Cien Años
I remember it was the first time I was returning to Colombia as an adult, as someone with his very own agency, free to roam around and do as I pleased. Still, I was always careful about speaking English in public and worried about how my Spanish sounded. I never thought my Spanish was lacking in any real way when I spoke it in the US, where I felt that I spoke more fluently and without the need to use English to fill in the gaps, unlike a lot of my friends who were born in the US. Still, when I visited Colombia, I was always reminded of the effect my regionality had on my speech. I was also aware the impact living in US was having on the way I spoke Spanish. I am thankful that I moved to NYC at the age of six and was able to spend summers in Colombia with my father; I think that it was because of those summer visits that I was able to retain my Spanish.
I used to be shy around certain family because I thought, in their minds, they didn’t even know I was able to speak Spanish, the same language they did. I understood everything they said to me, but without giving them any sort of feedback, I was not giving them much evidence to suggest that I still spoke my native tongue. Many of their comments were received by me with blank stares. I think that this had to do, in part, with the fact that my brother did all the talking when we were kids — all the talking and all the negotiations. When I would try to get a word in, he would cover my mouth. To him, I was there only as backup, a backup who nods his head in agreement with the leader (my older brother) and doesn’t say much. Here in NYC, after elementary school, I did not attend schools with sizable Spanish speaking populations—and it began to show in my speech. Sentences in Spanish were not coming out smoothly anymore. I was starting to feel like I was born in NYC and not Colombia. There isn’t a specific example that I could point to. I guess you can say that because there were so many, they all became obscured into one. I would often forget the word for things such as the types of fish we ate like cachama and bacalao. As a teenager, given that my peers at school and my family back home were so different, I began to feel more and more isolated from my family. Answers to my mom asking me how my day was becoming shorter and shorter and eventually became so short they were one-word answers. Good. Bad. I began to lose the ability to tell my mom how I feel. This was the kind of damage that takes years of learning how to talk to remedy. This was the kind of damage that makes you feel shame for not even being about to express how one feels to the one who brought you into this word. This kind of existential woe is one that led me to ask myself how it got so bad, so abstract, and if I would ever be able to see eye to eye with my own mother.
I decided that this was something about me that I wanted to change badly; so I started to read in Spanish as much as possible in the hopes that I would revert back to speaking Spanish to my mom as if we were still in Colombia. The news, books, articles, and so on. I would like to find an isolated area where I felt comfortable reading out loud. Initially this was a very heartbreaking endeavor. I started to see limitation in the way my tongue could contort. Certain letter combinations were hard for me to get out. For example, the r sound when combined with other letters came out sounded super flat and with no melodies to them. I would read the same sentences again and again hoping to hit that damn r in the head so good that it eventually become effortless to me. After so many tries, I would finally get a satisfactory sound but wondered how I was going to do that naturally. To be honest, to this day, it still takes a lot of effort. I couldn’t help but to feel a little envy for my cousins who could so effortlessly get those sounds out. My cousin born in Colombia that is. The ones born in the US could barely speak Spanish. I refused to allow myself to get discouraged. I was eventually able to devour –albeit with a dictionary in hand—literary works that had then seemed impossible to me.
One of if my triumphant moments was finishing the book Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Reading this book felt like I had reached the summit of the mountain where I had found the frozen remains of my previous attempts. Four times in total. I would start it and make it first one quarter of the way, then one half, then one half again until finally I was able to finish it. On that final attempt I was not able to put the book down. I think I would read around 100 pages a day. I would read it until my eye would begin to get heavy and the ink started to blur as if it was still wet and diffusing on the page. The sequence of events seems so obscure now, and I had finished some Spanish books before but finishing this one. This accomplishment seemed to mark a new chapter in myself. I was finally able to make it all the way to the end. To the top of the mountain. A dense book with difficult langue and many characters to keep track of –many of which shared the same name. One day I want to do it again just to see.
As is sit here writing this essay I find myself thinking about the many times where it felt like my very existence in this country was hanging from a thread. Reconciling with the duality of having grown up in NYC, speaking New York English, speaking Spanish at home with my family, knowing what’ll make a mother from Chelsea chuckle, or when someone from the block is looking at you with a little too much interest.
It’s a weird feeling: the indignation I feel when I talked to someone here in NYC in Spanish and they have the audacity to reply in English. That is to say, the poor young man is struggling, let me throw him a line. This way of thinking isn’t right and as I get older, I realize that people are going to respond how they are going to respond. They don’t know your life. They probably don’t care. There are a million bad reasons why they may have done that and a million more good. I’m just glad that where I am now, I feel infinitely more secure of who I am. No one gets to decide that for me.
It would take me 100 years learn
Who I am
And 100 more to accept it
