The mother tongue is the language of our earliest and truest selves, our first grip on the world around us as we learn to name the people, places, and things which hold us steady, which keep us fixed in a particular place and time. The mother tongue is both water and air as well as rock and earth. It is our medium, the place where we know ourselves and also where we lose ourselves, our edges and where we dissolve. It is our waking and our dreaming, our loves and our losses.
It is what we sing, and how we are sung. There are shades of difference in how it comes to us, just as we each stumble and fall differently when learning to walk. And it can fail us, and leave us wanting, searching for anchors. It can be hopelessly banal, our mother tongue, or it can be layered and filigreed, worked to a high gloss.
When our mother tongue happens to be English, the language of this essay and my own mother tongue, we unconsciously absorb the sense of its inevitability and its power. It is, after all, the language of empires, the most-spoken tongue in the world. In technology, international trade, tourism, and in many other fields, it is the default language, occupying the central position once held by Latin and Greek and later by French. We often speak English without thinking about the socio-political foundations of its ubiquity. To us first language English speakers, it just IS.
I grew up not in the United Kingdom or the United States of America, where my mother tongue holds sway, but in South Africa, which was colonized by both the Dutch and the English at different moments in history. One of the legacies of the Dutch colonizers was Afrikaans, a creole language with Dutch roots. Along with English, it was the other official language until the first democratic elections in 1994, which spelled the end of white minority rule.
As early as I can remember, the sound of words enchanted me, soothed me and sometimes scared me. Afrikaans, with its guttural “g” sounds in words like gaan (go) or gooi (throw) sounded coarser than English, more aggressive to my child’s ear. In apartheid South Africa, it was the language the Afrikaner Nationalist Party employed in their propaganda, in the media, and in white Christian national education. My father was a local doctor in Worcester, a farming town in the Western Cape inhabited mostly by Afrikaans speakers. Because Afrikaans was the language of many of his patients, he spoke it well.
My earliest memory of an Afrikaans word that frightened me so much that when I heard it, I would put my hands over my ears and run out of the room, was the word Voertsek! which means “scram” or “get lost.” Jeremy Taylor, an English singer/songwriter who had immigrated to South Africa, had written a hit single, “Ag Pleez Daddy” that satirized South Africans who spoke English with Afrikaans accents. It was written in the voice of children begging their father to take them to the drive-in and was filled with their fantasies of the candies and drinks they were going to have and all the cheap thrills he was going to treat them to. The father, who has been ignoring them all along, is finally roused from his stupor and shouts the single word in Afrikaans—Voertsek!—which ends the song. I found this utterly terrifying. Voertsek sounds like “Footsack” in English, which I might have associated with someone kicking a sack—in this case, a sack of children! Perhaps I picked up that it was the language of male enforcement, very much the lingua franca of the authoritarian environment I lived in. Or perhaps I unconsciously understood that the Englishman singing the song was making fun of the locals and that there was an underlying class snobbery in it that was discomforting. All I remember is that my older siblings thought the song was hilarious and I did not.
But of course the most famous Afrikaans word, the one which will forever live in infamy, is apartheid. The suffix, heid, and “hood” come from the same Proto-Germanic root, haidus, “manner, quality,” so it means not just “separateness” but the condition or state of being separate. Bland as it may sound translated into English, apartheid describes the system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa from 1948 to the 1990s. My parents, who had lived through World War Two, described witnessing the signs designating areas reserved for whites and those for non-whites that appeared when the white Nationalist Party came to power in 1948. As Jews, with the memory of the holocaust still fresh in their minds, they accurately saw those signs as harbingers of the state-sponsored violence that was to come.
What is less known about Afrikaans, often identified as the language of the oppressor, is that it is blended with Malay, Portuguese, Indonesian, and the indigenous Khoekhoe and San languages and that it “has a ‘Black history’ rather than just the known hegemonic apartheid history” (Willemse, 2017, The Conversation). Willemse points out that “many South Africans of every hue have contributed to the language’s formation and development.” Without consciously realizing it, the Afrikaans I came to love grew out of this multifaceted, complex history, and its sounds, as I came to understand them, could be tender, earthy, and vivid. The expression, “Moenie ou koeie uit die sloot grawe,” literally translated means “don’t dig old cows out of the ditch.” The equivalent phrase in English, “let bygones be bygones,” doesn’t even begin to conjure up the horror of revisiting old grudges as abhorrent as rotting cows. It’s also a language rife with diminutives, which didn’t escape my child’s notice. These were expressed with the suffixes ie or tjie. Cinderella was Aspoestertjie, the sandman was klaasvakie, brother was boetie, sister, sussie. A small hill was a koppie. All nouns in Afrikaans seemed to have the capacity to be made smaller, more intimate somehow.
