"Broken Speak" by I Was Born With Two Tongues:
The Agony and Beauty of Birth; What Happens When Asians Shout? (part 2 of 3)

In the world of "Broken Speak", the "sick self" of Asian America is the inability to act, the paralysis and voiceless response to oppression. While much of the CD shows props for the strength and knowledge of the elders, there are also vivid pictures of the older generations' failings as a legacy of fights not fought. "Morning Papers" tells the story of a father insulted and humiliated by white racists while his son wishes he would do something, anything to stand up and fight the bastards, only to see the anger sublimated to an angry fist, later at home at the kitchen table. "Alag" tells the story of a young Asian American woman growing up, at each stage of life not acting against the injustices thrown at her, pushing them under to become wild violent revenge fantasies. In "Hyphenation", Emily sews the physical metaphor of a hyphen as a stitch to reveal self-images of patched together Frankenstein's brides – a graphic reminder that the psychic fallout of oppression is repulsive. That piece also voices how the new self is built on the ashes of the old: "This song is a sort of death, punching my old self into the earth … / And this song is a sort of a life I sing to tell you of my sorrows gone; tomorrows' sun".

Azn Handshake
In "Broken Speak", the song is the word spoken, and the word spoken is the act of seizing freedom. Contrary to my fear that "Asian rap" would be copycat art, the Tongues have borrowed the music form and made it Asian America's own, with our own meaning and secret handshake. Where hip-hop comes out of different parts of the oral traditions of the Black and Caribbean communities, I Was Born With Two Tongues have claimed rap as a kind of antidote to Asian American silence. Broken Speak is the language of the infant learning a new language Ô "broken" English that is really a new Asian American dialect.
The language is born on the shadows of the sins of the fathers , as Marlon and Dennis say in Concerto in C for Two Shades of the Color Yellow,": "I am not tongue-tied …. I am not the forgotten one, I am not the slave. We are half the world / ….I will mark this Waldorf room with the name of my truer name, as soon as I learn that shit".

Brokenspeak3 Part of the Roar