CLR James on the ‘Surprisingly Moderate’ Reprisals of the Haitian Revolution

Here are two very powerful passages from CLR James‘ classic The Black Jacobins: Touissant L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution (Vintage Books, second edition revised, New York, 1962, pp. 88-89):

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on  them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilisation had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all. Yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. “Vengeance ! Vengeance” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.

And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. They did not maintain this revengeful spirit for long. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased. As the revolution gained territory they spared many of the men, women, and children whom they surprised on plantations. To prisoners of war alone they remained merciless. They tore out their flesh with redhot pincers, they roasted them on slow fires, they sawed a carpenter between two of his boards. Yet in all the records of that time there is no single instance of such fiendish tortures as burying white men up to the neck and smearing the holes in their faces to attract insects, or blowing them up with gun-powder, or any of the thousand and one bestialities to which they had been subjected. Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.

The italicized line is footnoted as follows:

This statement has been criticised. I stand by it. C.L.R.J.

I can imagine some of the contours of this criticism: How could you defend rape and murder and pillage? The killing of babies? The savage treatment of prisoners?

James offers a defense in the same passage and it is interestingly plausible.  The slave revolt, the uprising, was bound to be a convulsion, a shaking-off, one that could not but, given the history of their oppression–described in gruesome detail in Chapter 1–result in some reprisals. But this striking back would not be, and perhaps couldn’t be, anything more than a brief spasm of cruelty and anger, a cathartic and horrible outpouring of accumulated anger and grief. It would not be followed by enslavement and the systematic, prolonged brutality the slaves had been subjected to. The violence inflicted on the slaves was directed at the perpetuation of a very particular system of control; that which the slaves directed at their masters was a momentary outburst.  The mutilations, floggings, rapes, and live roastings–among other humiliations and obscenities–the slaves had suffered were to ensure the breaking of their spirit, the assertion of owner privilege; they were the visible features of an ideology of utter and total control. They broke bodies and minds alike. The cruelties of the retaliation meted out by the slaves, in contrast, appear as a momentary expression of revenge, the passions underlying which, hopefully, would soon subside. There is nothing systematic, nothing codified, about them.

These considerations do not, I think, condone the violence but they do put them into some perspective.

On First and Second Languages – III

In this ongoing series of posts on partially mastered languages and my frustrating relationships with them, I’ve written about German and Spanish. Today, I come to the most vexed alliance of all, the one with Punjabi.

My last name is a giveaway: I’m a Punjabi. But I’ve never lived in the Punjab. I did, however, spend many years in a city with a large Punjabi population: New Delhi. My parents never spoke in Punjabi with me (they did so with their parents) and so while I grew up listening to a great deal of Punjabi, I acquired no fluency in it whatsoever. In the tenth grade, during two years spent in boarding school, away in India’s north-east, I struck up a friendship with two Sikh lads and started some rudimentary practice. On returning to Delhi to finish high school, I initiated some tentative conversations with my grandmothers and attempted to learn some Punjabi from them. I noticed that none of my cousins, and indeed, no one in my generation of urban Punjabis in New Delhi spoke the language.

By the time I left India for the US, my fluency in Punjabi was still minimal. Matters picked up, ironically enough, on moving to a land ten thousand miles away from ‘home.’ I was keen to practice, keen to establish a very particular sort of contact with the few Punjabis I met. I also made contact with a brand new community of Punjabi speakers: Pakistanis. Indeed, it seemed to me that more Pakistani Punjabis, even urban ones, spoke Punjabi than Indian ones. My vocabulary improved, as did some aspects of my grammar.

Moving to New York City in 1993 facilitated this process even further. The city is home to a large Punjabi community and opportunities for practice were only limited by my enterprise and shyness; they still are. I discovered that the Punjabi spoken in the Punjabi hinterland–of whose representatives in New York City there were many–was far harder to master, and I would frequently, embarrassed, switch to Hindi/Urdu in the middle of a conversation, unable to keep up with the barrage of incomprehensible words coming my way.

My attempts to practice my Punjabi had unexpected consequences: on occasion, a cab driver from the Punjab–Indian or Pakistani–delighted to make acquaintance with a fellow homeboy, would simply decline my payment of the fare, and give me a free ride. I grew embarrassed at these inordinately generous offers and would try my best to pay, but to no avail. (This followed me to Sydney, when on arriving there for my post-doctoral fellowship, the young man who drove me to the University of New South Wales also declined payment.)

