The movie I chose to represent this type of CS is “ The
Terminal” The film is about a man who becomes stuck in New York's John F. Kennedy Airport terminal when he is denied entry
into the United States and at the same time cannot return to his native country
because of a military coup. He feels completely lost because he does not understand
English, at the end of the movie he he gets in a taxi, telling the driver,
"I am going home."
Viktor Navorski: please!!! televisor, please!! televisor. ( he tries to catch someone's attention to identify what is in the news, he wants someone to help him to understand English.)
Viktor Navorski: please!!! televisor, please!! televisor. ( he tries to catch someone's attention to identify what is in the news, he wants someone to help him to understand English.)
link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFgF2rN1f4o (in this scene Victor is told that
he does not belong to anywhere because his country is on a revolution. Now he
is is stuck there and the airport becomes his home, despite this fact he helps
other people to solve different problems and do friends within the building. In
conclusion, he was living in the border for some time and started to acquire
the new language to communicate his ideas, he started to feel better although
that was not his “home”)
Verdecchia: I'm not in Canada; I'm
not in Argentina.
I'm on the Border.
I am Home.
Mais zooot alors, je comprends
maintenant, mais oui, merde! Je suis Argentin - Canadien! I am a post-Porteño
neo-Latino Canadian! I am the Pan American Highway! (Fronteras Americanas,
Verdecchia, 1993)
Analysis: In my opinion, this part of the
play perfectly exemplifies Verdecchia’s sense of border home. After reflecting
upon his origins and the different types of borders between latinos and
yankees, Verdecchia finally gets to the conclusion that he’s from nowhere and
everywhere at the same time. In this case, he uses several languages: English,
French and Spanish to illustrate it. This shows this man’s multiple identities
and the fact that he is now embracing all these different cultures as part of
his own self.
Example: In the TV show “Modern Family”
one of the main protagonist Gloria Pritchett (interpreted by
Sofia Vergara, a Colombian actress) is tired of being misunderstood by her
American family because of her accent and, while speaking, changes between
English and Spanish to express her anger and says: “Privacy in esta casa”. This
is a great example of CS with a sense of a border home. She feels frustrated
and lost in a culture that is not her own, and despite her efforts, it is
sometimes difficult to feel at home.
Link to the video:
https://youtu.be/g68KgoHWupg (minute 1:00)
Example:
Verdecchia: (...) in france, Paris,
France, The Moveable Feast, The City of Light, where I lived for a couple of
years. En France oú mes etudiants me disaient que je parlias le francais comme
une vache catalan. En France, oú j’étais
étranger, un argentin-canadien, une faux touriste. (...) I felt almost at home.
(Fronteras Americanas, Verdicchia, 1993)
Analysis: I think this part of the play
exemplifies one of the Verdecchia’s sense of border home. It is difficult for
Verdecchia to feel that he does not belong to anywhere. The different
languages' uses, as a language of resistance, reveal the fact that he is lost.
His heart and his mind are in those places at the same time. He is undoubtedly
fragmented with the sense of a border home.
Vendechia:
`Well, I´m in Bs. As. and so far I haven't thrown up. So far, Everything's
fine.
We meet in
Caballito. And Alberto and I have dinner in a bright, noisy restaurant called
The Little Pigs and Everything´s fine. And now we're looking for some place to
hear some music, a place in San Telmo to hear some contemporary music, not tango and not folklore, Alberto wants to see a band called Little Balls of Ricotta and Everything´s fine but first we have to
get the flat tire on his uncle´s Fiax fixed. We stop at a gomeria, a garage where they fix tires.´
This
quotation exemplifies code switching, being that the
narrator uses embedding language to make reference about specific
characteristics of Argentina as it is the band `Little Balls of Ricotta, ( los redonditos de ricota), the particular music
heard in Argentina
that represents us around the world, which is
tango together with folklore.
Apart from
that, he uses the term `Gomería´ and then he explains what it is. He feels identified with those words, being
that those are part of his own culture.
At
the moment he uses those foreign words, the listener realizes that that person
feels identified with a foreign culture.
Talking about literary works, Culler consider that, when a
play doesn't follow a cannon it belongs to the term `Literariness´
The author asks himself: `Aren't there special ways of
organizing language that tell us something is literature? Or is the fact that
we know something is literature what leads us to give it a kind of attention we
don´t give to newspapers and, as a result, to find in it special kinds of
organization and implicit meanings?´ He say that the answer must surely be that
both cases occur: sometimes the object
has features that make it literary but sometimes it is the literary context
that makes us treat it as literature.
In Verdeccias´s writing we could see the way he changed the
language, and the way they were written. That was what led me to ask myself
that if it was literary or literariness.
