New Language New Lifestyle

I sat in room 207, more uncomfortable than ever. It was the first day of second grade and I was surrounded by people who spoke a different language from me. I said hi and smiled, they did the same but it never went further than that. All of my friends were in my class. Thalia, Jennifer, Aminda, Zoe and I were the only fluent english speakers in the class. Ms. Zondek had told us to try our hardest to communicate with the other kids who only spoke Mandarin. In the middle of classes ESOL kids would ask us for help on pronouncing words or what the homework was. It was harder than I ever would have thought to keep your patience when speaking to a person who can’t understand a word of what you’re saying.  Luckily, Ms. Zondek had us covered most of the time. I had a hard time keeping my cool when one of the ESOL kids would say something completely wrong and it was just straight up hilarious.

Laughing at their mistakes made me feel terrible. I knew exactly what it was like to not fit into a group, a community even. Like the quote from I Just Wanna Be Average “you’re placed into a system that isn’t designed to liberate you but occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train you”(166). In that quote I realized how hard it must have been for all of those non-english speaking kids who had no idea what me and my friends would be laughing at or what in the world our teacher was talking about. Instead they had to sit in their seats at lunch, doing extra work to improve their english skills. I only knew they stayed up at lunch because one time I had to stay up and help one of them. All lunch period all I could think about was how I wished I could be outside playing with my friends. While I was helping Pu Chen with his writing assignment on frogs I discovered the fact that these kids stayed up here on purpose. I had so many other thoughts in my tiny second grade mind. Like how upsetting it must be for these kids to stay up and watch us go out every single day while they stay in so they can get better at what I’ve known almost my whole life.

Lucky for me, that day was a day we got to go to the cybrary to pick out books for the weekend. I made a bee-line to the culture section and picked out a book about Mandarin while the rest of my friends were in the fiction section picking which Junie B. Jones book they’d each get. I checked out my book with Ms. Phillips and sat down at an empty table. My head filled up with new words and characters so fast that I finally got the full effect of how hard it is to learn a whole new language from scratch. Like in How To Tame A Wild Tongue the narrator says “for a people who are neither spanish nor live in a country in which spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which english is the reigning tongue but who are not anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard spanish nor standard english, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?”(55). Now, if you switch Spanish with Mandarin, it’s a perfect example of how secluded you can feel when everyone else knows what’s going on but you. Speaking a different language can put your mind in a whole different place, a place where you’re your own anchor. However, at some point that anchor needs to be brought up so you can continue to explore the world you never thought you’d know.

This piece of writing reflects on how I was able to use language to express myself in ways that I couldn't before. I was introduced to a new way to put what I was feeling into words, this was a big turning point in my life that allowed me to understand myself and the world around me in a new way.

Essay:

His name was Bukowski, Charles Bukowski, and he changed the way that I would write for the rest of my life. He was truly insane, a crazy man, but every word he spoke, every verse he wrote was pure poetry, a reflection on mankind that was almost as if he were watching the movement of the world from up above and spat out what he saw. The depressive way that he wrote could also reflect all of the pain that he felt through his life, as if he were baring his soul to us the reader, and then telling us all to go fuck ourselves. I loved it from the first moment, from the first words I heard, “There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going, to let anybody see you” from the screen as a montage of images were shown in front of me, with an old voice reading the heart wrenching words of a dead man.

“Who is this person? Who wrote this?” I immediately asked. I had never heard writing like this before, I had never felt a poem wrap it's cold, calloused hands around me before. Poetry had always been a chore to me, some assignment that a teacher would hand you and tell you to write your heart on the page, and I never knew what that really meant until now. That night I went home and read through every word that he had written, every thought that he had was now trapped rumbling around in my head. I was then convinced, I was convinced that I could be just like him, I could write just like Bukowski.

I decided to take a try at writing poetry. I let the words play over and over in my head like a broken record, lines kept repeating in my head until I could find the right way to express all of the pain that I had felt, I wanted to put myself into my words just like he had. So I wrote, letting the words flow out of me, and it felt like I had discovered something that I had never known was inside of me. A new medium of expression that allowed me to tell the world how I felt, a way to put the isolating feeling lingered over top of me for years into the minds of those who read my words.

“So you want to be a writer,” he said. “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut, don’t do it. If you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen, or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it.” Now I knew what Bukowski meant when he said this, that the only way you could be a true writer is if you have something to say, if you have the emotion to put into it, or the true desire to put your words into the minds of people. There are so many people out there who are writing for the wrong reasons, they want to feel the satisfaction of knowing that they have the deepest or most powerful words, but those who can put the most meaning into their words are not the people who want to write, but the people where all they can do is write, all they have is their words.

There are so many people today who have extensive stories to tell, people who have felt pain, but who don’t have the words to express it like I did. The fact that people all over the world are incapable of reading and writing is a horror, because I know that by using words I was able to find a way to express myself, and I couldn’t imagine an existence where I couldn’t. It is like being trapped in your own head, your body constantly feeding off of your pain until there you have nothing left. No way to release the growling beast inside that could make you one of the greats.

