An immersive story you can’t refuse
Glynis Cousin The Higher Education Academy
 
In Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses (much maligned but barely read), he depicts a way of being an immigrant that is imbued with an exile mentality.  Thus one of his Indian characters living in Britain is doing his best not to be immersed in Britain; he creates an ossified, virtual version of India which he then inhabits in order not to be contaminated by his 'host' country.  This example sprang to mind because it suggests to me that immersion per se does not enable flow, etc.   it also depends on your subject position;  if you are resisting with every fibre of your body, then even if you are structurally immersed, you are somewhere else.  Some victims of torture reported that they were able to deal with being immersed in a sadistic, torturing environment by taking their minds to another place.   So immersion is context plus a state of mind.
 
Years ago I lived on a Sicilian island for a year;  I knew no Italian or Sicilian but this was a very immersive experience in terms of language and culture.  I wanted to reinvent myself and thus opened my ears to embrace the new language about me; I was very happy to shed the old and take on the new because this now seemed so sumptuous, sensual, hedonistic and beautiful.  What was not to like.  I rarely said things like 'in England we do it like that', my reference point was not 'back home' it was here and now on this gorgeous island with these warm people (well, Mafiosi excluded).  I can now intellectualise this rich experience of immersion and say that it clearly demonstrated that learning requires an ontological shift; it is identity work as well as cognitive work.  I wanted to go native unlike Rushdie's Indian character and this had a significant impact on my ability to acquire the language.
 
 My second example would be my involvement with a far left organisation in the mid seventies.  Being immersed in a minority political movement has cult like features to it; it is a form of fundamentalism.  Immersion is required and dissent is discouraged except within the parameters of allowable debate. A new identity is encouraged and an old one must be repudiated. some of my fellow members even dropped out of university to assume working class jobs; many stopped seeing their 'middle class' parents.  So like the exiled character in Rushdie, immersion can be an experience of blocking out the light or at least light from some places.   I couldn’t fulfil the exacting demands of this organisation; not only did it involve reading vast chunks of Lenin, etc. but they wanted you to get up at unearthly hours to sell their paper.  I left this organisation because I wanted a more individual path and I found it crushingly judgmental of anyone who did not agree with them.  It had a dangerous and  preposterous moral universe in which people were either right or wrong.   So immersion, perhaps, has some murky links with homogenisation and the repression of difference.
 
In summary, the first experience of immersion enabled me to get inside another culture and I take pleasure from this experience even to this day.  It has left an enduring mark, a language competence and a deep respect for Italy, particularly the South.  The second experience of immersion has left me wary of dogma, fundamentalism, certainty, piety, sanctimonousness, religion and 'isms' of any kind.
 
 



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