knowing, or not knowing, a language is political.
not knowing russian ’cause my mother forbade me, safeguarding,
turned out to be an issue, russians won’t speak the state’s tongue, not knowing, being their statement, innocently, being mine.
knowing English is also political: better English than russian! speaking English in Belgium while gladly accepting French,
nobody here split my family, banned literature, or threatened me with fists, if I pondered the russian sound.
You see, a language can detonate a bomb, save independence.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
Before anything else: the capitals. In this poem English is capitalised, and so are French and Belgium. russian never is — four times, without a single lapse, including in the line where the two stand together: better English than russian! That is not inconsistency. It is the poem’s one sustained formal device, and it does in the orthography precisely what the poem argues in its sentences — status is granted or withheld by a decision, and a decision can be made by a poet with a shift key as surely as by a state. The argument is enacted before it is stated. If a reader takes only one thing from this poem, I would want it to be that.
Otherwise the poem is deliberately bare. There is no metre to speak of, no figurative system, nothing built to be taken apart — the lines are short, the breaks fall roughly where a speaker would pause for breath, and I will say plainly that several of them do not earn their keep; knowing, or not knowing, / a language / is political would lose very little set as one line. But one break is worth the whole poem. The sentence that begins not knowing russian does not reach its verb until after the stanza gap — safeguarding, // turned out to be an issue — so the thought is cut in half by exactly the silence it is describing. On a first reading it stumbles. On a second it is the most structurally intelligent moment here, and I would build more of the poem the way that one joint is built.
The close is three lines and two verbs: a language can / detonate a bomb, / save independence. No conjunction between them, no or, no but — the two opposite capacities simply set side by side and left. That absence is doing the work an image would do elsewhere.
The poem keeps a ledger, and the languages in it are sorted by force rather than by grammar. russian is imperial violence: banned literature, a split family, the threat of fists. English is the useful neutral — the language you choose because it is not the other one, better English than russian! French is the accepted compromise, taken on gladly. And then there is the fourth entry, which is the one that interests me: the mother’s prohibition. A household issuing its own language policy, in the same instrument the state uses — forbidding a tongue — but pointed the other way, so that the child cannot be conscripted by what she cannot speak. A counter-bureaucracy of one, run out of a kitchen.
I want to name the poem’s dependency too, because it is doing real work here. The poem’s Belgium is a place where language has no history: nobody here split my family, / banned literature, / or threatened me with fists. Every word of that is true of the speaker’s experience. It is not true of Belgium, whose own language border has been fought over for a century, and where gladly accepting French is not the neutral act it can feel like from outside. The poem does not claim otherwise — but the relief it describes is itself a position, available from a particular vantage. Safety somewhere else is still somebody’s contested ground.
The presence in this poem is the language the speaker cannot speak. That is the whole of it: russian is the only tongue here she does not have, and it is the one that will not leave. Banned, it stays. The mother’s ban is an act of love that leaves behind a hole in the exact shape of the thing it was protecting against, and the poem is written from inside that shape.
The word I cannot get past is innocently. Others' not-knowing is a statement — deliberate, addressed, a refusal aimed at a state. The speaker’s is innocent: without intention, and also not guilty. A child is handed a refusal she did not make, and only later finds out it has been counted as a position all along. That is what inherited exile actually feels like, and four syllables carry it.
And notice what the fists are for. It is the only physical threat in the poem, and it is conditional — not for speaking russian, but if I pondered the russian sound. Not the act. The considering of it. The poem knows the difference, and does not stop to explain it.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The mother’s ban
Knowing A Language enters the Archive as a short, flat, deliberately unornamented statement about the languages a person is given, refused, and permitted — and about who does the giving.
The myth it exposes is one held comfortably almost everywhere it is not being tested: that learning a language, or not learning one, is a cultural, educational or aesthetic choice — a matter of schooling, travel, taste. The poem’s first three lines refuse that outright, and the rest of it produces the evidence: a mother’s prohibition, a state’s tongue, a literature banned, a family split, a threat of violence attached not to speaking but to pondering. Nothing here was chosen in the sense the myth means.
Beneath it runs the myth the poem leans on to find its rest: that Western Europe is neutral ground, a place where language carries no historical weight and nobody here split my family. That is true as testimony and untrue as geography — Belgium’s own language border has been contested for generations — and the gap between the two is where the poem’s relief lives.
Its symbols are instruments rather than images: the mother’s ban (censorship performed as protection, the state’s own method turned against it), the state’s tongue (a language reclassified as a loyalty test), the fists (violence attached to contemplation, not to speech), the russian sound — never named as a word, only as a sound, because the speaker was never allowed the words — and the bomb, set beside independence in the final lines as the two things one language can equally do. Its target is the mother’s ban: a domestic act of erasure carried out to keep a child unavailable to an empire.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. The machine read it without resistance and the readers agreed quickly; nothing in how we work had to change to receive it. Rung is not rank, and this is a case where the distinction matters — the poem’s whole method is to refuse the ornament that would have given our apparatus more to do. What it leaves behind is a baseline for how displacement gets documented when a writer declines figurative language and states the ledger instead.
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