Wavelengths of Humanity
An imaginative extract composed by Josie (Year 11, Mackillop Catholic College)
His hand is rough in mine, heavy with wisdom years beyond my own. We walk slowly and carefully through the supermarket, taking time to peer through the wilted vegetables, the bright clearance labels.
“I bet I could eat all the sweets on this shelf!” I joke, and am satisfied when he throws his head back and dutifully laughs. I like that I am able to make him laugh. A woman to our left eyes my grandfather, and barks a question so abruptly I am sure he did not catch it, for I certainly did not. I watch his face contort, breaking the query into fractions, sorting syllables into words. For all his efforts, he does not understand.
He mumbles something, an apology of sorts, roughed by his own native accent, clumsily tripping over unfamiliar, unpracticed vowels. The woman clocks his foreign accent, and a smirk slides briefly across her mouth, unaware of my gaze trained on her. She makes a condescending remark, a lofty quip that makes my body burn with an indignant anger for my grandfather. How dare that plain, simple woman look down on my grandfather as she had?
Didn’t she realise how smart he truly was, how funny and observant?
My grandfather, who would sit patiently with his grandchildren as we babbled to him in our own language, who would teach us phrases of his mother tongue, enunciating each syllable carefully and laughing at our exaggerated attempts to mimic him, with mouths wide open and brows knitted in concentration. My kind grandfather, who loved music and literature, who travelled from a whole world away to be with us.
Of course she didn't. She was steadfast in her own world, sheltered by her easy knowledge of this country; treading the shallow waters of a culture that threatened to drag him under.
My grandfather was bound by his language. An intelligent, wise man, reduced to a bumbling fool by a language that was not his own. In his own country, he was one of many, familiar in all that he is. Here, he is adrift in a sea of ignorance. The culture of his people, the mother tongue that was his own, weighed on him like an anchor, stripping him of the cognisant being he is, leaving him only as what the world would perceive him as. How was it possible that the woman, who knew nothing of us, could be so steadfast, so unwavering in the belief that my grandfather was inferior?
I squeeze his hand all the more tightly, as though this act of solidarity would be enough to shield him from all the judgement of the world, protect him from harm. He smiles back at me, squeezes my hand in return, but the weight of shame and embarrassment digs into the lines around his eyes, furrows deep into his brow. I can tell he feels unsettled, like a small fish thrown to the rocky shore. Unaccustomed and unable to adjust to this unfamiliar territory. I am astounded at how backwards this all must seem to him. Words that flow through my mind effortlessly are jumbled in his, taken apart and translated into terms that do not quite convey the correct tone or tense. Even my words, when spoken too quickly, take him aback.
He lives on the brink of unfamiliar waters, alienated from people who look, act and think like him, but cannot hear past the thick accent, the mispronounced words. He exists a lifetime away, on a shore across the world, where the waters are not so unforgiving.
