Switching

I really like the work for this week. I felt like we got such a range of experience in it. I really like the work for Khaled Mattawa and Naomi Shihab Nye. I felt like their images and narrative were so beautifully spun together and felt to me like it truly expressed an experience that I didn’t have access to. There was also something about David Dominguez and Sheryl Luna that intrigued me as well, particularly Luna’s poem Learning to Speak.

On the surface Luna talks about not being able to speak Spanish because she choose not to speak it and how embarrassing and humiliating it is to not be able to speak a language that you feel culturally obligated to know, “My brown skin a scandal on the hard streets of El Paso.” (165). Under the surface Luna shows the reader how language can orient a person outside of both the society they wish to be apart of and that which they wish to leave behind. The narrator has a connection to the memory of having a closer connection to the Spanish speaking community that she covered over with speaking English:
“Years of English rumbled something absent, forgotten.
The Tigua Indian Village, men at the corner bench eating

tamales. Indoors, tables with white Formica,
floor-tiles peeling. In the steam of cilantro and tomato

children sit cross-legged and sip caldo de res.
Men smoke afterward in faded jeans and t-shirts lightly rise

around their pecs in the wind. It is how home is all
that’s left in the end. The way we all return forever exiled.”

What really stands out for me obviously are the lines “Years of English rumbled something absent” and “The way we all return forever exiled.” After learning English, it seems as though the connection to the Spanish speaking society of Tigua Indian Village becomes covered over, possibly with the desire to completely integrate into the English speaking society. What is interesting to me about this is that the narrator cannot be completely removed from the original society she can only cover it over. Being placed in a situation in which she meets someone who requires the original societal information she does have some access to the memory but she cannot switch as easily as she might like as we see with the line “The way we all return forever exiled.” While the memory and some cultural understand of what is required on her part is available for her, her code switching skills are not as easily accessible because she never allowed herself to be completely integrated in the Spanish speaking community. The narrator says quite plainly “I spoke/ Spanish broken, tongue-heavy. I was once too proud/ to speak Spanish in the barrio.”

To me this brings up the question of how a person is able to connect with community. By trying to use English only and separating herself from the Spanish community the narrator seems to be able to get by in the English speaking community. We do not have an indication that she is not able to traverse the English-speaking world but we can infer by the fact that she has brown skin that she still maintains a marginalized status as most minorities do, whether or not they speak the language. The narrator has not, however, learned the art of code switching, which is essentially the ability to change one’s language from community to community. Its code switching that allows us to move seamlessly from life at school if you’re a student to life at home where you may speak differently. Code switching to me is all about placement in society. If you are able to code switch you have access to numerous societies but mostly on the outskirts do to things like accents or miss use of words. However, in ability to code switch leaves the narrator outside one society and on the outskirts of another. It’s interesting how little value the U.S. as a society places on language (take for instance on the grammar that is changing simply because people have trouble remembering how it works) and yet it is one of the most important tools in how we determine who is accepted into society. Not only is there an expectation that people speak English but also that they speak a certain kind of English and with out any indication that you speak another language.

The other thing that I found interesting in this poem was the sense of longing that the narrator has looking at the man. “His eyes generations” of Spanish speaking identity and the privilege of belonging completely to one culture which the narrator cannot make the choice to do. “He smiles. Blue hills/in the distance sharpen in an old elegance; the wind/hushes itself after howling the silences.” We can see the desire to have a connection to one place, one cultural representation in this final moment. But there is also this longing in the fact that she whispers her desire to learn Spanish. This humiliation at being forced to say it but this longing to have the desire to respect the want as well. She wants to belong to one culture completely but knowing that she can’t, she will take on the task of learning to code switch instead.