Abstract
This paper is about the impact of becoming Black on ESL learning, that is, the interrelation between identity and learning. It contends that a group of French-speaking immigrant and refugee continental African youths who are attending an urban Franco-Ontarian high school in South Western Ontario, Canada, enters a social imaginary – a discursive space in which they are already imagined, constructed, and thus treated as Blacks by hegemonic discourses and groups. This imaginary is directly implicated in whom they identify with (Black America) which in turn, influences what and how they linguistically and culturally learn. They learn Black stylized English, which they access in hip hop culture and rap lyrical and linguistic styles. This critical ethnography, conducted within an interdisciplinary framework, shows that ESL is neither neutral nor without its politics and pedagogy of desire and investment.The Paper
“[T]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of color-line”, asserted W. E. Du Bois (1903, p. 13). If this be so, what are the implications of t/his prophetic statement as far as second language learning/acquisition (SLA) is implicated? In this fin de siècle, where identity formation is increasingly mediated by technological mediums, who learns what and how? How do our differently raced, gendered, sexualized, abled, and classed social identities enter the process of learning a second language? In a postcolonial era when postcolonial subjects are constituting part of the Metropolitan ‘centers’, what is the ‘critical pedagogy’ required in order not to repeat the colonial history embedded in the classroom relationship between white teachers and students of color? Finally, at a time when the North American blackness is governed by how it is negatively located in a race conscious society, what does it mean for a Black ESL learner to ‘take up’ and acquire Black English as a Second Language (BESL)? In other words, what symbolic, cultural, pedagogical, and identity investment would a learner have in locating oneself politically and racially at the ‘margin’ of representation?
This paper is an attempt, a will to an answer. Conceptually, it is located at the borderline between two indistinguishable, and perhaps never separable, categories of ‘critical discourses’: race and gender. The paper addresses the process of becoming Black, where race is as vital as gender, and articulates a political and pedagogical research framework which puts at its center the social being as embodied subjectivities which are embedded in and performed through language, culture, history, and memory (Dei, 1996; Essed, 1991; Gilroy, 1987; Ibrahim, 1998; Rampton, 1995; Giroux and Simon, 1989). As an identity configuration, ‘becoming Black’ is deployed to talk about the subject formation project which is produced in, and simultaneously is produced by the process of language learning, namely learning Black English as a Second Language (BESL). Put more concretely, becoming Black meant, as it will be seen, learning BESL, yet the very process of BESL learning produced the epiphenomenon of ‘becoming Black’. To become, I have argued elsewhere (Ibrahim, 1998), is historical. Indeed, it is history and how we experience it that govern our identity, memory, ways of being, becoming, and learning (see also Foucault, 1979, pp. 170-184). To address, therefore, questions of pedagogy in this context, is necessarily to attend to and be concerned with the linkages between the Self, identity, desire and the English(es) that our students invest in.
This paper is part of a larger ethnographic study (Ibrahim, 1998). It made use of the above ‘critical’ frames and the newly developed methodological approach ‘ethnography of performance.’ The latter argues that social beings perform (Butler, 1990), at least in part, their subjectivities, identities, and desires in and through ‘complex semiological languages.’ These comprise anything that does not have verbal utterance ability, mute, yet ready to speak: the body, modes of dress, architecture, photography, etc. (see Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Barthes, 1967/1983).The research took place in an urban French-language high school in South Western Ontario, Canada, which I will refer to as Marie-Victorin (M.V.), and it looks at the lives of a group of continental francophone African youths and their social identity formation. Besides their youth and refugee status, their gendered and raced experience is vital in their ‘moments of identification’: i.e., where and how they see themselves reflected in the mirror of their society (see also Bhabha, 1994). Put otherwise, once in North America, I contend, these youths are faced with a ‘social imaginary’ (Anderson, 1983) where they are already ‘Blacks.’ This social imaginary is directly implicated in how and whom they identify with, which in turn influences what they linguistically and culturally learn, as well as how. What they learn, I demonstrate, is ‘Black stylized English’ which they access in and through Black popular culture. They learn by taking up and re-positing the rap linguistic and musical genre and, in different ways, acquiring and re-articulating hip hop cultural identity.
Black stylized English (BSE) is Black English (BE) with ‘style’; it is a subcategory. BE is what Smitherman (1994) refers to as ‘Black talk,’ which has its own grammar and syntax (see Labov, 1972). BSE, on the other hand, refers to ways of speaking that do not depend on a full mastery of the language. It banks more on ritual expressions (see Rampton, 1995, for the idea of ‘rituality’) such as ‘whassup,’ ‘whadap,’ ‘whassup my Nigger,’ ‘yo, yo homeboy,’ which are performed habitually and recurrently in rap. The rituals are more an expression of politics, moments of identification, and desire than they are of language or mastering the language per se. It is a way of saying ‘I too am Black’ or ‘I too desire and identify with blackness.’
