In Rojbîn Arjen Yigit’s powerful poem, ‘Daykêmîn (Mother)’, a child sits down to dinner and savours her mother’s stories of when she first arrived in Britain and had to navigate many cultural and linguistic barriers.
Daykêmîn (Mother)
It was at the dinner table when you
Told me
Whilst eating fasulye
Whilst biting the meat off the bones
Starving for more snippets of stories
About the clinic in 2003
About how you really thought about it
Because you were new to this England
This cold country
With its unsmiling British lips
Probably because the sun never rises here
You said the doctor said ‘please reconsider’
And you heard it from the mouth of the
Translator woman
Not even in the tongue of your mothers
But that twisted language you had to learn
Made to sing the national anthem
Kurdish diluted to Turkish
Where you had no right to be
No identity
Now in this England
The echo of the doctor
In that carbolic room
Woke you up—
A little life sprouting
Suddenly the fullness of your belly
Was enough for you
And you told me how you said to the translator woman
Who told the doctor
‘Cancel it’
About Rojbîn Arjen Yigit
Rojbîn is a poet and student.
This poem was commissioned for Life in Languages, a series conceived and guest edited by Elodie Rose Barnes
Language is our primary means of communication. By speaking and writing, listening and reading, by using our tongues and our bodies, we are able to communicate our desires, fears, opinions and hopes. We use language to express our views of the world around us. Language has the power to transcend barriers and cross borders; but it also has the power to reinforce those demarcations. Language offers a form of resistance against oppression, yet it can also be used to oppress. Language has the power to harm or to heal.
In these times of shifting boundaries and physical separation, when meaningful connection has become even more important yet seemingly difficult to attain, language has become vital. The words we choose to read, write, and speak can bring us closer as individuals and as a collective. During lockdown, unable to travel, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to reading works in translation from all over the world – not only for the much longed-for glimpses into different cultures and ways of being that I cannot experience in person (for the time being, at least), but because they offer new words, new viewpoints, new ways of expression. Grief, loss, uncertainty, anger, hope, joy, love: these are universal emotions. Finding my own feelings mirrored in the writing of womxn from all across the world, from different times and different situations, across generations, is a massive comfort. It’s also led me to examine my own relationship to language and languages: what I read, how I write, the roots of my communication, and how that’s changing today.
In this series for Lucy Writers, I’ll share some of my personal reflections on how language has shaped my life and writing, and review some of my favourite works in translation written and/or translated by womxn. Writing on works written and translated by the likes of Natasha Lehrer, Jen Calleja, Saskia Vogel, Leïla Slimani, Sophie Lewis, Deborah Dawkin, Khairani Barokka and many more will feature in Life in Languages.
Elodie Rose Barnes, Guest Editor of Life in Languages
