I told you Alice would be back

Ok. So this isn't exactly what I promised last post. But then, since when do I deliver what I promise? At least it's something. More on its way once I get caught up on correspondence.


Upside Down Inside the Ukrainian Rabbit-hole

‘I can’t explain MYSELF, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’

‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.

‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’

I am beginning to suspect that I inhabit Wonderland. However, I can’t quite decide if I am Alice or, if having spent one too many months lost in the rabbit-hole, I have relinquished my aboveground citizenship. My very own Cheshire cat, quirky and confusing, is still the most logical person I talk to every day. At the same time, I realize that I am, therefore, talking to my cat. Hopping around with roll of wallpaper, pretending to cut off a monster’s head, attempting to get a bored and unruly 10b excited about Jabberwocky, I have the occasional desire to shout “Off with their heads!” The queen of hearts may not have ever seen her executions carried out, the king secretly reversing the sentences almost as soon as the words flew from her lips, but the words nevertheless instilled the desired terror and, shall we say, encouraged her subjects’ cooperation. I would be very happy to be overruled by Ukrainians in the teacher’s lounge, effectively leaving me to wield an empty threat, if the sword’s dulled edge could at least prod the students into feigned enthusiasm and scare them into maintaining the appearance of discipline. As I gleefully contemplate the possible effects of whimsically ordering executions left and right, Anya to Tanya to Vadim, the strangeness of my daydreams hits me: What is this place and this job and what has it done to me? Who am I?

At the very beginning of Lewis Carroll’s tale, long before she meets the condescending Caterpillar, Alice tumbles down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland, keenly aware that something very strange is happening and that whatever she will encounter at the end of her fall is quite out of her daily experience. But even as she rightly recognizes this fact, poor Alice is mistaken as far as the kind of change she will face: “How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward,” she exclaims before imagining a conversation with one of Australia’s indigenous Antipathies, and attempting a curtsey in mid-air. Physical topsy-turviness she is prepared for, but a place where the very forms of her daily life – polite curtsies and how-do-you-dos – are turned upside down is beyond her ken. Understandably so – who could possibly anticipate facing a gryphon dancing the Lobster Quadrille or a singularly ugly Duchess and her morphing pig-child?

Similarly, disembarking from a plane in Kyiv, what sensible American would ever conceive that a simple game of Bingo could take a full class period to accomplish? Or that the first question new students would think to ask the 20-something teacher thousands of miles from home would be “Do you have your own kids?” I certainly came expecting change, but not necessarily prepared to undergo the 180 degree shift in perspective required of me by a world flipped on its head.

Alice, very much like a Peace Corps Volunteer, is faced with two major problems of perception throughout her stay in Wonderland: the problem of language and the problem of size.

Her troubles with language begin when, swimming in a pool of her own tears, she offends a fellow swimmer, a mouse, by energetically launching into a description of her cat’s superior hunting abilities. Still focused on the “there” where she was, she neglects to think of what is actually in front of her (an example of Dinah’s unfortunate prey) and finds her normally well-mannered self looked upon as an insensitive boor. The social discomfort that leads her to make this blunder and her ill-considered words herald a book’s worth of linguistic frustration.

The work as a whole is very concerned with language; puns, morals, nonsense, and poetry all make finding meaning into a game – a puzzle without a definite solution. Wonderland’s nonsensical playing is absolutely foreign to Alice, who is forced to take language seriously. The aboveground world uses language as a means of instilling order and making the world understandable, and, to that end, Alice possesses an un-ignorable decorous upbringing that not only teaches the linguistic forms to be used in society, but also instills expectations about what she is to hear in response. She is thus afflicted by confusion as well as the uncomfortable feeling that everyone around her is very rude indeed. More, Alice trusts words – obeying “Eat me!” “Drink me!” without much hesitation, assuming a substance detrimental to her health will most certainly be marked, “Poison.” In her England words have import, and in Wonderland they are her only means of learning about, and maneuvering within, the strange new world. To Alice, language must be meaningful, and she sets to work making sense of what she hears, even when it means nothing – attempting to solve a nonsense riddle at the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, for example.

Not only does her aboveground perspective leave her unable to make out intended meaning, it renders her incapable of communicating. She confronts more than a simple language barrier; she faces an alien mindset. Her audience responds to her questions in incomprehensible ways and misinterprets her words. She may speak English, but she can’t effectively use their English to communicate. Suddenly, though she means what she says, she can’t adequately say what she means. Worse, as she moves through Wonderland, she begins to lose her own words; poems and songs she once knew by heart come out of her mouth changed. Mistake and miscommunication muddle her until she faces the disconcerting failure of that which seemed solidly hers: sensible English, the proof that her normal, understandable self still exists.

Adding to Alice’s confusion, and beginning earlier in her journey than most of the real linguistic difficulties she faces, are her constant shifts in size. The world she enters is not only different from any she has experienced because of the way it looks, but because of the way she looks at it. Alternately miles high and a meager three-inches tall, Alice endures a shifting perspective on Wonderland and a fluctuating relationship to everything within it – she is, for example, both a potential chew-toy to a puppy and a ruthless predator to a talking pigeon – that changes, not once or twice, but minute-to-minute. The changes in her physical self result in …well, a tremendous headache, I would imagine… but also an uncertain grasp of what she is and how she relates to the world. Who can she associate with? Is she so big that she poses a threat to those who see her? Or too small to be deserving of much consideration? More, Alice finds herself unable to do the most normal activities because of her size; whether too big to fit comfortably in a room or too small to take a desired key off a table, physical changes force her to act under unfamiliar limitations. And then, after enduring all of the literal ups and downs and frustrations of a few hours in Wonderland, she is asked – by, of all incomprehensible things, a hookah-smoking caterpillar – to explain herself. I’m surprised she didn’t sit down and cry.

All of which paints a rather distressing picture for me, one of Ukraine’s American Alices. My task, in confronting a new linguistic environment, is to get my head out of America – refrain, if possible, from speaking of cats to mice – and, following that, to not only know the words I hear and what they mean, but to hear and absorb what people in our new environment mean. I decode as well as translate – one cannot necessarily trust literal translation when “Ідй гуляти на вулиці” can mean “go sit in the yard.” To make myself understood, I find myself losing my old, comfortable English; I look towards the day when I will find that “Guys. Here’s what we’re going to do today” has incomprehensibly become “Pupils, on the lesson today, we shall study…”

As with Alice, linguistic troubles contribute to my problems of size. I am a giant in the classroom, both figuratively as the best English speaker for kilometers and, at least with the littlies, literally as a full-grown girl towering over boards set low for short arms and bending over desks built small for short legs. But the local militiaman at the door sends me scuttling for my cell phone and childishly begging my counterparts to “translate, please!” Poof – three inches tall. I bungle a purchase at the local store that even my poor 12 weeks of language training should have enabled me to handle with some facility and then am rather surprised to find that I can still see over the counter. The changes leave me reeling – big to little in record time, multiple times a day. I struggle to feel like the self I left in the States – who, despite my self-deprecation, I really did mostly like – while I am confronted with constantly shifting relationships to the wider world and seemingly impossible linguistic puzzles, both of which leave me wholly disoriented.

I take comfort in the fact that Alice had a whirlwind tour of Wonderland and I am in Ukraine for considerably longer. I find that, after a year of constant shifts in size, the vertigo has, for the most part, worn off. The jump from gargantuan in the 4th form to Thumbelina in the corner store still occasionally gives me pause, but the self-doubt goes away much more quickly.

I have always secretly held that Wonderland had its own logic unknowable to the aboveground reader, who is like Alice and thus sympathetic to her errors and her way of perceiving the world. To be honest, I can’t quite accept that it is unknowable, either, and every time I read the story, I find myself searching for the thread that ties it together, the clue to understanding the many forms of madness, the right height from which to view the events and interpret their significance. My search for a single answer is perhaps the problem, and Wonderland delightful and enraging because it is strange in so many divergent ways, each stop functioning according to its own logic instead of comprehensibly continuous with the larger whole. Maybe all that shape-shifting is an aide to understanding and not a problem: valuable practice for Alice, her trust of words – “Eat Me!” – leading her into situations where she is forced to see the world from a plurality of perspectives markedly different from her own.

A year of regularly changing size, then, has perhaps helped me get my head turned around to a Ukrainian mindset. And I have another advantage over Alice: Ukraine is at least aboveground and subject to some aboveground rules – no morphing pig-children here. I find that there is logic to that which at first seemed upside down. The bingo phenomenon no longer perplexes me; in a world where so much has to be written by hand, where official forms are very important, and where copybooks are proof of what has been learned, perfectly straight lines on a bingo board are important and a virtue. Even “Do you have kids,” still frightening, makes some sense: many of my students’ parents work abroad, and so a mother far from home for the foreseeable future is not foreign to their experience. Day by day, piece by piece, despite persistent upheaval, the world slowly turns right side up.

At the end of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll introduces Alice’s older sister, the one who stays at home, to the plethora of perspectives his tale includes. Alice’s sister is the first to hear what is inside the rabbit-hole. Reflecting upon it, wishing to hold Wonderland in her memory, she keeps her eyes closed out of the knowledge that upon opening them “all would change to dull reality… the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheepbells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy…while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs.” Separate from the overwhelming anxieties consequent of immersion in Wonderland, she savors her sister’s exotic dream. The common scene she holds at arm’s length as undesirable, however, is beautiful. After the maddening tea party and the chaotic lobster quadrille, tinkling sheepbells and lowing cattle are reassuringly normal. Peaceful. Beautiful in their familiarity and beautiful in familiar ways. The world Alice's sister wishes to escape from is exactly the calm, idyllic way of life that those of us who have been through the confusion and self-doubt of Wonderland crave.

I wonder how my audience receives my stories, and if the Americans I left behind have any idea how much I long for the sights and sounds of a daily commute on MTA. We all – Alices and her older sisters – need something to romanticize, I suppose.

At the same time, Alice's sister is correct. Memory works to smooth and polish the rough edges of experience, and her distance from the events mirrors the work Alice’s memory will carry out in the future. Alice may one day delight in Wonderland where she once felt only confusion. Maybe her story will change with time. Maybe Alice will relate her strange experiences to others, amusing and enchanting rather than confounding. Even as the vibrancy fades and both teller and audience take pleasure in the tale's charm at the expense of the baffling reality, Alice's adventures in Wonderland contains un-guessed-at lessons for those of us who, like Alice, eventually travel on our own and look back on her stories from rapidly shifting heights. (because I like overly dramatic endings)