Eric Calderwood

Study Abroad

Ive spent the better part of the last fifteen years studying abroad. My personal study abroad itinerary has taken me to Argentina, Chile, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Morocco, Syria, and Algeria, and Ive made brief trips to dozens of other countries. My first experience of study abroad was a four-week stint in Costa Rica when I was fourteen. On my first night back from Costa Rica, I remember sitting on my parents front stoop and crying to myself. Eventually, my mother came to the screen door and, without opening it, asked, Whats wrong? All I could say was: I dont want to be here. As I look back at this memory, I cringe at its bathos. At fourteen, I wasnt only rebelling against the chains of language and self; I was also raging against the confines of an affluent suburban existence that, at the time, appeared entirely unsuited to my cosmopolitan aspirations. My four-week stay in Costa Rica seemed far more glamorous than what remained of my American summer vacation. I had had what I thought was a great adventureparticipating in a student strike, hiking through the jungle, learning to dance salsa. I had fallen in love with a Costa Rican girl whose name still figures prominently in my online account

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passwords. I hadI thoughtmastered the Spanish language. I was, in short, an international man of action and mystery. Needless to say, my assessment of my Costa Rican adventure was bloated, and my assessment of my parentsof their house, their milieu, and their valueswas unfair. Its interesting, though, for me to consider how much of the next fifteen years of my life would be prefigured by that one simple phrase: I dont want to be here. Its clear to me now that I was treating herewhether it be the United States, Boston, my family, my class, or my languageas a straw man. I wish, though, that I could go back and recapture that fourteen-year-olds optimism about how easy it would be to transcend any of those things. I was reminded of this teenage memory when I first read Paul Bowless novel The Sheltering Sky. In the novels opening scene, Port and Kit Moresby, the married couple at the center of the book, sit on the terrace of a caf in Tangier and plan their impending journey southward into the Moroccan desert. Sprawled out before them on the table are large multicolored maps, which Port studies carefully. Port, the narrator informs us, did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time: Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. More than time, though, the defining characteristic of the traveler, as conceived by Port, is that of belongingor rather, the absence of belonging. Port, we are to discover, finds it difficult to tell, among the many places he has lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. He prides himself on this rootlessness. Things end badly for Port and Kit. He dies of a mysterious illness perhaps meningitis, perhaps diphtheria. Abandoned, Kit wanders alone in the desert until she is picked up by a caravan, whose driver, Belqassim, rapes her and then leaves her to be raped by another man in the caravan.

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At the end of the novel, Kit Moresby reappears in Tangier, without money, a passport, or luggage. The American consular employee dispatched to pick up Kit at the Tangier airport and to ensure that she is placed on a transatlantic ship back to America tries to comfort her about the loss of her luggage: Youll certainly get it back The deserts a big place, but nothing really ever gets lost there. Kit, left virtually deaf and mute by her ordeal, is not so sure. Bowles, like his male protagonist Port Moresby, was a member of the New York intelligentsia who became weary of his American life and set out to escape from it. Indeed, the principal motif of Bowless centrifugal novel is escape, the sense that anywhere must be better than hereescape from America, escape from Tangier, escape from the self. The important thing is to be always heading there, rather than staying here. Later, in his autobiography, Bowles would admit: Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which, in disclosing its secrets, would give me wisdom and ecstasyperhaps even death. As much as Bowles aligns himself with the European Romantics, there is something uniquely American about his novel. The obstinacy of Bowless self-imposed exile in Morocco, where he lived until his death in 1999, harkens back to a tradition of American rootlessness perhaps best exemplified by Huck Finns famous parting shot: But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally shes going to adopt me and sivilize me and I cant stand it. I been there before. Clearly, Hucks Territory is not only a physical destinationthe Wild Westbut a mental one: away from Aunt Sallys sivilization. Hucks contrarian farewell to the reader finds its echo in the nonchalant confidence with which Port, Bowless hero, asserts, But Id still a damned sight rather be here than back in the United States. *

