Academic English is often antagonistic to writing with whije:’.[1] Writing with my spirit
is just one of the many lessons bell hooks has taught me. English tried to break the spirit of my ancestors; it was forced into their minds to separate them from what made them Na:tinixwe.[2] As a direct result of this violence, I am not yet a fluent speaker of Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe. I write this for, and with hooks, in a manner she yearned for—in my language, the words handed down to me through love and survival. I write to break the boundaries of academic English, imagining and enacting ways of knowing and being outside of the colonial structures we struggle against.
I have been disciplined to write in academic English. I struggle to find my voice in academic writing. English is detrimental to so many communities; yet few works I had access to as a graduate student spoke to such truth. “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words” was transformative for me, as it allowed me to transfigure my relationship to language and the world.
Dikyung[3] I want us to focus on the power structures hooks articulated. Let us heed and expand
her call for Black and Indigenous[4] peoples and our languages to come together to create
(re)new(ed)[5] worlds outside and against those structures that continue to target our people.
Like hooks, “I can’t hear standard English without hearing conquest” (1994, 169), so, I’m constantly questioning the language I was trained to use and trying to learn the language that I was denied. It’s so overwhelming and crushing how hard it is to learn the language of my people, but I know it’s not my fault nor the fault of whita’,[6] who didn’t have the words to speak to me. Nor is it the fault of which’in[7] or whima’uchwing[8] who aimed to protect him[9] from the violence they endured for speaking our ancestral tongue. This essay was really one of the first times I saw someone reflect on the language they spoke and orient that in time, space, ancestors, violence, and a yearning for liberation. Hooks writes: “I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize” (1994, 169). Just as colonizers take over the land and bodies, they also take over the language and use it as a weapon. English then, as hooks continues, “is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear” (1994, 168). English hides the daily violence against ancestral tongues that colonizers enact. Simultaneously, we must acknowledge the global movement for language revitalization to ensure that these languages are heard once again. We must recognize the vast worlds and worldviews that these languages hold.
So how might we combine hooks’s call to enact and expand the revolutionary potential
of the Black vernacular and other ruptured Englishes of oppressed peoples with tapping into the ancestral knowledge found in ancestral tongues? For me this essay alleviates much of the tension that we think might be in this question. Hooks helps us to reframe such discussions of colonized/colonizer’s language abstractly and pushes us to connect it to the importance of the people that are using it. She encourages us to recognize that the languages Black and Indigenous peoples speak today is a direct result of and in “unbroken connection” with our ancestors’ languages and their actions to ensure our survival to fight on today. We must show up to honor them by continuing to use their languages, both our remade English and reclaimed ancestral tongues. It is in these spaces that we can create and recreate ways of knowing and being that continue to challenge and rupture colonial structures. It is the oppressors and their use of standard English that continues to punish and limit our work. How are we missing opportunities to truly be able to speak, listen, hear, and respond to one another unmediated by such limits when we use standard/academic English? Indigenous and Black communities have had to learn English as a means of survival, and by doing so, we have bent, broke, created, and recreated this language to propel our survival forward. Hooks writes, “Needing the oppressor’s language to speak with one another they nevertheless also reinvented, remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination” (1994, 170). Through this rupturing and remaking of English, we can see the liberatory potential to rupture the existing colonial structure and remake a world against and outside such oppression. Let us (re)build world(s) based in reciprocal relationships to one another and other living beings, world(s) based in the relationality, creativity, and love found in Black and Indigenous languages.
Language is the first site of struggle that we often overlook. Hooks continues, “The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for…different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counterhegemonic worldview” (1994, 171). She encourages us to take up the “revolutionary potential” of the Black vernacular and push it forward in our work, especially in academic spaces where standard English is forced the most. I encourage us to also take up the revolutionary potential of Indigenous languages and imagine what great possibilities bringing these alternative epistemologies together would produce. I ask us to reflect on the ways we are limiting the liberatory potential of our work by trying to make it legible to a wide academic audience rather than creating counterhegemonic spaces of intimacy where we can “touch” one another and create relationships, ways of being, and worldmaking outside and against where we are now. Let us center language as the first site of struggle and, to end with the words of hooks, “make our words a counterhegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language” (1994, 175).
Reference
hooks, bell. 1994. “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words.” In Teaching to Transgress, 167-175. New York, NY: Routledge.
[1] This can be translated as my spirit, heart, state of mind, or epistemology.
[2] I always carry my Shinnecock people and ancestors with me as well. We were robbed of our language
through this same process. However, because I am primarily learning Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe at this moment, I focus on those words in this essay.
[3] This can be translated both as this time and place.
[4] Black and Indigenous of course centers the voices of Black-Indigenous peoples and communities.
[5] I use (re)new(ed) here to signal the vitality of Indigenous language renewal that then leads to world renewal that challenges colonial notions of linear time and progress.
[6] This means my father.
[7] This means my paternal grandmother.
[8] This means my paternal grandfather.
[9] I reference my father here, but this includes protecting me as well.