The Skin, The History, and the Stereotype: Translating Identity Across Cultures

Boot and bonnet.  Chemist.  Trolley.  Nappie.  Serviette.  Centre.  Saviour.  Aeroplane. 

 

One thing I learned in East Africa is that I not only had to learn functional Kiswahili but I also needed to learn English.  Sure, I spoke English, but I spoke American English.  I spoke too fast, didn’t pronounce my letters properly, and I didn’t even know the right words or how to spell.  I needed to learn British English.  I needed to slow down my flow of words and actually pronounce the letters that are in the words (ki-tt-en not ki-in, wa-T-er not wadder) or I would not be understood.  My audience would struggle to understand me, not because they were not capable of speaking English, but because I spoke a “different” English.    

I quickly learned it wasn’t only my language that needed to be translated.  It was me, my self, my body, what I represent through my biologically embodied representation of my particular slice of humanity.

Growing up, I didn’t think too much stereotypes, especially not my own.  I struggled to understand my identity as Tara, as myself as an individual, but I didn’t spend an ounce of energy trying to understand my ethnic identity, racial identity, collective identity, or the identity that others see what they look at me. When I looked in a mirror, I didn’t think about the layers of history written in my genetic code.  I just saw me and my immediate family (i.e. my aunt’s jaw, my grandmother’s nose, my mother’s curl, my dad’s hair) but not traits that said “Swedish,” “Dutch,” “German,” and “English”.  But then again, I never had to.  I’d never been looked down upon or insulted because of the labels of identity that people attribute to me when they see me. 

My first weeks in Kenya, I quickly learned I had acquired new labels.  

Mzungu.

“Mzungu” (plural wazungu) now branded me.  I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know that I was no longer invisible.  I couldn’t pass down the street unnoticed or be seen as “normal” but I stood out like a scarlet macaw in a flock of penguins.  My appearance branded me as “other” and I found myself wading through a sludge of symbols so deep I couldn’t lift a tennis shoe without finding myself dripping with the expectations of those around me.

I didn’t understand my interpretation.  Kenyans saw me and labeled me in their framework, reading symbols that I did not know were there, let alone their meaning.  And I discovered I needed to translate what my appearance communicated in my new context.  I needed to understand what it meant to be “me” in their worldview.   

Mzungu comes from the same Kiswahili root word as the words kizunguzungu ( dizziness) and kuzunguka (to turn around in a circle).  It basically means “a person who wanders aimlessly” or “one who is lost” (coined by Swahili inhabitants of the first European explorers based on the actions of the Europeans wandering around “discovering” things the natives already knew were there).  (check it out on Wikipedia for more details).

The term has changed in meaning over time and has history has unfurled.  It can be a noun or an adjective.  It can describe a person, an object, or a behavior.  Still, the overall ideas that emerge from the term are something wealthy, powerful, and/or foreign.  It is often used to describe something (or someone) of European descent and takes on the racial undertone of whiteness (which in the East African historical framework are inextricably interwoven with concepts of power, wealth, beauty, and status). 

Wazungu are never poor and wazungu are always “other”. 

I quickly learned that my appearance led to being given the best place in church, on the bus, and in the line at the bank.  It meant the marriage proposals, dinner invitations, ministry opportunities, and business partnerships sought me out faster than the mosquitos.   I didn’t have to prove my qualifications or my worthiness.  People automatically presumed my competence based on my physical appearance.

This also meant I was a walking target.  It meant I was robbed by those I’d never met and those I considered my closest friends.  It meant being sought because of what I represented and not who I was.  Everyone wanted a piece of my pie and tried to convince me to support their cause, their need, their ministry, or their business.  My power and wealth were contagious to those in my sphere of relationships (and so I was uninvited from certain ministries and relationships because I would lead to heightened expectations and "scare away" potential donors).   

Adding the label of “female” made me even more complicated.  I represented free sex (thanks to globalized porn industry) and access to status.  I could give visas, job opportunities, cash, cars, and “add value” to those around me.  I was a free ticket to the “heaven” that is the mzungu world.  I represented the colonizer who could be colonized and the unattainable brought within grasp.  

