http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2014/oct/15/issue-86-living-hyphen/
ISSUE 86: Living on the Hyphen
My husband is from Guelatao de Juárez, a village of three hundred people in Oaxaca's remote Sierra Norte, where tortillas are pressed by hand, bread is sold by burro, and he and his classmates once chased an infuriated bucking bull as part of a school assignment. I am from a pleasant suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where crossing guards in safety orange escort gaggles of children across sleepy crosswalks, and impassioned debate erupts in City Council over cat leash laws. Our relationship is its own miniaturized clash of cultures, most obviously discernable when we use sentences like these: Cuándo va a terminar este pinche winter para que podemos tomar chelas otra vez en el front porch?
Love does not transcend language. It is formed by it like a footprint hardened in clay. Ours was formed in Spanish, in the middle of a revolution in Oaxaca, as we read Cortázar, listened to the gravel-and-feathers voice of the Spanish singer Bebe, and practiced the conditional on 4 a.m. walks home from the bar past burning barricades. For four years, in Oaxaca then in Beijing and Borneo, we spoke almost entirely in Spanish. The few times we were forced into English—when friends or family came to visit, or when I craved my language like a missing nutrient—were awkward and uncomfortable, akin to glimpsing photos of each other with ex-lovers. Who was that person?
But then we moved to the U.S. so that I could go to grad school, and English began to seep through the cracks of our lives, entering through doors and windows, restaurants and grocery trips, classes and new friends. It felt like artifice to maintain only Spanish in our home, and I began slipping more often and naturally into English, dragging a reluctant Jorge along with me. In this transition, we were almost unrecognizable to each other, several shades away from our established personalities. Our marriage started to look like a seventeenth-century arrangement, whereby I had died and Jorge had married my English-speaking sister. It took maybe six months for our English selves to thaw and warm to one another, for our English communication to settle in. Almost immediately afterwards, catching both of us unaware, came the Spanglish. http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2014/oct/15/issue-86-living-hyphen/
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.
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