The Infathomable Truths of Folk Culture

Southernisms. Ebonics. Hebrew.

What do they all have in common? The power of language and shared experience where culture is transmitted. Words are evocative layered onions.

Sometimes I get frustrated when I'm stripped of my colloquialism. When I loose it, I loose my way to speak, to have a true human voice. I must exchange it for argument, rhetoric, thesis-statements--the academic importance of a very very Western world. Please don't think that the language of academia is irrelevant, but it does provide a common language when vernacular (though more expressive, poignant, and even more to the point and accurate at times) isn't translatable and understandable to all. The frustration comes because colloquialism is my very voice and telling me to put it away means silencing my voice. How many times as a Southerner do you feel the pressure to speak better? Or to change your words? Or the Ebonics I picked up in high school--why can't I use those words when they may speak the essence of what I want to say?

I've struggled with the threat of wanting to hide my voice when in academic circles and wanting to only bring them out in the cultures that share the language. But as I'm learning Old Testament when the Hebrew words and images become important, as I learn the history of oppressed peoples in The South in Black and White, when I read about the dramatic display of both God's justice and mercy--I find that is the very language that I (and others) try to bury. For example, the double meaning of "blessed" like blessed prosperity and blessed out in black culture is much more accurate to describe the hebrew concept of blessing.

What happens if we begin to loose these modes of language in exchange for the argumentative style of writing? It begins to bury our culture and then even our very ability to communicate live--especially life cross-culturally and in our deep state of humanness.