Today at English class, level B1. A young student asks me:
‘Teacher, can you fail an exam because you used a swearword?’
Oh, this conversation again. Every year there is a point in which I must explain to my students that the vast amount of obscenity, foul language and profanity that is tolerated in Spain is rarely tolerated anywhere else, if at all. I explain to my teenaged or adult students that they simply cannot behave or insult in other countries the way they might do in Spain. I expected this conversation to be more or less the same.
‘Well, exams are usually formal, and swearwords are just the opposite. It depends on the word, what did you write?’, I ask.
‘Nigger’ he answers, the spitting image of cluelessness, with the genuinely puzzled expression of someone who has no idea what they did wrong.
Oh, mierda.
Now THAT has taken a long explanation, but I interrupted the class in order to give it.
Still, at the end he said:
‘I didn’t know if I should use black or “nigger”, but I had heard “nigger” in a song, and a black person singing, and it being used with other black people, so I thought it was right’. His confused look was endearing and funny at the same time. He had used old plain logic, and he was still coming to terms with the fact that not only it hadn’t work as expected, it had backfired with a vengeance.
Well, I can only say I thank god his teacher at school gave him a straight F so he came back to ask me and I could give a long explanation. This is a very fair, blue-eyed young boy from a little village in southern Spain. There are high chances he’s never seen a black person in the flesh before (he must have seen some immigrants in Cordoba, but I never saw a black person until I was 18, so I cannot be sure). I needed to give a quick class on USAmerican Political Correctness and History for him to start getting the point, and he was still a bit confused. I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if he had chosen to apply his knowledge in New York or some part of the USAmerican soil… With his very fair looks (something few people expect from Spaniards, due to stereotyping), I fear he might have looked as a white supremacist, despite having, as all Spaniards, African, Arab, Celtic, Iberian, Roman, Germanic, Jewish and Nordic blood, at the very least.
In order to try to explain to him the strength of that word, I told him:
‘They avoid saying it by all means. They call it the “n-word”, white people just don’t pronounce it. It’s unspeakable.’
‘Like Voldemort?’
You just have to love this job 😀
Isabel Guzman's Art. 