Black English

“Purify the dialect of the tribe.” --T.S. Eliot

Black English is more than hip talk, Jamaican lilt, a Rastafarian chanting the name of Jah by a surrogate Babylon in a Caribbean stream or river. It’s the English language’s own with syntax and de/construction, parsing in more than a passing phase. It’s also inner-city cadence; it is Ebonics writ large on the pages of magazines, if only in small talk or liming by a rumshop. Indeed Black English has its own distinctive intonation with hip hop and dub poetry, Lillian Allen’s or Clifton Joseph’s, and if strayed from an original source it, yet forms its own song with fire in its belly. Verve, élan, far removed from the Queen's English it is, but with its own standard variation nonetheless: American, Canadian or Australian, though we like to think it isn’t.

Black English--never a dialect because of the same fire in its belly--creates its internal rhapsody and singular diction, compressed or telescopic, even as an informal grammar’s rant. It is also Eldridge Cleaver’s rhetoric or Amiri Baraka’s poetic lilt, not distinctly un-American. Hip-talk, jive, rap or rapso, in Brother Resistance’s style in Trinidad at Carifesta (as I’ve heard). Spike Lee's dialogues or cinematics too, indeed. Parodied phrases all, if scintillation with accent, or down-south English beyond Faulknerisms: inner rhythms exposed, or fibre of the soul choreographed with energy and ecstasy combined. It is also Michael Jackson’s twists, moonwalk, “Billie Jean,” you name it. Oh, metaphor encapsulated with words like "cat" or "brother." Reflecting more than the filial or anthropomorphized? Ah, street language’s onomatopoeia: the gang’s rat-tat-tat, you hear?

An unexpected crescendo with nothing being circumlocutory with urbane euphemisms. Shibboleth all. Black English is also the dialect of the Aborigine’s tribe “down under” chockfull of spirit, accompanied by unbridled or wide-mouthed laughter: who can really tell! Memorable angst, see, or just another’s anguished cry, or pent-up rage slowly being released as grief. Black English is also mute-tongued, the individual self struggling for utterance with Alice Walker, which more conventional English can’t fully articulate with generalized words, rhythms, or Latinisms. Ask George Orwell. Whose politics? Whose English language with the backbone of empire, or power imposed? Ask Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake...and who else?

Black English is also the core of "nation language" aimed at reclaiming dignity because of history's caravel coming through the Middle Passage, if only aided by the North Star and birds like the albatross slanting in the sun and guiding a vessel along in the ocean. Now who’s really below deck? Elmina Castle too, as I hear echoes coming from Ghana’s hovels of despair, or from a nigger-yard or bound-coolie yard in distant Caribbean sugar plantations, more than lore. Orality being all, or historian-poet Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics. Do I hear ancestors speaking? Not just my grandma’s dialectal grammar, even if unpredictable...as my stoning the wind?

Whose voice really? Cries of the mind and spirit because of the longing to be free from an accursed infamous cargo. It’s also the strong impulse to reclaim oneself with identity intact, even if in the caricatured figure of an anonymous X. Indeed, Black English is ongoing Creole talk in Bridgetown, Port of Spain, Kingston, Toronto, New York, Miami, London. Verbs, nouns compounded and continually compounding.

Distinctly new rhythms too in Canada’s north, I hearsay, with the Inuit’s voice being resonant across snow drifts, and everyone truly being authentic drawers of water and hewers of wood, if just as latter-day immigrants who’re blue-collar workers, the steel mill’s own, or hotel and restaurant workers, laundry-room workers all. Oh, never the self-reflexive writer of verse in the League of Canadian Poets. Ask Milton Acorn, the People’s Poet. Never those in the Writers Union of Canada?

