Rationale and Memoir

Rationale
Written Task One

I’ve chosen to produce a memoir because it is a text type that is able to portray the individual’s insights on their personal thoughts and views. Through using a memoir, many anecdotes can be told that which shows a person’s wisdom evolving creating inspiration for other people. The response will be written in the perspective of Paul Dunbar, the poet who wrote Little Brown Baby because he will best be able to convey the meaning and express the feelings that were go along with the piece of writing. The target audience is everyone especially because it is a memoir, therefore everyone you should be able to read it and have an opinion. The purpose of this response is to show and prove to people that just because AAVE isn’t classified as Standard English, doesn’t make it any less degrading or for it to be considered as broken English or wrong and that in fact a lot of times it is understood and used for people to express themselves in their own ways and it is a part of peoples cultures and identity. There is a lot of historical context to AAVE and how it has developed through the years and how it is used with certain people at certain times. There is definitely a social setting, it is used to socialize between African Americans most of the times but recently other cultures have started using it but there is an extent to were no other culture can interfere because it is their language of intimacy between their culture. 

Memoir

AAVE… The first thing that comes to mind is our ownership. It’s a dialect that we own, we use and we understand. It is our dialect of intimacy. AAVE, also known as Black English Vernacular is mainly spoken in the United Sates and the Caribbean. AAVE has developed through the years with speakers of West Africa who learnt English on plantations in the southern coastal states such as Georgia or South Carolina. All our ancestors have been speaking this way and it has been passed down for generations now, it is understood between us.

Many people and scholars would argue that it is not an acceptable form of speaking and communicating because it is “broken” or “wrong” and less valuable and degrading to society because it degrades the English language and those who speak it are of less standards and do not really wish to educate themselves on a higher level. Some people also argue that in certain situations, speaking in AAVE is inappropriate and can sometimes let a person achieve less than they should. For instance, if a person was to apply for a job and went to an interview and spoke in AAVE to the manager, they would less likely be able to receive this job because the way they speak portrays a less understanding and devalued manner yet why should we be judged based on who we are? We don’t intentionally put on that dialect; it is a part of who we are a part of our master identity. Why should we have to change ourselves to be accepted or classified as “smart”? Many people don’t realise what an important role AAVE plays in our lives.

In my poem Little Brown Baby, I wrote the whole poem in AAVE, all of it. My use of AAVE in the poem creates the effect of speech patterns. In the poem, the father of the baby is the speaker, he came back from work and looks at his baby and is concerned of his sons future when he says: “Wisht you could allus know ease an’ cleah skies;/Wisht you could stay jes’ a chile on my breas’--/Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes!”
When writing this poem I tried to establish the joys of life, the baby’s father holds him and enjoys his son’s innocence. The son has sparkling eyes and a smile that’ll never leave his face.
So, Little Brown Baby conveys the importance of family, love, joy and humour and the heart wounds that occur in the life of the speaker but not only him but also the whole race of the African Americans. This poem was best written in AAVE because it best described the situation and best expresses the feelings and emotions that we have in our lives, it is not only a speech but a dialect of intimacy, a dialect understood within our culture and who we are.

I dislike how others thought of black people’s dialect, as if black people were limited to a compelled form of expression that was unassociated with the more educated class. When once asked at an interview how I felt about all this, I replied: "I am tired, so tired of dialect, my natural speech is dialect and my love is for the Negro pieces"
Back in school I was the only coloured kid there was but that wasn’t what stood out the most, it was my scholarly performance. I did very well and became the resident of the school Newspaper but later as I wanted to pursue these dreams of mine I couldn’t due to the black discrimination that was going on. Instead I became an elevator operator but much later was discovered for my true talents yet I started writing to suit society and in a way that didn’t please me much and much later did I realise that I will write in AAVE because that is my dialect of my people and it is a part of who I am which took a long while because living in that society made you feel like you were less of value and not capable of accomplishing much if you spoke or wrote in AAVE.  

The article “Ain’t No Reason” and the video “African-American English” both agree with important use of AAVE in our community. Just because AAVE doesn’t follow the traditional American English rules of grammar doesn’t mean it’s wrong, instead it has its own rules.  In the articles on “Ain’t No Reason” the author explains how we enforce our own grammatical rules such as using double negatives such as: “I ain’t got none” or “I ain’t singin’ nothing” or “I ain’t never eat no sushi” yet the interesting part is if you translated these sentences into French you’d have: “Je n’en ai pas” or “Je ne chnaterai pas” or “Je n’ai jamais mange de sushis” you can clearly see that French has the same structure as AAVE in using the double negatives, does that make French wrong? AAVE follows its own strict grammatical rules.
AAVE is spoken by younger people because they’ve brought up like that because that’s what they know, it isn’t wrong- it’s their language.

In the video “African- American English” it discusses the importance of language and how the music and poetry of the language creates a bond of love. People talk like they talk; they talk like who they are because they are who they are. The use of language is a way to continue to communicate ideas and especially emotions. We use AAVE to keep connection with group and to make sure we don’t lose them or our connection with them. AAVE is a part of life and a sense of family and familiarity and it determines lines. Every generation has to identify itself and create own language. We develop AAVE, like language to keep communicating and keep ideas going and most importantly because it is a language/ dialect of intimacy it is most certainly used to express our emotions in our own manners.