Tongues and tones

I don’t remember how old I was when I realised that I spoke two different languages. I remember learning words like learning hopscotch rhymes, and I remember being told at five that one of them was bad and dangerous and people would be angry if I used it and that I should forget it, and it took me forever to untangle which is which. I can hear the difference now – one softer and higher and dancing closer to my front teeth; the other lower, in the chest, cresting and dipping like ocean waves. I’ve added others in the meantime, and one of those, quick and colourful like a favourite paintbrush, is English – the first words that come to mind when I need to express, to connect, to describe. To write poetry. Unlike other more altruistic souls, I write poetry out of pure selfishness, because I want and need to be heard, and I delight in the vivid richness of the English language and how people listen so carefully to those colours.

In April 2005 I was sitting in a laundry room in my student hall in Japan, across someone who would become a dear friend in the years ahead, Sakura, who is half-Japanese and half-Mexican. At that point, I spoke some Japanese but not a lot, and her English was not great. She asked how I liked my room and I said it was nice, but there were cockroaches. She looked confused. I couldn’t think of the Japanese word for cockroach. There was an awkward pause. And then … ‘Cucaracha!’ I shouted in triumph, and then we were singing the song together ‘la cucaracha, la cucaracha’ and just like that we were friends. Words are powerful. Even words like ‘cockroach’.

I often find it difficult to speak to native speakers of whichever language. There is a vacuum that forms when the fear sets in of breaking down that which forms your thoughts, your identity, your history, your soul, in order to invite something completely foreign in. They look at someone who doesn’t look like them, who has an accent, who makes mistakes, and their eyes shake and they cannot function. One time I asked for directions in Japan, in Japanese, and the man yelled at me ‘I don’t speak English!’ and ran away, literally ran away to the other side of the street; in Finland I ask for information in Finnish and people answer in English, and the frustration tastes like licking magnets, sticking out your tongue in a storm, and waiting for a lightning to strike. It would be funny if it weren’t so dehumanising.

I left Bulgaria in 2004, and I’d never been frustrated with non-Bulgarian people having trouble pronouncing my name. I get it, it’s not a name you would see in Finland or Japan or Italy. In 2018, I heard an English guy ask a younger Bulgarian person, ‘wow, your name is so hard, do you have an easier nickname I can use’. And something in my guts twisted and screeched like a record player needle breaking. Maybe I felt protective, some elder sister in my bones raising her head; or maybe I’d just had enough. The Bulgarian guy laughed and said ‘yes, of course’ and he was not angry. He was used to it, like I was used to it, and I had said ‘yes, of course’ many, many, many times before. Of course we will make it easier for you to address us, our names don’t matter and we will twist and break them for you; yes, we learned your language, and we learned how to pronounce your words and your towns and your names, but you don’t have to try. I got angry that day. And after that, I asked every poetry event MC to introduce me by my full name.

Some of my close friends are English-monolinguals, and English monolingual poets, and I cannot describe the frustration I feel with their relationship with other languages. The whole world speaks some English, fucking everywhere you set foot there is a warm cup of hello waiting for you, and yet the native speakers of the language do not see it as the invitation to settle into the cushions of other vowels and consonants, to lean onto the backrest of stories and jokes, and listen; just listen.

By the way, if you have a friend, and you don’t speak their mother tongue, learn a word or two. I swear it makes their day.

One word I miss from my language, is душа (dusha), meaning soul. It is something we call each other between friends and family. Every day I miss being a soul, and not just a mouthpiece of my CV, of my country, of my profession. One word I miss from Japanese (and I realise I might attract unsavoury comments because of the unfortunate sexualisation of the term in the manga culture) is 先輩 (sempai). I miss having a mentor, being a mentor, relying on and being relied on; I miss knowing in my bones that there is a line of knowledge and experience running through a group that I can tap into.

I wish people would stop asking foreigners in their country ‘why are you here? are you here for work? did you come here because your partner is from here?’ How did I come here? I got on a plane, I lassoed a donkey on the side of the highway, I brushed away the knots in the clouds, and I whistled bark on the trees and an exoskeleton on the beetles. (I get that small talk is comforting. I like it sometimes too, when I am tired of stretching neurons so that they reach the other side, I like to just not think.) I am here. Right now. And so are you.