‘Of Spanish and My Grandmother’
— Joyce Chong
On our weekly six-mile walks, my friend and I often touch upon my fear that I’m captaining a ghost ship of my family’s heritage. In a country that considers us less than.
This week I have for you an essay that was recently published in Catapult on family, language, losing a grandmother and what that means for the tenuous ties that connect history and heritage with the future. Villarreal-Moura explores many different themes in this essay, from the reoccurring question of dating, marriage and race, to the almost inexplicable closeness that a relationship with a loved one can create, not only to a language, but to a person. Love as its own great, mutual entity.
What I couldn’t fully appreciate was that there is, in fact, a certain comfort in engaging with a person who has a similar cultural background or history. While it can be rewarding teaching someone your traditions, there’s also something to be said about understanding, without explanation, a holiday, a phrase, a food, or a song. My grandmother’s fragility was a stark reminder of our origins and what I stood to lose. In case I was oblivious, her disease made sure to repeat the same question over and over.
Several themes are explored repeatedly within this essay, the struggle to maintain ties with a language that has already begun to fade within the family, the loss of a loved one mirroring the language, ideas of family and marriage and continuing legacies. In this essay, Villarreal-Moura illustrates a particular progression of grief in her life, and all the interconnected ties of conflicts and worries that stemmed out of its memory. In retrospect, things seem to take on their own threads, their own sense of linearity and coincidence and purpose. While the adequate words to explain or lay bare grief may not be possible, reflection can place things into a sort of order that is meaningful, that almost makes sense of the world and our own places within it.