I attended dual medium schools from kindergarten to standard ten, the equivalent of twelfth grade, and our all-white classrooms were separated according to what language we spoke at home. There were far fewer first-language English speakers than first-language Afrikaans speakers in our rural district, so we first-language English speakers occupied one classroom while the Afrikaans-speaking students filled several classrooms. We all received instruction in our mother tongue but then had a mandatory second language requirement, either English or Afrikaans. Quite often, the teachers responsible for introducing us to Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy, were second-language English speakers. This was the case with one of my favorite English teachers, Mr. Ackerman, whose teaching style was passionate and dramatic. He once pronounced, with great conviction, “bowl” as “bowel”. At the time, I found it discordant and embarrassing. How could an adult I admired mangle a word so badly? Now, years later, I see why. To a non-native English speaker “owl” is pronounced “owel” so why shouldn’t “bowl” be “bowel”?
In addition to the two official languages, there was a third, non-mandatory language offering, which was either German or Latin. Not knowing that German would catch up with me later, I opted for Latin, taught by the same energetic, excitable Mr. Ackerman, with his large icy-blue eyes and his sandy-colored toothbrush mustache. I never tired of his tales of life in ancient Rome, as if he had walked the cobblestoned streets himself, and his Afrikaans-accented pronunciation of the Latin words, which, since it was no longer a spoken language, seemed fair game. Our Latin class was tiny, with less than ten students, which only added to the drama and mystique of this language that once ruled the world, this mother tongue of so many other mother tongues. Translating Cicero, Catullus, or Caesar’s Gallic War felt as if we were fanning the embers of what was once so vibrant, and in its nascent flames we could see the ghosts of English words. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” The bones are all visible.
Not only was I part of a minority as a first-language English speaker and a student of Latin, I was also part of the close-knit Jewish community of thirty families, a minority in the town. We celebrated Jewish holidays together and saw each other in synagogue every Shabbat. In the afternoons, all the Jewish children attended cheder, the Yiddish term for a room where boys and girls are first introduced to Hebrew and to the tenets of Judaism. After attending school all day, we were a rowdy, unmanageable bunch. Despite the mayhem that often erupted in cheder, I gleaned enough to develop a fascination for this new/old language that marched backwards, from right to left, and its arresting alphabet. We were taught prayerbook Hebrew as well as modern Hebrew. Unlike Latin, which had remained dead, Hebrew was revived as a spoken language based on the ancient written one when Jews began to move to Palestine in the nineteenth century.
I had taken to Afrikaans like a duck to water, or eend te water, but Hebrew presented a whole new set of challenges, mastering the new alphabet being the least of them. Like Arabic, Hebrew is an abjad which means that all the letters are consonants, and the vowels are only sounded in relation to a consonant. To help those less familiar with the language who might otherwise struggle to know how the words are pronounced, vowels are indicated with symbols. Fluent readers and writers, understanding the context and meanings of the words, no longer need or use the symbols. Hebrew is also highly gendered—which affects nouns, verbs, AND adjectives. There seem to be an endless, dizzying array of verb forms and, since Hebrew is a Semitic language belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family, most of the words are completely unrecognizable to a speaker of English (or Afrikaans), both Indo-European languages. The fact that the small cohort of Jewish children I belonged to instinctively gleaned that cheder was not real school but something added on at the close of the day, certainly didn’t help us obtain mastery or learn to speak Hebrew with any kind of fluency. What we did learn, was to recite the prayers phonetically with enough skill to be bar- or bat-mitzvahed and even if we couldn’t speak modern Hebrew, we picked up the excitement of the new language, how its Israeli, Sephardic pronunciation differed from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of our grandparents.
There was something very old about the prayer books stacked up in a dusty room at the back of the synagogue, but the primer that taught us the Hebrew words for cat and dog—chatool (חתול) and kelev (כלב)—along with an array of other words was brand new and featured two gamboling children, Shoshana and Uri, smiling at us with innocent pride from every page. Israel was a fledgling state then, born out of the ashes of the holocaust and just over a decade old the year I was born. And the Israel depicted seemed to be a cornucopia, flowing not only with milk and honey but with oranges, pomegranates, apples, and grapes. We learned the names of all the festivals and how they celebrated the bounty of nature. The Hebrews, after all, were a historically pastoral tribe with agriculture at the very center of their lives. Shoshana and Uri, along with the brightly colored posters on the walls illustrating the seasons, connected this ancient past with the thrilling present.
