Daily Archives: October 19, 2013

The Familiarity of an Unfamiliar Language

Ideas, The Netherlands, Travelling in Europe,

I keep catching myself. I’ll be sitting at a table, idly watching the conversation move back and forth, or sitting quietly on a train, zoned out but hearing the words drift by. Suddenly, it occurs to me that the words I’m listening to, the conversation I’m following, isn’t in English.

Perhaps I am used to the extreme opposite when I travel. The complete strangeness of Hangeul (Korean) or Swahili/Shona/Bemba, distant relatives of languages I know a little, with just a few common words. It is disconcerting to find myself in a country where the foreign language is familiar. I don’t speak Dutch by any stretch. I didn’t realise how much I would understand.

It comes in handy. Yesterday, I got to Rotterdam and headed out to take the tram, as per instructions sent by the hostel. There was a schedule posted. The tram I was waiting for was supposed to arrive every 10 minutes. But the sign with the expected times of the trams didn’t show it (yes, there are signs indicating how long you’ll wait, just in case the timetables are ever so slightly off – I imagine there will shortly be a post which is an ode to the awesomeness of Dutch public transport).

After waiting a while, starting at the screen, it occurred to me that I was reading the text scrolling across the bottom. The text indicating that the tram I was anticipating taking was not running on this particular day from this stop. Mentally thanking every Afrikaans teacher I’ve ever had, I headed off to the metro instead, instead of waiting around for ages and ages in the cold.

Inside the metro station, I looked around and couldn’t see a ticket desk with a human. I needed a ticket and there were ticket machines. Except there weren’t, because even the name of the machines was in Dutch. I picked up a ticket and only as I was leaving realised there was an option on the first page to use English instead (when I picked this, out of curiosity, it turned out to be English only to the first page, FYI, for anyone who doesn’t read Afrikaans).

It happened again this morning: I was reading a bilingual brochure for an attraction I wanted to visit and accidentally found myself reading the Dutch instead of the English, which turned out to be more detailed and more accurate.

Usually, I travel with a guidebook. This trip was so last-minute, so unplanned that I didn’t pick one up. Instead, I’m relying on maps and brochures picked up from information desks and hostels. And overwhelmingly in Dutch. Understanding a little makes travel easier. If I can’t immediately understand things, I find I can figure them out. I’m more confident. I can’t speak the language (I don’t generally speak Afrikaans either – just read and understand) but I can generally understand most of it.

There is something else. It’s something I struggle to explain – it’s comfortingly familiar. Perhaps it is the music of the language that is similar to Afrikaans. The voices of teenagers laughing on the square. The quiet conversation of an elderly couple on a bus. Even the people, the “types” feel predictably familiar.

Beyond the familiarity of the Dutch itself, there is a vocabulary of place that is familiar here. More than familiar – it represents a world I learned as a child. It struck me yesterday as I sat on the train from Amsterdam to Rotterdam. Outside the window, along a canal, were houseboats. There was a story, a long time ago, about a mole and a rat and a toad. Was it The Wind in the Willows? In it, there is a river or a canal and a houseboat. The pictures looked like these houses. On a canal. Somewhere in my head, I have held, all these years, a picture of a houseboat and a canal that didn’t match any of the houseboats or bodies of water I would ever see. It existed for me nowhere but the books I read as a child. Yet here it was. I made a note to complement the classics with African books for all the children in my circles and wondered how many other things there are in my mythology of the world that have no substance beyond imagination (for me) because they have never existed in my physical reality.

Like woods. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep…” “If you go down to the woods today…” “They shut the road through the woods seventy years ago…” I could go on and on. There were woods in Narnia, possibly the central book series of my childhood. There were woods in all the Enid Blyton books. There were no woods in South Africa. I’ve seen montane forests with hundred-year-old yellowwoods. I’ve visited the tropical rain-forests of the Congo. I had never walked in the woods until today.

It shouldn’t be possible for language to be both fragile and robust. Over the years other concepts had become attached to those words for me – forests for “woods” and yachts for “houseboats”. But language bounces back. The actual thing fits so much better that it quickly replaces the substituted concept. And those things – the real world things to which words should be anchored – make it possible for reality to translate from the unfamiliarity of Dutch to the gentle, safe familiarity of Afrikaans and, eventually, English.

Coming in to Land

Adventures, Travelling in Europe,

Written at 36,000 ft on the flight between Johannesburg’s OR Tambo Airport and Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam

The image on the flight tracking information screen says we are flying over Brussels. On the map I can see Calais and Amiens and Cantebury. Names out of stories and fairytales and books. I find myself struggling with the idea of Europe. The idea of landing in a European city.

I studied Africa. Europe was, particularly once I reached university and was able to focus my studies, a sort of background noise. Europe became important only in so far as the histories of the African places I was studying were impacted by Europe. It’s funny; it’s fairly common to study African history from the premise (and misconception) that Europe and Europe’s own troubles, shaped Africa. African historians and history departments struggle against this. In the determination to see Africa for itself, I didn’t realise how far I had moved from European history.

It wasn’t until I started working on this hastily planned trip. I know so little about Europe. I can differentiate between Togo, Ghana and Chad, I can chronicle the history of the conflict in the Eastern DRC, I contrast different explanations for the underdevelopment of Mozambique and I can converse intelligently on the relative chances of re-election for Malawi’s Banda and Zambia’s Sata. But I couldn’t tell you what the neighbouring countries of the Netherlands are.

Yet, here I am, coming in to land over the perfectly even green fields of Holland on a fairly ordinary Tuesday morning. Small fields laid out strip on strip. Bodies of water – lakes? canals? – silver under the clouds. It looks cold out there. The little bit of sunshine disappears with a final sunbeam of light through the airplane window, and we plunge towards a day European autumn day.

I keep trying not to let anyone on the plane see how enchanted and disconcerted this trip is making me. I doubt they would understand. I’m not even sure I can explain it. Europe does excite but it also confuses me. I am African. That is the touchstone of my identity. But I’m also a white South African with a European heritage (especially if the UK is included). I come from a country and a continent with a long and difficult history of conflict and contest with this place. Particularly with the Netherlands, that started all the development and complexity, the good and bad of colonial and post-colonial state-hood for South Africa. I didn’t intend to be here – my travel dreams are African, not European – but now that I am, I am excited to find out, to explore, to see first hand. At the same time, I remain apprehensive. It’s not a fun history. Coming here feels a little like walking directly into that contested space, walking into an emotional and intellectual storm.

The plane comes in to land.