Regarding mother languages, I have spent my life abroad among many who – by the choices of their parents, either in response to the vagaries of history, or to their own often misguided striving for something presumed, in fallacy, more promising – find themselves deprived of, or distanced from, any language to call, Mother.
Dispossessed for a time of my motherland, yet never content to adopt English as my first language – thereby forswearing allegiance to my Welsh blood and birth – I clung mightily to Welsh, first, despite, and still; then, to French. With these alone as an initial springboard, I was launched into the study of other languages, other linguistic families of languages. English – Saxon, language of Welsh subjugation – always, the tertiary, or lesser, choice.
Missing my mother language, heard in the voices of the hearts, on the streets of the minds, I have felt, and thought, and dreamed, in Welsh. The embrace of that Mother, though, was missing. In its absence, in her absence, in its wanting, in her wanting, I sought the embrace of any language that would have me. Multi-lingual and multi-cultural, now, quadri-continental, and trans-oceanic, thrice, I am yet longing – my motherland not here, not now, my mother tongue, the echo of my soul’s yearning, my sixth sense, hiraeth.
And these the words ensuing.
À la recherche de licornes. 