The Battle to Become Citizens Overwhelms USCIS

USCIS is inundated with applications for naturalization. Due to the fee increase that took place a few months ago, to save a few bucks – well, maybe a couple hundred bucks – many applied before the actual increase came into effect. The number of application almost doubled. Now USCIS is flooding. Future citizens have to wait an average of eighteen months now before they see their application processed.

Everybody is patiently in line, but the soldiers, the non-citizens who fought for the US, no, those shouldn’t wait for to become American citizens. That these people put in jeopardy their lives should speed up their applications. This is how it should be, but it is not what happens in reality. Because of the war, some military lost their lives before being able to become naturalized citizens. It is that the applications, sometimes, are not accurately filled, it is that in zone of war the time is stretched…

To know more about this topic, read a New-York-Times article by Fernanda Santos.

Hearing/Listening: a Binary Opposition

A reader, Michelle f, says,

"Don't lose hope, Anna! Some Americans are self-absorbed. But some aren't! There are so many people willing to listen and willing to help you. You just haven't come across them yet. I must admit when I first met you I couldn't figure out what in the world you were saying! Forunately for both of us that has changed and I love to listen to you. You bring a perspective to our blogging class like no others have before. I admire you."

Here “listen” is a key. There is a significant difference between hearing and listening. Sometimes, people hear but they do not actually listen. That is, hearing is a sensorial, almost mechanic, activity, and although involves the brain to participate in the hearing performance, it is not apt to understanding. Its opposite, listening, is related to the comprehension of a particular object/topic.

When one talks to another and he or she notices “wondering” eyes, it may be a sign that the other only hears what it has been told. If on one hand, today, media – its pictures and images – literally harasses the audience that, in return, loses most of its ability of listening; on the other hand, the busy routine humans use to cope with regularly don’t help the activity of listening. Thus, the “different,” the “alien,” and the “stranger” are often neglected because these bring within themselves the ineradicable necessity to be understood, interpreted. That is, one cannot only hear the “different,” the “alien,” and the “stranger,” but he or she must (actively) listen to them.

Hearing lies in the sphere of passivity, while listening is a labor that requires involvement, concentration, and focus on the speech that takes place. It is trough listening that people apprehend and understand the external world.

... But I Am Still Standing...

At least, I try to...

Ladies and gentlemen, Elton John!

Van der Waals Bonds or Human Relationships?

In chemistry, the Van der Waals bonds are weaker than other bonds. That is, it is easier to separate two atoms linked by such bond than to break bonds of other type. Humans are like atoms. Sometimes, they want to be very close to someone else. They may create a strong bond (ionic or/and covalent bonds, depending on the intensity of the relationship); sometimes, the resulting bond is weaker (Van der Waals bonds and/or Hydrogen bonds); sometime, humans believe they created a bond, but to realize then that it was not a bond at all. Now, the nature of these bonds may vary, so they can be friend(ships), love(ships), sex(ships), intellectual(ships), economic(ships); they can be everything humans want such bonds to be.

Throughout my life, I had my share of friend(ships) and love(ships), but I lost them all when I came to the U.S. Here, I found silence and frustration. Americans are not very extroverted people. Apparently, it is difficult for them creating any kind of bond. They do not talk much and they are self-absorbed. This is true in every field, in every context/contest, in everything Americans do. More than concerned with human relationships, Americans are concerned with rushing their lives and buying more things.

Yes, Americans are self-absorbed. This is one of their biggest problems; they do not need (or they just think they don't) anybody else's help or friendship. Americans can recite lines for you and after a minute say, “Oh, I have to pee in the woods, I’ll see you!” Americans can walk over a dead body without realizing what they just did, but then they may cry at a wedding! I am forcing myself to fit in this reality. A terrible feeling.

For years now, I have been screaming, “Hey Americans, I am here, can you see me?” But Americans do not want to hear/hear me. More than a critic, I became an observer. I cannot do anything else than just watching and hoping that, one day, somebody will take my hand and will say “Hey, I heard you. Do not scream anymore, I am not deaf… Let’s have a talk!”

Yeah, I am a little dreamer, still.

While I am waiting for this moment, though, I am afraid I can lose my humanity and my ability to create bonds. I am afraid my heart will dry like a handful of raisin.

