Week #8: Nation Language

[jscappettone]

How do you understand Kamau Brathwaite’s development of the Caribbean concept of “nation language” to be intervening in, or at least reinflecting, the trajectory of discourse surrounding vernacular language, minor languages, minimal languages, dialect, colonial language, and creole? How do you see this concept, which we would identify primarily as pertaining to language “spoken,” wielded and shaped further in his poems on the page in Born to Slow Horses? Does reading Brathwaite's work help you at all to understand Giscombe's Prairie Style, for which Brathwaite composed an extensive blurb?

Remember to "reply all" to the thread!

[Patrick Morrissey]

1. I’m inclined to say, though I’m not sure it’s quite accurate, that Brathwaite’s concept of nation language is more about bringing certain locations to fuller expression than about registering dislocation by disrupting given poetic idioms (which is not to say, however, that fuller expression of location won’t effect dislocations of certain readers).  Brathwaite, as least in his essay, is interested in work that is “truer” to a set of Caribbean locations, experiences, and ways of speaking than are the models of English literature provided by colonial education.  Nation-language poetry is a kind of realism, a fidelity to “the hurricane”—both the weather event and the historical experience of being Caribbean (8).  Many of the writers we’ve been reading are interested in disorienting us (Bergvall’s overtly disruptive code-switching, Lin’s relaxed but uncanny smoothness, Cha’s quasi-modernist montage, Giscombe’s “melodramatic” meditations), but Brathwaite seems more interested getting oriented in the first place.  Nation language, Brathwaite suggests, is not minimal or minor or impoverished in the lived experience of Caribbean speakers, but it’s only just (as of 1979) being realized as a literary language.  We could also make the case for the “realism” of the other writers I listed above, but their fidelity to their realities is achieved by various disruptions of ordinary discourse, whereas Anthony Hinkson or Mikey Smith achieve their realism by tuning into ordinary discourses that have remained outside of literature.  Brathwaite’s sense that Caribbean writers’ need to “tune in” has something to do, I think, with his faith in the expressive and mimetic powers of spoken language: “often [nation language] is an English which is like a howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.  It is also like the blues” (13).  Speech registers environment and experience, he suggests, and he’s interested in writing that is somehow true to that speech.  Textual remediation of oral performance is tricky business, though: compare this recording of Mikey Smith’s “Mi Cyaan Believe It” to Brathwaite’s transcription.  (Also check out this sweet video of Smith performing on TV.)     

2. I wonder if we might think about Brathwaite’s “Sycorax video style” as an attempt to get some of the “noise” of oral performance onto the silent page of a literary text.  In a footnote to the discussion of Smith, he writes:

Noise is that decorative energy that invests the nation performance.  Unnecessary but without which not enough.  Whistles, grater, scraper, shak-shak, shekesheke, wood block, gong gong, the cheng-cheng of the steel band, the buzz of the banjo or cymbal, the grill of the guitar, vibrato of voice, sax, sound-system, the long roll of the drum until it becomes thunder, Coltrane’s sheets of sound, Pharoah Sanders’ honks and cries, onomatopoeia, congregational kinesis… (46)

Brathwaite’s list indeed accretes onomatopoeia as a way to mimic literally the noise he’s writing about, but the later Sycorax style, which we see in Born to Slow Horses seems at once to admit that writing itself cannot recreate noise and to offer a kind of visual supplement analogous to the “unnecessary” “decorative energy” of nation performance.  Just looking at “Guanahani,” in which the Sycorax is fairly restrained, we can at least notice its graininess (to echo Barthes’ “grain of the voice”) and its seemingly arbitrary, gestural (decorative?) quality.  I’ll confess that I’m really not sure how to think about it.  In some sections the first line is bolded, in others not; the font size sometimes changes within a given line.  I find lots of words throughout the book simply hard to read.  Are these gestures a way of signaling something analogous to the contingencies of oral performance—the embodied, “unnecessary” shifts of emphasis and posture, the swells and retreats of the voice?  I’d hesitate to take them as straightforward cues for vocal performance of the text; instead, I want to think of them as specific to the print medium, a kind of silent noise. 

