No Opportunity for Song: A Slovak Immigrant\u27s Silencing Analyzed through Her Pronoun Choice

I can\u27t tell the most frightening story I know, because stories are made of words, and once I was without them. I was trekking in Nepal and ended up with amnesia. Later I stumbled into a mission hospital with a bruised jaw. A bad fall? I can\u27t say. I had no words. No words for this thing that was wrenching and crying, in which I - a bundle of terror - seemed trapped. No words for where I began, stopped, or the mud stubble terrace on which I sat. No words to map, no words to define, no words to possess. No words for the blobs of light and shadow shifting or parking before me. No words to rank or relate the garbage - my own memories - blasting against my consciousness, randomly, insistently. Names shouted inside my head - my family, my lover, my own name; places - my hometown in America, the name of the mission hospital I\u27d eventually find my way to. An eleven-thousand foot mountain rose in front of me. A backpack pulled at my shoulders. A Nepali woman stroked my arm. I had no words to weave any of these into a safety net of story or meaning. All were uncontrollable, unpredictable, stimuli, which somehow, suddenly, had complete, and therefore sinister, power, and struck again and again against - some other thing - me - a thing I couldn\u27t name or inhabit, for I had no words. I remember this sensation now when I want to know what it must have been like for my immigrant mother when, as an eight-year-old Slovak peasant child, she first arrived in America in 1929

The Sarmatian Review, Vol. 25, No. 2

Contents: "In Siberian Prisons", Simon Tokarzewski; "BOOKS BOOKS and Periodicals Received"; "Mission and Poetry: Adam Miciewicz in Europe", (review) Harry Louis Roddy, Jr; "The Revenge of History: Russian Strategic Initiative in the Twenty-First Century", By Aleksandr Sergeevich Panarin (review by Sally Boss); "The Eastern Orthodox civilization in the globalized world", By Aleksandr Sergeevich Panarin (reviewed by Sally Boss); Dariusz Skórczewski, "An anthology of Polish poetry in diaspora, 1939–1999"; "The Pulaski Legion in the American Revolution", by Francis Casimir Kajencki (review by James R Thompson); "Shut Up Shut Down", Poems By Mark Nowak (review Danusha V. Goska); "Journey from Innocence", By Anna R. Dadlez (review Patricia A. Gajda); "A note on Wisława Szymborska’s “The Tarsier” (“Tarsjusz”)"Ela Rossmiller; "Letters"; "Announcements and Notes"; "The Sarmatian Review Index"; "About the Authors"; Thank you note

The Sarmatian Review, Vol. 23, No. 3

Contents: "SARMATIAN REVIEW INDEX"; James R. Thompson, “Born Under a Lucky Star” (review); "BOOKS"; Adam Asnyk, “Over the Depths: First Sonnet” translated by Alex Kurczaba; Patricia A. Gajda, “Russia in the Twentieth Century” (review); Anna Czarnowus, “Through the Poet’s Eye” (review); Danusha Goska, “Regions of the Great Heresy” (review); Adam Fitas, “Spory o krytykȩ literacką w Dwudziestoleciu” (review); Joanna Nižyńska, “Selected Poems” (review); Joseph A. Kotarba, “Political Borders and Cross-Border Identities” (review); Theresa Kurk McGinley, “World War II through Polish Eyes” (review); Maria Szonert-Binienda, “Lying Down WithDogs” (review); "Poems" by Kevin Hannan; "OUR TAKE: Writing Counterhistory in Non- Germanic Central Europe"; Zofia Ptaśnik, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" (sixth and final installment); "About the Authors