English and My Mother’s Ghost

Trace a person’s linguistic heritage and you know the story of their life. My mother was born in Kuwait but grew up in Pune, India. English and Hindi were her first languages. The families of both her Kuwaiti parents were merchants based in India, among several Kuwaiti merchant families residing there. Indian Ocean trade was characterized by movement up and down the coasts, affecting the sensibility of traders and sailors alike. My mother’s family, despite decades in India, was never cut off from Kuwait, maintaining personal and economic ties to their homeland. My mother attended an Anglican boarding school in Devlali, along with her siblings. For her, English was the language of education and communication, Hindi the language of the heart. Arabic didn’t really come into the picture until later, following her family’s departure from India and resettlement in Kuwait in the mid-1950s.

My mother’s mother, my maternal grandmother, was fluent in both Hindi and Marathi, and when I say fluent, I mean no detectable accent, no hesitancy of expression, just an effortless glide between the two. She did not, however, speak English. My bibliophile grandfather, on the other hand, did. Enamored of English literature, he read and re-read the classics from Chaucer to Dickens and everything in between. His curiosity was insatiable and indiscriminate, his capacious floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with books on conventional subjects like philosophy, history, and mathematics, along with fringe topics like numerology and the occult. He was never without a book in hand, and was known among friends and family as “the walking encyclopedia.” There wasn’t a word in the English language he couldn’t define, and he was constantly being tested by his grandkids. We would shout out a word we had just looked up — “luminescence!” — and without skipping a beat, he would calmly recite a precise definition: “the emission of light by a substance that has not been heated, like fluorescence or phosphorescence.” We imagined him seated at his worn teak desk, reading his thick dictionary cover to cover for entertainment. English was not his first language, but it was his chosen favorite, the language to which he remained true.

Accidents of geography and family history made English, not Arabic, my first language. 

The residue of ancestral preferences gets passed down, even if unintentionally and undiscerned. My mother, an avid reader like her father, read exclusively in English. She gained fluency in Arabic upon her return to Kuwait at the age of twelve, attending an Arabic-language government school, but I never once remember her reading an Arabic book. At university in the United States, she majored in English literature and minored in political science. Her bookshelves sheltered what remained of her father’s precious collection. After his death, his library was dismantled by my grandmother, who, in the throes of grief, gave away many of his books to strangers. In addition to some of her father’s rescued books, my mother’s shelves contained all the books she had read at university, along with many others she had purchased on her trips to Mumbai. My mother’s connection to India was never cut, and she continued to visit annually with her friends, her siblings, her daughters, and her mother until she was too old to make the trip. She would return to Kuwait, her luggage laden with books, many of them for my sisters and me.

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Like my mother — because of my mother — English and Hindi are my first languages too. My father jokes that he couldn’t communicate with me properly until I was two years old, by which time he had managed a firm grasp of English, the language of his residency in the United States. My father’s first language was decidedly Arabic, but he was only sixteen when he moved to Vienna to study medicine, forced to quickly master German and Latin in order to attend the University of Vienna. Like my mother, my father had a real facility for languages, and he excelled at university, graduating at the top of his class. My mother spoke to me in English, and my beloved nanny, my ayah Monica, spoke to me in Hindi. My mother and Monica spoke to each other in Hindi, leaving my father out. My mother and father spoke to each other in Arabic, leaving me out.

I spent the first year of my life in the United Kingdom and the next five in the United States, where I started school. Apart from my parents, I didn’t hear any Arabic circling around. Until our return to Kuwait when I was six years old, I had no sense at all that Arabic was supposed to have been my mother tongue. What I had instead was English, my mother’s gift to me, wending its way up from India to Kuwait, following the trade route across the Indian Ocean. Accidents of geography and family history made English, not Arabic, my first language. 

