A Language, Starving
In the novel Meatless Days, Sara Suleri Goodyear compares bilingualism to maintaining two homes when your body can only inhabit one at a time.[1] To this day, it is the most fitting analogy I’ve found to describe my experience. After three autumns in Scotland, English has become a mansion. Flemish still offers shelter, its brick walls are too strong to fall, even though the occasional cold breeze slips through invisible cracks. As for French… I don’t know if these ruins can be saved. Is there a point in fixing the leaking roof? The smashed windows? I fear I would be wasting my time. That’s what my problems always seem to lead back to: time. It flies by, and with every passing day my first and second homes crumble a little bit more.
Perhaps it’s easier to see languages as bodies, rather than houses. I have three bodies, but I only carry food for one. It’s survival of the fittest, in a sense, forcing me to make this terrible decision. Which body is the strongest, which will run the furthest, climb the highest? That’s the one I give the most to. Which body can’t I afford to lose, which is so tightly braided into my soul that to rip it out would be unbearable? To that one, I offer bread and water, so it will have enough energy to walk. Only crumbs remain now, and it is cruel to push them towards the third body, but what else can I give? Some days, I can hardly tell if that body is still breathing at all.
*
I became an aunt at age seven; still a child myself, but given the opportunity to hold someone tinier than me, small and fragile in my arms. I would only agree to hold my niece when I was on the sofa, the prospect of walking on my stumbling feet while carrying something so precious too terrifying to even consider. I spoke to her in Dutch, even though her father couldn’t understand it, even though my sister murmured to her in French, even though I barely knew what to say to a being so new to this world. Now she’s thirteen and I still don’t have the words, and on the rare occasions they arise, I lack the fluency to say them.
Primary school is a blur of barely-there memories, saturated with a loneliness I couldn’t shake off. My dad failed to uphold his goal to raise me bilingual in my early years – in between me, my mother and my sisters (half-sisters, my mother’s side), Dutch became a language he couldn’t avoid. But he set his foot down on this matter: I would go to school in Wallonia and learn his language. Of my first day, I remember this: sobbing in the backseat of the car, begging my parents not to make me go. Of my first year, I recall this: looks of curiosity, repeating simple Dutch words alongside children who had never heard them before, sitting on the side of the playground with one sentence clutched close to my chest, ready to hold up to anyone who approached me, “Je suis néerlandophone”, I speak Dutch. I learned to live off a scarcity of words, learned to breathe the same few sentences time and time again. Between suffocation and rebreathing the same air, I chose the latter — between the long lapses of silence, speaking only when my lungs began to burn, only when addressed. I still catch myself falling into that habit. I go through a similar rota of sentences in English and Flemish, rehashing the same things over and over and hoping that no one catches on. I change the order, replace some words, but all I do is repeat. I can’t speak French without choking, I’ve long run out of air – how long until it happens again? I’m not the only one prone to repetitions, and the world is all too eager to make a fool of the girl who grew up priding herself on her affinity with languages. Haal diep adem, inhale. Try to find a balance between languages without letting either of them slip away.
To me French refuses logic, rejects simplicity. In a letter to my friend many years ago, I wanted to tell her I missed her but I kept messing up the grammar. A simple phrase, just three words, but it confused me with its silliness. Tu me manques. Tu, you. Me, me. Manques, miss. The order seemed wrong, which made me get the order wrong, so that instead I would always tell people ‘you miss me’, unintentionally proclaiming a confidence I didn’t actually possess. I eventually remembered to say it correctly, if only because I couldn’t forget how dumb it was. It took my younger self a while to realise it wasn’t just another nonsensical rule, to understand that a more accurate translation would be “you are missing from me”. As if the speaker is addressing an amputated limb rather than a person, a vital part of theirs, forcibly removed. Tu me manques. You, from me, are missing. A part of me is missing, and that part is you.
