In the summer of 1971, Syed Abul Barq Alvi sits on the dirty, damp floor of a martial-law court. Next door, his friends have needles shoved into their fingers and cigarettes burned on their bodies. Soon, Alvi will endure the same. For years, the Pakistani military has suppressed the Bengali government in East Pakistan, forbidding the language from the civil service and imposing Urdu in its place. After an overwhelming parliamentary victory from the nationalist Awami league, Pakistan voids the election and massacres hundreds of students at Dhaka University, beginning what will later be recognized as a genocide, and what Bengalis will refer to as the Liberation War. From that day forward, when Alvi paints, he will remember the physical torment of 1971, and what the army did to him and his friends.
Alvi isn’t just a figurehead to me — he’s family. Because of this close connection, the Liberation War has never felt distant to me. The repression of the language and the bitter struggle to defend it are visceral generational memories. My uncle was on the racecourse where Bangladesh’s founding father delivered his seminal speeches. My mother’s family doctor was dragged out of his house and murdered in the night. Her uncle announced the news of Bangladesh’s independence on the radio. Ever since childhood, I have worn T-shirts bearing reproductions of posters by Bengali rebels. I can never forget the war — I can never forget the eventual victory. Because of my proximity to these Bengali stories, the language feels precious to me. I know how easily and how brutally one’s mother tongue can be suppressed, and how beautiful it is to speak it freely. Bangla is the language of Tagore, the first non-European to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature; the language of Satyajit Ray, winner of the highest awards at the Venice and Berlin Film Festivals; the language of Ravi Shankar, organizer of the world’s first benefit concert with the Beatles. When someone speaks Bangla, they are continuing a tradition of artistry and innovation.
However, despite all my love for the language, I cannot write or read a single word of it. As time goes on, there are more and more ideas I struggle to express in it. I know the word for dream, but not nightmare. I know the word for sad, but not depressed. I know half the language and have half a soul.
Losing a mother tongue isn’t unique to me. Linguists call the process first language attrition. It isn’t easy to find statistics on the issue (the first handbook to directly discuss attrition was released only four years ago), but it’s clearly connected to broader trends of assimilation. Linguistic assimilation generally follows a three-generation model, which theorizes that the grandchildren of most immigrants tend to only speak the dominant language. One Duke University study seems to confirm as much — in America, more than 90% of third-generation children in every ethnic minority speak English exclusively.
The reasons for attrition are varied. While writing about her own childhood, author Jenny Liao recalls her parents’ belief that English was the key to a successful life in America. Her parents, Cantonese immigrants who spoke limited English and worked low-wage, blue-collar jobs, believed that English was the “missing piece” in their lives. Liao also notes that, for her, English had significant social advantages. In school, classmates would taunt her with “ching chongs,” mocking her Cantonese. As she continued to be subjected to racial slurs, Liao turned against her parents, dying her hair magenta and shoplifting as a form of rebellion. She began to blame her parents’ limited English on laziness and stupidity. In her article, Liao expresses immense grief at her language loss but ultimately concludes that it was “the cost of assimilation.”
There’s an element of undeniable truth to Liao’s conclusion. Her Cantonese did make her an active target for hate, and English did allow her to pursue a white-collar career in advertising. But is full assimilation even possible? Liao herself notes that the bullying continued even after her English became “pitch perfect.” Many Chinese families have lived in America since the 1800s and are still not seen as genuinely or completely American. The perpetual foreigner stereotype was particularly perilous during the coronavirus pandemic, when major health organizations recognized it as a motivation for anti-Asian violence. Conversely, I have several white friends whose parents are immigrants from Europe; they are never referred to as anything but American.
