Like many people crossing borders to live in other worlds, I now have an accent in each language I speak. Everyone has an accent, of course. And dominant accents are hardly the exemplars that they are made out to be. All vernaculars are in flux, for one. But I am referring to my blending of several accents at once in English, Arabic, or French, with nearly no “native” accent in any language. My accents wax and wane, depending on my entourage and where I am living. Chameleon-like, my speech calls up from other languages words, phrases, pronunciations, or intonations—and takes on new ones. This assortment of accents is often barely detectable to me.

When I was twelve and living with my family in Ramallah, a classmate observed about my Arabic, “You did not grow up in one place and you have no stable lahjeh (accent), so you speak with several at once.” At the time, I spoke with a mix of Palestinian accents that were urban and fallahi (peasant); from El-Bireh, Jerusalem, and Jenin; I even had a touch of Cairene mixed in due to the influence of a close Egyptian friend. I remember my classmate’s words because I liked her explanation, which distanced me from my worry about sounding awkward, or worse, like a self-fashioned native speaker. Many Palestinian students in our school in Ramallah were also “halfies,” sometimes speaking with improbable mixes of a specific village accent in Arabic and a Southern US drawl. I was keenly aware of living in the midst of ever-changing accents.

Even my first language, English, fluctuates. At this point, I am speaking some order of “international” English. It could be akin to what the French refer to as a “français neutre,” unmarked by a specific region, spoken by native speakers who live abroad. Considering the nexus of culture and language, I think that my speech could not be “neutral” and is instead marked by the specific places where I have lived, while evolving in new environments. I am not fully aware of the different accents that make up how I speak. My son Millal tells me that a “New York intellectual” accent still peeks through my spoken English. But I do not notice it.

Linguists used to refer to “foreign” and “native regional” accents, but an accent of any kind means another language and culture—even a historical one—is bleeding through. And spoken language has no “original” accent. When I travel into a language that is no longer quotidian for me (which would be Arabic and English these days, as I live in France), at first I feel a distance from my own speech, as if I am ventriloquizing. I become aware of my word choices, pronunciation, and how I put things. My daughter Shezza sometimes frowns quizzically and asks, “How did you get to saying ‘bo-dy’?” with a rounded ’o’ instead of an open one. “Complicated? What’s this?” She questions my over-enunciation for an American accent, where I pronounce a “t” instead of a “d.” And yet she may not notice that she has not entirely shed her own Lebanese-American accent, retaining it even after ten years of living in New York City.

My mix of accents is accompanied by gaps in cultural knowledge. It is, after all, through absences and living in different countries that one acquires different accents. “You haven’t heard of this?” friends—especially in the States—often say to me, startled because otherwise we have shared important parts of our lives. Have they suddenly discovered that I am a counterfeit native? Indeed, growing up, moving between the United States and Palestine made me feel as if I shed one self and inhabited another, over and over again. Before social media and cheaper airfares, it was like crossing an enormous chasm into a distinct and separate world. But today, instead of observing the gaps in my knowledge and experience in either culture, I focus on my access to other languages and understandings. And I do not experience as incongruous the worlds and lives that I allow to color my accents. Imagining any culture and language as cohesive is a misleading story that human societies have told throughout history.

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I say that I “allow” linguistic influences because accents are very often a decision, particularly for plurilingual people. How, and how well, we speak a new language is not a simple matter of pronunciation, or of being good at languages. I do not know of anyone who appeared to be so hopelessly monolingual as my mother Leah did, in the way that only Americans, with their vast territory, can be. She could not even mimic another accent in English. But when we lived in the Middle East, she gained competence in Arabic fairly quickly. My brother and I were horrible about her accent when we were little and living in Ramallah; we liked to hide and snicker when the doorbell rang, forcing her to speak to the woman who sold balady (local) apricots, for example. My mother mostly found our game amusing. She would ignore us and enjoy her exchanges in Arabic with the apricot vendor, asking after her health and children as she weighed out a few kilos of fruit, using rocks as weights on a brass scale set on the floor.

The whole family liked to quote my mother’s droll Arabic language cassettes: “Biddak salata mniha? Na3am, biddi salata mniha, ma3a na3na3!” (Do you want good salad? Yes, I want good salad with mint!). And for years, we would occasionally repeat these absurd phrases out of all context, walking around the house and belting out the guttural 3yn, the particular focus of that lesson. Lessons notwithstanding, my mother continued to speak Arabic using unadulterated midwestern-American sounds.

Despite our fun, we were not actually embarrassed by my mother’s accent—although in third grade in Ramallah, I reportedly said to my father that I would prefer a fat Arab mother who cooked kousa mahshi (stuffed squash), which made her cry. We were proud of my mother’s adventurousness and kindness. Her interest in and respect for people very different from her was, in fact, part of the reason why she was able to learn to speak Arabic at all. It was not linguistic talent that made it possible, but a sensibility. She was at first limited by a tiny vocabulary, like that of a child. But she relinquished power and allowed herself, with some humor, to be frustrated, addressed on the level of the limited Arabic that she could speak, until she could converse more comfortably. And learning to speak Arabic was not merely a matter of exchanging English for Arabic sentences, but of adopting new modes of life. Indeed, unlike most expats, my mother did not seem to feel besieged by too much newness—or perhaps she rose above this natural feeling of insecurity and resisted socializing exclusively with other Americans and anglophones. She clearly wanted to interact with and learn from other people. And she knew intuitively, as a guest in a new society, that it would be unfitting to force others to speak a second language—forcing them to make the effort to cross a cultural and linguistic bridge over to her, instead of the inverse. This kind of linguistic imposition is commonplace within colonial dynamics and it would have been easy for her to unthinkingly follow suit—but she did not. In almost all colonial contexts, there is also a long line of experts who try to gain “mastery” over a language or several, and with a similarly imposing attitude. But my mother never had the ambition to became that fluent; she spoke enough to make new friends, engage with them, and get around.

Beyond gaining accents, it is also possible to willfully lose one in certain contexts, as I did when I returned to Ramallah at the age of sixteen. Growing up, I closely identified with the stories of my father—a historian and political scientist of the Middle East who talked of his life, family, and experiences. In my mother’s family, I was seen as my father’s daughter. They affectionately told me that I was more “Arab” than “American,” whereas my brother was more “American” (and hence more a part of my mother’s family, as I understood it). Everywhere we went, my brother and I were called half this or that, sectioned off in pieces, never quite fully belonging. These shifting fault lines were baffling to me. He had lighter skin than I did but also striking dark curls, enormous green eyes, lashes as thick as curtains, and a thick unibrow—so he could have as easily been declared “more Arab.” I realized to what a surprising extent difference in general, and especially racial difference, is a learned phenomenon in the United States—even pounded into us, rather than necessarily being clearly marked on our bodies.

Palestinians, with half their society living in exile, are usually willing to claim anyone who is Palestinian in any way as one of them—even people who are not technically so, but who stand in solidarity with Palestine. By identifying with my father’s culture, I found a chance to be “fully” something. Indisputably, however, my greatest inspiration was political love—as Ana Dopico, in writing about her native Cuba, has termed the kind of passion that has ever since shaped my life. A determined watanieh (patriot) driven impetuously by a desire to belong and participate in the Palestinian national struggle, I worked hard at gaining full fluency in Arabic—reading through the Al-Fajr and Al-Quds daily papers, asking my father to translate every unfamiliar word. After a few months of this doggedness, I noticed that I was “passing” as Palestinian with no hint in my accent of the time I had lived abroad. And after several months, my new language and self were part of me, as is possible when one is malleably young and bicultural.

What has changed with time, in my serial migrant life, is that I now choose to retain my accents. Here in France, I do not attempt to achieve a “native” accent—nor did I in Lebanon, where I partly kept my Palestinian one. In the languages I speak, I instead summon up phrases, words, and intonations here and there, as if selecting à la carte from people and worlds that are part of my life. I have reflected on what could motivate this habit, and notice my need to recognize myself in my speech. I first learned this approach from my daughter’s father, Ahmad, when we were graduate students at Columbia, even though he may not have been fully conscious of having done it. He spoke fluent English and yet continued to roll his “r”s. He felt rather embarrassed for the Arabs who made brash attempts at a nasal American accent or generated soft growls to get their “r”s “right”; it sounded ridiculous to him and he wanted no part in it. And indeed, he knows who he is and still speaks with a slight Lebanese-American accent, keeping himself rooted in Tariq el-Jadideh, Beirut. I have since noted this implicit decision to retain an accent, on the part of some who migrate, especially if they are moving from poor and colonized lands into dominant (and dominating) countries. I understand and respect this way of being.

I think I have adopted a version of this approach in recent years, maintaining accents and language that ground me in my homelands and allegiances. But because I have several, the result is apparently not easily identifiable. And the many inflections and expressions that I let into my speech, often unawares, become refrains of sorts from people and places of belonging. I almost have a private dialect. When I import language and even physical gestures from other lives and worlds, I create, for my own pleasure, small hidden meanings. When I call a young person “sweetness,” for example, I remember the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was a dear friend and often used this term of endearment. When I moved to France, I decided right away that I would not be calling anyone “chérie.”

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Mimicking accents—giving play to untranslatable speech—is the good sport of multilingual friends and family who maintain a critical distance from their various cultures. Even after moving from Morocco years ago, I still use phrases in Darija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic) with my children—partly pronounced with a Levantine accent, according to my daughter, who thinks it sounds odd. Or I use a literal translation into English, pronounced with an Arabic accent to mark its origin: “He has no idea how the world spins” from the phrase “Ma ka y a3rfsh ‘d’nia ki deyra.” Irreplaceable once learned, this expression is amusing in English precisely because it is not idiomatic, as in Arabic, and so does not fully work. And if someone is over-reacting, we sometimes say, “Hey, it doesn’t need that much”—a failed English translation of “Ma bidha hal ‘ed” from our Lebanon days.

Mixing accents produces new language. But what fuels this ingenuity and wit is pain, even trauma: the loss of and longing for specific worlds of belonging, and the trying experiences of in-betweenness, of living in gaps. Playing with languages and accents is a way of transforming the unseen, continuous labor of constructing emotional bridges between worlds lost and gained. No one language is ever sufficient. Growing up, we invented words we felt were missing in English, delivering our neologisms with a heavy Arabic accent. “Impossiblest” and “seatment” (from “qa3deh,” a seated gathering) remain enduring words in our family that my cousins coined during sweltering summer days in Jenin. When we lived in Casablanca, my son Millal would, at age five, seamlessly integrate a word he needed from another language by maintaining a consistent accent. He offered us cooking instructions: “And then you mélange it, mélange it” (“mix it”), he would say, pronouncing the French word with an open “a” and hard diphthong like how Mick Jagger pronounces “Angie” in the song’s refrain. Aged thirteen and living in France, Millal would set in motion contending languages and accents:

“Mozzer, are you heating za sings that are making my face happy?” (The “amuses-gueules,” or “appetizers”).

“Not yet? Mozzer you are breaking my feet.” (“Tu me casses les pieds,” or “You are giving me a hard time.”).

“Are you mocking za 3alem?” (In Arabic: “Are you mocking us all?”).

I was made hopeful by his ability to bring it all together through humor—but also disquieted, perceiving the magnitude of the efforts that produced his talent, as well as his confusion and pain. Moving from Morocco to the United States, then to Lebanon, and then to France at a young age is not in and of itself traumatizing, and could be a path taken by many families with overseas careers. But as my son belongs to each of these cultures, he was not simply an expat: these countries are his worlds of identity. And the capacities he developed to navigate his worlds grew out of heartbreak, both “inherited” from his Palestinian side, and amplified by his own experiences of loss: of Morocco when we had to precipitously depart when he was five years old, and of Lebanon, with the port explosion and financial implosion shortly after our departure. Above all, multilingual cultural roots can be distressing to contend with when living in social milieux that present themselves as strictly homogenous. It is not easy to discover ways to overcome the pressure of forced invisibility—of key elements of our identities that do not adhere to the dominant culture.

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Resonant accents, words, and expressions are now my most potent repères, or markers, in a very itinerant life. Through them, I am able to extend feelers to people, places, and experiences, holding together important connections as I live what I think of as my fifth life, now in France. Such repères, because they are sounds, seem ephemeral. For exiles and displaced people, the advantage of such immaterial repères is that they cannot be occupied or confiscated. Thinking about the power of words as markers reminds me of the French writer Hélène Cixous’ account of how she and her brother used to repeat, back and forth like an incantation, “Tuterappelles?” (“Do you remember?”). And the other would respond, “Tuterappelles?” Cixous here joins three words, creating a new word with an object-like quality that she and her brother could bat back and forth between them. It marked the loss of their family life that perhaps could have existed in Algeria—Cixous’ family being of Algerian Jewish origin, but having moved to France at the time of Algeria’s revolution. This unlived life was perpetually unattainable, and yet sustained for them by their exchange. When homelands and people are far away, as they also are for most Palestinians, words and expressions that can link us to our experiences, peoples, and homes are ever-near.

Navigating accents and languages in a new world is hardly a smooth experience. It provokes new self-awareness, shifts in consciousness, disorienting questioning, and sometimes, unwelcome perceptions of the world. It can be jolting to experience incomprehension—to begin to speak differently, leaving a former self and language behind. At age five when we visited my father’s family in Jenin, I remember running away from my older cousins and into the fields at dusk behind my grandparents’ house. When they ran after me, I picked up a bottle from the ground and hurled it at them, hitting my cousin Sawsan’s thigh. She was not hurt, it seemed, but I am still haunted by my behavior. I think it was not incomprehension that caused my confusion and aggression, but rather my sudden double-consciousness. In fact, I had already started to understand Arabic and even speak it—as small children do within days—and was growing acutely aware of words, of language. I protested to my parents that I could “hear” myself think. I imagine that it was the first time I had been aware of thinking at all, let alone of interpreting—set off, as I must have been, by new sounds and language. A little engine on overdrive, absorbing new surroundings and churning out unfamiliar sounds, I took to escaping into the garden of my grandparents’ home. My poor Taita would wander through the olive trees calling out to me to come back inside, worried that I would encounter snakes that ventured out in the midday heat: “El-hayaya ya sitti, ya Jenine, el-hayaya!” (“The snakes, O Jenine, my grandchild, the snakes!”).

Encountering a new language and ways of speaking is often a pleasure—and always unsettling. It takes time to cultivate the knowledge needed to process such encounters: to recognize the fluidity of all categories (the self and the other, native and outsider), and to train oneself to respond gently, receptively. Otherwise, these encounters with otherness can backfire within ourselves or against others, in fits of insecurity that generate actual or symbolic violence. However, attempts to bypass difference altogether—to impose cultural and linguistic cohesion—can be even more enduringly damaging. In the old version of assimilation in France still championed by many, immigrants are supposed to leave their countries, cultures, languages, and accents behind them and become “French”—as if being “français de souche,” or of “pure French origin,” does not always already include the worlds of both colonial and immigrant Algeria, especially. Full assimilation is of course an impossible task. Were it possible, it would repress a grand source of cultural vitality. Linguistic and cultural difference is essential, as Edward Said liked to point out, considering the disproportionate number of immigrants and exiles amongst prominent artists, writers, thinkers, and inventors.

