L’étranger

Loads of things get lost in translation from one language to another. Take, for example, idioms. In English we say “It’s none of your business,” but in French the phrase is “C’est pas tes ognions.” Which, directly translated back into English, is “These are not your onions.”

Hilarious! But sort of missing the heart of the matter. (Unless you really, really care about onions, which is… none of my business.)

Or the time I was trying to help my host-mother in France set something up on the television. Eventually, she got frustrated that neither of us were making progress, and told me not to break my foot about it. Which in English we might know better as “to bend over backwards”, but perhaps the French are more concerned with broken appendages than gymnastics.

The same happens with French philosopher Derrida. Except it’s the entirety of an essay on the complications that arise when you try to define someone as foreign from yourself. The entire concept of the word “l’étranger” gets lost, in fact. The French word “l’étranger” can mean foreigner, or simply foreign (if you take off the article). Or abroad. Or, ominously, the stranger. If that many meanings can stem from one simple word, what has translation done to his entire philosophy?

(Nothing good, probably.)

But he asks an interesting question: who are you, to call me foreigner? Who is anyone, to call anyone else foreigner? What does it mean, to be foreign? Studying in France, I had many experiences where I felt very suddenly very foreign. Or very strange.

I studied with other American students, both semesters that I was able to study in France. We sometimes flocked together to places, sometimes lazily lapsing into English when it was too late at night and we were too tired to try and think in French. One such night was my friend’s birthday, and we decided to go see a movie. (It was Twilight, don’t judge us too harshly, please.)

Our group decided that I was going to order tickets, because my French was the best. So I went up to the ticket counter, where the cashier had been watching us speak half-French-half-English with each other.

“Six tickets for Twilight, please,” I asked, in French.

“The film, it’s in French,” the cashier replied. In French.

“Oh that’s fine, thank you!”

“There are no subtitles.”

“Yes that’s okay, we still want to see it.”

She then rolled her eyes and sighed, turning to the ticket taker to complain loudly about American students who came to her country and expected her to speak English. I was baffled; had I been hallucinating that I was speaking French? Was my French that bad? Who was she, to call me foreigner?

In my second semester, there was a party for all the university students in the area. My friends and I were gathered together, chatting in French and trying to hear each other over the music. A French student and his group of friends asked us if we were in line for drinks, and I shouted at him in French and asked him to repeat himself because the music was too loud.

“Oh, I am an American student,” he shouted back at me in English, “I come to France to learn French but I speak only English.”

I was furious. I told him exactly what he and his friends could go do, using French I definitely didn’t learn in a textbook. He looked embarrassed, but a few of his friends clapped for me. Who was he, to call me foreigner?

I acknowledge I had an easy time, studying in France. I was a white American traveling to a predominantly white European country where I spoke the language. My accent is decent enough, or at least un-American enough that I could pass as being from another European country, if I wanted to. I will never be so foreign as to be completely other, like James Baldwin living in Switzerland, where he was the first and only non-white person most of the people in his village had seen. His experience of being singled out, of living in a country for years and still being apart from the others there will never be my experience.

Likewise, I will never have to hide my reasons for traveling in order to assimilate, like Hannah Arendt and all the people fleeing to other countries during and just after World War II. I’ve never had to pretend I’m someone other than who I am in order to just live my day-to-day life in another country. To be simply left to my own devices instead of constantly questioned – why are you here, who are you, you foreigner. You stranger. And that is a privilege that I hold.

To be unbothered during my travels, to be so unquestioned that I’ve been asked directions in a country that is not my own is something that I’ve never had to think critically about until sitting down to write these stories. That’s a pretty big privilege, too. Being able to wonder if my experiences were foreign enough to compare with other experiences that I’ve read about because I wasn’t ever truly pushed apart from other French people.

I’m not really sure how to end this, other than to have a brief and philosophical existential crisis while thinking about Derrida: who am I, to call myself foreigner?