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Home in the Foreign: An Interview with Eve Zimmerman

Interview and profile

Profile

Does a foreigner ever stop being foreign? Eve Zimmerman, a professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley College, doesn’t think so. “As a caucasian person who started studying Japanese when I was seventeen,” she remarks, “I’ll never be a bilingual speaker—I’m always going to be a foreigner speaking a foreign language.” Nonetheless, Zimmerman delved into Japanese language and culture right after graduating from high school, and she never looked back.

“My introduction to Japanese,” she told me in her office one sunny Friday afternoon, “was serendipity.” Born in Wales and raised in the States, Zimmerman was a self-described teenage Anglophile, and planned to spend a gap year between high school and college nannying for relatives in England. Shortly before she left, her uncle got a job at the British Embassy in Tokyo; he invited her to tag along, and on a whim, she said yes. She fell in love with Japan that year—with the language, with the culture, with the aesthetic.

Zimmerman went on to get her PhD in Japanese Literature from Columbia University. After teaching for several years at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, she moved across the country with her husband and two young children. She then spent a few years teaching at Boston University before coming to Wellesley College, where she is now the chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures department. During her graduate studies, Zimmerman gravitated towards the study of girlhood and femininity within Japanese culture. Having spent nearly a decade studying the intensely male-dominated academic commentary surrounding the writing of Kenji Nakagami, Zimmerman recalls feeling “so tired of trying to fit into this impossible group” of critics. “I wanted to do something that I could recognize,” she explains, “and that was women’s literature.”

Japanese women’s literature has continued to captivate Zimmerman to this day. She’s currently at work on her second book project, a translation-based study of the introduction of classic Western “girlhood texts” to Japan and their subsequent influence on Japanese culture. From Wuthering Heights to The Diary of Anne Frank, Zimmerman has traced how translated Western “girlhood texts” facilitated a boom in postwar Japanese women’s writing. Her second book project was actually inspired by what she describes as “the equivalent of an academic midlife crisis when I began to wonder what it was … that I could offer to students, to a community of scholars.” Zimmerman found her niche in translation. As a white woman studying Japanese culture, she has always approached her studies with great humility, treading carefully and avoiding an imperialist viewpoint. Zimmerman’s “academic midlife crisis” led her to discover her passion for translation as the intersection of her own culture and Japanese culture.

Her teaching, writing, and discussion of Japanese language and culture has been infused with respect, and this has been a significant factor in her academic success so far. With her dedication, enthusiasm, and respect, there’s no doubt that Zimmerman will continue to be a positive innovator in the field of Japanese language and literature.

Interview Transcript

Hanna Day-Tenerowicz: Could you start by telling me a bit about yourself?

Eve Zimmerman: Yes, so, Eve Zimmerman, interviewee here. So now we’re beginning…So I research Japanese culture, postwar literature, and I got into this field partly ‘cause I grew up—uh, my mother was Welsh and I was born in Wales, and my father’s American, and we—I was moved to the States when I was very little. But my mother was a professor at the time, of Latin American literature, so I think I grew up with this interest in other languages from hearing Spanish around me, and seeing the antics of many Spanish departments, ‘cause she was an academic. But my introduction to Japanese was serendipity, I just happened… I had planned a gap year, I wasn’t going to go to college and I was going to be a nanny for my relatives in England. And right at that moment, my uncle got transferred to Tokyo, to work at the British Embassy. And so they said, “Do you want to come to Japan for a year?” and I had never even—I barely knew where Japan was, I’d never studied the language. But that’s what started me off, and after that year of doing intensive Japanese, I’ve never stopped studying Japanese. In fact, I think I’ll be studying Japanese forever. There’s always another level, there’s always some other Chinese character that you’ve never seen before. And, I just fell in love, I think, with the aesthetics of Japanese culture. That was the beginning. And then I began to study literature, because I just grew up in this household where there was a lot of literature around, and poetry, and so that’s just how I ended up here, where I am now.

[…]

HDT: How have you approached teaching, talking, and writing about East Asian cultures as an American and as a white person?

EZ: Ahh, with great humility. Actually, I think I had the equivalent of an academic midlife crisis when I began to wonder what it was, what is it that I could offer to students, to a community of scholars, and it’s actually what shaped my second book. Because, as a caucasian person who started studying Japanese when I was 17, I’ll never be a bilingual speaker—I’m always going to be a foreigner speaking a foreign language. So I thought, well what is it? Because I could never hope to catch up with my Japanese colleagues. So I realized that I was very interested in translation, and the process of that—not just theorizing translation, but actually doing translation. And I’ve done two book-length translations; one is a non-fiction, an autobiography of a guy who went and did strawberry farming in California in the ‘60s; and then the other book, the other translation I did was the story of this writer who came from the outcaste class. So I was just very interested in what it is to sit down and—it is a creative process, but how does it differ from the process of writing? And how, in a way, you have to really cleanse your mind of academic writing if you’re going to do translation, because academic writing gums up everything. So that I realized was something I could do in this field, I could translate. And then my second book project, which is based on translation, it’s about how Western classic “girlhood texts” (and “girlhood texts” I say with quotes around it), came into Japan, were translated, and how they facilitated a boom in postwar Japanese women’s writing. And, so, Wuthering Heights is the first chapter of the book, because Wuthering Heights was translated, and a number of Japanese writers have worked with the material, and the characters, and the setting of Wuthering Heights, to the point that a woman wrote a text about ten years ago that was an 800-page version of Wuthering Heights in Japanese. So it’s that sort of place, I think, having grown up being a reader of 19th-century English fiction, and I can see, is there any connection? And of course there’s going to be a connection, but is it worth—what kind of connection is it? So that’s how I thought I could contribute.

