When I think of language, I think of foreignness. I think of who gets to decide what is foreign and what is domestic. What is foreign? I am foreign. I am foreign because of the dark tint on my face. I am foreign because of my last name, of only six letters, that causes a raucous of confusion for messy high school librarians with an inclination to call anything different weird.

They ask, over and over again:“Kay-yir-uh? Kai-year-ah? Key-air. It must be Key-air”  

I am foreign because of my parents’ strange English or thick accents, as some might say. Yet, that thickness and strangeness remains unbeknownst to me.

I want to yell at the girl my sister invited over to our house. The girl stomped on the olive branch my sister extended.

She whined in her sing-songy voice: “I have to spend the day with your parents? But it’s so hard to understand them.”

I want to yell at her, but that would be impolite so the Cheshire cat of Keene holds my tongue. And so begins the narrative of a foreign girl in a Western land.

When I was four-years-old, my family departed from the orange-clay dusted roads of Malawi. You cannot trust my narration as the days of my first four years flicker like a tiny flame fending off wild winds. The memories remain submerged in the deep Indian Ocean of my subconscious. On and off. On and off.

Yet, I remember the threads of our departure. We, my mom, sisters, and I sat on tan leather cushions of a van. I held a smile across my lips, bemusing my aunt, who sat across from me.  She asked: “Patience, what are you smiling about?”

My reply flutters away like a bird in migration. The car morphed into a plane, and the plane became Heathrow airport, where I begged my mother to buy me a British doll with curly blonde hair. Eventually, Heathrow transformed into a first-level Victorian-esque apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, yet the airport never left.

44 Lawrence Street. At night, a ginger tabby cat hid underneath the porch. My four-year-old self would speak to the creature in an invented tongue of “let-me-entertain-myself-by-talking-to-the-cat.” Yet, talking to cats in broken English proved not to be ideal. From early on, my parents lectured me and my two older sisters on the value of English.

“Practice speaking English to each other. Speak up! Be a leader and not a follower.” These were some of the many lessons our sponge-like minds absorbed, almost too well.

With each year, the syllabic taste of my mother tongue in my mouth became odd. Do these sounds really belong to me and my lingual history?

At Malawian get-togethers, family friends greeted me with, “Mulu Bwanji, (How are you).”  My palms sweated tears of discomfort as I muttered quietly, “I’m fine.” It became a running joke that “Patience was not patient enough to learn the language.” Speaking English like an American child was not a sin, but forgetting my own mother-tongue was something else.

I grew to resent the title of “immigrant” or  “non-English” speaker. I wanted my speech to flow effortlessly like a ribbon in the wind. When my family moved to Canada, the distance between me and my history grew. Hearing my friends chat about their French grandmothers who urged them to practice their French, I developed a keen interest in French.

In my childlike innocence, I would reply: “Oh, that’s neat. I want to practice my French too.”

My friends would raise their eyebrows and blink rapidly for 15 seconds, reminding me that “French” is not my own language and to stick to my own culture.

Familial fingers across the globe blame my parents. Somehow, that trans-atlantic stream of judgement does not seem fair. Yet what really matters is what is outside the child’s window each morning: the bus stop; the school where children snicker at the African girl’s attempts to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; at soccer practice where someone asks, “If you’re from Africa why don’t you sound African?”; at a friend’s house where a friend asks, “How do you understand your parents?”; at a hipster teahouse where the barista asks, “So where are you originally from?”; and at a library where the librarian says, “Your last name is one of those weird ones, isn’t it?

These experiences repelled me from embracing my mother tongue, a decision that disheartens me each day as I type on my resume, “Patience Kayira, Majors: English & French, Concentration: Translation Studies.” I guess I am not too ashamed to say that I am proud of my shame.

 

Patience Kayira ’20 is originally from Malawi, but she has lived in the United States and Canada for the past 15 years. For the majority of her formative years, she has lived in different places, so she considers herself a global citizen. Patience is currently a double majoring in English and French, and she hopes to pursue a career in journalism or professional writing after Smith.

 

 

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