Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Basketball and other American mythology

7.27.09

Yesterday I lost a club basketball game for the village of Dimer. It is a testament to Melanesian hospitality that they congratulated me on the game afterwards—and only told me later I had fouled four times (and I had to elicit the information myself). If not realizing I carried the ball that many times is not enough testament to my pathetic skills, I don’t know what is.

Today my students gave me a two-hour tutorial on shooting hoops. (Essentially, they played a very kind—but driven—game for two hours, in which time I managed to wear out the soles of my feet since we played shoeless on a court of packed earth and grass. I’m making progress, but I’ve really got a long way to go on my layups if I’m going to play with the Dimer team again in two weeks.

My basketball fiasco is just the latest in my unconscious string of American stereotype-shattering activities. I’ve disappointed students by not knowing a celebrity’s photo in a tear out from a teen magazine and I’ve then astounded them by liking their music and wanting to learning their language. My Karkar family is used to my requests to scrape coconuts for dinner and now anticipates my help with the dishes at 6:15 each morning, but others are astounded when I ask to cook or to other chores and even Mama was still surprised when I lifted a 15kg bag full of rice and potatoes onto my head to carry it up to the school last week (for the record, that much weight pulling on your forehead does put a crimp in your neck). The perception of rich and pampered white Australians and, by extension, Americans runs deep here. Colonialism has a habit of doing that. And if we’ve managed to change anything by our presence here on Karkar, we’ve worked to decrease the “othering” effect Australian elitism had on the PNG psyche and dispelled some myths about Americans—even our alleged basketball skills.

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