For example, I never officially told you about “it.” I just came over for coffee one day wearing makeup, with a box of Lindt & Sprüngli (the medium-sized, not the small ones like usual), and then came to Christmas dinner in a skirt. I knew, or assumed, that Mother had told you about it. “It.” She had to tell you, because “it” was something I couldn’t tell you. It was one of those things we couldn’t say to one another. I had told Father, Father had told Mother, Mother must have told you.
Other things we never spoke about: the enormous birthmark on the back of Mother’s left hand; the heaviness Father dragged into the house—like a vast, wet, moldering deer carcass—when he came home from work; your loud lip-smacking, your racism, your grief when Grandfather died; your bad taste when it came to presents; the lover Mother had when I was seven, the silver earring this woman gave her as a parting gift, which hung like a long teardrop from Mother’s earlobe almost to her collarbone when she continued to put it on to provoke Father; the countless hours I spent—when I felt no one was watching—letting the earring glide from one hand to the other, holding it up to the sun so it would cast flame-like patterns on the walls, my intense urge to put it on, my unspeakable inner voice that forbade me from doing so, my intense desire to have a body, Mother’s boundless desire to travel the world. We never spoke about politics or literature or the class system or Foucault, or how Mother quit studying for her school equivalency certificate when I came into the world. We never spoke about how you grew a beard when you were pregnant with Mother, how this is called “hirsutism”; we never spoke about how you handled it, whether you shaved, waxed, or tweezed out the dark hairs, whether you took antiandrogens to halt the testosterone that your body “produces in excess,” and we never spoke about how people stared at you, how ashamed you must have felt; we never spoke about shame at all, never about death, never about your death, never about your increasing forgetfulness. We spoke frequently about the family photo albums and every single picture in them, yet we never spoke about how ridiculous Grandfather looks in the photos with the young men from his Burschenschaft, how comically they fluff up their chests, standing wide-legged, grinning into the camera; we never spoke about the girl who, up to a certain age, wanders like a ghost through the photo albums, mostly hand in hand with you, sometimes with one of your five brothers; no, we never spoke about this youngest sister, whose name was Irma, and where she disappeared to. We never spoke about whether other families find it this tiring to act as though they’re like other families, we never spoke about normality, never about heteronormativity, queerness, we never spoke about class, the so-called “third” world, and the hidden webs of fungi that are far more extensive and delicate than we imagine, we never spoke about all the paths that this world has in store for us, so we can run away from ourselves, the winding paths, the paths in the shadows of great poplars, the bleak, endless paths spooled around this world like thread around a ball of yarn, but we did speak about the paths that, added together, are called the “Camino de Santiago.”
A few weeks ago, we were sitting on the sofa and you brought out one of the photo albums. I forced myself to feign the same interest I had the last ten times you explained the same photos with the same commentaries. We looked at a photo of your mother in which she’s pregnant with you, a photo that surprised me the first few times I saw it: because there’s this naked woman, in a bourgeois family photo album from 1935. Suddenly you interrupted your flow of words, looked at me, and asked: “But why are you never there?”
I’m sitting here at my writing desk in Zürich. I’m twenty-six, it’s slowly getting dark, one of these evenings that are still winter evenings yet with a premonition of spring, a velvety scent: of overly sweet, blush-white blossoms; of people beginning to jog again, spreading their sweat through the excessively clean streets. I don’t jog. I sit here and chew my fingernails despite the bitter anti-biting polish, I chew until the white tips are bitten down and then further still, continually forcing them downward. Six months ago I took this ultra-boring job in the public records office, where I spend all day long among shelves deep belowground, I catalog the medical records of long-dead patients, I speak to nobody, I’m content, I’m invisible, I let my hair grow, I go home and sit down at my desk. From here I can see the beech tree in the neighboring garden, from here the memories of our copper beech come to me, the large, red-leaved beech in the center of our garden. The copper beech, which in Swiss German we call the blood beech. I write. When my friends Dina and Mo, who are also sitting and writing somewhere, text me: “Coming out for a drink?” I don’t reply. I try to write, and when I can’t write, when I sink into the mudflats of the past, I shave, shower, and ride my bike to the outer reaches of the city, the “outskirts,” as they’re called in English, scour the gas stations and football pitches, prowl back and forth outside the gyms, the Grindr app my pale flashlight in the suburban night, leading me to the men I’m looking for, the men I need and need to need me, to use and get used by, the men I let push up my skirt and push inside me behind the bike shed, quick and emotionless. I have enough emotions and don’t need more; what I need from them is a hard cut. I twin and twine with the rusty bars of the gym; I entwine with the railings of the deserted grandstand, they support me; and last, but not least, my cheek slams repeatedly against the Securitas break room door until I’m pounded out of my emotions and back into my flesh, then I go home, semen still inside me and the scent of a stranger on me, a warm feeling in my empty middle filling me up for the duration of my journey. I use the toilet, shave again, armpits, legs, crotch, always fearing the possibility of waking up in the night and smelling of somebody else, then I go to the toilet again to get the rest of the semen out of me, then shower, rub myself down with a pumice stone, moisturize. My skin is irritated from so much shaving. Then I sit back down at the desk, in view of the beech tree, and only then do I realize that it’s you I’ve been writing to this whole time. When I’m not writing, I read, or think about the possibility of taking my body to the Camino de Santiago. I think about the possibility of walking until I’m no longer thinking about anything or until I reach Santiago de Compostela or the ocean, and I think about the possibility of not doing any of that.
