The Invariant "Be" and Inflexible Me
“No slave who had had his ears nailed to a post and severed from his head would have wanted to speak exactly like his persecutors, no matter how many hours he had worked alongside them in the fields.”
From Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
What I mean to say is that some things just belong to black people, and our language—the one we speak when we are by ourselves, or share during a performance, or wield like a weapon in battle—with few exceptions, belongs to us. We created it, for many reasons—because our African dialects died out for lack of use; because we were denied formal educations; because we all had to be able to speak to each other through the babel of the Atlantic slave trade. Because we didn’t want to sound like them.
I didn’t like the way my language was being used the other night; it was all wrong. There was no music in it. The man thought that by using what is called in linguistics “the invariant be”* he had embodied Black English—his job was done. As stated in Spoken Soul “Most of the satirists who aped Black English had no idea how to re-create the dialect accurately. They didn’t know (and perhaps didn’t care) that the use of invariant be and other features is governed by subtle grammatical semantic rules that most outsiders, white and black, bungle when they try to imitate Spoken Soul.”
I didn’t like the way my language was being spoken with the invariant be becoming “the icon of African American vernacular” (Spoken Soul). And I didn’t like the inauthentic way he used this icon to embody an experience that was not his own. He may have suffered as a child, he may have been poor, he may have lived in urban squalor, but he was never black, and at that late stage, shouldn’t have tried to be.
It’s one thing to co-opt something from a culture and make it into something else, something better—jazz came through much in that way, a lot of African, some European—how can you miss the klezmer music? And our modern English language is gorgeous with words from all over, picked from here and there; it is an embarrassment of riches, our language. But it’s another thing, entirely, to take something, without even really knowing what it is, without bothering to understand it, to render yourself . . . I don't really know what the man was trying to do, the words were so alien coming out of his mouth the message was lost.
So, am I being proprietary and inflexible when I ask: Can’t something just be ours, and ours only?
*Unlike the Standard English "be", the present-tense form remains the same, no matter what the subject is, hence “I be” “you be” “he/she/it be”
From Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
What I mean to say is that some things just belong to black people, and our language—the one we speak when we are by ourselves, or share during a performance, or wield like a weapon in battle—with few exceptions, belongs to us. We created it, for many reasons—because our African dialects died out for lack of use; because we were denied formal educations; because we all had to be able to speak to each other through the babel of the Atlantic slave trade. Because we didn’t want to sound like them.
I didn’t like the way my language was being used the other night; it was all wrong. There was no music in it. The man thought that by using what is called in linguistics “the invariant be”* he had embodied Black English—his job was done. As stated in Spoken Soul “Most of the satirists who aped Black English had no idea how to re-create the dialect accurately. They didn’t know (and perhaps didn’t care) that the use of invariant be and other features is governed by subtle grammatical semantic rules that most outsiders, white and black, bungle when they try to imitate Spoken Soul.”
I didn’t like the way my language was being spoken with the invariant be becoming “the icon of African American vernacular” (Spoken Soul). And I didn’t like the inauthentic way he used this icon to embody an experience that was not his own. He may have suffered as a child, he may have been poor, he may have lived in urban squalor, but he was never black, and at that late stage, shouldn’t have tried to be.
It’s one thing to co-opt something from a culture and make it into something else, something better—jazz came through much in that way, a lot of African, some European—how can you miss the klezmer music? And our modern English language is gorgeous with words from all over, picked from here and there; it is an embarrassment of riches, our language. But it’s another thing, entirely, to take something, without even really knowing what it is, without bothering to understand it, to render yourself . . . I don't really know what the man was trying to do, the words were so alien coming out of his mouth the message was lost.
So, am I being proprietary and inflexible when I ask: Can’t something just be ours, and ours only?
*Unlike the Standard English "be", the present-tense form remains the same, no matter what the subject is, hence “I be” “you be” “he/she/it be”
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