...Wet Sand...

Ghana Journal Series 3: Assorted Happenings (Part 1)

Our first evening back in Accra was as eventful as can possibly be. The pole from Laysa’s tent went wild and hit the fan, which went wild and hit the light bulb, which produced a mini explosion of broken glass. I was not there to witness this precious moment though. For my own poor part, I had been out to get some pineapple after four days deprived of fruits, and of course I had to fall butt-down into the mud -.- As if my obreni status is not already enough to draw attention. I soon managed to attract a crowd of cheering locals. I have loved Ghanaians from the day I first set my foot here, and I love them even more after this (: Everyone was trying to help; ‘sorry’ came flying off from all directions above me. The lady at the fruit stand offered me water to wash up, and even a pair of flip-flops, because the straps of mine were broken when I tried to pull them out from the mud. Anyways I got back to the room in an otherwise completely pathetic state, if not for the huge pineapple in my hands, and saw Laysa sitting in the dark, shining the flashlight at me. Okay.

This is my seventh day without Internet access, and fifth day without seeing a computer of any sort. Away from all the modern weapons of mass distraction, I become significantly more attentive, my mind more agile. Outreaches aside, I have tons of time to read, to think and to write (with pen and paper even!) again.

There are alternative entertainment options aside from books and paper though (of course there’s Laysa as well, but two people are not enough for a good card game). We have also been given this black-and-white Nokia phone. Playing Hanoi tower with 11 discs on the phone now. I have not challenged myself to anything so hard in a long, long time. The protocol itself is not at all difficult, but to make 2047 moves without making a single mistake requires an insane degree of concentration (not surprisingly, Little Miss Perfectionist has to aim for the one best solution). It does not help that the screen is tiny, and all the discs are the same color, so consecutive ones do not look that different. So many times I made mistakes after 1800 or 1900 perfect moves. The one time when my exhausted thumb gave a mini fit in protest and double-pressed Enter at the 2010^th step, I felt like crying. I have two more weeks with this phone in possession – let’s see if I can conquer this. 

Ghana Journal Series 2: Come clean, come good (Part 1)

My stay in Ghana has been cathartic in many ways, not least because it gives me ample time to tidy up my head and come to terms with my problems. Putting things into words is in itself the way to acceptance – it forces you to think about the issues plaguing your life; it gives a concrete form that you can no longer shirk.

Accent:

It has taken so long for me to actually feel at ease with the way I speak.

Your personality changes when you switch to a different language, so they say. It sure is true for me. Now, the degree of talkativeness runs a continuum, and we all jump up and down on the scale depending on the time and place. When I speak in Vietnamese, I hover comfortably around the ‘below average’ level. With English, I plunge all the way down to the extreme ‘mute’ end.

I started studying abroad when the language still rolled awkwardly on my tongue (not that it doesn’t now, just less so), and my attempts at speaking were not always kindly looked at. Perhaps I won’t ever forget the not-too-discrete smirks, or the fingers furtively pointing under the table towards me. Sure, I did meet so many nice people, but to an impressionable 13-year-old kid, it was the mean gestures that lingered. I felt like a turtle timidly extending its head to see the world, yet soon frightened and hastily withdrawing into its shell. It developed into a sort of speak-phobia that manifested every time I had to speak English. With Vietnamese though, I remained the same girl – never too garrulous, but decently chatty if needs be.

I am all too fortunate to be at Duke and meet amazing people from all over the place. Here, I have learnt that what someone has to say far outweighs the accent with which it is said. A more standard accent is a privilege of birth (or the product of a talent at reproducing sounds, in which case I am intensely jealous xD), but doesn’t everyone has their very own accent? I do not have a way with sounds the way I do with written words, but I love trying to pick out the different flavors in an accent. After a brief dabble in linguistics, my ears have become a tad better at registering different vowels and consonants (not that I can differentiate all the Polish consonants or the Hungarian vowels though), yet my sound-producing apparatus always fails spectacularly at reproducing the same sounds. So be it, as long as I can string together complete sentences and make myself reasonably understood.

Over the last year, my relationship with my English accent slowly heals. I am even amused by its complex story. The Northern Vietnamese tinge has been considerably softened by my years in Singapore. A year in the States, and my accent now carries unmistakable American traits (e.g. dropping the ‘t’s in mountain and twenty), with even a tiny Southern lilt at times. I haven’t taped myself yet, but I bet by now there will be a hint of Ghanaian accent, aside from the conspicuous fact that I flavor my speech with vocabulary from 3 indigenous Ghanaian languages. Please, let me stay in Europe for a while, and my English accent will bear vestiges from all continents.

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Ghana Journal Series 1: Books I read (Part 1)

May 16th 

Machete Season (Hatzfeld) brought me to tears. No – ‘tears’ was a gross understatement. It reduced me to a wrecked mess inside out, haunted by the words, harrowed by the images conjured up in my mind. With the turning of the pages, in my head churned the entire gamut of negative emotions. Amidst the appalling darkness that enshrouds the book, the feeble specks (or, more precisely, spectres) of light are tales from wars and even massacres happening elsewhere. The Rwandan genocide is on a different level altogether.

