My Grandmother Tongue

English is my mother tongue, in the sense that it is the language that I grew up with and speak most comfortably. It is my first language. It is however not my favorite language, not the best language and certainly not i mas takhilo' para Guahu.

I am a non-native speaker of the Chamoru language as I learned to speak it when I was 20 years old. It is natural for me in some ways, but still unnatural in others, primarily when talking about things that are difficult in general to express in a Chamoru lexicon. This is not only something that I struggle with, but as the Chamoru language has become more and more limited in how and where it is used, many people find themselves constantly switching to English since a potential part of their conversation is something few people have actually used the Chamoru language to convey.

What makes speaking, thinking and writing easier is if the topic fits easily within some existing framework or lexicon for carrying meaning. If that framework has been carved out over time or there is something native in the language already that can help ease the transition, than things might not too difficult. But if that connection doesn't exist, things can get tricky This is one of the reasons that they say country music made such an easy transition into Chamoru language and culture. It was drawn from a hardscrabble agrarian lifestyle, something that both peoples in the US and in Guam shared. It was something that Chamorus felt more intimately connected to than rock, pop or jazz, all of which Chamorus enjoyed listening to, but did not feel the need to Chamorucize them the way they did country.

For me, although English will always be my mother tongue, Chamoru will forever be my grandmother tongue. It is a language I learned beside my grandmother and through sharing her beauty and her life. I can speak Chamoru today, to my children, in the classroom because of her patience and her love. There are times since she passed where the Chamoru I am using sticks in my throat and I feel overwhelmed with emotions, when certain words I use or things I hear remind me of precious moments I shared with her on my Chamoru language learning journey.

My approach to the Chamoru language was defined by the gaikinemprende that I saw in my grandmother. When I would ask grandma how to say something, she would not shut me down or tell me there was only one way to say something. She would always provide me with options, a list of possibilities. When I would ask her a question, checking with her to see if the way I was saying something was correct, sometimes she would say no it wasn't, but most of the time she would say, that's correct, but it isn't the way I would say it. There is nothing wrong with how you said it, but most people don't use it in that way. Grandma instilled in me not the bewildering myopia that so many Chamoru speakers feel when they encounter people trying to learn and speak Chamoru. She instilled in me the potential diversity in the language and that there is a beauty in the breadth of the language rather than its uniformity.    

Over the years she helped me with so many of my projects around the Chamorro language. When I would do translations for example, I would often give her sections to translate and then compare them against my own, blending hers with mine to come to something that felt special to me, because I felt as if it was something we had collaborated on together. When I was first learning Chamoru I would sit with grandma at the dining room table, playing Chamoru CDs for her, asking her to help me translate them. Since grandma's hearing wasn't very good and my audio comprehension of Chamoru was terrible, we would wander a fun maze of Chamoru translation possibility. I would tell grandma what I thought they had said and she would tell me what that meant. Sometimes she would tell me that what I had said made so sense and I would put the speaker of the stereo up to both of our ears and we would strain to decipher what Johnny Sablan, the Charfauros Brothers or Flora Baza Quan were saying. Over the years I have naturally gone back and revised our initial translations, but my understanding of those songs feels like a string of beautiful moments strung together on a necklace made by my grandmother and me.

One of the last major project that grandma helped me with before she passed away was translating Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" into Chamoru for the Guam Symphony. Grandma was already sick at this time, but she was still writing and reading everyday, and so she still loved to help me even if she was exhausted sometimes because of the cancer in her or the medicine that was supposed to treat it. As usual, I gave grandma an English translation of the lyrics and then we made our separate translations. When I wove them together, I could almost imagine us singing together to that epic song. So often, even though she is gone, when I speak Chamoru, the pain of her loss hits me. I only speak this language because of her patience, and through it I will always speak her spirit.