Day 50. Wideman on Eye Dialect

I was in Austin last week at my dad's, and I don't really get to do much for this project while I am gone, although there is some good reading time on the plane to and fro, and for this trip I was immersing myself in the always amazing Zora Neale Hurston, especially the amazing book published in 2001 from her "lost" manuscript, now found, of Florida folktales: Every Tongue Got to Confess.

The book contains an introduction by the great writer John Wideman, and his remarks on "eye-dialect" are some of the best that I've read as I keep wrestling with this problem in my own editing for this project. At some point, I should read through the introductions to a bunch of the books I've collected to create a kind of anthology of quotes about this problem, and the different thoughts people have had about it from all those different perspectives.

Here are some thoughts from Wideman:

The difference of these Africanized vernaculars is complicated by what could be called their “unwritability,” their active resistance to being captured in print. 
* I really like this idea of seeing the language itself as resistance, and also a kind of resistance on the part of collectors. I know there are all kinds of problems with the dialect, but it would also be a defeat to give it up. My compromise right now is getting rid of the eye-dialect only, not standardizing the words themselves. But is that the best choice...?

The difference of vernacular speech has been represented at one extreme by blackface minstrelsy and Hollywood’s perpetuation of that fiction [...] At the opposite end of the spectrum of imitation is a self-aware, vital, independent, creative community that speaks in Hurston’s stories.
* Exactly: there is a real danger at the minstrelsy end of the spectrum, but I don't want to lose that creative independence of speech.

Put in another way, any written form of creolized language exposes the site, evidence and necessity of struggle, mirrors America’s deeply seated refusal to acknowledge its Creole identity.
* I've been thinking a lot about this too, especially as I find words that seem so mainstream and modern now that clearly emerged from African American English back in the day. I never expected to find "bodacious" in these stories!

Plus, of course, it is such a miracle having Hurston's book to read at all; I cannot use the actual text of the stories, but it is very affirming to see the stories that she collected and to hear the storytellers' words alive in these pages.