WHOSE LANGUAGE IS IT ANYWAY?

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