So as I think back over his words, what it seemed like he was saying directly to me. “There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.” These words that are scattering throughout my head, eating away at me, and as I look for my response, I write:

If my heart could speak

Its every word would be stifled by your loud screams,

Your insatiable need to be heard by everyone in the room,

Though you don’t have a word to say.

As you fill the room with nonsense that no one wants to hear,

I sit in the corner,

Unheard and undesired,

And though you interrupt every word that anyone has to say,

I let you go on because,

If my heart could speak,

I wouldn’t say a word.   

             “ Wild tongues can't be tamed they can only be cut out.”-  How to tame a wild tongue.

               Many times in my life I have been criticized for the way I speak. Either I speak ¨ too white¨ or  I speak ¨ too ghetto¨ which I assume means black. I never understood how one's speech could reflect their entire race, let alone an entire other race. All my life I have been trying to find a balance in my speech that made other people comfortable talking to me when I never focused on making myself comfortable with the way I speak.

 It all started in first grade, a very innocent time in my life. At that age, a child is very vulnerable and easily influenced so what I heard changed me forever.

¨ Deja talks W-H-I-T-E ¨

           This was coming from one of the teachers in my class. I went home and told my mom because I didn't know what that specifically  meant.

¨ Mom do I talk W-H-I-T-E? ¨ I asked her.

“ White?  You talk white Deja?” She asked

This is a moment that I believe really shaped my speech. It was the moment when I realized the clear difference in myself from other people in my race. I didn't know I was different until I was pointed out that I was. Being raised in Rhode Island took a heavy toll on me.My family and I were the only black members in the community so I wasn’t exposed to my black culture very much. The only people who were around me were white so that's the culture I had to cling on to for the time being. I was at a very impressionable age so the things I saw and heard, I mimicked which in time reflected on the way I spoke. I followed by the examples I had.

        I was ashamed after that. At the age of six  years old I already lost myself cultural wise. I knew at this point I would have to change. That somehow I would have to become somebody else in order to fit in with everyone else.

¨ You sound like such a hoodrat ¨

             Flashing forward eight  years to me at fourteen years old in eighth grade . It took eight years of me learning and growing into what I believed was my culture. I had evolved in my speech. I began to sound like everyone else around me. I no longer sounded “white”. I would mispronounce words and phrases  purposely to sound like what I thought at the time was cool. My friends and I didn't realize the way we were speaking was damaging our images. Now we sounded exactly how everyone expected us to. Loud and uneducated. This comment was made to me by a classmate as a joke but I didn´t take it that way. Once again, I was put in a position where I was questioning myself and my speech. I was reminded about the way I felt all those years ago after being told I ¨ talk white¨ now I talk ¨ too hood¨. I couldn´t win . “ I've never seen anything as strong or as stubborn”.- How to tame a wild tongue.

               There was a point in my life where I was ¨too white¨ for the black kids and ¨ too black ¨ for the white kids. I was stuck in the in between. I was lost and i didn't know how to be found. Eventually I found myself in my speech. I had to blend all the things I know and heard to create something new. It was a new me. I realized in order to be accepted by everyone you must first accept yourself. ¨ If you didn't grow up like I did then you don´t know and if you don´t know then it's probably better you don´t judge.¨ This quote is from the story Wildwood and it perfectly explains what I went through. I was constantly judged for the way I spoke by people who didn't understand why I spoke the way I spoke. They didn't know anything about where I come from or how I was raised. I feel like based on people's  judgements of me and me trying to fit it with everyone else I lost myself. I was so wrapped up in trying to become someone I wasn't I never got a chance to find out who I could be. In life it's either you're making others happy or making yourself happy. Now I choose myself.

“Look, maybe there’s another way we can settle this! Isn’t this going a little too far?”

“Just hearing you talk makes me want to smash your face in!”

He served a firm strike to my lower abdomen. A gasp for air ended up becoming a gag, which transformed into a ball of saliva and today's lunch exiting my mouth almost forcefully. It hit the ground and splashed over the circulation of the feet around me. As his grip on my jacket loosened, the “flight” response in my head had overtaken my body, and I ended up home in less than a minute.

I reached for the handle as I heard my dad talking continuously with someone over the phone. I wanted to get inside as quickly as possible to tell him what had happened. I wanted him to know so he could be the father I dreamed of. The kind whose muscles bursted out of their shirts when they heard that their son had been bullied by a group of kids. I was excited to see that side of my dad for the first time. I burst through the door, my body aching from my previous endeavours.

“Yeah, I know! My son sounds like a real white man! Now all he needs is a-”

The sound of my dad was interrupted with the slam of our front door. I stepped inside, soaking wet with rain and vomit covering my body. Every breath heaved at my chest, dragging me down into the futon.

“Hey there, Sam. How was your day? Oh, yeah! Your grandma’s calling us from the plant! Come say hi!”

My grandparents worked in a plant in the Port of Tianjin. They grew up in a world filled with those like themselves, and didn’t know the world for what it was. They could only gain a few glimpses of outside reality from specific examples of media. Their views of race and social status were influenced solely on that. And it rubbed off onto everyone who they have connected themselves to, and it spread like wildfire. Their indifference to language shows how much they actually know about it.

