Inhabitants

There are quite a few different areas for the understanding of language in the brain, but Broca’s area for understanding spoken word, Wernicke’s for producing spoken word, and the Angular Gyrus for converting visual language into internal monologue are the big three.

In the beginning, there were two main inhabitants of my brain’s language gyri – Zulu and English. Unrelated at even a basic level, they jostled for space inside me, having entered through Broca’s area and growing at uneven rates and in different ways, and eventually forming something like a loose alliance – not exactly a one-to-one understanding, but at least something approaching unity of purpose.

English shared space with Zulu at school, though only English was allowed in the classroom – thus it took vast swathes of territory in Wernicke’s and the Angular Gyrus. The church was almost entirely Zulu’s domain, except for the occasionally sonorous drone of sermons delivered by homesick Englishmen. Likewise, the natural world was mostly Zulu’s territory – the birds and snakes, the frogs and cattle, the trees and herbs all had only a Zulu side to them. Mostly, Zulu was in charge at the political rallies, listening to the eloquence and passion of leaders and firebrands proclaiming freedom and nationhood and struggle.

By this stage, my brain was about seven years old. Other potential inhabitants had stayed for a short while, welcomed in by their relatives – English made French, Austrian German and Afrikaans less incomprehensible, where Zulu made the English part of me more welcoming in general, less xenophobic than those who only had English. In these early years, the brain first had a visit from Sotho and Xhosa, and Hindi came to dinner once too. Occasionally the melody of Italian serenaded a gathering, and Argentinian Spanish curses and blessings were common place.

Then the brain was moved away from the place where Zulu was strongest, to a place founded as a stronghold for the English. For a while, in that place, French hung out and taught English some swear-words, as did German, while Zulu made me hesitant with Afrikaans. Then Gogo Latin came to visit, initially just for a little while. She swopped stories with English, filled in some of the family tree and helped with spelling, and gave Zulu the words and concepts it would need to understand the grammars that had been written about it. Then Latin left, only to be replaced once more by French (which made more sense now that Latin had explained some of the weird family tree to English).

All the while, in this new place, Zulu was hanging out in the informal parts of Wernicke’s area – conversations with security guards and cleaners and cooks, homesick moments of reaching for some comfort in the cold place where English flourished. A flowering of hope at finding that Zulu was actually on the syllabus at the new place quickly withered, as the Zulu in my head revolted at the shrivelled thing being called by its name in the classroom.

The brain moved again, still surrounded by English and French, with some Afrikaans, and still no Zulu in the classroom. It seemed likely that it would forever be overshadowed by the rapidly spreading trees of English and its cousins, stunted in its shade.

But it wasn’t stunted forever. The last move was to a place where it was no longer ‘either / or’ but ‘both’ – a chance for Zulu to grow, in a classroom where it could recognise its potential as something more beautiful, and a chance for English to strengthen and flourish, unconstrained by any limits of vocabulary that might hamper those without the other visitors (chiefly French and English). The divisions between the areas were beginning to blur.

By sixteen years old, the brain had been inhabited quite fully by four languages – English, Zulu, French and Latin. For two more years, this remained unchanged, with occasional visits from Greek or other Europeans.

By eighteen, the brain had three permanent residents (French was reduced to an occasional visitor, useful in the same way that German was for decoding strange journal articles), when Ancient Greek (Granddad) came to stay. There were many arguments, and much dissonance, but after three years of coexistence it was English and Zulu ruling with Latin and Greek as their lieutenants.

But Zulu felt left out, as the only member of her family to be granted permanent residence in the brain. None of the other languages even understood her Noun Classes, or her strange idioms, no matter how deeply they were ingrained in the brain.

By now the brain and its vessel were working and living in the capital of KwaZulu-Natal, bilingual with an added touch of Ancient-Dead-White-People languages. And if that had continued, then other languages from Zulu’s family might never have joined it.

When the brain as twenty-five years old, however, it was moved by its vessel to live in Gauteng, where it was visited by hundreds of different languages each day. Many of them popped in just for a few seconds, too short to even recognise (let alone decode), and there were very few things that the brain’s vessel could find to help introduce the ones that stayed for longer – Sotho again, echoing the few visits from childhood, as well as Tswana, Venda and Tsonga, were as incomprehensible as apparitions in a play during the first years in Joburg. Their kinship with Zulu was not immediately clear, but something in them made sense.

In trips to other places, more of Zulu’s kin came to light – Chewa in the land around the Nyanja and Swahili on the coast were easily recognised by Broca and Wernicke’s areas, and when the time came to welcome Xhosa it seemed as though, finally, Zulu would no longer be lonely.

In fact, Zulu’s companions stayed for ever longer periods, eventually settling into a comfortable arrangement with English and her kin. While Xhosa stayed for longer and longer, the others (Sotho and Tswana and Venda) circled and popped in occasionally, resonating with phrases that were all too familiar.

But the final thing that changed it all was when Zulu, confident of her command and eloquence, took over the mind and began to create things – wondrous things, some translated and others forged afresh, ready to bring other worlds into being. She was supported by Xhosa, by a growing understanding of the connected beauty of all of their vast family, and mostly by the openness brought by having so many different visitors at any one time.

Since writing and creating the expression of the Zulu inhabitant, it is as though the floodgates were opened. Suddenly, visitors as strange as Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese and Finnish have been able to spend sustained time in the brain – echoing or contradicting or enhancing the power of the other residents despite having no relationship with them at all.

More importantly, Sotho and Tswana, Venda and Tsonga, Swati and Ndebele and Lala are all free to walk and meet and be in the space. For the space that before felt so small, so cramped and limited, so divided, is now filled with the continuous thrum of voices calling out, with the heady scent of idiom and proverbs exchanged, and with the laughter of a thousand puns that nobody else would understand, strung between five or six different families of languages.

Now, at thirty-six and almost thirty-seven years of age, the little room that had contained two languages at the beginning is now a vast space of interconnecting worlds strung out over distance, where any node that is touched lights up a thousand thousand others, and no act of speech or though is untranslated or untranslatable.

This is the change that has occurred.