A Deep Desire to Belong

Learn Languages, Find Yourself - A peek inside my story - part 1

As a little girl, I spent every summer with my aunts and uncles in Bari, a city in southern Italy. I remember the early mornings at the beach, dipping into the fresh water of the sea and then quickly running back to lie down on my colourful towel, my red hair bright in the sun, my skin, white, shyly hiding under the shade of the big parasol, salted water slowly dripping onto my upper lip.

My grandmother and her sister-in-law would giggle as they’d take a walk to go speak with the fishermen to buy freshly caught octopus, straight from the Mediterranean. It was always so impressive to see my nonna beat them up against the concrete and then bite off and swallow a tentacle while the poor creature was still moving.

I remember the laughters, the agitated conversations amongst the adults - although I’m not sure what it was about? Calcio? Politics? Or worse, food? I remember the cartoons in Italian on the small black and white tv. The smell of fresh pizza eaten out of newspaper wraps. The noisy motorbikes that would drive fast just in front of the palazzo della zia. I remember the walks at sunset on the lungo mare that would always end up with a gelato al limone. My favorite to this day.

I remember the long lunches we’d have in campagna. The huge garden around the tiny family house that didn’t even have a bathroom, the long tables on the grass with sometimes more than 40 people sitting around, eating roasted meat, fresh bred, tomatoes and olive oil that came straight from the surrounding olive trees. The lunches were so long that they would usually still be going on when the cicadas started singing. Old and young would share a humongous anguria, fresh and sweet so the heat would be bearable, whilst talking joyfully to one another in Barese, the flavourful local dialect.

Around that table, I was the only one that had blue eyes and freckled cheeks. I looked German, or Irish, but I was using their tongue, illustrating my sentences with the appropriate use of the gesto del carciofo to signify that I had understood they were teasing me. How they loved interacting with me, how amazed they all were to hear me speak so! I always got so many compliments Come parli bene!

That’s usually when my mother would try to correct my gluttural ‘r’s that refused to trill, and I would immediately withdraw into silence. Alberrrrrro she would repeat several times, as if insisting in public would magically do the trick. I’d say I was tired, but I wasn’t kidding anyone: they could all see that I was upset. In reality, “upset” didn’t start to describe how I felt. What I was feeling was ashamed, inadequate and desperate at the realisation that if my best tricks could perhaps bring me close to being like them, the truth was that I could never be one of them.

I could never belong.

Photo by Storiès on Unsplash

For a long time, I thought it was genetic.

That the capacity to trill your r’s comes with a special DNA code that says : You, there, no matter what you do, you won’t ever be able to look or sound Italian”. Believing that gave me something else to blame for making me different than the others. For making me so noticeable, so visible, when what I desired the most was to blend in. Like all children, I had intuitively understood that it was a question of survival.

My mother was doing her best. She took me to a speech therapist to help me overcome the stutter that made it difficult for others to understand me. To a dietician to make me lose the weight I was hiding under. To a podiatrist so I could start walking straight. I even got to see a psychologist a few times. So really she couldn’t be blamed for any of my shortcomings. No, the problem had to be my genes. And for many years, I hated them.

My name is Jessica Tefenkgi Ruelle. I was born in 1983 in a public hospital in Brussels, Belgium. I was relinquished at birth, a fancy word for abandoned, and then I grew up with my adoptive family from Italian descent. Like most children from immigration, I learned to speak several languages from an early age. In my case French and Italian, and of course Barese. I’ve always been fascinated by understanding what connects the languages we speak and our identities, the way we relate to ourselves and to the world.

Why do we learn languages? How does our identity change with the languages that become a part of us? Who do we become as we merge with the culture of another? As you’ve read in my story, language for me has always been a tool to belong and to connect. And therefore to survive.

As a child, I quickly caught that learning the official Italian language my mother taught me was not enough. It was catching the dialect expressions my grandparents used that would win me the golden ticket inside the family. As if by speaking their secret code, I would immediately earn their trust. In a way, I was right.

When at home, my mother and I would mostly speak French, but as soon as we stepped outside, we switched to Italian so nobody could understand us. The language was a tool to include or exclude, at will. In the same way then, when I started journaling as a young teenager, I chose to write my diary in English to protect it from curious eyes, English being a language that nobody in my family could speak. To me, it sounded like freedom.

That’s how almost accidentally, I started this incredible journey of exploring my thoughts, emotions, dreams and first love stories in English. Entrusting my heart-breaks and teenage angst into the white pages of my beloved notebooks. I was 13 years old at the time, and I have never stopped since.

In the sacred place between the lines of my journals, the silly teenage stories quickly turned into heart-felt confessions. Soon, I started exploring who I was, who I was not, who my adoptive family wanted me to be, and the perpetual sadness, rage and inadequacy that used to always be there with me. Without knowing exactly what I was doing, I was addressing my unresolved trauma. Writing all my thoughts and feelings in English made it seem like it was a game, like I was an actress pretending to be British and I’d write my memoirs. A silly trick that is in fact one of the most powerful benefits of journaling in a foreign language.

At the same time, my language skills rapidly improved and I soon became top of class in English. My classmates, who would usually make fun of me for being a plump red-head, started to admire me and ask me for advice or feedback on their English assignments. I was never popular, of course, nor did I want to be. But little by little, I grew more confident, in my skills, in understanding myself, and therefore in understanding others.

This made me want to learn more, and I became what we now call “a language geek”. I asked my parents if I could take more language classes and I enrolled in distance learning. This was in the late 90s, so the internet wasn’t yet in every home. The school I learned with would send me photocopied lessons that had originally been written on a typewriter. Every week, I’d get a new lesson together with a tape for listening practice. I would follow the course at my own pace, then send out my written and oral assignments through the mail. Like, the snail mail. And a few days - sometimes a few long weeks - later, I’d get my homework back with a written and audio feedback. It was the ancestor of asynchronous learning!

I spent hours in my room studying English, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, German, and I had even started Portuguese (which I’m now learning for real). These courses were unsurprisingly far from being effective in building fluency, but they had the advantage of being a clear step-by-step process with activities that required my full cognitive attention. This, as I realised later, was exactly what I had needed in order to cope with the complexity and chaos of my emotional landscape then.

Although I wasn’t fully aware that learning languages had become a therapeutic activity, the process was so joyful it brought me the hope that even if I wasn’t good within, at least I was good at something. So naturally, I went on to study modern languages at university and I became a language teacher, first in high school, then with adults.

This could be the end of the story, but we wouldn’t be here if that was the case…

Until next week for part 2 :)

This is an extract of my “book in progress” - Learn Languages, Find Yourself. You’ve just read part 1 of my introduction. Any thoughts or feedback are welcome.