I mentioned yesterday that I am trying to improve my Hebrew. There are a couple reasons why I’ve been doing that. First, it’s just a thing to do as the world burns: it’s way more fun to talk about She-Ra in Hebrew and learn about the complexities of the different tenses and verb forms than it is to have people yell at me about political positions I don’t actually hold; using social media to learn Hebrew feels like a virtuous addiction. Am I still posting a lot? Yes, but it’s good for my brain, like watching PBS instead of Cartoon Network.
But secondly: there is a way in which learning Hebrew feels like tapping into an alternate version of myself. There is a universe in which my family never left Israel, a universe in which I grew up speaking English and Hebrew simultaneously, in which Hebrew was my שפת האם*. I wonder, sometimes, about that alternate me: what would she have been like? Who would she have grown up to be? Would she have had the same interests as me? Would she still have become a writer? How would she have understood her sexuality?
It seems safe to say that she, too, would have figured out she was bisexual: there is certainly a queer/bisexual community within Israel (indeed, the author of Bi: Notes on a Bi Revolution is, herself, Israeli). But how that other me would have talked about her sexuality (not to mention when she would have figured it out) — that I wonder about, still. I asked on Bluesky how one says “bisexual” in Hebrew since I did not trust Google Translate to tell me what people really say (its suggestion, דו-מיני, apparently means something more like intersex, which is interesting to me if only because that was the original meaning of “bisexual” in English), and the general consensus seemed to be that… there is no consensus. That Israeli version of me might have been ב or ביסית or ביסקסאולית, or maybe she would have avoided all that bi stuff and just gone with the more generic קווירית, who knows**.
And on the one hand, maybe this all just sounds like language nerdery — a rose is a rose by any name, no? — but I don’t really think it is. I’m reminded of this conversation I had years ago with a Sudanese Muslim friend who insisted to me that Americans, or maybe even Westerners broadly, are just kind of weird about same-gender relationships. She’d grown up in a range of places — Norway, Malaysia, the UK, the US, Qatar, and probably other locales that I’m forgetting — and in her perspective, there was something more relaxed, more natural, to the way that queerness unfolded in Muslim majority countries, where most of one’s life was spent in single gender spaces anyway; where, yes, public queerness might be criminalized but private queerness was something altogether different. The time, the place, the culture we not just grow up in, but come of age in, shapes so much of what we think about, what we understand about, the most intimate aspects of ourselves.
And maybe that feels disorienting: there is a comfort, I think, in the idea of the fixed self, in the belief that, yes, even crap weeds would be a coveted Valentine’s Day gift. But I, personally, find more comfort in the reality of cultural relativity. Because what it means, ultimately, is that while there may be aspects of ourselves that are permanent and unchangeable, the way we understand them doesn’t have to be. The way we understand ourselves can always be different.
If we want it to.
* Mother tongue
** A note for ambitious copy-pasters: most of these are the feminine versions of the words, masculine versions would drop the ת and possibly both the י and the ת, depending. As for non-binary versions… that’s a whole other complicated conversation because Hebrew is a heavily gendered language.
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