When I asked my white writer friends how they answer this question, I was less than surprised to find that none of them had been asked. As our country moves further to the right, as affirmative action gets called into question, as race related biases against people of color soar, as the power structure in our society remains, in many ways, unchanged, why, then, would a person feel comfortable asking me this question? More than the question, it is the political context in which it is asked that is annoying. How do you feel about people writing outside of their own experiences? How do you feel about white people writing about people of color? At every conference, at every adult speaking engagement, at my breakfast table at the Coretta Scott King Awards, at my dinner table at the Newbery/Caldecott, even at book signings. Although it is phrased differently, it always comes. Invariably, there is the question and answer period. I talk about my friends, my goals as a writer, my home life, even my pets. I talk about the early days, about what propelled me to write certain books. And by this means, through the different, complicated elements of language and experience, through being and reading and listening and re-creating, I have come to understand the world around me - and myself as a writer.Īt conferences, I am often asked to speak about my experiences as a writer. But if I take the beauty of these works and filter my own experience through them, I can create something that is mine. Nor does Pound’s version of The Seafarer. James’s Portrait of a Lady doesn’t do this. But at my grandmother’s house, her experiences and the memories have filtered through her to us and by extension become our own. Each event is buttered thick with experience and language. Having majored in English with a concentration in British Literature and Middle English, I have come to love all aspects of the English language - have come to love sitting down with the writings of James and Pound as much as I love sitting down to Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s house. Like putting on a nice suit - one that you feel good in in the outside world but wouldn’t choose for a lazy Sunday afternoon. I had always thought of it as the language spoken on the outside, the language one used to procure scholarships, employment, promotions. I had never thought of standard English as that. You just need to have been a part of the experience.Ī friend once asked if it was hard to speak “standard” English. You don’t have to be a part of my family to understand what my grandmother means when she turns a phrase in a way that makes some friends knit their eyebrows and glance at me for help. It tells its own story, our language does, and woven through it are all the places we’ve been, all that we’ve seen, experiences held close, good and bad. It is not the stereotypical “I be, you be” that has made its derogatory way into others’ perception of ‘black dialect.’ And it is more complex and less frustrating than the whole ebonics argument, although the seed of the argument is truly the essence of our language. What is spoken in her house is the language of a long time ago, before we were shipped off to college, before my exposure to Chaucer and James and the Brontës. We speak this language to those who understand and then we come home and this language gets blended into the language that is spoken in my grandmother’s house. My younger brother and I listen to music that plays with language, that pushes against grammatical and linguistic walls. What was once great was then hype and now phat and so on. When the family is alone together or with close friends, our language flows into a southern dialect essenced with my younger brother’s (and sometimes my own) hip-hop of-the-moment idioms - what was once good became fresh and is now the bomb. We speak a different language in my grandmother’s house.
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