Category: Fordham University

  • Freud and Jung Broke Up at Fordham

    The psychoanalysis of dreams that came after

    In 1912, Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, delivered a series of six lectures at Fordham University. Students surely knew—or were at least briefed by their professors—that Dr. Jung was the protégé of a certain Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis and father-figure to the man who lectured before them.

    What they didn’t know was that this dynamic duo, almost always in ideological lockstep and seen as the two men guiding the bleeding edge of the budding field of psychoanalysis, was about to suffer a tremendous falling-out. 

    Jung saw the publishing of these lectures, The Symbols of Transformation, as the turning point in their relationship. Fordham University witnessed the breakup of Freud and Jung over differences that culminated in six lessons on Jung’s differing views on libido (Sharpe).

    An oversimplification, to be sure. However, this turning point nevertheless marks the beginning of the ideological rift between the two theorists that would set them apart in their field for the rest of their careers. Though Jung would go on to publish much work on the field of analytical psychology, one battleground within the realm of psychoanalysis in which Jung and Freud would differ greatly is the meaning of dreams.

    Dreams are a product of the unconscious mind—on that the two can agree. Freud introduced the idea that a role of the unconscious is to facilitate repression. The negation of base urges and desires seen as socially unacceptable or taboo uses the unconscious mind as a receptacle as the conscious mind saves face (Freud). Though Freud’s understanding of repressed urges is primarily sexual, this would be somewhat negated later by Jung, who generally prescribed to Freud’s sexual emphasis up until the falling-out.

    Freud’s more developed understanding of the unconscious coincided with his theories on dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams. Understanding “dream content” as the manifest reality of a dream and “dream thought” as latent, underlying meaning supplied by the subconscious, the work sets out to explore the ways in which dreams may mean more than their often-nonsensical nature would suggest (Freud).

    Through the act of condensation, Freud believes that the unconscious is able to package the dream thought and content into a single dream. The displacement of the dream describes the mismatch between dream thought and content—the repression Freud establishes makes clear messages of desire unable to be clearly expressed. For Freud, dreams are the workaround and dream analysis the decoder of these messages. The external aspects of a dream were Freud’s main focus—too much subjectivity would ruin one’s abilities to interpret the signs as they were relayed (Taveras).

    Jung differs in his conception of dream analysis. Instead of the free association characteristic of Freudian dream analysis, Jung prefers to “stick as close as possible to the dream images.” Building off of the manifest content of dreams, Jungian dream analysis relies on a detailed analysis of the more literal implications of certain concepts in dreams, as opposed to looser methods of association (Jung). Freud’s assumptions of sticks in dreams would not sit all too well with Jung (Sharpe).

    Jung’s notion of dreams includes, however, the act of amplification—the association of dream content with images from other sources. Drawing from popular culture and myth, for example, Jungian dream analysis looks to identify archetypal parallels through which the unconscious may very well be working as well (Taveras). This smacks of the loose, free-associative methods of Freudian psychoanalysis, but perhaps in this case with more emphasis on the internalized societal influences on the subject. 

    The act of dream analysis, as described by both Jung and Freud, attempts to distinguish the primary meaning behind what often amount to be discordant and nonsensical metaphors created by the subconscious as a response to a conscious unwillingness to simply express such primary meaning.

    Where Freud believed these coded messages were the result of specifically sexual repression, Jung believed the dream served to work through issues that plagued the conscious mind and focused on the finer details of the dream content (Taveras). Disagreeing strongly with Freud on the proper way to extrapolate all aspects of a dream, Jung sought to analyze the subjective and objective content of the dream in the interest of observing how an individual might both knowingly and unknowingly affect their dream content. 

    The state of dream analysis in the field of psychoanalysis might have seen its rise in the duo of Freud and Jung, but the rift that formed between them served to demonstrate how differently dreams can be interpreted—and how some parts of the process remained the same. Perhaps it was better for the world that their relationship deteriorated, the final straw at our very own Fordham University.

    Of all the hundreds of thousands of breakups that have occurred across campuses, it’s the best one I’ve heard of to date.

