Charles and Alejandra's Story
Sadie (voiceover): Before we begin, we wanted to let you know about some of the ways you can support Accentricity. To raise funds for the podcast’s running costs, we've asked the incredible artist Cat Ingall to design our first Accentricity t-shirts. If you’d like to get yourself one, you can find the link in the episode description or go to the Accentricity website and find the merch page. You can also find the link in the episode description to our Patreon and Steady subscription pages where you can pledge a small monthly donation, or you can give a one-off donation via the support the podcast page on the website. Thanks to our current supporters and past donations, we've been able to run the Moving Project without any additional funding and at no cost to the participants. We'd like to keep doing things like this in the future and your support will help us to do so.
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Sadie (voiceover): This is Accentricity Series Two: The Moving Project. Stories about migration, language, and identity from around the world.
Over the past year we've been working with a group of people, teaching them to podcast and helping them to tell stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. This is Charles and Alejandra’s story.
Charles is from America and has spent time living in France, but he decided that for this project instead of telling his own story he’d tell someone else’s. He interviewed his aunt, Alejandra, who was born in Chile but moved to America and has now been there for almost 30 years.
First, you’ll hear Charles’s 10-minute audio piece which is about Alejandra’s relationship with her Chilean identity and her Chilean Spanish. When you’ve been away from a place for so long it can be hard to maintain a connection to that place. Alejandra talks about how it feels to fight for that connection, why it matters to her, and the role played by her language. This is Charles’s first experience of interviewing and audio production, and because of COVID-19 travel restrictions it was made entirely online with him and Alejandra in different parts of the world. After Charles’s audio piece, you'll hear a conversation we had shortly after he'd completed it. We talk about life in the pandemic, learning to podcast, and the challenges but also the rewards of telling a story that isn't your own.
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Alejandra: Pololo or polola. Pololear. Of course, you know, I don't even know if that is being used right now.
Charles (voiceover): Meet Alejandra Cole: a Spanish teacher from Santiago, Chile, who's lived in the United states for 28 years. In addition to being a Spanish teacher she is also a member of my family. The sort of aunt where if you ever asked how we were related it would take a lot of diagramming and explaining. So let's just say aunt in the most nebulous of ways for now. We sat down to talk about her experiences navigating a language and diaspora.
Alejandra: As I was thinking about this interview earlier, I started -- that normally in hours -- which is a time that I -- the day, the month that I arrived, I usually have a mini, internal private celebration or commemoration of the day. So it was about the 14th of August. So yes, by now I have been living in the US longer than what I did my years in Chile.
Charles (voiceover): Chilean Spanish, like any regional dialect, is marked by a unique array of slang.
Alejandra: Al tiro. Al tiro means right now but not literally. Right now, literally but it could be “sí, al tiro”. If I tell my daughters “hey, can you take the trash out?” “Yeah, al tiro.” But it could be -- it be right away, or it could be half an hour. [laughs] Could be later and that would be very Chilean too but the al tiro means almost like just acknowledging that you said something, that you were asked something. Or voy al tiro. And it's 5, 10, 15 minutes later. So, al tiro yes. If you say al tiro you’re a Chilean. If you say pololo/polola/pololear, you’re a Chilean.
Charles (voiceover): The essential function of slang is to communicate identity, belonging. Belonging to a racial, ethnic, regional, or social class group. But slang is not a static entity resistant to change. It’s a thing that happens to lives, breathes, changes. Steeply tied to the places where it comes from, the people who create it, and the time in which it is most relevant.
Alejandra: Qué lata, qué lata, qué lata. What a bummer. [laughs]Qué lata. Lata is -- lata is a piece of metal. That’s also lata like una lata, like a can, soda can, made of lata. That would be lata. Qué lata, yeah. [laughs] We used to say qué choro. But that's the other thing, I have been here 28 years and my slang is a little bit outdated.
Charles (voiceover): A lot can happen in three decades. Especially in Chile. Since the early 1990s, Chile has experienced a transition to democracy, rapid economic growth, and a shift from being a country people immigrate from to a country people immigrate to. Chilean society has been undergoing particularly dramatic changes in recent years: with mass protests against neoliberal economic policies, culminating in a plebiscite at the end of last year in which an overwhelming majority of Chileans voted to rewrite the constitution from scratch. In a place that changes so rapidly, time and distance can make holding on to a particular identity incredibly challenging. I want to know how Alejandra sees her Chileanness after all that has happened.
