”…do you mean creates a distance or reformulation of the aesthetics of the text that is not commensurate with cultural closeness?”
This is the question that my dissertation supervisor put back to me during the draft stages of my thesis. I’d written a sentence – a seemingly poor one – in which I’d proposed that… ’through use of a certain kind of language, literary theory and criticism works in certain ways to alienate black British texts from themselves and readers alike’. Not a dreadful sentence, I thought, yet upon comparison I could see how the phrases ‘kind of’ and ‘certain ways’ failed to deploy the accuracy that hers so competently delivered.
My supervisor be like..
My thesis explored how linguistic styles that incorporate black-British dialects were being effectively overwritten, and so undermined by the standard registers found within works of Literary Criticism. It then went on to clarify how these interpretations (or as I call them, ‘translations’) have deleterious effect on how black fiction is both perceived and received. Now, while my sentences did not signify dialects found in black-British literature, the exchange did have me drawing parallels.
To be clear, I had meant what she had written. It was exactly what I meant in fact. I relay this anecdote not out of any particular feeling for the sentences themselves, but rather as a rumination upon the act. The fact of me being black, she being white; me being a novice, she an esteemed academic; my sloppy use of English, versus hers polished iteration – all of this conspired to moniker what I had discovered and was trying to write about.
The polished forms of English that can be found in literary articles and lecture rooms across the UK contain a history, power and hierarchy that remains ever present, and can be especially heightened when confronted by texts of ‘diversity’. The need to pontificate, the search for depth, the requirement for analysis that works to codify what counts as literary are all western modalities of reading that are carried into and onto texts of black British literature. The literary writer, Suzanne Scafe, wrote about this experience in Teaching Black British Literature:
The experience I’d had of reading about Black lives…was shattered by the tools of literary criticism and a hostile literary establishment. There was something devastating about seeing or listening to texts in which I felt implicated, destroyed by the dry and cutting tones of an English seminar
In many of my classes I had felt the same. There was a language being used to describe these works – works that possessed ‘black dialects’ by authors such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kamau Brathwaite and more recently, Jasmine Lee-Jones – that somehow didn’t fit, somehow didn’t ring true to my black experience in this country.
What Scafe doesn’t go on to say, however, are the ways that the black reader himself can go on to incorporate and mimic the dry and cutting tones! Years spent within academic environments has not only served to incorporate the Literary form into my linguistic repertoire but has in many ways become the dominant form. Far too many times have I witnessed myself speaking about literature – literature which I love, and ultimately feel close to – in a language that feels distant and abstract, using words and phrases that have nothing to do with my feeling for the piece, but rather, everything to do with my affection for the academy.
This experience feels particularly significant when writing and speaking about black British literature that possesses explicitly black dialects. This is what happens… you begin with a feeling for the piece, yet it somehow feels unacceptable within the academic environment to allow your body to express all of the blackness that connected you to the text… And so, you hold yourself down, and transfigure into something else, someone else…
You begin to call upon the Literary within you; that genteel, ponderous, and eloquent human being. You watch yourself speaking above and outside of yourself, and what you’re left to witness is bare caricature; a mimetic attempt to embody Professor English and all that she might mean. By the time you’re done finished, what came out of your mouth had very little to do with what you actually felt to say.
The psycho-social significance of this is not to be undermined. Issues around suppression, code switching and posturing are all well recognised areas of academic interest but have rarely been analysed within the literary / academic sphere specific to race and culture. The truth is, given my hybrid experience in this country, I have needed to have the ability and experience to move between dialects. And so, whilst without embarrassment I can confess my love for the Queens English I also have within me the impulse to destroy it.
Years ago I met with a colleague who was visibly pissed off after receiving an email from one of her students who signed off an email with the phrase ‘bless up’. She ran off into a diatribe about how he represented the worst of the incoming generation and how poorly prepared he was to enter the real world. As a black Caribbean man, I’d heard this phrase all my life, and for me it only meant a term of endearment, an affirmative sign of respect and recognition. I wanted to tell Sandra to relax – to ‘cool down nuh man and free up yuhself’, yet in her state I’m not sure she would have caught the irony.
Between this scenario and my dissertation there sits a question of cultural diversity. Much has been written about the history of cultural diversity that has converged to create the patina of modern Britian. Isn’t it time that there emerge a sort of diversity of discourses? A more flexible and fluid adaptation of dialects, one that can refashion old and stale stereotypes.
Dr Louise Bennett Coverley (known affectionately as Miss Lou), delivers an animated performance lecture about the importance of recognising the cultural diversity within a language or dialect (she rightly acknowledges the convergent dialects/languages of Portuguese, dutch, English and African and Indian on Caribbean dialects) and upholding this language. That it’s not to be bastardized or reduced to racist ridicule but upheld as an equal dialect to all others.
And so, the idea that Ramone could get the sack for trying to firm his boss is, I suppose, a real concern. Yet is it not possible to imagine a world where Gregory or Sandra may be culturally competent enough to return the gesture? A world where such discourse is not received as undermining or disrespectful, but rather as a cultural connecting device?
In this time of seeming polarisation, the embrace of different discourses has the potential to bring people together in new and interesting ways. One of the beautiful experiences of being marginalised is that your experience has the proclivity to incorporate multitudes. And in this there is an inborn, ingrowth of cultural diversity that speaks within you. How we incorporate, expand and share this sense of diversity is for each of us to determine.
Margin Page
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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