By Black popular culture, on the other hand, I am referring to films, newspapers, magazines, and more importantly music such as rap, reggae, pop, and rhythm and blues (R&B). The term hip hop refers to the overall naming apparatus which comprises everything from music (especially rap), to clothing choice, attitudes, language, and an approach to culture and cultural artifacts, positing and collaging them in an unsentimental fashion (Walcott, 1995, p. 5). More skeletally, I use hip hop to describe a way of dress, walk, and talk. The dress refers to the myriad shades and shapes of the latest “fly gear”: high-top sneakers, bicycle shorts, chunk jewelry, baggy pants, and polka-dotted tops (Rose, 1991, p. 277). The hair styles are as well part of this fashion. These include high fade designs, dread, corkscrews, and braids (ibid.). The walk usually means moving the hands’ fingers simultaneously with the head and the rest of the body as one is walking. The talk, however, is the BSE that I refer to above. By patterning these behaviors, significantly, African youths enter the realm of becoming Black. Hence, this paper is about this process of becoming and how it is implicated in BSE learning.
In this process, the interlocking question of identification and desire is of particular interest. It asks the following: Who do we as social subjects living within a social space desire to be or to become? And who do we identify with and what repercussions does our identification have on how and what we learn? This question has already been dealt with in semiology (Gottdiener, 1995; Barthes, 1967/1983; Eco, 1976), psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1988; Kristeva, 1974), and cultural studies (Grossberg et al., 1992; Bhabha, 1994; Hall, 1990; Mercer, 1994). I am yet to see it raised, let alone incorporated seriously, in ESL and applied linguistic research. For instance, in her study, Lynn Goldstein (1987) focused on the linguistic features of Black English as they were found in the speech of a group of Puerto Rican youths in New York City. However, she did not address the issue of what it means for a Puerto Rican youth to learn Black English? What investment does s/he have in doing so? And what roles, if any, do race, desire and identification have in the process of learning? Instead, Goldstein offers a very meticulous syntactico-morphological analysis. It is not a question of either/or, but I strongly believe that it would be more fruitful for ESL pedagogy, and the nature of SLA would be better understood if both were located within a socio-cultural context. Language, Bourdieu (1991) argues, is no longer and never was just an instrument of communication. It is also where power is formed and performed based on race, gender, sexuality, and class social identity. My work differs from Goldstein’s study in that it moves toward a more cultural, political, and stylistic analysis.
In what follows, I discuss the methodology, the site, and the subject of my research. This will be intersected with a discussion of the research’s guiding propositions, contentions, and questions, with a look at how the ‘I’, the researcher, is implicated in the research and the questions he is asking. ‘I’ then offer examples of African youths’ speech where BSE can be detected, to demonstrate the interplay between subject formation, identification, and BESL learning. I will also offer students’ reflections and narratives on the impact of ‘identification’ on becoming Black. Centralizing their everyday experience of identity, I hereafter conclude with some ‘critical pedagogical’ (Pennycook, 1994; Peirce, 1989; Corson, 1997) and didactic propositions on the connections between investment, subjectivity, and ESL learning. Beginning with the premise that ESL learning is locality, I ask the following: if local identity is the site where we as teachers and researchers should start our praxis and research formulations (Rampton, 1995; Peirce 1997; Morgan, 1997), then I would contend that any pedagogical input that does not link the political, the cultural, and the social with identity and, in turn, with the process of ESL learning, is likely to fail.
RESEARCH(ER) SITE, SUBJECTS, METHODOLOGY, AND QUESTIONS
Between January and June 1996, I conducted a ‘critical ethnographic research project’ at Marie-Victorin (M. V.), a small Franco-Ontarian intermediate and high school (grades 7-13). M.V. has a school population of approximately 389 students from a different ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. Although it is a French-language school, the language spoken by students in the school corridors and hallways is predominately English; Arabic, Somali, and Farsi are also spoken at other times. The school has 27 teachers, all of whom are white. The school archives show that up until the beginning of the 1990s, students were also almost all white, except for a few students of African (read ‘Blacks’) and Middle Eastern descent.
For a period of over six months, I attended classes at M.V., talked to students, and observed curricular and extra-curricular activities two or three times per week. Because of previous involvement in another project in the same school for almost two years, at the time of this research I was well acquainted with M.V. and its population, especially its African students, with whom I was able to develop a good communicative relationship.
