Michel Foucault describes heterotopia as a disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite…in such a state, things are laid, placed, arranged, in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them. In this sense Dreaming in Cuban is a novel that deals with heterotopias. The Del Pino family, around whom the novel spins and unfolds, is a family divided politically and geographically by the Cuban revolution. This family clings to the illusion of an utopian life and fails to recognize that they create and live in heterotopia
Foucault distinguishes two forms of heterotopias, the first is reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis, from this point of view, Celia del Pino, the woman on whom the novel Dreaming in Cuban centres, her two daughters Lourdes and Felicia, her son Javier and her grandchildren live in heterotopia. This heterotopia is critical as regards their relations with society and to the human environment in which they live. There is a feeling of in-betweeness about them all that makes them experience the awkward realization that they are half Cuban, half American, torn, split between two worlds and the feelings these two worlds evoke. The need to relocate themselves is what individuals sense they must do, because of this they create a place, in the hope of putting “the orders together”. This created place of conflict according to Foucault constitutes a place of nowhere without geographical markers, for it is a place that is borne from the figurative. Celia Del Pino builds one of her heterotopias out of the memories of her first lover Gustavo Sierra de Armas who leaves her to return to Spain. The fact that she writes letters to him for a period of twenty five years and the evidence that she removes her drop pearl earrings that he gave her, only nine times in all her life to clean them, is the hint that leads the reader to conclude that she construes a secret forbidden place for her and her lover. This allocation of memories that belong to an unresolved past, that has no location in her actual world, this imaginary conversations that she keeps with Gustavo through the letters she writes, is the strategy that gives her the strength to go on. “Mi querido Gustavo, A fish swims in my lung. Without you, what is there to celebrate? I am yours always, Celia.”(37). Another place of nowhere is constituted by the Hotel Inglaterra, this is the very place where she and Gustavo used to secretly meet, the place where the manifestation of their love took place. This hotel is an heterotopia because it represents the place of elsewhere in relation to home. In this sense, Soroa, the place where she honeymoons with her husband Jorge del Pino, also becomes a critical heterotopia, a no-place, far and away from home, a site where all memories can get accumulated and distorted. “Querido Gustavo, I’m writing to you from my honeymoon. We’re in Soroa…[Jorge] brushes my forehead with moist petals to wipe away memory. His kindness makes me cry. I’m still yours, Celia.”(50)
The most important events in Celia’s life are arranged in sites very different from one another, Celia finds it impossible to build a place of residence for them. She lives in a state of heterotopia that constantly calls for redefining her territories, redefining herself, by way of her past memories with her family in Cuba and her imagined pictures of the lives of her family in the United States. She is the split version of a woman that lives in two worlds. Through her memories of seen territories she lived in, and her imagination about the unseen places she will never know, she incessantly tries to put together the pieces of her past and the bits of the future she could have lived had she dared to leave Cuba. It is because of the birth of her daughters that she never leaves. Daughters, not sons anchored her to Cuba. The cultural ordeal is too heavy to be broken. “…If it’s a boy, I’ll leave him. I’ll sail to Spain, to Granada, to your kiss, Gustavo. I love you, Celia.”(50)
Being away from her family who decide to migrate to the United States, she senses that she can not tell which is worse, separation or death. “Separation is familiar, too familiar, but Celia is uncertain she can reconcile it with permanence”. (66)
The second form of heterotopias is deviation, it has to do with “individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm”.(Foucault, M.p4). Hugo Villaverde, Celia’s son in law, Felicia’s husband, becomes the example of deviation, a man who batters his wife and does little for a living, in a seemingly way Felicia’s actions also become exemplary of deviated behaviour: she leaves her daughters to build a too much we-depend-on-each-other relation with her son Ivanito. “Ivanito senses even then that something has come between them. He will never speak his sisters language, account for his moments like a cow with a dull bell. He is convinced, although he couldn’t say why, that they are united against his happiness with mama.”(86). “Ivanito thinks we are cruel to Mamá but he never saw what we saw, he never heard what we heard. We try to protect him but he doesn’t want to be protected. He is a gullible rag doll”. (121) Ivanito becomes a “gullible rag doll” for life thanks to this deviant way of possessing his mother imposes on him and thanks to his readiness for accepting the leisure that a life lead by a woman brings about.
According to Foucault the second principle that describes heterotopias is that society as history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion. An example of this heterotopia is the cemetery, a space connected to all the sites. These very sites are connected to each individual since each individual has relatives in there. This heterotopia takes place at two levels, one is physical, the other is mental. The physical place, however, gets blurred by the mental representations of the thinker, in this case, namely Celia. “…Celia thinks, her husband will be buried in stiff, foreign earth.” (6-7). The foreign place represents the Promised Land for Celia’s relatives; yet for her the foreign land is nothing more than a cemetery, the place that borders her next of kin, the place that prevents her relatives from coming back. “She imagines her granddaughter pale, gliding through paleness, malnourished and cold without the food of scarlets and greens.”(7).
