Double Launch: FIGHTING WORDS & THE MANGO MONSTER

Sunday, September 22

On Sunday, September 22, Join us for the double launch of FIGHTING WORDS by Leonarda Carranza of and THE MANGO MONSTER by Derek Mascarenhas!

ABOUT THE BOOKS:

FIGHTING WORDS: When Ali’s cousin rips his favorite book, angry words explode out of him. The words are so angry, they come to life! They tease Ama, wreak havoc on their abuelita’s home, and crash through the neighborhood. Ali didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but now that the words are on the loose, it’s up to him to catch them—and to repair the damage they’ve done.

THE MANGO MONSTER is a fun, imaginative, and tasty read that encourages sharing with others. After waiting all year for mango season, Marianne is excited that the mangoes on their tree are ripe and ready to eat. She loves mangoes and plans to eat all of them. But when she and her sidekick cousin Zoe check out the tree, the lower branches have been picked clean. Someone is stealing their mangoes! Who could it be? Marianne’s neighbor says it could be a mango monster. This exciting idea is more than a bit scary, but the girls are not deterred, and they decide to catch the mango monster in the act. They set all kinds of traps, hoping to uncover the thief—and end up with surprising results.

Sunday, September 22 · 4 - 5pm EDT

Another Story Bookshop

315 Roncesvalles Avenue Toronto, ON M6R 2M6

After two years of loss, the last thing I want to do is lose my mother tongue, too

Special to The Globe and Mail  |  Published December 22, 2021

It’s a cloudy December morning and my son leans forward in his high chair and pushes a slice of tomato in his mouth. “Ma ma ma ma,” he says while savouring his breakfast.

Every day it seems we understand each other a bit more. For now, his only word is ma. Ma while waving his hands side to side dramatically means stop. Ma and pointing means give me that. I don’t want to sit here anymore is Maaa while tugging on my shirt. Get that food away from my face – a slap at the approaching spoon. No words necessary.

This afternoon, I said, “Please get your zapatos.” And he walked toward the front door. He didn’t pick up his shoes, but he understood that it meant we were going outside.

I’m trying to be meticulous about only speaking Spanish to him. But as someone whose second language has become dominant, I’m often failing. I feel the heaviness of this effort as the pandemic chisels away all the birthday parties and gatherings where family and friends would seamlessly help with this work.

I haven’t always been this committed to my mother tongue, but parenting this tiny human during a pandemic has changed that.

I recently read about the alarming loss of Indigenous languages as a result of the death of so many elders from COVID. I imagine this loss like massive glaciers breaking apart and melting. Grief over language loss comes to us slowly, disrupting our sense of self, community and belonging.

I recently asked my sister if she regretted not teaching Spanish to her children.

“Of course, I do,” she said, sounding a little standoffish. “But they can always learn it.”

I understand, I might have done the same thing if I had my son earlier in life. There was a time when I didn’t really think it mattered whether our next generation spoke Spanish or not.

When we came to Canada I was 7. One memory stands out, a group of kids huddled together and laughing at me, a girl’s toothy smile. She asks me to say the word three and no matter how hard I try I keep saying tree. They laugh and laugh so hard. Learning English is associated with feeling ridiculed and ashamed of my tongue and the sound it made. All I wanted was to hurry up and learn English.

In those early years, English felt exciting and brand new. English was school, friends, boys, TV, books and movies. And Spanish became this narrow shrinking enclosure, the language of home, the language I spoke to Mom, Abuelita, my father and during family gatherings to my uncle, aunts and older cousins.

At home, we were forbidden to speak English. I didn’t realize at the time that my mother was doing this to preserve our language. And it worked. Even my youngest brother who was born in Toronto speaks Spanish fluently.

For a while in my early 20s, I started to sprinkle my conversations with my mother first with English words and then with complete English sentences.

If I lost fluency, what was the harm? During that time, I had started to learn more about the brutality of colonization in Central America and the role the Spanish language played in the violence inflicted on the Pipil and Lenca communities. I felt contempt toward my mother tongue. I couldn’t muster any pride in a language that was part of a strategy to eradicate us. It wasn’t as if I was valorizing English over Spanish. By then, I knew the violent colonial role that English played and plays throughout the world. Wasn’t I merely swapping one colonial tongue for another?

I didn’t know that that choice was a privilege. Mom never had the freedom to swap. Spanish was bound to her in ways I couldn’t understand.

When we first arrived, Mom took English classes out of necessity. Not out of some aspiration to one day read English literature or because she was falling in love with a new country. English was a means to access work, and like most working-poor racialized women, Mom’s time for schooling in those early years was cut short. We needed money and it wasn’t long before she was forced to start working. She was offered a job that required very little language competency and where she worked for eight hours a day on an assembly line making antennas.

Today, she tells me she still doesn’t feel confident in English even after all these years. Mom spent her time isolated while the rest of us went to school, made friends and started to plant roots in this country. So while we were busy learning a new language, she was left behind.

One summer, I went back to El Salvador with Mom. I got to see the village where she grew up. I met her cousins and my cousins for the first time. We talked and laughed with each other, and I got to experience Mom at home with community speaking her language. Spanish was more than a colonial tongue. It was also packed tight with our culture and beliefs. Spanish was the door and the bridge to Central America, the culture, the land, the people. And throughout the trip, I experienced something that Canada had always withheld. I felt moments of belonging.

Recently, I asked Mom if she ever worried when she saw us turning rapidly toward English.

