#I didn't have to change because of any cultural or ethical markers

[elijasz]

I've been reading a lot of literature written by people who have been displaced and most recently I've read parts of "The Ungrateful Refugee" by Dina Nayeri, which I can only recommend.

After reading the excerpts, the story has sparked an internal monologue within me. Between the white german perspective I grew up with and was raised on, and the one that started growing when I sat down with my grandma years ago and listened to her story of being displaced.

That side of me that has to carry my grandparents immigration papers and marriage certificate to every visit at governmental bureaus, as proof that they changed their name to fit in. Where they ask me why my birth name is different from the one I carry now even though I have never been married. (And I want to say "because this country deemed their names unacceptable and wanted proof that they were there to stay and wouldn't be easily able to return" every time, but haven't done so yet.)

I grew up unaware of the violence my grandparents and parents had experienced at the hands of the government or their fellow citizens. I didn't experience any. This is important to say. I am white. I only ever had this citizenship and I only ever learned German in my childhood. I am the product of integration so perfect that I didn't even know about the displacement my family went through. But their story isn't the same as that of other people who had to move away from their homes, because my grandparents moved within Europe and looked almost exactly like the people of the country they moved to.

Nowadays they are seen as European and German. They speak German, my grandma lost her accent, though her grammar is still a bit "strange", as her own daughter puts it. I love her strange little sentences and it makes me sad that her own daughter mocks her for it. But I never thought of that linguistic quirk as a marker for cultural identity. I thought of it as my grandma's identity, unrelated to the language she spoke in the past.

It makes me angry that her own daughter now complains that people who flee to this country, "our country" as she likes to call it, as if she wasn't bullied and beaten for her name and behaviour as a child, should try to fit in and be grateful. Learn the language, customs, unspoken rules, so they can become invisible. Abandon their past because it must have all been horrible. Any reminder of their past is a thorn in the eye of the observer. Identity a sharp stone that cuts the soles of feet which walk over them.

I cried after reading the few pages of the book, because I don't relate to my grandparents culture much anymore. I know the smells, the food, the traditions. But they aren't too different from the ones of the country I've lived in all my life. They're from another white european culture and thus more accepted. And still my grandma chose to hide them and my mother chose to abadon them almost completely, only displaying them in the safety of our home and only ever as a memory of the past. They aren't part of my present reality. They are something only presented on holidays and rarely performed unless we visit the rest of the family.

I don't feel like it is my right to reclaim this culture. It feels like I will never belong in this culture because I didn't go through the same hardship as those who openly lived it. I look the same as all the other white people around me. Light hair, light skin, light eyes. I speak the same language and eat similar food. I am "one of them" and I have never had the burden of being seen as different because my grandparents, at least the one who survived, was too afraid to teach her children about their identity. And those children assimilated and integrated themselves and lost their past to the place that said it would help them and then ripped their names from them, their titles, their achievements, their language and culture. And then told them to be grateful. And they are. Oh so grateful. So grateful that every time I criticise this shithole of a place, they say "Be quiet. At least it isn't this other place that we have learned is bad and dirty and barbaric. Be grateful you're born here!" And for so many years I was greatful. But I'm done being grateful for erasure. Grateful for the knife that flayed my ancestors identity, cutting off the unloved pieces. I have no wounds. My mother hides hers under bandages so thick and old she isn't even aware they exist anymore. Or maybe she's in denial. But my tongue itches whenever I hear others speak my ancestors language and my heart grows when I hear their songs.

I would learn their language. But I already learned enough European languages. Sure, I can speak them outside of Europe. They are useful there. But for what reason? I don't want to be the one pushing the knife through others skin, even if just by accident.

So now I'm learning Arabic, as here it is a language many speak in secret because its unacceptable to the white people. I'm cooking Iranian food and Polish food and Sudanese food and yes also German food and I don't care if sometimes someone complains it smells weird when I open my lunch at work. So does theirs, but I'm not complaining. I'm happy they enjoy their lunch. If it tastes good and if the smell makes the heart of a single person grow and their song grow louder and prouder then it was worth the work put in. I have endured a lot, but I am still whole and I am privileged enough to wield a knife myself. I intend to use it defensively, though I know I cannot avoid accidentally cutting others.

I'm a teacher and I want to allow my students to feel understood and represented and not like they have to shave off parts of their identity to be good and acceptable and successful. I don't want them to think they have to endure the knife and the pain to be acceptable.

Cultural Superiority is bullshit. We, as europeans, didn't respect other cultures in the past and we don't do it today. We carry knives everywhere we go to cut off what we don't like and then act surprised when others come wearing armor. You don't need to make yourself fit in to deserve respect. You deserve respect because you exist. You don't have to thank the people who cut pieces from you. You don't have to wield a knife to flay yourself either. And you sure as hell don't have to be grateful for being tolerated.

You are deserving of your identity.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

re: The ASL post

Surely I can't be the only one questioning the premise that if you shut down in one language, you shut down in all of them, equally?

