My Mother Tongue/My Mother's Tongue -- Un Boubou -- A New Linguistic Landscape -- Cultural Borderlands -- Saints and Sinners -- The View from Here -- Insiders and Outsiders -- Religion: The Language of the Bedroom -- My Brother: My Flip Side -- English Roots -- Battle Lines -- Becoming Other -- French roots -- The Double Frame -- Inheritance -- On being not quite right -- Shfiting grandmothers -- Ruptures -- Imaginary companions -- On the wings of geese -- The gifts I keep -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Poems
Summary
This gutsy, immensely readable memoir traces the influence of the author's mother tongue in the formation of her identity, and the role her second language played in providing a psychological sanctuary. The author recounts the emotional gains and losses of a life lived in two languages and the changing role of the Catholic Church