I shared this small piece during a writer’s workshop, where I was one of two visibly racialized people in a group of nine. The writing prompt was “Write about playing a game.”
Sau sau suka mahuli taYA! She squealed in giddiness as she snatched her pointer finger out of reach, mom’s hand grasping at air, trying to catch on in vain. Little Luz prickled with excitement, the giggles pealing from her, all wound up in the anticipation of being caught. “Hah! You’re fast, my Lulu girl.” Mama pulled her in close for a tight squeeze and chomped her cheek playfully. Louder happy screams ensued, as Luz wiggled and wriggled to right herself on the ground before her kneeling mom. “Again!”
Mama opened her palm and Luz tapped her tiny finger in rhythm to the syllables. Some of the only ones she knew in her mother’s language, but each echoed with the innocence and joy of a simple childhood past.
Sau sau suka mahuli taya.
Afterwards, though the group ground rules stated that critique was not the goal here, a fellow writer commented: “I like how you included the words from your mother tongue, I think the one thing I’d have liked to hear included was the translation.” I responded that I don’t know what the words mean, I only know the rhyme.
What do these words mean? Does it matter? What matters is that I have them, I know how they sound, how they taste in my mouth and how they land on my ear. They mean something about vinegar, something about dipping, but more than that they mean I kept something from my mother’s childhood, my village, my cousins, my innocence. The lovely older man looked lost in confusion. The sweet Irish facilitator laughed, perhaps nervously, saying there is room to develop in all of our pieces, perhaps implying I’d find out the translation one day.
But I don’t need to; I won’t. I have the rhythm, I have the game, I have the sweetness of this picture in my mind and the dance of the little phrase tapping in my heart. What I want them to understand, what they won’t understand, is what it means to have a strand of a language, a set of sounds joined to touch joined to love and laughter and culture and her. The frailty of it, like a single strand of her hair. The strength it gives me, to play this phrase in my mind like a needle plays thread, point and pierce and drawn and through.
Give me a writing group who can hold this tiny seashell of a piece. The ones who have also stuck fast to a string of their people’s words, opaque to their meaning but nevertheless infused with connection. This game bridged the language divide between my cousins and me, on that visit long ago when I left snow-covered sidewalks for tin rooves and tsinelas. We were the age that all children run and laugh and poke each other, but there we did it between the shopfront, where my auntie pulled ticks from between the puppy’s toes, and the ground pump where we pulled up water for washing. Running and tickling, shouting and squealing. Sau sau suka mahuli taya. I don’t need to know what it means.
Give me space to ask the question, did he critique me because of the otherness of these words? How inaccessible they were to him, a white man, whose piece about his time in the Vietnam war was both enlightening and dry. I’m feeling unfair – it’s more likely because he was late, and he may have missed the ground rules or misunderstood them. It’s hard not to wonder if, intentional or not, the non-English parts of my piece became a target. Or went over his head. Perhaps the idea of revering words that don’t convey precise meanings, ones that convey feelings and heritage and transport me to my mother’s arms, was lost on him. He may not know what it is like to hold onto the sounds of a language you wish you could express yourself in; to blanket yourself in them while your mothers, aunties and relatives weave laughter between ribbons of golden gossip and ruby-coloured chitchat.
Besides, he was wrong. Those words are not my mother tongue, they’re my mother’s [mother tongue]. My brain is wired to the same shapes and sounds as his: English. I am fighting myself to give him grace, he was late, he is old, he doesn’t know that my parents spoke English in our home – the language of their surrounds, the common adopted tongue they shared. I write in a language that has boarded ships. That forced itself into the mouths of migrants and subjects the world over. That signed deeds and declared dominion and dealt death and exploitation on a royal scale. I write in English about the languages I yearn to resurrect on my lips. I am fighting this spiral of defensiveness, because come on Thanya, it’s just a drop-in writing group. It was a suggestion, gifted I am sure out of helpfulness; innocuous. Benign.
What flowed out of me in that write – the bittersweetness of knowing only a little game, a little phrase of my linguistic inheritance – feels flattened by his lament. And the crush of it includes how none of this is likely even a spark of a thought in his mind (or the facilitator’s, or any of the other writers for that matter). I’m not trying to vilify him. But I’m also done gaslighting myself into believing that I am always the problem in these moments – that I am too sensitive, overthinking it. I know the truth: that my words will speak to someone. That my words, about words (beautiful, broken, misspelled words), mean more precisely because I have no translation. Warp and weft, loose fibers adrift, I weave myself as best I can. I’m grateful for every small strand of the textile of me.
(I left it the way I spelled it in my mind, but the rhyme is written “Sawsaw-Suka, Mahuli Taya” <3)
The Fugue 