Artist Statement

WORDSLANGER Wordz & Resistance An Artistic Statement The power, music, and potential of words have always fascinated me. I believe that a language spoken by living people is organic, alive, with the intention of those who speak it. I have a deep connection to African American Vernacular English, recognizing it as a language forged to mediate and resist the trauma to personal and cultural identity experienced by the African who found himself kidnapped, forced to traverse the middle passage under the most horrific conditions imaginable, and then as a captive, forced into servitude in a SorrowLand. Concurring with the American Linguistic Society in its opinion that AAVE, (African American Vernacular, Ebonics), is a legitimate language, partially derivative of American English, as American English is an emergent of English. It is also seeped in African cultural unconsciousness and a product of the captured African's conscious desire to hold on to elements of his/her own culture. I write in both languages, Ebonics and so called Standard English. I allow the message wanting to be born to select the language of its life. Some messages insist on both. So, sometimes I write in a mixture of both languages. Doubling my voice, doubling the message, sending the words to mainstream and the underground at the same time, sometimes saying something different to each, knowing some people understand both. I speak my double consciousness in a double language created by Africans becoming Americans, an ongoing process. The esteemed Nathan Hare once commented that my handling of language is a combustible mixture of Ebonic and Eurocentric language styles. I write about what I have lived and witnessed in my lifetime. I write about the issues, not written about in mainstream media and the events that shape the world we live in. I write from the vantage of an insider in The Nation within the Nation. My view here is that of a dweller in a SorrowLand, longing for a home that no longer exists. As such, my only choice is to build here as my ancestors have for centuries. My art focuses on our reality, our upliftment, it seeks to amplify who we are, and what we must do in order to midwife the dream still deferred. My gift, my contribution, to the ongoing struggle of the North American African to create home in the SorrowLand is my words. Strung in a fashion reflective of our position with in the socio-cultural composition of America; unassimilated, outside and off center in the melting pot, my words are tools of resistance. In my piece Composition piece I pay juba to the influence of Africa in America they are the shaping influence of all culture here whether the practitioners are conscious of this or not. This is the context in which I create. This is the source, root, and reason I am an artist. Again I pay juba to the "spirit sung to bones on ocean floors, the truth and the metaphor passed on to me, my children and yours, cuz every generation got a freedom song, cuz for generations we ain't been free, ... I pay juba to oceans, drums, dusty dance, Congo Square, the Harlem renaissance, the black arts movement gave movement to my movement, and i refuse to let them paint all hip hop with a gangsta rep, cuz we know u know we know, from the Gelede to the Two- Step, we stay in step wit the drum that u ain't heard yet, u can still AfriKa, but u can't make her forget..." This poem is resistance, naked on the side of a hill, clothed only in its on determination. Ayodele WordSlanger Nzinga, MA, MFA