These are the roots that clutch, my son.
--T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
The science we are dropping today regards roots. Not simply where we are coming from, but also what it is that nourishes us, what keeps us strong. Roots are not vestigial and inert. We forget this easily, how invested our lives are in the lives of our roots. It’s reciprocal. Deracinated, a tree expires--indeed, the roots usually outlive the tree itself. Yet the Jewish and black peoples in the postcolonial world are hardly stable and planted trees. We are the diaspora peoples, and seem to have more in common with wind-scattered dandelion spores than solid oaks. The question of who we are as a people is harder to answer when we have no nationality to speak of--the best we can do is consider ourselves as external and Other to the nation we live in. We consciously define ourselves within a system of difference. Effectively, we become not a people who are, but who are not. We exist as a nation to the extent that we are not of the nation we are occupying. Not Americans, but Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, “poisoned,” as Derek Walcott says, “with the blood of both.”1 We have no land of our own; we carve our home out of whatever rock we land on.
Yet the advantage that an unmoored or postcolonial nation has over its oppressor is that it can negotiate its relationship to its roots. If the ties that bind are loose, we can wrangle cats’ cradles of culture from the strings. We can spin the woof of our heritage with the warp of others’, and weave new wardrobes of identity. Unlike more firmly planted nations, our roots no more invent us than we invent them. Hence our culture becomes one dedicated to self-affirmation through self-invention. Deprived of our native soils, we create a mythical point of origin, a place to come from. We sculpt for ourselves a proud mask to present to the majority, which allows us to say, not entirely disingenuously, “this is who we are.”
This essay will concern itself with the way in which two distinct demographics have used art to construct their own identities, and define themselves with reference to their roots: black Americans and the black English.2 With each, the topics of assimilation, linguistic exchange and national locus will be raised. Each has a different attitude towards its collective ancestral home, but each of those attitudes has been shaped by varying forms of systematic oppression at the hands of the the white power structure. Each also has a different notion of how to respond to that oppression. One’s heritage is one’s culture; to the extent that one’s attitude towards one’s heritage is shaped by oppression, that oppression can be seen as beneficial. Without oppression, there is effectively no cultural heterogeneity in the world, and hence, no culture at all. The question this essay seeks to answer is, if you can’t beat them--and you can’t--and you can’t join them, what can you do?
It is best to start with the black English, as they are the ones to whom postcolonial theory is best applied (being the only strictly postcolonial demographic under discussion), as well as being the most ambivalent towards their national identity. Furthermore, the recently decolonized African and Caribbean peoples have the sharpest, most present memory of their homeland, yet are the least sure of their place in the world. Their assimilation was forced and rewarded, as opposed to the Jews’, who were only too eager, and were therefore rebuffed, or black America’s, which was prohibited entirely. The colonial agenda was to divide and conquer by rewarding assimilation and punishing recalcitrance:
One of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given a corporal punishment--three to five strokes with the cane on the bare buttocks--or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with such inscriptions as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into witch-hunters and in the process taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community.
The attitude to English was the exact opposite: any achievement in spoken or written English was highly rewarded; prizes, prestige, applause; the ticket to higher realms...English became the major determinant of a child’s progress up the ladder of formal education.3
In his poem, “Bought and Sold,” Benjamin Zephaniah, writing not of colonial Africa, but of contemporary England, and addressing the empire, not the imperialists, shows us just how little has changed since devolution:
Smart big awards and prize money
Is killing off black poetry...
...What happened to the verse of fire
Cursing cool the empire
What happened to the soul rebel that Marley had in mind,
This bloodstained stolen empire rewards you and you conspire...
...Now they’ve gone and joined.
We keep getting this beating
It’s bad history repeating.4
Beating them was out of the question. But joining was so tantalizingly possible. The promise that Rome once held for its empire, that no matter what color one was, or what language one spoke, if one loved Rome and obeyed its laws, one was Roman, seemed so authentic. But in Britain, black was black. The hope for acceptance and integration was illusory, and ultimately the struggle of the colonized became a zero-sum game: resist, and be marginalized out of the equation (for only “the coconuts have got the jobs.”5); acquiesce, shed your heritage, and enter the state of cultural limbo known, pejoratively, as being “half-caste,” as though the half of a man that isn’t British wasn’t worth considering. One’s identity, being (n)either/(n)or, was simply voided, declared null. The colonized were being denied the power to speak in any idiom that was not British.