I loved that the ch sounds in Hebrew produced at the back of the throat for words like shulchan (שולחן) and chalon (חלון) were not unlike the guttural “g” of Afrikaans. Similarly, the rolling “r” in Afrikaans was similar to the resh in Hebrew; both sometimes enunciated as alveolar or uvular trills, depending on the dialect. Neither of these sounds comes easily to an English speaker (unless born in Scotland) but I reveled in the sound of them when I said them out loud and when I heard them spoken.
In my twenties, after I had left the land of my birth for good, my love affair with language morphed into an actual love affair. I had met a German man in New York City, where I’d attended graduate school for film. He was an economist finishing his Ph.D. and had a startling affinity for languages. In addition to his native tongue, he spoke English, French, and Spanish with fluency and skill, sometimes peppering his speech with an Italian word or two, thrown in for good measure. I was hopelessly smitten and moved to Germany to live with him.
Nine months in Bremen, the Northern German town made famous by the Brothers Grimm story, Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (“The Town Musicians of Bremen”), gave me a passable knowledge of German, which I took to in much the same way I had embraced Afrikaans. Like Afrikaans, German came with its own associations and triggers, words like achtung, jawohl, lager, führer, words that evoked not only its Nazi past but also how it had been portrayed in Hollywood movies. And it was impossible, as a Jew walking the streets of any German town, not to feel conscious of the weight of that terrible history. My first day in Bremen, in fall of 1987, happened to be Volkstrauertag, a day of commemoration of the war dead. Church bells tolled and, beneath leaden skies, I could see, out of the back window of the apartment I was living in, a somber group of people assembling around a war memorial. The next Sunday was Totensonntag, the Sunday of the Dead, a Protestant religious holiday where observant Germans visit the graves of loved ones who have passed. I had an acute sense that neither ceremony commemorated any of the six million Jews who had been murdered.
When out walking in the nearby countryside, it seemed as if even the earth was tainted. North of Bremen was a region of bog and moorland named Teufelsmoor, which translated does not mean “Devil’s Moor,” as the words suggest, but is more closely related to the Low Saxon word, doof, which means unfertile or dead. The dead bog peat, formed from sphagnum moss, is used for burning. I couldn’t help feeling the heaviness of these places and names in my bones and found myself sleeping more than I ever have, either before or since. By the time the weather warmed and the darkness of fall and winter began to evanesce into spring, I had made German friends and was beginning to appreciate the seriousness with which they wrestled with the legacy of World War Two and the role it had played in the lives of their parents and their grandparents. There is even a German word, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means “the struggle of overcoming the past.” The young Germans I knew then all seemed actively engaged with Vergangenheitsbewältigung and talking to me, sometimes the first Jew they had ever encountered, was a touchstone for them to explore their thoughts and feelings. And, like them, I also came from a country reviled for its racist, inhumane laws. The big difference was that, in the late eighties when I lived in Germany, apartheid was still intact and South Africa was still a pariah among nations. The era of Truth and Reconciliation was still years away, while my friends’ parents’ war had ended four decades earlier.
Knowing Afrikaans, which is close to Dutch, gave me a leg up on learning German, as they are both West Germanic languages. Yiddish, also a West Germanic language and the mother tongue of my grandparents when they left Lithuania for South Africa in the early twentieth century, was helpful too. Like Afrikaans and Yiddish, German had a tender side, a warmth and earthiness. I learned that the ch in Ich is not guttural like the ch in chatool, the Hebrew word for cat, but spoken in the front of the mouth, softly. When mastering this sound, I would imagine Heidi picking flowers in the Alps rather than a jackbooted Nazi soldier. By the time I left, less than a year after I had arrived, I was dreaming in German. Needless to say, my relationship with the polyglot that had brought me to Bremen was in the process of failing. He was never going to be faithful, I had learned, zu meinem kummer, to my chagrin.
It’s 2023 now. There have been many transformations. I am married to an American architect and have two grown children, both in their twenties. My husband anchors me and speaks no other language except English. We have built homes together. We have quarreled. We have made up. Our lives and our loves are intertwined. We are each other’s best friend and sometimes each other’s worst enemy. Above all, we are lucky and blessed to have found one another.
