As we have made crystal clear in class, it is necessary but insufficient to state that fluency in Standardized academic English (SAE) does not equate with intelligence. If every example of competence, intelligence and status that we encounter is through the code of SAE, we will never unseat this geopolitical happenstance of linguistic power. One way to actively interrupt this pattern is to widen what counts as competence through the provision of diverse linguistic role models.
In response to this thread, holla back at me and all of us with examples you've found of linguistic prowess that goes beyond SAE. To get us started, I will offer two that are dear to me: first is Junot Díaz. His writing is unapologetically reflective of his immigrant experience across cultures and languages. In this interview, he handles with grace a question about why he uses Dominican Spanish if not all his readers can read this code.
Second, is this throwback from President Obama's acceptance speech in Grant Park. In minute 5, he moves to a rhetorical style that is familiar to anyone knowledgeable in some of the African American codes of English - call and answer. Esteemed sociolinguists H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman contextualize the President's verbal stylings with on point racial analysis here.
The idea in this post and your collective replies is to build examples of intelligence and linguistic, textual prowess that is not bound only by the rules in those little grammar books with their diagrammed sentences.
The first time I heard the Haitian American writer, Edwidge Danticat speak, I was filled with a great sense of pride and hope. As a child, the perception of Haitians was often slighted by negative images portrayed in the media. With that, it was often difficult to find representations of Haitian’s who exhibited a mastery of the English language while proudly exhibiting the beauty of the Haitian language. Edwidge Danticat did just that for me. She is widely known for her book titled Krik-Krak, however, the story that most reflects linguistic prowess is her story titled Claire of the Sea Light. In this story, it details the struggle of many Haitians in Haiti through the lens of a single father who is left to fend for his daughter without much means to offer her.
ReplyDeleteBelow: is a clip from Selected Shorts that I strongly encourage for you all to listen to. It is read by Anika Noni Simone. Let me know what you think.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/2012/sep/09/
As a huge fan of picture books, the first examples that came to mind for me are William Steig's fantastic pair of antistandard-language books, CDB! (1968) and CDC? (1984). They translate to standardized English, but only with help from the pictures, the reader's voice, and some puzzling. Take a look:
ReplyDeleteCDB!
http://goo.gl/ue1Kb
http://goo.gl/NRB2D
CDC?
http://goo.gl/WRZUo
http://goo.gl/2xNUL
My first vivid experience with reading a masterful work outside of SAE was reading the AAVE present in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, a classic that was only revived thanks to authors like Alice Walker (who also uses AAVE in The Color Purple among other works.) I had seen other examples of AAVE in the arts, but this book was the first that was self-evident (to me) that any other way of speaking just wouldn't have "worked". Their Eyes is on my "annually re-read" list as a result. It just always has something new to reveal.
ReplyDeleteHi Prof. Patel, I am posting on behalf of Luis Rosario. He can't yet access the blog but wanted me to post his response. :)
ReplyDeleteLuis says:
"The idea that we must be very intentional with making our dialogue public, accessible, noticed, and utilized on a massive scale resonates with me deeply. Upon reflecting on some fairly recent historical events, I think back to the way the Black Panthers used some lexicons to a very powerful extent. One word utilized to shake up power relations is the title “pig” to refer to any police officer. In his book Revolutionary Suicide, Ancestor Huey P. Newton explains how the word “pig” was actually not intentional and was preceded by many failed attempts of characterizing the brutal police forces in the United States. This term, as is evident by how often it is now used, became very widespread because of the intentionality in which it was applied.
As Dr. Newton explains, intentionality was key to the development of the Black Panther’s lexicons. Another example was “All power to the People” which created solidarity not only in the black and Latino communities, but served as a mantra to unite the predominantly white student population that was being brutalized for protesting the Vietnam War and the unjust social issues in the country.
In addition, the Panthers built breakfast programs, defended neighbors from the police, were active politically, did massive fundraising and created institutions that were able to actively disseminate this language. Going back to our conversation two weeks back, they instituted ideology and institutionalized the language of this liberatory ideology in several forms: assistance programs, books, a dissertation, national and international branches, documentaries, etc. The effect of this was critical: in many of these videos and documentation, we can see clear indications of the lexicons of African Americans and other marginalized communities in a positive context. They not only shook up the existing structure, but also were able to provide a reference point to people living on the ground level. This reference point was utilized and built upon by many other of their brothers and sisters of the Brown Berets, Young Lords, and many present day institutions that strive to serve marginalized communities.
As history shows us, we must find examples of positive use of our ways of speaking, but we must also amplify the publicity and power of our language and culture through institutional means. Finally, these must be our own institutions.
Ashé
Included video: Bobby Seale: “No more shucking and Jiving” – beautiful example of how Bobby Seale changes up his lexicons during a speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB5ktuUVspo&feature=related
Bobby Seale : "No More Shucking and Jiving!"
