Lately, immigration is regularly discussed: in the media, on the street, at any terrace gathering. . . . People speak of inflatable dinghies, illegals, church closures, deportations, expulsions, integration and fundamentalism, among other things. Research on the subject is abundant; how many have arrived and how many stayed, what they do, the quality of their Catalan, numbers and more numbers that try to make sense of a new reality as incomprehensible to most as it is unfamiliar—a reality that’s feared even, and often distant.
* * *
“Mom, what’s that, huh? What is it?” you ask me from your ninety-seven centimeters of bustling curiosity, your eyes wide open. You don’t pay close attention to my response, maybe it was a rhetorical question. Your interest shifts to the television, muted by the sounds of the washing machine. You get closer and start yelling: “I like water!” When a commercial is really good, you can tell from the first few notes and you run to it like a mouse after the Pied Piper. A few seconds later you’re kneeling at the rug, without knowing that your mother had put it in the dining room because she missed the feeling of sitting on the ground and resting her head on the cushioned walls. You don’t know that world, not yet, and when you do, eventually, it might seem a bit alien. You grab your foot and rock back and forth while trying out different points of view, watching the screen upside down. We’ve all done it at some point, suddenly everyone’s bottom-up. You tumble clumsily a couple of times then search in one of your secret hiding places for a tiny, tiny car, the kind that comes in chocolate eggs. You assume your original position. After observing your foot for a moment, you stare at your fingers and yell, outraged:
“Look, mama, I have axan!”
You don’t mix the two languages so much anymore, but there are words you always say in Amazigh; even though you know the word for nails, you enjoy saying axan instead. Maybe because I’ve always spoken to you as if you were my travel companion, from the very first day, from the moment they placed you on my chest, your head slightly dented from your passage through the vaginal canal. A mother learns to codify her child’s language. I won’t insist on explaining that everyone has nails and that what you’re trying to say is yours have grown. I know that with your persistent hardheadedness you’d spend a good while arguing the opposite. I suppose your language has its own logic, one no one else can understand. Even though you always elect to speak in Catalan, I’m certain your linguistic code must be an amalgam of this language and the one that once, a long time ago, was your mother’s mother tongue.
Before you were born, even far before you were even conceived, your dad and I decided we’d speak to you in Amazigh. Not out of any sort of patriotic fervor, no, but so you could have another tool at your disposal to interpret the world. Not giving you the opportunity to learn the language of your ancestors would have been criminal to your upbringing and to the increasingly feeble ties that bound you to Morocco. The place of your father’s grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, eight years of your mother’s past and about twenty of your father’s, not to mention, of course, the sporadic holidays, a ten to fifteen-day escapade, and phone calls with a very distant hanna. You listened carefully, and with some shock, to your father as he explained to you that this woman was his mother. Maybe you were surprised one person could be called both mama and iaia—mom and grandma—maybe all you express in the face of the many new things you learn is this innocent surprise; everything becomes a miracle to your eyes framed in curled lashes.
For the first couple of years, we managed to stick to our plan. We’d often see Moroccan kids speaking only in Catalan or Spanish and feel a little embarrassed for those parents who weren’t properly educating their children. We always judge others blindly until we find ourselves in a similar situation and have to recalibrate. I remember making you a part of my neurosis when you were only a few days old, explaining to you, full of hope, the story that was taking shape, delivering a sarcastic critique of the nonsense we’d both watch on TV, or a detailed account of current international affairs. You were one of the best interlocutors I’d ever met, listening without interruption, sometimes wrinkling your nose or half-smiling in disapproval, and you knew how to keep a secret. Now that you can speak, I can’t do that anymore. A few months ago, it occurred to me to explain that we were on our way to the doctor so they could have a look at your penis, and how embarrassed was I when you started yelling on the street: “We’re going to the doctor to look at my penis! We’re going to the doctor to look at my penis!” Maybe I should have started by explaining what privacy is—but how?
* * *
Ours is a beautiful love story, we’ve spent more waking nights together than all the lovers of literature across the universe; none of them would’ve weathered the trials of your first four months of life. What did it matter that I was sleepy, if you were hungry? Who said four in the morning isn’t just the perfect time to demand entertainment or start wagging your tongue? Some nights, already exhausted, the bags under my eyes reaching the floor, after waking your dad, you ceaselessly crying in my arms and me not understanding what exactly you wanted, I thought that maybe a few years later I’d laugh it all off. And so I did, now that you’re just shy of three and eating all on your own, going to the bathroom all on your own, and expressing clearly what’s hurting or bothering you, it all seems so far away and I can’t help but smile when I think of it.
How will you express yourself this Christmas, when we go away? Last time we were there, you hadn’t even turned one, and with enormous effort you’d blabber on in a strange language no one could understand. In the beginning, every word uttered by your little mouth was in Amazigh, you even called me iimma, though it’s been a long time now since you’ve started calling me mama, or even mami. Iimma meant seeing myself reflected in your eyes in my mother’s likeness, and something deep inside me would move. Mama is much more neutral, the figure of a mother that is unknown to me, one I’ve never encountered from up close.
