This week, I’m sharing an entry from my 2023 journal of delights, a writing practice that pushed me to find the delight in the daily monotony of life (inspired by The Book of Delights by Ross Gay)
2/20/23
I spoke to my dad today for the first time in what feels like weeks. I’ve been buried in endless studying, dragging myself out of bed just to sit in classes I’m not sure I belong in—or to walk through ivory towers where the eyes of passersbys prick me with the insistence that I don’t.
“Kù àtìjọ́,” he greets me, the familiar melody of Yoruba. There’s something about Yoruba that makes it feel like you’re always smiling when you speak it. It’s sewn into the structure of the greetings, the words lifting on each syllable.
You know how the upswing of vocal fry makes valley girls sound like they’re always asking a question, perpetually unsure? Yoruba has a kind of tonal fingerprint too—except it doesn’t ask. It declares—it celebrates. A language where greetings feel like a chorus of joy, a homecoming.
Maybe it shouldn’t mean so much, knowing the language is built to sound like you’re smiling, even when you’re not.
But it made me smile all the same, the kind of smile that stings your cheek, a sharp sweetness you hold back.
“Ẹ káàlẹ́ ó, Bàbá mi.”
Bàbá mi. The words still feels new on my tongue, even after all these years. Growing up, he was always Daddy—never Dad because Dad was “American” and trying to be American was, decidedly, rude in my household.
Calling him Baba is an advent of the last six years. Our new bond.
I called him today because I felt guilty, guilty for being distant. But three words in Yoruba, and we were laughing, joking— me with my nasally accent (the kind only an American can manage), my trying Yoruba—a blend of something old, something borrowed and something entirely new— while he speaks with the seasoned wisdom of an elder whose every word carries the weight of a proverb.
I get the tones wrong. Always. Which is part of the fun I guess. Say a syllable too low and suddenly the meaning of an entire phrase can be changed. Case in point, depending on where you place the accents, ‘oko‘ (ò̩kọ̀, ọ̀kọ́, ọ́kọ̀, ó̩kó̩) can mean: car, husband, farm, erm… let’s just say a certain part of the male anatomy, and hoe (of the gardening variety ofc ;p). I still can’t tell which oko I actually said (it’s like playing linguistic Russian roulette), but whatever it was, it had my dad bagging up laughing.
Which proves exactly the point I’m trying to make to him: Yoruba needs more words! How can the meaning of one word be so changeable by the simplest placement of your lips—the upswing or downswing of your tone? I guess every language does that in a way. In English, “You’re good” can mean five different things depending on the tone you use to say it (and about three of them could start a fight if uttered in the wrong context).
Maybe this is how we bond now, emi ati Bàbá mi. My dad and me, these little intellectual debates. He used to shoot me down every time, but now he listens. He’s trying too.
“Hnnh. Obìrìn méta ni ẹ”
(You’re three women!)
Traditionally, it’s “you’re three men”—a praise for strength. He changes it for me, his smile evident even through the phone.
My observations of Yoruba’s tonality guide him on a memory path back to his time in Japan; how the Japanese and the Yoruba must be long lost siblings: both with the tonal languages, the evident cultural reverence for tradition, value, elders–the past. Which leads him to telling me why I’m the future: I’m learning from languages like French how to make Yoruba more useful–how to move it into the present.
‘Rara!’ – I object. I didn’t learn that from French. I learned that in the Yoruba classroom after being forced to labor over “romance” (read: colonial [not sure how lovey dovey conquest and domination is, but I digress]) languages for years.
Yoruba taught me that the architecture of a language is really just a map–leading you to the intentions of it’s creators.
There’s a reason why French is so hard to learn: it’s difficult by design, like a cipher only a select few hold the key to unlock.
Middle French cultural campaigns intentionally obscured the language even further than its Romance counterparts: ‘fieste’ (from Latin ‘festa,’ like Spanish ‘fiesta’) morphed into ‘fête,’ while ‘bello’ (from Latin ‘bellus,’ akin to Spanish ‘bellos’) transformed into ‘beau.’
In this linguistic landscape, every word has a master—a gender or article it must adhere to. Label, label, label—making it all too easy to categorize, to conduct a quick spot assessment of a things value— of its place and reinforcing a system of divide and control. Here is a language built over time like a looming tower on a hill—tall enough to surveil and scrutinize, identifying and labeling anyone and anything seeking to enter its cultural realm, all the while presenting a deliberate air of intimidation—intentionally impenetrable.
Yoruba is open.
Its adjectives express themselves freely and fully without gender. Its verbs don’t get weighed down by time—they flow, unaltered.
Its verbs are unconjugated, unaltered by the presence of time. Time is not placed on a pedestal; it is not the fulcrum upon which words and phrases get their meaning.
In English, time stands like a wall between words. In Yoruba, it’s just a marker, a slight shift.
Its nouns are often idiophones–(case in point ‘tolotolo’ (turkey 😛 [say it out loud and you’ll see what I mean!] ).
Yoruba is intuitive. It’s difficult in the way all natural things tend to be when you’ve been taught to resist them. The most valuable lesson Yoruba has taught me is how to suspend my own disbelief. Humility. What it means to be open to understanding. Or to be open to being truly understood (vulnerability?, honesty?) a lesson I’m relishing learning.
Yoruba is a song you have no idea is already inside of you until you find yourself humming along: your lips shaping around the “ọ”, bouncing on the “gba”, sliding through the “ṣ.” It’s a melody that’s made to be sung as much as it is listened to. You can feel the bounciness—something alive, something like joy—in each word, sweet and sticky– like ripe mango juice dripping down your chin.
Or, maybe, that’s just how I experience it.
Because every time hear Yoruba—whether it’s Monday and Wednesday evenings when I’m dead tired in Yoruba class or blasting through my speakers in a Burna Boy track— suddenly I’m a little girl again:
I’m riding on the back of my daddy’s lawn mower after he heard me shouting for him (“DADDY!”) and scooped me up just before a pissed off bee stung a chunk out of my cheek.
Suddenly we’re driving through Amish country and I’m sitting in my car seat watching as he sneaks glances of me in the rearview mirror while he’s jamming to some Lionel Richie tape and breaking me out of kumbayah ass Quaker pre-school early.
And now I’m crying. Not car-seat pre-schooler me, but 24-year-old me. I think those are some of the few memories I have one-on-one with my dad when I was a kid (before “baba mi” entered my lexicon), when I was sure that he felt distinctly close to me, as more than an indistinguishable part of a set. I wasn’t the first-born. Or his mom’s namesake. Or the boy. Or the twins. Or his favorite.
With Yoruba it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be those things that I am not and that I cannot be.
When I speak or listen to Yoruba I feel that closeness. Maybe that’s why Yoruba means so much to me.
My close friend and I had to fight to learn Yoruba in undergrad. Brown—being the Liberal Bastion™ that it is—offered an array of languages, even dead ones like Latin, Sanskrit, and I kid you not, hieroglyphics. But, unsurprisingly, no African languages. I guess they couldn’t quite find the value in it.
Don’t worry—we directed them to it.
2/20/23 Isoro pelu Baba mi
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