Being the only Black adult beside the Black counselor, and being a displaced subject, a refugee, and an African myself had given me a certain familiarity with the students’ experiences. I was able to connect with different age and gender groups through a range of activities, initially ‘hanging out’ with the students, and later playing basketball, volleyball and soccer with various groups. I was also approached by these students for both guidance and academic help. Because of my deep involvement in the student culture, at times my status as researcher was forgotten, and the line between the students and myself became blurred; clearly, there was a space of comfort, a safe space which allowed us to open up, speak and engage freely. This research was as much about the youths themselves and their narration of their experiences as it was about my own; in most cases, the language itself was unnecessary in order to understand the plight of the youths and their daily encounters, both within M.V. and outside its walls.
Significantly, at the time of this research, the percentage of the students at M.V. (or their parents) who were born outside Canada made up 70 percent of the entire school population. Continental Africans constituted the majority within that figure, and indeed within M.V.’s population in general, although their numbers did fluctuate slightly from year to year. However, with the exception of one temporary Black counselor, there was not one teacher or administrator of color at the school. Despite this, the school continues to emphasize the theme of unity within this multicultural and multi-ethnoracial population. The slogan which the school advertises, for instance, is "Unité dans la diversité" [Unity in diversity]. This discourse of unity, however, remains at the level of abstraction and it has little material bearing on the students’ lives; it is the Frenchness of the school that seems to be the capital of its promotion. That is, the French language, especially in Canada, represents an extremely important ‘symbolic capital’ which, according to Bourdieu (1991), can be the key for accessing ‘material capitals’ -- jobs, business, etc. Given their postcolonial educational history, African youths, in the majority, do in fact come to Franco-Ontarian schools already possessing a highly valued symbolic capital: le français parisien.
My research subjects encompass these youths and part of a growing continental francophone African population in Franco-Ontarian schools to which I refer as Black Franco-Ontarians. Their number started to exponentially grow since the beginning of the 1990s. Their histories vary, first, in their length of sojourn in Canada which extends from one or two to 5 or 6 years; secondly, their legal status (some are immigrants, but the majority are refugees) and, thirdly, their gender, class, age, linguistic, and national background. They come from places as diverse as Djibouti, Somalia, Senegal, Republic of Congo (previously Zaïre), South Africa, Gabon, and Togo. With no exception, all of the African students in M.V. are at least trilingual: English, French, and mother tongue or first language, with various (postcolonial) histories of language learning and degrees of fluency in each language.
On my return to M.V. in January of 1996 to conduct my research, I spent the first month undirectedly talking to and hanging out with different gender and age groups of African youths; this was of course with their permission as well as their parents’ and the school administration’s. During this month, I attended classes, played basketball, volleyball, and indoor soccer, and generally hung out with the students. After having spent a month getting to know the students in this way, I then chose 16 students for extensive ethnographic observation: 10 boys and 6 girls. I followed them in and outside classroom and in and outside the school. I interviewed all 16. Of the 10 boys, six were Somali speakers (from Somalia and Djibouti), one Ethiopian, two Senegalese, and one from Togo. Their ages ranged from 16-20. The 6 girls, on the other hand, were all Somali speakers (also from Somalia and Djibouti), aged from 14 to 18 years.
I conducted individual interviews as well as two focus-group interviews, one with the boys and one with the girls. They were all conducted in the school grounds, with the exception of the boys’ focus group interview which took place in one of the students’ residence. Students were given the option to conduct the interviews in the language of their choice: some were in English, but the majority were in French. I translated these into English. The only Black counselor and the former Black teacher were also interviewed. The interviews were closely transcribed and analyzed. School documents and archives were consulted and I occasionally videotaped cultural and sport activities; on two occasions, tape recorders were given to students to capture those ‘natural’ interactions among themselves (Rampton, 1995).
RESEARCH CONTENTIONS
My central working contention is that, once in North America, continental African youths enter a social imaginary, a discursive space, a representation where they are ‘already’ constructed, imagined, positioned, and thus are to be treated by the hegemonic discourses and dominant groups, respectively, as ‘Blacks.’ Here, I am addressing the white (racist) everyday communicative state of mind: “Oh, they all look like Blacks to me!”. It is a positionality offered to continental African youths through net-like praxis in exceedingly complex and mostly subconscious ways, a positionality which does not, and is unwilling to, acknowledge students' ethnic, language, national, and cultural identity difference. This net-like praxis is brilliantly summed up when Fanon writes about himself as a Black Antillais coming to the metropolis of Paris. "I am given no chance", he posits, "I am overdetermined from without... And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality" (1967, p. 116; my italics).
