It is also very curious that the first three of us siblings all became High School English teachers. What were we looking for? Jenny and I have just finished reading Sadiqa de Meijer’s beautiful little book alfabet/alphabet: a memoir of a first language. There are many answers in this book. De Meijer’s roots go deep in the Netherlands on her mother’s side while on her father’s side there are Pakistani, Afghani and Kenyan roots. The family immigrated to Canada where she started to learn English and thus this lovely book, that reads more like poetry than prose.
“We had a family friend, someone whose kind, calloused hands had tied my skates, and he was very skilled at grafting trees. In his vegetable garden stood the odd, Edenic sight of an apple tree that also bore apricots and plums. Perhaps the minds of linguistic migrants are like that tree; the mother tongue is the apple trunk, with roots that penetrate the earth. And our later languages are branches, feeding through the same roots but setting their own fruit.
Apples spoken by the grainy image of a loved one on a laptop screen; handwritten on a birth certificate; stumbled through at a reunion. Apricots heard in a remote settlement; rising over schoolroom desks; tattooed on a forearm. Plums in a threadbare journal; a YouTube tutorial; a subtitled movie.
And all of them, harvest of words, in our sleeping and waking dreams.”