Mother Tongue

My mother, Nur, and my grandmother, Sahavet, in 1952

Turkish is not my mother tongue, but it is my mother's tongue. At the age of nine, knowing less than ten words of English between them, my mother and grandmother emigrated to the United States from Turkey. I've always loved the story of how this ended up happening.  In 1953 my grandmother divorced her husband, a rare and brave thing for a woman with a small child at that time in Turkey to do. My grandmother supported herself and my mother by working as a secretary. One day a friend invited her to Izmir, where, apparently, many handsome American GIs were stationed at the time. Her friend had the intention of finding a husband and my grandmother boarded the plane also wondering if she might be able find someone who could provide for her and her daughter. Besides, if she hoped to find a man who would accept a divorced woman with a child it would have to be among the Americans. The man I call dede, a farm boy from Louisiana, met my anneanne that first day in Izmir. The handsome computer engineer from the U.S. Air Force was struck by the lovely, confident Turkish woman. Speaking mostly in looks and pantomime - knowing only a smattering of each other’s languages – they courted, and within the year were married. And bringing my mother in tow, wearing her little sailor’s jacket and clutching a suitcase, they left Istanbul for faraway San Antonio, Texas.

My grandmother's brother, Behzat, with my mom and my grandmother

My mother entered public school still without knowing any English. They put her a few grades below her age, but being good at math and a quick learner, she was bumped back up as she began to master English. By the time I entered the picture my mother had spent the majority of her life and education in the U.S. and her English far surpassed her Turkish, which, though still fluent, had been arrested at about the nine year old level. 

My mother

(As an interesting and awful aside, the Texas public school administration originally wanted to place my mother in a segregated school as she was Middle-Eastern and – technically - Muslim. However, my grandparents insisted that they were from the Western portion of Istanbul, the European side of the Bosphorus, and thus themselves European. (We are actually from Kadıköy, on the Anatolian side, but no matter.) The school officials quickly apologized and assigned my mother to a white school. A disturbing little slice from history, twisted in many ways.)

My grandfather, Roy, and my grandmother

As a child the only exposure I had to Turkish was the exchanges between my mom and her mother, the gossip I overheard between my grandmother and the elderly Turkish ladies smelling of too much perfume who would come over for tea, and my grandmother’s classical Turkish music, which I found frightening at the time, using so many many minor scales. The only words me or any of the other grandchildren knew were the numbers between one and ten, and dur, Turkish for stop or wait, which I suppose my grandmother must have said to us a lot. And then there were the many swear words which we would prompt my grandmother to teach us so we could repeat them gleefully in chorus. (Also, it’s amusing now to realize how my grandmother’s Turkish, despite her being raised to speak properly in the old Istanbul manner, resembles that of a sailor or perhaps a minibüs driver, at least in relation to how much she swears, to the point that my mom’s little sister, born in America, would typically use the word herif, scoundrel or rascal, in place of the more general and appropriate adam, man, which caused no small amount of embarrassment when we all visited Turkey together last spring.)

My grandmother and mother during their first year in San Antonio

The first time I seriously considered learning Turkish was when some relatives came to visit during my last year of college. I only got to see them once while I was down in San Diego for Thanksgiving, but meeting them made a strong impression on me in several ways. First of all, I always knew we had a number of relatives still in Turkey, but it was always sort of abstract to me. And now here they were right in front of me: two aunts and a cousin about my own age. Yet I was totally unable to communicate with them. My cousin understood a little English at the time but was too shy to speak. As for my aunts, they knew none at all. It hit me that there was this whole branch of our family back in Turkey who I knew almost nothing about and with whom I shared no common language. I learned a few quick phrases, the basic “please” and “thank you,” as we smiled at each other over our tea, relying on my mom to translate anything more complicated. When I returned to Santa Cruz, however, I began to study in earnest. By the time my mom and I left for my first visit to Istanbul the following autumn, I knew enough Turkish to carry on a simple, if primitive, conversation.

