Kalypsoul: The Other Self: Prism

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Prism

I Need You
You -- enhance my sultriness
My seductress, lover-ness, diablesseness
Entice me, enfold me
Evocative me, provocative me
Swizzlin’ me, sizzlin’ me
Skintalizin’ me
Give entrance to enchantress
temptress in me –
swell my rising glow
rivers melt and flow
Tumultuousness
Tenderness
Togetherness
Craze me, faze me, daze me
Amaze me
A maze me

I Need You
You -- calming balm to spirit
and to soul –
and so to heart
if these are indeed separate and apart
as I’ve been told
spirit behold
creative soul
multi-chambered heart of gold
Voice my every forming word
seek being even as I am heard
Lifting lilting again and again
through narrowed passageways
of unspeakable pain

I Need You
You -- thoroughly known to me
Perfunctorily
Indelibly etched in memory
Identity
Fidelity
Essence of
Foreverhunger
Foreverthirst
Foreverlove
Foreverfirst
shared history, responsibility
duty, family, legacy
Everything in life to me
Eternally

I Need You
You -- tickle my soul
Bele drum roll
Dance, laughter, hilarity
Carousel and farmers in the dell
Simon sez me, twist me, twirl me
Tease me, please me
Caps me, collapse me
Ring me, sing me
Prepubescent me
Rummy
Riddle-a-ree
Romping, Carousing
like tomboy within
roughandtumbling
the joy I’m in

I Need You
You -- engage the mental me
Exquisite profundity
Discursive, paradigmatic, parabolic
Antithetic, synthetic, synoptic
Diagrammatic, Ism-atic
Intellectual giant ascetic
Strutting your philosophy
Supersize me
Parse and analyze me
Doctor me in blissfulness
Jingle jangle Headiness
Consumed, engulfed in happiness

I Need You
You -- welcome gate to sanctuary home
Nurturerprotectormother
Eternalwombincubator
Suckle on sustaining meat
Life-giving everlasting teat
Strengthen you
Lengthen you
From nothingness
To godliness
From potter’s mess
To firm-rooted flawlessness
Wondrous Adonis
Handsome in your manliness

I Need You
Multi-myraid you
Feed me
Fill me
Free me
Thrill me
From tangled wrong to fluted song
From prison night to prism light
From astride stately shining stern
Bring the bliss for which I yearn
Come sail anew in ecstasy
Wind-tossed multi-mirrored sea
Mirage Memory Majesty
Just as the multi-myriad me

I Need You

© KPLewis (Kalypsoul)
07.17.2005

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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.