by Areebah Ahsan
I didn’t notice I had an accent until someone told me I did. It wasn’t the kind that announced itself, nor the kind that belonged somewhere clearly. It lived in the pauses, in the way I said “water” like a question, and how I laughed after speaking, as if to smooth the edges of difference. For most of my life, I thought fluency meant belonging, that speaking English perfectly could make me safe. But accents have memory. They carry who taught you to speak, what you were corrected for, and what you learned to hide. Mine was built from classrooms, cartoons, and the quiet fear of being left behind. It was not a sound I chose, but one I inherited, an accent made from imitation, aspiration, and a little shame.
The Grammar of Disguise
When I was younger, we were told to “think in English.” Our teachers said it would make us sharp, modern, employable. We listened. We thought in borrowed metaphors, wrote essays about snowfall we had never seen, and corrected our parents’ pronunciation as a kind of filial duty. English became a ladder, and we climbed it, proud of every rung. We didn’t realize that each step took us further from the language that had raised us. My mother spoke English like she was borrowing it from someone she admired. Her pauses were long, her vowels tender. I used to fix her. I thought I was helping. Years later, I understood that her way of speaking was not broken. It was simply uncolonized.
The Classroom of Correction
In school, language was treated like a performance. We were told there was a right way to speak, and that rightness had an accent. We practiced the “English” way of speaking, learning to hide the sound of where we came from. Every correction was framed as improvement, every imitation as success. We didn’t notice how fluency slowly became a form of erasure. By the time I graduated, my English was smooth, polished, and distant. It was a language that opened doors but muted my roots. I thought I was becoming global. I was really just becoming quieter in my own tongue.
The Politics of Sound
Accent is never just about sound. It’s about class, power, and permission. The right accent can soften suspicion, make you employable, make you believable. In airports, it earns patience. In interviews, it earns respect. In conversations, it earns belonging. People often say language is power, but power, too, has a pronunciation. Every “your English is so good” carries a kind of hierarchy. It is like an invisible pat on the head that still feels like a leash. For a long time, I mistook that approval for acceptance. I didn’t know that being understood and being respected were not always the same thing.
The Geography of Speech
When I stayed home for university, I met people whose Bangla carried a confidence mine never had. It was raw, fast, full of rhythm and pride. It didn’t need translation. I envied that certainty. In their voices, I heard the kind of belonging that mine had traded away for correctness. My English was fluent, but fragile. It made me mobile, but not grounded. Sometimes, when I am tired, my old sounds return, the soft t’s, the dragged vowels, the warmth of a forgotten cadence. They come uninvited, but they feel like company. Those moments remind me that my voice still remembers its first home, even if I had tried to leave it behind.
The Unlearning
I don’t believe in linguistic purity, not anymore. English is part of me. It built my world, shaped my thoughts, and gave me a way to write myself into visibility. But I have stopped pretending it’s neutral. Unlearning, for me, isn’t about rejecting English. It’s about refusing to let it be the only language that counts. It’s about hearing my own accent without apology, about writing in a way that allows my original rhythm to live inside English instead of being edited out of it. Sometimes that means using words that don’t translate. Sometimes it means sounding strange. I am learning to let that strangeness stay.
Speaking Without Apology
I no longer want to sound perfect. I want to sound like myself. When I speak now, I let the accent breathe. I let it stutter, bend, stretch, remember. I let it carry the echo of two worlds that never fully overlap. I used to envy people whose voices belonged somewhere. Now I envy no one. Because belonging, I have learned, isn’t about how you sound when you speak, it’s about whether your words sound like you.
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This piece is part of Political & Personal: An Anthology of Gender & Sexuality Issues in Bangladesh, a weekly series by the Bangladesh Feminist Archives. To read all contributions and view submission guidelines, click here.