The native language of Cuban immigrants is also related to cemeteries, García refers to it in a way that makes readers relate it to something buried. The native language then, becomes a heteropia in itself: another kind of cemetery. “She ponders the transmigrations from the southern latitudes, the millions moving north. What happens to their language? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?”(73) The heterotopia, the placement of the native language indifferent sites makes it impossible for immigrants to find a place of residence for their language. Immigrants become at the same time foreigners for the Americans and foreigners for the Cubans who opted for staying in Cuba. There are other immigrants; however, who build the heterotopia of their native language. This is the case of Lourdes, Celia’s daughter who chooses to bury her language in order to assimilate to the foreign culture.” The desire to learn the language of others is often coupled with a desire to behave and think like them in order to ultimately be recognized and validated by them.”(Kramsch,C. 1998). For people like Lourdes the native language bears the mark of shame for it represents the border, the very thing that makes them feel and be seen as outcasts. Lourdes considers that immigration has redefined her and she is grateful to the fact that she left Cuba. Unlike her husband, she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention. “…She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which Lourdes claims never possessed her.”(73)The process of dislocation( from Cuba) and relocation ( in the United States) is apparently simple for her. She chooses to reinvent her life in the United States, to be all American and to bury her Cuban roots. Yet, in spite of her willingness to dispel a feeling of double consciousness she can not forget Cuba. “Lourdes misses the birds she had in Cuba.”(131).
Pilar, Lourdes’ daughter is a different case, the heterotopia Pilar lives in happens to be her memories. She lives an inner war. The constant fight between her Cuban past and her American present misplaces her both, in her family circle, with her mother and in her daily life with herself “Everyday Cuba fades a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside me. And there is only my imagination where our history should be.”(138) In order to relocate herself she resorts to painting. She finds in painting a universal language. “Who needs words when colors and lines conjure up their own language? Thats what I want to do with my paintings, find a unique language, obliterate the clichés.”(139) Pilar feels torn apart, she feels she is two women in one. Her in-betweeness finds a kind of solace in painting, it is thanks to this artistic endeavour that she experiences the possibility of being able to try to find her own identity.
The third principle that describes heterotopias is that they are capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible.” (Foucault,M. 5). Javier, Celia’s son, becomes a professor of Biochemistry at the university of Prague, lecturing in Russian, German and Czech and he speaks Spanish to his little girl. He is the very example of the juxtaposing of cultures.
The fourth principle that describes heterotopias is linked to “slices of time”, to heterochronies. Heterochronies represent a break with the continuity of time. Heterotopias and heterochronies feed on each other. There are heterotopias of accumulating time that have to do with the intent of creating an imaginary archive to enclose in a place all times, a place of all times becomes then, a place outside of time. Pilar´s diary which she keeps hidden from her mother´s eyes is an example of this type of heterotopia. Pilar records everything in her diary, in her intent to keep her life and memories intact and safe.
“I was only two years old when I left Cuba but I remember everything that’s happened to me since I was a baby, even word-for-word conversations. I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap playing with her drop pearl earrings when my mother told her we were leaving the country.”(26)
The routine of keeping a diary has to do with Pilar’s desire to pack her past in a safe place so as to then be able to move on into assimilation. The life of Pilar is sliced by time, the time she remembers she lived in Cuba and her present time in the United States.
“Most of what I’ve learned that’s important I’ve learned on my own, or from my grandmother Abuela Celia and I write and I write to each other sometimes, but mostly I hear her speaking to me at night just before I fall asleep. She tells me stories about her life and what the sea was like that day.”(p29)
Pilar’s heterotopia constitutes a heterochronia, a break with time that she tries to ignore by adopting an all-too-for assimilation attitude. Yet, her memories do not let her alone. Her dreams keep on intruding in her life.
The fifth principle describes heterotopias as a system of opening and closing that both penetrates and isolates the immigrant. Lourdes thinks that by giving immigrants from Russia or Pakistan a job, she is doing them a favour, she believes that she is breaking them in to the American life. She pictures herself as a door that opens new worlds and closes old lives for other people. These immigrants live in a state of constant re-definition that gradually deterritorializes them and because of this they become penetrable, vulnerable. The in-betweenness they live in makes them feel the impossibility of getting rid from a sense of unhomelessness. They feel trapped by memories.
“When Lourdes finally danced with her nephew, she felt beholden to the congas, to a powerful longing to dance. Her body remembered what her mind had forgotten. Suddenly, she wanted to show her daughter the artistry of true dancing.”(p224)
The sixth and last principle is about heterotopias and their function in relation to all space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion or to create a space that is other, another real space as perfect. This latter type is the heterotopia of compensation. The place of illusion is construed when the burden of coping with life as it is becomes too heavy to be borne, when the realization that there is no way out calls for activating a defence mechanism to fight back the actual misery these characters are immersed in.
