Learning as a transformative activity means that the individual not only acquires some skill or knowledge, but also goes through a rearrangement of his own notion of self and relationship with society, and we can usually perceive one or multiple factor(s) as the catalyst(s) for this transformation to take place (Boyd, 1989; Daloz, 1999; Dirkx, 2008; Freire, 1972; Mezirow, 1978;
Kegan, 2000; O’Sullivan, 2002; Taylor, 2012).
Few experiences in life have such a potential for being a catalyst for transformation as the experience of immigration. The potential for positive transformation does indeed exist in an immigrant's life; however, many of the experiences of an immigrant in his new environment are not only disorienting and disrupting, but also often contradict the cultural capital s/he brought from his homeland, not recognizing it as legitimate in her host nation (Morrice, 2013, p. 263). Thus, there is a darker side in an immigrant's experience: transformation is “not always a straightforward process of building on previous learning,” as it may involve an act of “unlearning”, which often amounts to “identity deconstruction,” in which the immigrants have to “let go of much of who and what they were” (Morrice, 2013, pp. 266-267). Since transformative learning can be – and often is – a double-edged sword in immigrants’ lives, it is relevant to explore which elements might help or hinder such learning experiences.
Contributing factors to Yan’s transformative learning experiences
There are at least three essential elements that may contribute for an immigrant’s experience of transformation to be positive or not: the individual’s own acts, his/her past history, and the environment. Positive transformation depends partially on whether s/he will consciously use self-reflection to critically re-assess his/her condition, and to explore new possibilities, roles, and capacities for his/her life. This rational process emphasizes the individual’s agency; however, one cannot ignore how the environment and the person's life conditions will also affect her capacity to promote “the resolution of a personal dilemma and the expansion of consciousness resulting in greater personality integration” (Boyd, 1989, p. 459).
When discussing transformative experiences, it is essential to know where the individual is coming from, in terms of his/her cultural anchors. Yan, being Taiwanese, has certainly been strongly influenced by Confucian thought, widespread within many Asian societies. Sun (2012) discusses how transformation can be affected by a Confucian learning model, mentioning the Confucian desire for the individual to fit in the society, and to “self-cultivate and realize the full nature of human beings through lifelong learning” (p. 212). Yan’s will to learn música sertaneja might easily be understood under this perspective: he desired to fit in Brazilian society, to be included, to avoid being seen as an outsider. At the same time, he is highly self-motivated to continuously learn an ever-increasing repertoire of songs, throughout his life. His frequent half-joking remarks to friends that he is more Brazilian than them, because of his vast knowledge of Brazilian music, is a reflection of the Confucian ideal that humans can only develop their full potential through learning, and that a continuous learning process “facilitates one to live in [a
multidimensional world] properly and successfully” (Sun, 2012, p. 214). Yet, one Confucian aspect that Yan apparently does not follow is its “emphasis on social hierarchy [, which] results in acceptance rather than questioning of knowledge” (Sun, 2012, p. 208). Yan did not accept the normal hierarchy that would keep him as a marginalized immigrant; he questioned this status quo and has not allowed others to pigeonhole him in what they might consider as the role of a typical Chinese immigrant. Thus, his transformation presents the Freirean quality of understanding the oppressive forces of society, and acting to overcome them, both in his own understanding and in trying to create a change in people’s behaviors and attitudes.
When thinking about immigrants, it is useful to think of Derrida and Dufourmantelle’s (2000) paradoxical concept of hospitality: conditional hospitality perpetuates a power relationship in which the person from the host country interrogates the immigrant, in the host country’s language, about his/her identity, and the host country keeps the right to define the other person’s status (Phelan, 2012). Nonetheless, unconditional hospitality, in Derrida’s thinking, is an ideal that can hardly be achieved, but that still should be used as a guiding goal behind one’s actions. As Higgins (2012) explains, unconditionally is practically “a transcendental idea, one toward which we might aspire, even though it remains inaccessible…[B]y reaching beyond what may be thought possible, new and interesting things can happen” (p. 139). Higgins says that the unconditional should not be seen as a Kantian ideal, “removed from time and space,” but rather as a concept “always entwined with what is conditional and [that] must be recalled in order to rethink and transform commonly accepted ideas and concepts” (p. 140). Furthermore, he affirms that “unconditional hospitality is not to be desired beyond what can be known or realized” (p. 141).
Higgins discusses the concept of hospitality in relation to the degree of openness of community musicians towards foreign and unexpected people (and their influences); however, this concept can also be applied broadly to an entire society’s attitude towards newcomers: the more open a host country is to the cultural baggage the immigrant brings with him/her, closer it would be to the ideal of unconditional hospitality. Music – and music-related activities, attitudes, and perceptions – are major environmental influences that may positively or negatively affect an immigrant's possible transformation. Phelan (2012) uses the concept of “sonic hospitality” to discuss how music – especially the act of making music together – can be used to welcome and bring together people of different origins, by overcoming linguistic barriers, and promoting diversity in a society which understands that, “in a world characterized by increased diversity and mobility, migrants occupy a unique position as cultural brokers and mediation figures” (p. 178). Higgins (2012) also concurs that community music activities can be used to welcome people from any origins, creating “a porous, permeable, open-ended affirmation” for everyone involved in “creative music making” (p.
137).
However, this sort of unconditional hospitality does not seem to have been offered to Yan: he did not benefit from any programs specifically designed to foster greater multiculturalism, and he does not feel that his Chinese cultural capital was valued by Brazilian society in any explicit way.
Nonetheless, despite the fact his new environment did not foster a positive transformative experience (one that would not cause identity deconstruction), this happened because of Yan’s own actions – his desire to learn and master a Brazilian music genre, by purposefully reaching out to his new community, while also choosing a style that kept him connected to Teresa Teng’s music. His own actions were thus fundamental to his process of transformative learning.
Desire for a hyphenated identity
Immigrants are often torn between a desire to return, a longing to be back home, and a desire to fit in, to fully belong to this new environment. They are also prey to the myth of return, which gets stronger with the passing of time; as Said (1999) writes, “they cannot return to the place they left, as they left it, [because] it too has changed. There are, of course, plenty of migrants who do return to the places from which they came, but even here the feeling of being ‘out of place’ may continue” (cited in Baily & Collyer, 2006, p. 171). Yan himself mentions the feeling, partaken by most immigrants, of never being able to feel at home; he will never be a total Brazilian, regardless of how many songs he may learn, but, when he goes back to Taiwan, other people view him as a foreigner.
It is interesting to reflect on Yan’s life experiences keeping in mind the concepts of topophilia and topophobia – respectively, “love and attachment” and “negative feelings and unfriendly attitudes”
towards a place – which illustrate how “diverse and contradictory” the life of an immigrant usually is (Ma, 2003, p. 11). Since topophilia and topophobia tend to co-exist, “wax[ing] and wan[ing] [in relation to an immigrant's] homeland as well as hostland”, an immigrant is likely to suffer from some kind
of spatial uncertainty.…Feelings of belonging to and longing for a place do not always coincide, which can greatly torture him as he struggles with the questions of national and local cultural identity and with issues of nationalism, citizenship, nationality, patriotism, ethnicity, loyalty, cultural assimilation and social and spatial integration.…He is frequently psychologically pulled apart by feelings of in-betweenness. (Ma, 2003, p. 11)
These feelings are certainly part of the subtext in Yan’s narratives about his life. In the Brazilian context, it is also important to notice that “public acceptance of hyphenated ethnicity remains contested” (Lesser, 1999, p. 169); it is as though immigrants are not seen as fully Brazilian, especially those whose “physiognomy often allows instant categorization” (Lesser, 1999, p. 169).
Brazilian might use words as árabe, turco or japão to describe people from those ethnicities,
“whether they [be] prominent ministers or local bookstore owners” (Lesser, 1999, p. 173). The society is thus multicultural but hyphenless. Immigrants everywhere wish to be able to have a hyphenated identity, which recognizes not only where they came from but also the place where they chose to restart their lives. Yan’s love for música sertaneja is a genuine love for the music itself, as well as an attempt to overcome this hyphenlessness: he did not want to be seen by Brazilian society as a “typical” Chinese immigrant; he desired to be recognized as fully Brazilian, even as he did not want to forget his roots. His attitude reverberates with Lesser’s (1999) affirmation about how “hyphenated Brazilians [incorporate] many elements of majority culture even as they [remain] distinct” (p. 5). Music thus became an important cultural capital for Yan, allowing him to negotiate his new identity within Brazilian society, and acting as a window for him to better understand it, while also being able to reminisce about the kind of Chinese music he loves.
Empowerment and self-definition
By singing música sertaneja to Brazilian audiences, Yan is first seen as an object of curiosity.
However, as he gradually demonstrates not only to memorize a vast repertory of songs, but also to be able to sing them in a compelling manner, he then dispels prejudiced notions that might be present in the audience’s mindset. For Yan, this acts as a political tool, to assert both his Brazilian-ness and his identity as a musician. Brazilians listening to him are often, in a covert way, becoming
more tolerant towards other ethnicities, and learning that everyone can be able to transcend any preconceived notions that are commonly applied to them. “[P]eople use music not only to locate themselves in a particular social context but also to preconceive knowledge about other people and places” (Martiniello & Lafleur, 2008, p. 1199); thus, by singing what is not expected of him, and with a mastery rarely seen within immigrants, Yan is thus able to subvert this knowledge, widening the scope of people’s understanding and tolerance.
That moment in the bar, when some girls made fun of Yan for not understanding música sertaneja, became deeply ingrained in his mind. Despite seeming trivial at first, it clearly had a profound effect on him, becoming a symbol for him of the rejection he felt by a segment of Brazilian society.
Returning to Derrida’s concept, it would have been nice if they had offered him a higher degree of conditional hospitality; however, in his case, he was the one who willingly chose to claim his right to belong in Brazil’s cultural tapestry, even though he had been denied this right at the bar.
As Mezirow (2012) states,
Transformation theory’s focus is on how we learn to negotiate and act on our own purposes, values, feelings, and meanings rather than those we have uncritically assimilated from others – to gain greater control over our lives as socially responsible, clear-thinking decision makers. (p. 76)
Singing música sertaneja is thus also an act of rebellion by Yan, a way to protect his right to self-definition. In Yan’s narrative, those girls who once laughed at him were denying his right to a multifaceted musical self. He took a stance against being defined by others, thus gaining control over his own life, and not allowing society to “foster conformity and impede development of [his]
sense of responsible agency” (Mezirow, 2012, p. 76).
This paper has explored how a Chinese immigrant in Brazil was able to gain control over his life by a self-motivated, nonconformist, and autodidactic learning process of a specific musical genre.
The narrative of Yan’s life – of which only a few illuminating vignettes were presented here – also provides a powerful example of the potential for music activities as a tool to facilitate immigrants’
adaptation to their new environments. As Lawrence (2005) writes, “through creating or interpreting art, we can go beneath the surface to see aspects of the self that were always present but veiled or hidden from view” (p. 76; cited in Litsheim, 2010). By learning a vast repertoire of Brazilian songs, and performing them in public, Yan was able to see – and present to others – aspects of himself that might have remained hidden otherwise: his musicianship, which allowed him to deeply move other people in his performances, his intelligence, which allowed him to learn, memorize, and master songs in a foreign language and foreign style; and his personal strength, which made him not conform to social expectations that others had of him. Yan uses música sertaneja as a powerful medium to claim his unique identity in an environment that had few possible roles that an immigrant could play. Thus, música sertaneja, when sung by him, assumes multiple meanings that would not exist when performed by a Brazilian singer: it becomes an expression of non-conformity, of hybridity, of longing for the past while embracing the present, of the right to self-definition, of strength, resilience, and defiance.
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