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WRitinG at QueenS316 RaZRan hallQueenS ColleGe, Cuny65-30 kiSSena BlVDfluShinG, ny 11367

ReViSionS is a publication of the Writing at Queens program at Queens College, the City university of new york. Written material may not be reproduced without express written permission.

WRITING AT QUEENS FACULTY PARTNERSkarina attar, European Languages and Literatureslimarys Caraballo, EducationMeghan healey, Drama, Theatre & Danceamy Wan, EnglishEmily Wilbourne, Music

Writing at Queens (WaQ) Faculty Partners work with Writing at Queens staff and CUNY Writing Fellows to develop discipline-based College Writing 2 courses. WaQ staff, Writing Fellows, and Faculty Partners also work to:

• conceive discipline-specific writing goals and foster pedagogical innovations that will help faculty achieve these goals with their students;• host faculty workshops in their division;• devise methods for assessing the outcomes of College Writing 2 and W courses;• develop teaching resources to enhance courses;• participate in an ongoing seminar on writing and learning.

Please contact the Faculty Partner(s) in your own division if you have questions about teaching writing. See the WaQ website for more information: http://writingatqueens.org or call (718) 997-4695.

Contact Kevin Ferguson (kevin.ferguson@qc.cuny.edu), Director of WaQ, if you are interested in becoming a Faculty Partner during future semesters.

i S S u e 1 2 , S p R i n G 2 0 1 5 : S p a C e S o f M u l t i l i n G u a l i S M

DIRECTOR:kevin l. ferguson

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR:katherine profeta

CUNY WRITING FELLOWS:Roya BiggieSamuel frank lisa karakaya andrew kircher Matthew RowneySara Salman

PROJECTS COORDINATOR:tyler Rivenbark

PROGRAM ASSISTANTS:Cecilia Britez, German Britez, Christopher Vitale

Please visit the Writing at Queens web site – http://writingatqueens.org – where you will find a description of the program, an extensive collection of teaching resources, and links to the Writing Center.

Spaces of MultilingualiSM

2 3

Every now and then, people ask me which nationality I identify with because I was born and raised in New York City, but my parents are Colombian. They always want me to choose a country as if I were choosing to be on a team, but there is no definitive answer. I am two cultures, and I am two languages.

Español is my native language, thanks to mamá. During my toddler years, Spanish sounds swirled around me through words, TV, and the radio. By the time I started kindergarten, I still hadn’t discovered my English-speaking identity even though I had started watching “Sesame Street” and the classics like Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny. Two years passed before I was comfortable in English. In the meantime, the mother-daughter bond of hugs and caresses, sprinkled with I-love-you’s continued in Spanish and permanently solidified in this language.

And then, my sister came along, and a new relationship emerged. Gina was three when I taught her how to read in English, although she already spoke Spanish. Throughout our elementary school years, she and I watched TV, listened to the radio, played, and fought in English, which led to mamá’s yelling from the kitchen, “español!”

“Español! Español! Español!” is what my mamá would scream at the top of her lungs throughout our childhood and adolescent years whenever we would breathe any English in our home. She didn’t want us to forget our native language because it was a part of our ancestry, and she firmly believed that being able to function in more than one language would pay off at some point in our future careers.

So, mamá pestered us into silence since we would choose to stop speaking to one another if it had to be in Spanish. It was sisterly bonding at its best because it was our way of rebelling against our mamá. Though my sister and I had no problem communicating with mamá—and with each other—in Spanish, Gina and I found it easier and faster to express our jokes and sarcasms in the English language.

Despite mamá, my sister and I found a time and space to experience our childhood and adolescent lives in English: on the couch while watching after-school specials, cartoons, or talk shows on TV before mamá came home from work; in our bedroom while mamá was cooking, washing the laundry, or performing some other household chore; and at our desks while doing our homework assignments. The strategy was for mamá to be too distracted to notice we were speaking inglés.

Although I had always agreed with mamá on the importance of knowing more than one language despite having been

SnippetSof a Duality

IlIana QuInonesQueens College AluMnA

stubborn about it as a child, it wasn’t until I transitioned into young adulthood that my appreciation for the Spanish language blossomed at the collegiate level. I registered for Spanish classes, eventually declaring the language as a minor. The grammar classes were my favorite. A few years after graduation, mamá’s nagging paid off when opportunity knocked in the guise of a Spanish/English copyediting role.

I enthusiastically dove into my first bilingual post by constantly surrounding myself with Spanish/English and Spanish-only dictionaries, a Spanish thesaurus, Spanish grammar books, and spelling, accent and punctuation books. I read, spelled, punctuated—punctuation in Spanish is different than in English—and edited in Spanish. At the end of the workday, I obsessed in Spanish about the copy I had edited, double-checking my decisions in my mind while cooking or cleaning. I had become infatuated with Spanish syntax because the challenge of the experience fulfilled me intellectually.

My bilingual role at the office also took me outside my stacks of technical books and led me to discussions in Spanish with the editor-in-chief, marketing director, art director, and writer. I no longer only spoke Spanish in the confines of the home with mamá, but I had also transferred my Spanish into the professional world.

Since my first bilingual copyediting role, my work experience in Spanish has allowed me to acquire positions that require this skill, thereby providing me opportunities that I would, otherwise, not have had. Today, I continue to play a dual role in the workplace as a bilingual proofreader.

I owe my fluency and love for this language to mamá. I could not have done it without her “nagging” or support. Because of her, I can easily communicate in Spanish as a professional, and I can also casually speak with my extended family when I visit them in Colombia. I can help a lost Spanish-speaking tourist find his or her way in the NYC subway system, and I can interpret for someone who only speaks Spanish and has limited English skills at the DMV or in a store.

Having to choose between being Colombian or American is not an issue. Throughout the years, español has tightened the bond between mamá and me, whereas inglés has reinforced the childlike, impish humor Gina and I have shared as sisters. But both inglés and español have helped me forge new relationships in the business world. It is this blend of two languages, linked to two ethnicities, that comprise the person I am today.

LETTER FROM THE eDitoRSFor the twelfth issue of Revisions, we invited Queens College students, faculty, and staff to consider “spaces of multil ingualism.” We encouraged submissions in languages other than English to represent the multilingual and multicultural space that is Queens College. While we did receive translations as well as submissions in foreign languages, the college community also chose to write about alternate languages—the language of digital interactions and the gestural languages of the gaming world.

Our contributors wrote about a variety of multilingual spaces: the home and the work place, a journal of Ethiopian literature, a neighborhood in Queens, a poster on a hospital wall, and the digital landscape of Assassin’s Creed.

We hope this issue of Revisions inspires the Queens College community to reflect on how multilingual spaces shape our identities and the cultural landscape of New York City—a city many of us call home.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS ........................................ 02 Editors

SnIppETS OF a DuaLITy ................................................... 03 Iliana Quinones

LanguagE anD Luck ...........................................................04 Gloria Fisk

QuanDO cOnOScI DuE LInguE ............................... 05 Antonio Femia

LanEy cOLLEgE .................................................................... 06 Lynley Shimat

JuDy’S WaLL OF pEacE ..................................................... 08 Judy KrinitzTRanSLaTIng SOME pOETRy ...................................... 09 Annmarie Drury acT LIkE an aSSaSSIn, THInk LIkE a BOT: SpEakIng aRTIFIcIaL InTELLIgEncE In aSSaSSIn’S cREED ............................................................................10 Andrew KircherSáBaDO gIganTE TaugHT ME a LOT ................................................................ 12 Samuel FrankTIME IS MOnEy: WHaT OuR IDIOMS REvEaL aBOuT OuR cuLTuRE ................................... 14 Ella Douglas

TRavERSIng LanguagE, OR, WHaT IT MEanS TO BE a “REaL nEW yORkER” .................................................... 16 Lisa Karakaya

EMBRacIng a cITy .............................................................. 18 Scott Kapuscinski

vOcaBuLaRIES OF paIn ................................................... 19 Julia Pemberton“TaO-HOang-SHE-kIang-Té” By ORLanDO LuIS paRDO LazO ................................ 20 Alison MacomberpHySIcaL LanguagE In DIgITaL SpacE .................................................................. 22 Christopher VitalepEnSaMIEnTOS DE MI BILInguILIDaD ........................................................................ 23 Felix Lopez

caLEnTuRE / caLEnTuRa ............................................. 24 Matthew RowneyWHaT IT MEanS TO BE ETHIOpIan .................................................................. 26 Maaza MengisteaBOuT cuny WRITIng FELLOWS ............................................................... 27

SpaCeS of MultilinGualiSM ReViSionS ISSUE 12 SPRING 2015

tunguMál og heppni språk oCh lyCkA dil ve şAns lenguAje y suertelAnguAge And luCk GlorIa FIsk Queens College FACulty, english

4 5

anybody. Our NGO would give him money to buy a bus ticket, and he’d go—to use his English to put them in touch with local sources of support and protection, official and not. The Somali community in town would help him make sure that this exhausted person had some food, a place to sleep, and the beginnings of a plan.

