CENTRAL NEWS
Like food and water, the mother-tongue is the most absolute demand of one’s essence. For some, language is the communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. For others, it is history, pain, and suffering, a longing sculpted deep within the hearts of millions.
Lorî lorî kurém lorî, the mother-tongue is introduced to the misfortunate. “Sleep, my son, sleep,” is hummed to Kurdish babies, benign in their cradles waiting for death to knock unexpectedly on their doors. “Your mother is thirsty and hungry, your father is a shepherd in the mountains.” And just as dawn infiltrates to collect its debt of devilish squeals of laughter, the agonising pound of death is heard on patched front doors. Death is demanding and impatient. It is hungry and has come to collect. Without so much time to mourn for our little ones, we are faced with the unforgiving reality of a nation of 45 million: torment. “If my mother-tongue shakes the foundations of your government, that means you have built your government on my land,” Apê Musa once said.
Yet, the tale of those who manage to flee the grip of death is far more terrorising. Take a child, for example, starting life defeated. Speaking another person’s tongue, living another person’s culture. Clueless of who they are, absent from the beauties of their identity, far from the values that are buried in the marrow of their bones.
Do wildflowers not wither when they are potted in different soil? Does the soil accept any seed? Is it not in the nature of nature and human, in the centuries of unwritten rules of the dialectic of creation, that jewels are sought in the places where they have been lost?
World Language Day, the orientalist imperialists of the capitalist system celebrate with marginal literature events in edgy book stores, while some are massacred in broad daylight for humming a distant lullaby.
Of all the however many thousands of words in the language of languages, the definition of injustice is a mere embodiment of those who are stateless. “To speak your own language,” the modern gods oblige, “you must obey me.” To this, we say “You may very well rip our tongues out.”
