Evynn Tyler McFalls.

This week’s reflection will be less about academic thinking and more about sharing some of my feelings, in part because I feel like the topic of “attitudinal literacies and performances” (how I taxonomies this more broadly) taps into a conversation for which I have simultaneously felt strong (mostly very frustrated) emotions and seen few avenues to express them. Because I tend to compartmentalize my feelings as kind of a defense mechanism, or try to police “negative” emotions in favor of more worldly “positive” ones that are more palatable for the institutions and people I have to negotiate with much of the time, I will apologize in advance for any lack of clarity or for the effusive frustration I express over matters that some people probably think of as trivial.

That preface offered, this week I wanted to tie our discussion about Black Girl Literacies (let’s make sure to capitalize this and think of it as canon) and their relation to a handful of public woman-identifying figures who have been on my mind of late. Centrally, Azealia Banks, Mo’Nique, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj have been on my mind—but secondarily, so too have Foxy Brown, Charlemagne “Tha God”, Safaree Samuels and DJ Envy.

To begin with, I want to situate my thinking about the art and public personas of these figures in Koonce’s work in “Loud Black Girls” and Troutman’s “Attitude and It’s Situatedness in Linguistic Politeness”; these world discuss what I think of as both verbal and nonverbal “literacies of being” as articulated by speech, negotiations with power, and people-relations. One mode of such literacy is what Koonce describes as “TWA”, or talking with attitude—which refers to the rhythms, idiomatic expressions, lexical manifestations and physical embodiments exhibited by many in the African American Speech Community—particularly black women.

Thinking about this in the context of hip-hop, I can’t help but think about rap music and “urban” comedy (and women’s contributions to it) as a direct manifestation of TWA. Thinking about it that way, and considering Koonce’s framing of TWA as an act of agency, a “resistance” and site for identity formation, I can’t help but think about it, contextualized in the genres I mentioned above, as manifestations of power. To that end, success, financial independence, and “clout” as earned within those spaces (for the moment suspending those limiting factors which undeniably exist within these genres for women and black women in particular) speak to a certain proximity to power.

In considering the extremely punitive language used to describe Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks and Monique throughout the years (as their “relevance” has waned and waxed with the time), it occurs to me that perhaps the social punishments doled out to these women socially have more to do with their command over their TWA-literacy and their ability to use that literacy to ascend (in some but not all ways) circuitries meant to keep them subservient, dependent and beholden to a subjugating power structure—and less to do with the actual quality of their work or content of their words.

Nicki Minaj and Mo’nique come up in my thinking here because I find that the goal post is perpetually changed for them—people come up with new reasons to justify their public mistreatment every day, as well as the intentional diminishing of their impact, which on its face should be undeniable and not qualified. As it pertains to Azealia Banks (and thinking about her uptown contemporary, Cardi B), I can’t help but wonder if the former’s immense, groundbreaking command of her literacy (used often as a cudgel, for good or bad I will admit) is as part of the social sanctions she faces as the color of her skin. Why is someone like Cardi B celebrated as an unquestioned success story to which we should all relate, without critique of her sometimes problematic public effusions, while Azealia Banks (equally problematic I imagine) is dragged through the mud?

I think that, for a lot of people, one of the most striking elements of Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self is the form Gilyard’s exploration of various literacies takes. Though there is some similarity between this text and Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin—in terms of some of the colloquialisms Gilyard uses in his writing—a stark difference is marked in that Gilyard conveys much of his thinking through a narrative about his childhood that most readers will associate with novels or creative nonfiction.

As is seemingly a theme in this course thus far, Gilyard’s work is an atypical manifestation of theoretical literacy that—to lean on Smitherman here—is in many ways a “transitional text” that brings readers into contact with what I’ll call rhetorical/compositional theory by way of a vehicle that is (presumably; and it is important that I clarify my presumption here as I’m under the impression that these literacies aren’t necessarily accessible to everyone*) inviting, clear, and mostly devoid of the labyrinthine academic jargon that so often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism.

