As the daughter of immigrants, language was sometimes a creative blessing and other times a raging battle. Learning my parents’ native tongue while living in an English classroom was challenging. Eventually it became a part of me, but not in the way anyone expected.
Growing up in a multi-lingual home, I wasn’t even aware of all the languages being spoken around me. The varying tempos, pitches, and speeds of communication flying around the room were as natural as someone rapidly flipping the TV channels; it was background music.
My mother spoke English with a classical eloquence, a gift from her convent school education. But since my father’s English was passable at best, they spoke their native Urdu at home. Along with conversational Urdu, I also heard a lot of expressive dialects and foreign street slang.
My grandmother, in an attempt to pass on her part of South Asian heritage, spoke exclusively in Memoni (a regional dialect). My mother did all her yelling in Gujarati. My father played leap frog between Urdu and broken English. My elder cousins made sure I knew how to swear in every language, including French and Spanish. We prayed in Arabic, lived in Urdu, played in English and sinned in all of the above!
Somewhere in this erratic symphony my ears picked up what they liked best, in little bits and pieces I could mix up with my rapidly developing Sesame Street English. By the time I was 3 or 4, I had my own home spun language; a wild combination of all the different tongues spoken around me. What I had created was unique to me, but very common to children of immigrant parents. I had absorbed language, and in the process had inherited the legacy of my parents and grandparents.
But of course this nontraditional method of acquiring tradition was not good enough. At age 5 when my parents grudgingly handed me over to the Canadian school system, English became a threat. It was the language that was taking over my daytime hours and my subconscious intellect.
My parents would ask in Urdu and I would answer in English. They hated this.
“Speak our language or you’ll lose it,” was the reprimand I heard again and again. Suddenly language wasn’t a toy I could happily play with; it was a duty. This feeling was further compounded by my family’s insistence that I now learn Urdu by the book, and so ensued hours of grueling regurgitation and old school classroom techniques that eventually became the “battle of the languages.”
I surrendered, but not the way my parents had hoped. I gave up Urdu altogether, refusing to speak, eat, wear or do anything South Asian.
I didn’t attempt to relearn my native language until several years later. At the time I was afraid to speak Urdu. I had witnessed how offended people could get if you used the wrong kind of pronoun when addressing an elder, inadvertently disrespecting them. A simple “tum” instead of “Aap” can land one into a lot of trouble.
I also had to admit my parents were right; I had lost the little Urdu I knew as a child and now any attempt to speak it sounded something like coins in a blender. It was painfully embarrassing for the speaker and the poor soul who had to listen. So I committed to keeping my mouth shut.
My mother tongue finally came to me, in a way I least expected; Bollywood! Of all things South Asian, this exaggerated world of symphonic love became a teenage girl’s temporary escape. Like many, I began building my dreams with Bollywood’s bricks. This was when my native language started seeping back into me.
Most of what I learned from Bollywood had to be unlearned later in life, but language and my love for culture were lessons that stayed with me. South Asian culture has a knack for combining visual and verbal expression; it’s why Bollywood’s colorful musicals appeal to people of all ages.
We have mastered the art of expressing human emotion in many ways: music, art, literature–all with a foundation in language. I was exposed to everything from Shayari to Tapori slang, Ghazals to Bhangra. I gained an appreciation for my heritage through modern versions of its ancient creed.
— Summer Yasmin
‘No Sex in the City’ is inspired by the popular TV show Sex and the City, and is a voice representing Desi romance and culture in all its complexities!