Germany is no longer divided and the legal system of apartheid in South Africa is over. Nine more languages, the languages spoken by South Africans not of European descent, have been added bringing the total of official languages spoken there to eleven. My understanding of the conflict in Israel between Jews and Arabs has undergone a sea change. I am no longer the child enraptured by the bright images of the new Jewish homeland, but an adult who has had to confront its other face. I have visited Israel several times, and, on a trip in 2014, went with a group of Jewish thought leaders to the West Bank, the permits, separate roads, separate privileges, separate access to land ownership, separate access to water, all evoking apartheid. And then there was the wall, or “separation barrier,” snaking across the land. In Hebrew, one of the names for this barrier, is Geder Habitahon, “security fence” (גדר הביטחון) but in Arabic it is called jidār al-fasl al-‘unsuriyy, “wall of apartheid or racial segregation wall (جدار الفصل العنصري). How could that not remind me of the wall between East and West Berlin, still in place when I was there? And it was hard not to correlate the passbooks South African Blacks were forced to carry as identity documents which monitored and restricted where they could work and live with the special permits Palestinians in the West Bank have to apply for in order to cross the border.
The Israeli justifications for this are the intifadas in the late 1980s and early 2000s; the terror that exploded in Israel, the devastating images of bombed out buses, the severed body parts. And for Palestinians, it is the Nakba (النكبة) or Catastrophe, the war in 1948, where 85% of the Palestinian Arab population fled or were expelled from their homes, which is the root cause of their rage and their sorrow and is behind their acts of resistance. For the Israelis, that same war is referred to as the War of Independence, Milkhemet Ha’Atzma’ut, (מלחמת העצמאות) which won them their homeland after the annihilation of European Jewry.
The blood feud between Israelis and Palestinians has a long history, with so many faces, so many victims. But I have come to believe that it’s the entire civilian populations of the West Bank and Gaza who continue to pay the price—the ambulance drivers, schoolteachers, shopkeepers, doctors, businessmen, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone in both territories living under perpetual occupation.
After a career as a novelist and essayist, I dust off the skills I learned as a young film student and embark on a documentary film project that knits together old ambitions and new concerns. The narrative follows the lives of two Palestinian girls who love horses, revealing, over time, where this passion takes them. I meet the first girl at the very first horse show for Arabian horses I attend in Jericho in the West Bank. In the horse stalls behind the scenes, as breeders and handlers ready their horses, she is the only female in a sea of men. One day, like her father before her, she wants to handle and breed Arabian horses. Everywhere, black, green, white, and red Palestinian flags flap in the breeze and Arabic music blares as dazzling purebred Arabian horses walk, trot, and canter into the arena beneath two giant portraits of Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Arafat. I glance up at them and wonder what my parents, who were medical volunteers in the Israeli Army in the 1948 war, would think.
Necks proudly arched, tails held high, nostrils flaring, these magnificent equines, led by their handlers on the flimsiest of halters, are the beauty queens of the horse world. In this arid, ancient place, I watch how they are judged for how closely they hew to the breed standard. The excitement of the crowd and their pure joy at watching the horses prance before them is intoxicating. I feel more alive and exhilarated than I ever have before.
Toward the end of the show, as trophies are being handed out to the winners, the arena fills with Palestinian men in black t-shirts waving their fists in their air, shouting in Arabic. Despite the warm desert air, I’m suddenly chilled to the bone, my head full of TV images of Arab men in black screaming threats. But then I notice Hebrew letters on the backs of their t-shirts, and a profile of an Arabian horse. Is it Zahav, or Zahava Arabians? Golden Arabians? I try to make out the word with my rudimentary Hebrew, realizing with a gush of relief that they’re shouting triumphantly. The winning horse they’ve trained is from an Arabian Horse farm in Israel. Mabrouk! Mabrouk! Loud music plays, the sounds of the Arabic words proud and romantic. The victory is a shared one.
Just as with Afrikaans and German, I’m learning the beauty of the language, its own particular enchantment, as well as the love of the participants for these horses. They are symbols of freedom and all who celebrate them—whether from a backyard barn in the West Bank or a horse farm in Israel—understand this. I too have been amazed by horses since I first sat on the back of one when I was a small child, and I can share their happiness.