Thinking about this in relation to broader themes in rhetorical / compositional theory, as well as research methods, I appreciate what I think can be described as Gilyard’s ethnographic approach. Rather than relaying abstract concepts about literacy events and what I think Smitherman would describe as “communicative competencies” (or what Guerra, as I mentioned in a previous post, would call “rhetorical savviness”, a concept that now seems admittedly less novel than it did when I originally encountered it without any knowledge of Smitherman) and then expect readers to scaffold those concepts onto their own understanding of the worlds/literacies they occupy, Gilyard gives us kind of a use-case of his theory by way of his own life.

It’s significant that, in the introduction, Gilyard mentions the “unreliability” of autobiography. Not because, in my opinion, it’s important to think of his narration as unreliable, but instead because announcing that acknowledgment at the beginning of the text better prepares the reader to take such limitations into consideration as they read his story, consider their own stories, and those around them. This, I think, bolsters the credibility of Gilyard’s work rather than damaging it, and it’s refreshing to see (for a change) a discussion about literacy that hedges in meaningful ways rather than asserting one man’s mode of thinking as absolute fact, as has always seemed so strangely common to me in academia.

To expand on this last point, I want to point to Gilyard’s discussion about a “sharpened social awareness” he claims to always have possessed, because I think it relates to this (in my own view) necessary hedging that he does at the introduction of the text. Gilyard writes:

“I carried with me a tremendously empowering repertoire of speaking and listening skills when I shuffled off to public school and continued to expand it once I arrived. Included in my bag of communicative tricks were that prize strategem, Black English, a productive (speaking) biloquialism, and a broader receptive (listening) bidialectalism. There was also an adroitness at responding to the perceived need to match each dialect to different sets of social circumstances“ (33)

I couldn’t help but wonder if my own desire to hedge—or maybe the better term is “contextualize, perhaps iempathically (?)—emerged from a similar place. In recognizing, as a black, queer male of a certain stature who occupied various different “communities of meaning” and negotiated no shortage of literacies, it has always seemed important to me to make it known that while I believe there is some validity in my perspective, that it is important to recognize it as “a persective”—”a literacy”, a “way of being”—rather than one. I think that, perhaps those who occupy those spaces which are understood to be the “standard” manner of being—”standard English” speakers of “standard” skin colors, “standard” socioeconomic status and “standard” orientations, for example—may lack such sharp awareness as Gilyard speaks of, leaning only into those rhetorical modes that are given to them from birth and afford them power while otherwise leaving them ill-equipped to recognize their limitations or to accept the validity of those perspectives or modes of being that live outside of standardization. There is a certain kind of power in that ignorance (or maybe the power always existed and the ignorance is just imbued by it), too, as it allows theorists (for example) to assert their ideas as novel, or paradigm-shifting, or whatever, when in fact people have come before them with the same ideas, under different names.

I imagine that, when enough people buy into that “standard” storyline with that “standard” literacy, it’s easy to get away with that kind of thing—because “standard” institutions might lack the awareness to say, “Hey, wait—didn’t... Geneva Smitherman talk about communicative competence first? Say, what are the differences between this and rhetorical savviness? Doesn’t Keith Gilyard give us a use-case for such competence?”

While the whole of Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin is fascinating and, for me, moving in its validation/contextualization of “black Englishes” in relation to other manifestations of black cultures/being, this week I wanted to focus specifically on chapter seven of Smitherman’s work: “Where Do We Go From Here? T.C.B.!”

My initial interest in this chapter stemmed from the name alone: that the title asks "where do we go from here?" suggested to me that Smitherman might venture to offer practical, tangible thinking about the "place" of black language and ideas about advancement. "How," I wondered, "Could we use a literacy of blackness to better understand black humanity and create more opportunities for advancement."

Excitingly, this chapter challenged this notion of language as a "tool of advancement" that I held—speaking to the "seemingly-liberal-but-insidiously founded" projects of "black advancement" that focused on linguistic "remediation" that sought to "re-educate and elevate" blacks as part of a curious progress narrative that Smitherman argues is a denial of cultural context and lived experiences from which black folk emerge. Further, Smitherman's instructive pointing to potential changes to be made in reading programs and the need for a focus on a pedagogy that emphasizes "communicative competence", or the endlessly complex negotiations that must be made in sharing information via languages across a number of languages and contexts. This reminded me of Juan Guerra's Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College Classrooms and Communities, and particularly his call for what he describes as "rhetorical savviness", or the ability for students to understand the features / rhetorical circumstances that differ among the various "communities of meaning" and thereby "navigate" them expertly—adhering to the standards of academic or professional institutions when they occupy them while at the same understanding that as human beings, students bring the whole of themselves and the community contexts from which they emerge to any given situation.

