Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 2/12/05: The New Berlin Wall

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

He deserves better than I can manage, and possibly worse, but this one is for Arthur Miller - he gave a voice to all the stupid schmucks out there who thought their hard work was supposed to earn them something. He was the man who gave me my first clue what art was all about. Thanks, Art.

“The grammar, the proverbs, and the idioms of a language give us a clear understanding of how its mother tongue users think and feel, and they do this more completely than anything else can. The vocabulary is the sum total of all the objects, actions and ideas that affect them or that they need to know in their environment. Their literature expresses the best of what they have experienced and felt over the years.

It is for these reasons that language is an expression of the personality of the group, a means of identifying its members according to their culture. When, for example, we say "I am Italian" or "I am Yoruba", we are identifying ourselves as members of a particular cultural group using a particular language.”

- from Clifford Fyle, “National Languages and Cultural Identity.”

UNESCO Courier, 1983

The last edition of my former magazine, EYE, ran a scathing piece about Jordan’s local television stations. To put it gently, they suck. No one watches them, because they show crap no one is interested in. Everyone has satellite. Even in poor villages on the desert highways, you see satellite dishes sprouting from the smallest towns like exotic mechanical flowers.

This isn’t just a local phenomenon. It’s all over the arab world, according to the media company execs I interviewed. It’s all over the world – while I was news junkying for that article, I found a piece about the exact same phenomenon in the Maldives. Local entertainment channels are being killed by satellite. Video killed the radio star. Old story.

Now, there are a couple of possible explanations for this.

The good folks at heavily-censored Jordan TV claim that all they need is money to reinvent the station as a viable market player. But short of the discovery of new, Saudi-sized oilfields under Abdoun, it’s staggeringly unlikely that JTV will ever have enough funding to produce programming that is as beautifully shot, well produced, and carefully designed as what comes out of Paris, London, Los Angeles, or even Beirut.

So, explanation number one is funding. Others say the one card JTV has to play is localization. That means TV shows about Jordanian characters, whose problems are Jordanian problems. It means presenters who look and sound Jordanian, who viewers can identify with. It means solid local news that makes people feel connected to their community in a wider sense. It may not look as pretty as what they make in LA, but there’s no law preventing it from being better written and more relevant. (Actually, that explanation mostly comes from me and the TV channel owners in the Maldives – Arabs have too much of an inferiority complex to think that anyone cares what happens to them. Looking at recent history, they have a point.)

“Localization” was a word I heard a lot in the EYE office – right before the damn rag got sold to Dubai. Still, they were trying. And they had a reason to, because so much of Jordan’s media is very un-local.

The first factor, of course, is language.

English is not overwhelmingly common in public life here – not yet. But there are English signs on every street in Amman, and English books, magazines and newspapers are widely read. Jordan’s universities teach a number of classes in English; some of my Jordanian co-workers actually consider it their mother tongue – they speak it better than Arabic. Some of the “old-timers” in this cellblock of a country get really worried about, say, the fact that there are now businesses that don’t bother to put Arabic on their signs, or in their literature, or on the doors of suites in their big high-rises. But hey, not me – I’m an optimist.

To optimists, what all this Anglicization is, is a sign that English, despite the colonial baggage it carries, is becoming a language of international communication and commerce. Esperanto sucked the big dick of death, but English is up and coming for the title of “universal language.” Perhaps it helps that America, the big popularizer of English, was never a colonial power in quite the way the nations of old Europe were. We always maintained plausible deniability. (thanks, Ike!) Or, maybe it’s just the fact that everyone watches our movies and satellite TV stations that makes English inescapable.

As Larry E. Smith said in the early 80’s, “when any language becomes international in character, it cannot be bound to any one culture. A Thai doesn't need to sound like an American in order to use English well with a Filipino at an A.S.E.A.N. meeting. A Japanese doesn't need an appreciation of a British lifestyle in order to use English in his business dealings with a Malaysian.”

In many places, English is studied for its utility as a language of international commerce, but not widely used locally (think Japan or Korea). In others, according to scholars like India’s Braj B. Kachru, many regions now have their own “Englishes” with serve as means of communication between different local ethnicities, so that English is in a way reinscribed by situation and use into part of the local landscape.

Is either of these the case in Jordan? The question is far from trivial, because languages are dangerous things: like walls, they can be used to enclose a nation and bind it together, or to divide and fragment it. Languages are more than just modes of communication. A language is a marker, a way of defining groups and inscribing them with value. As language both defines and is defined by culture, so the “possession” of a language by a group gives that group, in the words of the Eastern-European linguist Michael Shafir, “a certain power of moral regulation.”

“The central activity of intellectuals is their use and control of language,” Shafir says. “Those who spoke or could be made to speak a particular language--a national, hence a politically legitimate language--were the usable material of the nation, its members in whose name power could be demanded.”

So there is explanation number three: learning a language can be a way of putting up a wall without looking like you are doing so.

And new Berlin walls are going up in countries around the world – Ukraine, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Chechnya are only a few of the countries in the grip of conflicts of linguistic and ethnic divisions. An iron curtain has descended across the planet, dividing those who are lucky enough to talk American from everyone else. The curtain divides the rich kids in the clubs in Abdoun who wear Prada and buy English-language magazines from the kids who have to go to public schools where students are beaten with rubber hoses. The curtain divides the businessmen in glittering offices in Swefiyyah from the Egyptian day laborers and maids who make 125 JD and send most of it back to their families in Cairo. The curtain divides me and my one language from the Veema, the Sri Lankan maid who speaks five languages, none of which can earn her a living better than scrubbing floors.

Language a way of consolidating the power to define culture. Speaking a language gives the speaker a power to exclude from the discussion those who do not speak it. And the third world is tearing itself in half over this. Those who can speak English, who can play at being “western” even are they pretend to hate the west, are indefinably better than those who can’t.

And that brings us back to the tight spot that Jordan TV is in. Because what they are competing against is not just a lack of money, it is a deeply-rooted cultural trend. It’s the persistent idea that in some abstract and indefinable way, foreign means “better.”

Sometimes, of course, there is a concrete basis for the idea that a foreign product is better – Jordan TV's old programming, according to everyone we spoke to, just failed to be entertaining. Big budgets can pay for better acting, better effects, and a lot of other things. So maybe the budget hawks are right, and if they just get enough money, they can get local TV off the ground.

But I doubt it. Deep down, we all know that no one wants to watch a TV channel in Arabic. No one wants shows that are relevant to their real lives – they want entertainment that is relevant to the people they want to be. And the people who control the money want to be American. And to everyone who thinks Arab culture has value of its own, or that there’s no such thing as a language that expresses the sum total of everyone’s thoughts and feelings – well, heck, you’re probably right, but sometimes you’re just born on the wrong side of the wall.

- Nicholas Seeley, 2/12/05

Posted by rjt at February 14, 2005 12:06 PM