The Art of a Foreign Language

She had never put much thought into the squiggles of incomprehension that rebelliously decorated the streets in her own country, much less in the others she visited. Yet within her first hour in the city that was to become her home for several months she noticed the familiar spray of graffiti. The indecipherable stains on bridges and building-sides kaleidoscoped outside the taxi window as she approached her lodgings. So far away from home and yet so similar in practice, she dismissed the spray as a blemish upon the city she anticipated as pristine. She considered it a mild blasphemy to deface the place that boasted a rich artistic tradition.

Gradually she accepted the foreign squiggles and unintelligible script as being a part of living in a metropolis much larger than the one she left behind. A visit to a larger city, one rooted even deeper in antiquity than her new place of residence, confirmed her assumption. Urban living in a foreign country seemed to require a talent for ignorance and to see past the public vandalism was to see the beauty of her surroundings. Although names and shapes marred the surface, meaning resonated in the history and purpose of the structures themselves--so she thought.

In the midst of accustoming herself to the lifestyle of her host country--wrapping her tongue around the language, juggling the currency, and observing the local etiquette of jaywalking--an acquaintance described graffiti as something she had never considered: street art. She pictured the scrawls she observed during her taxi ride. The spray contained little meaning and failed to coincide with her reactionary definition of art. Unlike the critically lauded pieces that marched before her in textbook after textbook, the artwork that decorated the streets resembled the product of a rebellious impulse instead of an intellectually and aesthetically pleasing masterpiece. Her brief introduction to the term 'street art' catalyzed a change in that philosophy.

As she became familiarized with the streets of her host city, she stepped onto the sidewalk not only with the mission to navigate the landscape but to look at her surroundings. The artwork, she realized, had always been around her and she was the one who failed to see it as such. Spray painted words and characters appeared less like vandalism and more like the common form of expression that was as alien to her as the language. Indeed, she realized that it was a foreign language in and of itself.

Her hypocrisy embarrassed her, for she prided herself on her desire to experience the culture of her host country firsthand; yet she welcomed her mistake. She knew her own foreignness to the culture demanded that she make similar blunders throughout her stay. It became clear that the purpose of immersion within a new culture was not possessing an immediate proficiency, but rather learning how to navigate it--like the streets and the art within them--by trial and error. With a new openness to making mistakes she vowed to try new dishes when eating out, to try going new places, to try seeing life from a local perspective, and to try respecting all forms of expression she might encounter. Since viewing the graffiti in her new mindset, she was convinced that she could be sensitive to almost everything yet unknown to her because she had discovered the art of a foreign language.