HDT: Did you find with the “girlhood texts” that anything was lost or gained in translation?

EZ: Oh, yeah, that’s a great question. I think things are transformed sometimes, beyond recognition, because I do believe translation is a creative act, and so the original is just the seed that you throw into the ground. And you don’t know what is going to grow up from that seed, it depends on the climate, and the soil conditions. Very extended way of saying that things are the same, and yet they are different, and that’s the interesting thing about it. So in the case of Wuthering Heights, you’ve got Heathcliff going from being really quite a savage character in English to a Heathcliff who weeps as Catharine is dying, who worries, who is very solicitous about her illness. He doesn’t say, “I will blight and damn you,” he says, “Don’t do that, you will make your illness worse,” and is weeping. So, you know, what is that performative side of the translated text? You know, what is it performing about, and for whom? Yeah, so those are the questions.

HDT: How do you approach the responsibility of translation? I’ve done some translation myself, and it feels like kind of a huge weight on your shoulders to speak for these other people without, like, twisting their words around. Like, it’s hard to find the balance between direct translation that is not pretty, and pretty translation that isn’t quite as direct.

EZ: Well, you know…so I had an experience with this, and I was fortunate enough to show my translation to Jay Rubin, the translator of Murakami, and so, this is a very brief example: there’s a word in Japanese that can mean “bloodline” or “family line,” and so I had translated this word as “family,” because this character is talking about a tendency in the family—“we can’t drink, in our family we’re alcoholics if we drink, so we can’t drink”—but Jay pointed out to me that I really should stick with the image of the blood. Because it’s blood that defines Japanese outcaste status, right? Like, these people have different blood from majority Japanese. So, in fact, being somewhat more literal, it’s keeping that…recognizing what’s important in the text that you have to keep alive, and what you can dispense with so that the English reader feels somewhat at home.  So I don’t believe that one can be a successful translator and make it completely awkward in English, you know there’s that whole theory that that’s what you should do; I don’t believe that, because it doesn’t work!

HDT: Right, ‘cause it’s not really English then, it’s just translated English.

EZ: Exactly, yeah.

HDT: What led you to study girlhood and femininity in particular within Japanese culture?

EZ: Oh, thank you for asking! Well, I spent my graduate student years studying this writer, Kenji Nakagami, who’s writing about what seems to be a very macho culture on the surface, but is actually some kind of matriarchy underneath. But it was his writing, plus the male literary critics surrounding this author, who were controlling his legacy, and controlling the discourse about him. And I got so tired of trying to fit into this impossible group. You know, there’s just, it was just too much machismo for me after ten years of doing it. And so I wanted to do something that I could recognize, and that was women’s literature. This just happens to graduate students—you go through this almost hazing process, and you start identifying with whoever’s teaching you, and that’s what happened to me. You have to prove your worth on that ground, and my second book project was not about that. As a result, it’s taking me time to write.

HDT: Are you still working on the second project?

EZ: Yeah, yeah. So, hopefully this summer…one of the chapters I just finished is about Anne Frank’s diary and a Japanese woman writer, Yōko Ogawa, and how Ogawa uses The Diary of Anne Frank in her work, and how she uses it and what it means to her in her writing. So that’s the latest thing.

HDT: Do you identify as a feminist? And if so, when did you begin to call yourself a feminist, and if not, why not?

EZ: Wow, that’s a very good question. I mean, I suppose I started pretty young, and I think it’s ‘cause I had a working mother who was very good at pursuing the dream that she had of being a professional and having her own independent existence, so to me that seemed, by default, just the way to be. But I’ll tell you, I think the time I really became a feminist happened when I was an assistant professor, and you know, it was post structuralist days, and the feminists of the seventies, those critics, those original madwomen in the attic critics, started coming under—they themselves were being subjected to criticism, that their work was heterosexist, and it was classist, and I started going back and reading the old journals, some of the old feminist journals that came out in the seventies, from those co-operatives, and I thought, “This stuff is just great.” And I think it was then, after growing up with it, and then having to look back, and read about it and think about it, that I really became a feminist.

HDT: Do you remember what your first experience interacting with another culture was, in any context?

EZ: Oh, that’s a good question…yeah, any context…oh, well I was a terrible Anglophile as a teenager, because I thought that being Welsh and going to Wales and eating Welsh cakes was the height of civilization. I really, I just loved Wales. And I had a grandfather I adored, and he lived until I was about 12 or 13, and so I had this whole phase where England was the homeland. And it’s funny, now when I go to England, I feel very much a stranger there. I have no…English culture seems rather uptight and negative. So, yeah, I think it was my Welsh mother and my Welsh grandfather, that must have been it.

