Why you Should Use the Word “Nigger”.
“All
anxieties are linguistic.” – Jacques Derrida.
A preface seems in order, not
only out of concern for public accountability but all so out of consideration [f]or the Individual Reader, who is in fact my target audience and whose integrity
is not mitigated by this formal conceit:
I am not black.
Neither am I white.
I have forgone all such
identifications.
My ethnic background is very
peculiar to me; as far as I am aware I am one of less than a dozen people with
this particular cultural and genetic make-up. And neither of them, to my mind,
have any substantial bearing upon my personality, except in those dim corners
that most people are ardently and outspokenly apathetic about.
So there’s that.
When I first conceived of
these theories, I was a student at Palomar College. I was on the Debate Team,
part of a notoriously “politically correct” and, to that same degree,
criminally hypocritical youth organization called the National Forensics Association.
I have seen my share of contemporary American Fascism. Its contempt for both
artistry and intellectualism has been of textbook status.
I was
all so a student of philosophy, especially the works of Nietzsche, Camus, and
Derrida. I am to this day fascinated by the role that Language plays in the
construction of our Reality. It is certainly not monarchical in this respect,
nor ought it to be, but its dominion is great and terrible nonetheless.
I have recently taken to use
of the word “nigger” again in my poetry, and if any cause can be attributed to
this it is either this one or one that contributes likewise to it: the music of
Ja Rule. A classic rapper and poet of the thug tradition, who all so shares a
Sun Sign with me, (the Most Musical of All the Signs: Pisces) Mr. Rule is known
for blending profanity seamlessly with romantic imagery and blurring the lines
betwixt violence and love. Among his main guns is the word “nigger”, but in
particular its derivative form “nigga”, which follows the standard hip-hop
format of dropping the “r” at the end, as in Twista, Killa, etc. (This is of
course an inversion of some forms of British English that do the opposite, in
whose case a subtle “r” is added to a word ending otherwise in an open “a”
sound.)
As a native Russian speaker, I
was taught from a young age, in honour of our rich language, not to omit vowels
are consonants. I even listened to an educational Soviet song in youth, sung by
a boys’ choir, about the error of “swallowing syllables”. I still remember this
media to this day, as well as the various means by which it was conveyed to me.
The Cyrillic alphabet, for
those of you who wish to know, contains more characters than the English alphabet,
some of which are not even letters but rather symbols that are used to
delineate varying degrees of hardness or softness. The Russian “R” is all so of
an intrinsic hardness that makes a Spaniard saying “Honduras” sound all
most laughable. And of course I mean this half-jokingly; in reality, we are
probably neck and neck in terms of the severity with which we grate our tongues
against our teeth at the mere thought of the letter “R”.
It follows logically that I
would only drop the “r” at the end of “nigger” only VERY exceptionally, and only
for a post-modern effect (an aesthetic I do not court, though I might sleep
with it.). My “black” influence, from hip-hop, is tempered by the “white”
influence of grammar and diction, not to mention the literature of Faulkner and
Steinbeck. It is ridiculous and an insult to the artist’s hand to expect me to
filter out a perfect rhyme (such as “nigger” and “trigger”, whose rhyme is only
outshone by its reason, especially in both Gangsta* Rap and Social Justice
circles) for a sort of lazy, Mumble-Rap “near-rhyme”. (The classic Soviet joke
is “palka” and “selodka”, meaning “stick” and “herring”, respectively, and its
significance in that it ALL most rhymes, but not quite.)
*As a genre, I observe “Gangsta”
as distinct from “Gangster”, but this is obviously for exclusively taxonomical
purposes that hold no sway on the lyrical stage.
Balance is restored
aesthetically in the synthesis of both Apollo and Dionysus, Order and Chaos.
Such is a theme ubiquitous throughout the Human (and even the non-Human) World,
manifest in Taoism as well as in Hinduism, in Nietzsche as much as it is in Huxley,
Shakespeare, or Aristotle. So it follows that my liberal use of the ubiquitous
word “nigga” is tempered by the highest possible respect for its roots: “nigger”.
To me, the thought that any one would employ a word NOT out of respect for its
roots but out of SPITE for them is utterly barbaric. After all: without
knowledge of the roots we not only lose the original meaning, but we PRESERVE
it. So long as “nigga” and “nigger” are not considered simply alternate forms
of pronunciation, as alike in dignity and origin as “fake” and “fuck”, then the
latter maintains its archaic, “derogatory” quality whilst the former accrues
all the glory owed properly to the latter. This is not an issue of “social
justice”; it is simply RESPECT FOR LANGUAGE, an Ideal byfar surpassing most.
Language is our bridge between the civilized and uncivilized worlds. If its
role as this bridge is forgotten, then we lose the sacred harmony betwixt the
civilized man and the human animal. At that point we all so lose the
distinction between Freedom of Speech and Abuse of Speech, so that even the
most ubiquitous of Truths go up for sale in a sort of slave trade peddled by
narcissists who believe that they can say whatever they want so long as it is “socially
appropriate” and “politically correct”. The nurturing ear becomes assaulted
then daily by the silver tongue, and we become prisoners of language in a
neurotic game orchestrated by politicians, salespeople, and sociopaths. And our
own Freedom of Speech ultimately dies, as we are defined by those entities and
either forbidden or allowed, based upon considerations of which we have no say,
to say or not to say a given phrase.
Keep in mind that the word, in
all its permutations, holds no Fixed Meaning. At the point that James Cameron
becomes Night Lovell’s “nigga”, it is ubiquitous in its relevance. Every one
and no one is a nigga. And in the same way that to be wary is to be aware and
to beware, so it is that to be a nigga is, BY DEFINITION, to be a nigger. And
that means that one is UNIVERSALLY so; if Kanye West admits to being a “nigga”,
then George Bush retains the right to call him a “nigger”. There is simply no
way around that. And neither is there any thing that stops me from retaining
that right. It thus follows that the Law preserve the right of every individual
to use that term as (s)he sees fit, so that it might evolve in its connotation
and never fall into a dogmatic denotation. If the Spirit of the Law is to take
precedence over the Word of the Law, then the Spirit of the Word must never be
restricted BY the Law. The Law never reserved the right to judge of Souls, but
only of Actions, so to call someone a “racist” is pre-legal and inferior. When
I met a former neo-Nazi whilst walking with my friend D. Mendez outside of
Palomar College on one sunny day, the former told us a story of how he was
convicted of a “hate crime” for simply assaulting a member of a rival gang and
calling him a “nigger”. Considering the content of any one classic hip-hop
song, be it Regulators or Guerillas in the Mist, this proved Absurd to both me
and Mr. Mendez. Vulgarity is a fact of life in all street violence, and there
is NO MEANS by which Law Enforcement can put a stop to violence by restricting
its expression according to an arbitration of what sorts of slurs are permitted
to what people. Such a double-standard is the very ORIGIN of violence, and
rightfully so, for at that point all forms of violence are, with varying
degrees of potency, admittedly, a reaction to Fascism. No Police Officer or
Judge retains the right to dictate what you can or cannot say; they can only
tell you that you have the right to Remain Silent. And in so neurotically loquacious
a culture as insists that Silence cannot be Consent (not that this claim is
true) it’s only to be expected that gang violence be suffused with all sorts of
insulting rhetoric. Yet this rhetoric only adds INSULT to Injury; it is not
Injury IN AND OF ITS SELF. Offense is only violent to the King; the peasant has
bigger worries. And the United States was supposed to be a nation not of Kings
but of Peasants.
Dm.A.A.
PREACH
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