Lost in translation... really just lost

If the worth of a son is based on how often he calls his mother, then I am an extremely worthless son. Thankfully, other things like irrational, unconditional love factor into the grading process. But whenever I do get around to calling my mother, I squeeze as much information into our conversations as possible. I tell my mother everything.

I like to hold our phone conversations purely in Yoruba because Yoruba feels like home. During our last phone call, I tried to tell my mother that classes might be cancelled because of an impending snowstorm. I could not. There is no word for snow in Yoruba and that is how things should be. In my opinion, there should not be a word for the cold stuff in any language. Something so unpleasant does not deserve the honor of a name, but I digress. The point is that lately it is harder and harder to translate my first world problems into my mother tongue.

It is not that Yoruba lacks for expression. There are Yoruba ideas you can never fully unpack in English. How do you even begin to render the complexities of “Abiku” or the impish pepper that lies at the heart of “Agbaya”? Even my name, Oladimeji, I struggle to force into English confines. Whenever I am asked, “what does it mean?” I am tempted to reply “…just that. Oladimeji”. In truth the English language is too narrow to contain the nuances that are immediately obvious when I say the name to another Yoruba speaker.

But as I spend time away from home, I find myself having to switch into English more often than I would like during phone calls. How do you describe things like snow days? Finally finding the sweet spot on the shower dial? Insomnia cookie == life? The frustrations of Internet access at UNC? I could choose to do so, but the necessary convolutions detract from our communication. Also calling Nigeria is expensive; every word must count.

I don’t know what this all means, if I did I would not be writing about it. Maybe it is evidence of my growing multiculturalism, this switching back and forth. Maybe I should move to back to my father’s village, start a farm and never have to speak English again. Maybe this is really, really pointless navel gazing. But what I do know is that slowly, and these days more quickly so, my phone calls with my mother do not feel as much like home as they used to. These days almost nothing feels like home.