Reviewed by Jess deCourcy Hinds
8.13.07

Rotten English is the freshest anthology you’ll pluck off the shelves this summer. There’s simply no other book like it. A collection of two centuries of world literature, each page snaps with flavor and color. So why is it considered “rotten”? Because this vernacular writing breaks grammatical rules and alters spelling to capture the nuances of pronunciation. Here, you’ll find Langston Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Amy Tan, and many lesser-known but equally compelling voices that demonstrate the boldness of vernacular writing—artistically and politically.

“If Black English Isn’t Language, What Is?”, the title of a James Baldwin essay in this collection, sums up the message of this book. Just substitute the word “black” with other nationalities included here. In other words, if these Pakistani, Chinese, Chicano, New Zealander, and Jamaican vernacular Englishes aren’t worthy, then what is?

Sapphire’s Push and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, both of which Dohra Ahmad excerpts here, represent two examples of critically acclaimed, popular novels that use vernacular. As Ahmad writes, “What would have once been “pejoratively termed ‘dialect literature’ has recently and decisively come into its own.” A professor of post-colonial literature at St. John’s University in New York, Ahmad helps us see the landscape of vernacular writing for its power and purpose. For example, she points out that half of the Man Booker Prize-winning novels over the past twelve years were written in non-standard English.

Still, readers are deeply divided about literature in nonstandard English. In the children’s literature community, the “Junie B. Jones” series, featuring a kindergartener protagonist who makes endearing grammar errors (“I runned”), has been censored by educators, according to The New York Times. Standard English provides access to power in society; nonstandard English does not. That’s why vernacular writing can be unsettling to some. For others, vernacular literature is as transporting as reading in a foreign language.

If folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (two of whose stories Ahmad reprints) didn’t write “dem” for “them” and “Ah” for “I,” would we be able to hear this Southern African-American speech? Can we say we’ve really experienced a culture if we haven’t absorbed the texture and rhythm of its language?

Divided into four sections, this anthology includes poetry, short fiction, novel excerpts and essays. The most enjoyable of these for me was the poetry, which was almost effortless reading because I could pick up on emotion through rhythm even when the language was opaque. Vernacular poets, Ahmad writes, have always drawn from music, whether jazz in the case of Sonia Sanchez, or calypso in Barbadian poet Kaumau Braithwaite. In his “Wings of a Dove” (1967) Braithwaite chants about tourism, his tone soft at the beginning, but coiling with hostility as he goes on:

So beat dem drums
dem, spread

dem wings dem
watch dem fly

dem, soar dem
high dem…

full o’ silk dem
full o’ food dem…

full o’ flash dem
full o’ cash dem..

So beat dem burn
dem, learn

dem that dem
got nothin’….

Braithwaite’s use of vernacular, as he explains in this volume’s critical essay section, is “a howl, a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind or a wave.” This description accurately describes the force of the language in almost all of these pages.

The editor’s inclusion of Maori author Patricia Grace was nothing short of thrilling. The Maori may be on our cultural radar screen thanks to the indie film Whale Rider, based on Witi Ihimaera’s novel, but few people I know celebrate the literature of this people. And how many of us are aware of novelist John Kasaipwalova and literature from the Kiriwana Island of the Trobriand Island Group of Papua, New Guinea? When I described this anthology to my mother, she questioned whether some of the vernaculars included here weren’t a tad bit…obscure. Why devote your precious reading time—ten minutes on the subway, five minutes before sleep—to deciphering pidgin and Hiri Motu?

Ahmad offers encouragement: “No matter how difficult a new writer initially appears, decoding becomes much easier after a few pages.” She also presents a glossary. “If…we enter as fully as possible into a new idiom, we quickly gain fluency.” Gaining this fluency can be deeply gratifying. Flipping through this anthology, you can travel almost seamlessly from Jamaican English (Louise Bennett, Claude McKay) to Southern and African-American (Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston) to Dominican- and Chicano-American and “Spanglish” (Junot Diaz, Gloria Anzaldua) to Irish (Roddy Doyle) to tough-guy Brooklyn (Thomas Wolfe) to Nigerian (Uzodinma Tweala, Chinua Achebe) to Pakistani-Londoner (Gautam Malkani). When you finish, you feel like a world traveler.

If you’re still uncertain, Scottish poet Mary McCabe makes an excellent case for vernacular lit in “Comin Back Over the Border” (2004). In this brief poem, McCabe asserts that the texture of Scottish speech is as magical as its landscape. What makes Scotland Scotland isn’t just the “cleuths an corries” (rocky gorges and mountain hollows), but the sound of the “‘R’ rolling richly roon.”

If you’re a glutton for foreign accents, you’ll find this literary journey sweet and rich. The book is bound to spoil you. Rotten.

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Jess deCourcy Hinds, SSN’s Book Review Editor has recently written for Teachers & Writers, Newsweek and New York Press.