Upon our return to Kuwait, I was enrolled at an American school because my mother insisted on it. She believed in the American system of education, and, at the time, the American School of Kuwait was a truly American, non-profit school: American teachers, American curriculum, and, mostly, American students. Many of my mother’s friends and relatives tried to convince her that this wasn’t a good idea, especially since we were girls. I was the only Kuwaiti girl in my grade whose parents were both Kuwaiti. There were a few Kuwaiti boys enrolled at the school, which was considered barely acceptable. But for a girl, it was a ticking time bomb. What exactly were they worried might transpire? That my sisters and I wouldn’t learn Arabic? That we would lose our “habits and traditions”? That we would date boys and so tarnish our “reputations,” making a suitable marriage impossible?

This was the mid-seventies in Kuwait, a time of openness and great transformation, but still Victorian when it came to its consideration of girls. My mother, whose stubbornness I have inherited, turned a deaf ear and blind eye and did what she pleased. My father, whose brother was married to a lovely American woman and whose children, my cousins, already attended the same school, sided with my mother. So my sisters and I went to an American school, consolidating English as our mother tongue.

Arabic and Religion were mandatory subjects at our school, but, I’m ashamed to say, we didn’t take them seriously. Our poor teachers — all of them Palestinian, endlessly patient and caring — were forced by the government to teach the most mind-numbingly boring curriculum imaginable. Our teachers couldn’t do much to make it interesting, so holding our attention was nearly impossible. We wanted to pass, but we didn’t care much about actually learning the language or the culture being conveyed through that language. It felt far-removed and archaic. We were reading ancient texts that had nothing to do with our lives. The grammar seemed impenetrable and didn’t jibe with the way Arabic was actually spoken in the streets or at home.

I learned Arabic as I would a foreign language, as I would later learn Italian and French. While one of my uncles would relentlessly order his three daughters — also in American schools because he was a diplomat overseas — to “speak in Arabic,” my parents didn’t seem at all concerned about any linguistic threats to their own girls. As mentioned, my parents spoke to each other in Arabic, but to my sisters and me in English. My mother sometimes spoke to us in Hindi (especially if she didn’t want others in Kuwait to understand), and sometimes, rarely, in Arabic (usually when we were traveling abroad and she needed a secret code). My sisters and I spoke to each other mainly in English, to Monica in Hindi, and to each other and to our mother also sometimes in Hindi. For my sisters and me, Arabic was notably absent.

And yet, it wasn’t. Not really. We absorbed far more Arabic than we may have believed at the time. Algerian writer Assia Djebar chose to write in French rather than Arabic because it was the language of her education, even though Arabo-Berber was her mother tongue. She calls French her “stepmother tongue.” But a single word in her mother tongue could bring back the maternal connection to the oral tradition severed by French. Similarly, for me, Arabic has become, at this stage, an unlikely language of love. In it, I hear my mother’s habibti, and my husband’s. No other word in any language conveys the emotional tenor of this single Arabic word. But unlike French for Djebar, English is not my stepmother tongue. It remains my mother tongue, carrying on its wings my linguistic inheritance, my childhood, and my mother’s once vibrant life.

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Voracious readers don’t always become writers, but worthy writers are always voracious readers. We were a family of readers. My father read his medical journals and books in English, but he also enjoyed historical novels like I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves, and letter collections like those exchanged between Vincent and Theo van Gogh (books in English, not German or Arabic, because those were the ones available on our family shelves). When I was a child, my mother read Mother Goose nursery rhymes to me and all sorts of fairy tales. She sang little ditties like “I’m a shrimp, I’m a shrimp, and I live in the sea,” which she must have learned in India, and the American folk ballad, “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” (She had such a beautiful voice, a voice I can almost hear still, though she has been lost and gone forever for over twenty-four years.) She made sure my sisters and I always had plenty to read, and read we did at all hours of the day, everywhere. Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, Roald Dahl, and, in proper colonial fashion, Enid Blyton and Rudyard Kipling: at the dining table, in the bath, in bed under the covers with a flashlight. Then, at school, there were the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie. Books, ever more books to read.

