OLAMIDOTUN OWOLABI

 

 

The Theft Of Our Tongue

A Litany Of Loss And Reclaiming

 

Our hands were always language,

fingers drawing syntax in the air.

Though classrooms made sound their law,

our grammar lived: bright, visual, alive.

 

We learned to keep thoughts in shapes and space,

to hold names and stories in our palms,

to trade jokes with quick hand-flashes

that ears could not hear and silence could not take.

 

Signing was the first bridge between us;

it let us step close and touch one another’s minds.

It linked grandparents and children, teachers and friends,

made a place where everyone belonged.

Because of it we opened schools, stages, churches:

places where hands told joy and sorrow.

 

But power prizes uniform sound,

and every bridge becomes a target for those

who fear the mirror it holds.

Policies came like winter: bans whispered into law,

“Speak. Don’t sign,” a cruel, tidy decree.

Classrooms emptied of gesture, teachers silenced, palms pinned to desks.

They said lips were the passport to a single voice,

and so they dimmed our light.

 

They stole our language from the bright rooms,

not in one theft but through years of erasure:

punishments, shame, the slow rewriting of history.

Children were forced to lip-read;

our names reduced to footnotes, our stories recast in another script.

They placed the Deaf child in a world pretending to hear,

then called that pretense “progress,” and called us lucky.

 

Still, hands remember what mouths forget.

We kept signing in secret: siblings on the bus,

friends on the playground, grandparents at the kitchen table.

We saved our words in courtyards and back rooms,

in quick flashes behind closed doors.

 

From that hidden resistance rose a second freedom:

activists stood and said, “We will be seen.”

They asked for interpreters, for schools that sign,

for recognition of a language of the heart.

We wrote petitions with fingers and with voices;

we brought courts and cameras and conscience to the table.

Deaf schools reclaimed classrooms;

Deaf artists reclaimed stages;

children met teachers who signed like weather,

and the bridge began to be rebuilt, now in public.

 

Yes, our language was stolen and childhoods altered.

But a people cannot be emptied of what they know.

Our hands are maps that show the way back.

We teach the names of rivers, the verbs of light,

the faces that mean “fun you.”

We teach our young to stand and say with hands:

“This is language. This is law. This is who we are. This is our freedom.”

 

Let this be a litany against forgetting:

remember the hands that were pushed down,

the teachers who were taken away,

the faces that hid their words.

But also remember how hands rose like flags,

how signing circles became courts of culture,

how Deafness grew into a lineage of sight and love.

 

They stole one thing that gave us freedom: our tongue.

Yet that theft taught us how strong we are.

We took back what was ours and made new words for justice.

Let no law ever trade our language for a promise;

let no classroom be quieted into erasure.

 

Language is breath: to make, to know, to be.

When hands fly, a people speak their world.

 

OLAMIDOTUN OWOLABI

Dr. OLAMIDOTUN OWOLABI is a Nigerian missionary, poet, educator, and researcher. He serves as Head of the Departments of Sign Language and Adult Education at the English Master Institute (EMI) Worldwide. A passionate advocate for Deaf education, language, and inclusion, he combines scholarship, lived experience as the sibling of a Deaf adult, and creative writing to promote linguistic justice and educational equity through teaching, advocacy, and poetry.