“… what purpose does it serve to distinguish one massacre from another when they reach such a scale?… Is not the pain of the victims immeasurable? Is not the savagery of Srebrenica or Grozny as cruel as that of Nyamata? For those who experienced it, it is. For the rest of us, the barbarity of Nyamata is more harrowing because it was absolute.”

There are so many lines that simply send chills down my spine:

“After the genocide, many foreigners wondered how […] Hutu killers recognized their Tutsi victims in the upheaval of the massacres, since Rwandans of both ethnic groups speak the same language with no distinctive differences, live in the same places, and are not always physically recognizable by distinctive characteristics.

The answer is simple. The killers did not have to pick out their victims: they knew them personally. Everyone knows everything in a village.”

Jeanette (a survivor): “When there has been one genocide there can be another, at any time in the future, anywhere - if the cause is still there and no one knows what it is.”

What on earth is this collective madness? If I were to find myself at that time and place, stripped of all the education and experiences that I have been fortunate enough to have – an uneducated farmgirl raised in an ethnocentric society – what would I do? Having witnessed depression in the face, and struggling with B.E.D. myself, I am terrified of diseases that tamper with the mind. Who isn’t, anyways? But the Rwandan genocide went beyond ‘diseases that tamper with the mind.’ It seemed to be the doings of savages hidden in each and every individual, fuelled by greed, urged on by the promises of looting. Inner voices of dissent, if any, were lulled to silence by the reassurance that there would be no consequence.

Human nature. What does that even entail? In Vietnamese the word for ‘human being’ is con người (measure word for animal – human). We would say “phần con lớn hơn hay phần người lớn hơn” – is ‘animal’ or ‘human’ the dominant part?

I need time to pull myself together. Still deeply traumatized by Machete Season, I desperately looked for comfort from the other books that I have brought along. Noble Savages (Chagnon), Steinbeck collection, Truyện Kiều. Holy macaroni. Should have done a better job balancing the grave and the light-hearted in my reading list – if only I had more time to pack. (Read Let the Great World Spin before Machete Season btw. Love the prose.) Ahh yes, A History of World in 6 Glasses.

Nhớ ngày nào còn một lũ nhóc 17 tuổi bẻ gãy bánh sừng bò, ngoảnh đi ngảnh lại đã 20(++) xuân xanh.

“Màu mực tím lấm lem trên trang sách

Cánh phượng hồng ép giữa những dòng thơ

Những vui buồn hờn giận tuổi vu vơ

Thành kỷ niệm của một thời thơ dại”

(Thơ trong báo… Toán Tuổi Thơ. Nhớ thơ mà ko nhớ tác giả).

Năm học sắp (còn mấy cái finals to chình ình nữa) khép lại, có nhiều cảm xúc, nhiều suy nghĩ ~~ nhiều lắm, đến nỗi cóc biết viết gì, chỉ chém được mấy câu vơ vẩn vẩn vơ. Chỉ biết t đã gặp những người tuyệt vời, đã học được nhiều, nghĩ nhiều và cảm thấy mình SỐNG nhiều hơn những ngày tháng ở Sing (dù vẫn quay quắt nhớ cuộc sống boarding school và vô số danh ngôn bất hảo). Empty void vẫn còn đó khi mà vẫn chưa tìm ra phương hướng, nhưng ít ra cũng đang mò mẫm lần quanh, chứ không phải dậm chân 1 chỗ mug cho qua ngày nữa (: excited for the summer.

Linguistics tidbits ♥

• “[The] Australian aboriginal language Dyirbal […] has a category, balan, that actually includes women, fire, and dangerous things.” (Laykoff, 1987) Book here.
•  A remote Australian aboriginal tongue does not have words for “egocentric coordinates” the likes of left, right, above and below. e.g. “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” The word for a crazy person means one who does not know where north is. NYTimes article here.
• The semantics of Bantu noun classes are meant to be very rough guides with a lot of exceptions. e.g. Class 5 includes nouns that refer to a fruit, a ROUND object, the singular form of an object that tends to come in pairs or larger groups. e.g. knife (!)
• Mohawk word for school (the 4 lines are, in that order, word - morpheme breakdown - gloss - translation).

Painful irony: Every time I’m as busy as can possibly be, I NEVER fail to acquire another time-consuming addiction =.= (rabbit-and-carrot game on My’s phone, crocheting, fruit ninja, samurai sudoku, kenken, among others). Started LOTR and I can’t stop :(( Have been putting off reading LOTR for quite a while because The Hobbit is less complex than i’d like it to be. But the whimsical world of LOTR does live up to my expectation (: Almost forgot how much I loved the movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oAkS8Dcl54

Speed reading to the best of my ability. This reminds me of how I read Tây Du Kí over 10 years ago - skipping all the verses and songs :P T once asked me what the first books I read were. I remember now: chú gà đốm, Russian folk tales, Tây Du Kí, truyện chưởng Jinyong, kính vạn hoa, Harry Potter).