Dis-ease of Mother Tongue

Abstract

I wrote this poem titled “Dis-ease of Mother Tongue” as a grandson and health communication scholar. It was animated by an experience my grandmother– an 89 year old African American woman– endured in a hospital wherein she was misdiagnosed with early-stage dementia 15 years ago. The cause, a doctor’s misinterpretation of her verbal and written responses to a standardized health assessment. This spoken word poem, written down, raises the issue of linguistic bias in healthcare by positioning my grandmother’s voice as a representation of the many voices actively marginalized in hospital settings; it also upsets traditional framings of African American speakers (and patients) as deficient. In accomplishing these ends, the poem recruits key strategies. It leverages a rhetorical question early on as a literary device challenging the reader to question why some people misperceive my grandmother’s expression. Additionally, it employs the extended metaphor “dis-ease of mother tongue” as a stand-in for the linguistic bias that shapes the ways healthcare practitioners (mis)interpret my grandmother’s voice.

This poem aligns with critical perspectives within sociolinguistics (Rosa & Flores, 2017), and emerging perspectives in health literacy/public health studies that extend the responsibility of “literacy” beyond individual patients to healthcare providers and organizations as a fundamentally interactional process (Rudd & Baur, 2020). Echoing this shift, is a call at the end of the poem for healthcare practitioners to recognize and heal their own linguistic biases to improve patient care (Hagiwara et al., 2019; Ortega & Prada, 2020).