Language is a Virus

In Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own I underline a sentence woman writing thinks back through her mother. I write in a language which my mother doesn’t know so well. A daughter means a sequence, it’s a sign of a chronology. My mother has an aversion to the sun and is allergic to the past. She doesn’t get a rush, but often her eyes water and she gets fatigued. She taught herself words that her mother is not familiar with. She tried to teach me and my brother the words she taught herself, but we easily forgot them as they had no use in our surroundings and the people we were friends with. Mother tongues suggest a process of natural inheritance, a collection based on repeating gestures and arrangements of words.¹ But the connection between a mother and a tongue isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. It circles between hot and cold, high and low, sometimes reaching a momentum when something goes through. The lesson my mother gave me about the conclusions of the past was that one had to deal with completely anything, that there was no situation one couldn’t solve. For mothers’ day, when I was 8 years old, I did my first powerpoint presentation, in which I compared my mother to Tina Turner. I only knew one of her songs. Simply the Best was my mother’s anthem. My mother wins every single round of a board game that she bought with the intention of checking mine and my brother’s knowledge of the mother tongue. She’s ashamed that her daughter always loses the game. Sometimes I try to think of the silences and the interruptions in forensic structures – are they circumstantial or maybe they’re coming from a sequence of historical events? I’m not sure where the shortage of language began, I think while I look at my mother collecting the game pieces. My grandmother started talking with me about subjects that exceeded weather reports only when my grandfather died.

Every time you spoke your language your face would change, your gestures too, the way you walked and made smaller pauses between words – making you completely foreign to me.

After the war, courage was mainly a struggle. If someone wanted to be courageous, they fought. For going through the day, keeping the most basic hygiene, and keeping oneself on the surface of survival. Nowadays, people find other words for it – courageous is one that keeps civic conduct. At that time one could only think about escaping in order to really fulfil this wish. I didn’t know where he was as they locked us in separate places. Our prosecutors shared the language with us, but decided to disguise themselves in the tongue of the other, which gave them even more power as they demanded that we speak the language that belongs to the land we were relocated to. Phrasing thoughts that can decide upon your life in an unfamiliar tongue might have been more daunting than the state we were in. You have a sense of control, as you are the one choosing the words, but their meaning is unfamiliar to you and depending on how you put them together, you can either be guilty or not. The words were heavier than the stones we carried for building the stairs. The sound of the hills from the monsters’ leather shoes on the stone stairs is still haunting at times – maybe for them it would be the piercing accents we had when trying to make up our minds. I wonder if they heard them before the sentence, when the judge was asking them if they really did lose their humanity to commit the crimes. Did they hear the piercing accents begging for help?

I think and dream not in my mother tongue. When I write in English, which I mostly do, I think of my parents talking about America² as a paradise and a symbol of freedom. I write in language that killed many others. My brother and I didn’t really understand what America was, it was described in such a way that it didn’t seem to be from this planet, and definitely not to be a continent, but rather a huge space in the galaxy. English was supposed to open doors, give new opportunities. There were no excuses when it came to English classes. English was a status, which my parents were deprived of. Some aunt of sorts, whom I never met, would send us bubble gum from America, which I couldn’t find anywhere in our hometown. Everything seemed to be better there, even when my dad used a serial number of doors, from the construction site he worked at, as his visa number whenever someone came round for control. He said that if it wasn’t for his father’s funeral, he would never leave America. Thanks to America, I might not have been writing these words. When I went to America for the first time as an adult, I told myself that I will do everything that is possible to make my dad come to visit me. I see my dad smoking a cigarette on the terrace of a villa in Los Angeles. I asked him how he was, he looked at the cigarette and said even the Malboros taste better here.

Language analysis for the determination of origin (LADO) is an instrument used in asylum cases to determine the national or ethnic origin of the asylum seeker, through an evaluation of their language profile. For a long time the method involved an interview with the asylum seeker conducted by forensic linguists. However through the dialogue many assigned specialists would make mistakes in the analysis causing wrongful deportations. The companies, hired by governments to conduct LADO, changed the policy to a 15 min monologue of the asylum seeker. The migrants would say anything they wanted as nothing they said had any relevance.³

