By Emma Zhang
11th grade | Branham High School | California
First place winner, Human Rights category
With lines from “The Race To Extract an Indigenous Language From Its Last Lucid Speaker” by Simeon Tegel and Florence Goupil, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
Iskonawa comes from Iscon, another word for bird,
tongue-tied, tongue-lost in the creases of açai palms,
blood swelled thorough hyacinth macaws and dart frogs
exhaling perspiration to skin like another word for home,
safe under ojé trees, bleeding/breathing to stand. The linguists say,
as languages disappear, so, too, do ways of thinking.
The scientists say, we don’t even know what we’re losing.
Ancient ways of life crowded out by satellite television and English soccer,
Hollywood superheros, Latin American telenovelas,
booming jungle towns/cheap colorful clothing,
consumer electronics sold to the blare of amplified tropical dance music.
The functionary who said here is your birthday, here is your name.
"Dec. 30, 1940": Campo, the last bearer of Iskonawa is "born," parrot on shoulder,
barefoot & fleeing from chained rubber deathbeds, cree en nuestro Jesus.1
Now, museums decontextualized, syllables unstitched from kapok trees,
pianissimo chirping rivers away.
In Isokonawa culture, there is a song sung when a son dies.
In Isokonawa language, namai means to dream.
2375 languages extinct by 2100, I sing, we namai mina bana2 will stay.
Zariquiey, in his red-yellow sandals, asks,
Can I write down your livelihood? Can I write down your name?
They call him wetsako3, aki4,
a labor of love and a race against the clock:
ako5 beats from the wrinkles on her hands,
we begin to salvage the lost.
***
1 "believe in our Jesus" in Spanish
2 "hope your language" in Iskonawa
3 "brother" in Iskonawa
4 "son" in Iskonawa
5 a canoe shaped drum in Iskonawa
Emma Zhang lives and writes in San Jose, California. Lately, while trying to become quadrilingual, she has been thinking a lot about the similarities between language learning and math: picking slowly at the symbols until the flesh of thinking/feeling is uncovered (maybe also like finding a fossil!). She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Aster Lit, an international youth literary magazine funded by the U.S. Department of State, and believes in the power of intercultural connections through world literature. She had a very fun time sifting through Zariquey's Iskonawa dictionary and watching Amazon rainforest videos on a park bench while attempting to bring this story to life.
Read more winning entries from the 2024 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.