    Works Cited

    • Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Literary Theory: an Anthology, ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan.  Wiley Blackwell, 2017, 575-591.
    • Sharpe, Ella Freeman. Dream Analysis: A Practical Handbook for Psycho-Analysts. Maresfield Library, 1988, pp. 34-45.
    • Jung, C. G., ed. Anthony Storr. The Essential Jung. Princeton Univ. Press, 1983.
    • Taveras, Maria. “Jungian Dream Analysis.” Maria Taveras, Psychotherapist, jungiantherapy.com/jungian-dream-analysis/.

  • A.P. Style

    The Oxford comma and I have a complicated relationship.

    I have no quarrel with the comma itself—it’s often a leisurely, much-needed pause in an otherwise long and droning serial. 

    On the other hand, well—it’s not A.P. style.

    Throughout my academic career, throughout every piece of writing I’ve scribbled and submitted on a whim, I can say with certainty that I never cracked a style book. Never did it cross my mind to find out how to properly refer to senators, nor the best abbreviation for the states of the union. I didn’t know that “internet” only recently lost its capital I in the eyes of the A.P., and I didn’t care about the superiority of “OK” over “okay.”

    Perhaps the persnickety details of one style guide aren’t enough to paint a convincing picture, but the point remains: I have long worked under the fatal assumption that creative writers don’t give a damn about the rules. 

    I’d read enough “experimental” writing—funky spacing, out-there poetry and bad-on-purpose-but-you-just-don’t-get-it prose—that I assumed creative writers (myself, of course, ranking squarely among them) reached down into their subconscious and produced a fully-formed, Pulitzer-winning first draft on command.

    I thought that creative writing was a high art reserved for those born with arms long enough to reach it. I was, in a word, insufferable.

    More slowly than I’d like, but with a finality I’ve never experienced before, I believe that I have finally begun to mature as a writer. Call it peach fuzz or that first bullseye zit between my eyes, but something’s there. 

    To be a student of English and a creative writer at the same time is a bit of a contradiction—to study authorities on writing while writing with one’s own authority seems like a misplaced bout of hubris. However, the truth and value to the study of creative writing is exactly that—it’s a process, it’s a contradiction and it’s the only way to find out who I am as a writer and a person.

    The Pablo Picasso quote goes like this: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” Echoed by the likes of Alexander McQueen and the Dalai Lama XIV, this revelation is like any other equivalent college-age epiphany—though one can hear it ad nauseam, it’s only learned and internalized through experience

    For me, it began with A.P. style.  

    This year marks my third with the student newspaper at Fordham Lincoln Center, The Observer. This time two years ago, I submitted my first piece to the paper, expecting to never hear back from them. Instead, I got a Google Doc full of edits—and a saccharine note at the bottom encouraging me to “Keep writing!” 

    I hated it. People telling me that “this might work better” were purely critics to me—not individuals with my best interests in mind. I cringed at every last “lil awk” commented offhand on a compound sentence gone awry. 

    Every writer needs someone to tell them that their stuff is trash sometimes. When that someone gets to the heart of your writing—of you—and explains what can be improved, everything grows. The writer, the editor and the piece itself, I found, were beneficiaries of this process. 

    Slowly but surely, I worked through those edits. I tuned my voice, sharpened my focus and deleted every last one of those infernal Oxford commas. 

    I stuck with The Observer, becoming an editor myself. Then, I became Editor-in-Chief.

    My new role is tougher than I ever expected. The idiom “herding cats,” when applied to 37 unpaid members of a biweekly newspaper staff, has become my favorite turn of phrase. My week invariably involves poring over 40 or so pieces of student journalism—op-eds, theater reviews and administrative exposés among them—and ensuring they’re fit to print. 

    Of the standards to which I hold my writers, most are traditional. Journalistic integrity, ethics, grammar, punctuation and the all-powerful A.P. dominate. 

    But some are my own. I know that writing worth reading is creative. It tells stories in unique ways and dares—not begs—the reader to listen.