My fluency in Punjabi is a couple of rungs short of full-fledged mastery; I need a period of immersion to make what I consider would be a significant breakthrough. (In the winter of 2006/7 on a visit to India, my family and I made a short road trip to the Punjab; my spoken Punjabi improved even in the space of those four days.) I do not think I will ever have the time or the patience to master the script but spoken mastery lies well within my reach provided I can achieve total immersion. Even two weeks, I suspect, would do it.  I’m not sure when and how I will be able to bring this about though; work and family seem to leave little time for such an adventure.

So near, and yet so far.

Creationism, Climate Non-Change, And All That

Phillip Kitcher‘s Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (MIT Press, 1982) makes for depressing reading. Not because of any problems with its arguments, style, or content, but rather because, even as you read it, you realize that though the book was published in 1982, essentially the same points–in addition to others that would bolster the scientific standing of evolutionary theory–would have to be made today in any debate against creationists and their latest incarnation, the Intelligent Design-ers. Those folks are the Undead–zombies, vampires, take your pick–they won’t go away, they won’t stay down. And they certainly won’t listen to reason.

Kitcher’s thirty-one year old dismantling of creationist ‘arguments’ and polemics against evolution is careful and thoughtful and–though he occasionally lapses into an ironic or sarcastic aside–scrupulously fair to his opponents. I will confess that I have never read any creationist text in its entirety; my exposure to it over the years has been piecemeal, and perhaps the closest I’ve come to any serious engagement with its arguments was when I taught a section on intelligent design in my philosophy of biology class a few semesters ago. Thus, I was appalled to see the arguments that Kitcher set out to combat; their understanding of evolutionary theory being vanishingly small was the least of their errors. The sense of depression I alluded to above was exacerbated by the thought that a) book-length versions of this nonsense have been written, published and widely promulgated and b) they now require book-length refutations. (To Kitcher’s credit, his brief is literally so; it clocks in at a breezy two hundred or so pages.)

A dozen or so years ago, I saw an article in The Onion titled ‘Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics‘. An attached image showed a protester with a sign that read ‘I Don’t Accept the Fundamental Tenets of Science and I Vote’. I chuckled when I read the story and later that night, told a physicist friend of mine–he studied quantum many-body interactions–about it. His reaction was interesting; at first, he guffawed loudly, and then suddenly, he sobered up, his expression changing to one of concern and alarm as he said, ‘You know, that’s actually not funny. There really are people who think like that.’ Till then, I had been chuckling away too; on hearing this, I stopped. My friend was right; the Onion story was funny all right, but in a pretty disturbing way, one that reminds us that arguments like Kitcher’s–and many more that have been made since–need to be made and disseminated as carefully as they are because of a very particular context, one populated by a particularly intransigent mind-set.

The climate non-change folks aren’t quite yet at the level of those that resist evolutionary theory but they are getting there. Their attainment of that standard of hostility to empirical investigation and careful theorizing will be made visible to us–if it hasn’t already–by the marker indicated above: when they become the subject of an article in the Onion.

One that will make a scientist first laugh, and then grimace.

The ‘Trickery’ of Robots

Maggie Koerth-Baker reports on a case of supposed trickery–(‘How Robots Can Trick You Into Loving Them‘, The New York Times, 17 September 2013)–that has come to light as robots become more ubiquitous and enter an increasing number of social spaces:

In the future, more robots will occupy that strange gray zone: doing not only jobs that humans can do but also jobs that require social grace. In the last decade, an interdisciplinary field of research called Human-Robot Interaction has arisen to study the factors that make robots work well with humans, and how humans view their robotic counterparts.

H.R.I. researchers have discovered some rather surprising things: a robot’s behavior can have a bigger impact on its relationship with humans than its design; many of the rules that govern human relationships apply equally well to human-robot relations; and people will read emotions and motivations into a robot’s behavior that far exceed the robot’s capabilities.

None of this should be surprising in the least. Human beings have always relied on a combination of relentless anthropomorphization and agency ascription to make sense of the world around them. In doing so they have cared little for the ‘inside’ of the beings they encounter, and have instead, concerned themselves with which interpretive framework enables them to enjoy more fruitful relationships with them. As Koerth-Baker notes, “Provided with the right behavioral cues, humans will form relationships with just about anything — regardless of what it looks like. Even a stick can trigger our social promiscuity.” Robots will be no different in this regard.

In a world full of action, we are inclined to find agents everywhere; the interesting bit comes when we have to individuate these agents–figure out where one starts and ends and another one begins–and what kind of ‘inner life’ we ascribe to them. Chances are, the more those agents resemble us, the more likely we are to ascribe a rich set of inner states to them. But as the robots and stick example shows, a sufficiently rich behavioral repertoire might even overcome this inhibition.

