On Language and Estrangement

Contrary to the usual set up, I struggle with my first language more than I do my second. Largely because the occupant for 'native' language has shifted for me more and more as I get older and older in my familial estrangement.

My native language isn't the one I was born into, or the one I grew up hearing and speaking, or the one I spent countless interactions translating for myself and others. My native language is English now, and my first language is like a distant family friend who insists they know you, and are so emotional to see you, and you literally just can't remember at all.

Or maybe you do? Maybe you remember their gaze, or the atmosphere they described once knowing you in, or something in their laugh. But all in all, you don't know them, and you barely remember them, and you certainly do not feel able to carry a conversation. What would you say? How would you say it? And then it's awkward, or embarrassing, and you don't want to be rude, but you so badly want to leave.

When I ran away from home, I moved in with a kind and odd family of white people who had heard seldom about my country or culture except that it was uniquely challenging to trace my lineage due to "race and ethnicity!" (the mother in this household was an accomplished genealogist, which is why she knew that). 

Estrangement shatters your entire world. It's devastating, complicated, and tragic. It's traumatizing, very fucking lonely, and for some reason, it came as a total surprise to learn that estrangement is also devoid of culture.

Why didn't I anticipate that? To some extent I did, and I made it a point to travel to Puerto Rico on my own throughout the years and visit the few family members I trusted, or stay in the places I remember, and also in places I didn't know at all. I made playlists of the music I grew up hearing and shared them with my friends and read the lyrics and I bought a cast iron rice pot to cook for anyone who would let me, and I sincerely miscalculated how much of culture is made up of people, and there is actually no amount of music or food or tv shows or references or language books to "brush up on my Spanish" that is going to replace the missing people who made up those things.

I don't have conversational skills in Spanish anymore, and if I do, the slang and expressions are probably outdated by at least 10 years. The music I am most excited to play is bordering on 20 years old...some of it is older. My dialect is affected by the hundreds of people I've tried to keep my language alive with who aren't even from my country. I don't have a grasp on what is trendy, stylish, or cute.  I barely know what is appropriate or normal, and I certainly, absolutely cannot express myself the same.

Estrangement makes you feel more than what language can capture, and then as time goes on, estrangement takes away the language you had left to try.

I didn't know I was losing my native language until it was too late; not until the third or fourth eager face to converse with me that I felt like I was gonna disappoint. Or the ninth or tenth question I couldn't answer, or the hundredth sentence I sincerely couldn't process and translate in my head, and regardless, if I could, not in enough time before they switched to English.

There were times in the past where I'd hear myself speaking Spanish and realize I was losing it...then months would go by, maybe even years of no one in my house speaking to me in my native language, and it wouldn't be until a stranger spoke to me like I knew what the hell he was saying that I realized I had officially lost it.

My friends ask me to translate something - I can't. Maybe the gist, but even then, I don't know. They ask me how I would say ____ in Spanish, and if I know, I have to Google translate to be sure, and if I don't know, I have to Google translate just to know at all.

In the embarrassment of forgetting my own language is a deep yearning for something I technically already have. I feel like someone who peaked in high school, constantly referencing my previous glory days of proficiency and fluency as a band-aid for my very underdeveloped skill now.

This corrosion of language is a type of cognitive dissonance, and it's difficult to bridge because the trust between your language and your speech is broken. I see it in small moments where Spanish flies out of me like a furious flight of doves, and I feel like I am speaking to an old friend who I used to know very well and miss very badly; moments where I use a complex tense or verb and insist I must be wrong, only to check and see I was absolutely right.

Spanish is in me, but it's buried in the part of me that comes home to it, and calls my family with it, and translates for my grandma. That part of me is farther away than I remember, and every year that I live without my family in my life, I have less and less bodily memory of what it looked like to talk to them. Unfortunately, language makes up most of that.

Language and culture is one of the final frontiers of healing from estrangement. It's not a last step in the process by any means, but it's an unaccounted for punch-in-the-gut every time you realize that it can't just be re-accounted for. It can't be made up; there isn't a way to 'find' culture and language, the way you 'found' family¹. It is simply something you just lack, and miss, and slowly find yourself on the outskirts of, until you contemplate shocking your senses and psyche by just moving to a country you didn't grow up in but still grew up around, just to see if you can speed-run your cultural competence and regain a connection that is significantly more familial than you'd care to admit.

I have a Spanish dictionary-learning-book-workbook type thing on my dining room table. I pick it up and feel stupid. I pick it up and feel empty. I see the value in getting better, and practicing, and relearning, but that value is in employment, courtesy, and practicality. For me, that's admittedly not incentive enough.

I don't want to feel this way. But every time I try to reengage with it, I just keep feeling like, if I can't speak Spanish with the people who gave it to me, what is it worth speaking anymore at all?

¹ ‘Found Family’ is a colloquial term in the Estranged community, as well as in queer and trans community,  and is commonly used to refer to the friends and people that have become so trusted and integrated into our lives post-estrangement that they might as well be family, particularly since there is not a biological family occupying that space your friends and selected community is.