In a previous post, Katy pondered what love might have to do with visiting other worlds. She partly landed on love as a way of preventing us from objectifying the other, to engage with others respectfully. I want to take that a little further. Katy admits that she is uncomfortable with the idea of love in politics. But I think love can be a kind of language that allows us to start thinking about politics.
Visiting
According to Hannah Arendt, visiting is the process of expanding our perspectives by imagining the viewpoint of others. We visit other worlds when we successfully imagine the world from another’s perspective. During this process, Arendt cautions we must remain aware of the differences between our perspective and that of the other. For, it is that cognitive distance which allows us to visit respectfully and fruitfully.
Katy talked about how love might allow us to keep in mind this distance. But I want to ask: how do we actually visit another perspective? And can love help with this too?
Exchanging narratives
After nearly a year of research, Katy and I finished writing a paper about the value of listening for building relations of solidarity. I won’t get into that too much here, except to say that writing that paper has made it clear to me that visiting other worlds requires talking with other people. We can read someone’s life story, or watch a film that documents something historical, but if we hear their story from them, we can visit their perspective more successfully. When we converse with someone, as opposed to just learning about them through other means, we get invited into their world – to ‘see’ it as they do.
For this reason, exchanging narratives can be a powerful method of recognizing someone as they want to be recognized and supporting them as they desire. When we tell our stories, we get to tell them as we want to tell them. We can choose the topic and the plot; we can paint the characters as we want; and we can select words and images that are personally meaningful.
But what happens if we don’t speak the same language?
A little about me
My parents left South Korea decades ago and immigrated to Canada. So, English is their second language. I’ve always known that. Sometimes, they need a little help understanding formal letters from the government or writing a ‘professional’ sounding document. And sometimes, they ask me if I can pretend to be them on the phone – especially if it is to make a complaint or special request. I don’t really mind too much; it’s just always been that way. They needed help and so, I helped. (For a poignant short story about this phenomenon between immigrant parents and their children, read Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”.)
Besides, my Korean isn’t really that great and my parents help me when I need it. For example, I can write some Korean, but my penmanship makes me me seem like I’m in elementary school. So, if I send a card to my relatives in Korea, I usually ask my mom to write out my message for me. I’ve also been told that I have a bit of an accent and speak a bit too slowly. I know that’s likely true because on my last trip to Korea, a barista and I had quite the time trying to figure out what I was actually ordering (who knew there were so many ways of saying iced coffee!).
So how do my parents and I communicate?
We speak ‘Konglish’ – a fusion of the Korean and English language, with no fixed rules about grammar or word choice. We use words from both languages, sometimes mashing them up into a ‘Frankenstein word’. And sentences are constructed in whatever order makes sense at that time. (Korean is a Subject-Object-Verb language whereas English is a Subject-Verb-Object language. Konglish can be either.) We never sat down to figure out how to speak Konglish, and if someone should ask us how to speak it, I’m not sure I could teach them. But I do know that it is a language of love. It allows my parents and me to talk about almost anything and in a way that doesn’t frustrate either party or put an undue burden on any one side. Konglish allows us to visit each other’s worlds and, in so doing, understand the other.
Learning the other’s language (or creating our own)
I think that a language like Konglish is possible if the speakers of the language love each other. Here, by love, I mean either the emotion of love (where we care for the other immensely out of affect) or a more cognitive relationship (where we actively choose to care and respect the other). Drawing on Jodi Dean who says that people can be in solidarity via affect or commitment, I think a unique channel for communication opens when either affect or commitment are present in a relationship. In this channel, differences like our dominant languages or vocabulary don’t pose a problem per se. Rather, they become aspects of the other to recognize.
In other words, we acknowledge the other’s difference by learning about them through a cooperative conversation, through a language of love. It’s a language because we must still engage the other in dialogue. And it’s a language of love because we prioritize the other’s understanding of us over the rules of our preferred language. Thus, each conversation participant tries to meet their interlocutor ‘halfway’ and when they do ‘meet up’, narratives can be exchanged successfully.
This isn’t to say that we can visit well just because we negotiate a way to talk with one another. The language borne of love is only a way to visit other worlds; visiting still entails listening to and appreciating the stories that the other has to offer.
My ‘trip’ to Eritrea
Last year, I had the opportunity to teach employable (soft) skills to Eritrean refugees. I remember feeling excited the night before. I had googled tons of information about the country and came up with what I thought would be some clever jokes to get the week started. But on the first day of class, I was surprised: almost none of the learners could speak English at all! Almost all of them could greet me (“Hello, Ms. Teacher!”) but almost none of them could continue the conversation after that.
Somehow, though, we got through it together. We created our own system of understanding each other without relying on specific words. It took a lot of role playing, drawing, and wild gesturing but by the third day, we got the hang of it. And by then, we were laughing with each other a lot too. There was a comfortableness that had grown between us. By the end of the 2 weeks, I was surprised to see how much of the material we were able to cover and how much the learners’ speaking ability improved.
The learners and I had lunches together, and we learned a lot about each other. I explained to them that in a couple of months, it would get much, much colder (on a rainy September morning, they complained to me that it was too cold). I recommended that they try skiing (one of my favourite winter sports). In return, they showed me pictures of Eritrea and their families back home. One woman showed me the makeshift table on which she sold coffee by the cup for almost 5 years. Needless to say, I was humbled. They had just as much to teach me about the world as I them.
I remain grateful that I got the chance to visit their world, to communicate with them in a language of our own.
Love and Politics
Maybe politics isn’t the right place for love, but I think that political action, especially those related to social justice, could start with love. Either as affect or commitment, it opens us up to others, to not just hearing them but listening to them as they want to be heard. It can, in other words, allow us to travel to new worlds.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash