A Language Stolen From My Tongue Poem by Frankline Shem O.

By: Frankline Shem O.

They told me
Accents are embarrassing—
"Speak properly, " they say.
My name was too much. Too long. Too native.
Too hard to say. Too hard to pronounce. Too ethnic.
So I shortened it. Cut it down to syllables
That slip through strangers' mouths,
Let the rest rot in my passport.

We laughed at each other's accents—
That curled like home,
Not because we wanted to—
But because we learned early
That survival meant sounding
Less like home.

We watched our parents
Speak one language in public,
Another in the kitchen,
And we copied them.
Smiled when strangers praised our fluency,
Cringed when elders called to us in a tongue
We understood
But no longer claimed.

My cousin speaks only English now.
Says she "forgot" the old language.
But I've seen her at family weddings,
Smiling blank when aunties speak,
Nodding through stories
Like a tourist with blood in the soil.

We learned early
That fluency in English
Meant intelligence,
That fluency in our own
Meant poverty, backwardness, shame.
So we scrubbed our tongues
With BBC podcasts and American sitcoms,
Rolled our r's like rent depended on it.

Ask us today—
"Do you speak your language? "
And we'll say,
"I can hear it, but I can't speak."
We mean:
I buried it beneath school fees and shame.
We mean:
I watched it die in my mother's mouth,
And thought it a mercy killing.

We change names,
The ones who could no longer pronounce their own,
Who traded their mother's song
For something easier on foreign tongues.
We call it modern. We call it progress.
We call it global. We call it upgrade.

We upgraded them—
Traded Nyaradzai for Natasha,
Chukwunonso for Charles.
You remember Mohammed—
First Mo, then Mike.
And Rajinder? Vanished quietly into Ray.
And too many more
Whose names I never heard again.

There are days I hate myself
For being ashamed of it,
For letting the world convince me
That my language was not enough.
For letting them bury it under silence
And whitewashed smiles.

And I—
I am tired.
I am done pretending
That forgetting is freedom.

Let me say this plain:
My language is not a fossil.
It is not broken.
It is not embarrassing.
It is not for the uneducated.
Not backwards. Not a burden.

It is mine.
IT IS MINE.

And I will teach my children to speak it
Without apology.
Without shame.
Loud enough
That even my grandmother's ghost
Can finally rest.