Bilingualism

"And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife...And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life" ("Art" 12). The idea that habit is the death of life and that art has the ability to bring you back, to awaken senses you thought were gone or had forgotten you had, rings true more often than not.

Doris Sommer address bilingualism as having more possibilities of understanding different worlds and being more creative than being monolingual. Johann Herder argues that "Human spirit...thrived on one vernacular per person and would not tolerate the foreign contamination" (Sommer 5). In other words one language per person, per nation. This makes for a very boring world, not to mention the inability to communicate, interact or learn from different cultures and peoples. Without bilingualism or polylinguasim we let the door open for fascism, as Sommer suggests "Nazism is a glaring example of the conflation of a particular people and a political state" (5).

Working in public education I see this debate on a daily basis. They (bilingual students) need to speak only English. They are in America, so they need to assimilate. There is always a feeling of them vs. us and if they don't assimilate then they are seen as threat and definitely unpatriotic. I don't believe this is the case and tend to lean toward Sommer's perspective that being bilingual allows you to see the world through different lenses.

For example, Sommer talks about code switching, switching in and out of a language something (as far as I know) only those who are bilingual are able to do, and mentions Drown, by Junot Diaz (a great collection if you haven't read it) and Gloria Anzaldua. Both writers address the idea of being bilingual as living in to different places. To Anzaldua this is the "borderlands or Nepantla". A place where there is a linguistic and cultural border; here you must be at least bilingual in order to survive or be accepted. This could be seen as problematic becasue it creates a case of insider vs. outsider, where of course those who are bilingual are in the favorable position and I could see why those who are monolingual could feel threatened.

But still...

Being able to step in and out of languages enables the speaker to shift and understand different realities that those who are monolingual could ignore or see as separate or not of their concern. I think of the example I have of teachers who believe that because students live in America that their main concern should be with English and that Spanish should not be in their world. These teachers, being monolingual and irrational, ignore that perhaps their students reality outside of school is in Spanish or Spanglish and because that is not how they see the world are quick to disregard their students other language as unimportant and not American, regardless if the child is American or not.