Forms
Ariel Saramandi
I have come closest to the Global Village cliché in these stalls.
I have shared intimacy with strangers, a warm toilet seat the device of our communication.
That’s all you can think, lined up behind a floral lapis lazuli boubou, three hijabs, two Asian-Pacific new money women in their designer dresses. Can’t be too haute gamme though—these are economy-class airport toilets. Waste and excess: the unifying factor in this new Capital of the World, the marketed Home away from Home. Shared asses on self-flushing white ceramic.
But the buildings are calculated ostentation. The buildings are an idea once called the American Dream. Appropriated here, but with none of the American stereotypes. In these Hollywood movies we watch on the unchanging too-small screens, we see stories purveying Friendship Love Hope, the eternal formula reworked now to suit our age: Contacts Contracts Opportunity. But even with this New World Ethos airports resist human interaction. None of us are Tom Hanks in ‘The Terminal’.
Consumption yes but conversation? Look at the way the woman at the till serves the man queuing in front of you. You think he looks like he stepped out of your mental sketchbook, a rough pencil drawing of what an Australian would ideally look like. All slashes and muscle, Bromine skin, aged copper wire serving as his beard, his mask, his style. A few metres back there was a counter selling a beard facial mask. You look over on the rolling black rubber to see if he bought it. If he saw you watching he would have attempted the usual airport banter, but thankfully his attentions are now fully on the woman at the till.
“Let me guess… Korean? Am I right?”
She will not blush for him. “No no, Chinese.”
“Ah! I was there only recently? Where from?”
But he has already paid: she looks up at him, terminating the conversation with a smile she sells to everyone, handing him his Duty Free bag.
“Have a good flight.”
Then it’s your turn. And you will never ask where she’s from or how long she’s worked for.
No-one talks to you and you like it. You like to think you are a walking eye, walking all englobing all feeling or feeling nothing. You have the luxury of pure observation, since student money dictates you only buy cheap food and that one necessary box of chocolates. There are moments when you wish that maybe you had met someone: couples in one of the cafés, families. But not once have you seen random variables ping together at the sound of common language. A French-named café, advertising French pastries in French, unconsciously designed to rally all Francophiles together, perhaps. One of your other tongues. Maybe that is even why you are drawn aurally to this café in the first place. But even language is valueless when it becomes marketed authenticity.
Examine split ends. Wait for the computerized woman to announce your flight’s gate. She does so in medusa tongues; you pace in affected casualness to the waiting area, where all the Mauritians have gathered before you. You await for the confrontation with a snake head uncut by sales and advertising. One which you would speak with pleasure, if you could do so correctly. Mauritians are forgiving when one mutilates their language, but only when the mutilator is foreign. Props. Credit for trying.
You are half-foreign by blood, half-foreign growing up in a house that did not admit the Mother Language. You sprouted your Creole too late. Those that assume you are an other giggle when you speak, gently correct, admire the attempt. Those who see you for who you are take Creole as the great test of stand apartness: the degree of linguistic disfigurement provides to the hearer details of one’s address, class, social status. They recognize your wish for integration, they call it humility, they approve, but they will not treat you as a local, not ever. For the privileges such ideas entail it may be worth it, you think, but you wish your half-blood would run in one particular direction. Coming home, you wish it would beat to the veins of the earth that raised you, the volcano you live on.
They say that one adopts a personality for every language one can speak. They presume linguistic mastery in that statement, hence another reason why, you think, you could never speak Creole properly. It is not a tongue for the timid. It demands vowels that are spit, snarled, linguistic click-clack slaps. Even the sounds of affection are aggressive, ingesting the ‘o’ of love, regurgitating it as the ‘o’ of orgasm. Kontan. Elevated ‘O’. Climax.
The Mauritians on this flight content themselves only with observation. Eyes that follow the Franco-Mauritian woman speaking to a teenage Indo-Mauritian girl, sitting on the row opposite: first in French, then in Creole. The necessary questions, you think, traverse all the minds of those watching the pair: would such an encounter happen back home? Have we really changed? The Chinese-Mauritian woman next to you slowly masticates her lips with her teeth, digesting these new ideas. You see her pupil flit towards you.
This is like La Veillée Pascale all over again, you think, and the two conversing women are passing the candle around. Kwar. To believe.
You talk to her, in Creole. You are actually having a conversation, a first of the first. In typical Mauritian style, you learn all about her family, her marriage woes, her children at university, how tired she is, having just flown in from Singapore. You surprise yourself by opening up (a little, you think, only a little) on your own family, your life abroad, how excited you are coming back. Absent from the conversation, another first of the first, is the What Are You question. She doesn’t even bring it up, even though you know each syllable you pronounce is tonally wrong. Your syntax cartwheels, unhinged.
So dramatic is the question’s absence that you bring it up.
“Do they ask for those weird forms for you to fill out in Singapore too? In England it is always such a process…”
“You mean the ‘What Are You’ box?”
“Yeah.”
“I just usually check ‘Other’…? I mean, I’m not Chinese-Chinese, even though my parents are from Guangzhou. They still speak Mandarin at home, and everything, but ticking the Chinese box seemed wrong.”
The ‘Other’ box. Otherness abroad Otherness at home Othered tongue blood spit heart.
You liked to think that that box was just for you. You’ll have to create a new one.
~
Ariel Saramandi is half English and half Mauritian, though she grew up in Mauritius all her life. Her blood lines connect her to Europe, Africa and Asia, which make for fun physical features and interesting stories, maybe. If she were braver she would get William Blake’s poems tattooed on her wrists, but she isn’t.
Frédéric Mélotte is a Mauritian interior architect and has been a photographer for the past eight years. Photography gives him the possibility to experiment with different avenues in creative self-expression, and has led to a great love of people and animals. See more of his work at: www.facebook.com/fminteriorarchitect
