By: briana

briana — Sat, 09 Jul 2005 19:46:10 +0000

i was immediately touched by this story coming to a center in a deaf community and was easily able to connect with the beauty of these people fighting for their language, their culture, their lives. sign language is so rarely acknowledged or thought of as a true language so it surprised me for it to pop up in your story ( even though sign plays such an important role in my life and ours). what a beautiful connection to make between the fights for self-determination that are happening in oppressed communities all over this world and what a way to give voice to such a silenced community. i was thinking the other day about what guatemalan sign language is like, whether there are many varieties and whether you could find anything out about them from your teachers. also, i like the metaphor of the drug, the high that is achieved by using languages in such a simplistic way. it’s so important for us to think about as non-native speakers of languages, to think about the appropriateness of our use of that language, of our place in that community. that’s a clear theme in the American Sign Language community, but i think much less so in the Spanish-speaking community (at least in the states). i wonder if you’ve encountered this idea in guatemala, how we (often privileged folks) appropriate other people’s languages and cultures so easily, without a second thought, without much awareness of context, of implications. how, until we live in that truly liberated world in which the old power dynamics of white-brown, english-non-english, american-foreigner are a thing of the past, we have a responsibility to be conscious, be educated, be open and willing to listen, and be accountable to the communities that have survived through the strength of their language and culture to fight against the legacies of oppression that are in our blood and that many of us still benefit from to this day.

Comments on: A Science Fiction Story Idea

By: briana