A few months ago, I decided to learn Chisena, a language native to the region of Mozambique that has become my temporary home. Adamo, one of my biology students, offered to be my Chisena teacher. We set aside an hour or two each week when he would come to my house. He tutored me using a couple of books that I picked up from some missionaries I met in the city. I kept a notebook on grammar and repeated the words that he pronounced until I could say them correctly. This lasted for about a month.
Once, we spent our lesson time labeling items in the house with their names in Chisena. After arriving in Mozambique from the States, I had done this in the house where I lived, with Portuguese labels, and had found it helpful. “Madzi” - water - we wrote on a scrap of paper and stuck it to the water filter. “Moto” - fire - we stuck on the gas stove burner. Adamo stuck the word “janela” on the window.
But that's a Portuguese word, I pointed out. Of course, he said.
“Fio,” he stuck on the electrical cord – another Portuguese word. “Prato” on a plate. “Luz” on the lamp. When we were finished, of all the items labeled in Chisena in the house, most of them were labeled with Portuguese words that I already knew. Why, I asked him, do you use these Portuguese words in your native Mozambican language?
Why? Because they are Portuguese ideas, I guess. We just didn't have these things until the Portuguese arrived.
I finished making tortillas to go with the beans and guacamole (it was still avocado season) that I'd made for dinner and met a couple of kids outside who had come to the house to eat with us. I brought out plates of food and set them on the straw mat on my veranda. While we were eating, I told them about the new words I'd learned and ... “Shee!” one of them interrupted me - “sheee!” - and pointed at a little dot on the straw mat. There was a lightning bug crawling in the crease between two straws, blinking Morse code as it quickly made its way along a perfectly straight line.
“What do you call that in Chisena? “ I asked my friends.
I forget what the first kid to speak said. But whatever it was, his friend said he was wrong. Look at how small it is! He gave another name. A third kid chimed in. But look at its wings! Debate ensued.
While there is no unique word for window in Chisena, there are multiple and specific words for various types of lightning bugs.
...
Every word refers to some idea. And there are some words that just don't directly translate from language to language. The ideas contained within a language can only be conveyed exactly and absolutely within that same language. The specific words for various insects that those boys debated that night all translate to the same word for me: lightning bug. “Lightning bug,” however, doesn't recognize any of the distinctions or connotations of their words.
In college, someone once pointed out this difficult but fascinating lesson to me with the Spanish word “convivir.” I often have the same difficulty my friend had with Spanish with my Portuguese. When talking to other Peace Corps volunteers, I often catch myself sprinkling occasional and necessary Portuguese words - chinelos, pegar, conseguir - in my English. There aren't English words to convey exactly some of my ideas. My English-speaking friends do it to me, too.
I read some weeks ago in an old Best American book of essays that I came across in a friend's bookshelf, about Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of Eyak, an indigenous language of Alaska. “Neither T.S. Eliot nor Claude Lévi-Strauss knew how the world would end, but the last speaker of Eyak knows: It will end in silence,” wrote Earl Shorris in this essay, originally published in a 2000 issue of Harper's.
When a language dies, not only do the words disappear, but the ideas do too. Near the end of her life, there was no person on left on earth with which to share the ideas of Ms. Jones in the way that Ms. Jones thought them. The world in the unique way that it was perceived by the Eyak speaker was buried with the word.
I wonder sometimes about how Mozambique's native languages and culture will fare in the upcoming years. I realize that I am living here at a time of transition, a time in which such questions are being answered. Colonialism ended in 1975. Until then, the majority of the Mozambican black population did not receive much education or formal training in any language. Most people, I'm told, spoke only the language of their home – a language usually dictated by their ethnicity – perhaps a few words in Portuguese, and maybe another ethnicity's dialect. The last generation who grew up under colonialism is still alive. It's usually old women who I meet – often student's grandmothers – who cannot speak Portuguese. Their grandchildren, my students, translate between my Portuguese and the old women's Chisena.
The government that took power at independence declared Portuguese the national language of Mozambique. Government documents were all written in Portuguese; business transactions and classes at schools of all levels were conducted in Portuguese - just as they always had been. But now the native Mozambican population fully participated in these aspects of life. During the course of only one generation, a more-than-cursory understanding of Portuguese became necessary for most Mozambicans to live in Mozambique. Portuguese literacy programs were instituted across the country to accommodate.
