A Secret Language

Gloria Anzaldua, in Borderlands, describes her position as an ‘in-between’ who belongs to a community existing at the border of Mexico and the USA. Her inbetweenness is not only evident through the struggles of belonging that she describes but also through the way she narrates them. Anzaldua presents a mixture of prose and poetry. She does not stick to one form just like she does not use a single language to explain her experience. Anzaldua’s chapter, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” describes how as a Chicano woman, her language became a “synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness” (63). Her accent, pronunciation, and vocabulary were different from both Mexicans and Americans. The borderland had a language of its own and this language became a signifier of her difference. At home, she was considered not Spanish enough, and in school she was asked to speak in proper English. This led to a “kind of dual identity” which “internalized the borderland conflict” in a way that at times, Anzaldua felt that one identity cancelled out the other, leaving her as “nothing” and “no one” (63). The power of language and how it is able to create and represent identity is what was most striking in this text; Anzaldua shows that one needs to take ownership of language to be truly free. It resonates with me because a similar kind of juxtaposition of languages is happening with Urdu and English in postcolonial Pakistan.

Anzaldua refers to a “tradition of silence” which all marginalized people are forced to follow. She starts with an example of language being “a male discourse” (54). As a woman, she had always been taught that “well bred girls don’t answer back” (54). Some words in her language were only “derogatory if applied to women” and some words did not even have a feminine plural. It was not only that women were silenced because of cultural norms that associated silence with good breeding, but also the language itself gave them no words to speak. Anzaldua thus shows that language is molded by whoever is in power. It is a male discourse, and a white male discourse at that.

When the white man’s language is spoken by anyone who is not of the same race, it can be seen in a few ways. One way to look at it is to see it as the white man’s victory because he has been successful in enlightening the less intellectual beings. Another way, the one I think Anzaldua too proposes, is to see it as the colored person’s reclamation of power. If one establishes that the white man’s language is the language of power, whoever makes use of it should be understood as exercising that power. Chicano Spanish is the language spoken by the people on the peripheries who are otherized by their colored peers. One reason they speak both English and Spanish is because of their location. Another is that they feel powerless when they are rejected by both sides of the border. They speak the languages that they consider their own but that have been used as a tool oppression against them in order to empower themselves. These multilingual people then codeswitch and form a new “forked tongue,” a “secret language” (55). By creating the Chicano Spanish, these people took ownership of both the languages by molding them in their ways. It helped them communicate and gave them the sense of belonging which neither English nor Spanish could. This language consisted of “archaisms” of Spanish language as well as “anglicisms” which resulted from the English language being imposed on Spanish speakers. In this way, it had the essence of both the languages.

However, Anzaldua mentions how even then, these people were constantly reprimanded. They were blamed for “speaking the oppressor’s tongue by speaking English” or for speaking “poor” and “illegitimate” Spanish (55, 58). These attacks diminish their “sense of self” (58) and force them to prove to one another who the real Chicano person is, not recognizing the fact that “there is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience” (58).

This chapter on language is relevant to postcolonial states as reclaiming language is a part of the decolonizing project. If we take Pakistan as an example, and consider the imposition of the English language in the subcontinent, we can still see how people here are trying recover from the colonial hangover. The people here are multilingual and they too codeswtich between English and their local languages in daily conversation. The language spoken in Pakistan isn’t simply Urdu or Punjabi or any other regional language. It is a mixture of the local language and the colonizer’s language and it has become to norm across classes. Every now and then, someone on social media points out how sentences like “She was karing this (doing this)” with both English and Urdu words are funny. People view them as a joke. I propose, they are not a joke. They are, as seen through Anzaldua, a way of reclaiming power by reclaiming language.

Lastly, Aznzaldua also mentions how she would rather write without having to translate her words. In this chapter, she uses many Spanish phrases and she translates most of them because she is writing for an English speaking reader. This reminded me of Moni Mohsin’s The Diary of a Social Butterfly which is a novel of fiction and warrants no comparison to Anzaldua’s work except that Mohsin uses codeswitching and writes the entire novel in a language only decipherable to those who not only speak English and Urdu but also are familiar with the grammatical norms through which they’re juxtaposed. Anzaldua seems to be reaching towards a similar kind of goal; she wants to be herself unapologetically and rightfully points out that language plays a key role in doing so. Until she is able to achieve this kind of decolonization and freedom, she acknowledges that she will be bound and her language will be considered illegitimate.