Ni Festivalu
It was an uncharacteristically last-minute decision for me to go to Barlaston that weekend. I had spent the week working away from home in Wantage, and had really had no intention of attending ‘Ni Festivalu’ when I left home on the Monday morning. It was Wednesday evening when I had an inexplicable brainstorm and decided I was brave enough to risk it. Unfortunately, the limitations of public transport meant it was impossible for me to get to Barlaston for the start of the course on Friday evening, but I hoped to get there early enough on the Saturday not to miss anything exciting. My good friend and fellow Jebano Tim Owen had agreed to travel up with me from Birmingham, having promised to look after me for the weekend. I wasn’t quite sure what ‘looking after’ entailed, but I sincerely hoped it was going to involve him acting as an interpreter between me and the real Esperantists.
You see, I was on the eve of my first visit to Esperantujo. As an eterna komencanto, I have spent the past few years intermittently using Esperanto to correspond with acquaintances abroad in a rather random and half-hearted manner. When I joined JEB last May, I could understand a lot of written Esperanto but my own attempts at writing left a lot to be desired and my grasp of the finer points of grammar was somewhat shaky. Happily, with the help of the grammar threads in the JEB forums, plus the background knowledge provided by the free EAB postal course, my knowledge quickly improved and these days I am fairly confident in my written ability. Writing is comparatively easy, after all. You can sit in your room with a dictionary and agonise over your sentences for as long as you like; adding an accusative here, dropping one there, changing a tense somewhere in the middle. Yet learning a language isn’t just about reading and writing, it’s about speaking and listening too … and that’s where it starts getting daunting.
In four years of being a komencanto, my exposure to spoken Esperanto had been limited to incessant repetition of the John Wells Pronunciation CD during my bus journeys to work. So, whilst I can do a fair rendition of “Verdaj la junkoj, ho!” that’s about it. Although I had previously met three Jebanoj in the flesh, each meeting took place in an informal non-Esperanto environment and fears about the inadequacies of my pronunciation meant I had skilfully manipulated them into addressing me entirely in English.
A combination of uncooperative public transport and a setback with my ever-problematic health meant that Tim and I didn’t reach Barlaston quite as promptly as we had hoped. As we were finally walking up the hill to Esperanto House at two o’clock, my heart began turning somersaults. Suppose I couldn’t understand a word anyone said? Suppose I couldn’t think of anything to say myself? Suppose I really did, as I feared, speak Esperanto with a Brummie accent? I was temporarily reassured when the first person I met was our own JEB Treasurer, Mikeo Seaton. He seemed just as nice as during our occasional MSN conversations, and his Esperanto sounded the way I imagined Esperanto ought to sound. So far so good.
All too soon it was time to enter the classroom. Tim had reassured me that ‘Ni Festivalu’ would be attended by hordes of komencantoj whose Esperanto capabilities would be even more limited than my own. Desperately clinging onto this thought the way a drowning man grasps at driftwood, I followed Tim into the room. A room which, I later found out, contained some of the most established and fluent Esperantists in Britain. I was blissfully unaware of this at the time, else I would have turned round and run all the way back to Birmingham, as fast as my trolley case would allow.
A gentleman whom I later discovered to be Paul Gubbins was talking animatedly about a play. Teatraĵo. I remembered the word from a brief flirtation with ‘Teach Yourself Esperanto’ in 2003. He seemed to be asking people to comment on it. Had he written it perhaps? Unsure. I sat and let the words flow over me, getting used to the sounds and intonations. “This is alright”, I thought, “I can happily sit here all day and listen to people talking about plays.”
How naïve was I?! No less than ten minutes later, some sort of a commotion began. I looked from one face to another uncomprehendingly as a terrible realisation began to dawn on me. We were going to act out the play. We were going to act out the play! Aaargh, no, surely not?! That would involve speaking … out loud … in front of people … For notoriously shy me, that would be unnerving enough in English. But in Esperanto, a language I had as yet to articulate more than one word of out loud?! No way, not possible!
I looked to Tim with what I hoped were appealing, “please save me” eyes. This, I figured, was where the ‘looking after me’ bit came into play. He could explain to Paul Gubbins that I didn’t actually speak Esperanto and had just come to sit at the back and watch. But did my hero come to my rescue? Did he heck as like! Alas, ten seconds was all it took for him to whisper a quick goodbye and skip out of the room with his group, leaving me all on my own with a script and a bunch of complete strangers. I made a mental note never to trust Tim again.