Selective mutism is a whole Thing that exists. There's speech loss where you can somehow take a business call, but can't otherwise converse or ask for help or articulate anything outside of that specific compartmentalized embodiment. There's speech loss where echolalia is still possible. There's dissociation and compartmentalization and codeswitching which allow people to superficially bypass their own brain's shutdowns to produce the results they need.

And then there's the fact that different languages can mean different brainspaces! Thinking in and expressing yourself in language A versus language B can be sooo so so so so different in terms of emotional processing, sensory experience, gender realization, logic formation, etc, and that's even without getting into the root cultural differences. You can be groggy and overstimulated and find solace in a languagespace where you have more resilience, and it does not have to be a regression to a native tongue!

And that's staying within the same language modality! Once you change that, it's extremely possible that triggering conditions like fatigue/exhaustion/overstimulation can be relieved. How many writers have been utter wrecks in crisis while churning out beautifully written works in their non-native language? If a Deaf person has speech loss but can write in legible English during the event, is that marked as physically impossible with the same level of scrutiny?

Meanwhile, my experience with using ASL as someone who was already multilingual (including natively multilingual) before that is that the non-manual markers of the language are so embodied and so different from my natural performance state that of course it requires a different kind of brainspace, it's practically a form of masking except that it relieves the pressure of the other masking (tone, volume, pace, vocabulary, presque vu, cluttering, pitch, and then all those things but with stealth trans gender anxiety).

Also when someone is in crisis, why is it necessary for them to communicate with perfect grammar? What hill even is this?

(In addition, I resent the idea that it's impossible to have intuitive fluency in a language just because you didn't start it as a baby. And the idea that struggling with one parameter of a language will render native users utterly incapable of comprehending you... which is to not even touch the ways in which parameter prescriptivism hurts tactile sign users--*immediately falls through a trap door triggered by the anti-intersectionality police*)

As always, friendo, you speak mine own thoughts to the core, lol

I didn't really feel like getting into every concern I had with the way that post was presenting its conclusions, because I had already written several paragraphs and that felt.....unhelpful at best.

But yeah, I mean. I am not aware of ANY psychological research whatsoever that supports the assumptions they were making about speech/communication loss as an experience, about the way the brain interacts with language, and about the role of learning new languages. It sounded like a LOT of misunderstood moral/ethical arguments being made after hearing someone talk about a small piece of the complexity of Deaf/HoH language/communication sharing with other communities, that they didn't fully know how to apply because they don't actually know anything about the neuroscience of the situation.

Which like. Fine I guess. But that was sort of why I pushed back. I really appreciated the point that sign isn't AAC! I would really like to see that acknowledged more in the way speech/communication disorder folks talk about our interactions with it! And it worried me that the point didn't ACTUALLY seem to be "these things are different so here's the strengths and challenges of each/the outcomes one may hope for with each, so you can better understand how to utilize them" but rather "If you can't be confident that you have fully unlearned your prejudices and assumptions here, you're actually harming Deaf/HoH people by trying to learn our language." That doesn't make sense to me. And when the response was to completely misrepresent my words and ignore my explicitly coming from an intracommunal perspective while literally refusing to actually interact with what was said? That made me feel really uneasy about where that arguement actually was coming from.

One of the things I didn't talk about in the post is that my languages actually get employed in a clear and consistent order as my cognitive functioning decomps. I am "functional" if I can speak and/or write in English. I am "impaired" If I cannot use English, but CAN use Spanish. And I am fully "adrift" if all I can do is sign/use assistive gestures. Literally, what language I am using to communicate is almost always in indicator of my state of mind, to the point that long before I had language for any of this, I warned Wifey ahead of time when we first started dating that I might lapse into Spanish under certain circumstances, and they would need to tell me if they didn't understand because I prolly wouldn't notice. Despite being my "first language" English is genuinely the hardest for me to interact with. This remains true as I learn more languages (German is easier than English too, as is Italian, and even Russian.) English is - by literally every measure - a hot mess of a language. And it is actually really fucking common for even native speakers to find other languages more intuitive.

Why would that suddenly stop being true because your cognition is failing? Yeah, you won't have **the same access** bit you were never going to anyway???? And "more access than zero" is literally invaluable????

I dunno. I know it's poor behavior to get frustrated at people speaking with authority while repeating objective untruths in something I have actual expertise in, but there IS kinda a certain point when I have to wonder why people immediately internalize the stuff they see on tumblr without actually exploring the work of people who pioneered the research someone is attempting to convey? Why are yall happy NEVER interacting with a primary source?

And literally? Don't tell me "well we don't have any intracommunal research!!! Because that hasn't been true in any significant field of study for a decade now. Limited? Sure. Explorations of genuine intracommunal priorities in their infancy? Absolutely. But at this point if we are 30yrs into "nothing for us without us" without being able to recognize that intracommunal knowledge generation has ALWAYS happened, and the problem was not an absence but an obfuscation?

We probably have bigger problems at that point honestly.