In other words, continental African youths find themselves in a racially conscious society which, wittingly or unwittingly and through fused social mechanisms such as racisms and representations, asks them to racially fit somewhere. To fit somewhere signifies ‘choosing’ or becoming aware of one’s own being, which is partially reflected in one’s language practice. Choosing is a question of agency; that is, by virtue of being a subject, one possesses a room to maneuver one’s own desires and choices. My point put otherwise is that although a social subject may count her/his desires and choices as hers/his, these choices are disciplined (Foucault, 1979) by the social conditions under which the subject lives. For example, to be Black in a racially conscious society like the Euro-Canadian and American society signifies one is expected to be Black, act Black and so be the Other, the marginalized (Hall, 1991; hooks, 1992). Under such disciplinary social conditions, as I will show, continental African youths express their moments of identification in relation to African Americans and African American cultures and languages. They are thus to become ‘Blacks’. Taking up rap/hip hop and speaking BSE is by no means a coincidence. On the contrary, these are articulations of the youths’ desire to belong to a location, politics, memory, history, and hence representation.
Being is being distinguished here from becoming. The former is an accumulative memory, an experience, and an apprehension upon which one interacts with the world around her/him, whereas the latter is the process of building this apprehension, this memory. For example, as a continental, I was not ‘Black’ in Africa, though I had other adjectives that used to bricolage my identity, such as tall, Sudanese, basketball player, etc. However, as a refugee in North America, my perception of self was altered in direct response to the social processes of racism and the historical representation of blackness whereby the antecedent signifiers became secondary to my blackness, and I retranslated my self: I became Black.
BECOMING TRI/MULTILINGUAL: SITES/SIDES OF ESL LEARNING
For most francophone African youths, coming to a Canadian English speaking metropolis, such as Vancouver or Winnipeg, is a decision taken by their parents who themselves are bound by circumstances of having relatives in that city. I inquired why an English speaking city might be considered as a place of sojourn as opposed to Quebec which is a French speaking province:
Hassan : First of all, we had relatives who were here. Yes, secondly, because there is French and English. It is more the relative question because you know when you go to a new country, there is a tendency to go towards the people you know. Because you don’t want to adventure in the unknown; and you can’t have, you also want to get help, all the help possible to succeed better.
In this context where English is the medium of everyday interaction, African youths are compelled or expected to speak (in) English if they are to be understood, if they are to be able to perform simple daily functions like negotiating public transport and buying groceries. In the following excerpt, Aziza renarrates (in French) and remembers her early days when her English speech competence was limited:
If I want to go to the boutique, I have to speak to the guy (Monsieur) in English because he doesn’t speak French. If I go to the shop to buy clothes, I have to speak in English, you see. It is something that you have to; you have to force yourself. In the early days, I used to go with my sister because my sister spoke English. So, I always took her with me. Then, I had to go by myself because she was not always going to be by my side. I had to speak, I had to learn to speak English so I can help myself and I can you know, I can deal with anything you see. So, in other words, you are obliged, it is something you can’t escape from. Because the society is anglophone, the country is anglophone, the services are in English, you see, that’s why.
For the youths, the ‘inescapability’ of interacting in English translates into a will to rapidly learn English. Popular culture, especially television, friendship, and peer interactive pressure are three mechanisms that hasten the speed of learning. The peer pressure was felt more-so in African students’ early days in the school when they were denigrated for not speaking English. Franco-Ontarian students, Heller (1994, 1992) explains, use English in their everyday interaction, especially outside classrooms. This means that if African students want to participate in school public spaces as well as in-and-outside classroom activities, they are left with no option but to learn English. Once it is learned, English becomes as much a medium of communication as it is a source of pride:
Asma : If you don’t speak English, like in my grade 7, "Oh, she doesn’t speak! Oh, we are sorry, you can explain to her, she doesn’t understand English la petite . Can you?" They think that we are really stupid, that we are retarded (sic), that we don’t understand the language. Now I know English, I speak it all the time. I show them that I understand English (laughs), I show them that I do English. Oh, I got it, it gives me great pleasure.
