Being Othered by Others

Question: If a child cannot speak their mother tongue, who's to blame? The mother, or the tongue?

I’m currently in America, meaning that I was at war with spell-check throughout the drafting of this whole post. If you see some American English mixed in with British English at any points during your reading of this, please ignore them as hard as I did during the editing process. ENJOY! (This post also contains a SPOILER FREE book review/discussion)

Portrait of the Listeners — Tonia Nneji (2020)

When my soul was chosen to be pressed into flesh, and the obstetrician brought my wriggling form out from a gash in my mother’s uterus, my grandmother was there to name me.

According to the anecdotes I’ve heard over the years, she took one look at me and chose the Igbo name Chioma. Chioma meaning “good God.” Chioma meaning “lucky,” and “favoured.” Chioma meaning the first daughter that she bounced on her hip when my mother was bed-bound and recovering, and my father had thrown himself back into his work. To the untrained (read: non-Nigerian) ear, this name might seem pretty unique, even rare. In actuality, this name is pretty common; the name is so loudly Igbo that if you walked into a hall-party and yelled it out into the crowd, you’d turn the heads of about 65% of the attendee – not just because they, too, might share the name, but because it’s very likely that they know someone who does.

I say all this to reach this point: I’ve always felt that my grandmother was the most Nigerian thing about me. Not only did she appoint me with my ethnic name, but she’s the one that used to annually visit our family home with luggage smelling of dried cray-fish¹, blue plastic bags heavy-laden with Tom-Toms², and glass bottles filled to the brim with groundnuts³. She was my home away from home. I attached myself to her roots like an aphid, biting away at any and all culture and tradition she could give me.

I say all this to reach another point: my grandmother didn’t recognize me when I saw her about three weeks ago. Albeit, she’s well into her nineties, and I haven’t seen her since the summer of 2018, and I didn’t have nearly as many piercings back then as I do now, but that doesn’t change the fact that the woman that saw and knew me from the moment the umbilical cord was cut, gazed at me a couple weeks ago and saw a complete stranger.

To add salt to the wound, I tried to explain my existence to her. Told her the name of her youngest daughter who I just so happened to be the oldest daughter of — “Do you remember [redacted]? Yeah. I’m her daughter. I’m her oldest daughter. Chioma” — but in that moment it was as if my voice reached her eardrums only to bounce off. She wasn’t hearing any of it. It was only when my mother FaceTimed her a couple hours later that I was able to weasel my way back into my grandmother’s memory. It wasn’t my face or my voice that did the trick. No, it was my mother and the Igbo on her tongue that pried the door open, that gave me room to re-enter my grandmother’s heart and receive the hug that I’d been expecting from the moment I walked into her bedroom. Better late than never, some would argue. I don’t know, though. I’m not entirely sure I agree. Is a delayed, unsure hug truly better than an unreceived one?

There’s a part of me that writes this and cringes because what I have to say sounds not at all dissimilar from what comes out the mouths of mixed kids interested in spoken word performances. Not to be in my Logic-the-rapper bag, but there is an element of not fully belonging that I’ve been dealing with for all my life which has only been further aggravated by my move out here.

I was more than prepared for all the comments on my accent. I’ve walked into corner shops, sat in Ubers, and ordered at restaurants only to get immediately hit with raised eyebrows and opinions about the way words choose to leave my mouth. Sure, these conversations are uncomfortable but they’re uncomfortable in the way all small talk is: not completely terrible, but still obligatory and mind-numbingly boring. What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened when these conversations dragged on a little longer, when the questions moved away from my accent and dug a little deeper into where I’m actually from and on how I choose to identify myself.

A cashier asked me where my accent was from, so I told him it was from the UK. Then, he said, “Ah, you’re English.” I was quick to argue against that, telling him that I was actually Nigerian. He hit me with a quick, “You were born there, then? In Nigeria?” 

No, I wasn’t. I was born in London, Hackney. I told him as much. He asked me, “So, when’s the last time you went there?” I asked him, “Where?” He said, “Nigeria. Nigeria, of course.” I told him that it’d been years, so long that I didn’t actually remember, told him that I was probably no older than twelve at the time, surely no younger than eight. He nodded at that, scanned my next item before asking me if I spoke it — the it being Nigerian. 

And I just felt this urge to correct him, to tell him that Nigerian isn’t actually a language, that each tribe has a different dialect, a different tongue. But I stopped myself. I stopped myself, because how dare I? How dare I defend a tongue now when I’ve never thought to defend it before by housing it under the roof of my mouth? So instead, I said, “No, I don’t speak Nigerian,” before adding my purchases to my bag and asking for my receipt.

At first, I left that CVS thinking wow, the differences between nationality and ethnicity were seriously beating that guy up. But if you add this incident to the fact that my grandmother looked at me like a new house nurse before looking at me as her grand-daughter, you must understand why I felt myself standing on the edge of an identity crisis.

So, it was with all these feelings running amuck inside of me that I went to pick my next read of the month. Initially, I picked this book up because of the gorgeous cover — because how else are we supposed to judge books? Seriously? — only to be met with a story that not only perfectly encapsulated how I felt (and still feel) but also confronted me on those emotions as well.

