ENGL202 Blog 5 – Creative: Language’s Liberation and Enslavement

ENGL202 Blog 5 – Creative: Language’s Liberation and Enslavement

TASK: 1/ Write a poem or a short prose passage that illustrates the ways in which language can be both a prison and a release from prison.

Words can be gorgeously cruel. Cold and clean and quiet as they confirm your illness after months of blood tests and bone density scans. Words can be awfully kind. ‘I do,’ she whispers with tears shiny as the diamond on her pale, manicured hand.

Words can wind around you–a trickster crawling up your sibilant spine–a bilingual zephyr to seal your promises and read your palms. The words of her or him or them or you…oh, words play hopscotch with your hope and are the cement and soul in your thoughts. These letters–these hieroglyphs–these keys to the kingdom.

These syllables–this syllabus–these syntactic prison sentences.  

I remember my father’s ancient language; it was fast and harsh and loud. Truly musical, it sent me to sleep at night. A sad discussion with a village on the other side of the other world was my white noise machine.

Hausa is what they called it.

When I was small, I saw the language in my mind: it had a shape and a voice and a smell. The light of the garage was on, and the cup of tea was steaming, and my father’s impenetrable realm was teeming with melodic gibberish. It sounded as if he was casting spells, he rounded the worktable like chanting around a cauldron. Never had I ever felt so helpless and so fascinated. It was a secret power I had no access to.

It was the cotton candy grass on the other side the fence.