“Politics and the English Language"by George Orwell
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English
language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious
action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the
argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any
struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring
candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-
conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we
shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual
writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and
producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may
take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more
completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the
English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,
but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written
English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if
one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can
think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political
regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the
exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I
hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become
clearer.....
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give
another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its
nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into
modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the
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battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth
to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that
success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one....It will be seen that I have not made a full
translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning
fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread --
dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This
had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable
of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" --
would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole
tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two
sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty
syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-
eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and
one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase
("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single
fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened
version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second
kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to
exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will
occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a
few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much
nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes....
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least
four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3.
What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an
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effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2.
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this
trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-
made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even
think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the
important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at
this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of
language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his
private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to
demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets,
leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do,
of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never
finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some
tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial
atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to
shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human
being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at
moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank
discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A
speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning
himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his
brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the
speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he
may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the
responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is
at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges
and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be
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defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and
which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political
language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven
out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with
incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their
farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is
called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for
years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic
lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is
needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when
you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like
this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which
the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a
certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable
concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the
facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great
enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and
one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted
idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as
"keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of
lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad,
language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not
sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages
have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage
can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know
better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very
convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired,
would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind ,
are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back
through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again
committed the very faults I am protesting against...This invasion of one's mind by
ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only
be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase
anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain....
I think the following rules will cover most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change
of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.
One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the
kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing
thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words
are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political
quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against
Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize
that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that
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one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If
you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You
cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its
stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations
this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least
change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly
enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel,
hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into
the dustbin, where it belongs.
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“If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”by James Baldwin
The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is
rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the
argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with
language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the
speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in
this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able
to recognize him.
People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their
circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot
articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman
living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man
living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they
would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or
Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal--although the
"common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a
different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not
saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different
realities to articulate, or control.
What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order,
not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and
achievement, of one's temporal identity. So that, for example, though it is not taught
in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of
France still clings to its ancient and musical Provençal, which resists being
described as a "dialect." And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in
Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to
be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many
indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English
contempt for their language.
It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means,
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and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the
private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or
communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a
certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same
language, but in such a way that one's antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes)
hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and
reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English
and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is
(if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": You have confessed
your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your
future.
Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never
been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they
sound. Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white
people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same
thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants with no qualms or
hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which
was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed
into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed
of uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get
with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the
blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of
style.
Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt
to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its
only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more
whipped than it is.
I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black
English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States
chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other's
language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been
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able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted
as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his
master, Congo Square, and the Bible--or in other words, and under these conditions,
the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this
unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not,
merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an
alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes
into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated
by what the language must convey.
There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother,
or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I
was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a
speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and
that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it.
This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that
mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.
Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) "sheer intelligence,"
this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly
unknown to, or despised by "history"--to have brought this people to their present,
troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place--if this absolutely
unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am
curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.
A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a
population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly
called a "dialect." We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed,
and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that
we know to be a lie.
The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any
interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is
not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is
despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him,
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and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose
demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him
sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he
knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black
children that way.
And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country
that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so
many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the
streets--it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that
they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed
to learn so little.
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From “Authority and American Usage”by David Foster Wallace
Because the argument for SWE [Standard Written English] is both most delicate and (I
believe) most important with respect to students of color, here is a condensed version
of the spiel I’ve given in private conferences6161 with certain black students who were
(a) bright and inquisitive as hell and (b) deficient in what US higher education
considers written English facility:
I don’t know whether anybody’s told you this or not, but when you’re in a college
English class you’re basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called
Standard Written English. From talking with you and reading your first couple
essays, I’ve concluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants of SBE
{Standard Black English} common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in
my official teacher-voice: the SBE you’re fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds
of important ways. Some of these differences are grammatical—for example, double
negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE, and SBE and SWE
conjugate verbs in totally different ways. Other differences have more to do with
style—for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot more subordinate
clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most of these early
subordinates with commas, and under SWE rules, writing that doesn’t do this tends
to look “choppy.” There are tons of differences like that. How much of this stuff do
you already know? [STANDARD RESPONSE = some variation on “I know from the grades
and comments on my papers that the English profs here don’t think I’m a good
writer.”] Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. There are some otherwise smart
English profs who aren’t very aware that there are real dialects of English other than
SWE, so when they’re marking up your papers they’ll put, like, “Incorrect
conjugation” or “Comma needed” instead of “SWE conjugates this verb differently”
or “SWE calls for a comma here.” That’s the good news—it’s not that you’re a bad
writer, it’s that you haven’t learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to
write in. Maybe that’s not such good news, that they’ve been grading you down for
6161 (I’m not a total idiot.)
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mistakes in a foreign language that you didn’t even know was a foreign language.
