Tag Archives: Black Language

Impact of Baduizm: “On & On/…& On”

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baduPick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side

You need to pick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side

Well, If you don’t pick your afro, you gonna have one side hiiiiiiiigh…

That’s basically the trailer to Erykah Badu’s “On and On.”  When I hear those words, one image comes to mind: my undergraduate students.

Last spring, a student did a presentation on Badu using the video to this song.  The video is announced as a story that opens with the lines above. As soon as that third line hit, If you don’t pick yo afro daddy, you gon have one side hiiiiiiiigh, the class sang in unison.  And then everybody just started laughing.

Yes, I was cracking up too, but I was also surprised… now hold up, yall— yall was only 2 years old when this song came out.  What yall know about daddy’s afro being high?  They ignored me except, of course, Aysha, who came to my office (and still on many other occasions) to tell me I was EXTRA (I was always extra: extra with the homework, extra with the assignments, extra with the discussion topics, extra with the earrings…. just EXTRA… I have come to love this word!)  I get away with these kinds of comments as a college teacher, stuff I never got away with when I taught high school.  During lunch, I always turned on the old school at noon on HOT 97 (my hip hop station back then) so when students finished eating lunch, many would come to my classroom.  I should have known better but I was surprised when these students knew ALL of the lyrics to every and any Rakim or Sugar Hill or Roxanne or KRS-One song they heard, though many were not born at the time or, at least, they were still crawling in diapers.  When I expressed my surprise, they got all personal, snapped on me because I grew up in Ohio, and accused me of trying to learn to pop-lock when they just came out the womb knowing Hip Hop.  Yeah, they took it THERE.  I was not phased though and would describe, rather rudely (with reminders of what they just had for lunch), the kind of excrement they had in their diapers while I was grown, understanding what I was hearing, and able to wipe my own behind… in Ohio.    Not exactly one of my finer moments, I admit, but, hey, I wasn’t gon let them play me like that.  Sometime you gotta do what you gotta do.  Point is: there is a cultural apparatus and literate community here that recreates black experiences through music.

erykah-badu-feet-319487You don’t need to have been alive when Badu first came on the scene with that first album, Baduizm, (and every album thereafter) for it to make its impact on how you understand your life and the ways in which you understand being a black woman.   With Badu, I see my students placing themselves into new aesthetic expressions, whether it be through body adornment, sound collaborations, or the crafting of one’s singing voice.  Badu even designs new AfroDigital experiences to go along with her opening lament of a lost love or with her choral request that someone simply clap for her and have her back  (see Badu perform “Window Seat” at the 2010 Soul Train Awards below).  We seem to notice, maybe even over-notice, when young people of Afrikan descent gravitate to meaningless or, worst yet, offensive commercial musicians who often have very little to contribute in content or talent.  When students start singing a song that came out in 1997 as if they have lived that moment with Badu (they were only 2 and 4 years old at the time), then, clearly, it is not accurate to think they are only gravitating to commercially successful artists who trade in poppy gimmicks for style, choose corporate branding over aestheticism and music, and pursue money rather than soul. I love when my students let me feel the ways that they are feeling those differences.

When I have students who are so deeply invested in a genre or musician that is literally before their time, I stop to notice these explicit ways that black communities  sustain culture, memory, sound, and history.  In this particular case, there’s a word for it: Baduizm.

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Impact of Aja Monet: “Is That All You Got”

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Last week in class, we finished unit six.  In that unit, I asked students to hear, see, and draw a line of connection between black women in 1970s Black Power Struggles, Black Arts Movement, and contemporary spoken word artists.  I received an email one night from one of my beloved students, Karina, who asked that I include what she saw as one of Aja Monet’s most impactful poem, “Is That All You Got?,” in the list of Monet poems that I offered.  Here is that poem:

I was actually introduced to Aja Monet, the youngest national poetry slam winner, through my students, not through New York City’s poetry events.  I can honestly say that I have never had a class of young people where someone did not know Monet’s work and this spans quite a few years of my teaching now.  I am only now realizing that Aja Monet ‘s words and visions visit my classroom in each semester that I teach undergraduates.  It speaks to me about what Monet is speaking to these young black men and women.  In fact, Karina’s one request as a high school graduation gift was Monet’s book of poetry, a book I have now added to my own shelves. There are certainly a set of go-to essays and other texts that re-circulate back into my classroom and I know now to add Monet’s poetry to this set.

I have listened to this poem over and over this weekend, hoping to hear my students better.  Mainly what I hear now is that they have been through some things, are looking back on it, and are seeing just how and why they are going to make it through because as Monet puts it: “Is that all you got? What the f**k is you broken for?” It’s a reminder that I am also thankful for.

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My Father’s Black Working Class Consciousness as an Academic Necessity

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My Father as a Young Man

My Father as a Young Man

When I have heard white working class people talk about becoming academics/joining the academy, they seem to often talk about an estrangement from peers, neighborhoods, and, especially, from family.  I hear black academics sometimes talk this way also, usually in reference to the brothas and sistas on the block who no longer accept them.  I just don’t get it. I just don’t have these issues, never have, and don’t imagine I will in the future either. The older that I get, the further “ahead” (in years, I mean) that I move into the academy, the more I seem to be able to talk with and relate to my father.

My father is a retired heating and air conditioning mechanic and seems to be able to fix any motor/engine/system on the planet.  As is always so startlingly true of the discarding of black bodies, talent, and genius under white supremacy, in another world, my father could have been an engineer and inventor (I won’t even go into the everyday assistantship I have had to provide on his homemade barbecue grills and electric traps to catch squirrels and critters that eat the garden’s tomatoes).  His garage is the 21st century version of Fred Sanford’s junkyard/frontyard with anything that you could ever need to fix anything that is ever broken.

Sanford and Son

Sanford and Son… Now Insert Me as Daughter

For most of my life, my father worked as custodial staff for the federal building.  Today, he gets hassled daily for any odd job that any black person in that part of Ohio seems to need done, so much so that he never answers his phone anymore, forcing me to buy him a cell phone and put it on my account in order to talk to him (preachers seem to be his arch-nemesis for trying to get free or cheap work done).  As a scholarship student at an elite high school, my high school peers were the sons and daughters of lawyers and judges so they knew my father from their parents’ frequent visits to the federal building where my father worked.  To my peers, I was the janitor’s daughter and it didn’t seem to make a difference that my father was not the janitor at OUR building, he was just a janitor out there somewhere and so that was his and my only identity.  I won’t lie and say that I didn’t feel like an ugly, unwanted, poor black girl for most of my high school years— it was what that culture engendered— but I wasn’t estranged from my father’s class consciousness and had a full-blooded, full-bodied critique of elite and upper middle class white people.  Today, as a recently tenured professor of English, I relate to my father even more by nature of the work and white supremacy that I navigate daily in the academy.  What on earth would make anyone think that it would look any different for me than it did for him?

Being raised in a (very) large, black working class family is what I count as my greatest blessing and asset today.  The language and vernacular that redefines and plays, the ability to read whiteness and its violence, the knowledge that pleasure and sustenance won’t come from work, the explicit naming of unfairness in everyday banter, the transformation of the mundane (fish fries, the electric slide, etc) into the sacred have sustained me in ways that are beyond even my conscious awareness.

Last week, I mailed to my father one of the first copies of my first book.  When he received it, he called me and was stunned that it was 336 pages and DONE!  The thing he kept saying, over and over again, was this: “uhn, uhn, uhn, this is a whole lotta work, baby.”  He told me that it was time to rest now before I get back up and get back at it.  It was the best recognition of what I had done and the best advice for what I need to do next that I have received to date!  I knew he would understand just what I was feeling, down to the core.

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“It Bees That Way Sometime”

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nina-simone-240px_mediumWhen your guy has got his hat
and made himself hard to find
It doesn't mean you should go crazy
It could be that way sometime

Find yourself another love
Who will treat you good and kind
Return that love he gives to you
It also bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

When you think you've found a love
And you have peace of mind
Somebody else steals his heart
Yes, it also bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

Don't let the problems of this world
Drive you slowly out of your mind
Just smile, look at the problem
And say it bees that way, bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

I will be, also be that way sometime
Can also be that way, it also bees that way
Bees that way sometime

This week, we are teaching ourselves the rules/prescriptions/grammars of African American Language (AAL) using Lisa Green’s African American English: A Linguistic Introduction.  So what do these lyrics and song from Nina Simone have to do with that?  Seemingly, everything.

I want to remind us here of Smitherman’s 1977 book, Talkin and Testifyin, and her chapter named after this very same Nina Simone song (chapter two).  Issues such as signifying, semantic inversions, and the blues notes in Simone’s “It bees dat way sometime” made Smitherman move away from coinages like “dialect” and “Black English” to calling this system of speaking/thought a “language.” For this reason, in this class, you will also hear me say AAL/African American Language.

Here is what Smitherman (1977) argues:

Here the language aspect is the use of the verb be to indicate a recurring event or habitual condition, rather than a one-time-only occurrence.  But the total expression— ‘it bees dat way sometime’—also reflects Black [Language] style, for the statement suggests a point of view, a way of looking at life, and a method of adapting to life’s realities. To live by the philosophy of ‘it bees dat way sometime’ is to come to grips with the changes that life bees putting us through, and to accept the changes and bad times as a constant, ever-present reality. (p. 3)

So while tonight’s class is certainly more about learning rules, let’s not forget what these AAL grammars mean and do in the world as a languaging/living/breathing belief system.  Let’s remember Nina Simone and how/why saying and knowing that “it bees that way sometime” is part of an ideological system that, sometimes, is the only thing that can get you through the day.

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