xenofobie / xenophobia
Sadiqa de Meijer

Dutch words that do not exist in English include leeshonger (a hunger to read), afbellen (to cancel plans by phone), and gezellig. The latter is sometimes translated as “cozy,” but it is possible to be cozy in solitude, while gezellig, which shares its root with the Dutch word for companionship, usually describes a relaxed and enjoyable social atmosphere, or a space that invites a gathering. It’s also possible to be ongezellig: to fail to be cheerful in the context of a jovial group.

Other expressions translate poorly because they refer to particular places. My favourite is voor Pampus liggen, to “lie before Pampus,” which refers to a sandbank in the waters off Amsterdam. Large ships that reached Pampus at low tide used to have to wait until the water rose before they could enter the harbour; to say that you are lying before Pampus is to declare yourself idle and recumbent—it could be for pleasure, from exhaustion, or from excess food or drink. The Mokerheide is a specific heath, but also means as far away as possible. Bij Neck (an isolated village) om naar (around to) Den Haag (the Hague) is to take an unnecessarily circuitous route.

I have not experienced the limits of my languages as the limits of my world, but I am familiar with the sweet revelation of finding that the formerly inexpressible has a name. A friend of mine loves to be out on blustery days; a part of her has long intuited the clarifying nature of the wind’s force. When I told her of the Dutch term uitwaaien, which means to take a walk in strong winds in order to to refresh oneself, I was naming a concept that already lived in her; hearing the word was an affirmation.

This happened for me when I learned the Punjabi word jugaad. As a teenager, I’d been aware that my father had an unusually makeshift approach to materials. He picked things up from the curb on garbage day and repaired them. He made shelves out of the packing containers of our move. Recently, at my parents’ home, I saw that he had fashioned a baby gate for the grandchildren out of a bed’s headboard and two rubber exercise bands. As a teenager, my response to his contraptions used to take the form of an inner dispute; I felt embarrassment at their oddness, and also pride in what I took to be a hold-over from Kenyan culture, where children made soccer balls out of elastics, and toy cars out of tin cans (there is a Swahili term for this inventiveness as well: jua kali). Now I altogether appreciate them as frugal, unpretentious and self-sufficient. Unlike the sanctioned alternative—the immediate purchase of a designated and eventually disposable product—their construction is a creative process, and does no further ecological harm. I seem to have inherited the practice; my standing desk, for example, has long been a cardboard box on a table, and I’ve used the silver lids of take-out containers to reflect light onto houseplants. These wayward solutions are jugaad; they make do with what is at hand. Although I was alone when I learned the term, a sense of community arrived with it; I’d tried to describe the spirit of jugaad to a few friends, but it turned out there were millions of people who already understood.

To name experience is a clarifying sensation; it is more mysterious to find that there are words for what we may never have considered. For me, this was true when I read The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, where Anne Fadiman lists the meanings of a number of Hmong expressions, including txij txej (a rat or mouse crying out in a snake’s mouth) and nqaj nqug (many trees falling, one right after another).1 Soraya Peerbaye writes in her poem series “Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names” of the Yaghan language, which has one remaining native speaker, the author Cristina Calderon. “Your name would be different if I called to you from a canoe, or from the shore; your name would be different if earth or water lay between us.”2 Often, what is untranslatable between two languages is not a word or a phrase but a deeper structuring. Kanien’kéha:ka speaker Chelsea Sunday, for example, says the following: “Inside of our language, you can’t really say anything without relating to something else. You have to relate yourself to things around you.”3

The untranslatable is inherent in all intercultural contact, where its particles may accumulate and become tropes of otherness. This is dangerous; at the same time, I have trouble believing in an explicatory process by which we become fully known to each other—not because I lack faith in the tortuous, searching progress that words and gestures make, but because it requires picturing a method freed from existing hierarchies. It’s an old story; marginal communities, already fluent for their own survival’s sake in the practices of the dominating culture, do the uphill work of translating themselves—to a group that has rarely practiced any decent or imaginative listening.

Rainer Maria Rilke was referring to lovers when he wrote, in that third Germanic tongue: “(…) once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”4 I locate in his words a socio-cultural instructiveness as well; that phrase “if they succeed in loving the expanse between them” is an invitation to respect the untranslatable where it is found; to let go of infusing it with the worst of assumptions; to consider it the sacred foundation of all relations, over which translation’s intermittent sparks may astonish us.

1.    Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
2.   Peerbaye, Soraya. Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names. Fredericton: Goose Lane Press, 2009.   
3.    Dunne, Nick. “Kanien’kéha: Recognizing code talkers a part of resuscitating the language.” Cornwall: Standard-Freeholder. Sep. 11, 2019.
4.    Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. (transl. M.D Herter Norton). London: Norton, 1993.

Sadiqa de Meijer’s books include Leaving Howe Island, The Outer Wards, and alfabet/alphabet. Her work, which often explores landscape, language, inner lives, and the long wakes of colonialism and migration, has received the CBC Poetry Prize, Arc's Poem of the Year Award, a Jean Royce Fellowship, the Governor General’s Award for English Non-Fiction, and other honours. It has been published internationally in Poetry Magazine, The Walrus, Brick Magazine, Poetry London, and anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry, the Best Canadian Essays, and the Dutch Turing Prize series. Her essay collection In The Field is forthcoming in 2025.