Kalypsoul: The Other Self: September 2015

Monday, September 28, 2015

I-Dentity

I-DENTITY

I’m from old ladies
  with wrinkled skin, flowing skirts, and colorful headties
   who smoked pipes and snuffed tobacco
    and drank café black, fuerte y muy caliente
     sipping from home-made demi-tasses

I’m from savory smells of 'sweet-han' cooking and fresh salty seas
and sounds of braying burros and childhood laughter
  frolicking at ring games
   chasing catfish down gurgling streams
    diving and splashing in cool mossy depths

I’m from grannys and nen-nens, macooms, and tanties
named Alice and Benita and Laurencia
  and mothers who sang aguinaldos and danced
   and chatted in Español and French Patois
    and served beloved borracho sons
     steaming sancoche while young girls waited

I’m from women who knew the value of book learning they never had
and whose steely hope shone through mantilla-draped faces
  and black-cloaked bods, and downcast eyes
   and vice-like arms holding young ones close
    following en-hearsed remains
     of husband-provider gone too soon

I’m from matriarchs who gave all they have and then some more
and told talks of age-old, and folk-loric feats
  around blazing fire
   triumphant sagas deeply etched
    upon retinas of fading memory

Women like Paulina and Alice and Marcelina
  with identity firm set
   and buoyed by laughter
    and passed on to each sapling, bud,
     and germinating seed

   who made sure we knew
    that
   “Gopaul luck
    ain’t Seepaul luck”
    that
   “what sweet in goat mouth
    go sour in he behind”
    that
   “one day for police
    and one day for thief”
   and
    that
     some sweet day
    before cock get teeth
   our sun,too,
  will also rise.

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.