Review: Poems from the Edge of Extinction edited by Chris McCabe
Rating: 4.8/5 stars, rounded up to 5 on Goodreads
Every once in a while, I wonder if I care too much about language justice. Sometimes, I allow myself to lean into the arguments of my more “pragmatic” friends.
“The world is globalizing and more people speak dominant languages like English now,” they say. “That means more people can understand each other and it’s easier to communicate, right?”
I know my friends don’t mean any harm. The idea of languages being streamlined seems attractive in the abstract. But then I read collections like Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages and they remind me of the stakes of language justice.
These poems remind me that every two weeks a language falls silent. Perhaps, like any kind of death, there is a twisted sense of inevitability with language death. But even then, that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking.
When I tell my friends about my sadness, they often shrug and suggest that language death is just part of globalization and modernity. Sometimes, I am tempted to reluctantly agree. But right now, I feel like my friends are acting nonchalant at a funeral.
Everyone is sad or at least somewhat solemn at a funeral even when the person lived a long full life and died peacefully. And what makes language death all the more tragic is that it usually isn’t a peaceful process. Language death often emerges from violence. Instead of it being a sign of “progress,” it can be a victory of hegemony. Maybe there are times people choose to stop using a language as if it were merely on outdated technology. But I doubt it is ever that simple.
And I also wonder, rather gruesomely, how many languages died on the tongues ripped out of speakers’ mouths. I wonder how many people are losing the most intimate way of articulating themselves in the wake of globalized modernity. All of this makes me angry and makes me wish I could scrape English, a language of ultimate hegemony, out of my being. Of course, that would mean I’d lose access to my own native tongue.
In essence, I loved Poems from the Edge of Extinction because of the collection's emphasis on the beauty and art of language sovereignty through poetry. My heart swells and breaks and mends just for it to do that all over again as I reflect on these poems. I definitely plan to revisit this collection and I recommend it to others with a passion for language justice.
