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Article Excerpt
Words don't go there: this implies a difference between
words and sounds [...] an absence of inflection; a loss of mobility, slippage, bend; a missing accent or affect; the impossibility of a slur or crack and the excess-- rather than loss--of meaning they imply. --Fred Moten, "Sound in Florescence"
In "Sound in Florescence," Fred Moten juxtaposes the sounds of music with the inability of words to convey the same meanings as melody: "Words don't go there" (213). But what of speech, the sounding of words? Dependent as it is on words, speech may also not go "there," but the "inflection," "accent," and "affect" that Moten notes as missing in words are reinfused in speech, thereby pushing speech into the middle ground between words and sounds. Regional and national accents, in particular, can convey meanings unrelated to the words articulated in speech. Notwithstanding the ways in which such accents may affect pronunciation and consequently obstruct communication, the personal and communal stereotypes attached to accents create an "excess" of communication and meaning, meaning that is often uncontrollable (but perhaps manipulable) by the communicant.
This excess of meaning is most noticeable, as accents are most noticeable, when the speaker is displaced, whether as immigrant or as visitor to a new location. My concern here is with the extent to which this excess inherent in accents aids communication or creates community while simultaneously obstructing communication and communal access. Of particular interest is the dissonance between the words and the sounding of them. Can an accent be incompatible with the words it sounds? To examine this difficult node of accent and meanings, I turn to performance poetry, and to one performance poet in particular: Staceyann Chin, a Jamaican lesbian who has made her home and her name in the United States. In keeping with this special issue on sound, I focus mainly on Chin's performance, although I do include some of her written work. I begin by introducing Chin's work and its reception, situating my concern with sound and community within the various facets of her identity. In the section that follows, I offer a method of evaluating the effects of accents, specifically as they pertain to Caribbean immigrants. Finally, I examine Chin's performances, public appearances, and writings in conjunction with her sexual politics. Due to the popular disconnect between "Jamaican" and "lesbian," Chin's difficulty in claiming both identities in performance and print offers the opportunity to focus on not only the conflicts between the oral and the written but also the less explored politics attendant upon accents.
In describing Staceyann Chin as a performance poet, I am placing undue stress on both "performance" and "poet." She is perhaps most well known as one of the original cast members of the Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, which won a Tony award in 2003. But while the bulk of Chin's activity and popularity springs from her performance of her poetry in varied locations across the globe, she is also a published writer, with poetry and essays appearing in journals, popular magazines, and major newspapers in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. She has published four chapbooks of poetry--Wildcat Woman, Stories Surrounding My Coming, Catalogue the Insanity, and The Mad Hatter: Volumes I and II--and contributed poetry to several anthologies. Her forthcoming memoir, to be published by Scribner, will be her first full-length book of prose. On the performance end, her three one-woman, off-Broadway shows, which incorporate versions of her poetry into dramatic monologues, were well received by New York audiences and critics. She was the subject of a 2001 Danish documentary, simply titled Staceyann Chin, and has also co-hosted AfterEllen.corn's She Said What? and BET J's My Two Cents. Arguably, her most notable on-screen appearance was her segment on The Oprah Winfrey Show's "Gay Around the World" program in the fall of 2007, wherein she discussed the consequences of living as an out lesbian in her homeland of Jamaica. (1)
For Chin, migration to the United States in 1997 meant the liberty to live and love publicly. This freedom seemed to reach new heights in 2006, when she performed at the Gay Games' opening ceremonies in Chicago. Although she mentioned Jamaica only briefly during this performance, her Caribbean identity was not silenced. This identity always permeates her performance via her unmistakably Jamaican accent. But while she told the audience at the opening ceremonies that "all oppression is connected," the difficulty Chin faces in maintaining a connection between her ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race was evident even in this model safe space. The "we" of her "speech/poem/rant" (S. Chin, "Staceyann's Speech") alternately embraces and excludes members of her audience based on race, gender, and class, reminding them that one freedom often conflicts with another. In her work, Chin struggles to hold these realities together; she struggles to be Black, Lesbian, Caribbean without the gaps that hyphenated identities necessarily involve. As she tells her internet audience in a blog describing the negative reception she received at Central State University, Ohio, in October 2006:
I will not be forced to choose to mark one side of me invisible so you can see me one-dimension and frail I am Black and Lesbian and anything else--this body can hold it all Asian and Activist and Artist. (S. Chin, "Part I") (2)
Through public performance--simultaneously embodying blackness, sounding Jamaican, and speaking about loving women--Chin can approximate a resolution to these conflicts. The very existence of the conflicts, however, indicates that the simultaneity of these parts--sound and presence and poetry--creates an "excess of meaning" that no "and" or simple addition could produce.
Earlier, at a more publicized event and with an arguably more heterogeneous audience, Chin's performance choices more clearly indicated the ways in which words alone can reinscribe the division she wishes to avoid. At the 2003 Tony Awards, the nine poets from Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway performed two group poems. Although Steve Coleman recited the bulk of the first poem, an adaptation of his "I Wanna Hear a Poem," each of his fellow cast members stepped forward to recite a line or two about the type of poem they would like to write or hear performed. Chin, as "the Jamaican" of the group, asserted her ethnicity with the somewhat humorous:
I want to hear that poem About a Jamaican Rastaman Who has never smoked weed. (57th Annual)
She is, for the Tony's audience and the larger CBS television audience, instantly marked as Jamaican, not only by her reference to a Jamaican Rastaman, but also by her pronounced accent. Because her words focused on Jamaicanness, however, the extent to which Chin performs the difficulty of the cleavage that the hyphens and ands represent was not evident.
This difficulty became more...
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