Untranslated: The Quiet Revolution of Language

By: Coco Steemer

Photo by Osarugue Igbinoba on Unsplash

After nearly four years of homeschooling my children, I moved to New York City seeking a more diverse and affirming environment. We had spent too long in Colorado, a predominantly white state, and the impact especially in terms of racism was something my children were still carrying. They were craving community, and I wanted to give them a new start.

When I went to register them for school, I was introduced to a network that included a high school, middle school, and elementary school. One of the founders of the elementary school invited me in for a registration day, and when we met, I explained how hesitant we were about returning to the public school system. Our past experiences had left scars and truthfully, neither I nor my husband have ever truly believed in the public school system. That’s a deeper conversation for another time.

But something happened that day something I haven’t been able to shake.

The founder, who would later become one of my daughter’s teachers, told us he was learning Swahili. When I asked him why, he shared a story about his time in Vietnam with a group of Rastas. One of them had said to him:

“No matter how deep your thoughts get, you're still thinking and speaking in the language of the oppressor.”

That hit me in a place I didn’t even know existed. And immediately I knew my children were in the right place.

I had never truly considered how only knowing the language of my oppressor has shaped my existence, my emotions, my art, my ability to connect. I started wondering:
How has this limited my ability to express love?
To feel grief?
To connect with my children?
To create without translation?

And if I’ve only ever spoken this language, have I ever truly been heard?

It took me down a rabbit hole of thought. I started thinking about the communication challenges we face as Black American people. The difficulty many of us have expressing disagreement without it turning into conflict. The way so many of us struggle in our relationships, especially romantic ones, because of how we communicate or don’t. I began to wonder if that resistance, that sharpness in conversations where emotions clash, could that be rooted in the energy of a language we were forced to learn? A language that carries ancestral trauma in its vowels and consonants?

I imagined the trauma transfer that must have taken place on slave plantations when enslaved people had to force their children to learn English for survival. I thought about how they must have felt. And even when they learned, they were made to feel unintelligent and beneath their masters. Then I asked myself: Where did that anger, sadness, and hurt go? It mutated. It created silent gaps between generations, unable to connect.

As the healing era continues to trend, and Black American folks struggle to recreate community and family units that are healthy, I consider how elders often struggle to understand the healing language many of their descendants have learned in Western therapy—a language that I feel intentionally widens the gap through miscommunication by carrying the intention of the oppressors even when Black folks strive to make themselves understood.

That moment when the descendants are out of words but the feeling still lingers. When there’s no reservoir of language left to explain the emotion, the energy, or the urgency. When it feels like you still have more to say but suddenly you feel a clog so deep in your throat that it functions like a spiritual mussel over your mouth.

I wonder: Is it a lack of desire to heal from our elders, or is the elevation just lost in translation? Do our elders not feel intelligent enough to understand a language that is ancestrally trying to rob them again of something so precious to them, connecting to their children?

Even though the questions consumed me…

I thought deeper:
What if part of the healing we need isn’t just about therapy or activism, but about language reclamation?
What if part of our disconnection is spiritual, because we were separated from the divine frequency of our own tongues?

Even Swahili, one of the more accessible African languages, is considered endangered by the colonizers who tremble at the thought of us Black folks reconnecting to it. And many African languages are already heavily colonized, tainted with French, Portuguese, or English. Yes, we’ve made English our own in many beautiful ways, but at the end of the day, it still isn’t ours.

Resistance doesn't always look like protests and revolution. Sometimes, resistance looks like something slower, deeper, ancestral, like learning the language that was once stolen from your ancestors. Even if we don’t know our specific tribal tongue, we know what we’re drawn to. We know what makes our hips move. We know what calls our spirit.

Then I thought, even if I learn a native language, who would I speak it with?
And that’s when I remembered something sacred: the language of the Southern Black church, the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues. Even after I left Christianity, I never left that language. I understand it. My husband understands mine. It’s rhythmic. Emotional. Divine. It’s not about translation, it’s about feeling.

And that made me ask a deeper question:

What separation happens between a person and their divine essence when their true language is taken away?

I truly believe that returning to our native frequencies, linguistic, emotional, spiritual, is one of the most radical acts of revolution Black people can take right now.

So yes, we may not know exactly what our native languages are, but we know what we’re pulled toward. Let go of the lie that we’re lost. We are the most intuitive people on this planet. We remember with our hips, our drums, our food, our stories, our dreams.

And maybe, the path home starts with the words we choose to find again. The willingness to seek truth and allow our ancestors to guide us back.