Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

Here, Kinza Afraz Abbasi shows how mismatched language choices and mismatched communication channels render public health communication in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province ineffective.

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English-Only COVID-19 signage in a school in KPK (Image credit: Express Tribune)

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), one of the four provinces of Pakistan, it is widely believed that polio vaccination is a Western plot to make children infertile in their childhood with the aim to control Muslim population growth. As a result of this belief, health clinics have been torched and health care workers killed. Polio, almost eradicated elsewhere, remains a health threat in the province.

What happens in a situation such as this – where mistrust between the population and public health services is rampant – when a new public health disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic strikes?

There is wide agreement that Pakistan’s response to the pandemic has not been effective and that the country is now in a lethal second wave.

In my research project, I set out to discover what the government has done to inform the public about the dangers of the virus and about measures to stop the spread of the virus.

The linguistic situation in KPK

KPK is located in the northwest of Pakistan and shares a border with Afghanistan. The largest ethnic group in the province are the Pashtuns, who are comprised of many tribes and clans. Tribes are independent to govern themselves and most of the population live in rural areas. In addition to Pashto, Hazara, Hindko, Kohistani, Torwali, Baluchi, Persian, and other languages are spoken in the province.

This linguistically and culturally diverse rural population of around 35 million people has a literacy rate of 50%. In some tribal areas the literacy rate is as low as 9%.

Those who are fortunate to have learned how to read and write will have done so in a language that is not native to the province, Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

In addition to Urdu, English also enters the picture because it is a co-official language of Pakistan.

English dominates official COVID-19 communication

English has, in fact, been the preferred language of communicating official information about COVID-19. Pakistan’s official COVID-19 website is entirely in English.

The government of KPK has followed the lead of the national government and also communicated most official information in English.

I explored a number of official websites and social media feeds and determined the language of communication was almost always English, with some Urdu communications, mostly on social media. I could not discover any use at all of Pashto, or any of the other languages of KPK.

Few people follow official government information

Equally noteworthy as the mismatched language choice is the lack of attention that official government communications receive.

The official Twitter account of Pakistan’s Ministry of National Health Services, for instance, has 29,400 followers. In other words, out of a population of 212.2 million, a minuscule 0.013 percent follow official health information on Twitter.

With 1,771,291 followers, their Facebook page is slightly more popular but still under 1% of the population.

The follower numbers of the official Facebook page of the KPK government are equally dismal: 11,544 followers out of a population of 35 million, or 0.03% of the population.

Given the dismal state of telecommunications in the province and the low literacy rates, these figures are not surprising.

Private TV channels broadcasting in local languages

The COVID-19 messages of the Pashto-language TV channel AVT Khyber are in English

TV is popular in KPK and many private channels broadcast in Pashto, Saraiki, Hindko, and other languages.

Unfortunately, the information related to COVID-19 broadcast on these channels seems to be in English, too, as I discovered when researching COVID-19 messages on the Pashto-language channel AVT Khyber.

Their COVID-19 messages are directly copied from the English language messages of the World Health Organization without any adaptation or localization.

Mismatched communication costs lives

In my research I identified three key communication mismatches:

• Information is made available through the medium of English and, to a lesser degree, Urdu to a population who largely lacks proficiency in either of these languages.
• Information is made available through the written medium to a population who has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world.
• Information is made available online in a context where telecommunications infrastructure is widely lacking.

Given these mismatches, is it surprising that people in KPK do not believe that COVID-19 is real? And that it is yet another plot – by the government, by the West – to oppress and exploit them?

The house of the English high school teacher in the village in Sulawesi where Pasassung conducted his fieldwork

In a recent post, I reviewed language policy research that shows how compulsory English in China has given rise to new inequities and is far from being a means to fair development. In that context, compulsory English language learning is problematic for reasons of practical feasibility, allocative effectiveness and distributive justice. That macro language policy perspective is complemented by a school ethnography of English language learning in a small village in Indonesia. The study was conducted by Nicolaus Pasassung in 1999-2000 and has unfortunately never been published but the PhD dissertation it resulted in has now been made available here on Language on the Move.

