When NourbeSe reads her poem, you can see a physical connection and a symbolic connection through the mother tongue. Slaves during the 1800s were expendable so they weren’t too expensive to maintain. All they needed was some clothing and minimal food to survive. They weren’t educated because it wasn’t like the ability to read was going to help them while working in the field. Also it cut them off from the rest of world. Today we can learn about a country and its culture by simply reading about it. But if we didn’t know how to read and there were no photographs, how would we know about the place. The slaves were illiterate so that they wouldn’t know about the ideas of freedom and wouldn’t be encouraged to revolt. As NourbeSe and Douglas state, those who tried to learn a language were punished and served as an example to other slaves. This would condition others to associate learning with pain. They have no way of knowing that they can become free without seeing or learning about the outside world. When the overseer, Mr. Gore, says that he made the slave an example to prevent the enslavement of white men, you can tell

The symbolic connection comes in when NourbeSe says “I have no mother to tongue…I am tongue dumb.” Douglas didn’t know his mother for too long after his birth and all that he remembers isn’t enough to have loved her. Also he is tongue dumb because he didn’t get the chance to learn anything from her and therefore he lacked a human connection from early in life. You can tell that he didn’t care about her because when the time came to leave the plantation he felt no sadness or hesitation. He felt no “anguish” when he heard about his mother’s death because he didn’t know his mother or her mother tongue. There was no emotional attachment between them.