Missing a Mother Tongue

ταῦτ᾽ ἄρα Μοῦσαι ἄειδον, Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι,
ἐννέα θυγατέρες μεγάλου Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖαι,
Κλειώ τ᾽ Εὐτέρπη τε Θάλειά τε Μελπομένη τε
Τερψιχόρη τ᾽ Ἐρατώ τε Πολύμνιά τ᾽ Οὐρανίη τε
Καλλιόπη θ᾽: ἣ δὲ προφερεστάτη ἐστὶν ἁπασέων.
ἣ γὰρ καὶ βασιλεῦσιν ἅμ᾽ αἰδοίοισιν ὀπηδεῖ.
ὅν τινα τιμήσωσι Διὸς κοῦραι μεγάλοιο
γεινόμενόν τε ἴδωσι διοτρεφέων βασιλήων,
τῷ μὲν ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ γλυκερὴν χείουσιν ἐέρσην,
τοῦ δ᾽ ἔπε᾽ ἐκ στόματος ῥεῖ μείλιχα

Hesiod, Theogony

—

When I enter the Whitney Museum, I’m stuck in a thought loop.

Where am I going? It’s so hot. My shirt is stuck to my back. Is my forehead sweating? My face feels wet. I hate double-masking. Did COVID make me agoraphobic? [φόβος; panic fear] Unclench your jaw. There are so many people here. Did COVID make me claustrophobic? [φόβος; panic flight] Unclench your jaw. Why are there always so many people? The pandemic isn’t over. It’s so hot. Which floor is it on? Where am I going?

“Which floor is it on?” Unclench your jaw. I’m here with my partner to see the Biennial, titled Quiet as It’s Kept. The building carries the conversations of the mid-Saturday crowd, and I’m grateful that he’s here to center my focus. “Let’s start on the sixth floor,” I direct.

What I’m looking for is on the fifth. Forty-five minutes into our visit, we part ways and I exhale. He knows this is why I’m here today: in front of the elevators hangs a sequence of off-white curtains. At the entrance of this transient gallery, there is a bilingual placard suspended from two thin, silvery wires. Above each column of text, one in English and another in Spanish, reads in bold: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Within is a haven, fortified against the stream of passerby conversations and the dissonant audio overlap of neighboring artworks. I almost forget that I’m here during peak weekend hours. Cha’s presence here is all-encompassing. Cha as a sister. A daughter. A filmmaker and writer. A polyglot. [πολλή; many]. Throughout, there is also Cha the symbol and the artist. From the text at the front, I know that this space was constructed through collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Berkeley, Cha’s alma mater, is now home to her archive, from which this selection—film and video, photographs, artist’s books, typewritten text on textile—traveled to New York for this exhibition. I have never seen Cha’s artworks in person, and doing so became all-consuming when, around the time I first purchased a copy of Dictee, I learned they would be on view. I gulped through the book, reading and rereading each line in search of all the multitudes of herself Cha embedded in every word and when I finished, I sought more.

I didn’t know Dictee would remain with me as it does. In this work of autobiography by someone I did not know, with whom I share few lived experiences, I found echoes of home. They reverberate in her art: family, language. Dictee is dedicated “TO MY MOTHER TO MY FATHER” [μήτηρ; mother] and in her section CALLIOPE I encounter my own matriarchs. I think of them when I approach a portrait of Cha’s mother. It is small, easy to miss within a case in a far corner of the gallery. Most who walk through this area watch a nearby video showing a flickering sequence of portraits of Cha’s sister, whose face pervades exhibition reviews and Instagram posts. I wonder, for a moment, how many who have seen these images believe this to be the artist herself. Looking back to the wallet-sized, blue photograph, I recall that the image is reproduced in Dictee, opposite the first page of Cha’s chapter on her mother.

“Mother, you are eighteen years old. You were born in Yong Jung, Manchuria and this is where you now live. You are not Chinese. You are Korean.”

Unclench your jaw. With shame I recall: “You are not Indian.” Misdirected anger I too-often-for-forgiveness heaved at my mother before I understood that the displacement of our indentured ancestors to Guyana did not untether our roots from the subcontinent. It was an accusation doubly biting to one twice displaced. She arrived in New York City when she was twenty-one. She was not the first of her family to leave Guyana, nor was she the last. Her parents [nani and nana; mother’s mother and mother’s father] would live with us for much of my childhood. Her nani, whose true name I have never known, lived her whole life in Guyana. Her parents’ homeland was unknown to her, and to me. I don’t know their names either; as I call to mind an image of my mother’s nani in her loose blue dress with fine white hair beneath a whiter orhni, I imagine what they might have looked like, and what languages they taught her.

“You are Bi-lingual. You are Tri-lingual.”

My entire life I have heard my mother slip Creolese on and off like a fleece robe. Improper English, she called it. Broken. Something to conceal when in mixed company, as if she were inferior for knowing something they didn’t. Yet, it was clear that it brought her comfort. My mother speaking Creolese meant that she was in conversation with kin; family, friends, strangers with mutual contacts and shared myths. It meant she was scooping rice mixed with chicken curry with her fingers and cracking bones with her teeth to suck the marrow from the shards. It meant she was laughing. Unclench your jaw. Stale taunts of a fourth-grade classmate when I speak like my mother: “It’s ‘comf-ter-bull,’ not ‘com-for-ta-ble’; don’t you know English?” I practice, practice, practice, practice [ad nauseam; to sickness], curling and pulling my tongue until I yank the letters apart, extract a syllable, adjust the dental consonant, and meet the word where it should be: missing something, but no longer broken. I say it standing in the museum and once more as I write this sentence, to make sure I remember how.

“Mother tongue is your refuge.”

My grandmother [aji; father’s mother] spoke Arabic. I have heard that my father once yelled at her for refusing to speak English in my mother’s presence. She knew how and spoke to me only in English, but in those early days she held her mother tongue close. Maybe that’s where she found her comfort, conversing as if she never left Egypt. The comfort of what she understood and missed, when her firstborn brought home a tiny woman with dark skin and a foreign accent. Foreign to her: recognizably English in vocabulary and tenor, yet something all its own, with an origin far from all that she was.

Her husband [aja; father’s father] was the first of them to travel to New Jersey. Aji came later with her sons, my father and two younger brothers. When I hear the story of her reluctance to speak English, I imagine she sought refuge in language during those early years. I resent that nobody asked, and that it’s now too late. She was already practiced in assimilation, having given each of her Coptic sons Arabic names with the hope her homeland would love them as much as she loved it. How could she know that protection did not extend to the United States, with its promise of more and better, where the names she had so carefully chosen and the language in which she found solace brought her sons such harm that they wrenched their language from their mouths and replaced it with another. I dare to consider how much more she might have loved them if they had continued to speak to her in Arabic. Would she have loved me enough to remember my name if I called her teta instead of aji?