Status Updates From Tongue-Tied: The Lives of M...

Everytime I find myself thinking, speaking ,writing and breathing in two languages though, I disagree with everyone who thinks that speaking both simultaneously is a disgrace.

For too many years I have seen the cycle of poverty of our people. All my life I have seen more wasted minds and lives than Allen Ginsberg ever dreamed of seeing. -Benjamin Alire Saenz, I Want to Write an American Poem III

Each language makes the other relative...When I learn to say those smallest, first things in the language that has served for detachment and irony and abstraction, I begin to see where the languages I've spoken have their correspondences—how I can move between them without being split by the difference. -Eva Hoffman

Occasionally, Polish words emerge unbidden from the buzz. They are usually words from the primary palette of feeling.

I'm sad, too. For the English language robbed of the beat your home talk could give it...robbing the young one...of a fine brew of language, a stew of words and ways that could inspire her to self-loving invention...of the smell of the kitchen on the page. -Rosario Morales, I Recognize You

To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we'll see there. Pena. Shame. Low estimation of self. In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue...Often with Mexicans y Latinas we'll speak English as a neutral language...So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. -Gloria Anzaldua

English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes. Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer’s gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast. —Louis Erdrich, Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart

Nandookomeshiinh, the lice hunter, is the monkey...Aiibiishaabookewininiwag, the tea people, are Asians. Agongosininiwag, the chipmunk people, are Scandinavians...There is a word for what would happen if a man fell off a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and the stem of it went through the back of his head. The word for stone, asin, is animate...It is a language that also recognizes the humanity of a creaturely God

Naawi-giizis introduced me to the deep intelligence of the language and forever set me on a quest to speak it for one reason: I want to get the jokes...spiked with puns on both English and Ojibwe, most playing on the oddness of gichi-mookomaan that is, big knife, or American, habits and behavior...I can talk to God only in this language, that somehow my grandfather's use of the language penetrated. -Louise Erdrich

I suggest that we may learn from spaces of silence as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks in standard English.

to correct the student's Ebonics-influenced pronunciations and grammar while ignoring that fact that the student had to have comprehended the sentence in order to translate it into her own language...blocks reading development...She is encouraged to think of reading not as something you do to get a message, but something you pronounce

there was a tendency among young White children to tell 'topic-centered' narratives—stories focused on one event—and a tendency among Black youngsters, especially girls, to tell 'episodic' narratives—stories that including shifting scenes and are typically longer...of greater significance is adults' responses to the differences...that "family problems" or "emotional problems" might hamper her academic progress

all students invariably speak of the impossibility of attempting to apply rules while trying to formulate and express a thought...focusing speakers to monitor their language typically produces silence

Introducir in Spanish mean to put in, to infiltrate. The correct term is presenter. Yet introducer is used so often that people don't even catch it. Many bilingual cognates have returned to Mexico to become part of what is known as Mexican calo...film actor Tin Tan and singer Juan Gabriel have been very influential in "introducing" Chicano terms to Mexico.

A cognate is a word related to another through derivation, borrowing or descent. From one language to another, I suppose they become bilingual cognates if not bloopers...Two Chicanos were dining at a fashionable restaurant and one of them says to the other, "This is the best gabacho (gazpacho) soup I've ever taste." -Jose Antonio Burciaga

I want to tell them the goodness of people who seldom touch, who bring covered dishes to the bereaved in embarrassed silence, who teach me daily that all dialogue is reverie, is hearsay, is translation. -Rhina Espaillat

What words in any language but the wind's could name this land as I've learned it by campfire? I want to feed them the dusty sweetness of American roads cleaving huge spaces, wheat field clean and smooth as a mother's apron.

by then the four-word question had become so engraved in my mind that to this day, an Indian chief comes to mind when I hear it...Wachuseh became a word meaning something that was better than anything anyone could say...I love words such as wachuseh as much as the people who use them. The significance of such compressed words goes beyond their original meaning to say even more. -Jose Antonio Burciaga

I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write... Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."

"You really like this poetry shit," he asked.
"Yes," I said.
And then he followed with the very best thing I could have hoped for. "So, how many fights you had?"
...Whatever I answered doesn't finally matter. He had already found some kind of answer in his question. He was looking for an equation, for something to understand...
Just one, I said, like you.
-from Translating Translation, Alberto Alvaro Rios

The hair net by itself is interesting, and to an outsider perhaps effeminate...The boys' older brothers often worked...and had to wear nets. And a net, it was a show of attitude—you took your net off when the important things happened. School was not that.

Kohl, changed from Cohen, changed from Okun, changed from something lost in the darkness of history; one change to identify the family as Jewish, one change to deny it.

English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes. Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer's gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast. -Louise Erdrich

English kindliness has a whole system of morality behind it..Polish kindness has the tiniest element of irony..I'm beginning to feel the tug of prohibition, in English, against uncharitable words. In Polish, you can call someone an idiot without particularly harsh feelings and with the zest of strong judgment. Yes, in Polish these people might tend toward silly and dull—but I force myself toward kindly and pleasant.

I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves...words in their naked state are surely among the least satisfactory play object. No, this radical disjoint between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy

the signifier has become severed from the signified...River in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. River in English is cold—a word without an aura...When I see a river now, it is not shaped, assimilated by the word that accommodates it to the psyche—a word that makes a body of water a river, rather than an uncontained element.