Asma is addressing, first, the condescending teacher’s manner of speech when the latter realized that Asma did not speak English. Undoubtedly, this leads to more pressure on Asma and African students in general to learn English. Secondly, her narrative addresses the threshold desire of a teenager who wants to fully participate in dominant markets and public spaces. This full participation was obstructed by an inability to speak English which is the way to deploy and organize friendships. Yet, the deployment of friendship, and even learning English, is influenced by the popular imaginary, popular representation, popular culture: television. I asked students in all of the interviews "Où est-ce que vous avez appris votre anglais?" [From where did you learn your English?]. "Télévision," they unanimously responded. However, within this ‘télévision,’ there is a particular representation that seems to interpellate (Althusseur, 1971) African youths’ identity and identification: Black popular culture. Since African youths have a very limited number of African American friends and have limited daily contact with them, they access Black cultural identities and Black linguistic practice in and through Black popular culture, especially rap music video-clips, television programs and Black cinematic representations. Responding to my query about the last movies she saw, Najat cited (in English):
Najat: I don’t know, I saw Waiting to Exhale and I saw what else I saw, I saw Swimmer, and I saw Jumanji; so wicked, all the movies. I went to Waiting to Exhale wid my boyfriend and I was like ‘men are rude’ (laughs).
Awad: Oh believe me I know I know.
Najat: And den he [her boyfriend] was like ‘no women are rude’. I was like we’re like fighting you know and joking around. I was like and de whole time like (laughs), and den when de woman burns the car, I was like "go girl!". You know and all the women are like "go girl!" you know? And den de men like khhh. I’m like "I’m gonna go get me a pop corn" (laughs).
Najat’s example is illustrative because, besides showing the influence of Black English in using ‘de,’ ‘den,’ ‘dat,’ and ‘wicked’ as opposed to, respectively, ‘the,’ ‘then,’ ‘that,’ and ‘really really good,’ it articulates the notion that youths have agency and social subjectivities which they bring to the reading of the text. These subjectivities, importantly, are embedded in history, culture, and memory. Two performed subjectivities that influence Najat’s reading of Waiting to Exhale are, precisely, her race and gender identities. Respectively, it is with blackness, embodied in a female body, that Najat identified; it is the Black/woman in burning her husband’s car and clothes that interpellates Najat.
In a different context, another example that demonstrates the impact of Black popular culture on African students’ lives and identities is a moment videotaped just before the focus-group interview with the boys. Picture this: Electric Circus, a local T.V. music and dance program that plays mostly Black music (rap/hip hop, reggae, soul and R&B) had just started. Silence!, one boy requested in French. Attentively, the boys started to listen to the music and watch the different fashions that the youngsters on T.V. were putting on. Codeswitched conversations in French, English, and Somali occurred after the show. They were largely observations on what was the best music, the best dance, and the ‘cutest girl.’ Rap/hip hop dress were obviously the top two of ‘the best’ music and dress.
The moments of identification in the above examples are significant in that they point to the process of identity formation which is implicated in turn in the linguistic norm to be learned. The Western hegemonic representations of blackness, Hall (1990) shows, are negative and tend to work alongside historical and subconscious memories which facilitate their interpretations by members of the dominant groups. Once African youths encounter these negative representations, they look for Black cultural and representational forms as sites for positive identity formation and identification (Kelly, 1998). It is rather crucial to see identification working over a period of time and at the subconscious level. Omer in the following excerpt from an individual interview addresses the myriad ways in which African youths are influenced by ‘Black’ representations.
Black Canadian youths are influenced by the Afro-Americans. You watch for hours, you listen to Black music, you watch Black comedy, Mr. T., the Rap City, there you will see singers who dress in particular ways. You see, so.
Again, in my focus group interview with the boys, Mukhi explored the contention of identification by arguing that:
We identify ourselves more with the Blacks of America. But, this is normal, this is genetic. We can’t, since we live in Canada, we can’t identify ourselves with Whites or country music you know (laughs). We are going to identify ourselves on the contrary with people of our color, who have our life style you know.
Mukhi evokes biology and genetic connection as a way of relating to Black America, and his identification with it is clearly stated. For Mukhi and all the students I spoke to, this is certainly connected to their inability to relate to dominant groups, the public spaces they occupy, and their cultural forms and norms. Alternatively, Black popular culture emerges as a site not only for identification, but also as a space for language learning. In the following section, I point to how rap is an influential site for language learning. However, since rap linguistic performance was more prevalent in the boys’ narratives than in the girls’, I will raise the question of gender in the process of identification and learning.
‘A’AIT [aayet], Q7 IN THE HOUSE!’
On many occasions, the boys performed - that is, linguistic as well as bodily performance - typical gangster rap language and style, including name calling. What follows are just two of the many occasions where students articulated their identification with Black America through citation of rap linguistic styles. These examples occurred in English during my focus-group interview with the boys:
1) Sam: One two, one two, mic check. A’ait, a’ait, a’ait.
