Without fail, my mother’s voice rings through my head and tethers me back to Earth. With her eyes ablaze and her mouth set in a determined line, my mother has told me this phrase over and over and over again. Pinching my pouting cheek as she dropped me off at my first day of preschool, out the car window as I trudged to take my SAT, her voice crackling with static over the phone as I sobbed after my first breakup. Always, her demand is the same. Semangat.

Semangat is an Indonesian word that refuses to be neatly translated into English. If you plug it into Google Translate, it will posit that semangat means “spirit,” which isn’t exactly untrue. However, it only uncovers a small sliver of what the word is meant to evoke.

Yelled on sports fields and whispered in hospital waiting rooms, people are told semangat when they are on the precipice of a difficult journey. And while it is a word of deep encouragement, a caring phrase in a time of gritty work, it is also a command. Be strong, survive, force your way forward. To tell someone semangat is to eliminate their choice to give up. 

Indonesian, like many other languages, has grammatical rules built on strict conventions of social hierarchy. There are myriads of grammatical modifications one must employ depending on the conversationalists’ age, social class, and interpersonal relationship to each other. When I was just grasping hold of the Indonesian language as a child, these variations confused me to no end. Feeling painfully American and desperate to prove that I was just as Indonesian as my Jakartan relatives, I often found myself groaning in my mother’s arms after accidentally addressing my cousins with a tense intended for Javanese royalty. However, among the head spinning variants and formalities, semangat always stood out to me as the one glimmering exception to the rule.

It is strictly taboo to command your elders in Indonesian; the syntactical rules of the language are so exacting that I could never even command my younger cousin of anything, for the fact that his mother is a year older than mine. However, semangat can be said to anybody. To my frail great-grandmother in her dark bedroom, her eyes shining at the small American child she could not talk to: semangat. Three years later to my own mother, her face crumpling as she caught sight of her grandmother’s portrait at a memorial service thousands of miles away from her homeland: semangat. There are no modifications to be made when telling somebody to be resilient. When a loved one is hurting, typical conventions of hierarchy and social order melt away. We are never above accepting the strength of others.

It is a deeply unfamiliar feeling to command your elders in the Indonesian community. The action is rude, diminutive, and ignores the breadth of life experience that accompanies an age gap. In semangat, there lies a caveat; we can command our elders of nothing but strength. In a sense, this is the most respectful thing one can do; acknowledge the struggle of a loved one, and invest faith in them that they can best it.

This is where my love of semangat really lies; in its uniquely egalitarian usage. Semangat is nothing when it stands alone; if you repeat it over and over to yourself in the mirror, the word becomes empty. Its power is really derived from its delivery from one person to another, both a tender recognition of hardship and a subsequent unrelenting faith in the person undergoing it. When I tell someone semangat, I expect them to rise to the occasion. When I receive the same words, I take reprieve in the knowledge that someone, even if it’s not me, especially because it’s not me, knows that I will keep fighting.