Janika Oza on language and migration.
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I was four years old when I first realised that my family spoke more than one language in our house. We were at the kitchen table, my mother ladling rice onto my grandfather’s plate. As my mother doled out the second spoonful, my grandfather raised a hand and said, ‘Bas, bas.’ I remember laughing. ‘Bus?’ I said, ‘School bus?’
I think I recall my grandfather chuckling, though perhaps he was just humouring me, generous and kind as he was. He had been saying, ‘Enough’. I had known this, but for the first time I had heard the word alongside another word I recognised; for the first time, I understood that my family’s mouths could hold multiple truths at once.
My grandfather spoke mostly Gujarati, so for the years that he lived with us, so did we. But like many children of immigrants, I came home from school with not only fresh language on my tongue but a preference for these new words. When spoken to in Gujarati, my brother and I began to respond in English. My grandfather passed away and our grip on the language slipped further. My aunts and uncles balked at us, the Canadianised children who could barely get by in their mother tongue, but I couldn’t see why it mattered, to hold on to something as commonplace as words. Eventually, fed up with our pre-teen resistance, my parents hired a young immigrant from Gujarat named Jaydeep to give us lessons, hoping he might get through to us. He would arrive at our house on Sundays at 7am, armed with little squares of lined paper on which he’d carefully penned the Gujarati alphabet. My memories of these sessions are of being sleep-deprived and irritable. I would slump over at the kitchen table as Jaydeep repeated the words I already knew but didn’t want to say, feeling like I was being punished. My brother and I absorbed little, complained much, awaiting the moment when Jaydeep too would tire of our defiance and leave.
I couldn’t have foreseen that it would be my father who would eventually end these lessons. When he did, it was not out of sympathy for us, but because of a word. My brother and I had been recounting the vocabulary Jaydeep had taught us at my father’s request when he grew confused, agitated. ‘Balle,’ my brother said, meaning ‘you’re welcome’, and my father shook his head, no. The words we were proudly reciting were not the words he knew. The Swahili word for ‘you’re welcome’ is karibu. ‘Abhaar,’ we said, and this too was wrong. He quickly realised that the language of our teacher was not the language of our family. Jaydeep had migrated from Gujarat recently; my family had left four generations ago, in the early 1900s, when my great-grandfather sailed from British-ruled India to British-ruled East Africa to work at a railway station in Kisumu, Kenya. My family stayed for three generations, resettling only from Kenya to Uganda. In that time, our language morphed, adapting to the landscape and adopting new words. The language I was born into is a language borne of this movement. Our tongues were forked along lines of migration, and Jaydeep’s words, however technically correct, were not ours.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, thousands of South Asians were brought to East Africa to labour on the East Africa Railway under the British, constructing a railroad that would link the interiors of Uganda and Kenya to the ocean port at Mombasa. Among those who came and survived the abhorrent working conditions – indentured labourers, artisans, engineers, and officers – many chose to remain, settling and working in East Africa once the railway construction was over. This was the root of the South Asian community in East Africa. Thousands more migrants followed, leaving behind the dire circumstances in British-ruled India in pursuit of better economic opportunities. The diaspora grew, composed of manifold religions, regions, and languages that both integrated with and remained separate from the local populations. In Kampala, my father grew up speaking Swahili, Gujarati, and English, though the borders between the three were blurred.
This is the language of my family, my community. It is a tongue that reflects our specific history of migration, labour, and colonisation, descended from North Indian languages with words borrowed from both the colonisers and the adopted home, with its own cadence and accent. It is an oral language, one that shifted from generation to generation, a hybrid borne of change. In this way, it separates us from other Indian migrant communities, just as it separated us from Jaydeep – a product of uprootedness and resettlement, of remaking homes.
I wanted this language, and the specific and familiar Ugandan–Indian accent that accompanies it, to be reflected in my novel, which follows four generations of one family from India to Kenya to Uganda to Canada. During the process of creating the audiobook, I compiled a list of all the Swahili words in the book and asked my father to record himself reading them, which I planned to send to the audiobook producers. When my father sent back his recording, he admitted that he had been under the impression that several of the words had actually been Gujarati. I had felt the same uncertainty as I wrote the book. I knew the words my family used for ‘plantain’or ‘children’,but was unable to place them in one language or the other. My father and I laughed over this, comparing notes on which words had befuddled us, musing over the mingling of languages in our household. After, I listened to his recording so many times I memorised its order, a sadness settling in me. It was a pre-emptive grief, the feeling of having captured something fleeting. I thought of Jaydeep, my old teacher, and how I have always known these words, even though their confluence does not exist in any written register. But that fluidity, that in-betweenness, only makes them more ours.
This essay began with the loss of language through migration, but I cannot write about the language of my people without including the loss embedded in the language itself. The specific Swahili-Gujarati blend that my community speaks is not just a language of adaptation but a language of exile. In 1972, under Idi Amin’s dictatorship, my family, along with roughly 80,000 other South Asians who had lived in Uganda for generations, was expelled from the country. A community that had formed over decades, and solidified through shared alienation and displacement, was ruptured, scattered across the world. If the language was formed through movement and change, now it was removed from the very places that had given it rise. In the aftermath of the expulsion, our language became a dying one – because now it comes from a place to which we cannot return, forged through the particular conditions of a people making home in unfamiliar places, a home that is no longer ours.
At times, I have experienced this language as one of isolation, a factor that separates us. Every time my family visits the temple on the outskirts of Toronto, it is routine for us to lament our inability to understand the Gujarati spoken by the priests and leaders, musing on the long drive home over how lost we all felt during the ceremonies. ‘Pure Gujarati,’ we call it, which begs the writer in me to interrogate what that makes us: impure, tainted, mixed?
Once, when my family travelled to Gujarat to visit relatives, a rickshaw driver complimented my father on his Gujarati, telling him he spoke well, like a native speaker. I remember the pride on my father’s face, the sense that he had somehow won approval. Again, I wonder at the inverse: the shame of speaking a language that many would consider improper or broken, the embarrassment of how it sets us apart.
But if it separates us, it also binds us, as a people who were stripped of the right to remain together. It is not just a language of a community in flux, but of community itself. It is a catalogue of where we’ve been and a testament to our survival – that out of dislocation and upheaval, something new can grow. When my father says ‘matunda,’ it is a reminder of where we come from, connecting us to the history and journeys that brought us here. There is home in these words, even if the physical place is gone. Now I understand my father’s resistance to Jaydeep’s vocabulary lessons, because accepting those words would have meant rewriting our stor; because his children absorbing that language would have meant letting go of something already tenuous and fragile. I still cannot claim fluency in the language of my family. I am still that over-Canadianised child, rebelling against the distressingly early lessons and answering sheepishly in English. But what I understand now is that my learning will come not through classes but conversation, not reading but listening. I close my eyes while the audiobook plays and hear the cadence of my people. I encounter a word in my family lexicon and am unmoved by the need to categorise it into Swahili or Gujarati, knowing that the uncertainty is the truest testament to our story. And I marvel at all that it holds, the history, the kinship, the loss, the survival – a language broken and reformed into something fuller, more whole.
Janika Oza is the winner of the 2022 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction, and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The Best Small Fictions 2019 Anthology and Catapult, and a chapter of A History of Burning was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize. She is a features reader for the Rumpus and a 2020 Diaspora Dialogues long-form fiction mentee. She lives in Toronto.
Photo credit: Yi Shi
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