Christmas in Upstate New York

That first visit I spent a lot of time that visit just sitting mute while people conversed around me. Through long and lingering meals I would sit quietly, alternately listening in concentration and tuning out in frustration. Occasionally I would catch the topic and with a proud smile follow the thread of conversation for a couple of joyful minutes. Mostly I would just practice being patient, learning more about meditation than Turkish.

First being exposed to a new language is a very disorienting experience. You know the sounds and syllables must be meaningful because people seem to be forming and receiving meaning. Yet as hard as you listen it just seems like they are just speaking in gobbledygook. You think perhaps it’s just a big practical joke and any second they’re going to fess up and switch to English. It doesn’t happen.

My grandparents and my mother with baby Denise

In those moments language seems like a code, like the vertical streaming of green mathematical code you remember from scenes in the Matrix. You’re standing there watching it with your eyes glazed, unable to pick anything out from the constant flow of numbers and symbols. But if you could just crack that code and catch the meaning you could part that flowing stream with your hands and pass through to the other side…

I used to sit there, trapped and helpless, on the wrong side of the code. And I still do sometimes, reading or listening to something particularly difficult or obscure, but I’ve been mostly able to crack it and thank God for that. I studied obsessively and tirelessly for a long time. Though I don’t have any natural aptitude for picking up languages eventually all my labor began to pay off. Now, nearly three years since I began studying, I can finally speak and read with relative comfort. I still have a long way to improve and I’d be wary of calling myself fluent, but I speak proficiently at the very least. I understand almost all of what’s said to me, and I can express just about anything I’d like to express (though it may not always be in the most correct or eloquent way), and I can read novels with enjoyment. Of course, I can’t take all the credit for this. I owe so much of what I know to my family and friends (and even sometimes my students) who were patient and sweet enough to bear with me through a period of some truly atrocious Turkish and for putting up with my nearly constant questioning. This includes my mother, all my aunts, uncles and cousins in Turkey, particularly my aunt Asuman, and all my friends, most especially Cansu Serttaş. 

My grandmother posing in her belly-dancing outfit. She taught popular classes while living in Tehran.

I also feel a deep love and appreciation for the Turkish language itself - that beautiful, intricate, poetic, supremely logical and, at times, insanely difficult language of my maternal ancestors. Growing up, like many Americans, speaking only English, my first taste of bilingualism has been enthralling (I once saw a bumper sticker that read “Monolingualism can be cured” – remind me to track down one of those) but it came at no easy cost. To show some of what I was up against and a little of what I gained I want to share this quotation from Maureen Freely, a well-respected translator of Turkish:

“There is a very great distance between Turkish and English. There is no verb ‘to be’ in Turkish, and no verb ‘to have’. There is only one word for ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it’. Turkish is an agglutinative language: a root noun in a routine sentence will often have a string of six, seven, or even eight suffixes connected to it. It has many more tenses than English does. It can dart between the active and the passive voice with grace and ease. It loves clauses beginning with verbal nouns (the doing of, the having been done unto of, the having being seen to have something done to someone else…..) In an elegant sentence, there will often be a cascade of such clauses dividing the subject from the verb, and that verb appears so close to the end of the sentence that it often serves as a punch line, reversing the expected meaning of all that has come before it. To be overly clear is to be crude. To write well is not the say to the obvious, but to suggest what lies beyond it. So Turkish is not just another language: it is another way of looking at the world.”

Truly, as the philosopher Wittgenstein said, the limit of our language is the limit of our world. In gaining another language we gain another way of organizing and dividing reality. And it is only in learning a new language that we realize how arbitrary the way we organize the world through thought really is. But in addition to this, I realized, are different ways of interacting with those around us that are language-specific. It is not only the grammar and structure of a language that shape our world, but also what we are able or not to say. This is a case where the link between language and culture is very clear, and where the questions of which one comes first in the equation becomes very obscure. Whichever way it goes, while speaking Turkish I repeatedly noticed interactions that would be impossible in English because the language just doesn’t suffice. The terms of endearment I mentioned earlier are partly an example of this, but even more basic are certain set phrases used in Turkish that simply have no equivalent in English. If languages have personalities then the dominant personality of Turkish is that of a friendly and gracious host or companion. (If you piss Turkish off, however, it becomes the most perverse and creative of swearers.) Turks say things in daily life that, if translated into English, would sound not only awkward but cloying and insincere.

