When your first language is not your home language

How many people do you know, or know of, who learnt another language before they really spoke that of their parents’?
My reading of Speak Swahili, Dammit! by James Penhaligon got me thinking about this. And I can answer the above question with 3. There might be others who have slippled my mind, but the three I have in mind have all written their histories, two of which are published by TSL.

Speak Swahili, Dammit! is self-published with all the tell-tale signs within. Yet, while jarring on occasion did not detract from the overall feel of the book and the life story being recounted. The other two books are: Marthe Kiley-Worthington’s Family are the Friends you Choose and Massowia von Prince’s Tanganyika, Country of My Birth.

Interestingly, the three authors I am discussing here all spoke Swahili better than the language of their parents, English being the language for two and German for the third. Two were Tanganyika (pre Tanzania being formed) and one Kenyan. What is also striking about the three authors and their accounts is how they were seen as delinquent or ‘wild’, not conforming to (white) society. They lived between worlds – not fully European and not fully African, more acceptable to the latter than the former. Schooling played a large role in their learning to conform to the dominant European agenda, not always a positive or pleasant experience.

In all three books, there’s a tinge of not being English first language speakers – for me it adds to the character and tone of the book. Conforming wiht publishing expectations, all ‘foreign’ words in the various books are in italics. A point challenged by Abdulrazak Gurnah in an interview about his books where he writes in English, a language he became fluent in for reading and writing whilst it wasn’t his home language. He fought to have his family and community languages – English, Swahili, Arabic and German – treated the equally with no italics distinguising the non-English from the English. There’s something in that, as there is in retaining italics to assist those readers who are not necessarily clued in to reading other languages.

All four books – including Afterlives by Gurnah – transported me back to my few years in Tanzania and to growing up on a continent rich in diversity.