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According to one theory of language, there are firm lines between different languages, and different languages (say, English and Spanish) represent entirely different universes, whose speakers cannot share a common reality. Describe why Anzaldua disagrees. Find a quotation or idea in the essay that supports your argument.
Anzaldua disagrees that there are firm lines between different languages because she speaks different types of Spanish with other people. If she believed that other languages represent entirely different universes, she wouldn’t have explained the seven different types of Spanish that she speaks with people. Anzaldua said, “I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence and the same word” when speaking to different people (72 JTC). She also explains that she says “Tex-Mex” with her siblings and “pachuco” with people her age. This demonstrates that there is no one firm dialect for each language and that people can mix different languages to communicate with each other instead of creating barriers. These various languages were created for people to communicate with others that don’t share the same language as them, which shows that people can share a common reality without having to speak the same language.
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Describe Anzaldua’s style in her literacy narrative in your own words. Why do you think Anzaldua chose this style? Find a quotation or idea in the essay that supports your argument.
Anzaldua uses both English and Spanish throughout her narrative to give readers an oversight of her culture. Anzaldua mentions that she “walked around in a stunned amazement that a Chicano could write and could get published,” which led me to believe that the first Chicano novel she read, City of Night, was her inspiration to write a bilingual narrative (74 JTC). She incorporated both English and Spanish in her literacy narrative to prove that a bilingual tongue is legitimate. Having an accent and not speaking “perfect” English didn’t mean that your voice shouldn’t be heard. She mentions that “Chicano students were required to take two speech classes” to fix their accents (69 JTC). This is invalidating bilingual students, and throughout her narrative, Anzaldua proved that bilingual people are valid. At the beginning of her narrative, she asked rhetorical questions: how do you tame a wild tongue? By writing a bilingual narrative, she proved that a wild tongue, being a bilingual tongue, cannot be tamed.
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Which of Liao’s conventions for literacy narratives (59 JTC) are most apparent in Sedaris’s essay? Which conventions, by contrast, seem less important to Sedaris?
Liao mentions that “Literacy narratives are stories in which something changes.” At the beginning of his literacy narrative, Sedaris explained that while he learned French in New York, he “understood only half of what this woman was saying because she spoke perfect French (Sedaris, 11). However, Towards the end, Sedaris responds with, “I know the thing that you speak exactly now” when his teacher ridiculed him (Sedaris, 15). This shows that Sedaris learned how to speak French even when he thought he’d never be able to understand it. Another one of Liao’s conventions that are most apparent in Sedaris’s essay is a discourse community. Sedaris explains how everyone in his class was ridiculed by their teacher when they all had the same goal: to speak French properly. By contrast, cultural identity seemed less critical in Sedaris’s essay. His narrative did not involve an issue about his cultural identity or the different languages he spoke. He simply told a story about how he learned french.
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Near the beginning of Manson’s essay (written while she was a freshman at Baruch), she describes her silence this way: “Am I hurting? Am I depressed? Am I lost? I don’t know, and I would rather give too little of the truth than too much of a lie.” Do you believe she feels the same way by the end of the essay? Why?
I don’t believe that Mason felt the same way she did towards the end of her essay. She struggled to explain her feelings and never had any words to explain exactly how she felt, so she would always remain silent. However, towards the end of her essay, she decided to try to explain how she thought to a friend instead of remaining silent. In the beginning, she didn’t have any words to describe how she felt about her grandmother’s death. However, towards the end, she learned how to cope with her depression as she says that she learned a new word, setsunai- the mixture of feelings such as sadness, heartache, love, and nostalgia- which explains how she felt about her grandmother’s death. She also explained to her friend that she felt like she was in a car and it was “moving slower and slower” (88, JTC). This is significant because, in the beginning, she said that she felt like she was in a car that was moving way too fast, which shows that she’s learning how to express her feelings instead of remaining silent.