For the next six years, I travel back and forth between the Middle East and the U.S. to film. It is searingly hot when I go in summer and pleasantly warm when I’m there in the winter. The sounds of Hebrew spoken so freely and easily when I arrive at Ben Gurion airport connect me to my earliest self, those sleepy South African afternoons in cheder with Shoshana and Uri.
The flowers and plants are different to what I’ve grown accustomed to in the American Northeast. I drink in the bougainvillea, the night-blooming jasmine, the pomegranate trees, and the caper bushes. Cats stalk the streets of Jerusalem. In Jericho, I see a man in a horse-drawn cart filled with cauliflowers. On a beach in Tel Aviv, I watch a double amputee, with the bearing of an ex-soldier, playing volleyball with his friends. I traverse checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank, sometimes with ease and sometimes with difficulty. Often we film at a riding club in Jenin, where we encounter our second main character, a girl who comes from an Arab town in Israel and crosses checkpoints for her showjumping lessons because it is cheaper for her to ride in the West Bank. One year, on our way to the Jenin club, we pass a recently erected shrine along the road where a young man has just been killed. I have to turn away to hide my tears. But for my crew, death is ordinary. It can happen anywhere, any time.
Some of my Palestinian crew members speak English with fluency, others don’t. We are often in places where only Arabic is spoken. Other times, we are in Israel where many Israelis speak English in addition to their mother tongue, Hebrew. Wherever we go, there are horses and the people who care for them. This thread is a constant, and it binds my characters together across political, cultural, and religious lines. And it binds me to them.
I learn and I unlearn. I begin to study Arabic with a tutor. One of the first Arabic phrases I hear repeatedly as we film is fesh mushkila, no problem. I learn that, in this land of many problems, fesh mushkila bodes well. It means that we are, for now, not encountering any roadblocks, real or otherwise. I’m entranced by the melodious sound of alhamdulillah, praise be to God. We have reason to be glad, to be grateful. How precious life is. And I no longer startle when I meet a person by the name of Jihad, which is primarily a male name meaning “striving” and does not specifically mean “holy war.” It takes me longer to accustom myself to the sound of yahud, which means Jew, the word Palestinians use to refer to Israelis. Perhaps I will always struggle with it, just as many Palestinians struggle to say the word “Israel,” which reminds them of all they have lost.
Like Hebrew, Arabic is a Semitic language with its own ancient alphabet marching right to left. It’s also an abjad—all the letters are consonants and the vowels are sounds—and it is highly gendered. I can’t help noticing how close shalom aleichem is to salaam alaikum “peace be with you,” but, tragically, how far away peace is.
Despite all the similarities, I don’t know enough Hebrew to build bridges between the two languages, the way I could between Afrikaans and German and, unlike Hebrew, where I can at least decipher the letters of the alphabet, Arabic letters remain mysterious, a lockbox of interconnected, elaborate swirls. In many situations, I have to rely on crew members to translate for me. What keeps me afloat, is that I understand the non-verbal language of horses and the power they have to heal and console in this broken place. And there’s always the echo of my own history, the segregated world I grew up in. The word apartheid comes back to haunt me—people use it liberally to describe the conditions in Israel/Palestine—and it drives me to a new reckoning with it. I find myself inexorably connected to this land of dueling dreams and identities, situated at the very navel of the world. Here I exist at the intersection between what for some is a miracle and for others a catastrophe; ground zero of the heart.
As "Speech Acts" went to press, Hamas attacked Israel in an unprecedented way, setting off a war of as yet unknown dimensions. While I understand the conditions behind the eruption of violence and the urgent need to end the occupation, I will never condone the murder and kidnapping of innocent people. Every day brings new stories of horror from the region. I fear for the lives of everyone who I have been touched by over the years, including the lives of their loved ones in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
To my two main characters, both Palestinian teenagers, who have grown up through the making of the film and to my crews, both Arab and Jewish, who have worked tirelessly with me to bring their stories to light: May you all be safe, and may peace come in our time.
—ANNE LANDSMAN
Anne Landsman is a novelist, essayist, and filmmaker. Her novels, The Rowing Lesson and The Devil’s Chimney, were awarded South Africa’s two top literary awards, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the M-Net Literary Award and were nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ribalow Prize and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She’s also written for numerous publications including Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and has taught fiction and screenwriting in the M.F.A. programs at Columbia University, Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research. She is currently directing and producing a documentary film, Daughters of the Wind, about Palestinian girls who ride and train horses.
