NATIVE TONGUE
OLA OSAZE
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As a child, I never questioned the predominance of English in our home. After all, the same values were reflected in every aspect of Nigerian society, including literature, media, and in everyday interactions with strangers on the streets. The language we were taught in school was typically French (or Latin in Father’s time), not Edo or Igbo or Hausa or Ibibio or Yoruba or any one of the more than five hundred languages my people speak. Because of this nationwide complicity in the denial and relinquishing of our mother tongues, I can’t blame my parents for their choices.
I came to America with my mother in 1991, not too long after yet another military-backed coup rocked Nigeria. The riots and subsequent government-sanctioned reprisals meant more school closures, curfews, harassment, and abuse at the hands of police for indeterminate lengths of time. It also meant more killings. And so in search of a better life we left. I spent a portion of my first year in the United States in a strict Christian high school in High Point, North Carolina. There were White students everywhere. The principal mistook my Nigerian accent for a symptom of deficient mental capacity and decided to hold me back a year, so I entered school in the tenth grade. On the day we started reading Hamlet, I discovered that these White kids did not have a grasp of the English language—the language that I was taught to hold in such high regard. “What does it mean, Ms. Eubanks?” the students cried out, befuddled. With a smirk on my face, I showed them how to master their own language. But inevitably, every day after school I came home to a mom who roared into the phone in Edo or Yoruba, her words colliding one into another at rapid pace and not one of them meaning anything to me.
I can recognize this concerto of hard and soft tones anywhere. I’ve heard it float above the din of noise on Harlem’s 125th Street in the height of summer. I’ve heard it behind me in the vegetable aisle of the grocery store. The gb, kp, and eh sounds don’t always translate, but they are as familiar to me as breathing.
After twenty-four years in the United States, I realize why English was enforced at home. I’ve come to learn about the cultural capital of the language and how essential it is to survival here. It made it easier to hide my undocumented status, especially in the days before 9/11 when there was less scrutiny. My command of English also gave me an advantage, years later, when I successfully filed for asylum. This was my last-ditch effort to gain legal status in the States after many years of being undocumented and a desperate bid to prevent deportation back to Nigeria, where the parliament was hard at work on a “jail the gays” bill. During my asylum interview—the dreaded face-to-face with an asylum officer—I was drilled on the details of my story with the goal of poking holes in it, discrediting me, and disproving my claim. This is the reality for many Black LGBTQIA asylum seekers during the interview and throughout the asylum process. Despite being survivors of violence in homelands where there are actual laws on the books criminalizing us, more often than not, because sentiments like Trump’s description of Africa and Haiti (as “shit holes”) abound, our experiences are labeled lies and asylum claims denied.
Just like displacement, not knowing my languages is a form of erasure, a symptom and manifestation of White supremacy. It is a continuation of the pillaging the British began in my homeland many years ago, when they named it Nigeria and attempted to subjugate the people, eradicate our cultures, and invisiblize our histories. I long for Yoruba and Edo, the familial ways of speaking for which I lack the words.
Today I am an embodiment of myriad tongues. In my everyday life, I speak the English the Brits brought to Nigeria, the English of the African immigrant on U.S. soil that alternates between rolling Rs and hard Ts (“water” versus “warra”), the pidgin English that is a marriage between our native tongues, urban slang and a deconstructed English, and the little bit of Yoruba and Edo I’m picking up from websites and apps.
With my Naija friends, with whom I’m usually more at ease, pidgin flows out of me unhindered:
“How body?”
“Body dey inside cloth.”
“You dey see am?”
“I dey see but I no ‘gree. Story don get k-leg, abi?”
“I no know wetin do am O. Mumu.”
[sucks teeth]
Speaking with co-workers—who, given the relatively few African immigrants there are in the U.S. nonprofit world, are usually not African—my language is American English all the way. This never feels completely comfortable. Yet I’ve had over two decades of practice:
“Hey there! How’s it going?”
“I’m doing alright.”
In my spare time I’ve been teaching myself my languages gradually. What I do know is how easily the words roll off my tongue, how deeply soothing it is to pronounce them:
Ẹ ku abọ Vbèè óye hé? Ẹ ku aarọ
O ye mi
Kpẹlẹ
Koyo
I say these words to dig deeper into who I am, a child of the red soil of Benin, the gray mountains of Saki, and the oil city of Port Harcourt. These Edo-Yoruba words ground my shaky identification with the country into which I was born yet still barely know. They allow me to picture a different life for myself, one in which we kids were granted access into our parents’ polyglot world, and where at night I dream in Edo and during the day—one day—I write in Yoruba.
OSAZE