Accent Politics
My laptop screen blinked. Green lines highlighted my rectangle among the grid of virtual faces. I panicked. Did I turn my audio and video off? Shit. I checked the bottom left corner and the red lines crossing through the little camcorder and microphone icons put my mind at ease. It was a Thursday afternoon and I had class, the last of my online classes that week. The topic? Something political. I don’t particularly remember which student spoke or what she spoke about, but I do remember her accent. She was American.
I knew she was American for several reasons, the first one being the ungodly amount of American pop culture and media I had consumed as a child. I had spent hours staring at the television, remote in hand, with the channel glued to Disney. My mother would come in, shake her head, and mutter “Uyu mwana”, before leaving me for a few more minutes. I would recreate my favorite episodes from my favorite shows, casting my siblings in various roles they couldn’t care for (myself as the main character, always) and I would attempt to shoot a scene from the episode. I had memorized the lines, the looks, the sass, the wardrobe, but I couldn’t quite get the accent down. I sat there for hours, consuming, internalizing, and memorizing the peculiarities of the mainstream American accent in the media. Emphasis on the Rs, the subtle transformation of Ts into Ds (sometimes the complete erasure of the Ts), the gradual rise in intonation at the completion of most sentences.
Yes, the student was American, which I also knew because of how confident Americans tend to sound. From the vocal projection to the consistent emphasis on certain letters or lack thereof, there was no trace of insecurity. She spoke in a way that seemed like she expected the rest of the class to keep up with how quickly her sentences formed and then vanished throughout her commentary. She didn’t grasp at her mental thesaurus in an attempt to replace the all-too-colloquial and unnecessary appendages of “like” and “so yeah” with more formal synonyms. She just spoke how she spoke, and for her, that was good enough.
I wondered where it came from, the confidence.
I’ve been a student at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) for two years now and the range of nationalities, ethnicities, races, and languages that populate the campus never ceases to baffle me. With diversity so mind-boggling, I periodically slap myself in the face to remind myself of the fact that I’m having lunch, dinner, breakfast or taking a class, playing sports or even just walking with someone whose life began thousands of miles away from mine. The realization catches me at random times. Sometimes when I reference Bikiloni and Difikoti — an iconic comedy duo notorious around Zambian local television and media for their bizarre, animated skits — and realize everyone around me stare off into space or blankly blink at me. Or sometimes when I crave home-cooked nshima and visashi, I notice the lost and sometimes grossed-out faces as I describe the stickiness of the white, doughy pulp molded from maize meal or the stringy greens carefully boiled with pounded groundnuts.
But then I have a meal with someone from places like the UK or the US and I realize I understand the description of their favorite meal because I’ve grown up in a society heavily influenced by the remnants of British colonialism and currently swimming in American imperialism. I think of Zambia’s local variations of mac and cheese and fish and chips. I think of the standard fried chicken and fries sold at a KFC a couple of stops away from my house. I think of the burgers and hotdogs because these foods were just as much a reality of my childhood as they were of theirs. I understand their amused phrases of which I’ve heard countless variations in novels, films, news, and the media. I understand their language because it’s a language that was forced upon me and my ancestors many years ago. These students come to one of the most diverse spaces and seemingly never worry about being misunderstood as they speak or explain a part of themselves and their background, because the rest of the world has been accustomed to hearing a reality told through their accents for decades.
“I’ve grown up in a society heavily influenced by the remnants of British colonialism and currently swimming in American imperialism.”
There’s a sort of unspoken pride that comes from recognition, an especially global one, when people light up because they can place a nationality and background to your accent. Accents, as a manner of pronunciation and means of speaking specific to a region, nationality, and location, are a tool for linking a person to a place. They are one of the most distinctive cues of origin that help mark out core parts of our identity. Yet, the sad reality is that biases, prejudices, and stereotypes have been built around certain accents that stigmatize the speakers and the regions from which the speakers originate. Of course, people never seem to mind when their accent is linked to positions or places of privilege. I have yet to come across a Zambian who complains of presumption of wealth, education, and high social standing from their diluted or sometimes foreign accent — unless they hoped to score a cheaper deal in their purchases in the informal spaces of Lusaka.
On the other side of the spectrum are individuals who have grown aware of linguistic profiling, of when to mold their pronunciation of certain phrases or words to avoid stereotypes around their regional background, ethnicity, and race that can easily form in the minds of their interlocutor. Essentially, these individuals are excellent code-switchers. I moved to the American International School of Lusaka (AISL) right before grade ten. Excited to meet my new classmates and teachers, I challenged myself to not have a single quiet moment from the minute I stepped off the school bus to the last bell of the day. My interactions with the bus driver were rather pleasant, morphing Nyanja into the conversation as much as we could before he dropped me off in the parking lot the morning of my first day. I met the principal of the school a few minutes after and I remember how involuntarily and easily the act of diluting my accent seeped into my conversation with him.
