Finding a path in the perplexity of exile isn’t easy. We pack up our things, and move out to another place to start again, but the baggage isn’t just physical. As we adapt and grow, we also hold on to the origin of what we are, unintendedly or not, while carrying the pieces within. For many of us, it’s the small sounds, the imperceptible echoes of our accents and daily interactions that stay, but transform, making the old rings of our past become sounds in a new land.
Nostalgia and mind-maps: trying to make sense of it all
10 am. Sunday. Budapest sounds from afar make Venezuela even less hearable. But paradoxically, several kilometers of land and a whole ocean are sometimes bringing me closer to what I once considered lost.
While I pass by this street, concentrating on the ringing of the church bells, I think about my need to find comfort in the sounds. Although as an independent migrant adult, I have to over-pretend a pristine emotional strength, the fragility of being fragmented is inherently metamorphosed into a familiar sadness. Tropical and sad. That’s quite right, but not such a popular image. Andean and sad. That’s more normalized. But it turns out I’m both. I grew up in the mountains, but small pieces of my girlhood also stayed on the Caribbean shore. The warm waves and the mountain rocks. I’m the combination of the sounds of both, synthesized within me as chemical elements forming the new, and ongoing me. 
Who is this new person anyway? Sometimes I struggle to recognize myself, and my own voice in all its deflections keeps compartmentalizing. However, as an essay of a self pep talk – which is actually more of an auto welfare check – I remember that, as “there is nothing to hide under all this sun,” all the voices hanging around in my simultaneous realities are still me, but “my hand moves to my throat to make sure I’m still the speaker.” What has all this time apart made of me?
My first year in Hungary was a desperate search for likeness. The first quest: the similarity of sounds. Target languages: Hungarian and Spanish. I must say that most of the time it was unintentional. I was doubting my own auditory perception as I was called by the accents, tones and vibration of imaginary Latin American Spanish idioms walking fast by me in the form of a person. Needless to say, the people I contemplated spoke Hungarian, not Spanish. But as a matter of fact, I came to realize that I wasn’t called by the technicalities -although they can be fascinating- I was lured by the emotions.
A language is not only composed of the words we say, but also the pauses, the intonations. How to not get lost in the huge mixture of this great unknown?
The imprinted feelings in the words made me tie a connection between so very opposite and different foreign tongues, as well as I was encouraging myself to not lose whatever it is that makes me feel at home. Regardless of not being sure of who I am, I was vehemently holding on to my sounds. But as Wittgenstein pointed out in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” I had to expand. Not that I was closing my door to a new culture with its own sounds, I learned English and French for some time, and the conquering of a new world for me was already in the making, slowly, but there. I just had to open more portals.
Lost and found in translation: a subconscious effort to come back home while not being there
As our thoughts and perceptions are not independent from language, but profoundly linked to it, we try to make sense of our surroundings with new ways of pronunciation and new grammar discoveries. For instance, I take my favourite word in Hungarian: alma. In Spanish, it means soul, but if we translate it from Hungarian to English, it means apple. This one was love at first sight. Imagine going to the supermarket and encountering yourself with a daily reminder of Plato’s theory of the soul in every can of juice, dessert, or in the fruit aisle. I know my friends wouldn’t be surprised that I’m looking for human fragility while doing the groceries (wink wink to my Brazilian pals who always, and in a friendly manner, made fun of me because of it).
As I walk the streets of this city, I always self-debate: are we the same people in every language? How are these new and mixed sounds affecting our set core of values, emotions, and perceptions? Until what point are our decisions influenced by this?
Yes, languages are more than a resume skill. They’re a philosophical tool. As pieces of a person coming together, I portray in my mind our conversion to a multilingual being as Mary Shelley contemplated her modern Prometheus (aka Frankenstein). An eternal searcher in the sea of his new humanity. Aren’t we adventurous jumpers in a brand new world of sounds and tastes that we have to learn by being late to the party?
I was earlier recalling some fragments from a poem called The Punctum (from Time is a Mother), which honors immigrants victims of lynchings in California, and it made me think of one of my sanctuaries for solace: Poetry Foundation. Understanding our feelings with our own native words, and their new sounds in the language of our new foster home, makes us more open to embrace other’s truths and struggles. Over there, I read its author, Ocean Vuong being summoned in an article, talking about the sounds of the Vietnamese language, as it is a very tonal one, and how growing up with it made him feel like his life depended on understanding every little tone. How he felt like he had a superpower once he emigrated to the US and started to learn English, as he could hear the sounds under everything. It’s like having a magnifying glass. You can dissect more and convey a routine laboratory, if you may.
In Spanish, we have homonyms and homophones words. Even though Spanish grammar is not equal to Hungarian grammar – except for some structural similarities – I could draw the sounds out of Hungarian expressions that I didn’t even understand, compare them to my own sounds of words that I did understand in Spanish, and compartmentalize them in levels. Exact sounds, similar sounds, likely to be used as, etc. I know that literature and language scholars would cancel me for thinking like this. I don’t pretend to be an expert of any kind about language, but more to the perceptions of it, and perceptions can be subjective.
As time passed by, I realized that my brain started doing the same with sounds in other languages: Hindi, Russian, Dutch, amongst others. It turns out I wasn’t playing this game for English, French, and Portuguese, as I have already been exposed to them. What a huge set of nonsense. But coming back to my favourite word in Hungarian, and remembering an extract of Maya Angelou’s poem:
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.
Aren’t we all an immense parade of migration canvas, trying to rename our new sky? Raw materials are all around us and we are all trying to construct something with them. Sounds, colours, smells, flavours, even new lengths of silences, or new placements for them. We do not have the answer for our assimilation into a new alma – this time in the Spanish meaning, – but we carry our unique sounds, sung aloud or held quietly within.
Written by María Cuéllar.
Engineer by profession, social sciences enthusiast, with a passion for multiculturalism and human rights advocacy.
Illustrated by Dinara Satbayeva.
