Speak Truth to Power...but in what language?

I lack imagination you say

No. I lack language.
The language to clarify
my resistance to the literate.
Words are a war to me.
They threaten my family.

To gain the word
to describe the loss
I risk losing everything.
I may create a monster
the word's length and body
swelling up colorful and thrilling
looming over my mother, characterized.
Her voice in the distance
unintelligible illiterate.
These are the monster's words.

Poem by  Cherrie Moraga                                                          

I took a writer's workshop yesterday morning and this poem was one of the pieces we looked at. It resonated deeply with me. Why? Because it speaks to a condition that I and many others find ourselves in: the inability to fully express what we feel due to the lack of vocabulary in a beloved secondary language, becoming more popularly known as your Mother Tongue. The context of the above poem is a Spanish speaker finding voice in an English speaking world. As an Afropolitan I completely relate to it. I hold onto my native culture the best I can but, like many, I don’t speak my Mother Tongue as fluently as I would like and thus must rely on alien vernaculars to communicate the stories and perspective of the people I want to honor most. Even when someone does speak their Mother Tongue fluently the need to use a more prominent language to engage with the masses of this society threatens the relevancy and resolve of your Mother Tongue. In placing prominence over your "mother" we become unable to verbalize "the loss" in terms of our own choice, creating a "monster" of foreign words that terrorize our intentions.

"Language is power but we all know we live in a world that doesn't distribute power equally", Jan Clausen, Jan Clausen the facilitator of the workshop said. And I asked, "Is gaining more power synonymous with gaining more language?" Simply put, do I need to use the language of power to tell my people's story, to empower the ones I love so dearly? What is the risk to my Mother Tongue in doing so? It would seem I would distance myself from the very people I want to get closer to. It would seem I would get closer to the very people I wanted to distance myself from.

 
This conversation reminds me of Ngugui Wa Thiong'o , the Kenyan writer who deliberately chose to stop writing in English any longer and started to publish in his own native language, Gĩkũyũ. I highly regard this political and sociological shift as a gesture of faith and encouragement to Mother Tongue’s everywhere. Yet I often wonder what about those who never had a choice in using their native language or not, but would still like to say something positive, something organic about the Kenyans, the Africans, the world of "the others"? Talib Kweli once rapped "writing is fighting" and I hands-down agree with this statement when in the right context. I just wonder that if you are writing in English and fighting for the non-English then who are you really fighting? Who are you defeating?  

This is a complex issue that cannot be answered in a simple blog post. The poem inspired a response so I wrote one. Here. If anything it is interesting food for thought for the language lovers out there who contemplate the role of language on cultural identity. I guess, to paraphrase Kweli again, "Knowledge of Self" is the key to empowerment....no matter what language you speak.