My name is the one who is a turquoise stone⁴ and people usually have trouble pronouncing it. I was always rather shy so I never tried to correct people, never mentioned that what they’re calling me is actually not my name. There was an exchange program in my school every 5 years. Only three students could go abroad. I knew about this program relatively early so I told myself that I will try to learn as much as I can and maybe in 5 years until the next program, my average grade will be enough to qualify for the exchange. Everyday I would finish my school at 5 pm and go home to quickly eat something and jump back into studying again. My mum would make me go to sleep but I would pretend I’m sleeping and wait until she goes to bed herself. When I knew she’s asleep, I would put up a candle under a blanket and study until dawn. A power nap just before my wake up call would be enough to keep me going for the next couple of hours and my mum would have the satisfaction of waking up her child every morning. My energy levels would gradually drop during the day making me a bit dizzy and my mind spinning. Sometimes I thought that all of the studying was making me more stupid, but in the end it was the exhaustion and the lack of sleep that made my head porous. 5 years of sleeping only 4 hours every day. That’s not much for a school kid. But the time has come to send the application for the exchange programme. I filled all the documents, quadruple checking if everything was correct and if I didn’t forget anything. I licked the envelope and submitted the application at the headmaster’s office. Two weeks later, I was going to another class through a corridor when I saw the headmaster. I bowed and said “Good morning Headmaster” and kept on walking. The headmaster grabbed my shoulder and said: “Come to my office in 5 minutes.” So I did. The headmaster was sitting in his big chair, behind an old wooden desk. I sat on a chair in front of him. He pushed a bowl filled with alphabet cookies towards me and said “ grab an A.” There were only As and a couple of F’s left. I took the A shaped biscuit and put it in my mouth. I kept it without biting and waited until the chocolate coat melted on my tongue. It felt pleasant and seemed like the only thing to do as the headmaster was only looking at me without saying anything. He asked me how I am and I said I’m fine. Then his gaze started jumping between my face and my application, which he took out from one of the desk’s drawers. He lingered over the papers then quickly looked at me again and back at the papers and back at my face. It felt like he was trying to see if I really did the application myself – he was a human polygraph – hoping that maybe something in my face would tell him otherwise. “Is everything okay?” I asked. His eyes moved only between the papers and my whole face. Not right, not left, but up and down. “Yes, all good.” he said. His face changed completely. “You got in.” he added “You’re leaving in two weeks.” I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to thank him but by the time I found the words he moved his head and nodded on the doors as a sign for me to leave.

I landed in the country where the exchange programme was. Most of the people were really impatient and started standing up from their seats before the plane stopped moving on the tarmac. The corridor from the exit took us to the gate, where you had to make a sharp right to go to border control. I took out my passport and waited in a line for my turn. The border guard took my documents, my letter of acceptance for the exchange programme and started examining all the pages. Shortly, he started moving his head up and down, jumping his gaze between my passport photo and my face. Examining if my eyes are the same as in the picture, scanning each dot the printer made on the photographic paper with each pore of my face accordingly. “Please put your hair behind your ear,” he asked. So I did. His scanning gaze was very rhythmic, like the movement of a digital scanner that moved across the glass. The couple of minutes that this action took felt like hours, I couldn’t check the time as I feared that every unnecessary movement would equal an error and lower my chances for a positive outcome lighting up an invisible bulb above my head in red instead of green. He folded the documents and handed them out to me. “Think of a name.” he said and nodded his head as a metal bar beside him opened up. I went through. The first day at the new school was an introduction day. The teachers organised a get together with drinks and snacks. Each of us was holding a plastic cup and leaning on one hip, just standing while not knowing anyone around. The local students were playing football in the pit next to us. They were a team. I tried to see if there’s anyone courageous enough to start a conversation. After 45 minutes people were exchanging glances and our fizzy drinks went flat. I didn’t speak with anyone on that day and went to the student dorm to sleep. The next day, first class.

The teacher asks everyone to say their name and a few sentences about their interests and background. I was roughly in the middle of the circle – relieved that I won’t be the one to start. The closer it came to me the more vivid was the sentence that the border control guard told me when I arrived. Think of a name. Think of a name. Think of a name. Think of a name. Think of a name. Think of a name. I didn’t pay attention to anyone’s names and who was speaking as the sentence was blasting in my head. “Hey you!” someone shouted and pointed at me – they obviously didn’t know my name so I became you. I looked around. All the faces aimed at me. “Hi, I’m Jamie. I’m an exchange student.”

Interviewer: Please pause.

Ya dara duri fina, tayinsu ’asamihun wa hinsa ’asamina.⁵

Interviewer: I said: please pause.

