INTERSECTIONALITY

The Decolonization of My Tongue

How I forgot my native language — and how language, race, and migration reshaped where I belong

Photo by Hartono Creative Studio - from Unsplash

I eventually lost my French accent — in French

As an adult, I began to sound foreign in my own native language.

That is a strange thing to realize about yourself.

Only years later did I begin to understand that what had happened to my language felt like a kind of decolonization in reverse.

I had grown up in Western Europe with many of the advantages associated with whiteness and middle-class stability, but my identity was never entirely simple. My father’s North African Jewish heritage meant that belonging was sometimes conditional. I could pass as white in many contexts, yet I was also aware that part of my background placed me slightly outside the dominant story.

This was not only about race. I also did not fit the social blueprint of the school population around me. I was the only mixed-identity child in my class, but I was also raised primarily in my mother’s family, where women held high professional positions and where religion played no role in daily life.

In my first year of elementary school, I was confused by a question that seemed to fascinate the other children:

What does your father do?

At five and a half years old — younger than most of the others who were already six — I thought I knew enough about my family to introduce myself properly. My family had explained what to say: My mother was a pharmacist. My grandmother was a pharmacist. My grandfather was a botanist.

I thought that was enough. I was proud of them. I came back home confused.

My aunt later instructed me to answer that my father was a retired salesperson. So I learnt how to answer this one with precision too: “My father is a retired salesperson for pharmaceutical labs.” I still did not understand why that information mattered so much.

At school, I was also “othered” because of my name. Ironically, my mother had chosen an Italian-sounding first name for me while I carried her French-sounding last name. I then had a fully European name, but still too foreign. “Graziella” did not fly with French white kids in the 1990’s at my school.

I was even asked if Graziella was my “Baptism name” or “Nom de Baptème” — another question that left me very confused, as I did not know what a “baptism name” or even a baptism was.

I had a lot of early knowledge in language and subjects like science, but I did not understand the patriarchal and religious structures of society — my family neither followed them nor treated them as self-evident.

Ironically, Graziella is a “Catholic-coded” name. Still too foreign to fit in. I also learned to answer that I was not baptized, because my mother was a secular atheist and my father a (secular) Jew, which made me even more alienated from those who asked.

White kids from atheist families were present, but they were quiet. The few minority kids were also keeping a lower profile.

Luckily, other kids did not know my French-sounding last name was my mother’s. They would not have understood that either. I also tanned darker than most of the other children, and my skin color sometimes became a subject of curiosity.

Yes, I enjoyed certain privileges.

One year during our family vacation in Guadeloupe — the French Caribbean — I ran into one of my classmates at the same resort. Eight thousand kilometers away from our school in mainland France.

I was mortified. Vacation was my escape from my life at school, where I was bullied and isolated.

It wasn’t a luxury resort, but it was still the kind of vacation middle-class families from white neighborhoods could afford.

He came back barely less pale. I came back about five or six shades darker.

As usual, the comments about my “tan” began.

But I was not allowed to be “of color” either, because I did not neatly fit into any category. Not Jewish. Not Arab. Not Black. Not “métisse,” as the term was often used in France at the time — and still often is — to describe a person of mixed heritage. As a child, I understood it to refer specifically to people of Black African and European descent.

Later, when I attended schools in other neighborhoods, I began to see another reality. There were districts where French citizens — often children or grandchildren of immigrants — lived in communities that felt abandoned by the rest of society.

Many of these were French citizens of African descent who experienced a form of marginalization I could see but would never fully know.

And my own experience was different. In these circles, I was white. I was granted conditional belonging when I said my father was from Tunisia.

It is not the Olympics of oppression. Our experiences overlap, but they cannot be ranked against each other.

I remember my aunt telling me one day when I was nine years old:

“There are a lot of feminist movements in the United States because misogyny is very high there.”

I didn’t want to believe it.

The United States was the country whose television shows and movies helped me escape my life when I came home from school. It was also the language and culture that seemed to have words for things I felt but did not yet know how to describe — gender-neutral language, new ways of talking about identity, even the vocabulary of race itself.

How could the same country be worse for women than my own?

“Every child considered legitimate in the world carries their father’s last name, in (almost) every culture,” my aunt insisted — a fierce advocate for naming equality who had added her own mother’s name as a nom d’usage.

My father saw the issue differently, with outrage:

“I can accept you having your mother’s name,” he once said, “but your mother’s and your grandmother’s — no! Every child considered legitimate in the world bears their father’s last name. In almost every culture. Including in your dear United States, ma chérie.”

I stopped arguing.

Something shifted in my understanding.

My father was right. Patriarchal naming traditions were just as present in the country I idealized through the media. Every time I watched an American series or film, it became obvious: women and children almost always carried the husband’s name. The father’s name. The man’s name. (The law in France would only change later, in 2004.)

Today, mothers can legally pass down their names. Ironically, I later added my father’s surname — not out of patriarchal obedience, but for identity. His name carries my “brown” heritage.

For my father, “Western culture” was always something of an ideal.

He insisted on describing himself as “Tunisian-born,” not Tunisian.

My father was born near Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, in a Jewish family during the final years of French colonial rule — shortly before the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

The history surrounding his childhood contained two parallel dynamics.

As Jews, his family experienced marginalization as a minority in a Muslim-majority society. At the same time, French colonial rule imposed its own forms of domination and cultural erasure.

Yet colonial structures also offered certain advantages. After Tunisia’s independence in 1956, many Jewish families had access to French citizenship.

This created a complicated psychological reality: the knowledge that acceptance somewhere is possible — but only if parts of yourself are edited to fit.

A part of you must be muted. Softened. Translated.

