In the first four minutes of our Spanish class, I have managed to confidently declare more ridiculous statements and ask more impenetrable questions than any of the other students who are very wisely holding their tongues. A rough translation of my gibberish would be: I have a little spoon. May I borrow your hair today? Is the fruit seller awake? The little dog is driving the red car. I plunge forward, at one point puzzling the teacher (she’s good at guessing, but even this question leaves her stumped) with my request to borrow a lie detector. Of course I don’t know the word for lie detector but something I’ve uttered must sound very much like that because our profesora begins to laugh. At other times she’s the picture of composure as we bumble through this word and that, this handy phrase and that, sounding like the American tourists we may someday be, trying to negotiate a seat on a train in a language that is not the language of our birth. The double r’s and l’s, the silent h’s, the impossibility of rolling a relaxed new language off our tongues as we hold tight to the syllables, and in doing so we lose their beauty, their song. The words get caught in our mouths and we grind them out like a jeweler taking a belt sander to a diamond. What should fly from our lips like a spiral of starlings instead drops heavily like a bucket of gravel. “Very good,” says la profesora kindly. “You have done good work today.” It isn’t true but a kind teacher is essential in this endeavor and we are grateful.
French was my first foreign language. We were seven-year-olds sitting in a circle singing Frêre Jacques and learning the words for good morning, please and thank you. Our teacher would put her head down at the end of the song and signal us to sing it again while she napped. By the time I reached high school I could recite poems in French and say phrases like “the attic stairs creak.”
I learned a little Norwegian when I worked one summer on a remote farm in the northern part of Norway. I studied Italian because my mother and grandmother used it as a secret language for years, and now I wanted to understand what they were saying. I spent a summer at Gallaudet University studying American Sign Language in order to prepare myself for a hard-of-hearing friend’s eventual deafness. When I returned to Arizona two-and-a-half decades ago and started teaching poetry in the Tuba City schools, I wanted to explore Diné Bizaad, my first tonal language. When I was at my best, I could speak in Navajo about my grandmother’s sheep, and laugh at the way the word for fry bread can be confused for the words “I overslept.” My grandmother lived in Connecticut and never did have sheep, but sometimes the facts delivered are less important than their means of delivery. Learning another language is like opening the hood of a car to admire the engine. The car’s destination will soon be important, but the first thing to appreciate is the system that makes the vehicle run.
Spanish is the language that awaits me now, and though some of my effort arises from a pure love of languages, there is another motivator, and that is patriotism. I think one of our greatest acts of patriotism at this moment is to resist the erasure of diversity and familiarize ourselves with the cultures of those who call America home. Language is the key that unlocks the door of culture. To be able to say, in Arabic or Creole, Swahili or Hebrew, Hopi or Russian, at least a simple thank you and hello; to know when an invitation to eat is not a request but a requirement; to speak with the right pronouns of respect; to cover our heads or doff our hats; to know the holy days and the holy places. These are the words and gestures that lead to friendship and trust. To learn more about the many cultures living on this land for millennia, or more recently arriving on our shores, or passing through our deserts to our borders, is a way of acknowledging those who share common ground, a nation. And as a nation, we share the outcomes of our gains and losses, including in this extraordinary time the liability of speaking any other language but English. Spanish, in particular, is in the crosshairs.
I came from somewhere. Germany, Ireland and Scotland are the countries in my blood. Italy gave me dozens of cousins when a handsome signor put a wedding ring on the finger of my Great-aunt Mary. When Diné people introduce themselves we hear their lineage, their maternal and paternal clans. Whenever I hear that recitation I feel the power of belonging. No one is alone, those words remind us. We come from somewhere.
Today la profesora shows us a short film and we talk about it scene by scene in Spanish. I am hopelessly lost when I try and put together a sentence about the unpleasant man at the typewriter who is now making coffee in the kitchen. It is humbling that I cannot speak in Spanish about the simple act of making coffee, when in French I can say the attic stairs creak, and in Navajo language tell a story about my grandmother’s sheep, and ask in Norwegian if it is time to harvest potatoes, and swear like a sailor in Roman Italian. William Stafford once wrote that writing a poem was like starting a car on ice. The need for traction is followed by a soft acceleration into the poem itself. Learning to speak a language is more like driving a car on an icy Vermont road where 360-degree spins are inevitable. The more you try and gain control of the vehicle, the more it slips away. The more you brake, the harder you spin. The trick is to become the poem or the car or the language; to let it take you; to ride along with it without thinking. When I went to school in Rome for a semester, I learned more from dancing with Italians than sitting in language class.
There’s a time for thinking, a time for studying, for wrestling with the subjunctive or the three-or-more form or the numbers (Oh, the numbers!), but push all that aside when trying to express yourself in a new language. What you need, besides courage, is a few verbs, some nouns, an adjective to give it color, and you’ve made a sentence, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Rabbit after rabbit, and there you have it. Bob’s your uncle. ¡Aquí lo tiene! ¡Así es!
