Voices shouting to be heard

Lambert’s last words kind of put into my face what I do really believe “finding our own voice in writing means”. His words: “Through whatever means possible – by example, by flattery, by cajolery, by thread—the composition instructor should encourage students to remove their masks and to reveal their faces—however pimply, however shallow, however frightened, however bored. These faces, at least, are their own” (p. 34). I interpreted this in the following way: he is asking for composition teachers to help students to leave their masks and show “their real faces”. Wouldn’t this be to help students to find their own voices? I think it is. And I thought: this guy in the 60s was already worried about that! Then, I recapitulated what I wrote about finding my own voice in writing and how hard it was for me in a second language. Well… let me throw here a Bakhtinean point of view. We never “own” our voice. We always speak through other’s voices because the words we use and allow us to communicate are embedded with social meaning, they carry a history in them, they don’t belong to only one person because communication does not exist in a one-way-fashion. In this way, allow me to reformulate my opinion: my problem, when writing in a second language, is not that I can’t find my own voice, but that I don’t know (because I lack many shared cultural experiences and cultural knowledge) how to use the multiplicity of voices that socially construct that thing we call English. On the other hand, I could argue that I have a different voice in English, that I write “with an accent”, an accent that can be viewed as my mother tongue trying to shut out loud what I can’t express in English.
Gracias for reading this.
Violeta