“Our house is on a cement plot near the East River. At night, especially in the summer when the sound carries, I hear the low whistles of the ships as they leave New York harbour. They travel south past the Wall Street skyscrapers, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Bay Ridge Channel and under the Verrazano Bridge. Then they make a left at Coney Island and head out to the Atlantic. When I hear those whistles, I want to go with them.”(31)
The heterotopia of compensation occurs when the need to evaluate the life they live as perfect springs out. “We used to go to Cinelandia every Friday after work. I remember seeing Mujeres de Fuego with Bette Davies, Ann Dvorak and Joan Blondell”(100)
This type of heterotopia allows them to live in many places at the same time and to compensate for lost time, for lost choice and for los lives. “Imagination, like memory can transform lies to truths.”(88)
All the heterotopias in Dreaming in Cuban are held together very firmly by the dreams of an utopian future always too ideal to be fulfilled, because of this the deterritorialization the characters feel becomes a too familiar no-place. “I belong-not instead of here, but more than here.”(236). All characters considered, Celia is the only one who finally achieves a permanent state of location, she finds a real place where she can allocate all the disorder, all her lives: the sea, and in doing so she fulfils her fate. “There’s a wet landscape in [her] palm.”(7)
María del Pilar Martínez
viernes, 2 de noviembre de 2007
viernes, 26 de octubre de 2007
readers
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader. Terry Eagleton
Change your thinking
Motivational Poem - By Changing Your Thinking By Author Unknown
By Changing Your Thinking, You change your beliefs;
When you change your beliefs, You change your expectations;
When you change your expectations, You change your attitude;
When you change your attitude, You change your behavior;
When you change your behavior, You change your performance;
When you change your performance; You Change Your Life!
By Changing Your Thinking, You change your beliefs;
When you change your beliefs, You change your expectations;
When you change your expectations, You change your attitude;
When you change your attitude, You change your behavior;
When you change your behavior, You change your performance;
When you change your performance; You Change Your Life!
miércoles, 24 de octubre de 2007
Enter Sandman: Intercultural Explorations in the classroom
“Enter Sandman”: Intercultural Explorations in the Classroom
María del Pilar Martínez
I.S.F.D. Nº 5. Pergamino
Building a Sphere of Interculturality
“Language is bound up with culture in multiple ways.” (Kramsch, 1994). Because of this many teachers may regard how important it is to build a sphere of interculturality between the linguistic forms to be taught and the social structure those forms come from. In order to understand how a foreign language works it becomes essential to know about the culture of that language, English is foreign to Spanish speaking students in Argentina, learners that are taught how to relate the culture of the target language with their own depart from the idea that learning a language is a mere transfer of information and may adhere to the notion that learning a foreign language is a much more complex process that involves fostering reflection on the target and on the native culture. One way of achieving this is to resort to Literature, one of the tools in which language and culture converge, it is the tool that enables learners to widen their perceptions and views of the world, on the grounds that interculturalism is rooted in knowledge of self and others: “Interculturalism is not a prenational, utopian stage of cultural homogeneity and human unity. Its definition does not escape from the construction of two “otherneses”: interculturalism is a meeting of two fabrications of otherness from varying moments in history within the structure of an artistic media, be it a music recording, a theatrical production or simply an oil painting.”(Sze,F.2003)
Moreover, the literary work, according to Eagleton (1994), is a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social reality, the incarnation of some transcendental truth; and Walsh (2001) uses the term “outside world”,social reality, to talk about the importance of bringing together the two worlds: the one of the outside and the one that comes into being in the classrooms. So, the important thing, according to these authors, is to bring together the social reality of the native culture, of the target culture and the one of the classroom.
Let’s consider the idea that Literature and the learning of a second language, in this case, English, make the contact of cultures, Spanish and English, come true. It is in song lyrics where teachers may find a very succesful way to introduce students into the cultures of the world because of the fact that music is universal and specific to human beings. Music provides the scenario and lyrics, because of their culture specific nature, the vehicle through which expression finds its way. Through listening to the word and through further reading the word, people interpret song lyrics and adequate them to their own cultural social reality, they fill in “the gaps of indeterminacy” (Rossenblatt, 1978) that there exist in the lyrics with their own stories / histories and so they go back into their past, visualize their present and get forwards into a projection of their future. Sometimes it does happen that the culture the lyrics reflect does not resemble the culture of the people who listen to it,these kind of lyrics are the ones that let teachers explore intercultural matters.
Adolescents do get to lyrics more readily than to written texts, they start by first feeling identified with the tunes to then become interested in the lyrics. The pleasure music awakens in students allows teachers to profit from the learners’ curiosity to know what the lyrics mean. In Argentina a great number of teens adhere to foreign bands, namely English/American ones. Students, then, may experience appropriation of some songs or lyrics because of the added value that music has.This added value can become a propeller to make students reflect on the values of their native culture and on those of the foreign culture in order to build a bridge to otherness.
Teaching Culture as an Interpersonal Process
If interculturalism is fostered, a critical attitude in students; a critical stand that will make them better appreciate their own culture and respect the culture of others will follow. One way of doing this is using song lyrics as literature in order to foster interculturalism.
Song lyrics allow students:
· to reach out and connect: open discussion is fostered in the lessons and the students have the opportunity to voice their opinions and discover what their mates think;
· to facilitate processes and relationships: students get to know their mates deeper and are encouraged to widen their views about people from other cultures;
· to talk authentically: to talk authentically: new vocabulary related to what the Sandman represents and to similar characters eg. the bunyip in New Zealand open the way to view different cultural realities that are related to feelings, namely fears;
· to develop empathy: to encourage tolerance for different ways of thinking;
· to experience and express emotions: by talking about their own experiences and emotions students feel that they are using the language meaningfully;
· and, to promote the understanding of people from different cultures: by the careful selection of lyrics -on the part of teachers- that foster respect and understanding between cultures.
The following is an account of a whole topic unit and of how an intercultural approach was implemented in a state school in Buenos Aires Province in Argentina, in a classroom of 30 seventeen-year-old students of pre-intermediate level.
