So
I haven’t written in my blog for awhile.
All kinds of excuses: lots of stuff going on at work, nice long
vacation, health problems. Sometimes I
think that—just maybe—I have only so many words in me in a given week or given
day. And because I am doing a lot of writing every week: sermons, lessons,
grant proposals, reports, my poetry residency at Roosevelt High School, sometimes
it feels as if I’ve run out of things to say.
That
of course, is bullshit. Like everyone
else, there is barely a limit to the words I have in store for me, both in my
brain and in the common language that we share.
Part of what has kept me from writing here is a lack of energy (which
really means a lack of commitment to summon my energy for this blog, rather
than summoning it for work, obsessing about a topic on Face Book, or TV). But I think that part of the block has been
that I’m afraid what I will write won’t be beautiful, profound or at least
funny.
That
is a trap of course. I imagine a lot of writers—and other creators—feel that
way quite often. When I am most
connected to my writing, I’m not worrying about that. The act of creating is in itself sufficient
blessing. But when I’ve been depleting
myself, my ego asserts its primacy over the creative spirit in me, and I judge
myself by how others might react to something I might write, and so I don’t
risk.
This
also is vanity and a chasing after wind (Ecclesiastes 2:17), a more
elegant way of saying this is bullshit.
So here goes: I love language, and I hate that it is more and more
under attack. By that, I mean truthful,
engaging, polysemous (look it up!) use of language. Nothing like a presidential campaign to bring
out the demons of anti-language. From Trump’s “Mexico is sending rapists” to all
of the Republicans saying climate change is not real (which is like saying math
is not real). To me, the worst of the
bunch is the claim that immigrants are bad because “they refuse to speak
American”. Which is untrue. Most immigrants strive to learn English. But
many also speak their mother tongue (and often more than two languages). Why is that a threat to people—enough of a
threat that the candidates can milk it for its fear factor?
Many people in the world are in daily contact with more than one
language. Many people move for work,
education and family reasons, and come in connection with other cultures. Many people are Socrates. (It’s a thinker, that one). A French person who knows English or Spanish
or German is not considered a threat to other French people (Arabic, yes, due
to the fear of “terrorists”, another slaughtering of our daily tongue). Vietnamese who speak English and Cantonese
have work and education possibilities beyond those who only speak Vietnamese.
Maybe it’s part of our tortured immigrant past; a ghost that will
not stay quiet. My father started
kindergarten in 1917, speaking only German.
Bad timing, dad. We were at war
with Germany, and the teacher threatened to hit any child who spoke the
“language of the enemy”. He went home crying, and his father declared “From now
on, we only speak English in this house”.
So many immigrants made similar decisions—that to be accepted as
American, one had to deny one’s culture and language, rather than add to
it.
Is it because we stripped away so much of our immigrant past,
including the beautiful languages that we brought, that we are so afraid of
people who choose not to do so? (The
irony here is that English is the most mixed up language of them all, having
incorporated words, syntax and sounds from a whole bunch of nations).
This summer, I was able to visit the grave of my grandparents in
Langdon, North Dakota. I never met my grandparents. My grandmother Anna died from complications
of childbirth when my dad was twelve, a wound that profoundly affected him and
his family. My grandfather Jacob died
while I was in the hospital as an infant with brain trauma. I heard stories from my dad of his mom, and
how she would sing to him at night in Polish or Russian. How he remembered one
word in particular she would bless over him as he went to sleep: dobri.
Good. Good boy. Good love.
Good night.
This is a poem I wrote for my grandmother, who came to this country
speaking four languages, though she had not had much schooling.
FOR ANNA
SEBASTIAN
You
brought four languages
with
your name and passport,picked from the air churning
around a Europe torn over,
never forgotten even as you
whittled your tongue down to fit
America. Erde, chleb, víz, dam.
Earth, bread, water, blood.
With
a burnt oak chest and your
memory
tight as a grave stone,you left Kalusz the year
the cemetery stopped burying,
to try your back and your will
in this new world of
osprey and buffalo,
of homesteaders and wandering
bands of railroad men, of prisons
full of money and the wishes
of beggared children.
You
told my father “All my children
will
go to college,” but you died after giving birth to the last
boy; and, that year, the barn
burnt down, and the man you had
married for love and for his thick
German hands tripped over the wounds
and fell into a deep well, where
sorrow and rage made love
in the darkness, each upon each.
Where do you converse now,
granddaughter of conversos?
Where does your spirit fall?
This air we breathe descends
back to 1907; back to farewells,
hard bread and want. I want
to call you back from my genes,
the ones that make us speak
in any tongue, the ones that look
out this morning at a leafing tree
in early spring and cry out
for a word stronger,
deeper than green.
Grandmother,
I
write to you from a century my father failed to see,
where all his children went
to grad school, where I live
with a wife and daughter from Chile,
and a daughter who descended from slaves,
where no record of you
past the town of your birth
exists on line, in a museum
or a box. Where have you
gone? Can you see that I offer you
my fingers, the dirt of city soil
under the nails, the scent
of my daughter’s hair as I bless
her onto the school bus
taking her to her bilingual world:
Tierra, pan, agua, sangre.
Dirt, bread, water, blood.
Be
beauty. Be justice. Be the language you were born.
Patrick
