Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal


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Shelia y Yo

by Sheila krishna, Class of 2005

 

I am hoping to travel to Spain this summer and study in a university there. I am sitting in front of my computer now, applying for an award from the MIT Foreign Language and Literature Department, staring at the question before me: “Explain how studying a foreign language has changed your outlook.” At first, I am not sure how to begin; I have been asked this question many times before, in a variety of ways, with a variety of intentions, and with a limited range of acceptable answers.

During my medical school interviews, this question would be asked with a tinge of expectation, hoping that the answer would be a generic “It has made me appreciate and respect other cultures more.” While that is certainly part of my answer, it cannot be its entirety; I grew up in a city that was 85% Asian in Southern California- my cultural appreciation took root at a far earlier time than junior high school, when I began to study Spanish.

On trips home for Christmas, during our annual party for family and friends, I would be asked by my uncles and aunties (not by blood, but by shared backgrounds in India and common experiences here in America), “So what are you studying?” I would answer, “Biology and Spanish” mainly, but at times, to mix things up a bit, and instill a bit of fear, I would respond “Spanish….(pause two to three seconds)… and biology.” Breathing would then resume.

I remember one uncle’s visible distaste for my additional course of study. Clearly, I was the product of an American upbringing- too much money and time that lead to frivolous pursuits of a language spoken, in a certain world, by his gardener and housekeeper.

His wife, a lady with a razor sharp tongue and a penchant for speaking quite brashly for Indian circles, exclaims to him, “Don’t be rude! Sheila is learning Spanish so that she can speak to her patients when she becomes a doctor!” And Aunty is right- I certainly will use Spanish in my medical career. But her neat linking of my impractical pursuit of Spanish with an acceptable goal of medical Spanish leaves me dissatisfied. I don’t just study Spanish for language competence- that reason does not adequately explain the long list of literature courses on my transcript.

My MIT friends, ever practical, have attempted to explain my interest away by pointing to GPA-padding But this theory is quickly debunked when I remind them that I have actually worked harder than many of my classmates in my Spanish courses to receive the same or lesser grade. I can recall the aghast expression of my friend last spring when I explained that I read “Pedro Paramo” three times before I wrote my essay on it. My essay was about one of the character’s in the novel, Susana San Juan, a woman who maintains a double identity of sorts throughout the novel. To the world, she is a madwoman, but in her own mind, she maintains an intricate and imaginative dialogue that is inaccessible to the rest of the world. Her madness was a space that challenged his authority, I argued, for it created a subversive area that he could not control. I loved this idea, that a whole separate world could exist outside of one’s own reality, and I have seen this theme repeated in many of the Spanish novels and short stories that I have read.

But the questions remains, if I study Spanish neither for my medical career nor for an appreciation of other cultures, why exactly do I do it? What has been the point of roughly 9 years of language, literature, and culture? What does a foreign language education in Spanish at a technical institute like MIT do for an East Indian from Southern California?

You’ll notice four prominent proper nouns in the last sentence- they were not put there without intention. “Spanish,” “East Indian,” “MIT,” and “Southern California” all conjure vivid images, ideas, associations, and stereotypes. There is a certain set of roles that one could assume of each one. There would seem to be sharp boundaries around each of those nouns, limited spaces and interactions between their meanings. A person of Spanish descent is not a person of East Indian descent. MIT is not in Southern California. But clearly, the lines that separate these entities blend as well. Sheila Krishna, of East Indian descent, studies Spanish. Many Southern Californians attend MIT and maintain their state pride. It might seem that they blend to form a mass without definition or boundary, a “melting pot” of relationships between these nouns that make me who I am. But what happens to me in that process? Where does the “I” end up, in that mass of intersecting lines and blended definitions of who I am? The melting pot doesn’t sit well with me, and I suggest that, for me, my “melting pot” is better described as an alternate space for identity.

In retrospect, it’s not a coincidence that Susana San Juan interested me so much- her creation of an alternate space, free of the control of others, appeals to my sense of alternate identity. I was never comfortable with describing my existence in a border region, in the divided intersection of different influences. I seek coherency in my life, and my study of Spanish precisely as an East Indian from Southern California has brought me closer to that goal through the presence of an extrinsic but internal space for myself. I see another version of myself as existing wholly and fully in an alternate region. My alternate space encompasses the physical space of my Spanish classrooms and the ideological space of the meanings and world views that I have encountered reading Cervantes, Carlos Fuentes, and Juan Rulfo, to name some of my favorites. My alternate space includes every frustration I have felt in wrestling with these texts and, after I understand some part of them, my alternate space grows to include every displacement from what I once knew and believed. By studying Spanish language and literature, I have been able to project myself onto a history and culture that is not my own- the resulting image exists in an area unto itself, an intrinsic extension of myself.

An “intrinsic extension” makes no sense unless what is on the outside can somehow influence the inside. Does the alternate outside identity affect the inside? I would argue that it does and that it must. My study of Spanish has created a space in which I can be all of the things that I do not yet see in myself, where I can contemplate questions that I rarely think about it my daily life. But lately, as I near the end of my years at MIT, this hasn’t held true anymore. The ideas and thoughts that fill this space tend to reach critical mass and overflow into my daily life more frequently. I am reminded of a Borges short story, where objects from an alternate universe begin to pop up in the known world in surprising and unpredictable ways. In my own life, I can’t be sure of when or where or how my alternate space of thought and ideas will enter into what I know about myself and my life. But I am okay with that, because my alternate space still belongs to me. It is mine, it is me, and it is my vast unknown self that I am not afraid to call unknown.