It was the first day of the academic year and the students, who up to that moment, had been always taught English under a traditional grammar-oriented method that focused mainly on the testing of how much grammatical knowledge had been acquired, were now introduced into a somewhat different proposal. They were going to follow a syllabus that had been organized into topic-units. The first one, the one this article is about, was called “Fears”, no textbook was going to be used, the material designed for the whole year had to do with song lyrics, and the evaluation centered on portfolios and oral presentations.
The first class started with the teacher writing the name of the first unit “Fears” on the blackboard and followed with the presentation of these lines:
“Say your prayers little one
don’t forget, my son
to include everyone.”
The students were asked to discuss in groups and then answer the following:
· Who is saying this? Who to?
· What personal experience/s do these lines remind you of?
· Where do these lines come from?
· What time is it? How do you know?
All the students answered the first question by saying that the speaker was a woman talking to her son / daughter, none of them thought it could have been a man; an answer very coherent with the culture these students are immersed in, a culture that generally positions women as the ones that may be in charge of their children’s religious education. As for the other questions they said that the lines reminded them of their childhood, and some said of their grandmothers; again, a very much culturally-loaded that highlights the importance of grandparents in the culture of this country. Question 3 had different answers: “these lines are from a letter… a religious book ... a prayer … a note someone wrote… etc.” As for question 4 all the answers were coincidental: “bed time because people pray at night.” This answer provided the basis for the next set of questions:
· Do you pray at night?
· Did you use to pray at night?
· Do old people pray at night? Why?
The answer to thaese questions had as common ground that people pray at night because they fear night and sleep and that the most terrifying fear is to die in one’s sleep. All the students were able to give an answer to this set of questions, even the ones who never pray or proffess no religion at all.
At this point the students were told that the lines came from a song by Metallica called “Enter Sandman”; most of them knew the song but they did not know what the song lyrics were about, so their assignment for the next lesson was to download the lyrics and bring them to class.
On the following lesson they listened to the song while reading the lyrics and they answered the following:
1-What’s this song about?
2-What are lines 25, 26, 27, and 28 about?
“Now Y lay me down to sleep
pray the Lord my soul to keep
if I die before I wake
pray the Lord my soul to take.”
3-What is the Sandman?
“Say your prayers little one
don't forget, my son
to include everyone
tuck you in, warm within
keep you free from sin
till the Sandman he comes.”
4-Who or what is the beast?
“Hush little baby, don't say a word
and never mind that noise you heard
it's just the beast under your bed,
in your closet, in your head.”
Crossing Boundaries: from the Interpersonal to the Intrapersonal
At this point, the work started to be much more personalized, the students themselves decided to leave their groups, for it was very difficult to reach an agreement as regards the answers, though they were rather similar, each of them wanted to talk about their very own mental representations, that is their own memories. For example, Cecilia said: “the beast perhaps is death or everything that you are scared or frightened of”; Luisa said: “the beast are (sic) the nightmares”; for Julio: “the beast is monsters children are afraid of, in my case the beast is clowns, I was very much afraid of clowns when I was a child”. However, the interesting part was, in fact, when they had to answer the question about the Sandman, in Spanish “el hombre de arena”, literally “the man made of sand”; which did not make any sense to them. They could not fill in the gap that this word provided, for their culture did not give them the necessary elements to apply their schemata to the meaning of the new word; so they just had context of the song to rely on. Some said the Sandman was a kind of hero, others a monster, others said it was a bad character that frightened little children.
Then, they were given the answer:“The sandman, in folklore, is a figure who brings good sleep and dreams by sprinkling magic sand onto sleeping children. The sandman is also a symbol of the passage of time to death; he is sometimes depicted as the grim reaper holding an hourglass and scythe.” (http://www.wikipedia.org/)
Reaching the Other
At this point they were asked to associate the Sandman with other characters they knew from their childhood to see whether there were any similarities. They mentioned characters such as: “el hombre de la bolsa” (the man with the bag: a man who carries a bag and puts little children who misbehave in it); “el viejo” (the old man: an old man who scares children who misbehave); “la llorona”(ghost of a woman said to roam the streets wailing); “el cuco” ( the bogey man: an evil spirit who scares children); but they found no coincidence between these legendary characters and the Sandman.
The next activity had to do with their own fears when they were little children, and then, they wrote twelve words they associated with the word nightmare as an assignment for the next lesson.
On the next lesson they were asked to read aloud the words they had chosen and they were told that they had to borrow words – 5 words – from their mates’ lists in order to enlarge their own. This is one example:
horror – monsters – scream – fear – darkness – knives
death – storm – fire – twister – thieves – cold – people
After that, they were asked to classify the words in groups under headings. The following is a sample of how one of the students did the task:
Weather and Disaster
Black and Cold
Frightening
Disgusting
Storm
Twister
Fire
Darkness
Cold
Death
Horror
Scream
Fear
Knives
People
Monsters
Thieves
The next activity was to write a poem or a text using the words chosen.
Here is a couple of examples:
“On a dark night at a cemetery
skulls and bones all around me
A stranger came with a knife
I shouted and spiders
And snakes came over me
A thunder storm started
And a ghost appeared…
NEXT TO ME!”
By Patricia
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“In my dreams
I see monsters
At night
I’m very scared.
The dark of the night
the lightning of the storms
and the ghosts of the old castle
are my fears.