The thesis titled Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An ethnographic example of a remote Indonesian EFL classroom grapples with the question why compulsory English language teaching in Indonesian high schools has been such a failure. That question in itself was not novel even at the time of the research: the World Bank, for instance, had funded the British Council to explore exactly that question a few years earlier and their answer had been that the English language curriculum and the English language teaching methods in Indonesian high schools were inadequate. The solution was relatively simple: the communicative approach was promoted as the panacea to Indonesia’s English language teaching woes.

However, as the researcher found when he spent almost a year in a remote village on the island of Sulawesi, the curricular and methodological problems in the junior high school he observed were part and parcel of a much larger complex that mitigated against the success of English language instruction; this complex also included the status of English, the cultural values of the school and wider society and the material conditions under which English language teaching took place.

To begin with, English and contexts where it was used were entirely alien to the village and there was no place for English in the community outside the classroom. Even in the classroom, the language had a tenuous hold. For instance, the thesis includes a poignant description of a lesson in which students were studying hotel dialogues from the prescribed textbook. Neither the students nor the teacher had any experience of hotels and a number of misunderstandings unfold as the teacher tries to teach and the students try to study vocabulary items in English that they have no concept of in their native language: in a village that does not have electricity, “vacuum cleaner” is one such example where the researcher as participant observer is called upon by the teacher to explain what a “vacuum cleaner” might be.

This is one tiny example of a sheer endless list of obstacles that the students face: inappropriate materials, teachers’ limited proficiency, corruption, efforts to maintain a harmonious society where everyone keeps face, limited resources on every level etc. etc. all conspire to turn the compulsory English lessons in the junior high school under investigation into a meaningless waste of time. Not only does compulsory English study under these conditions not produce any results but it attracts a cost: the opportunity cost to spend the time invested into English lessons in a more productive way.

Like Guangwei Hu and Lubna Alsagoff in their review of compulsory English in Chinese secondary education, Nicolaus Passasung, too, recommends, inter alia, to make English language learning in Indonesian high schools an elective.

Would such a move further entrench the disparities between rural and urban populations and between the rich and the poor, as the proponents of compulsory English argue? In the world described by Pasassung, English simply doesn’t matter. Existing inequities are largely unaffected by English as securing a good education including learning English in itself is not enough to advance in a world where personal advancement depends on connections and even bribery. As one villager explains, without additional financial and social resources, his sons have little to gain from their education:

Why should I be bothered sending my children to university and spend a lot of money? A lot of graduates are unemployed. When someone finishes university, s/he only wants a white-collar job and would prefer being unemployed to working in a garden. I do not have anyone who can help my children find work in a government office, and I do not have enough money to bribe them. (quoted in Pasassung 2003, p. 145)

Pasassung, Nikolaus (2003). Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An Ethnographic Example of a Remote Indonesian EFL Classroom Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney

Pompei Restaurant, Karachi (Source: fcpakistan.com)

A few days ago I had an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Having lived all my life in Karachi, I had until then never heard of the Pompei Restaurant. I was invited there by a visiting British academic, who declined my invitation to have dinner at our house and wanted to meet me at the Pompei instead. He seemed very surprised that I had never heard of the Pompei, which he seemed to know well.

Armed with the Google map directions, I still managed to lose my way but arrived a few minutes before my host.  Stepping into the restaurant was like going down the rabbit hole: I left Karachi behind and entered Europe.

The furniture, the wall hangings, the light music, and the candle lit tables all made me feel as if I had been transported to Italy. I was greeted very politely by the valet and the gentleman at the reception and was taken to the table my host had booked for us. I sat down and looked around. The bar with impressive brass levers to pour beer caught my attention. I asked the waiter for a glass of wine in Urdu but my eagerness was met with a thin smile and the English response: ‘Sir, wine is not served here.’

At that moment, my host arrived. Before sitting down, he handed a bag to the waiter. The waiter took the bag and returned with two menu cards. The menu card was in English only but, despite the fact that English is the main language I use in my professional life, I did not recognize the name of single dish on the menu except for pizza.

My host graciously helped me with the selection of starters and the main course when he realized my ignorance of Italian cuisine. Before the starters were served, my host’s bag was brought back to him and a bottle of wine emerged. The waiter apologized to my host and said he wasn’t allowed to pour the wine for him. My host smiled back in the manner of a man of the world who understands cross-cultural differences and filled our glasses himself.

