I've been trying to complete a little sculpture about fear and learning. The sculpture began taking form on my trip in Mexico. As much of my thinking happens, it is taking shape by writing about it, tearing up the writing, and then gluing it back together. After my time in Latin America, I have thought a lot about what it means to be foreign, in every sense of the word, and to be different and try to learn.
Prior to this trip, I had spent two years of grad school thinking and practicing to be an art teacher-straddling the worlds of "teacher" and "student" and thinking about power and privilege and access to information. Going to Mexico put me firmly back in the role of student, in an unknown territory, with many privileges voluntarily stripped from me. I lived the paradox of having the means and privilege to travel across borders but to also be totally paralyzed and infantilized by the newness around me and a language I didn't speak. How do I wash my clothes? How do I ask for medicine at the drug store? How do I explain who I am and what I'm doing there? To be a learner is to be a foreigner and it requires courage, patience, the ability to be alone for a long time, and self-love.
My goal -to learn Spanish- was met largely through one-one-one intensive courses with tutors who only spoke Spanish with me. As I've recounted before, learning a new language can be magical: the new sounds coming out of my mouth, the strangers who became friends in a new language with me, or hearing a new common phrase click in my head as I walked down the road. But learning, of course, can be excruciatingly painful and lonely. I recall towards the end of my trip, I was really trying to blast through the Intermediate Spanish plateau that so many learners struggle to surpass. So much information was coming at me during one class and instead of seeing it as a fault of the teacher, or for speaking up for myself or asking to change course, I started blaming myself. That abyss between student knowledge and teacher understanding of their student is amplified in a language learning setting. An easy example: The teacher explains in Spanish what homework I should do, then I go and do something else and return with the wrong assignment. I really thought I understood. How many times do we think someone is not listening to us when really it was just interpreted differently? During one class, I felt so upset with myself that I hadn't figured out a conjugation and, according to my own goals, I was way behind. I fought back tears while the teacher talked even more loudly at me trying to shout the pronunciations and concepts into my skull. (Increased volume does not increase clarity and understanding, just my adrenaline.) Despite being an adult who chose to be in that room and was paying for it, I felt like a 13 year old who wanted to cuss him out and leave the room. I felt this strange hostility bubbling up when he asked me questions I couldn't answer. Stop exposing my ignorance, maestro! In that moment, I learned to be a more compassionate teacher and swore to never forget that feeling of being lost and isolated. I try to imagine that feeling when the power reverses and someone else "just isn't getting it" when I explain something seventeen times over. That's the feeling of being lost at sea without touching and seeing the bottom of the ocean but laughing at the turtle under your belly....that is the feeling I'm trying to squeeze into the little boxes of my sculpture so I never forget.
I say all this not because I want you to know how brave I am or how well I can take money out of an ATM machine in a foreign country. I say this because it has become more and more clear to me that we live in a culture of fear and taking a step out of our country, our comfort zones, our language, our circles, our expected "career paths" is a radical counter-action to fear. It is an attempt at love and imagination. When I think about my unplanned trip to Mexico with no return ticket, the word trust keeps coming up...and imagination. I couldn't have done this trip without imagination. I joked with others, "Am I crazy for doing this?" because intense use of your imagination feels unsound, unreasonable. It was unreasonable because I didn't need reason; I needed imagination. And curiosity. And trust. There was no reason to trust the taxi driver who made the sign of the cross and kissed his hand before accelerating wildly out of the airport and into the tangle of Mexico City. There was no reason to trust the chef on the street and follow him home on the subway. (Okay, that was a little crazy.) There was no reason to trust my naive, Anglo-brain, riding into the mountains without proper footwear and not nearly enough Dramamine. There was no reason to trust that my backpack stowed under the bus would be there in the morning. There was no reason that I should jump out of a boat in the ocean, a mile off shore with a turtle and a man I met on the beach. (I did trust the advice of a few Dutch people about which building to stamp my passport at the Guatemalan border. Now that was reasonable.) To leave the familiar and to move somewhere by yourself requires imagination...which is why I think artists are always traveling. We tend to imagine another way and another world. It's a feminist act as well. When men or women go outside of our usual network, our usually defenses, I believe we're actually respecting our hardy individual strengths and trusting our intuitive feminist selves.
So many people have asked me, "Weren't you scared traveling alone?" They usually are referencing sensational crime stories they hear on the news or have distorted notions of foreigners as all being dangerous criminals preying on young American women. I also think what they're really saying is "I'm afraid of doing that myself." I try to respond: Life is just as scary when you stay in one place, in one confined box, and don't use your imagination. Or I make a less eloquent response exaggerating the crime rates in Rogers Park. Whatever you take away from this, turtles and Dutch people are awesome and Rogers Park is a perfectly fine place to live.
