“Sí.”
Your inner child speaks Italian, said my therapist, and I burst into tears.
We had been discussing some revelation I had about how severe one of my internal voices is — and how connected that voice is to my childhood. And my therapist had suggested that we needed to work more on reconciling my identities.
And then came my affirmation in Italian. I never let Italian slip in a conversation, unless I know it can be welcomed and understood. It came out, just like that.
When I moved to Scotland to study after high school in Naples, I did my best to remove Italian from my everyday life. There was no WhatsApp to stay in touch with my friends, and phone calls home were expensive. I started writing my diaries in English. I avoided fellow Italians in town and spoke to them in English only. (I have since apologised to several of them who stayed in touch, despite my obnoxiousness.)
And now, decades later, some Italian just slipped through me in a very emotional moment. And I realised how much I had asked that 17-year-old version of me to leave behind.
Crying with an accent
Children start recognising sounds in utero. Not only do they recognise sounds, and people attached to their sounds, but they are able from a very young age to reproduce those specific sounds.
There is a famous 2009 study of how children even cry with an accent, which was carried out by Professor Kathleen Wermke at the Würzburg University in Germany, together with colleagues. The researchers showed the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns and concluded that the French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection.
Then there is Orla, a baby from Liverpool, who went viral on TikTok. In the video, Orla babbles in a Liverpudlian accent as her babysitter, a friend of Orla’s mum, tries to get her to take a nap. At 19 months, Orla can very clearly reproduce sounds before being able to form words while using her family’s intonation.
“It’s important to make parents recognise that any sound a baby is producing is part of his or her way into language,” Wermke told The Guardian. “We should admire that and listen to them – even if they’re sometimes in the mood to cry.”
Forbidden languages
But paying attention to children’s early sounds, as well as fostering them in your native language, is a privilege.
Recently, while I was in Argentina, I was speaking to a contact — a trainee psychologist working at a programme to support caregivers in helping their children’s psychological development — who told me that one mother said she was worried and ashamed to talk to her baby in her indigenous language. Speaking a different language makes you stand out. And while some languages represent colonial power, the power of language also changes according to place. For example, Spanish may be the language of power in a country like Argentina, but speaking Spanish in some communities in the United States is very different.
Throughout human history, people have been threatened, hunted, and killed for speaking a different language. Languages have been forbidden. Parents have been too scared and wary to pass them on to their children. The lullabies they grew up with got lost in between generations. Now they all get drowned out by Cocomelon instead.
I am very aware of privilege whenever people comment on my children’s multilingual upbringing. I speak to them in Italian, my husband, Nacho, who’s from Argentina, speaks to them in Spanish. We live in Greece and the children go to a Greek-English school. So they are growing up with four languages.
Showing our true selves
As I’ve written before, I don’t like people commenting on their languages as an amazing skill. Increasingly, I try to highlight just how lucky they are to be immersed in all this linguistic richness. I hope they will also understand their privilege and be able to find their way in the maze of identities we are bringing to their young lives.
So, why did my spontaneous “sí” bring many tears to my eyes? I am afraid that before making a point of passing my native language to my children, I had for many years tried to eliminate any traces of my upbringing from my conversations. My Italianness was getting in the way, I was ashamed of it. My accent was made fun of in work environments. I was told I would never be a broadcaster. And so I tried my best to suppress it.
Yet, when my voice came out in Italian, and my therapist commented on how surprised she was to hear it in Italian, I recognised a child’s voice in it. I said “sí” like I hear our little one León say it. And that is what moved me deeply, and brought me to tears. I felt that I had not allowed that native language of mine to flow freely in my life. The same way I hope I can work through some of that internal mess I feel, I also hope that we support caregivers to help children feel comfortable in their many languages of origin, so they don’t feel they need to hide their languages — and themselves.
What I’ve been reading
This article gives an overview of results of a new study that shows how maternal brains change during pregnancy — and how some of those changes last even two years after pregnancy. Scientists tracked a 38-year-old woman from before conception until two years after childbirth using detailed MRI scans. They found significant shifts, such as a decrease in grey matter and a peak in neural connectivity during the second trimester. This study leaves a lot of questions unanswered but it is groundbreaking because it opens the door to further studies that could help better understand conditions like postnatal depression.
What I’ve been listening to
Have you heard of the late Italian composer Ennio Morricone, whose oeuvre included the scores of over 400 films. He first came into my life when I was a child through the 1988 Cinema Paradiso, which somehow always brings tears into my eyes, no matter how many times I’ve seen it. One of the most incredible scenes of the film has a very emotional song as a soundtrack. Now, this video shows a children’s choir singing that song in front of Morricone, well in his 80s, and shows how he got emotional by listening to that rendition of his music.
What I’ve been watching
This short reel by UK comedian George Lewis made me laugh out loud: “Dads v mums — feeding your kid in public.” “Is there anything he can’t do?” is the reaction of marvel seeing a father feeding his child in public. Instead the reactions when a mother feeds a child are of disgust. A lot of George Lewis’ feed is quite funny, actually. (And a good relief in a week where I was otherwise talking about a lot of teary things!)
Who’s been inspiring me
Gisèle Pélicot bravely standing up at a court against her husband who drugged her for nearly 10 years, raping her and offering her up for rape to other men on the internet. Her willingness to make the public trial and to show up in the face of those who want to think of her as a victim is definitely redefining what being a survivor means.
📷 Susan Holt Simpson, Unsplash. Wooden alphabet blocks with colorful letters, stacked in a playful arrangement.
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