“Yes,” she said. “I thought a day would come when we wouldn’t understand each other.”

I want my son to have the language that connects him to our culture, even if, like me, he might not always appreciate this effort.

But the real reason I try to push English away and force myself to speak Spanish to him is because I want him to know his grandmother, her humour, the way she plays with language and makes up new words, her sense of justice, her wit and the sharpness and power of her Spanish tongue.

Tongues Anthology Launch

Join Book*hug Press on Saturday, November 13 to celebrate the virtual launch of Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language, edited by Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabari. In a review for Quill and Quire, Sheniz Janmohamed writes, “Astonishingly consistent in calibre, Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language is one of the finest anthologies published in recent years and should be required reading on syllabuses across the country.”

Featuring an interview with Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabrai, hosted by contributor Taslim Jaffer. Also with video readings by contributors Logan Broeckaert, Janet Hong, Camila Justino, Carrianne Leung, Karen McBride, Rowan McCandless, Téa Mutonji, and Adam Pottle.

With live captions. Pre-registration required.

Tongues Review: Quill & Quire

Reviewed by Sheniz Janmohamed | Starred Review

An anthology of painstakingly crafted essays, Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language explores the complexities of language and how it impacts identity, culture, and lived experience. The editors Leonarda Carranza, Eufemia Fantetti, and Ayelet Tsabari, who all in some way lost their mother tongues or ancestral languages, confess the irony of the essays being written in one language, acknowledging the colonial implications of using only English. However, this collection captures the intersections of language in its many manifestations.

The contributor list is a who’s who of the most brilliant new voices in CanLit – such as Téa Mutonji, Rowan McCandless, and Carrianne Leung – each adding to the kaleidoscope of the whole. The editors have actively resisted a tokenistic approach of “one voice speaks for one language” by including more than one contributor who experiences the same language or culture.

With this refreshing editorial approach, the anthology encourages reflection and engagement. The collection deepens in nuance with each piece, reminding the reader that language is not always limited to speech and writing; it can be an experience beyond both. Karen McBride writes of her childhood experience of conversing with frogs: “This is, perhaps, my first remembered experience with the visceral and deep connection we form with land language that isn’t taught but still learned. Every sound we let slip is foreign, filled with words that will remain unknown. And yet we glean some understanding, and there we take pride in a shared mysterious conversation with our amphibian counterparts.”

While language can connect, it can create a double exile, especially for immigrants, and some writers confront the shame of forgetting a language or how that loss is received by other native speakers. This shaming can lead to self-silencing. To reclaim language, writers attempt to revisit their homeland, only to realize that it doesn’t exist except within the mind, as Kai Cheng Thom writes, “A ghost limb reaching back through time, trying to hold on to a place I’ve never been.”

Many contributors, such as Danny Ramadan and Jenny Heijun Wills, come to terms with this separation in their own way. Kamal Al-Solaylee writes of returning to Arabic, but as a relic: “My comprehension has improved but my spoken Arabic remains frozen in time. Colloquial Egyptian has moved on. When I tried to speak it with my sister and her children, they laughed it off because I sounded like a matinee idol from the movies I used to restore my Arabic.”

Other essays reflect on how we exile ourselves through our choices in language, such as italicizing “foreignness” and the barriers that it creates, as Rebecca Fisseha explores in “Say Something in Your Language.” Ashley Hynd, in “The Seven Grandfathers and Translation,” reflects upon translating between languages, particularly in her own work between Ojibwe and English. For her, translation is a relationship: “the act of translating is not isolated in a moment. It is organic, in motion, alive in many moments. It can be a hard choice as a poet who writes in two tongues – how much to give and when.”

Across the anthology, there is a palpable sense of loss in the ability to communicate between generations. Taslim Jaffer, whose father lives with her young family, desires to keep Kutchi and Kiswahili alive on her children’s tongues. After bearing witness to the estrangement her own children felt on their first trip to Korea, Janet Hong spent quarantine teaching her eldest to read Korean – one step toward reinvigorating language and cultural understanding in her children’s lives. Jónína Kirton mourns the loss of both of her ancestral languages, reflecting on the intersections of privilege and trauma she experiences as a result.

As evidenced by the longing of many contributors, the language of loss cannot be fully translated. However, as Sahar Golshan reminds us, grief can open a pathway to the heart: “My body has inherited exile and I may never access Iranian soil, but the presence of these plants reminds me of my connection to here. … I kneel in a place that holds me firmly as I grieve.”

Some of the most fascinating and unexpected pieces in the collection are from Amanda Leduc, Logan Broeckaert, and Adam Pottle, who write of language as a barrier experienced in the body, with lived consequences. As Leduc puts it, “Ableism in language is different – sneaky, mundane, less apt to draw attention. Subtle.” In Pottle’s essay, “Newborn,” he notes the challenges of writing in sign language and the othering experienced between the words: “English does not translate directly into American Sign Language. Sign Language grammar is closer to Japanese than to English. To ask, ‘What is your name?’ in ASL, one says, ‘Name you,’ while lowering one’s eyebrows. Facial expressions are as much a part of grammar as the signs themselves, and I had to keep this in mind while writing.”

Astonishingly consistent in calibre, Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language poses questions that leap beyond the page: How is language received in the body? What is lost in the space between words? What cannot be recovered? What remains to be uncovered? It is one of the finest anthologies published in recent years and should be required reading on syllabuses across the country.

The full review is also available to read on the Quill & Quire Website.