Rhina P. Espaillat: “Bilingual/Bilingüe”

How closely is language tied to identity? To our sense of reality? Born in the Dominican Republic and schooled in the United States, Rhina P. Espaillat confronted these questions early, writing poetry in Spanish (her first language) and English (her second) from childhood onward. Though she’s a master of English versecraft, she’s never stopped exploring her dual linguistic heritage, which was shaped by both necessity and inclination. Exiled from her homeland when her family—including her diplomat father, Carlos Manuel Homero Espaillat—fell out of favor with the Trujillo dictatorship, the young poet eagerly absorbed English in the United States. Biographers Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres-Saillant recount:

[A]s her parents rebuilt their lives as working-class immigrants, Espaillat abided by her father’s stern language policy that forbade anything but fully grammatical Spanish at home. Even so, she quickly excelled in English, producing her first Anglophone poem at age ten. ...

As a result of her family’s cultural pride and domestic language policy, however, Spanish never became for Espaillat a lesser language. She remembers that for Don Homero “the words in his own language were the ‘true’ names for things in the world,” and that “if it could be said at all, it could be said best in the language of those authors whose words were the core of his education.” Espaillat, of course, did not inherit her father’s linguistic fundamentalism; her education brought her into contact with more nuanced thinking about the nature of language. But she does uphold his conservative sense of language as a legacy requiring protection from contamination: “I mean by bilingualism ... what my father meant by it,” she writes, “the complete mastery of two languages, with no need to supplement either one by injecting into it words from the other, either orally or in writing.”

Moving in itself, this passage makes an ideal introduction to “Bilingual/Bilingüe,” a gem from Espaillat’s 1998 collection Where Horizons Go. Both in this poem and in a corresponding essay by the same title, the poet peers closely at the intimacies and estrangements of language. Several concerns Kang and Torres-Saillant have highlighted among her “cornucopia” of subjects—“the nuances of family life,” “her Dominican ancestry and Hispanic heritage,” “an overarching desire to understand others”—dominate this text, which examines her relationship to both of her languages as well as to her father. (And her father’s relationship to both of her languages.) In 18 bittersweet lines, written in rhyming couplets, Espaillat honors all these bonds at once, recalling a bilingual childhood that complicated but never diminished her love of words.

This complex view of language announces itself in the poem’s title. Including both the English word bilingual and the Spanish bilingüe (or merging or dividing them, depending on how you view the slash mark), Espaillat refuses to privilege one over the other. Her poem will not only incorporate both languages but also draw meaning from the interplay between them—a meaning that neither could yield on its own. The grammar of her opening sentence is as intricate as its central metaphor:

My father liked them separate, one there,
one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart
(el corazón) and lock the alien part

to what he was—his memory, his name
(su nombre)—with a key he could not claim.

What does that first them refer to? Espaillat doesn’t clarify until the poem’s second sentence and seventh line. We’re left to infer, based on the title and on the parentheticals dividing one language from another, what the father liked to separate: English and Spanish. Likewise, we have to wait to learn that “one there, / one here” refers to the languages he wanted spoken outside and inside the home. The initial uncertainty creates rhetorical suspense while suggesting one of Espaillat’s themes: the way in which language unsettles our worlds even as it defines them.

This theme of thinking, speaking, living in two languages is reinforced by the poet’s formal choices. Each Spanish phrase is a close equivalent of the English phrase before it. Though the parentheticals divide English from Spanish, they’re a minor barrier; anyone hearing the poem read aloud, for example, will barely notice them. Every couplet in the poem contains phrases in both languages, so the one language is never far from the other: they’re constantly jostling or mingling. In a way, Espaillat is violating her father’s purist notion of bilingualism by “injecting” words from one language into the other. (She may also be rendering a childhood experience she recalls in her “Bilingual/Bilingüe” essay: the way her native Spanish gave her “a peculiar auditory delight best described as echoes in the mind.”) Moreover, the poem is written in a strict form—rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, aka heroic couplets—that forces both languages to “do their part” in filling out the scheme. The poem never rhymes a Spanish word with an English one, but it integrates Spanish and English into a unified rhythm.

As for what the first sentence of the poem is saying, readers need to look closely to catch the nuances. To start, how do we untangle that knotty metaphor of the heart, lock, and key? The father’s desire to keep languages “separate”—in particular, to dictate where and how he and his daughter used them—seems to stem from his anxiety that bilingualism would divide her internally and in some way separate her from him. The part of her “heart” that understood and expressed itself in English would become “alien” to him. (Espaillat’s word choice is ironic because her adopted country viewed the Spanish language as “alien.”) But there’s more: the daughter is a writer. In carefully hedged terms (as if, might), she suggests that her father feared she would “lock” the “alien,” English-speaking part of herself to “what he was—his memory, his name / ... with a key he could not claim.” In other words, he worried she would identify primarily with English and would understand and express his identity through that lens.

Accordingly, the father imposed a rule that the daughter believes was futile:

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”
he said, “y basta.” But who can divide

the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from
any child?

