now because Mark and I have an amazing relationship that had both of those aspects, but mentally I can. 

How do you feel about animal print? I like it sometimes. 

What do you wash your face with? Some off brand facewash. I wasn’t paying attention when I bought it and realized after it was too late that it didn’t have any acne stuff in it, so I use a Stridex wipe at the end of the day. 

Do you have sensitive teeth? I have sensitive gums. 

Do you straighten your hair? Nope, I don’t need to. I have noticed it’s been getting a bit of a wave to it now, but I still don’t have the desire to straighten it. 

Would you date someone you had a 16 year age gap with? Nope.

What is your sexuality? I need to have that shrug face like ready to go to be copied and pasted when this question comes up. I feel like I never explained it but honestly that shrug face pretty much sums it up. I’m attracted to everyone, but at this point in my life, I’m not going to act on it, because I know for a fact I want to be with Mark for the rest of my life, so part of me feels like, why define my sexuality? It’s not super crucial to who I am as a person. 

Do you like Lana Del Rey? I love herrrrrrrr. When she first started getting popular, the internalized misogyny in me was like “lol a girl signing about video games?? What is she trying to be cute or something???” So I didn’t really give her a chance until I heard that remix of Summertime Sadness that was popular a few years ago, so then I looked up her actual music and fell in love.  

Do you think suits are sexy? Sure. I’ve never seen Mark in an actual suit so I am really pumped to see him in a casual one on our wedding day. 

Do you think earrings are attractive or unattractive on guys? They don’t really do anything for me, but they aren’t a turn off either. 

Are you an old soul? Eh, I am a child. 

Do you wear slippers? There are some next to my bed in the expectation that it’s freezing when I get up to go in the bathroom on our cold tile floor, but there’s a rug in front of the toilet so I haven’t really had to use them. 

What are you doing tomorrow? Working. Going to the gym. 

Do you sleep better during thunderstorms? Sometimes the thunder wakes me up, but I definitely feel more cozy when one is happening. I am super excited for warm storms!

Have you ever cheated on a boyfriend/girlfriend? No, but one of my exes might tell you otherwise because he’s insane. 

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DIFFERENT KINDS of translation: Translation of, translation for, translation as —

Translation of … foreign — no, different — or — unheard voices. Of voices overwritten, banished, lost, annihilated, misinterpreted. Translation of lands, peoples, politics, cultures, contexts, geographies, dreams, worlds exterior and interior. Translation of fiction, essays, prose, poetry, memoir, across, and in between genres. Translations of translations. “The politics of translation takes on a massive life of its own if you see language as the process of meaning-construction […] If you are interested in talking about the other, and/or in making a claim to be the other, it is crucial to learn other languages,” writes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay “The Politics of Translation.”

Translation for … meaning, content, style, sense, sound, rhythm — are these things mutually inclusive or exclusive? Translation for nuance, for posterity, for preservation, for understanding — for the future, the past, the present. Translation for me, you, us, them — the self and the other. Translation for all, for none, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health.

And as — translation as — past, present, and future. As voices remade, returned, rehabilitated, refashioned, resilient. Translation as critical as creative as accurate as failing. Translation as necessary as urgent as soft as loud as rising in volume and demand. Translation as learning, translation as essential — as a way of living, as a way of life. Translation as learning how to speak for the first time in the first place. Translation as a bridge, a tree planted on a border, branches branching to branches on the other side — branches of meaning related yet distinct.

Translation as Transhumance is the title of Mireille Gansel’s rich and moving memoir about her life as a translator, masterfully translated from French by Ros Schwartz. Transhumance, from the Latin trans, across, and humus, ground, to the French transhumer, and then finally, in the early 20th century into the English word, referring to a type of nomadism or pastoralism, which Gansel describes as “the long, slow movement of the flocks to distant places, in search of the greenest pastures, the low plains in winter and the high valleys in summer.” In Gansel’s memoir, words, too, migrate. Languages cross borders and settle for the season, then circumnavigate back to their original territories in altered forms, bearing witness to their travels. Translation uncovers etymologies of similarity and difference. But a language involves not just layers of meaning, but also layers of time in the lives of all who have spoken it.

