Cursing, slang and other blends of the english language are just as legitimate as "standard" writing.
I recently passed around a draft of a short story I’d been working on for the last month. It concerns a kid named Javier from the Bronx, who is in search of love on Facebook. The story’s purpose, among other things, is to paint a picture of life for an inner-city teen and the role Facebook plays in youth culture. I wanted my story to be genuine, so I wrote in language commonly used in my neighborhood. This language includes cursing, slang, Spanglish and references some may find vulgar. Gauging the feedback I received, most enjoyed the story, but the language put some off. Some felt I overdid it and others couldn’t get through it because they felt there wasn’t a place for cursing and slang at all. At first I thought I was wrong, maybe my language was too vulgar, should’ve toned down the fuck’s and shit’s. And maybe that was true; I might’ve been too authentic. But the larger issue I realized was that some people weren’t appreciating the language. Some still held the belief that slang and cursing is vernacular of the uneducated and had no place in literature –– and that’s wrong.
In the Bronx, Spanish Harlem, and Brooklyn, places where I spent my childhood, cursing and slang is colloquial. And that’s OK. It’s part of the culture and it doesn’t make anyone less educated or ignorant. I attend an Ivy League University and in my lifetime I’ve found myself in esteemed academic circles. Nonetheless, I can truthfully say the most important lessons I’ve learned have come from people who speak in a manner that make supporters of “Standard English” shudder. I’m talking about viejitos in my neighborhood, former coworkers, and aunts and uncles at family barbeques with a couple coronas in ‘em and the glow of the moon behind their faces. They don’t have degrees and don’t hold lectures, but they’ve lived hard lives and have enough experiences to qualify them as wise. And when they say something like, “Andrew, fuck what everybody else thinks. Do you,” it gets across to me stronger than anything I’ll read in a self-help book because it’s blunt and spoken from the heart.
That’s the appeal of informal language: explicit, straight to the point, and never dressed up into something it’s not. No one drops big words or dilutes a message; they just tell you how it is. That’s what makes it real. That’s what I love about it. It’s everything I didn’t find in academic papers and abstract conversations about literature at school. Unfortunately, all situations in life can’t be free flowing. You’re not gonna speak to a judge the same way you speak to homeboy down the block. That’s the way life works, there’s a degree of formality you must measure, different situations call for different languages.
Fiction isn’t one of those situations calling for formality. Fiction is an art, and like any other art, an expression. And there are no limits to an artist’s expression, because if there were, the result wouldn’t be art anymore. So when a writer chooses to write in a manner straying from the norm, we can’t look down on him or her just because we don’t understand where he or she is coming from. We can disagree with their message, their plot structure, shit, we can even say their story straight up sucks. But we can’t come to that conclusion without having given them a chance on the sole basis that the way in which they communicate is different. That’s being closed-minded.
“I’m still trying to find what’s my kick. I’m still trying to find my own stick of living. I want to be wanted –– not by them motherfuckers but by me! But I ain’t got rid of that fuckin’ status that I got brought up on. I don’t mean at home alone. I mean like envied it on the streets, I dug it wherever it meant anything to be better than just a wrong color. I feel like shit. It ain’t just that I don’t wanna be what I’m supposed to be, it’s just that I’m fightin’ me and the whole goddamn world at the same time.”
That’s a passage from Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, printed in 1967 and critically acclaimed ever since. It’s one of many that stood out while reading the novel and a perfect example of well-used slang and cursing. Thomas, trying to explain his hang up with life at age 20, clearly captures the confusion, rage and anxiety he’s feeling in a way that a toned downed version never would. The curses add a layer of gritty emotion other words wouldn’t breach, and the slang brings out the street vibe Thomas wants to convey. Authors like Claude Brown, Ernesto Quinonez, and Junot Diaz have followed in the steps of Thomas and their success further validates the use of slang, cursing and other blends of the English language in a novel.
All these authors have influenced me to continue writing in a language I feel comfortable in, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. There’ll be further molding of the language with the ever-growing minority population in this country and for our language, however different it may be, to be accepted, readers gotta learn to lighten up and keep an open mind.
