DMT
There is a quiet, devastating curfew happening in our mouths.
We don’t notice it at first. We navigate our days in a borrowed luxury, English, mostly, polishing it until it shines, using it to pay rent, write emails, and order lattes with just the right amount of casual detachment. We treat our mother tongues like family heirlooms: beautiful, heavy, wrapped in velvet, and safely tucked away in the back of the closet, brought out only for weddings, funerals, and long-distance phone calls to grandmothers who wonder why our vowels have grown so sharp.
But if we aren’t careful, our languages don’t just fade; they become taxidermy. Curated artifacts. Museum pieces with little white placards reading: “Here lies a syntax that once knew how to beg for rain.”
It’s a strange dance, living between two worlds. You become a shapeshifter, a translator of your own soul. I remember sitting across from someone who loved the way I put words together, completely oblivious to the civil war happening behind my teeth.
English is an efficient machine; it gets me from point A to point B. But my indigenous tongue? That is architecture. It doesn’t just name an object; it tells you who built it, how it feels under the midday sun, and why its shadow matters.
When I speak it, my ancestors pull up a chair. When I speak English, they stand by the door, waiting for me to finish my business.
We grew up in a weird liminal space. The 1990s were an era of aggressive mimicry. We wanted to sound like the music videos beamed into our living rooms from across the Atlantic, yet we couldn’t entirely shake the dirt beneath our fingernails. We invented a dialect of compromise, a beautiful, chaotic slang that belonged to no country but our own.
We thought we were the blueprint of the future. We didn’t realize that slang is the most fragile part of an ecosystem. It evaporates. Now, when I try to use the street phrases of my childhood, they feel stiff, like vintage clothes that no longer fit the shoulders of the person I’ve become. If our slang can die in a decade, what happens to the languages that survived centuries of chains and borders, only to be starved out by our own apathy?
The real tragedy of losing a language isn’t academic. It doesn’t happen in university linguistics departments; it happens in bedrooms, during arguments, in the moments when life strips away your sophistication and leaves you raw.
She loved my poetry. She loved the exotic flair of my metaphors, the way I could bend a foreign sentence to sound like music.
When the world broke, English failed me. It didn’t have the weight for my grief. It didn’t have a word that could capture the specific, multi-generational ache of watching love collapse.
In that final, shattering moment, the language of my heart took the lead. I spoke in the tongue of my mother, and my mother’s mother words heavy with soil, blood, and ancient survival. And because she didn’t know that language, she couldn’t catch them. They fell between us like stones, breaking the last fragile thing we had left.
We cannot let our languages become museum pieces. A museum is where things go to be admired because they are no longer dangerous, no longer alive, no longer capable of changing the world.
Our African languages are not folklore to be preserved in amber for the amusement of tourists. They are living, breathing, unruly entities. They are meant to be shouted across chaotic markets, whispered in the dark, used to gossip, to bargain, to swear, and to break hearts.
Speak them poorly. Speak them with an accent. Stumble over the verbs and butcher the pronunciation if you must, but speak them.
Because the moment we stop speaking them to each other, we don’t just lose words.
We lose the only part of ourselves that knows how to say goodbye without losing our way home…
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