[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The two discourses of storytelling and15discovery increase the value of the African products and help to guarantee a sale.Without the rudiments of the language, however, selling the most basic merchan-dise can be frustrating.The morning wears on, and Khadi prepares for the tourist bus as she sits on astool outside her shop.Black African dolls with rich multicolored dresses adorn hertable.She designs the figures and their costumes and has quite a reputation for herknowledge of the craft.Her store, Mustafa s World of African Art, is co-owned byAnta, a young Senegalese man with extensive experience in the international touristmarket.The tight twenty-by-ten-foot space is filled with all sorts of wooden arti-facts.Hand-carved African masks fill virtually every space, hanging on the wallsnear the ceiling and on the beams.Now in her mid-thirties, Khadi arrived in the United States with her husbandin 1991.The shop is named after her son, who was born in Harlem the followingyear.In Senegal, she completed secretarial training and performed typical officeduties such as typing and filing.She still finds it hard to imagine her life as a mer-chant.But without an adequate grasp of English, she is forced to sell African art tomake a living.Khadi is extremely pleasant and has a ready smile, but a discussionabout her prospects in America, especially as compared with her former life as anoffice professional, appears to dampen her jovial spirit. We have problems with English, she says humbly,  because grammatically,it is the opposite of French.And that give us hard time to learn English.Directly across from Khadi s art shop is Mame, a Senegalese woman sellingclay pots and earth-tone sand pictures of African landscapes.When Mame s daugh-ter, Zeyna, was in New York, we spoke frequently about African immigrants inHarlem.After Zeyna relocated to California, Mame and I continued talking aboutthese issues. Don t forget, I d repeat often,  I want to talk to you about selling  wood[African sculpture]. Yes, yes, she d reply,  any time, any time!Although she customarily avoids any formal interview, especially with atape recorder, she always invites me to share a meal or to join daily chats.On one90 black meccaof these occasions, a young Jamaican customer ventures into the market.He passes Khadi s shop and walks over to Mame s earthenware.Picking up oneafter the other, he turns with one in his hand and spots Mame ready to assisthim. Do you have pots to put plants in? he asks. What? Mame replies. I don t understand.He repeats his question, this time a little louder and with greater agitation.Mame turns to Khadi, who is watching from her booth.She walks closer. What? What does he want? Khadi asks. I don t know, Mame replies.The customer looks at both of them. Can I use this for plants? he barks,raising the pot in one hand.Mame and Khadi stare at each other and then at him, and I try to help. He isasking if he can use this for plants, you know, a plant, I say.They both look at me, bewildered.Khadi shrugs her shoulders with her handsup. I don t know, she answers.The Jamaican customer replaces the pot and scurries off, meandering through-out the market.It isn t that Mame and Khadi don t understand the English words in and ofthemselves.They have a problem understanding the diction of their customer,since it is couched in a thick Jamaican accent.The long and varied U.S.immigra-tion history, with its recent influx of new migrants from Asia, Latin America,Africa, and the Caribbean, has greatly intensified an already diverse cultural envi-ronment.And the African presence adds a countless array of new languagesand sounds to the American tapestry.But this also means a concomitant rise inEnglish accents, old and new dialects intermingling in settings where both nativesand newcomers interact.In No Shame in My Game, an ethnography about theworking poor in Harlem, Katherine S.Newman shows how service workers inmulticultural settings must learn to navigate various dialects of English, streetslang, and nuanced behavioral patterns. Monolingual Spanish speakers freshfrom the Dominican Republic have to figure out orders spoken in Jamaican Eng-lish, Newman says. All of these people have to figure out how to serve customerswho may be fresh off the boat from Guyana, West Africa, Honduras. 16 AfricanAmerican patrons have their own expectations in the marketplace, and this addsa burden on African merchants who find it hard to respond adequately to theirdemands.Some residents feel a slow response from an African vendor, a twistedfacial expression, or a suck of the teeth is disrespectful, and conflict often ensues.Many customers find it incomprehensible that they can own and operate a busi-ness, no matter how crude, and not understand their idiomatic English or inter-pret their bodily gestures [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]