IV. Reading Comprehension (10%) "She cloaked herself in another language, played in its brocade shades of meaning discovered deep
pockets of puns, Surprise linings of double entendre."
–Ronnie Scharfman
A white English-speaking child, growing up in the apartheid period in South Africa, I knew at a very
young age that I wanted to write. I realized even then that in order to do this, it was necessary to know who
one was. What else was I going to write about? The other alternative and perhaps equally appealing, was
to become an actress, but even then I felt I needed to discover who I was. How did one find out such a thing?
Who was I? In what tradition would my work follow?
I felt it necessary to leave the country where I was born, to put on the cloak of other languages (as
my friend Ronnie Scharfman has written so eloquently), ones that were not my mother tongue. I wanted to
leave my home, my mother, and a land of injustice and racial divide.
I lived first in Switzerland, and then in Italy. I went on to France, where I eventually did my studies
in psychology and finally to America, the country that George Bernard Shaw famously said is separated
from England by a common language. Did the fact that I learned to speak French fluently, and to some
lesser degree Italian, help me to find myself? I have written of the loneliness of finding myself in a strange
French family at 17. Speaking a foreign language present, of course, many difficulties: the frustration of
not being understood, and the feeling of being stupid, reduced to a smaller vocabulary, without the
familiarity with the expressions, the fine-tuning of your own language. It is almost impossible to really
appreciate poetry, for example in another language—or so it seems to me.
Yet ultimately and despite the difficulties involved, I do believe one becomes different, other,
speaking another language. A language where the words do not have the echoes from our childhood, where
the vocabulary is not associated with childhood connotations enables us to look at life in a slightly different
way. We even move differently, gesture differently, even perhaps walk differently. In some ways, this new
identity is liberating.
I remember a patient at the Salpêtrière, the big mental hospital in France where Freud worked with
Charcot and where I was doing an internship, coming up to speak to me in English. The doctors were
amazed; the woman had been silent or almost silent for so long. Her English was not very good, but she
would not speak to anyone else in French yet somehow felt free enough to speak to me in this foreign
language, which must have seemed less threatening to her. We think too of Anna O, Breuer's famous patient
who coined the term "talking cure" who lost her own language, German, for a while but was still able to
read Italian and French and translate them into English.
Somehow, while speaking a foreign language, it gradually became possible to voice certain opinions,
to speak of matters that might have seemed taboo in English. Is that because the French are less squeamish
about certain matters?
And when I learned the lovely language of Italy, and felt there more welcome even in my reduced
capacity to express myself, I think I changed again.
Of course, our identities are formed in so many different ways: by the people around us, the books
we read, our heroes and heroines, and above all perhaps by the work we do—but speaking a foreign
language can lead one to create a different disguise and help to understand who we are.
-adapted from Psychology Today