Wurdablanc

Word-blanking in Cuba and New England

Judy Bolton-Fasman

Wurdablanc – a portmanteau of “wurda,” the German for word, and “blanc,” French for white or blank. My Spanish was evaporating, and this newfangled word perfectly captured my dilemma. The term feels expansive as it stands in for a description of drawing a blank on words that once seemed impossible for someone like my mother, Matilde, and me to forget. Wurdablanc: retrieving words for orphaned emotions and lightbulb ideas.

When speaking in her native español, Matilde floods a room with emoción – emotions too big to spar with. When her father died, Matilde grieved wildly in Spanish. She muttered, and then se gritó. Her screams turned her voice raspy. She constantly looked heavenward and pleaded with God. It was unbearable to watch her pray so hard for her father’s ghost to visit her. But the visit finally happened. She said his guayabera was streaked with sweat after a night of playing dominoes. She said he was all spirit, a fantasma shimmering like heat she could put her finger through without pain.

It may be strange to summon what is happening to Matilde in English and to me in Spanish with German and French words to explore wurdablanc – blank spaces where words are forming to express the ineffable. Wurdablanc  – Matilde’s words in English, and mine in Spanish play hide and seek with us.

Each day, it becomes more apparent that my mother and I are losing fluency in our second languages – she speaks English, and I speak Spanish. I am her sexagenarian silver-haired daughter, and she is a confused nonagenarian. Our memories are slotted into short-term and long-term. Matilde spends her days slumped in a wheelchair in a stream of long-ago memories strung together by “once upon a time.”  She had a bevy of memories when she arrived at the nursing home. Here she was in 1953, dancing at the Purim Ball in El Patronato, Havana’s Jewish Center. Fidel Castro was taking a seat next to her on a bench at the University of Havana. In a trivia game at the nursing home, she had trouble with the question of who took over Cuba in 1960.

“Let me give you a hint,” I tell her. “Who sat next to you at the university with his gun poking out of his jacket?”

“Fidel Castro, hijo de mala madre.” Her fellow players applauded. They knew the correct answer in any language.

Truth be told, the Spanish words I once had at the ready now float in amber, colliding with each other in my mind. These words were part of the Spanish I remember speaking in a pellucid green streak as a child. And in a world where English surrounded us, I held the critical position of language broker – Que dice, que dice – my abuelos asked me. Confused and frightened, their arrival in America was an endless loop.

Spanish was also the language of love and sex. Te amo, te adoro; the first words of Spanish I taught the man who became my husband.

Inevitably, my solid fourth-grade-level vocabulary in Spanish was dwindling. Linguists call this phenomenon “language attrition.” Language attrition and wurdablanc happen to someone once proficient in a heritage language. In my case, I was the link between bilingualism and the extinction of Spanish in my children’s generation. A language lives when someone speaks it out of necessity. Moving to a new country cancels the need to speak the old language. That is how English eventually stole me away, my mother’s American daughter, from Spanish. I was a teenager and wanted to shake off my Spanish and my mother and her accent.

But I did not completely forfeit my Spanish. There was a critical, long intermediate step of blurring Spanish and English, yielding Spanglish—anglicized Spanish or Hispanicized English; take your pick. The linguistic uniqueness of each language disappeared, forming something entirely new yet oddly familiar and still accessible.

Spanglish was the great equalizer – a wholly new way to participate in Latinx life. I don’t deny it was painful to drift away from the emotional closeness that fluency rendered. The ease of speaking in one breath was now a series of fits and starts, pauses dropped into conversation to allow the words to have a chance of catching up to their English counterparts. But Spanglish, was easily slotted into sentences, linking words to create worlds. And the best part was that it was available on demand.

Spanglish, this facile new-fangled language, superseded my Spanish. Spanglish indexed newfound words, tracked the progression of maneuvering, or perhaps not working so hard to maneuver, the two identities that cleaved me. Spanglish intruded sin permiso, without permission. Its choppy cadence rested on fused words I nevertheless pronounced like a Cubana. Spanglish did its best to disguise itself in sheep’s clothing while filling Wurdablanc’s overwhelmingly blank screen.

No matter que me defiendo en español – linguistic combat in which I defend myself in barebones Spanish. Me defiendo, signaled that speaking Spanish had become a struggle. Yet, me defiendo also meant that I had enough of the basics to understand and make myself understood in Matilde’s language.  

Like Cuba, my Spanish was time-capsuled in the 1950s. However, it made a surprisingly fluid appearance when I spoke Spanish to a taxi driver on my first trip to Havana in the aughts. He said to me con emocion, “Bienvenida a su pais.” He did not know he welcomed an imposter to his country – the woman with the Cubana accent losing her grasp of the Spanish language. Four thousand words floating away and thinning in the air. And yet, the excitement of seeing my mother’s country and becoming fully immersed in her language shook something loose in me. By the third day, I was speaking in full sentences. Wurdablanc receded. Cuba was magic; Spanish was mine again—no gaps in the ticker tape of words banding my brain.