(Mis)Communication
Without easy communication, time slows down, and we think more about what to say, how do we communicate our feelings. We miss people. Writing a letter becomes an action, a gesture of expressing feelings and emotions which have no other outlet.
Jiba tells us that there is a tradition of sending a message ‘home’ when you cross the equator. We decide to send messages in bottles, to past, present and future homes. We write to our great-grandparents in South Africa, our father in England, and to our future selves, who knows where. We mail the letters by dropping the bottles from the side of the ship, watching the words disappear into the waves. Perhaps this is the most appropriate place for our words to go – we have let them out, but it is the lived emotions that really matter, not the externalised words.
We send a lantern into the sky on New Years Eve, with a message translated into Morse Code. Using the code, words become a series of lines and dots. The ultimate removal from the confusion of emotion to the cool rationality of representation. Maybe its right that the lantern is caught by high winds, the code is ripped and flies off to the skies, part caught on the crane, burning. Words on fire, seems to express them better than the ink on dry paper. Bergson writes that language used to describe emotions and feelings can trap and externalise feelings. Language rationalises things which are not rational.
Translation, which derives from the Latin ‘Transferre‘, meaning ‘to bring across’, can be seen as a metaphor for migration. (Basu & Coleman, 2008) An object transferred takes on a new set of significances – or may be evoked using new objects which ‘stand for’ the original. Similarly, in the carrying over of language, words take on new significances; Benjamin’s question of how translation can constitute the continued life of the ‘original’ mirrors the question of how the migrant can continue the life of their ‘home’ in a new context. The difference between translation (word for word rendering) and transduction (sense for sense), and therefore of entextualisation, extracting discourse from its original context and re-inserting it into a new context, expose how translations and migrations can transform, as well as cross boundaries.
The written language of ship is in a multitude of words: German/Polish/Italian/English..a palimpsest of makers/users/voyagers. Original signage has aged and one language has gradually replaced another, hastily typed and pasted over. The crew speak Polish, and we write out a series of questions for them, and ask the Captain to translate for us. Somewhere the question “A family recipe” gets confused into the Polish “what do your family think of your job?”- a question that has a very different, emotive meaning. We provoke angry, difficult, upset responses without meaning to. By the time we work out that the word ‘recipe’ has been confused with the word ‘receive’ we have already had some difficult but interesting conversations about the hardships of their lives, one perhaps we would have avoided with a question about the culture of food.
On Christmas Eve, we were invited to share and exchange tiny pieces of communion wafer with all the officers and crew, a ritual they always share at Christmas. The etymology of the word communion is moi, and signifies change or exchange. (Newling, 2001) Common, communicate, mutual and renumerate all spring from the same route. Etymologically, a companion is a person with whom we share bread. Sharing the wafers, or our baking bread from the starter culture and offering it to the crew, seem more profound means of communication and exchange than the verbal questions, which lead to confusion.
Katy Beinart
References:
Bergson, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les donnees immediates de la consience)
Basu & Coleman, Introduction: Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures, Mobilities Vol 3., No.3, Nov 2008
John Newling, The Kitchen Table, August 2001