3. I’m thinking more about the relation to Giscombe, but I’ll save those thoughts for class.         

[Peter]

 What struck me as fundamentally different from the work we've read so far in Brathwaite's conception of nation language was that the dialect or idiom is conceived here as having more than poetic importance. In the essay itself this is only incipient, Brathwaite calls for a new criticism “to go along with the liberation...a re-orientation of criticism, an aesthetic, that will help us to redefine our current pseudo-classical notions of literature” (49). We might assume that this refers to the kind or content of the criticism, but the essay shows in its substitution of “riddim” for rhythm that nation language must also be the form of criticism. What Brathwaite seems to be arguing against here is the idea that nation language is poetically valid, but invalid when it comes to the clarifying role of criticism. Such a view, perhaps necessary to justify nation language in the first place, covertly smuggles in the high-low distinction between language and dialect that Brathwaite attempts to displace. If poetry now has a place for dialect (though not always a secure one), writing criticism or theory in dialect without extra justification still seems provocative. What do we imagine the response of Critical Inquiry would be to a dialect essay on, say, Middlemarch.

What is only beginning in the essay is fully present in Brathwaite's response to Cyril Dabydeen's Stoning the Wind in Born to Slow Horses. Though it is still framed as poetry, the essay shows how nation language not only expresses (as mimesis) the truth of the landscape, but how the language can be used critically to get at texts in a unique way. So for a simple example “is rightaway i can see that Stoning (1994) is OTHER – even the cover – that Guyana thos still there – there's a new & nother even nether direction” (46). The elision of 'it' here doesn't mime so much as produce the immediacy under discussion, and at the same time the joining of 'rightaway' foreshadows the paratactic elements of the sentence. All at once multiple facets of the book descend. The incomplete sub-clause “that Guyana tho still there” leaves the kind of negation and relation of Guyana to the new direction unresolved. Somehow in this new direction the old place continues to produce effects, but in not calculable way. Finally by dropping 'a' from 'nother', Brathwaite creates a resonance between nother and nether that pulls out the 'not' and plays on the negation of Guyana. With the 'a' in place we would have an emphasis on the 'an' that would exclude nether (a new and another).

As this last moment shows, using nation language as a critical tool is not an alternative to its poetic expression, but its critical use seems to depend and import poetic use as well. This would be an interesting light in which to look at the development of the vernacular in poetry across Europe while Latin persisted as the language of study. It is also a way of looking at Brathwaite's blurb on the back of Giscombe's book as an instance of nation language criticism. “In CSG's PRAYER IRIE, the POEMS come to match the driVen auracle intensity of the land....Here is jazz, fox, love, sex, joke, conundrum, some Black River Jamaican crocodiles to briefly change the scene, always the horizon, vernacular of vacancy abiding into itself. what flat is. what rails are.” Without any overtly recognizable words or phrases from nation language, Brathwaite makes his criticism poetic in order to produce different rhythms and associations. The list of qualities neither agree in number nor kind, creating a monosyllabic rhythm before the sentence opens up (on the onomatapoeia of the drum in conundrum we might add). Arriving at the phrase 'vernacular of vacancy' (a conundrum?) the sentence has prefigured this vernacular as the rhythm that results from the vacancy of syntax.

It seems that the political project of nation language gives it something like the security it needs to become criticism, to become a language that not only crosses but facilitates crossing. At the same time it reminds me of other experiments in trying to make poetic language everyday. Particularly I'm thinking of the Canadian poet bill bissett, whose phonetic transformation of language extends through his critical writing, correspondence, and spoken performance (so for example the acknowledgment at the beginning of b leev abul char ak trs reads: “sum uv thees pomes n drawings apeerd previouslee in the nash yunal post intrview with cori brown n sub voisiv n the eks taseez uv aprikots”). I would be curious to compare these kinds of projects in class, how far they come from different impulses and what their mutual effects are.

[Michael Dango]

What distinguishes the project of nation language from our most recent poets (with perhaps the exception of Adnan), it seems to me, is its utopianim.  For the "nation" of the language does not yet exist, and so the project is always trying to catch up with the future polis it intends to create.  Thus the definition of politics in nation language is the creation and curation of a space for politics finally to occur for the first time.  Deleuze's "minor literature" had a similar effect, magnetizing a community to and out of its irruptive force, but Brathwaite's conception is more developmental than subversive, positing the possibility of new origins from which to begin instead of a re-configuration of the given: "the resources which have always been there" (42). Patrick is right, I think, to describe the project here as one of orientation instead of disorientation or an attempt at keeping going on in the aftermath of an impact of disorientation.  In turn, Brathwaite, rather than registering the effects of dislocation, rather than being interpellated by the violence of non-anchoring, seeks to interpellate and join in labor with an audience that can be anchored coevally. 

