The Accent That Betrays
An accent that will not fade keeps marking the poet as an outsider, until he claims it as his own
However carefully I polished my grammar, my accent remained, a small flag I could not lower.
It flew in every sentence, betraying me at the first vowel, before I had finished saying hello.
In shops I was understood, served, and then asked, gently, where I had originally come from.
"Your English is very good," I was told, in the tone reserved for a clever, obedient child.
The was a border checkpoint disguised as kindness, and I was waved through, never quite admitted.
I was corrected, I was praised, I was placed; always I was the object, rarely the subject, of the sentence.
The passive voice, I came to feel, was the grammar in which foreigners are habitually discussed.
Things were done to my speech: it was noticed, it was imitated, it was found charming or amusing.
"Say it again," a man once laughed, "I could listen to that accent all day long."
He meant no harm, and that was precisely the harm: my mouth had become his gentle entertainment.
An accent, I learned, is the one piece of luggage that can never make you leave behind.
It is the last of the lost country, a strip of homeland flying inside the throat.
My children lost theirs within a year, folding smoothly into the crowd, , safe, and unmarked.
I envied them and grieved for them, for their belonging was bought with a quiet forgetting.
To be placed, always, is to be reminded that belonging here is granted, , and quietly .
"Where is home?" they asked, and the question, however warm, drew a line I stood outside of.
I learned to answer lightly, ironically, turning the interrogation into a joke before it could wound me.
"Home," I would say, "is wherever my accent is still considered charming rather than suspicious."
They laughed, and in their laughter I heard the soft machinery by which outsiders are kept outside.
Yet the accent was also mine, the truest sound I owned, unforged and impossible to .
It could not be taught, bought, or faked; it was the of every place that had made me.
Each foreign vowel carried a village, a mother, a courtyard where a particular light once fell.
To erase it entirely would be to sand away the last inscription of where I had been born.
So I stopped apologising for the way my mouth remembered the country it had been taken from.
Let them place me; I would carry my origin audibly, like a name I refused to change.
The accent was not a defect in my speech but the sound of a self that had survived.
It was the one thing the border guards, for all their stamps, had failed to .
And I began to hear, in that stubborn music, not my exclusion but the proof that I endured.