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“That evening I discovered that words, like trees, had roots whose magic my father had revealed to me,” Gansel writes at the outset, introducing the origins of what will become her lifelong vocation. “[A]ll of a sudden, the blueprint of my native French glowed from within.” Translation as Transhumance is loosely organized into narrative passages that interweave Gansel’s life with the work of those she has translated — including the German-language poetry of Nelly Sachs, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Huchel, and Reiner Kunze; the Vietnamese poetry, spanning North to South, of Tố Hữu, Nguyễn Du, Xuân Diệu, Chế Lan Viên, and Te Hanh; and the cultural geography of Austrian folklorist Eugenie Goldstern. In the case of each person and the work described, she entwines the history of the individual with the history of his or her language. For Gansel, as writer and translator, it is not just what, but how we tell of our lives; particularly in languages that have been marked by conflict and abuse. The terms and conditions of language are subject to the warps and frays of history — forever audible in the syntax and vocabulary of what remains. Gansel’s memoir, as such, involves the memory of so many other voices.

The seeds of her approach to her work are rooted in her account of a formative incident involving her father reading a letter aloud, and translating from Hungarian into French. In a passage meant for her, Gansel notes that her father uses a single French word for a series of different words in Hungarian. She presses him to do better, and he does; specifically, four words in the letter irrevocably alter her understanding of linguistics:

Drágám, my darling; kedvesem, my beloved; and two other words whose sensual literalness I would never forget: aranyoskám, my little golden girl; édesem, my sweet […] Those four words opened up another world, another language that would one day be born within my own language — and the conviction that no word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.

Those four words, simple exclamations of fondness, usher Gansel, raised to be resolutely French, into a new universe, written and spoken: the German of Mitteleuropa, the language of a people, the language of her family — “that entire little circle of survivors, all speaking the same language, from a world that is no more.” Having forbidden the use of Hungarian, as if to erase the painful past, Gansel’s father tells her that if she wishes to communicate with this extended family, she will have to learn to speak German — though he himself explicitly hates it, saying, “I know eight words, the ones the teacher reserved for the Jewish students in the class—the only ones he dinned into me: ‘Du bist ein Stück Fleish mit zwei Augen’ (‘You are a piece of meat with two eyes.’).”

If we are made in, through, and by language — its cultural histories and political persecutions, the silences and stutters of a family letter translated aloud, the denial of a native tongue — this sort of parental refusal tells volumes, only truly understood with the passage of time:

Many years later, the little girl would understand that in the dark waters of a shared suffering and a shared rebellion, this hatred developed into a dual rejection: of German, the language of the persecutors and those who humiliate, and of Hebrew, the language of his Jewish-self, his persecuted and humiliated self.

As Gansel reaches out to family members, she learns of the vast differences between the German of 20th-century postwar Germany she has learned, and that of Mitteleuropa, peppered with Hungarian, Yiddish, and Slovak; a language that originated in countries “on the very margins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, created at the moment of the partition of Poland in 1772, then wiped from the world map in 1918. The crossroads of the languages spoken by all the peoples it comprised: Polish, Ruthenian, German, Yiddish.” As described by authors and scholars, this German revealed a culture of complexity, multilingualism, and pluralism; it was a language that relied on subtlety and humor, and left space for imagination and memory.

It is the knowledge of this other German, now hardly spoken anywhere, that leads Gansel to ask, “How do you bridge the abyss created in the German language by the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers of history? How do you reach the shores of a language of the soul?” This is her calling, to search out via language the traces of different lands and peoples and their lyric iterations. In prose that is elegant and spare, Gansel fuses memory and anecdote, poetry and translation, to offer observations that read as both simple and profound. To move through new languages, she shows us, is to move toward an originary, essential form of communication, and finally closer to the center of the self.

Translation as Transhumance is structured in short sections, scenes that shift and blur and come into focus, flashing forward and back under titles like “The fruits of the elderberry tree,” “The price of a letter,” “The weight of a word,” “Interior exile,” “The universal language,” “Byways,” “A sliver of plane tree bark.” ­Gansel’s recollections are loosely chronological, but without specific dates or many descriptive details, leaving the sense that these episodes interlock on a different plane in space and time: a life as translator is to be always in translation.

As a student at the Collège de France, Gansel meets Robert Minder, an eminent Germanist and anti-Nazi scholar who lectures about the Weltverfinsterung, the

engagement of German poets and intellectuals, citizens of the world who rose up against the imprisonment and obscurantist manipulations of thought and thus of language, against the gradual and arrogant perversion of the German language, whose path he mapped up until the dark era of Nazism.

