on language, culture, and sex

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the connections between language, culture, and sex. This blog post, however, is mostly instigated by a really surprisingly fabulous cab ride that I had from O'Hare to my house the other day. The driver was a Somali man, and he engaged me right away, for some unknown reason, even though I stumbled into his taxi bedraggled and pungent, not having showered or brushed my teeth in about two days. We got to talking, and he told me that he wrote film scripts when he wasn't driving the cab. I asked him what the scripts were about, and he said that the first one that he'd finished was a sci-fi film featuring only a little killing (he was speaking quickly, and I couldn't catch his description of the film, but I did hear him say that usually in films there was too much killing, and you couldn't watch killing for too long, because it got boring). The new film was a comedy about an African man who comes to the US and experiences intensely comical culture shock. This sounded both autobiographical and somewhat cliched to me, but I didn't say anything. Then the cabdriver directly segued into a discussion of his own coming-to-America story, as well as the preamble. He talked about his introduction to American culture and the three most shocking things: 1) homosexual men; 2)women with their legs uncovered; and 3) doors that automatically opened and closed. About the gay men, he said that there weren't any in Somalia, though men often held hands with friends, and so it was hard to tell, and the Kenyans thought that all Somalis were gay anyway. The man said that he'd been working as a cook in a hotel, and one man was always very friendly to him, and also very "soft." Eventually, another cook told him that the man was gay, after which point he became so spooked that he had to stop working that job. He told me that he later became more educated and now realized that "gays are human too." Once again, I displayed my awkwardly nervous giggle.

Then, he said, when he was in California, he couldn't bear to look at the gorgeous, nearly-naked women - he wanted to look, but didn't know where to look! So many uncovered legs and burqa-less mantles. And finally, as for the automatic doors, he still shadowboxed them from time to time, not knowing exactly how fast to approach or when they'd give way. This was all destined to go into his script.

And I was thinking the whole time: why is culture shock here made equivalent to homosexual panic, or the shock of sexual difference? Why are culture and sex so often conflated when eliciting reactions of fear and disavowal in constituting selfhood? Why should sexuality even have a culture, which (as it turns out) is huge? How can a repeating repertoire of rote acts conjure such fear, paranoia, denial, abnegation, shame, imagination, excitement, devotion??? I remember thinking that sex was not so interesting when I was not so interested in it; but now I know that it has all of these facets, despite still not putatively being very interesting. Like, even though I can go through all of the motions in my mind until I feel like I should be acclimated, I am still excited by the boring. Hm.

We talked more about language, and he told me about the various languages in Somalia - Italian, of course, and Russian and even a Turkic language that was not Turkish and wasn't written in Arabic. He told me that all foreign movies, including cowboy films, are translated into Italian before entering Somalian theatres, and he always loved watching spaghetti Westerns that were both shot in Italy and now translated into Italian, making them thoroughly tangled in spaghetti. Clint Eastwood was his favorite actor.

He could also speak several languages, including the tribal languages of Somali, Italian, (perfect) English, and several other African languages, since he had spent many years moving around Africa on foot, crossing borders illegally with his brother and a friend. He said that Africa was beautiful and very dangerous. I felt that I agreed with that statement.

Then we talked for a while about the strangeness of English, especially to pronounce and spell - he ranted eloquently about its difficulty as compared to Italian, in which the rules spelled out clearly how to pronounce "c" if followed by "i" or "e." I had to agree with him, and I lamented that English was the lingua franca, being so difficult, and with such complicated nuances. He told me that in the tribal language of Somalia that he happens to speak (because there are many, divided into sections within the country), people can say entire sentences by using only one word, a word that can be as precise or as general as they want it to be, depending on the context. He told me that with the variety of expressions in English, he was often lacking a precise statement that would express what he wanted to say.

Anyhow, it was an interesting and rapid-fire discussion. We said goodnight and left; I gave him a pretty big tip for being such a great interlocutor. Also, everything really related to my recent feelings and thoughts about speaking Spanish and feeling comfortable in a world of Spanish - both understanding the signals and giving them. The discomfiting feeling of having misinterpreted signals that I thought I'd had right. I feel like speaking another language is like inhabiting another sexuality, by which I mean being privy to another culture. Hard to describe, but entering a cultural world of Spanish speaking gives me a palpably other identity that actually allows for a lot of erotic play, though not much that is sexually explicit. It's like wearing another set of clothes, granted intimacy to a new place where people might receive me differently but in which I don't have control over my comprehension. To say this a different way: I feel incompletely in control of Spanish, the same way that I feel incompletely in control of sexuality, and yet the destabilization and uncertainty are infinitely titillating to me. There's an erotics to code-switching, for sure, but one that is more than metaphoric.

So I've cooked up the phrases "bilingus" or "multilingus," or even "polylingus" to summon up the meanings of bilingualism, bisexuality, and cunnilingus and invoke the slippery sexiness of linguistic and cultural difference. I think that's pretty good and should make its appearance at the next Encuentro, eh?