I think Brathwaite's project, then, in addition to turning a region into a conceptual nation, is to turn environment into place.  To dwell within a language that can speak the hurricane is to settle into a place of belonging in which language becomes the ambience of the storytelling scene.  This is not quite the relaxation of Lin, since the settling in remains an active participation and since Brathwaite still remains a little more explicitly invested in a pedagogy of (linguistic) encounter.  But the curation of scenes in which to dwell is similar, and so are the difficulties faced by each poet: how to persist in presenting the utopian invitation to a new space without it being received as alienation. [Related side note: what's up with the qualification that Caribbean writers "except perhaps some of the most 'exiled'" are in agreement about the importance of (collaboration with) the audience? Does this culture have space for the abject, and what is the role of the exile and how do you manage an audience without exiling a portion of it?]

I'm drawn here to Brathwate's typography in /Born to Slow Horses./  On the one hand, differing fonts would seem something akin to dialect, but Brathwaite distinguishes nation language from dialect rather strongly.  I think the fonts are a management of expertise, or really of so many species of amateurishness.  What strikes me about the pixelated typeface in particular is its seeming archaic attempt at becoming-digital.  It's trying to catch up with a digital space that's left it behind.  There's something vaguely and self-consciously self-infantalizing about it.  This could interrupt the false universalism of clean type, and posit the possibility of a different trajectory of "progress," a history along and through different means.  But I think it is also a recapturing of orality as part of Brathwaite's "total expression" in which the audience not only is invited to smooth over the faces, but also to dwell within the rough space in which signification still persists.  There remains an invitation to a space through the non-finality of textual appearance.  

[Ingrid Becker]

I found it interesting that Brathwaite, in advocating for the use of ‘nation language,’ takes his negative examples—situations in which the language of the conquistadors enforces a model of the world that “had very little to do, really, with the environment and the reality of non-Europe” and the experiences of the various Caribbean peoples—from the sphere of Western canonical literatures. Of course on the one hand his descriptions of having to read Shakespeare and Austen in school or of the Sherwood Forest as the realm of adventure in his childhood imaginary are just lifted straight out of the history they mark. On the other hand, I think his choice to lodge an argument his argument in a discourse about the role of literature in forming someone’s conception of their reality, and in particular literatures that are typical or exemplary of a particular genre, place, and period, suggests the importance of a “national literature” to the formation of a nation language and the sovereignty of a people. That is, a national literature has an indexical purpose, marking the coming to “nationhood” of Caribbean countries. Moreover, this literature carries something “essential” about the way of life of the citizens creating, reading, and sharing their story. So I see Brathwaite’s project, both in his readings of other Caribbean poets and in his own work, as very invested in contouring a set of genres that can stand in as a national literature, that could be taught in public schools, that could act as models of culture and experience specific to an autonomous Caribbean. This seems to me rather different from the efforts of other poets we’ve discussed, most of who are not engaged with the effort to articulate a literary form, or a standard set of forms, that define a nation. The adoption of the nation-state as the political entity that language represents and reflects is also something new we encounter this week. Other poets, like Celan or Adnan, are displaced persons who react to the incongruity they feel between their environment and the language they have/use to interact in and with it by expressing or even deepening this disparity. Brathwaite takes a different tack to solve the same problem of incongruity, focusing on making things match. (“Matching” might be an interesting link to Giscombe, to his notion that “the problem with color is that it always matches.”)