The fiction of my nightmares
are huge dinosaurs
horrible beasts
and old crocodiles.
The darkness is the problem
the witches,
my fears.”
By Cecilia
After writing the poems, and for a coming lesson, the students answered these questions:
· What’s your most terrifying dream?
· Do you have recurrent dreams?
· How do you fight back nightmares?
· Do you daydream?
· Which is your most cherished dream?
·
I imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only Sky. If you could write a message on a wall for the whole world to see about your most cherished dream what would you write?
This is a student’s message:
John Lennon imagines a perfect world and that is our dream too!
For the coming lesson they brought the lyrics of the song “Fear of the Dark” by Iron Maiden and wrote a few lines about how they interpreted it. For a last activity each group brought posters about the Sandman, about how the Sandman looked for them, and a collage that represented their dreams. Each group had to talk about the meaning/s hidden in their productions. They also brought songs that talked about their dreams. “Imagine” by J. Lennon was the song everybody said was the best choice for this activity because these lyrics promote equality and understanding through cultures.
When the unit finished, they were given these questions to answer:
How do you rate these activities in terms of:
· complexity
· your involvement
· What did you learn?
· What’s your conclusion on this work?
Here are the answers given by two of the students:
“The activities weren’t very complicated but the song was a bit difficult to understand.
I learnt a lot of vocabulary, and things about my mates and their dreams, and about the Sandman. Learning English is not only vocabulary and grammar. The culture is important.”
“It was a very nice work which I enjoyed doing, and I learnt a lot, I liked the song very much.”
After this, the students did research into what legendary characters children from other cultures are afraid of. The topic “fears” was used to promote response, encourage creativity, make the students use the language meaningfully, and foster understanding between cultures. “Fears” is a universal feeling though children from different cultures experience it in different ways. Because of the questions, research on legendary characters from other cultures apart from the English or the Argentinian were included. The aim of the activities was double sided; on one way the activities aimed at an Intrapersonal level: through the exercises the students could find the way to minimize their fears and understand the fears other students feel; and on the other hand, at an Interpersonal level, the activities promoted cultural awareness because the topic made them widen their views on different cultures and ways of being.
Follow-up activities:
· Find the different voices in the text/ song: Who is speaking? - Who to?.
· Story telling: write a scary story about the Sandman to then tell it to your classmates. Find background music to create the atmosphere you want.
· Research: surf the net and find information about the DC comics called “The Sandman”; bring information to class about the main topic; and the characters. Write a description of the Sandman that is the central character in the comics. Write a few lines about the author.
· Look up bunyip, a character that is very scary to children in Australia, find information about the bogeyman in the USA and el coco in Latin America.
· Draw your own version of the Sandman. Give a title to your drawing.
· Make a chart of the similarities and the differences between The Sandman and the legendary characters of your childhood.
The song Enter Sandman by Metallica acted as the door that opened the way to cultural awareness, The Sandman became the starting point to share, analyze, and compare experiences. The song “Imagine” by J. Lennon that the students brought marks the success of the experience for the students were able to connect two worlds: the one outside and the classroom by understanding that though culturally different people inhabit it, the world is only one, that we may use different symbols, but we share fears, and that learning a second language through creative texts can help us become aware of this.
Learning a language implies learning about different ways of thinking and seeing the world. Interpreting texts means interpreting cultures and understanding differences by finding meanings in intertextual relations across texts.
All the activities mentioned above position students as producers of meanings that stem from the transfer: their own culture and take the meaning/s of the target culture, transform them, adapt them and appropriate them, so as to allow students to construct their own personal understanding.
“Fears” was the first topic unit developed and opened the way to the following topic unit which also had to do with understanding how important it is to consider that the native culture is the one element that lets individuals understand the target culture/s. This understanding may allow people to grow into open-mindedness and tolerance. The word “Sandman” was the one that held all the work together because, by filling the gap the word left the students were able to make sense of the cultural differences that there exist between different cultures as regards fears. This, in turn, led them to have a deeper and wider perception of the world they live in and of the world that surrounds them. May be this small step will lead these students to build th places in the future.
“The only way to start building a more complete and less partial understanding of both C1 and C2 is to develop a third perspective, that would enable learners to take both an insider’s and an outsider’s view on C1 and C2. It is precisely that third place that cross-cultural education should seek to establish.” (Kramsch 1994: p. 210)
Prof. María del Pilar Martínez. maryadelpilar@yahoo.com.ar
Bibliography
Rosenblatt, L.1978. The Reader,the Text, the Poem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP
Brumfit, C. J. and Carter, R. A.1987. Literature and Language Teaching. Oxford. OUP.
Canagarajah, A. Suresh.1999.Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. OUP.
Cook, G.1994. Discourse and Literature. Oxford Applied Linguistics. Oxford. OUP.
Eagleton, T.1994. Literary Theory: An Introduction.Oxford: Blackwell.
Kramsch, C.1994. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford. OUP.
Sze,F.2003. Interculturalism Performs. Deparment of Performance Studies.University, NY
Walsh, P. in A. Pennycook.2001. Critical Applied Linguistics an Introduction.Mahwah,. N.J..
Enter Sandman by Metallica, The Black Album, 1991.
Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden, 1992.
