Language can be a barrier—but also a window through which we experience new visions of the

world.’

THE FIRST WORDS I HEARD IN ENGLISH were from my grandmother Ilse Gamez, who I
remember as a magical presence in my childhood. Everything about her seemed legendary to
me. Among the stories she used to tell, my favorites were about her life in New Orleans where
she and her family arrived from Europe and where she spent her childhood until she was 14,
when they set sail again, bound for Nicaragua fulfilling her parents’ wish to return definitively to
their country of origin. Her stories of New Orleans were filled with references and names in
English (frequently also in French), and those in mysterious words so different from the ones I
heard in everyday speech, produced in me an irresistible fascination. The sounded like strange
music an exotic melody coming from faraway fantastic places where life had an agitation, a
rhythm, an acceleration unknown and unheard—of in the peaceful world I shared with my
parents, sisters, and brothers. We were all part of an enormous family that included
grandparents, great— uncles, aunts, and first cousins, as well as a second and third level of
blood relatives followed immediately by all the other people in the category of relatives
included in the family universe and its state of perpetual expansion…
The English I heard from my grandmother Ilse had nothing to do with the English I was taught in
kindergarten through songs teaching us to count from one to ten, or the language that
appeared in the English textbooks we studied in the second and third grade of primary school:
See Dick. See Jane. See Spot. See Puff. See Spot run. See Puff Jump. For me, that English lacked
charm, instead sounding like the noise of my shoes crunching in the gravel of the schoolyard
during recess. But that another English, the one my grandmother and her sisters spoke,
possessed multiple and varied registers that always amazed me. Sometimes it sounded like trill
of a bird, light and crystalline, and at other times flowed in dense, thick amber like honey. It
would rise in high notes with the lonely, nostalgic sound of a flute, or swirl in a whirlpool like the
frenzied crowds I imagined rushing around the streets of a big metropolis...

Before long, my ears began to discern another way of speaking the language. It was not the
cryptic and fantastic English full of attractions and mystery that I loved to listen to, nor the
tiresome, repetitious one that sound like a cart struggling over cobbled streets. No, this other
English expressed things in a different way that was not enigmatic and seductive, nor dumb and
monotonous, but dramatic and direct: whatever the characters said, happened simultaneously.
That is to say, a word was an act; words and action occurred at the same time. An activity was
named at the very moment it took place. For example, a character that was evidently crying,
would say: “I’m crying.” Another one, obviously hiding something, would declare: “I’ll hide this!”
It was the English I started to learn from cartoons on television, where the characters expressed
thoughts, emotions, and feelings m a straightforward way: “Out! Help! Stop it! Don’t go away!
I’ll be back! Let’s go!” I learned phrases and words that communicated necessity in a fast,
precise manner. The language of cartoons also introduced me to metaphors. The first time I
heard characters in a downpour shouting their heads off with the phrase “The sky is falling, the
sky is falling!” I believed it was the proper way to say in English, “It’s a downpour,” or “It’s
raining very hard.”

I had no choice but to learn yet another kind of English from cowboy movies, because my
cousins constantly used their game. Also, in a mechanical way, I learned by heart the English
names for all the plays in baseball, the most popular sport in Nicaragua.
Gradually, the English that was so dull to me in the first grades of school expanded and
deepened, with readings transforming it into a beautiful language that kept growing inside,
becoming more and more a part of my consciousness, invading my thoughts and appearing in
my dreams. Understanding the language and speaking it in natural way became integral to my
being, my way of appreciating literature, especially poetry, and enjoying the lyrics of my favorite
songs, which I was able to repeat perfectly.

Literature classes were my favorite. To act as a character in any of Shakespeare’s plays, or to

read an O.Henry short story out loud to my classmates, or a chapter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island, or a sonnet by Elizabeth Barret Browning, brightened my day. At the school
library, I discovered, among other authors, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent
Millay, then Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams. Further along, I encountered William
Blake, the sisters Bronte, Jane Austen, and Ernest Hemingway. Years later, while at university, I
read the Americans William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, and the Irish authors
William butler Yeats and James Joyce.
Along with my intense reading, I also became a music lover and put together a rather
substantial collection of Frank Sinatra and Beatles records—my favorites, although my interests
included many other groups and singers in English. From that deep relationship with the
language, I wound up with what I considered a broad and complex knowledge of English, the
sounds of which captivated me in the first years of life.
But my true encounter with living English (that is, the one spoken in everyday life) happened in
the United States, where I went to spend my school vacations in Middletown, Connecticut. My
first impression of the country was completely idyllic. My aunt and uncle’s house, where I would
stay for three months, was a beautiful and comfortable three-story building, an old New
England manor with a gorgeous garden out back, an orchard, a stable with horses and a pond
full of trout. A dense woods of birch and a variety of pine and spruce trees, crisscrossed by
narrow paths dotted with wild flowers, went around the edge of that peaceful pond in
landscape heat seemed like it was lifted from a fairy tale . Those vacations are part of happy
memories of my life because I also had the unforgettable experience of going to New York City
for the first time and visiting the shock I received from the language I had believed I understood
and spoke correctly.
Almost immediately, I realized that my English, that is, the English through which I expressed
myself, sounded strange to everybody. My cousins, not to mention their friends, listened to me
with surprise or mocking looks. In turn, their English was almost unintelligible to me because
they spoke, of course, in teenage slang. When one of my cousins couldn’t stand it anymore, she
told me that, I spoke like philosopher, some sort of Socrates or something, and asked me to
make an effort to try to talk like normal people so I could make some friends. She didn’t have a
clue about the extreme anguish I was going through trying to understand what was being said
around me, trying to decipher everything I misunderstood, assuming one thing for another.
Desolate I thought about the abundant literature I had read up to then, and the songs I had
worked so hard to memorize. It was all worthless for learning to speak practical English that
would help me establish bonds with boys and girls my own age. On the contrary, the vocabulary
I learned from books, especially from the poetry that taught me to love the language, had no
place in the everyday speech of my contemporaries.
To be accepted by everybody, I started paying extreme attention to how I expressed myself and
to the words I chose. Anxiously searched for ways to adapt my way of speaking, imitating what I
heard from others, so I wouldn’t be excluded from their conversations or activities.I understood
that if I didn’t do that, I would be left on the fringes of main current, and the mainstream where
all U.S. teenagers lived, with space only for themselves. The barrier not easy to cross, and when
I couldn’t do it.my consolation was to take refuge in the library of the house, where I read,
during the first vacation, an English translation Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
I was 14 years old when I went to the States for the first time—the same age as my
grandmother Ilse when she watched New Orleans fade into distance from the deck of a
steamship—and ever since then I’ve understood what it means to live I direct contact a
language through the people who speak it, through their culture, and through their vision of the
world.