My father spoke English, mother French.
He admired Churchill, she Napoléon.
When they quarreled, she accused
him of admiring le soûlard, the boozer,
and he chided her for liking the shorty.
When the living room teamed up
with Balzac, Voltaire, and Flaubert,
my father withdrew to his den
office, where he kept the company
of Shakespeare, Maugham, and Burke.
When they discussed which school we kids should attend,
my father practised British diplomacy;
my mother, French indifférence.
When his targeted barbes hit the mark,
she went to the kitchen to sabotage le dîner.
Whenever they disagreed, we scurried like little mice
between their feet and hid in the bedroom.
As a compromise, they decided we should learn Arabic.
My mother’s family praised us only when we spoke like her;
my father’s family spurned or welcomed us
depending on the language we used,
so we developed a list of mixed vocabulaire
of Napoleonic heights and Churchillian widths
to confuse them.
When both branches of the family met together,
the Anglophiles drank until they slurred,
and the Francophiles developed a thick accent.
In those bizarres hours, they patted us on the cheek
while singing Oui, we, en accord.
Then, as their mother tongue loosened,
they prattled in Arabic like little children
until the wee hours of the morning.
Suha Kudsieh is a Canadian poet and writer of Middle Eastern background. Her poems have appeared in Postcolonial Text, Harana Poetry, and Euolitkrant.
Questions and Answers
Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?
I cannot pinpoint a specific moment or situation that inspired me to pursue poetry. I’ve always liked reading poetry and listening to songs with thought-provoking lyrics, so writing poetry happened naturally. It was the first thing that crossed my mind when I decided to become a writer.
How/where do you find inspiration today?
Reading poems written by other poets inspires me to write my own. I read widely and indiscriminately; I read works written in the classical, medieval, and modern periods. My list of favourite contemporary Canadian poets includes: Bardia Sinaee, Sonnet L’Abbé, Margaret Christakos, Afua Cooper, and Joseph Dandurand. People are another source of inspiration. I like to observe how they behave and interact with others; I then build stories about them even though I don’t personally know them.
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
The premise of the poem, that my parents spoke two different European languages, is true, but they both had a strong foundation in Arabic. Although they encouraged us as children to study Arabic, they paid equal attention to learning French and English. From their perspective, the more languages we learned, the better. However, English and French are reminiscent of European colonialism in the Middle East, so I wove the concept of colonial empires into the theme of mother tongues in the poem.
What poetic techniques did you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?
I pay attention to the way vowels are pronounced, and to assonance and alliteration, but not at the expense of meaning. In this poem, I also employed parallelism and contrast, as when I juxtaposed the complex world of the adults with the naivety and mischievousness of the children.