I am a man among other men, but I am invisible. A face amidst other faces, a face without color, without a smile. I howl, “for God ’s sake, please I am a human being too!” And I am a screamer without voice. I am like in an Edvard Munch’s painting…

Can anyone grab my hand, before I fall?

Please.

What Writing Is (for me)

A couple weeks ago, a professor and I talked about writing/ creative writing and about my writing, in particular. This teacher always encourages me to continue to write – if this is what I really want to do, and it is – because all the issues I have in expressing myself into another language, with time, will eventually fade away. That is, with the time, I will get better, and I will get rid of my “silly” grammatical errors. I think so too. I think one day – and I do not know how long it will take – I will be good at writing in English.

Since I was born, all I wanted to do was writing. Perhaps I was in elementary school when I started writing poems and enjoying the activity – it is an “act-ivity,” indeed – of reading.
When I was in fifth grade, I read The Diary of Anne Frank. People asked if I “had understood” the book. Yes, I said! It was a compelling topic not suitable for kids of my age. Yes, I repeated, I got it. Yes, it was a complex read, but I enjoyed it very much. Even now, I can see myself – so young at that time– reading that book, and I remember the image and the style of it. I remember the suffering of Anne and her family as if they are right in front of me, right now.

Since then, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Since then, I knew that language was my lonely tool to express myself. Since then, I knew that language and I were going to be great friends, and that I was going to devote my life to language and written words.

Until… I became an immigrant, and I lost all of my lines because I did not know any English line. I lost myself, as I landed on American shores. I broke the pact I made with my language. But living without writing was not life, for me. Yes, writing has always been a matter of living or dying (for me)!

I can never be objective in the sense that I cannot separate myself from my writing. I make sacrifices for writing. One of the most painful sacrifices is the time I do not devote to my daughter because writing itself is time consuming and it sucks all of my energy.

I did not come to the U.S. seeking a job to make money; I do not care of it, at all. Richness is not my priority, but writing is the principal that rules my life.

My story of immigration is also the story of my writing.

"Roma Capoccia" by Antonello Venditti

Antonello Venditti: an artist!

Writing Workshop in Rome

How splendid must be attending a creative writing workshop in Rome. One may think Venice is the most romantic city in the world. It is not. Rome is the one! This city has something special. The way people talk, the dialect they speak is vivid, soaked with life, impregnated with a magic dust that envelops the city’s thin roads, its historical monuments, its art.

Rome and its cats, yes cats! The city is famous for its stray cats. The citizens feed them, and the city sterilize– or tries to – sterilize them all. There is nothing wrong with the felines being wild. They are intelligent animals who maybe know their city more than humans do. They do not bother people. They are just there. They are a feature of Rome.

Rome with its Colosseum, its life, its streetlights that at night may dance with solitary vagrants. Oh Rome and its author, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, another writer among the roster of my favorite authors. Oh, la Roma Capoccia sung by Antonello Venditti. A shiver.

Rome is the marrow of the Italian culture, tradition, politic, art, creativity. The food that little trattorie serve is delicious. Real Italian food. What is it? Something that down here, in Florida, people do not know! Only God knows how I miss the Italian food! Only God knows how I miss my Italian lines, and my authors, my poets, my roads, my folks… myself.

Plot: an easy interpretation

Plot is the framework of a composition. It is neither necessarily interesting nor juicy. It is the backbone of a story – of any story. A seemingly good plot will sell; if the author is lucky he or she will make millions out of it, but this commercial aspect does not have much to do with literature. Plot is nothing more than a chronological sequence of events, and it should subordinate the language and style an author uses. It is an easy understanding of a tale. Plot is for lazy people while language is for committed people. To base the meaning of a novel only on its plot is irresponsible. It leads to only one conclusion: the audience is not or does not want to be engaged in the read. Everyone can think of a plot, but very few can write a short story/novel/ novella.

Plot is an impart component of a story, but language is the tool that reveals, word after word, the “secret” of a work.

Words

“I came to love understanding how people use words to craft ideas,” Tim Challies says in his last post. His seems a powerful concept, a sort of epiphany, a sentence one may want to keep on his or her desk as it was a reminder.

