The verse that Philip repeats with the line “I have no mother tongue, no mother to tongue, no tongue to mother to mother tongue me, I must therefore be dumb tongue…” begins to explore the idea of dehumanization. In this line, the speaker is saying they have no native language to express ones self, no mother to guide ones self, so therefore they must be dumber, that is what slaveholder’s believed and what they used to break slaves. When she is reading the poem, she always returns to this verse to emphasize how dehumanization begins.

In the beginning of Douglass’s Narrative, he does not know much about his own self, such as how old he is, he doesn’t seem to be very connected to his mother since they were separated. Dehumanization begins with isolation leading to a lack of knowledge and language, resulting in not being able to communicate one’s feelings and thoughts. Being illiterate restricts one from having human connection. Slaveholders separated children from there mothers and did not teach them how to read or write because they believed that it would give them power, power to think and feel their own thoughts. For slaves,  “English is a foreign anguish”. They feared that if slaves had this power, the slaveholders would lose theirs.

Both Philip’s poem and Douglass’s Narrative explore and goes through the process of dehumanization.

-Michele Li