Contributors to the April “Exophony” Issue Share Some Language Stories

We invited contributors from the April “Exophony” issue to tell us the story—or a story—about learning the language that they’ve adopted for poetry (in 100 words or fewer). Here are their responses. Check the Editor’s Blog in the weeks that follow for responses to two additional prompts.

Abdulkareem Abdulkareem
I grew up speaking Yorùbá, which is my native language, and the English language, consecutively. Also, growing up, I could say my competence in the English language was beyond my competence in my native language. My aunt who was staying with us during my teenage years made us—me and my siblings—speak and interact in the English language to polish our competence.

Jeffrey Angles
It isn’t Japanese, my second language, which creeps along, so slow and hesitant. It’s English, my first, which crawls left to right across the horizontal of the page, terrified by too much possibility. The storm of my second blows across the page from right to left, raining from the top of the page, innocent and unafraid of staining the page beneath. I used to wonder where in the matrix of these scarcely intersecting languages I belong, but does it matter? Perhaps nowhere is the best point of departure of all. 

Dani Charles
I’ve adopted, well it’s adopted me on a trial basis, a mix of English and Spanish on a sliding scale (sometimes parts just stay inside) since that’s the internal mode of process my brain conducts its daily monologue in. It’s what I grew up learning (Spanish first then English at three) and speaking though I had to retrain myself to allow the combination to right (write) itself out of me and into a shared space again. After having ritualized the either or binary to filter itself in the way due to external influences. 

Moriana Delgado
While spending my afternoons at the library of a university that would later expel me, I wrote poems in the father tongue. Not because my dad speaks it, which he now doesn’t, though when younger did, but because he enrolled me into English after-school classes when I was seven, to which my mom drove my sister and me in the drowsy heat of Mexico City. English led me to that library, which led me to some authors, like Sei Shōnagon or Kenneth Rexroth, static on their shelves, who taught me how to hand-build my classroom father tongue into poetry.

Michael Dumanis
When I was three, in Moscow, my mother signed me up to learn English. When she tried to leave me in the classroom, I threw a tantrum. And suddenly, I’m in my mother’s arms on the other side of the closed door, her ear pressed to it, as she strains to hear the lesson, saying, “If I can only find out what the words are, I could teach you them myself.” Later, as a five-year-old America-bound refugee in Italy, I accompanied my parents to the extravagant museums and mastered the non-Cyrillic alphabet by reading and sharing the captions of paintings.

Ukata Edwardson
In Nigeria, the English Language is a fine curse, beautiful in many ways, and as much ugly. Growing up, I learned my ethnic tongue, Ekpeye, first before every other languages because I was home and comfortable. I traveled out of home and learned new languages for the first time, and then English came along, or I must say it came out to the light. I spoke the local unpolished Nigerian English until my senior years in secondary school, and throughout all that time, I received as much praise for it as I received resentment. 

Somto Ihezue
Honestly, there isn’t much of a story. I had to learn English in school. It was a requirement. If anything, it was pretty much erasing my native language, which got banned as a “conversational tool” in most schools. Schools believed it was hindering the assimilation of English by students. But my parents weren’t having any of it. At home, my original language, Igbo, thrived.

Jack Jung
In South Korea, when I was in elementary school, we learned this song in our first English class. It went something like this: “How do you do. I’m fine. Thank you, and you?” Nice rhymes to teach us how to say hello. Except when I came to the States, no one spoke like that. A kid in this small Midwestern junior high school walked up to me and said, “What’s up, man?” And I tried to answer him about what was up above me. We were both baffled at each other.

Dong Li
I love English but had great trouble acquiring it. It pulled my hair. The sense of being awake from the constant pull made me furious and I did everything to break the beast. Then I simply could not get it off my head. 

Dunya Mikhail
When I graduated from the secondary school in Iraq, I received an admission letter to study math in America as I wished. The then Iraqi law, however, went against my wish. “Girls are not permitted to study abroad during the time of war,” they told me. Therefore, I studied English literature, instead, at the University of Baghdad. “You will need English later when the war ends,” my father advised. Well, in college I met other poets and we enjoyed discussing poetry despite war or because of it. I got too busy with poetry that I forgot about America, until later ...

Mayowa Oyewale
I came to English or—considering the British colonialization of Nigeria—English came to me early in life. For a multi-ethnic country, this foreign and imperial language is the lingua franca of the country, you had to learn it from primary school through secondary school through the university and beyond. And while we rarely speak English in my immediate family, we always read the Bible (and sing Christian hymns) in English, never Yoruba. The ability to speak and write eloquent English becomes synonymous with being educated, so when I decided to study the language in University, few objections were raised. 

Suphil Lee Park
One second-language
writer sings herself to pain
in the head / the ass:

Four for’s are sitting
in my foyer, waiting for ...
Which for? And what for?

It is this that is,
not that that is not, and this
which is not that, is,

that is, it, is it
not? O the words that make us
feel our teeth exist.

How turns of the wrist
make a world in curlicues
slide out of my grasp.

Sasha Pimentel
When I was learning English, the word “lieutenant” flummoxed me. To spell it, I reminded myself in that word was a lie against the sound of you. Later, with French, I realized it wasn’t a lie which lurked there, but a lieu—that which takes the place of another—and in that word, the idea that place and tenancy could live in language unfurled. So the English vent turned from a metal square to a frame that is missing, or encasing, wind. And lieutenant became lieu and tenant of tenir, without lie, but of to hold, to keep, to grasp.

Sara Abou Rashed
On my first day of high school in Columbus, Ohio, the teacher handed me a copy of The Odyssey—and I kid you not—I thought it was the dictionary at first! Worn-out. Thick. Incomprehensible. In a way, it was. Word for word, I translated The Odyssey and every other textbook that year from English to Arabic. I had moved to the United States with my family, a teenager with little-to-no English, but quickly became fluent in it, and a few years later, I created with director Larry Smith my autobiographical one-woman show titled, A Map of Myself: My Odyssey to America. 

Laura Theis
I had my first English lesson when I was ten years old, and it was my favorite subject the moment my teacher came in and started speaking to us in this thrilling new language. I was immediately over-invested in the way my school books revealed little stories about the adventures of a group of friends called Ronnie, Kevin, Kate, and Barbara. I always wanted to know what they were up to next—usually things like “flying a kite” or “eating crisps” or “playing hide and seek in the attic!”

Zêdan Xelef
I think, for me, it’s safe to say that I am a translator of myself, therefore a linguistic outsider, in all the three languages I write in, just as an outsider to every place where I’ve lived. And perhaps this is the reason why I am writing in three languages—a quest for sense, like a migratory bird. I don’t get to decide in which language I am writing my next poem. And speaking of multilingualism and writing, I always remember what Farhad Pirbal wrote as a preface to a book consisting of poems he wrote in three languages, “Writing is like pissing for me, I do not get to decide in which language I should piss.” At least this is how I feel too.

Khaty Xiong
My first language in this life is Hmong. My second language is English. I’d like to think that the language I’ve adopted for poetry is a mixture of love and loss, mistranslations and false transcriptions. Both tongues are deeply rooted in mourning. The only difference is that English has carried me away from the language of my ancestors because I could not soar in the first, because the motherland of that language had always remained obscure, even when my parents spoke it so clearly. I grieve this deeply.