The River That Forgot Its Name

For A Million Acts of Hope week, we publish Mymona Bibi’s new fable.

Mymona Bibi leads World Writes who meet regularly in the west end of Newcastle. Its members speak and write in many languages, including Arabic, Spanish, Swiss-German, Kurdish, Sylheti, Portuguese.

The River That Forgot Its Name speaks of the yearning to speak in a mother tongue after a period of language loss and oppression. It connects language with natural landscapes to encompass the participants’ relationships with their mother tongues, and relationships with their motherlands. This fable is a symbol of hope for anyone who has suffered linguistic and cultural loss. World Writes is a space of hope for those who come together and write.

The River That Forgot Its Name

1.

In the beginning, there were two colours that never touched.
Blue and orange.

Blue was the colour of rivers, and orange was the colour of firelight on the mountain snow.

Between them stretched a country of many tongues, where words changed like weather.
The rhythms of the streams were watery, melting, sounds drip drip, hush hush trickling through the landscape. The language of the mountains was jagged, poking, probing at you, demanding attention – striking out in strong consonants. And at night, if you listened hard enough, stayed up long enough, you could hear whispers through the pine trees and echoes of the past in the caves. So many languages, so many songs.

The people of the country said,

“The sky speaks blue,
The earth speaks orange,
And we live in the shimmer between.”

But one day, a man from the city said,

“No. Choose one. Choose the tongue of power. Who is the best?”

But the mountains, the hills, the valleys, the trees, the streams, everyone who drank from the well of love in this blue and orange shimmering land, they’d never considered the strength of the tongues. The question of power, who is the best? This question was never asked before.

And with that question, the shimmer began to fade.

2.

Down in the valley lived a girl named Rina, keeper of the river songs. Her voice could call fish from their hiding places, and soothe the coral in the faraway delta.

She spoke in a language that was like tamarind – sweet and sharp, a language that rippled over stones. Her secrets, like veins of orange under the water.

But the men from the city came again, their coats corporate blue, uniform blue, their papers orange with stamps.

They said:

“The river must have a new name.
it is too small for the map of the state
Your tongue moves with the water,
we cannot control its saunter
it dismisses the rules of the land
so this language must be banned.”

they renamed her river in their language.
It no longer flowed but dropped like a corpse. Thudded along, as captive.
And from that day on, when she spoke its old name,
no one understood.
Even the fish turned away.

3.

Far above, where the air turned silver, slowly losing its shimmer,
an old woman watched from the mountains.

She too had lost her words once,
she yearned for the glottal stops and confident beats of the mountains. She remembered when the children chased her down the valley, tongue tripping, feet slipping on wet stones.

Now she lived in a cave of ice and echoes,
collecting lost words that floated up on the wind, dripped down from the stream.
The syllables she’d captured in her palms were like coral,
but they didn’t disintegrate. She gathered them in jars,
each jar glowing orange from within.

“Language,” she whispered,
“is light stolen from silence.”

4.

One morning, the river froze blue,
the colour of unspoken grief.
The villagers panicked because they could not hear the water’s voice.
So they climbed the mountain to ask the woman for help.

They knew she’d be in her cave but so much time had passed, they’d forgotten which cave.

There was silence amongst the group, no more whispering, no more laughing, no more exchanged glances or hands reaching, the mourning of all their languages clouded their journey to the cave.

Rina reached for her father as she climbed a boulder and her father kissed the hand that wouldn’t be small for long. Did you know that a kiss is the language of fire? The orange and blue attach themselves together and light the way. They found the cave and the old woman.

“Teach us the old songs,” they pleaded.
“Our tongues have not danced the way they used to,
we need those forbidden rhythms from your orange jars,
we need the knowledge that you’ve kept safe.”

The woman smiled, the way glaciers smile, slowly, monumentally, with cracks, with promise.
“I could teach you,” she said.
“But I won’t.”

“Why?!” cried Rina.

“Follow me.” She said.

5.

Rina followed the woman further into the cave.

Here the air trembled with voices, murmuring and melting into each other
children bullied in classrooms,
mothers banned from speaking to their children,
fathers punished for accents deemed unfit for work.

The walls whispered in a thousand dialects.
The cave was alive with dead voices.
And in the middle stood a spring,

The old woman said,

“This is the spring of unbroken words.
They cannot die, but sometimes they go quiet.”

Rina knelt beside it, cupped her hands,
and drank the silence.

For a moment, her mouth tasted of both colours, blue for memory, orange for survival.

And something returned.

6.

When she went back down to the valley,
Rina called out the river’s true name
as one might call a friend home,
a flow, a wish, a smile, a hand in a hand.

The ice cracked.
The water gushed out, like gossip.
The sound gathered other voices from the landscape,
and soon the valley was filled with speech
each word like a snowflake, melting on the living bodies of the land and the river.

The language of the city came crashing down in officials, suits and mild men. Their tongues jutted out like a broken jukebox, their steps out of sync.

The river ignored them, it ran wild, bright, polyphonic
a song the city could not write down.

A mess of melting, dripping, gushing, jagged, whispering, blasting, falling, waving, trying sounds, connecting day and night, water and land, sky and earth, hand in hand.

7.

Now the valley thrives again.
Children play beside the river,
mixing words like colours on their tongues.
No one can tell where blue ends and orange begins.

Sometimes, travellers ask the old woman by the mountain path,
“What language do you speak?”And she smiles
not answering,
keeping that word for herself,
keeping one orange jar,
in one dark cave,
her secret knowledge.
The same way rivers keep their deepest stones
and caves keep their own warmth.