Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your cultural background? What languages did you grow up with?
Hello, I’m Nicky and I’ve just joined Hejmo as the new Director. I grew up in the UK with my German mum and Nigerian dad. The main language at home was English, but I also spoke German with my mum, and my parents, who met in Nigeria, would sometimes joke around in Igbo / Pidgin English.
The language implications for identity can sometimes be very complex, especially when you grow up between cultures. How has language influenced your sense of identity? Do you feel different versions of yourself when you speak in different languages?
As a mixed-race third culture kid, I’ve always been fascinated by narratives of identity and belonging. Like nation states, they are of course ultimately arbitrary, and language has long been one of the primary ways people categorise and project assumptions onto you, which are in turn shaped by their own sociolinguistic frames of reference. There’s a saying that Germans are too direct to be polite, and the English are too polite to be direct. I find those cultural norms around how and why you express yourself in any given context really intriguing. In German, there’s the concept of falsche Höflichkeit, which could describe the euphemistic way Brits often communicate. It can be quite confusing for Germans who are linguistically but not culturally fluent in English. I’ve learned to be more direct in German, but I still often default to what Germans call um den heißen Brei herumreden. I’m also trying to learn Igbo, which is a very tonal language - you can easily say something really funny or embarrassing if your intonation is off. That tonal range is also a reason why Nigerians often speak English in a more rhythmic, energetic and poetic way than the Brits who tend to be more buttoned-up.
How long have you been living in Berlin? How has it influenced your relationship with your mother’s language to live in a city where it’s the majority’s language? Did German feel different when it was your mother’s language at home versus when you had to use it professionally?
I’ve lived here for 19 years, and English has more or less become the lingua franca in Berlin. I think it’s important to unpack the inherent coloniality embedded in the continued global dominance of English, and to see this not just as a given, but as an opportunity to actively explore and support indigenous knowledge production and cultural tools that circumnavigate the Western gaze. Hejmo’s language cafés are a wonderful way for English speakers to step outside their comfort zones, connect with others, and learn another language.
You have kids that grew up in a different language constellation, where your mother tongue and theirs differ. What have you learned experiencing their relationship to language?
My kids’ first language is German, and at home we speak a mishmash of Denglish. They love getting me to say Streichholzschächtelchen, and I also get the giggles asking them to practise their “th” by repeating silly things like Three Thirsty Thistles! I think language should feel playful and fluid - something that’s constantly evolving and evokes fun and magical memories.
In a place like Hejmo, where so many languages meet, what role do you think mother tongue plays in building community?
What’s lovely about Hejmo is that blended multilingualism is one out of many ways of communicating, storytelling and connecting. Whereas the term ‘mother tongue’ is gendered and heteronormative, storytelling takes many sensory and creative forms. It allows us to honor diasporic, racialized communities whose ties to language, culture, and heritage are multifaceted, sometimes complex and often encompass a fragile sense of liminality. I think about this passage from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous a lot:
"But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level. As a girl, you watched from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all but an orphan."