That they won’t let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair. If it does, you’re
probably not going to like this other news: I’m not going to let you write in SBE
either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. If you want to study your
own primary dialect and its rules and history and how it’s different from SWE, fine
—there are some great books by scholars of Black English, and I’ll help you find
some and talk about them with you if you want. But that will be outside class. In
class—in my English class—you will have to master and write in Standard Written
English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English,” because it was
developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated,
powerful white people. [RESPONSES by this point vary too widely to standardize.] I’m
respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this
country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power
and prestige and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to
succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is How It Is. You can
be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and
unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult
life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something. If you ever
want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to
communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our country uses to talk to
itself. African Americans who’ve become successful and important in US culture
know this; that’s why King’s and X’s and Jackson’s speeches are in SWE, and why
Morrison’s and Angelou’s and Baldwin’s and Wideman’s and West’s books are full of
totally ass-kicking SWE, and why black judges and politicians and journalists and
doctors and teachers communicate professionally in SWE. Some of these people
grew up in home and communities where SWE was the native dialect and these
black people had it much easier in school, but the ones who didn’t grow up with
SWE realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write in it,
and so they did. And [INSERT NAME HERE], you’re going to learn to use it, too, because I
am going to make you.
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From “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children”by Adrienne Rich
this is the oppressor’s language
yet I need it to speak to you.
“The Language of Power”
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by bell hooks
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It
speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the
most private spaces of mind and body. It was in my first year of college that I read
Adrienne Rich’s poem, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” That poem,
speaking against domination, against racism and class oppression, attempts to
illustrate graphically that stopping the political persecution and torture of living
beings is a more vital issue than censorship, than burning books. One line of this
poem that moved and disturbed something within me: “This is the oppressor’s
language yet I need it to talk to you.” I’ve never forgotten it. Perhaps I could not have
forgotten it even if I tried to erase it from memory. Words impose themselves, lake
root in our memory against our will. The words of this poem begat a life in my
memory that I could not abort or change.
When I find myself thinking about language now, these words are there, as if
they were always waiting to challenge and assist me. I find myself silently speaking
them over and over again with the intensity of a chant. They startle me, shaking me
into an awareness of the link between languages and domination. Initially, I resist
the idea of the “oppressor’s language,” certain that this construct has the potential to
disempower those of us who are just learning to speak, who are just learning to
claim language as a place where we make ourselves subject. “This is the oppressor’s
languages yet I need it to talk to you.” Adrienne Rich’s words. Then, when I first read
these words, and now, they make me think of standard English, of learning to speak
against black vernacular, against the ruptured and broken speech of a dispossessed
and displaced people. Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language
of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss
of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never
hear, the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other unremembered tongues.
Reflecting on Adrienne Rich’s words, I know that it is not the English language
that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a
territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame,
humiliate, colonize. Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us of this pain in Borderlands/La
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Frontera when she asserts, “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my
language.” We have so little knowledge of how displaced, enslaved, or free Africans
who came or were brought against their will to the United States felt about the loss
of language, about learning English. Only as a woman did I begin to think about
these black people in relation to language, to think about their trauma as they were
compelled to witness their language rendered meaningless with a colonizing
European culture, where voices deemed foreign could not be spoken, were outlawed
tongues, renegade speech.
When I realize how long it has taken for white Americans to acknowledge
diverse languages of Native Americans, to accept that the speech their ancestral
colonizers declared was merely grunts or gibberish was indeed language, it is
difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest.
I think now of the grief of displaced “homeless” Africans, forced to inhabit a world
where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition,
but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed “the
oppressor’s language.” “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you. “
When I imagine the terror of Africans on board slave ships, on auction blocks,
inhabiting the unfamiliar architecture of plantations, I consider that this terror
extended beyond fear of punishment, that it resided also in the anguish of hearing a
language they could not comprehend. The very sound of English had to terrify. I
think of black people meeting one another in a space away from the diverse cultures
and languages that distinguished them from one another, compelled by
circumstance to find ways to speak with one another in a “new world” where
blackness or the darkness of one’s skin and not language would become the space of
bonding. How to remember, to reinvoke this terror. How to describe what it must
have been like for Africans whose deepest bonds were historically forged in the
place of shared speech to be transported abruptly to a world where the very sound
of one’s mother tongue had no meaning.
I imagine them hearing spoken English as the oppressor’s language, yet I
imagine them also realizing that this language would need to be possessed, taken,
claimed as a space of resistance. I imagine that the moment they realized the
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oppressor’s language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a
space of bonding was joyous. For in that recognition was the understanding that
intimacy could be restored, that a culture of resistance could be formed that would
make recovery from the trauma of enslavement possible. I imagine, then, Africans
first hearing English as “the oppressor’s language” and then re-hearing it as a
potential site of resistance. Learning English, learning to speak the alien tongue, was
one way enslaved Africans began to reclaim their personal power within a context
of domination. Possessing a shared language, black folks could find again a way to
make community, and a means to create the political solidarity necessary to resist.
