Born in a Second Language 

“I am three languages short of know myself,” remarks Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie in the opening poem of Born in a Second Language. Much of the collection grapples with the violence of the English language and its problematic kinship with racist understandings of citizenship and belonging. In the poem “Port of Entry,” we observe how the immigrant is made to repeatedly surrender their name, homeland, and “nonimmigrant disposition.” In “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” (a direct quote from Matthew 27:46, which translates as “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) the poet asks:

How can I trust God
in the language in which
He first forsook me from 1619 through the Îles des Chiens
to Cape Agulhas. How can I when English makes a sentence
sink, iron gags and fastens mouths?

The protest of English is as much discursive as it is anatomical. Having “barely graduated from my mother’s back,” says the poet, her mouth had already shaped a whole litany of potential answers that immigrants from African countries might draw on “when first asked, Where are you from?”as if “this day’s English could unscramble Africa.” In these poems, body parts become instruments of naming and (mis)recognition, obedience and refusal, self-disgust and self-preservation, as the poet tries to understand the difference between “calling” and “naming” and their distinct orientations to the world: “I learn // naming is how one becomes a self. I know calling makes one return.” 

For Afiriyie-Hwedie, whatever is lost in naming, state legibility, and translation between cultures is made up for by knowing how and to whom to respond when summoned. The poet’s mother becomes a barometer of distance and by the book’s end, the poet measures both self and continent by “the length it takes to walk along my mother’s voice into my name.” This is one of the most gutting and lucid books I’ve read this year.