Mixed mother tongues: Memoirs of interlingual childhoods

Childhood involves entering “a stage which we did not design” and playing “subordinate parts in the dramas of others” (in the words of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre). What happens when the script of the “drama” a child is born into is spoken in more than one language—when the main players, one’s parents, come from different, even mutually hostile speech communities? While mixed race memoir is an increasingly recognized field, memoirs of mixed mother tongue families are a less familiar genre of life writing. This article considers Irish author Hugo Hamilton’s memoir The Speckled People and Algerian-born French writer Leïla Sebbar’s Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père as compelling examples of the mixed mother tongue genre, which explore how parental languages may be imposed or withheld, and the effects of this on children’s lives.