breaking language

blog post #1

what i was listening to while reading: to pimp a butterfly by Kendrick Lamar

what i watching while typing: black-ish

the dominant administration/solemnly/

undertook to defend this/woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered… it described the immense possibilities of woman/unfortunately/ transformed by the Algerian man into an inert, dem(one)tized, indeed dehumanized object… (Fanon 38)

in an initial phase (it is the action) the plans of the

occupier that determine the/

centers/

of resistance around which a people’s will

to survive becomes

organized/it is the white man who creates

the Negro/But it is

the Negro who creates negritude. (Fanon 47)

In Algeria Unveiled, Fanon points to the ways in which dominant culture and resistance operate. In the first quote I choose to “Shange-tize,” Fanon illustrates the way the colonizer, in his attempt to control and regulate the behaviors of the colonized, attempts to use their culture and moralities against them. Fanon utilizes the custom of the veil in Algeria explain this practice. By positioning the veil as a mode of oppression, the British hoped to present Algerian women as victims to themselves and to the outside world. They position her as a symbol, an object to liberated from her archaic society in order to sow discord within the community and encourage assimilation. In the second quote, Fanon dissects how colonized people form modes of resistance. Since the colonizers determine what will be prioritized by dominant culture, what will be the center, the colonized determines what they will prioritize about their own culture and promote as their own self-identity.

I picked this two quotes to juxtapose these two quotes, and by extension, these two ideas because I think they say a lot of Ntozake Shange’s mode of artistic production. One of her works many purposes, as she expresses in “my pen is a machete” is to reconstruct language and culture to allow colonized and oppressed people, particularly Black people, to express emotions, discuss experiences, and commiserate with others. By breaking down the constructions of centrist language, Shange both dismisses its value and creates new language for black people.