"No Cattle Here" by Angela Pupino
My favorite Gaelic phrase is the classic “Mo chreach ‘sa thàinig!” The literal translation is something like “my destruction has come” or “my cattle raid has come.” In 2020, Gaelic’s language for misfortune came in handy.
February 2020 began with me being mugged a block from my house, setting in motion a wave of agoraphobia that would be laughable just weeks later. I lived alone in a windowless basement apartment in Washington D.C., and suddenly there was no escape hatch. Visiting the outside world became a chore at best and a dangerous, selfish act at worst. The anxiety was bottomless, and most days I didn’t step outside at all.
To fill the holes in my life left by months of being acutely alone, I took to riding YouTube’s algorithm as far as it would go. Somewhere between long exposés from pop culture reviewers and weekly spreads from tarot readers, I stumbled on a short YouTube documentary about a class of middle school students in Nova Scotia learning Scottish Gaelic.
The documentary features shots of students singing and laughing in bright, airy classrooms alongside shots of a windswept and snowy landscape, text narration extolling the virtues of preserving a centuries-old cultural and linguistic heritage. Something about the earnestness of it all unleashed in me a flurry of Google searches. I learned that Gaelic is an endangered language most commonly spoken in Scotland (with around 50,000 native speakers) with a sizable community of speakers in Nova Scotia. As a Celtic language, it is related to Irish, Manx, and Welsh. English has long encroached on the language with violence, cultural hegemony, and heavy tongues, yet, throughout history, Gaels have been both colonizers and the colonized. Ground down by the English in the British Isles, they did not hesitate to steal Miꞌkmaq land in Canada.
I think those paradoxes are what initially compelled me to learn Gaelic. A dying language carried on by smiling children. A people escaping colonialism only to colonize others. Fresh out of grad school and possessing disposable income for the first time in my life, yet trapped in my apartment and facing an uncertain future, paradox seemed so relatable. As the documentary’s text narration informed me, These students are hope for the future of the language, I thought, Fuck it. I’m only 24; my tongue can also be a future.
I emailed the Nova Scotian cultural center featured in the documentary. An awkward email exchange and a few hundred US dollars later, I am enrolled in a 28-week virtual beginner course.
When our teacher, Annag, asks my Beginner Scottish Gaelic class if anyone wants a Gaelic name, almost every hand shoots up.
The next week, perched in her little Zoom box, she dispenses Gaelic names like candy. I watch as Samantha becomes Màili, Katherine becomes Catrìona, and Khrys becomes Crìsdean. On the edge of my seat, I wait to be rechristened.
“Angela, your name was a bit tricky,” Annag admits. “But what about Aingeal?”
The voweled monstrosity appears in the chat box and something turns in my stomach. Aingeal is a Gaelic word that means angel, but it is pronounced pretty much like “ankle.” I try to savor it—a k-sound like a tinkling bell, somehow mimicking the English name of a cracking joint—and fail.
Annag is a twenty-something in a comfy sweater with bright eyes and brown curls. There’s a warm, quiet nerdiness to her that I find endlessly appealing. She often jokes to herself while she teaches, and sometimes she snorts when she laughs. One week she appears in her Zoom window with hands streaked with white paint and apologies about a day spent on renovation. In the recesses of my sapphic brain, I occasionally imagine living in a cottage on some Nova Scotian beach with her.
For the first few months, I delight in being a class clown. Weeks spent practicing Gaelic on Duolingo have left me slightly ahead on the course material. We spend most of the class experimenting with question and answer sentences the way toddlers do, substituting other words from our limited vocabulary to make sentences as mundane or off-the-rails as possible. During conversation practice, Annag asks me if an imaginary building is a house. No, I say, it’s a dog. She giggles and I wish the moment would never end.
My class is half Canadian and half American, which creates space for more than just Gaelic to be exchanged. The Canadians teach us about bagged milk, and we teach them about employer-sponsored health insurance. As the U.S. election looms perilously close, I spend my Zoom breakout room speaking practice sessions with Ceallaigh (Kelly) from Philadelphia plotting how to sea kayak into Canada.
The Gaelic word for the English language is Beurla.
The word feels heavy to me, loaded somehow. But I’m not sure if that is a projection of my guilty mind. Throughout the fall of 2020, I read essays on the challenges of revitalizing the Gaelic language, blog posts about the ways the language is appropriated and Anglicized, and books about how to get an ethical Gaelic tattoo. I learn that my native tongue eats away at the future of Gaelic every single day.
As I muddle through my first Gaelic lessons, I realize that English has hardened my perception of how language should work. My classmates beg Annag for permission to drop words in their Gaelic sentences that are superfluous in English. Again and again, she protests that we are thinking like English speakers. I can’t blame them; sometimes when I speak Gaelic, my tongue doesn’t recognize itself. Strings of would-be English consonants become never-ending vowel sounds. I find myself searching, with increasing desperation, for syllables I can sink my teeth into.
So much of white, American, English-speaking identity is founded on the disposability of cultures that don’t “fit”. Cultures that cannot be commercialized, capitalized, or ground down into bite-size morsels are made to surrender, discarded after being pried from desperate hands. For every white American who longs to wear a feathered headdress or tattoo an Om on their wrist, there is an ancient Celtic or Slavic or Italian tradition long neglected, if not yet erased from existence, waiting to be reclaimed.
