The Language She Spoke

My grandmother spoke a language I never learned. This was, for many years, a fact I noted without particularly examining — one of those biographical details that sits in the peripheral vision of a life, always there, never looked at directly.

She had come from a small town that now belongs to a different country than it did when she was born. She had come young, as people did then, with very little and with the understanding that the things she had come from were not things she would be returning to. She spoke the language of arrival fluently and early, and within a few years it had become the language of her daily life, her work, her marriage, her children.

But the other language persisted. In the kitchen, alone, she used it for the names of things — the specific words for vegetables, for weather, for the time of day. When she was tired or distracted or dreaming she thought in it. When she prayed, she prayed in it, because the God of childhood requires the childhood tongue.

I understood almost none of it. My mother, the eldest daughter, had absorbed more than she let on — she would sometimes register something my grandmother said with a micro-expression of recognition that she seemed unaware of. My aunts understood even less. By the time my generation arrived, the language had retreated into my grandmother's interior life entirely. It was there, behind her eyes, in the particular quality of her attention, but it no longer emerged into the rooms where we gathered.

I have been thinking about this loss, if loss is the right word, for a long time. What was lost, and to whom, and what it means.

What was lost is not merely the language itself. Languages are learnable; I could, in theory, learn it now, and in some attenuated way recover access to the tradition she came from. What was lost is the specific way she was in it — the person she was in that language, the texture of her thought in it, the associations and the idioms and the particular weight she gave to certain kinds of silence. These are not recoverable. They exist nowhere except in her, and she is gone.

When I think about her now I think about the doubling that she lived without apparently experiencing as a problem. She was herself in two languages — differently inflected in each, differently at home — and she managed this not with the dramatic difficulty that the literature of diaspora tends to emphasise but with a quiet, practical competence. She put the appropriate self forward in the appropriate context. She kept the other self for the kitchen and the prayers.

I have come to think that this doubling is not unusual. Most people have a version of it — a self that exists in a register not accessible to everyone, a mode of being that belongs to some private or early or otherwise partitioned domain. Language is only the most dramatic version of this phenomenon. The things we know in the body that the mouth cannot say, the thoughts we have in dreams that dissolve into imprecision on waking, the feeling of being most ourselves in circumstances that others cannot witness — all of these are forms of the same doubling, the same holding of a private register alongside the public one.

My grandmother kept hers until she died. I sat with her in her last days, when the English had receded and the childhood language came forward, and I could not understand what she was saying, and she was not troubled by this, and I have spent years since then making peace with that fact — that she was somewhere I could not follow, using a self I never knew, and that this was right, and that it was enough to be present at the border of it even without being able to cross.

The language she spoke is still spoken. Somewhere, people are using it in kitchens, naming vegetables, describing weather, praying to a childhood God. They are not her. But they are connected to something she was connected to, and sometimes, when I hear recordings of it, I feel the edge of the room she lived in, which I was never quite inside, but which was always there.I am learning the language now. Slowly, badly, with the awkwardness of someone who began too late. I am learning it not because it will allow me to speak with her — she is gone, and the specific version of her I could have known through the language is gone with her — but because it is a way of moving, at whatever distance, in the direction of what she was.

The language has its own idioms, its own untranslatables. There are words in it that do not have equivalents in any language I already know — words for weather conditions and emotional states and the quality of light at specific times of year, words that name things I have experienced but never had names for.

She was in those words all her life, and I am finding her there, late, in a grammar that was always part of the house I grew up in even when I couldn't hear it. This is the closest I will get to speaking to her across the distance. I am speaking, as it turns out, to a version of the language that carries her.