1. Anzaldua disagrees with the idea that there are firm line between different languages and that speakers of different languages do not have a common reality. ” Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language “. This quote shows that even different people may speak different languages, the purpose of speaking a language is to communicate. It’s just a living language. She proves that there can be a common reality even if she speaks different languages, because she is the one speaks different languages.
2. I think Anzaldua’s style and feature in her literacy narrative is with a purpose, like “why she want to tell this story”. “To get rid of our accents… Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.” So after reading her story I think the purpose is she felt the language barriers is frustrating. But later she gives example of how she overcome it and be proud of her heritage and culture, also want people feel the same way, to arouse people’s compassion and sympathy. “Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild… Stubborn, persevering, impene-trable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain.”
3. Liao’s conventions for literacy narrative are most apparent in Sedaris’s essay as they both learn a new language from not knowing to knowing, both are confusion to fluency. But the convention that seems less important to Sedari is, Liao mentioned that “Literacy narratives both show and tell.” and need to illustrate ideas about things as a result of one’s own experiences. But in Sedaris’s essay, I can only see that she’s talking about how her French teacher is harsh for the class, and did not illustrate a lot of how she became better at understanding French. Instead, she just claims she can understand what the teacher says at the end.
4. I don’t believe she felt the same way at the end of the essay. Mansion describes silence as a tool for speak when it is unspeakable, but she doesn’t always do it because she needs to talk to friends and family. At the very end of the essay, she fell silent again, but no longer using terms like “I don’t know”, she sat down and cried, saying things were unclear, but the point was she changed the tone from “I don’t know” to “I said what I could”.
Hi Nana, thanks for your comments. I agree– Manson’s essay doesn’t end with a big dramatic change, just a new way of coping with her difficulty in expressing her emotions.