Speaking, We Remember
by Fileona Dkhar ︎︎︎1813 to 1831. 18 years was all it took to etch sounds into ink. Magic into roman alphabet. A verbalization, not a speaking. Tongues stopped at the behest of East India Company. Rote replaced memory, first the Gospel according to St. Matthew then the entire Bible then colonial law. Blocks of text sticking to our souls, the spoken word is published. Speaking is denied.
But. I remember.
I remember my grandmother’s voice. Her long gray braided ponytail, a coconut-oiled shaman. Ka sangia. Curse you. Fuck this. Fuck that. She would say, “if bad comes your way, yell a good shrill FUCK OFF.” The word is all it takes.
She remembers.
A sunny noon near the end of summer. She will be the first to read. Her hands will grow to write, but now they trail scratches of skidded red skin. Itching thighs and itching knees. Chubby knees and thighs. She is 6 years old. Seated on her mother’s lap, her itch feels like a lifetime. In front of a hut, mother, and itchy child, squatting on grass. Soon a stocky, old woman appears. She looks at the child, “So where have you been?” She speaks strangely, half spit, half words. The child responds quickly, shy and afraid, “I don’t know.” She says, “we need to know where we’ve been.” Half spit, half grunt. Silence. Mother grabs her thighs and points to the marks. “A curse” and a round of sighs. Always a curse before the child forgets her tongue. Before she takes a foreigner’s tongue. Left shin, the deepest red, a circle the size of a one-rupee coin, the inner splotch like the foreign Queen’s head. Red and spreading like how tea spills on a morning newspaper. The old lady gets out a small, wrapped leaf from the folds of her wrapped skirt. Opening it, she then taps her wrinkled finger on a little white wet cream of limestone. She draws a white circle around the spot. Then begins… spoken words. Words jumbled into sounds, through more spit, anger, a swear word. The child giggles. Magic. Less and less itchy, less and less red. In 3 days, no spot, no itch, no circle. She went to school the next week. Her a, b, c, d, e, f, g… We wanted to learn, we let go of our curses. Grandmother remembers.
We remember a creation myth.
When we came to the earth, we all had a script, a word written and spoken. We all came literate. We all had voices. But we had to cross mountains and rivers to see the expanse of all there was. Many chose to cross mountains and deserts, for in the river you would surely lose your script. That was when we lost our script. Our ancestor clenched the scroll in his mouth and swam past treacherous currents. Midway, he swallowed the script. We have no written script; we had spoken word. Digested, our script was always within us.