So what really drives assimilation in the first place, and why is it linked with success? The reasons English-speaking abilities are useful in a predominantly English-speaking country is self-evident, but why is English monolingualism seen as better than stable bilingualism? The aforementioned Duke study highlights recent research suggesting that stable bilingualism can bring greater socioeconomic benefits to ethnic minorities than English monolingualism. Moreover, the myth that bilingualism is detrimental to language development has long since been debunked. Such data suggests that the racist hierarchy dividing English and minority languages is actually the key factor in language attrition. Indeed, Pew Research reports that 70% of Americans see English as the most important factor of national identity.
This xenophobia is not isolated to a small segment of the country. The assault on minority languages in this country has been organized, violent and persistent. Within Michigan alone, auto baron Henry Ford spent millions on programs to “Americanize” his European workers, even running a secret police to quash dissident activities. After the genocidal, apocalyptic trauma of the Trail Of Tears, the Cherokee nation rebuilt itself on new lands, establishing bilingual schools where students learned “everything from Latin to algebra in Cherokee.” As reported by the High Country News, in the late 19th century, the Cherokee nation had a higher literacy rate than white individuals in Arkansas or Texas. Unfortunately, the U.S. government eventually seized control of the Cherokees’ thriving school system, spending $1.3 billion to create a boarding school system where students were kidnapped from their families and forcibly assimilated, forbidden from speaking Cherokee or participating in native rituals. The bodies of children killed by everything from illness to physical abuse are still being found. For every 7 cents spent on preserving native languages, the United States has spent a dollar on annihilating them. These events aren’t ancient history. The last native boarding school was closed in the late eighties. Today, 99% of Native American languages are endangered. Boarding schools and automotive police may technically be gone, but we live in the America of their design.
In my early childhood, I attended a Bengali after-school in Hamtramck run by my mother and her friends. They hoped the environment would preserve the language in second-generation kids. As a toddler, I hardly paid attention. I doodled in my notebook, disrupted my mother’s lessons and sat in her lap. Back then, my household was still filled with Bangla. We watched cheesy natoks on our grainy television set, my father bellowed old love songs, I was ferried to cultural events where my parents goaded me into reciting poetry. I couldn’t imagine that I would later spend years of my life in my grandmother’s kitchen rewriting and forgetting the same five vowels. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever live in a college town where hearing Bangla would be rare enough to inspire homesickness.
In first grade, I remember eagerly awaiting story time every day at school. We would be granted brief respite from tedious worksheets and treated to hot chocolate, graham crackers and stacks of picture books. A young bookworm’s equivalent of superyachts and diamonds. At some point, however, I started to be escorted from story time by faculty. A special teacher would guide me to a white-walled room where we would stare at whiteboards presenting magnetic letters and rudimentary sentences. My parents made the mistake of reporting Bangla as my native language; I was sentenced to English remedial school, despite the fact I spoke fluent English and devoured chapter books.
It quickly became obvious that my association with Bangla conferred an otherized, marginal status onto me. When watching my father interact with lifelong Americans, I have frequently seen his intelligence doubted on account of his limited English, despite the fact that he holds a master’s degree. When hearing my mother’s highly verbose English, many have expressed surprise, despite the fact that she studied English literature for seven years and taught it for several more. The remedial school, the racist taunts and the treatment toward my family members made it clear that I had a societally inferior status.
This second-class status is worsened by the fact that I love English. I write poems in English, I read primarily in English, I perform monologues in English. A copper plate of Shakespeare even hangs in my room. My love is overshadowed by the pain of attrition. When I talk about my favorite Shakespeare sonnets, I know that I cannot talk about Tagore with equal eloquence. I can quote the moving oration of Frederick Douglass but not Sheikh Mujib Rahman.
Language is prayers. It’s questions, love poems, first words. It’s “I love you’s.” Can you imagine the loneliness of never being able to say “I love you” to your partner or parent or child? Being trapped in English means being trapped in a language that hates you, that wants to wipe your kind from the Earth. As the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott asked,
“I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?”
