Of Mother Tongues and Sleeping Orchids
Mother tongues, endlessly chimeric, endlessly beguiling, can become both dangerous baggage and precious commodity.
Universal Words, the Art of Mariem Abutaleb
In which a young artist goes beyond words, beyond language, to create meaning with signs and symbols of her own creation.
“It’s Not ‘Whatever’”: On Mother Tongue, Exile, and Inheritance
A Lebanese poet in California, Zeina Hashem Beck tends to the tension between Arabic and English, grief and joy, and the inheritance of our mother tongues.
Three Artists, Five Writers on Mother Tongues
TMR’s Editor-in-Chief, curious about how people negotiate their identity between a mother tongue and other languages, asked a few questions.
Language and the Mother Eternal
A reflection on how multiple languages in a family become a perfect conduit for grief and acceptance.
Culture Got Your Tongue
A writer questions whether physical ailments — numbness, stuttering, uncontrollable trembling — may in fact stem from a cultural silencing, in this case of Turkish identity and belonging.
Ojalá: Toward an Illiteracy of Liberation
In the wake of the genocide in Gaza, a Palestinian writer loses her words — until she finds her way back to language in another tongue.
English and My Mother’s Ghost
A writer traces the circuitous journey of a mother tongue, noting that “accidents of geography and family history” made English, and not Arabic, her first language.
“Sorry about the Typos”—two Poems by Hajer Requiq
Two poems explore the contradictions within language and how they influence and reshape our perception of the world.
“Urdu,” a poem—Language as Heirloom
A poet of Pakistani heritage raised around Arabic and English longs for deeper expression of her mother’s tongue.
New Poems: “bey-zubaan; without a tongue”
This collective work, penned by seven Afghan writers, offers a counter-narrative to dismantle the disaster narrative mapped onto Afghan lives.
“Sara”—a short story
Palestinian writer Majd Aburrub dissects the exquisite loneliness of losing one’s mother tongue.