Writing felt as natural to me as reading. I kept a diary obsessively from around the age of ten. Then, at fourteen, I discovered the diaries of Anaïs Nin on my mother’s shelves, devoured them, and understood my destiny. I was a teenager — everything felt dramatic and necessary, writing most of all. At first, it was my mother’s books, her tastes and preferences, that shaped me as a writer and, more significantly, as a young person. I took risks, was independent, didn’t care what others thought, and was willing to make mistakes and pay the price. Heady stuff for a girl growing up in the Arab world, but that’s how it was for me, and I had no doubt that English was what had made it possible. My cousins who attended Arabic-language schools did not feel the same way about themselves or their futures as I did; the only difference between us that I could make out was English.

In the mid-1990s, when I was a student of postcolonial studies in graduate school, the debate around the continued use or abandonment of colonial languages by the once colonized remained salient. Chinua Achebe had famously made the case that English in African countries was part of a colonial legacy, “which history has forced down our throats.” As he put it in his seminal 1964 speech, “The African Writer and the English Language”: 

Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.

He is not suggesting that English should be the only language utilized by African writers, but that those who choose to use it will reach a wider audience within Africa and across the world, and will simultaneously manage to transform African languages in exciting ways that reflect African experiences. 

In his Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o counters Achebe’s claim:

Why, we may ask, should an African writer, or any writer, become so obsessed by taking from his mother-tongue to enrich other languages? […] Why not create literary monuments in our own languages?

Ngũgĩ abandoned English in his fiction writing, committing instead to Gĩkũyũ, his mother tongue. For Ngũgĩ, the use of European languages by non-European writers was a sign of their mental colonization and mystification, an indication of the triumph of neocolonialism in non-European countries. “What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?” None. On this point Ngũgĩ remained unequivocal until his death.

At the time, both perspectives seemed convincing to me. Decolonized countries needed both kinds of writers, I thought. Achebe’s view made space for this: “I hope […] that there will always be men [sic] […] who will choose to write in their native tongue and ensure that our ethnic literature will flourish side by side with the national ones” (written in European languages, according to Achebe). Morally, Ngũgĩ’s view seems the more uncompromising and admirable one. After all, he was imprisoned in Kenya for a year in 1978 for his play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, critical of the government, and written in Gĩkũyũ. Upon his release, he lost his position at Nairobi University and was forced into exile. Even so, I, like Achebe, continue to feel that I have no choice but to write in English.

Kuwait was a protectorate of Britain. Though not a colony in the strictest sense, it was nonetheless shaped by exactly the same colonial imperatives as the rest of the region. However, English and its cultural baggage were not imposed on Kuwait the way they were on Kenya, Nigeria, or India. My mother’s Anglican education was no doubt colonial, as were my grandfather’s reading preferences; they carried that legacy with them, minus the direct violence colonial subjects suffered. Indirectly, my English is tainted by colonialism; and as the center of imperial power shifted from Britain to the United States, my American school education no doubt expanded and intensified this taint. My awareness of all this did nothing to change my sense that, for me, English was as inevitable as a coup de foudre.

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But where does all this leave me today as an Arab writer who writes in English and is based in the Arab world, who inhabits a language that is not the language of my homeland or culture, but is the language of my mother’s love for me? Very much at the periphery of the literary establishment — a lonely place to be. Like Ngũgĩ, Arab writers and readers tend to look askance at those of us — a small minority — who write Arab narratives in English. I remember an Arab journalist being appalled when, in response to a question from an audience member at a book reading, I explained that I dreamed in English. He took it as though I had openly admitted to committing adultery. For me, it was just the way things were. This negative judgement does not extend to Arab writers writing in English based in the West. Such writers — Arab-Americans, Arab-British, or Arab-Australians — are considered by the Arab literary establishment to be American, British, or Australian writers. They belong to a western literary milieu that has no real connection to the Arab context (unless their books are translated into Arabic, though even then, they are not quite inside). As a result of immigration — their parents’ or their own — they belong elsewhere, to an English-speaking place. Indeed, they are often celebrated for their successes as Arabs making it in the West. In contrast, an Arab writer based in the Arab world writing in English is not afforded the same grace, and may be judged not only as a traitor to the Arabic language, but to the Arab world tout court.

