Inquiry 1

In Joanne Kilgour Dowdy’s novel The Skin That We Speak, the main character is torn between her native language, Trinidadian, which connects her to her people and British English, which she can use to advance her social status. The “good girl” speaks in two different languages to please different people. When she wants to fit in with her friends and fellow Trinidadians, she chooses to speak in her native tongue, but when she is in a social setting like school, she feels as if she must please her mother and grandmother who have worked so hard to achieve a higher social status. How does this teenage girl know who she is if she cannot identify herself with a language? She uses each language depending on whom she needs to impress. Since she grew up with the each language that each had a particular purpose in life, she never got to choose who she wanted to be. If one were to ask her who she was, could she answer? In the first chapter “Ovuh Dyuh”, the “good girl” did not express which language she liked better or which one she wanted to use. She simply spoke whichever language was necessary. Is this girl loosing parts of her identity when she switches languages, or did she ever have one from the beginning? Will she ever get a chance to choose who she wants to be?