An Offering to the Power of Language

‘Mi’ja, it’s me. Call me when you wake up.” It was a message left on my phone machine from a friend. But when I heard that word “mi’ja,” a pain squeezed my heart. My father was the only one who ever called me this. Because his death is so recent, the word overwhelmed me and filled me with grief.

With my father’s death, the thread that links me to my other self, to my other language, was severed. Spanish binds me to my ancestors, but especially to my father, a Mexican national by birth who became a U.S. citizen by serving in World War II. My mother, who is Mexican American, learned her Spanish through this man, as I did. Forever after, every word spoken in that language is linked indelibly to him.

I continue to analyze and reflect on the power a word has to produce such an effect on me. As always, I am fascinated by how those of us caught between worlds are held under the spell of words spoken in the language of our childhood. After a loved one dies, your senses become oversensitized. Maybe that’s why I sometimes smell my father’s cologne in a room when no one else does. And why words once taken for granted suddenly take on new meanings.

“Mi’ja” (MEE-ha) from “mi hija” (me EE-ha). The words translate as “my daughter.” Daughter, my daughter, daughter of mine, they’re all stiff and clumsy, and have nothing of the intimacy and warmth of the word “mi’ja.” “Daughter of my heart,” maybe. Perhaps a more accurate translation of “mi’ja” is, I love you.

When I wish to address a child, lover or one of my many small pets, I use Spanish, a language filled with affection and familiarity. I can only liken it to the fried-tortilla smell of my mother’s house or the way my brothers’ hair smells like Alberto VO5 when I hug them. It just about makes me want to cry.

The language of our antepasados, those who came before us, connects us to our center, to who we are and directs us to our life work. Some of us have been lost, cut off from the essential wisdom and power. Sometimes, our parents or grandparents were so harmed by a society that treated them ill for speaking their native language that they thought they could save us from that hate by teaching us to speak only English. Those of us, then, live like captives, lost from our culture, ungrounded, forever wandering like ghosts with a thorn in the heart.

When my father was sick, I watched him dissolve before my eyes. Each day the cancer that was eating him changed his face, as if he was crumbling from within and turning into a sugar skull, the kind placed on altars for Day of the Dead. Because I’m a light sleeper, my job was to sleep on the couch and be the night watch. Father always woke several times in the night choking on his own bile. I would rush to hold a kidney-shaped bowl under his lips, wait for him to finish throwing up, the body exhausted beyond belief. When he was through, I rinsed a towel with cold water and washed his face. --Ya estoy cansado de vivir, my father would gasp. -- Si, yo se, I know. But the body takes its time dying. I have reasoned, since then, that the purpose of illness is to let go. For the living to let the dying go, and for the dying to let go of this life and travel to where they must.

Whenever anyone discusses death, they talk about the inevitable loss, but no one ever mentions the inevitable gain. How when you lose a loved one, you suddenly have a spirit ally, an energy on the other side that is with you always, that is with you just by calling their name. I know my father watches over me in a much more thorough way than he ever could when he was alive. When he was living, I had to telephone long distance to check up on him and, if he wasn’t watching one of his endless telenovelas, he’d talk to me. Now I simply summon him in my thoughts. Papa. Instantly, I feel his presence surround and calm me.

I know this sounds like a lot of hokey new-age stuff, but really it’s old age, so ancient and wonderful and filled with such wisdom that we have had to relearn it because our miseducation has taught us to name it “superstition.” I have had to rediscover the spirituality of my ancestors, because my own mother was a cynic. So it came back to me a generation later, learned but not forgotten in some memory in my cells, in my DNA, in the palm of my hand that is made up of the same blood of my ancestors, in the transcripts I read from the great Mazatec visionary Maria Sabina Garcia of Oaxaca.

Sometimes a word can be translated into more than a meaning. In it is the translation of a world view, a way of looking at things and, yes, even a way of accepting what others might not perceive as beautiful. “Urraca,” for example, instead of “grackle.” Two ways of looking at a black bird. One sings, the other cackles. Or, “tocayola,” your name-twin, and, therefore, your friend. Or, the beautiful “estrenar,” which means to wear something for the first time. There is no word in English for the thrill and pride of wearing something new.

Spanish gives me a way of looking at myself and at the world in a new way. For those of us living between worlds, our job in the universe is to help others see with more than their eyes during this period of chaotic transition. Our work as bicultural citizens is to help others become visionary, to help us all examine our dilemmas in multiple ways and arrive at creative solutions; otherwise, we all will perish.

What does a skeleton mean to you? Satan worship? Heavy-metal music? Halloween? Or maybe it means--Death, you are a part of my life, and I recognize you, include you in mine, I even thumb my nose at you. Next Saturday, on the Day of the Dead, I honor and remember my antepasados, those who have died and gone on before me.

I think of those two brave women in Amarillo who lost their jobs for speaking Spanish, and I wonder at the fear in their employer. Did he think they were talking about him? What an egocentric! Doesn’t he understand that speaking another language is another way of seeing, a way of being at home with one another, of saying to your listener, I know you, I honor you, you are my sister, my brother, my mother, my father, my family. If he learns Spanish,, or any other language, he would be admitting I love and respect you, and I love to address you in the language of those you love.

This Day of the Dead I will make an offering, una ofrenda, to honor my father’s life and to honor all immigrants everywhere who come to a new country filled with great hope and fear, dragging their beloved homeland with them in their language. My father appears to me now in the things that are most alive, that speak to me or attempt to speak to me through their beauty, tenderness and love. A bowl of oranges on my kitchen table. The sharp scent of a can filled with campaxiuchil, marigold flowers for Day of the Dead. The opening notes of an Agustin Lara bolero named “Farolito.” The night sky filled with moist stars. Mi’ja, they call out to me, and my heart floods with joy.*