Language and the Mother Eternal

In an essay on the influence of the musicality of prayers on his poetic sensibility, Kaveh Akbar, an Iranian American poet and novelist, references the idea of “ruh” — meaning both “breath” and “spirit,” which he insisted was “absolutely essential” to his evolution. Although he later established himself as an English-language poet, as a child Akbar  spoke only Farsi and acquired, through the recitation of Arabic prayers, an appreciation of the rhythm of the spoken word from another language.

One of the earliest prayers my mother taught me was a Shia prayer, Nade Ali. 

O! Ali for Thee granted eternal hidden grants to you, Help! Allah the Almighty is Supreme, Allah the Almighty is supreme, Allah the Almighty is supreme, I am relieved from the enmity of (your) enemies. Thee is Eternal, Absolute; I have trust in Thee, By that truth, Thee do we serve and Thee do we beseech help.

She recited the Arabic words with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap. At the end, she would purse her lips and blow gently in all directions, as a symbolic gesture of thanks that every problem could be dissipated as easily as breathing. The words of the Nade Ali, which she explained to my sisters and I in English, echoed the moment the Prophet Muhamed called for intervention from his cousin Ali, popularly known as “La fata illa Ali,” or Ali the Chivalrous and epitome of spiritual courage. My mother made sure we memorized the Arabic words and much later, the translation in English, too; although she generally spoke Katchi (a dialect) with us, many of our discussions were in English. For years, the last thing I saw every night as I fell asleep was my mother seated at the foot of my bed, whispering softly in Arabic.  

Early on, while all our prayers were in Arabic, my mother spoke to us in English, Katchi, and Gujrati, these languages often interspersed with words from Kiswahili. Growing up in Kenya, it did not matter in the least from which language words were borrowed. Languages were interwoven with expressions and idioms, infused with meaning that enriched our communications with feeling and culturally specific nuance. When my mother spoke to my aunts or her friends, words were used interchangeably. Kitchen artifacts inevitably were in Kiswahili as were names of many fruits: “ndizi” for bananas and “mboga” for vegetables; “muiko,” “sufuria,” and “bakuli” for wooden spoon, saucepan, bowl. 

But beyond the everyday discussions that incorporated a mixture of languages, there was a coded way of speaking about “private issues.” For instance, once I heard my mother telling my aunt that she could not attend her swimming lesson because her “guests had arrived.” The phrase included the Swahili word for visitors — “wageni”  —which was combined with the Gujrati words “aiva che,” meaning “have arrived.” I was ten years old and, not seeing any guests, I wondered who she meant. It was only much later that I understood my mother had been referring to her period. Possibly the Gujrati word for menstruation was not known, but in any case, the subject of periods was culturally taboo, so the language was kept cryptic, only understood by those who needed to know. 

In much the same way, if you ask someone what their mother tongue is, you may receive an intellectual answer, perhaps one shaped by cultural expectation, or even one that resists it. But a more revealing approach is simply to listen.

My mother also spoke to us in Katchi, when she was explaining something important or being emphatic. For instance, when my sisters and I complained of our friends at school being mean to us, she would simply say, “Koi jo nai khabar” — only four words but with a depth of meaning. Literally translated as “We don’t know about them,” she meant we could never really know what a person had experienced and that made them behave in a particular way, ergo we should not be quick to judge. In uttering that phrase, my mother taught us to live and let live, and even forgive, by encouraging us to be more compassionate. 

A whole new vocabulary entered my imagination when my mother died, and provided a map of sorts on how to navigate her loss. Everyone who came home to give us their condolences and pay their respects recited the Arabic words, “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” meaning “Surely to Allah we belong and to Him we will all return,” confirming that everything belongs to Allah, and all will return to Him. It was a way of trying to reassure us that it was the path of all souls, but it did little to comfort us. Not long after the funeral, I heard our driver, Amos, telling the gardener, Jared, in Kiswahili, “Mama ime enda juu ku pumzika” — “Mama has gone upstairs to rest.” For Amos, the euphemism made the telling easier. Similarly, I heard someone else ask — in a combination of English and Katchi — “Kyare off thai wai, Dilly?” or “When did Dilly go off?” — as if a light bulb inside my mother, Dilly, had been merely switched off. And yet another person, sitting in our living room, said in Gujrati, “Garyal kyare bandh thase, koi ne nathi khabar” — “no one knows when the clock will stop ticking.” And one of our Sikh friends, who embraced my father, said to him in Punjabi, “Dilly, poorey ho gayi”— “Dilly is finally complete” — implying her breath-soul was one with its creator. As for my sisters and I, when we said our prayers of supplication, in Gujrati, we asked that our mother’s soul become “Asal me vasal,” or be merged with the universal soul. A connection of words to “ruh,” to spirit, essence and breath — a straight line between living and dying and the human heart-clock ticking each precious second, to an eternal timeline. God’s will as our destiny. All of these ideas swirled around in my head in my sorrow, as I tried to make sense in my own words of my mother’s sudden passing and the journey of her soul homeward.

This was when I began to feverishly recite the Nade Ali dua, all the time, not even remembering what each word meant, just holding on to the strange Arabic words my mother had taught me. It reminded me that my link with her and the eternal, where I believed she was, was unbroken. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, panicked, and then imagine her at the foot of my bed, her calm, measured voice speaking in English and Gujrati, “Remember, saas ooh saas”: hold every precious breath steady, through recitation of the prayer, still your turmoiled mind, your ruh. 

