Forward Into Foreignness

As soon as I started reading Joseph O’Neill’s “Forward Into Foreignness” (called “Polyglotism” in the paper version of the issue of the New Yorker I was reading; archived), I knew I was going to post it:

In the nineteen-sixties, my father, a Corkman, was employed by Chicago Bridge & Iron, an American corporation that built industrial plants worldwide. He worked in hardhat management positions. An early project took him to Mersin, in Turkey. There, he met my mother. She had just spent a year at Langham Secretarial College, in London. They courted in English, then married at Mersin’s Church of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things.

My mother belonged to Mersin’s well-off Christian community, which was mainly of Syrian origin. This Levantine subculture socialized in French, voiced endearments in Arabic, communicated with functionaries in Turkish. Polyglotism was prized. My mother’s father spoke French, Arabic, Turkish, German, English, Italian, and Ladino. He sent my mother to French-language boarding schools in Lyon and Aleppo. She used French with her four children. We called her Maman and my father Papa. My first word was “attends,” because “attends” was my mother’s invariable response to my cries from the crib.

That was in Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. We kept moving—to Tripoli, in Lebanon; to Amanzimtoti, in South Africa; and to Matola, in colonial Mozambique. Our nanny there, Victoria, chatted to us in the language of Lisbon, and my first ironic remark was made in Portuguese. I was four years old. The remark came in response to my parents turning off my bedroom light. “Muito obrigado,” I said. I added, translating, “Thank you very much.”

During my father’s next assignment, in Ras Lanuf, Libya, mother and children stayed in Mersin. At preschool, I rapidly acquired fluent preschool Turkish. My teacher selected me to recite a Mother’s Day poem. I wore a navy-blue velvet suit handmade by my grandmother (her languages: French, Arabic, Turkish, and Greek). The poem began, “Annecim, dünyanın en iyi sin.” My maman, you are best in the world.

My father was posted to Iran. I didn’t want to go. After a family friend procured the airplane tickets, I cursed him: “Allah belanı versin, Georges Chalfoun!” We moved to Kermanshah, in the Zagros Mountains. There I lost almost all my Turkish.

A year later, in 1970, we moved to Den Haag. I learned Dutch. My mother, too, learned Dutch, well enough to attend Leiden University and teach French at the Eerste Vrijzinnig-Christelijk Lyceum. Near the V.C.L. was the Lycée Français de la Haye, at the front gate of which I was deposited, without my consent, aged ten. I’d been happy at the English School of The Hague. Now I faced two years in the French education system. I had learned an important Gallic concept: the fait accompli.

When I was eleven, my mother signed me up for private German lessons with an enigmatic German lady. With her, I reluctantly studied a book called “Die Drei Schwarze Katzen.” Later, I studied German more systematically. I can still affirm the dative prepositions: aus, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu, and gegenüber. And außer.

That’s how we did things in my family. You went forward into foreignness. Tabbouleh, hurling, helva, “Inshallah,” “godverdomme,” Georges Brassens, George Best, the Dubliners, Kaptan Swing, Sinterklaas, “Shoot!,” Johan Cruyff, “çok güzel,” “ya’aburnee shuhelwa,” Louis de Funès, “à table,” “Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge,” “Revolver,” Roger Casement, “Guerilla Days in Ireland”—all of it was our culture.

Click through for the rest. A good deal of it resonates with me, even though my own collection of foreign locales was different; I recognize most of his list of cultural items from my vast reading (though Louis de Funès was barely a name to me — apparently “he remains a household name throughout most of continental Europe including the former Eastern Bloc, the former Soviet Union, as well as Iran, Turkey, and Israel”), but does anyone know what “Shoot!” refers to?

Oh, and Amanzimtoti has an interesting onomastic story:

According to local legend, when the Zulu king Shaka led his army down the south coast on a raid against the Pondos in 1828, he rested on the banks of a river. When drinking the water, he exclaimed “Kanti amanzi amtoti” (isiZulu: “So the water is sweet”). The river came to be known as Amanzimtoti (“Sweet Waters”). The Zulu word for “sweet” is actually mnandi, but, as Shaka’s mother had the name Nandi, he invented the word mtoti to replace mnandi out of respect not to wear out her name. Locals frequently refer to the town as “Toti”. In 2009 the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Geographical Names Committee recommended changing the town’s name to aManzamtoti/eManzamtoti.

Frankly, “he invented the word” sounds like hokum, but I leave it to others to provide whatever fact-checking might be available.