Poetry Friday -- Languages

I'm between audio books right now, so I'm catching up on podcasts of the NPR TED Radio Hour. Earlier in the week, I was listening to the program, "Playing with Perceptions." One segment features academic activist and poet Jamila Lyiscott. She's a first-generation American. Her parents are from Trinidad and she grew up in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. She's working on her PhD in Literature and Race at Columbia and describes herself as a "tri-tongued orator."

When she was about 19, she was asked to be a guest on an academic panel. After participating in her very best, most polished Academic English, a woman came up to her and told her she was very "articulate."

This is the poem she wrote in response to that experience.



The transcript is here if you'd rather read the poem.

I'm thinking hard about checking my perceptions at the door, especially when it comes to the languages my students speak.


Irene has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Live Your Poem.

I AM DIFFERENT! CAN YOU FIND ME?

I Am Different! Can You Find Me? 
by Manjula Padmanabman
A Global Fund for Children Book
Charlesbridge, 2011
review copy provided by the publisher

Recently named on USBBY's 2012 list of the 36 most outstanding international books for children and teens, I Am Different! Can You Find Me? is a celebration of languages and differences.

Each double-page spread features an illustration that has some sort of repeating pattern, and a page about one of 16 different languages spoken in the US. In each illustration, one part of the pattern is different. On the language page, the sentence, "Can you find me?" is written in the featured language.

On the language page, readers are given the sentence in it's own alphabet, transcribed into English, and with an English pronunciation guide and a note when the script reads right to left in the native language. There is also a short paragraph about the language and a bit about the culture of the people who use it. Where applicable, several English words that come from that language are given.

I love it that some of the indigenous languages of North America have been included, as well as American Sign Language.

The afterword states, "Language helps people connect with one another. How we name things -- people, places, animals, toys, even thoughts and feelings, can create special bonds within our communities. By learning languages that are different from the ones we grew up speaking, we can better understand how others see the world."

Spreading better understanding about how others see the world could be the mission statement for The Global Fund for Children, which is the nonprofit organization who developed this book and many others. For more information, check out their website: Global Fund for Children.org.

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