This is part one of a dialogue between Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, and Katherine Russell Rich, author of Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language.
Hey Kathy,
Congratulations on Dreaming in Hindi! I loved it, but I’ve been trying to work out what genre it fits into. It reads part travelogue, part memoir, part personal survivor story, and part popular science. Just to catch up our readers on some background: You were 37, you'd had two harrowing bouts with breast cancer, and you'd reached critical levels of ennui in your magazine editor's job (the constant promotional parties, the fancy shoes, and the endless supply of giveaway moisturizers). Then, you were fired and you took a major left turn. You went to India for a year to learn Hindi.
This is where the story really starts. You sincerely gave yourself over to a new place, and you came out of it a different person. But this isn't a book about being different because you feel different, it's about actually becoming different. “Transformation” is one of these words we use loosely these days, but you doggedly track down the mechanisms of transformation. What happens to our brains when we take on another language? Do they change in fundamental, physical, and verifiable ways? Your book is an exploration of new findings in cognitive science as well.
You talk, for example, about a baffling silence that befell you early in your journey. You just couldn't find words, English or Hindi. This reads like a personal watershed, and clearly it was, but it was also, you discover, a predictable stage in acquiring a new language. You mention kids who are dropped into another language and go through a period of not talking before they suddenly open their mouths one day and, voila, they speak fluently. Like a virus, the new language has been quietly colonizing their brains. Who knew that for both one's character and one's neurons, silence is golden?
Other feelings and metaphors of your daily experiences turn out to have origins in neural connections as well. You write about how fragile you felt in this new world, how your English seemed to fall away. As one cognitive scientist tells you, the problem is that it was never your English to begin with. Language is constantly animated and reinforced by the world around us. If we give up that world, it's remarkable how fast our language dissolves. This dismantling of your self even affected how you looked—one day you glanced in the mirror and your face had changed. Again, you explain that this wasn't just a shift in self-regard. You looked different because the resting point of your face was different—the basic vowel in Hindi, the place to which your lips and everything else around them repeatedly returned—is different from the basic vowel in English.
Christine Kenneally has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and New Scientist. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
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Comments
Don't knock the author
By: Jen Gaspar | Wed, 07/22/2009 - 04:24
I'm troubled more by some of the comments on this post, than the premise that after a year in a foreign country, one has the competence to write deeply on the culture or language. We should be encouraging more of this cultural exploration (what a loaded and haughty term 'cultural window shopping' used by a fellow commenter!). I am a collector of languages, and have lived in several foreign countries where I also struggled to understand, speak and learn. I'm currently in year seven of my life in Russia, where I have planted roots – for now. I know from my own multiple experiences that there is a honeymoon period and a period of great self exploration and discovery when one truly tries to learn a foreign language – not through grammar and syntax, but through culture and communication. It is a period when you feel as though you have figured some things out, and are eager to share those new understandings with others. It's a phase where overarching cultural concepts begin to make sense to the foreigner, and construction of a new framework for referencing ideas begins. This is a wonderful period, although certainly not the last phase – to borrow from Heidegger – on the way to language. I am in a different stage in my language learning, no longer in wonder, I realize now how little I really know. The writer deserves praise for her bravery in making public observations and sharing her experience – it has clearly opened her up to all sorts of rather wicked criticism. But her writing should be taken for what it is – the truth of her own experience (and pardon me for I have yet to read the book, but I hope that she uses this approach in her writing). She changed through her experience and her writing is a reflection upon those changes. Why must there be such a knee-jerk reaction of “you don't know us” to an honest effort at understanding? Thank God there are people out there who try to understand the world around them and other cultures. Imagine if we didn't.
Not learnt a thing!
By: neerajamb | Tue, 07/21/2009 - 14:26
OK, I actually signed up because I had to comment. This is easily one of the most condescending, regressive, over-generalized, unintellectual tripe I have read in a long while. I am annoyed because I speak Hindi without swathing myself in bee-keeper clothes, without non-uttering my husband's name and without referring to myself as 'we'. Apart from the fact that the explanation the author invented is wrong on so many counts, I cannot imagine that anyone in their right mind thinks they can bracket 300 million Hindi speakers into one rural, chauvinistic culture that the author seems to paint as 'Hindi'. I am Indian, and my parents and grandparents are progressive minded individuals who are proud that their daughter conducts herself with ample swabhiman and atma-samman(two Hindi words for self-respect, that the author clearly did not study well enough)! What was more irritating than the pseudo-acceptance of that culture was the alien feeling the author describes on return to her NY apartment: the place of a more sophisticated, educated person?!! So is that a hint to us Indian, on how we should feel when we enter your exalted residences?!
Suppression of women unfortunately does exist in India, but it is actively looked down upon by educated circles. XX, I thought you were feminist: what's with the doormat opinion!
a new level of power
By: lobat | Mon, 07/20/2009 - 20:00
to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Language shapes the self - mind, thought, reality, and now body