Often this language feels foreign to me, uncomfortable inside my mouth, rolling on my tongue. Or rather, I feel as though I am a stranger intruding on a language defined by and restricted to others.
Often I feel lost in my own home, and I feel lonely in my own stories.

The language we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
- James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I was born into Tamil and was later, for reasons of survival, required to adopt English. Bilingualism was not an option. So I forgot Tamil. Over the years I picked up Arabic too, and forgot that. I still understand the two languages, but the words freeze on my tongue.

It seems to me that I betrayed my own language. And I don’t know why it is, perhaps a remnant of my childhood as an alien, but I find it hard to learn new languages. I hate the thought of a new structure to trap one’s experiences in. I don’t remember how I forgot and learned my “first” language.

And standing in line at the supermarket, what reason would you have to possibly believe that I speak no language but English. I am not Caucasian; I am not African-American. For the most part, I stand there seeing you but not seeing you, perhaps because IÂ’m remembering things I want to forget, perhaps because I feel uncomfortable in my skin. You can mistake my blankness of eyes and the looseness of hands for signs of a vacant mind. It is often done.

I cannot shake the feeling that this is not my language.
Though I sound as Canehdian as any white kid here, there are times when accents clash in my mouth. Times when I fear to speak words that are familiar to me in print but awkward on my lips.
So yes, IÂ’m the girl with the hand up in English class discussing Abraham and his sons and their relation to Chinua AchebeÂ’s Things Fall Apart. And yeah, IÂ’m the one who becomes everyone elseÂ’s messenger girl just because I can pretend to justify anything.
I do the talking.
And the thinking, the dreaming, the living in this one language.
But I will always be a stranger to this language.