Nowhere's Vernacular

I [heart] A.E. Stallings’s post on the vernacular:

Do I think the “plain-spoken” impetus in poetry has gone to far? Yes. "Plain-spoken" often just means dull and listless and unimaginative writing. Real plain-spoken people are more imaginative than that. “Idiomatic” after all, is Greek for “individual,” for “peculiar.”

There are poets who do plainspoken masterfully, and then there are the imitators. It’s a paradox that beginning students are always struck by: poetry is made up of the language we all use, but not everyone can just toss off poems. Even the plainspoken is a style, wrested through hard-won technique. (I think of James Schuyler, who was W.H. Auden’s personal secretary in Ischia; he once said of Auden’s work, If that’s poetry, I guess I’ll never be a poet. The irony is that one could say the same thing of Schuyler’s work. It’s that peculiar.)
Stallings’s post touched off another set of associations on a parallel track. I, too, was an ex-pat for a while—just a short year—in Ifrane, Morocco, in 1999. It wasn’t long enough to miss the American vernacular, but I became keenly aware for the first time of the jeers aimed at my native tongue. “Ah, American,” a librarian told my husband, wagging her head. “The Berber English!” Berber, of course, is one of the indigenous languages of Morocco, but you know—a redneck dialect. The Queen’s English was like to Classical Arabic. That was just the Moroccan view—you don’t want to know what the British academics thought of us!

[This article in the New York Times on the disappearance of languages around the world—at the rate of one every two weeks—probably foretells Berber’s doom, alas.]
But the fascinating thing was that everyone spoke three or four different languages: Maghrebi, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic; classical Arabic, the kind one heard on the news; French or Spanish, the colonial tongues; one of the three dialects of Tamazight (Berber); and, increasingly, English (the language of Business). The consensus seemed to be that although everyone was multilingual, no one really mastered any language, even their own. I met Moroccan students who resented, not only the colonial tongues, but the blundering way that newscasters spoke Arabic. They dreamed of an uncorrupted language to call their own.
I did not see it that way, of course, and not only because I spoke the dreaded Berber English. I grew up speaking Brazilian Portuguese with both sets of grandparents (who had been refugees in Sao Paolo before emigrating here), and all around me relatives spoke different, impenetrable languages: Belorussian, Hungarian, Ukranian, Polish, and even some German. This postwar polyglottism was just a faint foreshadowing, I think, of the pidgins and creoles (the very words sound like species of bird) to come in the wake of globalism.
I have my own theories of how my upbringing influenced my use of language, but I never leaned toward writing the sort of book that would crystallize my experience as a mongrel moving among mongrel tongues. It turns out, that book has been written by someone else—Cathy Park Hong, whose Dance Dance Revolution showcases an invented patois, “an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects.” The epic narrative is centered in a resort city in the future, a phantasmagorical Las Vegas that reconstructs world capitals, where a Virgilian Guide (a former South Korean dissident) leads a Historian (whose childhood in Sierra Leone, with a father who worked for Doctors Without Borders, is told in Sebaldian flashbacks). The invented patois, by the way, alternates with prose and lyric interludes. It’s not all hard going.
It’s incredible—Hong just piles detail upon detail of a fully realized world. And everywhere identity is complicated, layered, and finally expedient. The brave new world demands masks, not nostalgia for uncorrupted language.
Here, here, and here are excerpts from the book.
So, ultimately, Hong gives me another reason to think that reigning notions of the vernacular not only hobble our language locally, at the level of the line and stanza, but imaginatively—at the level of concept and conceit.
Speaking of guides. In Morocco we were plagued by false guides—faux-guides—young guys on the make, in a country where the unofficial unemployment rate was 30-40%. This, along with the polyglot, also seemed like something arriving from the future, rather than the past.