A mongrel tongue is a language, like English, made up of words imposed by, borrowed, inherited, pilfered, and misheard from many different languages. A mongrel tongue language of the mixed-up descendants of the colonized, the crimson-lipped feminized, the weepy survivors of a fevered nostalgia, and hybrid beasts of the deep. We turn to a mongrel tongue when the stories we’ve been told have calcified into media narratives, advertising, and purebred political campaigns, and we wish to write another story, whose ending is yet unknown.