I tried to be like my friends, who didn’t speak any other language. The more I read and learned in English, the more, as a girl, I identified with it. Bengali was something they could easily ignore.
Unlike my parents, who knew English well, the Americans were completely oblivious of the language that we spoke at home. Or maybe in reality it represented nothing. Just as English did for my parents, Bengali represented for the Americans I knew as a child a remote culture, unknown, suspect. It didn’t interest them, as if that part of me, that capacity, weren’t there. They attached no importance to it, didn’t ask about it. None of my teachers, none of my friends were ever curious about the fact that I spoke another language. Bengali represented the part of me that belonged to my parents, that didn’t belong to America. For my family English represented a foreign culture that they didn’t want to give in to. I thought they had nothing in common except me, so that I felt like a contradiction in terms myself. They were incompatible adversaries, intolerant of each other. Those two languages of mine didn’t get along. The linguistic coming and going confused me it seemed a contradiction that I couldn’t resolve.
I remained suspended, torn between the two. I realized that I had to speak both languages extremely well: the one to please my parents, the other to survive in America. On the other hand, after speaking English for hours in the classroom, I came home every day to a place where there was no English. Even though I spoke only Bengali with my family, there was always English in the air, on the street, in the pages of books. One was always concealed behind the other, but never completely, just as the full moon can hide almost all night behind a mass of clouds and then suddenly emerge, dazzling. The part of me that spoke English, that went to school, that read and wrote, was another person. If I spoke English at home they scolded me. My parents wanted me to speak only Bengali with them and all their friends. And yet my mother tongue remained a demanding phantom, still present. I became a passionate reader by getting to know my stepmother, deciphering her, satisfying her.
0 kommentar(er)