An inspection of the script revealed that my certain doom was titled ‘Mi vizitis grandan urbon’. What it was about was anybody’s guess, but I was allocated a character by our group director, Colin Simmonds. Ah, Colin; we met at long last! For the past few months, Colin had been subjected to the trial of being my postal course tutor. We had already got to know one another via email, discussing a wide variety of questions, such as whether la kato ludas per aŭ kun la muso, and whether the personality of the individual cat is more relevant in determining the correct preposition than the fact that it can’t be per because I’m only on lesson three and per isn’t introduced until lesson six.
With Colin’s patient direction, I managed to grasp the gist of what I was supposed to be doing. Norah Brown and I were playing two Africans who had never been in a motor vehicle before and were deeply disturbed by the strange sensations of travel. As the motion of the car on a bumpy African road combined with the fear of seeing trees speeding past us, I threatened to jump out of the window in fright and the scene reached a gripping climax as we both leant over and mock-vomited over our esteemed taxi driver, Peter.
Far from being the terrifying experience I anticipated, the hilarity of the scenes combined with our complete inability to remember Colin’s intricate stage directions, meant that it was actually the best possible icebreaker. My role didn’t involve too many unpronounceable words, and any I did get wrong everyone else was polite enough not to laugh at. Nevertheless, I took full advantage of the subsequent coffee break to dart murderous “How dare you abandon me?!” glances at Tim over the top of my teacup.
The next session looked to be more sedate. Paul Gubbins handed out copies of his play, ‘Kien la pruneloj kreskas’ and suggested we read it round the class. Cool.
Hasty whisper to Tim: “Kio estas pruneloj?”
Cue ‘You are so blonde I don’t know why I’m even sitting next to you’ look from Tim. He covered the final letters with his finger, leaving the word ‘prune’ visible, and winked. That’s the thing with our Tim; he knows everything … or does he?
The source of all knowledge later confessed that when he proofread this article, he figured he’d better double-check the meaning, seeing as he’d recalled out of nowhere the existence of the word pruno! He was chatting to Gavan Fantom on Messenger, who confirmed the meaning of pruno. “Phew”, he thought, “pruno is a plum not a prune, so I’m alright.”
Tim basked in the relief of knowing he’d got away with it this time … until he had an epiphany. Jumping straight to my Instant Messenger, he chose to hit me with “A prune’s a dried plum, isn’t it?” in place of a more conventional “Hello Clare, how are you today?” When i replied in the affirmative, he uttered an expletive, then went uncharacteristically silent. Somewhat confused, I enquired after his displeasure. “Well, if it’s a dried plum, it can’t grow on a tree, so ‘Kien la pruneloj kreskas’ tells me that a prune is not a prunelo. So now I’ll have to look really stupid in your article, as though I’m the kind of person who takes two hours to watch 60 Minutes.”
Just for the sake of completeness, the word for a prune is seka pruno and prunelo is blackthorn or sloe. No, neither Tim nor I had any idea what those things are either!
Anyway, back to the story. I was just settling back to enjoy an afternoon of passive Esperanto absorption, when Paul began giving out parts. I wasn’t overly concerned; surely lots of people would want to read. The play only had three roles. Paul allocated the first two, paused, then gave me the part of the third character, Pelv.
“Me?! What do you mean, me?! I can’t read out loud, not in front of a room full of people! In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t speak Esperanto!”
Tragically, I was incapable of expressing this sentiment in Esperanto itself and was condemned to giving Paul a weak, consensual smile. Reading out loud presented somewhat of a challenge; I could either try and pronounce my words half correctly and not worry about what they meant, or I could try to follow the story and get them half wrong. Making a supreme effort not to turn crimson with self consciousness, I stumbled through ten minutes of it, after which I was able to collapse in grateful silence as the roles moved round the class. That is, until it was my turn again …
The evening meal prepared by the Barlaston staff looked inviting, but I wasn’t feeling particularly well and eating didn’t seem like a plan. Yet despite my self-imposed starvation, dinner was actually a very fulfilling experience. I found to my genuine shock and amazement that I was able to follow in real time the conversations of other diners at my table, and even join in when asked questions about myself. Whilst I wasn’t able to respond quickly enough to truly participate, I felt quite proud that I had even the vaguest idea what was going on. Things were going better than I expected. Perhaps I didn’t need Tim to look after me after all!
Dinner was followed by an enlightening lecture, ‘Unuaj trovitaĵoj pri teatro-esplorado’ by Paul Gubbins, in which he shared some interesting statistics about dramatic works in Esperanto. Since I had next to zero knowledge of Esperanto literature, his information about notable playwrights was quite fascinating, as were the slides he produced demonstrating the frequency distribution of Esperanto dramas throughout the decades. It was particularly remarkable how few had been written during the war years, and how many immediately afterwards. More remarkable for me, however, was the fact that I actually understood what he was saying! Not every word, of course, but enough of the gist to know what was going on and not feel out of my depth, despite my growing feeling of giddiness.