HDT: Did you ever feel like you were in between two cultures having moved from Wales to the United States, or did you just grow up feeling like you fit in in America?

EZ: Oh, I think I was American. Except I did have this mother who didn’t know what sports were, and we never went to Disneyland, and we didn’t do a lot of those things. But, I think I felt very comfortable growing up. The times I’ve felt in between cultures is when I’ve lived in Japan for a long time and come back to the States, because then I really feel a bit estranged. I get so used to living and speaking in a certain way, and behaving in a certain way. I come back, and my sisters will tease me, “Why are you speaking in such a high voice?” So, but all in a good way, yeah.

HDT: What do you think is the hardest thing to get used to when you’re transitioning into living in Japanese culture and then when you’re transitioning back to American culture?

EZ: Oh gosh, so many things…yeah. Well, how to be female and assertive while speaking Japanese is difficult, Hanna, it really is. Because it’s, you know, here we’re sort of trained to, you know, you have to speak up, and you have to walk into the room and make sure people hear you. But there’s a way to be incredibly assertive in Japanese as a woman without sounding or acting like an American. So that’s always the challenge for me. It’s hard. I don’t know if I’m successful. But what I’ve done is find female role models, so women who are somewhat senior to me, or Japanese women, and I listen to the way that they speak, and I copy that.

[…]

HDT: Do you prefer to be traveling, or do you prefer to have a home base and just kind of staying in one place?

EZ: Oh, yeah, that’s…you know, here’s the thing—I like to be at home, and then I get very restless. So, I’m afraid that’s happening to me at Wellesley a bit. I’m getting restless, I’ve been here fifteen years, and I’ve never stayed anywhere for longer than five years before this! Because we moved a lot when I was a kid, so I, yeah, I think I like to be able to have a home base but also roam around. And I feel as if I’ve traveled a lot, but my kids are just leaving home now, and so this could be the time to do more traveling.

HDT: If you could give your undergraduate self one piece of advice, what would it be?

EZ: Oh, gosh, yeah…have more confidence in my abilities. I would tell all my undergraduates…there was Helen Miren, I was just talking to Thom Hodge in Russian…so, Helen Miren has this quote, that is, “To be young and beautiful is to be miserable and paranoid.” I thought that was so funny! And he’s designing—we’re doing how to spread the word about, promoting humanities at the College. And he said that, you might be young and beautiful, but then you do waste an awful lot of time just feeling you might be beautiful but you’re worthless, or you know, yeah, I think there’s still that feeling among women, of insecurity, you know, young women. And so I would turn to myself and say, “Go and be proud, be confident. Don’t waste time.”

HDT: What is your favorite thing about American culture and what is your favorite thing about Japanese culture, if you could pick some aspect?

EZ: Oh, yeah…American culture is messy, and Japanese culture is clean. And so what I mean by that is, what I like about America is the openness, when I come back from Japan I notice how many different kinds of people are interacting with each other—yeah, sometimes it’s a disaster—but, you know, there is this lack of…things aren’t determined, at some level in America, it’s more rough and tumble. And in Japan, there’s an unwritten set of rules and behaviors, and sometimes it’s constricting. […] You get tired of, if you speak Japanese, you begin to expect people to treat you like any normal person, but there’s still always this emphasis on racial difference or cultural difference, so I find that kind of constricting.

[…]

HDT: How many times have you been to Japan to live or study?

EZ: A few long times where, you know, I did graduate research. I would say I’ve lived there about…not quite ten years, but on and off. So, these days, with this job (hello, Wellesley College), and the family obligations, it’s been harder to go. I go for short periods, so last year I was there for a month in April, and this summer I’m going for a month in July, to do a research project with my sister. So, but, you know, one of these days soon I’d love to go and spend more time there, just be there for two years, because one year seems too short. But two years would be great.

HDT: What would you want to do there?

EZ: Oh, I’d probably do, I’d love to do a Fulbright with some teaching in it, because then you meet people and there’s a context, and work on my third project, whatever that’ll be. That’s what I’d love to do. It’s a great place to live.

HDT: What’s your favorite thing about living there?

EZ: Oh, my dear…It’s probably the way you discover things in Tokyo. You know, you’ll be in a place that looks like a concrete jungle, and you’ll be walking down the street, and then there’s suddenly a garden or a shrine, or you see a store that’s selling beautiful edo fabrics. And it’s just these moments of discovery […] There’s an attention to…there’s a kind of care given to how one lives in the world, and it’s aesthetic, again, it’s that sense…and I just go, “Aaahhh! So now I know why I’m so interested in this.”

HDT: How did you find yourself at Wellesley College?

