ktravula – a travelogue!

Pondering Stereotypes

What do you think of when you hear the words “British”? Well, it depends on who you are, doesn’t it? I bet the French, the Irish, the Scots, and the Americans think of them differently than the Germans, South Africans, Indians and Nigerians do. Stiff upper lipped, stoic and unyielding. My first impression of Britain started and ended at the UK Border Agency counter at Heathrow Airport in London en route to Boston, and it wasn’t very heartwarming. Portrayals in Mel Gibson’s The Patriot and Braveheart didn’t help either, and if those were all I had, I’d have re-routed my plane flight to go through France. But then, there was Colin Firth in The King’s Speech that brought much humanity back to the name. And there is the delightful Queen. In any case, this post – which is merely supposed to explore my contact and thoughts with stereotypes has just merely started. I chose “British” as the first example in my head. Imagine if I’d chosen to start with “Jewish.”

Now, I have just listened to a nine minute video by Andy Borowitz, one of my best living comedians. His tweet feed was named the funniest of 2011 and he has provided the best commentary on every contemporary news since I’ve started reading him. He makes twitter a fun place to spend one’s day. So, back to the story. One day, I discovered that he was also a stand-up comedian. I’d always thought that it was hard to combine being funny in 140 characters to being funny in real life. He does both very well that now I can’t tell which one I like better. (Well, that was a lie. His tweets take the cake.) What was notable about him today that I discovered was that he is Jewish. Now it all makes perfect sense. See – and I’m not an aspie like my friend Clarissa – I sometimes tend to look for patterns, for no good reason. I discovered sometime ago that Jon Stewart was Jewish, and then I knew of Lewis Black, and then Larry King, then Jimmy Kimmel, and Jerry Seinfeld. The only other thing that connected them all was that they were funny, brilliant people. Then Woody Allen.

Now, a few steps back again. My favourite authors weren’t Jewish. They were Irish. George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Becket, W.B. Yeats, (and Barack Obama 🙂 ). I had grown myself into the idea that the most brilliant authors/people had some Irish in them. Oh, and let me now forget George Carlin. So it was such a shock to find out that when it came to intelligently interrogating ideas through literature and the arts, the Irish were not just the ones out there, and were definitely not the funniest. Thinking about it now, I should have taken a hint from the fact that Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman also had Jewish ancestry. So where does that leave me? Nowhere, actually. Like I said in a much earlier post, the link between the Yoruba people of West Africa to the Middle East – as plausible as it sounds on the surface – leaves many questions than answers. And that’s fine. I’ll just watch the Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, read Borowitz Report and go watch Larry King (whose last name is actually Zieger) on his comedy tour. There is an interesting, notable pattern in the talent of those who carry the ethnic (if not the religious) identity into the public sphere.

And there ends my post on stereotypes. I’m sure this wasn’t what you were expecting, but I have a feeling that a sequel will come sometimes soon when I come up with the other recollections of contact with people based on expectations, observable patterns of behaviour, hearsay, and yes, stereotypes. And yes, my friend Clarissa, and my head of department are Jewish as well. Regarding that expectation of brilliance – if only through contact – now I have nowhere to hide, and no excuse.

Riding the Storm

There was a huge tornado in this area four weeks ago, and I was in it. It was a most frightening experience. I was returning home from campus, and it ended with my car being spun 360 degrees and tossed off the road along with the meal of fries I had just bought at McDonald’s. (It gives a new meaning to “taking the car for a spin”, doesn’t it?) Luckily I wasn’t hurt, and neither was the car. But by the time I read the news and saw what it had done to the airport in St. Louis that same night, I knew how much luckier I had been. It moved planes and cars, broke glasses and knocked down electric systems. Since then I’d sworn never to ignore tornado alerts.

