Monolingualism vs. Bi/Multilingualism
In "Tongue Tied", a work of staggering genius and full of compassionate poetry and prose from the perspective in support of bilingual education, author Otto Santa Ana writes that "The ideology of 'monolingualism' provides a false excuse to blame these children for their educational circumstances…(teachers) easily succumb to an unspoken misconception: the smartest child in the room is the language and the dialect of the teacher." (p.4). Kai Davis, and countless other non-English-speaking or non-standard-English speaking students know intuitively: the pre/mis-conception that these children are not just as brilliant as every other kid in their own way becomes, as Santa Ana says "creates a self-fulfilling prophecy". Someone once said it is easier for the confused kid to be the bad kid than to be the dumb kid, and far more socially acceptable in America, and so we have inner city schools here that are filled with so-called "bad kids". Ironically, according to a National Public Radio report on May 14, 2013, "The Latino high school dropout rate has fallen by half over the past decade – from 28% in 2000 to 14% in 2011" (http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/05/14/183813129/Latino-High-School-Grads-Enter-College-At-Record-Rate ). Stereotypes seem often to be based on anecdotal evidence rather than statistical analysis. In "Bilingualism in the USA", the authors assert that "bilingualism is a normal condition that affects people around the globe – there is no urban society that is untouched…(and) the U.S. may need to reconsider preconceived notions of language and culture in the light of the nation's true multilingual history" (p.290-1). In the final words from NPR's report, Latinos "are the future of our country".
In a poem called "Healing Earthquakes", by Jimmy Santiago Baca, he relates how when he was a kid he experienced terrible racism towards his grandfather because of English language deficiency. He writes in this patchwork of excerpts:
(p. 166)
My behavior shattered
By outsiders who came
To my village one day
Insulting my grandpa because he couldn't speak
English
English –
The invader's sword
The oppressor's language
That hurled me into profound despair…
(p. 167)
Me porto bien, Grandpa,
Grandpa,
Your memory
Leafing my heart
Like the sweetly fragrant sage…
(p. 168)
The world was never the same
Because it was the first time
I had ever experienced racism,
How it killed people's dreams, and during all of it
My grandfather said, Portate bien, mijo,
Behave yourself, my son, Portate bien.
(in "Tongue Tied", p.166, 167, 168)
Here, the metaphor of the sword reminds me of Conquistadores coming to the Americas, and leaving all of Latin America speaking the Spanish language ever since. The introduction of the Grandfather's Spanish, however, reminds me that a new conquerer has arrived to cut the metaphorical tongue from the old man's mouth: now he must speak English, and yet in his hesitation he is called "dumb". This is the same way many Chicano-Latinos have been treated in school. The complacency of behaving gives rise to anger, and I am more inclined to fight for dignity for the elder, rather than be complicit in the invisible prison into which he seems locked. Juan Felipe Herrera wrote
Lissen
To the whistle of night – bats
"Oye Como Va?" . . .
Jut out to sea, once again – this slip
Sidewalk of impossible migrations. Poesy mad
& Chicano-style undone wild.
Language escapes me. Passion is smoke.
I dissolve.
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241376)
Martin Espada, another poet anthologized frequently in school textbooks, uses the haunting image of the sword as well. In a self portrait poem from his own website (http://martinespada.net/My_Name_is_Espada.html) he recounts the images self-associated with his surname:
Espada: sword in el Caribe,
Rapier tested sharp across the bellies of indios, steel tongue
Lapping blood like a mastiff gorged on a runaway slave,
God gleaming brighter than the god nailed to the cross,
Forged at the anvil with chains by the millions
Tangled and red as the entrails of demons.
Espada seems to recount the horrors of the Spanish attack on native peoples in the Caribbean, blaming the same God who inspired them, and twisting the images like eviscerated intestines he describes as possessed by demons. Even in his allusion to the Mastiffs, great dogs whose size and ferocity were used by the Romans and Spaniards to keep enemies at bay, and even worse, to hunt slaves, mix the very physical with the spiritual. He continues:
Espada: sword in Puerto Rico, family name of bricklayers
Who swore their trowels fell as leaves from iron trees;
Teachers who wrote poems in galloping calligraphy;
Saintcarvers who whittled a slave's gaze and a conqueror's beard;
The personal in Espada's poetry ("family name") is again juxtaposed with the terrifying symbol of the sword, the image of the bricklayers and their trowels awakening our sense of labor and work and sweat and toil, but also the physical aurality of the trowels falling and hitting the ground. And can calligraphy gallop like a horse? The Spanish conquistadores brought horses to the Americas to rise up greater than the indigenous peoples, the slaves whose faces are just as much a part of the sculptor's art as the slave masters. He finishes with a return to the by now mythic image of the sword:
The slave of the saber riding a white horse by night
Breathe my name, tell me to taste my name: Espada.
(http://martinespada.net/My_Name_is_Espada.html )
This sensory overload touches on the breath and taste of an invisible journey: our own names, and the search to understand ourselves. We attempt to drive language like a vehicle, but it is not always the one who drives us onward like we are passengers; instead, we are language, and we are also the continuous journey, from Spanish to English, and back to Spanish again, as we take ownership of the language of our oppressors, seeking always to own our own voice.
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