Juma: This is the rapper, you know wha ‘m meaning? You know wha ‘m saying?
Sam: Mic mic mic; mic check. A’ait you wonna test it? Ah, I’ve the microphone you know; a’ait.
2) Sam: (laughs) I don’t rap man, c’mon give me a break. (laughs) Yo! A’ait a’ait you know, we just about to finish de tape and all dat. Respect to my main man [Sam was pointing towards me]. So, you know, you know wha ‘m mean, ‘m just represen’in Q7. One love to Q7 you know wha ‘m mean and all my friends back to Q7... Stop the tapin boy!
Jamal : Kim Juma, live! Put the lights on. Wordap. [Students are talking in Somali.] Peace out, wardap, where de book. Jamal ‘am outa here.
Shapir : Yo, this is Shapir. I am trying to say peace to all my Niggers, all my bitches from a background that everybody in the house. So, yo, chill out and this is how we gonna kick it. Bye and with that pie. All right, peace yo.
Sam: A’ait this is Sam represen’in AQA [...] where it’s born, represen’in you know wha ‘m mean? I wonna say whassup to all my Niggers, you know, peace and one love. You know wha ‘m mean, Q7 represen’in for ever. Peace! [Rap music.]
Jamal [as a DJ]: Crank it man, coming up [rap music].
Of interest in these excerpts is the use of Black stylized English, particularly the language of rap: ‘Respect for my main man,’ ‘represen’in Q7,’ ‘kick the free style,’ ‘peace out, wardap,’ ‘‘am outa here,’ ‘I am trying to say peace to all my Niggers, all my bitches,’ ‘so, yo chill out,’ ‘and this is how we gonna kick it,’ ‘peace and one love,’ ‘I wonna say whassup to all my Niggers’. On the other hand, when Shapir offers ‘peace to all’ his ‘Niggers,’ all his ‘bitches,’ he is firstly re-appropriating the word Nigger as an appellation which is common in rap/hip hop culture. That is, although no consensus, it is common that a friend, especially young people, calls another Black friend ‘Nigger,’ without its heavy traditional use as a racist slur. Secondly, however, Shapir is using the sexist language that might exist in rap (Rose, 1991). These forms of sexism have been challenged by female rappers like Queen Latifa and Salt ‘n Pepper. They were also critiqued by fellow female and male students. For example, in my interview with the girls, Samira, a 16 year old girl from Djibouti, expressed her dismay at the sexist language found in some rap circles. She cited (in French): "OK, hip hop, yes I know that everyone likes hip hop. They dress in a certain way, no? The songs go well. But, they are really really, they have expressions like ‘fuck’, ‘bitches’ etc. Sorry, but there is representation." Here, Samira is addressing the larger societal impact which these expressions might have on how the Black female body is related to and perceived, which in turn influences how it is represented in, but also outside, rap/hip hop culture. Hassan as well expressed his disapproval of this abused/abusive language: "occasionally, rap has an inappropriate language for the life in which we live, a world of violence and all that."
In rap style, one starts his/her performance by ‘checking the mic’: ‘One two, one two, check mic check.’ Then, the rapper either cites an already composed lyric or otherwise ‘kicks a free style.’ Spontaneity is what rap is all about. In general, the rapper begins the public performance by introducing her/himself with her/his true or made-up name - ‘yo this is Shapir’ - and thanks her/his ‘main man,’ her/his best friend, who often introduces her/him to the public. Specific to gangster rap, one does not only represent oneself, but a web of geo-physical and metaphorical spaces and collectivities which are demarcated by people and territorial spaces: ‘represen’in Q7,’ ‘a’ait, this is Sam represen’in AQA.’ At the end of the performance when the citation or the free style is completed, again one thanks her/his ‘main man’ and ‘gives peace out’ or ‘shad out’ (shout out) to his/her people. The boys are clearly influenced by rap lyrics, syntax and morphology (in their broader semiological sense) and, in particular, gangster rap. In learning ESL in general and BSE in particular through music, Jamal used significant strategies. These include listening, reading and repeating. For example, Jamal was listening to the tunes/lyrics while simultaneously reading and following the written text. Acting as a DJ, he then repeated with the performer not only words and expressions, but also accents.
The girls, on the other hand, had an ambivalent relationship to rap, depending on their age, although they used the same strategies as Jamal in learning English through music. For example, during the picnic organized by a mixed group of males and females to which I was invited, females were listening to the musical tunes and at the same time following the written text and reciting it (complete with accents) along with the singer. The girls’ choice of music (including Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton) differed in that it was softer, and was concerned mostly with romantic themes.