Alejandra: I do feel yeah, I do feel Chilean. Well, there's so many things that have happened that I haven't lived lately there. I think that is one thing that separates me emotionally from people because we haven't lived the same things and maybe because I see certain things from another perspective, or I don't know too many details to feel the way they feel.
Charles (voiceover): Despite these challenges though, Alejandra maintains a through line to a linguistic identity, allowing it to evolve in diaspora as something that's dynamic and fluid.
Alejandra: Whenever they hear -- my daughters hear me talking to my sisters, my sister, or my friends in Chile, they said “Mama, you're so Chilean.” [laughs] when you speak with them. Words that don't come up most of the time here at home or at school, come up so easily. So it's very easy when you are surrounded by that group or -- to speak that way.
Charles (voiceover): Sometimes though that fluidity isn't entirely conscious.
Alejandra: When I was working in Washington DC most of my colleagues were from Central America. So when I went back to Chile they told me -- they said to me “ah, you were speaking -- you have a Central American accent” but it's not that I chose to but probably unconsciously I was imitating certain intonations or certain words that are -- were not pronounced the way we usually do in Chile.
Charles (voiceover): It is worth pointing out here that as Chileans in the United States, Alejandra and her daughters speak a minority dialect of minority language. While they are in regular contact with other speakers of Spanish, these are speakers of other varieties of Spanish. I’d also like to point out that Alejandra’s using the term Central American to include speakers of Caribbean varieties of Spanish such as Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans. Today Alejandra works as a Spanish teacher, primarily with elementary school students. She's been recently speaking with her students about the differences between her Spanish and the Spanish’s they speak at home.
Alejandra: And that brought up other conversation about words that I use in my class that they don't understand, or they don't use normally at home. So they say, yes, she speaks Spanish but it's not the Spanish we speak at home. So that was really interesting. That also was a very good opportunity to speak about language: that even though we all speak Spanish, we are not all using the same words to name certain things.
Charles (voiceover): As a mother it was important to Alejandra that her children have access to Chilean Spanish as a way to be connected to her family heritage and traditions.
Alejandra: One of the things that made this possible is it was for us to visit Chile every year. They really like the culture because we were very lucky to be able to take them there and for them to go to school for a few weeks, for about seven years during the summer here. They really like the culture, they have friends. They still are in contact with them, and they have their cousins of course. Whenever you ask them, they say that they are Hispanics, and they are -- and of course they are Chileans. I like for them to say they are half and half because of course they have a lot of this culture too and it’s their country.
Charles (voiceover): Alejandra recognises that Chile and being Chilean mean different things to her and her children.
Alejandra: Of course, I go there and I'm Chilean, looking for the food, the typical food. The food, the drinks, the smells, the places, the noises that I was used to. That would be mostly my connection to Chile but yes, I do feel Chilean but then I know that I think -- I think being married here and having two daughters that who knows if they will always, ever -- I mean they will ever go live there. It’s like I have one foot here and one foot there. So you have a little bit of both.
Charles (voiceover): Maintaining a connection to Chile is about maintaining a connection to those still living there. When her daughters speak Chilean Spanish, they’re speaking the language of Alejandra’s family.
Alejandra: I thought it was going to be part of their identity and also to enable their communication to all my family. Because nobody lives here, everybody is in Chile. So if they wanted to be connected to their grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, and everybody else, they had to speak the language. They can have profound conversations with everybody there.
Charles (voiceover): They can also know their mother in a way they wouldn't, as their relationship was being filtered through Alejandra’s second language.
Alejandra: And when I speak Spanish to them, I don't think twice that they're not going to understand what I'm saying. Any topic. Anything really.
Charles (voiceover): There’s a certain poignancy in reaching the anniversary that Alejandra reached this year, where she's now spent longer outside of Chile than she ever spent there. It's a point in which the balance is officially shifted, and it was really significant for me to get to speak with her at that juncture in her life. While she's had the good fortune to be able to maintain a strong link to both countries, which made of her duality something enriching, it’s a hybridity that is essentially conceived out of longing. A longing for distant other, that perhaps seems always just out of reach or one that shifts just quickly enough that you can't keep up. Like clutching onto a fistful of sand beneath the waves.
Alejandra’s story so perfectly illustrates the fact that the experience of migration is so much more vast than knowing this word or that word. Of saying bolígrafo to your students, lápiz pasta to your daughters, and ballpoint pen to your husband. It’s an experience of trying and sometimes not succeeding, to bridge gaps between people and spaces, and bridge the gaps within oneself that are born out of contact with those people and those spaces. With her daughters she's empowered them to forge their own duality, to plant their own feet in each country. But she knows their hybrid identity is not the same as hers and as they enter adulthood the balance between the two places, cultures, languages, and histories will continue to shift and oscillate for them as well as for her.