 

Like Patrick, I was struck by the trust in language that Brathwaite seems to have—and to need—in order to produce something like national literature. I think this trust ties in to the notion that a Caribbean nation language takes its character from oral tradition. At the risk of making an obvious point, the spoken word possesses a fluidity and flexibility that becomes ossified when print becomes the dominant literary medium. This is why Caribbean nation language performs a cooption of the English language, able to mutate it, to ingest, digest, and spit back out English in a new form. And, Brathwaite seems to say, this flexibility of the oral tradition is connected with something essential about Caribbean life. I think there is a further distinction to make between forging a necessary connection between language and something like “being” a Caribbean subject and affirming a connection between language and a set of Caribbean social practices. Thus Brathwaite’s trust in the ability of a nation language to mimic the way that Caribbean persons experience their relationship with the world (the hurricane) is not totally parallel to something like Pound’s ideogrammic method. Pound sees an inherit mimetic relationship between the ideogram and the set of objects/instantiations of an concept that it ostensibly points at. The nation language is accurate to the rhythms of life, to activity, to performance. I think that the structure of the relationship Brathwaite sees between nation language and ways of living can be seen in, for instance, the use of “she” instead of “her” in phrases like “she getting on now / she nerve shallow.” I take this second line to have an English equivalent of “her nerves are shallow” or “she has shallow nerves.” The possessive, the very colonial object pronoun that establishes terms of ownership, is undermined and replaced with a subject pronoun who has a verb as its object, that is imbedded in practice.

 

This flexibility in the tongue even defeats, or at least troubles, the Western formulation of dichotomy. I think we also saw this troubling in Giscombe. Brathwaite says in his poem/review of Dabydeen: “In these conundrum situations. What can we say? There’s only home or oasis – both w/their limitation contradictions. But Dabydee here chooses neitha. Instead he goes for osmosis – the opposite. in fact. of neitha” (51). Clearly the dichotomy does not fully disappear here (osmosis and “neitha” are posed as opposites) but is wrenched around, played on, and complicated. The idea of deepening incongruities in language by fragmenting it, fighting incoherence by exacerbating it, does not seem to dissolve the cogence/chaos binary. Both Brathwaite and Giscombe are working in a landscape where these concepts don't totally apply – I’m not yet sure what the paradigm would be for talking about dislocation and location as not quite opposites—for what osmosis does to borders—but I’m interested in this theme.

[Mollie McFee]

One thing that seems significant about nation language is its ability to record history. Oral history has proliferating meanings in Braithwaite’s article-oral story telling is an important form of literary history in nation language, but it is also one of the vestiges of Africa to survive the Middle Passage. Because language is carried by speakers it can be deracinated and form new branching lines that record its interactions with new language groups and indeed new places. I keep returning to the quotation that was cited in our conversation about Bergvall’s work-learning a new language completely reshapes the body. In Braithwaite place enters the equation, and as people live with the feeling of anticipation of a hurricane, bodies and languages shift as well. Nation language is I think defined by its ability to be a story as it tells a story; this ability to be a story shifts when it is written, and is a result of a dependence on orality for survival.

I think though that Middle Passage changes the way that language is a story. Middle passage is one feature that sets nation language apart from other concepts we’ve examined. If space changes the way a language is spoken, the condition of being forcibly removed from a homeland and then held as cargo while traversing an enormous ocean must have its physical mark as well. Despite its enormous specificity to the Atlantic slave trade, Braithwaite is pushing us to think the Middle Passage generally, as he indicates in “Mmaassaaccourraamann”: “the long nigh(t) becoming memory-that’s the (postToniMorrison) word CD keeps calling to us-of the MiddlePassage/MiddlePassages. MiddlePassage of history . African/East Indian . MiddlePassages into the Atlantic of the prairies . into the prayers & xpensive xpanses of xile . MiddlePassages of career & tired hopeful talent . MiddlePassages of middlelife ” (50). Decontextualized, Middle Passage becomes a traversal of space and time into an uncertain and evolving future. This can be said of many of the dislocated poets we’ve read, yet the specificity of Middle Passage persistently haunts nation language. Braithwaite evokes forced labor and massive loss for the sake of colonial and economic expansion. Nation language emerges from the “long night” of middle passage, and is marked by a spectrum of particulars (Ashanti, Yoruba, Congo, and later Hindi and Chinese) coming together and being formed around the pressures of national language. And yet it’s important that the underground language inflects national language as well. I think something unique is happening in the way Braithwaite describes multiple histories of colonization and economic exploitation existing on the same confined piece of land, as similar stories unfold across the 2,000 mile expanse of the Caribbean. 