My first couple of days at AISL were rather strange. Not only was I made aware of just how different I sounded, but I also felt the need to apologize for it whenever I interacted with people of other races and ethnicities. Suddenly, I was back in my living room practicing how to roll my Rs and gloss over my Ts. One afternoon, as I sat with my friends by the tuckshop benches, my phone buzzed with an incoming call from my brother. When I answered, there was a momentary silence on his end, static, followed by “Is…is this Mbiko?” I stared at the phone, pulled it back to my ear. “Yes, yes, it is.” He hesitated. “Are you sure? You sound different.” He was silent for a bit, almost like he wanted to say something more but just told me that he would be picking me up late from school that day. Later, he shared how
I wish I could say the hyperawareness began with my enrolling in AISL, but the subconscious understanding that a pronounced Zambian accent alluded to lower social class, lack of education, and illiteracy established itself long before I stepped foot on those grounds. One day when I was in grade six, my brother Samson and I mocked my mother relentlessly for pronouncing risk as “risik”. Samson and I went back and forth, my mother getting visibly irritated. Finally, she snapped, “I don’t know why you two are laughing. My English is better than yours. I was taught by a white man.” My brother and I looked at each other, the authority of the white man enough to silence us. She did that often, utilizing her former English teacher as her iron shield against any form of teasing or mocking of her pronunciation of particular English words and phrases. Of course, at the time neither my brother nor myself realized the alienation and disrespect that comes from mocking an individual’s accent and the inability for that accent to convey a language that was never theirs. At the time, I was blinded to the insecurity she had felt for having to defend herself from her own children for incorrectly pronouncing words of a language she had learned a decade after she learned to speak itself. At the time, neither my brother nor myself understood what it meant to place the authoritative figure of the “white man” above our own personal understanding of the language.
I remember sharing my mother’s insecurities in grade six through to grade nine where people endured relentless teasing for placing emphasis on consonants, most especially, D, T, and N, or the replacement of L with R and vice versa. I remember how I would rather have been called anything else under the sun than be tagged as “bundu ”, the middle-school kids’ label for the less affluent and the less educated, earned by virtue of the strength of your accent alone. To be called bundu was to be destined for blue-collar jobs, to live in the neighborhoods stigmatized as breeding grounds for criminals, and the general “scum” of society. Bundu was a step closer to Kaponya, which grade six me understood as the actual scum of society.
I wish I could say I completely worked my way out of the implicit biases I possessed against my accent once the awareness of them kicked in. Truthfully, I no longer desired to dilute my accent by the time I enrolled at NYUAD, yet the fear of being labeled as unintelligent fueled the need to expand my mental thesaurus. It wasn’t enough to simply suggest “sitting and chilling”; I had to emphasize “the importance of refraining from strenuous labor by retiring to our respective suites and recharging to tackle the duties of the good ‘morrow”. It wasn’t enough to simply “talk about stuff like racism”; I had to reiterate “the importance of engaging in complex conversations surrounding societal concepts such as racism embedded in our everyday interactions.” In Lusaka, the privilege of attending private schools and spending hours consuming western media diluted my accent enough by local standards to keep the stigma at bay. Yet, in an international space with the accent hierarchy globalized, I was thrown right to the bottom with presumptions of underdevelopment, backwardness, and the purported unintelligence of Africans following the strength of my Ts and Ds. Therefore, it didn’t particularly surprise me when my Colombian classmate with wide eyes praised how “well-spoken” I was or when my South Indian crush commented on how “surprisingly” attractive African accents are.
“…the privilege of attending private schools and spending hours consuming western media diluted my accent enough by local standards to keep the stigma at bay.”
Everyday became a game of not if, but when and how I could string floral sentences together to avoid any long-standing stereotypes a listener might have against individuals of my background. My awareness surrounding stereotypes of individuals from the African continent rose with the recognition of the role Africans in the United Arab Emirates play. With each waitress, security guard, and cab driver I spotted, came the growing need to expand my vocabulary to set myself apart, show my “difference” and my “promise”. It didn’t help that I would often be mistaken for a sex worker when I went for walks by the beach or when I stood on the side of the street waiting for the pedestrian crossing signal to turn green. I had grown more aware of the ways I could distance myself from my Zambian identity in the quickest way possible because tweaking my articulation and vocabulary. Molding my means of speaking provided a shelter from my Africanness that my dark skin simply could not provide.