While savouring the novelty of eating Italian food and drinking alcohol, I did not omit to look around me and take note of the people who had by now filled the place. The majority were foreigners but there were also a fair number of locals. Nearly everyone was drinking alcohol and smoking. English was the only language I heard.

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the novelty of it all, it was good my host kept the conversation going by telling me about his interactions with Pakistani scholars, who he had been visiting as a UN ambassador in the previous weeks. His role was to provide consultancy on improving academic standards. ‘You guys don’t know how to write,’ he observed casually. In my mind, I was busy adding all the other things I had discovered in the last hour only that we didn’t know.

When we finished the meal, I of course tried to pay my share. However, I have to admit I was grateful to my host that he wouldn’t allow me. I also have to admit that I tried my best not to stare when he put his hand in his pocket and pulled it back out with a fist full of currency notes. The bunch of currency notes was so thick that he had a bit of a problem picking out 7,000 Pakistani rupee notes out of this thick wad of US dollars. He gave those 7,000 rupees (ca. 70 Australian dollars) in the same manner as if they were worth 70 rupees. We had just spent around 7% of the average annual per capita income in Pakistan on a meal!

I thanked my host for his generosity and we parted ways.

Walking back to my car, I kept on thinking about my experience: I had just stepped out of Pakistan for a few hours without ever leaving Karachi. The material difference between the Pompei Restaurant and its surroundings was spinning in my head. I also thought about the role of language in this world of mirrors. Pompei exists in Karachi because of the development industry and the foreigners who come here as part of international institutions, which are supposed to help our poor economy. But are they really helping by creating islands of opulence that are unrecognizable to the average citizen? For me Pompei seems like a new sovereign state maintained by international money that has come to us from the World Bank, the IMF and other international bodies – ostensibly to reduce the deep and pervasive poverty in Pakistan but practically to be enjoyed by whom?

I was also musing on the intercultural nature of this encounter: a British and a Pakistani academic meeting in an Italy-themed space in globalized Karachi sounds very cool and postmodern and like a coming together in some global, hyprid, even ‘metrolingual’ space. But is that what had happened? To me, the encounter felt as one that accentuated difference and increased distance between people of different cultures. Had this encounter not turned me into someone utterly deficient: an academic who doesn’t know how to write? A customer who doesn’t know how to order? A local who doesn’t belong?

My last thought was about resistance: who is going to resist this new economy and its language? How can we truly achieve meaning in intercultural communication in a grossly unequal world?

Pakistan Swat Valley 2009

Ingrid briefly mentioned Zubeida Mustafa’s new book Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem and its solution recently. Since then, we’ve had numerous enquiries about the book here on Language-on-the-Move, and I’m pleased to offer a review and more information about language education in Pakistan today. Zubeida Mustafa is well-known in Pakistan as a veteran English language journalist and Tyranny of Language in Education is her first book. It has multiple focuses around language and power, bilingualism, language learning, equity in education, globalization, and, of course, language-in-education policy. Here, the readers of this review need to understand that the author has written this book not for academics but for the general public and policy makers of Pakistan. The book’s central argument is as follows:

The child begins life with an advantage in a certain language, namely his mother tongue or his first language, which he uses to communicate and when learning is imposed on him in another language, he is robbed of this natural advantage … . He is additionally burdened with the handicap of a linguistic barrier that he has to surmount when he goes to school. (p. 6)

It’s hard to argue with this point in Pakistan where the national language Urdu could be said to have been imposed on a hugely multilingual society. Parents and pupils are not usually given a choice to have formal education made available in local languages. Furthermore, the author points out the unsound and unjust language education policies and practices in Pakistan, which she argues have been developed and are being sustained by a small elite class:

Polices should be made for the greatest good of the greatest number and not for a small elite class which formulates state policies and thus ensures that its privileged position is not undermined. (p. 6)

By way of background to Zubeida’s work, let me provide you with further information about languages, education and poverty in Pakistan. Ethnologue lists 72 languages for Pakistan. Out of these, 14 languages have more than 1 million first language speakers. The number of speakers and their percentage of the population differs significantly: Western Punjabi, for instance, has 60.6 million speakers and is spoken by 38.3% of the population but there are also languages which have only a few hundred speakers such as Aer, Bhaya or Domaaki. Overall, 85% of the population speak 14 languages and the remaining 58 languages are spoken by 15% of the population. The key point is that Pakistan’s population is a highly multilingual one.