We never spoke about the afternoon you didn’t find your way home and how Mother got a call from the police. We never spoke about putting you in a home, and when you had a really bad turn a month ago and woke up in a rehab center and asked what had happened to your balcony overlooking Bern, Mother said, “But they removed it, remember, it wasn’t safe anymore.” And you said, “Oh yes, that’s right,” and laughed at yourself a little too loudly and then talked about the geraniums on the balcony. I hated Mother for her cowardice in not telling you the truth, I was annoyed at first, and then more moved than I wanted to be by her sudden concern for you. All at once she ’s the caring daughter, I thought, but not me, you don’t get me as a caring daughter, Ma, and I said goodbye to her more coldly than usual. We don’t talk about the high probability that you’ll have another turn in the next six months (“a turn”—as though you were just making some slight detour), and we don’t talk about the high probability that this “turn” will erase what remains of your memory.
It’s nighttime now, and I imagine you also standing at the window of your room in the rehab center and staring the night in the face. I can feel you slowly disappearing. Dear Grandmother, I want to write to you before you completely disappear from your body or can no longer access your memories.
I’d like to be able to tell you I was afraid of you, that for example it was I who smashed the jar of raspberry jam that time, just after you’d made it, the one you thought Mother had smashed, and that Mother was actually protecting me, she took the blame and you really bawled her out. I feel guilty about that to this day. I’d like to know what happened to my great-aunt Irma, the girl who walks hand in hand with you through the family albums and then disappears. I’d like to understand what it was like to be you: first a lower-class, then a middle-class woman in twentieth-century Switzerland. I’d like to understand why I have barely any memories of my childhood, and why the only ones I have are of you. I’d like to find a language in which I can ask you: “Where are my people?” I’d like to know how all this shit gets in our veins.
You were too loud, too demanding, too coarse. You never listened. You sent me money, accompanied by notes: “You know you can visit me anytime.” I’m sorry I’m such a bad grandchild. I’m too delicate to be decent.
Dear Grandmother. When I think of you, I think of all the things we never could and never can say to each other. I remember how you always used so proudly the words that the Bernese German dialect took from the French, and while I can understand that pride, it also makes me incredibly uncomfortable. French was brought to us by Napoleon; it was the language of the occupiers, the language of the cultured yet barbaric warmongers. He brought us the language and some laws, and in return he stole Bern’s treasury, renowned all across Europe. Several hundred billion, if you convert it into modern-day Swiss francs (even the name of our currency comes from Napoleon, from the old French franc, which literally means “a French”!). He used it to pay off his debts and finance his Egypt campaign. I know these are my petty tears of white privilege, and that we’ve been world champions at high-finance robbery since the late nineteenth century. Napoleon’s looting gave early nineteenth-century Bern and its surrounding region a very high emigration rate. By the 1890s a good one hundred thousand Swiss people had emigrated to the USA. And the tax implications of Napoleon stealing Bern’s treasure stretched into the twentieth century: Bern had been a rich city and its residents were only taxed after he came robbing. So I find it strange that you proudly bear the fruits of the man who carries part of the blame for your poverty.
Traces of Napoleon that can be found in your vocabulary to this day:
dr Nöwö—the nephew—le neveu
ds Fiseli—the son—le fils
dr Potschamber—the bedpan—le pot de chambre
ds Gloschli—bell-shaped petticoat—von cloche
dr Gaschpo—flowerpot—le cache-pot
ds Lawettli—washcloth—von laver
You told me about Madame de Meurron, the legendary Bern character who was the first woman in Switzerland to drive a car: a patrician who spoke almost exclusively in Frenchified expressions in order to show how aristocratic she was. She didn’t roll her r’s like the tanners from the shabby Matte district, but instead pronounced them nicely at the back of her throat, à la française. “Schaffed Iir no oder sid Iir scho öber?”—Do you still work or are you already somebody?—you mimicked her, sounding the r at the back, totally exaggerated, laughing and exposing your teeth. I didn’t understand the question. How can a person move up in the world if they don’t work? (I hadn’t yet learned that genuine fat-cat capital can only be inherited, not acquired through hard work, in contrast to the rags-to-riches myth we shovel into one another practically from birth.) You’re beginning to forget anything that didn’t happen before your fiftieth birthday. You’re disappearing. But the French stays with you. I think about how close to you I feel when I’m writing to you, and how far from you I feel when I see you. How you talk about going to Santiago de Compostela someday, and how happy that would make your mother and Maria, and how—after the long, long walk—you would jump joyfully into the Atlantic, clothes and all. I think about how you talk without pause, about anything—the special offers at the Migros supermarket, the days when there are double Cumulus card points. Your fear of silence. I remember how you continually protected me after Grandfather’s death, so you wouldn’t have to confront the loss. No, wait—that’s not me remembering. That’s Mother’s memory.
