There is much talk these days of immigration and assimilation. I’ve determined to assimilate my roots.
A sudden desire to reclaim my Dutch identity happened while I was speaking Spanish last month on a Miami elevator. My wife and I were getting on a hotel elevator to go to the lobby. When the doors opened, a hotel employee was working on the elevator and spoke Spanish and made hand gestures to inquire if we were going up or down.
“Abajo,” I said, tentatively recalling some of the two-years of Spanish I studied in college. But then another word came to my mind silently.
“Why?”
Why, I wondered, would a person who is not only in the United States but working here be unable or unwilling to speak English? Since they work on elevators, would it not be possible to at least learn up, down, open and close?
This probably sounds harsh to some. It sounds practical to me. And the question is born not out of judgment of immigrants but the fact that I come from an immigrant family.
Seventy years ago, in 1956, my mother and her parents and siblings came to the United States from the Netherlands. They had to have a sponsor and prove that they could gain employment. They also learned English.
I remember my mom telling me she got work in an office and used the typing and filing as a way to improve and practice her English. My oldest uncle was able to purchase a television for the family and they used that to work on their vocabulary and intonation. My youngest uncle came home from school having been mocked for his accent and stood in front of a mirror repeating the words that caused him embarrassment until he could pronounce them as close as possible to an American Midwestern intonation.
All of this to say my mother’s family assimilated. My mom was 16 at the time the family arrived in New Jersey and made their way to Michigan. Four years later she met my dad, an American whose dad had immigrated from the Netherlands as a boy. By the time I came around, all my family knew was English and I considered myself simply an American. My mom made some attempts to teach us Dutch, but we just giggled. This is typical of second-generation immigrants, like my friends with Hispanic surnames who speak less Spanish than I do.
When I was in high school, I wanted to learn Dutch. But the high school did not offer that. So I had two years of German. This is a bit ironic. My mothers family was still in Utrecht, a suburb of Amsterdam, when the Germans occupied it. Last year when one of my aunts died, my cousin told a story at the funeral of her spitting on a Nazi soldier’s boots when he tried to give her candy.
I also recently finished reading a great book called “Things We Couldn’t Say” by Diet Eman. Eman went to the same church my wife and I attended in Grand Rapids when we were first married. She had worked in the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation. She speaks proudly in the book of refusing to speak German, even though she could, that whole time. She lost her fiancé in the conception camps, and left the Netherlands after the war due to the painful memories, eventually landing in the United States. She passed a few years ago, but would likely have frowned, or this many years on, laughed at me for learning German.
But I give a lot of this as backdrop. What really sparked my desire to re-embrace was a recent trip to the southern Caribbean. We took a Christmas cruise to the “ABC” islands—Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. I learned that all of these islands maintain a close connection to the Netherlands and are part of the Netherlands Antilles. I thought this was merely a historical artifact. I saw a man with a t-shirt that said “Dutch Caribbean” and I thought it was amusing. Then I saw that descriptor on a post office and city hall and other official contexts.
I also heard conversations in shops and on the sidewalks that reminded me of family gatherings when I was young, back when my grandparents and mom and aunts and uncles would speak Dutch when together. It turns out that Dutch is one of the main languages of these islands. Another is Papamiento, a blend of Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and African languages.
I thought many times on this trip that it would have been nice had I learned Dutch as a child, and then I speak it with the folks on these islands. In addition to learning German and Spanish formally, I on my own studied some French to prepare for teaching at a partner school there four times. When I worked for an NGO I always tried to pick up some basic phrases in everything from Hausa, a common trade language in Nigeria, to Tagalog, one of numerous dialects in the Philippines. I’ve always been fascinated by languages. But why did I not learn the language of my heritage?
Well, I’m doing that now. Despite the large number of Dutch people where I live in west Michigan, few speak Dutch anymore. But I may go to the Netherlands one day,, and I’d like to return to the Dutch Caribbean, where I could speak Dutch. But even so, I want to learn it as a hobby, because language acquisition is a good exercise for the brain health of persons my age. But I also want to do it as a re-connection to my own heritage, albeit decades late.
I have started the lessons, and am enjoying it. I also recently visited a Dutch store near me to acquire some Dutch treats. (Little known fact: we get the English word “cookie” from the Dutch “koekje,” which technically means little cakes and comes from what the Dutch put together from meager provisions when they lived as a colony in New Amsterdam, so named from 1624 until 1664 when the pompous English renamed it New York).
My mom is amused that I am doing this. She is advanced in years, and laughed when I practiced a few of the basic phrases I learned so far. I recently moved her and my dad to assisted living when they both suffered sudden health declines. As part of that, my mom had fallen and passed out and was a bit loopy for several days, during which one time she randomly spoke Dutch. She was no doubt back in her long-term memory because she had not done so in years. This also got me thinking. I am all for assimilation of immigrants into the language and culture of their new country. But it saddens me that my mom suppressed a lot of her Dutchness, including the language, to blend in. She says she identifies simply and proudly as an American, I’m happy about that. But part of her, and my, identity is Dutch as well.
Perhaps I should fill out the demographic information on various forms that I am Dutch-American and join the hyphenated community of my countrymen.
For now, I try to regularly take time in my home office, glancing occasionally at a decoupage of the city of Utrecht I took from my parents place when they moved, to go through my Dutch lessons. I feel like an immigrant in a way. A man of a certain age with a PhD going through the paces of what seems like “See Dick Run” books from grammar school. But it is a source of joy and a sense of duty to learn the language of my roots.
I will still speak English to most, and Spanish or German or French when necessary in multi-cultural conversations. But when those interactions end, don’t be surprised if I say good bye in Dutch:
Tot ziens.
