==================================================

Location: Home.
Studying: Swahili.
Listening: "Twisted Tenderness" by Electronic.

Took a break from my usual custom of heading entries with lyrics to show off a little of my recently acquired knowledge. "Hamjambo?" translates roughly to "How y'all doing?" and is appropriately answered by "Hatujambo, mama." ("We are fine, miss."). Note that this is the traditional courteous exchange for general greetings--much like "How are you?" "Fine--and you?". More intimate acquaintances would use phrases I am still wholly unfamiliar with, but all in due time.

I've decided to not only try to document my writing progress (or lack thereof) in my journal, but to also throw in the occasional armchair lesson in Swahili, so if you've ever considered picking up bits and pieces of a second or third, etc. language, stay tuned and learn with me. I'll try to throw in not only the vocabulary lists that I'm memorizing, but also notes on grammar and pronunciation. Fun for the whole family.

Of all the languages that I've studied formally (Latin, Spanish, French) or informally (American Sign Language, Arabic, Japanese, Gaelic, Tsalagi (Cherokee)), Swahili has been one of the more esoteric and definitely the most intriguing. When I've set aside other lists of words, phrases, and declensions, I've always come back to Swahili. I'm not entirely sure why. It likely has something to do with my deep attraction to the study of the continent of Africa--particularly, of the Eastern Coastal Regions of Kenya and Tanzania. The notion of Africa has held a deep pull for me since childhood (when many games of make-believe were centred around the "darkest Africa" I first heard referenced in old black-and-white movies on TNN). The notion of safari (Swahili for "trip" or "journey" borrowed from Arabic) has conjured all manner of deeply romanticized images for years--the golden savannah, lions lurking in the swaying grasses, gnarled tree branches spreading against those crimson sunsets from the Discovery Channel. Two years ago, while still LARP'ing, I created a character whose history began at the height of the slave trade in Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar in what would later become Tanzania. I researched the histories of Kenya and Tanzania for weeks and was entranced by the blending of cultures, languages, and traditions that have distinguished Eastern coastal Africa for centuries. I also developed a craving for any information concerning the British occupation of Kenya that I could get my hands on. In essence, I'm likely another damn colonialist caught up in exoticizing the other and romanticizing a land that I have never actually seen for the express reason that I have never actually seen it. So be it. Like Beryl Markham, Isaak Denison (Karen Blixen), and Peter Beard, I am in love with Africa--even if it is the Africa I have constructed of historical fact, media photography, and pure imagination. One has to start somewhere.

So I'm starting by learning one of her many languages. Swahili is a Bantu language that borrows many words from Arabic and Hindi, a legacy of the traders that visited the eastern coast's port cities. It is the national language of Tanzania and one of the national languages of Kenya (along with French) and is widely spoken in the surrounding areas of northern Malawi, the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and northern Mozambique (although the regional dialects vary widely). Oddly enough, my prep school college counselor (who held a Doctor of Divinity from Yale and was also the Religion teacher), spoke semi-fluent Swahili and was my first exposure to the language. He used to delight in greeting us and playing little word games in Swahili when he ran into students in the halls. Apparently something took because here I am, almost ten years later, studying the language.

My general love for language has been chalked up to heredity. My mother's elder sister was the first woman to graduate from Rhodes College in Memphis with a degree in International Relations and was recruited to be a linguist for the CIA. She chose instead to marry my uncle, a sailor in the Navy, but traveled the world and speaks about seven languages fluently after living in, among other places, Morrocco, the Philippines, Italy, Spain, and Saudi Arabia. I was required to study Latin in seventh and eighth grades and then chose to branch out into Spanish and French in high school (after wrangling special permission to get out of the language + ancient history traditional track). This resulted in my placing third in the state in my sophomore year on my Latin, Spanish, and French examinations (a fact of which I'm still pretty proud) and, more amusingly, in my eventually answering essay questions in a polyglot of the three languages. This last consequence almost lost me my permission for special study, as my language teachers were annoyed when I replaced words that I couldn't recall in one language with corresponding words in one of the other two. I eventually dropped Latin (exceptionally useful, but fairly dull) and French (very annoying grammar), but went on to take a Spanish literature/translation course in my freshman year at USC (with Dr. Afatsawo, a Kenyan-Caribbean who spoke nine other languages fluently--the man was a minor deity). Of all three, Spanish is the one that I have kept most current in (I have, after all, lived in LA for eight years broken by a six month stint in Houston--enough said)--and the one that I will still occasionally dream in or use to translate Neruda from the original Chilean dialect. However, I've lately started to make an effort to brush up on my French and I've subbed to Latin-L, a mailing list that forbids posting in any other language. In short, yes. I am a geek--but I love it. Language is our machine code--the somehow unfailingly elegant cipher that we use to communicate our wants, needs, dreams, and fears on a daily basis. Language was one of our first inventions, and is as necessary as water, food, oxygen, and shelter to the survival of a pack society. Even if we cannot write, we must have a capacity for coherent verbal exchange in order to interact with beings other than ourselves. I never fail to be amazed at the power of the simplest communication and the sharing that, by necessity, accompanies it. If you've never thought of the power inherent in the briefest conversation, try it. Perhaps we in LA (or other areas that are heavily populated with many diverse races and cultures) are a little spoiled in that we have daily reminders of how significant language can be--think of how many words or phrases you may have picked up from other cultures just in your day-to-day life or of how difficult it can be to, say, order a meal from your favorite lunch place when you and the waiter have to carefully negotiate a language difference (or, for that matter, how difficult it was to work through a theorem or finish homework while learning another language from your professor or TA). But you know, it's always worth the momentary confusion or frustration. Do people who live in, say, Memphis (a city not significantly affected by that sort of diversity), deal with such things? How does that affect one's perspective on the world? My mother would have no idea what a taco lengua was if it was offered to her. After being in LA for so long, that idea astounds me. Do we Angelenos (or San Franciscans or Chicagoans or New Yorkers, etc.) ever consider ourselves multi-lingual--or what a remarkable thing it is to live in cities that educate us on a daily basis? How dull what it be to never encounter another person with a different language or customs from our own? We're fortunate, y'all. No doubt about it.

But I'm rambling. I'll fill you in on my trip to parts east soon. Suffice to say, I had a wonderful time. For now, I'm off to drink some more wine and read some more of the Koran before bed. 'Til tomorrow.