Trying to Communicate
by Lindy Davies
It is amazing, in some ways, how little Americans think about the intricacies of language -- their own, and others'.
It's well-known that the main benefit of studying a foreign language is the insight it gives into one's native tongue, and to the texture and nuance of verbal communication itself. I was lucky there; I got a second chance. Between the school-grades of four and eight, I was directed to a class called "French", and had pretty much the standard public-school experience of foreign-language study, amounting to diddly-squat. However, I was on the way to college, and foreign language was strongly recommended, so I was talked into trying Spanish in high school. There, I was confronted with a force I was powerless to resist: the stubborn patience of a young teacher. From some reason, Ms. Deborah Mandycz decided I was teachable, and despite my best efforts to ignore and annoy her, she would teach me Spanish. I ended up studying with her for four years, and to this day, I teeter on the brink of bilinguality.
Some years ago I attended a conference in the Dominican Republic. I actually got there a couple of days early, having been called on to help with final setting-up. One of the jobs that needed doing was the welcoming of travelers at the airport — helping them get their baggage, navigate the customs process and secure transportation to the hotel. Our host had a small team of volunteers who were familiar with these matters, but, as it turned out, didn't speak English. What an interesting challenge! Here came parties of bemused gringos, one after another, being (rather persistently) offered free shots of rum by airport personnel, and not having the slightest idea what to do next. Our hosts could only communicate with most of their guests via — alas! — me.
If you have ever had an experience like this, you know how tiring it can be. People disembarking from long flights aren't as articulate or composed as they might be. A fair number of our guests were a bit on in years, and the background noise of the terminal didn't help them. People kept popping up with those trays of neatly-poured shot glasses. Many were unused to international flights, and had to find their way through customs. (The lines were extended by hundreds of local folks coming back from the States, carrying impressive loads of toilet paper, shampoo, disposable diapers, canned goods, copier paper, gym socks, powdered drink mix, headache remedies, birthday candles, board games -- family after family seemed to be traveling with the stock of an entire Rite Aid on their backs.) I had never served as an interpreter before -- and I found, disconcertingly, that my ability to string together a couple of decent sentences made it seem as if I really spoke the language -- inducing my amiable hosts to talk at their normal pace -- "¡Mas lento, por favor!" There was great potential for misapprehension; one conversation after another, all day long, demanded all the concentration I had. Not that it wasn't fun! It was a rush -- and I basked in the praise of norte and sur alike for my efforts. (I did have to congratulate myself for one bit: the guests asked about the frequency of hurricanes there. Yeesh -- how to say that!? So I stammered something about "the wind that is so big it has its own name" -- and our driver said "Ah! Ciclónes!" Interesting how poetry sometimes emerges...) Anyway -- my day of interpreting at the Santo Domingo airport was a marathon: incredibly exhausting. When the last posse of guests was dispatched to the hotel, I gladly accepted some rum.
I've been recalling that experience lately, as I read that for approximately every one hundred and twenty US military personnel serving in Iraq, there is one person who can speak and/or read some Arabic. That doesn't mean fluent speakers, folks — that means a lot of people like me. If I found my little day at the airport exhausting, imagine the stress of a day at the Baghdad airport, where the cocktails are Molotov, and the background noise includes machine guns. Much has been said about our poor post-war planning — but it occurs to me now that most of that discussion has been overly detailed and specific -- and therefore seems debatable. But: how profoundly arrogant, what monumental folly it was to field tens of thousands of soldiers, into neighborhoods, to keep peace, patrol for violent insurgents, resolve disputes, help to restore services -- yet who could not speak the language? How could Americans be anything but hated by the Iraqi in the street?
I suspect, too, that our inability to communicate with folks we met in Iraq had a great deal to do with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It was reported at the time that many of the people initially rounded up and held there were not under any particular suspicion; they were simply apprehended in random sweeps. Our intelligence-gathering had gone rather spectacularly south at that point, and the Administration urgently wished to get some information on how the insurgents were organized, where and who they might be. But we didn't know who to ask -- so we picked up cab drivers, grocery shoppers, construction workers, put them in Saddam's infamous prison and tortured them, hoping maybe some of them would provide us with leads.
The effect of all this on troop morale gets little play in the mainstream media, but it has started to filter through to attentive readers. The "Iraqization" policy on which the Bush Administration has placed so much of its hopes has made little progress; the Pentagon recently admitted that there are only "several hundred Iraqi troops capable of operating fully independent of American troops." Our stated plans call for more and more Iraqi troops to be embedded with US units -- and for Iraqis eventually to gain the authority to call in US air strikes. With our near-total failure to understand even the most basic questions to ask about civil and political life in Iraq, it's hard to imagine how any intelligent person could believe in such a plan.
Military and Administration spokesmen claim that the troops are "focused" and "on-mission", and the President even claims that criticism of the war is what lowers their morale. Be that as it may, one of the many ways in which the occupation of Iraq resembles the Vietnam war is that troops have no way of knowing who their enemy is. Anybody on any street could be an insurgent; any passing car could blow them up. Foreign Policy in Focus cites a survey of the Illinois Army National Guard which showed that, "[the] majority of soldiers feel they are poorly informed, inadequately cared for, and that training in their units is boring and unorganized", and that "In July 2005 the Army's surgeon general reported that 30 percent in a survey of US troops have developed stress-related mental health problems three to four months after coming home from the Iraq War." The main cause cited for the extremely high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder is soldiers in Iraq have a high rate of contact with "the enemy".
A great many of those normal Iraqis that our soldiers meet are not the enemy, however -- and it falls to those guys teetering on the brink of bilingualism, trying to accomplish the exhausting feat of holding conversations in another language, to make those life-and-death distinctions. It takes a lot of damn gall to send a force to occupy a country, of which one person in every one hundred and twenty speaks some of the local language. If that is the best we can do, then we really had better bring them home immediately, and make a New Year's resolution to mind our own business.
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Also see: Broad Background is Healthy - Learn a Foreign Language
Davies: I'm Running for President |
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