In the language I’ve inherited from you, Bernese German, my mother tongue, “mother” is meer. It means both “mother” and “the sea,” sneak-tweaked from the French; la mer and la mère. For “father,” we say peer. For “grandmother,” grossmeer. For “great-grandmother,” urgrossmeer. The women of my childhood are an element, an ocean. I remember my mother’s legs, I remember wrapping my arms around them, gazing up at her and saying: “You are my meer.” I remember a feeling of home and of beingutterlyenveloped. The meers’ love so big we couldn’t escape it, can’t escape it, even if we swam for a lifetime to emerge from its depths.
The language I’ve inherited is itself a sea; language herself an ocean, waving and mixing, ebbing and gushing, with no clear border, her shores are constantly shifted by storms, humans, more-than-humans, one language-sea flows into the next, they are endlessly weaving themselves into one another, jostlingcocktailing-throttling time and space; words are little truckli, as my mother tongue calls little trinket boxes; they travel through these times and spaces, slowly changing their meaning while always still speaking their past, and so languages are borderless spaces to me, lisp-whispering in undercurrents and riptides, melting and washing and vortexing, and another word has reached my consciousness, from my friend Mo who told me about his Irish heritage, told me a word that I realized was another word for meer, for this Swiss-Frerman word, this mother-sea-ness, because when he told me about the fairies in Irish folklore, the Sidhe, pronounced “Shee,” I remembered that as a child I had a lisp, so the child cowriting these lines has too much tongue in its mouth and says shee for sea, and this many-tongued word clung to me as Mo spoke more about the Sidhe, those pagan creatures of land and forest, who I believe had traversed Europe in most celticgermanic-heathen cultures, and I summon them here, dear Shee, dear fairies, please come, put your sparkly gay magic into these lines, because I believe you to be tangible beings, I believe you to be creative critters who do not inspire worship of a transcendent power, a power that has cut all ties from the Earth and matter and dirt and body, no, I believe that you are the Earth, matter, dirt, and body, and as the times have grown ever more dire while writing this, I need your fairy energy spilling and spelling itself into this many-tongued work of and about mothers, about the ocean, forest-ocean fairies, all fairies, and about the children lisping the sea into shee into meer.
There, there. I now return to the language that started me, to Bernese German, this language I’ve inherited from you, Grossmeer, my Meer language, in which there are only two ways to be a body. Growing up in the palate of the German language forced me constantly into this two-by-two, like a line of kindergartners. In the language I’ve learned from you, my mother tongue, my smother tongue, I don’t know how to write about myself. There ’s Mother’s tongue and your eyes and me, my body, my bodies, my corporeality? There ’s this I, the writing I, and the child I once was, the child standing before that line of kindergartners, still needing to find a way through. And I’m permeated with the child, just like the moon in its entirety is held handlessly by the earth, but in writing I have to differentiate between us, because otherwise the childhood, because otherwise the childhood-body, because otherwise the flood of the past will wash me away.
And yet it’s not simple in the Meer language either: because little detours, one might even say deviant deviations, crept in—the women were objects. Meer, admittedly, is given the feminine article die. But all other adult women, even the other nouns for mothers and grandmothers—like mami and grossmami—took the neuter article das, making them sound like objects, like pieces of furniture rather than people. And not just the mothers; all women when called by their names were neuter nouns: das Anneli, das Lisbeth, das Regini. And the children were objects too, sweet and tiny, like little mocha spoons: das Mineli, das Hänneli, das Hansli. I remember that this objectification infuriated me. I didn’t want to be an object; I wanted to be a person, and grown up, and being grown up meant having a gender, a male one. As a woman, you were at risk of remaining an object or becoming an ocean. I didn’t want either.
When I think of you, Grossmeer, I think of the Migros supermarket cafeteria, where you always invited me when you wanted to treat me to a “meal out,” I think of the Urmeer, the primordial sea that emerged from the first bacteria, its temperature a rather precise thirty-seven degrees Celsius, I think of Meer and the life she sacrificed for me, and of the life you sacrificed for Meer, I think of how you’ve just been released from the rehab center, how at this very moment you’re probably standing on your balcony and staring angrily at the half-withered geraniums, and I think of all the stories I’ve never written to you. In one of them, a bearded woman walks all the way from Ostermundigen to Santiago de Compostela. Halfway there, she meets a young person who has a beard too, and broad shoulders, a deep voice, a skirt and kohl eyeliner, and they talk about nothing, they walk silently alongside each other toward the sea, their footsteps dropping like flotsam between them, like lost ancestral lines drifting in the twilight.
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From Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues by Kim de l’Horizon. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025.
