Challenge: Identity
Somewhat late, but I was abroad. Nadia study, no spoilers beyond general season 4 setup.
Nadia lives in translation. The language she talks in with the people who surround her is not her own. She actually likes the sound of English, the simplicity of it, but sometimes she longs to express her thoughts without framing them for the ease of others. Though of course there are people she could talk in Spanish to at the office, if she wanted to. Jack and Sydney speak it quite well. Her father is fluent, like in so many other languages, but he speaks the sharp flawless Castilian of Spain; the soft vowels of Argentine pronunciation, which depends on the ability to let things go, not to care about precise consonants and endings, aren’t within his grasp. Which is strange, because when he speaks Italian, he’s much more variable. He can talk like a native of Tuscany, he can talk like the Sicilian immigrants who make up a considerable part of Argentina. If it didn’t remind her of Siena each and every time, she’d talk in Italian with him now and then, when the urge to escape the ease of Californian English, to dig for something more complicated and more real, gets too strong.
Eric is all the charm and the wit of the English language personified, and its limitations. He quips, he teases, he makes her laugh and lets her flow with the stream of happy coincidences that make up their conversation. He’d never call her bruja, as Cesar did quite often, and so for him, she never is. Eric is ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s, not tequila, and his unabashed, innocent joy in food does never carry over to the ability to eat something that’s older than three days, as you have to when you live on the streets. Not Eric; he’s American generosity and wealth and blissful ignorance of anything else.
She still has her Argentine passport. Sometimes she wonders whether she’s going to apply for a greencard, or even for citizenship. After all, she works for the American government, and it should be easy. It’s not like she was anything but an immigrant in Argentina, either, as if the identity she used to believe in truly belonged to her; the bastard child of a Russian spy and an American terrorist, translated into an Argentine edition of La Femme Nikita. Her mother’s tongue is Russian, not that she ever heard her mother speak it, or heard her mother, full stop; her father’s land stopped to be America a long time ago and now consists of maps drawn by an Italian centuries ago, and of his own ever shifting boundaries. Why not leave Argentina behind for good, together with its language, and throw herself into Californian breathlessness?
But then there would be no way out, and it’s good to have one last escape route. One part of her that is not sister or daughter or girlfriend but Nadia who was and did not belong to anyone. She thinks in English more and more often, and is glad because it means she truly does become a part of her new world, but she dreams in Spanish, and she’d like to keep that.
Nadia lives in translation. The language she talks in with the people who surround her is not her own. She actually likes the sound of English, the simplicity of it, but sometimes she longs to express her thoughts without framing them for the ease of others. Though of course there are people she could talk in Spanish to at the office, if she wanted to. Jack and Sydney speak it quite well. Her father is fluent, like in so many other languages, but he speaks the sharp flawless Castilian of Spain; the soft vowels of Argentine pronunciation, which depends on the ability to let things go, not to care about precise consonants and endings, aren’t within his grasp. Which is strange, because when he speaks Italian, he’s much more variable. He can talk like a native of Tuscany, he can talk like the Sicilian immigrants who make up a considerable part of Argentina. If it didn’t remind her of Siena each and every time, she’d talk in Italian with him now and then, when the urge to escape the ease of Californian English, to dig for something more complicated and more real, gets too strong.
Eric is all the charm and the wit of the English language personified, and its limitations. He quips, he teases, he makes her laugh and lets her flow with the stream of happy coincidences that make up their conversation. He’d never call her bruja, as Cesar did quite often, and so for him, she never is. Eric is ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s, not tequila, and his unabashed, innocent joy in food does never carry over to the ability to eat something that’s older than three days, as you have to when you live on the streets. Not Eric; he’s American generosity and wealth and blissful ignorance of anything else.
She still has her Argentine passport. Sometimes she wonders whether she’s going to apply for a greencard, or even for citizenship. After all, she works for the American government, and it should be easy. It’s not like she was anything but an immigrant in Argentina, either, as if the identity she used to believe in truly belonged to her; the bastard child of a Russian spy and an American terrorist, translated into an Argentine edition of La Femme Nikita. Her mother’s tongue is Russian, not that she ever heard her mother speak it, or heard her mother, full stop; her father’s land stopped to be America a long time ago and now consists of maps drawn by an Italian centuries ago, and of his own ever shifting boundaries. Why not leave Argentina behind for good, together with its language, and throw herself into Californian breathlessness?
But then there would be no way out, and it’s good to have one last escape route. One part of her that is not sister or daughter or girlfriend but Nadia who was and did not belong to anyone. She thinks in English more and more often, and is glad because it means she truly does become a part of her new world, but she dreams in Spanish, and she’d like to keep that.