Living the dream can seem like a nightmare

Iknow the hardest thing to endure for people with a high opinion of themselves is to be ignored and misunderstood. With this in mind, I can report that the longest September of my life has now ended. I spent the month speaking entirely in te reo Ma¯ ori as part of Mahuru Ma¯ ori, a campaign to boost the language around the country. Every major conversational interaction in my life became a strange, continuous reversal of one of the most tired comedy bits in history. That scene in movies where Westerners speak very loudly and slowly to natives they presume can’t speak English. In my version, a native speaks slowly and loudly to a bunch of English speakers. It wasn’t any less funny, but it was slightly sadder.

Most conversations began with a simple statement or question and descended into quagmire. We all have our bad moments, but trying to converse last month became an Iraqi battle of attrition; and outside chess, there’s no such thing as a stalemate. If you can’t end a fight, then you’ve lost it. The rest is just farce.

So, if the best we can hope for in life is a gradual unfurling of disappointment, then September was a lifetime in four weeks. I started the month believing all Pa¯ keha¯ speakers around me – whom I knew – would be delighted to share my reo Ma¯ ori adventure (and some were). But by the end it was generally a fight to see who would break first.

Conversation took its toll on everybody. I’d moisten my lips, open my mouth, and people would look at me with the weary resignation of someone rolling up a sleeve after dropping their cellphone in the toilet.

And so it would begin. I would say something – a statement, recollection, question – and it would be greeted by a blank stare. Then I would do that exact thing people do in those movies and television shows. I would say the thing to them again, only more slowly, leaning heavily on the enunciation. It’s ridiculous, I know, but at the time it seemed to make sense.

The dreary punchline in actual movie scenes usually comes when, surprise, the non-Westerner emits a perfectly pronounced one-liner showing they do understand. Here in real life, the recipient never could, so it was time for phase two. I would recast the sentence – arrange it differently. This did not work either. Why on earth would it?

The worst time came when I would use other, more obscure-to-the-layperson words to explain the Ma¯ ori words the person already didn’t understand. Had we moved on to something new? No! I’m still trying to explain the first sentence. This new, newer sentence, however, really put the cat among the pigeons. Or as I might say in Ma¯ ori for the second and third time, it was really throwing a feline into a flock of winged animals; you know, things with feathers, startled by an animal often used as a pet, and disliked by Gareth Morgan.

Sometimes it devolved into charades. Actual charades. I remember using charade hand motions signalling broad categories such as books and movies, or the number of syllables, or small words like ‘‘the’’ or ‘‘a’’. The saddest discovery I made this past month was that nobody remembers how to play charades any more. More than once, the act of tapping my nose furiously and pointing only evoked a look of mild disgust from people.

At a certain point, Mahuru Ma¯ ori isn’t as much a social experiment as a psychological one. I went a little crazy.

It would have been less disconcerting if these people, these places, these languages were all foreign to me. The sport of getting through a foreign adventure makes up for the discomfort. But everyday life flipped on its head carries the befuddlement of huffing carbon monoxide.

I’d moisten my lips, open my mouth, and people would look at me with weary resignation.

The worst part was that speaking only Ma¯ ori all day, every day – on top of my full immersion classroom – genuinely changed me. I know, I went into this year seeking change. But when it happens, it’s actually scary. One night last month I went to sleep watching episodes of Waka Huia, after speaking nothing but Ma¯ ori for weeks. I experienced fragments of dreams in Ma¯ ori already this year, but this night I dreamed only in Ma¯ ori, and then I woke up in the middle of the night with my stream of consciousness locked in te reo too.

I discovered that, if you think in a different language, you feel like a different person. Maybe you are a different person. This thought promptly knocked me back into Pa¯ keha¯ . I sat up feeling anxious and sad and wondering in the darkness, who am I?

The answer is, I hope, that I like the quiet life as much as anyone, but I’d rather be doing something important. I’m seeking that elevation again, those dreams.