Playing with English
Englishes like all languages are living — they have felt histories, malleable presents, and possible futures
April 27, 2022
While writing my current fiction project, I have spent a year challenged with how to write character dialogue. As I reflect over this time, nature, setting, or a character’s actions all transliterated better than character dialogue for me. At first, I assumed the challenge came from not yet knowing what the characters would say, but this assumption was further complicated by the nascent realization that I couldn’t write what a character would say without knowing what they think.
I didn’t know how to resolve this concern besides writing more, so I wrote more. I wrote about the cerulean sky breaking open behind bleached clouds; I wrote about pine trees and their branches swaying in gusts of wind; I wrote about ham hocks and greens sweating, an iron cauldron bathing in an orange flame, Abram walking in an forest of chopped wood or him swimming in a running river; I wrote about Pastor holding a weathered Bible in his withered hands or that grossly uneven door jamb marking Big Jim’s cabin. I wrote the emotional landscape of surviving on a plantation as an enslaved person; I wrote the psychological landscape of surviving with people in violent command of power; I wrote the bodily landscape of surviving treatment as chattel. After a year of this writing, I finally accessed my characters' minds.
I chalk this to having a better materialized world where I could play and think with more accuracy — information which helped uncover a character’s personal story; but my initial thinking that knowing a character’s internal monologue would help in accessing character dialogue was only minimally true. A year later, I still had trouble writing dialogue. I knew what my character was thinking now, but I was not confident in how they would express those thoughts to the people or nature around them. This challenge taught me to rethink dialogue, not merely as a verbal exchange, but also a psychological, emotional, spiritual, physical or otherwise realized expressions stemming from an internal response to an image, whether still or moving, whether seen or imagined.
A year later, I still had trouble writing dialogue…This challenge taught me to rethink dialogue, not merely as a verbal exchange, but also a psychological, emotional, spiritual, physical or otherwise realized expressions stemming from an internal response to a real image, whether still or moving.
I knew the tongue of the dialogue would be English since my world is set in 1863 Virginia, but how would that tongue be used by a character? And why would it be used that way and to what end? Writing dialogue became less about writing what I thought my characters would say, and more about removing my thoughts entirely. I learned to listen, instead, to what characters have been saying to me, typically in a still small voice that comes in flashes and demands a humble listen .
When I write, like Amy Tan, I bring all of my “Englishes” to bear. Each informs my writing whether or not I’m aware. Since my fiction is exploring history (which we must remember from James Baldwin is as much the present as the present itself), I rely heavily on my ancestors’ language. I think about my grandparents’ language who were born, reared, and raised children in Virginia. I think about my cousins, my recently ascended great-great-uncle, my siblings, my parents. I think about their speech pattern and speech content, their inflection and tone when they communicate an idea. I think about how they language love, how they express family, and — although typically ineffable — how they language their trauma.
All of these expressions are noticeable and full of information. When audible, it is typically in English (still, the lack of a noun modifier on “English'' not only feels lazily done, but also the term itself feels inaccurate). Growing up with a language originally foreign to one and one’s ancestors resolves the acquired tongue to be authentic, made new, informed by more than the compilation of symbols which unifies a language. It was through writing that I learned about the different Englishes I know — Discreet English: concealing, deep in meaning, found in phrases; Bold English: short, take it at face-value; White English: binding, constricting, present as statue; African American English: Black, honest, free, crafted in survival, pure art; Silence (no English): Trauma and the harming ineffable.
Writing dialogue became less about writing what I thought my characters would say, and more about removing my thoughts entirely. I learned to listen, instead, to what characters have been saying to me, typically in a still small voice that comes in flashes and demands a humble listen.
I learned through writing that the challenging moments I felt expressing character dialogue were actually moments to pause and remember that if I want to write authentic dialogue, especially from the minds of these characters I feel responsible for — characters who carry my ancestors stories and speak to me with direction — then I must first understand myself better, know my own tongue. At the very least my writing required me to think about my own acquisition and utilization of language as a speaker, reader, writer, and hearer of English. This reflection aids me in entering my character’s mind with both experiential knowledge and psychic distance. This reflection allows me to maintain humility and reverence for the aspects of their experience I can only attempt to understand in my modern habitation.
I’ve spent my fiction writing life studying writers, namely Toni Morrison and Baldwin. I have found solace in the warm embrace of their literary arms; found sure footing in the paths their literary minds have traversed; and fertile soil in the plots of dirt their literary works have tilled. One area they spent time writing outside (and more often without regard for) the white gaze. Writing outside of the white gaze means first understanding that at a fundamental level, all writers write for readers. Secondly — in the U.S. context — it is important to understand that this readership has been legally and violently enforced for centuries to be white readers, having only recently been altered by writers from marginalized groups to break the confines of that white prison.
Thirdly, writing outside of the white gaze presupposes that the lack of active repudiation of this social construct can cause a well-intentioned writer to default to a white readership. Another way of analyzing this perspective is to think about the white gaze as limiting English to its deodorization, which has the form and structure of English, but is stripped of the truth about us as humans and interconnected beings with mutual respect. The literary limitations of the white gaze has been studied by many, most notably in Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. Her works and the works of other black women writers and writers from other marginalized communities offer transmorphic opportunities for our public English to render more true, honest, and free as they are read by the citizenry. That is to say, Englishes like all languages are living — they have felt histories, malleable presents, and possible futures.
I’ve spent my fiction writing life studying writers, namely Toni Morrison and Baldwin. I have found solace in the warm embrace of their literary arms; found sure footing in the paths their literary minds have traversed; and fertile soil in the plots of dirt their literary works have tilled.
I want to return to writing about my fiction writing and bring into conversation one character, Pastor. To understand Pastor, which is my goal for every character as I get to know them and before I can realize them on the page, I relied on the English I intimately grew up with and still speak and participate in today — sermonic English. On plantations across the U.S., racist practice of de jure and subsequent de facto prohibition of teaching both reading and writing to its enslaved and Black populations were fatally enforced. Many enslavers by official or unofficial means deputized an enslaved person they felt they could control to be the teacher of the Holy Bible to the enslaved, limiting the reading and hearing of these enslaved persons to passages of scripture which manipulated enslaved populations to believe they were in their condition because of God.
Although the devil meant this for bad, this turned into an opportunity for enslaved people to read in resistance. To view education as power. Conflating this history with my own understanding of sermonic language, I heard Pastor speak to me. It was a quiet night and I was headed to bed. I was thinking about Pastor and trying to understand him. It sounds a little nebulous, but when a character presents themselves to me I know who they are before I know why they are the way they are. Meaning it is easy for me to locate and understand a spirit of a character before I know the physical wrapping — i.e. hair, skin, face, and voice — or other contextual wrappings — i.e. emotional, psychological, mental health and wellness.
For physicists, a character presents themselves to me as a wavefunction; in order for me to describe this wavefunction, I must carefully experiment using the observables at my disposal. I think about all kinds of landscapes mentioned as wrappings above and the implications of those wrappings on them, their community, and larger society. Once I have this information, images begin to formulate which contain enough information for me to write. This process can happen quickly for some characters and longer for others, so I have to be comfortable waiting. I had been waiting for Pastor to speak for a while, and that night I was trying to understand what made him such a shepherd for his family living on the White House plantation. Before I could settle in my brown duvet, I heard him speak. It was two words. I mulled those words over in my mind and soon a river of language came rushing through. I’m not sure yet who he’s speaking this passage to, right now it feels like a monologue, but I ultimately know the words came through me and not to me, meaning they are meant for another character or destination:
