As I am writing this piece, I am simultaneously sitting in my room watching my parents’ wedding video. It took weeks for me to reach this moment. I spent a good chunk of the last month attempting to convert AV to HDMI so that I could experience these cherished moments that I was, unfortunately, unable to live through. Throughout my childhood, I watched this video at least once a month.
The story of how my parents met, fell in love, and got married is like the storyline of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” My mom is Chaldean, the daughter of two immigrants, and was taking classes at Oakland University, at a time when people like her were still in the minority at the college. It’s where she met my dad, who is white and had parents who didn’t know what hummus was and thought their people invented baklava. (My dad took it to a cultural lunch event when he was a kid. Needless to say, he misrepresented his culture). They eventually fell in love, got married with a very Chaldean wedding, (complete with the band, the halhole, the works) and had me, a Chaldean-American girl.
The future of the Chaldean community is something that I tend to contemplate quite often. I wonder how our cultural norms and language will evolve. I fear that while our faith persists, our culture and language are fading.
As a stateless and fragmented nation, our language is especially integral to our identity, as one of the last remaining links we share.
