ABSTRACT
“I Have English” is an experimental attempt to commingle theory, memoir, criticism, what some call autotheory and others call autoethnography. Or it is a rage essay about Whiteness, racism, and other assorted oppressions that beset Brown and Black female bodies in the United States? Or it is a thought experiment about one person’s embattled relationship with English, the language in which she thinks, lives, dreams, loves, and hates? Or it could also be a meditation on longing, belonging, and nostalgia, the predictable thematics that are always readily available for immigrants to perform. Or the essay is a cliché. What it is, what it feels like is a series of prose, poetic, storied, and entangled thoughts about having, possessing a colonial linguistics object, but never fully owning it.
