An ode to and reflection on my mother tongue

Megan Serfontein, Copy Editor

So, you have read the subhead. You have even looked at the graphic and have seen the non-U.S. country. I am South African American. I was born in South Africa to a very South African family. My surname is Serfontein, a very well-known Afrikaans last name. I am Afrikaner, but I cannot do what most Afrikaners do every day. I cannot speak Afrikaans. Well, I can, but also, I can’t. It wasn’t always this way; Afrikaans was my first language and my primary language, but things change, and my nationality changed from South African to South African American.

In 2008, my family left Pretoria, South Africa, and came here to Johns Creek, Georgia, and surprise, surprise, there aren’t that many Afrikaners here, which meant no one to practice Afrikaans with aside from my family. I tried my best to retain Afrikaans, but everywhere I went I came to realize that if I didn’t speak English and only English, I was less than. Going to school and excelling in English class reinforced that. My primary language became English. I felt my mother tongue slipping away, and with it, my connection to my birthplace. The disconnect between me and my birthplace is deep; I don’t even refer to it as my homeland because that’s not what it feels like. Johns Creek feels like home, but Pretoria feels distant and different. My whole life is here, my friends, my childhood home, my family, my future. This disconnect is so wide I even feel disconnected from my immediate family and relatives. With my relatives, I feel this growing disparity, almost as if I don’t know them, and they don’t know me. With some of my Serfontein cousins, I can’t even properly communicate with them since they don’t speak English, and my vocabulary in Afrikaans is limited. Even at my grandmother’s funeral it was hard to understand what the priest was saying since he talked too fast for me to process it. And after the funeral when we had tea and cookies back at her house, asking my uncle if he wanted any tea was a daunting task because I didn’t want to mispronounce the word for uncle. With my immediate family, I feel this intense feeling of embarrassment when my father asks me a question in Afrikaans, and I reply in English. I feel shame. I can respond in Afrikaans as I know the words, but I am so fearful that I will be embarrassed by mispronouncing the word or say the wrong word that I just don’t try at all. And although I know my family would never make fun of me, I still feel this shame rise up. I feel like I’ve disappointed my family, I’ve disappointed my late grandmother, I’ve disappointment my ancestors who escaped persecution and created this new language. I was everything they dreamt of, except I abandoned their language.

I grieve my loss of the language and connection to the language. I feel the pain associated with my feelings, and I try not to think about it, but at the end of the day, I cannot escape Afrikaans. The books in our basement that I can’t read haunt me. The birthday messages in Afrikaans from my family haunt me. The Afrikaans nickname my father has for me haunts me. My very South African last name haunts me. All of it haunts me because it feels as though I have done something profoundly wrong for this not to be second nature to me. It feels uncomfortable that my siblings aren’t haunted by all of this, and yet I am. It feels as though I am the only one who has failed in the effort to keep as our Afrikaner-ness as we assimilated to American life.

With all this being said, I deeply love my birthplace, I still love Afrikaans, and I am still proud to be an Afrikaner. While I cannot read Afrikaans novels, I can read the picture books we have, and that’s a start. I can still understand everything my parents say to me in Afrikaans, and although I respond in English, it’s a start. I have an aspiration to learn more Afrikaans so that I can become more comfortable speaking it with my immediate family and the non-family Afrikaners I know. And I want to make sure Afrikaans stays in the American Serfontein family with my siblings and me. If I have children of my own or even my nieces and nephews, I want to call them by the same sweet Afrikaans nicknames my family has given my siblings and me. When I get married, I want to bring my spouse to South Africa and show them the life I had before America. I want to make my family and ancestors proud to live their wildest dreams for me and be truly bilingual but for now, I am bye-lingual.