My Native Language
Is your native language something you take for granted? Well, for me it has been a struggle — a struggle with history, politics, society, and myself. Yet something guided me through it. I don't know what you heard about my native land — Belarus. For most of the world it is a new country, as four centuries of severe Russian assimilation devastated Belarusian culture. But some of it managed to survive, mostly in the villages. This shaped my biography.
Although I was born in a city in the western part of then Byelorussian SSR1, the first six years of my life I spent in a village with my grandparents. I remember the manmade old woody gate to the orchard. I remember noises of storks on the roofs of the houses and frogs croaking in the evening. I remember the sounds of whistling "ts," "dz," tough "ch," "r," "dzh" people made while talking. "Volya..." I would hear from my great-grandparents, and I would feel proud as this word also meant "freedom." All of those sounds seemed to come from nature, creating feeling of harmony and peace.
At the age of six, like thousands of other children in the 16 Republics of the Soviet Union, I entered a school in my native town, Brest. It was at school I noticed I spoke a different dialect than the other children. They said I had bad grammar and pronounced words in strange, "village" ways, ways they used to correct. I felt ashamed because of my lack of education. In those soviet 80s, for the city people "village" was almost a derogatory word. Little by little, I learned to speak correctly. But during vacations I went back to the village, and the world there worked in other sounds — in another language. I would no longer accept that language as it stood for som...
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...an culture, I can afford it, because I am out of the country for most of the year. My parents use Belarusian in the city themselves when I am in Belarus. As for strangers, I chose to surprise them, sometimes meeting resistance or anger, sometimes recieveing thanks and cheers. It is a battle every time I leave my apartment in Brest. It is hard to get used to. But sometimes that what it takes to be who you are. When I visit my grandmother, she laughs: "Remember, when you were a kid you used to correct me when I said "stork" in Belarusian to "stork" in Russian, saying that now you knew how to say it correctly. Old people also know something about life."
ENDNOTES:
I use a different spelling of Belarus and Belarusian when I refer to the Soviet era, as before 1991 the country's name was translated to English from Russian as "Byelorussia" or "Byelorussian SSR."
Originally born in Moscow, Russia, I came to the United States fourteen years ago with my parents along with my unrelated brother as their newly adopted children. Transitioning to a new country can be hard, but not knowing the language is even harder. For the first few years of my life, I struggled to speak, write and read any English. Since then, I have become acclimated to the American culture and state of mind and learned English proficiently, but, lost touch with my mother tongue because I spoke minimal Russian. I have always been proud to acknowledge and tell others that I am adopted from Mother Russia. However, over the past several years my curiosity and desire to learn about my native homeland have increased significantly. My interest in the Russian language reignited last year when I overheard a Russian and Kazakh having a conversation in Russian. I soon found myself listening to anyone anywhere, who spoke Russian.
Most people who grow up with a foreign language spoken in there house grow up with an advantage in society. This advantage can only occur once the individual learning that foreign language also learns the dominant language spoken in that country. Once both of these languages are learned and mastered, the individual has now placed them se...
The transformation of individuals also included citizens’ desire to become more cultured. Many Soviet citizens characterized peasants, those who were not yet part of the transformation, as “economical[ly] and cultural[y] backwards” (70); thus, the people wanted to be more cultured to distinguish themselves from the lower-class. Such things as brushing teeth, table manners, and public behavior allowed them to be distinguished (80). Fitzpatrick says on page 80, “Newspapers and journals carried regular accounts of successes in mastering the first level of culture, […] these should not always be taken literally.” Fitzpatrick again emphasizes that much of the reports during this period were propaganda.
