Dancing with my Mother Tongue

HOW I RETURNED TO MY POWER THROUGH CELEBRATING PUNJABI Written and modeled by Sonakshi Garr, Diversity and Inclusion Co-Director Photographed by Evelyn Barrios, Guest Photographer Photo Editing by Audrey O'Neill, Photography Director

In every word I spit, my lips repress a violent waltz between two tongues. The first tongue is wet and knotted— drenched with the hope of authenticity, but not the promise of it. This first tongue has seen Punjabi many times in her gracefully rugged nature, but has never bothered to say hello. The second tongue is supple—the product of the type of discipline you can only learn in white classrooms and white playgrounds and white parties.

In the United States, 77% of people say that speaking English is important to national identity.1 The mere accent that envelopes someone’s English plays an even greater role than their looks when it comes to perception.2 I ached to be a part of this American identity.

Punjabi is the mother tongue of 146.7 million people across the globe—including my parents.3 It is the language I first heard at home in a small, heavily white Midwestern town, sandwichedbetween stale cornfields, silent warehouses and savvy people. Punjabi is the language that decorates stained spice packets in my family’s cabinets and playlists on our road trips. It is the language that slips from my parents' lips like honey when they sing and like water when they rant.

And that’s why I hated it. I hated Punjabi because I was Punjabi.

For me, middle school gym class was a sweaty, concave mirror, reflecting remnants of my distinct culture through pitch-black splintered hair ties and missed kicks on overgrown soccer

¹ “Punjabi - Worldwide Distribution,” WorldData, accessed Oct. 23, 2021. ² Bruce Stokes, “Language: The Cornerstone of National Identity,” Pew Research Center, May 30, 2020. ³ “Psychologists Show How Accent Shapes Our Perception of a Person,” ScienceDaily, Dec. 20, 2010. fields. In high school, I hated how my Punjabi bled everywhere, so I stopped speaking the language altogether.

Growing up in a town with a population that was 2% Asian, language was one of the only factors of my identity I felt I could control. If I could not control how the aromas of my school lunch filled the air, I could control the way my tongue curled to match the interests of my peers.

These emotions shifted when my grandfather, a stern man with caramel skin and elegant opinions, suddenly died the day of my junior prom. His death reminded me of all the things I had killed before—tethered relationships, old versions of myself and most importantly, the mother tongue that could have made us closer.

In a 2017 study done by linguists, it was discovered that people never truly forget their first language—it just needs to be revived.4

So at 19, I chose to revive my wounded mother tongue by threading random Punjabi words into the sentences I spoke with my parents. The words came out bruised, draping the coat of a Midwestern accent. I could not roll my “R”s or annunciate my “D”s, but the daily attempts, while clumsy, made me feel like I was coming home to myself.

I knitted old Punjabi songs into the playlists I listened to when I ran errands and brushed my teeth. I adorned henna on my palms. I cooked lentils in beds of softened onion and tomato. I stopped catering to the white gaze.

Punjabi culture is loud in every aspect of the term—it tells the stories you could only ever tell in India, where hundreds of small revolutions sit in every street corner. Layered hand drums and jars of saffron and old, intricate folktales all taught me the meaning of multidimensionality, the meaning of coexisting.

On a campus that so badly longs to limit its members to one identity, untangling my mother tongue was not only a way of returning to my authenticity, it was a way to join the narrative of other students on the same journey. By embracing my ethnic language, I found I was engaged in my own activism: being an unapologetic version of myself. ■