I’m inclined to believe that I first became aware of the loss of my mother tongue the day I had to use Google Translate, from Arabic to Spanish, to express myself while Skyping my parents. I felt embarrassed confessing this to my parents in the midst of our conversation and felt a growing estrangement as I realized that even my Spanish accent was diluting to assimilate that of a Spanish as a Second Language speaker.

This incident took place during my sophomore year, a time when Arabic, English and Spanish waged a constant war in my head every time I engaged in a conversation. Yes, I am that guy at a dining table full of Spanish speakers, who uses English more frequently than others and throws Arabic words in the middle of conversations. This, among other things, has led people to ask: Are you even Latino? What happened to the Colombian Gabriel? How are you so Arab? Although I’m proud to see how much my mastery of Arabic and English has grown over the past years, there isn’t anything that makes me feel more estranged and annoyed at times than having people question my identity on the basis of language. This has indeed placed me in a linguistic identity limbo.

Changing the notion that language is an identity fixer is, to me, crucial. I see language-learning as accidental — the same way that nationality is. I see language as a dynamic factor in identity building; it does not determine who we are, but rather, allows us to explore different aspects of ourselves. I also strongly believe that there are other factors that are more pertinent to the question of belonging than language. I’m aware that some of my notions regarding this topic have been shaped by the fact that as an NYU Abu Dhabi student, whatever I speak is a matter of choice. Had I decided to stay in Colombia, or had I been an economic migrant looking for better life opportunities in a context where learning a language is a matter of integration or exclusion, my views would most likely have been different.

So, language, and even accents, have been accidental for me in many ways: I don’t have full control over the ways in which my relationships with different languages develop over time. When I came back to Colombia after my first year studying in United World College Costa Rica, I realized how much of my mother tongue I had altered. I had spent most of my time hanging around people from Mexico and upon my return, I faced constant mockery from friends and family due to the change in my Spanish accent. That’s when I realized how malleable my brain was in changing linguistic environments. Since then, that process of diverting from Spanish has accelerated. Here are some facts that better allow me to understand where my relationship with Spanish stands at the moment:

I left Colombia when I was 16 years old, and I did not already have good academic command of the Spanish language. I had only recently discovered Latin American literature through the short stories of Julio Cortazar. When I arrived in Costa Rica, the main language of instruction suddenly became English, and I was asked to critically approach English literature — something I had never done before. Undoubtedly, I struggled, getting a three out of a seven in my first exam. But I was driven to do better in English, as a foreign language. By the end of high school, I scored higher in my English literature classes than in my Spanish classes. My success, I think, was accidental — a byproduct of the fact that I was adapting to a new environment. But it also illustrates the quickness with which I diverted from Spanish — and that, to me, does not seem accidental. I could have chosen to improve my command of Spanish, but I did not, because I lost more in terms of opportunity with my English being weak. My relationship with my mother tongue, Spanish, was not subject to this idea of opportunity as much as English was — a fear of losing my mother tongue has never been present.

I see now that attempting to retain my mother language at all costs could have undermined my experience at UWC and NYUAD. Most importantly, it would have hampered my immersive learning of Arabic and could have shaped me to become a completely different person. Since I left for Costa Rica and moved to Abu Dhabi, I’ve been discovering a great deal about myself. I’ve been through emotionally intense moments filled with joy and love, sadness and frustration. Many of these experiences are as vivid and intense as others from my childhood in Colombia. Yet, I had to go through these experiences in English, and not in Spanish. I’ve had to defend myself from discrimination in English, I’ve had to express deep feelings of love and gratitude in English, I’ve had to talk through intense frustration in English. I was stubborn enough to restrict these experiences to Spanish and my Spanish-speaking friends during my first year in Costa Rica. I decided it would be foolish to spend my entire time at UWC, and then at NYUAD, sticking with people from my own region. Since then, English has been the lingua franca of my friendship circles. Now, Arabic has started replacing it.

Language is also not an identity fixer. It is awkward when people put me into boxes of The Arab Gabriel or The Latino Gabriel on the basis of the language I use. For me, it has never been an issue of being or not being someone when speaking different languages. I’m the same person in the end: Gabriel or Jebreel — both mean the same, and both are the same for me. Rather than fixating on who I am, languages have been a means to discover myself. Thus, there are several instances in which Arabic, Spanish and English have allowed me to discover and express different parts of my identity.

Learning Arabic has pushed me to interact with people to extents that I had never done before. This has not been only through the several interviews that I’ve had to carry for my Arabic classes, but as I fell in love with the phonetics of Arabic, I started to actively look for more venues in which I could hear it and speak it. For instance, my love for Arabic led me to Oman and I set out to talk only in Arabic for the three days I was traveling during the Islamic New Year break of my freshman fall, despite the fact that I had been learning the language only for six or seven weeks. Since then, I’ve put myself out there to work with different people from the region and tried to get involved in every single event or initiative where I knew I would be able to talk in Arabic.

Most importantly, learning Arabic has nurtured in me a great love and admiration for the complexity of human life and experiences. Hearing the poems of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, one of the most renowned modern poets of the Arab world, made me aware of the complexity of the questions of identity and belonging for Palestinians. This is a love that continued developing throughout my several conversations with people in Jordan, Palestine, Oman, Egypt and here in the UAE. Through these conversations, I was exposed to a multiplicity of realities that I wasn’t aware of before — from Palestinians that were arrested during the second Intifada to Jordanians that were desperately trying to leave a country they described as being suffocating.

Yet, as I said before, it is not only that I’ve discovered certain parts of myself through certain languages, but I know that, for the moment, there are things that I can only express through Spanish. For example, although it is true that I’ve had to express deep feelings of love and frustration in English, I’ve never been able to cry in English. I might be able to fully rationalize what I’m feeling in English but that has never quite conveyed the emotional weight of my expressed feelings. For example, when someone asks me how my week is going, and I respond that I’ve been trying to push through it, it might be an accurate answer but it never conveys what I’m trying to say. When I get asked the same question in Spanish though, I tend to answer I’m “la lucha” — literally, I’m in the fight — and this expression has a whole new layer of meaning. Saying that I’m in la lucha instantly reminds me of the fact that my grandmother, as a divorced woman, had to raise three children by herself at a time when single mothers were stigmatized in Colombian society. This never prevented her from pushing forward, and she never complained. When I say I’m in la lucha, it reminds me of the fact that my mother has been working 10 to 12 hours per day for the past 25 years to provide a better future for me and my brother.

If language is accidental, and language is not a fixer, then there are already solid grounds to question how instrumental language is in the topic of belonging. Furthermore, from what I understand about myself, I know there are several other traits that are more key in determining my belonging to a certain place. This applies especially for people like us who are constantly moving, and I take, as an example, many of the proud Puerto Ricans and Cubans that I met while interning in the Bronx last summer. Many of them had broken Spanish, and yet this never prevented them from feeling they were as Cuban as they were U.S. American. Language is not the ultimate factor in determining whether I belong to certain place, nor is my religion and especially not the things that I wear. I’m, in the end, a happy Muslim Colombian who speaks as much Spanish as he speaks Arabic and English and who feels that the UAE is home.