Sitting in the church basement, the faint sound of vocal rehearsals echoed down the hallway. Our choir director, Tasoni Gigi, handed me this laminated musical manuscript for the ancient hymn "Tai Shouri." Looking down, I didn't see standard sheet music. Instead, I saw a text split into three parallel columns: English meaning on the left, ancient Coptic script in the center, and Arabic translation on the right.

"For many people, language is just a tool to communicate," Gigi told me, pointing to the Coptic characters—the last surviving stage of the ancient Egyptian language of the Pharaohs. "But for us in Queens, this page is where we actively fight against total cultural erasure."

Because the first generation of Coptic youth born in New York grows up primarily fluent in English, preserving a millennia-old liturgical language is a creative battle. Tasoni Gigi explained that our community must systematically separate immutable spiritual dogma from mutable language. By visually mapping the ancient text alongside our parents' native Arabic and our own everyday English, the manuscript acts as a literal bridge between worlds. It allows us to chant the exact oral sounds passed down by our ancestors since the first century, even while living in twenty-first-century America. For me, this paper proves that saving your heritage isn't passive memory; it is an active, beautiful act of engineering.

– OT

Relationship:  Im/migrant Im/migrant