Black English is stridency in a plantation-overseer’s voice with remnant Irish, Scotch or Welsh, if the backra’s man own. Reggae relived again and again in Bob Marley’s chants. It is also a French-Canadian forging an Acadian lilt in New France or Louisiana. Indeed Black English is the Great Spirit as coyote, or Nanabijou–the Sleeping Giant--looking across Lake Superior, or simply a Cree’s or Ojibwa’s reaction to a beaver crossing water or a partridge scuttling through thick brush...on Turtle Island! It’s also akin to my immigrant mother's talk in a living room in Brampton, Ontario, close to the Toronto airport (always ready to head back “home”). More surreal utterances too among those falling asleep and always dreaming of tropical “escape”, if it’s only my deep longing or vicarious going back to the equator, or just north of it. I am also part of Sam Selvon’s rhythms in his once-Calgary home, yet wrestling with being an alienated “Lonely Londoner.” Black English is also intricate or fragile in its fragmented form, while being genre-embedded in us all. A nomenclature of expression no less with the new literature’s demand because of sprung rhythms, if seen at a glance around in Austin Clarke’s voice of domestics in a ‘50's and ‘60's Toronto.

More compelling it is, Black English being the image of an ocean swirling with sargasso’s serpentine strands, or sheer eddying drifts. See, vocalization being all. Poseidon, d’you hear? Classic Homer, with Odysseus going to a farther sea, distant horizons being compelling from an ancient or fabled time, maybe. Black English keeps asserting itself with blood pumping through the arteries–the heart’s wild thump, and always the body being closer to places like Belize, Barbados, Bermuda, if indeed still being with the likes of Baker and Rhodes in Africa calling out, “Dr Livingstone, I presume.” Who’s Stanley...if not being Richard Burton also? Trash-talk intermingled or just commingling with one like Eminem’s white-talk also. Black English keeps becoming more complex without love’s rhythms, or just being alive with jive-talk, always. Or it’s simply listening to those exulting or exclaiming "Domino!" in the Jane-Finch area in Toronto’s North York, if not everywhere in Canada’s multicultural mix-up. Sheer wrap-up.

Here I go again. Victory at last!

© Cyril Dabydeen (first published in the Ottawa Citizen)

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Cyril Dabydeen was born in the Canje, Guyana. He began writing in the early 1960s, winning the Sandbach Parker Gold Medal for poetry in 1964. His first collection of poems, Poems in Recession, was published in 1972.

In the early 1970s, he left Guyana for Canada where he obtained a BA (First class Hons) at Lakehead University, an MA (his thesis was on Sylvia Plath) and an MPA (Master of Public Administration) at Queen's University. He was literary juror in 2000 for the Canada's Governor's General Award for Literature, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the James Lignon Price Competition (the American Poets University & College Poetry Prize Program).

Dabydeen has been a finalist four times for Canada's Archibald Lampman Poetry Prize, as well as for the Guyana Prize. He received the City of Ottawa’s first award for Writing and Publishing, and a Certificate of Merit, Government of Canada (1988) for his contribution to the arts. He is a regular book critic for World Literature Today (University of Oklahoma).

Cyril Dabydeen has worked for many years in human rights and race relations in Canada, and currently teaches in the Department of English, University of Ottawa.

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Rastafari Inna the White House

I'll let the pictures do the talking!

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Am I a Writer?

Teaching creative writing has been one of the most rewarding activities in my life because it gives me the opportunity, as an inheritor of certain traditions, to situate my work within the flow of Caribbean literature and to transmit these values to my students.

One of the more frequent questions that I get from my students (usually by the second week) is "Do you think I'm a writer?" My usual response is, "If you hear on the news that Miami is under a hurricane watch, and you begin to pack pen, paper, and then, water, food, flashlights…you are a writer."

Or rather I should say, "You are a human being who because of certain experiences takes the role of writer seriously." Writers know their priorities. It is also part of the realization that as a writer, one has to be always prepared for those lucid moments that Anthony C. Winkler describes in Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer: "Taking pictures with my mind was something I had begun doing quite early, when, I do not remember, and why, I still can's say. What I do know is that every now and again, during a heightened moment when something particularly intense is happening or some spectacular view is unfolding, I hear a slight click in my head that tells me that my brain is taking a picture" (61).

Nearly every writer I know has experienced this "click in the head" or something like it, and unless one has the kind of memory that Winkler possesses "to recall the moment in all its vividness," one usually resorts to pen and paper to record the details of the event.

The best example that I can recall about this "click" (and when I was unprepared) was in 1996 when I decided to write a series of poems in response to Midsummer by Derek Walcott. But instead of writing poems that spanned two summers, I decided to follow the calendar year and write at least one poem per week.

