Multimodality in the Poetry of Lillian Allen and Dionne
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MULTIMODALITY IN THE POETRY OF LILLIAN ALLEN AND DIONNE BRAND: A SOCIAL SEMIOTIC APPROACH by Maria Caridad Casas Institute of Education Doctor of Philosophy 2002 2 UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ABSTRACT MULTIMODALITY IN THE POETRY OF LILLIAN ALLEN AND DIONNE BRAND: A SOCIAL SEMIOTIC APPROACH by Maria Caridad Casas Abstract This thesis develops social semiotic theory by asking it to account for the meaning-making practices of African-Canadian poets Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand. Its primary aim is to develop the theory, though it attempts to describe in new and interesting ways certain moments in these oral / written texts at the margins of the literary. The research question, what is the relationship between spoken creole and English writing? is an entry into the political issues raised by the texts themselves, and larger issues of clisciplinarity and the epistemologies of linguistic and literary studies. After giving an account of their literary-historical and black feminist contexts and an overview of the poetry of Allen and Brand, I look for a post- structuralist semiotic model of the relationship between letter and sound in Derrida's "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Finding his -07 version phonetic writing too restricted to account for the practices of Allen and Brand, and deconstruction only a partial explanation of Caribbean feminist poetics, I develop a critical sociolinguistic / social semiotic account 3 of language standardisation, conventionality, and grammar. With the aid of Saussure's Cours 4 linguistique generale, I work out the formal properties of the sign necessary to account for these, and then go on to explain how they work in the texts of Allen and Brand using two social semiotic principles of production: "projection" and "embodiment". My thesis is that orality is a mode, as is dialect (including standardised language), the English grapholect, and the semiotic body. Each of these has certain meaning-making affordances not accessible in the others. The writing of Allen and Brand, as well as Allen's performance, use each of these modes to create different meanings. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES 7 Chapter One 9 INTRODUCTION 9 What is the relationship between spoken creole and English writing? 10 Allen's written Jamaican English Creole 14 Why Social Semiotics? 17 What is Social Semiotics? 21 Theory 21 Methodology 24 Summary of the argument 26 Work done in the area 36 Terms 46 Chapter Two LITERARY CONTEXTS 51 Literary-historical context 53 Female and black 55 Exile 61 Brand's work: an overview 65 Allen's work: an overview 71 Nation language 77 Dub Poetry 79 Chapter Three ORALITY / LITERACY AND THE DERRIDEAN SIGN 83 Orality and literacy 84 The grapholect English 86 Derridean writing 92 Vulgar vs. arche-writing 95 Con/version 99 Deconstruction 104 What happens when a dub poet wishes to write her songs? 108 Conclusion 114 5 Chapter Four WHAT IS A LANGUAGE? 116 ON METHODOLOGY Creole continua 118 What is a language? 126 Conventionality and uniqueness 135 Rules 138 What is a grammar? 142 Conclusion 146 Chapter Fire A SIGN THEORY 148 Semiotics and the sign 149 The Saussurian sign as a duality 151 The sign as a unity 157 Value 160 The place of the analyst 164 Systemic boundaries are recreated with and within every sign 167 Conclusion 173 Chapter Six PROJECTION AND MODE 175 Projection 176 Modal projection 184 Projection in the written texts of Allen and Brand 188 Orality and the body 196 Conclusion 200 Chapter Seven EMBODIED METASIGNS 202 Metasigns 205 Metasign systems, or grammars 207 Performativity and the body 213 Embodied meanings 216 Dub 220 Conclusion 227 6 Chapter Eight CONCLUSION 229 Summary of the argument 234 Implications for Social Semiotic Theory 242 Stylistics; or, can linguistics really describe a literary text? 246 Literature as verbal art 249 WORKS CITED 254 7 LIST OF FIGURES Number Page Figure 1: Saussure's initial model of the sign 152 Figure Two: Saussure's second model of the sign 156 Figure 3: new terms change value / meaning of old terms 173 Table 1: Grammars of social categories: metasigns and markers 208 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank Gunther Kress for his patience and generosity throughout the research; Theo van Leeuwen for his intellectual and professional support; Barbara Godard for her early institutional support, and ongoing wisdom; Leslie Lancaster for a timely email that led to Chapter Four: the members of the London Semiotic Circle. with whom. in discussion. Chapter Five was begun; Jennifer Rowse11 for friendship and discussions: and Marco Fonseca for all of these gifts and more. This research could not have been completed without a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. The author also wishes to thank the British Council. This thesis is dedicated to Lillian Allen. who started it all. 9 Chapter One INTRODUCTION The texts of Allen and Brand dance at the edges of the capacities of linguistic description. Since