El Silencio del Lenguaje

Pathologies of Power Forward, Intro. pp. 25-28

Me interesa saber de donde eres my father translated what the man asked him. Someone asked my father, who was from Guatemala, but was afraid that his Russian accent would seep through his Guatemalan-Marajuma accent.

Silence, in this regard, is inevitable, it is forced. My father has for many years, spoke to my sister, my brother and I in Spanish. My mother speaks English to us. She doesn’t fear the trampling of words.

I grew up knowing two languages, and in knowing these two languages I held two powers. The power to think in any language and communicate in any language. Estos son mis poderes.

For such a long time, I knew my parents voices, their actions, their thoughts were silenced. The way that a land encloses a body of water. At some point the water expands it moves forward or recedes, but it touches the land.

I am interested in knowing where you are from my father was asked. There is something about the silence of place, the language. What is silence? Is it the rumbling I hear outside my window, although no one speaks? Is silence a signifier of death? I think about silence as a space that is not filled.

Guatemala, is a space, filled with people, with animals, with mountains. My father’s tongue spills over this land. Although he lived in Mexico, D.F. for 6 years, his tongue, his thoughts roll along the dialect of the people he was around. Language has a silence. This silence is the one that comes when you have spoken another language for so long. You come to another place, another space, that by the laws of being social you slowly fill. My father has feared filling this space, although he reads in English, and sometimes he writes. He is afraid. Language, Spanish can at times be associated with poverty. Third world countries, right?

“The silence of the poor is conditioned…

but rather runs the risk of missing the great eloquence beneath the silence.” (26)

So then, I turn to the layering of silence. The silence of the poor who speak in another language is conditioned. It is almost like thinking about the conditions in which my father will speak Spanish and English. When will he attribute a Spanish word to a conversation, to explain himself fully and thoroughly? I think I can name many times my father has done this. Is it still silenced when he speaks another language? Is he silenced when he wants to speak Spanish with someone who doesn’t? I make the connections about this language with the poor, because they have been presented to me in this way. The conditions, the human condition, the experience. There is a silence created because of the state of the human condition.