It’s all about communication

I think alot about my ability to communicate with people here in Bangladesh. Sometimes I have to remind myself that what I’m doing is really tough, so that I won’t get discouraged. There are moments when Rashida and I will be speaking to each other in such a way that it seems as if language and culture were not a barrier at all. And there are other moments–not often with Rashida, but with other men and women in Char Fasson–when I can’t understand a damn thing they’re saying, and I feel so upset and disheartened.

Part of the issue stems from language learning, and it’s totally expected. I learned most of my Bengali in Calcutta, where people speak both more slowly and more clearly. It’s not true, unlike what Bangladeshis and West Bengalis both think, that Calcuttian Bengali is ‘better’ (that’s my humble, academic opinion). In fact, there’s a sweetness to Bangladeshi Bangla that I really appreciate. But it’s undeniable that West Bengalis speak in a way that is much easier for me to understand.

One step removed from the Bengali I learned is the Bengali spoken in Dhaka. The Dhaka dialect is obviously different, especially in the use of Perso-Arabic words and a slightly different way of producing verbs, but I can usually understand Dhaka-ites. I say that cautiously, because I still have trouble with the newscasts (people speak very fast) and with complex vocabulary.

Two steps removed is the local dialect of Char Fasson. In the last few weeks, I’ve caught up fairly quickly on the language spoken by educated people, and sometimes I can even understand older people, who may or may not be educated. But there really is a very different way of speaking that sometimes is a complete mystery to me. Sometimes it’s all I can do just to get the general topic of the conversation!

Language, ‘Voice,’ and Identity

A few weeks ago, my friend AB called me from Europe. He’s Bengali, from Calcutta, but he was spending a number of months in London, Paris, etc. All of the sudden, in the midst of our phone call, he exclaimed, “You speak like an American!” I immediately knew what he meant, although he went on to explain that, having been in Europe, he now knew what American English sounds like as opposed to other groups. Now, I’d be lying if I said that while he and I were in India, we spoke only in Bengali. In fact, I spoke a lot of English around him and his friends, because their English is so very good. But I had taken on their Indian English accent and idioms, and I’m sure that none of them had ever heard me speak in my own, unaffected speech. I think that my friend believed that it was simply a situation in which I had (intentionally or not) taken to mimicking the speech I heard around me. That’s partially true, perhaps in the same way that too much time around my North Carolinian cousins will affect my accent. But, as I’ve thought about it, it’s much more than that.

I remember an odd moment in Calcutta, in the studio of a Bangla-language TV channel. I was part of a number of episodes in a series about West Bengal folkart. I was, oddly, supposed to be the starry-eyed white girl who couldn’t speak Bengali, which, by that point in my stay in Calcutta, was a bit difficult. For the first (and only) time in the episodes, I had a fixed script, in which I was speaking with two other ‘characters’ (the wife of the then-consulate general of Calcutta and a Bengali actor who was later featured in The Namesake). I’m no actress, and I forgot my lines halfway through. In this strange situation–me acting like me, even though it wasn’t really me–I got a bit aggravated and suddenly spit out, “Shit! Can we start again?” It startled me perhaps as much as it startled all the people around me. But it was perhaps the most ‘authentic’ that I had been in months.

Speaking in another language, at least for me, is not just about language. It affects my whole personality, my whole way of being in the world. Bengali made me, simultaneously both more mousy and more bossy. And even when I was speaking English in Calcutta (or Dhaka or Delhi), it wasn’t the same person who speaks English in the U.S. I spoke in an affected Indian English because that’s who I was. To have spoken to my friends–a few are close friends–in my American English would have seemed out-of-place and startling..perhaps even vulgar? Not to mention that people would have a harder time understanding me. One of the young boys who used to stay in the orphanage was quite annoyed with me when he realized that he could understand the English of the orphanage director, but not mine. Guess I’ll have to work on my Bholai English!

The TV channel crew

Another linguistic note

I didn’t realize this, but it seems that tuphaan is also the word used for ‘deluge’… as in the deluge (flood) that came during the time of Nuh (Noah). (See Qur’an, al-’Ankabut 29:14).

‘The Hungry Tide’

The name of this blog has, of course, a particular meaning for me. When I went to India for my year-long academic program in Bangla, my teachers could not come up with a unique ‘Bangla’ name for me. It was a bit dissatisfying to me, until one of the teachers pointed out that my given name is similar to a Bangla word that comes from Persian and Arabic (and possibly Greek, it appears). Tuphan (the typhoon) is, of course, a strong storm in the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans. I held on to this, even as my teacher remarked that the name really didn’t ‘fit’ me because I’m so calm and quiet (friends and family can debate whether or not this is true!). So I reluctantly gave this as my “bangla name” to my host family, and the father, in true Bengali fashion, replied with a proverb: “Kanacheler nam padmalochen” (the blind boy is named the lotus-eyed). I was thrilled with this explanation, which basically means, ’someone whose name doesn’t describe him/her’.

So there’s ‘tuphan.’ Again, I’ll leave it to those who know me to decide whether or not ‘Tuphani’ really describes me. But the second part, ‘char,’ refers to my fieldwork site, Char Fashion. A char is basically an island created by the silt that runs down the delta into the Bay of Bengal. This particular ‘char’ is now part of a much bigger island that is not likely to be dragged away by the tides any time soon. Bhola Island is quite big, and it has weathered the Bhola Cyclone of 1970, one of the most deadly natural disasters in recorded history (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhola_cyclone).

Lucky for me, most people in Bangladesh use the word ‘jhor(d)’ to describe such storms, or cyclone even. I did not often hear people use the word ‘tuphan.’ My goal is certainly not to speak lightly of the force and destruction of cyclones, so I hope my choice of the less often used ‘tuphan’ will signal its meaning in this context.

Thus, the one named Tuphani comes to the char…