From the Bottom of My Liver
Over here, your LIVER, not your heart, is the seat of emotion.
This has a virtually one-to-one correspondence with the way we use ‘heart’, so far as I can tell. In love, you feel it in your liver. Sincere, you wear your liver on your sleeve. Pop stars sing it from the liver. When we obliged a friend in watching together her favorite Indonesian soap opera—Wulan—the emotionally tormented hero suffered from a metaphorical case of liver cancer. That is, given his troubles with women, he was literally dying of liver-ache. Heartache. He was miraculously saved.
There’s a pop hit Islamic single by Aa Gym that’s out (& played everywhere) called “Jagalah Hati”, which is translated as “Guard Your Heart” but which literally means: “Guard Your Liver”.
The problem with this, of course, is that most everyone here knows perfectly well that the English speaking world—that is, the greatest exporter of pop culture—doesn’t think much of the liver, emotionally speaking. English lyrics are everywhere & so “heart” is also on everyone’s tongues & brains. Sometimes it’s all a big jumble of organs. I watch young Indonesian rock stars croon lyrics about their livers, while gyrating their hips & but clutching their chests (their hearts) in the now-universal gestures of western heartache.
An unsubstantiated claim: According to some, this has begun to change the language. "Hati"--liver--is so often translated as "heart" now, & the soap-operatic imprecision of where one's liver-heart is exactly (as the pop star I mentioned demonstrates), that Indonesian DOCTORS are beginning to use a third word to refer to the liver organ, in order to eliminate the ambiguity.
This has a virtually one-to-one correspondence with the way we use ‘heart’, so far as I can tell. In love, you feel it in your liver. Sincere, you wear your liver on your sleeve. Pop stars sing it from the liver. When we obliged a friend in watching together her favorite Indonesian soap opera—Wulan—the emotionally tormented hero suffered from a metaphorical case of liver cancer. That is, given his troubles with women, he was literally dying of liver-ache. Heartache. He was miraculously saved.
There’s a pop hit Islamic single by Aa Gym that’s out (& played everywhere) called “Jagalah Hati”, which is translated as “Guard Your Heart” but which literally means: “Guard Your Liver”.
The problem with this, of course, is that most everyone here knows perfectly well that the English speaking world—that is, the greatest exporter of pop culture—doesn’t think much of the liver, emotionally speaking. English lyrics are everywhere & so “heart” is also on everyone’s tongues & brains. Sometimes it’s all a big jumble of organs. I watch young Indonesian rock stars croon lyrics about their livers, while gyrating their hips & but clutching their chests (their hearts) in the now-universal gestures of western heartache.
An unsubstantiated claim: According to some, this has begun to change the language. "Hati"--liver--is so often translated as "heart" now, & the soap-operatic imprecision of where one's liver-heart is exactly (as the pop star I mentioned demonstrates), that Indonesian DOCTORS are beginning to use a third word to refer to the liver organ, in order to eliminate the ambiguity.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 12:12 PM
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