language

The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.

Third year in Canada, and I have learned that writing in English is a matter of details and emphasis. This is something I already knew in Spanish, but in my mother tongue these features are, in a way, learned by heart. Attributes of writing such as punctuation, grammar or paraphrasing are necessary to have a good foundation in a language. I keep learning crucial details that make me think of writing as a whole. Ideas take shape according to their nature, the materiality transforms from sounds or images in my head to words that have a reader in mind.

In acting school it is fundamental to learn how to use the voice, it is a basic tool to be acquired. When one is taught to interpret a text (poetic or dramatic), one immediately incorporate some techniques to become familiar with one's voice and convey a clear message. However, it all depends on the awareness of proprioception, how skillfully one integrates the principles of a singular technique as a communication resource.

In English class, it is said that punctuation is seen as the breath of a sentence. It was exactly the same thing I learned, a few years ago in acting class, to let the words come out of my body naturally and following the meaning (and intention) of what is to be said. Silence, breath, voice and language have been in some ways the path I have embodied my reality in North America.

My writing reduces these actions to mere nouns, not even verbs, and the epigraph with which I chose to begin this excerpt then resonates. Addressing the idea that someone is less than human to others because they do not belong to a language, a race, a social status. Immediately, they become inanimate. Maybe an immigrant. So it is a problem - and a challenge - to become local, native and successful in a world that is "generously" designed to include others. That can be easily identified in most spheres of the entire and capitalist world: academia, society, nation or art. Under an umbrella of laws and norms of social interaction, the risk could be invisibilization in a world of hypervisibilization. However, there is something that animate beings with a language have not yet considered. Inanimate beings do not need words to speak. Indeed, it is a matter of silence to begin to listen to them and value what they have to say.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Listening to the Grammar of Animacy”, In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 48 Fall 2021