.....

brenda cårdenas's poems, "empty spaces" in particular, had me thinking a lot about the power and journeys of language. "empty spaces," i think, points to how the ways "we" (who makes these decisions? who has power over language?) value and impose hierarchies on language and fail to recognize and value multiple literacies, multiple modes of expression, and importantly, how this causes harm and fragmentation. i see the empty spaces as the things the speaker loses or fears of losing in the journey of learning and embodying english. there is a desire to hold onto words, letters, sounds, functions. though english is made up of most of the same symbols, it's structured completely different, the sounds are different, the emphases are different.
 the way that language is institutionalized and systematized is inherently imperialist, racist, classist, etc. in the attempt to "universalize" language, whose language gets considered the norm, the reference point for all others to accomodate? how is speech, sound, words commodified and homogenized? what happens to self-identity when one is forced to adopt that language in order to be understood, to gain legitimacy?

what do folks have to empty themselves of in order to communicate themselves and in order to be heard, understood, seem viable? how do you get back your lost sounds, your empty spaces? i like how she makes connections between speech, language, identity, history, the body. describing the speaker's hollow of pelvis as "georgia o'keeffe"-- whoa. the way we universalize culture and language has specific consequences for the otherized body.

there's all of this, and then i think about how fast and loose we are with language, and completely unconscious of consequence. not just blindly unconscious, but decidedly unconscious. tonight i was at a reading where a white male read a number of problematic pieces that, i (and others) felt, reeked of entitlement and privilege, and were downright offensive. he read a story about working in whole foods, managing other workers-- his "slaves." he threw this word around i don't know how many times and suggested "it's okay that i call them that, they think it's funny and they kinda like their work anyway." i think the fact that there was a veiled self-consciousness there-- "it's okay, they think it's funny" was the most disturbing because there was some sort of nod to using that language as fucked up and a blatant display of power, but ultimately, it didn't matter and it was okay. then there was the quip about homeless people coming into whole foods asking for the free dog biscuits they give out to customers, HOW FUNNY!, and the fact that whole foods only allows service animals in the store but there are so many dogs in there and it's doubtful all those folks are disabled but you can't really ask if they are because that's, you know, messed up and awkward to ask, etc etc. i'm not sure what the worst part about hearing all this was-- whether it was the fact that it was all meant to be funny, the fact that he decontextualized the very real and present legacy of slavery, exploitation, oppression, the fact that people were laughing, the fact that he'll probably read those stories again outloud and instantaneously make the space unsafe, the fact that he felt comfortable reading out something like that (which speaks to the fact that there isn't widespread challenge to this kind of behavior, otherwise there would be consequences for doing it, etc)... the fact that after a friend did call him out, he listened but it was unclear if it really sunk in as a critique of his privilege rather than feedback on his writing, or if it meant anything to him to hear that...

i guess i am bothered because we hear voices like his all the time and there's so much air space for it and a lot of praise goes there, but we rarely hear voices like brenda cårdenas's, and voices like hers aren't valued or distributed as they should be, otherwise maybe it would be less acceptable and feel less encouraged for folks like this guy to take power over spaces and over language in the way that he did.

i know i am probably oversimplifying in my processing of this, especially in connection to cårdenas's work, but i am just angry that not only are marginalized folks at all times needing to acquire, reshape, delete, de-politicize, etc their languages in order to be heard, which often leads to a loss of language (whether it's a dialect or a whole language in itself), but other folks are rarely moved to even think about how their words contribute to erasure, violence, inequality, etc.