Language Body Maps

Today while attending a (virtual) conference in Salzburg, Austria, I heard Dr Urilke Hatzer say these words:

“We are not afraid of languages we don’t know.”

The sentence was spoken within a particular setting (the Glossary of Performing Arts in Context conference) and referred to the creation of a network of international practitioners in the performing arts. Urilke used this as her premise to discuss a multilingual project, whereby colleagues may not speak each other’s languages, but share a vision.

This sentence struck me. We are not afraid of languages we don’t know. I guess it struck me because today I’ve been working all day on the reflective prompts for a research instrument, as part of the Sorgente project. After reflecting on the prompts, I reached out to  Somali, Pashto and Swahiili translators to translate the instructions for our participants, who can speak several languages, but whose English is still developing.

This week the Sorgente project officially started, after 14 months of delay due to COVID-19. Our first arts-based activity (Workshop 1) was the LANGUAGE BODY MAP, inspired by the Plurilingual Portrait, as published in the Council of Europe’s Language Support for Adult Refugees toolkit (Tools 16 and 38). It was Fiona who suggested it, Sorgente’s international partner at the University of Padova, as she had conducted it last week with her Mimosa group of migrants.

The LANGUAGE BODY MAP activity consists in drawing a silhouette of a body, and using the body shape as a map of the languages you speak. There’s a lampant example on the Council of Europe toolkit, the activity is quite simple – or so it seems, at first sight. You don’t need to be 100% fluent in the language represented to include it; so if you know only a few words in a given language, it can go on the body-map (this is an important point to tell the students).

We chose this as the start for our Sorgente project for various reasons: to find out about participants’ backgrounds, and to gage their ability to think on an abstract plane. But also to acknowledge that, while their English may not be fully developed, they are talented multilingual individuals – whose expertise as language learners is invaluable. This is at the heart of the matter – defining learners for the languages they know, not for those that they don’t know.

As a reflective practitioner, what I do with my students always becomes a source of reflection for me, too. Before trying out the LANGUAGE BODY MAP my colleague Miriam and I decided to try it for ourselves. We came up with very different results, and talking about our choices was key to the reflective process. Conducting the activity reminded me of my love of languages; it helped me to think about where languages may be located in my body, and the associations that brought me there.

Why did I draw English in my eyes? Polish in my finger nails? Spanish in my feet? Serbian in my armpits? French in my hair? German on my shoulders? Italian in my gut? Portuguese in my heart? Irish in my nose? I strongly feel that it couldn’t have been any other way. This is where the arts give us the chance to make our own, unique sense of life.

While engaged in this activity, I realised there’s a number of metaphors that need to be unpacked with the group – to make the instructions as clear as possible. In case anyone may want to use this activity with groups of learners, here’s my thoughts on what four implicit metaphors are (there may very well be others).

The first metaphor embedded within the activity is associating a language and a colour. This could take a long time figuring out, or it could just be an intuitive act. I heard some people say: “I have chosen the colour red for Spanish, because… ” while others (like me) just picked a colour based on a hunch that goes beyond logic. As Einstein said, logic will take you from A to Z; imagination everywhere else.

The second metaphor embedded within this activity is associating a language and a body part. This is also a symbolic operation. It’s the faculty of imagination, an ability to associate somatic memories and a given language (intended as a system of communication) that will govern this choice. Someone may say: “Spanish is in my feet, as it’s my roots; or in my head, as I have to think about it”.

As for me, why Spanish in my feet? My association was with the famous saying: “Caminante, no hay el camino: se hace el camino al andar” [Traveller, there is no road; you make your path as you walk] by Antonio Machado, and my experience of travelling through Spain. Thus, that is the language of road trips, of traveling. The imagery was evoked by the poem.

A third metaphor then, is to associate a language with literature, a poem, a verse, lyrics or any text. In my own map, each language has an arrow and connects with a song, stanza, a sentence or leitmotif. This reminded me of a very simple tenet – that languages are alive in our bodies through memories, poetry, songs, sayings, literature. Remants of a language may be stored in our body memory for years.

A fourth metaphor, one that I didn’t choose to pursue in my map, is to quantify the level of the language spoken, and to colour a portion of the body accordingly. My co-facilitator Miriam, for example, coloured most of her body surface map with her chosen ‘colour’ for English, and just a small section with her chosen colour for Swahili – as she speaks more English than Swahili. That is yet a different operation which could be evoked by the LANGUAGE BODY MAP activity.

Finally, what is recommended by the Coucil of Europe, is to reflect on the status of each language (or dialect). This is where the drawing of the map becomes a promp for critical thinking and reflection: why is it that someone who only speaks one language (English, for example) may be considered more educated that someone who speaks 3 or 4 languages?

Back to my first point. There is a core belief running at the core of the BODY MAP activity, that is encapsulated in what Dr. Mira Sack said today:

“We are not afraid of languages we don’t know.”

Our L2 students may speak languages we don’t know. It’s important to acknowledge those languages, and not to be afraid of them (or pretent they don’t exist). That connects to Dr Fadi Skeiker, applied theatre practitioner and academic, who writes: “Any work which seeks to erase the Syrian/Iraqi/Somali/etc., life and family from the refugee and to replace it with a new German or American identity will fail in its mission.” (2010)

It also reminds me of a brilliant article, The Wound of Multilingualism, where Sulaiman Addonia describes how, for a while, Silence became his first language. In the article Sulaiman uses plenty of metaphors to associate languages and the body. For example, he writes: “Arabic was like a necklace of white pearls around my neck, its foreignness and temporariness so visible on my skin”.

Some of our Sorgente participants located English not in their body, but outside their bodies, e.g., on their hat. Others drew English as external to their body, in a bubble. All drew one language in their heart (but none drew English in their hearts). What would it take to make a language alive, in the body, rather than an add-on, external accessory?

That’s what we’re asking participants next week. We’ll pose the questions in their first language (hence the translators) and invite them to answer using collage, text and drawing. Their answers will turn into an artefact, a so-called pocket Zine, a research tool that researcher Autumn Brown has been working on – but that’s a story for another day.

For today, all I need to remember is not to forget the languages I do know, not be afraid of the languages I don’t know – and what their presence or absence may reveal.