If accents announce cultural belonging, then mixed accents can, too. In fact, hybrid accents are open to being understood by many more kinds of people. Given the improvised nature and private lexicons of mixed accents, one might assume that they are not so accessible. But the way this openness works is comparable to how, when learning a new language, the speech of a fluent non-native speaker is often more readily comprehensible than that of a native speaker. By contrast, the more homogenous the accent the more insular the speaker, revealing that the person almost exclusively interacts within a narrow band of society. Parisian or New Yorker fast-talkers who use lots of in-group jargon, I now consider provincial. This provincialism could be acquired, often unwittingly, by mainly sticking to privileged milieux; or it could be forced into being, for example, by housing prices that separate out poor and immigrant neighborhoods. In all cases, it is evident when speakers do not have significant, daily exchanges with people from very different backgrounds. The influence of diversity is audible—however slight—in the pace, inflections, and slang of spoken language.

The entire Global South and immigrant communities in the West, by comparison, are full of adept polyglots. Uniform accents and monolingualism are, today, largely a first-world privileged phenomenon, particularly in the United States. This is an ironic historical reversal, as in the day of Milton it was impossible for one to be considered learned if monolingual. An assumption of linguistic superiority sustains monolingualism—and is upheld by education systems that offer no early foreign language instruction, let alone access to languages beyond European ones across school districts.

In a lecture series delivered at the Collège de France, Moroccan writer Abdelfattah Kilito argues that Islam acknowledges—in theory and historical practice—the equality of all languages. He discusses tenth-century grammarian Ibn Hazm’s interpretation of a passage from the Qur’an—in which he concludes that Adam and Eve spoke all languages, and that it was only after the fall and the scattering of their progeny that humankind lived in separate groups, speaking single tongues. Mixed accents often open the door to instant social intimacy, to meeting new people and exchanging stories. People often readily share their stories with me without being prompted, and I figure that what invites this is my accent. That it is mixed may signal to them, even unconsciously, that I am not part of their social networks—my identity is hard to pinpoint, and I am therefore a “safe” interlocutor and keeper of social secrets.

Living in France I could, quand même (nevertheless), make an effort to lose the “joli petit accent” (“pretty little accent”) that I am often told I have. Normally this remark is a polite prelude to asking me where I am from. I usually respond that I am Palestinian and American, and have lived un peu partout, a little bit everywhere, if I want to keep things short. I may add that I am now also French. But I always ask my questioner, in turn, where they are from. If surprised by my question, they answer, “I am French!” Sometimes I follow up with “Yes, but from which region?” An older Iyengar yoga instructor once asked me insistently, as I was attempting to get into the breath-restricting chandelle (shoulder stand) position, “De quelle origine?” Since I could not puff out a single-word response, I indicated by hand gesture that I would tell him later. At the end of the class I asked about his own origins. He rashly declared, “Aucune origine” (“No origin”) but then caught himself and said, “Parisien.” “I was guessing Armenian,” I remarked, noting his bafflement.

What surprises me is that the people here in France who are surprised—or even taken aback—by my reciprocal question about origins often end up telling me about their family’s migrations: from Andalusia to Oran, then Marseille; from pied-noir Algeria; from poverty in southern Italy over a century ago; from further afield. Indeed, things are rarely what they seem. And we realize, as one can never realize enough, that we are all migrants. For very different reasons, both Palestinians and Americans rarely seem surprised by this question about their origins, and usually love to respond.

A mélange of accents and languages enables the simultaneity of worlds, offering a way to exist on cultural crossroads. Most of humanity moves along cultural crossroads. That this plurality and ongoing transformation of culture, identity, and social milieux are repressed in many communities—or by groups in power—inevitably causes harm both within and without strictly-defined groups. Migration is not only a story of movement across geographic expanses both historic and contemporary—but of movement between ethnicities, racial identifications, social classes, and so on. How can we gain the knowledge and experience needed to not only see the other, but to cross bridges towards them every day, especially when difference is abiding? A transformative social life between very different kinds of people is possible—it is cultured in the true sense.