Mama + Louisiana

Max Jack-Monroe

Preparing to co-facilitate a group discussion on the connection between ethnicity and language brought up a lot for me.  The readings helped me to think about how I situate myself in terms of ethnicity and language and how these intersecting forces have impacted my life.

I begin with my family history, specifically on my mother’s side.  My mother was perhaps the first person in centuries on either side of her family to be born outside of the state of Louisiana (my grandfather’s side was from New Orleans proper and my grandmother’s side from the neighboring countryside). Before my mother’s birth, my maternal grandparents had moved to Nashville, Tennessee so my grandfather (Pop-Pop) could complete his medical residency at Meharry Medical College.  A couple of years after my mother was born in Nashville, the family moved to a place, coincidentally, not too far from Montreal–Buffalo, New York.  By the time the family made their way to Harford County, Maryland both of my aunts had been born.  My grandmother (Meman) still lives in that house, which, despite going through many changes, still seems, in many ways, untouched by time.

The older I get, the more I realize how much of an impact this isolation had on the formation on my mother, my aunts and, by proxy, my brothers and I’s sense of identity and belonging.  I’m jealous when I hear other African-American folks talk about frequenting big family cookouts and family gossip.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2012, when I was nineteen years old, visiting Louisiana for only the third (and, so far, last) time in my life, that I learned that my great-grandmother spoke Creole.  I came face-to-face with a small woman in her mid-90s with fair skin, saucer-like seafoam-green eyes, and missing teeth that made her look like a children’s cartoon interpretation of a quirky old woman who would accent her miles-long ramblings with countless “chèr”s and “dey all dead”s.  I was witness to an ethnolect (Van Herk, 2012) in action—one that is part of my heritage.  The thing is, Meman refused to speak it growing up, and so this linguistic tradition was never passed on.

When my great-grandmother died in 2014 due mostly in part to complications from a hip injury, so too, it seemed, did a legacy.  I didn’t attend my great-grandmother’s funeral, but my mother, Meman and aunts did.  My mom saw how loved my great-grandmother was and how much she had been a part of the community.  For my mother, the funeral was a pivotal moment, a visceral glimpse of what could have been. 

Through language and developing my communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2014), I try to carve out a small bit of a legacy, in my own way.  My French and living in Montreal brings me closer to my Creole and Cajun/Acadian roots.  I incorporate AAVE into my every day communication, even if no one else in my immediate family does.  I feel pride when I look in the mirror and hear my Blackness that refuses to be muted by my European features; my Blackness that whispers through my long, spindly limbs, speaks loudly through my mass of curls, and screams through the fullness of my lips.  As a Black person in living in North America, who, in ways very different, but also similar to the African immigrant teens in Ibrahim’s (1999) account, is so distant from African American culture and vernacular but embraces it, for all that it represents; to be unapologetically Black in America.

To quote the late Eola Dorest, the great-grandmother I wish I could have known better, and the character Leroy Johnson (the late Gene Anthony Ray) from Fame:

Chèr, I speak like I likes.

References

De Silva, D. (Producer), Marshall, A. (Producer) & Parker, A. (Director). (1980). Fame [Motion Picture]. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Ibrahim, A. E. K. M. (1999). Becoming Black: Rap and hip-hop, race, gender, identity, and the politics of ESL learning. TESOL Quarterly, 33(3), 349–369

Rymes, B. (2014). Communicative repertoire. In C .Leung& B. Street(Eds.), Handbook of English Language Studies(pp. 287-301). New York, NY: Routledge

Van Herk, G. (2012). What is sociolinguistics? Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.