“You speak so well”
- A backhanded compliment
Before I moved out of Mitchell’s Plain, a suburb located on the Cape Flats, to a suburb closer to the city centre, my best friend and neighbour at the time said to me amusingly though with feigned conviction, “Zhea, make sure that by the time you come back home to visit, you have a ra-ra accent.” I remember laughing it off and jokingly agreeing that when I returned, my R’s would be more pronounced.
I grew up speaking a sort of ‘broken’ English in which Kaapse Afrikaans would often interject in my speech. When I visited my cousins, who resided and attended school in white suburbia, peculiar faces peered round at my accent and the way I spoke. Although my English was clear sounding, and incidentally creased by my Kaaps accent, I began to notice that my accent became an identifier. In certain spaces, it was the signifier at which eyebrows were raised and questions of where I grew up surfaced.
Speaking Kaaps is seen as one of the biggest offenses you could commit. At family functions it seems aunties and uncles have their ears alert for the slightest lapse in let’s say, ‘formal English’ and any innocent mumble of words in vernacular. Trans-lingual practices of code switching and code mixing was and probably still is heavily frowned upon especially in a school context. This meant that English is required to be spoken uniformly, hence one’s syntax had better be English syntax. Nevertheless, a policed Zhea is left more often than not, to the mercy of aunties and uncles with an unwavering scowl on their faces. Their heads shaking with disapproval and an aura of authority hanging over them. In primary school I, to my shame, had a poor language development regarding my abilities to read and write. By the age of five, I had still not acquired the ability to fluently read texts that were even designed for younger age groups. The alphabet seemed trivial in a world where I created dialogues with my dolls in solitude. This is my earliest memory to date in which I emphatically recall speaking freely and being comfortable with the way that I spoke.
Over time, how well I spoke English, the language of the colonizers, became a marker of my confidence. And every time I felt myself code switch to my so-called mother-tongue I could not help but feel pitifully apologetic because that is how I had been conditioned to feel. While my self-esteem boosted up a notch every time someone told me “you speak so well”. By the time I started high school, not only the English language but the kind that is spoken strictly uniformly had such a big impact on my enunciation that when I visited my friends and neighbours in Mitchell’s Plain, I was told repeatedly that I had acquired the so-called ra-ra accent that my best friend so jokingly requested I return with. Even more so, I began to patronize my family who did not try to assimilate their dialect as I have.
As time went by, I began to notice how my personal language history influences the way I think and perceive. I was trained to believe that Kaaps is something to deem as “less than” and that certain accents are to be looked down on. So, when my mother and father communicated with one another and they uttered even the slightest form of ‘broken English’, you would find me patronizingly laughing at them. I began to believe that a person’s poor articulation of the language was synonymous with ignorance and a low intellect. This became my mindset as I navigated the world as a young coloured individual. This way of thinking became more and more apparent in the circles I occupied. Those who added a discernible amount of flair to their pronunciation and whose English had a trace of their mother tongues were mocked, all seemingly to aspire to western mannerisms. In this way, I felt myself change the way I speak in different situations and spaces.
My next visit to my home suburb, I stopped at the town centre market where people traded all kinds of foods and clothes. I made my way to a fruit stand and addressed the shopkeeper in Afrikaans asking him whether the oranges he was selling were sweet, and he replied, “of course they are sweet, kyk net hoe stil sit hulle”. I had realised the craft in his creativity and wit in code switching between two languages. I began to become less and less proud for having lost my identity and slowly started to unlearn years and years of indoctrination. I drew conclusions for myself that it is not wrong for anyone to want to code switch, but that doing so out of contempt for one’s own linguistic history is essentially problematic.
Having grown up in a household that often speaks broken English and Afrikaans, and who would probably break all the language rules if they allowed themselves to learn other languages too, I have learnt to take pride in the fact that my accent immediately tells people where I am from. I have learnt to see beauty in the way my tongue chooses to enunciate certain words and that every kind of accent and way of speaking is valid and important. Each one its own contribution to the kaleidoscope of diversity. In this way I have noticed the value in not only my own culture, but of others too. I am most comfortable when speaking the English that I grew up speaking and it will continue to be ‘broken’. And as for my friend back home, I always look forward to greeting her with an accent heavily drenched in Kaaps.
So how dare you mock your mother when she opens her mouth and broken English spills out. Her accent is thick like honey, hold it with your life, it's the only thing she has left from home. Don't stomp on that richness, instead hang it up on the walls of museums next to Dali and Van Gogh Her life is brilliant and tragic. Kiss the side of her tender cheek. She already knows what it sounds like to have an entire nation laugh when she speaks. She's more than our punctuation and language. We might be able to take pictures and write stories, but she made an entire world for herself. How's that for art
- Rupi Kaur
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