This multilingual population, however, is not served by an equally multilingual language-in-education policy. As a matter of fact, Pakistan’s language-in-education policy is not explicitly stated. While the policy maintains that comprehensive school language policies should be developed in consultation with provincial and area governments, it does not seem to realize the importance of community, school management and teachers and pupils in the development, sustenance and implementation of a policy. Like all other previous language policies the approach adopted seems to be top-down. The current language-in-education policy of the country maintains that Urdu is the medium of instruction in government schools and English is introduced from Class 1 onwards. Most private schools in the country have English as medium of instruction.

Whether as a result of the policy or other factors, education outcomes are dismal: the literacy rate is 57.7%. For males it is 69.5% and for females 45.2%, and urban populations with 73.2% are more literate than rural populations with 49.2%. Furthermore, most people only receive elementary education. Only 18% of girls and 24% of boys are in secondary schools and only 5% of the population of tertiary age are in tertiary education.

While monolingual language-in-education policies for a multilingual population are certainly one aspect of the failure of education in Pakistan, the linguistic facts only go so far by way of explanation, as I’ve argued before. In my view, the material conditions of deep, widespread and entrenched poverty in Pakistan probably go a much longer way to explain the failure of education in Pakistan. For instance, let me tell you about the actual buildings and spaces of schooling in this country: 32.7% of elementary schools are without boundary walls; 36.6% without drinking water; 35.4% without toilet facilities; and 60% without electricity. These statistics help us understand at a surface level why only 10% children out of roughly 70% enrolled in schools manage to finish their secondary education.

Some more statistics: 23% of Pakistan’s population live below the poverty line of USD1.25 per day. The 2010 Human Development Index has Pakistan in 125th position – out of a total of 169 countries. Shocking inequalities manifest in every sphere of life, the poorest 10% of the population have access to 3.9% of the total national income while the richest 10% access 26.5%. The state of the country can also be measured by the fact that perhaps the cheapest thing in Pakistan is human life. People are killed on an everyday basis. Since 2006, 35,000 civilians and 3,500 security personnel have been killed in a “war on terror” that terrorizes our people.

Coming back to Zubeida’s book, I would say that the author at some places in her work makes attempts to connect language-in-education policy with societal power relations, inequalities and the material conditions in the country, such as chapter 7 titled “Ground Realities,” where the accounts are based on her personal visits to a less-privileged area of Karachi. In these account, the reader can easily hear the fresh voice of the author, which in other chapters sometimes gets lost in the scholarly sources tracing the development and explaining language policy in pre- and post-colonial Pakistan. To me, the key achievement of the book then is that it stimulates debate and puts educational disadvantage in Pakistan back on the table of public debate. However, with much of the work the author draws on, the book also shares particular weaknesses in positing particular interpretations of colonial language policy. These often give inadequate empirical evidence and tend to make straightforward links between past and present. It would not be incorrect to maintain that scholarship produced in this country has largely been overly deterministic in such matters without engaging with the material base of education in Pakistan and exploring what actually goes on in schools in Pakistan. Unfortunately, to date the country does not have one single study that could describe and explain the everyday language practices in specific institutions and explore the interlinked micro and macro levels of language in education in Pakistan. My ongoing PhD work is designed to partly fill that lacuna.

In Pakistan, as elsewhere, scholars all too often take refuge in political constructs and partial historical narratives without attending to empirical grounding and depth. If education in Pakistan is embedded in the power structures of the society, giving rise to inequalities and polarization, we would like to know how such dominance, inequalities and polarization is developed, maintained and implemented.

Private school in Machar, Karachi

Last year the British Council initiated a dialogue about language policy and particularly language-in-education policy in Pakistan, and their report was recently published. The introduction includes the following two statements:

The report […] is the result of two visits made by Hywel [=British education consultant Hywel Coleman] to Pakistan in March and July 2010 taking him to Sindh, Punjab and Azad Kashmir, as well as over six months of desk-based research. (p. 4)

This document is a report on a consultancy visit to Pakistan between 4^th and 17^th March 2010. (p. 3)

While these quotes from the report are inconclusive as to whether the consultant was in Pakistan once or twice, he comes to some sweeping and far-reaching conclusions. The report argues that Pakistan has a language crisis in its schools and calls particularly for the promotion of indigenous languages through making them a medium of instruction in Pakistan.

