The Language Teacher
06 - 2002
Unfinished Business:
Identity Formation and Rejection Through Language Learning
Jacqueline D. Beebe
Nihon University
I'd known Raimundo for years before I interviewed him1 for a case study on language learning. I knew he had a complicated identity and knew lots of languages. I discovered unexpected complications and languages, and also learned about the power of language to help us resist, escape, and create new identities and lives. When teachers are touched or fascinated by a learner's story it reminds us that learning languages matters, and that each student has a history we need to be sensitive to. Potentially daunting theories of identity and language learning become more accessible if we can connect them with a real person. So I'll tell Raimundo's story and touch upon its relationship to current poststructuralist theories of language, discourse, identity, agency and power.
Multiple, Mutable Identities
Raimundo's story is unfinished because he died suddenly before we finished our interviews, and because Raimundo was constantly recreating, re-presenting, and even misrepresenting himself when discretion was called for. He spoke five languages by age six, arranged to study three more by twelve, and studied twenty in all.2 He varied his explanation of his ethnicity and nationality, what names he went by, what languages he admitted knowing, and what speech communities he entered depending in part on whether he wanted to reveal his history of oppression and resistance during Argentina's military dictatorship, his homosexuality, or his HIV status.
Raimundo's unusual story illustrates how we all have unfinished identities constantly created by both ourselves and the individuals and institutions we interact with. Norton (2000) writes that "the concept of identity as a site of struggle is a logical extension of the position [of feminist poststructuralist theory] that identity is multiple and contradictory. If identity were unitary, fixed and immutable, it could not be subject to change over time and space, nor subject to contestation" (p. 127). Norton illustrates how, depending on the social context, a combination of markers such as age, gender, apparent ethnicity, and degree of competence in a particular language can trigger someone being positioned as either a well-traveled person with a charming foreign accent or an ignorant lower class immigrant. Individuals who want to change how others identify them struggle for the right to speak so that they may demonstrate their competencies and qualifications even while the form of their language is being held against them. In elementary school Raimundo soon learned that if he slipped into Swedish, he'd be targeted by teachers and students, and forty years later he was still using multilinguality to resist or escape oppressive subject positions imposed on him and those around him through language.
What languages do our students feel comfortable using and what identities can they reveal? Both language teachers and language attitude researchers should be sensitive to how the discourses and ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, etc. are enacted or resisted through language use choices (see Pavlenko, 2001). Students may have various invisible identities (ethnic, sexual, class, religious, political, health-related, etc.) (Vandrick, 1997). Teachers need to monitor both what is said and left unsaid in the classroom and interject a wider, more nuanced or more multicultural perspective when even unconscious othering is taking place. A discussion on the high rate of divorce of those Americans may take place in the presence of a student whose parents are divorcing. A Japanese student may return from a trip and talk about how bizarre San Francisco was or how obnoxious some Koreans were, not realizing that a gay classmate or a student hiding their Korean ethnicity is listening.
"I Don't Belong to Argentina"
Raimundo had a Swedish surname and looked Swedish, and he often introduced himself as Swedish until he knew someone well. He had a Swedish father and an Austrian mother who immigrated to Argentina before he was born. Raimundo was an Argentine citizen, but he never felt very Argentine, and he said, "being American or Argentinean...it's just a word in the passport.... It doesn't affect us as a person.... I don't belong to Argentina." "I have no attachment to the country at all. I think the mountains and lakes are very beautiful, but the price I have to pay to live there is too high, and...I cannot afford that. I mean internally, for myself." Although he taught and translated Spanish while living in Japan, he avoided Spanish and Portuguese speakers, books, and films outside the workplace for many years. South American immigrants in Japan, unlike the Swedish, tend to work in low-prestige jobs and to be subject to negative stereotypes often associated with large groups of people immigrating for economic betterment (see Bortz, 1998). But Raimundo denied his Argentine identity to avoid the judgments of not just the Japanese, but of other Argentines. He didn't want talk of his homosexuality or his gay activism during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship getting back to the Argentine embassy staff. He told me how at age eighteen, in Argentina, he was begged for "a kiss" then entrapped, beaten, robbed, and sexually assaulted by an off-duty policeman. The transcript continues:
J: [G]oing back to Argentina isn't really a choice to you.
