http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/world/10156742.html
On translating Ahmadinejad
By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
Published: September 28, 2007, 23:14
Two cultures collided in New York early this week. Happily, the collision
was not of the violent kind that we associate with bloodletting. But it was
nasty nevertheless, involving as it did a nightmare of untranslatability
between two disparate views of the world, two value systems, two historical
experiences and two semantic fashions of perception.
On a three-day visit to the United States to address the United Nations
General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to deliver
a speech at Columbia University. That made him a guest speaker, and thus he was
entitled to be treated with respect by his academic hosts.
Introducing him at the podium, however, the university's president, Lee
Bollinger, deemed it necessary to identify the Iranian leader as a man who
lacked "intellectual courage", had a "fanatical mind-set" and was
"astonishingly undereducated". Turning towards Ahmadinejad, Bollinger hollered
theatrically: "Mr President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel
dictator". And on and on. And that was just for starters.
Bollinger, who did not appear quite "overeducated" himself, clearly did
not seem to understand the sacrosanct place that a guest, whether invited to
one's campus or one's home, occupied in Middle Eastern society.
Seeming visibly shaken and chastising his host for lambasting him before
he uttered a single word, Ahmadinijad still soldiered on, delivering his speech
and later answering questions from the audience. He did not disappoint the
predominantly hostile attendees who had come to the lecture hall predisposed to
laugh him off the stage.
"Our people are the freest people in the world," he said. On the issue of
women's rights, he claimed that "the freest women in the world are women in
Iran". Addressing himself to a question about the press, he asserted, none too
convincingly, that "in our country freedom is flowing at its highest level".
Then came this: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals as you do in your country".
To the audience that was a howler. And so it went.
Currency of rational exchange
What is going on here? What is going on here is the question of two
cultures that meet at an academic venue, to exchange ideas, only to discover
that their respective experience of each other (each others' language habit and
assumed social reference) has set them apart.
The language world of Middle Easterners is different from that of North
Americans. Language, of course, is more than a mere currency of rational
exchange among people, for it stands in vital, close-knit reciprocity with
culture, felt reality and consciousness. The ornamental irrelevancies and
elided references that we insinuate into our speech act in the Middle East, our
capacity to use the same word to mean different things (to psycho-linguists
known as "polysemy") will totally escape people in the Euro-American world but
be recognised instantly by a Middle Easterner as signals of mutual
understanding.
When Ahmadinejad, for example, claimed that there were no homosexuals in
Iran, he did not expect his audience to take him literally. He may be
"undereducated", and he may not have taken the trouble to read half a dozen
decent books about what makes American society tick, but he is not insane. The
remark's ferocious innocence came across to his audience as simply duplicitous.
Then, passing equally misunderstood, came that strain of ultimatum, that
separatist stance, that masculine use of the third person plural, in his
references to "we in Iran".
Different cultures define the objective world around them differently,
though they may seem to use the same vocabulary. During the heyday of the
Soviet Union, as a case in point, Communist leaders employed the same idiom as
their counterparts in the West to refer to, say, "freedom", "progress" and
"human rights", but the terms in both locales had fiercely disparate meanings.
Try to search for the right words to explain to someone in a country that
has known, or been allowed, only a "mobilising press" (whose sole role in
society is to mobilise support for the government) the victory scored by the
American media to win the right to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971 against
the strenuous objections of the White House. Conversely, try to explain to an
English-speaking person how absurd, how improbable, the character of Lady
Macbeth, committed to killing Duncan "under my battlements", appears to an Arab
being introduced to Shakespear's play. Duncan, he will exclaim, is her guest.
Who harms a guest? Unimaginable!
Different cultures speak differently indeed, at times even in body
language incomprehensible to non-native speakers. To Yasser Arafat, packing a
.45 at his hip while addressing the UN General Assembly in November 1974 was,
as it were, a normal fashion statement for him as it was for several other
political leaders in his part of the world. For New Yorkers, and other
Americans, however, it was gross, unbecoming and scandalous. A Korean who
smiles at a stranger means to insult him. A Japanese fan beating before a
speaker's face in ceremonious motion will convey impatience. And the rest of
it.
Ahmadinejad did not appear to understand American culture one bit.
Neither did Americans appear to understand Ahmadinejad one bit. They talked at
not to each other. It was as if Iranians and Americans heard each other for the
first time and discovered, with sickening conviction, that they shared no
common language, that their previous encounter, before 1979, had been hollow,
leaving the heart of meaning in both cultures untouched. All the pity.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several
books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in
Washington D.C.
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