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I now know what it is like to live in a hoodie https://www.instagram.com/p/B-LO3pQAtlJFP5SZ8UHyQH_I7mgbCE5DCnC40E0/?igshid=1l4oi01rao07t

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Five Short Stories by Trans Women of Color

“The Girls and the Apple.” Jasmine Kabale Moore. The Coalition

“Waiting Room,” Jamie Berrout

Love and Comets, Gillian Ybabez

Coconut, Gabrielle Bellot. Small Axe Journal

Bonus: Watch Ryka Aoki read her story “To the New World”

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Zahrah the Windseeker (2008) by Nnedi Okorafor

“In the Ooni Kingdom, children born dada—with vines growing in their hair—are rumored to have special powers. Zahrah Tsami doesn’t know anything about that. She feels normal. Others think she’s different—they fear her. Only Dari, her best friend, isn’t afraid of her.

But then something begins to happen—something that definitely marks Zahrah as different—and the only person she can tell is Dari. He pushes her to investigate, edging them both closer and closer to danger. Until Dari’s life is on the line. Only Zahrah can save him, but to do so she’ll have to face her worst fears alone, including the very thing that makes her different. “

Get it now here

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Linguistic racism and antiblackness, internalized or otherwise, always rear its head in conversations surrounding the language spoken in the Caribbean. Namely, Jamaica.

Patois has its own grammatical structure which is separate from English and is accompanied by its own lexicon (which yes, does include English loanwords.. we were colonized and enslaved for a few hundred years so that happens).

Patois is not to be confused with a Jamaican person with an audible accent speaking English.

The sheer disrespect people give it because it’s a language born from colonization is ridiculous at best, and these same people are the ones who claim to love vacationing in our country and consuming our arts.

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Jamaican Patois contains many loanwords, most of which are African in origin, primarily from Twi.

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To reiterate:

Patois is not to be confused with a Jamaican person with an audible accent speaking English.

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Let’s look at some hard examples.

Examples from African languages include /se/ meaning that (in the sense of “he told me that…” = /im tel mi se/), taken from Ashanti Twi, and Duppy meaning ghost, taken from the Twi word dupon (‘cotton tree root’), because of the African belief of malicious spirits originating in the root of trees (in Jamaica and Ghana, particularly the cotton tree known in both places as “Odom”).

Let’s keep it going.

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The pronoun /unu or unnu/, used for the plural form of you, is taken from the Igbo language.

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Let’s look at some real world examples of linguistic discrimination and trivialization of culture and denial of right to call a language what it is: a language.

Rihanna, a Bajan artist, released a song entitled “work”. On the track, she used quite a bit of Jamaican patois in the song, which was a dancehall/pop fusion.

People went bananas. The first thing to happen was the demotion of the language to “gibberish”.

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Now, I want to take a step back here and actually rewind about 20 or so years.

Dancehall, a Jamaican music genre, has been in the international eye in a major way since the 90s, with artists like Shabba Ranks and Beenie Man holding the culture torch.

We’ve been scrutinized as a people for our language that exists in our music since then (and of course before that as well, but we won’t go into that for now).

From jokes about gibberish in movies and television (In Living Color did a skit on Shabba Ranks, mocking patois and Shabba’s prominent Black features. Thus, reducing a key bearer of popular Jamaican culture to an ugly (read: Black with Black features) gibberish spouting comedy crutch), we’ve been perceived as a caricature for so long, that blatant disrespect of our culture seems trivial.

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Here’s the video for “Mr. Loverman” by Shabba Ranks: (xxx)

Here’s the parody video by the cast of In Living Color: (xxx)

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So here we are in present day. We’ve watched dancehall in the 90s and early 2000s get “othered” in the American and European eye, and we’ve seen the caricaturization of Caribbean (in this case, Jamaican) culture so much that we are desensitized.

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In comes Rihanna and her dancehall hit of 2016.

The language is demoted.

It went from “broken English” (which is problematic in and of itself, as the use of the term has been used to point to English being a default language worthy of respect and humanization for most of its speakers) to “gibberish” in a matter of seconds, with memes to match.

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My language isn’t a broken dialect of your default language.

My language is an act of rebellion and is a middle finger to colonization and antiblack violence.

I’m proud of it and how my language and my people have influenced the world around us. Be more critical, because I watch a lot of you take part in this sort of behavior and it’s a shame.

kiddsawsomnes

ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK‼️

Unnu ah guh put soom bloodclat respec pon mi language.💯💯

moonisneveralone

There is….Twi in Patois?

That makes so much sense

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Many of us were stolen from modern day Ghana.

My grandmother is of a group of people called the Maroons. They fought for our liberation in Jamaica and even fought in other countries like neighboring Haiti.

My grandma, like many Maroons, speaks a language called Kromanti that is spoken among many elders on one of the settlements called Moore Town in Jamaica.

For some Ghanaian people, Kromanti and Twi are mutually intelligible, meaning they can understand us!

Here’s a video of an elder speaking and breaking down Kromanti

augustdementhe

THANK YOU.

My family is amazing.

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You’re welcome! As for your tags, you can learn your mother tongue through laughter!

Here’s some Jamaican vines to laugh at and learn with! This guy in the videos reminds me of my mom lol

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We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel (2016)

“The Freeman family–Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie–have been invited to the Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected for the experiment because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family.

Isolated in their new, nearly all-white community not just by their race but by their strange living situation, the Freemans come undone. And when Charlotte discovers the truth about the Institute’s history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past begin to invade the present.

The power of this novel resides in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s undeniable storytelling talents. What appears to be a story of mothers and daughters, of sisterhood put to the test, of adolescent love and grown-up misconduct, and of history’s long reach, becomes a provocative and compelling exploration of America’s failure to find a language to talk about race.“

By Kaitlyn Greenidge

Get it now here

Kaitlyn Greenidge received her MFA from Hunter College. Greenidge was the recipient of a Hertog Fellowship and the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize. She was a Bread Loaf scholar, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace artist-in-residence, and a Johnson State College visiting emerging writer.

Her work has appeared in the Believer, the Feminist Wire, At Length, Fortnight Journal, Green Mountains Review, Afrobeat Journal, the Tottenville Review, and American Short Fiction. Originally from Boston, she now lives in Brooklyn.

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