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Sadie (to Charles): So I guess back in August you found out about the Moving Project and signed up to take part. What was it that made you want to try out podcasting?
Charles: Yeah, so it was -- it was actually I think it was Helen Zaltzman that retweeted it or tweeted about it and I've just been like a long-time fan of her work. I think she’s really, really good at this.
Sadie: Me too.
Charles: It's like one of those things that it's a media that I consume a lot of, but I've never tried. I think a philosophy that ended up emerging out of the pandemic was a desire to try things that I was going to be bad at. I think that was the driving force of it. The topic of the Accentricity podcast appealed to me: I’m interested in migration and language, and identities associated with place and language.
Sadie: Cool.
Charles: So it was that. It was the desire to do something that I didn't think I would be good at.
Sadie: Obviously the pandemic has been awful in 700,000 ways, but it has definitely got me trying out new things that I might not otherwise have tried just out of -- yeah, I guess, out of partly boredom. I guess from our point of view running the Moving Project was a bit of that, a bit of the desire to try something new and to try and work a little bit differently. Under normal circumstances I guess we would have been out meeting people and talking to people face to face, so we wanted to find ways of hearing people’s stories and having voices other than mine on the podcast, and this seemed like a good way to do it. And yeah, we've been able to work with people from all over the world which has been really cool. So you are in America?
Charles: Yeah.
Sadie: Where abouts are you again?
Charles: I live in North Carolina. In a city called Asheville, which is in the west part, in the mountains.
Sadie: Yeah so, it's just -- it's crazy to think that you're so far away from us [laughs] and because of the pandemic you might as well be just down the road [laughs] because we would be communicating the same way.
Charles: Yeah, and I think in general from the pandemic it’s like my world feels so much smaller but also so much bigger at the same time.
Sadie: Yeah, yeah totally. Like I was saying this to somebody else I was chatting to the other day but the -- yeah, it's like space, geographical space, has completely both collapsed and expanded so that --
Charles: Right. [laughs]
Sadie: -- so that down the road could be 1000 miles away and 1000 miles away could be down the road. [laughs]
Charles: Right.
Sadie: It’s a really strange thing, I think.
Charles: Yeah.
Sadie: I wondered about -- so had you done anything like this before? Was this completely new to you? You've done some writing before, right?
Charles: Yeah, and I guess that's -- that was the entry point. I did an internship at France Culture, which is the national public radio in France. We produced a podcast, well we produced a radio documentary that then was a podcast, and -- but I was entirely on the writing research side of things. I had never touched audio at all. All of that was completely new: the editing audio, recording things.
I was just talking to someone about this yesterday how it was interesting how different it was. You know when you're editing a document it's vertical. Everything's oriented vertically but audio editing is horizontal. And I didn't expect that to be a thing that was a challenge, you know? It was sort of like reorienting how I conceive of content in space was really tricky and particularly doing the final project it was like -- you know when you have a long document and you’re putting things in different places and moving around inside the document, it has a feel to it that I'm comfortable with but then suddenly just having everything be horizontal really threw me off somehow.
Sadie: I totally know what you mean. It’s a strange one but I get you.
Charles: Yeah, I didn’t expect that. [laughs]
Sadie: And I think when you first start editing everything’s so slow and cumbersome and you're just not used to it. Once you start to get to a place where you can -- it feels a bit more like writing or you know like it feels as natural as writing a document.
Because I think when you first spoke to us about what you were going to make, you were sort of toying with different ideas for migration stories that you could tell and whether it was going to be part of your own story. And you settled on telling someone else's story. So why did you choose to tell the particular story that you chose?
Charles: I guess another pandemic project has been improving my Spanish and so we have these distant relatives that are from Chile and in the theme of the world getting smaller and getting bigger at the same time. I think we ended up becoming closer; me and the subject Alejandra became closer. That ran parallel with just another sort of rabbit hole universe of interests that we’re going on. Particularly related to sort of South America in the 1970s: that series of military dictatorships throughout the region. Particularly Chile. I had sort of one of the most brutal experiences with that. So that was the grain of interest, just sort of like what's the deal with Chile? Why does it always seem to be the other one? It always sort of seems apart from the rest of the region somehow.