With that brusque y basta—meaning, approximately, “and that’s that”—the father believed he’d laid down the law with respect to language. His daughter, the writer, knew better. She understood that kids’ appetite for language and experience can’t easily be curbed. Nor can parents pass their own experience of language—barriers included—to the next generation. The father’s words fail his own rules: Espaillat quotes him in both English and Spanish, even though he’s speaking from within the home where he’s prohibiting English. Notice, too, the difference between this door and a near-equivalent, such as these walls: unlike walls, doors don’t always divide; they let things in and out.

Among the things that crossed the threshold of this home were books. The speaker recalls enjoying them “late, in bed,” as a contraband source of English in her father’s Spanish-only territory. The image is familiar from many coming-of-age narratives: a child perusing—often with a flashlight, under the covers—a forbidden stash of anything from comic books to horror stories to explicit material. For this young poet, however, the big thrill wasn’t sex or violence but language. She was silently learning a new way to be vocal:

              I knew how to be dumb

and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed,
I hoarded secret syllables I read

until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run
where his stumbled. And still the heart was one.

Again, Espaillat’s formal choices are astute and telling. The word stumbled alters the metrical form, slipping a trochee into the second foot of the iambic line and making the line “stumble” a little. The Spanish phrases continue to appear as parentheticals; for the adult poet, Spanish seems to assert itself as a second option or counterpart after every English phrase. The pairing of my tongue and mi lengua is especially evocative: in Spanish as in English, this noun can mean both “organ of speech” and, metaphorically, “language,” as in the phrase “your native tongue.” Of course, no two languages are alike, and a word in one language may not have an equivalent in another that captures its essential, cultural meanings. Even untranslated words can contain internal dualities, or multiplicities—as the speaker, inundated by linguistic complexity, knows all too well.

Just as readers begin to wonder whether her identity has fractured after all, Espaillat declares, “And still the heart was one.” Despite her father’s fears, bilingualism hasn’t divided but expanded her. It’s been a gain, not a loss. In a way, this seems obvious: for the lover of language, why wouldn’t two tongues be better than one?

Family dynamics, however, aren’t so straightforward, and the close of the poem measures the impact of her gain on the father-daughter bond.

I like to think he knew that, even when,
proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen,

he stood outside mis versos, half in fear
of words he loved but wanted not to hear.

Though the speaker knows for herself that her “heart” remained “one”—her sense of identity strong, her pride in it undiminished—she can only hope that her father knew the same. The past tense here is mournful: she can’t be sure because she can no longer ask him and perhaps couldn’t find a way to ask during his lifetime. What’s clear is that his feelings about her writing (mis versos) were terribly complex—fraught in ways he couldn’t articulate, and she can only imply. “Proud (orgulloso)” as he was of her literary talent, he seems never to have connected with her poems in the way she might have wished. The speaker says he “stood outside” them—in what sense? Was he standoffish toward them? Not fully captured by them? Both?

The final line of “Bilingual/Bilingüe” deepens the ambiguity. Which language contained the “words he loved but wanted not to hear”? We might guess that these are the Spanish words in his daughter’s English poems (or the Spanish poems in her bilingual oeuvre) and that the line means, roughly, “words from the language he loved but didn’t want to hear in that context.” But could it refer, instead, to English words he loved because they brought his daughter success yet feared because they marked a generational and cultural gap between them? Espaillat suggests both possibilities, even as she evokes her father’s delicate mix of anxiety and pride. The anxiety has many possible sources—lack of expertise in the language he “stumbled” over, a sense that she has grown apart from him, and so on. The pride underscores that she has not only acquired English but also mastered it in a way few native speakers ever do.

The last Spanish phrase in the poem, mis versos (my verses), is the first to escape the confines of parentheses or quotation marks. What a subtle touch this is! Spanish and English are truly joined at last, and it’s literally her poetry that joins them. Espaillat also reverses the translation order: now Spanish is at the forefront, and the reader’s mind must supply the English equivalent.

At the same time, the linguistic politics of the poem don’t boil down to a flat “statement.” It’s notable that these verses are written mainly in English, in an old form (iambic pentameter plus rhyming couplets) that is famously vital to the English tradition. To date, Espaillat has found her largest audience in the United States, where English predominates but is not an official language and where the robust presence of both languages causes political tension. (In particular, the growth of the Spanish-speaking population has often prompted a xenophobic backlash among the Anglophone majority.) Even as Espaillat celebrates her full heritage, the drama of assimilation haunts the poem’s structure. A mirror image of this structure—Spanish lines embedded with English phrases—would presumably reflect a different side of her experience or someone else’s experience altogether. It’s fitting that the poem would be daunting to translate: to do so would require navigating the essential questions of bilingualism and communication the poet raises.

Setting Rhina P. Espaillat’s biography aside, “Bilingual/Bilingüe” takes up a thread that runs through countless immigrant stories. Its core theme is reconciliation with the past: with the ghosts of the home country, the first language, the prior generation. In it we hear the speaker sorting through old conflicts, seeking a peace that eluded her and her father beyond the page. Finding that peace, in the end, means letting both love and fear have their say. No poet can resolve the destabilizing elements of language—or of the transition from one culture to another—but through her heart, tongue, and versos, Espaillat expresses them with wonderful precision.