SUPPLEMENTAL STORIES
The views, information, or opinions expressed in this essay are solely those of the creator(s) and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of The Rhizomatic Revolution Review [20130613] or its members.
We live in this house…
Where there are polished slabs of wooden flooring, carpet, the color of dust-strewn olive, once lay. Our kitchen walls were a bright, garish yellow meant to help us mark the sunrises. Every room felt bigger and more mysterious then than they do now, for you and I have grown taller – tall enough to see, tall enough to reach. Where dirt and dust from the years coated our lives, now little drafts dance through.
We live in this house on the corner of South Central.
We always have, we always will.
Even as the world sickens and crumbles around us, here, time will stand still.
I cannot balance moments with margins of eternity that remember me with grace. Maybe it was early in 2019 when I watched a pink-strewn music video where beautiful young men danced and sang about love and love and love. I’m not sure anymore because I cannot balance moments with margins of eternity that remember us with grace and poise, but also with a gentle note of scolding.
A year later, I had universes of information about them whizzing through my head so surely that the only obvious way to release was to assign essays to my students about their galaxy –
“Analyze the balance of the intersection between identity and language in ‘IDOL.’”
Universes, universes, and time lapses that are hard to glean when you’re on the brink of thirty and an academic and a child still.
It might have been a year later, and I might have been listening to Map of the Soul:7 again when I heard Black English woven through “My Time” and thought that another year had missed me.
Black English – or African American Vernacular English (AAVE)1 – is a variety of English that burst into existence from the lived experiences of those of us who are descendants of formerly enslaved people in the United States and across the diaspora. Black English is dynamic, in the middle of change as Internet English2 and Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL)3 descend, integrate and sometimes cherry pick syntactic and discourse and phonetic features from it. This shift cannot be contained, but it can be scrutinized, and we can interrogate it to retain awareness of the looping layers of experience that have brought our English to life and make it sound like it do.
Black English is systematic, it is rule-governed, and it is lyrical. Where institutionalized varieties lack the range to grapple with the still-unknown universes of time and space, Black English accounts for the magic of being human and being spirit all at once. When we walk to the store, for instance, I walk, you walk, they walk, she walk, he walk. We exist forever, and we exist together.
We live in this house. You live in this house. They live in this house. She live in this house.
We be livin’ in this house. We be in this house day in, day out. We been in this house.
See – eternity.
A part of the song goes like this:
“Oh, I think I was in yesterday/ Cuz everybody walk too fast”4
This is the lyric that I return to often because it tells me this: Someone understood that this is the way to express the timelessness and communal nature of being alive, the way time humbles us before we have a chance to mark it, to name it, to wrangle it in and ask for a slower clip, the way time evades us all and makes us commune on the selfsame level, beneath it, against it, in awe of it.
In standardized English there are different ways to render the present tense of a verb form. When we have a non finite form like “to walk,” we mark it for time to indicate to our listener where we stand in relation to an event. We mark time in the present, in part, based on the status of a noun in a sentence, and that status has to do with person, number and whether the noun is in the subject or object case:
First person, singular, subject: I
First person, plural, subject: we
Second person, singular, subject: you
Second person, plural, subject: none
Third person, singular, subject: she, he, it
Third person, plural, subject: they
When a person is using standardized English, that third person singular subject is a trickster because it wants to force that verb to take on the -s morpheme, the ending that marks it for the present tense. So “I walk,” “we walk,” “you walk,” “they walk” but “she”/ “he”/ “it”/ “everybody walks.”5
My linguistics students are learning that language is a mirror that reveals our innermost beings. The structures of a language tell us so much about the way we think in the culture that is deeply tied to the language. What we value is revealed even in the syntax of our languages. So, if I want to distinguish some person outside of me from “I,” “we,” “you” and “they” – if I want to place more emphasis on the singularity – or other-ness – of some individual that is not me and not present in our conversation – then I think I would want to make that verb an outlier. At least for “they” . . . our entity is not alone in their acts.
Not so in Black English. In Black English, we all “walk” if we here on the same time-space continuum.
When I look at the song-writing credits for “My Time,” I see the names of African American folks there with the familiar names of BTS members and of those artists that form their creative team.
We be livin’ in this house. We be in this house day in, day out. We been in this house.
