Is communication worth it? In some senses this questions seems to be at the root of looking at cross-cultural communication and connection.
After class today I was considering how fear so often plays into our hesitation to communicate with those who are seen as different than ourselves. There is a fear of sounding stupid or offending – and the risk of “failure” can often stop us from trying. And perhaps this fear comes from seeing the violence that has happened in various forced sharings of culture. In hearing, experiencing, or learning about the forcing of culture upon an unwilling person – we can easily go to the extreme of then hiding from any sort of communication.
But is this better? Is it better to hide from one another than suffer from the failure of making mistakes and in the worse place destroying someone else’s culture?
I was recalling a conversation I had with my dad a few years ago about our family. (Having a multi-racial family as well as two siblings from another culture - this questions often arises.) Is it worth it? Is the struggle to have a large family filled with people who look and sound different worth it?
In our conversation I said that it was worth it. That I wouldn’t be able to experience the depth of beauty and growth I have experienced and enjoyed without the pain that I had also felt in our family. I suppose anything worth truly having and appreciating comes with a cost.
So perhaps as in all of life there is a need for balance. A need to take the risk to communicate with those who are different from ourselves – leaving the fear of failure or mistakes aside – but with a sense of humility and openness to change.
For in any good communication there needs to be a willingness on both parties to listen and learn and be willing to grow.
And growth is painful – hard – but beautiful.
Connection to other works: Especially in regards to the questions of colonialism I was reminded of the following two novels that consider the difficulties and often problems that can come through cultures intersecting. The books are based on the intersection of our earth and an imagined planet containing another species. They are called The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell
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5 comments:
I think communication is worth it. We all fear communicating with other cultures, and not only that, just other people who are like us in general. At times when I'm just having a casual conversation with one of my friends who may have a similar background as mine, I'm always afraid of saying something offensive or sounding stupid. I think that's one of the ways I learn though.
We all should experience failing sometimes. I'm just a firm believer in learning from failure. Now, I'm not saying just go around and offend people just so you can learn, but if when you're communicating with someone from another culture, and that happens, don't look at it as failing, but learning and experiencing.
With you're family being so diversified Sarah, that just makes you a stronger person and probably in some ways, more understanding. It's great to have balance because how can you grow as a person, if you don't experience other cultures and other backgrounds at some point in time? It can allow you to appreciate your culture more, or just open your mind to other options experiencing someone else's culture.
Wonderful Post Sarah! I would only add that the fear also extends to the fear of being attacked for our Perception of the situation/event/belief, etc. I think the first readings on Perception are a key element in communication as you have so accurately described. If we stretch beyond our own limits of perception to empathize with (not sympathize but try to ascribe basic human emotions, that we have all felt, to another's experience so we can say "wow, that feels awful/wonderful/frightening etc)then, perhaps we can be brave enough to really begin to communicate with others both inside and outside our own culture.
I think your Dad is right. A family as diverse as yours (and you have probabaly felt the most effect from the diversification since you are the eldest), has to be strong to come together and bond and survive as a family. We're getting a very minor taste of that ourselves in my family right now. Although it is not a drop in the bucket to yours (ours is temporary) but my 19 year old nephew is with us from South Florida right now. He has been raised is a completely different family with a totally different social and educational environment. So, coming to Louisville and living with us for a period of time is quite an eye opener for everyone! We've already had snags and tensions, but my husband and I are bonding together to show him another method of dealing with tensions. Namely through communciation that is free of the fear of attack, ridicule, stupidity, etc. Just as you named.
Mel said this probably made you a stronger person. I think it has made you a far more empathetic person as well. You're so wonderful at viewing problems/situations etc from different perspectives. You always seem to have a very real sense of identifying with another persons basic human emotions. Even if you have not had the exact same experience, you certainly respect and understand the emotion they've expressed.
I think that it is important to remember this concept when being questioned about your own culture. I was being interviewed by Mel the other day and I realized that I was filtering some of the things I was saying to make sure that my cultural experience did not offend her. Then the question arose, "Should you be honest about your cultural heritage, knowing that it might offend, so that the the cultural exhange can happen?"
