First Year Courses & Programs
Basic Writing (ENGLWRIT 111)
Unit 3
Selves Spoken & Unspoken:
Language & the Construction of Ethnic Identity
Work Schedules / Exploratory Writings / Related Sites
English can express what I mean, but only Chinese can express who I am.
Wendy Cheung, former student
Carlos McBride's poem "Ghetto Thang," which opens this unit, demonstrates the irresistible power of Black English to expose the hardships and degradation that engendered it. In so doing, "Ghetto Thang" becomes a consummate expression of irony. But its message remains clear and unmistakable. McBride composed his poem when he was a student at the University of Massachusetts and a member of this writing class; it has since been published in the anthology Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, edited by Daniel J. Wideman and Rohan B. Preston.
In her vignette "No Speak English," Sandra Cisneros tells the plaintive story of Mamacita, brought to the United States by her husband. Speaking but three phrases in English, she secludes herself in their apartment with her baby boy and refuses to leave, longing only to return home.
¿Cuándo, cuándo, cuándo? she asks. ¡Ay, caray! We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ!¡Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country.
Through its seeming simplicity, Cisneros's tale of Mamacita communicates the profound truth that "Home is where the heart is"--and where our language takes us.
Richard Rodriguez offers an alternate yet equally profound truth: While private individuality may remain forever tied to and expressed in our "home" language, only through the dominant language can we achieve public individuality. And in the United States, the dominant language is Standard English. In this excerpt from "Aria," a chapter in his autobiography entitled Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez discusses public and private languages, and submits that his achievements in English separated him from his Spanish family and culture but also brought him "the belief, the calming assurance that [he] belonged in public."
James Baldwin's eloquent essay "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" emphasizes that Black English is not "broken" or "incorrect" or "bad" English, or a "dialect" of English, but a language, which, like all languages, has come "into existence by means of brutal necessity." The "brutal necessity" that gave birth to Black English, he tells us, was the black diaspora and, in particular, the United States slave trade, by which black people came to this country "chained to each other, but from different tribes" and, therefore, different languages. "There was a moment, in time, and in this place," he writes, "when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me . . . the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today." That language, that "mighty achievement" in the face of unspeakable degradation, is Black English.
June Jordan, in her essay "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan," offers those of us who know only Standard English a brief, introductory course in the rules and grammar of Black English, making it clear, as she does, that Black English is its vocabulary of idiomatic phrases and slang but also much more: it is a complex grammatical system of syntax and inflection, through which are displayed "the three qualities of Black English--the presence of life, voice, and clarity--that testify to a distinctive Black value system" and which equals the structure of black consciousness itself. But Jordan's essay is much more, too. It is the story of her class in Black English; of the murder of one class member's brother, shot and killed by two New York policemen; and of the class's decision whether to compose their letters of protest in Standard English, "the language of the killers," or in Black English, the language of their own, and the murdered Reggie Jordan's, experience. Their choice of Black English demonstrates the tragic truth that the same "brutal necessity" that gave birth to Black English over a hundred years ago continues to dictate its use today.
In "The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition," Fan Shen goes beyond the surface structures of the English language to explore the experience of "reconciling my Chinese identity with an English identity dictated by the rules of English composition." As we all know, writing demands more than a knowledge of grammar and punctuation rules. It requires that we develop our ideas in a "reasonable" fashion and order them in a "logical" way. Shen's experience demonstrates, however, that notions of "reason" and "logic" are not the same worldwide but are, like everything else it seems, the social constructions of each individual culture. Like Rodriguez, Shen demonstrates as well how fragile and changeable is the self composed in writing as he remarks, "In order to write good English, I knew that I had to be myself, which actually meant not to be my Chinese self. It meant that I had to create an English self and be that self."
In the final essay of this unit, "The Quare Gene," Tony Earley identifies himself as "a Southerner" or, more specifically, "a North Carolinian, of Appalachian, Scots-Irish descent, the off-spring of farming families on both sides." He, too, like Rodriguez, describes the alienating effects of a school language at odds with one's home language. Earley's home language, however, is not geographically but historically "foreign." That is, the Appalachian dialect of English Earley's family and neighbors speak in the isolated mountains of North Carolina still contains the three-hundred to eight-hundred-year-old vocabulary of Shakespeare's English and even Chaucer's, a vocabulary filled with words long since disappeared from "Standard English." The Appalachian vernacular is fast dying out and with it Earley's felt connection to his ancestral past, his "small comfort of shared history." So he compensates, he says, by writing stories and sending his characters back up into the hills of Appalachia in the belief that "stories . . . can save us."
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