Language(s)

Listen: my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty rich as saag paneer coastal Kiswahili laced with Arabic, he speaks Gujarati solid ancestral pride.

Five languages five different worlds yet English shrinks him down before white men.

-Shailja Patel's ‘Dreaming in Gujarati’

Language is the very essence of human interaction. Personally, I have seen, on countless occasions an English speaker (butchering, more often than not) another language, which is almost always met in a delightful manner. No one looks down at the attempt but rather, it is seen as a credibility to the language. Bless their souls. Yet, on the other hand, upon hearing an accented English, the general presumption is that the speaker is less educated or may be not clever enough to grasp the language and how it should be enunciated. As if English is some measure of intelligence. This is something I myself have witnessed as someone who is not a native English speaker. I can’t say whether this subconscious prejudice would end one day, or whether history will repeat itself with another language of colonisers. Nevertheless, this poem by Shajila Patel makes us all reflect and translate these raw emotions into words no matter what your first language may be.