Gloria Anzaldua asks the question “how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it?” in her essay, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” She tells the story of her at the dentist but connects it to her life experience. For most of her life, Gloria, because she identified as a Chicana, was often silenced, disregarded, and stripped of her identity. By silencing someone’s tongue, you are taking away their ability to be human, stand up for themselves, and speak for what they believe in. They are essentially losing the biggest part of what defines them and what makes them unique. As we learned earlier this year, wildness is defined as something untamed, uncultivated, and something that stands out from the rest. To break down the question “how do you tame a wild tongue,” I personally think something so “wild” does not actually have the ability to be tamed. How can you “tame” something that is meant to be loud, to be heard, and to be understood? In Gloria’s example, people want to “tame” and silence her because of where she comes from and looks like. They want to take her established identity and change/silence it because they believe it does not belong, but she should be wild. She shouldn’t be silenced let alone ashamed of who she is.
~Audrey Wines
I think this is a great answer to this question. I like that you discussed the answer in both a general sense for the entire population, as well as discussing how Gloria herself experienced people trying to “tame” her “wild tongue.” I like that you also decided yourself that a wild tongue cannot be tamed if it is truly wild.