Language itself is just a really weird thing - at the risk of coming off all 'Bill Nye-y' on the subject, it's really just manipulating physical body parts to produce various auditory signals which others can then interpret and attach some form of semantic to. On a broader scale, language continues to evolve and change rapidly with our society.
For example:
Just do it.
JUST.. DO.. IT!!!
The two phrases most likely immediately made you think of two completely different things - the first of Nike (a large company whose slogan is 'Just do it'), and the second of everyone's favorite actual cannibal, Shia Labeouf (whose recent rise to internet fame is closely tied to both the viral YouTube video "Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf" and his green screen motivational speech in which he repeatedly yells "Just do it.")
Fifty years ago, neither of those phrases would have meant the same things they mean to us now.
A century ago, it's likely that we wouldn't have even been able to effectively communicate with our peers, even though it's the same 'English'.
I'm sure this phenomena isn't exactly a groundbreaking realization for you guys - the point that I'm trying to get at here is that language is more than just a form of communication - it can be used as a lens through which our society is viewed.
Along the same vein, I think that beyond just the story being told to us, the language itself within DDR is a crucial tool for us to analyze the Hong's narrative.
Okay there's tons of stuff to address under the broad umbrella of 'language' in DDR. The one that I want to focus on in this post is the effect of not fully understanding (or at least having to parse and interpret) desert creole on the reader.
The reason I wanted to focus on this topic was because I actually connected it with another aspect of my life - Chinese. I'm fluent in Chinese, but like many other students who attended international schools, my speaking skills for exceed my writing and reading abilities - there's a pretty straightforward explanation for this; Chinese is is a non-phonetic language, which means you can't really 'spell' characters. Instead, you just kind of have to memorize what they look like and attach that meaning directly to the character. The effect of this is essentially that speaking the language is much much easier than learning and memorizing individual characters. Nowadays, it's very difficult for me to read Chinese - if I picked up a newspaper, I would need to work through it very slowly, reading over sentences deliberately and looking up characters I didn't recognize. It reminded me a lot of how I had to approach Desert Creole in DDR.
I draw this connection because it's super frustrating for me when I have an idea that I want to convey to someone across languages - whether it's explaining the meaning of a Chinese word which has no direct translation to an American friend, or trying to tell my mom why 'Tree bark tea' has no scientific basis for strengthening my immune system. In such instances, I fully understand what's going on in my head, but language becomes a barrier in my trying to communicate it to others.
Desert Creole in DDR serves much the same effect - it acts as a barrier between our own understanding of the text, and what the author may be trying to actually convey. It's also a highly individual barrier - depending on the reader's understanding of English, Korean, Latin, Spanish, etc. it can mean different things to all of us. I touched on this in my last blog post, but I think it's effect became more and more pronounced as the book progressed; the effect of language in DDR became increasingly relevant, but also increasingly subtle, as we worked through the novel. I'm sure many of us noticed that it became easier and easier to 'read' Desert Creole, and that with that ease came some sort of innate understanding of various aspects of the language - idioms, phrases, and manners of text/speech. I found it incredible that we were essentially learning an entirely different language, and that it's 'semantic' could be so easily separated from that of English.
This entire post was kind of unrefined and messy, but so were the ideas that I explored. Maybe I made it so rough as a stylistic choice, to manipulate syntactical elements of the language to change your readings of this post oooooo (nah, I'm just really tired, and too lazy to proofread the post).
Here are those Shia Labeouf videos I was talking about:
Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u4M6vppCI
Just Do It:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0
Terrence,
ReplyDeleteThis was a great and thought-provoking post! One of the things that I found cool when looking at the language of DDR was the tension between the written and spoken word. As I read the book, I found myself reading sections aloud to try to glean more meaning from the phonetic pronunciations of Desert Creole words that I didn't understand. I'm not sure whether it's just me, or humans in general, but I found it much easier to understand the Desert Creole when it was spoken, which makes it that much more interesting that Cathy Park Hong chose to write her poems in such a phonetic made up language. Does she want the reader to read these aloud? Are they meant to sound this much like spoken word or am I just totally wrong? Who knows !!