In some ways, I think Guerra's take on this matter is limited in some ways in comparison to Smitherman's—in part, I imagine, because Smitherman's focus lies on black language and culture as a whole whereas Guerra is speaking about a fairly general (if not diverse) population of students in university institutions. As someone who is interested in examining activist pedagogies related to language, communities of meaning and "real-life" experiences beyond the so-called "Ivory Tower" of academia, Smitherman's discussion of communicative competence has provided me with tools to further think about community rhetorics that maybe aren't so academic—a tool desperately needed for scholars seeking to do work beyond the walls of the university.

On that note, I leave my readers with a video of Cardi B discussing why she “talks funny”. More on her later.

Remember when I loved you

much more than I liked myself?

What was that like for you?

How did you feel?

If you had to tell your children,

or your grand children about the

people you could not love back,

what would you say?

It is a conceit, I realize, to suggest

that the people who do not love us back

have any desire to talk about us at all.

Still, in the absence of all other possibilities,

For as long as I can remember, I have crafted stories. I remember in elementary school, I was often praised for my creative mind and for my curious affinity for what was then called the "language arts". In those days I never really entertained the idea of being a writer, or anything at all. Writing those stories was an escape as natural as breathing--but back then it seemed harmless.

Maybe it stopped being harmless sometime in 2003--July--when I was still interested in becoming a visual artist and was drawn to anime so profoundly that I'd learned to pirate Japanese video games and to program KISS dolls, which were a digital adaptation of the paper dress-up dolls that were at one time popular in Japan. Back then, piracy, coding, navigating the internet, learning and creating the specter of a human being, a character, on a digital medium seemed--it seemed easy. Innocent.

Back then I couldn't see the harm in developing a persona, removed from my true self. I thought of it as a canny manifestation of internet security. If I lied to the forums about myself, strangers couldn't find me. Wasn't that what we were told to do? To conceal ourselves on the internet as a method of self-preservation?

Dear Mister Complexity,

Who pictures himself a

modern Donald Draper.

He who,

preens in the mirror,

who practices the smolder

of a man that,

when caught in a lie,

will deploy the indignation

of somebody wronged,

carrying on the tradition

of men able to make their

shortcomings all the fault

of their lovers.

It’s not that I hate you, but

I wish you’d stop sacrificing

naive lovers at the altar of

your finding that, in the end,

you expect very little of yourself.

It is a rite of passage we could do without.

You could have found out

how small you were all on your own,

never having reached out to grasp and,

finally, crush out that glimmer

of hope reflected in the face of someone

who loved you enough to expect better.

Your failure is neither romantic

nor all that complex,

and it is not our duty to serve

as the next sad footnote

in your life’s story;

nor is it our duty to serve

as the next excuse for why

you will lie to the next

Your lips let loose love notes. Your lips let loose maledictions. Little old I, with my starlight eyes, too blind was I to see how your hands did wring; or how, that night on Cleveland street, what seemed like a dutiful hello was instead the planting of a good-bye seed.

Who might I have been back then, who might I have become, if not for that fated, fatal meeting on Ryland where I was sure I could not possibly matter to anyone— wore it like a red badge— and you saw it.

Those next three years were not beautiful. Those three years were a mundane trial but there was a certain order to them, and even as I dissipated in every other way, I clung to the rigid lattice of my attachment, hoping that our secret wildness, careless longings like wildfire draped from view by ridiculous veils, would break to bits before I did.

It was a choking game. It was a starvation game, and I, ever the competitor, ever the observer of rules, was determined as hell to hold my breath. “You first!” “No, you!”

I overheard a man say,

“Love is love is love is love”,

and while I appreciate the sentiment,

I have to disagree;

his words do not account for

the love that cannot be because

one girl loves another

and the other girl can’t love her back

out of fear for what that mean

for her quality of life.

Often, love is forbidden.

His words do not account for

the woman who loves a man

but is terrified to show him her body

out of fear that he might mistake her

for someone she never wanted to be.

Sometimes, love is dangerous.