[Suzannah Spaar]

According to Kamau Brathwaite’s definition of “Nation Language”, the nation language in the Caribbean “in its contours, its rhythm and timbre...is not English (13).”  The caribbean speech does not exist inspite of English, but rather, it exists with it.  Compared to previous texts we’ve read, it almost doesn’t seem to be dislocated. The languages are fused--and although they are originally distinct from one another, they have become inseparable. They have become a third entity. In her book, “Born to Slow Horses” is Brathworth, then, locating dislocation, Rather than trying to locate oneself in dislocation, as I feel most of our poets have done.

I do think this is an interesting way to look at Giscombe’s “Prairie Style.”  If dislocation is fixed, it can be visited and exited. We can love “into and out of dislocation.”  Dislocation could have a shape--an abstract, subjective shape, but a shape nonetheless.  Isn’t that poetry? We spoke in class on Thursday if poetry could actually exist “off the grid”--and landed (for the most part) on the conclusion that a book of poems is very much on the grid.  Not only is it a physical object, but it is published and distributed and dependent on money and publishers, &c. So it is located (even by something as small as its author or its publication date) but I think it is also a place of dislocation, that can scramble and fuse languages (weather we call them dialect or nation language) cultures,--and, well, fonts--and allow them to exist together in a single location.

On Friday, May 17, 2013 10:48:57 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Dani Fox]

Brathwaite's concept of nation language is at work here to really remove any since of diminished status of the spoken tongue of the Carribbean.  Careful to note its many influences from many different cultures as well as the difference between those born in and those brought to the Carribbean, a nation language imbues a certain power to the tongue unafforded to the lesser natures of any other type of language "variant" to its "standard" version.  Already the power dynamic is clear in the words available to us to talk about the differences.  There is the official language, the standard language, given legitimacy through official use, writings, government decree and so on.  Then there's the rest--somehow accented, inflected, marked to show difference.  For Brathwaite this structure is unproductive.  Nation Language gives new legitimacy to the word in the Carribbean.  More than simply renaming it as to inflect greater power, so too does he write in it, putting the inflection on the page and leaving it up to the reader to acquire his or her own fluency in reading it.  

It seems to me that Brathwaite sees in Giscombe's Prairie Style the same strong desire to write firmly out of a sense of place--a place returned to and made maybe more vivid through the work of memory and a type of nostalgia.  This, I think, is what lead our discussion toward the nature of sympathy that arises in Prairie Style toward the often hypnotic and otherwise unappealing flatness of the Midwest.  Where so many come and view the flatness as a distinct lack (of hill, of mountain, often even of tree in those seemingly endless corn/grain/soybean fields), Giscombe celebrates its expanse, its horizon, and its possibility. 

[Tala Radejko]

I understood Brathwaite’s concept of a nation language as an attempt to address the inability of standard English language and literature to adequately serve as a means of expression for Caribbean writers and their experiences. ‘Normal’ English doesn’t have the “syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane” (8), and as a consequence of colonial education systems neither do Caribbean writers, at least not within a context that would be recognized as “literature”. In this sense, nation language serves as an exercise of orientation, of attempting to address the disorientation and disconnect between the experiences of Caribbean writers and the modes of ‘legitimate’ expression available to them.  If Brathwaite’s work is disorienting to read, it is for readers accustomed to standard English, for whom the written standard correlates very closely with the spoken version. I would argue that ‘normal’ English in this case is the disorienting language – the rhythm, style, structure and organization, as well as institutional ‘greats’ – the types of books learnt and so on have nothing to do with the experiences of those learning it in the examples Brathwaite recounts. Hence you have students writing “snow falling on canefields” in an attempt to reconcile the differences between the form of expression they are required to write in and their experiences of the world around them. Nation language for Brathwaite addresses those gaps, and helps give structure and voice to the Caribbean experiences and identities.

