By Alissa Bohling
4.
As my first weeks in Guatemala wore on, I waited impatiently to reach that mythic benchmark for language acquisition, when the new language gets deep enough into the unconscious to penetrate the dream-world. The first time I dreamt in Spanish, I was sleeping in a windowless cement room—all I could afford on my NGO worker’s stipend—which adjoined the open roof of the pensión where I stayed. I kept the door ajar for fresh air and, like a paranoid foreigner out of her element, slept with my bone-handled knife at my side. In my dream, Christina, the housekeeper, entered my room and demanded: “Déme tu cuchillo.” Give me your knife.
In real life, Christina, fifteen years old, had recently come to the city from her family’s rural home to the north. Although she was quiet and my Spanish was still erratic, we fell into the habit of talking in the kitchen when no one else was around. Her father worked on a banana plantation far from her mother and siblings, but he still managed to ensure she was pulled out of school once she reached the sixth grade. Now she confided to me shyly that her arms ached from twelve-hour days spent washing clothes by hand. She would continue her long hours—the family that ran the boarding house would not pay her until she completed a month’s work, and she had no money of her own. One Sunday she got permission to take the night off to attend Mass and invited me along. As we headed for the door, the señora, apparently forgetting their agreement, barked a reminder to buy bread before the bakery closed in fifteen minutes, right as Mass would be starting. Needless to say, we didn’t make it to the church.
Before I came to Guatemala, I was an off-and-on contributor to an online magazine devoted to empowering women in developing nations. I left the states propelled partly by my curiosity to see how the heroines who starred in my research were faring in real life. In many ways, Christina embodied one of these women, and, in my admittedly out-of-context Northern feminist’s opinion, she was not doing well. And now here she was in my dream, speaking in a strong voice that belied the acquiescent tones she spoke in waking life: “Give me your knife.”
I am not an expert in dreams, but I usually understand my own: she was asking me for my power, for the safety I enjoyed as a foreigner, as an adult, as an educated and relatively wealthy woman. The relationship between women and power has fascinated me since before I can remember, and now here I was, dreaming about it in a language I was still fighting to master. Why? Each time I remember that dream now, I become more convinced that my mind admitted Spanish into its unconscious at that moment because I had landed on a subject I cared about deeply. That almost visceral connection to one of my core interests crowded out my beginner’s self-doubt and my attachment to English as the most effortless mode of expression.
This insight into my first dream in Spanish urges me to ask now, as I write and edit in English: does the writer’s passion, her investment in the topic, summon the language, or is it the other way around? Where are the places the writer might be digging, contriving, merely practicing at communication with the reader the way I used to practice bargaining in Guatemalan markets? How can I, as an editor, encourage that passion back around and rejuvenate the writing? As I edit, one of my primary goals is to fully understand the emotional (or intellectual) thrust behind the words I’m working with and respect its primacy. Even as I alter or carve out elements that weaken a piece of writing,
I remain committed to maintaining the underlying shape of a work, the conceptual shape that precedes language and serves as the impetus for the words on the page. Just like a traveler living abroad in a new culture, I try to cultivate a respect that listens and watches to the “culture” inside the piece (a culture which, in addition to containing this conceptual impetus, is also composed of the writer’s voice), before determining the proper time and place to step in.