So he missed some days from the class we taught, where our primary purpose was to say this: The goal of a translator at the U.N. is not to embellish the displaced person’s story to make it better, but to tell it precisely the way you hear it, only in a different language.

There had been problems with this in the past. If a man told the United Nations’ Refugee Agency (UNHCR) that he’d fled his home after rebel soldiers killed his neighbor and burned the neighbor’s house, a translator might incline to exaggerate this truly scary story. Speaking the same language, the translator was likely to come from the same traumatized region and want to help the UNCHR understand the severity of the threat.

Maybe the soldiers had tried to burn down the whole town, or launched some attack at this displaced person specifically; maybe the neighbor who was killed was not a neighbor at all, but a brother, a father, a close friend. And if the UNHCR perceived inconsistencies in the story, they would deny the case. How would they know that the fabrications were the work of the translator, and how could they give legal recognition to a person whose story wasn’t true?

Every day I worked there, I had this thought: It’s embarrassingly lucky to have a passport, and lucky, also, to speak the world’s lingua franca as a native language. And, it’s only the luckiest of the lucky who can speak a language that is widely understood while we also live among people who speak something else.

That was me, for four hours: speaking almost entirely in nouns that I pulled from the dictionary, waving my arms and trying the patience of strangers. In the customer service office of the gas company, I was trying to heat the apartment I’d rented in a city in a country where everybody speaks a language that was mostly meaningless to me. So, I tried and failed to translate the documents that would prove my identity, because I needed an identity in this language to open a gas account in this place.

That was also me, standing in front of the door to the locksmith’s, rehearsing the sentences I’d need to ask him to repair the lock that I’d broken after I’d locked myself out. If you’ve never lived in a place where the dominant language is not your native language, you may not realize how many verb tenses are entailed in most repair requests.

And, I’ve also been the person who left the dinner party parsing vocabulary words in my head, observing how many ways I had seemed more boring than I really am. It’s hard to say anything interesting in a language where each word possesses only one definition as far as you’re concerned.

But these are not real problems, and I came upon them voluntarily. Even when the frustrations that attended them felt huge to me, I knew that they were so small.

Their smallness was made plainer to me when I taught a course in translation to refugees at an NGO in Istanbul. The city is by popular cliché a “bridge between East and West,” but it’s a bridge on which lots of people get stuck. Most of the refugees I taught between 2006 and 2009 came from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Today, the students in those classes must be predominately Syrian. The United Nations has counted more than a million Syrian people displaced to Turkey since the war began, and unofficial counts range much higher. Tens of thousands of people cross that border every day, carrying whatever they can from homes that they have lost to the war.

Their inability to speak Turkish is not their biggest problem, but it is a problem. Even bigger, maybe, is their inability to speak English. That makes them reliant on a translator for representation to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), which has the power to grant them the legal status they need to be resettled in a safe place—where they can work, go to school, put down roots, have a life.

The classes that I taught were the classes for those translators, but the goal of the class was not to teach the languages that my students would need to work for the UNCHR. They were already fluent in English and at least one other language that is commonly spoken by displaced people in Istanbul (Arabic, Amharic, and Farsi, for example, in addition to many dialects that are local to war-torn places in the region).

Most of my students enrolled in my class because they were stuck in Istanbul, too, as refugees without official recognition, and they wanted to do something. Unable to work legally because they didn’t have papers, they were always looking for ways to make a little money. They were also looking for something meaningful to do while they sought the refugee status that would enable them to get on with their lives. As translators, they could help other people like them tell their stories to the lawyers who volunteered to represent applicants for refugee status to the UNHCR.

My co-teacher was a Somali refugee who had traveled to Istanbul through Iraq on foot during the war, which had taken him nearly two years. On the way, he practiced the English he’d begun to teach himself at home. By the time I met him, he had become a prominent figure in the refugee community in Istanbul and beyond, because his English was so good and he was so generous with it. Somali refugees would land on boats or travel over the border on foot, carrying the number of his mobile phone on a slip of paper.

He’d receive a call, saying that there was a Somali person stuck in some border town who couldn’t communicate with

5

La lingua ci da l’opportunità di esprimere I nostri pensieri vocalmente; ci aiuta a scoprire I nostri perspettivi, come quando inizi a spiegare qualcosa a qualcuno e ti viene un epifania. Le lingue sono tutte diverse e distinguono le regioni in cui ci troviamo. Tra regione e regione le lingue cambiano e sottopongono una metamorfosi.

Da piccoli impariamo una lingua dai nostri genitori; scopriamo la comunicazione verbale. Certi bambini crescono imparando due lingue contemporaneamente. Io, per esempio, ho imparato l’Italiano prima dell’Inglese ma siccome l’Italiano l’ho imparato a casa, le scuole elementari erano un ambiente perfetto per acquistarne un’altra lingua. Fortunatamente, sapere due lingue cambia molto il modo in cui capiamo il nostro mondo. Alle volte vedo qualcosa scritto in altre lingue romanze e lo posso capire. È allora come cambia la mia esperienza del mondo?

Quando conosci due lingue, pensi in altri modi ma è più che interpreti il mondo diversamente. Certe volte ascolto ai miei amici che parlano delle loro vite e mi viene un proverbio Italiano in mente che descrive i loro problemi perfettamente. In pratica, saperne un’altra lingua quando osservi certe conversazioni, ci aiuta a capirle meglio. Cioè, le capisco in Inglese, le parole “fisiche” delle frasi, e dopo in Italiano, con proverbi e detti. La lingua Italiana, in particolare, si arricchisce con l’associazione ai proverbi. Non posso contare le volte che ho parlato ai miei genitori di un problema che ho avuto a scuola e loro mi rispondono con un proverbio, tutto in Italiano ovviamente. Gli Italiani sono cresciuti con un istinto per capire il loro mondo usando proverbi. Io posso dire che sono orgoglioso di essere Italiano e di saper parlarlo e scriverlo. Nel mondo ci sono tantissime lingue, con molti dialetti e tanti accenti, ma l’unica cosa che hanno in comune è che più lingue sai, più arricchisci le abilità per capire il mondo intorno a te. Non c’è niente più bello di non poter spiegare un fenomeno in delle altre lingue perché esiste solo in quella che parli tu. Gli altri si perdono un mondo di sapienza!

Quandoconosci

due lingueantonIo FemIa

Queens College student

6 7

I smell air conditioned air and industrial train smell. I feel the hum of electricity and engine. I hear the buzz and squeal of the train on the tracks. I see a silver train car, blue and grey seats, red tiles at the station. I’m on the BART train from North Berkeley to Laney College, Lake Merritt Station. A black woman in a suit with a name badge holds a coffee and talks to her colleague in her alto voice. People speak Chinese. I try to understand them. I am reading Dostoevsky or Chekhov or Plato.

A computer voice announces, “Transfer here for train to San Francisco. MacArthur Station. 5 car train for Fremont—now boarding.” A white man with a long blond ponytail wheels a bike. A young black guy with earphones sits in a backward facing seat. I hear Spanish. I feel the seat behind me move. I love the diversity of the people and languages. I see people with coffee standing and holding the train pole, and people not holding the pole rebalance when the train stops. I ride up the tall grey escalator. I hear the gears grinding. I smell coffee. I see people doing Tai Chi in the parking lot. I cross the street to Laney College. I see street signs in Chinese. I remember Chinatown, buying real chopsticks and chopstick rests. I smell the Chinese medicine store, and the fortune cookie factory. I taste the crunch of chocolate fortune cookies.

I taste Vietnamese sandwiches and iced coffee in Chinatown. I think about Chinese, about writing characters, and art. I see red brick buildings. I taste the water in my water bottle. I walk through the corridors and courtyard and look for a bathroom. I see sunlight, light blue sky, and clouds. I feel heavy and tired. I see a bathroom with the woman sign. The door feels heavy and opens with a grinding noise. I look in the mirror.

I see the bamboo-colored metal walls of the toilet stalls. I taste early morning air. I smell hand soap. I push open the metal door of a clean stall. I smell metal and water. I see white light from a skylight. I enter the stall and close the door behind me. I hook my bag on the door and feel the weight lift.