So, during Easter Sunday in 1995, while my wife and I were visiting her godparents, Don Luis and Doña Asela, one of those "heightened moments" occurred and didn't have paper, pen, or even a pencil. It was a particularly depressing event. Don Luis was dying of cancer and Doña Asela, who was always his support, was fading into the twilight of Alzheimer's: "the shoals of her minds nibbled by the sea of a further shore."

I had gone to the hospital without paper or pen as a sign of respect for Don Luis and Doña Asela, but then life and poetry come at you when you least expect it.

And when Don Luis said, "Todos tenemos zapatos que nos aprietan," which roughly translated means, "We all have shoes that squeeze us," the camera went off, and I was naked.

For the rest of the visit, I was in a daze--mentally recalling all the details--but when I got home, I knew that I hadn't gotten all that I'd wanted to capture.

So the next day, I did something that I've never done before. I paid for a poem.

Let me explain. I had to go back to Mount Sinai Hospital to pay ten dollars for parking, which the day before had been free. I sat in the lobby, wandered through the gardens, writing down all the things that I needed to complete the poem as a proper tribute to Don Luis and Doña Asela.

"easter song" was the name of the poem that emerged, and it was eventually published in hurricane center:

easter song

On the walkway between the warner
building and saunders pavilion, mt. sinai,
a boy, recorder in hand, practices, "row, row
row your boat" to bands of gold lantanas
sunning under the tinted dome
of the ruth and sidney harris garden
with its iron butterfly mounted
near the corner where my daughter sips
water from a fountain--above her head:
to my husband, the love of my life
while the other kids play hide-and-seek
around the statue of the burning bush--
a symbol of god's love for humanity,
above our heads, so many dead, dying,
overlooking the emerald bay, battered
in the wake of cruisers ploughing
past idlers this easter sunday, on our yearly
ritual to present ourselves, the children,
to my wife's godparents: don luis, always
nattily dressed, with so few months to live,
a paisley suit on a stick, his lungs, liver, soon
his cortex invaded by colonies of corpuscles, plotting
their own death; doña asela, always the stronger,
floral nightie, stubs of hair, gray to the root, held
bravely by pink ponytail holders, the shoals
of her mind nibbled by the sea of a further shore.
she barely recognizes us, the children, so we apologize
for not visiting more often, don luis whispers
over the sand in her throat, "todos tenemos
zapatos que nos aprietan," and as we leave
the garden, its queen palms shrubbed
by bachelor buttons, we glimpse the stone
flame behind him, for it still burns,
it still burns.

Joseph Campbell once said, "All life is a meditation," and if that is true, then anyone who has accepted the role of poet should always be prepared for those brief moments when we are immersed in that field of "pure awareness."


And it shouldn't take a hurricane for us to awaken.

***

July 20, 2009: Am I a Writer? (Part Dos)


Related Post: The Top 10 Things Every Writer Should Know

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"Criolla de Dispossessed Meets the Great Griot From St. Lucia." by Donna Weir-Soley

Donna Weir-Soley was born and grew up in Jamaica. She currently teaches at Florida International University. She is a poet and critic and has been widely published in journals such as Macomere, Caribbean Writer, Sage, The Carrier-Pidgin, Frontiers and in the anthology, Moving Beyond Boundaries. She was recently awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for career enhancement.

Donna is the author of First Rain, an amazing and passionate book with poems of nuanced meditation and engaging thought-provoking anecdote. She includes family legends, those of home, immigration, and displacement.

"Where are your monuments

your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that gray vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History."

("The Sea is History" by Derek Walcott)

Criolla De Dispossessed Meets the Great Griot from St. Lucia.



A me dis

de illegitimate offspring

of de illicit affair

de outside chile

once remove from both sides

both a dem a try fe deny me

mi double birthright

dis-possession

"I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed

The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Betray them both, or give back what they give?

How can I face such slaughter and be cool?

How can I turn from Africa and live?"