In the West, where writers like me must publish in order to attempt to gain a wider readership, there is equally scant interest. Attention is primarily focused on their own hyphenated Arab citizens rather than on interloping outsiders. This is not surprising; such hyphenated Arab writers are physically nearby, more accessible, often writing about familiar contexts. There are two exceptions to this tendency: Arab writers who happen to be from countries currently making headlines and Arab writers whose books have been translated into English. However, Arab writers based in the Arab world writing in English and publishing in the West are not granted much space in the English-speaking world.

While it can’t be easy for immigrant writers to switch languages, when they make the decision to do so, they become part of the community of writers in their new home: most famously Conrad, Beckett, and Kundera. The immigrant writer who decides to cling to the mother tongue in the new locale is writing for a different audience, an audience left behind, such as, for example, Sinan Antoon. In both cases, these immigrant writers know who they are writing for. In my case, the situation is more nebulous. I believe I am writing for a local audience, but that audience, apart from a small minority, understandably isn’t interested in reading books in English, a language not its own. At the same time, I believe I am writing for a wider, English-reading audience across the world, but that audience, apart from a small minority, is usually more interested in reading books by writers closer to home, for the reasons mentioned above. 

If Arabic had been my mother tongue, and my mother’s. If she had grown up in Kuwait. If I hadn’t spent my childhood abroad. If my grandfather hadn’t loved English literature. If I hadn’t attended an American school. If Arabic had been the language of home. If I had made a decision to abandon English and to adopt Arabic instead, forcing it into the shape of a stepmother tongue. If this string of conditionals had been met, would I still be me? More importantly, would my glorious mother still have been herself? No — and for that alone, I will never abandon English, even if I could.

I had always brandished English proudly, grateful for the geographical and ancestral serendipity that had made it mine.

As a writer, English can do things for me that Arabic can’t. English gives me a degree of freedom of thought and expression that doesn’t quite translate. I’ve worked closely with the translators of both my collection of short stories and novel, and it’s not easy to convey texture and tone. Not because the translators aren’t excellent — they are, I’ve been lucky in that regard — but because Arabic itself seems to resist my specific formulations. Dialogue can come across as stilted, wavering uncomfortably between a formal, classical Arabic and a more casual dialect. Certain subjects seem difficult to broach — especially when it comes to sex and politics — and language seems to falter because of societal taboos or fear of governmental repercussions. I’m not suggesting that expressions of such topics aren’t possible in Arabic; they are. It’s just that, to me, they seem cloaked in shame. English never makes me feel ashamed of my writing or myself in quite the same way. The problem isn’t with Arabic, of course, but with me — or perhaps with my society, its cultural mores, and the imagined (or real) judgment I seem to have internalized. Still, I can’t find my way through this particular knot. I’m not sure I want to anyway.

To be honest, I never experienced any loneliness as a writer as a result of English before now. I had always brandished English proudly, grateful for the geographical and ancestral serendipity that had made it mine, oblivious as to how it may have resulted in any exclusion or judgment. In fact, I relished the outsider status it bestowed, how it fostered an uncommon perspective aligned with the single-minded intransigence inherited from my mother. I wonder whether this recent sense of isolation has started to surface because I am nearing the age my mother was when she died. If I live to be older than my mother — something she would want for me but which to me feels unnatural and cruel — I will be alone in time, alone in English. Until now, my mother’s ghost has accompanied me through the years. I’ve been able to reassure myself that she had been here before me — at any of life’s pivotal junctures — so I, too, could proceed despite impediments. Soon, however, I won’t be able to tell myself that. I will have to make my way without a trace of her precedent. But if I keep reminding myself that English was her precious gift to me, I may be able to maintain my connection to her and stay loyal to her memory. If it means that as a writer I will never quite belong anywhere, so be it. I will use English anyway to write as I please. By doing so, I remain my mother’s daughter, the writer only she could make me.

Discover more of Hazem Harb’s art here.