On the walls, I see a mosaic of writing in pen and marker and pencil, a Talmud of commentary in multiple pens, pen tip widths, and ink colors. I see philosophy in colors and shades of black. I hear echoes of Dostoevsky and Chekhov and Plato. I feel the voices of women who write philosophy on walls. I imagine the people on the train are philosophers. I love Laney College in English, Chinese, Spanish. I smell water, early morning, and bamboo color. I see tile floor and my Esprit sneakers. I feel lighter. I taste air. Ly

nley

Sha

mat

lynley shImat Queens College student, MFA CreAtive Writing And literAry trAnslAtion

lAney College

8 9

It is very exciting to work on the country’s most diverse college campus. I have coined the term “we are Division I in diversity.” What does that mean? Since we speak over 100 languages and over 100 countries are represented, the most exciting part about working here is learning from one another. One could think that with so many languages spoken and cultural differences, it is a recipe for conflict. I have decided to play down our differences and stress our main commonality: the quest for peace.

When you enter my office in the Student Union, the first thing that you’ll see is something that I created, called “Judy’s Wall of Peace.” When students come to visit me, I ask them if they speak another language at home. More often than not, the answer is yes. I then ask the students to write the word “peace” in their languages. I also ask that they include transliterations, so I can learn how to pronounce “peace” in different languages. Finally, I take the pieces of paper and hang them on the wall. Students feel welcome and recognized when they participate. Even if a student sees his or her language on my wall, the student feels a sense of connection. One staff member felt so connected to the random pages that she brought in a paper with the word written in Hungarian, the native language of her late husband.

After collecting fifteen pages and sticking them on the wall,

I decided to frame them. I am told that it gives my office a warm feeling, and it really encompasses what we are all about—being Division I in diversity. I have described my wall to other colleagues, and they have asked me to send a picture. Responses have been “inspiring!” and “awesome!” One co-worker was so inspired that, when she attended a folk festival, she thought of me when she saw a string of peace flags. “Peace” is written on five different small flags that are strung together along with the international symbol of peace, the dove. She purchased a set of peace flags for me that I hang on the threshold of my doorway. Now, upon entering and exiting, students, staff, and faculty come and go in the warmth of the word, “peace.”

I only have fifteen languages represented in my office. My goal is to obtain and learn the same word in the other 125 or so languages that are spoken on this campus. Each time someone contributes to the “Wall of Peace,” I honestly (admittedly, simplistically and naively) feel that we are just that much closer to obtaining it—without the long-winded, wordy conversations of negotiations and treaties, and just by learning from each other. Once I have achieved my peace goal, I am going to move on to another universal word—love. In the meantime, let’s find ways to keep us “Division I in diversity.” What is your universal word for Queens College?

TranslaTing some PoeTry annmarIe Drury FACulty, english

“Habari gani mnyampala? mkubwa! mimi ni K. bin T. Unayafurahiaje maisha baada ya Kufa. Wanasemaje malenga wetu. …“How are you, Mnyampala? Boss! I am K., son of T. How are you enjoying life after death? What do our poets say? …

Katika shairi kuna makosa ambayo yafaa niyasahihishe. la kwanza liko msitari wa kwanza. neno “ mkubwa” liwe “mbukwa”. mnyampala alikuwa mgogo kutoka Dodoma. Wanasalimiana “mbukwa”maana yake good morning. […] K. bin T. ni Kezilahabi bin Tilubuzya (jina la baba yangu) Kila la heri.“How are you, Mnyampala? Good morning! I am Kezilahabi bin Tilubuzya. How are you enjoying life after death? What do our poets say? …

First, a few lines from a poem by the Tanzanian poet Euphrase Kezilahabi, “Kumbukumbu II,” or “Remembrance II.” (They imagine a conversation with the great Tanzanian poet Mathias Mnyampala after his death.) Next, an English translation of those lines. Then, an excerpt from Kezilahabi’s note telling me there were mistakes. Among the mistakes, what I read as the Swahili for “boss” is actually Gogo for “good morning.” Finally, my corrected translation of the lines.

JUDY’S WALL OF PEACEJuDy krInItz AssistAnt direCtor oF student liFe

10 11

Pho

to C

redi

t To

Go

Her

e If

The

re Is

One

I had difficulty differentiating him—and here I refer to the performed assassin character, not the gamer nor the programmer behind the game’s code—from the mass of non-player characters, or NPCs. His signature aesthetic element, a pair of small, round spectacles resting on the tip of his nose, was illegible from this pixelated distance. Though this multiplayer component was new to me, I had long been a resident of the Assassin’s Creed universe and knew just what to do. With a click of my second left trigger button, I emptied my purse of gold coins onto the packed-dirt street of Kingston, Jamaica, and predictably the dozens of eighteenth-century NPC passers-by dropped to the ground, undulating percussively as they scratched up the gold coins. In the middle of my screen, exposed above the crowd of money-hungry artificially-intelligent bots, stood my assassination target—a real live person, a fellow gamer. As I glided my hidden blade into his gut, he must have realized his mistake: he had failed to think with artificial intelligence.

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This past summer, a debate erupted online over whether a Siri-like bot named Eugene Goostman “passed” the Turing Test—a method of evaluating machine intelligence “passing” as that of a human. Goostman, a chatterbot designed by three Russian programmers, convinced one-third of a panel of judges that he was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. It is curious that the very same week, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the newest installment of the Assassin’s Creed franchise of video games was announced. The supernarrative of this blockbuster series involves a present-day hero entering an “animus chamber” which enables him to relive the memories of assassin ancestors,

to see major moments in history through their eyes and to play a murderous role in the proceedings. In gorgeous, open-world historical recreations of Venice, New York, and Constantinople (to name just a few), gamers enact what Kiri Miller might describe as performance as reconstitution. Miller, an ethnomusicologist and videogame theorist, argues that playing games is an expressive act of “playing along,” whereby the player is doing more than “just adding water” to the game designer’s code; they are testing the limits of the game to create new collaborative performances. In Assassin’s Creed, however, if the player’s actions deviate from the designer’s intention—from the pseudo-history being reenacted—the picture becomes distorted with the word “desynchronized” superimposed. The player is then invited to try again to trace the gestural paths imprinted in the game’s digital code, approaching machinic fidelity.

In this way the open-world structure is revealed to be a platform for a restrictive re-remembering. This radical approach resolves the central concern in contemporary interactive game design: ludo-narrative dissonance. This term, first coined by renowned creative director Clint Hocking refers to the tension that arises between pre-scripted narrative and emergent gameplay. An oft-repeated example is cut scenes in the Grand Theft Auto game series that portray the protagonist in a sympathetic light, only minutes after he has beaten an elderly person to death while under the gamer’s control. Assassin’s Creed manages this tension and staves off incongruity by conditioning the player in the gestural language of their world. To borrow from French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, players “follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’

they write without being able to read it.” 2 However, from atop a cathedral spire, looking down on the network of streets below, the urban text is clear. The reconstructed cities of Assassin’s Creed are vertical playgrounds; players can climb above the machinic conversing of the non-player characters and assume a panoptic perspective. From this altitude, the bot language—how they trace the visible (and sometimes invisible) urban grid—is finally legible.

This act of machinic embodied writing, or rather tracing, is clearly reflected in metatheatrical moments littered throughout the series. In one game, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, players murder and take the place of an actor in a passion play—staged in the Roman Coliseum—and use their extrasensory perception to hit illuminated marks (or, “find their light”). They trace a remembered performance, acting as understudy to the bot-actor they have just silenced, alongside a cast of pre-programmed NPCs. In this scene, the game designers recapitulate the ethos of the entire series: act like an assassin, think like a bot. This points to the one instance of ludonarrative dissonance the designers let slip: this ethos of hegemony is in direct conflict with the series’ narrative philosophy of liberation. The titular creed reads “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

Nowhere is the need for artificial intelligence more deeply felt than in the multiplayer component of these games, which invites players to “pass” as non-player character bots to avoid assassination. Successful play involves besting a sort of inverse Turing Test, where the goal is to convince a fellow human of your machine intelligence. In the story that opened this essay, I knew that the NPCs were programmed to drop to the ground and grab at loose change—it was a trick

I had used many times to create trip hazards for pursuing soldiers—and my opponent, by not tracing that machinic gesture, revealed his humanity. In Assassin’s Creed, gamers learn how to walk in crowds, how to respond to acts of violence, and how to emulate glitchy collisions with buildings and “other” NPCs. Successful gameplay involves making one’s behavior and gestural language indistinguishable from the games programmatic logic. This sort of play transcends simulation and becomes wholly embedded within the game, and thus unrecognizable as play.