some of them are performed, meanings are made in non-verbal ways (e.g., gesture, body-language, vocal sounds that are not verbal). Allen and Brand also insist on the black, female body as an inerasable presence in their meanings and therefore in their meaning- making. They insist on using oral language, whether it is recorded, performed, or transcribed. They insist that these material realities not be folded into dominant categories, such as "woman", or "language"; they ask me, as a participant, to consider what these categories hide. This is therefore a project with a dual ambition: to work out a suitable approach for reading these texts; and to use this process to make revealing readings. It asks, what kind of linguistics, broadly conceived, is adequate as an explanatory framework for the description of these oral / written texts at the margins of the literary? In order to focus the argument further, I follow a research question thrown up by the texts themselves. Allen writes her poetry, but also composes it for performance; many of her poems are in both print and audio technologies. The print versions often have phonetic spellings for 10 Jamaican English Creole words. Brand transcribes a light Trinidad English Creole, avoiding phonetic spellings but adapting a creole syntax and morphology. The written texts of Allen and Brand are therefore an ideal, socially-situated test-case for exploring the question: what is the relationship between spoken creole and English writing? This question is also an entry into the political issues raised by the texts themselves, and larger issues of disciplinarity and the epistemologies of linguistic and literary studies. Though stylistics is considered to be the linguistic analysis of literary texts, in this thesis I move from the linguistic analysis of a literary text to a social semiotic approach. I build on and expand social semiotics, in a search for a metalanguage capable of describing the oral / written poetry of Allen and Brand. What is the relationship between spoken creole and English writing? My interest in the connection between creole sounds and writing came from previous literary-linguistic work I did with a thirteen-page prose poem by Dionne Brand called "No Language Is Neutral" (Casas "No Language"). The task was to look at the writer's movement back and forth between Canadian English and Trinidad English Creole (hereafter TEC). Linguistically, these movements are known as "slides" (Labov Language in the Inner City) or "code-switches" (Gumperz). The 11 linguistic approach raised a series of fruitful questions. First of all, the linguistic models were from a tradition that focuses on non-literary language. The literary equivalent of these switches is called "dialect writing". Dialect writing in literary studies is treated unproblematically as the written equivalent of the dialect it is supposed to represent, while the Standard Written variety that usually contextualises it represents the imaginative status of the hero or narrator. This applies throughout English literary history, including even colonial literatures: the speaker of dialect is lower class, or an outsider; at best, the dialect speaker's identity as a member of the group that speaks that dialect is more salient than his/her individuality. The Standard Written foil to this represents a "classless" speaker or narrator. Often literacy and Standard Written dialect are in a strong connotative association, so that another dialect represents not just orality in a written imaginative world, but illiteracy'. A dialect speaker in English literature is often the buffoon.2 However, in Brand's poem, the consciousness of the dialect speaker was the same as the consciousness of the Standard Written passages. That is, the entire poem is written in the first person; it is a lyrical, highly personal narrative of the speaker's immigration from the Caribbean to Canada, with all of the international class issues this entailed (issues embedded in colonial history, in neo-colonialism, and in class, race, and 1 In short, the fact that literature is written in itself conditions the meaning of representations of non-written language. 12 gender oppression). Here was no "standard English" narrator sending up, or subtly objectivising, a speaker of dialect; in this highly literary and literate text, dialect was central to the thesis of the poem that "no language is neutral". Standard Written language is also a dialect, loaded with socio-political associations. The code-switching model brought this point into relief in a way that a literary treatment would not have done. Sociolinguistic descriptions of code-switching (Auers; Blom and Gumperz; Gibbons; Gumperz; Myers- Scotton) describe people in naturally-occurring situations who speak first in one language/dialect and then another, switching back and forth either during a conversation or according to the situation in which they find themselves.3 The fact that I was transposing from a tradition that focuses on spoken language (linguistics) into the analysis of a written text, though, raised issues that I was unable to attend to within the terms of that project.