Kalypsoul: The Other Self: In Your SPELL

Saturday, October 22, 2005

In Your SPELL

(in honor of Giles Hall, Spelman College)

In Your SPELL

You
stand there
Majestic red-bricked sight
Shuttered door in peeling white
Dwarfed by sheer tow’ring height
trellised four-storied light
Slated belfry pierce the night
world-wearied eyes dusted in speckled grey
Mirroring wisdom of many a day
Aged oak limbs yellowed and long
Fluting winter’s last swansong
On much trodden mould dusted in soft burnished gold
What secrets do they really hold?
You
Stand majestic
in December’s tired dance
Sagacity echoes in your very stance
Heads bow in humble obeisance
To your o’er pow’ring omniscience
So . . . can you tell . . .
Of TV camera lights blasting bold
Casting you in A Different World
Can you tell . . .
How Harriet and Sophia burned
And in Friendship Baptist turned
Their fervor
Into favor
Of those who yearned
To rise, and sit and learn
Like Miss Mamie from ole Decatur town
shut out, shut up, long before Brown
Etta, Ludie-Mae and Aunt Dell . . .
So Can you tell . . .
Of ancient lore, Anansi tales or more
of starched voices, ruffled pinafores
praising all homemaker’s score
Well . . .can you tell?
How many have graced these hallowed halls
how many tried within these walls
to rise up with the few
of dark accursed hue
What dainty little damsel queens
Emerged to grace this tidy scene
in white-gloved work hands
from this Southern land
And did you see. . .
When that poor child fell
Pinned ‘neath your sorrowing tree
You were there. . . so did you see?
And can you tell?
Your many secrets kept so well
Dear old G-I-L-E-S
I'm captive in
your SPELL!

© KPLewis (Kalypsoul)
01.14.2005

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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.