It is Minder who leads Gansel to the work of Brecht, whose poetry she translates at school, and whom she eventually encounters in the East Berlin of the 1960s. Brecht and his theater group, The Berliner Ensemble, are working on a production of Antigone based on a translation by Hölderlin, whose work had been appropriated by the Nazis. Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, along with a small group of actors are working on the diction of the text — an attempt to reappropriate their native language after years in exile, “in order to give Germans the possibility of listening to their language again, a de-Nazified German language in a production that was also de-Nazified.” It is through Weigel and Brecht that Gansel learns that to interpret and to be an interpreter are not the same thing: one is a functional activity, the other an embodiment, an intensity, as in Brecht’s theory of gestus, which combines physical gesture with “gist,” or attitude, a sense that there is something that hovers beyond the text, which must be incorporated in the speaking of it. In Brecht’s work, Gansel sees the necessity of recognizing strangeness, “the foreign in the familiar, the familiar in the foreign.” Lodged within the language of another are all of the ways in which one does not yet know, may not even be able to imagine, how to speak; and in this different use of language and its alternative modes of description, exists the corresponding possibility of a different way of life. Critically, to control language is to control people; to deny or permit the opportunity for speech, and on what terms such expression may exist.

These ideas take on still new dimension when Gansel attends the Russell Tribunal in Paris, a private body organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to evaluate American foreign policy in Vietnam and the degree to which it had sanctioned war crimes. Gansel befriends the Vietnamese who attend the conference and pass through Paris as delegates, learning about their lives and the horrors they have witnessed by reading the poems they carry along. She is invited to translate an anthology of Vietnamese poetry compiled in response to McNamara’s declaration that the United States will “bomb ’em back to the stone age”: the Vietnamese wanted “to answer McNamara’s threat with poetry.”

As with her work with the German language, this project takes Gansel through many layers of Vietnamese culture, its long history of both poetry and conflict from past to present. To learn and to then translate Vietnamese, she takes an immersive approach, working with a team of specialists, each of whom addresses a distinct, critical aspect of the language: a linguist, a musician and composer, a musicologist, a refugee from Saigon, and a sculptor — as well as a host of contemporary poets. “Staying faithful,” Gansel notes, “means first and foremost seeking to recreate the work’s humanity, its universality.” Again, Gansel apprehends an essential unspoken element that lurks outside the words themselves; one for which she must find an equivalent in her French translation. Ultimately, it is the music of the culture, in the sound of the Vietnamese monochord, which Gansel learns to play so she can better hear and understand through, “the breath-chant, the double-silken thread of the cantillation it interweaves with the human voice […] a vast and entirely different kind of poetry.”

To read Translation as Transhumance is to transhume with Gansel as she cultivates a multidimensional understanding of language; it is likewise to excavate words, an archeology of the strata of interpretation that extend from the merest surface inscription. This practice reaches new depths in Gansel’s reading of the poetry of Nelly Sachs, whose work she explores through four levels of meaning, based on the Bible’s four levels of interpretation according to Jewish tradition — “Peshat, literal meaning; Remez, allusive meaning; Drush, deeper meaning; Sod, secret, esoteric meaning.” Like Brecht, Sachs strove to refashion postwar German, to restore the language to those whose forms of communication had been destroyed. It is in this language, both rhythmic and stark, that Sachs writes of the Shoah — of the devastation of a people, of the brutal loss of children and childhood itself; but in terms that record this experience on and in their own cultural terms.

Words, we know, have roots. Like plants they grow, adapt, spread below and above the ground over time. Words are rhizomatic — interconnected with double-meanings and interlocked, subterranean origins. In German, lesen is to read, but it is also to gather, to glean, like leftover grain after the harvest. Indeed, language is an agrarian economy, and Gansel writes of the shared roots of words as reassuring: in language, anyway, ideologies near and far are fundamentally linked. When we speak, we have more in common than we know.

I write this in Europe. The part of Europe that will soon cease to be, if it ever really was. I’m thinking now of those who manipulate language and thus thought; those who are intent on reinforcing binaries; those who conspire to keep people out based on alleged difference, be it language or skin color or religion; those who benefit from language that aims not to expand but to police and to pervert meaning.

Translation as Transhumance, and Gansel’s practice as described, champions the use of language that cannot be instrumentalized — on which fascist ideologies have no grasp. In her poignant foreword, Lauren Elkin — a writer and translator herself (adding a third intra-lingual female practitioner to the book) — links Gansel’s practice to Rimbaud’s famous statement, je est un autre: I is another; or, the Self is the Other; or, I is someone else. Even in the English translation, Elkin leaves the phrase in French — allowing it to speak the layers and volumes of interpretation it has accumulated over time. After all, as Gansel herself has written toward the end of the book: “It suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand from the other.”

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Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer and critic based in London, where she is visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art.

The post We Have More in Common Than We Know appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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