bell hooks Text Comparison
"I imagine them hearing spoken English as the oppressor’s language, yet I imagine them also realizing that this language would need to be possessed, taken, claimed as a space of resistance. I imagine that the moment they realized the oppressor’s language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a space of bonding was joyous.” From this quote found in her essay, bell hooks is trying to explain the advantages of having to speak multilingually in a daily basis based on her experiences of being a black person needing to speak a ‘foreign’ language as a way to speak to other people in different communities. Some texts regarding this issue agree with what bell hooks have quoted. One of those texts is a text written by Garry Engkent named “Why My Mother Can’t Speak English”. This text explains the difficulties of his mother obtaining a Canadian Citizenship due to the fact that she has limited English proficiency. In this case English can be seen as the oppress...