It is interesting to consider this act of performing Artificial Intelligence now, in this age of the Internet of Things, given that nonhuman connected devices (from thermostats to cattle trackers) are projected to outnumber human online activity (on computers and smartphones) three-to-one by the year 2020. There is a palpable need to believe in intelligent bots, like the now-debunked @horse_ebooks twitter account, which was thought to be a malfunctioning twitter bot posting nonsensical word jumbles. This fascination makes sense: with rising concerns over privacy and hacking, including the recent and offensively-named “The Fappening” and the violent misogyny of “Gamergate,” who wouldn’t be attracted to bots? Bots have no identity, moving freely about the web with abandon. Their artificial intelligence makes them invisible to would-be assassins, their writing silent amidst the noise.

-----------------------------------------------------------1. Kiri Miller, from Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube and Virtual Performance (New York: Oxford UP, 2012): 5,15.

2. Michel de Certeau, from The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: U of California P, 2011): 93.

ACt like An AssAssin, think like A Bot: speAking ArtiFiCiAl intelligenCe inAssAssIN’s CreeDanDrew kIrcher DOCTORAL CANDIDATE, THEATRE

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I learned a decent amount of Spanish watching sábado Gigante as a teenager in New York City, but after living with a family in Chile for a semester during college I began to understand how much the show reflects multilingualism in the United States. The show infuses Spanish with English words and phrases, as only a Spanish-language show made in the U.S. could. Its use of “Spanglish” as a unique form of communication, one that sounds simple but in fact works in subtle, often sophisticated ways, shows the importance of this hybridized language to Latin American culture and identity in the United States.

I am careful to say “United States,” and not “America,” because for many Latin Americans, there is only one América that spans the entire Western Hemisphere from the Bering Straight to Tierra del Fuego. In Chile and much of South America, referring to people from the United States exclusively as “Americans” is not just ignorant of history and geography, it’s rude. Better to use the term norteamericano, or even estadounidense. Don Francisco, the 73-year-old legendary Chilean television host and creator of sábado Gigante, undoubtedly knows all about these subtle and not-so-subtle variations in language that weave between Spanish and English and between Latin America and the U.S. He has embodied them for millions of devoted viewers for over 50 years.

sábado Gigante is the world’s longest running T.V. variety show, a fact I learned only after doing a little research to better understand the impact this zany show has had on my understanding of multilingualism. It is a variety show in the truest sense: it combines singing and dancing contests, beauty pageants, human-interest stories, family comedy, weird comedy, silly pet tricks and whole lot of product placements into a weekly 3-hour prime time extravaganza. It is a Spanish-language show, but since it is produced in the U.S. – Miami to be exact – and viewed by a largely bilingual audience, it incorporates lots of English. It is only a slight exaggeration to call sábado Gigante a “Spanglish” cultural touchstone. The term “Spanglish” is sometimes used as a pejorative to denote a kind of bastardized Spanish. It is often seen as a loaded word. It should be noted that I use the term in a respectful context.

I see it as a tool for specific kinds of self-expression that Spanish-speakers in the U.S. have developed. Spanglish weaves English words and phrases into Spanish to create a hybridized language that reflects the diverse history of Hispanic culture and migration. To speak in Spanglish signals a certain cultural reality of living in two worlds at once, and I always saw sábado Gigante as the best practical example of Spanglish. The show taught me that this colloquial Spanish-English dialect, rather than being a lazy way to speak Spanish, was a complex and strategic form of communication.

I was less aware of these complexities as a teenager. I watched parts of the show to test whether I had actually learned anything in my high school Spanish class. I could keep up, but it was a struggle. It didn’t sound strange to me when presenters and performers sprinkled bits of English throughout the show since I had already become accustomed to hearing Spanglish in my daily life. I didn’t have a sense of the cultural significance of the show, let alone the unique use of Spanglish in the U.S. Don Francisco was showing his audience that he shared their experience of folding parts of English, their adopted language, into their mother tongue of Spanish. The use of Spanglish, rather than threatening the linguistic and cultural purity of Spanish, was a way to expand on that heritage and claim agency for the unique role of Latin American-ness in the U.S.

But at the beginning of my time in Chile, I didn’t know that Don Francisco was Chilean, an oversight my host family in Chile corrected. When I arrived in Valparaíso, Chile, I hadn’t seen sábado Gigante for years. I was minoring in Spanish in college, but I figured there was not much value in watching silly variety shows on T.V. any more. I was reading Lorca and Marquez now, in Spanish! I felt very sophisticated. Then, I saw Don Francisco on Chilean national T.V., only this time he was hosting a telethon to raise money for children with developmental disabilities, a far cry from the wise cracks and scantily clad models of sábado Gigante. It turns out that La Teletón is a national event in Chile that raises millions of dollars annually. Don Francisco has hosted every single installment since 1978. When I saw Don Francisco hosting La Teletón on the T.V. in my Chilean

family’s living room, I made what I thought was a pretty astute observation that I had seen him before on an estadounidense show called sábado Gigante. And, oh yeah, I thought he was Puerto Rican. Que no! I was told in no uncertain terms. Don Francisco is a national institution in Chile, and all the Latin Americans in the U.S. who watch sábado Gigante should feel grateful to Chile for producing such a broadcasting treasure.

My familia chilena set me straight on Don Francisco, but rather than feel embarrassed about getting it so wrong, I saw that sábado Gigante and its host had a deeper history and more Hispanic cultural relevance than most gringos in the U.S. realize. (The word “gringo,” sometimes a loaded term, is used colloquially in Chile and other parts of Latin America for “North American,” and is not pejorative in this context.) The show is a bridge between generations. It still uses the old school multi-camera format with a live studio audience, sponsors hocking toothpaste and fabric softener, and an avuncular host. But it is also a platform for musical acts in bachata and reggeaton – aka, young people’s music – with lots of Twitter hashtags and Facebook fan pages. sábado Gigante is like a cross between today’s “The Voice” and “The Gong Show” of the 1970s, with real singing talent mixed in with utter buffoonery. No matter the segment, Spanglish is the lingua franca on the show. When Don Francisco announces the superior teeth-whitening ability of Crest toothpaste, he ends not by saying you will have a sonrisa brillante. Instead, he says “Usted va a tener un bright smile!” When a young announcer introduces a hot new bachata singer, he crows that coming to the stage is “un nuevo star en el top ten!” Young and old alike understand completely.

There is no equivalent English-language show on U.S. television today. The U.S. entertainment landscape has splintered, with shows and movies increasingly targeted to specific demographic groups, primarily 18-49 year-olds, the “key demo.” sábado Gigante, contrary to this trend, remains a relic of an era when three generations would sit in front of the T.V. to watch a show together. It is no coincidence that many households in Latin America – and many Latin American households in the U.S. – have three or more generations living

under one roof. My family in Chile was no different. We would gather together to watch La Teletón and other shows, with Camila, my Chilean sister Claudia’s 7-year-old daughter sitting at the foot of the couch, Claudia’s 89-year-old abuelita Clara settled comfortably in her La-Z-Boy, and everyone else from in-between generations scattered around the living room.

We watched La Teletón and not sábado Gigante, so Don Francisco was only speaking Spanish, though a few English words did sneak in (“llame a nuestro hotline!”). But by this point I had come to understand that Don Francisco’s deft modulating between languages was not just a strategy to cater to different audiences of different shows. It was a subtle tool he used as a cultural arbiter. His use of English words shows his audience that he knows, just like they do, what it’s like to be a Spanish-speaker living in the U.S. But his confidence and popularity signal to his viewers that speaking in this hybridized way is a natural way to communicate. His use of English is kind of like a knowing wink to the Spanish-speaking crowd. He uses English within the malleable realm of Spanglish in a celebration of linguistic diversity. Ironically, when Don Francisco speaks in Spanglish to connect with his sábado Gigante audience – young, old, and everyone in between – he comes across as more authentic than if he actively tried to suppress the infusion of English into everyday spoken Spanish. After all, that’s that way Spanish speakers in the U.S. sound these days.

Maybe the idea of bilingualism is too simplistic. Many “bilingual” speakers often use a third, hybridized language more often than they use either original mother tongue. Watching sábado Gigante, one can see how the host, performers and even the audience use Spanglish in ways that reflect a diverse blend of vocabularies mixed in with lots of corny jokes and lively singing and dancing. For me it took a semester studying abroad in Chile to realize that beneath the surface of what I thought was a simple, lowbrow variety show was a complex linguistic commentary. sábado Gigante taught me that language – beyond simply being a way to communicate – can be a nuanced marker for an individual’s cultural history.

sáBAdo gigAnte tAught Me A lotsamuel Frank doCtorAl CAndidAte, eArth And environMentAl sCienCes

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Language is a vehicle through which culture, our mode of living, is transmitted. Language is coterminous with culture. Since we all inhabit the world differently, and we all act in and on the world differently, our languages express that. Yet, our idioms appear natural to us. I write this essay with the intent of exploring multilingualism, and as such, multiculturalism, in the United States – a country which has been recognized, in recent years, as linguistically and culturally diverse. The term “culture” carries many definitions, ranging from art and literature, which are creative and fluid, to values and beliefs, which are mundane and static. The above definitions are all correct. Here, I use “culture” to denote the latter: the socially accepted set of structures and norms that act as a stabilizing force in society.

