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Porque Tu No M’entrende? Whatcha Mean You Can’t Understand
- Temple University Press
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Ntozake Shange Porque Tu No M’entrende? Whatcha Mean You Can’t Understand Me? Before we can honestly address multiculturalism, we must address the chauvinism of the English language. Since medieval times English speakers have characterized other languages, like Italian and French, as dandified and lacking depth, or as incomprehensibly erudite, while in fact English is a greedy, swallowing language that appropriates words and gestures as an infant at the nipple sucks milk. Without examining our relationship to the English language, we cannot honestly “hear” the “other” speak, we cannot become intimate with what we do not respect. What we deem as “foreign” we cannot take to our hearts. As the Brazilian novelist Lydia Fagundes Telles notes in Girl in the Photograph, “I used to think about my people. I knew I wouldn’t go back but I kept on thinking about them so much. Like when you take a dress out of a trunk, a dress you’re not going to wear, just to look at it. To see what it was like. Afterwards one folds it up again and puts it away but one never considers throwing it away or giving it to anyone. I think that’s what missing things is.”1 The Middle Passage was not monolingual, nor were the grape and lettuce fields, the avocado and cane fields of Florida and Cuba and the Yucatan, nor the rice paddies of the Carolinas and the Philippines and Vietnam, nor the rhythm and blues songs of south central Los Angeles, nor Houston’s Vietnam town. We have not seen alone. We could not “hear.” We are strangers to the black Uruguayan voter polled on galavision, to the Asian Cuban in Machito’s beach, to the Navajo weaver imagining mud cloth as an alternative to what she’s known for so long. Yet as monolingual African Americans, we’ve turned inward in order to be able to hear ourselves outside the thunder of Sambo’s visage and the blare of the Mammy’s smile in our faces. We try to create and re-create ourselves like sixteenth-century Peruvians , as Irene Silverblatt suggests: Early hints of “Indian” identities appear in the Andes three decades after the Spanish invasion , when, in 1565, the Taqui Ongoy (Dancing Sickness), a movement of nativist re- demption, inspired women and men, kurakas and peasants in Peru’s central highlands. Signaling both the despair attending European dominion and the hope of being able to abolish it, Andean gods began to take over Andeans’ souls. Those possessed by the dancing sickness blamed the deteriorating condition of their lives (impossible labor demands and high mortality) on themselves and other natives for deserting huacas (deity, sacred place) for Christian gods. To right the wrongs of this world, the Taqui Ongoys argued, would require Andean peoples to return to their sacred traditions, to restore the sacred balance between huacas and mortals, and to renounce Christianity and all things would be turned. And their promised victory would be a total one: Spanish gods, completely routed, would disappear from the Andes and from native life.2 If we would “route” the white man and deliver ourselves from any way of naming the universe outside the English language, where would we then go? Clinton Turner Davis and Marta Vega are correct in suggesting that the Caribbean is a vital, evererupting source of our myths, our spirit guides, our tragedies and triumphs. Our rhythms survived Pizarro, Trujillo, Batista, and Pinochet as well. For we must never forget that no New World territories escaped the presence of African bondage, of the slave trade of Africans who look just like us. The danger of ignoring the unfamiliar, the exiled, the forgotten, is more than a bit of wrestling with “something missing,” it is the terror of becoming the embodiment of our own folklore set in time and not de- fined in our own terms. Perhaps the constant moving about of our people, from the continent to the Caribbean to North, South, and Central America, then Detroit, El Paso, and Nueva York or little Haiti is one of the many elements at work to save us from an inert reality, a real objectification of the “I” and “yo!” Byo no me voy. As Edward Said writes, commenting on the work of Salman Rushdie, “What happens to landless people? However you exist in the world, what do you preserve of yourselves? What do you abandon?” I find one passage particularly valuable, as it connects...