Like many Americans, I can claim a proud and nebulous Scottish heritage. My great-grandfather was born in the Scottish town of Milnathort before settling in British Columbia and dying, improbably, in Akron, Ohio at the age of 46. According to family legend, he became a lithographer after stumbling upon a newspaper ad for the job. I like to think I have inherited his capacity for happenstance.
It wasn’t until Gaelic syllables first slipped off my tongue that I realized the gravity of the culture my ancestors gave up. Here was an ancient heritage still very much alive, thriving because some communities committed themselves to passing it on. Poets still craft masterworks in Gaelic in the 21st century. Today’s Gaelic speakers fight to be more than a mistranslated Outlander reference, to be recognized as something that still is. They sing ancient songs while making new ones.
I realize that my experiences of Gaelic are like the view from the door of my basement apartment: a sliver of sky and the row houses across the street. I can never see the whole world that way. Yet Gaelic gives me many glimpses into worlds just beyond. There is a charm, a necessity even, to learning a communal language during a global pandemic. My class becomes a weekly cèilidh of sorts, a celebration of the life still happening outside my apartment walls. During Zoom classes, my classmates cradle pets, pop out of frame to answer work calls and listen to voicemails, eat soup and yawn and laugh.
Rising death tolls, isolation, and U.S. politics have left me an anxious puddle. But the Gaelic language is warm and calm. It is not lost on me that there were times, like when Gaelic was forbidden in Highland schools, when the language was learned in just this way: quietly, in the safety of homes, and with eyes on a turbulent social and political future.
The Gaelic word for December, literally translated, is something like “The Dark Month”. Staring down the barrel of December 2020, I decide that Gaelic speakers have long been ahead of their time. Dark is exactly how I feel.
In the last weeks of November, depression creeps up my spine. It becomes difficult to think and impossible to get out of bed. The future feels too heavy to hold. Depression, COVID, and impending winter would be the equivalent of a horse tranquilizer straight into my life. Or perhaps a cattle raid.
Mo chreach ‘sa thàinig!
I skip class once, then a second time a few weeks later. I don’t bother, can’t bother, to tell Annag that I will be absent. When I appear again in Week 10, she is unphased. In breakout rooms she asks me, with an earnest lowness in her voice, if I have any questions about the previous week’s material.
Week after week I answer “How are you?” with Tha mi sgìth. I am tired. So tired. I don’t have words, in English or in Gaelic, to say “I would rather not be alive.”
As the weeks stretch on, I am untethered. Unmoored. My cattle have long since left the pen. My circadian rhythm is now dictated by artificial lights alone. I go to bed at 2am, nap at 6pm. I have nightmares about everything and nothing. Even a few weeks visiting my family in Ohio have little effect. I have a tenuous grasp on my will to keep going.
I skipped Gaelic again on the day of the insurrection at the Capitol, and am shocked to find check-in emails from Annag and my classmates waiting in my inbox. “An dòchas gu bheil thu gu math” Annag wrote. I hope you are okay. And “Thoir an àire dhut fhèin”. Take care of yourself. On the day everything feels like too much, I find that I have friends a thousand miles away.
By late January 2021, my pronouncements of exhaustion are joined by a chorus of others. Encouraged by our shared weariness, Annag teaches us the classic Gaelic song Tha Mi Sgìth. Our lesson runs long but we stay on the call, glued to our Zoom windows as she sings a haunting melody. The main chorus begins with “Tha mi sgìth 's mi leam fhìn...”.
“It means ‘I am tired and I am alone’,” Annag says. Thank goodness I am muted, because I snort. I relate to those words deeply.
In the Zoom window before me, my classmates and I are singing along, mouths moving like fish in their little muted boxes. The only voice we can hear is Annag’s, leading us home.
As the class winds towards an end in March 2021, I can see other endings dancing on the horizon. The main side effects of my COVID vaccine are effusive joy and a dawning sense that I just might survive. I find myself brave enough to venture outside for ten-minute walks around the neighborhood. The breezes are warm and I am mostly able to steady my anxiety with bubble tea and chocolate bars. The relief is indescribable. I thought I had forgotten how to exist outside my apartment walls.
We are all still exhausted during Wednesday night lessons, of course. Weariness is there in our eyes even through tiny Zoom screens. Tha mi sgìth is still the most popular response to pleasantries, but some people also say Tha gu math. I am well.
Annag gives us new words to explain why. “Tha sinn beò fhathast!” We are still alive. And the vaguely off-color “Is math bhi beò, tha poidhle dhuibh nach eil.” It’s good to be alive, there are a lot who aren’t.
Most of my classmates sign up for Gaelic Intermediate 1, starting in fall 2021. Annag offers to host lessons over the summer, and I jump at the chance to learn more from her.
Slowly but surely, I realize that I have pieced together a future from the scraps of my ancestral past. I want to outlive the travel bans and spend hours outside in some sunlit place again. I want to visit Nova Scotia and stay in touch with Annag. I want to visit the Highlands and stammer out Is mise Aingeal (I am Angela) to hapless shopkeepers. I want to retrain my monolingual, colonizing tongue. I want to dive deeper into the things about Gaelic language and culture that I can’t yet see. I want to learn more Gaelic jokes, more curses, more ways to describe bad luck.
Learning Gaelic gave me windows into another way of being in the world. But it has also held a mirror up to my own face. I am tired and alone, without my cattle, and still alive... but none of that is special. The Gaels were all of those things before me, and they thought to sing about it.
Angela Pupino grew up in Ohio's Mahoning Valley and now lives in Washington, DC. Her nonfiction essays have appeared in CNN, The Nation, and Belt Publishing's LGBTQ anthology.
