After analysing face-to-face and online Esperanto gatherings, I now delve into Esperantists' themselves, which means 'actual people and their lives, words, and affects — their subjectivities' (Biehl and Locke 2010: 320—321), which are at the core of this study both explicitly and between the lines. Concentrating on individual Esperantists and their practices, this chapter analyses people's motivations to learn and use the language, also exploring how Esperanto plays out in people's everyday lives and provides them with novel experiences. I argue that an analyt- ical focus on subjectivities and individual practices dislocates Esperanto from the framework of traditional social movements (as presented in Chapter 6) and brings about the possibility of reading Esperanto through the lens of prefiguration and prefigurative politics. By unpacking how people like Martine, Daniel, Idris and Julien—who are the heart of this chapter—mobilise Esperanto to build alternative social relations, I look at perspectives on the playfulness of the language, how to render it useful and how to perceive it as an alternative to other languages and manners of communicating. In sidestepping claims that define Esperanto as a language that failed to become universal, individual Esperantists concen- trate on regimes of temporal reasoning that enable them to do something out of Esperanto at present. Ultimately, this chapter invites the reader to think about what Esperantujo gains and loses with the present-oriented, prefigurative approaches enacted by Esperantists and what anthropology itself gains and loses in emphasising discussions on prefiguration.
8.1 Deleuze and the Esperantology of Becoming
The frequent opportunities I had to travel using Esperanto—and the centrality such travelling has to Esperantists—led me to accept the invitation from Esperanto-France to give talks at several Esperanto asso- ciations across the country. As this Tour de France began, in February 2017, one of my stops was La Roche-sur-Yon, the 54,000-inhabitant capital city of the French department of Vendee, where I arrived on a cold but sunny Saturday morning. A group of 25 Esperan- tists welcomed me for the monthly meeting of the local association Esperanto-Vendee, where I would give a talk about social anthropology, followed by a communal lunch, board games and informal conversations, all conducted in Esperanto. At the end of the day, Martine and Daniel— a couple living in a town on the Atlantic coast, 45 kms away from La Roche—would host me for the evening, before I continued my tour the following day. While we were in the car heading towards their home, the talkative and enthusiastic couple were eager to share with me, in a conversation entirely in Esperanto, the experiences they had when they travelled to Brazil a few years before.
Martine and Daniel, who were in their mid-fifties, started studying Esperanto in 2004, after they came across a rock singer who had an Esperanto song in her repertoire. Only later did they learn about the cosmopolitan principles behind the language. At the time, Daniel was working as a Republican guard and lived with Martine and their two children in Paris. As Daniel was dissatisfied with his job and Martine did not like living in the capital city, the couple decided to move to this town, where they started working together as self-employed gravure printers. Their lifestyle changes also included quitting smoking, devoting time to Esperanto and committing themselves to 'enjoy life to the fullest'. After studying Esperanto through face-to-face classes for two years at the association Esperanto-Vendee, the couple took advantage of their flex- ible work schedule and the coming of age of their children to use the language to meet people, make new friends and travel abroad.
Once at our destination, Daniel opened the front door and, with a wide gesture pointing to the living room, welcomed me with a 'bonvenon!' The two-bedroom house was simple but spacious, with the few pieces of furniture decorated mostly with objects they brought from their trips around the world. Daniel enthusiastically showed me around while carrying my rucksack to the second bedroom, which had been built 'to host Esperantists — and, secondarily, our daughters'. Despite Vendee not being a popular travel destination in France, the couple occasionally hosted Esperantists who came to give talks at the local association. Inviting me into the kitchen while they finished preparing dinner, Martine continued telling me about their 2011 trip to Sao Paulo to attend the 46th Brazilian Congress of Esperanto. Instead of making concrete plans for the two weeks they intended to stay in the country, the couple ended up meeting Esperantists at the congress who offered to host them throughout Brazil.
Daniel then asked me to follow him. Around the house, he showed me photos, souvenirs and pieces of decoration they had brought from Brazil, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Poland, places they visited after having learned Esperanto. After a failed attempt at playing a Vietnamese bamboo flute from their collection, he said:
The greatest thing about attending local and national Esperanto meetings abroad is that we are often among the few foreigners there. The local Esperantists are curious, they come and talk to us, and we make friends easily. This gives us great opportunities to visit other places and make friends. That's how we choose the places we want to visit. So, we met nice people [Esperantists] from Vietnam, and they said we could visit their country and be hosted by them. That's what we did. For me, this is the only interesting way of travelling. Check this out!
Daniel then took me to where their car was parked, in front of the house. Mocking his talkativeness, Martine followed us and interrupted him: 'I know, you're gonna show him the bumper sticker, right?' They both laughed, and he indeed showed me the white sticker on the black Citroen, with the image of two backpackers (a man and a woman), followed by the sentence (in Esperanto): 'The crazy grandparents travel alternatively thanks to Esperanto'. He commented:
I keep saying that we're not tourists, we're Esperantists. I don't like to visit a place as a tourist, to just go sightseeing. I like to be hosted by local people, to learn about their customs and their everyday life, and to visit the place itself. And Esperanto is what enabled and encouraged us to do so.
Over dinner, Daniel explained how they pushed themselves to quit smoking by investing their cigarette money on travelling:
We must make the changes we want. Many people say things like 'Oh, I'll change my lifestyle, work less and enjoy life more when my partner or friends are free to do the same'; 'Oh, I'll learn Esperanto when everyone else speaks it.' That's not how things should be. We have to make the change. So, we decided to change our lifestyle, and Esperanto is part of this change. After meeting nice people at Esperanto meetings, we keep in touch and sometimes visit them. Thanks to Esperanto, we trav- elled beyond Europe and, indirectly, also thanks to Esperanto, we quit smoking. We wouldn't be able to travel alternatively if it wasn't because of Esperanto. What would we do? Would we wait for everyone else to learn this language? No! We did it, and it changed our lives now.
Despite both Martine and Daniel being fluent in German and Daniel speaking English, they still decided to study another language. Yet, they did not regard Esperanto as any other language. They turned it into part of the alternative lifestyle they pursued, linking it to their decision to move to a small town and start their own business. They wanted to travel the world in a different way, dismissing the label 'tourist', and Esperanto played a major role in this. If they stayed at hotels when travelling, for instance, they would be ordinary tourists. Then, if they stuck to visiting only French friends living abroad, their contact with locals could have been restricted. They could use Couchsurfing.com to have closer contacts with locals when abroad—in which case, they would likely have to use English, French or German to communicate. However, being Esperantists enabled them to connect with fellow speakers abroad in another sense, as they joined a borderless network-like community in which they could both make themselves at home and be surrounded by national Others during their trips. As Martine's and Daniel's perspective shows, Esperanto was not the only alternative they had available to 'make them do' what they do in terms of travelling. Nevertheless, this is the path they chose to follow among several others because it allows them to become part of an international community. In adopting an alternative lifestyle and embedding the language within these changes, Martine and Daniel were drawing what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) call lines offlight.