...nited States of America is throwing billions of dollars down an empty black hole trying to solve a problem that they don’t really even have. If just the slightest reforms were made towards drug rehabilitation instead of incarceration then many people’s lives could be saved to live productive lives in society and contribute towards the well being of everyone. If drug policy were changed to exclude incarceration then the U.S. would save billions of dollars every year from having to incarcerate these prisoners. If District attorneys were held responsible for withholding crucial evidence that can exonerate the accused then we would reduce the number of innocent people serving time for crimes that they did not commit. If the death penalty was abolished throughout The United States of America then we would know that no injustices are being served that cannot be reversed.
Betty was only seventeen when she found out that she was pregnant. She and the father had been in a long term relationship, and had discussed having children of their own. However, when he found out that she was pregnant their relationship immediately changed. Suddenly he began to question her fidelity, and he accused her of being pregnant with another man’s baby. After his reaction, Betty decided not to tell anyone, especially because having a child out of wedlock was frowned upon. She began to search for an abortion clinic. She found one by looking through the telephone directory for gynecologists who did not advertise themselves as obstetricians. She went to meet the practitioner in a run-down shack in the middle of nowhere. Once Betty arrived, the practitioner immediately began the procedure. The method this practitioner used was a cervical puncture followed by an insertion of willow bark. Betty was given no pain medicine. After she left she began to bleed profusely and soon presented symptoms of an infection. Although the woman who performed the abortion told her not to come back, she did, and was given some painkillers. After a few days the infection appeared to have passed and her doctor told her she was no longer pregnant (Fadiman). Betty’s story is not a rare one. Many women suffered because of the unsafe conditions that they had endure to get an abortion after abortion was criminalized. These conditions were a direct result of new laws that punished women for attempting to procu...
Elena Gorokhova explains in her memoir that “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” The novel, A Mountain of Crumbs, depicts the hopelessness, opression and deception of life behind the Iron Curtain during the 70s and 80s. Many rights of the people within the Soviet Union were violated and unacknowledged. In ages past, there were no human rights but the idea evolved after a while. It was at the end of World War II that the United Nations created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the purpose of saving future generations from devastating internal conflicts. Human rights are the rights one has simply because one is a human being. There is no distinction between who can exercise and obtain their rights. Some of these obvious rights include that all humans are born free with the promise of life, liberty and security of person. The above rights should be protected and respected by everyone. However, the rights of the communist nations in the USSR were not kept safe. Specifically, the rights to emigrate and move freely as pleased, the freedom of consciousness, thought and religion and the ability to express oneself as they wish. Essentially, people’s rights were being restricted within the Iron Curtain, many of them uncovering their voices and pleeing for change at once, but instead they encountered armed forces prepared to erase anyone in defense of the status quo.
While this may have in part been true, overall this was a false portrayal of what life under Socialism was really like. In order to secure obedience, the Soviet Union “brainwashed” the younger generation and lied to the entire population about how life in the West was. Peter Sis, a man who grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet Union, writes about this in a children’s book. He writes, “As long as he could remember, he had loved to draw. At first he drew shapes. Then he drew people. After drawing whatever he wanted to at home, he drew what he was told to at school. He drew tanks. He drew wars. He didn’t question what he was being told” (Sis). In this excerpt, Sis writes about his love for drawing as a child, and how as he grew up, the state took away his freedom of choice by telling him what to draw. Later on in his book he writes, “Slowly he started to question. He painted what he wanted to – in secret” (Sis). This shows that despite the image of conformity and obedience, people like Peter Sis went against the rules of the state in order to do what he loved and to have a sense of uniqueness. This need for uniqueness is established yet again in another piece of writing. It focuses on the underground black market that was rampant in the Soviet Union during Socialism. This black market sold Western goods and allowed customers to express their
In 1900 a law was passed banning women from having an abortion. Before 1900, abortions were a common practice and usually performed by a midwife, but doctors saw this as a financial threat and pushed for a law making abortions illegal. From 1900 until 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a women’s right to have an abortion, women who wanted to have an abortion did so secretly. These secret abortions were performed
