I was asked to contribute to the Familia ry blog by writing an article on intercultural identity from a personal point of view. The original post can be found here, while a slightly longer version is below.

The Problem With Language

It is a question I’ve been asked all my life, with little to no variation, except for perhaps a slight change in inflection, depending on which word the speaker wants to emphasize. A question too often repeated, at times even with the voice rising as though that would make it easier for me to understand what the asker is trying to convey. Because to the person asking there is no way on God’s green Earth someone could have two native languages when by nature of its definition you can only have one mother tongue. Or so it would appear to those who grew up in an (exclusively) monolingual environment where additional languages may or may not be taught later in life. 

It is especially disconcerting when the question comes from people who – by nature of their work – really should know better. In my case it usually comes about when I state that my native languages are English and German. It confuses people first of all because there are two, and second because I am a French citizen, which in the eyes of the confused means I should only be speaking the language of my passport country. I do speak French, and write it, but when it comes to feeling at ease, my languages of education and work have primarily been English and German. In other words, I feel fine writing in French but would like to have a second pair of eyes on it before I make it public. 

That’s the surface, because there are other languages in the mix, languages I’ve known since earliest childhood or learned in elementary school, but to bring those in only complicates matters even further. Also, because I have forgotten at least two of them while perfecting one to a level that makes me sound like a native pretending to play dumb. In other words, I sound like someone who has been out of the country for a long time and now acts like a local unable to speak the language properly anymore. At least this is how it comes across to the onlooker who is used to communicating exclusively in one language with complete and utter ease, missing out on the fact that one can prefer to communicate in a language one doesn’t necessarily master with utmost fluency. 

Fighting Assigned Identity 

The problem is that too often people tend to associate identity and belonging with language, and will label the speaker accordingly. For my part, I don’t want to be labeled as being part of a culture I either rejected early on or have absolutely no connection to by virtue of its changed geography. I also don’t want to come across as assigning more value to one culture than another, though that has been my subconscious go-to all my life. Cross Culture Kids, who are brought up in this mindset,  can dip in and out of cultures at seemingly breakneck speed, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have our own likes and dislikes when it comes to certain cultural norms. Some of us thrive in more authoritative structures, while others benefit from permissive environments. Personally, I’ve always functioned best when I was given freedom over set guidelines, but I have friends for whom the set guidelines work. As a consequence  there are places I’ve lived in that leave a very bad taste in my mouth still, whereas others evoke an instant feeling of inner peace, love, joy and the happiest of memories. 

The cliche of the CCK who instantly accepts all cultures (they have lived in)  with unquestioning enthusiasm is as true as that of every little girl wanting to be a (Disney) princess while every little boy wants to be a superhero. They exist, but there are so many others that live their lives alongside them. People who grew up in a multicultural world might be aware of the diversity in cultures around them but will continue to keep up the separation of cultures. In other words, while they will shop at the ethnic market or learn about someone’s religion, or even (try and) appropriate their lifestyle, the cultures never truly intersect. They exist side by side and sometimes meet, but mostly as a novelty or entity apart. Their environment is as far removed from a truly intercultural world as a fast food burger is from a proper BBQ. 

In the perfect case scenario, we all want to move towards being truly intercultural, dipping in and out of rituals, habits and customs we grew up as we please; wrapping them around ourselves like a mantle when we need to, displaying them for the whole world to see as we like. Because each culture has the same value as the other. But society often has different ideas on who we are (to them), and will shove us into corners we don’t want to be in; assigning us an identity we never asked for in the first place, based on our names, where we have come from and how we speak the language. The latter is important because we are not just judged on our diction but also on the dialect(s) we choose, our patterns of speech, not to mention our mannerisms while we switch in and out of languages, often in the same breath. That’s our reality, our world, and it is one we immediately have taken away from us when we are assigned an identity by whoever we speak to or interact with, whether they say this out loud or imply so with their actions. 

In my case I was taken to be German by pretty much all relatives on my mother’s side, because to them that’s where I’d (mainly) grown up. We didn’t exactly keep in touch, so they missed a large chunk of the time I had spent in the US, and somehow having a French passport (and identity) completely bypassed them. It wasn’t until I started really talking to fellow CCKs about our individual experiences that I saw how common this pattern was of assigning an identity to us in order to please the other person we speak to but not necessarily ourselves. In fact, it very rarely complies with how we would describe ourselves. To those rigid minded locals we encounter within our own families, in school or just in daily life, we are always The Other never allowed to be part of them in their eyes, at least not completely. 

