I’m Sorry
A few apologies, and a rumination on the essence of apologies. I probably should’ve been Catholic. Or Jewish. (Please please please let me be Jewish.)
On a recent Saturday, I spent the day volunteering to help immigrants fill out paperwork as part of their application for U.S. citizenship. I’d like to say it’s because of my great big heart, or is my way of giving back to the country that welcomed my own parents almost 40 years ago. But it’s mostly my way of atoning for my sins of 2016, where like many liberals, I sat idly by during the Clinton campaign — donating nothing, canvassing nowhere — beyond confident that she would win in a landslide, and beyond appalled that we had stooped so low as a nation to even let a man like now-President Trump even share a stage with someone of her stature, let alone actually consider him for any sort of office.
So every few months now, I put my tail between my legs, pump up the NPR, and head on down to a crowded room full of people whose dream of living in America keeps taking steps backwards with every word that comes out of our leader’s mouth. A leader I helped elect with my inaction.
It’s a small way of saying I’m sorry.
Unlike the vibrant, scrappy feel of the previous workshop that was held at a city college campus (serving many students who are immigrants themselves), this weekend’s workshop was held in a massively wealthy tech company’s downtown office. The company was gracious enough not only to let us commandeer their space for an entire day, but also to let us loose on its high-end snacks, complete with an enabling “Help Yourself!” sign on a drink fridge that couldn’t have imagined what carnage was coming.
Of course, there are many things wrong with visibly sipping something that boasts “organic charcoal juice” as one of its top ingredients in front of someone trying to seek refuge from their homeland which is literally on fire. Or with the fact that almost certainly, most of us interviewing hopeful future Americans had at some point in our lives vowed to voluntarily leave the United States if the political climate took a turn against our wishes (but still not really affect us directly). This, of course, included me as well.
I’m sorry.
To better assuage my liberal guilt, I conduct most of the 1-on-1 sessions in Spanish, a language in which I’m not fluent. In fact, I’m not so sure I’m fluent in any language at this point. Growing up speaking Turkish has left me fluent only in matters involving ice cream, why something isn’t fair, and how I really don’t want to eat exactly the thing my parents prepared for dinner. But as much as my father insists Turkish is a really useful language to know (“You can totally get by in Azerbaijan!” “Really?” “Well, some parts, maybe…”), very few Turkish families appear to be lining up to talk to me (unless they have a son in Minneapolis whom they think I’d get along veeeery well with…!)
So Spanish it is.
I begin most interviews apologizing. For not being a native speaker, for asking them to speak slower for me, for the length of the forms.
For my president, I think to myself.
For all the struggles many Hispanic Americans or almost-Americans face with language barriers and discrimination, part of me enjoys this apology, this moment in which me, the white tech worker, is the fish out of water. The irony is not lost on me of a benevolent tech company offering itself to assist those from countries whose immigrants they helped displace from now-gentrified, now-mostly-white neighborhoods.
I consider offering them a charcoal juice, and think otherwise.
In one of my tougher interviews of the day, I had to inquire into the former marriage of an elderly woman who insisted she couldn’t remember any of the critical information required by the forms.
“Forgive me,” I began, in Spanish, “but I have to ask you to try and remember the dates. How old were you? What was going on in the world? Would your children remember?”
She kept repeating no, refusing to go down that painful memory lane. Unprovoked, she began describing what a nightmare her ex-husband was — abusive, controlling, the whole disgusting 9-yards.
I didn’t know what to say. There was only one thing I could say, but suddenly, I forgot the words. It was silent between us as my mind raced to find the words, and then finally arrived: “Lo siento.”
Now, it is comical that I would forget how to say I’m sorry, given the “Spanish 101” nature of its basicness. It’s the phrase you learn on day 1, the simple way to pardon all your mistakes to first your teacher, and later the locals you will inevitably offend on vacation in Mexico.
In truth, I regularly said I’m sorry to local Spaniards when studying abroad in 2004, as well as during these citizenship interviews, but I often used other words, not lo siento (and likely offended them as a result). I had noticed that when moving through the crowded Madrid subway or bumping into someone, natives would say perdona (“pardon”) instead. When stopping to ask for directions, it was the same, or sometimes even disculpa (“forgive me”, though that sounds considerably more anachronistic and dire in English). I would try my best to fit in, and use these seemingly more correct ways of saying sorry when bugging someone to help point me toward the nearest McDonalds or to a bar showing a REAL football game for once (I kid, I kid.)
