Language

This piece was born of desperation...

The below piece was written as a result of several failed attempts at writing in my native language, Arabic.

Arabic is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, and one of the richest with an extensive history in poetry and story telling. As such, being unable to write in it with as much fluency as I do with English has been one of the biggest issues I have had to reconcile with myself.

Language

I am a prisoner. A prisoner of a privileged kind. A prisoner of an enviable kind.

I am a prisoner of words that are not my own, or a truth that is not mine to speak.

I am a prisoner of a language that is unfamiliar. A language I was never meant to know, a language born of centuries of manipulation, torture, and pain.

I am a prisoner to foreign words, ideas, and truths. They are not my own. I call back to my ancestors for inspiration but they look back at me with pain piercing through their souls.

"Have our screams, tears, and blood gone to this? A daughter of ours that knows not our words? Not our truth?"

She speaks the language of those who stole her from us. She speaks the language of pain and force. The language of erasure and extinction.

And as if in a terrible dream, I try to scream back anything, tears of plea race down my cheeks. I wish to gain their love, respect, and forgiveness. I want to speak their words, sing their songs and uplift their truth. I want to know their language. I want to show them I am the descendant of greatness too, of writers and poets who used our native tongue for love, for pain, for resistance. I want to make them proud, I want to show them all that I know.

Most of all, I want them to be proud of me, of the words I speak, and of the ideas I weave.

Look at me now! Look how much I know.

I can alliterate like the best of them. I can juxtapose.

This language is the foundation of my intellect, I know it so well.

I weave its words into melodies, they rearrange themselves in front of me.

Don’t you see how smart I am, aren’t you proud of me?

But.. they don’t understand me. I speak their colonizers' words. Not theirs. I am a descendant of pain, suffering, and erasure. They don’t understand me, I speak the language of their enemy. So they watch me with disdain and pity. They watch their daughter be the prisoner of the White Man’s ideas, the White Man’s language.

The war is lost, the language forever altered, and their daughter stands painfully shackled. A prisoner to foreign words, ideas, and truths that are not their own.