I like the word “craft” because it gives me a sense of great dedication. And writing is an artisanal work done with only one tool: words. These are important! It is my idea and it seems Challies’s idea too. Words stand out of the page like many little sculptures. Each one is important to the context, and each one participates in the creation of an idea, a thought; in short, each one is responsible for the “creative” work and its originality.

I have always been bewitched by words. Most of the time, I fell desperately in love with them and with the ideas lying beneath them. A dictionary has always been a perfect companion for my literary trips. With the time, I discovered that there is a word for every meaning, there is a word for every account and for every moment. There is a word to console and another to discourage. There always the right word that can be found. You just listen… it is right there, in your heart.

Another Video

This video is just hilarious. But it is also true because this is how Italians may behave. What is most interesting, though, is that different meaning of words and signs may change according to a particular culture.

Behind the "Accent"

“How may I help you?” the woman said. She greeted me from behind the counter of my dog’s doctor.

“I am here for Easy. She needs a rabies vaccination,” I said. She found my dog’s record, and she asked if I had an email address. I started to spell it. Once. Twice. Three times. She didn’t get it. I wrote it on a piece of paper. At the end, she got it!

I could swear to god she was annoyed at my “accent.”

An “accent” is not necessarily a bad characteristic one may have. “There’s nothing wrong with your ‘accent’,” people tell me from time to time. Of course, an “accent” is not a sin, but it becomes an unfortunate attribute if the audience don’t know how to listen. With the time, I am learning that people barely hear what others say, and if the tune is not the right one, if the “other” bears an “accent” forget it!

An “accent” may be funny. YouTube has many videos that mock the (Italian) “accent.” And it is okay. But people should never forget that behind that “accent” there is a human being, who lives and breathe just as Americans do.

A Matter of Style

Yesterday night, after a workshop of one short story I wrote, a backpack full of peer reviews lay on my bedroom floor. I hesitated before flipping the twenty-five returned copies of my work. I awaited the comments of my classmates with dread. In the last few weeks, I sweated on my story; I cried for my characters; in short, I cared for my work that was not only an assignment for my advanced fiction class, but it challenged also my ability to write clearly and concisely in English.

Of course, I wanted to read my classmates’ comments; of course, I wanted to consider their suggestions of how to better my writing and my work. I took a deep breath. I opened the pack, and I found that many peers encouraged me; other appreciated my work; some did not “quite get what I was trying to say.” Sometimes, the components of my sentences were misplaced, they said. I really enjoyed looking into these possible issues. I stayed up late. I tried to understand what my peers meant by saying that they did not get the sense of what I wrote. After I scanned through my lines for hours, the only plausible outcome was that some of my classmates confused style with what they thought was a “sentence-structure-issue.”

That is because, most of the time, readers do not understand what style is.

Style is about sensitivity for a language and its written speech. Style is what fits the thoughts of an author and how such ideas are displayed on and within a document. Style is what distinguishes a writer from another; what makes a reading crispier than another that might be flat and empty.

Style is a destination a writer may reach after a continuous process of digestion of a language, its grammatical rules, and its mechanic. Style is like a rose: each petal is a functional layer of the crown.

Next Posts

Challies.com and Langugae log are two interesting blogs. Both talk about language. I am going to write one or two blogs on some post of theirs.

In his last post, Tim Challies writes "I came to love understanding how people use words to craft ideas." I think it is a poweful line. I think I'll be touching on it on my next post.

Giuseppe Ungaretti Recites Giuseppe Ungaretti

In this video, Giuseppe Ungaretti recites one poem of his and talks about his earliest literary influences, he cites Giacomo Leopardi and Stephane Mallarme. On Mallarme's poetry, Ungaretti says that, even though the lines of the French poet were "obscure," they carried a secret. It is that secret that Giuseppe Ungaretti wanted to discover...

"Veglia" by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti is one of the most famous Italian poets of the XX century. He is popular for his shrunken lines, for the humanity each word he chooses bore in its contest. The uncanny depths of Ungaretti’s words make almost impossible a translation of his poems.

