Masks

Authors of novels sometimes say that after they have started writing, a character runs away with the story and changes it completely. This usually doesn’t happen to me, though occasionally, I’ll be following one topic, and details from a completely different one will take over. Then I have two choices. (I don’t consider plunking two topics next to each other without any bridge an option. Or not having a topic. That’s out.) So I can either think up a way to connect the two topics (I’m the Queen of Connections) or delete the bits of the first topic and explore the second.

Today I thought I was still writing about controversy, but I wasn’t. I was writing about… (had to change this sentence five times)…how we fall back on body language to communicate when words fail. I am expert on this topic because I watched all three seasons of Lie to Me and read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Actually, I miss way too much, just sailing through people’s day without noticing their internal weather. I’m better at noticing people’s feelings when I’m teaching. Do I detect enthusiasm? I ramp things up. Do I detect boredom? I move on immediately. Boredom is anathema.

Yesterday…(with my Syrian friends, “yesterday” is short hand--or synecdoche--for any time in the past. If you mean a long time ago, you add circling gestures and “yesterdays.”). So, yesterday, I met another Syrian family who has just arrived in Canada and has moved in a couple floors above Manal. They served me the thickest coffee I’ve ever tasted in a tiny cup and saucer and vanilla pudding (sweet milk is how it got translated). We invited them down for our English lesson, so my class swelled from one to six. We laughed a lot. We stood on chairs, sat on walls, turned left, turned right, touched toes, and picked out colors. Beige is “beige” in both languages. I let my guard down, sat on the floor, and behaved downright silli-ly to keep the game going.

While we worked, I was always watching the faces of my new students, because it was the only way I could tell how they felt. Body language. Micro-expressions. They knew no English. I think I feel so drawn to these Syrians because they are so immediately hospitable and expressive, like many of my Mexican friends. It makes them easier to read, easier to teach. (Maybe. They mask displeasure with guests, too.) Not all cultures are expressive, though, and I need to guard myself against grading them on that. (Would you want your introverted child graded on expressiveness?) I especially noticed Jala’s expressions. She’s the mom. She had such an intent look on her face, her forehead slightly furrowed. And when I’d address her, she’d tilt her head slightly to one side and down, a regal gesture of approbation. I could teach people like this forever. It’s rarely me that stops the lesson but bright-eyed Manal laughing and insisting, “Break, break.” She holds her head to show how full it is of learning. She would never let on if she were bored.

I think I understand my friends well. But who knows. Even simple gestures (“Go. Come.”) can be misunderstood across cultures. I remember when our friend Roland first came to visit us in Guerrero years ago. He had asked to stay in a Mixtec home, and this was his first night. We had just dropped him off. An hour later, he came to the house red-faced and upset. “They have asked me to leave!” he insisted. We doubted that, wondering, “How do you know?” He said they had gestured him to be gone, out into the dark, and that he could read people’s gestures as well as anyone. He was utterly certain of their intentions.

We traipsed over to the home of the Mixtec family, our neighbors at the time, and we tried to solve the mystery. This is what had happened: Roland had said, in Spanish, that he wanted to shower. But what the family heard was him asking for the bath-room. They had no bath-room. They bathed out in the open next to the open water tank and did their other business in the field across the road. So they gestured away from the house, into the dark, toward the field across the street. He misunderstood.

He learned, though, and went back to sleep in their home. He eventually married their daughter. And I have learned, too, reverting to childlike silliness to get a word across. Cross-cultural communication is a gift of God to keep us young and childlike and aware of our ignorance.

Wikipedia