The big change came in nursery school—you were so frightened those first few days! Soon, though, you became used to that new universe and, I guess, must have caught onto the admiration I felt every time you said a new word in Catalan. I was scared you wouldn’t be understood, you’d always been so chatty, but then your teacher told me time and again that you hadn’t breathed a word. I still can’t believe you spoke so well after only two months, but that’s how it went and nowadays no one can pry a word of Amazigh out of you.
You fall asleep on the floor, just like you’ve always liked. Where does this habit come from? You kneel and start rocking all on your own, singing until sleep gets the better of you. Maybe you know that your mother, and all your ancestors, slept on the floor as children. I doubt it, but customs also live on in our genes; they’re part of your genetic legacy.
Like that, with your eyes closed, your long lashes casting shadows onto your rosy cheeks, anyone might say you’d never broken a single plate—after an entire day of emptying out your closet, unmaking my bed, of dragging along the cushion as if it were a horse, smearing your entire head with that expensive cream I hadn’t even had a chance to crack open. . . . And there are days when you’re exhausting, but I wouldn’t take it back, not for anything. In fact, seeing you grow so fast is a little like facing the abyss of tomorrow, I don’t even want to picture the day you leave home. There’s still a while to go, but sooner or later all things come to pass.
* * *
Right in the middle of this cloister of age-old columns you lean into the pond surrounded by greenery; belly-down, legs stretched out all the way, your hands gripping the edge and almost brushing the water, you contemplate the brilliance of the red fish that swim seemingly unaware of your presence, utterly enchanted. You don’t dare plunge your fingers into the water since by now you’ve heard me say “no” a few times. You look at me for a moment and, happy to be there, in that place, ask me.
“Oi, this is my virsititat, isn’t it mama, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Rida, yes, this is your university.”
Possessiveness must also be a thing quite of this age. I think that for you a university is no more than that pool of water full of wondrous animals, circled by a strange building, who cares if it’s the School of Philosophy or Mathematics. It’s because of this that every time I need to check grades or run an errand, I try and bring you with me. When the time comes to leave, the great spectacle of crying ensues, with tears and extortionate hugs so I’ll let you stay just a little while longer.
Back when you’d only just started kicking in my belly, enveloped in amniotic fluid, we were already walking together through the classroom; between dizzy spells, we would settle as best we could onto those old and narrow wooden benches which, of course, hadn’t been made with pregnant women in mind.
In this corner of the world, with the muffled roar of traffic outside (I’d never get used to living in Barcelona, there was so much noise, so much hurrying, it was madness), a mother ceases to be mother, wife, daughter, worker, house mistress, immigrant, Moroccan, Berber, or Amazigh. A mother, my son, sheds all labels and is only herself. Sometimes, transported by the effort to understand some concept or entranced by a new discovery, a new word or a new author, she even sheds her own body and, in that moment, becomes only thought. This impulse is what made me keep studying, taking the train each day, an hour and a half there, an hour and twenty back, missing you on days when I barely saw you, with so many things to organize so that I could find a moment to study, to read. A little selfish, maybe, I know, but at the end of the day, you seem to understand that mom is happier now that she’s back in class. I don’t think my postpartum depression was exactly that, but rather a depression caused by the fact that it was the first time in my life I didn’t have to take notes or prepare for exams, a symptom of abstinence perhaps. Luckily, in just six months I’d already signed up for English classes, which must have been my methadone, a proxy of three to four hours a week.
Hasiba, Khadija, Faisal, Fàtima, Najat. . . . Who could have known we’d all followed parallel paths and finally meet at university. We’d all arrived here at the age of eight or nine, some earlier, had grown up in a country that wasn’t ours and, at first, experienced the same contradictions, the same uncertainties, and missed a part of ourselves, the one we’d left behind in Morocco. Now, we will rule among the chrestomathies of Emilio García Gómez, poetry for the ignorant, the greedy of Khorasan and lost kingdoms in order to recover that parcel of ourselves that came loose at some point along our path that was neither first or second generation.
And you, son? Will you search among the stones of this ancient building for something to fill the vacuum left by your upbringing in this educational system? Will you want to learn Arabic, even by dint of dictionaries and irregular roots? At the end of the day, Arabic is not only your parents’ language but the language of oppressors in a land where the Amazigh were considered second class; language that’s only oral; barbarians, they called us. Will you feel hurt the day you return to Morocco and are spoken to by those in power in the language of the prophet, of the king? They’ll probably scorn our sounds, but this won’t feel unfamiliar to you. Your other mother tongue, Catalan, was in another time also scorned and misunderstood, and it isn’t for nothing that your mother considers them sister languages.
I hope that sooner or later you’ll realize that the amalgam of linguistic codes you’re growing up with can only be enriching. I hope that, like your mom, you’ll learn to love each language equally; as historic patrimonies, the oldest legacies of every civilization, music that comes to us from very far and which we must strive to preserve. You’ll know there is no language or dialect better or worse than another—they all serve to express our feelings and desires, our frustrations.