Lesson learning

She rolled her eyes when I said I preferred not to use the word “Prostitute”, but “transactional sex worker”, instead. Granted it was in Portuguese, and while this might not reflect the cultural trends of the Lusophone world, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be critical thinkers as we enter the speech of new cultures.

It’s funny how when learning another language we can wear words like veils, pretend we don’t know ourselves in terms we would never use in native tongue. It is like putting your linguistic feet on the coffee table of a foreign language house, knowing merda well you wouldn’t pull that at your own domicile.

This week in my course on service-learning I read of Critical Whiteness, this theory that postulates that “white” people, particularly “white” men are often uncomfortable with facing their own inherent privilege when discussing the marginalization of other ethnic groups as it forces them to question their own identity. This idea dropped me off on the side of a thought: Is there such a thing as a Critical Womanness? If so, then this might proffer a possible reason as to why many of the female population find it so difficult to consider the problematics of words like “Prostitute” or “Bitch” as it causes them to rearrange their own self-perception. No matter how dictionaryized a speaker might be, definitions get lost in the culture of fast speech – quick words that feed thought at the cost of our progression. What self-loving woman wants to really question the words she uses that perpetuate a vicious cycle of misogyny? It’s so much easier to chalk it up to over- analyzation, but truth always translates to verdade.

It’s curious, too, because in African Studies when we talk about the quasi-racist word “tribe” most people with half a head accept that, say “ethnic community” and call it a day. Even in Portuguese, I teach that the word “tribo” is used to denote groups of people, but it’s better to say “comunidade étnica”, even though the bulk of Lusophones probably wouldn’t agree, but we are the owners of our speech and we select the words we use, freely. We are not chained to terms that we appear to have such affinity for.

Some people toss forth any given word to formulate a sentence. I arrange poetry to sing meaning through ever dialogue I breathe.