R: No. It's not a choice. Never. I'm done with that.
J: So do you think that has some influence on your feeling of who you are as you are in other places and learning other languages, and using...
R: Probably. And I spent...years without using Spanish at all when I first came here [to Japan].
J: So you didn't make any Spanish-speaking friends?
R: I didn't want to. I didn't trust them.
Embracing an identity is hard when the discourses of that identity feel alien. Raimundo said, "The Latinos I knew then [in Japan], their main interest was...soccer games and car races.... I couldn't find any way to relate to them.... And they put the Argentine flag out. Nonsense." He talks about a town near Tokyo known as Little Buenos Aires. "I've never been there, I don't have any interest in going there.... It's Argentineans who...life is limited to Spanish...and they don't care, they don't know." Raimundo avoided Argentines who gathered solely to forget the wider world and socialize with fellow nationals, but he took a job directing a telephone counseling service for Latino speakers in Japan. Raimundo enjoyed socializing with the volunteers because they met not simply to perform being a Latino in Japan but to serve humanity in the form of their fellow Latinos. Raimundo's identity again evolved through this shared endeavor in a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) where his counseling and training expertise made him a core member instead of a marginal member unable and unwilling to talk sports.
Even as a child, Raimundo's Argentine identity was problematic. He grew up in Bariloche, Argentina, a mountain resort dominated by ethnic Germans where open Nazis freely settled (Dam, 1995). "It was like a German colony...we are 'us'. They are different. The locals eat different things, do different things, speak differently...until I went to school I never heard a word of Spanish, not one word."
"Locals" went to neglected Spanish-medium public schools. Raimundo went to an authoritarian private elementary school where lessons were taught in Spanish and German and all the teachers were German. Raimundo started school a year early. His older brother had brown eyes and having only one Austrian parent didn't make him pure enough for the school administrators without blue-eyed Raimundo beside him. "[The teachers] had this dream like, it didn't work out there [in Nazi Germany], so here we can make it work...because the other countries were against Germany Hitler killed himself, right, so we have to make a new Reich."
Raimundo's Agency in Becoming a Language Specialist
Raimundo believed that hearing four languages spoken in his home primed him to pick up languages easily. In his home German (his mother's language) was spoken three days a week, Swedish (his father's language) three days, and on Sundays they spoke what they chose. He learned two indigenous languages from servants. He first was aware of incomprehensible speech when he heard Spanish at school, and when his mother explained that this was "a different language" and that he would soon learn it, he decided he wanted to learn even more languages, and he loved learning languages from then on. His parents encouraged him to learn any language he expressed interest in, and he learned an indigenous language of Paraguay from his mother although no one but her spoke it where he lived. At age eight he convinced his parents to pay the school to provide private English lessons just for Raimundo (his brother soon quit). Raimundo picked a junior high school where he could formally study the French he was already picking up from an adult neighbor, while his brother chose Spanish-medium schools and stopped speaking Swedish and German. Raimundo, said, "I couldn't really talk with other teens because they were...so boring. They were into the latest fashion...and I had a basic interest in languages." So Raimundo aligned himself with adults who could informally teach him French and Danish. Raimundo chose an international Spanish-medium Catholic high school (and was excommunicated for his views expressed in religion class). While other students reluctantly struggled with all the languages in the experimental curriculum, Raimundo joyously and easily learned the French, English, Latin, Greek, and Arabic they were taught.
Questioning Hometown Ideologies
Raimundo learned languages for the pleasure it brought him, but also as a way to access information not available at school and home. I asked how his parents felt about the elementary school's Nazi ideology:
R: At home my father was against Germany and he knew that all this going on in school and he said "I will not say one word about education, that's your mother's task.... Don't ask me." And she will tell me about her being a Hitler Youth.... It sounded like fun, like being in the boy scouts...like doing something good because we are better. When you're five years old and you hear from everywhere you don't question it, right? But later on I started to think there was must be something wrong there, and probably there started my idea that I would go to Europe to see for myself, to meet...my great-uncle and to talk with him. He was the main Nazi boss in Innsbruck, Austria, and I wanted to meet him and I wanted to go to Sweden [in another interview, he says he wanted to meet two Swedish half-siblings], I wanted to see my roots, so to speak.