Their ancestry reflected centuries of movement: Persia, the Levant, Italy, and North Africa.

A people constantly crossing borders that never stopped shifting.

Yet I was also encouraged to look toward the English-speaking world. My French maternal family insisted I learn English early. They even made me watch Disney films on VHS in their original language.

I remember watching Cinderella in English without subtitles before I had even started school, and feeling frustrated that I could not understand most of the dialogue. Yet because I had seen the film so many times, I had memorized the sounds of the language and repeated them, hoping to catch new words.

On my father’s side, I encountered another narrative: the perceived prestige of American Ashkenazi Jewish culture — its visibility in media, its association with freedom, opportunity, and allyship.

Today, I look back with a more complicated understanding.

France is far from perfect, but I am proud of the diversity it now reflects.

Sometimes I wonder: if I had grown up in the United States, would I have felt even more out of place? I strongly believe so now.

I recently heard someone on a podcast say something that stayed with me:

“My parents were two different races. In the 1970s in Ohio, that was still very frowned upon. I never felt like I belonged anywhere as someone of East Asian descent and half white.”

In France, we now have public figures representing diverse backgrounds, like television presenter Émilie Tran Nguyen, of Vietnamese and Algerian descent, whose documentary Je ne suis pas Chinetoque — I am not Chinese! explores growing up mixed-race and of East Asian descent in rural France during that era.

It isn’t perfect. And the categories themselves remain complicated.

Now living in the United States and working in hospitality in an international tourist city, I often meet French people who reflect the diversity of France itself.

Recently, I met a mixed-race French woman whose experience felt familiar. She was half white French and half Togolese. She had grown up feeling that she did not fully belong among white French people. People often expressed disbelief that she had a white parent. Yet when she visited Togo, she was treated as a “white woman with plenty of money.”

Like many children of mixed backgrounds, she grew up with a longing for belonging — and, like me, she had once been mesmerized by the promise of America.

Belonging, it seems, still depends on where the line is drawn.

Years later, that instability returned through language itself.

Because I learned English and Spanish so early, I never remember having much of an accent in those languages.

But as an adult, something strange happened: I began to sound foreign in my own native tongue.

In the United States, people often tell me I sound “born and raised here.” In Latin America or among Latinx communities, I am told I speak Spanish like a native speaker.

Spanish had become important to me as a teenager. When my school required us to learn it, I did not care for it. When I discovered Latin America, something clicked. I realized Spanish was not just another European language structured and gendered like French. It was also the language of cultures coded as brown — cultures where my features and my name finally made a kind of sense together.

When I was sixteen, my mother and I traveled to the Dominican Republic.

Most of the French people on the flight were white. It wasn’t luxury travel, but it was still the kind of trip many middle-class French families could afford, while other families traveled back to their countries of origin — Algeria, Morocco, Portugal, Senegal — often by bus and boat.

The only other brown French person on the flight was a man of Tahitian/ French Polynesian descent.

My mother spoke with him briefly.

At the airport, a Dominican border agent addressed him in Spanish.

“¿Usted nació aquí?” Were you born here?**

The man looked confused.

“Comment ? Je ne comprends pas.” What? I don’t understand.**

The agent tried again, this time in hesitant French.

“Vous son Dominicain ?”

The correct form would have been close enough for the Frenchman to understand:

“Vous êtes Dominicain ?” (Are you Dominican?)**

The man shook his head.

“Ah non. Je ne suis pas.” (Oh no, I am not.)**

Then he walked forward holding his passport and added with a small shrug:

“J’ai la couleur.” I have the color.**

That moment stayed with me.

Languages slowly became my way of navigating belonging — a way of editing myself depending on where I was.

By moving between English-speaking spaces, Spanish-speaking communities, and even Arabic-speaking environments, I learned how identity could shift depending on context.

But something unexpected happened.

After high school, I began living abroad. When I returned to France, people started asking me:

“Where is your accent from?”

Somehow, I had managed to alienate myself even more in my own country.

Photo by Andrej Lišakov on Unsplash

The years I spent processing trauma from my late twenties onwards were also the years it took to regain my French accent.

French is the language where much of my childhood trauma happened — a language I once mastered as a young student, where I stood out in my essays, but later came to feel estranged from.

English, meanwhile, became the language of agency.

It was the language I chose. Slowly, it began to occupy the space of my first language in my mind.

In the United States the opposite happened.

People told me I sounded as if I had been born there.

No foreign accent. No French accent.

But my documents told another story. Legally, I did not belong there at all.

The result was disorienting. My voice suggested belonging, while my legal status denied it.

I made no sense. It was distressing, even.

At times, I felt like a curiosity — a person who seemed to belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Now that I am recalibrating after years of processing trauma, my French accent returns naturally when I speak French. I once thought it never would. At times, I even believed I did not want it back.

I now call this my new agency: reclaiming my identity.

I sometimes think of this journey as the decolonization of my tongue.

As a teenager, I became curious about Arabic first — the language tied to my father’s roots in Tunisia — before later immersing myself in Spanish and other languages associated with cultures coded as “brown.” Learning them felt like a way to diversify the linguistic map inside my mind, to move beyond the hierarchy in which English and French seemed to dominate everything.

My university education later was in English. English replaced my first language.

At some point, I even found it difficult to communicate deeply with my own mother — the first person with whom I had ever needed to communicate at that level.

But years later, another form of decolonization appeared. Reclaiming my own mother tongue — speaking French again with a French accent — became its own quiet act of return.

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© Grazi L. S. 2026

Grazi L. S. is a writer and artist exploring identity, migration, language, and belonging through personal essays and fiction.

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