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At fourteen, I would have read Port Moresbys self-definitionas a traveler, not a touristwith a mixture of pride and identification. As it happens, I first read Bowless novel at the age of twenty-eight, on a Moroccan train heading south from Tangier to Fez. Many people read up on a place before traveling there. This experience can be like reading the book before seeing the movie: your perception of the country is tinged by nostalgia for the country you had already visited in your mind. For many, reading is itself the journey, and the subsequent trip is merely a souvenir to refresh your memory of an adventure youve already enjoyed. My experience of reading Bowles was the opposite. Rather than a journey foretold, it was a window onto a parallel version of my life. It was travel as a book thats already been written. This book, however, was a perverse mirror. I sensed that I was supposed to sympathize with Port and Kit, Bowless protagonists, to consider them glamorous and cosmopolitan. Instead, I found them parochial: disavowing country and culture is, after all, one of the most radical affirmations of being an American. I looked around me in the first-class train compartment. It was the middle of a workday, and the trainor at least the first-class carwas only half-occupied. Diagonally across from me sat a Moroccan woman in her thirties who kept adjusting the folds of her light blue djellaba, the long, flowing outer garment that almost all Moroccan women wear in public. She traveled with a wide-eyed toddler, who tugged at her headscarf and her djellaba with little whimpers. When he tired of harassing his mother, he started examining me with the unabashed curiosity only permitted to children. I was, no doubt, a strange creature to him: everything about me was differentfrom the color of my skin to the cut of my pants. And I was sitting there with a book in my hands. Morocco is a country where illiteracy is high, and where a butcher advertises fresh camel meat for sale by hanging a camels head on a hook outside his

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shop. In short, its a country where messages are not usually transmitted by text, and where books are rare. And yet there I was on the train, a rare bird with a rare object in its hands, being observed by the Moroccan boy. At that moment, it was difficult to buy into the worldly confidence of Ports claim not to know precisely where it was he had felt most at home. The boys stare, while not malicious, had a clear message: wherever your home is, it is not here. And yet I did not feel uncomfortable as the object of the boys gaze. In fact, it was nice to be noticed. One of the things I enjoy most about living abroad is the way it constantly draws my attention to difference not only the difference surrounding me, but also my own difference with regard to my surroundings. As a result, when Im abroad, Im able to entertain myself with much more meager resources. Even the most trivial transactions become laden with new purpose: ordering a coffee, taking a taxi, walking down the streetall of these actions put me face-to-face with the challenge of not-being-from-here. And Ive been living with this challenge, on and off, since the age of fourteen. When I returned home from Costa Rica, I really believed that I was on the verge of transcendence: that I was about to become something or someone different. This aborted transformationthe return home precisely at the moment when my sense of home was changingopened a void to which I have returned, time and time again, over the ensuing years. Ive realized nowor rather, Ive come to acceptthat there is nothing on the other side of that void, but that hasnt stopped me from pushing myself into it whenever I have the chance. The phrase study abroad has become so commonat least in our university lexiconthat we rarely stop to examine it. Like its predecessor the Grand Tour, study abroad adopts the form of a rite of passage: the young student separates from his home culture and his home identity, transitions to a new context where he fashions a new identity, and then

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re-incorporates himself into his home culture, bringing with him the values and insights of his experience abroad. Study abroad describes one process by which a student becomes adult. But while the Grand Tour had obligatory stops in France and Italy, study abroad has no fixed itinerary. Its destination, like Bowless Morocco, is defined by what it is not, rather than what it is. The location of abroad is both vague and resonant: it is where home is not. And yet the project of study abroad itself casts a shadow over this location, since the pursuit of study abroad is, presumably, to learn about, mimic, and even incorporate into a new culturethat is, to expand your sense of home. Therein lies the tension of study abroad, for it is not clear whether you are meant to return home as a more cultured person or to disappear into your adopted country of study. The phrase cultural immersion suggests a depth from which you might not emerge: a losing of oneself in another environment. For this reason, I think, the fantasy of many Americans living abroad is to pass, to be unrecognizable as a foreigner, to match the cultural and linguistic norms of another place, to be one of them. Behind this sought-after transformation is the seductive notion that you can choose the person you want to be, that you are not bound by chains of language and nation. In my experience, though, this notion is just that: a seduction. Eventually, you returnto your country, to your language, to yourself. For an American expatriate, the most frustrating reminder of these limits is being spoken to in English in a public place, particularly if you have already invested several years learning the language or culture of that place. American expatriates have to live down their countrys notorious reputation for being bad at languages. No matter how many pirouettes you do, this reputation can be hard to shake. You can order sweetbreads in Catalan at a restaurant and then have the waiter say thank you in English when he brings you the bill. Thirteen-year-old boys will stop you on the street to try out their newly learned four-letter