The incidents I most remember, as they turned on a switch in me that took a good several years to digest, occurred mainly in Germany. It was one thing to have to negotiate the fact that many Germans would break out in “Ausländerdeutsch” – a deliberately broken style of speaking German that mimics the way guest workers (mainly from Turkey, Sicily, Spain and Greece) would speak after picking up the language without any formal training. That I could put down to people being ill educated themselves, primitive mindset I’d call it. And in a way, hurtful as it was, I was not being targeted or even addressed directly. But the teacher with the French-sounding name who considered me to be of Huguenot ancestry because of my name was more personal, assigning me an identity I did not want to have and had never asked for. And still she didn’t come close to the teacher who suggested I work on my German when I tried to copy the style of an ethnic German writer from Poland in a creative writing exercise we had been assigned. I later got back at that teacher by passing off a book I’d written as someone already published. 

But assigned identity can also create the potential for some fun, though admittedly not (necessarily) the kind of fun people had in mind. Like every kid and teen I experimented with identities growing up. I could be a French person from Paris, or even from Belgium. Or I could be an American who was just hanging out in Germany because her parents happened to like Europe. In the US especially, thanks to my last name, I could pretend to be part of the Puerto Rican community a lot of my friends came from, though by the time this dawned on me, I had already forgotten a lot of the Spanish I had picked up from watching kids’ programs in the US as a child. But I could also be French-Canadian or from New Orleans and failing that at least Louisiana. The possibilities were endless, only really limited by my imagination.

Growing up in cross-cultural and multicultural environments with my parents’ own cultures kept hush hush was alternatively disconcerting and pretty cool as a kid. Eventually it raised the question if I  was French because I feel that I am, or am I French because this was imposed on me. But if the latter was true, who had the authority to assign my identity to me? The locals of the country I was hanging out in or the French I met abroad and in France? And what does it even mean to be French? Do I now have to dress a certain way (and if so, how), do I have to act a certain way (again, how, and who determines this way) or do I have to speak a certain way, change my pronunciation, my accents? I sound completely American when I speak English, but tend to have an American accent when I speak French. In the past it mellowed out after a while of being back in France, but there’s always the uncertainty of the present. 

Against All Odds – the personal workaround

Today, describing myself as “French-American with a dash of this, that and the other in the mix” allows me to come to the polycultural table on my own terms. I don’t have to reveal identities I know (or assume) will interfere with which culture I feel particularly connected to on the particular day I get asked, but I am not pushed into a corner where I have to define myself against my will. A close friend coined the term “personalized blend,” which I now use before launching into the longer definition. As a rule of thumb, if we only engage in a surface interaction I can leave it at that, and if we have more time to delve deeper, I can always dissect and explain.  

Was it all bad being a CCK without proper guidance? At times, I would have liked more guidance, more acceptance from those closest to me in letting me explore and find out more about this or that side instead of instructing me to keep it hush hush or relegating it to some undesirable status. But at the same time, it also helped me find out who I am or / and who I would want to be. I did not grow up embedded in the social fabric of my father’s land or the place(s) my mother considered home. I had to create my own culture from which to pass my own judgment on people and situations in order to navigate life, take away what was good and that which was bad. It helped me hone and trust my instincts when it comes to people and situations, ultimately carving out my own niche and staying safe when it comes to culturally sensitive questions: is this behavior cultural or was it merely imposed to feed someone’s ego? Addressing an elder in a more formal manner is a cultural idea I can easily take forward. Being subjected to their abuse under the guise of “elders know best” clearly is not. But knowing the culture this comes from, I can understand where this abuse and its acceptance are rooted. I may not be able to fight either, but I can (hopefully) walk away from it less emotionally battered than if I was tied to that culture with my heart and soul without the recourse of another. 

Most importantly perhaps, it cemented a desire to help those who were – or still are – in a similar position to me: helping them and those around them truly understand what it means to have different cultures (be they religious, regional or spanning across countries / continents) living in your soul by creating more and more spaces for us and having someone to talk to. I’ve seen the greatest heights of being cross-cultural and the lowest depths of being intercultural. As we move from a world with global thinking on one side battling the monocultural advocates on the other, my resolve has never been stronger to help those who grew up as cross-cultural individuals  forced – explicitly or implicitly – to trade one culture for another or to chose one above the other in a bid to become truly intercultural, where every culture has the same merit(s) as the other. 

We moved to Germany when I was nine going on ten, and even though we’d been there before, something in my had broken enough for me to hate the place with a passion only someone who has been torn away from all that they held sacred could muster. I heard the song on the radio shortly after and I can honestly say, it’s what kept me grounded. It was beautiful and mysterious, haunting in its nod to the use of synthesizers and – without my childhood self being able to put it into words – spoke of another place and another time when life was one city adventure after another and friends – along with having a few places to hang out – were all that mattered.