His words do not account for that fleeting

moment when lovers hold hands

in secret, knowing that there is so much more

that can never be said, but happy to be with

each other nonetheless.

Sometimes, love is comprised of small victories,

and silent despair.

I write one-million words seeking

to liberate myself from whatever

you have been to me;

but one day as I examine my weathered

body and tired mind and altered chemistry,

as well as the limitless scrawls I have

dedicated to getting you out of me, the truth

in all its resplendent cruelty breaks into my

head with force that sends my head swimming

like a coldcock blow.

My rage is your child,

For 1,164 days

I licked my own mouth raw,

until fire and smoke formed at

the corners, until gore and bacteria

sewed my lips shut,

and kept my ailment,

my humanity,

off of your mind.

Four years of silent penance

for the sin of loving you and

for the sin casting my precious dignity aside

And for the sin of giving every centimeter of my sacred

body over to heathen hands that worshiped false idols

and wrote maledictions into my flesh every time they

touched me and begged me to fuck the fire raging

inside of me out and deep, deep, deep into you.

I writhed one million ways,

coveted the refuse beneath subway tracks

and often considered assuming a similar posture.

I didn’t.

I loved you dearly even as I ran 3,000 miles

away and scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed the

hexes you etched onto me off of my flesh;

I drank 365 liters of ocean water and swallowed one

charcoal for every lie that made its way into

my ears and into my throbbing heart and into

my blood and brain and I ran I ran I ran desperately

trying to sweat you out of me because I did not

want to be a monument to your defilement,

or a photograph of my pain.

You, my supposed lover,

my absolute colonizer,

the implement-of-war who saw my freedom

and sought to populate my fertile ground

and peddle it for profit.

You, my libertine who longed for french-speaking

lands that were yours no longer,

who sought my black skin as a substitute

for the life that banished you because

your runaway greed stood no chance

against the wringing hands of justice.

You, who lost me to that same greed.

You, who loses everything to greed that

is tradition to you and abhorrent to me.

You, who attempts to occupy land

that does not welcome you,

who lazes about in sun

that rightly burns you,

who declares a war

you have no discipline to win:

Soot curls in between my teeth,

and I rebuke you fully.

I am a shrill bitch untamed

a sea of fire,

no longer content to contain

myself to abate your fear.

If you attempt to cross these seas,

the ones you have always been too weak

to venture,

you will be ash.

What do you like to do,

set off bombs?

Twenty or twenty-five years ago

a woman asked me this

when I told her good-bye.

All the days before that

were good ones

according to my memory —

but she walked off

looking for America

and we never talked again.

What good is closure?

A loaded word.

Probably this is a folly of my youth, 

but every so often I feel terribly sad

about the linear structure of time. 

Every once in a while I'll taste a meal that reminds me of my first adult love or of my late grandfather's cooking when I was a kid. I’ll think of pulled-pork and Havarti and cinnamon cake and how I choose plain, healthy foods now so I don’t feel an ache in my heart for things that are forever gone.

I'll remember the sheer force of the laughter that erupted among my siblings and I before we were teenagers because one of us had come up with a joke that we found surprisingly novel. I will remember when we were best friends because we didn’t know anybody else, and I’ll regret being the first best friend that disappointed them for moving on to something else. I’ll miss when we were the only people we knew and wonder if we were at our best then.

I will think hard about how unusually nice and gentle I was when I was younger and how much different I am today. I’ll remember how my mother told me that I should stop holding doors for people because it made me late for class, and how I didn’t understand that she was trying to protect me from my own naivete until years later when it would run me teeth-first into heartbreaks that are now innumerable.

I will think about the first time I noticed (with great wonder) dust particles spinning softly in the beams of light that gleamed warmly into the living room, suspecting that many more sights like this were right around the corner.

I will long for, forcefully, that sensation of experiencing life’s wonders for the first time and fear that the abstraction of the past--that can never be again--has wrapped itself around my head like a caul, choking the wonder out of newborn moments before they even crown.

On Thursday I had the opportunity to honor a commitment extended to me by my friend, mentor and respected poet Lee Ann Brown. Because she was away at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, she needed a substitute instructor for the creative writing classes that she usually teaches during the week. She was hoping to find somebody who could share their poetry and help her students to workshop their writing.