“Hi, Grandma”, I said unenthusiastically. My breathing was often interrupted by hard whooping coughs from the pulsing of my lower body from the massive blow I received earlier.

“Oh my goodness! You sound like a ‘man’ now, huh?”, she chuckled.

My dad held in his cackling handed the phone back to my dad, clutched my bag handle, and headed upstairs in the blink of an eye. In that moment, the events that I believed I could escape at school stalked and fixed itself to my own house. I couldn’t escape the cryptic descriptions of the way I talk. The thought of ripping out my vocal reeds from my throat spun around my head until I fell asleep. “Tomorrow will be better”, I thought to myself, trying to flee the position than the voice gods had put me in. I was in a hell that caused me to be someone I'm not. Someone who I don't want to be.

“The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense work.” Adapting to the places that you are in is the only only way out of situations that you don’t want to be in. You have to attempt to make amends with a new persona to add to your arsenal if you don't feel  comfortable in a certain location. You'll have to shut down. You’ll have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm. You’ll have to “cultivate stupidity.” “You’ll have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world.”

INTRO

This essay allowed me to dive into a deeper part of writing. As I wrote this I had to challenge myself writing so that I could make my transition somewhat smoother and more understandable. Writing in English with a Portuguese mindset can be slightly difficult. My goal of this essay was to explain my experience trying to find my true language. I am proud to have properly finished this. I was hitting roadblock after roadblock, however, I was able to go around these roadblocks and continue on with the writing. This Essay has taught me that there are different ways to writing. I wish to learn ways to properly write more difficult things that are understandable.

ESSAY

There is no such thing as correct literacy. The correct literacy is the literacy that you are most comfortable with. This is something that I tell myself every time before I speak today, however, I wish I told myself this years ago. I remember sitting in the front of my class willing to learn every English word that I could. My mind was a black hole that devoured knowledge at every chance.  One way that I would try to expand my knowledge of the English language, would be by comparing the sounds of the English words to the Portuguese words, and seeing if it sounded the same. Of course, this didn't always work, however, it provided huge support to my younger self in lust for knowledge and improvement.

Thankfully, my hard work not only improved my English, but it also allowed my little brain to keep up with my Portuguese as well. However, not everyone was fond of my way of learning and my way of speaking.  As I would try to sound it out loud in class, the teacher would always lose her temper, “You are disrupting the class! Please speak English!” She would say with an annoyed look as she turned the question to someone else. I never understood how trying to learn was disrespectful, or why it was a bad thing. I was also powerless as I was just a student. In chapter two of Freire’s “Pedagogy of the oppressed”, he states, “The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined” So many teachers let this get into their heads, which causes them to be ignorant to their student’s opinions as if they expect them to be stupid.

Maybe she felt threatened, that I went against her beliefs. She expected me to be like the other students in the classroom who answer questions like mindless zombies and were never willing to learn.

After diligently learning English, I was finally able to answer the questions without disrupting the class. As time went on, I spoke English full time and I began to neglect Portuguese as if it was something I no longer needed. The only other person who spoke Portuguese was my mother, however, she was always at work, therefore, I had no one to speak to in Portuguese adding salt to the wound. It almost felt like Portuguese was becoming my second language. All of my memories, dreams, and cultures, were quickly being dubbed to English like a foreign movie trying to appeal to the American audience.

That summer I visited my family members back in Brazil. Something strange happened. One of my cousins said something that I just couldn't understand. “Pivete” What is that? I asked myself. I felt lost and alienated as I was unable to understand what they were saying. The word, “Pivete” threw me off completely making me completely unable to understand anything else. In the book, How To Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua, at page 54 she says, “The first time I hear two Puerto Rican women and a Cuban say the word, “Nosotras” I was shocked. I did not know the word existed.” This relates perfectly to me. Neglecting Portuguese Caused me to completely forget the basics. It felt like I was pulling my own roots from the ground.

I was so focused on learning English that I forgot about my own language. Or was it my language? As I tried to continue speaking to my cousins, like deja vu something happened. My heart raced, “Did I just said an English word while speaking Portuguese?” I began to sweat profusely. My biggest fear was being labeled an “Americano” or a “Gringo.”  I was ashamed. I was so angry that I allowed myself to stray from my roots and focus on something else. Was this my own fault? This quote from How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua at page 56 perfectly answered my endless questions, “What recourse is left to them but to create their own language?” It wasn't my fault.

My language wasn't the same language that all of these people were speaking. Neither it was the language that my teacher spoke. It was the language I was comfortable with. The language I created. After a while, I began to care less and I began to embrace my new language. I was no longer looking for the language that fitted me best, I had it within me all along. Gloria Anzaldua perfectly touches upon this at page 54 oh How to Tame a Wild Tongue, “My home “tongue” are the languages I speak with my sister and brothers, and friends.” The shame was no longer there and my language became the one I understood and felt comfortable with them most. The language my friends and family are used to. My own language.