TMR received a deluge of submissions for our newest issue, demonstrating that mother tongues, whether they elicit yearning, pride, grief, or shame, are never neutral.
Here at The Markaz Review, we are all translators, whether by profession or proclivity, choice or circumstance of life. We have all lived in foreign countries and spoken foreign languages, forever navigating the push-pull of competing cultures. How, then, could we not be intrigued, if not obsessed, by the amorphous notion that is a mother tongue? Of the pairing of the vehicle of language and the happenstance of birth, and the turmoil so often wrought by such an encounter?
There are so many ways to lose a mother tongue, though surely displacement is among the most common. Leaving one’s home, through migration, forced exile, or voluntarily, in search of a new beginning or, quite simply, a better life, can also mean leaving one’s language behind as well. For the better you speak your new tongue, the easier, in theory, is access to your new country. “In theory,” because as we all know — however snug the blinders worn, we all see — this is often not the case at all. Mother tongues can then become both dangerous baggage and precious commodity.
Regardless of country, region, or language, “mother tongue” has come to mean “original tongue,” and by extension, for far too many, “legitimate tongue.” Perhaps some of our readers will be well acquainted with one manifestation of this poisonous belief, in the form of two questions, the second invariably following the first: Where are you from? … No, where are you really from?
Perhaps others will know the depth of yearning for a mother tongue, forever out of reach — forbidden, repressed, or merely, irrevocably, forgotten. In my own case, that language is Arabic, a tongue I have grieved for, however silently, for most of my adulthood. For although my first four years of life were spent in Tunisia, hearing Arabic around me — or rather the cajoling blend of French and Tunisian, speakers effortlessly switching between the two — this was not enough of a safeguard. At home, and especially after leaving the country, we spoke English, the shared language between my Tunisian father and my American mother.
For years, I hoped, again silently, that this language — my father tongue — was simply lying in wait. That it had been imprinted in my mind at a young age and could be more or less easily awakened later in life, like one of those rare orchids that lie dormant in the soil for years. Rip Van Winkle orchids, they’re called. But today, more than thirty years after leaving my birth country for the United States, and currently residing in yet another country (France), I’m well aware that my Arabic is gone, though perhaps not forever. There is always time, until there isn’t. I can still learn. As my father would say — as I might say — bi shwaya bi shwaya. Slowly, slowly.
In any case, my lost tongue is forever returning to me in precious scraps, in the books I am inclined to read and translate, mainly by authors of North African origin, a WhatsApp message from a beloved uncle (a mix of French, Tunisian, English, and emoji), or, as of late, during staff meetings peppered with a mix of accents and dialects, expressions from Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, alongside Americanisms, Moroccanisms, and countless other -isms. The shared tongue is English, a language that, despite its faults, namely the well-deserved burden of being the colonial tongue par excellence, is delightfully flexible and yielding. Welcoming even. At least to neologisms.
Of course, we’re not alone in feeling the urge to share and express this sense of linguistic multiplicity. We received a deluge of submissions for our MOTHER TONGUE issue, written in or about languages as far ranging as Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Hindi, Italian, French, Yoruba, Turkish, and English. Every piece differed, many moving, some surprising, a few delightfully strange, but they all had the same through line — language is what makes us. It forms the core of our identities, whether absent or present, wanted or unwanted.
As Mai Al-Nakib writes, in her essay “English and My Mother’s Ghost,” which explores English as her Kuwaiti mother’s gift to her, “Trace a person’s linguistic heritage and you know the story of their life.” Writer Majd Aburrub impressively distills this same notion to a single word in “Sara,” a short story about a Palestinian woman living in an unnamed U.S. city, haunted by the invisible yet weighty “H” English speakers unknowingly append to her given name. In “Language and Mother Eternal,” Farah Ahamed describes the multiplicity of tongues she inherited from her mother, and how language itself can be the conduit for acceptance in the face of deep grief. Amy Omar, in “Culture Got Your Tongue,” unpacks how physical ailments — numbness, stuttering, uncontrollable trembling — may in fact be manifestations of linguistic and cultural silencing.
Poetry is unsurprisingly an excellent medium for thoughts about tongues, maternal, paternal, or otherwise. This issue includes, then, a hybrid piece by Sheeshaka (Farsi for “witches”), a collective of seven Afghan American women, as well as new poems by Namal Siddiqui and Hajer Requiq, the latter of whom sardonically notes, “I never thought my Arabic could last this long against the beatbox backdrop of ‘byes’ and ‘babes’ and ‘Bath & Body Works.’”
Our centerpiece is an essay by Sarah Aziza, author of The Hollow Half. “Ojalá: Toward an Illiteracy of Liberation” is a lyrical meditation on grief, language, and political solidarity, tracing one Palestinian writer’s silence in the wake of genocide in Gaza and her gradual return to language through learning Spanish. Other highlights include two interviews — “Three Artists, Five Writers on Mother Tongues,” conducted by our founding editor Jordan Elgrably, and another with Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck, conducted by TMR’s new Literary Editor, Abdelrahman ElGendy. There’s also new fiction in translation by Zeinab Ghassan Khaddour, “Words That Don’t Sink,” a book list compiled by Executive Editor Rana Asfour, a profile of Egyptian artist Mariem Abutaleb , and finally, because we couldn’t help ourselves, a literal interpretation of the theme in the form of recipes for… tongue, by acclaimed chef Anissa Helou.
All these pieces feel especially pertinent now, amid renewed violence in the very regions these voices speak from and to. Some writers noted the failure of language, in the face of horror, and others, its endless power. Both can be true, though the latter thought is surely what keeps us all going.
We invite you to take your time, read this selection of stories, essays, interviews, and poems, and let us know what you think. We plan to keep the conversation going, first with an upcoming round table with a few of the featured authors, hosted by TMR Senior Editor Lina Mounzer, and pieces related to the theme throughout the year — there were too many gems that we couldn’t bear to discard. Happy reading.
—Lara Vergnaud
TMR Managing Editor