Chisena, where I live, is still spoken in the homes of most of the people that I know. However, it is not always the first language of many households. Some parents that I know raise their kids to speak Portuguese at home. Likewise – I wonder if it is a remnant of the urgency with which literacy programs were established – Chisena is all but outlawed in schools. When, the other day, I wrote a Chisena word on the board to clarify a concept for one my students, a girl yelled out, panicked, “Teacha! But what if the director comes in?!”
That Chisena is no longer the primary language where I live evidences itself sometimes with my students. When I ask one of my students what something is called in Chisena, if they don't know the answer, they reply with Portuguese. Then they think for a moment and say, “But a word does exist for that ... a pure Masena would know” [Chisena refers to the language and culture; Masena to the people].
I sometimes find that many of the students that I teach – now, the third generation since Independence – make fun of students who have trouble speaking Portuguese. “He doesn't speak good Portuguese” is the equivalent of saying “He's stupid.” My students say that the only places where Portuguese isn't spoken are in the bush (that's where the “pure” Masena live). And for many kids in larger villages like mine, living in the bush is something of a joke. “He doesn't speak good Portuguese” is the equivalent of saying “He's a hick.”
But it isn't a “pure” Portuguese that my students speak, either. My students are also the first generation of Mozambicans to grow up with regular access to television and movies – almost all of which are in English.
“What did you do tonight,” I asked Luis, a student, some weeks ago. He was walking out of one of the bamboo “movie houses” where people set up a tv and dvd player and play movies all day, charging entrance.
“Watched a cowboiado,” he said.
“What's that?”
“You know John Wayne?”
My students use words like “big,” “power,” “boss,” “job,” and “nice” in their regular conversations. English here is not new: Mozambique shares its border with five English-speaking countries, and Mozambican workers have been working abroad for a long time. Likewise, in this area specifically, a number of plantations were run by Englishmen. However, some of the words that my students use are specifically adapted from an American context. The other day, I heard used the word “gym-ar,” meaning to lift weights. A patent-leather briefcase here is called a “james-bond” (obviously because of American films and not the British books) and a backhanded deal is known as a “mcgyva” (A colleague explained: “Imagine that the president said that he was going to give you a new car for all of your hard work. And the new car came and he gave it to your boss to give it to you ... and your boss gave it to his political friend, instead. That's a mcgyva”).
There is a certain pride that my students take in using English words. English is the language of music and movies and international business. Speaking English is a skill and sign of future success (I've been told more than once by Mozambican kids that, “Teacha, you're a smart guy.” And if I guffaw, they say, “Well, I mean, you can speak English!”)
My students speak Chisena with their grandparents. They often use it as a sort-of secret code to speak above non-Chisena speakers' heads (including mine). But, often, especially among students, the language evokes smirks or grins - the kind of looks that city-dwelling Minnesotans make when someone says “eh” or “you betcha.” It's kitchy. It's folksy.
And, I wonder, sometimes, if it's also dying.
...
My dad called this morning at 7 o'clock to tell me that Great-Uncle Evan (“ee-vahn”) was diagnosed with cancer and that his doctors expect that he'll live only 10 more days. Uncle Evan was tending his garden, my dad said, when he felt a pain in his chest. That's the only reason he'd gone to the doctor.
I remember standing in his 1950's-style kitchen wearing a big red Clifford dog costume, with black floppy ears, with whiskers that one of my parents painted on my cheeks. We went to Uncle Evan and Aunt Dorothy's house every year on Halloween. Even after we moved out of town, my dad, brothers and sister and I drove there every year to have to converse and enjoy candy that both my uncle and aunt loved to spoil us with.
Uncle Evan is my grandpa's youngest brother. My grandpa and most of his siblings have passed away; Uncle Evan is one of the few of my grandpa's generation to remain. One of my favorite parts of talking with Uncle Evan – besides his stories, besides the fact that he always cared – was that he reminded me of Grandpa. It was, in part, his face and the build of his body. But, more than that, it was the way that he carried himself and the way he talked. He said Grandpa's words and sung Grandpa's songs. He understood and related to the world like Grandpa did, too.
Uncle Evan and Grandpa were first generation Americans. They lived in a time of transition, a time of major changes. My great-grandparents spoke Czech around the house of Grandpa and Uncle Evan's childhood. Though Grandpa and Uncle Evan went to English-speaking schools, they continued to speak Czech far into their later years. My dad tells me that when he was growing up, Grandpa and Grandma spoke Czech with friends who visited the farm.