EZ: Oh, yes, how did I get here? I didn’t go to a small liberal arts college, so it wasn’t on my radar. You know, I got here, again out of luck. I was teaching at USC in LA, and my husband couldn’t find a job, I was supporting him. And then he got a job at MIT. So we, I’ve been incredibly lucky. First I was at BU, I had a job there for three or four years, and a job opened up here. And it’s just been great. And I’ll tell you what I love most about it, it’s really the students here. Because I was at BU and it was hard to get students to do the reading or take an interest. And they were not served very well by the university at the time, I think it’s much much better now, but I just remember the first day I came to Wellesley it was winter, and I came here with the kids, they were playing, they were very young then, two and four, and I just remember seeing the garden, the Hunnewell topiary…and I thought, “Where am I?!” I got the job offer and I said yes. Much, much better than where I’d been.

HDT: What is your favorite thing about Wellesley, and what’s your least favorite thing?

EZ: Oh, so, the students are my favorite thing. I know it sounds hackneyed, but I was thinking this semester what I’ve enjoyed most, and really it’s working with the students, and with Katherine, and Sophia. And it’s not just teaching students in one course, it’s getting to know them, really intellectually from the time they—you know, maybe they come to one of my classes as a sophomore, then maybe they come back again—and so it’s seeing students growing. I think that’s…you know, and I don’t mean in some sentimental way, I mean in concrete, intellectual terms—how they write, how they think, what they feel they can do—it’s all that. I also have very nice colleagues in this department. So that I enjoy, a lot. So, what do I like least about Wellesley…oh, dear Wellesley…dear Wellesley, if I were to write a letter to Wellesley College, I’d say, “Please learn to change with the times, and to be more responsive to new ideas.”

HDT: I’m sure a lot of the students would agree with you there!

EZ: Yeah, you know, I do have a history now, fifteen years, and I just wish there were a quicker decision-making process, or a way to do innovative things without lots of plodding along.

HDT: Forming a committee…

EZ: I think lots of educational institutions have this problem, it’s not just here. […] Here, I know what I’d do! Get rid of the departments. ‘Cause I think a lot of the problem comes from these entrenched departments, and faculty being territorial, and if we could just take the walls down, it would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

HDT: What are your thoughts on the new admissions policy regarding gender?

EZ: I say the more the merrier. I think it’s great! I mean, I don’t know how many students it will impact, but I must say I’m very proud to be at this institution and having Wellesley do that. I think that took courage, because the alums can be very conservative, or they are worried about it. But it’s interesting, I went to speak to an alumna club in Santa Barbara, and you would think that that would be a pretty conservative place, and they couldn’t care less about gender. You know, somebody raised a question after my talk, and everybody else said, “Oh, it’s not an issue, who cares?” So I thought, “Wow! This is a very good group.” And if this is representative of Wellesley’s alumna body then I’m not worried at all. […] I don’t think it’s going to change life here that much, it’s just the way it is now. Your generation doesn’t mind about that!

HDT: No! Although surprisingly, a few people do, which was very strange. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Yik Yak, it’s this anonymous thing […] and some people, after they released the decision, were on Yik Yak saying like, “I can’t believe this. I’m gonna transfer.” They literally said that, and we were all like, “Woah!” And some people were like, “My right to call this a sisterhood feels infringed upon.”

EZ: Ugh, what a snooze, really. Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is that in East Asia and in South Asia, there is a third gender sometimes. [Someone] was telling me about the third gender in India, and it’s a thing, it’s just been there for a long time. And in Japan you have men who live as women in the theater world, you know, it’s just, they perform female roles, but in real life they live in a female way. So there isn’t this split saying, well I just do it on stage but I don’t do it at home, no, they live that way, and they identify that way. So, I think in some cultures, it’s just not a big deal anyway.

HDT: That’s really interesting! So Japan tends to be pretty accepting about that?

EZ: Well, again, it’s repressed. Right, so there are certain ways to express one’s sexuality that are accepted, and there are other forums or other areas of life in which you can’t. So, I would say businesses are pretty darn conservative, but then you look at some of the traditional edo period premodern prints, and there’s a lot about…I mean, I’ve seen one set of prints that’s about a transgender man, and it’s no big deal. So, again, it’s very context-oriented.

HDT: How does Japan feel about Queer people or homosexuality?

EZ: Well, it’s coming out now, Hanna, in the sense that I would say that now there’s more of a movement. And I had a former student that went to Kyoto, and she made a connection to a lesbian bar coffeehouse, and she worked there and met people, and we actually had another student who did a thesis on this topic and was interviewing people about their attitudes on homosexuality. So it’s definitely something that has arrived. And I know also that the first two women in Japan just got married in Tokyo. It was six months ago, and there were a lot of photographs, you know, there was big press about it, and it was all over the web. And they both were wearing these quite traditional dresses, you know, both of them were in white dresses. So, yeah, I think it’s gonna take time, because it’s never like America where it’s all on the surface, but people just kind of know that about other people and I don’t think it’s such a huge deal. But it’s not out in front of the cameras the way it is in this country.

HDT: Do you think that slows down their ability to make cultural or institutional changes? Or do you think that the United States is just as slow?

EZ: No, I think they’re behind. Definitely. And because the U.S., because you have these social movements, it’s easier to make changes. We’re good about that! I mean, not all of the states are, but…Yeah.

