This guest post was provided by Ann C. Colley, author of The Odyssey and Dr. Novak.
Twice I have set off to new countries not speaking the language. The first occasion was in late August 1995 when I abandoned the familiar routines of my life in Buffalo and flew to Poland. For a year I was to lecture in English at the University of Warsaw. Knowing scarcely any Polish after a two-week introductory course, I worried about how I would make sense of my surroundings. Five years later I again left home in order to teach literature for a year at Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev, Ukraine. This time I had received no language instruction whatsoever. To make matters worse, I had no practice in reading the Cyrillic alphabet. Although, once I arrived, there were to be the occasional guides and benevolent colleagues who spoke English, much of the time I was on my own, feeling vulnerable, inadequate, and occasionally stupid.
Shopping for daily needs was a nightmare, especially in 1995 and 2000 when modern supermarkets were extremely rare. Almost every day I reluctantly walked into a crowded local store where the goods were displayed on tall shelves behind a counter. Not allowed behind that barrier, I must ask a forbidding shopkeeper to reach for a particular item.
On the other hand, selecting items from one of the rare modern supermarkets with open shelves was not always a solution, for the labels were all printed in Polish, Ukrainian, or Russian. Vigilantly I studied the pictures on the food containers, but even they could be misleading. More than once I got home, opened a can, and discovered that its contents were not what I had expected. What I thought were sweet cherries were pickled beetroots. I began to realize what it meant to be illiterate.
Recently I have thought about how the act of writing bears some resemblance to being in a place where one is not fluent yet must find one’s way.
Recollecting my own experiences, I have come to realize that embarking and then traveling on a writing project are like entering a foreign land. Apt words or suitable expressions that should move my writing along are not always readily available, so the text comes to an awkward and annoying halt. I know what I want to say but the vocabulary that should propel the journey’s progress is just not accessible. The tracks which usually take one from place to place are simply not there.
When attempting to find just the right words to represent the tenor of an instant or an image, I often sit in front of the computer, stare despairingly at what I have written, check my Thesaurus, and then valiantly try out various phrases or alternatives, only to find that I am still stuck. I am frustrated because my vocabulary is inadequate and simply not mirroring what is in my mind. In a sense, the words I have selected are the pickled beets I once bought in Kiev that I hoped were cherries.
It is at moments like these that I must get up, leave my office and ask a friend, even a passerby, for advice about a phrase. As I did in Poland and Ukraine, I need to open my door and go out into the hall to get help in order to progress and translate my thoughts into words. Even if the offered suggestions are not exactly right, they and the subsequent conversations get me out of a rut and move me forward. Living abroad taught me this lesson.
And speaking of moving forward, it also strikes me that the act of writing bears a likeness to my taking the underground train when I went to the supermarket, on the outskirts of Kiev – this is where I mistakenly bought that can of beets. Even though I knew the name of the destination and really wanted to go there, the journey, because of my linguistic inabilities, was fraught with difficulties and uncertainties that could have resulted in my deciding either not to board the train or to jump off it before reaching the desired stop – to abandon the project. Writing is a journey that is lonely; it is one that does put an individual in a foreign land, where finding one’s way can be problematic and scary. To write, a person must have the courage to board the train, endure the insecurities and bumps of the ride, push through the uncomfortable parts, and trust that in the end the desired goal will be reached.
My experiences living abroad taught me that one must endure that journey if one is to succeed, and it taught me that there are always people willing and able to help. What I learned in Poland and Ukraine, I have also realized In Buffalo, where I am fortunate to belong to a small writing group (there are four of us) who have been together for over twenty years. The members of this group read drafts of each other’s work and help each other translate ideas into words by suggesting new phrasing, proposing structural changes, or substituting one word for another. The group offers courage to board the train and reach the final destination. For me this journey has recently been the completion of my memoir The Odyssey and Dr. Novak, written to create a complex, composite portrait of Poland and Ukraine at a time between the fall of the Soviet Union and the recent resurgence of a Russian threat.