Perspectives

This last week in class I was teaching comparisons to my students. Our adjectives of the day were tall, short, big, little, fat, thin, long,curly and straight. So after the length of our grammar lesson I decided to put their new knowledge into action. Asking two children to the front of the class I then called on my students to make a verbal comparison using the structure they had just learned. Here is the resulting conversation. At the front of the room stand myself, a boy named Onja, and a girl named Juliette.

Me: "Ok class, now what can you tell me about Onja?" ( notice I did not use the key phrase "give me a comparison")

A girl name Aina raises her hand(smart girl): Onja is black.

The shock sets in with cultural smoothness and I stammer: " Yes, ok, Onja is black. Now can you give me a comparison?" (gesturing between the boy and girl)

Aina consults with her partner, a very smart girl named Mendrika. Quickly they come to a most remarkable conclusion: "Onja is blacker...than you."

I hold back the laughter and take on a supportive expression for their efforts and correct usage of the grammar learned and then decide to just go for it: "And who is blacker than me?""

The class doesn't understand that one too quickly so I translate it into Malagasy and they all start to giggle. Aina raises her hand again and I call on her: Tsy iza, tsy iza.

The answer... no one.

I smile, throw up my hands in a shrug, which always leads to classroom laughter and turn back to my chalk bag. Lesson completed. I consider my reactions as I write the exercises on the board.

If I had been in America, that conversation would have been an absolute disaster, resulting in parents filing into classrooms, serious faces, and serious expressions promising serious consequences. After a conversation, perhaps two, the child would be so frightened out of the expression that it would/might only appear in the future as a term of difference/hate.

Here in Madagascar, however, it means absolutely nothing. Except in this case that my children actually were able to apply our English lesson for the day into a real life, spontaneous incident. Other than that it serves only to remind me that the wonders of children is that they have yet to learn what we all have yet to forget. Color only matters to those who would choose to make it matter. My 50 children of this particular English class see it as only a color. It means nothing else. It may mean, in this country, many different things as a result of American cinema reaching its hands across oceans and those perspectives are not ones we would ever wish on other people as our statement of us. Yet, as an ex-patriot, I live every day in the shadows of these expectations and, as a result, have begun to see our self portrayal so cleverly hidden in our films.

Imagine, hundreds of years from now, scientists discover a carefully preserved blockbuster. With careful precision they extract the delicate discs, unearthing machines as they go. After months of care and anticipation they play the first disc in an attempt to understand the society that had created such an uninteresting place. What would the film tell about us, as a people?

Scary question if you think about it long enough. Or maybe it is only scary to me as someone living that exact situation. Only I am not with scientists. I am with normal, every day people that will more than likely never experience anything outside of their farm fields, local town centers, and , if they are lucky, the capital of this country. To them, America IS what is in the film. American women ARE the women in the films and in the magazine pictures. Our culture IS what is portrayed in these pictures of extravagance, emaciated women wanting to lose more weight, clothing that has no purpose other than to flash its colors, homes of such gross extravagance the people in it are considered with disdain. We have so much that we cannot possibly appreciate or cherish anything. We have no culture of our own to respect so how can we respect others, especially when we clearly don't respect ourselves. Money has given us laziness and has robbed of us of our sacred. We don't know what it is to be married ( reference to divorce rate), have real relationships, responsibilities, our to understand what true need feels like. We have never suffered so we cannot understand suffering. Our society is so glutenous we could never understand what it is to be without food. We hold no one more dear than our own selves, and even they we treat with neglect and utter disregard. (These are perspectives and casual statements I have gathered from many conversations, enough to know that they are no limited to a few select people, but rather are shared by many, although not all.)

This is what I am constantly fighting as I enter even a basic conversation with a Malagasy person, be it child or adult. Constantly fighting against the attributes, attitudes, and qualities we have given ourselves in our attempts to impress others and thereby creating our own sadness.

Not mine though. I love telling people about my home, my family, my culture. Explaining how many types of foods we have and why, the cultures we have and why. Why I am so big when they all look so small, why my hair is curly if I am not Metis ( African and white blooded). Why I smile like I do, why I have no money etc. It makes me laugh, I make them laugh, and it spurs more and more conversations. I see my time here, my time with my friends and families and students as a broad domino affect. They will tell their families, and friends. And while the information will eventually die out in its interest, it will have changed or questioned the perceived notions of who I am for enough people that when the next person comes along with their wonderfully obnoxious assumptions it is my friends and co-workers who correct them, not I.
And this is already happening.

Look at the power of information.