Prologue (Their language in my mouth)

I put on this language – does it suit me? Of course not.

It’s a ragtag cloak I stitched together from Guardian headlines and Eminem. International friends. From smart ass intellectuals trading in bad puns and abstract nouns. From local pub-goers in the post-mortem mining towns of Northern England. Cambridge Advanced English textbooks. (London is the capital of Great Britain.)

I rap on the keyboard so you can’t hear my accent.

Where is your accent from, I am asked by way of small talk. A façade of a sentence, a polite cover on the blunt: where are you from? Curiosity killed the cat, I might say. But the cat has nine lives.

English in my child’s mouth, hissy, singsong, clumsy words, an anxious game I don’t yet know the stakes of. I still retain the muscle memory of that first acquaintance with ‘w’ – voiced labial velar approximant, as I later learn to describe it. Your lips nearly touch, the sound is held in the ring they form, then you release. It’s dynamic pouting with a sound. Then there is ‘th’, lick your front teeth for it’s a voiced dental fricative, a slight lisp or hum, this or that.

‘How are you?’ – the teacher asks. I am meant to repeat. She says this counts as a response. In fact, this is the only appropriate response. It’s a grammar course but no one said it shouldn’t prepare you for life. She says I might still add: very well thanks. But be careful not to say very vell.

The first English class starts with changing our names. Noémi becomes Nancy. Sára – Sarah. Dávid – Dave. Gyöngyi, Enikő? Well, good luck.

I am nine and I feel like a circus animal, but this new game of holding an elsewhere in my mouth is exciting, so I don’t mind. Whatever you cannot ship over into this shiny container you will leave behind.

So where is my accent from? From late arrival, foreign beginnings. Defiance. It’s my admittedly poor, singular claim to diversity, a marker of difference you cannot unhear. Not fully.

I will bend your grammar, flatten your melody, smuggle in my bygone, my left behind, my mother, my grammar, my unused consonants, my childhood riddles.

English, for the rest of us anyway, is global news, abstract nouns, the language of world affairs, porn, wars. Its wars start right at home, where every metaphor is militarised.

I am amused to try on this language where you set targets at work, where you win your arguments, disarm with your beauty, get bombarded by news. Where your discussions are full of landmines, you come under fire from opponents, where you get rich by making a killing, and, when sticking a cannula in your arm, nurses are engaged in front-line work.

So, I put on this language of yours. In it, elephant on a catwalk, I live my life. I have attempted this a few times by now. It’s not always pretty.  I am no immigrant, mind you. Don’t worry. I have not come to stay. Yet, here I am. It so happens, and it keeps happening so.

Each day I place this language of yours in my mouth like a denture, lick its foreign body. I smile, faking that it’s real. I have no other means with which to tell this story.

So, I start. This is how I start.