But despite being the star of elementary Spanish classes, lo siento wasn’t as common, at least not in Spain. After my interview with the elderly woman at the workshop, I thought about this for a moment. Lo siento was reserved for exactly those situations — situations in which you want to express true sorrow, or sadness for someone else. It literally translates to “I feel it”, which is just about the coolest way to express such an emotion.
Of course, not every use of lo siento is preceded by someone divulging an empathy-evoking anecdote. Sometimes you forgot to bring that thing you said you would for a friend, or forgot to grab the mail, or forgot to not sleep with your best friend’s husband. Lo siento is right for many occasions.
But I had to wonder… does saying it inherently make you “feel it” more? By virtue of the phrase also meaning you were feeling something, did that predispose you to feeling more empathy in that moment, perhaps at least subconsciously? Did it make you more emotionally aware?
I’d be lying if I said “feeling more” wasn’t a blatant stereotype for the cultures of many Spanish speakers.
In college, I conducted a series of interviews with native speakers of various languages, focusing specifically on the word “love”. My hypothesis was that people who spoke languages where there are fewer words for “love” thought of the concept of love in simpler terms — they were quicker to fall in love, and perhaps a bit more traditional. In contrast, those who spoke languages where there is a variety of ways in which to express love would have a more complex notion of the sensation, and would perhaps take their time in letting all the various stages of falling for someone sink in, and maybe even lead more convoluted love lives in general. My participants all spoke a non-English language as their native tongue, and ranged from those who spoke Turkish — a language which has one main verb “to love” which often is used to indicate “to like” as well (sevmek) — to those who spoke other languages like German or Spanish, which have separate words to indicate liking a person, wanting a person, loving a person, loving a food, and loving a person for bringing you food specifically (I’m sure this is a thing in some language I was meant to speak). I of course didn’t control for age, gender, or experience with love. Nor do I have the results, as I made only one hard-copy in the form of a comic book (I did not go to clown college, I swear.) My septuagenarian art professor misplaced the book, and gave me an A, potentially out of guilt. Lo siento.
In any case, I was and apparently still am infatuated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity. The basic premise is that the language we speak influences the way we think. Surrounding theories often focus on sentence structure and how an interaction of objects is expressed, and how that can extrapolate into cultural behaviors. But scholars have also focused on word choice and vocabulary limitations and how in fact this could impact the speakers’ belief systems. I think. It’s been a while since I’ve read this stuff, and you have just witnessed what I consider to be good research. (I should note at this point that remarkably, I have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals — credits which will undoubtedly be revoked as the editors of those journals most certainly read this blog, along with all the cultures I’m perpetually offending (and also Beyonce. Beyonce definitely reads Genetically Stranded.))
Regardless, my desire to write that paper/glorified doodle spawned from recurring experiences with my parents, specifically where I’d tell them I had started seeing someone but wasn’t sure where it was going.
“Well do you love him?” they would ask.
“No! It’s too soon for that…” I would reply, appalled at the thought of saying the big three words a few weeks into a courtship that was built upon 2am sleepovers, warm beer, and buying each other dinner using a campus card our parents pre-loaded.
“Then why are you with him?”
I didn’t understand my parents’ insistence that love was such an early prerequisite for the potential of a relationship. It wasn’t until I thought about how they said it, and how they used that same word to describe liking someone as well, or even an inanimate object, that I thought maybe their mentality was restricted by the words they grew up with. And while I don’t remember much from my love findings, I do recall one particular anecdote where my Catalan friend Antoni was getting exasperated by the way English speakers abuse “love”. Flustered, he looked at me and said simply, “How do you love a spaghetti?!? This is gross!”
Despite Antoni’s unfortunate lack of faith in my ability to fall in love (and lust) with spaghetti, he was saying exactly what I was feeling 15 years later at the citizenship workshop pondering the full meaning, the baggage of lo siento. He felt love in more nuanced, particular ways than I did in large part, it seemed, because of how he could express it. Could we collectively have more empathy for one another if we evolved our language?
