"How to Tame a Wild Tongue"
- Author of the work: Gloria Anzaldua
- Oct 14, 2017
- 2 min read
Brief Summary: In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, published in her book Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera in 1987, Anzaldua shares her lifelong experiences of people wanting to “tame her wild tongue” because of the different dialects of language she has spoken throughout her life and being “unwanted” by those around her, but learns to take pride in her own form of language.
Rhetorical Context: Purpose- To show the struggles that people who speak foreign languages face, but also to show the people who cause those struggles what their actions are doing. Anzaldua also is trying to teach those foreign language speakers to take pride in themselves, and she does all these points through sharing personal experience.
Audience- The author mainly wants to reach out to people who speak a different first language than english, those who have faced the same struggles she has, but also those who are the cause of the problem.
Genre- Informational, autobiographical
Angle of Vision: Anzaldua’s angle of vision is one from the point of view of a foreign language speaker who has faced challenges due to their language. She focuses on how she has had people all her life try to control her language, from the victim’s perspective. Through her angle of vision as the storyteller, we can also see from reading the passage, the perspective of the critics of her language. They want to stop her from being different and they want to normalize her to their society. The author writes as the victim but since she also wants to help others who have gone through the same, she uses strategies to make the reader connect with her to make them have pride, the way she was able to with herself. She also uses writing as a victim as a strategy to show the critics of her language what they are doing to not just her but all people of a foreign language. The author seems to have omitted solutions for the critics, her solution is to just learn to take pride in yourself regardless of the critics. By omitting solutions for critics, the passage seems to connect more with readers who share her experience.
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