The thing that interests me about her story in coming to United States, is that it was actually kind of completely unrelated to the dictatorship. Obviously, those narratives of people that left because of Pinochet are interesting and I'm interested in looking into those, but hers was just completely divorced from it. She had this different -- very different perspective of Chilean society. I mean as she mentions in the interview, it's like she's missed out on the last 30 years of Chilean history, which have become the most significant [laughs] in what has made Chile what it is today. So yeah, that interested me: the thing of the distance and closeness that she is always experiencing. That there are these little triggers she mentions that make her feel very close to Chile and then when she steps back and looks at the big picture she's very far away.
Sadie: What was it like telling someone else's story compared to telling your own? What were the dynamics like with her being your aunt? Were you quite close before you did this project with her or was she someone a bit more distant from you?
Charles: Yeah, we weren't particularly close and actually I think that doing this opened the door to a lot of -- a lot more interaction that I’ve enjoyed.
Sadie: Were these conversations you’d had with her before or was this the first time you asked about these kind of things?
Charles: We had talked before about the issue of -- particularly the issue of being a teacher of Spanish and raising Chilean children in America. That it was a funny anecdote of she talks this way at school in this way at home, but it was something that I wanted to go deeper into: what is that? What does it actually feel like to be -- to have these two Spanish’s that you are assigning different roles? And I think that her explanation of it was really interesting, that in the classroom she's not trying to create a neutral Spanish or making moral claims about Spanish or judgement calls about the Spanish but is instead trying to give this most versatile Spanish to her students. And that the function of language at home is just different. The purpose of her children speaking Spanish for her is so that they know her family and that they know her. So that was eye opening because I had gone in with the assumption of “oh there's Spanish teachers have this assumption of there’s good Spanish and there's bad Spanish” but it wasn't at all how she was conceiving of it. And the openness she had with her students, who many of them are Mexican and Cuban and Dominican, dealing with their Spanish that they speak at home and how to deal with that kind of friction where there's a possibility of judgments.
Sadie: So you mentioned that you had some assumptions to begin with that turned out not to be what came out of the interview. When you started making your episode and before you did the interview, did you know what you were going to be saying? How much did the story end up being changed by your aunt when you did the interview?
Charles: I think it was completely changed. I think in my plan I had written just -- I’d written a beginning, a middle, and end. And then I presented her with the beginning, and then she changed the middle, and then it was like well, what? [laughs] But it was good because it was -- it ended up being more authentic than this thing that I had contrived. But yeah, I think I had a ton of assumptions about -- particularly about assumptions that non-Chileans make about Chileans. And that I anticipated there being more, I don’t know, conflict.
I thought it was -- I thought it was particularly interesting the way that she talked about the friends that she has that are -- she has this group of friends that are mostly -- I think she said they were Argentinian, Ecuadoran, and Cuban, and Dominican. And that Argentina and Ecuador are places where people have lots of opinions about Chile and so she was -- it was interesting to see that in that space of Jacksonville, Florida, a lot of that baggage was put aside. It's put aside but still present. She says that with her Bolivian friends they do talk about the border. This really old conflict about Chile made Bolivia landlocked and but that it's -- I don't know. I was sort of surprised by how surprising I found that.
Sadie: Were you at any time -- did you ever feel the temptation to ignore the bits that didn't line up with what you were expecting? [laughs] Because I have felt this in interviews before where I will -- I'll feel like I understand something and then the interviewee will throw in something that I don't understand at all. And it seems to contradict what they've already said, and it doesn't line up with what I thought I knew and what I thought I was learning. I do understand, I have felt that temptation before to be like maybe they didn't mean that, maybe I'll just leave that out. I really tried to lean into -- to lean into the difficult bits and to lean into the bits that I don't understand but yeah, did you ever feel that conflict when you were making it?
Charles: Yeah, and the -- I mean the temptation is so much greater when -- our interview was about an hour and then it had to be condensed into 15 minutes and structured. She said lots of things they were super interesting that didn't make it in because they didn't really fit the final narrative. Near the end we ended up having this really interesting talk about race in Chile today and how the demographic -- the demographics of Chile are changing, particularly as Chile goes from being a net emigration country into a net immigration country. I think particularly her -- she was very open about -- she's very open about not knowing things and very open about being surprised by things, very open about the ways that our talk were taking her to new places. And so at the end there's -- she had this very interesting statement about how now when she goes back to Chile, she's curious to pay more attention to the intersections of class, race, migration status, and the way people talk that she had been conscious of but that our talk made her more conscious of.
That's something that I really appreciated about her as an interview subject: that she was so forthcoming about -- she knows what she knows, and she doesn't know what she doesn't know. Her openness to look more into things and even change things. Like she mentioned that she was -- that after our interview she wanted to -- it gave her an idea for a new lesson plan in her classroom of how to incorporate more Mexicanisms and Cubanisms that are in the classroom and make her students feel more seen and valued for their own contributions to language. I think that element to her personality made her such an ideal subject. It was also devasting because you were at the end it's like okay, these are the three points I want to hit and none of those fit in but they’re brilliant. I feel almost like people should know that she's brilliant and insightful.
Sadie: Absolutely. I would definitely listen to a whole series with your aunt. I think she's fantastic.
Charles: Yeah. [laughs] She's really charming.
Sadie: She's so charming. She's so charming and so interesting and I love listening to people who are in the process of working things out as they’re working things out. I just think that's a gift in an interviewee, I think. If you get someone who --
Charles: Oh yeah.
Sadie: -- they know what they think but there are things that they haven't made up their mind about yet and you get to listen to that process. I think that's really cool.
Charles: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Sadie: How do you feel about -- because I kind of mentioned what -- what were the dynamics? I think when you're telling someone else's story there's always this really interesting collaborative -- there's a collaborative thing going on but also, you're the one who holds the reins. You're the one telling the story and you're the one who ultimately presents it and decides how it's presented and you're in control. I wondered maybe, particularly with her being your aunt but just in general, what that was like? How do you feel about how -- has she listened to the piece yet?
Charles: No, she hasn’t. I think that she's waiting for the final --
Sadie: Oh great.
Charles: -- final edition.
Sadie: Is there any part of you that feels a little bit nervous about that or do you think -- are you pretty confident that you've told this story the way she would expect it to be told? Or maybe you haven't told it the way she would expect it but -- do you know I mean? Do you think she'll like it?
Charles: Yeah, I mean I think that -- I mean I think she comes across really, really great but I think that that was something that was really important to me in structuring a narrative, is that I didn't want to -- I didn't want to create a narrative that wasn't true to the one that she had made herself. And in that the tricky -- the trickier part I think was where to put myself. That was something else for little lot with was the voice in the own writing inside the piece of how present I'm supposed to be. How much this is my own -- where did I put my feet? That was something and I don't know if I really succeeded in finding something coherent in the end. But that I mean -- so just on that point it was so much of the final product I surprised myself in enjoying how much it wasn't what I finally desired.
I don’t know if this was an idea that Ira Glass had himself or if it was advice given to him that he then shared, but he once talked about in any creative endeavour there's the big difference between your taste and your ability. And so, there was something sort of pleasing in the end of listening to the final thing and thinking I don't know if I love this because it was that. It was like okay, well my taste is up here, my ability is down here. And sort of oddly that felt satisfying to be like okay, well this is the space to make up. That's the room to move into. And it's frustrating but it's also much better than I think your taste and ability being on the same level.
There are a lot of things about the final piece that I recognise as not totally landing or not really hitting the mark, and -- in that I have that recognition that someone much, much more talented than I would be able to pull it off. So if anything, it gave me a much bigger appreciation for this as a creative art form. Like as a means of production it's not obvious. [laughs] And as someone who listens to a lot of podcasts sometimes you can trick yourself into thinking oh, well yeah, slapped this together, boom boom boom, write an intro. Done. And then when you're actually doing it it's like oh my god, how does anyone do this.
Sadie: Knowing enough to be able to see the flaws in your own work [laughs] is like -- even I had to listen back to the first episodes of Accentricity recently because I was doing something with -- I was picking clips for this online exhibition that it's we’re going to be part of. But I was listening back, and it wasn't that long ago that I started making it, but I was like “oh come on Sadie. What are these edits?” And I think that's one of the things that's been lovely about the Moving Project though, is that everybody has come on so much in such a short space of time. It's incredible between the first assignment and now in terms of both the technicalities of recording and editing, and the storytelling. It’s been amazing just watching how fast everyone's come on. I think learning to podcast is a steep learning curve but that also makes it really exciting. Yeah, that's been -- it's been really fun for me.
I should clarify as well, when I'm like “oh, do you think your aunt will like it?” I think she will. I didn’t mean to -- didn’t mean to sound like I was implying. But I was asking that because I'm making this piece with my mum about her expedience and I do feel a little bit -- I’ve still got, I’ve still got -- I'm not finished it yet, I’ve still got some work to do but even though I'll be working quite closely with her and she's my mum so I feel like we're close enough that maybe I should understand her experience, there's so much that I don't understand. I am a little bit nervous about playing it to her. Even if she listens and thinks this is well made, will I have got it right and captured -- and the question of where you put your own voice, who you are in the story, is really tricky I think because you end up a lot of the time speaking for someone else in a way, even if you're just summarising something that they said to you. But I think we talked about this before I think that -- I think that as an interviewer, at an editor, there's always going to be so much of you in the piece anyway that you might as well just be honest about your presence in it by putting your own voice in as a narrator or an introducer or whatever form it takes. I've thought about this quite a lot before and I've thought about removing my own voice so that it's not all about me but then it kind of is all about me, even if I pretend it's not. [laughs] I think once I’ve finished doing the editing.
Charles: Yeah, it's like the myth of objectivity.
Sadie: Exactly, yeah.
Charles: I don’t know. I think I’m a very private person, I don’t like -- I don’t want to share. If I were to make a podcast, I wouldn't want it to be about me and the idea of putting things that I create out into the world is terrifying because what if what I say is wrong? What if I say what I say is stupid? It was I guess useful for making me confront that fear of I’m going to try to say stuff and people can react to it however they react. But that is deeply terrifying to me. So the whole concept of a podcast is possibly my greatest fear. This is like a little self-administered therapy, I think. [laughs]
Sadie: Yeah, I think it feels like you're just putting a piece of your soul out into the whole world sometimes. Putting a piece of your soul on the internet and letting people tell you what they think of it. [laughs] And that can be very, very scary. What about in terms of your aunt and your family’s experiences with migration? Do you think that -- do you think that now after making this piece -- do you think that you're able to understand the experience that your aunt was describing, or do you think it's something that's hard to understand if you haven't lived it?
Charles: I think that I -- it came up during one assignment and then it led -- it became the theme that I wanted to explore the most with her, which was motherhood. It's specifically a compartment of migration that I have not experienced and cannot experience as a cis man, but I think it was -- it was almost like the un-understandability, incomprehensibility of it that was the most interesting of it and in the attempt to understand -- I don't have children and so I think the most interesting thing for me was that element of having children. Children mixed up inside the question of migration. It's always been something that really interested me that question of what happens when you -- I think a lot of parents who migrate experience this -- of an essential part of parenthood is a realisation that your child is a person unto themselves. And that compounded by they’re foreign is always such an interesting thing.
I have friends who have children, and a lot of my friends who have children, are raising their children in a different place than they were raised. I think it's always interesting that idea of why are my kids German? How did I get -- how did I get these French children? Where did they come from? It’s always so interesting to watch people navigate. And so, I wanted to explore that particularly with her, especially because I think that her -- whatever approach she took to in bilingual household having your children be in contact with the culture. She pulled it off in this exceptionally competent way. That her children are very, very able to -- their Spanish is incredible for people that didn't grow up in a Spanish speaking country. Okay yes, they have a mother whose native language is Spanish, they grew up in Florida where Spanish is very, very, very, very spoken but it's impressive to see them. They're just so competent to a level that feels kind of rare in terms of multi-generational language transmission.
So yeah, it was like that element of motherhood. There's something about motherhood and maternity that’s always fascinated me. It's such a unique relationship that people have. And so, exploring that, compounded by language in place, was a really great door to more insights from me, I think.
Sadie: Yeah, it's fascinating to me as well. My mum was born in Scotland and still I think the first time I had been to a Polish class at Uni, and I tried to speak Polish to her, I could see it in her eyes that she looked at me and she was like why are you Scottish? How did that happen? [laughs] Even though she is too for all intents and purposes. She’s like when I tried to speak Polish and spoke it with a Scottish accent, she's like “hmm not sure how this came about.” [laughs]
Charles: Right. [laughs]
Sadie: It's a really fascinating thing. It’s really interesting that you said -- it's almost like the process of trying to understand is the story. Like it's not that to have made a piece about this, to have made an episode, you have to understand it. The process of you working it out can be the story and I really like that.
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Sadie (voiceover): Thanks to Charles for all of his hard work, skill, and enthusiasm. And to Alejandra for sharing her story. Thanks as always to the Accentricity team: John McDiarmid and Martha Ryan. And to Seb Philp for the music. Remember to have a look in the episode description for a link to the merch page and links to our Patreon and Steady pages. Thanks for listening.