In acting class the other day, another student who has been almost an enemy to me found common ground in our past experiences and it was extremely comforting. If we had not had the opportunity to share our histories and the pain that comes with them, we may have continued to be enemies. However, now that this experience has happened the attempt at healing/mending can occur. So in that situation, I say yes. It is okay for you to share your cultural background if it may offend, because middle ground may be reached.
However, it is interesting to notice that there are people out there that are so guarded about their culture that it offends them to even begin to discuss other facets to it because it almost comes across as minimizing their pain. Pain is in all cultures. Therefore, how can you begin to share cultural experiences that involve pain without offending the other person? I think it is Trust. Except that trust can only be earned. So do you begin to discuss cultural experiences to establish trust and only then begin to explore the different painful facets of it? Or can you establish trust at the beginning before you begin to discuss?
I love the turn of phrase Sarah uses here: "forced sharing." It's true that a history of violence and coercion has led us to hold back from attempted communication so others don't perceive our "failures" as disrespect or a lack of understanding. Doug's point about trust is an important one: how does one stay accountable and convince people that their best interests are at heart? It's an interesting problem to consider: as theatre practitioners, how do we not "pillage" another culture? And how can we invite responses to our work (if we use "different" cultural practices) that open up discussions about our successes and failures, and build some kind of artistic integrity and mutual trust?
I'm thinking also of when I was in Italy many years ago as a student. I deliberately chose to go to a country whose language I did not know to see what it was like to try to learn and communicate. I was so afraid when I was first learning Italian that people would make fun of me if I got anything wrong, but once I got over that fear I started learning a lot more quickly. Then just a few months later, when I was in London, I started speaking Italian to an owner of a sandwich shop who was from Florence. He told me my pronunciation was excellent! I was thrilled that through failing a whole heck of a lot of times I had ended up learning quite a bit, and could communicate passably well.
I've been sitting here re-reading some of the old post on here, and Sarah's blog really stood out to me. This morning I was watching this documentary about these two mothers in Isarel, one mother is Jewish and the other Muslim in Palestine. These two women are forever connected because they both lost a daughter in a suicide-bombing. However, it was the Muslim mother's daughter who was the bomber. To make a long story short...the Jewish mother wanted to meet with the Muslim(whose name is Um)so that she could try to get a sense of who this girl was and perhaps why she did this.
As I'm watching, thanks to the cable gods who gave me HBO, I see the determination of these to women to meet. Um couldn't cross because of curfew and laws preventing Muslims to go into Isarel and when the Jewish mother (can't remember her name) tried to cross the film crew was arrested by Palestian police. Finally they had to talk by satellite tv. I thought that through this tragedy these two women could come together and try to make sense of it all and work together to bring about change. However, that is not the sense I got.
It seemed to me that the Jewish mother wanted to condemn Um more than try to understand what could push someone to do this. Mind you Um's daughter was very intellectual, wanted to be a journalist and try to help free her people from the occupation. Um didn't know that her daughter was going to do this, she didn't find out until the news that night about it. The Jewish mother (ok..I'm gonna call her Hanna cause I'm tired of saying "the Jewish mother")kept asking Um how could she let her daughter do this, that she mustn't have really known who her daughter was cause if she did she could have stopped her from doing this. While Um said that she didn't agree with what her daughter did, but can understand why and that Hanna had couldn't understand because she is free. While Hanna's view is that she can't use the occupation has an excuse. There is more to it than what I'm writting, but this is the jist of it.
So, to answer Sarah's question about whether communication is worth it....I think that it takes more than communication. I think it takes a willingness of each party to set aside their thoughts or preconcieved notions and actually listen. Here are these two mothers who want to talk to one another but I don't think they were really listening to one another. And what I'm about to say is not in praise of suicide bombings or other acts of violence, but I think that people who try to communicate and feel like they are just speaking to a brick wall get so frustrated that they feel the only way people will hear them is by resorting to such acts.
But I think it's hard for "the dominant" to really find the balance of listening and communication.
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