Language, identity flow through essays

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This article was published 15/01/2022 (1699 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this collection of personal essays, 26 Canadian writers explore their relationship with language. The language in question could be Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Italian, Cantonese, Norwegian, Punjabi, Anishinaabemowin, English, French, sign language or a dialect spoken by only a few. Or it could be their connection to the range of English words used to describe race or gender. But in most cases they are writing about their relationship with their mother tongue or the mother tongue of their parents.

All these writers excel in English and earn their living writing, translating or teaching in English. Indeed, the quality of the writing here is as impressive as the range of experiences. While a few of the essays in Tongues explore issues of particular interest to writers, such as a debate on the use of italics for non-English words or the challenges of translating Anishanaabemowin to English when the languages have developed in such different contexts, most of the essays focus the experiences of first-generation Canadians.

The subtitle of the book, On Longing and Belonging Through Language, is a good summary of the themes. Language isn’t simply a means of communication; it’s about identity and connection as well. Often the cost of perfecting your second language is the deterioration of your first. The phenomena of first-language attrition may not seem important when you are young, but eventually the fallout registers.

In the opening essay Tongue-Tied, Kamal Al-Solayee, the director of journalism at UBC, tells of leaving his Yemeni family for the U.K. at age 18. He knew he could never be comfortable as a gay man in the Arabic-speaking world. Now, 30 years later, he tells how little Arabic he spoke on a recent trip home. “In my mind, regaining a forgotten language has always been a drama in which I was the leading man and my family the supporting cast. It feels more and more like a one-person show, a one-sided expression of longing and memory.”

Leonarda Carranza, one of the book’s co-editors, tells how she too “fell hard for English” at the age of seven, when her family came to Canada from El Salvador. “It was a messy, toxic love, born out of racial injury, self-doubt and insecurity.” Her first day of school she knew not a word of English, but in a few years became a good student, proud to have shed her Spanish accent and ashamed of her mother’s lack of English. Only much later did she realize that she owed her own fluency in Spanish to her mother’s determination to speak to her children in their mother tongue.

Adam Pottie, who is deaf but not fluent in sign language, describes the ups and downs of writing a play produced in sign language: “I had so much to learn and unlearn if I wanted to be part of this world. And I wanted to, more than anything.” Sahar Golshan, a first-generation Canadian who speaks neither of her parental languages, studied Farsi for five years so that she can finally speak with her paternal grandfather. Winnipeg’s Jenny Heijun Wills, adopted by an English-speaking Canadian family in infancy, despairs of ever having a fluent conversation with her biological family in Korea.

A different take on language and belonging is explored by Logan Broeckaert. In Gender Fluent she explains that “as a masc person with a female body… it was important for me to find a language that didn’t sit heavily on my tongue.” Learning to use gender-neutral language took time, and so did finding ways to combine it with gendered language. But, like learning any language, she found it was a matter of practice and eventually came automatically.

Rowan McCandless, another Winnipeg writer, recounts a question posed by her doctor: “What are you?” With a white mother and a black father whose family has lived in Nova Scotia for generations, how should she describe herself? The racism of the question itself is an education in what not to say, ever.

This whole collection is an education for readers and a good introduction to some Canadian writers whose works they might like to read.

Faith Johnston once asked an optometrist in Ottawa where he was from. When he answered Golden Lake, she felt like diving under the table.