Drowning in Water

The Meaning of Water

A favorite parable of mine goes like this:

Two young fish are swimming along side-by-side talking about the things youngs fish talk about when an elder fish says to them in passing:
 
"'Morning fellows! How's the water today?"

The young wish swim on without reply. Only When the strange, old fish has safely passed does one turn to the other and say: 

"What the heck is water?"
Culture is like water. We swim in it without knowing it for what it is. We take it for granted.

(For a more extensive exploration of this idea, I recommend the following commencement speech by David Foster Wallace.)

This parable has been helpful to give me perspective on my own culture. To be more see more of the thins that I take for granted. when I lived inside my own culture.

Lately, though this has metaphor has taken on a whole new  dimension of meaning.

A Very Bulla Christmas

The holidays were hard for me. (Cat, too). I would have been hard pressed to explain it at the time but with the wisdom of a few weeks perspective I can see it was a matter of cultural difference.

Being out of my own culture meant swimming in unfamiliar waters. The winter holidays in the DR are just different and that made me uncomfortable and a bit depressed in a way I wasn't anticipating.

So, you ask, how are they different?

These lights on a neighbor's house are one on a short of five items that DR and US Christmas celebrations have in common. The others? Family comes home, people take a week or more days off work, they celebrate with food and drink, and the special day gets special recognition in the church.
(We were invited to Mass but we didn't go. I now wish we had - the familiarity might have been grounding for me.)

Gift giving? That's really only for kids here and it's done on the el Día de los Tres Reyes, which is January 6. In the Hispanic tradition the Three Kings give the gifts instead of the Germanic, quasi-pagan figure of Santa Clause.

Christmas trees are a bit too nothertn, too. There's been some adoption of "l arbolito in the cities but here in the campo with a significant deforestation problem "holiday cheer" is not a good enough reason to cut down a perfectly good tree.

Christmas music? The two or three songs I heard para la Navidad (yes, one of them was by Jose Feliciano) were Mexican imports.  These were far outnumbered by the secular bachata, merengue, salsa and dembow tunes. These I heard all night, every night, from la Noche Buena (Christmas Eve) through la Noche Vieja (New Year's Eve).

The Spanish word for this - used with pride by some locals - is bulla which translates as "racket." This is, of course, directly contrary to the Christmas traditions of Northern Europe and the Northern America. Underneath all the crass commercialism, Christmas in the United States is still a spiritual and introspective time. You stay in because it's cold. You spend time with your family. You try to be nice in a way that you aren't normally.

The folks in my campo mostly use la Navidad as an excuse to get together with people  they don't normally see and hacer la fiesta.  They drink and dance in la discoteca. Because Christmas just isn't that big a deal here.

What is a big deal is Semana Santa (Holy Week), the last week of Lent before Easter. I'd love to write about it's role in Dominican culture but that will have to wait until I've actually experience it.


It all makes sense in perspective. I come from a society that is Protestant Christian at it's core at it's core while Dominican roots are distinctly Catholic. The water felt wrong, so it was hard for me to go with the flow.

I wonder how Dominican immigrants to the US feel in to find themselves in a society where their biggest cultural event isn't celebrated outside of a few ethnic enclaves? I imagine that the first Semana Santa they spend away from home passes not so - how, shall I put it? - swimmingly.

This post is part of Blogging Abroad's 2017 New Years Blog Challenge, week three: Cultural Differences.