No visit to Barlaston would of course be complete without a visit to the pub. Or at least, that’s how Tim justified it to me. It was a good opportunity to chat to a few people I hadn’t spoken to yet, and see Esperanto in use as a living, functioning language, as the people around me used it to laugh, joke and insult one another. Unfortunately for me, my dizziness increased, and when the bell rang for last orders, I found myself peculiarly unable to stand up. Aware that I was about to go down in Esperanto history as the first komencanto to get legless on a single glass of lemonade, I nevertheless couldn’t help drawing attention to myself when I proved unable to walk even with the assistance of Tim. I was mortified. My first time in Esperantujo, surrounded by names I had read about for years, and I was embarrassing myself so horrendously! I wished the ground would open up and swallow me; it would spare my blushes and have the added benefit of removing the necessity for me to walk anywhere.
In fact, I needn’t have worried. My new acquaintances were touchingly concerned for my wellbeing and Malcolm Jones hurried back to the college only to return a few minutes later with his car to give me a lift. Tim and Mikeo between them managed to bundle me in and out of it, and somehow drag me to my room at the other end. To them, and to everyone who helped and who enquired after my welfare; thank you very much. Your help and support made what could have been an awkward and difficult weekend into a very positive experience. I was reminded later of a friend of mine who always used to admonish me for my refusal to Esperantistiĝi and tell me that the atmosphere at Esperanto events was something special. I used to laugh at him, yet having experienced the kind and accepting welcome of so many people at Barlaston during ‘Ni Festivalu’, I’m beginning to think I owe him an apology.
Sunday dawned with a delicious Barlaston breakfast and the opportunity to read through some of the children’s plays which had been created by Paul Gubbins for the Springboard project. Plays for primary school kids – this was more my level of Esperanto! We read through all six, taking on a variety of different roles from toothbrushes to the letter o. Some accusations of type casting were levelled at Paul following his distribution of the characters, but personally I don’t believe it was anything other than pure coincidence which caused Tim to be cast in the role of a pig.
Unfortunately the train I had to catch home was at half one, and so I had to leave before the end of the day. There was just time, however, to act out a few pages from ‘Kien la pruneloj kreskas’. Malcolm Jones, Angela Tellier, and I gave a very moving performance in which Malcolm was afflicted by strange sounds in his ears, Angela used her mystic powers to cure him, and I was so overjoyed at his recovery that I ran across the room to kiss him. The constraints of time meant I was mercifully spared performing the final part of our production, in which I had to spend several minutes miming the creation of a fire with pieces of torn newspaper. Try making a fire-lighting mime last more than thirty seconds, and you’ll see why that was such a big relief!
The excitement of my weekend didn’t end there, as on the way home I accidentally acquired myself a boyfriend. That is a story for another time, but it was a perfect conclusion to what was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. My first venture into Esperantujo went far better than I could ever have imagined; the ease with which I understood what people were saying to each other and was able to communicate myself, despite having never before experienced the language in its oral form, is testament to the simplicity of Esperanto. Perhaps more importantly, the friendly welcome and support with which I was greeted is testament to the kindness of Esperantists in general, and the participants of ‘Ni Festivalu’ in particular. After four years it was high time I took the plunge, and I’m glad that I finally found the courage to do so. To any new Jebanoj who are sitting at home working their way through postal courses and despairing of ever getting to use the language, I would recommend you don’t wait as long as I did to get involved and find the courage to sign up for an event. I’m prepared to bet money that I’m the least confident person in JEB, so if I can survive a theatrical weekend, you can too!
Per discussion with Paul Gubbins, the next ‘Ni Festivalu’ will take place between the 18th and 20th of January 2008. The costs will be as follows:
Single room £91.00
Shared room £83.00
Non-resident £61.00
Of course, if you’re under 26, you can use NoJEF (The Norwich Jubilee Esperanto Foundation) to cover your costs so that you actually pay nothing. Drop Tim or Daniel a line, and they’ll explain how it works and whom to contact to you.
Whilst the weekend is undoubtedly well worth attending to participate in the theatrical activities, there has also been talk of other groups, such as JEB, organising their own program of activities to run concurrently. Something to think about, perhaps. In any case, it would be nice to see a higher turnout of Jebanoj in 2008. Health, work and public transport permitting, I certainly hope to be there!
