There is a coarseness to the English language that makes it almost unpalatable for African tongues. These words make us cough up the bones of our indigenous languages. We were told to chew and digest them to become the ideal workforce – cheap and silent. We swallowed them whole with the hope that one day they would emerge from our bellies and live free. Sometimes they escape in fragments. Make no mistake about it, indigenous words are knives. Eyes widen when the new tongues they strangled our old ones with rebel with clicks and sounds they thought were beaten or bred out. Bodies wince when the sound punctures their eardrums. They fear we will slit throats with these fragments, and suspend the carcass of a game named servitude.
//
the English language
tastes like sandpaper,
embraces speech organ
like a boa constrictor
there is no freedom of tongue,
ability to speak shackled in a ship’s belly
chained to the stench of death
speaking English
smells like surviving
a slaughterhouse
we speak it soaked in bloody remains
every now and then we cough
up a remnant, nouns coated in sinew,
adjectives embraced by tendons,
verbs pulse the phantom arteries
of dismembered language families
this quilt we speak
is sewn with blood
patched memory
born of shea and ceiba trees
as much as pine and mahogany
they call it broken
because their backs
could never endure
welts and scars
and still take weight
they call it broken
because their esophagi
are too sensitive to tolerate
being scraped by bones
with the utterance of every word
we call it survival
Timothy Prolific Veit Jones is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for March 2018.
Timothy Prolific Veit Jones a poet, educator, and organizer whose creative work operates in the continuum of the Black Arts Movement, using a multi-disciplinary approach rooted in Hip-Hop culture as an African Diasporic folkloric praxis. He has performed his poetry at a diverse variety of venues, from Cornell University to Rikers Island to STooPS in Bed-Stuy. He has been published in African Voices, 12th Street, the graphic novel Gunplay, the Penmanship Book anthology 30/30 Vol. 2, The Ferguson Moment, and YRB Magazine. Through his former publishing company, Andre Maurice Press/Indelible Books, he edited and released Blackout Arts Collective’s One Mic: A Lyrics on Lockdown Anthology and Peuo Tuy’s Khmer Girl. Tim was a Riggio Fellow at The New School, and is a fellow at The Watering Hole. He is the author of Musaic: 40 Days, 40 Nights and the forthcoming ethnographic book of poetry titled Water + Blood. Timothy is the Visioning Partner (VP) for Institutional Culture at PURPOSE Productions, teaches Kuumba/Integrated Arts at Ember Charter Schools, and is the co-founder of the Rebel Waters publishing and performance collaborative. He is from Uniondale (Long Island), and lives in Bed-Stuy.
Featured image via PublicDomainPictures.net.
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