ESSAY

Tangible Fluency

By Leah Prada

I never knew that my grandmother and I did not speak the same language. It wasn’t until after she passed away that that particular fact settled into my consciousness. She never would be fluent in English save for a handful of basic words, and my mother thought it rude to teach her children a language their father couldn’t understand, so our regionally specific and dying language would never extend beyond her generation.

Looking back at my childhood, I can now see that she and I never had any true conversations, not with words anyway. But I do recall being acutely aware of what she was communicating to me and that my needs from her were always met. We did not share a linguistic vocabulary; we shared an understanding that went beyond words.

I suppose it is for this reason that I have such acute memories of her. Her wrinkled hands, kneading masa daily, the shape of her fingernails. The raven black hair she would flaunt until she became too ill to continue dyeing it and the perpetual little whorl of white that always crowned the top of her head; a little wink of truth to anyone who cared to pay attention. The only time we saw her real hair color in its fullness was the day of her funeral. It had gone fully white. She looked like an angel crowned by light as she lay peacefully inside her casket.

I recall the perfect grid my mother would part into her hair when setting her rollers every weekend. It became a weekly ritual. My mother would paint her nails too. My grandmother would sit and tell stories rhythmically and laugh often. Her words were unfamiliar but her cadence was clear. Despite never being able to understand her stories fully, I knew she was a funny woman.

I remember her love of jewelry. In that way she was like a raven as well, always drawn toward shiny things. She donned a black onyx ring on her finger for as long as I knew her - another thing she would only give up upon her passing. She had more jewelry than anyone I have ever known. To this day she remains unmatched.

Browsing her jewelry collection was my favorite thing to do. She would sit in her room watching her novelas while I carefully examined each piece from the designated drawers of her jewelry box that she allowed me access to that day. Our shared love of shiny things became a language of its own.

Our world was one of tangible language: gestures, objects, and body signals that filled the gaps that words could not bridge. I remember visiting her on my walks home from the school bus, her attention always shifting to whatever jewelry or blouse I was wearing that day. That recognition became a love language of its very own.

Perhaps this is at the root of my relationship to the physical world around me. One of my earliest and most important relationships required me to understand meaning through objects and not words. Much of my childhood felt like watching a silent film; always searching for clues in cues and gestures and relying on my intuition for the rest.

What becomes language when words are inaccessible? When our languages and cultures become ruptured, what do we truly inherit? What survives when language does not? These are unfortunate questions we all must ask when these ruptures belong to a much larger generational story.

For me, the linguistic rupture will always remain one of my deepest wounds. That is a piece of my ancestry I was never given the choice to carry on. Even the Spanish taught in schools is a completely different dialect than what my family spoke. The death of regional languages feels like a tragic inevitability, but there was an inheritance still.

What I did inherit was a love of adornment, rituals of beauty and presentation, and memories encoded in hands, rings, masa, red lipstick, and laughter. Where spoken language failed, meaning in memories and objects prevailed.

Today, I still speak her language. Her language survives in what I remember touching and seeing. My fluency shows in the work that I create with my hands - hands that look a little more like hers with every passing year. It survives in my attention to detail, my love of opulence, and my ability to read one’s emotions before a word is ever spoken. Her language became my sixth sense.

I never knew that my grandmother and I didn’t speak the same language because, when she was alive, I never needed words to understand her.