JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

The "feather-bed resistance" or "theory behind our tactics" Hurston writes of in Mules and Men suggests what has been called in the African American oral tradition "signifying"--meaning, in this case, a way of rendering powerless through language an uncompromising oppressor. But, according to Roger Abrahams, signifying can also mean "any of a number of things" (51). It can mean the ability to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie; the propensity to talk around a subject; making fun of a person or situation; and speaking with the hands and eyes (52). Still, for reasons that I will make clear later, I see signifying ultimately as the use of language or discourse to affirm cultural identity and community in the face of the imposition of cultural dominance and oppression. Admittedly, my interpretation is not altogether original. Abrahams implies as much when he writes concerning a neighborhood of inner-city Philadelphia men:

But the good talker is not just a good arguer. He is also the storyteller, and the stories he tells represent a further ability of his to convince and thus illustrate his masculine power. . . . It indicates that the verbal strategy so important in Negro life involves an attempt to parade strength through boasting and through putting the other person down. . . .

The man of words is immensely important as a representative of the dispossessed men of Camingerly. By exhibiting his wit, by creating new and vital folkloric expression, he is able to effect a temporary release from anxiety for both himself and his audience. By creating playgrounds for playing out aggressions, he achieves a kind of masculine identity for himself and his group in a basically hostile environment. (58, 60)

While the political overtones of my interpretation are consistent with Abrahams', I don't see signifying as mere playground activity or as a coping mechanism. Indeed, because signifying is so deeply embedded in the everyday lives of African American people, I rather see it as an attitude or stance toward humanity or, as Abrahams states elsewhere, "toward life itself" (Afro-American Folktales 6). Such an attitude or stance must then figure into many African American students' resistance to academic literacy (see both Labov and Farr and Daniels for a discussion of this resistance). Whereas vernacular discourse affirms for these students black cultural identity and community, academic discourse, because of its privileging of, for instance, the conventions of standard written English, often, at least implicitly, displaces these students' cultural links. The natural reaction of many students is to resist the attempts at cultural displacement, even in spite of obvious consequences to their education. By focusing on vernacular discourse and African American personal narratives in this essay, I want to suggest that African American students' linguistic and cultural identities be placed at the center, not on the margins, of their instruction in academic writing. The Signifying Monkey tradition and the tradition of African American autobiographical narratives provide rich resources for centering African American students.

The Toast of the Signifying Monkey

One of the more popular users of signifying in the African American oral tradition is the mythic folk hero the Signifying Monkey; he who as Signifier, according to literary critic Henry Louis Gates, "wreaks havoc upon the Signified" (52). Though literally only a character in a fictional narrative, the Signifying Monkey exists as a vehicle for narration itself; he stands "as the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse" (44).

For the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with the Signifying Monkey tale and its function in African American vernacular discourse, a little background is in order. Signifying Monkey tales or toasts, as they are customarily referred to in the vernacular, are narrative poems performed often, though not exclusively, by men in barrooms, in pool halls, and on street corners (Gates 54). Gates aptly points out that given the nature of these poems as "rituals of insult and naming, recorded versions have a phallocentric bias" (54). As to the structure of the poems, Abrahams notes that toasts possess a general framing pattern, including a "picturesque or exciting introduction, action alternating with dialogue (because the action is usually a struggle between two people or animals), and a twist ending of some sort, either a quip, an ironic comment, or a brag" (97). Signifying Monkey poems achieve unity through the "consecutiveness of action"; that is, they're organized by the conventions of the traditional epic (98).

As to the content of Signifying Monkey tales, they center on three stock characters: the Monkey, the Lion, and the Elephant. In most versions of the tale, the Monkey reports to his friend the Lion some insult purportedly generated by their mutual friend the Elephant (Gates 55). The Lion, outraged by the insult, demands an apology from the Elephant, who refuses and then trounces him (55). Realizing that he has been duped, the Lion then returns to the Monkey to settle the score. The Lion's mistake, of course, was in taking the Monkey literally, that is, in failing to realize that the Monkey was signifying. Although Gates denounces the simple black/white binary opposition many scholars have interpreted between the Monkey and the Lion, I find an intriguing implication in the Lion's misreading of the Monkey's use of language. To take an example from pop culture, the Monkey's duping the Lion is much like Homey the Clown "gittin ovuh" on the Man (Smitherman 73). It is this element of "gittin ovuh," of surviving, that suffuses the Monkey's heroism; it imbues him and, more importantly, the teller of the tale with identity, authority, and persuasive appeal. Thus, signifying as derived from the Signifying Monkey tales means the use of certain discourse forms not only to put down or poke fun at someone but categorically to debunk an individual's or community's self-imposed status of power. This strategy is commensurate with the teller's affirmation of self.