A stereotype doesn't have to be true to be powerful.

It’s very few people who see below the skin, the history, and the stereotype.  

Hood and trunk.  Pharmacist.  Cart.  Diaper.  Napkin.  Center.  Savior.  Airplane. 

When my husband came to the U.S. from Uganda, he also had to adjust his English.  He’s tried to slur certain words, force his “r” in words like dirt, bird, and water, and not pronounce all the letters in mosquito, leopard, and juice.  His English has had to adjust to include more American slang and idioms.  It’s been part of the process of helping his audience understand him and not consider his fluent English as "broken".

He’s also had to relearn what it means to be him.  He has always experienced people interpreting his appearance.  It happened all the time back home.  Other Ugandans, at one glance, read the tall, lean frame and  deep fudge-colored skin and immediately labeled him as “northern Ugandan” or “Nilotic” as opposed to “Bantu”.  These labels carried an army of stereotypes that he shed like a snake sheds skin when he landed in the U.S. he was interpreted according to those stereotypes.  

African.

It didn’t take a week in the U.S. before Ivan found himself mired in a swamp of symbols he didn’t understand.  In the American context, he has been forced to translate his appearance into the American labels of “Black” and “African” and renegotiate what it means to be him based on how he is interpreted. 

“Black” does not refer to a physical description of aesthetic appearance, but a long, complicated racial history that puts people on a ladder from least desirable to most desirable based on a socially constructed idea of immutable origins.  His skin means he is called n****r, slave, dangerous, and dirty. 

People read his appearance and cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking too close.  The police follow him in their police car and frisk him just to make sure he isn’t causing problems.  His appearance means people interpret his “standing politely and listening” as “threatening” them and will report him to his supervisors for hostility.

Yet his label of “Black” is sometimes countered with “African”.  He is often rejected by African Americans as being “not Black” and told to go back to where he is from.  His status as “African” also means he is exotic and is sought out by “White” Americans to share about what it’s like to be African and poor. 

Africans are always poor and Africans are always “other”.    

Ivan thought he was Ugandan and from the “Pearl of Africa,” the “Source of the Nile,” and he came proud of his heritage.  He quickly learned he should say he is Jamaican.  African is associated with deranged dictators, child soldiers, famine, civil war, AIDS, and poverty.  To be African means to be incompetent and inferior to an American in all things.  To be African means he must have lived with a pet lion, hunted with a spear, clothed in a loin cloth, and only experienced literacy, English, electricity, and automobiles upon U.S. soil.  He is congratulated on finally making it to the "heaven" that is America and freed from the "hell" of Africa.

As an African in America, he learned it means he is wrong.  His English is wrong, his education is wrong, his job experiences are wrong, and his culture is wrong.  He needs to go back to zero, relearn everything, redo everything until he can be reborn “American” and know how to do things “right”.  Until he throws off everything “African” about him, he will just be another “unskilled worker from a s***hole country”(source), no matter how many skills, degrees, and doctorates he possesses.  

A stereotype doesn't have to be true to be powerful.  A jug labeled milk will be treated differently than a jug labeled paint, regardless of contents.  

It’s very few people who see below the skin, the history, and the stereotype. 

We were born into bodies that we did not choose, into ethnicities we did not intend, and into nationalities that were chosen for us.  Yet these markers of identity still communicate to our audience deeply powerful symbols that influence how we are understood and perceived.  

In cross-cultural interactions, it’s not only the language we speak and way we greet that needs to be translated.  There’s a long process of renegotiating identity: who am I?  Who do other people think I am?  What does it mean to be me?  How do I interact with the world around me based on how this world understands me? Who should I become in future? 

Sometimes we do not know what we communicate through perceptions of our skin, history, or stereotype.  And sometimes we are forced to learn, unlearn, and relearn our own embodied symbols in order to understand how our identity translates across cultures.