The biggest storms I’ve ever experienced in Nigeria usually happened at night. There have been tornadoes but they are rare and spaced out so I’d never actually been in one. They’re deadly nevertheless. Imagine walking in the rain at night and have the wind throw an aluminum roof straight at your jugular or at your car while you drove. Just a few years ago, father went to bed in a large house of two storeys and woke up with an open roof. The whole roofing frame had been moved a few miles down the street. My grandfather’s house once suffered the same fate many years later.

The houses in America are built differently, it seems, and thus suffer a seemingly greater damage. Then there is the powerful wind running at such speed that can wreck anything in its way. Two days ago, another big stormed roamed this parts and killed about 117 people from Missouri to Minnesota. Pictures from Joplin MO looked like a war zone. When people say “be thankful for little blessings”, I guess they mean that one should be grateful for not being in a place like this when the storm comes. It is a frightening, and often devastating experience.

UPDATE: President Obama has promised to visit the town on Sunday.

Ramblings on Tone

What can be observable in the process of acquisition of tones by L1 speakers of English? Chinese (and a host of other languages in South East Asia) already gives us an enormous database of observable patterns. African languages (in this case Yoruba) occupy another level of the problematic realm for those merely accustomed to a language based on intonation, stress and inflections. Why is it funny when my friends call me in a way that rhymes my name with Cola or “caller” rather than with the uptalk mode of pronouncing the “sugar” in “sugar daddy” or the “brother” in “brotherly love”. Tone is music, rising and falling as needed. What makes it imperative that speakers of English relate to it only in one direction, viz (usually) as a high-low in a two syllable word? Why will “Bolaji” sound like “allergy” rather than the “beautiful” in “beautiful girl”?

What other nuggets are observable? How much proficiency can an L1 English speaker really acquire in a tonal language like Yoruba? With the many years of study by people like Karin Barber and (perhaps) Susanne Wenger, could they/did they pass the native-like proficiency test? What is the bar for native-like proficiency anyway?; and besides the general list of impediments across second language learning processes, what are the specifics in L2 tonal language learning that presents the greatest obstacles? And how does it happen? It is after all equally easy, equally difficult to learn any language either at L1 or L2 level given an equal and sustained level of interest and low affective filter. Jargons, jargons.

A linguist might know, or at least be neck deep in the long process of finding out.

At Lewis and Clark

The Lewis and Clark interpretive centre is built to commemorate the spot where the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark departed on the orders of President Jefferson to discover what lay in the piece of land by then just recently purchased from France. It was called the Louisiana Purchase and it contained what is now must of the Midwest United States reaching to Arkansas, Minnesota and North Dakota. (A most fascinating look-back to those times would wonder what kind of country we would be living in now if the land hadn’t been sold and the land – as it was then – consisted of English speaking people on the east, Native Americans and some French speaking people in the middle and Spanish speaking people on the West.)

Here are some of the pictures I took on a visit to the state historic site a few miles away from here. The old houses there are replicas of the camps that must have been built by the expedition party before they set off on the Mississippi river trying to discover the flora and fauna of the wild west. The models, according to information, were rebuilt from the notes and diaries of Lewis and Clark.

Books Everywhere

As soon as school closed last week, professors emptied their shelves onto a table in our building. Old and new books, from fiction to plays and journals, poetry collections and textbooks lay spread there competing for attention. They were free to be taken away. By evening everyday, the best of the books would be gone. But by the next morning, there would be another load, and the process continued. I made a few selections every day of the week, including The Book of Yeat’s Poems by Hazard Adams and Exploring Language edited by Gary Goshgarian among many others.

Just last month, a colleague gracefully handed me a box filled with books of African writing published in the 70s. He had cleaned out his shelf and thought that I might be interested in the collection. I was. It is times like this that I wish that I was rich enough to pay for shipping costs to send tonnes of books no longer useful to their owners to small-town libraries and bookstores in Ibadan where young literary minds can get access to them. When I’m done with these, I’ll have to hand them to someone else who might find them useful. It’s hard to think that in a few years, the concept of books itself will have eventually become archaic, especially in these parts.

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