As a sociologist, I argue that despite the richness that multiple languages provide to different cities in the United States, New York included among many, the Anglo-Saxon culture of the U.S. remains largely hegemonic. This culture is best summarized by Benjamin Franklin’s famous dictum “Time is Money.” New immigrants arriving at the US have to internalize this in order to successfully “make it in America.” My essay is a reflection on my experience conducting fieldwork in Dearborn, Michigan, witnessing integration into the dominant cultural ideology among recent Arab immigrants.

Dearborn is a suburb of Detroit, where Arab-Americans and Arab immigrants constitute 70% of the population. There, I spent six weeks at social services agencies, shadowing NGO personnel, attending acculturation and language classes, and interviewing recent Arab immigrants. In many ways, Dearborn looks as if it could easily fit in New York –if only it had room for pedestrians. It reminded me of Chinatown. Its streets boast miles of Arab-owned and operated businesses. Some were more “Arab” than others, such as clothing stores geared specifically to Levant women. Some were not so “Arab,” such as halal tattoo parlors. Restaurants specialized in “shawerma sandwiches” but were laid-out like classic diners. While I visited during Ramadan, the fasting month, almost all the Arab-owned establishments including eateries were open during the day. Dearborn appeared to me to be

very much bilingual and bicultural. Its inhabitants retain elements of Arabic culture without rejecting American culture. They appeared integrated into American society as Arab-American, and their suburb reflects that linguistic and cultural richness.

So much so that I was surprised to find that the personnel at the social services office were critical of Dearborn’s cultural character, believing that it prevented newcomers from succeeding in America. Much of the concern was around acquisition of language and culture. This is not particularly new. In fact, the sociological literature on immigration establishes acculturation as one of the indices of immigrant success. Why did personnel overlook the bilingual and bicultural aesthetic of Dearborn, and view bilingualism and biculturalism as obstacles to integration?

Acculturation is often defined in sociology as the process by which a group of newcomers preserves its values while adopting some of the host society’s values. It is indeed the case that many new immigrants arriving in Dearborn struggle in learning English. But that is the case with language acquisition among adults. It simply takes time. The personnel seemed to understand this, yet they insisted that the Arabic character of Dearborn acts as a disincentive to adopt American culture.

But one of the personnel, an Arab-American himself, raised a curious point. He had been working with different waves of Arab immigrants since the 1990s. He said with great worry that the biggest struggle facing them is that “if you say to them, ‘time is money,’ they won’t know what you mean.” The personnel, an Arab-American himself, added, “They want to sit at the dinner table, eat and talk for hours. That just doesn’t work here.” It wasn’t a matter of understanding the words per se; it was the cultural context that grounds the expression, most famously coined by Benjamin Franklin, which seemed elusive. In other words, it does not matter how culturally and linguistically rich Dearborn and its inhabitants may be, the crucial marker of becoming American, successfully, is to internalize this dictum, and recent immigrants seemed resistant to the idea.

Time is money ascribes a peculiar value to one’s time. It imbues it with the capacity to make money. Since we exist in time, and live in a society in which money comes from work, the value of time is not that it can bring pleasure to others or to oneself, but rather that it makes money through work. If one wants money one has to put their time to work. No limits exist on how much time one should spend to make money, and one’s success in making money is understood to be the result of one’s own hard work or lack thereof, irrespective of structural factors. A noted American sociologist observed in the early 20th century that emphasis on individualistic material success is a unique feature of American culture, unshared by other cultures of the world, which can act as a disruptive force in society. The trouble with sociological analysis is that it speaks of patterns, and as such can only speak in general terms. I know there are always exceptions. But the point holds: American culture is mad about “making it.” I also know that one cannot speak of a single Arab culture because Arab culture(s) exhibit multi-religious, Asian, African and Western influences. Yet, it remains that there is no equivalent expression of “time is money” in Arabic. But there is the expression “time is of gold.” Gold does not translate to money, though. Time here is understood to be a finite precious resource, just like one’s life. As such, it must be used to spread Good in the world, in the form of literature and science, and joy and work. Work here exists as one responsibility among many.

Of course, this does not suggest that every American or every Arab accepts each dictum. This also does not suggest that Americans and Arabs are so different that integration or co-existence is impossible. I must state that recent immigrants I interviewed did not appear so distinct culturally from Americans. They believed work was important to their identity. They were all either employed or searching for work. They believed it was necessary to provide for themselves and not be dependent on charity. They believed that education, home ownership, and meaningful employment were necessary for upward mobility. They enjoyed mass consumerist goods and the latest tech gadgets. All of this sounds a lot like what we would call the

“American dream.” I merely want to emphasize that the dominant cultural orientation of Americans is different from the dominant cultural orientation of Arabs toward time and work in ways that appear visible linguistically. In turn, this makes multiculturalism a tenuous goal which can only be achieved by accepting the hegemonic American orientation.

The immigrants, despite sharing the “American Dream,” were troubled by how much they had to work just to make ends meet. Indirectly invoking that “time is of gold,” they spoke of one’s finite life and the importance of spending time with family and loved ones. They spoke of their roles as parents and responsible adults who are supposed not only to provide materially but to be present in their children’s lives. It seemed strange that all the hours being put into paid work could not pay for bills and life necessitates, let alone leisure. The problem they struggled with was with accepting something which Americans have taken for granted for some time: endless work.

While the immigrants believe that work is a means to an end, the personnel seem to have lost the sense that working to make “it” (it being the American Dream) should make work a means, not an end in itself. But Americans work more hours per week than their counterparts in the advanced world. While Americans may not be happy about it, as many social surveys tell us, there remains the deeply held belief that if pursued persistently, our goals can be achieved. So we continue to work. American culture is built around the notion of working to make it.

It seems to me that the preoccupation with work has a material dimension and a cultural dimension. The cultural dimension stems from the Protestant heritage of this country. The notion that time is money legitimates endless work. The Puritans left England and arrived at the North Eastern shores of America. Their asceticism, which compelled them to work even on Sunday, made them subject to religious persecution. The Puritan ethos of hard work had much to do with seeing oneself as a tool put on earth by God to do Good. Departing radically from the Catholic teachings of redemption and confession, the Puritans believed in pre-destination. One

tiMe is Money: WhAt our idioMsreveAl ABout our Cultureella DouGlas doCtorAl CAndidAte, soCiology

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cannot change one’s fate by confessing sins. One’s duty is to engage in tireless and endless labor for God on earth and to be thrifty. Salvation reveals itself to us in earthly blessings, in success at work, and in accumulating wealth. Wealth cannot be spent on earthly goods but should be invested in making more wealth. While work was very much a this-worldly activity, it was understood to be work for the after-life, for other-worldly purposes. It had a transcendent meaning.

Yet, how many of us work for salvation today? One of the most significant sociological observations made in the 20th century is that of the unintended consequences of the Protestant ethic: tireless labor for God loses its religious significance and provides the world with the spirit of capitalism. Of course, by the time Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase “time is money,” secular industrial capitalism was well underway in the United States. The United States emerged as an industrial capitalist nation state at a time when other countries were still lagging behind. The ascetic orientation lost its religious value and became a “shell as hard as steel,” as a famous German sociologist noted. While the Puritans chose that life, we did not. Work has ceased to provide us with the same meaning. And while for a brief moment in our history, work was the means through which we enjoyed consumer goods, holidays, and allowed us to leave an inheritance for our children, this is not the case today. If figures of inequality and poverty tell us anything, we couldn’t accumulate wealth even if we wanted to. Most of us will be will repaying loans and mortgages forever. The notion that time is money has lost so much of its original promises. But despite the disconnection between our cultural belief and our material life, “time is money” persists stubbornly.

