The Word for Water
Atl: water.
Yolo: heart.
Nechmaka atl: give me water.
Nechmaka moyolotsi: give me your heart.
Gilberto’s friend David is teaching us Nahuatl.
We sit in the bright green living room of our little house in an ugly Pachuca fraccionimiento and learn to produce the vowels in chopped-off bursts of sound. We pronounce the words for deer, bat, butterfly, cat, dog. The word for puma translates as “cat that cannot be tamed.” We learn to say river, spring, waterfall. Rain, star, cloud. There is one word for mud that is more that fifty percent water, and another for mud that is more than fifty percent earth.
David doesn’t concern himself with verbs or grammar. The vocabulary comes at us in a stream: the words for fresh corn, dried corn, tortilla, bean, comal, fire, firewood. Hill, mountain, tree. Orange, lime, banana, plum, papaya. It’s more vocabulary that we could possibly memorize in one go, but we just listen as David paints his world in nouns in the air of our living room.
He’s from one of the few regions of Hidalgo where pure Nahuatl, unmixed with Spanish, is still spoken, where people still live more or less as they have for thousands of years, without stoves or refrigerators or traffic or shopping malls—without even words for those things. He can’t teach us the language without teaching us the community—what there is, what there isn’t, and how it’s perceived and how it fits together.
David can only come once a week, but I study in the afternoons whenever I can. For Gil, this is a practical endeavor: he will be able to use the language in his work with indigenous communities. For me, it’s meditation, a search maybe. A gesture of hope, certainly: I hope someday to raise my children to be trilingual—English for practicality, Spanish for affection, and Nahuatl for…something I can feel but can’t name.
I feel it when I dream one night of an ameyali, a natural well. I am walking into the mountains above Pachuca, when I come around a bend and see a pool of water so blue and beautiful it makes me gasp. The word ameyali is implicit in the dream; the dream, the image, could not exist without the word. I wake up feeling that I’ve received a gift.
Another day, I’m studying on my own about pluralizing nouns. Animals and insects are pluralized by adding the suffix –mej. People and inanimate nouns are pluralized differently—except the words for star and hill. Stars and hills are treated as living beings. Thus, sitlali, star. Sitlalimej, stars. Living stars, moving stars, breathing stars, fellow-living-being stars.
And from a list of vocabulary, a world I want to live in begins to emerge.
3 responses to The Word for Water
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janetfactor said on December 23, 2008
And that made me think of one my favorite poems, Rupert Brooke’s “The Great Lover,” which is available online, so I won’t post it here. It takes immense joy in naming things.
It is also where I learned the word “inenarrable,” which I love, even though I never get a chance to use it.
Julie Schwietert Collazo said on December 21, 2008
I moyolotsi this.
Made me think of this poem:
Saying Things – Marilyn Krysl
.
Three things quickly – pineapple, sparrowgrass, whale -
and then on to asbestos. What I want to say tonight is
words, the naming of things into their thing,
yucca, brown sugar, solo, the roll of a snare drum,
say something, say anything, you’ll see what I mean.
Say windmill, you feel the word fly out from under and away.
Say eye, say shearwater, alewife, apache, harpoon,
do you see what I’m saying, say celery, say Seattle,
say a whole city, say San Jose. You can feel the word
rising like a taste on the palate, say
tuning fork, angel, temperature, meadow, silver nitrate,
try carbon cycle, point lace, helium, Micronesia, quail.
Any word – say it – belladonna, screw auger, spitball,
any word goes like a gull up and on its way,
even lead lifts like a swallow from the nest
of your tongue. Say incandescence, bonnet, universal joint,
lint – oh I invite you to try it. Say cold cream,
corydalis, corset, cotillion, cosmic dust,
you are all of you a generous and patient audience,
pilaster, cashmere, mattress, Washington pie,
say vise, inclinometer, enjambment, you feel your own voice
taking off like a swift, when you say a word you feel like
a gong that’s been struck, to speak is to step out of your skin,
stunned. And you’re a pulsar, finally you understand light
is both particle and wave, you can see it, as in
parlour – when do you get a chance to say parlour -
and now mackinaw, toad and ham wing their way
to the heaven of their thing. Say bellows, say sledge,
say threshold, cottonmouth, Russia leather,
say ash, picot, fallow deer, saxophone, say kitchen sink.
This is a birthday party for the mouth – it’s better than ice cream,
say waterlily, refrigerator, hartebeest, Prussian blue
and the word will take you, if you let it,
the word will take you along across the air of your head
so that you’re there as it settles into the thing it was made for,
adding to it a shimmer and the bird song of its sound,
sound that comes from you, the hand letting go
its dove, yours the mouth speaking the thing into existence,
this is what I’m talking about, this is called saying things.
Hal Amen said on December 19, 2008
This is wonderful. Language (especially indigenous American ones) is filled with such mystery and laden with such potential–you really capture that here.