Porto Santo: Metaphors of Fluidity

The inspiration for the FLO project came at a time I was working remotely in Fuerteventura. I wrote the project proposal sitting at a beach bar with some nomad friends. Getting admitted for a Ph.D. was something I had barely thought of until the moment I read the call for projects related to language fluidity and transcultural communication.

May 2022 has been one of the most intense moments in my life. I had just concluded my education, I had left my apartment, I had left my country with a one-way ticket, in front of me only the desert and the ocean. In that period, I was surfing almost everyday, I was meeting incredible people from all around the world and learning so much from them, I was picking up Spanish while giving online lessons of English and Italian. When I first read the Ph.D. call, I felt as if that topic – fluidity – at that moment was a sign for me to go back to my reality and start something new, something in which I was truly involved. What followed is weeks of study and preparation to come up with a sound proposal and get ready for the admission interview.

At that moment, fluidity was nothing more than a vague concept for me. So, when I finally got the scholarship and started my research, I spent one full year studying different theories about language acquisition and learning, mobility and multiculturalism, contemporary sociolinguistics. The book ‘Translanguaging’ by García and Wei (2014) has been a great companion in my research journey. Some literature has been easier than other to understand. Some works, such as those by Blommaert, have requested deeper reflections and made me question the most basic knowledge about language and communication.

After a full year in search of a definition of language fluidity which could translate my personal experience into a concrete object of study, today I‘ m looking at the waves and I think I’ve finally found the metaphor.

It’s eight a.m., I came to the beach for some morning stretching. The dunes hide the road so now that I’m writing it’s only me, the sand and the sea.

The waves break chaotically into each other, against the rocks and on the shore of Porto Santo. Each wave is different from the others, they originate in different places, all of them happen in their very own unique conditions, as long as I can stare, I can never see two same waves. But they are so similar that if I wasn’t looking at them with such scrupulous admiration, I could have never told one wave apart from another. After all, thousands of waves are caused by one swell, they are messy yet tuned in a harmonious flow: they are crashing into each other at all times. Their duration is also funny: the waves last for few seconds, but the flow is continuous.

The small waves crash into the bigger ones, finding renewed strength, tuning to new disruptive rhythms. The foam is the smartest of the borders, dancing on the shore at waves time.

And I am staring at all this now and I can’t help but think about the people I’ve had dinner with last night. Total strangers until two days ago, we come from different angles of the world, we have lived different experiences, our eyes do not see things in the same way. And yet somehow we manage to communicate. And not only that: we speak to each other in the most sincere way, up to the point when we lose our identity, we look at ourselves from new perspectives, we understand who we are in front of who we are not, we are open to receive input, take in new languages and ways of sayings, assimilate or disrupt discourses, and we grow.

After two years travelling around islands, the sea has become my language.

I don’t believe I’ll ever find an image that can represent fluidity better than today’s waves.