But as Calvin says in Calvin & Hobbes, “if you can’t win by reason, go for volume.” Reggae (and Hip-hop)-influenced “dub poetry,” sprung largely from the Caribbean, was and is brash, entertaining, direct and effective, and as successfully as it collided Queen’s English and colonial patois, so well did it weld national identities. It is a categorically aggressive response to colonization, which is the attempted erasure of a nation’s culture from the earth. In dub poetry, the empire, as Salman Rushdie put it, “writes back.”
...I ent have no gun
I ent have no knife
but mugging de Queen’s English
is the story of my life
I dont need no axe
to split/ up yu syntax
I dont need no hammer
to mash/ up yu grammar
...I’m not a violent man Mr Oxford don
I only armed wit human breath
but human breath is a dangerous weapon
So mek dem send one big word after me
I ent serving no jail sentence
I slashing suffix in self-defence
I bashing future wit present tense
and if necessary
I making de Queen’s English accessory/ to my offence6
Dub poetry is a massive attack on the Man. Colonization is not a one-way street, as Said has it in Orientalism. There is a reason Chicken Tikka Masala has become, by all reports, the national dish of Great Britain. Language, too, is imported from the colonies. This reverse cultural influence, though, is monitored, and consequently minimal. It’s also accidental. Dub poetry, though, amplifies the volume of that influence tremendously. Unequivocally aggressive in its intent, it ravishes the Queen’s English as fiercely as the Queen ravished the colonies. In “Listen Mr Oxford Don,” John Agard commits wholesale vandalism, and it’s thrilling. He is less aggressive in “Half Caste” and “checking out me history,” but remains def, always representing. In the former, he casually ridicules the insensate phrase: “Excuse me/I’m standing on one leg/I’m half-caste.”7 In the latter, he rejects the history he has been assigned, which is not just Eurocentric, but markedly Anglocentric, in favor of the history of his own people--black people:
Dem tell me
Dem tell me wha dem want fo tell me
But now I checking out me own history
I carving out me identity.8
It’s a paradox: postcolonial populations are so supersaturated with national identity that they have none to speak of. But that’s why dub poetry is such a potent form--it is the language of paradox. It douses the house with a volatile linguistic flow, strikes a match, and sets the room to burning. But in a way, it’s their own house the dub poets are torching. As Audre Lorde put it, you can’t use the master’s tools to burn down the master’s house--and making the Queen’s English accessory to one’s offense is attempting to do just that.
A population can only stay in limbo so long, and the postcolonial state is a transitory one. The dub poets are singing out a historical interlude situated between foreign domination and self-determination, burning the candle at both ends. The more cemented their national identity becomes, the less necessary dub poetry will be, the less brightly it will burn. Dub poetry is the aggressive poetry of oppression; without an oppressive figure at which to “fire a riddim dat shoots like shots,” there is no poetry. To quote a white gentile woman:
My candle burns at both ends;
It shall not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light!9
As critical as reggae-style rhythms are to dub poetry--that is to say, its sine qua non--so critical has musical expression been to the black American experience. Negro spirituals were used as a form of clandestine communication between slaves (“Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd,” for instance, indicated a route to an agent of the Underground Railroad). The blues had its hallmark 1-4-5 tonal progression plundered by white people, whereupon Rock ‘n’ Roll burst forth like Pallas, fully-formed (or so the Miller Brewing Company would have us believe).10 Today, the dominant black American art form is, without any doubt, Hip-Hop.
