People do not talk about how much you give up learning the English language. I never took the time to recognize how much I had to lose to “perfect” my English speaking, writing, and reading skills. Although I was born in America, I spent the first five and a half years of my life in Senegal. A small little country in west Africa. When I was six, I was forced to move back to America because of medical issues. I will never forget how I cried on the airplane thinking that I was leaving my mom (she was my aunt). Everything about this country scared me. The elevator ride down to the terminal, the loud noises, the cars, and the people. What made it worse was the fact that I did not understand anything, not the language being spoken nor the writing in the airport. I was still seeing my mom for the first time; she was holding a bag of food and a balloon that I now know read “welcome home!”

After a couple of weeks, I was enrolled into elementary school. A new place where no one looked like me. On the first day everything felt so new to me. There would be times my teachers would try to call on me to answer simple questions but all I could do in return is look at them perplexed. Let us be honest here it is a bit ridiculous to try and get me to answer questions about a topic I know nothing about on the first day is it not? Who knows, they could have been asking me something simple like how to spell my name?  After the first day I went home and asked my mom how to spell my name.

She said, “Awa Lowe is your name. A -W – A – L-O-W- E very simple”

Although it did not take me long to learn how to speak in English, it took me a long time to learn how to read and write in English. I always had trouble reading big words, spelling, essay writing, and remembering definitions. In elementary school I was the student that never raised her hand to read aloud. By the end of third grade, I became even quieter due to my English teacher yelling at me for not completing one of the HW assignments. For her our conversation ended the moment she stopped yelling at me. However, for me that was a moment that tainted all my future relationships with teachers. I was able to survive without interacting with teachers much in elementary school but When I got to middle school, I noticed how far behind I was compared to everyone else. That’s when I started to force myself to build relationships with my teachers. I started asking them for feedback and of course most of them were more than happy to help me. Eventually, my language skills got better, I became an excellent reader and speaker. I gained the skills I wanted but I had to give up another part of myself. The part that understood her native language.

Giving up my native language came with more negatives than I could have ever imagined. For one growing up I could never speak to my mom the way my older brothers did. They did not have to adjust their words for her to understand them, she understood them completely. However, the main thing that frustrated me about not knowing my native languages was the fact that even strangers had something to say about it. At work some customers would read my name tag and proceed to ask me where I am from, and the conversation always went like this:

“Awa? Where are you from” – Customer

“My family is from Senegal and Gambia.” – Me

By this point they have already proceeded to talk to me in Wolof and I would have to interrupt and say “Sorry but I don’t speak Wolof, I can only understand what you are saying.”

Depending on who it is they will either end the conversation awkwardly or say a sly comment like “If you were my kid, I would send you back home to learn the language.” Comments like that were complete BS because I could see in the persons face what they really meant.  The more this happened the more I hated the idea of people knowing where I was from.  I was tired am the judgmental eyes, slick comments, and overall feeling incomplete.  I don’t remember the exact moment when I stopped caring about such comments, but I did.  Or maybe I just got used to the comments instead.

Now I often times think about my how different my life is because of the fact that I unintentionally gave up my native languages in order to learn English. I never blamed my mom for not speaking to us in Wolof, instead I used to blame the teachers who gave her the suggestion in the first place. Till now I still do not understand what makes someone, especially a teacher, suggest that to someone? Maybe they did not know the long-term consequences that came with the suggestion. It is interesting to think about how in another universe there is a me that knows how to speak all her native languages, Wolof, Mandinka, French, Fulani, and English. However, I also appreciate the me in this universe who no longer lets people’s perception of her language skills reflect on to who she really is.