In principle the idea of promoting students’ home languages is appealing. It certainly touches the heart; less so the intellect, considering the practical, social and political constraints prevalent in the country. The report argues that in contemporary Pakistan, Urdu and English are being imposed on speakers of other languages. This may or may not be the case. The fact is that Pakistanis of all stripes and colors want to learn both Urdu and English from as early as possible because they understand the social and financial implications, and teaching through indigenous languages is a very low priority.

In order to understand language policy and education in Pakistan, and the global South more generally, I think people must experience what it means to live in Pakistan in the present circumstances. In Pakistan the central issue is not the language crisis but poverty. Pakistan is a country where 23% of the population live below the poverty line of USD1.25 per day. The 2010 Human Development Index has Pakistan in 125^th position – out of a total of 169 countries. Pakistan is a country where water is more precious than human lives. People are killed every day, no one bothers. The media report loss of human lives in numbers only. “So and so many people have been killed in this bomb blast, and so and so many people in that suicide attack.” Humanity has simply been numbered in this part of the world: 30 killed, 40 killed etc.

The salary of a private sector university lecturer in Karachi is less than GBP1,200 per year; even so, this is considered a very good salary by local standards. At the same time, it is not enough to put the fees of a good school for their children within the reach even of university lecturers, not to mention the vast majority of the population.

Power cuts for four hours a day are routine in city areas and in villages they exceeds eight hours every day. Imagine living without electricity every day for eight hours! Who gives a thought that the severed heads of the suicide bombers are often the young ones of their family? What makes them go to this extent? Do they have anything in their lives to live for or to look forward to?

Anyone talking about the promotion of indigenous languages among the poverty-stricken multitudes of Pakistan cannot be but alien to the realities of our lives. Why should we care about maintaining indigenous languages in the face of such bitter life experiences? Common ordinary Pakistanis want to have access to socio-economically powerful languages. They know very well that multilingualism is strength and they want to teach their children local, national and global languages at the same time.

Language death, language preservation, language revitalization and mother tongue education are for those who haven’t walked in our shoes. The way I see it they are nothing but distracters from the real issues of grinding poverty, suicide bombings and the energy crisis.

In 50 years, less than two generations, Egypt’s population has exploded from less than 30 million to close to 75 million. Its population pyramid looks like a pyramid sitting on a huge raised dais as the vast majority of the population are under 30 years old, with a median age of 24. During my recent visit to Iran I had the opportunity to experience what such demographics feel like (Iran experienced similarly rapid population growth in the second half of the 20^th century followed by a highly successful attempt to control population growth in recent years so that their population pyramid looks more like a pyramid on one fat leg). So, what does it feel like? Well, crowded obviously. However, not crowded in the way Tokyo feels crowded but crowded in a polluted, angry, competitive kind of way. I spoke with many highly educated young people who chafe at their economic marginalization, who are alternately depressed and angry about the fact that their talents, ambitions and best years are going to waste and who want out, nothing more than out.

Without wanting to compare Iran and Egypt in any way, population pressure is real across much of the Middle East, and indeed the global South, and it has generated masses of angry, frustrated and largely hopeless youths. The story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young man whose self-immolation sparked the uprising in Tunisia, is probably repeated countless times across the developing world (see also my earlier post about the burning children of Tangier). Exponential population growth is another key aspect of linguistic practice in motion that hardly any sociolinguist has even started to think about.

To date, the marginalized youths of the global South have mostly been kept at bay by plying them with video games and virtual worlds – the social equivalent to parenting-by-TV. English has been part and parcel of those virtual worlds. How all this is going to play out remains to be seen but one thing is for sure: the virtual was always going to be a poor substitute for hope. Game over! Hope springs eternal! I would love to supervise a PhD project exploring the intersections between the spread of English and the new angry young men and women of the global South.

Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park

“There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love stupid white men.”

