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.