I have zero memories of my first two years of life where I resided in my birth country. Born in Tokyo, Japan to two Japanese parents and a family line entirely residing in Japan, my home environment was largely reflective of Japanese values, practices, and foods. This “immediate community” of my parents, older sister, grandparents, neighboring friends and their young children is what constituted my “primary discourse,” a concept termed by James Gee as summarized in the video titled, “What is Discourse?,” by John Scott. In his text, “What is Literacy?”, Gee formally defines the primary discourse as “the primary process of enculturation” (23). Immediately following my move to New York at 2 years old, my world almost entirely consisted of my primary discourse aside from trips to the grocery store and walks to the park. This was the case until I was old enough to enter what Gee termed, “secondary institutions,” or “social institutions beyond the family” (23). I entered academic and extracurricular settings without the notion that I would be at a disadvantage, unprepared for the reality that gaining literacy in said discourses would equate to social and financial progress in America. These discourses, ones that “lead to social goods in a society” are what Gee calls dominant discourses (20). Preschool was one of my first experiences that exposed the relative largeness of this gap between this all important dominant discourse and my primary one, compared to that of many of my peers. There are only 2 details of this preschool I remember off the top of my head; the fear that filled me when seeing my friend’s bloody mouth after she lost a tooth, and the distinct metal flavor I tasted in everybody’s favorite Kraft Mac n Cheese. Gee says that people with primary discourses that are compatible with secondary ones are at “a great advantage” (22). While this peculiar yellow dish itself did not put me at a disadvantage, it was indicative of the reality of my life ahead in America. As it turns out, my anxieties as a young child were neither naive nor misplaced; these differences would later manifest in a cognizant belief that I would be at a big disadvantage my whole life if I couldn’t effectively strip myself of these differences.
Gradually, the literacies that had been painstakingly set forth by my parents in the primary discourse — the Japanese language, cultural values of humility, frugality, discipline, listening — lost its value in my mind. I reasoned that the skills that would provide me with power and respect were powerful and worthy of respect while all others were inferior. In his conversations about Language and Power, Paulo Freire specifically comments on the power of speech, acknowledging that knowledge in the dominant syntax directly translates to our abilities to be critical by allowing the oppressed to be heard by dominant groups. But he deems it a necessity to simultaneously clarify that non-dominant ways of speaking are “as beautiful as [the dominant] way of speaking. Freire’s former point was made evident to me in my everyday life. The more I exercised my English abilities by speaking up, the more friends I made. The faster my English improved, the faster my grades rose. I was naturally conditioned by social and academic capital. As a result, I wholeheartedly embraced and spoke the English language as my own. On the contrary, the evidence was copious against Freire’s latter point. As the remnants of my Japanese accent slowly diminished, my ability to capture the attention of others and communicate my intention seemed to grow exponentially. I took the learned isolation of deliberate exclusion or unintentional ignorance and my fear of failure, and attempted to resolve them by rejecting the Japanese language its accompanying cultural elements. My mother’s packed lunches were no longer what I longed for over Mac n Cheese but what I longed to rid myself of.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s view in “The Dialogic Imagination” gives reason to why this mutually exclusive dichotomy was born in my mind. He defines the “authoritative discourse” as something so “indissolubly fused with its authority — with political power, an institution, a person — and it stands and falls together with that authority” (78). For me, this “authoritative discourse” was not only the English language but the ideologies that it carried with it. According to Bakhtin, the discourse does not seek a willful assimilation but “unconditional allegiance,” so much so that one must “either totally affirm it, or totally reject it” (78).
This is no better exemplified than my refusal to speak the Japanese language. My parents enrolled me in a Japanese school that I attended on Saturdays for years K-12. My aversion to speaking the language grew gradually and became all too evident through my refusal to respond to any promptings from instructors. Half of the time, I knew the correct phrase they desperately wanted to hear me answer with. I also had full confidence that the words would flow out of my mouth with buttery smooth pronunciation. But every time, I refused to let it leave my mind where I held the words hostage.
Speaking a Japanese sentence would irritate me. Participating in Japanese dialogue was unbelievably taxing. Bakhtin’s examination of the weight of the word helps me understand my past behaviors in a way I failed to articulate at the time. He describes the significance of an “utterance,” in both the “centralization and decentralization” of language. An utterance follows the centralized rules of “its own language as an individualized embodiment of a speech act,” but simultaneously serves “as an active participant in… speech diversity” (75). One rewards both powers to a word purely by uttering it, and I was refusing to give either to the Japanese word. I didn’t want to follow the rules of a language I thought no longer belonged to me. I didn’t want to feed the diversity of speech within myself that, I believed, signaled a weakness to others. To Bakhtin, every utterance is living, and joins a “tension-filled environment of alien words” that are equally alive when brought to life (76). For me the environment of Japanese words carried with it a tension and conflict that created deep discomfort within myself.
Furthermore, Bakhtin views these unruly words as powerful entities to be subjugated to an individual’s control. The word only “becomes ‘one’s own’ when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent” (77). In an obvious way, I struggled to take hold of the language that I no longer wanted to be mine. Yet beneath this apparent struggle, I was counterintuitively mourning the apparent loss of the same language and culture that was my own.
I realize now that even through these times of self-rejection, a curiosity and love for my native language and culture survived. The pain it brought me to act according to my conscious desires and strip myself of my native language and culture, and my failure to do so ultimately, may be a testament to my underlying desire to reclaim these literacies that existed all along. By the end of my teenage years, it was difficult to move forward from the very obvious consequences of my long-held mistaken, and self-fulfilling, belief that literacies in my primary and dominant discourse could not coexist. I was left with the rifts I’d created between myself and my family and the early fruits of my efforts at becoming “successful” in American society. In some ways, I felt that I had opened myself to a seemingly bright future at the expense of failing certain aspects of myself and my family.
My adult life has seen an abundance of opportunities for me to grow curious and cultivate the literacies that were waiting for me to reclaim. Attempting to recreate my mom’s recipes in my apartment and learning from the practices of older family members has shown me the impact of cultural values I once dismissed as useless. They demonstrate the power of discipline, repetition, and labor in communicating love and care for others. Sharing and receiving languages, cultural values, and foods have served to be some of the most powerful acts of love and friendship. There is undeniable potential of exercising non-dominant discourses.
For this and many other reasons, I believe I have been bestowed the forgiveness of literacy. The cruelties and harsh behavior I directed towards my native culture did not dim its shine or that of the literacies it has afforded me. They neither negate my parents’ gifting of these Japanese language, values, and skills to me. The way these literacies, dominant and primary, developed within me have shaped my worldview and vice versa. This realization and my hope to encourage this bidirectional relationship moving forward ultimately afford me peace with my literacy story.
“Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values. The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean . …” (Bakhtin)
MODES:
I chose to express my story through a mixture of photographs, videos, and design elements. The colors represent my old and new perspectives on the same cultural literacies as well as my comfort with and acceptance of them. The gifs serve to represent the “living” quality of my literacies, how I will continue to reshape and add to them throughout my life. The videos I used for these gifs often show my family members, representing the idea that their lessons and their teachings will continue to live on through my use of the literacies I acquired through them. Overall, I wanted to combine these modalities into a creative piece to mirror the way artistic expression has also been a literacy that I had to reconnect with in my adult life.
