Week 3: Tentative Speaking

I am an English major. I do all of the expected English major things: I read at every opportunity, I have a journal for all of my writing needs, and I subscribe to a poetry channel on YouTube. Button Poetry, the YouTube channel I subscribe to, posts videos of slam poetry performances wherein a poet recites their poem in dramatic fashion. Melissa Lozada-Oliva, one of the poets that is featured on the Button Poetry channel, won the National Poetry Slam Championship in 2015. Her winning poem, “Like Totally Whatever”, was a direct response to another poem by poet Taylor Mali, “Totally Like Whatever, You Know?” Both of the poems are a commentary on the hesitant, questioning quality of the way some people talk. Mali makes the argument that we all need to speak more assertively, and words such as “like”, “you know”, and “totally” are detrimental to language. Lozada-Oliva, however, views the same words that Mali took exception to as an inherently female addition to language that is by no means harmful.

It is necessary to watch both of these performances to fully understand my reaction to them so here are links to both videos:

Taylor Mali's Poem

Melissa Lozada-Oliva's Poem

 The poems are very similar in places, but the tone of each poem is dramatically different. Mali invites the audience to laugh at what he views as the degradation of language, and he seems largely ignorant of the broader and gendered message of his poem. Lozada-Oliva takes what Mali implied—mostly women speak in this way—and emphasized it so that the argument was inherently gendered. Mali asks “what has happened to our conviction?” (1:34) in order to call attention to the fact that the hesitant words “like” and “you know” make everyone sound as though they are unsure. Lozada-Oliva argues that Mali was being sexist with this criticism because women are typically thought of as the perpetrators of this tentative way of speaking. Lozada-Oliva’s poem performance is powerful and emotional right from the start. She begins her poem, “it has somehow become necessary for old white men to tell me how to speak” (0:10), to remind her audience that this topic is only an issue because of patriarchal rules. Just like Mali, Lozada-Oliva makes it a point to use “like” and “you know” excessively, phrasing her sentences as though they were all questions, but she didn't mock this way of speaking like Mali did.

            Lozada-Oliva does a fantastic job of making her poem sarcastic, scathing, humorous, and thought-provoking. In the face of Mali’s mansplaining, Lozada-Oliva says “maybe I am always speaking in questions because I am so used to being cut off. It’s like, maybe this is a defense mechanism” (1:36). Her idea that the uncertain way of speaking is a defense mechanism makes a lot of sense and affected me on a personal level. Women speak in questions because they are so used to being contradicted and talked down to that a lot of their confidence in oration has been stolen from them. I can’t stop myself from inserting several “likes” and “you knows” in my sentences because I am terrified that I will appear stupid if I say something that I believe is true with confidence, and it turns out that what I said was completely false. While Mali tells us that tentative speaking is a problem that needs to be addressed, Lozada-Oliva reassures us that it doesn’t matter how you use your voice, as long as you use it.