in short: Rotten English: A Literary Anthology edited by Dohra Ahmad (white? editor) is an anthology of poetry, short fiction, novel excerpts, and essays that use, discuss or otherwise engage with vernacular/non-standard/dialectical/world English(es), has a 5:2 ratio of PoC writers to white writers, and has writers from and stories set on every continent other than Antarctica. (I had to double check South America, but Trinidad and Tobago are on the the South American continental shelf, so it totes counts.) The books title is a reference to Ken Saro-Wiwa's novel, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English.
in which it is all about me: So I haven't posted in a second? w/e, w/e, I'm posting now.
I'm writing this up in particular, because anytime someone says something stupid about how other people talk and how it's "bad", "wrong", "uneducated", "ghetto", etc. I want to throw this book at their head, except for how it would hurt the book. Because I never run out of those moments (irl on the big wide internets) and neither does anyone else and because this anthology is one-stop-shopping for cluebats, I thought others might be interested. If you want to know what prompted me to reread this book now, start
here (link) and
here (link).
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actual analysis )