“Purny, tumi amake tumar lekha ta poira dao na kan?”
My ammu asks me this question frequently. After every Honi I bring home to show off and every late night spent editing, she asks: ‘Purny, why do you never read your writing out to me’? It’s a tired question, one that I have asked myself, again, and again. It feels too weighted with complexity and sentiment for me to find a viable solution, if there even is one.
I have been meaning to write translated versions of my pieces, a way to express myself to my ammu in her language, my mother tongue, and to express myself as freely as I do in English. I don’t struggle to weave the words together in English; I easily twist them into prose, fast-paced and fervent, my thoughts running across the page. The way I can make something so simple sound important in English, the way I can make words mean something; I’ve mastered linguistic manipulation.
My Bangla, however, stutters over itself. It comes out much slower; I cannot capture a metaphor for the life of me, let alone emulate the gravity of my writing through my very limited vocabulary. My restricted fluency does not carry the sweetness of the language, so I don’t read my work out, I don’t translate it into a fragmented version of itself, and, therefore, my ammu does not ‘read’ my writing.
Conversely, my ammu doesn’t understand the language I write in. Her intelligence is wasted on my English — the words, the metaphors, and the context present in my work do not belong to her community. There is a disconnect that draws a line between the two of us. English prose is nothing compared to that of the Bengali writers, poets, and songwriters, and my weakly translated attempts fall flat. It’s a grotesque, violent act; the butchering of language in its purest form, for the purest reason — a daughter simply trying to talk to her mother.
It begs the question, do I belong to my mother’s community? If all we can share are broken sentences, syntax that is made up of em dashes and hyphens, ellipses and misplaced periods, loan words and stuttering, how else do we understand one another? Does she belong to my community, if the form my identity takes up is so intrinsically represented by the words she does not understand? What makes community if not mutual understanding? What makes a shared culture if not words and language?
I find myself heartbroken overthinking about how easily conversation might have flowed if we were a monolingual family, or if I had grown up in Bangladesh. If my parents and I existed within a shared monoculture, rather than awkwardly straddling either sides of our identities, what would change? If I had painstakingly learnt how to write beautifully in Bangla, would my ammu understand who I am better than she does now?
There is a lost culture in the words that we do not understand, the message that goes missing in between the lines. Our relationship is a constant learning curve, much like my Bangla — there is always something new we do not know, something we do not understand, something incomprehensible.
I’m not sure that is such a thing as a monoculture as a child of an immigrant. Other families, those born and brought up in their home country or, at the very least, the same culture as their parents, do not need to cross cultural and linguistic barriers to simply reach each other. Linguistics is a metaphor of the greater divide — the values, the beliefs, the worldview that sets us apart.
However, cultural disconnect does not stop at linguistics. Brown kids spend their entire lives curating their identities — every part of ourselves is carefully selected, presented, and the rest is tucked away, saved for an alter-ego outside of the borders of our homes.
We hide mini-skirts and corsets at the back of our closets and wear them under oversized trackies when leaving the house; we sneak away with our friends and cross interstate and international borders; we flirt and date and fall in love, all without our parents knowledge, and when we marry our partners of ten years, our parents believe that we had only met the year before. At home, we are perfectly curated personalities.
Even the things that don’t need to be hidden are never truly disclosed. The books we are reading, the songs we’re listening to, the intricacies of our innerselves, the inconsequential matters of our day to day. We discuss university at great lengths, but never the nature of our essays, never what we have learned, never the conversations we’ve had. We can never find the words.
Yet, my mother knows me like she knows the curves, crevices, and the creases of her palms. I know I’ve made it sound as though my ammu and I don’t speak, but that is not the case. Our unique language is familiar, made up of stutters, stumbling speech, and broken syntax of both Bangla and English fragments. We speak, for hours at times. I ramble off in my broken Bangla, and she teaches me the pronunciation of words I do not yet understand the meaning of. We make daal together and I ask her the names of the ingredients in her own tongue. I sit down with her and show her how to type out her Facebook caption, I fix up her commas and her capital letters.
I sat her down, once, with a copy of Honi and my butchered mother tongue. I struggled through the piece to find the words in Bangla, to find metaphors applicable to her culture, carefully explaining the intentions behind every little detail. I couldn’t manipulate the message through fancy prose when speaking in Bangla, like I did with English. But she cried anyway, a mixture between understanding and appreciating, connection and yearning. She keeps the copy folded up next to her Quran. We have become fluent in understanding one another, or at the very least, trying to.
