Creating space for marginalized vernacular speech can itself begin healing

Evidence

To recognize that we touch one an other in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language. To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular. When I need to say words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating our selves in language. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 349 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Caught in the discrepancy between second person interrogative (fugis) and the imperative (fugi), Ovid cannot allow her to be, even Echo, so that Narcissus, flying from her, could have made of the ethical structure of response a fulfilled antiphone. He reports her speech in the name of Narcissus: quot dixit, verba recepit (M, 150, line 384)—he receives back the words he says. The discrepancy is effaced in the discrepancy of translation. In English, Echo could have echoed “Fly from me” and remained echo. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1487 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Theory can function as a healing place for lived pain — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 132; Marginalized people reclaim themselves in language by turning the oppressor’s tongue against itself — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 349; Speech that merely returns another’s words can preserve its own subject-position — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1487 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Marginalized people reclaim themselves in language by turning the oppressor’s tongue against itself #corroborates (0.75) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 349
• Effective media must preserve roots in a real vernacular #expands (0.75)
• Speech that merely returns another’s words can preserve its own subject-position #corroborates (0.72) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1487