“It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, Hazel,” I remember I said to my wheaten terrier on our morning walk the other day, though I can’t remember why. She looked up at me with a quizzical, maybe even offended, expression. I reconsidered. “You’re right,” I said. “You would never eat another dog. Someone—probably a white capitalist guy—decided that expression accurately described how nature works. And we humans go around using that frame as an excuse to be greedy and selfish.” Seemingly satisfied with my response, she turned back to sniffing the decomposing leaves, freshly uncovered from the melted snow.
It’s true. My partner and I talk to our dogs like they understand complex ideas in English, and I think on some level, they do. It’s also true that I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves and how they shape our worldview. In January, I wrote about how we might tell ourselves a different story about how economies work.
Recently, I was listening to this excellent Code Switch episode about the people who are saving the Hawai’ian language. In the middle of the story, the reporter interviewed a few Hawai’ians who grew up speaking English and are now learning their Indigenous tongue as adults. She asked them if it’s changed them in any way. One man said it helps him be “closer to the land, to the people.” He didn’t elaborate, and the episode carried on, but I found myself returning to this idea of Indigenous language bringing one closer to both the land and people.
I have an intuitive and theoretical idea of how this might be. I understand language to be a kind of manifestation, utterance as a kind of binding that we use on each other and the world around us. I also know the land has its own language that humans can understand if we are taught or we teach ourselves how to listen. I believe Indigenous languages were formed in reciprocal relationship between humans, land, plants, animals, birds, and fishes native to that area. That these languages and stories provide instruction and guidance on how to live on and steward the land for all.
I believe all of this, though I don’t have first hand experience of it. I was born on the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Očhéthi Šakówin people in the Rocky Mountains in the U.S., and during my first year I lived on the lands held sacred by the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Myaamia, and Očhéthi Šakówin people (Wisconsin) as well as the Kanaka Oiwi (Hawai’i).
Then we moved to Tokyo, Japan where I lived for the next ten years. I learned to speak Japanese and English simultaneously. Growing up, I switched languages depending on the context and to whom I was speaking, but I was most comfortable speaking a mix of both English and Japanese to my family and my friends at the international school I attended.
As a result, I internalized two very different worldviews, approaches, and spiritualities in my language, in my body, and in my thoughts. Somehow, I was able to move through my childhood holding the worldview that the individual was most important, and also that the collective was most important. That everything and everyone was connected, and also that we were all islands unto ourselves. That things could and should be separated and categorized into white and black, alive and not alive, and also that nothing can be separated, that all things are animated with spirit, that there is a whole rainbow of color between black and white.
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I often think that I am a poet because of this early experience of the mutability and potential of language. I landed with English as my primary language—today, Japanese lives in the far reaches of my brain. I can access it only sporadically and not very skillfully. But I was deeply shaped by my very first years of living within and between both languages, and although my only linguist tool now is English, I am never satisfied with it. I feel its supremacy, its violence, its insistence on individualism, its flattening out of so much of lived experience. So I turn to poetry as a way to trouble English, to stretch it, to travel into and through it. I think that’s why I am drawn to the use of the pronoun “we” in many of my poems, even as I grapple with the limitations and problems of assuming a “we” in English in this white supremacist culture.
But recently, I’ve also been marveling at how elastic English is, if we allow it to be. I’ve noted the rise of the pronoun “they” as a singular, non-gendered pronoun. It was only a few years ago that I was explaining to my parents why a friend of mine went by “they,” and it was confusing and mystifying to them. Now, in many virtual gatherings I attend these days, about half the people use “they” as one of their pronouns. I mostly hang out with queer folks, so I imagine that my encounters with people using “they” is probably higher than many, but even so, this is a marked difference from a decade ago.
Also in the last several years, the term “enslaved people” as a replacement for “slaves” has gone mainstream. This shift of phrase does several important things. It calls attention to the humanity of those who were enslaved. It also implies action and causation. People weren’t slaves because they were born that way. Other people—white people—were doing the enslaving. This small shift in language, I believe, opens up neural and spiritual pathways necessary for securing justice and reparations to the descendents of enslaved people in this country—along with organizing and agitating for redress.
These are just two examples of how I see writers and organizers shaping the English language toward justice, and it gives me some hope.
