“It’s Both What You Say and How You Say It”: Trangressive Language Practices Via Spoken Word Poetry

• In Event: Transgressive Language Practices: Taboos, Boundaries, and Linguistic Agency in the Classroom

Abstract

From the blues to jazz to hip hop, the arts are an open arena where language can be concealed, contested and expressed (Baraka, 1963). Here, there is room to test the limits of language by utilizing racial epitaphs (e.g., N-word), profanity (e.g., the f-word), and double entendres (e.g., European on me (Medina, 1994). The arts provide an avenue to creatively express everyday language practices to articulate our lived-realities. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the ingenuity and dexterity employed by poet-scholars via transgressive word play within their spoken word poetry.

Gee (2001) defines his framework of Discourse as, “[The] ways of being in the world…[our] values, beliefs, attitudes and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes” (p. 526). Distinguishing between primary and secondary Discourse, he defines the former as the discourse we use to make sense of the world as we interact with “intimate” others, which differs across race, class, and gender. The latter is used in various out-of-home social institutions such as local stores, churches, schools, community groups, etc. Literacy is, therefore, the mastery of secondary Discourses, and Gee argues that there are multiple forms of literacies.

Breaking from Western approaches to research, I embrace a methodology of the oppressed (Sandoval, 2000) where research serves the marginalized, allowing them to tell their stories in their own words. The site of the study is an after-school spoken word poetry class that ran for three years in a Los Angeles area high school. The participants (45) in the class were primarily African American or Latino. The study incorporates 70-videotaped sessions and 16 semi-structured interviews. I employ grounded theory (Creswell, 2003) for qualitative analysis.

Below is an untitled poem written by Zero, an African American male, exemplifying transgressive word play:

The mirror shatters….me with shards of glass.
Fuck is the word
I use in this situation...
If you add I before fuck you suddenly have a way to
Live through…
Thats when you can…add ED
To the equation and just like that you have built yourself a situation
Where fuck has turned into a past tense Fucked.
Which life easily does to you.
The fun of fucked isn’t over just yet because…
You suddenly you have a phrase which creates most of your problems:
I fucked up

An adage often communicated in the poetry class was: It is both what you say and how say it. Zero utilizes profanity to powerfully communicate how life easily places you in dire situations. He uses course language and double entendre in the process of self-reflexivity. Hence, transgressive language, particularly in spoken word, often incites thought and action.

Transgressive language practices via spoken word demonstrate the multitude of “hidden literacies” (Finders, 1997) students use to make sense of their world and resist. They privilege the lived-experiences of marginalized youth without apologizing for the utilization of graphic language. Spoken word provides an alternative space where youth can experiment with language in order to communicate the harsh realities of their world.

Author

• Shiv Raj Desai, Thomas More College