Author:
The Language of Almost
Literary Fiction Atmospheric Identity Literary Fiction Atmospheric
There is a word in Ga that has no English equivalent. My mother uses it when she describes the feeling of being in two places at once — not homesick, not present, but suspended between, the way a translation is never quite one language or another. She uses it for airports. She uses it for the particular quality of light on an October afternoon in London, which she says looks nothing like October should. She has used it, twice, looking at me.
I grew up in the seam. English at school, Ga at home, the particular hybrid my friends and I built in the years when we were inventing ourselves — code-switching without code, just switching, just being whatever the moment required. I thought this was a skill. I have spent twenty years coming to understand it is also a kind of wound: not a serious one, not dramatic, but present the way a healed break is present, in the weather, in the cold.
My daughter speaks only English. This was not a failure — it was a series of small reasonable decisions that accumulated into an absence. She knows a few words: the foods, the terms of endearment, the things you say to elders. She knows the shape of a language the way you know the layout of a house you visited once as a child. Sometimes I watch her and I think: I have given her something I did not know I was keeping. I have also kept something she will never have. The word my mother uses has no English equivalent. I have not yet decided whether to teach my daughter the word or the feeling.
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