Language, identity and belonging
Open Minds Group November 2020 - Language, identity and belonging
Like lots of other groups, we have had to move our face to face support group to an online only space because of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a summary of our November 2020 meeting.
When my grandmother was still alive, I tried to have a conversation with her about our family history. Although I had a lot of love and respect for her, my lack of ability and confidence in speaking in Punjabi meant that conversations always got stuck very quickly. I asked my dad to support me in a conversation about our family tree and managed to find out a few names and occupations.
Even this conversation ended after a few sentences and I realised that my grandmother and my dad didn’t really understand why I was trying to find out this information. For them, their sense of identity wasn’t something that they thought about much.
My grandmother passed away a few years ago and it makes me sad that I didn’t have the language to be able to tell her that I was happy in a relationship with another man. Having lived over 80 years I am sure that she will have been aware of other same sex relationships and I like to think that with time she would have accepted me as I am.
Language communicates what we think and feel and it’s how we get our needs met by other people. There are other forms of communication, including body language, which are just as important.
Language also communicates our identities and for someone born and raised in the UK I have a complicated relationship with the language that my grandparents spoke. Punjabi was my first language until I went to school but gradually, I became less able to speak it. I would make a lot of mistakes trying to speak it to relatives and they would mock rather than encourage me. I can now read Punjabi, but it’s taken effort as an adult and I’m still very much a beginner.
At November’s Open Minds group, it was interesting to hear that we all had complicated relationships to our ‘mother tongue’ and even those of us who are fluent in Punjabi found that being able to speak the language didn’t mean that it was easy to have discussions about our sexuality or gender.
People agreed that the type of Punjabi that their parents spoke depended on when their families left Punjab. The Punjabi sometimes became stuck in time and this was true of some of the attitudes towards LGBTQ+ issues too.
Being able to speak fluent Punjabi helped some of us feel like we were able to move more confidently in places like India. In saying this, we also realised that it’s impossible to speak ‘proper’ Punjabi because just like other languages, Punjabi is spoken differently in different parts of the world.
Not hearing neutral or positive terms for LGBTQ+ identities in Punjabi meant that some of us felt invisible in Punjabi cultures. Not being talked about also made some of us feel shamed or that there was something wrong with us. For some of us, not having our sexualities named by our families is a positive thing as it means that we were able to choose how much to tell them about how we lived our lives.
As the conversations continued it became clear that we have all worked out ways to make sense of the Punjabi part of our identities and that language is only one part of this. Language changes as cultures change and there are signs that it’s becoming easier to talk about LGBTQ+ issues in Punjabi cultures in the UK and India.
Culture is shaped by the words we use and if we all use LGBTQ+ words more freely in Punjabi conversations then bit by bit we’re likely to make more space for these conversations to be a normal part of how we communicate.
Kuljit
The Open Minds Project
