“Imiti ikula é mpanga.”
― Growing trees are tomorrow’s forests, Bemba proverb.
It’s been four years since we landed in America. The dizziness of spinning letters is finally ebbing. The meaning of TOEFL, VISAs, OPT and Adjustment of Status now sits somewhere in a muted white office.
Four years. A split second in which mother tongue can drown inside another while I am busy treading new waters.
In a Minnesota suburb where my friendliest neighbour’s attempt at my name emerges as an unsteady Mu-ga-mba, I can finally sit down long enough to remind my children that the t in water has a sound like all letters are supposed to. The e at the end of kale, the i in mukwai, ß in abantu.
This splice of time is a near lifetime for them. Their old accents, my forever accent, have faded into those first videos of their four and six-year-old selves marvelling, Can I eat it? at the first feathering of snow. When I show them these recollections now, they cackle at those not-so-long-ago iterations of themselves, wondering out loud why they sound so funny.
Sitting in the embrace of their laughter, I hope this humour at a part of themselves won’t one day regress into those performative Point-And-Laugh-At-My-Immigrant-Mother skits on TikTok.
I shrug, swiping to the next video, crushing down a sharp, unexpected mourning. The feeling echoes my perpetual craving for chikanda––a wanting of something I’d barely noticed before leaving.
Over the phone the next day, I lament the Americanisation of my children’s speech to my auntie, who raised her two in the UK, a place as much of a far cry from Lusaka’s warmth as this. But her response, in the fashion of this side of the Atlantic, is a clipped Just teach them, not the indulgent pity I was pining for.
I marinate in her advice the way I’d adjusted from cooking sashilad chibwabwa with pounded groundnut to stewing the pumpkin leaves in peanut butter.
I’ve never had to teach a language before––the same way I’ve never had to mother alone. At my grandmother’s farm, aunties and cousins waited in the fold to scoop babies from my arms, papa them in chitenge, trade words across tongues. Here, between work and school, it’s just my husband and I, tag-teaming soccer matches and Seussical performances. Like this insular parenting, teaching a language like numbers tastes as odd as the peanut butter stew––not quite right. But, like the food substitute, this too will have to do.
The next morning, I meet the boys’ yawns with Mwashibukeni and encourage their tripping over the vowels.
That means, good morning? The curious one asks, ready to store it in his Did you know? bank for later.
We are 40 minutes away from a tardy card at his school, there is apple-cinnamon oatmeal to be microwaved, ADHD medication to be administered, a fade top, and a mohawk to be conditioned, finger detangled, picked; hugs and a flurry of kisses before the goodbye. I nod Yes and make a mental note to say Mwaiseni instead of Welcome home, at the end of their day.
Mwashibukeni sits closest to Have you arisen well? not Good morning, which kills the music along the way. Every word in Bemba is a poem. One meaning cannot contain it. I promise myself that when they get off school, I’ll say, Bana bandi, mwaiseni, and the cheerful one will say Welcome back? I’ll nod, helping him out of his hat and jacket―or how else to say My children, you are welcomed back to your home?
Finally, after seven hours immersed in murdered consonants and dragged vowels, my children return to me. From our living room window, I watch them pick pebbles from the sidewalk and turn them into miniature soccer balls. At the lip of the driveway, they race each other––past the crab apple tree, through the small puddle at the step, towards me.
Mom, we’re home! There are those monophthongal o’s that mark them as Minnesotan. Because they sound like my husband, who has lived here all his life, the sound of it is as cosy as his affection.
The boys shed their school clothes across the hardwood, trading them for superhero pyjamas. They recount their day in a gust of questionouncements. Look, Mom, I’m the star of the week, wanna see? crashes into Will you please sign my permission slip? Third-grade is going to the zoo! I fell and skinned my cheek at recess, can I have a Band-Aid? One of them hands me a Spiderman-themed birthday party invitation for this Saturday while the other asks if I baked butter-scotch cookies like I promised yesterday.
I nod, even as that now familiar grief keloids in my chest, fearing Mwaiseni has drowned.
Between mouthfuls of cookies, one of my boys looks up at me. Concentration strains his small face. Slowly, he says Mwashibukeni, Mom. In this new accent, the b is hardened; he placed the emphasis on shi instead of mwa, it is the wrong time of day for this greeting.
Outside, the Fall sun is already receding. In the small quiet that wafts between my son and me, the sound of northern mockingbirds settles––the small bird chorusing to mimic the hawk song nearby. Soon, the evening rush will be upon us––dinner, dishes, bedtime stories, kisses goodnight.
So, I smile back at my child’s waiting expression and return the salutation, Eya mukwai.
Contributor Notes
Mubanga is a Zambian attorney, editor and writer. She is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana), unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press) and Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (Wayfarer Books). She is also the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2024), selected by Angie Cruz; the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest (2022), selected by Carmen Giménez; the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award (2019) & Kalemba Short Story Prize (2019). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Overland, adda, Waxwing, Contemporary Verse 2, on Netflix and elsewhere. Her creative practice has received support from the Young African Leadership Initiative, the Hubert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship, the Hawkinson Scholarship for Peace and Justice, the Africa Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She is the founding editor of Ubwali Literary Magazine, a current Miles Morland Scholar, and a PhD student and Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) scholar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
