Issues in Contemporary Literature: Black English as Identity

Literature Review from the year 1999 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1, State University of New York at Stony Brook, course: Contemporary Issues in Literature, language: English, abstract: Language is one very special way we have to communicate with other

human beings. It unites members of similar cultures who learn to share through

the same experiences and to see the world through the same vocabulary. There

are at least as many cultures as languages in the world. As Wilhelm von Humboldt

mentioned ¿The variety of languages is not merely a variety of sounds and signs,

but in fact a variety of world views.¿ Undoubtedly, languages are a unifying

element that brings identity and uniqueness to every human being because they

tell the rest of the world, where we come from, where we have lived and who we

are.

This paper deals with Black English, also called African American English or

Ebonics, as an African American linguistic variety of American English and the

way it is reflected in the novel Push (1997) by Sapphire. It discusses Black English

as a way to express and define black identity and their unique culture. There is a

parallelism in the oppression of a language and the culture it represents, as we

can clearly appreciate in the case of Black English. While Ebonics has been

oppressed by the predominant Standard English, blacks were violently silenced by

¿standard¿ North Americans. It was not until recently that Ebonics¿ uniqueness

has been interpreted neither as a mispronunciation of English, nor as a series of

grammatical mistakes due to ignorance or lack of education. Unfortunately, both

blacks¿ language and their culture have suffered from manipulation and have

been bent to fit the needs of the dominant class.

Sapphari¿s Push (1997) is a novel that combines pure poetry and brutal

honesty and was also the first novel completely written in Ebonics. As such, it

arose an important controversy due to its novelty and harsh themes. It tells the

story of a black American adolescent who fights to survive a vicious cycle of

incest and abuse. Being obese, illiterate and lacking self-esteem, her father rapes

her repeatedly and she becomes pregnant for the second time, her first baby

having Down¿s syndrome, and is, as a result, expelled from school.