I agree with Patrick that in his essay Brathwaite seems to be primarily interested in work that is ‘truer’ to Caribbean experiences, and that therefore in a way nation language can be thought of as a kind of realism. I think too though that it also serves as a means to re-affirm the existence of a linguistic and literary space that ‘ordinary’ English language and the traditions of English literature have no place for. In his essay Brathwaite urges writers to use the resources already at hand – the language he is speaking of already exists, it is its legitimacy and place in literary criticism that I understood Brathwaite to be arguing for. Oral tradition and its legacies of sound and rhythm are central to the types of literature that are truer to the Caribbean experience, yet not only are those sounds relatively inexpressible through standard English, but oral traditions and written forms that seek to express their rhythms are not usually recognized as “literature”. In his conclusion, Brathwaite states that “what we need, now…is a re-orientation of criticism…that will help us to re-define our current pseudo-classical notions of literature… To confine our definitions of literature to written texts in a culture that remains ital in most of its people proceedings, is as limiting as its opposite” (49).  The redefinition he speaks of is necessary for nation language and literatures employing it to be able to carve out a space for themselves.

With respect to Giscombe, I also felt that both him and Brathwaite have the same desire to create a sense of place, and while I’m not sure how to phrase/think about this applying the phrase “into and out of dislocation” to Brathwaite I think is interesting. For Brathwaite, dislocation had very much to do with language use and the types of linguistic expressions and structures available; manipulating standard English and nation language was perhaps his way of moving into and out of dislocation, of attempting to find the space through which the Caribbean experience could faithfully be depicted and expressed. Identity and the physical location did not seem to be as big a part of the disorientation/dislocation in Brathwaite’s poems, though perhaps I’m not reading it properly. In any case, looking at the phrase “into and out of dislocation” for both Giscombe and Brathwaite I think would be interesting given their emphasis on place and writing out of it, and the different types of dislocation that could be talked about. 

[David Gutherz]

Warning: what follows is a little harsh. Basically, I’m really in the fog about what Brathwaite is trying to do with “nation language,” so I’ve tried to articulate my objections as severely as possible, in the hopes that doing so will at least make clear what I'm after, if not what Brathwaite is. So I get, or think I get, why Brathwaite wants to differentiate what he’s doing from “dialect poetry” (the implicit assumption of high vs. low culture, dangers of a false folksiness, the slippery slope from idiom to idiocy that Zanzotto spoke of, and so on) . But why bring in all the baggage of “nation?” The coinage strikes me as doubly dubious. First, what is national about “a howl, a shout, or a machine gun, or the wind or a wave?” The common thread that ties these examples together is their elemental quality, or sub-linguistic status. Brathwaite seems to be suggesting that all languages (and nations) are not equally far from such things—or conversely, that (due to environmental features?) each language has its own particular “exterior” that it's speakers can be eloquent about, or virtuosic mimics of. This is an intriguing thought, and one that seems to chime with a certain kind of common sense philosophy of language (which is not necessarily a bad thing). But for that same reason, all this talk of English Snow vs. Caribbean Hurricanes reminded me of a kind of pop-anthropology always a little too eager to make broad generalizations based on linguistic and cultural peculiarities. In short, I’m troubled by the continuity between Brathwaite’s way of speaking about how his “nation” speaks and a certain essentializing linguistic relativism that was all the rage at the height of European Imperialism. I doubt that we would be responding so generously to statements like “this total expression comes about because people be in the open air, people live in conditions of poverty…because from a historical experience where they had to rely on their very breath” if they were made by Mr. Brian Braithwaite of the Aesthetic Institute ofChicago instead of a poet born in Barbados.

 

My second issue is that much of what Brathwaite’s work (textual and otherwise) suggests that he is in search of modes of translocal belonging that move beyond nationalism. In a way, I guess a lot of this rests on how we ought to interpret Brathwaite’s invocation of Dante and the “successful establishment of national language and literatures throughout Europe” on page 14. Leaving to one side the fact that, as we have discussed, in many states (like Italy) this nationalization remained incomplete well into the 20^th century, what is the “all this” that Dante was a forerunner of? Is it a project Brathwaite opposes or one he proposes renewing? Does Brathwaite truly see himself as a descendent of Dante, albeit one trying learn from the mistakes of those who came after him? In that case, the project really would be, as Michael says, about creating a language (and new Authorities!) for a nation to come. A very European utopia, that.  Or is he trying to play “nation language” off against “national language” as a language of those who, as Derrida once put it, have only one language that is not their own, those who were forced to become legible for the enrichment of nation-building elites. To do justice to the many very real Balaams of this world. If this is the project, then his way of theorizing “nation language” strikes me as still too bound to the very concepts and categories that his poetry starts undoing.

On Friday, May 17, 2013 10:48:57 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote: