Review by Melissa Oliveira
Immersion, with all its connotations of going under, of being enveloped by something greater than oneself, seems to imply a kind of surrender to change. When something is immersed, whether in a baptismal font or a dye bath, we don’t expect it to emerge the same as it was when it went in. Linda Murphy Marshall’s recent book Immersion: A Linguist’s Memoir (She Writes Press, 2024) explores this idea beautifully as it chronicles decades of the author’s life in learning and working in foreign languages.
Over the course of her career as a translator for the U.S. government, Marshall immersed herself in not one language, but in several. “First Spanish,” Marshall writes, “then Portuguese, French, German, Russian . . . eventually Xhosa, Amharic, Shona, Swahili, and others, till more than a dozen filled my coffer… They introduced me to new ways of thriving, to new ways of seeing myself, of seeing others.” On one level, Immersion allows readers to peek behind the scenes and see what it is like to work as an interpreter or government translator, or to dedicate months learning a language – not to visit a place – but to listen for chatter that could indicate political instability in a location. On another, Immersion is a straightforward memoir illustrating Marshall’s own trajectory from isolation into expansiveness, from the strain of domestic practicalities in suburban Missouri to the excitement of bridging communication gaps in Spain, Ethiopia, Brazil and many other places, all thanks to languages.
The start of Immersion finds Marshall describing her early isolation back home in Kirkwood, MIssouri. It’s the mid-1980s and, as a young suburban housewife with two children, Marshall can’t shake the feeling that the life she’s living doesn’t quite feel like her own. Her kids mean the world to her, but she recalls a few key previous experiences. One was a year spent studying abroad in Franco’s Spain; its heavily-armed soldiers and tanks ready to turn against student protestors exposed her to a world beyond what she’d known. “The year contained many firsts,” she writes. “The first time I viewed the US from afar, shocked to hear Spanish friends criticize my homeland.”
She knew her future lay somehow with foreign languages, earning a master’s in Spanish as well as a PhD in Hispanic languages and literature, then working for a time as a professional translator for the government. But after having two children, family pressure pushes her to give all of that up to be a housewife. She tries to step into the role, but it feels about as far from her abilities, desires and gifts as she can imagine. She runs through Portuguese verb conjugations in her head to cope with what she calls the endless “domesticities” of her life. She also sends out what she calls “test balloons” by taking a language test and applying for a job as a linguist in Washington DC, keeping hope alive for that parallel life. When she receives an offer for that longed-for job, she puts off responding.
Meanwhile, another job offer materializes through her PhD. mentor. This one is a shorter-term engagement, so it wouldn’t require her to give up her entire life, but would take her to Brazil for a few weeks as a translator and interpreter with a group of university students. She takes this job, finding herself suddenly in demand as one of the sole people who can communicate well in both Portuguese and English. As Marshall puts it herself, “They needed me to serve as a conduit between both groups… I stood in the midst of it, the heart of it. With hundreds of spokes all converging on me, I became a hub of the wheel.” In the favelas of Rio and the dusty backroads of rural Brazil, she is a translator and interpreter, a leader and teacher. She’s indispensable. Marshall, by then, already knows she can’t return to her life as it was before. After Brazil, she accepts the offer to be a linguist in DC and soon begins her new life as a Spanish translator and single mom.
In 1987, Marshall starts learning less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), and that’s where things get very interesting. Structurally, Immersion is pretty uncomplicated, with each chapter’s title reflecting some linguistic element (tense, mood, etc) that aligns with the content. But the ideas she plays with map onto journeys both linguistic and spiritual. Spanish and Portuguese, Xhosa and Sotho, Swahili and Amharic: each one is a door leading Marshall to someplace different, in the self as well as in the world. “Every time I immersed myself in a new language,” she writes, “I discovered new truths, new concepts I hadn’t considered before. I learned how other people lived, what their belief systems were.”
Some challenges are expected (like learning a variety of click sounds, formidable grammar, or a syllabary). But some, like the fact that old, racist textbooks dating back to the missionary days are the only ones available to begin Xhosa, or that she may wait years before actually visiting a country where a language she works in is spoken, are not so expected. Since she knows the languages so intimately by then, the variety of experiences in-country among native speakers are some of the most fascinating and sometimes harrowing parts of the book.
On the whole, I found the linguist’s eye view fascinating. As Marshall writes, “some scholars claim that when you’ve mastered a second (or third, etc.) language it takes hold inside your mind in a way unlike when you have only a cursory knowledge of the language” — this is an idea that keeps circling back. Languages are easy to start and tough to stick with, but in the long haul they can offer us something deeper and more soulful in terms of connection with others. That seems a valuable pursuit in a period of isolation. In certain ways, it reminded me of Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words; though the scope is different, if you liked Lahiri’s book you’ll probably also Immersion: A Linguist’s Memoir, too.