Speak white

Queer sci fi writer Nalo Hopkinson has me thinking about language. She sometimes has characters speak in Creole -- and has found, to her surprise, that many readers assume a speaker of dialect -- especially black dialect -- is stupid. Readers presume that this person, that their entire race, even, is a colonized one. One reviewer wrote flat out that Hopkinson uses the language of racism, but that her blackness meant he could not call her a racist.

Hopkinson, speaking at Montreal's Concordia University earlier this month, was flabbergasted.

She's looking ahead, rewriting the past into the future. The colonized of old do not remain so for all time -- they are even the potential oppressors of tomorrow. (Human nature is so much more complex that the simplistic analysis of a speech pattern.)

But the past is not so easily forgotten. Anthologist Virginia Hamilton, in her collection of slave stories, "The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales," writes in the introduction: "In 1880, journalist Joel Chandler Harris collected some of the oral literature of the slaves in 'Uncle Remus: His Songs and his Sayings.'... Harris' Uncle Remus told animal tales in fractured English to the little white boy of the plantation house. But author Harris was not concerned with reproducing exactly the tales or their language. Harris and his contemporaries used phonetic dialect as a literary device. They felt that an exaggerated colloquial language best symbolized what they regarded as the quaint appeal of lowly, rural people. Thus, some of the folktales recorded by early collectors are much more difficult to read than the narratives in the form of letters and petitions that some slaves managed to write themselves." (Slaves were forbidden to learn their letters.)

The children's book "Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon," by Victor Appleton, was published only a few years after Harris' efforts, in 1913. I picked it up at a second hand bookstore. "'Scuse me, Massa Tom," broke in Eradicate ["an aged colored man-of-all-work"], as he put his head through the half-open office door. "'Scuse me, but dere's a express gen'men outside, wif his auto truck, an' he's got some packages fo' yo' all, marked 'dangerous -- explosive -- an' keep away fom de fire.' He want t' know what he all gwine t' do wif 'em, Massa Tom?"

"Yais sah, Massa Tom. Dat's all right,' but he jest can't bring'em in."

The Chinese immigrants in the Charlie Chan detective novels I've read (circa 1929) are cringe-making : "Missie look-see watch, say 12 minutes aftah eight plitty muchee time bootleggah come. I say plitty muchee time dinnah gets on table." And on for far too much paper. Title character Chan doesn't speak like this of course. He, according to author Earl Derr Biggers, is a far better example of the "psychic" and "nocturnal" Chinese race (I kid you not) who has worked hard to tame his accent and speaks only a vaguely stilted (and poetic) English. Just to show how smart Chan is.

All proving Virginia Hamilton's point. But in 2005, we can go too far. Many people learning a new language have accents, patois is a legitimate lingua franca, and speaking skills are not connected to brains. One cannot live one's life afraid of racists, nor pandering to those who claim to fight racism -- but are in fact only replacing one bunch of offensive rules with another galling ordinance.

Here's hoping Nalo Hopkinson continues to inject realism into her imaginary worlds. Not everyone speaks white. Nor should they.