I spend a lot of time thinking about language. As someone who grew up in two different worlds and occupies yet another world in a different way through adoption, language fascinates me. The way words can be woven into sentences that carry at once: great meaning, the ability to wound deeply, and the ability to heal is an intriguing and multilayered phenomenon. Language can be wordless. Brazilians love to dance, to move; the ancient traditions that made a people are alive in beating drums and thumping hearts. I think legacies endure through language - be it spoken or written word, a stunning composition, or wonderfully embodied dance. Legacies keep us tethered to our humanity. We learn from the shameful ones we’d rather keep hidden, and we draw strength from the inspiring ones we hope will shine forever.
Humans want to be a part of something. When you boil everything down to a deep desire to mean something in the world around you, a great capacity for nuance is unlocked and we can see, as Maya Angelou says, “with a hurtful clarity,” the harm in what has been and the call to action to reconcile and restitute. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves a beautiful story out of her journey using science, mysticism, and the embodied knowledge from her Indigenous roots which she always carries with her. It is touching and beautiful, and heartbreaking - particularly her lament over the endangerment of the language of her people. There are only a select few elders in her community who speak the language of their ancestors. The whole community must come together to learn the language and keep it alive; to save it, very literally, from dying.
I’m struck by the beauty with which Kimmerer wrangles words - reckoning with the violence of erasure and tending to the indigenous roots of many words in the English language with both tender hope and palpable sadness. My first language was lament. Beginning with a separation at birth, lament entered my life early through both personal and collective experiences in a country very familiar with suffering. Growing up in Brazil gave me a bird’s eye view into the mingling of the embodied language of lament and the extraordinary ability I noticed in the people around me to recognize delight. The melding of lament and joy became a primary language from an early age.
Many of our family friends lived in homes with unstable walls and dirt floors. These friends taught me how to share, and to give thanks; friends who out of their scarcity would produce the most delicious corn cakes from ground dry yellow corn served with velvety sweet coffee, or water from their terra cotta water filters. To this day, the look, feel and smell of terra cotta feels like home to me. I can taste the earthy, clean swell of flavor from water filtered in terra cotta pots in my memories as clearly as if it were my first sip on a hot day in Belo Horizonte. We spoke Portuguese, the language of lament and joy, at home when our housekeeper was around. When it was just us, we spoke my other first language, English.
English for me was the language of lake houses, beanie weenies, fried okra, and salted watermelon. Although impatience made me a terrible fisher, when we were at my grandparents’ for a visit, I loved nothing more than going to the lake house and spending time in the shed picking out a life jacket, choosing a canoe, and reveling in the smell. Oodles of little plastic worms emitted a rubbery scent that met the strong and somehow soothing aroma of WD-40. In the shed among the smells, I learned the language of coziness, home, and family. I had birthday parties at the lake house; it was where I finally got a Baby Secrets doll, along with baseball cards for my collection.
My grandmother, who wanted so much for me and my sisters to be ultra feminine, loved us enough to give into our tomboyish ways. For my sister, it was hot wheels cars and for me, it was baseball cards. During every trip to the store when we were with her, we were allowed to choose an item. Joana always chose a new car for her collection, and I always chose a pack of Big League Chew because at the time they were packaged with baseball cards – a fun surprise to be enjoyed long after the chewing quality of the gum had expired. The Lakehouse was a time of family togetherness. It also bore witness to a peril that will forever be known in my mind as the time Joana and I got lost at sea. We decided to take one of the canoes out for a little row around the lake. We couldn’t have been more than 500 feet or so from the shore, when anxiety hit and I began to believe we would continue to drift further and further from the pier and our beloved Lakehouse.
I began to cry, and yell for help. “Help us! We’re going to get lost at sea!“ My dad pulled us back to the dock, and that marked the end of my impromptu adventures in water based transportation without an expert present. Our other grandparents’ home, rather than a lake house, had acres of farm land and woods with bluffs, creeks and hiking trails - perfect for two adventurous girls to play explorer. I can still smell the aroma of wild onions and freshly mown grass; and the soaked dirt after a summer rain shower. We were taught to enjoy the outdoors and live it up out there - learning from nature and enjoying beauty and bounty. After being instructed to return home or move to another area if we suddenly smelled a spicy smell, Joana and I set out on one of our many adventures one sunny day. Rattlesnakes emit a spicy smell when they sense danger, which is why we had strict orders to leave if we smelled anything like that. Rattlesnakes, however, wouldn’t be the greatest threat to our lives that day. As we were hiking to the old broken-down house in the woods - our hideout - we encountered a creature. It had dark brown fur and a chubby looking belly.
Convinced we were about to have a showdown with a bear, I yelled “run for your life!” and we took off toward Grandaddy’s house, not bothering to look back. Like the boy who cried wolf, we ran and started yelling our warnings “a bear is coming! Go inside!” When we reached the yard and stopped to take a rest next to the old dinner bell, our parents asked questions about the creature and why we thought it was a bear. “Because,” I said authoritatively, holding my arms up in the air and cupping my hands downward, “it went like this.” Years of cartoons had taught me that bears in the wild always sit on their hind legs and “go like this.” We were informed that we had most likely seen a woodchuck. And that’s probably true. But as someone semi-fluent in the language of vivid- bordering-on- overactive imagination, I know the truth: I survived a close encounter with a bear.
Grandaddy’s farm was rest, renewal, and adventure. I loved to sit in the upstairs bedroom which served as the library and read all of my mom’s old Nancy Drew books. I relished walking in my mom’s footsteps at the farm, reading the books she read and being in the space where she grew up. In my most reflective moments, I can still smell the old books, the wood fireplace, and the sweet summer honeysuckle. I can feel the tar bubbles popping under my bare feet on a summer day. And I can feel Grandmother’s gentle spirit in the memory, a spirit that lives on in my mom and sisters.
I learned to speak 2 languages growing up- English and Portuguese; but I also learned to speak the language of elf houses made of dirt and pine twigs adorned with delicate leaves from the underbrush. I learned to speak the language of gathering over a meal, of gratitude for abundance and trust in scarcity. I learned to speak the language of love, born of the divine breath that my body carries, a body made in the image of God, the God of Eve and Sarah, of Rahab and Jael, of MawMaw and Grandmother, and Nancy; a divine breath that finds its rhythm in being a presence of God’s love in the world.
This is beautiful. Thank you for reminding us of the many ways we "speak" to one another.