Pregnant Silences

Book or movie review

Every generation experiences some collective anxiety in its youth, wonders what will be permanent and who will remain by their side, fears loneliness and rejection. Two sisters, Delphine and Muriel Coulin, have captured this bittersweet sentiment brilliantly in their simple and beautiful film, 17 filles (2011). Both sisters had worked on films centered around femininity and the body prior to 17 filles, so when they encountered a news article about a large group of teenagers at an American high school who all got pregnant at once, they were inspired to create their own adaptation of the story. This story of young women’s desire to take charge of their own destinies, the Coulin sisters remark, is one that transcends time and culture.

Set in southern France, 17 filles follows Camille Fourier, a pretty and popular sixteen-year-old girl who gets pregnant, and decides to keep the baby after she convinces sixteen of her friends to get pregnant too. The film is bookended by offscreen narration telling the story of a great ladybug migration oddity that occurred the same year that the pregnancy scandal did. Together, the young women navigate the ups and downs of pregnancy together, all the while spinning idyllic dreams of living together and being a lifelong support system for one another.

The cinematography of 17 filles is dreamy, colorful, and intimate, embodying the sentiment of quixotic teenage aspiration that the Coulin sisters sought to convey. The opening scene is a series of close-ups of a line of undressed girls, setting the cinematographic tone for the film. It feels organic, it’s naturally lit, and there’s no background music. Yet none of this comes across as drab in the least—little details intrigue us with their rawness.

17 filles grapples with themes you might not expect from a movie centered around the actions of teenage girls—togetherness versus solitude, the fleeting nature of time, strong women supporting one another. Though teenage dramas are typically reserved for frivolity, the Coulin sisters have allowed the complexities of youth and womanhood to occupy space with the gravity they deserve.

The group of pregnant teenagers becomes a heated topic of debate among community members, and even on the local news. The adults are troubled because, legally, they cannot intervene. After several riotous school board meetings, the school nurse is directed to have a threatening meeting with Camille, the student whose pregnancy incited the controversy. The nurse questions her motives for starting this trend, asking if perhaps it’s a means of rebellion, or maybe a subconscious reaction to the local economic crisis that had shaped the lives of this generation from an early age. Camille argues that doing the same as her parents have done won’t get her generation anywhere, and that their parents have failed to lead meaningful lives. She spiritedly defends the actions of herself and her friends, exclaiming, “We’re right to try something else!”

Although the film deals with some heavy subject matter, the cinematographic style is clean and evocative, characterized by a minimalism that reveals just enough visual information to thread the plot together. For instance, after Camille’s best friend, Clementine, is kicked out of her house for being pregnant, her friends furnish an abandoned trailer for her to stay in. We see a shot of a severe winter rainstorm ravaging the outside of the trailer, we see a shot of a frightened Clem cowering inside, we see Clem’s phone in her hand and hear her voice say, “Mom?” Then, we see a pair of headlights coming down the dirt road through the rain and wind. This is followed by a shot of Clem lying on a red couch, presumably in her parents’ house. These five simple shots simply and artfully illustrate Clem’s reconciliation with her parents. The entire story of the film is told in the same fashion, which lends it visual intrigue and a beautiful sparseness.

The lack of a soundtrack, too, is compellingly minimalistic—as well as classically French. Most shots and interactions between characters are backed by poignant and provocative silence. The silence plays on the themes of solitude and youthful loneliness that stitch the film together. Silence is a bold choice in the overwhelmingly sensory world of contemporary cinema. The modern moviegoer is bombarded by aggressive advertisements, bright colors, and fast-paced action, all tied together by a immensely loud soundtrack—silence is simply not seen as an option by filmmakers today. The Coulin sisters, however, have chosen to trust their audience to appreciate the silence, to pay attention to quiet simplicity amidst the maelstrom of visual and aural stimulation pulling us every which way.

17 filles also literally brings us closer to the characters with extremely close-up shots, a frequent feature in the film. There are also many long-shots of each pregnant character sitting around her own domestic space, alone in quiet contemplation. Though we are not privy to their introspection, these shots give the characters depth. We know they’re thinking deeply about the issues at play in the film; these characters are more than the shallow teenage girls they initially appear to be.

At the end of the film, the story of the ladybugs continues as the narrator explains that no such strange event ever occurred again, that all returned to normalcy following that year. We are finally able to connect the strange tale of the ladybugs to that of the seventeen pregnant girls, and this detail deepens the narrative of the film as a whole, tying the story of the seventeen girls into a larger cycle of nature.

17 filles is a brilliant and artistic exploration of the complexities of youth, a subject frequently glossed over. With their evocative cinematographic style and bold filmic choices, the Coulin sisters have created a masterful work of art.

Re: “The Brilliant Weirdness of Die Antwoord” by Eve Fairbanks

Letter to the editor

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/die-antwoord.html?_r=0

Though Fairbanks begins to address the criticism Die Antwoord faces from black South Africans, she tiptoes past one glaring problem: “How dare a white band hit the jackpot by imitating a community whose own musicians were still largely stuck in apartheid-created slums?” Fairbanks wonders. Yet, she never answers her own question. Instead, Fairbanks takes the approach of humanizing Ninja and Yo-Landi. There is no good answer to Fairbanks’ question: catchy though their music may be, the group’s persona is undeniably racist and appropriative.

