IN WHICH The Girl Buys a Pronoun

"How may I pronoun you?"

Apparently, I'm fixated on gender recently. I read Rachel Hartman's Shadow Scale, the sequel to Seraphina, last week. While I enjoyed the story overall, the one part I can't out of my head is the treatment of gender pronouns by one of the book's nations. Who wouldn't obsess over an interesting grammatical innovation?

Gender identity has gotten a lot of attention lately as people start to talk more openly about what gender actually means. Many people today accept gender as something defined by society and tradition rather than sex. Our ideas about gender roles have changed, at least slightly, over time, and are likely to continue changing. As we come to see gender as malleable, we can also see why people may identify themselves as a gender different from their biological sex or somewhere on the spectrum between sexes.

This understanding and acknowledgement of varying gender identities is starting to be seen in colleges. It is not out of the ordinary for a student to request a different name and/or pronoun from what is on the roster sheet at the beginning of a semester. Many schools are introducing gender-neutral bathrooms, and campus groups have made more effort to bring awareness to the faculty and students. In the orientation at the beginning of this semester, one such group came and talked to the faculty about gender identity. One suggestion they provided was to ask each student what name and pronoun he or she would like to go by on that first day. This is why I was so struck by a country whose customs require you to ask each person you meet which pronoun he or she prefers:

"You use cosmic neuter for a stranger, Abdo insisted. And he's a stranger until you've asked, 'How may I pronoun you?'"

However, the issue in America is not just a lack of understanding and acceptance of different gender identities, but a lack of pronouns. The English language doesn't accommodate unknown or indeterminate gender. We have he for males and she for females, but no gender neutral pronoun for people. No cosmic neuter like in Porphyrian. We often deal with this in two ways; we use it, which is inappropriate - and insulting - for humans, or we use they, which refers to more than one person. We can use he or she, like I did earlier, but that is just bulky. Our language encourages gender to fit into distinctly masculine or feminine boxes and excludes everything else.

The Porphyrian language in Shadow Scale addresses this issue by having a variety of gender options:

"Sounthlanders can't speak it, said Abdo sleepily. Too hard for your flimsy foreign minds. There are six genders and seven cases. . . naive masculine, naive feminine, emergent masculine, emergent feminine, cosmic neuter, point neuter."

Vocabulary adapts to the modern world constantly. For example, words like hot mess and selfie have been added to the dictionary. Nevertheless, it is very hard to change the more basic structures of the English language, such as pronouns. I feel like if people can accept that literally often means that something is not actually true, they can eventually adapt to a new pronoun or two. It will be interesting to see how English does or does not adapt in respect to gender over the next decade or so.

In Shadow Scale, we also get to see a character who has changed her gender identity and, therefore, her pronoun choice as well. Seraphina, the main character, encounters Camba for the second time without recognizing her because she had appeared masculine earlier:

"I racked my brains for the Porphyrian verb Abdo had taught me, a polite inquiry that didn't even exist in the Southlands. 'How may I pronoun you?' I hazarded. Camba smiled warmly and inclinded her stately head. 'I pronoun myself emergent feminine,' she said in Porphyrian, then added in my native tongue, 'Or I do now, at last. On my Day of Determination, I declared myself naive masculine. I was already ityasaari; it embarrassed me to be even more complicated than that.'"

Interestingly enough, Hartman also implies that this culture allows people to pick their gender on a celebration day, Day of Determination. However, we can see that in any culture it is difficult to be different from the expected.

The pronoun question is just one intriguing and progressive aspect of Hartman's Seraphina series. Plus, it's about dragons. Go read it!

IN WHICH The Girl Gets Lost in Translation

“Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door? Speak, friend, and enter. In f—king Elvish! (Please don’t ask me how I knew this. Please.)” 

Yesterday, I finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the latest pick for my book club. We celebrated the completion of the book by going out for jibaritos sandwiches (a delicious combination of steak, fried plantains, salt, and garlic) and then drinking mamajuana (red wine soaked in spices and then mixed with honey and rum) in a 7-11 parking lot. We are a super classy book club. While we purposefully sought out a multicultural experience, Diaz’s book bakes multiculturalism into every aspect of his characters’ lives. The result is a brilliantly told tale of how our families, beliefs, cultures, politics, and even roommates irrevocably mold our lives, for better or worse.

