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How to tame Gloria Anazulda's How to tame a wild tongue Reading Gloria Anazulda's How to tame a wild tongue was like playing a jigsaw puzzle. The ideas were all scattered aimlessly throughout the entire essay. It was up to the reader to find them and piece them together into a powerful and insightful essay. Her essay was filled with jargon's, foreign words and strange organizations. It was very difficult to comprehend and follow at first. However, I then realize that it would take an unconventional mean of reading to comprehend this unconventional text.
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel said Robert Laden. If this was true, my life is no more than just a tragic play; another Romeo and Juliet. I tend to absorb all emotions and analyze it with my heart, not my mind. Similarly, I read the same way.
During a course of reading, I tend to be oblivious to narrative and drawn to emotionally-pack-phrases or words. These phrases triggered in me emotions of my own about the reading. Using these emotions, I then analyze my reading. This was the same way I approached How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anazuldas. As I read her essay, I could feel the anger and injustice she felt for her people. Being a minority myself, I was sympathetic to her point of view yet embarrassed because I am a full-flesh Vietnamese, yet I cannot proficiently speak, read, or write my own language.
In her writing, she made numerous claims that language is definitive of culture. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity- I am my language. To her I lacked culture. As I feel my way through her essay, I quickly became confused of the sudden changes in topic and emotions.
I was baffled by the incessant usage of Spanish words and was distracted by her unconventional organization. She vacillated between arguments. The way I went about reading these confusing paragraphs was to filter out all the narrative from commentaries. I skimmed through the narratives and carefully examined the commentaries so I could figure out what emotion is being conveyed and henceforth use that emotion to retrace and define unknown words. If I felt satire and anger in certain clusters of sentences I could be certain, that the Spanish words in that sentence or nearby must also be a negative word denouncing whatever she was criticizing. Every word triggers some type of emotion.
In a paragraph, the emotions encompassed must be uniform and consistent. Therefore knowing what emotions was displayed, one can use it to second-guess what the words used in the paragraph means. In the excerpt Deslenguadas. Somos los del espanol deficient. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your build. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified.
Racially, culturally and linguistically somos hermanos- we speak an orphan tongue, one can use emotions and logic to define the Spanish phrases in here. The emotion that seems to be displayed here is confusion and puzzlement. Therefore, the word build could mean something that misleads or causes confusion. The phrase somos los del espanol deficient could mean some one who cant speak Spanish fluently because only those people could cause linguistic nightmare. Even in total chaos, there exists some order. That was how I viewed Anazulda's essay.
Her essay seems very unstructured, however it must work up to some kind of order. If one was able to view her whole essay as one entity and understand its underlying meaning, one can move backward to see how each individual section build up to this single main point. As I read Anazulda's essay, I constantly search out the main thesis or point. In her unique essay she explored her burden of perpetuating her language and tradition in a community where there was so much diversity, influences, and pressure to fit-in. Nostro los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglo's incessant clamoring so that we forget our language, Gloria cried out.
Another aspect that she simultaneously explored was the hardships of assimilating into her own race. Being just another permutation of the mother race, the Spaniards, she often struggled to identify herself. Was she Tex-Mex, Latino, Mexican Chicano, or standard Mexican? It wasnt until she was able to stop trying to differentiate herself from the other closely related ethnic groups that she was able to define herself.
Anazuldas finally, became aware that she was, indeed, a synergy of all those ethnic groups and that they are the same people. They eat the same food, listen to the same music, read the same text, and most importantly, they speak the same language. In accepting herself, she also found pride in her culture. She became proud to be affiliated with the group of people who are so strong as to be able to withstand decades of oppression. Humilde yet proud, quite's yet wild, nostro los mexicano-Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, preserving, impenetrable, and strong, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable.
She found true identity through the exploration of her own culture. Recognizing this as the underlying purpose of her essay I then worked backward, dissecting her essay into three segments for the ease of understanding it. In her first segment she cleverly used a personal anecdote and a quote from Ray Gwyn Smith to introduce her topic to the reader. In her second segment she began to take us deeper into her life She thoroughly went into details about her language and its different permutation. The third section was the most in depth.
She painted a picture of her culture to us and defined what culture was to her. She also gave us insight on how everyday mundane practices can be indicative of a culture. A piece of writing is much like a table. It has a main surface, which is the main idea supported by legs, which are the minor propositions. By figuring out the main idea first, I was able to figure out the minor propositions and ultimately understand how and why her essay was structured the way it was. Although the method I employed to approach it was awkward, I felt that it was effective for, the essential purpose of reading is comprehension.
I not only comprehended her essay but also captured the every essence of the art of writing in it. Bibliography:
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