("A Far Cry From Africa" by Derek Walcott)

No one nuh come fe claim I and I

so me climb up inna de cave

curl up with de snakes

and learn to whisper venom

blow me snake-breath into de wind

embitter de firs’ dust of spring pollen

bees come buzzing round me lap

creaming one love into me orifices

me lend dem deceit fe sweeten dem sting.



Me is de outside chile

de illegitimate one

mother declare herself unwilling

unwitting accomplice, declare me bastard

corrupt like me daddy passion

birthed me at de mouth of de cavern

and return to Prosper

unblemished from her nights of sin

"While somewhere, a white horse gallops
with its mane plunging round a field whose sticks are ringed with barbed wire,and men/break stones or bind straws into ricks."

("Elsewhere" by Derek Walcott)

Me deh yah de suck snake venom

while she squeeze out me milk

from outta her breasts

pon de hot fire-hearth stone dem

hear de tortured sizzle

as she drain herself dry like parched corn

(and dem claim dem never learn nuttin from mi granny)

while me de dead fe hungry

But me jus ban mi belly

and swallow bile with de venom

and grow forked tongues

dat stretch the length of fern gully

me grow verdant and supple

like alan bamboo

reaching round worlds

and back to this little piece of rock

where me stretch out, shed me skin

like croakin’ lizard

and wait for de day when me nuh longer wait...



Fadda nuh dare look pon me

him talk to mi wid im back turn:

"They walk, you write; keep to that narrow causeway without looking down

climbing in their footsteps, that slow, ancestral beat

of those used to climbing roads; /your own work owes them

because the couplet of those multiplying feet

made your first rhymes. Look, they climb and no one knows them;

they take their copper pittances, and your duty

. . .is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice."

(Omeros, 75-6 by Derek Walcott)

And a so fe me fada name de worlds I and I see

and de faces that refuse to see me

me learn de rhythm of him voice

each curve and dip

every swell and whirl

syllable by syllable me swallow

him meaning whole

until me learn to speak in parables

like de river.



Red moon over Lagos

Bleeds fe me name in ochre dust

Ile Ife a call me

Ile Ife a call me

Ile Ife a call me name

"Then suddenly from their rotting logs distracting signs of the faith I betrayed,

or the faith that betrayed me,

yellow butterflies rising on the road to Valencia."

(Midsummer,"LIV" by Derek Walcott)

Street children throng de markets

bellies heavy wid wind.

gods are silent now, yes!

sleeping in de museum

By de Palace gate.



Rent de moon, Iyah!!!!

Let de rain come dung

Sacred blood cleanse even fools!

"Who is that dark child on the parapets

of Europe, watching the evening river mint

its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets,

the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes,

then, black on gold, the Hudson's silhouettes?



From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours,

under the airport domes, the echoing stations,

the tributary of emigrants whom exile

has made as classless as the common cold,

citizens of a language that is now yours."

("Forest of Europe" by Derek Walcott)

Now… dem bound to hear

though dem still don’t see me

mis-naming me daughta of Caliban,

bastard chile of Miranda

when me is none a dat



just me in multiplicity!



me oneness, me own...

although me nuh have nuh face

yet me will roar yuh

thunderous ululations



mock yuh safety

yuh sureness of self.



Till I and I become de bo in bombo!

eloquent and sacrilegious

yuh will love me yet!

Know ME

name me right.



When me upset de table at yuh dinner-party

turn over de dutchie pot

off de pimento wood fire

dumpling turn to ashes

caviar nestling in vomit...



Say yeah, a me rule

fire an’ brimstone a fe rain dung ya so!

A weh oonuu tek dis ting fah?

"The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree,

the tornado's black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins, heart, muscles,tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure light streaks the field

and furrows wait for the sower."

("Forty Acres: A Poem for Barack Obama" by Derek Walcott)

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"Everything Pure Must Be Broken"

"Everything pure must be broken," she said,
her smile tightening into a stranglehold.
and I began to feel the familiar cold

crawling across the floor and into my bed,
following the sweep of her dress over the threshold.
"Everything pure must be broken," she said,

her heels crunching the bones of dead,
men who never dreamt their story would be told
as the maudlin tale of a sad cuckold:
"Everything pure must be broken," she said.

--Geoffrey Philp--

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My contribution to Read Write Poem #82

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