The versions of Veglia available on the Internet are forced attempts to a skinny transplant from the Italian language. They only mirror the original work. But the people who translated the poem have no fault whatsoever because a translation cannot fill the nuances each foreign word contain. To give an example, the word digrignata is translated into sneering, gnashing, or gnashed. Among these latter, gnashed is perhaps the closest dared translation, because the participle, an adjective in this case, has the same function digrignata has in the poem.

Now, neither these gerunds nor the participle conveys the meaning digrignata. In Italian, it has a visual effect that it seems it cannot be translated into English. A frustrating aspect of translating, in this case, is that digrignata bears the content of the entire poem. It is the key term to understand the poem; it is the leading word to which all the verses will converge on when the deed of understanding the poem is completed.

Maybe, a visual experience may help the translation of Veglia.

Harmony of Language: a Recipe

Translation is not only a means to survive in a foreign country, but it also a story of addiction and frustration. These have nothing to do with drugs and alcohol, but they deal with "language exploration." Like addiction, a traslated word drags other words that wait to be translated, and so on until an entire phrase, sentence, or paragraph is poured into another language. It is funny, to some extent. It is compelling, but also frustrating because words and language are intangible. That is, people give words their meanings, and they change with time. Translators are always concerned with how to get close to the meaning they want to convey. Words and their significances depend on the context. While for a native speaker such context may be intrinsic, for a foreigner the many nuances a term bear are not so explicit. This difficulty is at the core of the experience of a writer who wants to translate even a simple written work.

To translate themselves into another language, writers must rape the foreign idiom. That is, they have to uproot the words from the text and observe them as if they were a Michelangelo’s statue. After that, writers must make peace with them and treat them with pure respect as if they became their own words, their own children. Only in this case, probably it will be more a harmony of languages than a mere transplant of nouns.

Why are American students obsessed with grammar?

For a writer and for everybody, grammar should be a “natural tool.” As Stephen King makes clear in his On Writing, one has either already grasped the sense of grammar since her earliest years of writing or she will never learn. According to King’s view, students in school can only learn the name of the grammatical rules. Other than that, if one arrived in college not knowing the mechanic and the style of her own language, she will never learn it. Grammar is to a writer as walking is to a baby. That is, a baby learns to her own how to walk. Then, when the time comes, she will walk!

Most American students seem obsessed with grammar. Why? Nobody, in middle or high school, taught them the rules? Perhaps, in their earliest years of school they did not find the right teachers. Grammar should be funny. It is nothing to be frightened. Students need only some goodwill and a strong backbone able to hold on negative feed backs that are not always “bad,” but they are constructive most of the time.

Language and grammar shouldn’t be an obsession, but an integrated sphere in everybody’s life.

On Illegal Immigration

Today, whatever users tune their ears they can listen on illegal immigration. Lou Dobbs – and God bless who may understand him when he talks! – fights illegal immigration almost, if not, every day. The CNN plays immigrant’s story, the headlines of the newspapers are filled with immigration issues. For years, they are talking about it, but almost nothing has been done. Ok, let them fight illegal immigration, let them send 25 million people back to their own country. Then what? The U.S. will go through an even greater economic crisis than it is experiencing today.

In Farmer Branch, Texas, illegal immigrants cannot rent or own homes. This is what the city’s council ruled.

Ok… dear Texan residents and citizens you send your illegal immigrants home. Then ask yourself who will milk your cows and prepare your meal when you go to your favorite restaurants? Who will harvest your fruits and vegetables? Who will clean your personal and public restrooms? Who will build your houses and clean your roads. Dear Texas: think about it!

On Immigration

Immigrants often don't know what immigration means until they become immigrants. Only when in a country something goes wrong, its citizens need and want to live their homeland. In a state of peace, people do not depart from their native country. Sometimes, the choice to leave everything – and often nothing – they own in their nation is not a happy choice. Often, it is a forced way out, but it also an unconscious act because immigrants have no idea of what they will go through after they will leave their familiar soil. They have no idea of the suffering they will encounter on their journey. If they knew it, probably they would have remained poor for the rest of their life and die in their motherland.

Immigrants double their working hours to show their new country that they can make it, and that they are entitled to be there. Immigrants take all the scraps, the hunger, the harshness of the native citizens: whatever unfortunate events happen in a country, it is considered the result of the immigrants’s sin.

That of the immigrants is a story of survival.