For the most part, the older females (16 to 18 years old) tended to be more eclectic in how they related to hip hop and rap. Their eclecticism was evident in how they dressed and in what language they learned. Their dress was either elegant middle class, or partially hip hop, or traditional; and their learned language was what M. Nourbese Philip (1991) called in her novel Harriet’s Daughter "plain Canadian English." The younger females (12-14 years), on the other hand, were more similar to the boys. They dressed hip hop style and performed the BSE.
In spite of their ambivalent relation vis-à-vis rap and hip hop, I was able to detect the following three features of Black English (BE) in the girls’ speech, across age: 1) the absence of the auxiliary "be," 2) BE negative concord, and 3) the distributive "be" (for BE features, see Labov, 1972; Goldstein, 1987). The first feature, identified on nineteen occasions, is when a girl cites "they so cool," "I just laughing" as opposed to ‘they are so cool,’ ‘I am just laughing.’ I noticed the second feature on four occasions. This is when a female contends "... all he [the teacher] cares about is his daughter you know. If somebody just dies or if I decide to shoot somebody you know, he is not doing nothing" (italics added). This female would have been corrected in standard English for having a double negative. The third feature which I also observed on four occasions is when a female utters "I be saying dis dat you know?" or "He be like ‘Oh, elle va être bien’ ..." These BE markers are expressions of the influence of Black talk in the females’ speech and simultaneously performances of their identity location and desire, which they undoubtedly ally with blackness.
PERFORMING ACTS OF DESIRE
Rap and hip hop have been identified as influential sites in African students’ processes of becoming Black, which in turn impacts on what they learned and how. Their narratives, moreover, show that youths are quite cognizant of their identification with blackness and the impact of race on their choices. In my focus-group interview with the boys, by way of illustration, I had this conversation in English with Sam and Mukhi, in which Mukhi reflected on the impact of rap (as just one among so many other Black popular cultural forms) on his life and other lives around him:
Awad: But do you listen to rap for example? I noticed that there are a number of students who listen to rap eh? Is ...
Sam: It is not just us who listen to rap, everybody listens to rap. It is new.
Awad: But do you think that that influences how you speak, how ...
Mukhi: How we dress, how we speak, how we behave [bold added].
These linguistic behavioral patterns and dress codes that Mukhi is addressing are accessed and learned by African youths through Black popular culture. They do not, as I already noted, ask for mastery and fluency. Indeed, they are performative acts of desire and identification. As Amani contended in my focus-group interview with the girls:
We have to wonder why we try to really follow the model of the Americans who are Blacks? Because when you search for yourself, search for identification, you search for someone who reflects you, with whom you have something in common [italics added].
Again, in my individual interview with Hassan, he lends support to Amani by arguing that:
Hassan: Yes yes, African students are influenced by rap and hip hop because they want to, yes they are influenced probably a bit more because it is the desire to belong may be.
Awad: Belong to what?
Hassan: To a group, belong to a society, to have a model/fashion [un model]; you know, the desire to mark oneself, the desire to make, how do I say it? To be part of a rap society, you see. It is like getting into rock and roll or heavy metal.
Hence, one invests in where one sees oneself mirrored. Such an investment includes linguistic as well as cultural behavioral patterns. Hassan, in an individual interview, would find it an unrealistic expectation to see blackness allied with Rock and Roll or Heavy Metal as they are socially constructed as ‘white’ musics. On the other hand, he would emphatically argue that African youths would have every reason to invest in basketball - constructed as ‘Black’ sport - and not hockey, for example.
BY WAY OF CONCLUDING: IDENTITY, DISCIPLINE, AND PEDAGOGY
Analogously, African youths’ desire to invest (Peirce, 1997), particularly the boys, in basketball is no different from their desire to learn Black English as a Second Language. Learning is hence neither aimless nor neutral nor is it without the politics of identity. As I have shown, to learn a second language can have a marginalized linguistic norm as a target, depending on who is learning what, why and how. This raises the questions: Why would youths choose the margin as a target? What is their investment and politics in doing so? And what role, if any, do race, gender (sexuality) and class social differences play in their choices? In other words, if youths do come to our classrooms as embodied subjectivities, which are embedded in history and memory (Dei, 1996), should we as pedagogues not couple their word with their world (Freire, 1970/1993)?
