A Fleeting Thought on Our Talk

I was passing by a group of people talking the other day and I got to thinking.

I remember Chinaka would say she’d fail to catch what folks were saying to her because she would often willingly lose herself in the rhythm of their speech. I could dig that. Sometimes I swear I hear a drum keeping beat as they speak. As we speak.

There’s something so familiar about it.

They say that Brazilian Portuguese is the most unlike the Portuguese spoken anywhere else in the world and that the Portuguese of Bahia is the most unlike the Portuguese spoken in the rest of Brazil. I suppose it makes sense considering that a majority of the enslaved Africans forcefully brought to the Americas came to Brazil with the greatest portion coming to Bahia.

On any given day I hear Yoruba. Jamaican Patois. Fante. Harlem street corner slang. My Grandmother’s US Southern drawl. At some golden moments I hear ideas communicated in a foreign language as clearly as I do in my native tongue, also a foreign language. There are other times where I’m on the receiving end of someone sharing shared experiences of a shared past.

I catch it. I feel it. And I respond. Produced by a beating heart pumping ancient blood, syllables slide off my tongue and fly through the air with the wings of centuries.

So much of who we are is in our tongues. Tongues connected to souls that don’t forget, that know no time, no space. That we don’t speak these languages all grammatically good ain’t as important as our capacity to speak them right, to share experience, to pass on wisdom with less words and more feeling.

We know we are too big to fit into words.

Believe that.

-Amari