My husband and I were stunned by this comment thrown at us by a stranger in Ueno Park during our Language-on-the Move tour to Japan. The insult came from a middle-aged Japanese man who was standing near Shinobazu Pond holding a can of beer in his hand with a flat expression on his face.

“Excuse me? What did you say?!” My husband, a white Western man walking with his Japanese wife, was not going to let the insult pass and was getting ready for a fight.

“Not worth it!” I grabbed his arm and quickly dragged him away assuming that the stranger was a drunk or mentally ill. Ueno Park is notorious for the large number of homeless people living there and we had already seen so many of them along the way from the park’s entrance. Homelessness is one of the hidden dark sides of Japan’s declining prosperity as Shiho Fukada so poignantly demonstrates in her photography.

Although I hadn’t wanted a confrontation, the comment upset me. I have explored issues of misogyny and of animosity towards interracial relationships in Japan in my research but this was the first time I personally experienced this kind of harassment in a public space.  I was also intrigued by the fact that the man had insulted us in fluent English. I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind: Where did he learn English so well? Does he stand there all day insulting interracial couples walking by? What else does he do? Why is he doing this? How often have such comments resulted in a fight?

After we had looked at the pond and decided not to take the famous swan-shaped boat, we had to take the same way back passing the man again. I felt weary and he, too, noticed us. He was staring at us but said nothing this time. My curiosity got the better of me:

Kimie: “Excuse me, but may I ask where you learned English so well?”
Stranger: “I didn’t learn English. It’s God’s gift.”

Soon we were having a friendly conversation because it turned out that he didn’t mind Australians as much as Americans! He told us how Asian women were stupid going after White men, and how interracial marriage, which he called stupidity, weakens the nation. In his view, Japan should never have opened its doors to the West in the 19^th century. Ever since then, the country had been infected with evil Western influences. In particular he was aggravated by the fact that Japanese women are so into White men. “They say ‘I love you, I love you’ and the women love it. It’s stupid. If love is there, you don’t have to say it.” I asked him if he had a partner. With the same contempt, he said “How can I find a partner when women here watch stupid American romantic movies and expect me to say I love you?”

He also told us that he was a freelance writer and that we were standing right in his publishing office. “I write many things including haiku”, and he took out several hand-made copies of a small booklet. “If you’d like to take one, I’d appreciate a small contribution.” We paid and left. By way of farewell he said “I hope you will enjoy my work.”

When we sat down in a café later, I looked at his collection of twelve haikus. They were beautifully hand-written in English and in a fude brush pen with titles such as ‘Bird’, ‘Northerly wind’ or ‘Journey’.  “How interesting”, I thought to myself in that café in the Ueno Park.

Hideo Asano on the right and Kimie with his haiku collection, September 29, 2010

At that point I did not yet know that we had actually met Hideo Asano, a well-known Tokyo artist, writer and blogger! Attacking Japanese-Western couples seems to be some sort of street performance he engages in as this, rather disrespectful, YouTube video shows.  However, the haikus, poems and short stories on his website are beautiful.

Hideo Asano is a bilingual, English-as-a-second-language writer who could be an inspiration to many learners of English. On his website he writes:

I hope especially my work could encourage students who study English as a second language that anyone could reach to a higher level, striving with persistence, to reach to the point of realizing that the more you know the more you don’t know. English belongs to everyone who cares, a baseball player’s son can’t automatically be a good baseball player.

This must be one of the strongest encouragements to find your own voice in a second language I have seen in a long time! That Asano is left to peddle his art as a homeless person on the streets of Tokyo and to draw attention to himself by insulting others, in a country that is obsessed with English language learning and idolizes native-speaking teachers is a sad and deeply disturbing testament to the power of the intersection of linguistic and racial ideologies.

