I Lost My Talk

In “I Lost My Talk,” the speaker opens by saying that she has lost her ability to speak her mother-tongue. However, she did not lose it by her own mistake or accident; instead, it was forcibly stolen by the white power structure—as she writes, “you took it away” (Line 2). Her birth language was stolen when she was “a little girl” (Line 3) by the white faculty and staff at the residential school Shubenacadie, an institution that should have protected children, but instead abused them. As the speaker reflects on her past, a sense of trauma emerges, especially in the second stanza, when the speaker’s calm tone shifts to one of pain and bitterness; she now accuses the white institution of subterfuge and theft, describing their attack on her native language: “You snatched it away” (Line 5), amplifying the original milder “took it away” into the jargon of criminality.

Trauma can sometimes leave individuals too paralyzed to speak. This poem shows an adult speaker now able to share her story after a time of silence. Nevertheless, the speaker does not hide the serious emotional consequences. In the second stanza, the speaker laments that she now speaks like the thief or thieves who stole her language—forced to assimilate into their culture, she has lost her originality and now “think like you / […] create like you” (Lines 6-7).