Written piece
Bifid Tongue
Leonel Alvarado
New Zealand
About this piece
This poem is a reflection of my experience as an immigrant living between two places and two languages, and of the challenges faced, particularly by adult immigrants, while trying to adapt to both.
Bifid Tongue
‘I will die far from my language’
Nazim Hikmet
I won’t die far from my language, Nazim.
But at times I feel that my language
is the one dying as I break its limbs
and stick splinters under its nails.
I know that its arteries are falling apart,
it is being contaminated by new words that
come forward and finish a sentence leaving behind
the ones my memory can’t recall fast enough
for they are so far away, in a country inhabited
by a tongue that once was whole.
Because it is easier, Nazim, to make way for the new one,
this other language of mine that is also broken and bastardised
—you can’t repeat the sounds, your tongue struggles,
your teeth grind the vowels, spit the consonants
as you try not to look like an idiot but you can’t say
it’s damn cold in another language without blowing your cover.
You don’t want to know what time they serve tea
at the House of Windsor or unravel one of Shakespeare’s
iambic pentameters. You are just saying damn, it’s cold,
the bus is late, how much for that mince pie I’m dying for?
That craving can really kill you, Nazim, while you look
for the words, your syntax fails you, the preposition
you need won’t fall into the right place.
This shop is a heaven of food but all your mind knows
is words that won’t be able to open the gate.
Meanwhile, your intestines are waiting down there,
struggling to comprehend why the names you brought
in your stomach from the old country won’t bring
that pie closer. The names, like your life, are split in two.
Let them fight, Nazim. Let these two languages
devour each other inside of me.
While they are at it, let them eat up
the fear that takes over
every time I open my mouth.