I'm writing this at the end of a long day. But it isn't taxing at all. I feel relaxed, comfortable, soothed by the clatter of these keys.
A few days ago a friend's comment on inactive blogs (bloggers) got me thinking about my own reluctance to blog sometimes. Sometimes I hesitate to write when I feel too talkative, when my fingers are itching to tell. But isn't that the reason why I started doing this in the first place? Am I not writing / blogging because I like to write and talk? Absolutely!
Yeah, I know I "focus on the words and opinions of others," but I do so for the most part through my own opinion of their words. To be quite honest, I am a shameless exhibitionist. But I do so in this blogging realm of contrived privacy (or so I'd like to think). But the more comfortable I get, the more I reveal myself. A very dangerous thing for me to do, I realize. But the comfort I feel is so seductive.
I tell myself (and I do believe this to some extent) I'm doing this for a bigger reason than shameless exhibition. And to that end, or whatever end is revealed, I intend to write more often than I've been doing here.
Judging from your comments here, some of you who read me see the beauty of owning a language in which you feel comfortable. I think this bit taken from the Rickfords' Spoken Soul aptly conveys the general consensus of how you (and I) feel about a person or group's ability to identify and celebrate tongue and soul through language.
Most African Americans--including millions who, like [Claude] Brown and [James] Baldwin, are fluent speakers of Standard English--still invoke Spoken Soul as we have for hundreds of years, to laugh or cry, to preach and praise, to shuck and jive, to sing, to rap, to shout, to style, to express our individual personas and our ethnic identities ("'spress yo'self!" as James Brown put it), to confide in and commiserate with friends, to chastise, to cuss, to act, to act the fool, to get by and get over, to pass secrets, to make jokes, to mock and mimic, to tell stories, to reflect and philosophize, to create authentic characters and voices in novels, poems, and plays, to survive in the streets, to relax at home and recreate in playgrounds, to render our deepest emotions and embody our vital core.
I feel at home in my language--this brash, sexy combination of Standard-American-slang-Guyanese-creolese in which I speak and write. I own it. I am comfortable in it. I have no problem showing it off.
