Can an Afro-latina speak English?

Accessing our emotions to understand our collective subjectivity, or so-called intersubjectivity, is crucial for us to grow as a permeable-body. Let me explain:

In the last four years as a teacher, I have had the impression that the classroom environment is a place where anxiety, sadness, anger, and disappointment have affected the self-esteem of those who are learning.

These marks, which seem to be imprinted on the people who come to me and are already affected by guilt and pain for not speaking the language, even as adults, have to do with colonial marks.

If we analyze this carefully, we will realize that this is due to the way the language is imposed: cold, impersonal, and in a colonizing manner.

As someone who learned English on my own, I realized that this kind of oppression is part of the teaching pedagogy itself, as a way of controlling the hierarchy, allowing who can speak and who cannot.

It's not unusual that over classes, emotions overflow into trauma due to the way theory, grammar, semantics, and structure were taught by previous teachers.

Frantz Fanon explains that language is a matter of power. Therefore, this same language carries

the weight of a civilization.

Now, can South Americans speak English?

Our fear of speaking out is a colonial prohibition precisely because there is a system of surveillance of who can circulate within that language.

Accumulating traumas of completely different phases of our life: childhood or adolescence in the school or even in the adulthood weather in academic or professional environment.

Language become a shield of civilization, the object of mocking or being sarcastic pushing to the opposite side those ones who do not perform as the same manner that the colonizers do.

When people ask me why English I always say that it has approached me to black people across the globe and when we speak in the Global South Diaspora, we subvert it.

My first impressions of English weren't the best ones. In fact, I ended up falling in love in the past with no intention to keep forward.

Just as pretuguês has recreated the language here in Brazil, the reinvention of the pedagogical environment allows the circularity of multiple affections from rage and fear to relieve and hunger of learning, giving room to the intersubjectivity between teacher and student.

The relationship between teacher and student opens up space for disobedience to the American imperialist accent and Western strict on language and doing so we can strengthen a strong bond of emancipation and allow this closeness with other countries of the diaspora and africans.