In response to Die Antwoord’s wild collage of an identity, many fans have questioned whether or not the band’s image is an act. Die Antwoord has addressed this question in their song, “Fok Julle Naaiers,” rapping snidely, “Is it real? No, it’s just a big black joke.” Fairbanks’ article clearly illustrates that it is, in fact, a joke, but what she fails to mention is that, whether or not it’s real, it is a blatant exhibition of white privilege. “After apartheid fell,” Fairbanks writes, “white artists were free to explore a wider range of personas.” But this right to self-exploration does not, by any means, give white South Africans the right to try on other racial and cultural identities—identities whose authentic owners have been oppressed by colonialism—as though they are mere costumes. Die Antwoord’s flagrant use of blackface and senseless appropriation of a “ghetto” aesthetic are simply inexcusable. No matter how much I strain to find a progressive social statement behind Die Antwoord’s appropriative persona, I just can’t do it: cultural appropriation is cultural appropriation, no matter how much we might wish it weren’t.

Closeted in the Congo

Op-Ed

As a Catholic fundamentalist nation, the Democratic Republic of Congo is very conservative, politically speaking. Having grown up a quiet liberal in an overwhelmingly conservative town, I’m pretty good at holding my tongue when I disagree politically with my friends. When I traveled to the Congo the summer before my sophomore year at Wellesley, this skill once again became useful. I wasn’t about to reveal to my new Congolese friends that I’m gay, but even admitting my support of queer rights earned me stricken responses like, “I’ll pray for you,” and “you’ll go to hell.” Nevertheless, I’d have felt disloyal to my values if I’d refrained entirely from advocating for my beliefs, so I found myself on the losing end of many political debates, struggling to stay afloat with my clumsy French. Try as we might, they could not fathom my views, and I could not fathom theirs.

Queerness has been adamantly discouraged in the Congo politically, socially, and historically. Aggressive heteronormativity is even built into the Congolese Constitution—article 40 states that “all individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex.” It’s nice to let people choose who they marry, I can appreciate that—but true choice doesn’t include stingy stipulations or impose limitations. Biased though I may be, to me sex is sex, love is love, and bodies are bodies. Why criminalize queer existence?

On top of that, anti-LGBTQ* activists have pushed for even more stringent limitations on sexual conduct in the Congo, pressing to penalize homosexuality and zoophilia (because they’re basically the same thing, right?). Proposed bills have included punishments like a fine of 200,000 Congolese francs or up to five years in jail for these “counter-nature acts.” The most recent bill, spearheaded by Steve Mbikayi, a member of parliament, hopes to render both homosexual acts and transgenderism entirely illegal. A recent article published by Think Africa Press explains the details of Mbikayi’s proposed bill: “The proposed penalty for engaging in a homosexual act is 3 to 5 years in prison and a fine of 1 million Congolese francs; while a transgender person would face the same fine and a jail sentence of 3 to 12 years.” What is it that makes queerness such a grave criminal offense?

Mbikayi has an answer to that question: “In relation to our culture,” he says, “homosexuality is an ‘anti-value’ that comes from abroad.” His logic isn’t arbitrary—37 African countries already have sanctions in place concretely banning homosexuality and other queer lifestyles, legislating against the LGBTQ* acceptance supported abroad in order to preserve the religious righteousness of their nations. But, if you ask me, as much as everyone is entitled to their own moral values, no one is entitled to legislate the moral values—or “anti-values”—of others. That’s the central flaw in Mbikayi’s logic: his definition of Congolese culture is all too narrow and not entirely Congolese. Homosexuality is seen as an “anti-value” in the Congo primarily as a result of colonization. With Belgium’s aggressive foray into the Congo in the 1870s came the ideological imposition of Catholicism; today, most Congolese are Catholic fundamentalists and, therefore, not so LGBTQ* friendly.

However, homosexuality is not an inherent “anti-value” according to Congolese tradition. An article on gay life in the Congo relates that “in Africa, [homosexuality] has often been associated with magic and mystical practices.” As reported by a traveler in Kasai, a district in the center of the Congo, in 1977, those on the hunt for diamonds would often visit small groups of homosexuals, as it was purported to bring good luck. So, really, homosexuality is not an anti-value in relation to Congolese culture at all; this borrowed homophobia is, rather, an anti-value to colonialist Belgian culture circa 1870.

Many times since my trip, I have considered the double-edged implications of my silence. I worried that it would be disrespectful to argue with the dominant attitudes of modern Congolese culture, but I also didn’t want to partake in the fearful silencing of queer people in the Congo. In the end, I chose to stay neutral, smiling, silent, not wanting to take on a battle that wasn’t mine to fight. All I can do is support the Congolese LGBTQ* activists already fighting for justice in the Congo. Maybe they’ll begin to win over the Congolese population, and maybe queer Congolese will find a more welcoming home in their own nation. Maybe Mbikayi’s bill won’t pass.

