Semester at Sea Fall 2006 Voyage |
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Turkish Delights |
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TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Istanbul,
Turkey
Lara Calloway In my own feeble and poorly executed attempts to learn a foreign language, I have always worried and wondered excessively about joke-making. How long would it take to acquire the affluence, accent, and linguistic ability necessary to makes effective jokes in another language without everyone just thinking that you don’t know what you’re saying? I
can’t answer how long it takes, but I can at least now rest assured
knowing that
it is, in fact, possible. Picture: I’m in It was soon apparent that Yachob was the practical joker, to the point where sometimes even the girls would laugh at what he said to us in English. They couldn’t understand a word of it, but his expression and intonation was enough indication that he was clearly pulling our leg. The majority of the time, I couldn’t even catch all of what he was trying to say, and he still had Amy and me rolling on the floor. We believed him when he told us that both Zeldtha and Eminou were his girlfriend, until context clues eventually suggested that only Eminou was. At another point, he had us convinced that his mother was coming over at midnight and bringing more wine and tequila.
Several times, he
would make plays on obvious but stereotypical and false cultural
differences, playing on the typical "western idea" of a Turkish person.
Wrapping a towel around his head and insisting it was "turban time," he
tried to convince us that every night at 2 a.m. all muslims must stop
what they're doing and put on their "ceremonial turbans." In this
instance specifically, I was strongly reminded of the politics of
traditional verse modern Turkish culture that Yael Navaro-Yasin
discusses in the article The
Historical Construction of Local Culture, referring to the
jokes that the modern Turks made about the "islamic takeover" after the
municipal elections in 1994. With the
confidence of someone completely capable of communication, Yachob
actually used
his broken English (and the advantage that we knew very little about
him, his
friends, and his lifestyle) to make connections through humor.
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