Deliberate grammatical rupture in slave spirituals encoded rebellion

Evidence

Enslaved black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language. They put together their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning of English language. Though it has become common in contemporary culture to talk about the messages of resistance that emerged in the music created by slaves, particularly spirituals, less is said about the grammatical construction of sentences in these songs. Often, the English used in the song reflected the broken, ruptured world of the slave. When the slaves sang “nobody knows de trouble I see— ” their use of the word “nobody” adds a richer meaning than if they had used the phrase “no one,” for it was the slave’s body that was the concrete site of suffering. And even as emancipated black people sang spirituals, they did not change the language, the sentence structure, of our ancestors. For in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance. Using English in a way that ruptured standard usage and meaning, so that white folks could often not understand black speech, made English into more than the oppressor’s language. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 342

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘nobody knows de trouble I see’ reading — ‘nobody’ pointing at the body as the site of suffering — is a delightful, shareable parse.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier hooks point about vernacular as living speech, and to linguistic arguments that creole/patois is full language, not broken English. — connects to: Marginalized people reclaim themselves in language by turning the oppressor’s tongue against itself — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 349; Religion and myth armed enslaved peoples for eventual impossible rebellion; Spirituals encoded practical escape instructions for enslaved people — , A Year of World Stories, 5139 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Spirituals encoded practical escape instructions for enslaved people #corroborates (0.80) — , A Year of World Stories, 5139
• Religion and myth armed enslaved peoples for eventual impossible rebellion #corroborates (0.75)
• Enslaved people’s spirituals encoded both existential questioning and hope for deliverance #complicates (0.75) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1145