Culler says that, a
highly organization of language doesn't necessary make something literature. He
gave the example of a telephone directory, he says that we cannot make just any
piece of language literature by calling it literature. `I can't pick up my old
chemistry textbook and read it as a novel´(Culler, 1997).
I took a really interesting quotation by Culler´s writing:
`literature´ is not just a frame in which we put language: not every sentence will make it as literature
if set down on a page as a poem. But, on the other hand, literature is not just
a special kind of language, for different literary works don't flaunt their
difference from other sorts of language; they function in special ways
because of the special attention they receive.
We can think of literary works as language with particular
properties or features, and we can can think of literature as the product of
conventions and a certain kind of attention.
I consider that Verdeccia´s writing is a convention.
In
Verdeccia´s work it appears the following fragment:
“I´m not in
Canada; I´m not in Argentina.
I´m on the
Border
I am Home
Mais zoot
alors, je comprends maintenant, mais oui, merde! Je suis Argentin – Canadien! I
am a post-Porteño neo-Latino Canadian! I am the Pan American Highway!
In
this example it is clearly demonstrated that we always tend to drow on to our
mother tongue to express ourselves better. Nelson Mandela said "If you
talk to a man in a language he understands, it goes to his head, if you talk to
this man in his language, it goes to his heart". In Verdeccia´s case, he had a feeling of belonging
to several places, not just one, that is why he used those languages which
are part of his identity.
In the following example the author is trying
to say that no matter where the history started or is going to end, he is still
looking for his home. In several opportunities Verdecchia mentions that Buenos
Aires seems to be the place where he feels at home, mentioning important
people, culturemes and even
the emotions that come from inside him when he was there. His own history has a
mix of languages as well as experiences that allows him to talk and express his
deepest concerns.
Verdecchia mentions:
“It actually starts before that. I starts in France. Paris, France, The Moveable Feast, The
“It actually starts before that. I starts in France. Paris, France, The Moveable Feast, The
City of Light , where I lived for a couple of
years. En France où mes etudiants me
disaient que je parlais le francais comme une
vache catalan. En France, où j'étais
étranger, un argentin-canadien, une faux
touriste. Paris, France where I lived and
worked illegally, where, for some reason,
known perhaps only by Carlos Gardel and
Julio Cortázar, I felt almost at home. (Fronteras Americanas, Verdecchia, 1993)
I have found a very clear and
famous example of Alterity: “Hasta la vista, baby”. The phrase occurs when one of the protagonists
of the film, John Connor (Edward Furlong), teaches it to T-800 (Arnold
Schwarchzenegger). John Connor is a boy who lives in the border between usa and mexico.
His English is modified due to the large number of Spanish speakers who live in
that area.
In the
publicity of Molto, Maru Botana shows her origin saying Italian phrases as
“Molto practico”, “Molto Rico”, “Capisco”. Apart from that, the study of being
a chef implies a lot of specific vocabulary from other countries. Is a clear
example of Alterity, because she continually mix the languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXWkPOU6y0
For this
example I‘ve chosen the film “Spanglish”. In a scene the protagonist Flor and
her daughter Cristina are having a discussion in the bus stop (both use English
and Spanish). After a moment, Flor asks Cristina: do you really want to become someone so
different from your mother? In the bus Cristina hugs her mother. Like a play,
Cristina narrates as an adult who recognizes that "everything that is
today is based on the simple fact that she is the daughter of her mother”. This
example reflects code-switching as a functional mechanism for recreating a
sense of a border home because Cristina realized that her home is with her
mother and not in another place.
According to
Igor Maver: “Contemporary Canadian Perceives Home as several locales, which is,
however, at the same time deeply embedded in the collective cultural memory of
a migrant and her/his own personal biography (or that of their parents or
grandparents)”.
Link to
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DE00LB0QB8 (minute 1:25).
I chose a
song called "The Seashores of Old Mexico"; is a country music song
written by Merle Haggard.The song is about a young man wanted in Tucson,
Arizona. He decides there is a better life for him in Mexico; so he packs up
all of his stuff and moves to Mexico. In Mexico he loses all of his money the
first night playing poker. He then hitches a ride to the beach towns of Mexico
where he finds love and lives out the rest of his life.
The song
talks about the border that means freedom, a new life.
(as a functional
mechanism for recreating a sense of border home)
I consider that
this part will be wrong, but any way there might be a reason why it seemed
correct . Here it goes:
I
chose a part of a song (Dad - Neele Ternes) where the singer says “Home means
nothing without you” and I feel that not only a language can recreate the sense
of a border home, but also someone or something in your life. In this case, her
father meant home to her, and I feel in the same way. Missing home is not
always a matter of language or place, is more than that. Much more. Home can be
a pen, or a dog, or someone from your family, or maybe your neightbour’s plant.
Home is where the heart is, and if the heart hasn’t been settled yet, finding
home is a “must” on the “To Do List”.
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