poetry STOLEN PROPERTY: The language of my Ancestors was Stolen

Dee Allen’s poetry reminds us of the price of theft, a robbery not only of goods and services, but language itself.

Dee Allen Brittle Paper
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STOLEN PROPERTY
The language of my Ancestors was Stolen

By Dee Allen

                                    For Peggy Robles-Alvarado

The language of my ancestors was stolen

By European settlers

Or their American descendants.

They thought the sound of it

Was pure gibberish, garbled

Word salad served

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On thin air, harsh on their delicate

Coloniser ears.

The tongue they heard

Was far from being mangled

Verbs and nouns.

It was a linguistic

Tell-tale sign of a land

No longer home.

The only property

They had left from old lives

In Gabon,

Country that sits on Africa’s west coast

Between Cameroon and the Congo, wedged—

The keepsake

My ancestors spoke,

Learned and owned,

Uniquely theirs, before

Being taken by force

To this alien land by boat,

So unlike the okoumé-filled rainforests

Sheltering elephants and apes and warm streams

And open savannahs golden-hot like the sun

The Ateke tribe were used to,

Ferried to a realm of dogwood trees,

Corn and tobacco crops grown to be

Plucked from tall stalks and top soil

All day for no pay, teeming with fearsome

Strange-talking, strange-dressing

Ghost-faces, living in bigger

Strange huts—

The language of my ancestors was stolen

Mitsogo*—Stolen and discarded—

Replaced with one

Which I’m sure

Felt awkward rolling inside

West African mouths:

English.

A language that says

WE DOMINATE YOU—

*Language of the Tsogo and Ateke tribes from Gabon.

  Pronounced: “Me-show-go.”

Dee Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California, active on creative writing & spoken word since the early 1990s. He’s the author of 7 books--Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater, Skeletal Black (all from POOR Press); Elohi Unitsi Conviction (2 Change Publishing) and 2 newest, Rusty Gallows: Passages Against Hate (Vagabond Books) and Plans (Nomadic Press).