This period of grief transported me back to the happy memories of my school days at a Catholic convent, where my mother used to drop me off every morning. In the car on the way back home, I often sang the hymns I’d learned, and eventually she learned them all; we would sing together. Unbidden, a forgotten Latin phrase began playing in my mind: “Au causa nostrae laetitiae” — Mother of Joy, words we used to sing at school for Mary, the mother of Jesus. But now in my confused state, I began to say them as though I was asking my own mother for help and reassurance. 

Bereft, and my mind wandering here and there, I recalled an Arabic phrase that a professor had mentioned to me several years earlier when I was studying at university in Canada. At that time, my younger self had not paid attention to it; the context was secular, I was not quite certain what the phrase meant, and the words had not really resonated. But unexpectedly, the incantation came back to me — “Labbaik Allahumma labbaik” — “Here I am Lord, Here I am.” Those words became a plea to my mother, in as much as they were to God, Here I am, don’t forget me.

Untethered, words and phrases swirled in my mind — Arabic, Latin, Gujrati, Katchi, Punjabi, Swahili. I held onto whatever I could, the language did not matter, simply grasping at whatever words came to me, to calm myself.  

One afternoon, a few months after the funeral, sitting in our home library, which housed my father’s collection of four thousand books, I picked up a volume of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry translated from Bengali (1912), Gitanjali. Flipping through the pages, I found a poem my mother had bookmarked with a shopping receipt, which renewed my desolation and heartbreak. The poem was about the absence of words, when one experienced “ultimate reality.”  In Poem 67, Tagore notes how in the spiritual realm, “there is no day nor night, nor form nor color, and never, never a word.” According to Tagore, in the presence of the divine, which is “the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in,” earthly concepts like time, day, or night, physical attributes such as form and color, and all communication or words cease to exist. Everything is replaced by a “stainless white radiance,” and profound peace. These lines of the poem frightened me. In my anguish I had been trying to hold on to my mother’s memory and spirit with words, and understand her passing using language and logic, but the reality was that I never would. She was in a place where there were no words, and her death was a spiritual experience in which language had its limits. To Tagore, death or spiritual union highlighted a moment of perfect, wordless communion with the divine, a state of being rather than knowing:  

But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor color, and never, never a word. 

Around this same time, a friend introduced me to a prayer in Sanskrit, which she said was special because it praised the feminine divine. This was a new discovery for me, as the figure of God had always been male-centric, and in seeking solace for the loss of my mother, these newfound words resonated and reassured me:

OM anandamayi chaitanyamayi satyamayi parame 

“Om – She, the Delight, She, the Consciousness, She, the Truth, She, the Supreme.” When I sang those words, I felt my mother was at peace, in bliss, with the ultimate. In my heart I believed she would have liked me to know that she really was.

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I do not know if it was my mother’s ruh guiding me to discover ways of keeping our bond alive, through words and languages, in a form that was unique to her and myself, or it was just coincidence. Whatever the case, from Arabic to Kiswahili, Gujrati, Katchi, Latin, Punjabi, Bengali, and Sanskrit, I have sought consolation and tried to deepen my connection with my mother through her language — one of prayer, euphemism, poetry, and spirituality.  

In his poem “Do You Speak Persian?”, Kaveh Akbar writes about linguistic loss and identity, and about the experience of forgetting one’s mother tongue:

I have been so careless with the words I already have.
I don’t remember how to say home
in my first language, or lonely, or light.

The loss he names is not merely that of vocabulary, but of something more intimate — the fading of a lexicon that once held memories of familiar yearnings: “home, loneliness, and light.” What disappears is not only words, but access to a particular emotional register, a way of feeling and naming the world that cannot be perfectly translated. The mother tongue, then, begins to feel less like a single, fixed language and more like a constellation of words that carry one’s earliest meanings. He writes:

I remember only
delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, goodnight.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?
Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?
Shab bekheir.

For so long every step I’ve taken
has been from one tongue to another.

As I reflect on what might truly be my mother tongue, I am reminded of the ancient Catholic phrase “Lex orandi, lex credenda” — the law of praying is the law of believing. If you want to understand what someone believes, don’t just ask them. Listen, if you can, to how they pray. There, more than in any formal explanation, their deepest convictions are revealed. In much the same way, if you ask someone what their mother tongue is, you may receive an intellectual answer, perhaps one shaped by cultural expectation, or even one that resists it. But a more revealing approach is simply to listen. Listen to how they speak with their family, with close friends; notice the words and phrases that come most naturally, the language, or languages, that surface without effort. In those unguarded moments, what emerges is not merely a single language, but a lived lexicon: a store of inherited words, borrowed cadences, private idioms. There, in that accumulation of speech, you may discover their true mother tongue, not as one language alone, but “from one tongue to another, ” as the feeling carried by the words that have made them who they are.

I’ve come to understand the idea of a mother tongue or tongues as less about words, phrases, or languages, and more to do with feelings — what was learned, how it was conveyed, and how that shapes understanding. For what can it mean to have a single mother tongue when one is brought up in a context with diverse languages? In a world of endless translation, languages offer a path to loss and connect us to our mothers, our inner selves, and the eternal Mother.