How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua - Essay Example

How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” is an essay by Gloria Anzaldua. She lays down the first half of the starting passage in a dentist’s workplace. Her selection of the setting intensifies the passage’s metaphorical force. Her work demonstrates that the process of writing itself helps individuals in coming to understand and articulte their sophistications of identity. Readers view Anzaldua’s narrator investigate the crossroads and details of manifold elements of her identiy.

The dentist’s workplace is a place where people generally feel uncomfortable and tense because of the pain many people bear there. Similarly, Anzaldua felt uncomfortable and apprehensive in America because of the emitional pain from cultural denial. She starts her essay quite authoritaively. “We are going to have to control your tongue” (2947). The reality that the dentist does not provide her any pleasurable greeting, such as “hi, how are you doing”, speeds up the pace and exigency of the passage.

Instead of saying, “I am going to have to control your tongue” to denote the dentist’s actions, the text instead affirms, “We are going to have to control your tongue” (2947). The choice to use plural first person, as oppossed of a singular first approach, divulges Anzaldua’s belief that the dentist was the only one trying to control her tongue. For the dentist, the narrator’s tongue is too rowdy and rebellious. It keeps getting in the way and the dentist affirms, “something must be done about it” (Anzaldua 2947).

This introductory metaphor sets the stage for the scrutiny and opinion Anzaldua creates considering the significance of language, linguistic identity, and cultural identity. Starting with individual account and moving to an interrogative reference, Anzaldua constructs a crossbreed structure, which resonates with her examination of linguistic identity. In addition to creating a crossbreed text between different forms of written expression, Anzaldua’s work adds a level of crossbreed sophistication by concurrently shifting between manifold langauges in order to construct a strong, polemical declaration.

Next, the move to the poetic language and structure broadens the narrator’s ability to move between jerky discussions and forms of writing. Nevertheless, things are not rather so simple, as the narrator highlights in the two sentence-closing paragraph of the segment. “Even our own people, other Spanish speakes nos quieren poner candodas en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de acedemia” Anzaldua (2948). Yet as the narrator attempts to construct a descriptive and evocative point of view asserting how silence might be surmounted; the text appears dissatisfied with resolving too effortlessly or sacrificing the sophistication of the quantum sorrounding languge use to one-dimensionalism or excessively positive, lines of thinking.

Here, Anzaldua sets apart writing as both waiting and creating to develop the mode that we think about writing. Certainly, her passage works to explain one conception of writing followed immediately by its opposite. Another important lesson we learn is that writing is not just a means of doing or of communicating; however, it is mode of fluctuating between means of comprehending, creating meaning, and translating. This procedure of struggle thereby sophisticates the hold one way of writing, or its alternative.. On the other hand, Anzaldua in her text distinguishes between her cultural context of Western customs that are inclined towards separating art from application, structure from content, and male from female.

In spite of the fact that texts explore and shape the links between reader and writer, the reader and the writer are not seperated with the text moving in just one directionWork CitedAnzaldua, Gloria. How to Tame A World Tongue, 1987. Web. 26 April. 2013. < http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/calabj/282/how%20to%20tame%20wild%20tongue.pdf>.