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“Bilingualism strikes me as a kind of synesthesia. Instead of seeing colors associated with letters and words, instead of hearing melodies, what I hear with language is the play and echo of the other language. The option to say it differently, and thus to live it differently. Language is not only a means of communication or description. It’s a framework in which we process existence. Yi writes: “It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible in my native language.” As every bilingual person and translator knows, there are certain words—a feeling, a way of being—that is absent in one language but perfectly brought to life in another. A word that, by existing, gives permission to be. What if you need that which does not exist in your language?”
— Yoojin Grace Wuertz, “Mother Tongue”
“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas… . Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?”
— Toni Morrison
It’s important to mention the only time my mother speaks in English is when I make her speak in a poem. So she says, get out—says, leave but it’s me, my voice, that slams the door.
Hieu Minh Nguyen, “Note,” from Not Here (via bostonpoetryslam)
“There’s a tension at the level of syntax that appears when a person is forced to use the language of their oppressor to articulate their trauma. There’s no escaping that tension, so you find a way to work with it, to weaponize it.”
— Kaveh Akbar, interviewed by Claudia F. Savage for Drunken Boat (via bostonpoetryslam)
It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one’s antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to “put your business in the street”: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.
“If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”, James Baldwin (via blxckberrying)
I know to trade Spanish for English is to trade one hatchet for another please do not misunderstand me I am grateful
I have a voice at all what a gift it is to dictate how I am remembered it’s just when I say my name for all it has inherited my lungs fill with soot I inhale
& am cooked alive by light
— Brandon Melendez, from “Etymology of Absence, Ending in a Still Life of the Rio Grande at Sunset,” published in [PANK]
Whether you are alive or not makes all the difference. In Spanish, fish are peces till dead; then, pescados—one syllable from animal to meal, from subject to object. In death we’re reduced to the body’s usefulness: cow becomes meat, human becomes organ. But a dog remains un perro. A child can be nothing but a child.
Alicia Catt, “WHEN I PUT BLUEBEARD’S KEYS IN MY POCKET THEY STAIN MY DRESS & I HOPE YOU DON’T NOTICE,” published in Toad (via bluebeardsbride)