Enter Sandman lyrics
Say your prayers little one
don't forget, my son
to include everyone
tuck you in, warm within
keep you free from sin
till the sandman he comes
sleep with one eye open
gripping your pillow tight
exit light
enter night
take my hand
off to never never land
something's wrong, shut the light
heavy thoughts tonight
and they aren't of snow white
dreams of war, dreams of liars
dreams of dragon's fire
and of things that will bite
sleep with one eye open
gripping your pillow tight
exit light
enter night
take my hand
off to never never land
now I lay me down to sleep
pray the lord my soul to keep
if I die before I wake
pray the lord my soul to take
hush little baby, don't say a word
and never mind that noise you heard
it's just the beast under your bed,
in your closet, in your head.
María del Pilar Martínez
I.S.F.D. Nº 5. Pergamino
Building a Sphere of Interculturality
“Language is bound up with culture in multiple ways.” (Kramsch, 1994). Because of this many teachers may regard how important it is to build a sphere of interculturality between the linguistic forms to be taught and the social structure those forms come from. In order to understand how a foreign language works it becomes essential to know about the culture of that language, English is foreign to Spanish speaking students in Argentina, learners that are taught how to relate the culture of the target language with their own depart from the idea that learning a language is a mere transfer of information and may adhere to the notion that learning a foreign language is a much more complex process that involves fostering reflection on the target and on the native culture. One way of achieving this is to resort to Literature, one of the tools in which language and culture converge, it is the tool that enables learners to widen their perceptions and views of the world, on the grounds that interculturalism is rooted in knowledge of self and others: “Interculturalism is not a prenational, utopian stage of cultural homogeneity and human unity. Its definition does not escape from the construction of two “otherneses”: interculturalism is a meeting of two fabrications of otherness from varying moments in history within the structure of an artistic media, be it a music recording, a theatrical production or simply an oil painting.”(Sze,F.2003)
Moreover, the literary work, according to Eagleton (1994), is a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social reality, the incarnation of some transcendental truth; and Walsh (2001) uses the term “outside world”,social reality, to talk about the importance of bringing together the two worlds: the one of the outside and the one that comes into being in the classrooms. So, the important thing, according to these authors, is to bring together the social reality of the native culture, of the target culture and the one of the classroom.
Let’s consider the idea that Literature and the learning of a second language, in this case, English, make the contact of cultures, Spanish and English, come true. It is in song lyrics where teachers may find a very succesful way to introduce students into the cultures of the world because of the fact that music is universal and specific to human beings. Music provides the scenario and lyrics, because of their culture specific nature, the vehicle through which expression finds its way. Through listening to the word and through further reading the word, people interpret song lyrics and adequate them to their own cultural social reality, they fill in “the gaps of indeterminacy” (Rossenblatt, 1978) that there exist in the lyrics with their own stories / histories and so they go back into their past, visualize their present and get forwards into a projection of their future. Sometimes it does happen that the culture the lyrics reflect does not resemble the culture of the people who listen to it,these kind of lyrics are the ones that let teachers explore intercultural matters.
Adolescents do get to lyrics more readily than to written texts, they start by first feeling identified with the tunes to then become interested in the lyrics. The pleasure music awakens in students allows teachers to profit from the learners’ curiosity to know what the lyrics mean. In Argentina a great number of teens adhere to foreign bands, namely English/American ones. Students, then, may experience appropriation of some songs or lyrics because of the added value that music has.This added value can become a propeller to make students reflect on the values of their native culture and on those of the foreign culture in order to build a bridge to otherness.
Teaching Culture as an Interpersonal Process
If interculturalism is fostered, a critical attitude in students; a critical stand that will make them better appreciate their own culture and respect the culture of others will follow. One way of doing this is using song lyrics as literature in order to foster interculturalism.
Song lyrics allow students:
· to reach out and connect: open discussion is fostered in the lessons and the students have the opportunity to voice their opinions and discover what their mates think;
· to facilitate processes and relationships: students get to know their mates deeper and are encouraged to widen their views about people from other cultures;
· to talk authentically: to talk authentically: new vocabulary related to what the Sandman represents and to similar characters eg. the bunyip in New Zealand open the way to view different cultural realities that are related to feelings, namely fears;
· to develop empathy: to encourage tolerance for different ways of thinking;
· to experience and express emotions: by talking about their own experiences and emotions students feel that they are using the language meaningfully;
· and, to promote the understanding of people from different cultures: by the careful selection of lyrics -on the part of teachers- that foster respect and understanding between cultures.
The following is an account of a whole topic unit and of how an intercultural approach was implemented in a state school in Buenos Aires Province in Argentina, in a classroom of 30 seventeen-year-old students of pre-intermediate level.
It was the first day of the academic year and the students, who up to that moment, had been always taught English under a traditional grammar-oriented method that focused mainly on the testing of how much grammatical knowledge had been acquired, were now introduced into a somewhat different proposal. They were going to follow a syllabus that had been organized into topic-units. The first one, the one this article is about, was called “Fears”, no textbook was going to be used, the material designed for the whole year had to do with song lyrics, and the evaluation centered on portfolios and oral presentations.
The first class started with the teacher writing the name of the first unit “Fears” on the blackboard and followed with the presentation of these lines:
“Say your prayers little one
don’t forget, my son
to include everyone.”
The students were asked to discuss in groups and then answer the following:
· Who is saying this? Who to?
· What personal experience/s do these lines remind you of?
· Where do these lines come from?
· What time is it? How do you know?
All the students answered the first question by saying that the speaker was a woman talking to her son / daughter, none of them thought it could have been a man; an answer very coherent with the culture these students are immersed in, a culture that generally positions women as the ones that may be in charge of their children’s religious education. As for the other questions they said that the lines reminded them of their childhood, and some said of their grandmothers; again, a very much culturally-loaded that highlights the importance of grandparents in the culture of this country. Question 3 had different answers: “these lines are from a letter… a religious book ... a prayer … a note someone wrote… etc.” As for question 4 all the answers were coincidental: “bed time because people pray at night.” This answer provided the basis for the next set of questions:
· Do you pray at night?
· Did you use to pray at night?
· Do old people pray at night? Why?
The answer to thaese questions had as common ground that people pray at night because they fear night and sleep and that the most terrifying fear is to die in one’s sleep. All the students were able to give an answer to this set of questions, even the ones who never pray or proffess no religion at all.
At this point the students were told that the lines came from a song by Metallica called “Enter Sandman”; most of them knew the song but they did not know what the song lyrics were about, so their assignment for the next lesson was to download the lyrics and bring them to class.
On the following lesson they listened to the song while reading the lyrics and they answered the following:
1-What’s this song about?
2-What are lines 25, 26, 27, and 28 about?
“Now Y lay me down to sleep
pray the Lord my soul to keep
if I die before I wake
pray the Lord my soul to take.”
3-What is the Sandman?
“Say your prayers little one
don't forget, my son
to include everyone
tuck you in, warm within
keep you free from sin
till the Sandman he comes.”
4-Who or what is the beast?
“Hush little baby, don't say a word
and never mind that noise you heard
it's just the beast under your bed,
in your closet, in your head.”
Crossing Boundaries: from the Interpersonal to the Intrapersonal
At this point, the work started to be much more personalized, the students themselves decided to leave their groups, for it was very difficult to reach an agreement as regards the answers, though they were rather similar, each of them wanted to talk about their very own mental representations, that is their own memories. For example, Cecilia said: “the beast perhaps is death or everything that you are scared or frightened of”; Luisa said: “the beast are (sic) the nightmares”; for Julio: “the beast is monsters children are afraid of, in my case the beast is clowns, I was very much afraid of clowns when I was a child”. However, the interesting part was, in fact, when they had to answer the question about the Sandman, in Spanish “el hombre de arena”, literally “the man made of sand”; which did not make any sense to them. They could not fill in the gap that this word provided, for their culture did not give them the necessary elements to apply their schemata to the meaning of the new word; so they just had context of the song to rely on. Some said the Sandman was a kind of hero, others a monster, others said it was a bad character that frightened little children.
Then, they were given the answer:“The sandman, in folklore, is a figure who brings good sleep and dreams by sprinkling magic sand onto sleeping children. The sandman is also a symbol of the passage of time to death; he is sometimes depicted as the grim reaper holding an hourglass and scythe.” (http://www.wikipedia.org/)
Reaching the Other
At this point they were asked to associate the Sandman with other characters they knew from their childhood to see whether there were any similarities. They mentioned characters such as: “el hombre de la bolsa” (the man with the bag: a man who carries a bag and puts little children who misbehave in it); “el viejo” (the old man: an old man who scares children who misbehave); “la llorona”(ghost of a woman said to roam the streets wailing); “el cuco” ( the bogey man: an evil spirit who scares children); but they found no coincidence between these legendary characters and the Sandman.
The next activity had to do with their own fears when they were little children, and then, they wrote twelve words they associated with the word nightmare as an assignment for the next lesson.
On the next lesson they were asked to read aloud the words they had chosen and they were told that they had to borrow words – 5 words – from their mates’ lists in order to enlarge their own. This is one example:
horror – monsters – scream – fear – darkness – knives
death – storm – fire – twister – thieves – cold – people
After that, they were asked to classify the words in groups under headings. The following is a sample of how one of the students did the task:
Weather and Disaster
Black and Cold
Frightening
Disgusting
Storm
Twister
Fire
Darkness
Cold
Death
Horror
Scream
Fear
Knives
People
Monsters
Thieves
The next activity was to write a poem or a text using the words chosen.
Here is a couple of examples:
“On a dark night at a cemetery
skulls and bones all around me
A stranger came with a knife
I shouted and spiders
And snakes came over me
A thunder storm started
And a ghost appeared…
NEXT TO ME!”
By Patricia
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“In my dreams
I see monsters
At night
I’m very scared.
The dark of the night
the lightning of the storms
and the ghosts of the old castle
are my fears.
The fiction of my nightmares
are huge dinosaurs
horrible beasts
and old crocodiles.
The darkness is the problem
the witches,
my fears.”
By Cecilia
After writing the poems, and for a coming lesson, the students answered these questions:
· What’s your most terrifying dream?
· Do you have recurrent dreams?
· How do you fight back nightmares?
· Do you daydream?
· Which is your most cherished dream?
·
I imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only Sky. If you could write a message on a wall for the whole world to see about your most cherished dream what would you write?
This is a student’s message:
John Lennon imagines a perfect world and that is our dream too!
