Angela Davis: “Dreaming in French”
“Davis is by far the most fluent and most vital of the three. Just watch her speaking French. She had a point to make which had nothing to do with making herself seem smart or cool or beautiful or elegant or the greatest speaker of French, even. And yet Davis is all of these things. The intensity of her desire to understand, and to make herself understood, is transcendental. “A political thinker and an analyst of society, Angela Davis considered her individual adventure important only in the way it might illuminate society,” Kaplan writes. In any language the immediacy of what a person has to say will surmount whatever obstacles her questionable vowels might put in the way. Because it is not a matter of pruning one’s character as if it were a bonsai. Real language happens when there is someone to speak and someone to hear.”