Kalypsoul: The Other Self: June 2003

Sunday, June 22, 2003

Sundays Suck

There is nothing unusual about the day. Except for the fact that my cable feed has been interrupted for some strange reason and I am watching a blank blue screen. No eye candy. No mental stimulation but my own alive imagination. Sunday morning huh? Not a good sign for the rest of the week.

Boredom moves in like a flood, and rises quickly to tsunami proportions. Many Sundays ago I would have been lying wrapped in arms that once formed an encricling band of love around me -- arms that promised to do so eternally, as they are wont to do. They urged me to stay even while I struggled to be free. And then they were gone.

And years before that I'd be up early primping and prettfying for my weekly appearance before God in his sanctuary. Trotting to church without knowing why. From the middle of a bed cluttered with scholarly appurtenances and other paraphernalia emptied from the Bermuda Triangle that serves as a pocketbook, a face tired with restfulness looks Godward for a sign.

Are you out there somewhere Daddy? Watching over me all these years? And have you hooked up with Lesly and Althea and Orna and Grans and Rory?

The list of people I know out there gets longer with time and I am no closer to the truth. I look at the telephone willing it to ring but it resists. Maybe I should call him? But would he be quiet and just let me be? Tom Joyner, how about that? He's funny. But no, he's not a Sunday person. I could read a book but Sister Souljah is not really a Sunday book. Toni Morrison - too deep for Sunday and real Sunday books will do nothing to relieve boredom. Eat perhaps? Nah. Too boring.

So here I am writing about boredom and literally putting myself to sleep. Yawn.

© KP Lewis (Kalypsoul)
2004.

The Way I Use Language

Author’s Note: Codeflow

You will find that I have started to experiment with movement in communication referencing (in speech and thought patterns) from dialect to standard that is neither unidirectional nor formulaic. This is deliberate. The style used here is my experimentation with what I call code-flow. I find myself writing the way I speak – in a comfortable, fluid mixture of standard and dialect, often within the same sentence, the same thought. It is what we Caribbean people do in uncontrived everyday speech. It is not code-shifting with which the literary world is familiar. Code-switching or code- shifting tends to follow a certain pattern, dialect for speech and standard for description and narration as has been traditionally used in Caribbean fiction. I am taking it a step further, letting dialect flow into standard and back again in both dialogue and narration/description, mingling together in the same sentence, the same thought. To me this shows the true fluidity/reality of how we operate linguistically in everyday life. We do not think in standard English and converse in Trini dialect; we think in both and speak in both but not all the same time. I may begin a thought in the standard received form but suddenly I want to express surprise, hilarity, indignation, outrage and the standard does not have the right words. I flow effortlessly to that in which I can express those thought, those ideas, those sentiments most comfortably. I express them and, depending on what I wish to reference next, I either move back to standard, stay where I am or move deeper into another dialect comfort zone. I may say it in French Patois or Cocoa Panyol or a dialect of Hindi or of English or I may use a uniquely West African turn of phrase or grammatical construct or express m thoughts in a totally creative word or expression known only to my country or one group or individual within. Language gets created through use and new words and expressions all have a very specific starting point.

Code switching is an improvement on the outright rejection of the use of dialect as having no place in the written word or in Caribbean literature. It also differs from the outright rejection of the standard as a form of linguistic resistance to colonialism. Yet, code switching is a colonized, conformist mode that, in spite of itself, accepts the superiority of the standard and makes apologies for dialect by restricting its use only to direct speech. It reflects the pedagogy of colonial education which polarized the acceptable standard of the reading books and the classroom from the unacceptable dialect of everyday use by everyday people. It was a time when the whip was applied to purge the tendency towards dialect use in respectable settings.

Code sliding attempts a more integral blending of the two and brings together a variety of Caribbean dialects in one form. It moves in the direction of defining a distinct and decolonized Caribbean identity in the aftermath of colonialism. The term code-sliding, however, implies for me a lack of control, a downward sort of slippery slope movement, and a built-in acceptance of linguistic hierarchies. Instead I advance the concept of code-flow which conveys the sense of non-hierarchical fluidity and an effortlessness that defines acceptance of a unique identity in the context of postmodernity rather than deliberate conscious resistance in the context of coloniality or postcoloniality. It speaks of creativity, reinterpretation and transformation. The smooth fluidity of language that melds the standard with dialect in a thought, in a phrase, in a sentence, shows not so much a rejection of historic influences but an acceptance of the new self, the birth of a Caribbean identity in which colonialism and an ethos defined by resistance to it are merely blurred distant memories. Caribbean code-flow essentially involves and emerges from an unequivocal acceptance of all aspects of a new self: Africa, Europe, India and Mesoamerica, all integral to the new identity through reinterpretation and transformation. It is méstissajé, creolité, unrepentant.