In a New Yorker article entitled “Teach yourself Italian,” author Jhumpa Lahiri details similar struggles with Bangla and English. For her, English represents a culture to be “interpreted,” and a dividing line between her and her parents — a predicament complicated by her love for the language and commercial and critical success from publishing in it. For Lahiri’s mother, the rebellious choice was to refuse change, resembling a woman in Kolkata decades after moving. For Lahiri, change is the only way to escape “the void of her creation.” She studied Italian, eventually moving to the country and publishing several novels in the language. In Lahiri’s mind, “the mechanism of metamorphosis” is the only constant. Just look at the animal world: It’s irreversible, radical and mundane for a caterpillar to become a butterfly. Moments of self transformation are what define us, structuring our existence. “Almost all the rest is oblivion.”
Maybe this is an inevitable truth I am afraid to admit. That the colonized can never escape the darkness of colonialism. Alvi will always feel the torment of the Pakistani militia whenever he paints. His hands carry the war, the partition, the century of British colonialism. I wonder if it’s possible to reclaim what I’ve lost, or if time simply cannot be turned back. My nihilism is worsened by the knowledge that my struggles with language attrition and assimilation are one part of a broader struggle. Every 40 days, a language dies. According to the Guardian, by the end of the century, conservative estimates predict half of all spoken languages will be extinct. The New York Times recently reported on Amadeo García García — the world’s last speaker of Taushiro. When asked about his feelings after his brother’s death, García said, “It’s over for us now.” Linguists have made some efforts to document the Taushiro language, but García is uncooperative. Mostly, he spends his time drinking and reciting the few bits of verse that have made their way into his mother tongue.
I understand his malaise. How can one person carry the weight of a nation’s prayers, poems and curses? The three-generation model offers no hope. I often fear my children won’t speak any Bangla and will feel the same sense of loneliness and isolation I do. Or, worse yet, the language won’t have any emotional relevance to them whatsoever.
I spend my days flipping through the Center for Global and Intercultural Studies catalog, considering studying multiculturalism and politics in Berlin. Part of me is drawn to the program because it perfectly aligns with my academic interests. Another part of me is drawn to the four-credit German requirement. I see the opportunity to do something completely unfamiliar — to become a completely new person in a completely new place. As Lahiri puts it, foreign language study can offer “a shelter from which a new reality bursts forth”; a place seemingly outside of my family’s long struggle with colonialism. Sprache. Zugehörigkeit. Heim. Words which have never been taken from me or forced into my mouth. Words which could be mine.
Running away is an appealing fantasy but an inadequate one. After all, I have already spent years studying Spanish. And whenever asked a particularly disorienting question and pressed for an answer, I often respond in Bangla. I even do this while talking to friends who I’ve only ever spoken English with. To this day, there are still basic cooking ingredients I struggle to name in English. Even if I move to Berlin and somehow never meet an English or Bangla-speaker again, the words would still be within me.
Some recent studies have challenged the idea that it’s possible for a deeply ingrained first language to be fully forgotten. Perhaps it’s impossible to ever escape the colonialism and assimilation surrounding my family history, but it seems equally impossible to fully lose my roots. Change may be inevitable, but maybe there’s a version of transformation other than complete healing or complete linguistic assimilation. It’s not a comfortable answer. Choosing to remain in the gray area between forgetting and remembering is choosing to actively live alongside the messy, painful memories of assimilation. It’s constant torment. Still, my family has endured worse, and for far longer, for Bangla’s sake.
Sometimes, I find myself recalling a poem I recited a long time ago at a cultural night in Hamtramck, a translation of a poem my mother loves. I’ve forgotten almost all of it, but I’ve held on to the first line: “Once I spoke the language of flowers.” I cannot tell where the forgetting or remembering ends. I cannot tell how much Bangla I will speak by the time I die, or how much Bangla my children or grandchildren will speak. But I remember speaking the language of the flowers. And I will continue writing each letter over and over again, just for the chance to hear them sing one more time.
Statement Correspondent Awmeo Azad can be reached at awmeo@umich.edu.