In my last blog post, I wrote about getting rebuffed by the crowd at an experimental music show and how it caused me to stop searching for connection at live music shows. But turns out that’s not really what happened.
This past weekend, I hosted a few NYU Paris Writers Program alums in my attic apartment for our monthly writing group. One writer friend, Juliana, told me that she’d read that blog post and laughed because she’s a part of the Baltimore “sound scene” and she’s familiar with William Basinki and she could picture me infuriating a crowd of people by asking someone, anyone, to explain to me what was happening. She said everyone who rebuffed me, including the girl who looked me dead in the eye and called me selfish were “surprisingly nice” to me. “You wouldn’t go into a meditation or yoga retreat and say ‘Excuse me, can someone tell me what’s going on!?'” she said. She said people go to sound shows to be in their own heads, to be surrounded with the sounds the artist is creating and to see what comes up. It is not a social experience. I misread the situation. I failed to recognize the situation as being of a completely different culture. I was in America. I was in Washington DC. I was at a cerebral live music show. That is my culture, right?
I thought of the many times when I’d lived abroad that I would walk into a situation I didn’t quite understand, but because it was clearly a different culture, I would just take it in, look for some clues, process it, perhaps a few days later ask local friends for clarification. The karaoke bar in Jerusalem across from the King David Hotel. I saw how nights progressed there and the effect Hebrew ballads had and the proprietor’s penchant for playing Beyonce performing Tina Turner’s Proud Mary and at old Kennedy Center Honor’s gala had on the crowd and I went with the flow of the nights. Karaoke culture was different in Jerusalem than in America, that I understood. Driving in Israel was quite different than in America, too. The all-women’s carpet market in Morocco where the women who appeared to be shooing me away from their booths were actually saying “come here.” It didn’t take me long to learn that at government-sponsored concerts in the Chinese-built opera house in Algeria, people would leave their seats practically immediately and dance in the front rows and in the aisle and after watching for a while, I starting dancing the same way, the shimmy of my hips, the gentle turn of my wrist from upstretched arms. The gym culture in Madrid was vastly different than that in America and I quickly learned of the nationwide repulsion to bare feet and of the expectation that one should look as elegant whilst sweating (but probably don’t sweat) as they did on Madrid’s stately streets. But all these things I recognized as being of a culture different than my own because I was in foreign countries.
At the U.S. Embassy in Algeria, I hosted a YouTube show that attempted to explain certain parts of American culture – our country’s legal protections for people with disabilities, what American food is, what “Black food” refers to, what it means to be Hispanic. Once I returned home, had I really assumed that everything in America is my culture just because I’m American? Juliana’s comments felt like an epiphany (one of many in a year that’s been chock full of ’em). The northeast industrial sound scene is not my culture. I think in the future I’ll be quicker to recognize when a culture is not my own and act more as I would abroad – respectful, interested, observant. I cringe when I think how annoying and graceless I was when I failed to recognize I was experiencing a “cultural difference” in my own country at the William Basinski show.
It is funny that someone had to tell me “You thought this was what was happening, but really here’s what was happening.” One of my favorite stories, which I told in this blog post on the vulgarity of learning a new language, is about how I tried and failed to buy zippers in Rabat and how I thought because of my poor grasp of French I had accused shopkeepers of having zippers rather than inquiring as to whether they had zippers for sale. No, a Palestinian friend later told me, it’s because you did the motion for zipper and said “zip zip zip” and “zib” is Arabic for penis. She explained that what I’d actually done was marched into shops in the Rabat medina, shout “You have zippers!” and pantomime zipping and unzipping while declaring “penis penis penis.” (Never found any zippers. Collected many a shocked expression). So I’d thought the story was one thing, and then a person with more familiarity with the culture informed me what had really happened.
I have a good friend who recently moved to the U.S. from Algeria and as I’m having fun showing him things about America (how to use a can opener, for instance, as Algeria’s cans are all pop-top) I’m increasingly aware of the specific cultural sphere I’m exposing him to. Hanging out with me, he might think all Americans love mayo (not true), that Americans talk to strangers constantly (sort of true, depending on where you are in the U.S.) and that Washingtonians wear colorful clothes (decidedly not true). This friend asked me what “wishy washy” meant when I used that term recently and I told him it meant “hot and cold” but warned that if started talking like me, people were going to wonder why a 30-something large Algerian man was speaking like a British grandmother.
To cultural differences. And recognizing when you’re experiencing one.
Emily
thenextdinnerparty.com 