Right out of the gate, though, the would-be Hip-Hop critic gets tripped up: it’s nearly impossible to say precisely what this form is (the idea of a nebulous form, much as it may bake one’s head, is a good example of the endless possibility suggested by the poetry of paradox). Rap, its most present and public face, didn’t even come into vogue until the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 chart-topper, “Rapper’s Delight,” a watershed in Hip-Hop not only because it focused on the MC, but because it faded back the DJ, hitherto the maestro of flow. Hip-Hop had been “born” in the Bronx about six years prior--by all accounts, at a party on August 11, 1973, at DJ Kool Herc’s sister’s house on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. But the fuel that would propel its stratospheric rise had been accumulating since 1968, “a time when youth and revolution seemed poised to seize the world by storm.”11
1968 can also be described as the year America, and with it most of the world, completely lost its shit. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the Weather Underground were bombing down the house, Mark Rudd and the Students for a Democratic Society (Sinn Fein to the Weathermen’s IRA) took over Columbia University12, the students of Paris pried the cobblestones and bricks loose from sclerotic French façades, lobbed them through the windows of the bourgeoisie, torched a few shops, then went on vacation with their parents, and, in the aftermath of the riots that overwhelmed more than 150 American cities in 1967, gang warfare in the inner-city ghettoes exploded geometrically. In New York City, the “megalomaniacal” urban builder Robert Moses devised the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which willfully shattered neighborhoods and trapped blacks in the ghettoes, while providing a organ of mass white exodus to the suburbs--in effect creating what we now refer to as the “inner city.” But in 1971, “after years of Nixon’s and city officials’ policy of ‘benign neglect’ had taken its toll, [after] the raging fires that razed communities and made the Bronx a symbol for urban failure,”13 the gangs themselves forged a truce. It was into this tensed, tested world that Hip-Hop first dropped its science. As it grew, Michael Eric Dyson writes,
it was still limited to mostly inner-city neighborhoods and particularly its place of origin New York city. Rap [Dyson uses “Rap” and “Hip-Hop” interchangeably] artists...were experimenting with this developing musical genre.14
A kid named Theo started messing with his older brother’s record player, discovering that he could do a lot more with vinyl and a needle than just play the album. He became Grand Wizard Theodore, the creator of scratching. Grandmaster Flash tinkered with the ubiquitous two-turntables-and-a-microphone setup, and gave birth to the technique that has made Hip-Hop a postmodern totem: sampling--the perfect expression of Jamesonian bricolage. New forms of dance--breaking, popping, boogaloo, forms devoted to boasting, taunting, representing, pure bravado--grew up around the music, becoming as integral to Hip-Hop as the rhythm itself. In 1977, the TV mini-series--aptly named, for our purposes--Roots demolished ratings records as blacks across America set about forging a history for themselves. Graffiti flourished so phenomenally that in time, like rap, it would grow so successful, so commodified, that it became toxic to itself.
But in the early days, hypercommodification and selfconsumption of the form were a long way off. Perhaps the most essential fact about the founding fathers of Hip-Hop, writes Jeff Chang in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, is that
They were about unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul, unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful and protected and enclosed by monastic rites, codes, orders. They sprung from kids who had been born into the shadows of the baby boom generation, who never grew up expecting the whole world to be watching. What TV camera would capture their struggles and dreams? They were invisible.
But invisibility was its own kind of reward; it meant you had to answer to no one except the others who shared your condition. It meant you became obsessed with showing and proving, distinguishing yourself and your originality above the crowd.15
In America, blacks are not half-caste. They are not half-in, half-out and they do not have half a chance. If they are black, they are all black. If they are an eighth black, they are all black (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896).16 It was indicated earlier that black assimilation in America, historically speaking, has not just been difficult, it has been prohibited entirely. Langston Hughes poem--almost an anthem--“I, Too, Sing America,” illustrates the difference between the black American experience and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s postcolonial experience:
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.17
That is as gangsta a sentiment as has ever been written. The Jim Crow laws which enforced a system of “separate but equal” segregation had been struck down with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but the damage was done, and the country was--and still is, to an extent--unmistakably riven. Black youth in the ‘hood were indeed invisible. White people were not rewarding with prizes and scholarships any ardor to assimilate, but where no reward is possible, the threat of consequences is equally absent. “Benign neglect” works both ways. No consequences meant that, so long as they kept it in the hood, kept it real, kept it black, they could do anything they wanted--be whoever they wanted to be. It was out of this atmosphere of possibility amid oppression that the “Hip-Hop nation” came into being.
But what is the “Hip-Hop nation?”
We are a nation with no precise date of origin, no physical land, no single chief. But if you live in the Hip-Hop nation, if you are not merely a fan of the music but a daily imbiber of the culture...then you know the Hip-Hop Nation is a place as real as America on a pre-Columbus atlas.18
Entirely mythical but indisputably real. Again, the language of paradox becomes necessary to describe the efforts of a deracinated people finding ways to cultivate roots. On the Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang, the Clan--one of the most electric ensemble musical acts ever assembled, in any genre--talk to a reporter. Raekwon the Chef and the Method Man make it abundantly clear what they want out of this project, and in so doing echo vividly Hughes’ manifesto:
Raekwon: Right now, right now, we still, we still feelin’ like we ain’t got what we want yet. When we get, when we get, when we get a little past ‘em, when we really get to where we wanna go, that’s when you know it’s on, you know what I’m sayin’? Cause right now? I ain’t braggin’ or nuttin’, but yo, the Wu, the Wu got somethin’ that I know that everybody wanna hear. I know I been waitin’ to hear it, know what I’m sayin’? We straight up and natural; we get the gold, we gonna keep goin’.
