A recent Quinnipiac poll came out that had me shaking and scratching my head, while muttering under my breath interspersing the muttering with … “Hmmmm …” and “Say WHAT???”

Now, before I get into the poll results that I find either confusing or unconscionable, let me pose a question for you … and this is one I would like you to ask of some of your friends who support the Republican Party …

If I am taking my trash to the curb and see your young child or grandchild playing in the street just as a large truck comes careening from the other direction, and if I run out and grab your child/grandchild out of harm’s way, what is the first thing you will say to me when I deliver your child/grandchild safely to your door?  Will you ask me whether I am a Democrat or a Republican?  Or…

Language has long been used to destroy, control and denigrate the ways of knowing and being of those subject to colonialism and racism. In this piece, poet and activist lisa luxx traces these colonial roots, as well as the inventive linguistic creolisations of imposed languages that poets have used to resist domestication, “to rewild their grammatology” and “To dream in their own language.”

Mohammed El-Kurd told us recently on a Zoom webinar that in the courts of occupied Palestine, the legal language is Hebrew, so whole families would sit together in a courtroom whispering to one another, trying to piece together – through the various words they understood – what was being held against them. What was being decided. This, he says, is apartheid in language; colonialism in language. Having your life and safety dictated to you, on your own land, in the settler’s tongue.

The policing of citizens begins with being bound…