The title, back cover, and even the first chapter all imply that the story will focus on Oscar, the socially awkward, obese, and perpetually love struck Dominican “hero” of our story. But while Oscar serves as a home base connection for all the characters, the book quickly delves backwards into the history of his family, tracing the effects of a fuku, or “the Curse and the Doom of the New World” that may or may not have been placed on the de Leon family by the infamous Dominican dictator, Trujillo. While this family certainly does seem cursed, and at times the book will break your heart, it never becomes truly depressing because of the narrator, a smart-talking, ridiculous, and completely unreliable storyteller:

“Dude used to say he was cursed, used to say this a lot, and if I’d been old-school Dominican I would have (a) listened to the idiot, and (b) run the other way. My family are surenos, from Azua, and if we surenos from Azua know anything it’s about f—king curses. I mean, Jesus, have you ever seen Azua? My mom wouldn’t even have listened, would have just run. She didn’t f—k with fukus or guanguas, no way no how. But I wasn’t as old-school as I am now, just real f—king dumb, assumed keeping an eye on somebody like Oscar wouldn’t be no Herculean chore. I mean, shit, I was a weight lifter, picked up bigger f—king piles than him every damn day.” 

All in all, Oscar Wao provides an entertaining portrayal of some very unique characters while questioning your belief in curses and fate, exploring the cyclical nature of dictatorship, and teaching you the history of the Dominican Republic. However, there are two aspects of the book that might throw some readers off: the mix of Spanish and nerdy pop culture references that pop up on every page of the book.

Almost every character in the book has one foot set in the Dominican Republic and the other in America, including the narrator. Like most bilingual speakers, both the characters and the narrator mix the two languages together in what Michiko Kakutani from the New York Times calls “a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale.” I happen to agree that even non-Spanish speakers, like me, can grab most of the meaning from the context and some basic knowledge of languages, but I also know that I’m missing some of the meaning along the way. While the novel includes an unexpectedly high number of footnotes, none of them are translations. There are really three ways to react to the language:

1. Get frustrated that you don’t understand the language and give up. Hopefully, no one does this because you would miss out on an excellent book.
2. Pull up a Spanish/English dictionary and translate every phrase. One reader went through this process and generously put the results online here for other readers. I didn’t actually discover this website until I was almost done with the book.
3.  Just read the novel straight through, figuring the Spanish sections out by context and any words you might happen to know.

I went through door number three for a few reasons. One, I’m a little lazy and didn't want to have to look up every word. I did look up some of the Spanish words that kept repeating and I thought were important, but otherwise I left the dictionary alone. In addition, I think stopping to figure out each Spanish line would have distracted me from the story itself. I would have been so concentrated on the translations that I would not pay as much attention to the characters and plot. Reading this novel is a lot like listening to a friend tell you about his or her life. You want to just absorb the tale without interruption.

However, even more importantly, I believe that I should be left a little in the dark. I don’t know Spanish – through this really did make me realize how much I should know Spanish – and, therefore, I am slightly outside of the culture of the book, as I am in real life. I am the immigrant in the Oscar Wao land. When asked in an interview how he felt about readers who cannot understand the language, Diaz responded:

“I've almost never read an adult book where I didn't have to pick up a dictionary. I guess I participate more in my readings and expect the same out of my readership. I want people to research, to ask each other, to question. But also I want there to be an element of incomprehension. What's language without incomprehension? What's art? And at a keeping-it-real level: Isn't it about time that folks started getting used to the fact that the United States comprises large Spanish-speaking segments?”

But even if you do know Spanish, another language weaves its way through this book, what I’m going to call geek-speak. We quickly learn that Oscar feeds on comics, science fiction, fantasy, and Lord of the Rings. Even the narrator, who claims to be cooler than Oscar, fully understands and uses tons of references to the “Genres,” as he calls them. According to the narrator, Oscar:

“Could write in Elvish, could speak Cakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. . . . Perhaps if like me he’d been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn’t. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.” 

This geek-speak provides another barrier for those who don’t follow comics and science fiction closely. I consider myself pretty nerdy, but I only caught about a quarter of the references. Again, you can choose whether to look up all the references or just give them your best shot through context. I will say that these references do add to the entertainment value of the narrator though. It should be noted that Oscar’s propensity for speaking oddly keeps him isolated from both friends and family, just as we are isolated from the novel by not fully understanding the languages.

Despite these language barriers, I thoroughly enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and highly recommend it to others. There are so many other things I could say about it, but I’m getting tired, so I’ll let you discover the wonders of the book all on your own. Now, I just need to start on my new bucket list of nerdtastic books, shows, and movies referenced in the novel.