Any signs of innovation and improvements were saved for cities, while conditions in the villages drastically worsened. Villagers like Matryona would listen about new inventions and Earth satellites through radio as if they were some useless magic wonders, and then they would go on loading peat with forks and eat plain potatoes and barley kasha. Soviet ideology infiltrated Matryona’s life through a wall poster and a radio, but it was unable to change her peasant soul into sophisticated and progressive New Soviet Man. Villagers’ life was a struggle of surviving the winter and finding food to eat, leaving no place for abstract concerns about ideological
Soon after World War II the Soviet Union had created a red iron curtain around Eastern Europe, communist regimes could be seen throughout with countries like Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. These regimes where severely oppressive and violated basic human rights, hence a growing opposition was beginning to form. From the mid-1970’s Vaclav Havel, a former playwright would become the most prominent Czechoslovakian “dissident” and campaigner against the abuses of the Communist Regime by actively defending the rock group Plastic People of the Universe, being one of the three public spokespeople for Charter 77 and by writing various essays critiquing the communist regime. No essay has had more influence and been instrumental in “dissident” movements in Eastern Europe than the essay “The Power of the Powerless”. Within this essay and others that Havel wrote throughout the 1970s and 80s Havel describes the Communist system, critiques it and explains his strategy for overcoming the regime.
Boroditsky concludes that “Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.” (Core reader p. 49) I would like to add that language is also the foundation of a person’s culture, pride, and self by exploring articles written by Eric Liu, Amy Tan, and Gloria Anzaldua. In his book, The Accidental Asian, there is a chapter called Notes of a Native Speaker: Growing Up Across Racial and Cultural Divides, where Eric Liu describes his assimilation. His parents “didn’t tell [him] to do anything except to be a good boy,” C.R. p.62) so there he was, at a fork in the road between being the typical Asian and the atypical Asian.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Yuri Slezkine. "N.I. Slavnikova Et Al. "Speeches by Stakhanovites"" In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000. 331-41. Print.
Abortion has been a complex social issue in the United States ever since restrictive abortion laws began to appear in the 1820s. By 1965, abortions had been outlawed in the U.S., although they continued illegally; about one million abortions per year were estimated to have occurred in the 1960s. (Krannich 366) Ultimately, in the 1973 Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, it was ruled that women had the right to privacy and could make an individual choice on whether or not to have an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. (Yishai 213)
I had the chance to live in very diverse linguistic environment. I was born in Romania and obviously the first language that I learned was Romanian. I the age of three I moved in Gabon, Africa, where the primary language was French. During my fifteen years in Africa I learned to speak the literary French, Verlan, and the French African dialect.
Love however, is the source of much confusion and complication in another of Shakespeare’s comedies, Twelfth Night. Men and women were seen as very different from each other at the time the play was written, they were therefore also treated in very different ways. Because of this Viola conceals her identity and adopts the role of a man, in order to better her safety whilst being alone on the island, and to get a job at Count Orsino’s court. In the play Shakespeare uses the gender confusion he has created from obscuring characters identities to explore the limits of female power and control within courtship, and their dominance within society. Violas frustration surrounding her inability to express her feelings to the Count because she is a woman is an example of the limiting rules of courtship which were upheld at the time. (Aside) ‘yet, a barful strife! Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife.’ Here she is already expressing her anxiety and emotion at being a woman, and having to keep her emotions hidden from those around her. She longs to be able to express her love as a man could, and in her disguise as Cesario she finds an opportunity to vent her feelings for the Count, but concealed as his words and towards Olivia. Viola is unaware of how her words may sound to Olivia because she is aware of their gender boundaries however Olivia isn’t and soon falls for Cesario. Because Olivia is a Lady and head of the household, and especially how she lacks a father figure, she has a lot more freedom in courtship. Duisinberre comments on this saying, ‘...Viola and Beatrice are women set free from their fathers, and their voice is that of the adult world.’ This is seen when Olivia immediately takes the dominant role in her and Cesarios relat...