50books-poc Uncounted: Rotten English: A Literary Anthology
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).
actual analysis: Writing in vernacular can be... fraught, and when done badly is usually hugely offensive. (e.g. Gone with the Wind, any non-West Indians estimation of a "Jamaican" accent ever, and, wow, this list could go on and on - especially if we went into television and movies.) Your mileage may vary, but I think that all of these manage to neatly side-step the most common problems with writing in vernacular because:
Wat a joyful news, miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in Reverse
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town,
By de ship-load, by de plane load
Jamaica is Englan boun.
Dem a pour out a Jamaica,
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
What an islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An turn history upside dung!
Some people doan like travel,
But fe show dem loyalty
Dem all a open up cheap-fare-
To-England agency.
An week by week dem shippin off
Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.
Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see da turnabout?
Jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout'.
For wen dem ketch a Englan,
An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.
Jane says de dole is not too bad
Because dey payin she
Two pounds a week fe seek a job
dat suit her dignity.
me say Jane will never fine work
At de rate how she dah look,
For all day she stay pon Aunt Fan couch
An read love-story book.
Wat a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wonderin how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse.
And that really sets the mood for the rest of the anthology. Another poem that creates a nice reversal is 'Unrelated Incidents' - No.3 by white, Scottish writer Tom Leonard
The essays are especially heavy on the cluefulness, except for one which is excerpted for schadenfreude purposes and is meant to shame its writer even in his grave:
Chinua Achebe, from "The African Writer and the English Language"
...my answer to the question Can an African ever learn English to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so. The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer... should aim at fashioning out an English that is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
Gloria Anzaldua, "Borderlands/La Frontiera: The New Mestiza"
"We're going to have to control your tongue," the dentist says...
"We're going to have to do something about your tongue," I hear the anger rising in his voice... "I've never seen anything as wild or as stubborn," he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?
...
El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arranco la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.
James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?"
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.
Kamau Brathwaite, from "History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry"
...in the Caribbean (as in many other 'cultural disaster' areas), the people in this system came to know more, even today, about English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes... We are more excited about their literary models... And in terms of what we write... we haven't got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane that is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of snowfall.
Thomas Macauley, from "Minute on Indian Education" [warning: vile, racist claptrap.]
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them...
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.
(Ahmad says of Macaulay: "In many ways, his 'Minute on Indian Education'... inadvertently brought about the linguistic innovations Rotten English celebrates... When that policy later reverberated through the British Empire, its outcome of a thoroughly reinvented English would have been thoroughly unexpected - and one imagines fairly unpalatable - to its originator.")
Gabriel Okara, "African Speech... English Words"
As a writer who believes in the utilization of African ideas, African philosophy and African folk-lore and imagery to the fullest extent possible, I am of the opinion that the only way to use them effectivly is to translate them almost literally from the African language native to the writer into whatever European language he is using as his medium of expression... For, from a word, a group of words, a sentence and even a name in any African language, one can glean the social norms, attitudes and values of a people.
M. NourbeSe Philip, "The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy"
Some people are born writing, some achieve writing and some have writing thrust upon them. My belonging is to the last group... I have come upon an understanding of language - good-english-bad-english english, Queengish and Kinglish - the anguish that is english in colonial societies.
Amy Tan, "Mother Tongue"
Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken or ''fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can of no way to describe it other than "broken," as though it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "Limited English," for example. But that seems just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perception of the limited English speaker.
Writers of color included in this anthology:
Achebe, Chinua
Anzaldua, Gloria
Baldwin, James
Bennet, Louise
Brathwaite, Kamau
Chesnutt, Charles
Diaz, Junot
Duff, Alan
Dunbar, Paul Laurence
Grace, Patricia
Hughes, Langston
Hurston, Zora Neale
Iweala, Uzodinma
Johnson, Linton Kwesi
Kasaipwalova, John
Keenes-Douglas, Paul
Kempadoo, Oonya
Linmark, R. Zamora
Lovelace, Earl
Malkani, Gautam
McKay, Claude
Mistry, Rohinton
Mutabaruka
Okara, Gabriel
Philip, M. NourbeSe
Sapphire
Saro-Wiwa, Ken
Shange, Ntozake
Selvon, Sam
Tan, Amy
White writers included in this anthology:
Burns, Robert
Carey, Peter
Doyle, Roddy
Foer, Jonathan Safron
Kipling, Rudyard
Leonard, Tom
Macaulay, Thomas (his inclusion is intentionally ironic)
McCabe Mary
Molloy, Frances
Twain, Mark
Welsh, Irvine
Wolfe, Thomas
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).
actual analysis: Writing in vernacular can be... fraught, and when done badly is usually hugely offensive. (e.g. Gone with the Wind, any non-West Indians estimation of a "Jamaican" accent ever, and, wow, this list could go on and on - especially if we went into television and movies.) Your mileage may vary, but I think that all of these manage to neatly side-step the most common problems with writing in vernacular because:
- Vernacular in these pieces is used to humanize characters, not to other them.
