Three languages, three acts
English is cluttered. It’s a language with a million redundant words and heavy discourse tied to each one. I have been elbow-deep in English for decades. Especially since law school, I am tormented by specters of subtlety which haunt every corner of this language. The mispronunciations, the weaponized verbs, the insufficient adjectives. All the sincere intent lost while beating meaning into sentences. Or perhaps out of them.
English sometimes feels like a suspect I must interrogate. For me to render English into what I believe him to be, what I’ve been told he is, I have to force the meaning out against his will. Throughout this gruesome task, a thesaurus website open in another tab is my ever-present accomplice. We manipulate and bludgeon. Until the line is blurred between his violence and ours. It was never the case that anybody couldn’t find the words. They were strewn around the crime scene. They told us much we wished we didn’t know.
In French, I read at the level of a preschooler. Every line is poetry. In this new language, everything is precise, and I am confident, buoyed by the lightness of what I don’t know. The words that cut have not been given to me, so I don’t worry about accidental violence. There is also no need to wrench meaning from these words. I say what I know. Or, I simply don’t know. I’ve found I know a lot, even with very few words. I am my best self this way. Concise and polite and direct.
Naively, when I began taking French, this is what I thought the language felt like for native speakers. I thought this mental clarity was why French people in movies were constantly taking relaxing strolls along the Seine, birds chirping overhead.
I’ll admit, I never want to shatter that illusion completely, even though I know that all languages have their own expressions of anguish, loneliness, and grief. I want to live in the adolescent space before those expressions are foisted upon you. I want to learn everything in a new language except how to hurt and be hurt.
In Tamil, the feelings I know best are shame and anger. Tamil was the form words took when my mom had to scold me in a grocery store, or when my dad explained his finances to family abroad, the minutes on a long distance calling card burning away with each heavy sentence.
At 7 years old I found every excuse to skip weekend Tamil school. I was sick. I was scared. I had a birthday party. I remember silently rejoicing after my mom and I got in a car accident coming back from Tamil class. I hoped a bad omen like that would scare her off from taking me back.
As a teenager, I feigned redemption by enrolling in a college Tamil class. It was a test I had my whole life to study for but still failed. While white classmates from the linguistics department easily picked up formal conjugations, I let loose Chennai street slang, confusing it with vocab from our lists. The humiliation ritual of Tamil class worsened after I rejected the romantic advances of a boy who sat next to me. Each week, the tension between us grew, and I started skipping class. Old habits die hard.
When I finally stopped running from Tamil, it was four years later. I was spiraling after a breakup. Reaching for some sense of familiarity to cushion my fall into despair, my mind caught on language learning. I paid for an ASL webinar, purchased Spanish vocab books, devoured YouTube study guides, and registered for Tamil lessons online. I still take Tamil lessons online.
My Tamil lessons are far more satisfying than therapy. Each hour of stunted, confused conversation illuminates my past. In the Tamil lessons, I quickly learn that I do not know how to conjugate hypothetical phrases. I learn that my family avoided discussing uncertain futures. In class, it is apparent that I can easily recall words for “angry,” “hit,” and “go,” but no matter how long I wrestle with the silence in my head, I can’t remember how to say “friend” or “happy.”
My patient teacher is seated ten thousand miles away in Madurai. When she returns those words to me, I nod sincerely. I take a few seconds to mouth the new-old words, reintroducing my mouth to their architecture. I fill countless pages with these new-old words. Words I probably already knew but needed to be reminded of. Eventually pages turn into multiple notebooks. I use my best handwriting and color coded pens to organize these notebooks. I don’t want them getting cluttered.