I hope that by now it is clear that I wholeheartedly wish to do away with “time is money,” a cultural relic that has not delivered on its promises since the 1970s. We ought to start thinking of another way to valorize time. But this is a different issue altogether. Here, I would like to conclude by noting that the staff member got it wrong. Adopting American culture does not mean renouncing every element of one’s culture. It means adopting its work ethic. As I stated above, most of the interviewees I had spoken with had secured employment (however precarious). When I asked what they think their lives will be like, most expressed uncertainty. They fear their future here but know that to “make it” they have to let go of much of what they cherished about life back home, including social gatherings. Several immigrants observed, “This is the way things are here.” Despite their confusion and even skepticism, the immigrants have already taken on the ethos of endless work. If anything, Dearborn offers a successful example of integration precisely because it did away with “time is of gold” in favor of “time is money.” It offers a success story of bilingualism and biculturalism because its Arabic elements do not pose a challenge to the dominant American cultural ethos. It is a success because it does not resist endless work, even if its citizens, like most Americans, are struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. Linguistic and cultural diversity are invited only if one accepts the dominant ideology of work.

trAversing lAnguAge, or, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A “real new yorker”lIsa karakaya doCtorAl CAndidAte, FrenCh Every other week or so, I see a link on my Facebook feed to

another online quiz claiming to identify the characteristics of a “real New Yorker,” which is apparently a desirable, distinct, and superior identity, as opposed to being a “real Chicagoan,” or a “real Philadelphian.” The quizzes seem to agree on the following: that being a “real New Yorker” involves learning how to be a pedestrian on Manhattan streets, learning how to navigate the subway, learning how to handle New York taxis, and learning how not to act like a tourist. The quizzes never mention encounters with people who speak languages other than English, and I have yet to see one of these quizzes in a language other than English. They seem to concur on two general assumptions: one, that readers of these articles, who apparently want to know whether they are “real New Yorkers,” have moved here as English-speaking adults from other parts of the United States, and two, that being a New Yorker involves learning how to physically navigate the borough of Manhattan. I’ve been thinking lately about what it is to be a “real New Yorker” and whether it means something deeper than how to quickly pass sidewalk-hogging, slow-moving tourists in midtown.

What if being a “real New Yorker” has less to do with your skills than with your attitude? A few days ago, I read the October 10, 2014 entry, entitled “Learning to Love Astoria,” in the “Metropolitan Diary” of The New York Times. The author, Dorothy Howe Kelley, started with the following lines: “When my freshly minted college graduate daughter told me she was moving to Astoria, I indulged in a silent scream. Its growing reputation as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country activated the maternal switch in me that wanted to shut this whole thing down… Nothing, it seemed, would dampen her love or her spirit for the city I secretly loathed.”

There were a few things that bothered me about this “Metropolitan Diary” entry. Although the story ended on a positive note - Kelley told a story of how an Iranian shopkeeper generously lent her his own drill to hang shelves and she finished by saying that she now loved Astoria because of his kindness – the assumption in these first few lines seemed to be that everyone would relate to her initial fear of diversity. “Who does she think she’s writing to?” I thought. What New York Times reader would relate to or even understand her fear of diversity, when New York City is one of the most diverse cities on earth? I felt that the author assumed that her New York Times-reading audience would be both monolingual and monocultural (as the authors of those online quizzes also seem to do) and that consequently they would understand her fear. But she couldn’t be more mistaken, if many New York Times readers are New Yorkers. We New Yorkers often hail from all corners of the world and must live alongside, and with, other cultures and languages. Passing from neighborhood to neighborhood anywhere outside midtown Manhattan is like passing between countries – and most New Yorkers live outside midtown Manhattan. I was also amazed that Kelley thought no other neighborhood across the five boroughs could equal Astoria’s diversity, when most neighborhoods are pretty multicultural.

To me, one of the greatest aspects of New York City is its diversity. My son attends PS 166Q in Astoria. He has classmates who are Pakistani, Chinese, Nepalese, French, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Egyptian, Thai, and Greek, and who speak languages other than English at home. My neighborhood is also culturally diverse. I live near LaGuardia Airport, in an area sometimes known as Astoria, sometimes Astoria Heights, sometimes Upper Ditmars, sometimes Jackson Heights, and sometimes East Elmhurst. It has a rather hybrid identity to match its many names. At the playground and on the street, I often hear Greek. My landlord’s family speaks Italian, as does the local deli owner, who is Sicilian. The cashiers at the local Trade Fair speak Spanish. The owner of that Trade Fair speaks Arabic, but a passable Spanish with his employees. My next-door neighbors grew up in Thailand and speak Thai with their son. The neighbors on the other side of my apartment are from Bosnia. My upstairs neighbors, one from the Dominican Republic, one from Bolivia, speak Spanish. In my apartment, we speak English and Turkish - I married a Turk. He speaks English with me, but only Turkish with our son. As for me, I was born in the United States, and my native language is English. I guess that if the author of that “Metropolitan Diary” entry met me, she would assume that I sympathize with her fear of diversity because I am originally from a small, homogeneous town in the Midwest where not many people speak a language other than English. But I always loved languages. When I was little, I used to dream about learning other languages; I used to be fascinated by the languages on instruction manuals for assembling toys or electronics, thinking that I could somehow learn those languages if I compared them to the adjacent English. I went on to study Spanish, French, and later Turkish. Now I’m earning my doctorate in French literature, and I teach French. I feel at home in New York City, where monolingualism is a rarity, partly because it calls to my love of languages.

When I first moved to New York over ten years ago, I gradually learned the multicultural topography of language here. I learned that if I go to Flushing, I’ll hear Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean; if I go to Jackson Heights, I’ll hear Spanish in accents from all across Latin America. Going to Astoria meant hearing Greek and Italian, hearing Arabic in “Little Egypt” on Steinway Street; going to Brighton Beach meant hearing Russian; and going to Sunnyside meant hearing Turkish. In New York City, I have the opportunity to interact with so many cultures and languages. I have the opportunity to speak Spanish in Jackson Heights, in Corona, and East Elmhurst. I have the opportunity to speak Turkish in Sunnyside and Sheepshead Bay. I have the opportunity to speak French in Astoria, in Long Island City, and at the new French bookstore, Albertine, in Manhattan. When I pass through this city, through neighborhoods, across the street, and even when I come home, I traverse cultures and languages. And even if I don’t speak all these languages, or I might not be familiar with the customs of all these cultures, I value diversity. And that, to me, is being a “real New Yorker.”

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The outpatient center of the Johns Hopkins Hospital is unremarkable in the way typical to most medical facilities —so much so that a full description would be a waste of ink and time. Linoleum, fluorescent, sterile, cold, plastic, pastel—adjectives and nouns that come together effortlessly in every doctor’s office, waiting area, and operating room. Like many others, I come here every few months, regardless of whether I feel ill or well.

I take a seat in the waiting room and, next to me, pamphlets declare the obvious (don’t smoke, sugar is bad, so is red meat) and feature photographs of the comically sick—a woman caught in mid-sneeze, a man clutching his abdomen in discomfort. On the cover of a magazine, an aggressively fit couple in fluorescent jogging suits grins at me, golden retriever in tow. As enlightening or educational as these reading materials may be, my gaze moves to a poster on the wall. Written in both English and in about ten other languages, the poster publicizes the hospital’s translation services and says, multilingually, if you need a translator, we’re here to help. I read what is written in French, and then Spanish, matching up the words I don’t know to their English equivalents. For a minute, I entertain the idea of requesting a translator in a language I don’t understand, say, Swahili, just to add a little variety to the mundane routine of these visits.

The nurse calls my name, and I leave the multillingual poster behind. But, as I sit to have my blood pressure measured, the nurse asks me to perform a translation of sorts on my own. She hands me a scale, intended to measure pain. On the right, the “0” end, a round cartoon face smiles stupidly. On the left, the “10” end, the round face frowns, a thermometer sticking out of its mouth. I am lucky—this task, giving a number to the extent or lack of my pain, is often very simple. Typically, I point to the zero, the grinning circle, and move on. But, today, I am in pain—my joints are swollen and stiff—and my task suddenly becomes more complicated. “What do you mean by ten?” I ask (demand). “Well, are you in a lot of pain?” the nurse replies.

Yes, I am, I think, but does my pain warrant a ten? I’m not bleeding out of my side; a gunshot wound must be worse; I’m not in so much pain that I can’t speak or drive a car. “But, what is a ten, really?” I respond. The nurse sighs. We’ve had this discussion (argument) in the past, and I know I’m not being fair. “I need a translator,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. She glares.

