Why I (love to) hate the English Language
By: Rafael Cocchini
Tags: Cultural Appropriation, Culture, Language, English, Language Learning

I speak three languages, write in

Two, dream in one.

Don’t write in English, they said, English is

Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave

Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,

Every one of you? Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak,

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

All mine, mine alone.

— Kamala Das

Ever since I can remember, I’ve spoken English.

Despite my effortlessness, I learned the language as a child, by sheer overwhelming exposure to what I later in life came to understand as a symptom of the American/European imperialism.

I’ve never formally studied English. And yet, somehow, I became an English Teacher in a Portuguese speaking country which is surrounded by Spanish speaking countries.

Now how did that happen?

Granted, I was born and grew up in Latin America’s largest city, so the amount of culture I’ve been exposed to is undoubtedly root cause for my acquisition of the language. However, — and I have no plan on providing nothing but questions and assumptions in this text — why is it that most of the content I had access to in my country was made by and to English speaking people?

That question popped into my mind about ten years ago, when I started teaching and was confronted multiple times with the question “how did you learn English?”.

My first response was simple: “I don’t know, I just know it.”. But that wasn’t enough for inquiring minds.

I started to reflect upon all the content I’d normally consume and started to realize that I — like so many people of my generation and social condition — had an actual aversion to any content produced in my own native language. Now, I’m no culture scientist, but I believe this is how culture dies. When the people of a country start to hate their own culture and language and start to worship another’s, we may have a problem — especially if you’re an artist in that country.

Teacher’s life was busy enough to keep me from actually going deeper into that question (throughout the first years I was usually in class for about ten hours a day), but it did spark in me a thirst for actively seeking content and culture produced by and to people of my own country, which led me to discover amazing things that I’d been missing out due to my own closed view of the world.

It was a tough task. I realized that culture in my country was never handed to you unless it was made by an American. It was so easy to have access to American culture and it was so hard to even fathom what my own culture was. Everything that was produced here had little to no funding and the internet hadn’t quite taken off at the time so it was a heroic task to keep up-to-date with what was happening here in the culture field.

That ease of access to American culture to the detriment of my own country’s sure enough planted a seed of hatred towards the English language and the fact that I only learned how to speak it so well by renegating the mother tongue in me.

That hatred grew stronger when in 2012 I had a stress breakdown at work and ‘forgot’ how to speak my mother language (spoiler alert: it came back).

In my quest to get to know more about my own culture, I came across an artistic movement in the early 20th century that had as central pillar the assimilation of foreign culture. They are known as the ‘modernists’ (free translation). Their history and ideas started to change the way I felt about the English language, but not my conception that it was wrong to have so much foreign culture whilst having so little of my native culture in the mainstream media.

I no longer feel bad about having learned English as a child by sheer exposure. I now have made a commitment to myself to do whatever is within my reach to assimilate that foreign culture into my own culture. Thus creating something new.

Not American, not African, not Asian, not South-American, not European. Something new.

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