I finally figured out why I couldn’t get around to learning Yoruba but have somehow gotten myself to at least conversational ability with French – it’s love. Yes, interest is one of those things that I didn’t have for the Yoruba language and despite how often my mother told me it was easy, I never got around to wanting to pick it up. I have found however that the lack of interest is not the real reason. I have found that behind the lack of interest is how the language makes me feel. French makes me feel love and Yoruba does not. Before I continue, I must say that my lack of interest in Yoruba language has nothing to do with the language itself and much more to say about me.
So what do I mean by love? After many years of being different people, and taking up conflicting character, your true self eventually comes out clean, and in my case, over the years I have been loud, pretentious, smart, dull, condescending, kind, and even mean but I have evolved to be a quiet-ish, woman who says more with her facial expressions than her words. I have also found that I am a hopeless lover. I am in love with love stories, the cheesy, tragic, and unconventional and when I hear french, my heart feels light because of how much love I hear. In contrast, Yoruba does not run chills down my spine in that way and while it is full of passion, it is mostly a passion that makes me uncomfortable and so I choose to learn and speak the language that keeps my heart full.
I think all of us are selectively multilingual and our personalities evolve around the ‘languages’ we are most fluent in. I do not mean literal languages like English, French, or Igbo even though those can be a significant part of our character, defining who we are. By languages, I mean expressions of any kind – an example is someone who is fluent in giving, or fluent in empathy. You find that by choosing to speak one language and master it, you suppress the other languages that you could speak. The challenge is as we navigate through life, we sometimes don’t get to choose our languages, our wins or losses along the way suppress or improve parts of us and voila, we keep evolving. I find in my life that knowing that there is that battle between the worst and the best parts of me helps me encourage the better parts of me – do the same today.