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (2022) — Noor Naga

Rating: ★★★★★

TW/ racism, sexual violence, addiction/drug abuse, death

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English — Noor Naga (2022)

I’ve found that all the books I’ve read this year that have made it on to my favourite lists have come from the minds and pens of poets. Poets do something with novels and novellas that I’ve found regular authors can’t replicate. Poets are less obedient to the expected form of literature. Instead, they’re willing to branch out of linear story-telling, they’re ready to play around with form, they aren’t afraid of presenting stories that you simply cannot take for face value; they present stories that you cannot skim, that you have to sit with for a little longer, stories that demand you to think on them even after you’ve flipped the last page. As an aspiring author and someone who has spent hours pouring over traditional story structures, the approach that poets take to story-telling is not only unconventional, but it’s also refreshing. As much as I like predicting outcomes and being proven right, there is also something so enjoyable about buckling into a novel and genuinely having no idea where the writer intends to take you, no idea on how the writer intends to take you there.

That being said, in If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Noor Naga is able to take a mere 192 pages and pack into it an experimental story following an Egyptian-American woman and a man from a village called Shobrakheit who both meet in a café in Cairo during the aftermath of The Arab Spring — a series of anti-government/pro-democracy protests that occurred throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s.

In this book, Naga uses the development of a toxic relationship between these two unnamed “characters” as a device to explore a wide range of challenging themes. Not only does she create a discussion (both literally and figuratively) surrounding the many pitfalls of Western identity politics, but she also presents a story dedicated to highlighting how similarly racialized bodies can and do have varying life experiences based entirely on whether they are located in the Global North versus that of the Global South, and how that difference lies entirely in their literal physical proximity to privilege.

Ultimately, this book is about the varying positions of power. Where does the power lie between men and women? Where does the power lie between the rich and the poor? Where does the power lie between the English-speaker, and the non? How does this power shift globally? What happens when these varying degrees of power collide — within a relationship, within a person, within a city — and how do we, then, choose who needs the most protection? In fact… Why are we so set on choosing just one protectee to begin with?

There’s a danger between us, but I’m not always sure who it belongs to. Which one of us needs protection, and which of us should be afraid?

— If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (2022)

I’m sure that you can already tell that this book is an uncomfortable read.

Not only is it uncomfortable watching the growth of the relationship between the narrators — because it’s very toxic, please take the trigger warnings seriously — but the book is also uncomfortable in the way the narrative is literally written to be self-interrogating. We see this in the various questions posed at the beginning of each perspective switch. Exhibit A:

Question: Is it arrogant to return to a place you’ve never been?

— If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (2022)

And, we also see this in the way Noor uses the whole third part of the book to present a meta scene where she creates characters who embody the voices of all potential readers. Noor uses these characters to predict the reactions of different people who read the first two parts of her book, and she works to criticise them before they get the chance to run to their Goodreads, their StoryGraph, or to their Substack, to criticise her.

I found myself aligning with the Egyptian-American for the large majority of the novel — the both of us nostalgic for countries that we’ve never/hardly ever visited, the both of us claiming home countries that we have no actual home in, the both of us with tongues rooted in English soil. It was almost immediate how quickly I saw myself in her and Noor Naga was quick to call me out on that fact.

I resent [my father] because I recognize him. This desperation to refashion ourselves into the most pleasing form makes fools of us both. We’re pliable and capricious, shed our skin at the slightest threat, and ultimately stick out everywhere we go. We were both more convincing Egyptians in New York than we’d ever be on this side of the Atlantic. There I had enough Arabic to flirt with the Halal Guys and the Yemenis at my deli. At school, identity was simple: my name etched in hieroglyphics on a silver cartouche at my throat. I could say, “Back home, we do it like this, pat our bread flat and round,” never having patted bread flat or otherwise. But here I keep saying I’m Egyptian and no one believes me. I’m the other kind of other, someone come from abroad who could just as easily return there.

— If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (2022)

One of the first times I ever felt truly othered was while I attended a performing arts school during my tween years.

Of course I was different. I was the only fully Black child in a school of about 200+ students; I had hair that couldn’t be thrown into the expected french-braid of our uniform, and instead had hair that had to be relaxed and fried straight in order to be neatly corn-rowed back into something passable. I had a name that no one could pronounce, so I dropped it on the very first day and started going by my other given name: my English one, Stephanie, my get-out-of-othering-free card.

However, what really set me apart back then had very little to do with me and everything to do with my father.

You see, we had practice every Saturday. Started at nine in the morning, ended at around two thirty in the afternoon. On one of these many Saturday’s, my dad let me know that he’d be coming to pick me up early — “We have a party to go to,” he’d said. “Tell your teacher you’re sorry but you’ll be leaving a little earlier than usual.” My teacher didn’t care. Said it was perfectly fine, said that when I saw him through the door I could just excuse myself, gather my belongings and leave, said she’d see me again next week. No real issue there. The “issue” was that it wasn’t me who saw him through the door first.