But, at some point – by the time that I have memories of Grandpa - they stopped. There were few people with whom they could speak Czech, I suppose. The few times I heard my Grandpa speak the language of his family, it was a novelty and a reminiscence. He was remembering or explaining something from the past. I don't remember ever actually hearing him hold a conversation in Czech.
None of Grandpa's children – my dad, aunts, and uncle – speak Czech, except for a few words. And many of the ideas of my grandparent's generation has gone the same way as their language. Grandpa and his siblings' good nature, their unique understanding of the way the world works, and the way they expressed themselves in it: what was their language and their religion. Grandpa and his family that found God in nature and hard work. Grandpa and his family that were patient, that tempered uncertainty in faith with faith in uncertainty.
With Uncle Evan sick and nearing his end, I fear that the word and way of Grandpa and his family is too.
...
Sunday mass in my village is held in a church made of bamboo laced together in the traditional Chisena way. The bamboo walls are now coming apart. Much of the tin roof peeled off when a cyclone hit the coast a couple months ago. The building sits next to the abandoned ruins of an even more dilapidated white-wash cement Portuguese chapel.
Yet the sad structure of the outside has no bearing on the demeanor of the people on the inside. Every Sunday, the church fills up with excited, hopeful people, from collapsing wall to collapsing wall.
Mass is given in Chisena, though the words of the church – Jesus, Christ, crucifixion, even the word “church” itself - are all in Portuguese. The priest is not a native Chisena speaker, and, out of habit, or to fill in gaps in his vocabulary, he scatters his homilies with more than Portuguese words and phrases. Sometimes, he falls into Portuguese for minutes at a time, scattering his Portuguese with Chisena, instead of the other way around. It reminds me of the way that while driving among the farms in southern Minnesota, dying radio signals don't disappear all at once but fade as competing ones punch in and out, the weakest broadcast always playing in the background of the one that is coming in clearest.
What amazes me is that everyone understands what is going on. Members of the congregation, which is composed mostly of women, many of them grandmothers, nod their heads in agreement with what Father says. They don't miss a beat. When Father tells a joke in Portuguese, everyone laughs. Though the languages are mixed, it doesn't appear that the meanings get jumbled.
English – what my Grandpa's generation began speaking instead of Czech - is a mutt of a language, too, the daughter of Latin and Germanic tribes. It's the product of a lot of words long since gone. No one speaks in the language that Beowulf was written - the language has undergone an incredible metamorphosis since then. But components of the old still live on.
Whatever happens in Mozambique, however this generation and the next handle balancing their needs to speak Chisena and Portuguese and English, the old way, I pray, will somehow find its way into the new. And my old family language – not the Czech language, but the “language” of my Grandpa and his family – I pray, will live on: in poppyseed bokte and garden techniques; in the fact that at Christmas, someone always yells, “Come and get it, or I'll chuck it in the crick!”; and in the the way that we have learned to be patient, too. I pray that I can learn to understand the world in the way that my Grandpa and his siblings did, that I can remember some part of Grandpa's wisdom. And I pray that someday my children can, too.
...
A couple of weeks ago, I assigned a biology project to my 11th grade biology students. I asked them to collect five insects and pin them to a cardboard display. They were required to display information of the insects' taxonomic classification (phylum, class, and order), where the insects were found, their significance in local society, and their names in Portuguese and Chisena. The results were incredible. A couple of students captured scorpions. Another, a praying mantis. And another, a grasshopper almost twice the length of my index finger.
I collected the projects last week and, after class, brought them to the teachers' room, a straw and bamboo canopy, for display. I laid them out on a couple of small tables. Other teachers and my friends crowded around. The grasshopper, they said, was amazing. Someone said that they used to love to catch those when they were a kid to give to mom to cook with dinner. Another asked who the courageous student who caught that big spider is.
Someone was surprised by the fact that I'd asked students to give the Chisena names for these insects. One teacher grabbed onto the shoulder of another: Hey, isn't there another word for this type of beetle? Yeah, someone said, the kid used the general word for beetle ... but there is a more specific word. Another teacher threw out a response. But, no, it's too small to be that kind of beetle! And, someone else: But look at it's wings! Debate ensued.
