Pijin Love

So, after 6 months of speaking pijin pijin, I had my first proper lesson today.  Although my conversational pijin is pretty passable, my aim in the next month or so is to be able to facilitate a training session fluently in the local lingo.

But the most interesting thing I learned today spun me off into a world of thought that had nothing to do with the language lesson at hand..and everything to do with my greater life lessons right now!

I learned that the term for love in pijin is the same as the term for death..x 2.  Death, or to die is “dae”.  Love or to love is daedae.  And this reminded me that in whatever language you speak, to love is to die a little.

Why is that? Is it the heart-stopping, aching anxiety we feel in our desperation to not be rejected by a lover that feels a little like death?  Or is it the loss of ourselves?  The inevitable compromises we carve out of two (or more in the case of a family) merged lives?  Or is it death itself that starts its tiny seeds of grief with the birth of love?  Because everything that has a beginning has an end, of that we can be sure.  No matter how it comes.

Maybe the fact that I feel this way is certainty of the fact I’ve loved the wrong way (or the wrong people?)! One of my lovers once told me I was too much hard work – that she wanted an easy life.  Maybe she correctly wanted no part of the daedae kind of love I have a penchant for –and who could blame her really?

Another long-term partner told me I was her darkness and her light.  And I think that’s more the point. Because maybe life is about light and shade; about every silver lining having its cloud; about being able to distinguish a whiz, bang, sparks kind of pleasurable love when we see it because the flip-side of that same coin is the despair of isolation, loneliness and loss? Good daedae relationships can perhaps scale the heights and plumb the depths of life - knowing life doesn't all have to be champagne and roses all the time.  And in fact, adoring the challenge of that.

When the writer Jeanette Winterson opened her novel “Written on the Body” with the line: Why is the measure of love, loss? I felt like closing it as soon as I had taken in that one awe-some statement.  Not because I disagreed with it, but because in those 7 short words so beautifully fashioned, she had encapsulated a perfect idea. 

We ex-pats heap a lot of shit on Pijin for being backwards English – but there are some languages that are able to pour all their cultural experience and wisdom into certain terms – and I reckon daedae is one of those terms that resonates with a thousand nuances we can both grasp and never capture – all at once.

Yep, I reckon my preference for love is captured well in daedae – mostly because I prefer my love to come with a desire to fall completely, to lose myself in its wondrous maze – no matter how the bastard thing likes to prick me with its thorns and laugh when I can’t find my way out.  And if love is death, then so be it.  Now show me death’s sword, so I can fall on it again some time soon!