Clearly, this is an interdisciplinary paper. It may have raised more questions than it has satisfyingly answered them. However, it is meant to ask new questions that link identity, pedagogy, politics, investment, desire and the process of ESL learning. It borrows greatly from cultural studies. In it, I discussed how a group of continental African youths were becoming Blacks, which meant learning BESL. Becoming Black, I have argued, was an identity signifier produced by and producing the very process of BESL. To become Black is to become an ethnographer who translates and looks around him/her in an effort to understand what it means to be Black in Canada, for example. In doing so, African youths were/are interpellated by Black popular cultural forms, rap and hip hop, as sites of identification. Gender however was/is as important as race in what was/is being chosen, translated, by whom, and how.
Choosing the ‘margin,’ it should be emphasized, is an investment act, an expression of desire, and simultaneously a deliberate counter hegemonic undertaking. Choosing especially rap cannot not be read as an act of resistance. Historically, rap is formed as a ‘voice’ to voicelessness and performed as a ‘prophetic language’ that addresses the silence/d/ness. It explores the hopes and the human, political, historical, and cultural experience of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy, 1993); and as Jamal argues (in French), "Black Americans created rap to express themselves; how do I say it? their ideas, their problems, [and] if we could integrate ourselves into it, it is because rappers speak about or they have the same problems we have." Such may include human degradation, police brutality, and everyday racisms (Essed, 1991; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992).
If learning, I conclude, is an identity engagement, a fulfillment of personal needs and desires (of being), an investment in what is yet to come, any proposed ESL pedagogy, research, or praxis that fails to culminate in these, will quite obviously not involve the youths. It is therefore bound to be unsuccessful, if not plainly damaging. Identity, as it is re-pre-configured here, governs what ESL learners acquire and how. What is linguistically learned is not, and should not be, dissociable from the political, the social, and the cultural. Hence, to learn is to invest into something (e.g., BESL); something which has a personal or a particular significance to who one is or what one has become. Since language is never neutral, learning it then can’t and shouldn’t be either. If this is so, then it is necessary that we as teachers, first, identify the different sites where our students invest their identities and desires and, second, develop curriculum materials that would engage our students’ raced, classed, gendered, sexualized, and abled identities.
In conclusion, therefore, I want to identify and propose rap/hip hop (and Black popular culture in general) as curriculum sites where learning can and does take place and where identities are invested. In the language of anti-racism education (Dei, 1996; hooks, 1994), this proposition is, on the one hand, a call to centralize and engage our marginalized subjects, their voices, and their ways of being and learning and, on the other, a revisit to this question: In the case of African youths, whose language and identity are we teaching/assuming in the classroom if we do not engage rap/hip hop? That is, whose knowledge is being valorized and legitimated and thus assumed to be worth of study and whose knowledge and identity are left in the corridors and the hallways of our schools? To identify rap/hip hop as curriculum sites in this context then is to legitimize otherwise ‘illegitimate’ forms of knowledge. As Bourdieu (1991) shows, wittingly or unwittingly, schools sanction certain identities and accept their linguistic norm by nothing more than assuming them to be the norm; we should be reminded that these identities are raced, classed, sexualized, and gendered.
However, since rap and hip hop are also historical and social productions, they are as much sites of critique as they are of hope. As we have seen, rap/hip hop are not immune to, for example, sexism (and homophobia, see also Rose, 1991). They can not, therefore, and should not be readily consumed; they are to be critically framed, studied, and engaged with. To be able to do so, however, teachers need to first be in tune with popular culture, since T.V., music, newspapers, etc. are increasingly the sources where our students learn their English and not the classroom. Second, in cases of infamiliarity with popular culture, I believe, teachers should not fear to engage the Freireian notion of dialecticism, where our students can become our teachers. In practical terms, this might mean planning activities where our students will share with us and the rest of the class what is rap and hip hop and what they represent to them.
On the other hand, rap/hip hop are also sites of hope and possibilities: A hope that all learners (from dominant groups or otherwise) can be introduced to, and be able to see, different possibilities and multiple ways of speaking, of being, and of learning. In the case of African students, in particular, rap/hip hop are sites of identification and investment. To introduce them in the classroom, in Paulo Freire’s words (1970/1993), is to hope to link their world, identities, and desires with their word. To put it more broadly, may be the time has come to put to rest that schizophrenic split which minority students live through between their identities and the school curriculum, and their identities and the classroom pedagogies, subjects and materials.
* The author would like to deeply thank Loreli Buenaventura for her comments and feedback; as well as the editor and the TESOL Quarterly anonymous reviewers. The author graduated from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and teaches presently at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, 145, Jean-Jacques Lussier St., P.O. Box 450, Stn. A. Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5 Canada; email: ibrahim@uottawa.ca. He is interested and teaches in the areas of Anti-racism, cultural studies, sociology of race and ethnicity, and sociology of language.
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