Dancing with Seaweed

Report on a cultural event

My face felt raw as I trekked through the February blizzard to Alumnae Ballroom, where a hula dancing workshop was being held by Wellesley’s Hui O Hawai’i Club. Eventually, I arrived, apprehensive and snow-dusted. There were three other students there, including the teacher, Emily, a Wellesley student in the Hawai’i Club. Emily was from Hawai’i and had taken hula lessons growing up, as many Hawai’ian kids do. She handed each of us a long floral skirt to wear over our jeans and sweatpants. I couldn’t help but feel like a gawky little girl playing dress-up.

I’ve experienced the very same impostor syndrome every time I’ve visited Hawai’i. Four years ago, my dad moved to Hale’iwa, Hawai’i, a touristy country town on the north shore of Oahu. Spending time in Hawai’i has always made me slightly uncomfortable; I’m not a tourist, but I’m certainly not kama’aina, a resident of the islands. Hawai’ian culture is extraordinarily welcoming—Oahu translates literally to “gathering place”—but I can’t help but feel the uncomfortable reverberations of colonialism all around me. By being present, I’m participating in the massive tourist industry driven by colonialism and cultural appropriation. I decided to venture out through the snow to the hula workshop that February day because I wanted to engage in more appreciation of Hawai’ian culture, and less appropriation of it. Hula is still very much a vital element of Hawai’ian culture, not simply a gimmick used to please tourists or exoticize Hawai’ians. Hula is a hymn linking the present to the past, a shared ritual that transcends generations.

The hula workshop began with introductions and watching a video of three Hawai’i Club members performing a slow and elegant hula dance in the living room of a Wellesley residence hall. The dancers were dressed casually—no campy grass skirts or Western caricatures of Hawai’ian culture to be seen. “The song is about seaweed,” Emily explained to us, giggling as she pointed to a sheet of translated lyrics she’d printed out, “Hawai’ian music is always about nature. Even if it’s about love, it’s expressed through nature.” Each of the dancers’ synchronized movements and gestures told a story.

After we’d spent several minutes being mesmerized by the tiny, pixellated dancers on Emily’s dim laptop screen and swaying to the tinny music drifting from the meager speakers, Emily beckoned us to get up. She told us that we would be learning the dance performed by the girls in the video we’d watched, as it was slow, simple, and repetitive relative to many modern hula dances. She started by teaching us the building blocks of hula, most of which centered around swaying hip movements and subtle steps taken with bent knees. Little by little, we learned several variations of the kaholo, a series of steps to the side. “Step right, left, right, tap!” Emily called to us as we clumsily mimicked her graceful, flowing motions. I found it to be infinitely harder than it looked—step gracefully, but keep your knees bent to emphasize the sway of your hips, don’t fall behind!

Next, we learned the ‘ami and the ‘uwehe, swinging our hips in synchronized figure eights and popping our heels up from underneath our voluminous skirts. Soon enough, Emily told us it was time to learn the arm movements that accompany the dance steps. I wasn’t so sure I felt ready for this just yet—the gesturing of the hands is what really tells the story, and I didn’t want to destroy the beautiful flow of the melody’s tale. It took a lot of coordination to try storytelling with my hands while dancing with my feet; to mimic a wave with my palms while doing a sharp ‘uwehe with my heels. I felt like a cartoon character in fast-forward as I skittered around the floor: the dance didn’t seem so slow anymore.

The dance accompanies the song “Ka Uluwehi O Ke Kai,” composed by Edith Kanakaole; the title translates to “Plants of the Sea.” The song begins with the singer’s gentle voice crooning to a plucked refrain which repeats often, stitching the song together. The verse translates to “Such a delight to see / The great big ocean / So familiar and very cherished / With its fragrance of the lîpoa,” expressing affection for the sea and its lîpoa (a type of seaweed). Hawai’ian looks like an intimidating language to American eyes, endless strings of vowels punctuated by glottal stops, but upon hearing the words spoken, the enchanting phonetics snap into clarity. The words themselves become music.

As we went, Emily explained to us the meaning of the dance we were learning, folding tidbits of information into her explanations of the moves themselves. The song and dance are about picking strands of seaweed off the beach as though they were flowers. One of the gestures repeated throughout the dance involved holding our hands out in front of us, then flipping them over and drawing our fingers together to form flowers with our hands, bouquets of seaweed we’d just plucked off a faraway beach.

Before long, Emily checked her watch and announced that there were only five minutes left of the hula workshop. We had only learned the steps to the first two verses of the song, but since the song’s melody repeated so consistently, Emily encouraged us to run through each verse twice so that we could dance for the entire song (even if the moves weren’t entirely accurate). Though challenging, the full run-through of the dance was a lot of fun. The lilting lyrics created a lighthearted atmosphere that set the stage for our dancing.