Those intimate with illness know that, in the pastel of examining rooms, language falters. The nurse’s chart is arbitrary and simile seems insufficient. In her essay, “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf discusses the inexpressibility of pain, observing that, unlike other universals—love, anger, hate—illness is seldom the topic of literature. She attributes this lack to “the poverty of language” and writes, “for the sufferer…there is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself and, taking his pain in one hand and a lump of pure sound in the other…so to crush them together that a brand new word drops out.” 1 Elaine Scarry, in her meditation on pain, agrees. She too argues that pain resists language. Without a precise vocabulary, the ill rely on figures of speech and “vocalize[d] cries” to convey the felt experience of discomfort.2

I’ve learned that it is moments such as these, when the body is at its most urgent, that language betrays us. But, I have not invented new words, scripted a new alphabet, nor do I wish to cry out in anguish. I desperately yearn for translation—a dictionary, someone who is more fluent than myself, but I know this is impossible.

So, I respond with a non-committal, “Five.” The nurse jots it down.

-----------------------------------------------------------1. Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” from selected essays (Oxford: Oxford’s World’s Classics, 2008): 100.

2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985): 5.

I recently moved to New York from Knoxville, Tennessee, specifically to further my education in languages. Believe it or not, in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, the Italian population is relatively small. Nevertheless, the University of Tennessee (in Knoxville) offers Italian as a language elective and a major, which I pursued, along with a handful of other hopeless romantics. I continued my studies abroad, spending a summer and then a full academic year studying at the Universita’ degli Studi di Urbino, after which I considered myself to be essentially fluent. So now, when I walk around the city, my ears always perk up when I hear a language spoken with an emphatic, vowel-heavy cadence. In my experience, the language I strain to hear, without wanting to appear too obvious, could be Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or even Greek. When I determine the language in question is Italian, I am always tempted to drop in, but almost as often, I get nervous and tell myself it would be better not to intrude. However, when I do decide to launch into an Italian conversation with a stranger, it is always unique and invariably leaves me feeling good about the interaction. Perhaps, the most amazing thing is how otherwise banal topics and rehashed discussions become new again. A different voice emerges from within me, and people have even told me they prefer my sentimental Italian voice to the more matter-of-fact English one.

But enough about me, when is it appropriate for you—as one who might consider taking part in a conversation in a different language—to chime in? Anytime you want! I can understand feeling embarrassed because you think you might sound silly, but oftentimes, people in a casual setting, like at the park or on the train, are happy to entertain a few words with a stranger because the experience is mutually beneficial. Moreover, when the speaker of a region’s official or dominant language chooses to risk sounding silly in an attempt to connect with another culture, it shows respect

and a willingness to appreciate diversity, which might just be the positive reinforcement someone needs. I have friends who tell me how annoying it is when someone starts in with their broken Italian/Farsi/Old Norse, and my friends all have to smile and nod politely until the person stops. These people are obviously very busy having important conversations about shoes, and you need to be sensitive to their annoyed shudders, too. However, the truth is that one negative moment, though it affirms your worst fears about putting yourself out there, will be much less relevant to a person’s day than the warm-fuzzies you transmit to someone speaking a foreign language who is not having an important conversation about shoes and would incidentally love to entertain your linguistic experimentation for a few minutes. Get it? Your chance to have a positive impact and dive into the polyglot milieu greatly outweighs your negative impact on shoes. For example, one of the other staff members at my job started speaking Italian, and, after I heard that familiar cadence, I spoke up. It only took a few words and we were off; for the rest of the day, we spoke more Italian than I have spoken in years. And it didn’t stop there! Now, any passing remarks in the hallway are in Italian, and I feel a much greater connection with my colleague than I had in the past. So, let the haters have their sneers—you go get your culture on. Talk it up.

This is New York and, when we shy away from an intercultural exchange, we as residents are turning our backs on one of the city’s greatest features. I am guilty of it myself at times, and I can say I regret 100% of the chances I missed to speak another language. You could think of it like honking your horn, a much beloved New York pastime, except instead of commenting on another’s driving ability, you are showing genuine interest in someone’s cultural heritage. Now who would flip you off for that?

eMBRaCinG a Cityscott kapuscInskIQueens College student, MFA CreAtive Writing And literAry trAnslAtion

voCABulAries oF pAinJulIa pemBertondoCtorAl CAndidAte, english

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tRanSlatoR’S note:

Boring Home, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo’s latest collection of short stories, features several micro-fictions like “Tao-Hoang-She-Kiang-Té.” Lazo’s stories circulate around a certain commonality: appropriating Cuba’s imaginary, political, allegorical, and metaphorical relationship to other totalitarian environments like China and imperial Japan. Lazo’s stories in Boring Home relay political irony, as the individual is deleted as part of the people. Lazo also creates alternative personal narratives of the official speech that homogenizes the Cuban nation through unusual, often paranoid or schizophrenic manners. Thus, I chose to translate Lazo’s work to highlight his aesthetics in light of transforming political Cuba.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Pick-Up Stix or hoang-she-kiang looks like chaos, but no: it’s like a big family or a little nation. For the experts (whether they’re Chinese natives or from foreign Chinatowns), each stick reincarnates a name, a hierarchy, a style of use, a tone, and even certain symbolic secrets of the universe, such as “Will” and “Representation.” It’s as easy as attending a Noh theatre.

So, Pick-Up Stix or hoang-she-kiang comprises ubiquitous, pan-national writing. These sticks can also be used as silverware (for the neo-bourgeois ex-monarchy); as gallant, pre-sexual objects (among the Mao-vanguard youth); as treacherous, cunning weapons (a favorite among femme revisionists and revisionists in general); as partisan and/or bureaucratic and/or military badges (in fashion since 1989); as a preschool learning game (between ages 3 and 5, according to the pre-Popular Ministry of Education); and as a portable system of divination (xiao), or even as self-help (tung).

Rather than writing at random, Pick-Up Stix or hoang-she-kiang is a type of message to the citizens (experts or not) from the Emperor himself (Kai-Fú). Or, in its contemporary lacking, from the State itself (Fú-Kai). This system functions as a set of bricks for building a wall that can never be seen from the cosmos, but it’s still monumental. As a linguistic effect, every stick is both a character and a calaboose. In grammar, this paradox is called semiotalitarianism, or tian-am. In politics, it would simply be governance, or kong.

So, Pick-Up Stix or hoang-she-kiang is the genesis of a hyper-national vocabulary, incorruptible meaning within the heart of the masses, and immanent leadership in every historical context. It’s nothing of chaos, as foreigners or the ignorant might initially think. But to the contrary, every time a citizen of the current Republic (whether they be Chinese natives or from foreign Chinatowns) uses the sticks to form a phoneme or ping, centuries and centuries of that exquisite and exhaustive tradition convene as if on blank sheet music. The same happens when this factual gospel is read (hoang-she-kiang-té): that which vibrates between the vocal chords of the reader will not be so much his own voice, but a certain air of a small family or a great nation. Each throat resounds the choral notes of a Chinese cosmotracheotomy whose pitch is always ideal for tuning by any member of the People or of the Party. This is what Western anthropologists have called a state of chinesity.

For example, even this portable history or tao-hoang-she-kiang-té could not be told by anyone who isn’t involved in the same Pick-Up Stix choreography, mathematically defined as: ta

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A murmur of conversation hums over the clanging subway tracks. The words are foreign: mere noises to me. I glance around for facial expressions and listen to the tone of voice to determine whether or not they are talking about me. Shedding my unwarranted self-centered paranoia, I put my ear buds back in and swipe to a song that will drown out the noise. A tap to play, and a scroll through my Instagram feed gives me a glimpse of an acquaintance’s day before losing service under the East River. In that moment, a seamless conversation occurs with a handheld piece of glass, metal, plastic, and electricity.

Stop for a moment and reflect on your definition of language. Can languages be unspoken? Sign language is the clearest example of a physical language based in gestures, but gestural interface interactions can also be considered a form language. Interface interaction is an evolving system of taxonomical gestures, motions, and physical input. That physical input varies between audio input, tapping pieces of glass, swiping fingers across a series of interactive pixels. Taking advantage of cheap sensors and computer processors, we are able to create quasi-intelligent receptive devices that interpret physical expression to create a digital response. We have dialogues with our machines. We ask and it delivers. Any number of times a day, we tap, click, swipe, and scroll within a user-friendly environment of icons and images. There is a flurry of text-based conversations going on behind the thin veneer of our graphical user interfaces (GUI). With that said, we need look no further than surface deep to appreciate that we are speaking an entirely new language.

What are the implications of using? gestural, physical input technologies to interact with machines? It is important to

acknowledge that levers, buttons, and the like have been around for many more years than what we refer to as interface devices today. These rudimentary inputs paved the way for the digital touch screen and gestural sensors that we know today. What has changed is the form of output. We have created more intelligent and complex output. We have begun to teach our devices logical thought-processes. We have scratched the surface of what could be called artificial intelligence. Automated learning devices are becoming the norm. Using full body motions and audio input to garner much more complex data input to manipulate your surroundings is also becoming a reality at an incredible pace. We are seeing smart homes, smart TVs, and smart cars.