Below is the introductory portion of a tale illustrating the Monkey's signifying. It's taken from an adolescent version Abrahams records in Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1964). In this version, the Monkey is figured as something of an adolescent trouble-maker:

Deep down in the jungle so they say
There's a signifying motherfucker down the way.
There hadn't been no disturbin' the jungle for quite a bit,
For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed,
"I guess I'll start some shit."
Now the lion come through the jungle one peaceful day,
When the signifying monkey stopped him and this what he started to say.
He said, "Mr. Lion," he said, "a bad-assed motherfucker down your way."
He said, "Yeah! The way he talks about your folks is a certain shame.
I even heard him curse when he mentioned your grandmother's name. (113)

A more extensive introduction appears in a version offered by another of Abrahams' Philadelphia informants. The Monkey in this version assumes an adult personage, only one that is perhaps more respected by adolescents than adults--the bad-talking, smooth-dealing pimp:

Deep down in the jungle where the coconut grows
Lives a pimp little monkey, you could tell by the clothes he wore.
He had a camel-hair benny with belt in the back,
Had a pair of nice shoes and a pair of blue slacks.

Now his clothes were cute little things,
Was wearing a Longine watch and a diamond ring.
He says he thinks he'd take a stroll
Down by the water hole.
And guess who he met? Down there was Mr. Lion.
The monkey started into that signifying.
He said, "Mr. Lion, I got something to tell you today."
He said, "The way this motherfucker been talking 'bout you I know you'll sashay."
(He told the lion)
He said, "Mr. Lion, the way he talking 'bout your mother, down your cousins,
I know damn well you don't play the dozens.
Talking about your uncle and your aunt's an awful shame.
Called your father and your mother a whole lot of names.
I would 'a fought the motherfucker but looked at him with a tear in my eye.
He's a big motherfucker, he's twice your size."
The lion looked down with a tear in his eye,
Said, "Where's this big motherfucker that's twice my size?" (115)

Another section of this toast also illustrates the Monkey's signifying, however, this time not as a reported insult of the Elephant toward the Lion's relatives (i.e., playing the dozens or sounding) but as the Monkey's direct insult of the Lion:

Here goes the monkey in the tree with that same signifying.
He said, "Look at you, you goddamn chump.
Went down in the jungle fucking with that man
And got your ass [mangled] and drug in the sand.
You call yourself a real down king,
But I found you ain't a goddamned thing.
Get from underneath this goddamned tree
'Cause I feel as though I've got to pee." (116)

The Monkey first calls the Lion a "chump," then ridicules him for having foolishly challenged the Elephant. But notice how in the narration the Elephant takes on a different identity. The Monkey calls him "that man" who the Lion "Went down in the jungle fucking with." By contrast, the monkey denies the Lion's identity as a self-proclaimed "real down king," instead positing him as not a "goddamed thing." In "Toward an Ethnography of Black American Speech Behavior," Thomas Kochman discusses the politics behind this type of signifying (257); however, I point out these pronouncements because they demonstrate the rhetorical strategy the Monkey uses for self-affirmation.

Signifying as Self-Affirmation

In as much as the tales are worthy of a complete rendering and a more detailed explication, I would instead like now to shift to a discussion of vernacular discourse, that is, signifying. From the Signifying Monkey tales derives the popular practice of signifying or what Gates calls the "language of Signifyin(g)." For Gates, the language of Signifyin(g) refers to black figurative language use and corresponds to Claudia Mitchell-Kernan's term "metaphorical signifying" (in contrast to the "third-party signifying" displayed in the tales) (Gates 85). In metaphorical signifying, "the speaker attempts to transmit his message indirectly and it is only by virtue of the hearer's defining the utterance as signifying that the speaker's intent (to convey a particular message) is realized" (Gates 85). An excellent example of this type of signifying is given by Mitchell-Kernan in her monograph, Language Behavior in a Black Urban Community:

I: Man, when you gon pay me my five dollars?
II: Soon as I get it.
I: (to audience) Anybody want to buy a five dollar nigger? I got one to sell.
II: Man, if I gave you your five dollars, you wouldn't have nothing to signify about.
I: Nigger, long as you don't change, I'll always have me a subject. (82)

Speaker II's recognition that speaker I has signified exemplifies the metaphorical brand of signifying. In addition, speaker I's use of the term "nigger" and his suggestion of selling "a five dollar nigger" to a member of the audience amusingly plays upon insult and naming in black vernacular language use. But Gates wishes to argue that signifying is more than a mere ritual of insult or a specific verbal game. He rather believes that it is a mode of language use, synonymous with figuration. Elsewhere he defines signifying as "a strategy of black figurative language use" (85). Motivated by purely literary interests, Gates' definition well suits his purposes. But it doesn't go very far to explain the kinds of signifying displayed in the tales. I'm thinking here especially of the Monkey's pronouncements to the Lion that I quoted in the previous excerpt. The Monkey dethrones the Lion not just because, as Gates maintains, the Lion can't read his discourse (and thus is goaded into a fight with the Elephant) but because the Monkey's ability to signify, to git ovuh, affirms his otherwise questionable status in the hierarchy of the jungle. As consummate trickster, as bad-talker, as braggadocio, the Monkey displays his ability to use language to affirm his own identity and reverse the power differentials of the jungle.

Signifying and African American Personal Narratives

In the remainder of this essay, I wish to explore how through the use of signifying African American student writers can affirm cultural identity and community in the context of a large predominately white university. I'm suggesting that these students be encouraged to do so because, I believe, as teachers we wish to empower our students to demystify (as the Monkey does the Lion) the academy's self-imposed status as king or arbiter of discourse. Put plainly, the use of signifying as a rhetorical strategy in the academic writing of African American students would allow them to define themselves in apposition and/or opposition to the mainstream, whose discourse, if David Bartholomae is right, demands appropriation.

To explore how African American student writers might affirm identity and community, I'll refer to selected examples of signifying in their own writing and in the published autobiographical accounts of two well-known signifiers: H. Rap Brown and Malcolm X. I should point out, however, that the former derive from the personal narratives of two student writers. I classify these narratives as academic writing for two reasons: 1) they constitute the core writing assignments of the students' Bartholomae and Petrosky-modeled basic writing course; and 2) as I hope it will become clear throughout this paper, personal narratives are more than mere records of one's life experiences; they are (or can be) rhetorical and political agents (that is, agents of persuasion and change) and, as such, can be considered fitting examples of academic writing. By the end of this essay, I want to argue that students be exposed to signifiers like Brown and Malcolm X so that teachers can better enhance the students' use of the verbal resources they bring with them to the classroom (Farr and Daniels 42).

The first example comes from the personal narrative of a male student in a first-quarter, university basic writing course. The student was required to write about a time in his adolescent years when he had changed. In the third paragraph of the essay, the student writes the following:

Growing up in the hood and going to private school was interesting, because I had the best of both worlds. I could chill out with the fellas on the street and still have a good enough chance of being something with the name and the education that my parents would make me recieve. I never liked school I liked the streets, I liked the freedom of the streets, I liked the brothership of the fellas in the neighborhood and I liked the excitement and danger of the streets that was caused by us and others. Seeing the older gangsta niggaes mess up, I learned what and what not to do. I felt that these lessons were more important than any school books.

While much in this passage is worthy of commentary (such as, the student's use of vernacular vocabulary and his errors in spelling and punctuation), I wish to highlight just three statements. The student repeats the phrase "I like" in a series of sentences that begin with "I never liked school I liked the streets." Then, the last two sentences read "Seeing the older gangsta niggaes mess up, I learned what and what not to do. I felt that these lessons were more important than any school books." The signification of these statements, though mild by comparison to the Monkey's, essentially hinges on the notion that the streets are where real education takes place. Thus, in a way, the student is signifying on (that is, putting down) teachers and the type of learning privileged in school.