My mother and I drinking rakı at an aunt's house during my first visit to Turkey

To take one example of something commonly said in Turkish with no real equivalent in English let’s take the ubiquitous phrase heard around dinner tables, kitchens, and restaurants in Turkey: afiyet olsun. Literally, afiyet means good health or appetite. Olsun means, roughly, "let there be". So the phrase could be translated as “Let there be appetite.” Not only does that sound schmaltzy, it also doesn’t match the feeling of the phrase or the way it is used. Neither does bon appétit, which is the most typical translation into English, despite the fact that it is French. Saying afiyet olsun to someone carries the hope that the food being eaten will nourish them and that it will bring good health and enjoyment. It is typically said as a set response to elinize sağlık, "health to your hands," which is a way of complimenting and thanking someone who has cooked you a meal. And afiyet olsun, unlike bon appétit, can be said before, during, and after a meal, or even when hearing that someone has eaten something special or delicious some time before.

Myself, my mother, my aunt Denise, and my grandmother in Moda, Istanbul, 2010

Here is another example of how learning Turkish opened up new ways of interacting to me. I once had an exchange with someone at a train station that, simple as it was, would have been inconceivable in English. I was waiting for a train in the morning on the way to work. I passed by a man cleaning the windows of the station and I said to him kolay gelsin, "may your work come easily to you". In response he gave me a heartfelt Allah razı olsun, "may God be pleased with you," and we continued about our business. For neither of these phrases is there an acceptable English equivalent, at least nothing that is or would be used in everyday life. When you see someone working in English what can you say? "Take it easy"? "Don't work too hard"? They don't convey the same emotion and as phrases they are not as versatile as the Turkish. For me it feels wonderful to be able to walk into a store and in two words say, "You know, I know you hear this phrase all the time, but I can see that you're working and I just wanted to say that hope that your work comes easily and is satisfying to you today."

There are many such phrases in Turkish. To native speakers they seem so obvious and simple. However, when they learn English they learn that the absence of such phrases alters how they can relate to others. For example, başımın üstünde yerin var, "there is room for you on top of my head," used to express a hospitable invitation. Or maşallah, an Arabic phrase which literally means “It was God’s will,” but is used to admire children while not opening the door for the evil eye through excessive praise. There are also phrases like kurban olayım, “let me be the sacrifice” (an emphatic way of saying “please” or “for God’s sake”) and canın sağ olsun, “may your soul be healthy," used when telling someone not to worry or be sad about something.

All of this not to say, however, that Turkish is a better language. There are also many things we say in English that have no clear equivalent in Turkish. Languages are like the species of an ecosystem, each perfect in itself and fulfilling a necessary niche. I think Turkish is a more polite and perhaps more sincere language, but English also has incredible benefits, in particular its capacity for clarity and the unmatched flexibility and size of its vocabulary. What I’m trying to emphasize is how learning Turkish allowed me to express feelings and sentiments that were inaccessible to me in English, widening my world and giving me new ways to interact those around me. And my imperfect grasp of the language notwithstanding, I have found that in some ways I am now able to be more myself in this mother tongue, mother’s tongue.

My mother watching the Bosphorus during our visit in June of 2010

Last, and most importantly, there is my grandmother. Her immigrant’s English, learned only through exposure, which was never very great but always sufficient, has started to age along with her. The older she gets, the more her English fades. She still understands well - and speaks an idiosyncratic and hilarious mixture of her two languages we call Turk-lish – but more often than not a sentence that begins in English ends in Turkish. And this is fine for my grandfather and my mother, and now for me as well. Having become the only of three grandchildren to learn Turkish, I find myself able to connect with my grandmother in ways that would have become increasingly cut off to me as she gets older. Without needing recourse to my mother’s translation - or having to remind my grandmother, saying, “Anneanne, I don’t understand Turkish” – I find that we are able to understand and appreciate each other more than ever, and I can see from the look on her face how much that means to her.

July 2012