The friendly Malawian dining hall staff member at NYUAD greeted me everyday with a mulibwanji. I politely responded with “Good morning/afternoon/night.” By freshman spring, I developed a phone voice with the lexicon of a professor of English literature for when I received calls from insurance companies, banks, or dentist receptionists. I refrained from speaking in any form of Lusaka slang with the only other Zambian on campus and declined offers from my African American friends to learn African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I managed to maintain the strength of my native accent but denied myself the liberty to speak freely in Nyanja and reminisce about Lusaka life in a way that paid true homage to the cultural atmosphere of the city. I denied myself the chance to learn a dialect infused with rich history beginning 400 years ago to date and expanding still, with new words and phrases exchanged as terms of endearment. I denied myself a chance to speak without the anxiety of caring for the thoughts and opinions of other people, whose biases against my identity would likely persist. .
At the core of all my attempts to dilute my accent, expand my thesaurus, and avoid any stigmas, was a search for access and acceptance. I wish someone had told me it’s not my job to appear more intelligent, well-educated, approachable, or dateable, especially to individuals who insist on dismissing whole human beings based on their preconceived notions of social status. It’s not my job to ease the difficulty one might experience in understanding the medium through which my narrative is told. My life deserves to be narrated by a means that pays true homage to my place of origin.
”At the core of all my attempts to dilute my accent, expand my thesaurus, and avoid any stigmas, was a search for access and acceptance.”
I wish someone told me status, underneath all the prestige and the envy and admiration of others, truly means as little as the temporary satisfaction it gives. And to seek status and acceptance, especially at the expense of cultural self-expression, is ultimately not worth it. I wish someone had told me the “scum” of society and the less affluent workers from the far reaches of the African continent are just as valuable as the CEOs of companies whose accents and vocabulary I worked so hard to emulate. And to mimic the work ethic and resilience of these individuals in the face of societal obstacles would instill a will of iron within me to overcome anything.
Ultimately, I wish someone had told me that accents are a means of finding comfort, where the strongest sense of camaraderie and home can exist. And to ditch the diluted, polished scripts I used daily to speak to my professors, colleagues, and sometimes, non-Zambian friends. When my British Nigerian friend insisted on the “universality” of my accent and how I could belong to any point on the map, it bothered me that I wasn’t linked to my home, my parents, and grandparents. It bothered me that if blindfolded, very little about the way I spoke and my means of communication could allude back to Zambia and the rich history I carry with me, from my ancestry to the Kunda tribal mainland. I wanted to be instantly connected to one of the most beautiful countries in the world.
“It bothered me that if blindfolded, very little about the way I spoke and my means of communication could allude back to Zambia and the rich history I carry with me.”
But I was too focused on how fluidly words flowed out of my mouth to recognize the softened faces of the “bundu” children when they were included in games and discussions on the same table as the affluent kids. I was too afraid to notice the alienation my family felt when they couldn’t recognise the voice of an individual too afraid to be herself. My anxiety about my articulation blinded me from the joy the Malawian dining hall staff member exuded when he realized someone else existed in his place of work that could understand his accent and his language. I was too blinded to the freeness I felt and witnessed in other people when our accents strengthened as we conversed with people from home.
My relationship with my accent has grown into somewhat of a power struggle between the voice pushing me to dilute it and the one pushing me to strengthen it. Sometimes the first voice takes over and sometimes the other. Sometimes neither takes center stage and I simply exist without allocating too much thought to how I sound. It then quickly became important to me that the accent of T’Challa — a character from Black Panther, one of the few Hollywood films that depicts Africans in a positive light — spoke in an accent as close to the countries surrounding the fictional land of Wakanda. If T’Challa’s accent is an accurate portrayal of the real countries surrounding Wakanda, it pushes a more positive view of those African identities which, in my book, is a step towards gradually dismantling the hierarchy. Quite honestly, this hierarchy may never collapse, much like the deeply rooted structures of racism, colonization, and sexism. But knowing that I am actively working on not being part of the problem that continues to marginalize, dismiss, and invalidate gives me enough confidence to speak in the strongest Kunda tribal accent I can master…mostly.
Mbiko Mayaka is a second-year Social Research and Public Policy and Arts and Art History student at New York University Abu Dhabi. Originally from Zambia, Mayaka strives to combine her affiliation and connection with her cultural background with her newfound relationship to the diverse and interculturally rich spaces of Abu Dhabi. She strives to create written work and art that grapples with and addresses the realities of what it means to be an African-identifying woman in the UAE.
Artwork by Myriam Louise Taleb