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I grieve for the extinction of Indigenous languages. According to Code Switch, “every two weeks, a language dies with its last speaker.” Each extinction is a loss of a highly specific understanding of the land and the spirit of all the beings on the land. Each one is a loss of a rich trove of stories and ways of understanding ourselves as human beings. Humanity is poorer for the loss of these languages, and the land suffers.
And I am thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s exhortation in Braiding Sweetgrass for each one of us to develop our own relationship to the land we find ourselves on. To listen, to love, to learn from, to commit to stewarding the land that holds us, whether we are indigenous to it or not:
So much has been forgotten, but it is not lost as long as the land endures and we cultivate people who have the humility to listen and learn. And the people are not alone. All along the path, nonhuman people help. What knowledge the people have forgotten is remembered by the land. The others want to live, too.
For those of us who don’t know—can’t know—our Indigenous languages, I believe that we can keep pushing the language or languages that reside within us, that shape our thinking, that we utter every day. We can continue to shape language so it better reflects what we learn from the land, and what we learn from the people who live with us on the land we occupy or inhabit. What would it look like to transform, in my case, English, into a language that brings me—us—“closer to the land, to the people”? I don’t know if we can succeed—English has been used as a weapon for so many centuries. But we humans are incredibly creative, resilient, and imaginative. I believe part of my work in this world is to help shape and shift the language that shaped me.
Prompting
Go outside and find a space to sit and get quiet. Maybe you can go to a park, a beach, your back yard. If you don’t have access to those places, open a window. Feel the air on your skin. Open your ears to the sounds around you. Imagine the land that holds you. Listen. Write what you hear. It might be nonsense. It might be a poem. It might be an essay. Let your brain be quiet while your fingers transcribe the language of the land you stand on.
Engaging
On Tuesday, March 16, hours before the anti-Asian and misogynist terrorist shootings in Georgia, I attended a talk by professor and Soto Zen Buddhist priest, Duncan Ryūken Williams. He discussed how the teachings of our “Asian American Buddhist ancestors offer a way to heal and repair America’s racial and religious fractures that endure to the present.” It was a beautiful and grounding conversation, whose spirit and wisdom I held close to me in the days that followed. I wish that the recording was available online to share with you all, but in lieu of that, I’ll link to this article by Williams, “The Karma of Becoming American,” which includes many of the themes he discussed.
From Spenta Kandawalla’s Immunity and Community series on the COVID-19 vaccine, I learned that there is a direct line from the work of finding a vaccine for HIV to today’s vaccine. We owe our ability to get vaccinated today, to, as she put it, “the dedication of those living with and dying from HIV, and those studying it.”
On repeat: The lovely new album from Valerie June (h/t to reader Lizzie).
Community/Announcements:
These Grief, Gratitude & Courage Gatherings for Asian American Pacific Islanders sound like beautiful and healing gatherings. There are two sessions: Tuesday, March 30th: 6:30-8:30pm ET/ 3:30-5:30pm PT and Wednesday, March 31st: 3-5pm ET/ 12-2pm PT. I encourage any AAPI folks who are looking for a healing space to check this out. (h/t to reader cori)
As I wrote on Instagram, I’m committed to uplifting Asian American joy, community, art, and organizing as well as our grief, rage, and sorrow. To that end, I’m happy to announce a whole slate of readings in the coming weeks, celebrating the release of my new poetry collection, Last Days. I’ll be reading with many Asian American poets and other poets of color. More info and links to register here. If you’d like to get the book, you can pre-order here, or if you are an organizer, activist, cultural worker, or healer, you can sign up to get it free here.
I’m also excited to shout out Muriel Leung’s new book, Imagine Us, The Swarm.Winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, Imagine Us, The Swarm offers seven powerful texts that form a constellation of voices, forms, and approaches to loneliness, silence, and death. Following the death of the poet’s father, Imagine Us, The Swarm contemplates vengeance, eschews forgiveness, and cultivates a desire for healing beyond the reaches of this present life. In this collection of essays in verse, Leung reconciles a familial history of violence and generational trauma across intersections of Asian American, queer, and gendered experiences. Moving between the past and the present, Leung imbues memories with something new to alter time and design a different future. Order here.
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