Nowadays when I speak French I feel clumsy again, as helpless as I was in childhood. I turn into an unwilling time traveller, and with every word the same associations I made in primary school come to mind. Take cahier, for example. Notebook. One of the first challenging words we were taught to spell. Cahier, pronounced as ka-jee to my Flemish ears. To help myself remember the spelling, I pronounced the French words exactly how they were written while studying. So cahier became ka-hier, or in English: ka-here. Even now when I hear the word cahier, it comes with that familiar echo of ka-here, as if I’m still eight and terrified of failing my dictée. Languages exist on their own timelines, ones that can pause at any moment and resume years later. For me, French is still stuck in that school in Wallonia, counting down the days until high school. My tongue holds the memories of my younger self, of her fear and loneliness – does it see this language I shed so many tears over as a threat still? No wonder French feels like a distant memory, no wonder that Lara (pronounced Lah-rah) hides away in the deepest corners of my mind. No wonder my tongue hesitates and stutters when I try to speak that language, as if afraid of what else I would uncover by reaching for it.
I hated how my classmates said my name. Lah-rah. A grating, ugly sound, nothing like the melodic pronunciation by my family. French strips my name of gentleness, and English moulds it into an unrecognisable shape. I’ve had no choice but to accept its various pronunciations. Introductions come with uneasy hesitations. The name feels strange on my tongue – it isn’t mine to say, only for others to call me by. How do I pronounce it? It doesn’t feel natural to use the Flemish pronunciation when I’m speaking English, but that’s my name. That’s how it’s supposed to be said. If I pronounce it the way it’s meant to be, I know to expect a look of confusion, a polite request to repeat myself. For a while I pronounced it the English way, hoping to make it easier for those around me, but why should I change for their comfort? They can’t help mispronouncing it, but I have no excuse, can’t see it for anything other than the betrayal it is. And even when I did it, they would go on to call me Laura more often than not. Right now my habit is to pronounce it correctly again, followed by a spelling of the name: ‘Hi, I’m Lara, L-A-R-A.’ It rolls off my tongue by now, as naturally as the smile that accompanies it. I wonder if people think it’s strange that I spell it out without being asked to, I wonder if they even realise that I do it. Do they notice the ways I try to accommodate them? Do they even pay attention, or should I still expect to be called a name that isn’t mine?
Muscle memory: even as my vocabulary deteriorates, my mouth knows the French pronunciations and recalls how to get the accent right. I can still roll my r’s and say coquelicot correctly, but ask me to talk with my paternal grandmother and I’ll trip over every sentence. The body remembers, even when I fail to. I wish I’d heard the warnings before it was too late. R.F. Kuang observes, ‘Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.’ [2] I wish someone had told this to my younger self, the one who never could have fathomed how easily this hard-earned language would slip away. Perhaps she wouldn’t have cared, though surely she’d agree that those years of loneliness should at least be good for something. I’ve carried this language with me my entire life, bore its carving as they were made, whimpered but never rejected the marks left. It doesn’t make sense that I can be stripped of the language without being physically torn to pieces. Yet the words and phrases fade…
Affection overwhelms me when I think of the patience my niece and nephew have shown for me over the years. Growing up they looked at me with a fierce adoration I have done nothing to deserve, called my name with excitement whenever I visited and hugged me like they never wanted to let go. Some of that enthusiasm dimmed over the years, maybe because they’re older, maybe because I’ve changed. Will they grow to resent me for the language I’ve lost? For allowing myself to lose it when that meant losing a part of my connection to them? Will they blame me for my carelessness? Tu me manques, tu vas me manquer, you will be missing from me.
A funny anecdote: over dinner, my brother-in-law asks about my studies. I tell him about classes and les autres students, the other students. He gives me an odd look, and it takes me far too long to realise my mistake. Étudiants, I correct myself, cheeks hot with embarrassment. It has been happening more and more that I throw English words into my sentences but pronounce them with a French accent. The habit catches me off guard every time. It ties knots of shame in my stomach, it gives us something to laugh about. Funny out loud but less so in the aftermath, when I am all alone with my thoughts. English is the greediest of languages, I think. A parasite that eats and eats and leaves no space for anything else.
*
A muffled, near-silent panic. The sinking realisation that you’re losing a language. I give myself moments to grieve, but they are short and with small eternities in between.
Sometimes I am swallowed by the fear of what else will be lost if I let this language fade.
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Goodyear, Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (London: Flamingo, 1991)
Kuang, R.F., Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence (Dublin: HarperCollins, 2022)
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Lara Luyts is a third year student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Dundee.