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vocabulary in English. It is like walking around a foreign city with a big flashcard taped to your back saying kick me. The literary scholar Philip Weinstein put this frustration best when he said, after having spent many years in Paris: Ive given up on the dream of disappearing in French. Even the most enlightened travelers (Weinstein, a Francophile, even studied under Derrida and Foucault in France) run up against the wall of disappearing into another language and another culture. This is why becoming fluent in a language is an entirely different proposition from becoming native. And this is also why the exhilaration of study abroad always finds its necessary corollary in mourning: the final insight of study abroad being the death of the mobility fantasy that gave the journey its original impetus. Put more simply, the final lesson of study abroad might be that you cannot, in fact, leave your home, but that you canand shouldalways try. I can find no more vibrant illustration of this lesson than the process of language acquisition. I was not blessed with a bilingual childhood but was smittenfrom my very first trip to Mexico, at age ten with an incorrigible desire to communicate with people from other places. For those of us with a monolingual upbringing (and who come to realize, often too late, what a severe limitation this is), foreign language becomes the field in which we exercise our desire to be more than what we actually are. Perhaps for this reason, Ive tried my hand at fifteen foreign languages: mostly European languages, but also Arabic, Hebrew, and even Mapudungun. (It will come as no surprise that I did not blend in seamlessly with the indigenous peoples of south-central Chile, despite my year of Mapudungun at the University of Chile.) This perverse need to start a new language every yeareven as I face my disappointment about unachieved goals in the languages Ive already startedis just one of the factors that has driven me to become interested in North Africa and to spend two of the past three years here. As I complete this essay, Im a visiting scholar at a research center in

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Oran, Algeria. To be a fully functional citizen in Algerian (or Moroccan or Tunisian) society, you need to be fluent in no less than three languages: Modern Standard Arabic, French, and colloquial Algerian Arabic, which has no standardized written system and is mutually unintelligible with other Arabic dialects. To make matters worse, discrete fluency in all three languagesno mean feat in its own rightis not enough: rather, you must know how and when to switch between each language, as Algerians mix and match them all, often within the same sentence. Fluency in the Maghrib is interstitial: weaving between set codes rather than residing in any one. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida, himself an acculturated Algerian Jew, gestured at the inbetweenness of Algerian speech when he wrote, famously, in French: I have but one language; it is not mine. The instant you open your mouth in a Maghribi country, you unsettle and displace yourself. There are so many viable codes of communication that it is almost impossible not to make yourself understood; there are so many viable codes, that it is almost impossible to know whether you are saying things in the right way. Every act of speech is an experiment, where total failure is unlikely and total success even more unlikely. My favorite and most admired polyglot, Luis Girn, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard, once said that he speaks Puerto Rican in fourteen languages. No doubt, Girn undersells his linguistic acumen, yet I would have to join him in turning Derridas famous dictum on its head: I have but one language; it is mine. Language study, then, becomes just a path to an increasingly layered monolingualism. Likewise, study abroad is often a voyage inward rather than outward, a recognition of limits, rather than an expansion of borders. This statement seems, at best, a half-hearted endorsement of the whole project, but I dont mean it that way; I actually have a very optimistic viewalmost naively optimisticof our ability to understand difference. The path of this understanding, however, runs straight

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through the frustrating and embarrassing recognition of all the cultural and linguistic baggage weve acquired by the time we travel abroad as college students or as adults. The traveler and the tourist that Bowles imagines in The Sheltering Sky might be little more than an expats fantasy. In any case, I started traveling too late in life to say with any honesty that I belong no more to one place than to the next. For better or worse, I belong to the childhood stoop to which I returned that summer after my trip to Costa Rica. With each trip abroad, though, the stoop grows a little larger.

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