The more fascinating question of course, is whether this style of social interaction will become the preferred modality in preference to talking about the robot’s innards or design. Will humans describe the robot’s ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ as the causes of the actions it takes? Doing so would regard robots as originators of the actions they take: in other words, they would be considered ‘true’ agents in the philosophical sense.

One prominent asymmetry should also become apparent in robot-human interaction: those who know a great deal about the robot’s innards–its engineering principles, its software, its internal design–will be less inclined to anthropomorphize and ascribe social graces and capacities to robots. They will sometimes find that the best explanations they can offer of the robot’s behavior will be more expeditiously expressed in a language that refers to their physical composition or logical design. But this subset of users is likely to be a very small one and as robots become more complex and more capable of a sophisticated range of behaviors it might be that even those users will find the language of propositional attitudes a more convenient one for dealing with robots.

Eventually, we might come to treat robots as authorities when it comes to reporting on their own inner states. When that level of sophisticated interaction and behavior is possible, we’ll face a genuine conundrum: as far as social relationships are concerned, what, other than their innards, distinguishes them from other reporters–like human beings–that we consider authorities in similar fashion?

Manil Suri on the Beauty and Beguilement of Mathematics

Manil Suri has an interesting Op-Ed on math–How To Fall In Love with Math–in The New York Times today. As befitting someone who is both a mathematician and a novelist, there are passages of writing in it that are both elegant and mathematically sound. The examples he provides of mathematical beauty–the natural numbers, n-sided regular polygons that become circles as n approaches infinity, fractals–are commonly used, but for all that they have not lost any of their power to beguile and fascinate.

I fear though that Suri’s message–that math is beautiful, creative, elegant, not to be confused with routine number crunching, and worthy of wonder and exaltation and careful study–will not be heard through the haze of the very math anxiety he seeks to cure. Suri needn’t feel too bad about this though; many others have tried and failed in this very endeavor in the past.  If, as Suri suggests, we are wired for math, we also sometimes give the appearance of being chronically, congenitally, incurably anxious about it.

A personal note: I came to a realization of mathematics’ beauty late myself. Like many of the math-phobic that Suri refers to in his article, through my school years my attitude toward the study of math was fraught with fear and befuddlement. I was acceptably competent in the very junior grades but a harsh teacher in the seventh grade ensured that I would earn my worst grades then. My concerned father took it upon himself to drill me in algebra and I regained a little confidence. Not enough though, to want to study it at the higher levels that were made available to us in the ninth and tenth grades. But the pressure to study engineering at the university level meant I had to return to the study of more advanced mathematics for the eleventh and twelfth grades.

In those two years, I was exposed to calculus for the first time and came to love it; its connection with motion, the slopes of curves, the use of differential equations to model complex, dynamic systems; these all spoke to me of a logical system deeply implicated in the physical world around me. Once I had learned calculus, I saw it everywhere around me: in a stone’s dropping, a car’s acceleration, a rocket’s launch, an athlete’s push off the starting block.

I majored in mathematics and statistics at university, but if I saw any beauty in mathematics in those years, it came when I saw some good friends of mine working out complex problems with some style. I had lost motivation and interest and barely survived my college years. My graduate studies in computer science didn’t help; I was able to–unfortunately–skip the theory of computation and graduate.

Years later, when I encountered mathematical logic as part of my studies in philosophy, some of my appreciation for the world of abstract symbol manipulation came back. It helped that my dissertation advisor was an accomplished mathematician whose theorems and proofs sparkled with style and substance alike. From him, I regained an appreciation for the beauty of the symbolic world.

I was never a mathematician, and don’t work in logic–mathematical or philosophical–any more. But my brief forays into that world were enough to convince me of the truths that Suri refers to in his piece:

[Mathematics] is really about ideas above anything else. Ideas that inform our existence, that permeate our universe and beyond, that can surprise and enthrall.

The ‘Historic’ Statue Toppling That Wasn’t

In his essay ‘The Toppling: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war‘ (The New Yorker, January 20, 2011), Peter Maass provides, by way of context and background, a useful deflationary account of the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003. The statue’s downfall had always had a stage-managed feel to it, even at the time; Maass’ account makes clear it was a journalist’s event through and through, with few Iraqis in the square, and even those outnumbered by war correspondents, cameramen and the like, and cheering only when the cameras  panned to them.

