It's surprisingly nice to read Desert creole.
Normally I gets really annoyed at people imposing accents on writing, but this
book does it well- it's as readable as english, with the added layer of the
guide's voice. (Also, for some reason, I keep thinking the guide's really
feminine, even though her word's aren't exactly gendered.)
I'm really interested by
class in this story: if the Desert is Vegas/Dubai, how does it end up with the
creole? Is it a Vegas thing where there's the really rich tourists plus the
actual residents who aren't actually that well off? It seems to be something
like that, which has a lot of implications for language as a socioeconomic
symbol in this world.
The guide being
extremely vehement about guiding (the part where she slept outside someone’s
door) reminds me of a not-really-scam that some people would pull in China
where they’d be really friendly and help you carry your bags up like great wall
or whatever and give you restaurant recommendations and all that, then try to
sell you overpriced water or paper fans or something. I don’t know why I
thought of that.
It’s also cool that the Creole is very
romance-based. There’s a bit of Korean in there and I know chenji is used in
the Chinese season-end way, but the poems pull heavily from Spanish and latin,
with an obviously English base. I guess it makes it easier to read, but I think
it also plays with our expectations of education- the guide speaks with a very “b”
and “m” heavy voice that somehow ends up sounding uneducated, at least to me,
in contrast to the stereotypically high-brow latin (no one learns latin anymore
unless they’re at least a little bit pretentious).
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