Needing the oppressor’s language to speak with one another they nevertheless
also reinvented, remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries
of conquest and domination. In the mouths of black Africans in the so-called “New
World,” English was altered, transformed, and became a different speech. Enslaved
black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language. They
put together their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning
of English language. Though it has become common in contemporary culture to talk
about the messages of resistance that emerged in the music created by slaves,
particularly spirituals, less is said about the grammatical construction of sentences
in these songs. Often, the English used in the song reflected the broken, ruptured
world of the slave. When the slaves sang “nobody knows de trouble I see—” their
use of the word “nobody” adds a richer meaning than if they had used the phrase
“no one,” for it was the slave’s body that was the concrete site of suffering. And even
as emancipated black people sang spirituals, they did not change the language, the
sentence structure, of our ancestors. For in the incorrect usage of words, in the
incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a
site of resistance. Using English in a way that ruptured standard usage and meaning,
so that white folks could often not understand black speech, made English into more
than the oppressor’s language.
An unbroken connection exists between the broken English of the displaced,
enslaved African and the diverse black vernacular speech black folks use today. In
both cases, the rupture of standard English enabled and enables rebellion and
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resistance. By transforming the oppressor’s language, making a culture of
resistance, black people created an intimate speech that could say far more than was
permissible within the boundaries of standard English. The power of this speech is
not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a
space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies—different
ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic
worldview. It is absolutely essential that the revolutionary power of black
vernacular speech not be lost in contemporary culture. That power resides in the
capacity of black vernacular to intervene on the boundaries and limitations of
standard English.
In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has become one of the spaces
where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant
mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed.
However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will
trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in
ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested
in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is
undermined. In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing,
there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular—or, for that matter, any
language other than standard English. When I asked an ethnically diverse group of
students in a course I was teaching on black women writers why we only heard
standard English spoken in the classroom, they were momentarily rendered
speechless. Though many of them were individuals for whom standard English was
a second or third language, it had simply never occurred to them that it was possible
to say something in another language, in another way. No wonder, then, that we
continue to think, “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.”
I have realized that I was in danger of losing my relationship to black vernacular
speech because I too rarely use it in the predominantly white settings that I am most
often in, both professionally and socially. And so I have begun to work at integrating
into a variety of settings the particular Southern black vernacular speech I grew up
hearing and speaking. It has been hardest to integrate black vernacular in writing,
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particularly for academic journals. When I first began to incorporate black
vernacular in critical essays, editors would send the work back to me in standard
English. Using the vernacular means that translation into standard English may be
needed if one wishes to reach a more inclusive audience. In the classroom setting, I
encourage students to use their first language and translate it so they do not feel
that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange them from that language and
culture they know most intimately. Not surprisingly, when students in my Black
Women Writers class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white
students often complained. This seemed to be particularly the case with black
vernacular. It was particularly disturbing to the white students because they could
hear the words that were said but could not comprehend their meaning.
Pedagogically, I encouraged them to think of the moment of not understanding what
someone says as a space to learn. Such a space provides not only the opportunity to
listen without “mastery,” without owning or possessing speech through
interpretation, but also the experience of hearing non-English words. These lessons
seem particularly crucial in a multicultural society that remains white supremacist,
that uses standard English as a weapon to silence and censor.
That the students in the course on black women writers were repressing all
longing to speak in tongues other than standard English without seeing this
repression as political was an indication of the way we act unconsciously, in
complicity with a culture of domination.
Recent discussions of diversity and multiculturalism tend to downplay or ignore
the question of language. Critical feminist writings focused on issues of difference
and voice have made important theoretical interventions, calling for a recognition of
the primacy of voices that are often silenced, censored, or marginalized. This call for
the acknowledgment and celebration of diverse voices, and consequently of diverse
language and speech, necessarily disrupts the primacy of standard English. When
advocates of feminism first spoke about the desire for diverse participation in
women’s movement, there was no discussion of language. It was simply assumed
that standard English would remain the primary vehicle for the transmission of
feminist thought. Now that the audience for feminist writing and speaking has
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become more diverse, it is evident that we must change conventional ways of
thinking about language, creating spaces where diverse voices can speak in words
other than English or in broken, vernacular speech. This means that at a lecture or
even in a written work there will be fragments of speech that may or may not be
accessible to every individual. Shifting how we think about language and how we
use it necessarily alters how we know what we know. At a lecture where I might use
Southern black vernacular, the particular patois of my region, or where I might use
very abstract thought in conjunction with plain speech, responding to a diverse
audience, I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated
in its entirely, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole,
that we may know in fragments. I suggest that we may learn from spaces of silence
as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we
may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all
desire must be satisfied immediately, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism
that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks in standard English. …
To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult
in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of
passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western
metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language. To heal the
splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to
recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for
intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured,
broken, unruly speech of the vernacular. When I need to say words that do more
than simply mirror or address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There,
in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s
language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech,
liberating ourselves in language.
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