I’m a talkative person from a talkative
family, but it was only when I was eight that it began to
dawn on me that not all talk is conversation. The occasion was a
family Thanksgiving dinner in 1966. It was my first, because until
I was in third grade we’d lived hundreds of miles from my
mother and father’s New Jersey and New York relatives. And
because my parents were solitary folk, this was the biggest gathering
of adults I’d seen—perhaps eight or 10, plus children.
The family is where conversation is first learned or glimpsed. It’s
a matter of socialization, like learning table manners or how to
dress properly. Dinners at our home were far from quiet. My father
could be depended on to vent about office politics, or about the
people he thought were ruining the country (this was the ’60s,
so there was lots to discuss). My little brother babbled in his
two-year-old voice, and my mother tried to correct my father’s
rhetorical excesses. And both mom and dad would lecture me if they
thought I needed it. (My mom and dad didn’t talk much to each
other in a more private, intimate way, and it took me years to even
realize that was missing, and why.)
But at that Thanksgiving dinner in my aunt’s cramped New Jersey
home, I realized that when the adults told stories to each other,
they were doing something a little different than what my dad did
when he discussed the “idiots” and “sons of bitches”
in his office. First, the speakers alternated turns. After one person
gave an opinion, another person followed. No one person spoke as
much as my dad did at dinner at home. And the people seemed to be
in a good mood. They weren’t raising their voices the way
my dad sometimes did. They seemed to be making each other happy.
My dad made everyone laugh at his anecdotes and jokes. And while
I would never have dreamed of objecting to one of my father’s
opinions, I heard his younger sister doing just that, defending
the hippies he was attacking. But he wasn’t getting angry;
in fact, he was smiling.
I couldn’t have said so, but I’d discovered conversation.
And while I’m pretty sure that I’d find that Thanksgiving
discussion unsophisticated if I could travel back in time, I began
to sense that talk could be used to persuade, to seduce, to impress
and to amuse.
It took me another 35 years to realize that there are non-verbal
elements that create the feeling that a conversation, rather than
simply talking, is occurring. It was in Afghanistan, where I unexpectedly
found myself living with a very open-minded and friendly Afghan
family in a provincial city. Only a couple of the children spoke
a little English. I’d only been studying Persian for a few
months, and the family spoke Uzbek among themselves half the time
anyway. I was traveling with their cousin, an Afghan-American, but
when he wasn’t around, there was no one to translate for me.
While there were frustrating times, I found that a deep bond of
affection and respect developed nonetheless between me and these
10 Afghans.
What I quickly learned is that you don’t have to be talking
all the time to have a conversation. Sometimes a smile, a wink or
a joking gesture is enough. Playing with a child who doesn’t
speak your language, you have to develop a rapport in other ways.
Some of the same means can be used with grownups, too, of course.
People we call “born conversationalists” grasp this
intuitively. Those raised in highly social cultures, like the Afghan
culture, may even have a head start.
The Afghan kids I bonded with had a very limited experience of the
world compared to their counterparts in the American upper middle
class. Even now, four years later, Leeza, 7, and Fayez, 9, have
never had music or dance lessons, gone to a playground, or been
more than a hundred miles from their home. They don’t have
bikes or know how to swim. But they have spent thousands of hours
listening quietly at the edges of adult gatherings. They are far
more intuitive in some ways than we are. The rest of us have to
develop these skills as we grow up, by trial and error.
I’d like to be able to say that my experiences in Afghanistan—I’m
writing this on my sixth trip—have made me a more intuitive
or subtle communicator. But it’s hard to change in your forties.
I’m still apt to talk too much and to watch too little. I
have to constantly fight my urge to be a brilliant conversationalist
in order to amuse or impress, rather than to get closer to the people
I’m talking with.
Nor is getting closer to the person you are talking with necessarily
a matter of talking about intimate subjects, or sharing confidences;
that’s an effect rather than a cause of closeness. (And that’s
why people who bare their hearts in a first chat with a stranger
probably have serious misunderstandings about intimacy.) Here is
where men in their friendships seem to understand something women
may not see about their own. The stereotype is that they are based
on daily conversations. While they do have more content than male
friendships, it might be that the glue is not the conversation.
The glue might be the emotional comfort that allows for the conversation,
that gives confidence to the timid and restraint to the bold. And
then again, some of the conversation may really be more like talk,
despite the superficial display of intimacy: just because the topic
is emotions doesn’t mean that the emotion of conversation
is achieved.
But sometimes the “being interesting” that we strive
for is more about being genuine, and perhaps the reason I found
my Afghan friends interesting was that they had no idea what would
impress me, so they didn’t try. And being equally clueless,
I didn’t either.
Although naturalness might be a necessary—though not sufficient—condition
for conversation, this very characteristic makes conversational
skills fragile. They tend to be the first to go when we feel ill
at ease—another proof that they’re rooted in emotion
as much as intellect. And so we have professions that focus on setting
conversation right in times of stress, like psychiatry, and on a
larger level, diplomacy. We have a profession that introduces a
different kind of conversation when the usual one has broken down,
or is not precise enough: law.
Here is where the flaw in the Afghan way of communicating appears.
There are aspects of this intuitive, somewhat vague approach—as
well as geographical luck—that lead to decades of civil war
here. It’s also why a lot of Afghans suffer from depression
and conversion symptoms that we haven’t seen in the West since
Freud’s day.
The respectful gaps between words, the smiles and understanding
silences aside, a healthy society has more explicit conversations,
ones where important issues are raised and argued, sometimes strenuously,
both within the family and within the body politic. This is where
the United States excels, and Afghanistan has a lot to learn. This
is where my family knew something my Afghan hosts might not. Talk—expressing
one’s thoughts and feelings openly—turns out to be as
essential a part of conversation as the patient silence I discovered
in Afghanistan.
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