Method: Cause we tryin’ to do all this, we tryin’ to make a business out of this, man, we ain’t tryin’--you know what I’m sayin’--affiliate ourselves with them fake-ass A&R’s and all that, we tryin’ to make our own shit, so that when our children--word--when our children get old...they got somethin’ for theyself.19
That prophesy comes at the end of the track whose chorus is, “can it be that it was all so simple then?” That track begins with a backward glance o’er traveled roads:
Yo, you remember back in the days? I’m sayin’, like, back in fuckin’ ‘79, now, now, ‘87, that was my favorite shit, y’all. All old shit. Everything, everything was lovely man.
’79 refers to “Rapper’s Delight,” and ‘87 most likely refers to Run-DMC’s album Raising Hell, the first rap album to go triple-platinum (three million copies sold). They’re selecting the forbears against whom they want to be measured--constructing their personal history. This is the privilege of the rootless. Wu-Tang’s ensemble act derives itself from the original group structure set up by Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Jazzy Jay, the name of whose group rather says it all: The Mighty Mighty Zulu Nation.
This is “carving out identity.” Bambaataa, like the Wu-Tang’s RZA (Prince Rakeem), considers himself part of the Nation of Islam--a nation whose borders are somewhat better defined that those of Hip-Hop--as well as the Zulu Nation. And yet, he, too, is America. He invents his ancestry, reclaiming his past from places he has no physical relation to, save for his essential blackness, as Agard does in “checking out me history” when he says
Dem tell me bout Lord Nelson and Waterloo
but dem never tell me bout Shaka de great Zulu
Dem tell me about Columbus and 1492
but what happen to de Caribs and de Arawaks too20
How can Agard and Bambaataa claim simultaneous relation to the Caribbean and Africa? Because it doesn’t matter what side one is on, black is black--that is, not white. The use of the word “colored” to describe blacks, long since banished in America, but unsettlingly commonplace in Ireland, encapsulates that attitude: if you’re not white, we don’t care what color you are, yellow, brown, black, or, to quote De La Soul, straight up with polka dots--you are not coming in.
They couldn’t beat ‘em and they couldn’t join ‘em. So American blacks, instead of allowing themselves to trapped in the postcolonial double bind, did the one thing guaranteed to piss Whitey off: form their own club.
The clubhouse they called “the ‘hood,” the spiritual heart of Hip-Hop to which it eternally returns, and from the full and brutal experience of which all street credit is derived. The ‘hood is a squalid place--south central in L.A., the south Bronx, the south side of Chicago, always subaltern--the ghetto from which every denizen prays for flight. And yet one is not permitted to flee entirely. Even when one blows up, takes one’s seat at the table when company comes, one is still required to represent--hence Jennifer Lopez’s song, “Jenny From the Block,” an embarrassing flail of an attempt to recover the credit she was hemorrhaging, and featuring the distressingly poor lyric, “In spite of all the rocks I got,/ I’m still Jenny from the block.” The closer one comes to the power structure--that is, the whiter one becomes--the more difficult the struggle to retain one’s cred. A white man is about as welcome in the ‘hood as is a black man in the oval office.
It was the secret password, though, that showed the Hip-Hop nation’s genius for keeping black undimmed by white. On the one hand, it could only be used for black people; on the other, it could only be used by black people: nigger.
