“Do you speak another language?”
“No”
That answer above is technically both correct and incorrect. While it is true that I don’t speak another language altogether, I do speak a hybrid language of sorts. For instance, since Spanglish is considered a pidgin language, I too speak a pidgin language, just without the blended name: Samoan and English.
At a certain point in my life, I was what most people consider legitimately bilingual. When moving to the middle of nowhere with my family, my grandmother had also moved with us. For the next couple of years, after coming home exhausted from the newly foreign yet energetic realm of elementary school, my grandmother would teach me Samoan. At first, it was just something that I felt that I had to do, but that sense of forced obligation quickly morphed into a desire. I’d notice how her eyes would sparkle just a tiny bit every time my pronunciation did not sound like that of a palagi or how her smile radiated her pride in me. It was glaringly obvious growing up that my grandmother favored her grandsons over her granddaughters; her preference was nowhere near being discreet, as she would dote on the boys without sparing us a second glance. Thus, seeing her look at me with just a fraction of adoration of how she would look at the boys sparked an ambition to improve, to go above and beyond her expectations and impress her. And eventually this did happen. While my comprehension skills were way more advanced than my conversational skills, I still could say Talofa to my elders, count to 100 in Samoan, recite the alphabet, and hold a simple conversation without someone threatening to fasi me. With all this progress, she would smile at me lovingly, developing a unique bond that she did not have with her other granddaughters.
Around the third grade, she moved out, and I suppose this was around the time that the language started dying around me. My father was always working, so I could never practice with him; my mother, being palagi and Black but not Samoan, would have been no help; my older cousins and younger siblings were not proficient enough to teach me, or at the very least help me retain it. As my barely existent proficiency started to dwindle, so did my grandmother’s health. The July before my last year in elementary school my grandmother passed away, and while mourning the sun setting on her, it never occurred that the language had also followed her to Heaven.
Hypothetically, the language may have persisted if my complex never developed. A few years later, I’m swimming in the communal pool with my cousins. While trying to cool off from the intensely blistering sun in the saltiest chlorine-filled pool to ever exist, we chatted about the random people in the pool. When I was referencing a woman playing with her child, my cousin started giggling before making the remark that planted the seed to my insecurity: “you say ‘palagi’ like a palagi.”
I instantly laughed it off, hoping it would hide the way it lacerated my dwindling confidence in the language, yet that comment haunted me with such an indescribable intensity, one that persists even to this day. After hearing that, I intentionally spoke Samoan less and less. If I ever ran into any other Polys, I would tell them that I only spoke English. While noticing their pitying glances, I convinced myself that it was a better alternative than their mocking eyes if they heard me mangle the beautiful language. I felt every time my mouth uttered anything in Samoan, I was maiming the beautiful language.
It was not until random 12 a.m thoughts during my junior year in high school that I flipped the script. Already not pleased with the person I was, I started the process of trying to better myself. During the restless night, I coincidentally reflected back on my lack of using Samoan and if in that sense, did I have a right to call myself Samoan. Being an afakasi in general caused me an embarrassing amount of strife, but I learned to honor my multiple identities by working on self love. When reflecting on my lack of language and the reasons for it, I was suddenly hit with an epiphany: isn’t it more disrespectful to give up on the language entirely rather than try and fail to speak it in the way that rightfully encapsulates all of its beauty?
It was already bad enough that American Samoa was colonized, but that did not mean that I too had to be colonized alongside, forced into complete assimilation. My submission into assimilating would be the largest disgrace I could ever do towards my grandmother, my family, the language itself, and me. Since then, I have slowly let the language trickle back into its home and take root once again within me.
So, when someone asks if I speak another language, my response? Knowing my insecurity, it will probably remain the same: no. However, that does not mean that I have submitted. Rather, I will continue to decolonize my tongue until the day I can proudly answer the question in the affirmative.
תגובות