There is lots about the experience I'd like to write, but for the moment I wanted to take some time to jot down a quick diary entry about an exchange I had at my poetry reading during the last class of the day.

I read three selections from my digital poetry collection, "In Post". I ended my reading with the first poem from that work, titled, "On Divorce". It is a partially autobiographical piece which examines the remains of a house devastated by the ruins of a toxic relationship.

One particularly stunned student commented on the devastating bleakness of the poem.

"There just seems to be no hope there. The poem seems helpless," she said. "Is it always like that? Are things always so negative?"

I was stunned by the question and, as I'm prone to doing, I nervously laughed it off by making some joke I don't remember before pausing to take the question more seriously.

"Well, no, it isn't always that bad," I replied. "But sometimes it is, and there's nothing wrong with putting that into words. Not every experience is profound, transformative or beautiful--and that's okay."

Though I was mainly making a point about writing poetry for the benefit of the writers in that class, I realize that some part of me had said those words for myself.

How often had I re-framed the difficulties of my last decade as a tale of toil and triumph, dishonestly characterizing my struggles as something I hadn't experienced them as until I could editorialize from a brighter perspective?

How often had I taken "poetic license" with my own life by way of social media, sharing tid-bits of aspirational positivity while mortgaging my well-being to seem happy, healthy and in good spirits when I was not?

For at least three years of my life, I know for sure that I'd focused on projecting an image of abject positivity and "having it all together" when, in fact, I was in a toxic relationship that drove me full-force into destructive habits that I privately--but in no uncertain terms--thought would kill me eventually.

I won awards, started graduate school, consulted with startups and, on paper, had several good years during the period of my bleakest depression. I made headway in some creative endeavors, tried new things, and even submitted a chapter for an academic manuscript in my first semester as a masters student--but as all of this was happening, I spent most of my days lying down in crushing emotional pain, unable to tell anybody what I was really going through because I was sad, and scared, and certain nobody would understand. Why?

Take a look at your social media feeds and bear with me a moment.

Many people might blame my circumstances solely on social media like Instagram and Facebook which encourage us to "put on our best faces", but these things are just symptoms of what I envision to be a larger problem. I am not someone who hates capitalism in and of itself--in fact I think it spurs a great deal of innovation. That being the case, I suspect an unfortunate side-effect of capitalism is "people-facing consumerism". In the eyes of many Americans, everything is a consumable and a status symbol--even people and states of being.

A chilling effect of this, I've come to think, is that we see ourselves as brands and singular startups rather than human beings.

The American government has made the argument that corporations are people. Perhaps, in our way, we have come to argue that people are corporations, too, and corporations don't have time for the real, whole human experience.

Grief, pain, anger, confusion and frustration--difficult emotions that aren't easily packaged and sold--simply don't fit in with our never-ending campaign of self-aggrandizement and branding, so we punish ourselves and each other for publicly experiencing anything that doesn't belong on a brightly colored label. We assume that when we can't hashtag the moments of our lives as #blessed, our lives are somehow less.

Today, and through my writing, I reject that notion. I flatly reject the idea that the only parts of my humanity worth sharing are the ones that can be transformed into "likes". I discard the notion that the "best" parts of me are those that will get me a job because people see me as "happy" and "friendly" and "easy to get along with" at all hours of every day--because it's simply not true.

Sometimes I'm sad. Sometimes I'm angry. At my worst, I'm an uppity douchebag with a chip on his shoulder. So are you. That's life, and there's nothing wrong with that. Not every moment needs to be spun into a #blessing that you are grateful for. Sometimes, people are in the trenches of their life, and that should be respected.

Am I advocating for a campaign of off-the-wall negativity that we all just accept? Absolutely not.

Instead, I'm asking that we take a moment to re-examine the direction we are headed.

If everybody expects a highlight reel from one another without regard for what might be going on beneath the veneered surface, what suffering do we miss? What pain do we fail to alleviate--what lives do we fail to help--when we filter out any face that isn't a smiling one?

This focus on aspirational, consumerist positivity is going to kill people and, besides, it is lazy. We should want to have more empathy than experiencing the easiest part of others. The full spectrum of thought and emotion is what makes us human, and we should respect that.

More thoughts on this later.