Things We Carry on the Sea

The “mother tongues” (Line 15) carried by the speaker contains a number of meanings. The “mother tongues” primarily serve as a synonym for the speaker’s languages, which they speak in the three lines following the phrase. The phrase “mother tongue” also serves to connect the language to the speaker’s ancestry (through the word mother) and body (through the word tongue). Their language becomes a physical part of them just like their “hands, feet, bones, [and] hearts” (Line 8).

Though language is created by the body, its form is a nexus of one’s identity, culture, and homeland. The speaker’s use of their native languages—particularly ones that do not use Latin characters—serves as a point of cultural translation or assimilation. The speaker includes parenthetical anglicized versions of Chinese, Arabic, and Yiddish scripts. Rather than translate the words, the speaker chooses to share an analogous English pronunciation. This sharing suggests a larger desire to share their language and culture. However, this reading is complicated by the influence of Western culture (See: Themes) and the use of parentheses, which make the English pronunciation self-contained and reliant on the original.