More on Code Switching

What does it mean to code switch? Linguists use the term to describe something people who speak more than one language fluently often find themselves doing when speaking with someone who knows the same languages they know. They will switch back and forth between languages, mid-sentence even, using the language most closely identified with the subject. For example "My mother told me to go to the store to get some corn flour for making arepas" might become "Mi Mami told me to go to the store to get harina pan for the arepas".

I never used corn flour until I learned to make arepas while living in Venezuela. I would never call it anything but harina pan. My entire life, whenever I switched from using primarily one language to using primarily another language, some words from the first language would have a hard time ceding to the second language and thus I would speak a mixture. The word for with, con in Spanish, avec in French, is always the last to leave. For weeks after returning from a trip to France I will find myself saying things like "would you take me avec you when you go to the store?" That is not code-switching. It's just a slow transition from one language to the other.

My German uncle, Wolfgang, once said to me that I was not like my sisters. "they think like Americans, " he said, " and you don't." It was a strange thing for him to say to me, but it resonated within me. I went back and forth between France and the US a lot as a young child (we arrived here when I was only 10 months old). I have often wondered if the social difficulty I had as I got older could be traced somehow to the ripping away of my social structures and the painful mending process when I would come back home, speaking French to children who did not understand a word I said. I suppose that explains my insistence (at the age of four) that my mother never speak to me in French again.

So then, as a young adult, I took a flying leap and went to live in South America for four years. It was an exciting time in my life, I was learning new things, learning to express myself in what would become my favorite language. I finally learned how to have fun in life, how to drop my self consciousness and enjoy life. It took people who had nothing, sometimes not even a roof over their heads, to teach me the importance of celebrating life. In those four short years I discovered color and passion, learned to dance salsa, merengue, cumbia, sang in the streets for money, discovered that I was an artist, fell in love for the first time, and never ever looked at numbers.

I came back to the US to continue my education and to make sure that I wasn't thinking about spending the rest of my life in Venezuela because I couldn't be happy in the US. What I discovered is that I am different here. My work is different. There I did community organizing. I organized meetings, social activities, protests. Here I evaluate interventions and educational programs. I conduct research, play with statistics, explore ways to get at abstract constructs and relate them to life. There the rewarding moments were when someone questioned why it had to be the priest who washed feet during the religious service, why couldn't they instead? Or when one of the youth I had worked with since she was 15 wrote to tell me that she had finished college with her masters degree and was going back to the community she came from to run a community-based school. Here the rewards are less tangible, the excitement over analyses that show my hypotheses about the impact of an intervention were correct, the discovery of something we hadn't even imagined when we begin running analyses.

Some might value one over the other. I do not. I am just as likely to use a story from my experience in Venezuela to explain a phenomenon I see in data as I am to use data about rebuilding community when I talk about what I lived in Venezuela.

But I am a different woman here. I speak with more animation when I speak Spanish than when I speak English. I speak rapidly and use many more gestures, the drama queen in me emerges. Here I dress in somber colors, loose clothing. There I dress in bright colors and celebrate my body's curves, wearing clothes that accentuate my body's lines without shame. Once I learned to speak Spanish I found that I could only write poems in Spanish.

so back to code-switching. I don't really code switch in my language because the people I know speak either one language or the other, very few are fluent in both. Where I find myself code-switching is in my artwork. I speak two languages there too. Both are very important to me. The first emerged when I lived in Venezuela, the language of the body. So I take images of human bodies and celebrate them, their strengths and weaknesses. But my mind is in the world of the abstract. I process my world in ideas and symbols, statistics and geometry, symmetry and chaos. I follows that I would use abstract imagery to express my world vision or my personal experiences. While when I started the figures were the message, they are becoming abstractions as well. Yes they still look like figures, but they are there, not as figures, not as bodies, but as expressions of ideas, fears, emotions, joys, life. The work is no longer about the figure, it is about the ideas they communicate. And they are surrounded, not by a frame, but by the world of everything that humans fill their lives with. Ultimately, while I never have the opportunity to code-switch when I speak, I find myself code-switching, using both my language of figures and my language of abstractions in the same sentence or piece.