Unlocked: Poems for Critical Times (Series Two, Part Seven)

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Enslaved, colonized and migrant people lose not only their communities, cultural life and countries but often their languages as well. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote poignantly about the pain involved in using the language of the overlord, but also about the power of remodelling a colonial language - in his case Spanish - to his own linguistic and political purposes.

In Words, wounds, scars the late, much loved Nigerian-born poet Harry Garuba, whose first language was Uneme, laments the loss of his ancestral language, a “voice from another life” which only returns to him in the summoned memory of a trilling Senegalese kingfisher. The injury feels physical, a scarring of the skin. But he takes his understanding of “wounded words” to students studying English, sensitizing them to similar wounds in the poems of Irish poets Yeats and Heaney “and in the words of all speakers/Of a language they own and do not own.”

Jolyn Phillips’ poem Diglossia is explosively inventive, a verdant assemblage of words and phrases that attempt to “break tongue,” and “disguise my voice.” Nursery rhymes, colloquial English and Afrikaans, new combinations of words as well as phrases from canonical writers like Alexander Pope rise “from language graves” to battle for authority over her poetic voice. She digs them up and then buries them again, wondering, it seems, which fragments to put to use, which “to kick to pieces”.

In Xhosa lessons Beverly Rycroft rehearses with onomatopoeic precision the difficulty the speaker has in learning to speak Xhosa. The poem centres on the struggle to make new sounds, change the shape of mouth and tongue, shift “English lips” to manage the “clickety click of X.” To learn a language gives access, even if only conditionally, to a different world view and community of voices. The poem ends with an urgent and humorous appeal for luck (is the learner like wood?) and the chance to enter the realm of the exacting language: “Knock on wood./Let me in.”

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I am a collection of dismantled almosts 

– Anne Sexton 

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