MOTHERS, COLLEAGUES, GODFATHERS AND LINGUISTIC STRATEGIES

When I was a kid, my mother, quite often, would tell me I was lying, and I would go on trying to explain to her that I was not, maybe I was lying, but she could not stop threatening me, and continued asking me questions and pushing me with her verbal aggression, and I continued answering her, and it became a verbal struggle until she would jump on me and beat me up real bad. It did not help that she was an alcoholic in a home where violence was part of the normal daily life. The last beating took place when I was around 14 years of age. At that point my cousin was there (she was living with us -poverty was part of a larger extended family-) and told my mother I was telling the truth. My cousin and I have spoken about that event and others trying to figure out what was wrong and what was beneficial in our upbringings. As it usually happens with many children, I became like my mother. I can lose patience very easily when people do not answer my questions or I feel they are giving me some kind of deceiving answer or making fun of my statements. Now, I know that it is better to stop the interaction and move out of the conversation. I see that kind of destructive behavior in a lot of non rational parents, going back and forth with kids trying to demonstrate how wrong those kids are, as well as, among many adults, with each of them going nowhere;  at times, leading to violence. There were times at CCNY where I could not express my ideas, becoming frustrated, because some of my colleagues where more concerned with proving I was wrong, than trying to understand my perspective or framework of reference; making the matter more complicated when my narrative style or syntax or phonology was influenced by my native language: Spanish interfering into the English being used. There were quite a few times that I tried to explain this interference to the person or persons I was speaking with. Some of my colleagues or students would understand and learned from the situation; except one, an African professor, a very cynical and borderline cruel man, who would used his own experience to compare himself with me, in order to demonstrate that, while he came from a bilingual context, did not have such linguistic problem. Inflated egos cannot see what are their “true” problems or are not able to reflect upon anything that is beyond their small worlds; as if we were all alike. My quebecoise godchild is 10 years old and French is his native language and gets frustrated when not finding the appropriate English word or phrase, when talking to me. His bilingual parents, that are more patient than me, stare at both of us, wait and smile. I let him try to find the word he wants to use, and then I go into Spanish and mention similar words to the French ones, and when he finds the one that he wants to say in English, we go into the web and get a translation. At least, I can assure myself that there has been some progress when dealing with communication issues and mastery of related strategies. What I always knew saved me: that in spite of my linguistic limitations, my Aristotelian mental temperament, my Kantian intellectual capacities, my Skinnerian cognitive problem-solving strategies and my broad and always expansive kultur were superior to mostly everyone else’s, including my mother’s and the limited ones of the petite colonial African academic arribiste. Given that self awareness and culturally driven id and ego, I knew my linguistic strategies would improve; reassured by Philippe Aries dictum in his classic, Centuries of Childhood. He suggests, on the use of physical punishment and the ideas on how children and adolescents are perceived at a given time and place, that the older generation will try to improve the educational conditions provided to the newer ones; a statement that has been proven by how my "compadres" listen and talk to their kids, including my godchild, and  to "el padrino."