Kiswana Browne

In the short story “Kiswana Browne,” Kiswana fights with her mother about her name (Melanie), her brother, the suggestive statue in her apartment, refusal to get a phone, her run-down apartment, Kiswana dropping out of school, her job situation, problems that face black people, the NAACP, and the pride in their heritage. Yet although they fight a lot, by the end of the story Kiswana begins to understand her mother, and respects her opinions and decisions in life.

Between the beginning and the end of the story there is a shift in how the main characters feels towards her mother. In the beginning of the story, she sees her mother as distant and different. She believes that her mother is a sell out to her African heritage, and refuses to grow up to be a part of her mother’s world. In the story she picks to live in a poor area of town, because she is trying to retaliate from the oppressions of the government and her families’ standards. As Kiswana and her mother continue to argue about her new life in the poor area of town, it confirms all of Kiswana’s expectations of her mother’s disapproval. Yet after her mother explains her beliefs and concerns about her family, Kiswana begins to see the similarities between herself and her mother. She learns that she is more like her mother than she ever thought.

Identites and Languages

My mother is Bolivian, and speaks fluent Spanish, while my father is white and does not know how to speak Spanish. In my household we spoke English, yet when ever any of my mother’s relatives came over, my mother spoke to them in Spanish. Although in high school I took four years of Spanish, I never really picked up my mother’s language. To this day, that is the only thing I regret not learning when I was little. Not knowing how to speak Spanish has created a language barrier between me and certain members of my family.

I believe that the way we talk, write, think, and read have a relationship to who we are. Each language is made up of words that are associated with certain connotations and history. Although it can be argued that languages are just words, each language is shaped and changed by the people that speak the language. Much of a person’s personality can be reveal by the walk they talk and present themselves, and language is the tool that allows people to do that.

How to Tame a Wild Tongue

The mix of languages and the fragmentary character of the text puts special demands on the reader, because the reader cannot fully comprehend the entire text. It forces the reader to go from English to Spanish, and pick out the few Spanish words that are similar to English. The readers experience is equivalent to what Anzakdua calls the “borderland,” because the reader has to constantly switch back and forth between dialects and cultural associations. The different cultural aspects of each dialect are also presented to the reader through the Spanish language. The nature of encounters across cultures in multicultural America reveals to me the struggles people face living in lands near the borders. They are faced with the challenged of cultural and language barriers.

Although Anzaldua has combined seven separate sections of writings, they all represent a unified theme. Anzaldua expresses the challenges and struggles that face people living near borders, especially the language barriers between English and Spanish. She illustrates the shame and rejection of identifying with different Spanish dialects. Yet the message that she is trying to make is that although different Spanish dialects have been ridiculed, they will thrive, and continue to be spoken.

From Silence to Words

In my high school, whenever we were assigned to write an essay, it was never an open topic. The teacher would explain her interpretation of a text, and it was then our responsibility to write an essay based on her/his interpretation(s). My experience is similar to Lu’s experience in school, because she also did not feel free to express her own feelings and opinions in her writings. Up in till my senior year of high school, I had learned that writing an essay was based on the five paragraph structure. Each paragraph had to be put together in a certain way, and did not leave much room for creativity. Yet once my essay was set up and composed of five paragraphs and much of my teachers opinions, it was time for students to switch papers with other students. Although it seems like a good idea, the only thing I ever remember getting out of peer critic was the last gossip. Most of the time I would just switch papers with a close friends, then we would both glance at each other’s papers, and agree that each other’s was “good”. Then we would proceed to talk about, what seemed at the time, more important conversation. I believe that some of these practices have limited my writing creativity.

From Silence to Words

Lu adopted a view of languages as a “tool of survival” in order to survive her life at school and her life at home. She believed that each language was a, “tool made by someone else and then acquired and used,” by herself. Along with each dialect came a certain culture, beliefs and expectations that she had to obey. In order to not be ridiculed at school, Lu had to change her beliefs and suppress her English dialect. Likewise, to stay true to her upbringing at home, Lu had to reject the political views taught at school as her own. She believed that the key to coexisting between the two languages was that each was only, “relevant in each place”. Lu “saw language as a tool”and, “how the other made it before I acquired it determined and guaranteed what it produced when I used it”.

Lu was passive and unable to participate in public discussion, because she felt as though she could not control the barrier that separated each dialect and the beliefs that came along with them. She was torn between the ideologies of two opposing cultures.