Tum Log, All Y’all

A late-night reflection on my relationship to language

I don’t pray in Hindi. Instead, the language falls out of my mouth like onomatopoeia—echoes of my childhood.

My conversations with God are peppered with glimmers of my parents comforting me or admonishing me in more than one language.

My memories, sprinkled with the sound of my grandmother shushing my cries as she pulled my hair back tightly, promising a broad forehead would make me more beautiful.

With the sound of my father at the height of his illness watching black and white Bollywood songs on the TV, VHS case in hand—the most forgotten living room crooner of his era.

I’m noticing that while I struggled to embrace the culture of my parents—at times, while I consciously distanced myself from it—tiny bits of the South crept in. As I struggled to find where I belonged, grappling with my own unidentified brain differences along the way, one particular word stuck.

I’ve read that y’all was seen as lowbrow, even vulgar. I’ve heard brilliant minds express that they associate it with complicated, broken, and oppressive power dynamics. But I’ve also seen an argument made that y’all is one of the most inclusive words in contemporary language.

I don’t write in Hindi, but my poems often collide with the limited words I know. Simple words and colloquialisms stop me in my tracks. I question if it’s authentic to include them, if I have the right to use them. I wonder how many words will fit on the fence I seem to be sitting on, straddling two cultures but never truly feeling at home in either one.

A few years ago, I participated in a poetry workshop led by a New Yorker of Peurto Rican descent. He spoke about the way his work impacts his childhood friends. How the language in his poetry takes them back. I’ve been thinking about this for years, wondering if I even have a language that takes me back.

In my personal mythology, the first time “y’all” slipped out of my mouth in front of a group of other desi kids, I was probably stuffing my face with pakoras or dhokla. I do recall that my peers looked surprised, as though I’d insulted them. We were hidden away in an upstairs bedroom while the parents mingled downstairs. I listened to a boy my age brag about selling burnt CDs to kids at school.

“Y’all. That’s so dumb.” I probably said.

And to this day, the word itself is punctuation. Y’all. Period.

In awe or joy or anger or surprise:

Y’all.

It reminds me of the way my father said chalo or theek hai.

Ok. It’s cool. Let’s go.

I’ll take it.

It’s fine. It’s all good.

I don’t tell jokes in Hindi. I certainly don’t have inside jokes with anyone in Hindi. In fact, I don’t know that I truly have a shared vernacular with anyone. Yes, I have a family of origin. And there are other Indians who grew up here whose parents did not. First- and second-generation children whose parents came out of the IITs and IIMs, whose parents are professionals or corporate climbers or professors. But the language of our mothers and fathers was different. 

The shared vernacular, if we can even call it that, was that we existed in an in-between place. We learned how to do what I later learned could be called code-switching or masking. Then again, it wasn’t even that really. We learned how to talk with an Indian accent when an older Aunty asked us about school. We learned to be coy or demure, and focus on our studies, thoughtfully and consciously omitting the boys we were chasing or our creative pursuits. We were emphatically and repeatedly taught the difference between ट and ठ.

But we still got it wrong. 

I almost never speak Hindi. In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve had the opportunity that I’m not sure I could. I remember visiting family in India as a teenager, one relative laughing so hard she gasped as she asked me to pronounce things in Hindi. “You sound so American,” she managed to say in a spare breath.

Yes. Me, in all my American pronunciation. Me with my American birth certificate. With my American words and dreams and confusion.

Sometimes I say words through my teeth, which has in the past prompted people ask if I’m from up north. A friend’s father once described the Atlanta suburb I grew up in as the “Connecticut of the South.”

But then that word slips out. Y’all.

“Y’all, look at this.” I might say gently to my children at the park.

“Y’ALL!” I might exclaim less gently to my children before someone gets hurt.

“Y’all! I can’t!” I might muster as I laugh so hard. (Although not as hard as that one family member on family trip to India.)

It’s unexpected. Perhaps subversive. But maybe I am just a person who enjoy sa good second-person plural pronoun. I know it was something I particularly delighted in when taking foreign language classes in high school in college.

Maybe it’s my way of staking a place for myself. For those of us who don’t have roots in the South—or even this country—what better way to integrate with my peers, my community, the people I admire and aspire to emulate?

I mean, at the end of the day, I’m just one of y’all.

Right?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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Bits & Bobs

• Currently listening to a Spotify daylist called angst old school punk sunday night, but it includes “mid 2000s” and “00s alternative.” I feel old, y’all.

• We’re more than a month into this year’s homeschool adventure, and I’m very excited to take a small detour from “regular school” to do “pirate school” this week ahead of Talk Like a Pirate Day (9/19).

• A friend just sent me a copy of Kate Bowler’s The Lives We Actually Have, and I am so glad to have this in my possession. The blessings are a blessing. Both because of the friend who sent it and the book’s contents. Here’s one that’s included in the book.

• I’ve been having some weird health things going on, and I’m doing more work than I have been. It’s a tricky dynamic, but I’m finding ways to turn my low energy into sweet moments with my children. I’ll always be grateful for that.

More to come. Thanks for being here, friends. 👋