I mentioned a concept near the beginning of this post — a hall-party. More specifically…an African hall-party. We were going to a hall-party that Saturday. These are parties with buffet-tables decked with traditional food, speakers booming with traditional music, and attendees fashioned in traditional attire. Of course, my father was no different.

I won’t go into too much detail about what happened because, dear reader, you’re smart and I’m sure you can tell, but one of the comments that stuck with me the most was one from a girl I’d labelled as a close friend. She’d been pointing at his reflection in the mirror when she’d asked, “Is he wearing a costume?” A costume like the ones we wore on stage whenever we performed. An outfit worn to look like something or someone else. A set of clothes worn with the intention to other oneself.

I really don’t remember if I’m the one who told him to not show up wearing that again — you see, children have no filter and I’m sure I was no different — but what I do remember is that it simply never happened again. Traditional isiagu was traded for a plain shirt and jeans.

Maybe it was because I did say something; maybe it was because I didn’t even have to, or that he could tell that I was uncomfortable; maybe it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with how he may have felt ogled at from the moment he entered the hall to the moment we left. I don’t know. Maybe I never will. All I do know is that when the next Saturday came around and my father’s skin colour was the only thing that singled him out from behind the glass door, I was undeniably thankful.

And, you want to know what’s crazy? The embarrassment I’d felt then was immediately traded for enjoyment when I put on my own traditional wear and entered a party full of friends, of family, of a mixture of the two. I danced and sang and ate with such reckless abandon that you wouldn’t know, you would’ve never guessed, that just a couple hours prior I wished to shed my Nigerianess all together. What a jarring thing it was to be torn between self-love and self-hate at such a young age.

Question: How far can you run from home before you run out of water?

— If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (2022)

I like to think I’m a lot better now. I thank the friends I’m now blessed to be surrounded by and the diverse media I’m lucky to now be exposed to — no matter what people may say, it’s so much easier to accept yourself when you see pieces of yourself in others, and fall in love with how they wear it — but what I’ve found is that the lack of an Igbo tongue remains one of my greatest barriers to complete cultural submersion. I often meet other people from my tribe in real life and one of the very first questions I get asked is if I speak the language. I tell them no but I also tell them I understand it well enough – oh I promise that I hear it well well – but the nail in the coffin has already been hammered in by that point, the lines of relatability have already been drawn. The people I wanted to accept me into their otherness have already done the job of othering me.

And I know what you’re thinking. Why are you writing this post instead of using the time to learn the language? Don’t you know how crazy it is to outsource a teacher when your own parents speak the language when they’re half asleep and want you to get them the remote, when you have little cousins running around your feet speaking the language as easily as they breathe? It’s embarrassing. And it’s not like Duolingo is diverse enough to house the Igbo language; the process of finding a teacher is not as easy, or nearly as cheap, as downloading an app and having a green bird terrorise your notifications every evening.

But while I say this, I’m also disagreeing with myself. I guess the next point—actually the next question I’m trying to pose is this: when do you stop placing the blame on other people and start accepting your own complacency? When do you stop blaming your upbringing and start blaming how you choose to continue living? If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English explores this theme from beginning to end through the character of the unnamed Egyptian-American who expresses a want of immersing into her culture, all while struggling to come to terms with not only her own biases, but her own arrogance when it comes to how she expects the Egyptian city of Cairo to slow down for her, spoon-feed her the culture she believes she was not only wrongly deprived of but also entirely entitled to.

A lot like Noor Naga’s novel, rather than having any concrete answers to the question of identity, all I have to offer are thoughts on the topic and further questions.

I can’t sit here and write that I know I’ll eventually figure it all out, that there will come a day where this diasporic guilt will leave me alone, because saying that would not only be untrue but it would be yet another manifestation of my very own arrogance. But, still, I guess that acknowledging said arrogance is the first step of this journey. Sure, there are things that I’ve learnt by tasting my culture through my friends and cousins, through media, through my parents and my grandmother, but by admitting that all those experiences were just that — tasters — I’ll be able to give myself grace when my knowledge does fall short which, in turn, will give me the resilience to learn more.

So… Question: If a child can't speak their mother tongue, who's to blame? The mother, or the tongue?

Answer: Whichever one gives up first.

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Before you go, I’ve been thinking of creating an online book club via this substack. Because I'm 100% sure that most of the books we’ll read will explore adult themes, I think it would be best if the book club was directed towards people 18 and over. It would be a one book, one zoom discussion a month kind of affair. It would be so much fun. The idea is definitely still on the drawing board, though, but I would still love to know if anyone would be interested… 

1. Dried crayfish is a very popular spice in West Africa, and is used for the preparation of several different African dishes, mainly in the preparation of soups and stews.

2. Tom Tom is a menthol sweet. It’s striped white and black, and it’s shaped like an oval. It delivers a fresh breath and an instant sweet relief. It’s also fucking addictive.

3. Groundnuts are… how do I explain this? Think roasted peanuts but not. I feel like only Africans will get what I mean but they really just don’t taste the same. You’d have to eat some to understand.