The other day, I sat in my office reading a research article about narratives and the discursive construction of identity (Hayati & Maniati, 2010). The analysis is a familiar one in the Labovian vein, but it was the data that touched me. The examples made me miss my home country and its beggars (!) very much! This is an example I found particularly moving:

bæradæra! mæn geda nistæm! mæn æhle Y hæstæm ælan do hæftæs ke tu šæhretun hastæm hæmeye puli ke dæštæm hæmun ruzæye ævvæl tæmum šod ælanæm vaqeæn hiči nædaræm mæjburæm šæba tu park bexabæm bexætere hæmin qiafæm šekel motada šode bædæm miad mærdom be češme motad mæno negah konæn væli mæjburæm ye kæm pool mixam ke bærgærdæm šæhræm xoda pedæro madæretuno biamorze

Dear brothers! I’m not a beggar! I’m from Y and it is about two weeks that I’m in your city. I had come here to find a job, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any. All the money I had was spent the first days and I’m really broke now and have to sleep in streets and parks, that’s why I look like a drug addict. It’s so disgusting for me to be looked upon as a drug addict and beg other people but I have no other choice. I just need some money to get back to my hometown. May God have mercy on your parents’ souls. (English translation by Hayati & Maniati)

In Iran, beggars usually beg in or around mosques since such holy places give them the upper hand in arousing the religious feelings of worshipers. Some beggars display enormous creativity in their begging! They may artistically sing wistful songs for the worshippers even if worshippers try to stonewall beggars’ attempts either by quickening their pace as they walk toward the mosque or even by pushing beggars away. This beggar’s artfully enacted narrative transported me back to my homeland. To me, as a person living out of my home country, this personal begging narrative was trans-historical and trans-cultural. The narrative was there like life itself.

When I read this story, I started to co-construct an identity with the begging speaker while listening to him reciting his narrative in my mind and in my first language which I had been longing for. The narrative which was being recited was to me what I had been missing for weeks. This narrative had a potently pleasant impact on me just because it was being rendered in my mother tongue!

The beggar’s narrative imitates life and life imitates narrative. For the beggar, life is an achievement of memory recall; beyond that, recounting his life is an interpretive feat. And, I think, this memory recall is assisted more through narratives of personal experience formulated in my first language. From now on, when someone tells me their life, I will try to scrupulously listen to them. I will try to consider it as an achievement and not merely a panhandling attempt which I used to egotistically evade.

Hayati, A. M., & Maniati, M. (2010). Beggars are sometimes the choosers. Discourse and Society, 21(1), 41-57, DOI: 10.1177/0957926509345069.

The Encyclopedia of the Muslim World has a good overview if you want to brush up your knowledge about Kyrgyzstan. However, even after reading this monograph, I haven’t been able to figure out what exactly distinguishes a Kyrgyz from an Uzbek. They certainly look alike to the degree that saying a given person is Kyrgyz or Uzbek makes them so, as this chilling account from a blogger on Global Voices shows:

… he called me and asked: “…so, no one is going to help us?” I wouldn’t wish this to anyone. I felt myself like a dog….I met them near the tuberculosis clinic. I took the driving wheel and shouted to everyone that he’s a Kyrgyz. With difficulties we managed to get him out of the district. On the street there were about 20 soldiers and behind them a crowd of young and not so young people of the Kyrgyz ethnicity. I don’t know what to do.

Amnesty International also report ethnicity as a matter of “claiming”:

Eyewitnesses have reported that groups of armed civilians, mostly young men claiming to be Kyrgyz, were roaming the streets of Osh, targeting districts of the city inhabited mainly by Uzbeks shooting at civilians, setting shops and houses on fire and looting private property. (my emphasis)

So, they hate each other with a vengeance but it’s not easily possible to say who is who?! Maybe that’s where accent comes in handy, just as it did in biblical times:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan River opposite Ephraim. Whenever an Ephraimite fugitive said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he said, “No,” then they said to him, “Say ‘Shibboleth!’” If he said, “Sibboleth” (and could not pronounce the word correctly), they grabbed him and executed him right there at the fords of the Jordan. On that day forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell dead. (Book of Judges, 12: 5-6)

The varieties of the Kyrgyz and Uzbek languages spoken in the Ferghana Valley seem to be mutually intelligible, which would leave ample scope for “shibboleths.”

Just as with the Bihari speakers of Urdu, the invention of ethnicity and language in the Ferghana Valley has largely been a product of colonial intervention: in Tsarist times, both groups (and some others) were lumped together as “Turks.” Soviet policy than made a distinction between “settled Turks” and “nomadic Turks” – the former were to be collectively known as “Uzbeks” and the latter went by a range of tribal names, including “Kipchak-Uzbeks” for those who are today “Kyrgyz.”