Video I put together for a class presentation. I love his word play in this excerpt! ;-)"
I have a big appreciation for writers that seamlessly code switch between SAE and their primary way of speaking in their works. Among the greats are Malcolm X, Toure, Gloria Anzaldua, Frank D. Wilderson III, Sister Soulja and Andile Mngxitama. Mngxitama is a leading Black Consciousness thinker, organizer and writer in South Africa and I was fortunate enough to meet him while abroad there. In his speeches and in his writings, he effortlessly switches between Black South African, African American and SAE codes, often deliberately to privilege and place speakers of these devalued codes at the center of discourse around race relations, and to constantly challenge what counts as academic language. One of his well-known works "Blacks Can't Be Racist; Critical Essays on the Black Condition," embodies the importance of placing marginalized groups, but even more important, their modes of speaking at the center in ways that are both accessible and empowering.
ReplyDeleteBefore clicking letters to form words, I bounced numerous role model through my mind. At first, I considered famous political figures, poets and even black pastors, but my favorite example of SAE, Code-switching and linguistic dexterity is hands down Lauryn Hill. More specifically, the album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a prime example of a verbal stew. Hill incorporates Standardized Academic English into a counterhegemonic genre of music, hip-hop. Not only does she create the beautiful musical offspring of hip-hop and r&b, but Hill displays a certain competence through her verbal dexterity and her ability to transition from American English to Jamaican patois in a seamless manner. Lauryn creates plays on words while playing with words in order to engineer harmonic measures of 'traditional' intellect, folk speech and tantalizing stanza which make me say, "Dang," after stating them myself. A prime example of this competence is "Lost Ones" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlakbCyq9Hw). However, Hill is not the only hip-hop artist to display such competence in a field marked as "ignorant" or "problematic" by outsiders. Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Common and (believe or not) Nicki Minaj are other rappers who have a flow that would cause Noam Chomsky to stumble over the words at times. Don't sleep on hip-hop, folks.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you get the opportunity to hear Greg Tate speak or the chance to read his material---do it! Brother is sick with the words.
DeleteThe only person that I can recall of being a great writer without the use of SAE, is a poem I read the first time in English in 6th grade by Maya Angelou called A Brave and Startling Truth. It took me a little more than a month to translate it and know not just the definitions of the words, but the actual "soul meaning" of the poem.
ReplyDelete"We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it."
Tense, aspect and Lexical features are not the only points of reference in this example but are prominent in this discussion between Al Sharpton and Cornel West. These two well known, educated men, have dialect that escapes during a heated discussion and is not often prominent when calm and talking with individuals of a different race.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m5bmVgxGc0
I started chuckling when you hear Traynham's dialect directly juxtaposed to Sharpton. Glad you pointed this out.
DeleteThis post brings to mind two examples of what I would call-for lack of a better word- “nonverbal” language/text. The first is a video we all watched in Rick Cass’s class: “In my Language”. In talking to my Donovan friends, I have found that many of us have a close relative on the autism spectrum. In rendering SE as the most superior form of communication, dominant society not only marginalizes ways of knowing communicated through variations of SE, it renders illegitimate forms of communication not rooted in written or spoken word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc
ReplyDeleteThe second example that came to mind was a product of what I found to be an extremely problematic anthropology initiative I was a part of. In my junior year of college I took a class called “Urban Borderlands” that had one semester-long assignment based on individual fieldwork/ethnography. We were to find and interview Latino artists in Somerville for a final report and community event. The class was mostly made up of white women-something we were not asked to consider vis-à-vis our assignment, and I was frustrated with the premise. I wasn’t comfortable tracking down and taking away time from five people who were chosen due to demographic criteria and asking them to speak for all artists identifying as Latino/a in that community (with the ultimate goal of furthering my academic career). Luckily, I was able to get in touch with a former classmate who was Latino and a student at the Museum School, and his brilliant artistic vision and conjectures on identity and language converted my project into a counter-story complicating the assignment itself. I used the following quote to introduce my report:
“Life is transcended through not only my work but my being and just breathing, it’s like that’s art in itself. And I don’t label myself as an artist but more of a human that’s doing what they’re doing because they have to, because they live day by day and that’s the way they gotta communicate. This is my language, you know. I may know English, I may know Spanish, I want to learn French, I want to learn Portuguese, but this is my language and I hope other people read it as thus”
~Diego Guzman
I ended up getting a B on what I thought was one of the most important works I had ever done because my primary artist apparently didn’t meet the assignment’s criteria because he “hadn’t struggled enough” according to my professor (i.e. didn’t fit the stereotype she was gunning for). Needless to say I was done with anthropology after that but I will never forget how my incredible friend revolutionized my thinking.
You can check his art out here http://www.flickr.com/photos/diego_guzman
As previously mentioned I too think of Hurston and a few other authors who wrote black dialect into the dialogue of characters in their books. I remember this vividly because one of my English Professors brought it to the attention of the class and asked what does it mean to have SAE and this dialect together but also in opposition of each other throughout the same narrative. What we took away was the understanding that perhaps the words written in the dialect could not be represented properly in SAE. I believe when the authenticity or meaning behind the work could be at risk if not written in true form is when I really think of what SAE would take away.
ReplyDeleteThe second example is not one that is public but occurred when Corey Booker spoke at the 2011 commencement at Williams College. When addressing a majority white group of graduates he choose to stray away for SAE, specifically when addressing his upbringing. In his code switching Booker was able to make it clear to the students of color what he was telling them while at the same time addressing what the graduates of Williams should go on to do. I think this version is very telling of how elite blacks maneuver the system to get their message across.
*Sorry for typos I had to write in on my phone.