Mouth news. Lots of mouth stuff happening in the news. In Venezuela, a group of eleven prisoners sewed their lips together in protest of not being transferred to another jail. Caracas has the bad reputation of having the worst overcrowded and violent prisons in the world, and the gristly self mutilating act still has not moved officials to take the protesters seriously. That is fucked up yo. At least they have straws. The protesters can eat and drink through the small spaces left in the corners of their mouths. I am not even fucking kidding. It is really happening. These dudes said, “Fuck this shit!” and then got a needle and thread, and stitched their mouths up. I am not sure I understand this as being the best method of rallying against the authorities. They cannot yell at anyone, and if they do – it comes out like “Mmve ufff teeoo somm uffrt ppidon. Phukkyu!!!” It is a muffled war cry. I wonder what caused their frustration to manifest itself in this way. Were they having a secret meeting, late in the night, these desperate men, looking for some solution to the darkness of the life they were leading, arguments breaking out then settling down quietly, hoping not to attract attention from guards, the desire to protest effectively outweighing the petty squabbles of the prisoners, then, in the corner, they spot one prisoner, a shy and retiring older man who mostly kept to himself, sitting on his bunk, doing a bit of needlepoint. A revolution is born.
At first I thought they were sewing their mouths together, prisoner to prisoner, so that it would look like they were making out all the time. That would have been kind of hot, but that wasn’t the case. I hope that they are able to use their mouths again, to be heard soon, that the stitches will not be permanent, that the world will take notice of their pain, so great it would be better to mutilate oneself than to endure life as it is now. I wish I could go there and carefully take the threads out of their lips myself, and kiss them all. Because that fucking sucks.
In South Korea, one mother took her six year old son to have a half an inch of his tongue removed, so that he would be able to speak the language of his choice without any trace of a Korean accent. Ok, well first of all, this is so typical of Koreans. Elective surgery is fuckin’ hot shit in the country of my ancestors, and this latest surgical offering does not surprise me in the least. What I don’t understand is why they even think this extra bit of tongue is the culprit in the capital crime of having an accent and what is going to be so bad about having an accent in the first place, no matter where you are from or how strong it is. Look at the British. We love the way they speak, at least I do. I find it terribly charming and seductive. I am an Anglophile to be sure, and it isn’t something I am particularly proud of, but I cannot help myself. I came of age in the mid 80s, and I do not have a choice. The tsunami of British bands of that era, the cult of personalities like Sting, Simon Lebon, Limahl – that’s right – fucking Limahl – would drown me in desire, and so the accent immediately makes me want to take off my pants. Why do we not treat Asian accents with the same erotic associations? Is it the foreign nature of it? It cannot be, because the British are as foreign to us as Asians are, because they are not American, to us the UK is another country, yet the accent has yet to win any points in our culture, except perhaps as the punchline of a joke, in which the ‘R’ sound replaces the ‘L,’ a laugh riot to everyone all over the world.
I think that mouth news is really weird. The way we speak being valued over another way of speaking, and not even the language getting in the way, but the way you come to the language, whether it was bestowed upon you at birth, or you came into it later in life, if you can speak it, what does having an accent matter?
My accent is mainly Californian, and I have the luxury of not yet having my lips sewn shut nor my tongue sliced up for the sake of fitting in, but I feel tremendous sadness for the mouths of all these people, because I want to speak for them, as I want to speak to them, and to say that I love them and have them hear me, with my accent, or lack thereof.