- All of the writers are writing in a vernacular that they themselves speak.
- They are using that vernacular in order to write about and engage with their own communities.
- Language is politics, and vernacular and dialect even more overtly so. All of these pieces have themes centered around racism, classism, colonialism, and systematic oppression.
- Nobody in this anthology sounds like Jar-Jar Binks.
Wat a joyful news, miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in Reverse
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town,
By de ship-load, by de plane load
Jamaica is Englan boun.
Dem a pour out a Jamaica,
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
What an islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An turn history upside dung!
Some people doan like travel,
But fe show dem loyalty
Dem all a open up cheap-fare-
To-England agency.
An week by week dem shippin off
Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.
Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see da turnabout?
Jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout'.
For wen dem ketch a Englan,
An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.
Jane says de dole is not too bad
Because dey payin she
Two pounds a week fe seek a job
dat suit her dignity.
me say Jane will never fine work
At de rate how she dah look,
For all day she stay pon Aunt Fan couch
An read love-story book.
Wat a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wonderin how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse.
And that really sets the mood for the rest of the anthology. Another poem that creates a nice reversal is 'Unrelated Incidents' - No.3 by white, Scottish writer Tom Leonard
The essays are especially heavy on the cluefulness, except for one which is excerpted for schadenfreude purposes and is meant to shame its writer even in his grave:
Chinua Achebe, from "The African Writer and the English Language"
...my answer to the question Can an African ever learn English to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so. The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer... should aim at fashioning out an English that is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
Gloria Anzaldua, "Borderlands/La Frontiera: The New Mestiza"
"We're going to have to control your tongue," the dentist says...
"We're going to have to do something about your tongue," I hear the anger rising in his voice... "I've never seen anything as wild or as stubborn," he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?
...
El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arranco la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.
James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?"
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.
Kamau Brathwaite, from "History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry"
...in the Caribbean (as in many other 'cultural disaster' areas), the people in this system came to know more, even today, about English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes... We are more excited about their literary models... And in terms of what we write... we haven't got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane that is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of snowfall.
Thomas Macauley, from "Minute on Indian Education" [warning: vile, racist claptrap.]
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them...
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.
(Ahmad says of Macaulay: "In many ways, his 'Minute on Indian Education'... inadvertently brought about the linguistic innovations Rotten English celebrates... When that policy later reverberated through the British Empire, its outcome of a thoroughly reinvented English would have been thoroughly unexpected - and one imagines fairly unpalatable - to its originator.")
Gabriel Okara, "African Speech... English Words"
As a writer who believes in the utilization of African ideas, African philosophy and African folk-lore and imagery to the fullest extent possible, I am of the opinion that the only way to use them effectivly is to translate them almost literally from the African language native to the writer into whatever European language he is using as his medium of expression... For, from a word, a group of words, a sentence and even a name in any African language, one can glean the social norms, attitudes and values of a people.
M. NourbeSe Philip, "The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy"
Some people are born writing, some achieve writing and some have writing thrust upon them. My belonging is to the last group... I have come upon an understanding of language - good-english-bad-english english, Queengish and Kinglish - the anguish that is english in colonial societies.
Amy Tan, "Mother Tongue"
Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken or ''fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can of no way to describe it other than "broken," as though it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "Limited English," for example. But that seems just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perception of the limited English speaker.
Writers of color included in this anthology:
Achebe, Chinua
Anzaldua, Gloria
Baldwin, James
Bennet, Louise
Brathwaite, Kamau
Chesnutt, Charles
Diaz, Junot
Duff, Alan
Dunbar, Paul Laurence
Grace, Patricia
Hughes, Langston
Hurston, Zora Neale
Iweala, Uzodinma
Johnson, Linton Kwesi
Kasaipwalova, John
Keenes-Douglas, Paul
Kempadoo, Oonya
Linmark, R. Zamora
Lovelace, Earl
Malkani, Gautam
McKay, Claude
Mistry, Rohinton
Mutabaruka
Okara, Gabriel
Philip, M. NourbeSe
Sapphire
Saro-Wiwa, Ken
Shange, Ntozake
Selvon, Sam
Tan, Amy
White writers included in this anthology:
Burns, Robert
Carey, Peter
Doyle, Roddy
Foer, Jonathan Safron
Kipling, Rudyard
Leonard, Tom
Macaulay, Thomas (his inclusion is intentionally ironic)
McCabe Mary
Molloy, Frances
Twain, Mark
Welsh, Irvine
Wolfe, Thomas