How ironic, I thought, that I should feel so much more connected to Hawai’ian culture in the middle of a Massachusetts blizzard than I do when I’m 5,000 miles away in my parents’ mainland bubble on Oahu. It’s the people that make a culture real, not the place. Upon examining a translation of the lyrics after the workshop was over, I learned what the last two verses guiding us through the dance meant: the words eulogized the diverse species of seaweed found in Hawai’i—limu kohu, lîpoa, lîpalu—as though they were old friends frolicking in the sea mist. Nature is revered Hawai’ian culture, and there is no better way to understand this than to tell stories of their friendship with your own two hands—and your feet, and your hips, and your bent knees.

Shy American Bigmouth

Blog post on a cultural experience

I was a nineteen-year-old with a tendency to bite off more than she could chew. I was staying in Mbuji Mayi, a rural town in the south-central Democratic Republic of Congo. I had traveled there to make a documentary for a locally-run scholarship program. I was charged with nervous energy throughout the trip. One of the foremost sources of my anxiety was the Congolese law against cameras in public. The Congolese government is unstable, and the large country is extremely divided politically, so the law was enacted in an effort to prevent propaganda that would push the Congo further from unity. I had no intention of making any divisive political propaganda, but I still had to bury my camera equipment deep inside my suitcase and hope that none of the airport personnel pawing through my bags would find it. I remember holding my breath at every security checkpoint.

Despite my years of schooling in French, I’d been dismayed to discover that I could understand almost nothing my host family said. They conversed dizzyingly fast at loud volumes late into the night, their conversations dotted with lilted Tshiluba and other Congolese dialects.

This was an important morning: it was the first day of filming interviews with the students in the scholarship program, an ambitious group of high school-aged girls. I had written and memorized a short speech in French about who I was and what I was doing there. I should mention that I’m terrified of public speaking (even in my native English), so naturally, I was filled with dread.

In typical Congolese fashion, my host family and I were running extremely late—an hour and a half late, to be exact. When we finally arrived at the Lycée Muanjadi, we walked in to a classroom full of eyes: some eager, others wary. My heart raced, and the hot Congolese air felt even more sweltering than usual. The classroom was small, walls covered in chipped sea foam green paint, and packed with people. People standing, people sitting, people laughing and talking and yelling. I felt claustrophobic.

When I was in Mbuji Mayi, I was hyperaware of my whiteness, of my Americanness, of my privilege. Whenever we drove through town, windows down because the car’s air conditioning was broken, the crowds strolling about the streets gave me waves of rolling stares. My host family pointed out to me that I might be the youngest white girl most of the townspeople had ever seen, that I looked like the people in the movies with my pale skin and light hair. As such, I felt a constantly nagging pressure from within myself not to rely on my whiteness to make me worth listening to. I wanted to be more than a white voyeur visiting their community. I wanted to be someone who had come to listen and learn, not to teach and patronize. All of these thoughts swam about in my mind as I stood beside the blackboard that stifling day, waiting.

The time came for me to speak. I began to rattle off my memorized French sentences, pushing myself to speak louder, louder. “I hope to talk to each of you about the problems you perceive in your communities,” I began, “my question for you is: what could be done to improve one local issue close to your heart?” I paused at the end of the first paragraph, and everyone in the room burst into deafening applause. I waited for it to stop. It didn’t. Did they even hear what I said, or were they just applauding because I was an exotic white girl from America who could kind of speak French? The clapping went on and on, seeming to signal the end of the speech I had just begun. I panicked—if they thought I was finished now and I continued to ramble for two more paragraphs, surely they would think of me as some American bigmouth who just couldn’t get enough of her own voice. Scrambling to improvise a plan, I decided to cut straight to the conclusion.

I’d omitted many important details and some key examples of interview topics, and the tropical air felt rife with misunderstanding. The rest of the morning was a disaster. It was chaotic, sticky, hot, noisy. The interviews I had filmed with the students were long and circular, full of cultural disconnects and misinterpreted words. My camera batteries died. By midday, I was thoroughly overwhelmed. I broke down to Sandra, the founder of the scholarship program. She listened, and when I sobbed to her about my awkwardly shortened speech, she stopped me. “Hanna,” she exclaimed, “their clapping wasn’t to tell you to stop speaking! That’s how the Congolese show that they like what you’re saying—it’s normal to have several long rounds of applause during a speech.” I was at once relieved and horrified at my misinterpretation of the audience’s reaction. I was used to streamlined high school assemblies and Christmas choir concerts and National Honors Society induction ceremonies, gatherings of busy, punctual people who preferred to save the palms of their hands for a single pragmatic round of applause. Unbridled, unscheduled clapping was unfamiliar to me.

In rapid-fire French, Sandra explained the confusion to the group of girls surrounding us, mercifully saving me from attempting to explain this small cultural difference in my own clumsy French. I blushed through a spirited round of laughter, embarrassed by my misreading of the situation. As the crowd of students laughed, I tried to gracefully accept my role as the foolish other. Much as I wished I could fit seamlessly into Congolese culture, my foreignness was as loud as the unexpected applause had been. Whether I like it or not, I’ll never be able to erase my American cultural background and replace it with another—sometimes I’ll be the outsider being stared at, and sometimes I’ll be the inconspicuous girl next door.