Speaking in Tongues

Directed by Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider
PatchWorks Films



The award-winning documentary Speaking in Tongues spells out an intriguing paradox of America’s identity: Although we’re a nation that prides itself on diversity, we also militantly cling to monolingual education at the expense of culture, communication, and even academic achievement.

Speaking in Tongues follows four San Francisco children, all of whom attend either a Spanish or Chinese immersion public school: a young African-American boy who lives in public housing but is gaining fluency at his Chinese school; a Chinese-American girl who is one of the only people in her family who can communicate with her grandmother; a Caucasian boy who tests out his Mandarin on a trip to China; and a Mexican-American boy who is the first in his family to learn to read and write Spanish, in addition to English.

The naysayers of immersion programs—at least the ones quoted in this film—warn about the United States becoming a Tower of Babel, or that learning other languages is a waste of tax dollars when children should be learning English. But what this film shows, mostly with statistics and interviews with experts, is that kids who continue academic learning of their mother tongue learn better English, perform better academically overall, and are much less likely to drop out of school. There’s also a huge distinction between speaking another language at home and learning that language academically. Students who have oral bilingual skills are doubling their proficiency if they learn their native language academically instead of just informally. And children whose mother tongue is English benefit academically from early bilingual education, too. They’ve acquired language skills early in life that will be sought-after when they enter the workforce.

The film makes great arguments—illustrated by lovable kids and their earnest families—for why bilingual education should be a priority in the United States as it is in other countries. The film uses interesting quotes about immigration, English-only legislation, and education against eye-catching graphics. A segment of educators talking about the languages spoken in their school systems, animated onto a map of the United States, was an especially interesting visual.

From a feminist viewpoint, it’s impossible to know why the filmmakers chose to follow three boys and only one girl. Surely they had their reasons, but it would have been nice to see the experience of a Latina or African American girl, especially since the education achievement gap is currently skewed for both ethnic groups, on top of the achievement gap between girls and boys.

Regardless, Speaking in Tongues is a great film that focuses on the benefits of being bilingual without delving into other, potentially more sensitive political issues like immigration, racism and xenophobia, all of which intersect with English-only politics.

Review by Hannah Moulton Belec

Table Alphabetical of Hard Words

By Pattie McCarthy
Apogee Press

Recently, as I was pushing my daughter in her stroller up a hill, a guy in a pickup truck whistled. Pattie McCarthy’s poem “spaltklang: is good broken music” reminded me of this moment. McCarthy describes a new mother who finds her body meaning has been overwritten with a new set of signs:

it’s the stroller, she said, it renders one
invisible, no one will ever look
at me like that again, she said, not
even him.

Table Alphabetical of Hard Words tells the story of how we want to believe in the simplicity of signs, even as these signs slip away from us and are ultimately irreducible to their dictionary definitions. Her poems show that “the stroller” does not make “one/invisible,” just as diacritical marks do not always tell us precisely what part of a word matters most.

While reading Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, I found myself drawn by two incongruous impulses: to join McCarthy in an archive outside of our time and to relish in the shape, the feel, the complexity of early modern language and to try to piece together the fragments she had drawn together. The first of these impulses fits neatly with the material project of the collection.

The cover of Table Alphabetical of Hard Words is a repeating yet off-center set of identically bound archival documents, their contents listed but hard to read on the bindings. McCarthy makes her reader enter the archive with her, where she provides etymologies and connections between words while also sending readers outside the text with annotations like “(see usage notes)”. She identifies twenty-first century language as something difficult and tricky, in a different way than the “Hard Words” comprising early word lists and dictionaries: "I don’t understand your euphemistic emoticons, please stop saying important things in code.” We do not have a word list, a key for our own linguistic shortcuts, she suggests in frustration, yet Table Alphabetical of Hard Words also tells the story of what is not said, and McCarthy unpacks only some of her shorthand in her list of sources. Her readers must think outside this text, following traces of allusions and shades of influence.

McCarthy’s language echoes modernists including Virginia Woolf, H. D., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and especially Gertrude Stein. She draws on Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts,” and she jarringly blends Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, and Jenn McCreary’s poems with Old English sources, contemporary references to television shows like NYPD Blue, trial records, and other fragments of language that she pieces together with sometimes playful and always visceral effects. For instance, she notes that Webster’s original dictionary used the long s for bloodsucker, making the word look like bloodfucker. Her first poem, “askew: latelye done to deathe” echoes Howe’s The Europe of Trusts, in which Jonathan Swift’s Stella (Esther Johnson) blends with Shakespeare’s Cordelia: she is given a voice, but still obliterated by her lover.

McCarthy forces her reader to question this search for allusions and origins. If our own markings are so illegible, so meaningless, and misleading to us, how can we read break down words we have lost? If a mother’s body may or may not be read differently because of the diacritical mark of a stroller, how do we know what and how to read on and about the bodies that surround us? Table Alphabetical of Hard Words explodes the one-to-one relationship between words and meanings that are so basic to daily life while demonstrating that bodies and words are both hard to interpret, meaningful in their matter, but tricky, mutable, and often unintelligible.

Review by Emily Bowles

Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

By Pavan K. Varma
Penguin Books

Pavan K. Varma’s most recent book, Becoming Indian, argues that cultural freedom has eluded formerly colonized nations, specifically India. He sees a need for a cultural revolution in India. Although it reads at times like an extended opinion piece, Varma makes convincing arguments highlighting the importance of reclaiming language, architecture, and art in a way that empowers indigenous knowledge rather than oppressing it. He examines concepts and examples related to language, architecture, and art with regard to modern Indian history, contemporary events, and personal experiences.

Varma believes that the real strength of empires lay in the colonization of minds, and he views modern history as one that has resulted in cultural and ideological consequences. He explores how English has become a tool for upward mobility and questions the cost, as the loss of one’s own language is seen as a gain in India. He uses the example of young people performing Shakespeare in English with no knowledge of theatre in their own languages to illustrate this pervasive ignorance. He also compares the success of writing in English to the sure failure of writing in Indian mother tongues to illustrate a flaw in today’s Indian value systems. Convincingly, he critiques the concept of providing important information, such as health and traffic signs on the highways, in English.

Although India has been independent since 1947, Varma argues that colonialism persists in the realms of language, politics, and self-image. Varma believes that globalization is leading to the desire for a homogeneous identity. To counteract this, he believes it is important to know one’s cultural roots in order to move forward into the future.

From a feminist perspective, it is interesting to note the ways in which the British have historically seen Indians as effeminate, and thus treated them with less respect. The power dynamics within post-colonial societies are especially tricky as colonization has already permeated people’s minds. According to Varma’s arguments, what may be necessary is not only a contemporary Indian cultural revolution but also one that involves all sectors of society, from the lowest to the highest castes and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Review by Lakshmi Saracino