The over-the-top, prematurely celebratory response–of the Bush administration–to the statue’s toppling, part of the delusional description of the war, one made especially poignant by our knowledge now, of the mayhem that lay ahead for Iraq, was egged on by the media:

The powerful pictures from Firdos were combined with powerful words. On CNN, the anchor Bill Hemmer said, “You think about seminal moments in a nation’s history . . . indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.” Wolf Blitzer described the toppling as “the image that sums up the day and, in many ways, the war itself.” On Fox, the anchor Brit Hume said, “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen. . . . This speaks volumes, and with power that no words can really match.” One of his colleagues said, “The important story of the day is this historic shot you are looking at, a noose around the neck of Saddam, put there by the people of Baghdad.”

The invocations of ‘seminal,’ ‘indelible,’ Berlin Wall,’ ‘power,’ ‘historic,’ in these breathless descriptions of ‘ a minor moment in a long war’ are galling. They serve as good evidence for a thesis I have privately entertained for a long time: rare is the journalist who does not self-servingly succumb to the temptation to describe a reported event in precisely these terms because doing so increases their sense of self-importance as well. After all, if it’s a historic, momentous, seminal moment, then aren’t the journalists reporting on it carrying out equally momentous work, equally deserving of their place in history? Perhaps they should be written about next, made the subjects of detailed reportage, praised for their presence at The Event?

Descriptions like those cited above are thinly veiled exercises in self-glorification.  This was never more clear to me than during the Monica Lewinsky affair.  Then, confronted by one breathless television reporter and talking head after another, it rapidly became clear to me that what they all seemed to be desperately hoping for was an impeachment of a US president on their watch. Imagine: the memoirs you could write, detailing your role in the coverage of this ‘crisis’, the blow-by-blow accounts you could detail  of every manufactured twist and turn, every ‘intervention’, every skillful and perceptive and brilliant report you provided, as you expertly shepherded The Event and its actors towards its final, earth-shattering conclusion. I was there; this is what I saw.

It’s hard, apparently, to not want to be part of the story.

The Baby Industrial Complex

When you bring home a baby, you bring home something else as well: a subscription, a ticket to a strange new domain, one populated by goods designed and manufactured for babies–and their parents–to better equip them for all of life’s supposed challenges, to train, dress, entertain, edify, and amuse them. An industry of industries churns out one product after another, first placed on baby registries, then procured and presented, and then, sometimes, handed on down, to the generations to follow. They cater to many, many needs, some imagined, some real; they cater to anxieties and insecurities; they reassure, comfort, sustain; they prop up the edifice of upbringing and rearing.

There are wipes, fragrance-free, made of the right chemicals that won’t corrode skin; high-technology diapers that could soak up a mid-grade tsunami; breast-feeding aids, boppies, that promise comfort to the exhausted mother; ointments, creams, lotions, shampoos, all carefully calibrated for the tender infant’s epidermis; towels that will dry and warm; rattles that will distract and amuse; books in bright and dark contrasting colors, all the better to train babies’ eyes with; cribs and cots with adjustable bottoms and padded walls; bottles of plastic and glass sporting a dazzling variety of nipples and shapes; bottle cleaners and sterilizers; breast pumps, which introduce a new sound, disturbingly industrial, to the daily rhythms of the household; hand sanitizers to ensure the non-transmission of germs from caretakers and enthusiastic visitors to the baby; food processors for blending, whirring pureeing, and chopping, to prepare those mysterious concoctions that babies so happily and messily consume; musical toys, sometimes classical, for the more refined sensibility and the more ambitious parent, sometimes plebeian; talking toys, sometimes jocular, sometimes perky; toys with flashing lights; video and audio monitors; diaper changing tables; diaper pails, which, sadly, need to be emptied periodically; strollers and perambulators, their sizes ranged along a spectrum marked out by gigantic, tank-like behemoths at one end and slender whippets at the other; baby carriers for placing the infant in front, at the back, or on the side of the parent’s body and then carrying around; car seats for safe automotive transportation–you can’t bring home your baby from the hospital without one; high-technology noise machines to ensure an undisturbed daytime nap while the sounds of the city–the fire engines, the ambulances, the road construction crews, the police cars, the sanitation trucks–rage outside; bibs to keep the soon-to-be-soiled cute onesies and dresses clean; the high chairs for dining; the door swings; the rocking chair; the plastic tub and rubber duckies for the bath; the numbered blocks for learning to count; the snot-suckers; the thermometers; the pediatric vitamins.

