Do you ever
feel something so deeply
that you don’t know how to express it?
Well, this text is exactly that.

1

I don’t remember the exact moment when I first became interested in words. I don’t remember it like I remember an event, but like I remember a feeling. I imagine it like this: a scribbled man, staring with fascination at people’s lips chewing something that wasn’t food. Something with rhythm and sound, but that couldn’t be touched. Something that came out of the body accompanied by emotions and feelings I couldn’t yet name.

I imagine wanting to grab that thing floating between air and lips, put it in my ears, in my mouth, hold it in my hands. Since that wasn’t possible, I started chewing too. I opened and closed my mouth to see if that thing—that thing that made people laugh, get angry, or calm down—could happen on my lips. I don’t remember, but I can imagine how frustrating and how fun it must have been.

Before I understood a word, my body already felt it. I knew if it hurt or not, if it brought joy or not. Not from the words themselves, but from the way my mouth closed when I said them. It may sound unbelievable, but unlike many children, my first word wasn’t mother. My first word was word. Perhaps I didn’t pronounce it that way, but that’s where it all began. That’s how I became a writer. And now that I think about it, I can say that language didn’t come to me as meaning, but as a weight in my body.

For a long time, that child’s body believed that language was a game, a territory without hierarchies. It didn’t yet know that there were languages ​​that commanded and others that obeyed.

I started to think about words again with the same intensity many years later, when the game was over. At the end of December 2012, I had to become a child again, but this time without the protection of childhood. Learning another language was no longer a curiosity; it was an urgent need. It wasn’t about imitating lips out of fascination, but about doing it to survive.

Arriving in a foreign country forced me to relive that primitive stage of language: pointing, repeating, making mistakes. But now the mistakes carried weight. The body that once played with words was now observed, evaluated, categorized. The same gesture that in childhood provoked laughter now provoked impatience or mockery. I understood then that the difference between these two life stages is that in childhood, this process didn’t create the psychosocial conflicts it does in adulthood. I also understood what Fanon meant when he wrote: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” Grosso modo, it’s an action that encompasses an entire psycho-sociocultural code.

The child I once was reappeared then, not as nostalgia, but as a persistent awkwardness of speech, a cadence that didn’t quite fit. And with it came submission, then violence.

2

By social, historical, and political law, every being incapable of communicating is placed in an inferior position to those who possess that ability. Hence, perhaps, the submission and resignation that those who migrate to a place with a language different from their mother tongue feel—because one of the factors that presents itself as a condition for healthy and egalitarian coexistence among beings is communication.

It is not that the migrant is inferior, but rather that they are classified as inferior by a system that hierarchizes languages ​​and, with them, the bodies that host them.

Communication comes from the Latin communicatio, “the act of transmitting and receiving a message.” But what happens when that message is only transmitted partially, with errors, or not at all?

When I became a child for the second time, I understood that without needing theory.

First came the submission and resignation: Since I was the one who couldn’t communicate, I was forced to accept everything, to be silent, to obey, to submit; to smile in public and cry in private. To say yes when I should have said no; and to say no when I should have said yes. My objections had no audible form, and my silence became the consequence.

Then came the violence and the rebellion: Tired of submitting, of being ridiculed, of being deceived time and again, I resorted to violence as armor. And as is often the case with violence, regardless of its motivation, it projects an image of animosity, and a body that doesn’t speak properly becomes suspect when it defends itself. In this way, an absurd lesson penetrated me, like those imposed on us in school: The lesser a person’s ability to communicate with others, the more inferior they seem; and the greater their ability to communicate, the more respect they earn. It was the logic of my environment speaking through me. And I believed that mastering the language of the country I was in would restore not only my ability to communicate, but also my equality; that speaking well was equivalent to being recognized, and that language could redeem the body—because a language, as Damourette and Pichon so aptly put it, is a way of thinking. And that’s what I did. Then the real dilemma began.

3

There’s a saying that has always fascinated me: “Translation is treachery” For a long time I understood it literally, almost fatalistically. I believed that certain feelings and emotions—the deepest and most primal—could only fully exist in one’s native language, and that by passing through another language, they would become diminished versions of themselves. Today I know that betrayal lies not in the foreign language but in the illusion of equivalence.

Mastering a foreign language didn’t fulfill the promise I’d hoped. I thought that speaking the language well would be enough, that the conquered tongue would restore my lost equality, and that once I was within the correct system of signs, the world would rearrange itself. I discovered that while a language can open doors, it also leaves entire rooms in shadow. However, I’d be lying if I said that something unexpected didn’t also emerge in that transition: There were words and expressions in the foreign language that allowed me to say things I could never say in my mother tongue—not because they didn’t exist, but because they were too closely guarded by custom. Saying them in another language made them less solemn, less fatal, and in that distance I found a different way of existing, of feeling. Translation didn’t give me back what I’d lost, but it surfaced areas of myself that were previously unavailable, and that discovery—uncomfortable and contradictory—forced me to distrust both the foreign language and the nostalgia for my mother tongue.

But one’s native language isn’t of pure origin; it’s an archive in which gestures, tones, silences, and words heard at specific moments in life accumulate. That’s why not all languages ​​weigh the same on the body—not because one is more true than another, but because they don’t all carry the same emotional history.

Let’s consider an example: A loves B. A’s native language is Haitian; B’s is English. When A says, “I love you,” it’s sincere, but it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing as if A had said, “Mwen renmen w.” Not because English is incapable of naming love, but because that love was learned in another language, with a different rhythm. B, for their part, receives the phrase within their own emotional framework, where “I love you” has other nuances and expectations.

While this lack of alignment doesn’t imply repression or automatically lead to violence, it does produce something more subtle and persistent: translation fatigue. And living by translating emotions and feelings means constantly negotiating what is lost, what must be adapted, and what is left unsaid. That’s why in moments of extreme anger or fear, even those who are fluent in a foreign language often revert to their native tongue. The body remembers before grammar does. It’s not a romantic or primitive gesture; it’s a cerebral reflex. Language ceases to be a social tool and becomes, once again, a release, sound, breath.

Therefore, we could say that migration involves a profound reconfiguration of the linguistic-emotional apparatus‚ hence, the feeling of identity fragmentation. And this fragmentation can be a source of strength or depletion.

To possess a language remains an extraordinary power, as Fanon points out, but that power is neither absolute nor innocent—because even when one possesses a language, the world it expresses does not always allow itself to be fully possessed. Perhaps that is why the injustice suffered by migrants cannot be explained solely by racism or xenophobia. There is also a more subtle violence: the constant demand to translate, to adapt, to express affection in a language that never quite aligns with the intimate archive of the body. And in that gap, perhaps, lies much of the contemporary unease of the migrant.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Grove Press, 1967), 17.

[2] Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, “comunicación,” https://dle.rae.es/comunicaci%C3%B3n.

[3] Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon, “Tout idiome est une façon de penser,” in Des mots à la pensée: Essai de grammaire de la langue française, Volume I (Éditions d’Artrey, 1911), 10-11.