Diane Ackerman (b. 1948), poet, essayist, and naturalist, explores nature and human nature, science and art, and writes frequently about “that twilight zone” where these seemingly opposite spheres meet. The author of more than twenty volumes of poetry and nonfiction, Ackerman has received numerous awards and honors, including the Lavan Poetry Prize, the John Burroughs Nature Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship; she was honored as a “Literary Lion” by the New York Public Library in 1994. Her books of poetry include The Planets (1976), Jaguar of Sweet Laughter (1991), I Praise My Destroyer (1998), The Senses of Animals (2000), and Origami Bridges (2003). Her nonfiction includes Twilight of the Tenderfoot (1980); On Extended Wings (1987); and the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses (1990), which became the basis for a PBS series, “Mystery of the Senses,” which she hosted in 1995. Ackerman’s latest work is An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain (2004), from which her essay “We Are Our Words” was adapted for publication in Parade Magazine. She is a contributing editor to Parade and a contributor of poems and nonfiction to literary journals, periodicals, and newspapers, including the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, and the New York Times.
Ackerman has explained why she does not write fiction: “I have enormous respect for fiction, but I consider it a very high class form of lying. I like it a lot. I admire it. I’m just not very good at it. It’s not something that appeals to me to do myself. Which is not to say that nonfiction writing is any closer to the truth all the time because of course it’s subjective and you choose what you’re going to include. You can’t lie about something, but you can choose. . . .”
Babies are citizens of the world, whether they’re born into a world of high-rises or tundra, jackhammers or machine guns, Quechua or French. The ultimate immigrants, babies arrive ready to learn the language of their parents, with a brain flexible enough to adapt to any locale. Whatever language they hear becomes an indelible part of their lives, providing the words they’ll use to know and be known.
If two languages are spoken at home, they’ll become bilingual. One of my nieces is trilingual, because her Brazilian mother spoke Portuguese as well as English to her from birth, and then together they learned Italian. A bonus of bilingualism is that it forces a child to favor one set of rules while ignoring another, and that trains the brain early on to focus and discriminate, to ignore what’s irrelevant and discover the arbitrariness of words.
Learning language can begin surprisingly early, at around 6 months, when babies start to identify the special sounds of their native tongues, like the umlauted ü of German that requires a little lip pucker or the squeaky e of American English’s “street.” Long before words make sense, babies learn a circus of familiar sounds — all the exotic vowels and leaping rhythms. Before their first birthday, they can recognize a foreign language, analyze word order and memorize sentence and sound patterns in their native language. Babies the world over babble alike at first, then gradually babble in their own language. Children born deaf can babble with their hands.
But we’re not the planet’s only babblers. Some monkeys babble, which suggests that babbling evolved long before language, perhaps as a plea for affection or to summon Mom. In that case, language may have bloomed from a natural urge to babble.
Human babies learn language the way most baby birds learn their songs — by imitating grown-ups. Like birds, we have a learning window. A bird or child raised in isolation, then introduced to its song or language later in life, won’t be able to fully learn it.
There’s a prime time — the first few years — during which the brain is so plastic, so busily restructuring itself, that one can almost inhale a language. Children acquire the basic rules of grammar before they enter school, and it doesn’t matter which language or how complicated the rules. By puberty, the process requires active learning skills, repetition and hard work. Learning a language as a grown-up is heavy lifting. Language is so difficult, only children can master it.
How miraculous human language seems. But no more so than hummingbirds being born with the ability to navigate through jungles, over mountains and open seas; or bloodhounds with a talent for discriminating among thousands of odors. Because species evolve what serves them best, the ability to decipher complex rules of language is woven into our genetic suit.
We use words to label and categorize, to discern subtle differences, to group related things, to build endless lists. But also to create false divisions, false distinctions and false unities, which become possible the moment they’re put into words.
Thanks to language, we have a verbal memory that allows us to learn and remember without physically experiencing something. Through writing and other technology, we no longer have to memorize the endless fine rubble that passes for everyday life. We make lists, we take notes, we file things away. Books invite one to view another’s mind, self, suite of defining memories. Instead of straining to remember everything, we can deploy our attention (and many neurons and synapses) to toil at other jobs — coining new games and ideas, for instance.
Words can gap gushing emotions and trawl for memories. They can highlight and name things when we need perspective, and they’re excellent handles when we need to grip a slippery notion. As social beasts, we trade words with others, negotiate meanings, use words as currency.