The list goes on; you get the picture. A dazzling array of products conceived and constructed with every need, every eventuality, every possibility, seemingly kept in mind, anticipated, and catered for. And then, placed on the market, advertised and hawked as indispensable aids for life’s journey.

Tiny creatures; but ones apparently requiring a complex, expensive, and intricate infrastructure, all made available for the right price.

‘Prohibited’ and ‘Acceptable’ Weapons and Targets in War

In my last two posts on Syria on these pages–here and here–I’ve tried to express my discomfort at the threat made by the US to launch cruise missile strikes in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. In them, I was trying to make a distinction which I did not clearly articulate, one whose provenance goes back to the debates over nuclear deterrence at the time of the Cold War, or to be more precise, the 1950s, when the threat of mutually assured destruction was first made manifest:

[T]he crucial distinction in the theory and practice of war [is] not between prohibited and acceptable weapons but between prohibited and acceptable targets. [From: Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illuminations, 3rd ed., Basic Books, New York, 2000, pp. 276]

Indeed, insofar as a ‘prohibited’ weapon is to be viewed as such, it is because its effects are likely to be–or have been–disproportionately borne by ‘prohibited’ targets i.e., non-combatants, civilians, innocents, bystanders, call them what you will.  The use of a tactical nuclear weapon, say in the Second World War, on a battlefield, perhaps against massed infantry or armored formations, or out at sea, against a massive fleet of warships, would have provoked considerably less angst than its actual use against the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. (Despite Paul Fussell‘s–sometimes ad-hominem–dismissal of critics of the decision to use the bomb, there are good arguments to suggest it was a criminal act c.f the Walzer reference provided above, and especially the discussion on pages 263-268.)

This distinction, once established, now lets me make more explicit the incoherence in our attitudes toward war and weapons that I had suggested in my earlier posts on this topic. Drawing a so-called ‘red line’ around the use of chemical weapons seems arbitrary and hypocritical when those that have charged themselves with the enforcement of a supposed norm against such use are:

a) confused about the right norm to be observed;

b) guilty of violating the appropriate norm themselves.

A ‘limited’ US cruise missile attack on Syria–one committed to no other objectives other than the preservation of the ‘red line’–then, would have been problematic on both these counts. It would have flirted with the implicit claim that the slaughter of civilians is acceptable, or tolerated, so long as it is carried out by conventional weapons;  it would have established that the US, which is guilty of violating the norm against killing noncombatants in its drone strikes in Yemen and Afghanistan, was taking upon itself the responsibility to enforce its confused reading of it elsewhere.

In response to the cries of ‘What do you want us to do while civilians–prohibited targets–are being gassed?’, I’d suggest that in this case–this Syria, with its warring parties, at this point in time–all options short of armed retaliation be explored first, especially when such an action is likely to cause further loss of life, destabilize the region and perhaps invite retaliation by Assad, using conventional weapons this time, against the same non-combatants. (My post at The Washington Spectator alluded to some of these possibilities.)

Note: I realize that recent diplomatic maneuvers involving Russia have made a US attack less likely, but the threat has not completely receded, which suggests this discussion is still relevant.

The 9/11 Attacks: A Terrifying Spectacle, Viewed from Afar

On September 11th, 2001, I was in Sydney, Australia, working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales. I spent most of the day in my office, composing a long email to my girlfriend back in New York City, my former home for seven years, suggesting we break up. Our long-distance relationship was not working out; too much misery had been parceled out to the both of us; we hadn’t covered ourselves in glory; time to move on; and so on. I read and re-read and edited my email a few times, and then, as the close of the workday approached, saved a draft, and headed for home. I would read it once more at night before sending it off, hopefully bringing to a close an unnecessarily protracted series of disputations.

Once back in my neighborhood, I picked up some excellent takeaway Thai food from my local takeout joint–on Cleveland Street, Sydney’s home to amazing ethnic food–and a bottle of red wine. Time to eat. The pad thai was excellent, as was the rustic Shiraz, and soon, I was sated and drowsy.  I didn’t feel like editing and reading a long, dramatic email any more. I’d send it on the morrow once I was back at work. I watched a bit of television, and then headed to sleep.

