This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
Song credit: “Scrapes” by Bing and Ruth (2017)
2020 marks a decade since I’ve moved to Canada, and what seems like 10 long years on paper feels very much like a blink of an eye behind the screen. This realization has rendered me pensive about my journey thus far to belong in this country–a journey of belonging through the matrices of culture, language, and identity. The journey hasn’t always been easy; it has been a grueling rite of passage that seems to never reach its destination. I write here and ask myself, where does it all lead? Where have I been and where am I trying to go now? Where will I, my languages and identities, end up? Where–and when–can I finally be home?
Our guest blogger this week introduces herself: سلمى , a PhD student in the interdisciplinary humanities at Concordia University. “Born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, I grew up speaking Arabic and Amazigh (the Indigenous language of North Africa), as well as French, English and a bit of Spanish. Issues of language, heritage and identity have always been part of my life. At the wake of my twenties, I decided to embark on the PhD journey, after having completed my Master’s degree in Swansea University, Britain, in human rights and international law with a focus on Latin American studies. Currently, my doctoral research is interested in the multiple manifestations of Indigeneity in the case of Montreal, including issues of identity and decolonial praxis. Moving to Montreal, the invisibility of Indigenous peoples in the city reminded me of my own experience as an urban Amazigh living in Morocco’s capital city: there but not really there at the same time. My interest in Indigenous issues in the Canadian context came from a desire to reconnect with my Amazigh and Arab heritage, and understand what Indigeneity means locally as well as globally. I enjoy traveling, the outdoors, listening to all kinds of music and dancing. I am also an etymology geek, especially regarding the intersections between Arabic and Portuguese/Spanish as a way to understand intercultural relations between my ancestors and Southern Europe in history.“
One snowy afternoon in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), I interrupted my writing activities to call my mother, and check in with the family. Since moving to this city five years ago to pursue my PhD, Facebook has become my main window into that part of the world ‘where the sun sets’ (literally)—a.k.a. المغرب or Morocco–the place I call home.
It’s mid-January here in frozen-solid Montreal and minus 30ºC with the wind chill. Naturally, the pipes froze this morning, not just in my home but in hundreds of homes across the city. Not for another week is the temperature here supposed to crawl up to a balmy high of zero…maybe! Under these somewhat frigid circumstances, it’s not easy to believe that a few short weeks ago, one could have been in a place where the temperature is never less than 30ºC above the freezing point, as is the case in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where I spent ten days last November on the way to Kolkata in December 2019.
The view from home—looking down from my cousin’s second-floor balcony in a residential neighbourhood in Jadavpur, south Kolkata, West Bengal, India
I want to write, nearly did write, “on the way home” to Kolkata. I stopped myself. It isn’t my home; hasn’t been since I was eighteen months old. I came to Canada for the first time in 1960 as an Indian-born Indian child on my father’s Indian passport. If my mother had given birth in Calcutta (as it was spelled then) any time after 1977 rather than in 1958, she would have passed on her Canadian nationality to her child through the principle of jus sanguinis, “law of the blood.” However, between 1947 and 1977, for children born abroad to Canadian parents, “Canadian citizenship could only be passed down by Canadian fathers when born in wedlock, or Canadian mothers when born out of wedlock.” The law, in other words, was sexist; children of legally married Canadian women living abroad could not inherit their mother’s nationality, only their father’s. It was not until age eight that I was naturalized, along with my father.
This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
When I visited Montreal for a conference fifteen years ago, it was not only love at first sight but also love at first sounds. The remarkable soundscape of the many different languages spoken in the streets of the city is very different from where I grew up: I was raised in a small town in Germany that was, and still is, almost entirely monolingual – including my parents’ household.
For those who are Key and Peele[1] fans, or even if you are not, I’m sure you might have come across this comical and satirical classroom sketch where Key poses as a substitute teacher in a predominately white classroom and mispronounces all their names as he takes the register. The sarcasm of the skit is unmistakable – anyone who is familiar with urban educational contexts can immediately recognize the parody on classrooms where monolingual and ethnocentric English-speaking teachers ‘bastardize’ or mess up multicultural students’ names. Except in this case, Key the mix-raced substitute teacher is the one who mispronounces some very common English names, such as Jacqueline as /dʒæ·kwa:·lɪn/ (ja-kwa-lin) or Blake as /ba·la·kɪ/ (ba-la-ke). The hilarity builds up as the teacher sees the students’ efforts to correct his pronunciation as acts of defiance, typical of inner-city high-schoolers and is all ready to declare “war” on them. When one student, Denise, retorts repeatedly that her name be pronounced as /dəˈniːz/ rather than /dɪ·naɪs/ (de-nice), the teacher lets out his anger by snapping his roster clipboard into two. His indignation is only assuaged when the only ethnic student (played by Peele) in the class, Timothy, responds readily and gladly to the teacher’s call of his name as /tɪ·məʊ·θi/ (ti-mo-thi).
The bazarro classroom depicted in this Key and Peele’s sketch jolts us to confront ethnocentric teaching practices, such as carelessly mispronouncing multicultural students’ names or even changing or imposing on them a certain new name to better fit with the dominant linguistic and cultural practice. Naming practice has “the power to exclude, stereotype or disadvantage students” (Peterson, Gunn, Brice, & Alley, 2015), particularly in the case of foreign names that bear unfamiliar sounds. One BILD guest blogger Narjes اسم من نرجس است (April 15, 2019) expressed how she felt different and out of place when her teachers couldn’t say her name right and that no one seemed to be interested in knowing the story behind her name. With her name erased, she felt part of herself got erased as well. Stories such as this reminds us as educators that insensitivity towards multicultural students’ names and identities can cause indelible harm and compels us to be respectful of linguistic and cultural diversity and vigilant of any identity-rejection practices in class.
