Читать книгу The Forbidden Word - James Henry Harris - Страница 8

During the fourth week of class, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn forced me to think long and hard about how today’s young Black people mimic his language, by using a hybrid form of the word nigger. Not even the white rapper from Detroit, Eminem, has ventured to do what Mark Twain does. Twain’s mastery of the Black Southern dialect is at least equaled by Eminem’s mastery of the Black rap and hip-hop dialect. Without visuals, Eminem would be presumed Black. The only indicator that Eminem is not Black is the fact that he never uses the word nigger in any of his rap music because he grew up in the ghetto. As a white rapper, he understands that this racial epithet is completely off-limits for whites. This is reverse irony. It is true that Eminem sounds and acts Black, but in America and the world, he is not Black. He is still white and he has the skin color, the money, and the recognition to prove it. Acting and sounding Black, even wearing a hoodie, like Trayvon Martin, have never spelled death for a white person in America.

I must confess that the course professor and I were about the same age with similar backgrounds in the humanities. So, I was always over-interpreting and hyper-analyzing almost every word that Mark Twain used. I had an insatible hunger for understanding the text in my own way. I was expressing and working out my own feelings of tension and strife as I read the words spilling from Twain’s pen.

A few years ago, I tagged along with my wife to the World Reading Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica. As I was waiting for her to come out of a seminar session, I struck up a conversation with a young man who was also accompanying his wife. I had told him that I was writing a book on my experience with the word nigger as used by Mark Twain and in Black culture, especially in hip-hop. He was a former marine who lived and worked in Baltimore.

“Anthony Brown, age forty-one,” he said to me as he extended his hand in a brotherhood shake. He was fifteen years younger than me. A random meeting in Central America between two Black men from the United States, in a Reading Conference hotel lobby surrounded by people from all over the world: teachers, school principals, college reading professors, authors, and literacy coaches. After talking about the difference in complexion of Costa Ricans who come from the Caribbean side and those on the Pacific and inland part of the country, we began to talk about hip-hop and its use of the forbidden word nigger.

“So, what do you think about how rap and hip-hop have globalized the word nigger?” I asked.

“Hip-hop defines itself on its own terms. It has almost become messageless,” he said.

“You think so?” I intoned.

“Well, let’s face it. The people who greenlight the movement are not Black. They are the movers and shakers of the record industry. Those who fund the movement are California and New York business people. Corporate America.”

“OK. That’s true.”

“It’s what sells. The beat, the misogyny. This type of stuff.”

“What about the word nigger? And, allowing this word to be used in song after song?” I asked.

“It’s more complicated than what people say. Black folk had the audacity to try to turn the meaning of the word upside down. That says something.”

“Yeah. But what about the history of the word? As a vile racial epithet or the essence or symbol of white supremacy.”

“That’s the complication. Most Blacks in the U.S. know what it meant. But those in other countries have no real connection to it, other than through rap and hip-hop music and language.”

“That’s the danger,” I said. “That’s a problem with Black folk calling themselves niggaz. The history cannot be undone. And it cannot be explained fully to those who don’t know.”

I began to think more about it, as we stepped out of the grand lobby into the hot sun and went our separate ways.

A couple of years earlier while sitting in the baggage claim area of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport, I overheard two Black and two Latino youths talking about their lives. Their language was unfiltered and laced with profanity and the cavalier use of the word nigger or its hybrid, nigga. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was confused and surprised because they used the word so freely in referring to each other as well as to others who were the subject of their conversation. And, unlike me, they didn’t care who heard them.

“Nigger, don’t be so goddamn stingy with those chips.”

“Come on nigger, you just a greedy ass mutha fucka.”

“Nigger, you can kiss my Black ass.”

I realized that this demotic language usage by Blacks in the presence of whites and Latinos is a new reality embedded in popular culture, and young African Americans and other minorities have a different understanding of the forbidden word than I do. I didn’t think the word should be used by non-Blacks, and especially whites, in the presence of Blacks, because I interpret that as racist and colonialist. But what do I know? Who am I to judge? Nevertheless, the use of the word nigger or nigga has taken on overtones that have fused a connection or disconnection between persons of different races and cultures. While the usage has been fused, the meaning is still unclear when used by Japanese, Chinese, French, Germans, Algerians, Egyptians, and others who have not had the common experience of oppression like African Americans—an experience rooted in American chattel slavery. To some, this doesn’t matter. But, to me, it matters a lot because our history is a sacred memory that helps to shape our identity.

There is an appetite for the music that is felt all over the world among different races, cultures, and socioeconomic classes. Hip-hop seems to be unstoppable.

In a strange sense, rap was born long before its time. My first memory of rap was when Muhammad Ali (aka Cassius Clay) came on the television scene as a young twenty-one-year-old boxer talking trash and talking pretty. And in this sense it was born out of the resistance to the draft by Muhammad Ali, who argued that he was a pacifist—a conscientious objector to the violence of war. Ali’s resistance to American hegemony and the violence of the Vietnam War made him the focus of the news media. He was a new Negro who did not fear the white man. He did not hold his head down when he talked to white people. He looked them directly in the eyes and spoke his mind without apology. In many ways Muhammad Ali became the new symbol of Black manhood and Black pride. He was the voice of resistance and hope, so much so that every Black male I knew exhibited a new confidence because of this young, handsome, self-assured high school graduate from Louisville, Kentucky. He was strong and could fight for the system and against the system and could still talk pretty. In the language and spirit of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, hip-hop music, and David Sedaris: “We Talk Pretty One Day, yes we does. Dad blame it!”

Thinking about Ali now forced me to reckon with hip-hop and rap music and the way these Black rappers talked. One thing led to another. Reading Huckleberry Finn caused me to think about contemporary issues and how young Blacks also use the forbidden word. The reading raised a lot of questions, and a lot of anguish and a good bit of ambivalence. I began to think more about growing up as a Black boy.