    When I pull up a new submission on Google Drive, I’m faced with what sometimes seems like two irreconcilable responsibilities. It’s my job to mold and trim the writing before me to conform to an unwavering, annually-issued style book—and I need to make it sound good. But it’s also my responsibility to retain the original voice of the author. Their style and unique perspective matter. 

    While they may not think they’re writing creatively, I believe that they are. Journalism is formulaic by trade, but it’s a lot less gloomy and gray when the ability to tell a story in a multitude of ways is treated as a strength, not a distraction. 

    Editor-in-Chief implies that I must know a little about how to improve a piece of writing. My title doesn’t imply the second part of the job, however—that experientially, I’m just as much a fledgling writer as any first-time contributor on our staff.

    As I do my best to help my staff and contributors grow as writers—and, more importantly, grow as people—I find myself growing along with them. The lessons I try my hardest to instill in my peers are just as much for my own benefit. 

    I tell them to learn the rules, hoping that one day they will build a strong enough foundation to be able to break them. I tell myself to learn the rules, hoping that one day my strength—as a person and as a writer—will allow me to shatter the what I’ve known into just enough jagged pieces with which to build something new and meaningful.

    With every lede suggestion, source attribution and endless debate over that damn Oxford comma, I told people what I myself needed to hear most. Learn the rules. Then break them—effectively, carefully, and creatively.

  • Please Swipe Again

    Commodity Fetishism, Conspicuous Consumption and the Supreme MetroCard

    At its cheapest and lowest quantity, the advertising rate for a standard, four-color, single-side advertisement on 50,000 Metropolitan Transportation Association MetroCards is an even $25,500 (MTA).

    In July of 2012, “the latest frontier in the MTA’s campaign to squeeze new revenue from the transit system” became the ability to advertise on both the front and back of the iconic yellow card—starting at $112,000 for 250,000 cards (Mann). MetroPCS, Audible, and HBO’s Game of Thrones have all endorsed full MetroCard advertisements through the years; all randomly distributed throughout the MTA system. 

    No New Yorker’s wallet is safe: gracing mine currently is a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show-branded card with a coupon on the reverse side that expired long before it was even issued to me. 

    But there is one MetroCard, however, that stands out from the rest, living in infamy among collectors and everyday commuters alike: the limited-edition Supreme MetroCard.

    Supreme is a clothing manufacturer known for utilizing scarcity to drive up the value of its branded products. Memorable merchandise includes a branded clay brick along with a modestly-branded plan white tee shirt—both selling for upwards of $1,000 each (Tiffany).

    When Supreme and the MTA’s tracks finally crossed, the result was fascinating to many—and likely the worst nightmare of Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen. 

    A commodity, as defined by Karl Marx, satisfies a human desire. Supreme capitalizes on the difference between a commodity’s use value and exchange value—its intrinsic worth in contrast with its perceived value in a capitalist society. Commodity fetishism is what creates the gulf between the two. What makes the vast inflation of the price of a Supreme MetroCard so illogical or absurd is fully understood and utilized by Supreme.

    At its very essence, a MetroCard is a piece of vinyl and a magnetized strip, manufactured in large quantities and used by consumers to store value that can be exchanged for entrance into the MTA system. Its usefulness simply as a yellow rectangle is negligible; however, its ability to transfer value gives this commodity a value of its own. It acts in the place of money; itself intrinsically worthless but representative of some amount of perceived value.

    In this way, the MetroCard has no first-order use value but takes on use value when its larger role in the grand scheme of currency is considered. Its exchange value becomes its primary use value when put into the context of a greater capitalist system.

    The exchange value of a MetroCard in this higher sense, then, depends entirely on the amount of currency represented on the card. This makes the humble MetroCard a useful, but largely unfetishized commodity—that is, until another element is introduced to make the card desirable outside of its role as a conduit of value transfer. 

    This is where Supreme comes in.

    Though many ads on MetroCards are simply seen as a nuisance, the Supreme MetroCard, introduced in July of 2017, was the latest in a long line of commodities fetishized—according to Marx—far beyond their traditional use values. 

    The card was red and white, with “Supreme” written on the side opposite the iconic yellow logo. It was released in limited numbers in stations across New York City and sold for $5.50. 

    The cards were loaded with enough fare for two trips in the MTA system. Their intrinsic value—on a primary level as red strips of vinyl and on a secondary level as a means for holding and transferring value—was rather low.

    In the ensuing weeks, Supreme MetroCards resold for as much as $999.97 on eBay. 

    This valuation fails to correlate with any conception of the intrinsic value of a MetroCard—a prime example of the fetishism Marx argues destroys the link between utility and value in a capitalist society. The “mystical” x-factor that makes consumers amenable to paying almost a thousand dollars for an aftermarket MetroCard: the combination of artificial scarcity, brand recognition and other societal factors that amounts to a true capitalist fetish. 

    One of the contributing factors to the fetishization of commodities is elaborated upon by later economist Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Like Capital, Veblen’s work lampoons its titular subject, arguing that “the emergence of a leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership,” a statement reminiscent of Marx’s conception of the bourgeoisie and their reliance on capitalism. Conspicuous consumption—the pursuit of commodities regarded to be of great value in order to display wealth and power in a capitalist society—is characteristic of Veblen’s leisure class. 

    This helps to further explain the extreme overvaluation of the Supreme MetroCard—and all other merchandise with unequal use and exchange values. While a MetroCard would simply allow a working-class member of society to access public transportation, a Supreme MetroCard appeals to those of higher socioeconomic status because of its perceived exchange value. It is rare, and it is expensive—a perfect display of wealth and power for a class of people with nothing better to do than flaunt.

    Through Marx’s theory of commodity fetishization, developed and augmented by Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption, the frenzy surrounding the release of the Supreme MetroCard—almost religious, as Marx asserts—makes perfect sense. A capitalist culture imbued the brand of Supreme and all of their merchandise with a value far exceeding their utility and total labor necessary to produce them, and the leisure class bought Supreme MetroCards for $999.97 because the perceived “value” of displaying their wealth and power made the price tag more than worth it. 

    The other day, I saw a rat faithfully pulling a MetroCard into a hole in the subway station tile. I don’t know why it did so; the card’s utility to that particular rat was completely foreign to me. I imagined that it was a special Supreme card, perhaps dropped accidentally on to the subway tracks by a careless subway-goer. I can only hope the rat knew how much money was paid for that little red card.

    Works Cited

    • Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. London: Penguin Classics, 1994. Print.
    • Marx, Karl. Capital. London: Penguin Classics, 1994. Print.
    • Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “The MTA’s Supreme-branded MetroCard is a hot commodity.” The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/20/14674604/mta-supreme-metro-cards-nyc-subway-resale. Accessed 26 April 2019.
    • “Advertise on MetroCard.” MTA, http://web.mta.info/nyct/RatestoAdvertiseonMetroCard.html. Accessed 27 April 2019.
    • Mann, Ted. “MetroCards Get Advertising Makeover.” WSJ, https://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/07/18/metrocards-get-advertising-makeover. Accessed 27 April 2019.
    • “Supreme Metro Card NYC Subway MTA Train Pass New York City Metrocard SS17 X.” eBay, https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supreme-Metro-Card-NYC-Subway-MTA-Train-Pass-New-York-City-Metrocard-SS17-X-/282370033138. Accessed 26 April 2019.

  • Mr. Steichen’s Well-Intentioned Spell

    The (Great) Family of Man and the consequences of mythmaking

    503 photographs were used in the final exhibition of The Family of Man, including Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother. The images of the hydrogen bomb test and aftermath of a lynching were omitted from both the physical exhibition and the printed book thereafter. The exhibit toured the world, reaching 9 million people—the most for any photo exhibit—in 37 countries on six continents. This did not include China, Spain, or Vietnam (MoMa).

    Edward Steichen’s Family of Man has lived a double life of sameness and otherness since its first showing in the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. The exhibit’s great undertaking in attempting to capture the similarities of cultures worldwide could never have been perfectly comprehensive. However, the deeper meaning and motivation for the exhibit is what has been called into question.

    The myth that it posits—the “great” family of man—understood within Roland Barthes’s formulation of myth, intends to show that a collection of snapshots of the human experience mean something more. 

    Some called this thinking reductionist; others praised its humbling effectiveness. In both cases, Barthes’s thinking rings true: The Family of Man legitimizes the myth of the same name by taking a collection of human images, all with their own meanings, and deriving a second-order connotation from this collective (Barthes). The exhibit, as a sum of its parts, champions the values of similarity and shared human experience. Said Steichen himself, “Photography communicates equally to everybody throughout the world. It is the only universal language we have, the only one requiring no translation” (Steichen). 

    His confidence in the legitimacy of his mythmaking was called into question, especially by Barthes, but the human tendency to derive higher meaning from simple concepts persisted—and persists to this day.

    Barthes acknowledges that the French translation of this exhibit, The Great Family of Man, implies sentimental and moral connections where a lack of “great” would simply suggest zoological similarity. An “alibi to a large part of our humanism,” this notion of shared human experience contributes to the myth of The (Great) Family of Man. Criticizing the medium and presentation, Barthes argues that photography is dangerously reductionist. “…if one removes history from [universal fact], there is nothing more to be said about them… To reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing” (Barthes). 

    Further criticism of Steichen’s high-reaching conclusions from 503 photographs points out that mythmaking is often founded on the negation of nuance. Said Phoebe-Lou Adams in Atlantic Monthly shortly after the exhibit opened, “If Mr. Steichen’s well-intentioned spell doesn’t work, it can only be because he has been so intent on [Mankind’s] physical similarities that… he has utterly forgotten that a family quarrel can be as fierce as any other kind” (Adams). Abetting this are the exhibit’s own conscious choices already listed: omitting two powerful negative images and failing to visit three countries. That these three countries may not have even desired to exhibit The Great Family of Man complicates the validity of such generalizations further. 

    When seeing The (Great) Family of Man, museum-goers then and readers in the present are wont to “see no evil” if they were to experience the full effect of Steichen’s myth. In her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, artist and activist Susan Sontag echoed Barthes’s criticism of the lack of nuance and context so essential to the higher-order connotations of myth: “By purporting to show that individuals are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the same way, ‘The Family of Man’ denies the determining weight of history – of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts” (Sontag). She acknowledges Steichen’s collection as an expression of humanism, as Barthes does, and does the opposite of mythmaking—she puts the work in critical context. To her, the post-war period in which the exhibit was made fostered a popular culture wanting to assume the best in people, “…to be consoled and distracted by a sentimental humanism” (Sontag).

    The generalization characteristic of myth does not only work to nefarious and revisionist effect, however. That much can be seen from Steichen’s faith in the ability of his work to unite humanity in a positive way—suggested in the very name Family of Man. From a special issue of Aperture Magazine on the exhibit, Barbara Morgan asserts that “… Empathy with these hundreds of human beings truly expands our sense of values” (Morgan). Whether this empathy is well-founded and such values deserving to be universalized is up for contention, but the effect of myth is evident nevertheless. 

    In creating a second-order meaning from a series of independent, meaningful entities, The Family of Man succeeds. The exhibit uses photography to represent this myth visually: that humans are far more alike than different. Though perhaps best understood with historical context and painstaking nuance, assertions of human nature are far more given to the process of mythmaking. Steichen’s exhibit, for all its shortcomings, succeeds in the creation of higher-order meaning, but the rest of society is tasked with determining its validity. Like many myths, The Family of Man is at once reductionist fluff and elegiac truth—at the end of the day, it is simply something for the audience to behold.

    Works Cited

    • Barthes, Roland. “Mythologies.” Literary Theory, ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2019, pp. 88-89
    • “Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955.” MoMa, https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/archives/archives-highlights-06-1955. Accessed 4 March 2019.
    • Steichen, Edward. “Photography: Witness and Recorder of History.” Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 41 no. 3, 1958.
    • Morgan, Barbara. “The Theme Show: A Contemporary Exhibition Technique” in “The Controversial Family of Man.” Aperture, vol. 3, no. 2, 1955.
    • Sontag, Susan. “On Photography.” Penguin, Harmandsworth, 1977.
    • Adams, Phoebe-Lou. “Through a Lens Darkly” in “The Controversial Family of Man.” Atlantic Monthly, no. 195, 1955.

  • I’ve Gotten This Far Without Trilling My R’s

    ¡CIENTO VEINTIDÓS!

    ¡CIENTO VEINTIDÓS!

    ¡CIENTO VEINTIDÓS!

    There was no significance behind it. To the three whiter-than-white seventh-graders chanting “one hundred twenty-two!” in the back of Señora O’SmithSchneiderStein’s Spanish 1 classroom, the syllables that tumbled from their mouths simply felt good on their tongues—and, after all, it was funny.

    Funny in the same way that kids would shout things like TAREAAAAA and PAPAS FRRRRRITAS during vocabulary review sessions to get a laugh out of their classmates.

    The way we learned the cultural significance of the baCHAta before donning colorful dollar store sombreros and filling paper plates with tortEEya chips and UNE POCOE de SAALSA.

    But not guacamole. It was green, after all. VERDAY. We were a little suspicious.

    Have you ever heard kids with heavy Philadelphia accents go through their first years of learning Spanish? The same people that drink WOODER bottles and root for the IGGLES on winter Sundays send children off to school each day knowing that their offspring will butcher two languages before the day is done.

    ~

    The United States of America has no national language. Our melting pot PR is very good. However, thirty of the fifty states in the union have laws mandating English be spoken in all important official interactions and exchanges, and Geno’s Steaks is famous for proudly displaying “This is America, when ordering, speak English” in its window.

    Obviously, people here care a lot about how they are allowed to express themselves and tell their stories. The fear of people saying things we don’t understand (while also never making the effort to understand) has inevitably taken root in the public school system. Suburban Philly kids are not alone in their hatred of Spanish class. The nation’s majority cry out from the un-air-conditioned half-open windows of their schools with an arrogance almost as palpable as their ignorance: 

    When are we going to actually interact with someone who actually speaks Spanish? Like “Gimme a cheesesteak wit” is even English.

    But it’s cool to be ignorant. Doing terrible in a foreign language class is just as acceptable as struggling with math—communicating with others is permitted to be “just not my thing.”

     The “humanities” surely include literature, but we’re under the impression that only what we can already comprehend counts. To deny another human’s expression—to render their literature, their language inapplicable to you—is to negate their existence. I’ve polled the room, and the 11th graders bored out of their minds in Spanish class don’t seem to mind all that much.

    ~

    Accent and emphasis are the two key elements of Spanish pronunciation. In Spanish class, you’ll get along just fine without them. While it is assumed that emphasis is placed on the penultimate syllable, sometimes it lies elsewhere, wherein we denote this emphasis with what we call an ACK-SCENTO ( ´ ). The funny little snake atop the N in MANYANA is called a TILL DAY  ( ~ ). Accents define regional dialects and can give you a good sense of where someone’s from or who they hang out with. If they replace their YYYs with soft JJJJs, they’re probably Argentinian, Uruguayan, or somewhere in that neighborhood.

    If they say things like pWEDO EER ull BAHNYO right before the quiz to go study and vape in the bathroom, they might just be an American teen duped into thinking their world is far smaller than it actually is.

    ~

    I like to imagine that, just as we enjoy characters in movies with heavy foreign accents, people from Spanish-speaking countries see movies with Americans that have that perfect mixture of Spanish mastery and unmistakable English steamrolling of syllables. Perhaps that’s why I’d be able to understand Spanish with impeccable accuracy so long as everyone spoke like the skipping cassette recording we used in middle school.

    Ac-Actividad… uno. Escuchen a las siguientes palabras y marque con un circulo la respuesta correcta que corresponde a cada pregunta.

    Perhaps the Spanish learning experience—foreign relations in general, even—would be better for everyone if we spoke loudly, slowly, and only about the weather and the whereabouts of the nearest library.

    ~

    The last time anyone bothered to check (2008), 58% of middle schools in the United states taught foreign languages. Twenty-five percent of elementary schools, if you care. We are creatures born with a desire to communicate and an unabashed love for language, but that magic biological window that ends on one’s 18th birthday for learning a language seems to be a resource yet untapped for the better part of America’s population of monolinguists. The kids don’t really care.

    They’ve never been given a reason to care. 

    Nations around the world brag about their high percentages of bilinguals, but we have the luxury of speaking from birth the language everyone on Earth strives to master if they want to puncture the international seal and inject the tiniest bit of personal experience and struggle. The future engineers and stockbrokers and English teachers of the world sit through Spanish class because they have to, letting riches go in one ear and out the other simply because they cannot be bothered to convert the currency. 

    By the time English-speakers get to high school, where a foreign language is required in 91% of schools, it’s too late. Their best language-learning years are running out, and there are more pressing matters to attend to than Spanish 1 workbooks. A token class period to sing songs about “EEZKEYERDA, DUHRECHA, DUHLANTAY, DUHTRASS” and whisper test answers in English does little to build the foundations of language. More often than not, these efforts amount to no more than shallow graves.

    ~

    CircumloCUTION means “talking around the word I need to say because I forgot my dictionary and just blanked on how to say ‘where is the discoTEca.’” Talking around something is excusing your monolinguity with a dismissive wave because you will never, ever, have to communicate with someone who doesn’t talk like you. And you really don’t want the hassle, anyway.

    CircunloQUIo is how students ramble on and gesticulate wildly in the middle of their presentation on Bodas de Sangre because they never really bothered to read it because, you know—it was in a foreign language.

    It was someone else’s story. If the literature was that good, how come we didn’t learn it in English class?

    ~

    Words that sound similar in English and Spanish are called “cognates.” CogNAtos. Kids in Spanish class love those. Beware, however, of false cognates—Pope and potato, pregnant and embarrassed, exit and success headline words that should not be confused with each other across languages. If someone spills a drink and tells you that they’re emBAraZAda, ask them when the baby’s due. Confusion is inevitable when you present someone with something significant but told in a manner to which they cannot fully relate. The lack of one-to-one comparisons is more than enough to discourage those who demand mathematical answers to human questions.

    Have you ever tried watching the news in a different language? Suddenly, everything is happening outside yourself, in a world where your words mean nothing. You may sit diligently though every last mediocre Spanish class in high school, score decent marks on your placement exams and pursue it as an avenue of study in college, but I think I speak for all the whiter-than-white college kids still chanting CIENTO VEINTIDÓS under their breath with a grin when I say that feeling like an outsider in Spanish class is some poetic irony.

    ~

    Should I tell my story in a language I’ve only co-opted? I question whether I’d even be communicating authentically using words that are not my own. To make them mine smacks of the very process of conquering that made my mother tongue the alpha throughout the world. My problems are minute when we speak of relativity; but just as I am free to communicate and co-humanize with the majority of my country, I am locked out of so many others. At its worst, Spanish class is less a passport and more a ticket to gawk at the Other; to imitate its movements and mimic its vocalizations. Call it lip service, satire, or blatant farce—most just call it fifth period. A prerequisite to graduation. A participation trophy.

    But I do not study the language to apologize for my countrymen and classmates in TEXCESS and LOSS ANJULUS demanding their neighbors speak American. 

    My EMbarAZO when I talk is the very thing that chains me to the back row of my high school Spanish class. The eggshells I crush underfoot with every butchered proNUNciAciON are, I suspect, self-placed. That if I simply let go of the parts of my identity that stick out when I fumble over TILL DAYs and encaBALgamiENto, I’d finally do the language justice. I’d be someone who shares—not takes, nor simply observes from afar—the experiences, the life, and the humanity of a fellow human.

    How do you know if you’re really, truly honoring a language? Ask a native speaker, and I suppose they’ll give you an answer. But they might just ask you the same question instead.