Mimicking sounds is a popular, but not effective strategy for learning a foreign language. MTV was the first English class. You start with songs – the words don’t matter, you don’t understand what they mean anyway. Some words pop here and there, but no one notices if you should say them out loud as the parents are not really sure if they heard what they heard, if you said what you said. Anyway… the smarter ones will later list the words, but giving only a hint of a letter of what they could actually be – the hangman counts on you now. Thinking in hints of a letter is equal to saying the word. No excuses – relearn; reprogramme; reboot, refresh, restart / Fresh page, new day, OGs, new key.⁶

Polyphony is music in which autonomous melodies intertwine. In 2018 one of my best friends took me to see Taryn Simon’s performance An Occupation of Loss. You entered a raw, half-built concrete opera house, from the busy Essex Road, to face professional mourners simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations, enacting rituals of grief from around the world. The mourners were performing in separate rooms, but with the lack of doors in-between, the recitations of the Albanian laments of uncried words, Venezuelan laments protecting the soul’s way to the Milky Way, Greek Epirotic lemants, which bind the story of a life with its afterlife; and Yezidi laments, which map a topography of displacement and exile, would blend together in the middle of the concrete building. ⁷ The polyphony would reassemble and fuse with every floor, reaching a blurred harmony of loss under the roof. The indeterminacy of loss was the vantage point for the histories and geographies to crash into each other. The devastation lacked border structures and prejudice. The devastation lost words to describe the brittleness of existence. While thinking of grief as an entirety, we were guided to the big steel door, where we were given a booklet collecting testimonies of all the mourners present in the performance on their experience with migration policies in the UK. Most of them tried to cross the border many times, each time having to answer questions in a language that can’t contain the worries, pains, fears and joys of their experience. It was in listening to the unison of their troubled stories that we could encounter our hopes for precarious survival. We were pushed to the busy Essex Road. I looked at my friend and without saying a word each went their own way.

I can’t express love in any other tongue than the one I got from my mother. My grandmother refused to speak German. She said that I fell on a traitor’s side, when I told her that I am moving to Germany. My dad refers to Germans by a word which I don’t want to name, even though he says it as a joke. It’s been almost a century and the bitterness is still afloat. I can list a number of authors which I wished to be able to read in German, in fact it’s still the main reason why I keep on trying to approach this language. At the beginning, I didn’t have a choice – German was obligatory in schools among kids in my generation. When someone asks me how old I am, I think Ich bin elf Jahre Alt. It’s been 16 years. But for unknown reasons the closer I come to the point where my mother tongue and German meet, the further I am from both of them. And even though it was liebe auf den ersten blick, I still can’t explain what kind of relationship it is.

There are more non-native English speakers than native English speakers in the world right now. How many Englishes are possible? Which pronunciations of English are widely heard and in which situations? Which accents secure someone a job interview or enable them to access a helpline in a crisis? Whose English is considered “difficult to understand,” which accent outs someone as a misfit, sets them up for a discrimination? Which accents sound suspicious, trigger secondary screenings at border checkpoints, warrant demands for “documents”?⁸ Some might say that in fact the language you speak is not English – contamination with an accent is not welcome. Or it can go to this extreme, when the listener when encountering someone’s accent pretends to not hear you – simply ignoring you. You become mute. Politicians also turn their ears or claim to answer questions asked only in pure language when their native one is contaminated by journalists.⁹ Shouldn’t the muffled, incomprehensible or broken be more carefully listened to? The incomprehension for me is like a gate to listening better. It’s an exercise to train the ear to something unfamiliar. Gayatri Chakravorty Sivak describes it as: The experience of contained alterity in an unknown language spoken in different cultural milieu is uncanny.¹⁰ She emphasises the term uncanny in relation to German unheimlich, for which there is not a direct translation in English. If we sought familiarity in the strangeness, perhaps there wouldn’t be such a drive for homogeneity. Sanas, founded in 2020, is a patented AI speech understanding technology. It seeks to minimise the accents of call centre workers in real-time to apparently protect them from bias and discrimination. The company claims to personalise voice experience and make speech sound unique to the speaker by capturing the subtle nuances of human speech. Sanas says it breaks barriers, one conversation at a time.¹¹ We reached a contemporary dystopia, where technology is like a bulldozer going through identity markers and cultures. The more broken we speak, the more expectation there is to even the roughness out. On average, a language is dying every two weeks.¹² Will the accent be the gravestone, marking something which was there before but is no longer present?

Come, your answer
in broken music, for thy voice is music and
thy English broken. Therefore, queen of all, Catherine,
break thy mind to me in broken English: wilt thou
have me?¹³