Translation Through Dance
I started learning salsa recently, and on Saturday night I danced with Cubans. I don't speak Spanish. They didn't need me to. Someone puts out a hand, you take it, the music starts and somehow you understand each other. I spent most of the night smiling. Dancing, watching other people dance, getting something wrong, finding the rhythm again. I had the time of my life. There is something about being able to connect with another person without needing to know how to speak to them that makes my heart scream.
I think about language a lot. The Caribbean is full of people who share histories, ancestry, music, food, movement and memory, but cannot necessarily have a conversation with each other. English here. Spanish there. French, Dutch, Creole, Papiamento. Enslavement separated people physically, and colonialism continued that separation through borders and language. Generations later, those languages can become another reason to assume we are more different than we actually are. Sometimes we don't cross the room because we don't know what we would say when we got there.
But you can dance.
That is what struck me on Saturday. I could dance with someone from Cuba without knowing anything about them. I could follow a movement, respond to a hand, understand when to turn, laugh when I got it completely wrong and find my way back without either of us explaining anything. There is a vulnerability in that too. You are trusting another person with your body for the length of a song. Listening through touch. Paying attention. Responding. For a few minutes, communication becomes completely physical.
And I love watching it just as much. Watching two people who may have met thirty seconds ago suddenly move together. Watching someone ask a stranger to dance and seeing that stranger say yes. Watching age, nationality and language become temporarily irrelevant because everybody understands what the music is asking of them. I look around the room and smile. It is just so much fun. Connection does not always have to be intellectualised. Sometimes it is sweaty and loud and happens at midnight with somebody whose last name you never learn.
I have spoken about connection for years. It is at the core of WIC and the reason I care so deeply about the diaspora in the first place. But I am starting to understand that I don't only want to document those connections. I want to embody them. I want to learn salsa. I want to learn Spanish and French. I want to listen to music I don't know yet, wear designers from places I have never been, understand different art forms and keep putting myself in rooms where I am not completely familiar with everything around me. I don't want curiosity about the diaspora to end on the page.
Saturday night felt like a tiny version of everything I have been trying to say. We have inherited languages that separate us, borders that define us and enough cultural differences to convince ourselves that we belong to completely different worlds. Then someone puts out their hand. The music starts. Your body understands before your mouth ever could. And for the length of one song, nobody needs a translation.
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