That’s over 123 ways to try and say I love you. Here, I only say
it in English. I learnt English on the other side to be on the other side
of the other side. It takes over today to siphon the thickness out
of my tongue trying to fit in the room that is not meant for me. You see
this tongue was my house full of dreams once. The top floor guarded
the most fluent—the American. It floated on my mothers tongue, its water
reached by her withered hands, the warm wetness used to fill the crevices
of her fingerprints. The moisture necessary to smooth the touch and count
on everything she earned that day. After dinner, she’d squat on cold bathroom
tiles, wash the yellow deodorant off my shirt, while I wrote love letters in English
to good ol’ boys. Her candle-lit face from the opposite room made everything look possible—even the
costly land of the free I wanted to run to, my direction
always the West.
I could pack my country in three bags: two old, one new, bright pink
ribbons tied on its handle to help me recognize my roots if I was let
past the immigration cubicle. When I united with that country in this country,
my village brimmed, spilled through the zips, heavy and heaving, trying so hard
to fit in. Americans do this funny thing when asked where they’re from—they tell me
where they grew up and add where they last lived. I grew up in Nepal in the upper lip
of Banepa where Rhododendrons are so sweet you say their name when you have a
fish
bone stuck in your throat. I last lived in New York City, the silence
so loud sometimes I cannot hear my breath. When I returned home, I stopped
calling it home. The old brown rooms with my grandparent’s gospels and folklore
were sinking in the murky bottom of the water, leftover from
my mothers tongue where lived my dirty soaked shirt once. And everyone said
you have become so American now, you have deported all of those 123 tribes
from your mouth, you walk like them now, you talk like them now. Wow.
The land of the free has cost me my country. It wiggles on my tongue that I have
swallowed. My tongue is stuck in my throat. I say Rhododendron,
and it does not work in English. When my tongue finally lurches to the catacombs
of my mothers tongue, all it can say is
I love you
Alisha Bade Shrestha Bhaila एलिशा बादे श्रेष्ठ भैल is a Nepali student currently exploring storytelling in theatre, visual and literary arts. Her work meddles with girlhood, femininity and female spaces in liminal as well as speculative zones. She lives in four and a half languages.
Artists’ Statement: This poem wrestles with my American dream leading to being fluent in English and touches upon how it impacted my mother tongue and my mother’s tongue. In My Country There Are 123 Languages is a new work and very much a poem in progress.