J: Before you went, though, I think you didn't know what he'd been doing in Innsbruck, right?
R: I didn't know.... When I was going to school there were two Germanys already. Two parts. And I think, why if they are so bright and so superior, why is there East and West Germany? I couldn't feel that they are [superior]....So I think I have to go there and see for myself what's going on there. But I can't now [at age eight or ten].
I asked Raimundo if he also questioned Bariloche's race/class system, for example the ethnicity of servants. He answered,
Yes. And I ask...my grandmother, "Why is this happening?" "Because they don't know German, they're not Germans".... So I think at that point I started to think, "OK, I will go to Europe and see with my own eyes, because here it's not real, what's happening here, something is wrong here, in this town."
The boys couldn't date "local" girls and Raimundo's parents disapproved of the brother's marriage to an Italian-Argentine, not knowing that Raimundo had a Black boyfriend in high school. Raimundo left Argentina at seventeen because he needed another perspective on both world history and his family, not because he had the sort of "positive" attitudes towards Germany that would show up on a language attitude survey. Hodges (1998) writes that:
Ideologies about identification can be countered through attention to the material details of the lived past...to encounter one's own manipulated and manipulating self is an oppositional strategy that employs a critical and conscious reading of the internalized interplay of social forces. (pp. 288-289)
Raimundo spent sixteen months in Europe, and met relatives in Austria and Sweden who told him stories like the blue eye color school enrollment story mentioned earlier. Through seeing Europe for himself, and through discovering that he had both Nazis and Jews in his family tree, he co-created a new narrative and a new identity for himself (often by contrasting his life path with his brother's), rejecting superiority granted by accidents of birth but believing in superiority earned through broadening intellectual engagement and daring to explore an unknown world.
Richardson (2000) writes that according to poststructuralism, "language constructs the individual's subjectivity.... Experience and memory are thus open to contradictory interpretations governed by social interests and prevailing discourses. The individual is both site and subject of these discursive struggles for identity and for remaking memory" (p. 929). For example, someone who forty years ago quit a job because she didn't get along with her boss might remember that time of her life now and realize that she quit because she was "sexually harassed"--with a new feminist discourse available a new memory is made.
Raimundo contradicted the discourse of German superiority he had been exposed to by his teachers and relatives and remade his memories of world and family history, but he maintained his parents' admiration of multilingual intellectualism. He used his multilingualism and achievements as top student in his schools to escape his hometown and to travel, study, and work abroad. Raimundo was pulled by his intellectual inquisitiveness and pushed by the racism and homophobia of Bariloche to leave home. He also followed the typical progression of gay people moving from small towns to metropolises. "I could never live in Bariloche. It's too small. If I see a guy once, and this evening again, half of the city will know." Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) write of this individual agency within power relations:
It is ultimately through their own intentions and agency that people decide to undergo or not undergo the...linguistic, cultural, and personal transformation [of late/adult bilingual border crossings]. This decision may be influenced by various factors, including one's positioning in the native discourse and the power relations between the discourses involved. (p. 171)
Border-Crossing Narratives
Second language acquisition research examines how individuals who move to new cultures and learn new languages there reconstruct new identities through social interaction (e.g., Norton, 2000) and through the personal narratives they construct around their life trajectories (e.g., Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). Raimundo constructed an identity as a free citizen of the world by traveling and working in Europe, entering Stockholm's safe public gay community, and studying at the Sorbonne, where he acquired a Japanese boyfriend. But he couldn't afford to go to university in Europe. He returned to an Argentine dictatorship where overnight Europeanized cosmopolitanism was a liability and some of his friends were among the 20,000 to 30,000 "disappeared," of whom France writes, "The vast majority of the state's victims were educated, politically aware men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.... Many were students of politics or literature...even intellectual curiosity was subversion enough to merit death" (1998, p. 15).
Stories of immigrant language learning often contain a theme of loss of self-integrity or identity as the original ways and language fall away after leaving the home country (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). But Raimundo decided that he could only construct a true identity for himself by leaving the social site built upon lies and suppressed truths in which his initial identity was formed. Raimundo experienced a greater threat to his "true self" when he returned to Argentina. He was jailed several times and tortured with beatings and electric shock for being suspected of being gay, although he was never caught for his involvement in the Homosexual Liberation Front. He taught English and German while attending graduate school, but the military closed down the teaching of foreign languages. So, he said, symbolically looking for that Japanese boyfriend, he headed for Japan, and in twenty years only returned to Argentina for a visit or two.