A short while later, the phone rang. I picked it up, groggy and confused. An Australian friend from Melbourne was on the line.  He asked, ‘Are you watching the news?’ A little testily, I said no. He then continued, speaking quickly, in one breath, ‘I think you should; some hijackers have taken over a bunch of planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.’ This all sounded a bit bizarre, so I put the phone down, walked over to my living room and switched on the television. A close-up shot of one of the towers was being shown, with smoke billowing out of its windows. The scale of the building and the close-up confused me; it looked like a minor conflagration, perhaps caused by a small plane flying into the tower. But what was that about hijackers and the Pentagon? Still confused, I walked back to my bedroom, thanked my Melbourne friend for calling, hung up, and returned to the living room to continue watching.

Over the next few minutes, I slowly became more cognizant of the scale of the disaster unfolding before my eyes; I think I might have viewed some video of the jets’ impact. I’m not sure. And then, suddenly, it happened; the South Tower collapsed. I stared at the screen, incredulous. Perhaps this was a Hollywood movie being shot in New York City, and this building collapse had been rigged up for that? Somehow, strangely, I had managed to have my very own ‘it sounded/looked just like the movies’ moment. I continued watching, now transfixed by the spectacle. Half an hour later, the North Tower collapsed. I continued staring at my tiny television screen, barely paying attention to the newscasters.

I stayed awake for a while, sending some emails to my friends in New York City, inquiring after their well-being; I sent one to my girlfriend, hoping she was ok, and asking her to call me as soon as possible. Finally, the late hour and the wine caught up with me.  Besides, I was getting tired of the endless speculation about motives and the identity of the hijackers. I went to bed.  I wished I was back ‘home’; curiously, I felt excluded, looking on from the outside.  Miraculously, I fell asleep, and as I did so, I dimly sensed the next day would be quite unlike the ones that had preceded it.

That is my 9/11 story. That’s where I was; that’s what I did.

I never sent that break-up email; it wasn’t quite the sort of thing you do after a disaster like that. But we broke up anyway. I would return to New York City soon. First in December 2001, for an interview with Brooklyn College, and then, in August 2002, to begin my new job and life in a changed city.

On First and Second Languages – III

In the first post of this series, I described my relationship with English and Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani; in the second, that with German. The story in today’s post–that of Spanish in my life–is similar to the German tale: partial fluency, a long-standing, constantly procastinated commitment to formal study. The distinctive contrast lies in the nature of the fluency: in German, I possess some grammatical foundation coupled with a poor vocabulary; in Spanish, my vocabulary outstrips my grammatical foundation.

But back to the beginning. After I moved to the US in 1987, I lived in Elizabeth, New Jersey and attended graduate school in Newark. Elizabeth had a sizable Colombian and Cuban population (they were prominent members of its local Hispanic demographic). Newark’s Hispanic population was also considerable. There were, therefore, ample opportunities to pick up some Spanish. So I did; I read a lot of store signs, browsed Spanish-language newspapers, and acquired a small smattering of sentences and words to use in interactions with Spanish speakers (something as trivial as ‘tiene cambio para un dollar?’ was very useful when catching the bus in the mornings).  But I never learned how to conjugate verbs.

My opportunities to learn Spanish only increased after I moved to New York City in 1993, but I continued to make one crucial mistake: I did not take a class in Spanish to bolster the vocabulary, context, immersion and daily practice that was available to me. I prided myself on reading subway advertisements; I received praise for my pronunciation from native Spanish speakers (some consonant sounds in Spanish are similar to those in Hindi/Urdu, as are the rolled ‘r’ and the soft ‘d’); I sometimes helped tourists and immigrants who could not speak English with a Spanish sentence or two after they had sought help from me (assuming that I was Hispanic because of my appearance).   But verb conjugation remained a mystery.

I traveled to Spanish-speaking countries: Spain, Ecuador, Peru (twice), Puerto Rico. My wife, whose Spanish is more advanced than mine–yes, because of those damned verb conjugations–and who had used it during her work as a community organizer in East Harlem (Spanish Harlem, El Barrio) was our primary interface with the ‘natives.’ My Spanish improved during these trips; I picked up more words, more sentences, and used it more extensively in a variety of interactions.  I even attempted to learn a bit of Spanish formally; I browsed some guidebooks; attempted some drills; and even took a short afternoon class in Quito, Ecuador. But it wasn’t enough, and wait for it, my conjugation of verbs was still non-existent.

The problem with not being able to conjugate verbs is that you cannot form sentences; you can have a great vocabulary at your disposal, but you cannot employ it if you cannot conjugate verbs. It’s really as simple as that.

As in the case of German, I have made many plans to learn Spanish formally, but something or the other has pushed it off. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I have taken a closer look at duolingo.com and finished one level of practice; perhaps this time, I’ll stick to my guns and get the damn conjugations right.

Desearme suerte!