In a selection from H. Rap Brown's Die Nigger Die! anthologized in Alan Dundes' Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, Brown offers a similar critique of schooling:

THE STREET is where young bloods get their education. I learned how to talk in the street, not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit. The teacher would test our vocabulary each week, but we knew the vocabulary we needed. They'd give us arithmetic to exercise our minds. Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.

I fucked your mama
Till she went blind.
Her breath smells bad,BRP> But she sure can grind.

I fucked your mama
For a solid hour.
Baby came out
Screaming, Black Power.

Elephant and the Baboon
Learning to screw.
Baby came out looking
Like Spiro Agnew.

And the teacher expected me to sit up in class and study poetry after I could run down shit like that. If anybody needed to study poetry, she needed to study mine. We played the Dozens for recreation, like the white folks play Scrabble. (354)

Brown's use of signifying is certainly much more directive and intentional than the student's I just cited. For this reason, signifying might best be defined here as a verbal put down or, in Abrahams' terms, "making fun of a person or situation" (52). But the point of comparison between the two passages emerges when we read how, like the student, Brown denounces the real life relevance of school learning: "I learned how to talk in the street, not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit." Apparently, Brown intended to encode a political message here, though ostensibly relating his personal life experience. That message I see as twofold. For one, it suggests that teachers should be about the business of making what they teach relevant to students' lives. Second, and perhaps more important, Brown's message suggests a kind of community status reversal; it denigrates mainstream community values to affirm the values of the black vernacular discourse community. Although the above two examples of signifying don't possess the "element of indirection" Mitchell-Kernan refers to in her definition, they do seem to embody her notion that signifying as an alternative message form "is not focal to the linguistic interaction in the sense that it does not define the entire speech event" (65).

By contrast, the next example better illustrates the element of indirection. Here again community status reversal appears to be the message that Malcolm X encodes in his report of a rather tempestuous conversation he had with a black Ph.d.:

One particular university's "token-integrated" black Ph.D. associate professor I never will forget; he got me so mad I couldn't see straight. As badly as our 22 millions of educationally deprived black people need the help of any brains he has, there he was looking like some fly in the buttermilk among white "colleagues"--and he was trying to eat me up! He was ranting about what a "divisive demagogue" and what a "reverse racist" I was. I was racking my head, to spear that fool; finally I held up my hand, and he stopped. "Do you know what white racists call black Ph.D's?" He said something like, "I believe that I happen not to be aware of that"--you know, one of these ultra-proper-talking Negroes. And I laid the word down on him, loud: "Nigger!" (284)

Although here Malcolm X is not explicitly signifying on school learning, he is signifying on the elitism (not to mention what the black vernacular community calls the Uncle Tomming) of certain black representatives of the academic community. Such signification is especially clear when he writes "he was looking like some fly in the buttermilk among white 'colleagues.'" Not only does Malcolm X use a vivid and humorous metaphor, but also his use of quotation marks on the word colleagues expresses the irony of the professor's kinship with the white establishment. Of course, the last two statements present the strongest evidence of his use of signifying. In the first, he describes his interlocutor as "one of these ultra-proper-talking Negroes." The description signals the professor's status outside the vernacular discourse community to which Malcolm X so strongly identifies. The final statement even more expressively reveals how Malcolm X, like Brown, uses signifying to deny the mainstream its claim to ideological, cultural, and linguistic superiority. He loudly answers the rhetorical question he posed with the pejorative label "Nigger."

One other student example of the use of signifying language comes again from an African American male student enrolled in a first-quarter basic writing course. For this essay, however, the student was required to write a short autobiography, focusing specifically on significant events that occurred during his adolescent years. Note, by the way, how the student's use of the vernacular four letter word "shit" resembles Brown's in his attack on "Dick and Jane":

When I was about ten that is when I had my first sexual intercourse I did not feel anything at the point in long ago time, but when I reached twelve I could not be stop until I asked my mother what is the white stuff, and she told me without hesitation; see my mother is the type of mother who would tell me things straght up she did not play that birds and he bees shit, and when she told me what the white stuff was she also told me to wear rubbers. . . .

"Shit," I believe, accentuates the signification being lodged here. The key notion is the pitting of a mother who discusses sexual matters straightforwardly with her children against mothers (presumably white middle class) who relate such matters euphemistically. Obviously, for this student sex is not a tabooed subject. Quite the contrary: one has the sense that it is a subject to be celebrated, even boasted about, which wouldn't be out of sync with the image of the pimp in the black vernacular discourse community. Thus, here again we see a kind of community status reversal in the student's privileging of his own community's social practices over the dominant cultures'.

