ABSTRACT
In a highly entertaining poem about why cows are superior to human beings, British-Caribbean poet John Agard lists a whole set of features that distinguish between the two. The main theme of the poem is racism, and cows are described as not being racist because of the black and white hide of their skin. The characteristic that interests us most here is that cows ‘never impose their language’ upon others (Agard, ‘Cowtalk’, in Mangoes and Bullets, 1990, page 46, lines 34-5). For this is what human beings have been doing for centuries, whether it was European colonizers destroying their slaves’ languages or modern nationstates imposing their language upon immigrants. In the colonial situation, the slave-traders and the colonizers separated the slaves in such a way that they would not be able to speak to each other in their own language. Moreover, cutting out the tongue was a frequent punishment meted out to slaves caught speaking their own language.
