Growing up, Amanda Gorman is determined to eliminate her speech impediment.
Called the "next great figure of poetry in the US," 19-year-old Amanda Gorman is the first ever Youth Poet Laureate of the United States of America and a Moth GrandSLAM champion. Her first poetry book, "The One For Whom Food Is Not Enough," was published in 2015. A Harvard sophomore, she has worked as a U.N. Youth Delegate in New York City, a HERlead Fellow with girl leaders in D.C. and London, and an Ambassador for the feminist platform School of Doodle. She has been featured in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Teen Vogue. At 16, she founded the community project One Pen One Page, which promotes storytelling and youth activism.
This story originally aired on May 18, 2018 in an episode titled “Different.”
Story transcript
“Errr. Awrrr. Come on, Amanda, you can do it. Awrrr, matey.” These were how dinners were spent at my mom’s house on a weeknight, her, on one hand, saying words like ‘hamburger’ and ‘awrrr, matey,’ trying to teach her five-year-old daughter, me, how to say the ‘r' sound and me just failing miserably. Then you have my twin sister on the other hand, Gabrielle, who’s is just bored out of her mind and looking at us like we’re crazy, because we are.
It was also at this table that my mom would remind us of life morals like, “You can do anything,” and, “You each have your own superpower,” which I knew was a baldfaced lie.
Let me give you some background. When I was in elementary school, I was so small the teachers would put rocks in my pockets so the wind wouldn’t blow me away. My mom took me to the UCLA Medical Center to get myself weighed and the doctor said, “We’re not sure she has enough fat to go through puberty yet. We’ll wait and see.”
On the other hand, my sister is basically Mrs. Incredible. By the time she was two she could do Chinese splits, she could run five miles without stopping or sweating. And I'll give you another example. She learned how to do a backflip on her first try on accident, on cement.
Of all of these things, the thing I was most upset about is we’re twins. We were born at the same time, which means we were both born early and prematurely, which means we both had ear infections and which meant that we both had an auditory processing disorder, which means we basically heard things differently, which also meant that we both had speech impediments. We talked very differently than the children around us. But of course it was my sister Gabby Douglas, Mrs. Incredible Gabrielle Gorman, who overcame her speech impediment before I even made any progress.
So I’m here trying to ‘arr’ and ‘hamburger,’ whatever and my sister is just there eating her cornbread and she's like, “You know, Amanda, you should do what I did to learn the ‘r' sound. I just imagined a movie in my head of me saying the word and I figured it all out.”
What my sister doesn’t get in sound she makes up by thinking in motion. She thinks in pictures which makes her a fantastic director. I, on the other hand, think in words, like snapshots of letter,s which means I’m screwed. Because you can memorize the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean you can really pronounce it correctly.
And my mom she's, “Hey, hey, hey. You both have your own strengths. Amanda, until we work out this whole speech impediment thing, tell people the truth that you were born this way.”
So I do and that works for a little bit, but now I’m in middle school and I’m going through puberty. Thank God, or not. I don't really know. Suddenly, people just don’t want to hear I was born this way anymore.
I remember this one white mother coming up to me and she has a pink crop top that says, “This is what a feminist looks like.” She has obviously really fake blond hair and I remember she's the mom that owns all the condos in Santa Monica.
She's like, “Amanda, your voice is so interesting. Where are you from?”
I’m like, “Los Angeles.”
And she's like, “Where are you really from?”
I laugh inside because I know we’re about to play that ‘game’, the game where a white person is like, “So where are your parents’ from?” Then I’m like, “Chicago.”
“And their parents?”
“Texas.”
“And their parents?”
“Mississippi.”
“And their parents?”
“Child, I don't know.”
And I have to explain to this poor, ignorant, white mother how the transatlantic slave trade works in the great migration.
Now, every now and then so that I can avoid reciting Roots by Alex Haley, I just tell these people I’m from wherever they think I’m from, which some days is London, other days it’s Nigeria, and some taxi cabs it’s Ethiopia. But most of the time it’s New York, which tells you how little we actually really know about accents.
Now, I’m in ninth grade and I’m just through with it. I am done. I’m done lying about where I come from and who I am and why I sound this way so I decide I’m going to just eliminate my speech impediment.
This is a lot easier said than done because speech pathology or the study of speech and sound is a science. It’s a clinical practice that people study so hard, but I ain’t got money for that stuff. Also, it sounds really easy like, oh, how about you just call up your best friend who, I don't know, can say the ‘r' sound. They can help you out a little bit.
But actually with the ‘r' sound, most speech pathologists recognize it as the most difficult letter to describe to another person in the English language.
Let’s do an exercise. I want everybody to close their eyes. Yes, you in the front row. Thank you. Okay.
I want you to imagine saying the ‘m’ sound. And imagine how you would tell someone to say that sound. Maybe you'd say, “Oh, rub your lips together like you're putting on Chapstick, like you're humming.” Easy, right?
Keep them closed. Thank you.
Now, I want you to imagine saying the ‘err’ sound and how you would describe that to someone. It’s a bit more complicated.
Open your eyes. Awesome. So that was the same as you would have with my mom because she was just stunted.
Anyways, I get to this point. I’m looking on Wikipedia and I figure out Sidney Poitier, the first black man to win Best Actor at the Academy Awards got rid of his Bahamian accent in six months just by listening to the radio and recording himself. I was like, “I’m going to be Sidney Poitier, except the female version and cuter.”
And I’m like, “I’m going to watch YouTube videos where they're describing how to say ‘l’ versus ‘r' to Asian immigrants. I’m going to stick my tongue to a popsicle stick to make it a bit stronger. And I’m going to record myself,” and I do stuff like recording myself saying the lines from Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than when I could say the names of the heroes and the villains which all have Rs in them, like Harry, Ron, Hermione, or Lord Voldemort, Draco, Dursley, it was like J.K. Rowling wrote that all for me.
Then my next greatest challenge was singing Aaron Burr from the Hamilton musical. “How are you? Aaron Burr, sir.” Okay, I was done. That was just too hard.
But the more I worked at it, the more that I felt that my speech was my own villain, my own Aaron Burr, it was tripping me up when I was on stage performing poetry, or when I was saying my own last name which was Gorman, or when I was telling people that I went to Harvard. Of course it came out all garbled because of my voice and they just assume, “She's black. It’s Howard.”
Turns out it wouldn’t take me six months to overcome my speech impediment. It would take me six years.
Now, I’m a freshman in college. I’m about to perform a poem in front of like 250 young women, and it’s a poem about feminism which is the worst for me because it has words like ‘girl,’ ‘world,’ ‘earth.’ I’m like should I just say young female, but that’s like exclusionary. I could say like globe, but that doesn’t really make sense.
I feel like I’m about to vomit because I've also gotten eight minutes or so to write this poem and memorize it in front of this huge crowd.
I get on stage and I hear voices in my head and my sister telling me to think about everything in motion, and I just take a deep breath and I do my poem. Something miraculous happens. I don't think like my sister in pictures but I think like myself in words. Like even when I’m looking out at the audience I can see the letters in my head. I can see a snapshot of the page. And every time I’m saying a line the words with ‘r' in it pop in front of my head in bright, bold red as if warning me, “Danger! Here it comes. Prepare yourself.”
All of a sudden, I can say ‘girl’ with more power than I've ever said before, power even in itself. And sure, my speech still messes up a little bit but, for the first time, I’m okay with it.
I get off stage and immediately zooms down this nine-year-old girl and she has deep brown hair and she tells me, “I have that same exact speech impediment and hearing it on stage was so powerful.”
Wow! She thought my work was powerful not despite my speech impediment but because of it, because I was still speaking up and empowering others. If that power is not super, I don't know what is. Thank you.