Brown echoes this sentiment in the following lines:

Sometimes I wonder why I even bothered to go to school. Practically everything I know I learned on the corner. Today they're talking about teaching sex in school. But that's white folks for you. They got to intellectualize everything. Now how you gon' intellectualize screwing? At the age when little white kids were finding out that there was something down there to play with, we knew where it went and what to do with it after it got there. (356)

Brown's verbal onslaughts, however, verge more on the comic, especially the final statement. Before in verbal dexterity, now in sexual know-how, Brown ranks street culture as superior to the bastions of white middle-class culture, in particular, school.

As in the Signifying Monkey tales, the binary opposition between black and white is obvious. The Elephant, the pivotal third party in the tales, doesn't seem to play a role in Brown's depiction of real life. Yet, the writer's construction of personal narrative (construction of self), whereby he or she invokes signifying language, may be the bigger and badder third person that African Americans outside the mainstream can call upon to trounce the daunting image of a dominant culture. In other words, African American student writers' writing of personal narratives which engage in signifying could allow them to inscribe themselves and their communities in ways that liberate them from the inscriptions and definitions imposed on them by others. The writer, like the teller of Signifying Monkey tales, fashions an image of himself or herself that contrasts sharply with the images of, for instance, illiteracy and linguistic deficiency erroneously ascribed to African Americans. (See Thomas Fox's "Writing is Like an Enemy" for a discussion of these issues in their revived form.) In addition, the writer creates space, "a world" in Abrahams' terms, in which he or she exercises control over how he or she is to be perceived, valued, and judged (58). "The speaking black subject," Gates explains in his introduction to Our Nig, "emerge[s] on the printed page to declare himself or herself to be a human being of capacities equal to the whites. Writing, for black authors, [is] a mode of being, of self-creation with words" (lii).

Centering the African American Student Writer

What I'm calling for, then, is that African American student writers (especially those who are speakers of Black English Vernacular) become familiar with the writings of accomplished Signifiers like Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown so that they too can become Signifiers, become Rhetors if you will, not only in talk on the street but also in writing at the university. The students whose essays I've cited in this paper already show some potential for using signifying language in their narratives. But, I think, their signifying voices are muted, limited as they are by what they have been taught or perceive as appropriate for academic writing tasks.

The Bartholomae and Petrosky-modeled syllabus on which the students' course is based advocates that students learn to compose within the conventions of academic discourse because, supposedly, their language can't be characterized as merely street or home language but something in the margins (4-5). Unfortunately, over-simplistic characterizations go both ways. Neither can "our" language (if I can unequivocally call it mine in the first place) be characterized simply as the language of the academy, for sometimes it too is something in the margins, something between our various other registers and some perceived academic standard for oral and written discourse. Besides, are vernacular and academic discourses so vastly different? Gates' notion of signifying as a trope suggests that there is enormous similarity between them. Thus, we do our students a disservice if we fail to acknowledge and explore the ways in which their language intersects with the university's.

More importantly, however, the inclusion of vernacular discourse in our writing pedagogies would affirm the cultural identity and community of many African American students whose identity and community are often questioned, if not categorically denied. Serious inclusion, not the token representation that we see in status quo versions of the American literary canon, would bring the African American experience from the margins to the center of the academic community where it belongs. Centered in this way, students then can readily participate, as Bartholomae and Petrosky would have it, "as speakers with place, privilege or authority" (4). Teaching African American students (or any student for that matter) "the conventions of the highly conventional language of the university classroom" isn't sufficient to meet these ends (4). Exposure to African American writers of personal narratives, especially those who have successfully demonstrated dexterity in both vernacular and academic ways of using language, is needed. By exposure, I don't mean to suggest that students mimic the prose models we select, but, as Fox has suggested, such texts would "work to provide historical and political [I would also add rhetorical] contexts within which African American student writers can position themselves" (300). If we are to make what we teach relevant to many of our African American students and if we are to equip them to compose rather than be composed, then we must view vernacular discourse as a resource for teaching writing.

University of Texas
Austin, Texas

Works Cited