It’s all very confusing and to determine the “precise” meaning of “Kyrgyz” and “Uzbek” seems to be a bottomless-pit problem. However, the upshot is that the colonial re-definition of a social distinction (nomad vs. settled) as an ethnic distinction (which intersected in some way with the social distinction) in conjunction with the colonial creation of arbitrary boundaries (just as the British carved up India, Stalin carved up the Ferghana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) has created a recipe for mayhem and bloodshed.

This recipe is now readily available to corrupt politicians and criminals of all sorts if and when they choose to mobilize for their own purposes. Right now, the best hope for the people in Southern Kyrgyzstan seems to be more colonial intervention in the form of Russian peace-keepers. In the long term, all humanity will all have to look for ways to put the evil genies of ethnic and linguistic division back into the bottle.

Harraga derives from the root hrag ‘burn’ and could thus be translated as ‘the burners.’ The burn is an act of travelling, specifically illegal crossings from North Africa to Europe. A harrag is therefore a “person who metaphorically burns himself or herself, that is, one who disregards his or her own self and undertakes the trip to “make it to Europe” even at the risk of death” (p. 232). Harraga is the plural of harrag and anyone vaguely interested in current affairs knows that at any point in time over the past decade or so there have been a fair number of harraga waiting in North African ports to make the crossing to Europe, circulating in Europe with various types of official status but very often without any legal status at all, sans papiers ‘undocumented,’ or in the process of being deported back to Africa. The BBC has a factsheet which provides a quick overview of Africa-to-Europe migration and the Boston Globe has a moving photo documentary.

There are many different harraga and Hannoum’s ethnography is with a group whose “burning” is particularly poignant: children. “The harraga of Tangier” the title refers to are street children, far away from home, waiting to burn.

They are already immigrants, in exile (ghurba) in a city with a strong sense of identity. The people of Tangier view themselves as superior, “people of the North” (awlad al-shamal). They have a clearly distinctive accent. The rest, in their view, are people of the inside, the interior, al-dakhil, considered by and large a land of “hicks” (a’rubiya). […] if an average Moroccan is looked at as an outsider in Tangier, how would those children be looked at, given their triple status as poor, a’rubiya, and harraga? (p. 232f.)

The way they burn is as stowaways, mostly by crawling under trucks as they stop at a red light before entering the port. Some of the children attempting to burn are as young as six years old: at an age when the fortunate children of the world still have their hands held when crossing the street, the harraga of Tangier attempt intercontinental journeys hidden under a truck. The author quotes a Moroccan policeman as saying “Twenty children burn every day. We catch and return seventeen of them” (p. 238). Those who make it to Algeciras, the Spanish port 14 kilometers away from Tangier, get caught there and deported although some of the these child harraga had made it as far as Amsterdam before being deported back to Morocco. Most of them had burnt many times.

Formal education obviously has a very limited reach with these children and only one of the children Hannoum spoke to had made it to second grade. Sadly, education does not even hold a promise for these children. One of them asks Hannoum: “What have those who went to school gained? Have you not seen educated people and doctors who are unable to find a job? Have you not seen them protesting and asking for employment?” (p. 233) The only hope for these wretched of the earth is actually to go elsewhere. Their dreams are modest and clearly shaped by a tourism economy: “I want at least to learn Spanish and come back and work as a waiter in Tangier” one of them says (p. 241). Bigger dreams include to be able to keep clean, to dress well, to have money, to own a car, to find a girl. It is modest dreams such as these that children are burning for. No wonder they see themselves engulfed by quhra.

Misery is not a good translation of quhra. Quhra means total poverty, owning nothing. But it can also mean the profound feeling of being completely squeezed by misery to the point of despair and utter hopelessness. Quhra is defeating. It also wounds one’s dignity, often fatally. (p. 238)

You may have wondered when I’ll finally get round to the Christmas message of my post – well, there is none. At a time when much intercultural communication is constituted by a kind of material striptease of consumption that “the West” broadcasts to “the rest” and when “The Festive Season” is nothing more than an annual spike in this orgy of consumption, it just seemed fitting to spare a thought for the burning spectators.

Reference

Abdelmajid Hannoum (2009). The Harraga of Tangier Encounters: an international journal for the study of culture and society, 231-246