Words form the backbone of what we think. So, although it is possible to have thought without words, it’s rarely possible to know what one thinks without bronzing it in words. Otherwise, the thoughts seem to float away. Refine the words, and you refine the thought. But that sometimes means squishing a square thought into a round hole and saying what you can instead of what you mean.
We try to remedy that by piling up words like brushstrokes in what we call descriptions or explanations or by blending images (words, paint, brushstrokes) or by adding emotional sounds to what we say.
“Please do that for me” means altogether different things if you say it pleadingly or in separate jabs. How eager humans are to complicate things. Isn’t language complicated enough? Apparently not. Every family invents its own dialect, as members bring home this or that expression from school or work and add televisionese or song lyrics to the general mix.
A separate lingo binds people, but I find another motive persuasive too: our endless need to express the sheer feel of being alive. How does the brain convey that to itself and others? Only through language, memory’s accomplice.
1. ‑Why does Ackerman call babies “the ultimate immigrants”? What aspects of language that babies pick up easily through imitation prove difficult for older humans to learn?
2. ‑Ackerman outlines a number of purposes for language. In what ways does our language define us as human beings?
3. ‑Ackerman argues that bilingualism trains a child to “favor one set of rules while ignoring another . . . to focus and discriminate, to ignore what’s irrelevant and discover the arbitrariness of words” (paragraph 2). Compare Ackerman’s perspective on language and bilingualism to Richard Rodriguez’s in “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” (page 239). How does Rodriguez exemplify the difficulties of learning a language after infancy? What is the distinction he makes between a private and a public language?
How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004), a poet, cultural theorist, essayist, and editor, used her writings to explore issues such as racism, Chicano culture, lesbianism, and feminism. In addition to writing and editing, Anzaldúa taught creative writing, literature, and feminist studies at San Francisco State University, Oakes College at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and Norwich University. She coedited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which received the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. She was also the editor of Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (1990), and coeditor of Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lore (1997). Anzaldúa coedited the collection This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002), for which she was named a 2002 Lambda Literary Award finalist. She was the author of three bilingual children’s books, Prietita Tiene un Amigo/Prietita Has a Friend (1991), Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado (1993), and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y la Ilorona (1995). Her last published writings were La Prieta (1997) and Interviews/Entrevistas (2000). Her first book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), from which “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” is taken, is a blend of poetry, memoir, and historical analysis. Anzaldúa, a native of South Texas, lived in Santa Cruz, California.
“We’re going to have to control your tongue,” the dentist says, pulling out all the metal from my mouth. Silver bits plop and tinkle into the basin. My mouth is a motherlode.
The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp. “I can’t cap that tooth yet, you’re still draining,” he says.
“We’re going to have to do something about your tongue,” I hear the anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. “I’ve never seen anything as strong or as stubborn,” he says. And I think how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?
“Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?”
— Ray Gwyn Smith1
I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess — that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for “talking back” to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. “If you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.”
“I want you to speak English. Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el inglés bien. Qué vale toda tu educación si todavía hablas inglés con un ‘accent,’” my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican. At Pan American University, I, and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents.
Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.
Overcoming the Tradition of Silence
Ahogadas, escupimos el oscuro.
Peleando con nuestra propia sombra
el silencio nos sepulta.
En boca cerrada no entran moscas. “Flies don’t enter a closed mouth” is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don’t answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back to one’s mother or father. I remember one of the sins I’d recite to the priest in the confession box the few times I went to confession: talking back to my mother, hablar pa’ ’tras, repelar. Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada. In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women — I’ve never heard them applied to men.
The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word “nosotras,” I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we’re male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.
Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia.
De La Frontera
Quien tiene boca se equivoca.
— Mexican saying
“Pocho, cultural traitor, you’re speaking the oppressor’s language by speaking English, you’re ruining the Spanish language,” I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas. Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of Spanish.
But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolución, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invención o adopción have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language.
For 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 (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves — a language with terms that are neither español ni inglés, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.
Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identify ourselves as a distinct people. We needed a language with which we could communicate with ourselves, a secret language. For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest — for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are:
1. Standard English
2. Working class and slang English
3. Standard Spanish
4. Standard Mexican Spanish
5. North Mexican Spanish dialect
6. ‑Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have regional variations)
8. Pachuco (called caló)
My “home” tongues are the languages I speak with my sister and brothers, with my friends. They are the last five listed, with 6 and 7 being closest to my heart. From school, the media, and job situations, I’ve picked up standard and working class English. From Mamagrande Locha and from reading Spanish and Mexican literature, I’ve picked up Standard Spanish and Standard Mexican Spanish. From los recién llegados, Mexican immigrants, and braceros, I learned the North Mexican dialect. With Mexicans I’ll try to speak either Standard Mexican Spanish or the North Mexican dialect. From my parents and Chicanos living in the Valley, I picked up Chicano Texas Spanish, and I speak it with my mom, younger brother (who married a Mexican and who rarely mixes Spanish with English), aunts and older relatives.
Words distorted by English are known as anglicisms or pochismos. The pocho is an anglicized Mexican or American of Mexican origin who speaks Spanish with an accent characteristic of North Americans and who distorts and reconstructs the language according to the influence of English.3 Tex-Mex, or Spanglish, comes most naturally to me. I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word. With my sister and my brother Nune and with Chicano tejano contemporaries I speak in Tex-Mex.
From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco. Pachuco (the language of the zoot suiters) is a language of rebellion, both against Standard Spanish and Standard English. It is a secret language. Adults of the culture and outsiders cannot understand it. It is made up of slang words from both English and Spanish. Ruca means girl or woman, vato means guy or dude, chale means no, simón means yes, churro is sure, talk is periquiar, pigionear means petting, que gacho means how nerdy, ponte águila means watch out, death is called la pelona. Through lack of practice and not having others who can speak it, I’ve lost most of the Pachuco tongue.
Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak. We collapse two adjacent vowels into a single syllable and sometimes shift the stress in certain words such as maíz/maiz, cohete/cuete. We leave out certain consonants when they appear between vowels: lado/lao, mojado/majao. Chicanos from South Texas pronounce f as j as in jue (fue). Chicanos use “archaisms,” words that are no longer in the Spanish language, words that have been evolved out. We say semos, truje, haiga, ansina, and naiden. We retain the “archaic” j, as in jalar, that derives from an earlier h (the French halar or the Germanic halon which was lost to standard Spanish in the 16th century), but which is still found in several regional dialects such as the one spoken in South Texas. (Due to geography, Chicanos from the Valley of South Texas were cut off linguistically from other Spanish speakers. We tend to use words that the Spaniards brought over from Medieval Spain. The majority of the Spanish colonizers in Mexico and the Southwest came from Extremadura — Hernán Cortés was one of them — and Andalucía. Andalucians pronounce ll like a y, and their d’s tend to be absorbed by adjacent vowels: tirado becomes tirao. They brought el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalismos.4)
Chicanos and other Spanish speakers also shift ll to y and z to s.5 We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, toy for estoy, hora for ahora (cubanos and puertorriqueños also leave out initial letters of some words.) We also leave out the final syllable such as pa for para. The intervocalic y, the ll as in tortilla, ella, botella, gets replaced by tortia or tortiya, ea, botea. We add an additional syllable at the beginning of certain words: atocar for tocar, agastar for gastar. Sometimes we’ll say lavaste las vacijas, other times lavates (substituting the ates verb endings for the aste).
We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from ball, carpeta from carpet, máchina de lavar (instead of lavadora) from washing machine. Tex-Mex argot, created by adding a Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such as cookiar for cook, watchar for watch, parkiar for park, and rapiar for rape, is the result of the pressures on Spanish speakers to adapt to English.
We don’t use the word vosotros/as or its accompanying verb form. We don’t say claro (to mean yes), imagínate, or me emociona, unless we picked up Spanish from Latinas, out of a book, or in a classroom. Other Spanish-speaking groups are going through the same, or similar, development in their Spanish.
Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. We are your lingistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos — we speak an orphan tongue.
Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other.
Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with suspicion and hesitation. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. Then it dawned on me. 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 diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives.
Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure. Their language was not outlawed in their countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their native tongue; generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in school, heard on radio and TV, and read in the newspaper.
If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me. Often with mexicanas y latinas we’ll speak English as a neutral language. Even among Chicanas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time, we’re afraid the others will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. A monolingual Chicana whose first language is English or Spanish is just as much a Chicana as one who speaks several variants of Spanish. A Chicana from Michigan or Chicago or Detroit is just as much a Chicana as one from the southwest. Chicano Spanish is as diverse linguistically as it is regionally.
By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S., a country where students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more “cultured.” But for a language to remain alive it must be used.6 By the end of this century English, and not Spanish, will be the mother tongue of most Chicanos and Latinos.
So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity — I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.
I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue — my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.