It’s brilliant. The oppressed and Other oppress right back--and there is no question that the minority can oppress the majority; the difference is that the majority don’t get to complain. It’s the least secret password in the world, in every way a breakdancing-style taunt, devastating to Whitey because even though he knows the secret word, he is categorically unable to pronounce it. Whitey don’t get to drop the N-bomb, ever.21 Hip-Hop self-segregates itself and tries to guard its product for itself, and in so doing inspires extreme covetousness and involvement in majority it tries so hard to exclude--sadly, to the dereliction of the form. Instead of taking dub poetry’s aggressive stance, the Hip-Hop nation is passive-aggressive, not arguing with the power, competing with it. It becomes “a darkness shining in brightness that brightness could not comprehend.”22 And its influence on world culture is tremendous. It’s almost too successful, in fact. Black slang is more eagerly accepted than black people are--witness the much-publicized addition of the word “bling” to the Oxford English Dictionary, the arbiter of propriety for the English language. The power structure is not just recognizing, but sanctioning the intrusion of the Other. But paradoxically, that one word, the first word from the Hip-Hop nation to be preserved in lexicographical amber, is doing more damage to that nation than anything else. Hip-Hop has “blown up” so big, is bling-blingin’ so outlandishly that it threatens to collapse under its own weight. It’s become hypercommodified and globalized, “all about the Benjamins,”23 which, for a form which is “for African-American society,”24 is severely threatening to its integrity. Even graffiti was in danger as far back as the ‘80’s, as upscale art gallery owners attempted to take Bronx street style to the white walls of SoHo. Whitey-sanctioned, legal, paid-for graffiti is a sad, toothless cariacature of itself, and rap is threatening to go the same way: “Forgot where ya came from/ Now ya straight illin’.”25 Deltron speaks the gospel: in 1993, David May, co-founder and CEO of the Source magazine, said: “this isn’t just a niche market or just an ethnic market...Hip-Hop is like rock and roll twenty-five years ago. It’s a music-driven lifestyle being lived by an entire generation of young people now...this market is dying to marketed to.”26 Who knew, Jeff Chang asks, that so many white kids were down with a “Niggas 4 Life” program?27
Over a decade on, though, the Source seems to have picked up on the myopia of May’s statement. At last November’s Vibe Awards, a melée broke out in the audience. The Source sped off a press release which one can only hope is not entirely disingenuous:
Ultimately, what took place Monday night at the Vibe Awards has its root with the executives at record companies, media companies and other corporations that want to capitalize on Hip-Hop but don’t start with a strong foundation of respect for the community from which Hip-Hop was born...The Source has been on the front lines battling against the exploitation of Hip-Hop, and we...urge the leaders of the Hip-Hop industry to be more responsible in protecting and managing the development of Hip-Hop culture.28
Judy asks, “can a commodified identity be authentic?”29 The best answer to that question might be another question: can an authentic identity be commodified? Of course. Only how authentic is the identity of a citizen of the Hip-Hop nation? Only as solid as his science. On Goapele and Hieroglyphics’ joint, “Soweto,” Casual lays down the conflict, and shows us just what can come from nothing:
I dont know dog, maybe it’s just me
But I feel I’m clutching
To hold nothing
I mean bluffing
I got the poker face
Don’t really know my place
And I never chose this way
So I go astray
Throwaways blow away
Every hope I hold today
We were sold as slaves
The sky’s cold and gray
My niggas show the way
I see the golden age.30
All these, home, history, language, color, all these are the roots that clutch. Eliot chose an ambivalent word, a last paradox. They clutch the nigga and hold him down, even as they clutch him and hold him close, safe in the most nurturing place he will ever know.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Works Cited:
Hip-Hop Music:
All About the Benjamins Movie Soundtrack. New Line Records, 2002.
De La Soul. Three Feet High and Rising. Tommy Boy Records, 1989
Deltron. Deltron 3030. Tommy Boy Records, 2000
Hieroglyphic. One Big Trip. Hieroglyphic Records, 2002
Jennifer Lopez. “Jenny from the Block.” Sony International, 2002
Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). RCA, 1993
Hip-Hop Criticism:
Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2005)
That’s The Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. Ed. Forman, Murray and Neal, Mark Anthony. (Routledge: 2004)
Postcolonial Criticism:
Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura (Prentice/Harvester: Hertfordshire, 1994)
Web:
Benjamin Zephaniah: http://www.benjaminzephaniah.com. Accessed 1/4/05
John Agard: http://www.humboldt.edu/~me2/engl240b/student_projects/agard/. Accessed 1/4/05
Salon.com: http://www.salon.com. Accessed 2/4/05
The Source Press Release: http://www.buzzcommunicationsmusic.com/onstage/webnews. Accessed 3/4/05
Other Poetry and Literature:
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fourth Edition. ed. Ferguson et. al. (W.W. Norton: New York, 1996)
Joyce, James. Ulysses (The Franklin Library, 1979)
Works Referenced
Hip-Hop Artists:
Grandmaster Flash
Geto Boys
Handsome Boy Modeling School
•Hitchens, Christopher. “Hooked on Ebonics.” from Unacknowledged Legislation (Verso: London, 2000)
•Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. (Anchor Books: New York, 1992)
Online Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive: http://www.ohhla.com
