The Affective Turn in SLA: From 'Affective Factors' to 'Language Desire' and 'Commodification of Affect'

Aneta Pavlenko

In memory of my mother, Bella, who, undaunted by the Iron Curtain, decided that I will be multilingual when I was all but six years old.

It was an early morning in May of 2011. I was standing in front of a room full of strangers, about to begin a plenary talk about multilingualism and emotions at the International Conference on Foreign/Second Language Acquisition (ICFSLA) meeting in Szczyrk, a mountain resort in Poland. I am usually quite confident as a public speaker and this was not my first plenary, yet this time I was almost paralyzed by anxiety. This was my first visit to Poland and this particular talk was not intended to be just a plenary – it was a declaration of love, a remembrance of things past and the hold the Polish language had on me in my teenage years. And so I opened the plenary with a Polish love poem by Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Nie widzialam cie juz od miesiqca [It has been a month since I had seen you], and heard a surprised gasp from the audience – most of my Polish colleagues were unaware that I actually knew Polish. Encouraged by friendly smiles I went on and then the strangest thing happened – I realized that I no longer spoke of things past, rather, then and there, I was falling in love with Polish all over again, like a woman who meets her first love after two decades of separation and finds him as irresistible as she did when she was a love-sick teenager.

My first encounter with Polish took place in Kiev, when I was 8 years old. My mother, who taught English at an evening foreign language school for adults, decided that I too should be learning languages. Yet her attempts to teach me English did not go far – I was utterly bored. Then she decided that a Slavic language may be a better way to start and asked one of her colleagues, charming Pani Zhanna, to teach me Polish. On her first visit, Pani Zhanna brought with her a well-thumbed green book with a mysterious name Elementarz [A primer]. From then on, she came over once a week to read with me about the adventures of Ala, Ola and the dog As. (Decades later, in Szczyrk, I will learn that Marian Falski's Elementarz has been in use in Poland for over a century and is fondly remembered by almost all Polish adults.) Once I had mastered the basics, Pani Zhanna and I began reading a real book, Przygody Misia Uszatka [Adventures of Teddy Floppy-ear], adding from time to time stories from a children's magazine Plomyczek [Little fire]. Two years later I was so into it that my mother decided that I no longer needed a Polish teacher and hired a teacher of Spanish instead.

Meanwhile, I continued reading in Polish, even though I had no one to speak the language to. This attraction to Polish, at the time, was not an idiosyncrasy – rather, it was the Zeitgeist. In the 1970s and 1980s, Polish culture had a lot of cache in the USSR, and especially in Ukraine, the former Polish dominion. We loved the intellectualism of Polish film-makers, from Hoffman and Holland to Wajda and Zanussi, admired dazzling Polish movie stars, from dramatic Zbigniew Cybulski and Daniel Olbrychski to coldly elegant Beata Tyszkiewicz and Barbara Brylska, longed together with the singer Maryla Rodowicz to board a random train leaving everything behind, and watched in rapture cult TV series Stawka wieksza nizzycie [Stakes larger than life] and Czterej pancerni i pies [Four tank-men and a dog]. Russian-language readers also relished – and still do – Polish literature, from Stanislaw Lem's incomparable science fiction to Joanna Chmielewska's ironic detective stories.

In Ukraine, as in Lithuania, part of the population was able to read these books in Polish. On the main street of Kiev, Khreshchatyk, right opposite the metro station, there was a book store Druzhba [Friendship] that sold books from socialist countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. Each Saturday mom and I took the metro train from our faraway suburb to center city to browse in Druzhba's ever-popular Polish section. The few books I still own from those times vividly remind me of the thrill of entering this magical world, so different from the piteous offerings of regular Soviet book stores. You never knew what surprise awaits you: a new edition of a Polish classic, by Sienkiewicz or Prus, travel adventures by Fiedler or Szklarski, a contemporary drama by Zofia Posmysz or...