The conversations we have with our devices are not restricted to regional or national boundaries. Engineers the world over are taking universal gestures and physical input to create devices like the iPhone, NEST, and yes, even a smart toilet. We have begun to see the development of languages that cross traditional boundaries and allow us to converse with our surroundings. For those of you who are quick to deny that this input/output interaction is language, think about the things you yourself do on a day to day basis. At what points do you find yourself reliant on effective conversations with your technology? Think about the use of GPS data and pinching and pulling a real-time updated map on a screen to get to your location. Think about using voice commands in your car to make a hands-free phone call. Think about using the swipe of a card to tell a computer to open the door for you. You must learn and understand the vocabulary of actions in order to communicate with these technologies. So, next time you’re swiping through your phone on the subway, appreciate your multilingualism.

physiCAl lAnguAge in digitAl spACe chrIstopher VItale grAduAte student, MAster oF liBerAl Arts in digitAl huMAnities

penSaMientoS De Mi BilinGuiliDaDFelIx lopezQueens College studentCuando yo pienso de mis actividades diarios, yo casi nunca me considero como soy afortunado de ser bilingüe. Yo hablo, escribo, y entiendo bien el español y el inglés juntos, aunque el inglés es mi lenguaje preferido.

Yo entiendo bien el español en la tele latinoamericana, en las películas y en las canciones. Si alguien quiere que yo le lea un periódico o articulo para traducirlo en inglés, sé que puedo hacerlo bien. Sin embargo, también tengo que admitir que no soy un experto, y casi siempre hay errores en mi manera de hablar y escribir. Yo admito que yo he descuidado de mi talento, y todavía necesito un diccionario bilingüe para saber lo que no se traducir en casa o en mis clases.

Mi español me ayudó muchas veces en entender palabras de otros lenguajes que yo no hablo. Como que español es uno de las lenguas romances, a veces yo puedo entender palabras y dichos en portugués, italiano, francés, y hasta el antiguo latín. Si alguien hable uno de estos lenguajes con fluidez, yo se que ellos podrán entender un poco de las demás idiomas.

El lenguaje español es un tesoro que recibí junto con el inglés, y es imposible decir cuál de los dos es superior, porque ambos tienen sus bellezas. Yo pido para la gente bilingüe a apreciar lo que tienen, por ser un privilegio y un talento poderoso en la vida real.

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In the final chapter of Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote, we find the hero finally coming to his senses, and renouncing all his former outlandish behavior as unbecoming to a gentleman and a Christian. He languishes in bed for several days, makes his final confession, and dies peacefully in his sleep. All of the mad tilting at windmills and outlandish battling with giants—all the absurdity and hilarity—are reframed in the last pages of the novel within an orderly and sober society where God is in heaven and all is right with the world. Or so it seems.

What muddles this picture is the story of a word. How this word comes to be defined, translated, applied, and interpreted suggests not only a very different conclusion from the one given above, it tells us something about the way language works, or that is to say, about the way it often doesn’t.

Cervantes tells us that on Quixote’s return home after his long adventures he is “arraigó una calentura,” which is often translated as “seized with a fever.”1 However, the Spanish “calentura” had another meaning in Cervantes’ day. Sailors who spent long months at sea for the purpose of trade, exploration, or conquest would often develop an unusual condition which caused them to hallucinate a vision of green fields onto the waves of the ocean. These sailors would then be seized by the overwhelming desire to go into these green fields. In this way, many a sailor lost his life. Picking up the term from Spanish sailors in the sixteenth century, the condition became known in English as “calenture.”

Before considering how this applies to the illness of Quixote, it is important to mention here that one of the most widely read translations of Don Quixote in English, from the time of its publication in 1755 to the present, describes Quixote as “seized” not with a fever, but “with a calenture.” The translator was the noted author Tobias Smollett, famous for his satirical fiction, who coincidentally spent time as a naval surgeon on a voyage to Jamaica.

Quixote was, of course, no sailor. And La Mancha, his home, is an arid plateau in central Spain, far from any sea. So why give Quixote calenture? The obvious answer is to point out that the supposedly moralizing Christian closing to the novel is in fact only superficial, and that Quixote’s claim to have returned to sanity can also be read as a kind of madness, a hallucination projected onto the world, provoked by an intense nostalgia. The novel lends support to this reading. While lying sick in bed with his friends around him, the bachelor encourages Quixote to “forsake his couch, that they might begin their pastoral exercise” and a little later Sancho Panza exclaims “let us take to the field in shepherds apparel.” The multivalent, ambivalent calenture causes the reader to reevaluate Quixote’s madness, and gives new meaning to the sympathetic contagion affecting his friends in their urge to go into the green fields.

-----------------------------------------------------------1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, from The History and Adventures of the renowned Don Quixote.

CAlenture/CAlenturA matthew rowney doCtorAl CAndidAte, english

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QUEENS COLLEGE WRitinG felloWS 2014-2015

Roya BiGGie is a doctoral candidate in English. Her dissertation considers the relational possibilities of suffering in early modern drama.

SaMuel fRank is a doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences and a Climate Science Fellow at Climate Nexus. His dissertation research focuses on state climate policy in the U.S., and he writes a weekly newsletter for NGOs about renewable energy.

liSa kaRakaya is a doctoral candidate in French with a certificate in women’s studies. Her research focuses on social class in French and Francophone women’s writing of the latter half of the twentieth century.

anDReW kiRCheR is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and an adjunct lecturer for the Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) MFA program at Brooklyn College. His research focuses on the dramaturgies of intellectual property law in contemporary performance.

MattheW RoWney is a doctoral candidate in English. His research interests include trees, hexagons, and the history of obscure diseases.

SaRa SalMan is a doctoral candidate in Sociology. Her research examines citizenship in late modernity. Her other research interests include structural violence, subjectivity, and resistance.

ChRiStopheR Vitale is earning a MALS in Digital Humanities from the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the Editor-in-Chief of QC Voices and works as a program assistant for Writing at Queens.

fRank Vitale kaRakaya RoWney BiGGie SalMan kiRCheR

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Ethiopia has historically been a closed country, shielded by difficult geography and fiercely protective leaders who mistrusted the ever-invasive, ever-greedy foreigners that came in. In 1896, the great Battle of Adwa proved to the world that the small African nation could fight off—and defeat— an invading European army (Italy) with colonial aspirations. Ethiopia remained independent. Forty years later, in 1935, Benito Mussolini reminded his people of Adwa as his Fascist army went in again to try to make Ethiopia an Italian colony. That quest, too, failed for the Italians. But something interesting happened along the way. Though many returned to Italy, some soldati chose to stay in the country they had tried to conquer, and they made it their new home. Both nations would see complex relationships develop between their people: children from one place were born in the other; some left for Italy in search of fathers; some, raised in Italy, wondered about the land of their mothers. Families were soon made up of both cultures, and a new one emerged in the process.

In the decades following the 1935 war, Ethiopians watched their country move slowly towards modernization, buckle under the weight of poverty and famine, and nearly collapse under a revolution and a series of repressive regimes. Somehow, Ethiopia would gather herself again and again. The stories coming from this history are of the country’s collapse and rise, of her people’s migration and resistance, of deeply personal despair and hope. Whenever I read them, sitting in my apartment in NYC, I find myself caught in that shifting space

that immigrants must inhabit—not all the time, not every day, but just often enough to remind us of birthplace and home and the landscapes that separate those two words. They remind me, if anything, of my own hybrid life, as American as it is anything else.

I am not the same type of Ethiopian as my mother, but maybe the truth is that neither is she the same kind of Ethiopian as her mother, or her grandmother before her. Every generation witnesses change. They accommodate time, history, geo-politics, and the simple human yearning to know more, to travel further, to experience difference. I come from a country with close to 90 different languages, with a population of over 84 million, site of some of the most astounding discoveries in the science of human evolution. There is so much here. Our history is vast, our identities so multitudinous, that if one asks what it means to be Ethiopian, there could be 84 million responses in 90 languages. When I was asked recently to edit an issue focusing on Ethiopian literature for the journal Words Without Borders, the magnitude of those 90 languages loomed large. How to find the stories and select for range? How to avoid reading each story as a representational rather than an individual accounting? The value of translators, of readers of translated literature, and venues that support this work felt very real. In the end, I did what I could with the time that I had, understanding that the work was incomplete, but it had begun and would continue.

“WhAt it MeAns to Be ethiopiAn”

maaza menGIste FACulty, english