I miss the Trini language

He is not very tall but the long, thin line of his nose, the nostrils flaring gently, give him a lofty, slightly aristocratic look. The others are much shorter than he is, shorter than I am. They look up at him on the train, his high cheekbones and pale skin, the beard very black against his almost sallow complexion. They chatter ceaselessly, make constant, nervous gestures with their hands, their karas flashing briefly from under their sleeves.

They smile and laugh in their strange language, speaking loudly, confident that no one can understand them. The Sikh I notice every day seems to never initiate talk, looking at a fixed spot on the door in front him. He responds to them in English.

At work, less than half of us come from a country where English is our native language. It is a United Nations convention, each continent represented on two office floors, half a dozen languages repressed. For me, it is a bigger shock that I expected. I’ve never had a problem switching between Standard English and dialect back home; thought I was equally comfortable in both.

But it’s only up here, where it’s not a choice, but a necessity, that I realise the confines it inflicts. Initial reactions are repressed; quick mental checks for grammar and easy comprehension have rendered speech sterile; dead, textbook examples that are perfect in their formation but bereft of warmth.

And I am surprised to find that when I think of home, it is the language I miss, the sweet, deceptive simplicity of the words that roll around the tongue with the satisfaction of a tomato ball. The inability to describe a dress as cosquel, to exclaim tonerre at a story that is long and convoluted, a langniappe is reduced to "one for the road," its essence definitely, irretrievably, lost in translation.

In describing an event back home I use the word bacchanal, an English word that, although rendered intrinsically Trinidadian, I still consider safe. It is unknown; its context misunderstood. Suddenly, I become tired by the burden of description and end the conversation. Someone asks if I want a Jack Dee and I am lost. It’s Cockney for a cup of tea and my own status as someone outside of this city’s reality is re-established.

And it is not only I who suffer. With English as the unofficial lingua franca in the office, conversations can be tedious, wearying affairs. One co-worker displays the classic qualities of the non-native speaker. He takes his time to think of what he wants to say; long pauses in his sentences are evidence of the clockwork of his mind running ahead, picking up and rejecting and then finally selecting the next word that he wishes to use. Many times, others finish his sentences for him and move on with what they were doing but, stubbornly undeterred, he plods on until he has finished what he wants to say, even after backs have been turned and conversations terminated.

I am amazed and troubled by this. In my private cell I walk the streets of the city, my thoughts liberated in a way my speech could never be. One’s language, one’s words, they are everything. They are the culmination of one’s experiences, one’s upbringing, one’s culture. It is a distillation of the collective memories of a people, of a place. In the days of New World slavery blacks weren’t allowed to use their native languages, but instead were forced to learn and use the language of their respective masters.

Derek Walcott writes about this, this ultimate act of colonisation. The way to counteract this, he says, is to take the curse of the master and make it a gift, make the language one’s own. It’s easy to do so when describing something that’s one’s own the way moonlight coruscates the waves at Toco, the thick smell of overripe mangoes as they rot under a tree, the way brown sugar rolls and boils at the bottom of an iron pot when being burnt. But how does one colonise the coloniser in his homeland when one must seek out and emphasise one’s similarities for the sake of survival?

It has been estimated that by the year 2020 whites will be the minority in London. It is also believed that the champions of English will be traditional non-English speakers. And everyday I am reminded of the opening of Walcott’s poem Codicil: Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles, one a hack’s hired prose, I earn my exile.

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