Raphael ThysPhoto by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Everyone laughed
I laughed too, without knowing why.
I do that a lot.
For the first time in my life, I have friends who don’t speak English. And I speak French on only the most basic and rudimentary level. My wife is better, and she acts as interpreter between us when we get together. But you can pick up enough from gestures, from tone, from the few words I do know, to have at least an idea of what’s being said.
I never anticipated this. I’ve been an immigrant before, but only to an English-speaking country. And it’s not just the language that holds me back. Social interaction is tricky enough even in the language my parents taught me. I smile along as others talk and laugh sometimes, without knowing why.
All that’s changed, really, is that now, people expect far less from me.
The region of France where I live now, Occitanie, is defined by a language that isn’t French. It used to be called Languedoc, literally, the language of Oc, which is the local word for ‘yes’. Occitan is what people used to speak here, before proud kings from Paris marched their armies down towards Spain and impose a unified culture on what used to be a collection of independent kingdoms.
There’s nothing new about that. The Romans did the same, and the Greeks did it before them. The whole of human history is like this, a displacement or an absorption of one people by another. Go back far enough, and you wouldn’t understand a word your great great grandparents said. Most of us don’t even have to go that far back.
I’m not particularly interested in questions of identity
The fact it’s currently all the rage is just more unnecessary proof that we live in a vapid and narcissistic culture. This is what you get when you spend generations telling people that only the individual matters. We are all lonely and half-mad gods trapped in our private glass-walled prisons.
An old family story says that my father’s grandmother spoke French. How or why, living between the thick stone walls of a thatched cottage in rural Ireland, is unknown. She spoke English, too. She spoke Irish, despite the best efforts of the occupying British government to stamp it out. It’s hard to rule over a people you can’t understand. And language is culture. Wipe out the one, and you critically disable the other.
My name isn’t really my name. There’s no W in the Irish language, or any sound that exactly approximates it. My real name, the one my ancestors pronounced in damp cottages and chiseled into slate gray gravestones darkened with rain, bristles with vowels and sounds my tongue doesn’t know how to make.
I could change my name, of course, to something that more closely approximates how my ancestors would have spoken it. But what would be the point? It would only condemn me to having to spell it out to people forever.
Besides, my new French friends have enough trouble with Ryan.
All around the world, there are millions like this
My black friends with names like Carter and Freeman, a legacy of a language and culture completely severed by slavery.
The descendants of European immigrants who had their names anglicized at the port as they entered the new world, to make things easier for harassed and underpaid customs officials. Those who changed their names willingly, tired of having the spelling and pronunciation mangled by people who spoke a language different from theirs.
In Shakespeare’s time, no one could quite agree exactly how to spell his name. And they sounded nothing like us back then. Listen to Hamlet’s famous speech pronounced the way it was in Shakespeare’s time. It sounds like a bad American actor doing a terrible Irish accent.
Identities split and shatter, fragmenting into sharp shards like shells on the beach. It’s dangerous underfoot, sometimes. Pretty, though, not in spite of the transitory fragility, but because of it. Part of the dance of being alive, like the music that swells and gets your foot tapping whether you want it to or not. But have you ever tried to cling on to a song? The whole point is that it moves. That it changes. A single unceasing note would soon drive you out of your mind.
My neighbours don’t understand me. I’m only starting to understand them. I’ll confess I underestimated the difficulty of learning a language as an adult, especially when you have a thousand other responsibilities to attend to at the same time.
There’s no substitute for practice. The ten thousand hours the salescreatures love to quote that give you mastery over a subject.
I’ve put much more than that into writing. I’ve put tens of thousands more into being a friend, a brother, a son, a husband. I’m still nowhere near mastering that.
But the English language was the key to it all. A thing I maybe struggled to learn once but have since got the hang of. My superpower, in a way, even when I was a kid in an arbitrary and unfamiliar adult world.
You could hide behind those shifting forms and meanings like the gods in the tales from mythology I devoured page by page. You could build an entire world in the shadows of every syllable. And as I grew older and the power structures of the world laid themselves bare to me, I saw that language, like George Orwell always said, can be a tool of control.
But it can also set us free.
It’s not all that long ago that my ancestors were forced to learn English, to make their names pronounceable for those who despised them. But we are all, in some sense, doomed to become what we hate. Now the language of the colonial occupiers of Ireland is the only language I speak, and those foreign German-inflected words feel so natural to me that I sometimes mistake them for the things that they describe.
But they are not, any more than the sign outside town that points the road to Paris is Paris itself. For all their history, variety, colour, and beauty, words are arbitrary noises we mutually agree to imbue with meaning. To share a language is in some sense to share a way of thinking, as though we can’t think about what we cannot name. The complex aesthetic concepts of the Japanese are untranslatable, and when we try, we lose all the precision and power of the original. There’s a word, in Irish, for the noise the sea makes among the rocks, a word that itself mimics the sound of the ocean washing against the shore of my ancestor’s home.
But it’s not my home. It’s not my language.
The English language brought me here
I’m not the greatest writer in the world, and not half the writer I want to be, but false modesty is its own kind of arrogance. I’m pretty handy with a pen when I want to be. I’ve won a couple of ego-fuelling awards and, for the last half-decade, made a good living from nothing but the words I know. Moving to France, I disabled myself, in a way, like Cú Chulainn bringing about his own death by breaking the taboos laid on him.
Because like the old stories tell us, it’s only when you lose your powers that you discover everything you have it in yourself to be.
I’ll learn French, but I’ll never be French. The best I can manage is a rough approximation, the same way my Irish farmer ancestors could only pretend, grudgingly or willingly, to be the same as their English counterparts. I may never get all the jokes, the allusions, the references and shared customs that go along with absorbing a culture from the moment you’re born, so that the word for a thing merges with the thing itself.
When I speak my halting French, I have to think carefully about the way I put the words together, finding ways to make my astonishingly limited vocabulary work to express ideas that may or may not deserve better. It’s like being a child again, feeling forever uncertain of yourself, not understanding half of what the adults say but trying to piece it together as best you can with the limited resources to hand.
Then again, for some of us, talking to people in our native language is like that too.
Given more time than I have left in this world and less interaction with English speakers than I have, the day might come when I start to forget my native language. It happens to others. Things that just seem so obvious, so set in stone, so much a part of us that we can’t imagine life without them, fade away like everything else, like the color in your hair and the clarity in your eyes. Time takes it all in the end. My early love of words is still with me now, almost the last remaining vestige of a childhood that has otherwise evaporated entirely, along with the world that nurtured and supported it. Along with many of the people who created it.
But a language is not an identity. Or if it is, it doesn’t matter. Mountains and oceans and the stars at night speak no earthly tongue, but we all understand what they say. Who you are is a moving target, the red shift of the unnamed stars charging into the outer darkness, and in each moment, including this one, you are changing form into something else.
The only things worth saying, I sometimes think, are the things that can’t be said in any human language. But existence chants them over and over again each day. And that’s what we’re doing. And that’s what we are.
Not a member of some nation or tribe or culture, this or that linguistic group, male or female or in between. We are a hand reaching out to touch the unknown, an eye regarding itself, the mute unformed majesty of existence becoming conscious of itself through us.
There are no words for that. At least, not in any language I speak.