Before Corsica I was feeling pretty good about my progressing abilities to communicate with others despite the language barrier. However, one night I was once again humbled by my complete lack or French comprehension skills under pressure. You see, it all started with free time.
It was our first free night to grab dinner and entertain ourselves without a tour guide or an organized dinner so everyone was very excited.“Finally,” we thought, “the sweet taste of independence.” And just like those baby birds my friends and I eagerly leaped from the nest to spread our wings and fly free to experience all of our imaginations’ most exciting possibilities for a night out in Corsica.
Well after we exhausted out Panini option we were basically out of ideas so we wondered along the dock hoping to run into people who had better baby bird dreams than we did. Luckily we stumbled upon a group of Pepperdine students who seemed to be having a grand old time. My friends and I joined them and soon realized we had arrived just in time to watch two either very brave, very stupid, or very desperate for Euros, boys about to swim in their boxers to a buoy and back in the freezing cold Mediterranean ocean. As the boys dived in the growing Pepperdine crowd cheered and hollered loudly. It was then I noticed a disgruntled native in his boat to my right who was trying to get our attention. The crowd was too involved to notice and even as I tried to tell my neighbor discretely of my concern, my comments were lost by the excitement of the race. The man in his boat became so enraged that he approached us and because I was closest to him I met him and prepared myself for negotiations.
“LOUD, RAPID, UNINTELIGIBLE FRENCH” he yelled at me and all my French vocabulary flew out of my ears. “mumbles that I hope resemble innocence and understandable confusion” I say pathetically when he takes a breath so he can continue his, “EVEN LOUDER PROBIBLY PROFANE NEVERENDING VIOLENT GIBERISH!” As I struggled to remember the very basic words that usually help me in these kinds of situations- like “hello” or “I’m sorry” the man’s anger just continued to escalate until I was simply standing there letting him yell loudly at me with no way to help myself, my friends, or this man calm down. “JE COMPREND? JE COMPREND?!!?” the man kept asking me “si. I mean. Oui. Je comprend.” I say as assertively as I can back at him because im very sure the telephone motion he keeps making with his hand and the “policia” word means get the heck out of here I’v called the cops. So I finally remember how to say sorry as I turn to let the man continue to yell at me as I get everyone to leave.
Looking back it is not this man that frustrated me, it’s the fact that I have always prided myself as being someone who can resolve interpersonal conflicts, solve group dynamic problems, or even just put my emotions aside and understand someone better through their moments of anger and ugliness to others. I was so frustrated with myself because I always believed in Symbolic Interactionism where the words themselves are not what matters that it is the meaning we all agree to assign to words that matter. But if you do not know the words you cannot participate in the coordination of their meaning so we were both completely powerless to barter over how our interaction would play out. His words had no power except to frustrate me but that probably was not his only intention, and mine had no power because he did not know mine either. Although I knew this man was upset at us I have no idea why he was upset or even why he was so upset. I still do not think all the answers lie in the words themselves however as someone who has always used words like a puzzle to uncover what people are saying behind their words, it was disheartening to realize how far away I am from uncovered the truth about so many people. There are so many languages I do not speak and more then just not being able to have a conversation with them I will never know why they say the things they say, and therefore never know them at all.
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