IX: Synaesthesia | Uncomposed: "Daughter, Peach"
There is a French expression I always think of when I think of my mother: avoir la pêche, to be in good spirits, literally “to have the peach.” For the first 14 summers of my life, we spent Julys in her hometown with my grandmother. There she taught me how to eat a peach: how to find the seam in the fruit and pull gently with my fingertips until it opened like a book, pit nestled in the flesh. My mother laughs loud and often, a song I have known all my life. My mother laughs like peaches, warm and bright, pulled open under the southern sun.
She came to this country with few friends and fewer words in English, and maybe this is why so much of my childhood was steeped in her language. On parle français à table, we speak French at the table, melody as ingrained as the nursery rhymes I learned in preschool. If I spoke English, she pretended not to hear me. She refused to let her words go, her vowels fade, and she refused for her children to ignore that inheritance.
Put simply, it worked. Speaking two languages felt (and when I’m lucky, still feels) like seeing the world in extra color, shades no one else could name. I loved the expressions she taught me, often translating into nonsense—press on the mushroom, leave concrete—and so tasting like secrets. I was lucky, though I didn’t know it yet.
/
At fourteen, my grandmother died, and our trips overseas stopped. The further I got from the last summer I spent in France, the more it felt unreal, like a dream that was foolish to try and recover. Time and distance are corrosive: I could feel the dulling of my own tongue, and it embarrassed me. It worsened when, by some administrative fluke, I was placed into French courses in high school. My mother loved that I was reading Camus and learning tenses, but under her increased attention I shrank, turned bitter. The French of my childhood, lilting and mischievous, stiffened under grammar constraints, the accents and participle agreements I could never remember. More and more, when we fought as mothers and daughters do, I would deliberately snap in English, my anger full of teeth and harsh consonants.
The guilt always followed, lingering and sour. I knew I was wounding her. I knew she often dreamt of my grandmother, a silent ghost. But with a teenager’s selfishness, I thought only of my own wounds: her badgering, my sense of misplacement, a feeling of fracture between me and my supposed inheritance. I never stopped to think that she might have shared my guilt—for the years she left her mother behind, for raising her children an ocean away from the rest of her family.
Returning from my grandmother’s funeral, my mother brought me back one of her records: a children’s musical I had played constantly in her apartment, its cover sun-faded and worn. I refused to put it on the player in our house, afraid time had warped the songs beyond recognition. In the same way, my mother’s language turned sun-faded and scratched in my throat. Even now sometimes, I feel I am still filling the colors back in. I watch films and have to Google certain phrases; I hear my mother say a word and ask her, baffled, how it’s spelled. Some songs feel off-limits to me. Like punishment for my distance.
/
“I envy you, you know,” says my cousin, in French. We are sitting in the blue lakeside evening, throats thick with beer. I ask her why. “Because your mother pushed for you to have both. My father didn’t.”
Our American fathers both married French women, but we were raised on opposite sides of the ocean—her in France, me in the States. We are mirror images, each reaching for the other’s language. She and I only see each other in August, when our massive family flocks to this stretch of land from three coasts and two continents.
She pauses. “I will never sound like you do.”
The air feels heavy, like ripe fruit. What she means is: I pass. My French is tinged southern, long ends on the words, but I don’t sound American. She and her siblings, who learnt English in their teens and speak with their Parisian edges, can’t shape-shift the way I do.
She rubs a thumb over the neck of her beer bottle. “Sometimes I’m angry at him for it.”
I think about the strange harmonies that two languages create from one word: colère, anger, sounds like cholera, infectious and devastating. Fâché, angry, sounds like fascist, unforgiving as a boot heel. My mother and cousins’ anger is all burnt orange, hiss of a gas flame from their mouths that goes out soon enough. But I can’t get angry in French; it feels too heady. It doesn’t taste right. It’s rage doused in gardenia, in tuberose.
Sitting with my cousin in the plum-ripe dark, I want to say I feel like a liar, half the time. That I feel stupid when she has to translate slang that I never learned. But now is not the time: her mouth is drawn, her expression sour-bitter beer. Each of us only feels our lacks, hollow and fluting as the bottle.
/
In college, I became homesick—not for place, but for language. I felt my way back into French as if picking up an old instrument. I forgot to call home as often as my mother wanted, but rewatched her favorite films in my dorm, trekked uptown to the one French bookshop I knew. When I got the chance to go abroad, there was no question of where. What might have seemed lazy to others felt to me like a personal imperative—I had to go back.
I didn’t sleep on the plane. The other passengers startled when we hit the Paris tarmac in the wintry cotton of morning, but I was electrified, humming. My aunt met me at the gate to drive me into the city; with her my vowels felt overround, marbles in my teeth. In the January damp we climbed the steps of Sacré-Coeur. Suffused with timezones, my body moved slowly, remembering a language of its own. I was uneasy, like I had walked in on something I had no right to—but proud at the same time, light blooming in my throat.
That seasick in-between followed me through the first cold, grey months. I was four thousand miles from most of my anchors, developing an anxiety disorder that would eventually send me to a Paris hospital with my aunt sitting in the hallway. I fumbled a thousand tiny rituals, rigid trappings of French culture. Always have exact change; address people as monsieur and madame; bring your own bags. French conversation is coded with countless formules de politesse, politeness formulas that I only learnt once I first forgot or botched them. Fidgety child at the piano, wrong notes abounding. I sounded like a native, but I came off like an idiot.
Yet something else in me was opening. For the first time, I woke and dreamt in French. The limits of language, which had felt fixed, gently spilled into songs altogether new: the books left by students renting my studio before me, intricate spells by Colette and Saint-Exupery. Polite bakery interactions, rhythmic and familiar. Protective silence on the metro. Rapid-fire slang on a night out, dizzying. Paris began to make sense in a way even my hometown never did. It made space for me: color in my voice. Music in my body. I could be sharp-tongued, curious, fucked-up—what had never felt available to me. For the first time, French was no longer borrowed, but mine.
A boy I met there, when I asked for his first impression of me, said: charismatic. Sarcastic. Cultured. Une nana libérée, quoi, a liberated girl. It made me laugh—who was this girl? She was nothing like me and everything I wanted. In French, I felt a different song stretching through my limbs, sung by someone I wanted to meet.
/
The average French dictionary houses one hundred thousand words. The average English dictionary, half a million. Sometimes I try to explain this to my mother, that the French words I want are not always there. English is so much more precise.
I asked her once how to translate home. “There isn’t one word like that,” she said. There are only neighbors: chez moi, at my place, à la maison, at the house, se sentir à l’aise, to feel at ease. Every language has its untranslatables, like unliftable melodies, but this one sticks. Home, its roundness, a nectarous humming in my throat and lips. A song of peaches, a tree with roots taut from searching. The grief of it, having to plant yourself in words or in passports—but not both. That the baseline cannot be transferred.
/
To be from somewhere and not is to constantly decide where your parts belong. I go a month without reading French news, or I forget a word on the phone, and the guilt is bitter licorice, the kind my mother loves so much. France’s highest value is patrimoine, loosely translated as heritage, though really it’s not so well-bordered. It is a sense of knowing—not just who you are, but what that means relative to where you are and what came before.
Sometimes I feel I have no right to a motherland, even when it is my birthright, blooded into me. The country’s national anthem calls, allons, enfants de la patrie—come, children of the fatherland. In French, lineage is always of the father. Patrimoine, patrie, masculine words for an inheritance from my mother and her mother before. An obscuration of all the women in our family: often alone by chance or by choice, seeking something better first for the daughters on their backs and then for themselves. Forever forging what we think are new songs, but are really just variations on the same theme.
My mother never had the kind of homecoming I did. For her it has been a slow fracturing, a seepage stoppered by her trips home but never sealed. She talks about moving back, but we all know she wouldn’t: her daughters are here now. Calling to thank me for a recent letter, she gushed over my handwriting and perfect French. “You write like your aunt, like your grandmother,” she said. Where I had seen only a letter, she had seen a lineage. A memory she is fighting to hold onto.
I am a daughter who left a daughter who left. My mother was raised by a mother alone who was raised by a mother alone. We are always running, running, listening for the words of a song we might recognize, in a language we might know.
/
On one visit home, my mother presses gently about how I’m doing. It catches me off guard. When we’re together, it is mostly bad jokes and sarcasm and a lot of espresso. But it’s true, I haven’t been doing well, how can she sense it?
I see myself in you, she says. She was a quiet girl too, left home for something bigger just like I did, and the city that found me swallowed her. Paris is where she met my father; had she not left her mother, she would have no daughter. But it wasn’t easy. Strange, I think, how one city can sing in so many different keys. Can speak so differently to each of its daughters.
J’en parle pas, she adds, I don’t talk about it. Je garde cette porte fermée, I keep that door closed, pour ton bien, for your sake. (I don’t forget that she grew up with a widowed mother and a sister far away in the city, lineage of sadness. Another language, maybe, that she has learnt to read, and I after her.)
She searches my eyes. But it’s okay. To feel that way sometimes.
I try not to cry at the kitchen table. I want to explain that she has it wrong, it’s not just sometimes. I’m not Jonah, swallowed once and coughed back up. I’ve made a home in the belly of the beast.
Enough with words. Sometimes they are just too small for all I carry, language-less. The colors I’m still trying to dig up, decades later. The tightness in my ribs, threatening to burst into oceanic song. The ache I trail through airports, tasting of pride and dust and southern salt. There is much I will never be able to tell my mother, much she gives me without speaking.
My mother begins to hum, a warmth that catches then carries. Of her mother, powdered and sunlit, who had a melody for everything. Of her daughter, trailing her voice through cities on both sides of the ocean. A song of peaches. A word that cannot be translated.
(Uncomposed is a column by Paola Bennet about the music in the moments we don’t think to look for it: woven into the fabric of a life, steady and simple as breath. This column, along with two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IX: Synaesthesia. It is available for preorder now.)