“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
Ada Limón, 2018
Originally published in The Carrying
Editor’s Note: The poem in this chapter is considered a transformative fair use. Please see the annotations section in How to Use this Book for an explanation of the author’s pedagogy on creating conversation within a text.
Hashtags
#exclusion, #tokenism, #stereotype, #perspective, #protest, #poetry, #assimilation, #personal is political
Frame
ET & DU: Discussing this piece with my co-authors was particularly entertaining because the person initially most annoyed by the poem came to the most transgressive reading of the poem. We spent a good amount of time talking about the lines that irritated us—like, “Don’t mention your father was a teacher, spoke English, loved making beer, loved baseball.” We asked ourselves, is the poem critiquing casual, violent acts of “otherness” by reifying a stereotypical image of Americanness as some kind of false transgression? Our conversations got us wondering more and more about how the kitschy and cringy parts could have more power than we first gave them once we thought more on who is talking to whom in this twist on the lyric poem.
The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual
When you come, bring your brown-
ness[1] so we can be sure to please
the funders. Will you check this
box; we’re applying for a grant.[2]
Do you have any poems that speak
to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.
Would you like to come to dinner
with the patrons and sip Patrón?
Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?[3]
Don’t read the one where you
are just like us. Born to a green house,
garden,[4] don’t tell us how you picked
tomatoes and ate them in the dirt
watching vultures pick apart another
bird’s bones in the road.[5] Tell us the one
about your father stealing hubcaps
after a colleague said that’s what his
kind did. Tell us how he came
to the meeting wearing a poncho
and tried to sell the man his hubcaps
back. Don’t mention your father
was a teacher, spoke English, loved
making beer, loved baseball[6], tell us
again about the poncho, the hubcaps,
how he stole them, how he did the thing
he was trying to prove he didn’t do.
Text Version
Wide Shots:
- What social contracts bind your behavior and identity? What are the costs and benefits of keeping those contracts?
- Have you ever felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy? When do the things you tell yourself come from something outside of yourself? What social or cultural messages have you internalized?
- Audre Lorde wrote, “We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition.” Reflect on this idea.
- When and how does a request become a demand? If you reflect on this question before reading, revisit your thinking after considering the transition between the fifth and sixth couplets.
Close Shots:
- Identify the speakers in the poem. Who is the “you”? Who is speaking to the “you”?
- Circle all the nouns and take note of their concreteness. How are they placed? What do they do in terms of situating the speaker, the requests of the speaker, and the speaker’s reality?
- Compare Limón’s vulture in the eighth couplet to Lorde’s dragon reproduced below. What do these animals symbolize? How do they interact with the people in the pieces?
Within this country where racial difference creates constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings and neither were most of you here today, black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
Mid Shots
- See “Reading the ‘Fine Print’” for an extended discussion of the poem that leverages the concepts of social and racial contracts in the U.S.
JS: For a fuller discussion of the burden of cultural representation on writers (and how requests for language become demands on identity), pair this text with Yiyun Li’s “To Speak is to Blunder” and Sofia Samatar’s “Skin Feeling.” This poem also works well with Jamila Lyiscott’s “Three Ways to Speak English” which also delves into the character stereotypes against racialized groups.
DU: Instructors may productively pair this text with Miller’s “Oracabessa” to complicate notions of universality. In my view, the most challenging part of teaching Limón is getting students to complicate the oppositions of the poem – particularly the poet’s opposition between the “universal” everyday, “don’t tell us how you picked tomatoes,” and her images around performing otherness, “bilingual is best.” In my experience, students seize on “universality” as the central idea of the poem and leave the class thinking, “see, we’re all the same, let’s stop talking about difference so much…” which is not what I’m hoping to do with the poem. If any instructors ever teach this, I’d love to know how it goes because I rarely get to the depths of where I want to go.
- JS: a great phrase for thinking about identity -- what does this really mean? what is "brown-ness"? ↵
- ET: What happened to the question mark? Is there a choice to make? ↵
- ET: How does this mimic the closing line of the previous couplet? ↵
- JS: how does this image help to establish who the "we" or "us" is? what division is being established in this line that separates while also admitting commonality (you are just like us). ↵
- ET: What other "watchings" are happening in this poem? ↵
- ET: How do you understand the limits of these lines? It seems like an affirmation of an assimilated "American" identity. ↵
analysis that highlights or encourages different points of view, usually as the basis for developing arguments
See:
"Connecting the Dots"
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Emotion in Language (exploration)
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
written or spoken form that typically uses metered language and structure to highlight sound and rhythm
See:
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Tracing Citations (exploration)
Translations Across and Within Languages (exploration)
See:
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
“Skin Feeling”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
"To Speak is to Blunder"
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Emotion in Language (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
Juxtapositions of Silence (exploration)
Self Reflection, Collective Change (exploration)
Transculturation, Language and South-South Migration (exploration)