Ongoing Identity Struggles and Language Use
While living in Japan, "depending on the day," Raimundo thought in German, Spanish, English, Swedish, or Japanese. He chose languages according to whom he wished to align himself with and which part of his identity he wanted to reveal. For example, in cyberspace he could hide that he had AIDS and present his ethnicity and nationality as he pleased, and Raimundo made good use of Japanese language gay chat rooms until his computer crashed and he lost his Japanese software, when he switched to English chat rooms and made more worldwide contacts in various languages.
Bailey (2000) writes that "language is a medium which affords individual social actors the freedom to highlight various aspects of identity [e.g., through code-switching]; but it is also a medium through which constraining, hegemonic forms of ascription--e.g. social classification based on phenotype--are invoked and reconstituted" (p. 557). Raimundo grew up confined by the discourses of racism, colonialism, fascist nationalism and heterosexism, but he freed himself through language learning. His life illustrates how "while a person may be positioned in a particular way within a given discourse, the person might resist the subject position, or even set up a counter-discourse" (Norton, 2000, p. 127). Language became both the economic instrument of escape and the symbolic instrument for forging a new international, multilingual identity as a gay intellectual, spiritual seeker, and community educator and activist not bound by accidents of birth.
But Raimundo's story is no simplistic narrative of progress towards one fixed cosmopolitan identity. Queer theory (see Gamson, 2000; Jagose, 1996) sees all identities as continually socially constructed and questions claims to any naturalized stable essential identity. Just as Raimundo questioned the "natural" right of the state to define him as Argentine, and rejected that identity at times, he questioned his own sexuality and twice returned to trying to live as a heterosexual, and later after he considered his gay identity stabilized, he often concealed that he had AIDS. He also enjoyed playing with his shifting identities, designing business cards with various names highlighting different ethnicities in his family tree, (reminding me of EFL students adopting English names).
Norton (2000) writes that "the voices of particular learners, their distinctive histories, their unique desires for the future...are important in understanding the relationship between identity and language learning" (pp. 47-48). Many turns that Raimundo's life path took were at the intersections of language, identity, and power. He went to Europe seeking the perspectives of Europeans on the inequalities of class, race, and language in Bariloche. Living in less homophobic parts of Europe gave him a vision of a freedom he was willing to fight for in Argentina, pitting the international ideology of gay liberation against government propaganda and violence. In Japan he chose among languages as he managed how others who might be prejudiced perceived him and as he retreated for some years into his own prejudice against Spanish-speakers, gradually relearning to selectively trust Latinos while still not trusting the Argentine government (see Human Rights Watch, 2001; The International Lesbian and Gay Association, 2000).
Bateson (2000) writes of how we should approach teaching and all of life as participant observers, looking with curiosity and respect on others and being open to surprises from those (such as our students) that we think we know best. She acknowledges that it takes too much time and energy to do that all the time, but recommends the reading of life stories as a way to keep refreshing our vision. Raimundo teaches me to humbly question how well I know myself and others; our strengths or vulnerabilities or how we'll define ourselves tomorrow.
Endnotes
1. Raimundo and I talked informally in English on audiotape for around fifteen hours. My questions often directed the conversations, I tended to finish his sentences, and I've selected only a few events from his forty-odd years, so there is a lot of me in this narrative. He was from Argentina and I'm a white American woman, but both of us were long-term residents of Japan, were queer, were meditators, had graduate degrees in applied linguistics and had taught languages.
2. At some time in his life Raimundo had some ability to speak and/or read these languages, grouped in descending strength by most recent ability: A) Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish; B) English, Japanese; C) French; D) Italian, Danish, Dutch; E) Bahasa Indonesian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Mapuche, Tehualche, Guaraní, Thai, Malay.
Acknowledgements
I thank Kirsty Barclay, Eton Churchill, Sonja Franeta, Andrea Maeda, Alan McCornick, John McLaughlin, Tim Murphey, Bonny Norton, Aneta Pavlenko, Roberta Welch, and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on this article.
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