For the coming lesson they brought the lyrics of the song “Fear of the Dark” by Iron Maiden and wrote a few lines about how they interpreted it. For a last activity each group brought posters about the Sandman, about how the Sandman looked for them, and a collage that represented their dreams. Each group had to talk about the meaning/s hidden in their productions. They also brought songs that talked about their dreams. “Imagine” by J. Lennon was the song everybody said was the best choice for this activity because these lyrics promote equality and understanding through cultures.
When the unit finished, they were given these questions to answer:
How do you rate these activities in terms of:
· complexity
· your involvement
· What did you learn?
· What’s your conclusion on this work?
Here are the answers given by two of the students:
“The activities weren’t very complicated but the song was a bit difficult to understand.
I learnt a lot of vocabulary, and things about my mates and their dreams, and about the Sandman. Learning English is not only vocabulary and grammar. The culture is important.”
“It was a very nice work which I enjoyed doing, and I learnt a lot, I liked the song very much.”
After this, the students did research into what legendary characters children from other cultures are afraid of. The topic “fears” was used to promote response, encourage creativity, make the students use the language meaningfully, and foster understanding between cultures. “Fears” is a universal feeling though children from different cultures experience it in different ways. Because of the questions, research on legendary characters from other cultures apart from the English or the Argentinian were included. The aim of the activities was double sided; on one way the activities aimed at an Intrapersonal level: through the exercises the students could find the way to minimize their fears and understand the fears other students feel; and on the other hand, at an Interpersonal level, the activities promoted cultural awareness because the topic made them widen their views on different cultures and ways of being.
Follow-up activities:
· Find the different voices in the text/ song: Who is speaking? - Who to?.
· Story telling: write a scary story about the Sandman to then tell it to your classmates. Find background music to create the atmosphere you want.
· Research: surf the net and find information about the DC comics called “The Sandman”; bring information to class about the main topic; and the characters. Write a description of the Sandman that is the central character in the comics. Write a few lines about the author.
· Look up bunyip, a character that is very scary to children in Australia, find information about the bogeyman in the USA and el coco in Latin America.
· Draw your own version of the Sandman. Give a title to your drawing.
· Make a chart of the similarities and the differences between The Sandman and the legendary characters of your childhood.
The song Enter Sandman by Metallica acted as the door that opened the way to cultural awareness, The Sandman became the starting point to share, analyze, and compare experiences. The song “Imagine” by J. Lennon that the students brought marks the success of the experience for the students were able to connect two worlds: the one outside and the classroom by understanding that though culturally different people inhabit it, the world is only one, that we may use different symbols, but we share fears, and that learning a second language through creative texts can help us become aware of this.
Learning a language implies learning about different ways of thinking and seeing the world. Interpreting texts means interpreting cultures and understanding differences by finding meanings in intertextual relations across texts.
All the activities mentioned above position students as producers of meanings that stem from the transfer: their own culture and take the meaning/s of the target culture, transform them, adapt them and appropriate them, so as to allow students to construct their own personal understanding.
“Fears” was the first topic unit developed and opened the way to the following topic unit which also had to do with understanding how important it is to consider that the native culture is the one element that lets individuals understand the target culture/s. This understanding may allow people to grow into open-mindedness and tolerance. The word “Sandman” was the one that held all the work together because, by filling the gap the word left the students were able to make sense of the cultural differences that there exist between different cultures as regards fears. This, in turn, led them to have a deeper and wider perception of the world they live in and of the world that surrounds them. May be this small step will lead these students to build th places in the future.
“The only way to start building a more complete and less partial understanding of both C1 and C2 is to develop a third perspective, that would enable learners to take both an insider’s and an outsider’s view on C1 and C2. It is precisely that third place that cross-cultural education should seek to establish.” (Kramsch 1994: p. 210)
Prof. María del Pilar Martínez. maryadelpilar@yahoo.com.ar
Bibliography
Rosenblatt, L.1978. The Reader,the Text, the Poem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP
Brumfit, C. J. and Carter, R. A.1987. Literature and Language Teaching. Oxford. OUP.
Canagarajah, A. Suresh.1999.Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. OUP.
Cook, G.1994. Discourse and Literature. Oxford Applied Linguistics. Oxford. OUP.
Eagleton, T.1994. Literary Theory: An Introduction.Oxford: Blackwell.
Kramsch, C.1994. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford. OUP.
Sze,F.2003. Interculturalism Performs. Deparment of Performance Studies.University, NY
Walsh, P. in A. Pennycook.2001. Critical Applied Linguistics an Introduction.Mahwah,. N.J..
Enter Sandman by Metallica, The Black Album, 1991.
Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden, 1992.
Enter Sandman lyrics
Say your prayers little one
don't forget, my son
to include everyone
tuck you in, warm within
keep you free from sin
till the sandman he comes
sleep with one eye open
gripping your pillow tight
exit light
enter night
take my hand
off to never never land
something's wrong, shut the light
heavy thoughts tonight
and they aren't of snow white
dreams of war, dreams of liars
dreams of dragon's fire
and of things that will bite
sleep with one eye open
gripping your pillow tight
exit light
enter night
take my hand
off to never never land
now I lay me down to sleep
pray the lord my soul to keep
if I die before I wake
pray the lord my soul to take
hush little baby, don't say a word
and never mind that noise you heard
it's just the beast under your bed,
in your closet, in your head.
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