I learned early on in my immersion into the sea that is ARMY that BTS as a creative entity makes deliberate and thoughtful moves throughout the scope of their invention process. We cannot make assumptions, here, about how much any of the creators knew about the layers of nuance in even the minute details of the grammar of BE. There are writers on this song who probably do speak this variety of English, and Hip Hop Nation Language – which BTS often integrates into their lyrics – is infused with structures close enough to BE that those with fluency in this variety know a little bit about its ancestor. I’ve read what the writers and producers have said about the song, so I know.6
What is important, though, is this layer of meaning that cannot be summarized in a grammar chart, the layer that carries the universe and the wave of time that we cannot fathom because we always so bound by everything, and we probably always will be.
See, here – there’s something else in this song:
“Can I someday finna find my time?”
This is interesting because it deviates from the typical structures of BE to frame “finna” within the scope of a question.
Questions – especially those that linguists call “yes-no questions” – are difficult to form in standardized, “mainstream” English. In grammar studies, we often teach our students that helping verbs aid in the formation of questions, reversing their position or inserting themselves to force a statement to morph into exploration. “I can someday finna find my time” might be the original statement, maybe. If so, it would not work in Black English. In BE, we would say “I’m finna find my time.” But, to my ear, it doesn’t seem possible to make it a question. Maybe “You finna find your time?” where intonation signals that we are not stating but asking. But not a question formed with that helping verb “can.”
“Can” implies ability. “Can” implies the need to be granted permission. When we ask someone if they “can,” we are asking if the action is within their scope of ability. When we ask someone if they “can,” we are asking for an indicator from them that we’ve been given license to do something. “Can you remember?” “Can you let me know?” “Can I have a minute?” “Can you give me more time?”
“Someday” is an adverb, and adverbs are interesting because they can float around in a sentence in ways that other parts of standardized English are not allowed, unbound, flighty, a bit of seasoning that makes our sentences taste more delicious on the tongue.
But “can” and “someday” don’t gel with each other at that deeper layer of meaning because “can” implies ability or permission and “someday” makes all things seem . . . almost unreachable, far out in a time-space that may or may not ever truly materialize. Is it a reality? Is it a dream? What is its material and boundary? Does it carry presence, and can I touch it, hold it? At least with “can” we know that there is only one of two realities possible: Either our intended audience has the ability, or they do not.
We be livin’ in this house. We be in this house day in, day out. We been in this house.
This deliberate choice makes the sentence seem like it is framing a reality that is less material than a possibility, less material, even than a dream. “Do I have the ability to someday have the intent to find my time?” Because when you fixin’ to do somethin’, it don’t mean you gonna do it necessarily.
There are thinkers better suited to exploring all of this than I: June Jordan did and so did Toni Morrison; H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman have and still do; young thinkers investigating the shifts and undulations of the impact of BE and Black images on Internet communications7 are considering all of this; and the scholars who are teaching Black American Sign Language (BASL)8 are actively preserving these waves of our past to steer our ships into the present state of language in America and beyond, in time.
Still, we be livin’ in this house. We be in this house day in, day out. We been in this house.
In our house, we never deliberately spoke BE – we were BE, so we simply existed in it, even as Grandma recited lines from Shakespeare and Countee Cullen in the span of the same ten minutes of existence. I had no frame of reference for what it meant to “code switch” because code switching is very, very deliberate for those of us who often turn one language off to use another better suited to our environment. When I teach the subject of code switching to my students, they often see nothing in it that may be remotely insidious; rather, they deem it a benign and useful and necessary tool. I understand this. Sure. But I also know that code switching splits up our identities, usually in favor of one identity over another because that is the reality of living in an environment where we cannot be too much of one kind of existence and not enough of the dominant kind. That severance always prioritizes the identity that allows us access to resources, the identity that helps us connect with the most people, the identity that grants us entry into spaces where we may be more at risk of hearing “you are so articulate, for a Black girl . . .”
These lyrics, though? They stand in a beautiful stew of disparate realities. They live in the shapes of Korean and the melody of BE. I’m enthralled with it, and I wonder at its ability to frame the confusion of existing in more than one space, with more than one identity, uncertain of even the very ability to start tapping into singularity, wondering if one has permission to be.
Today, our house is very different from the way it was when Hooper and 90th here in South Central Los Angeles brimmed with the sounds of Black English. Los Angeles has changed. So many of the old folks are dead now, and the city pushes those without the ability to code switch – on every single solitary level – onto Skid Row up around 6th and San Julian and now, all over the city, unhoused. I miss those sounds because it seems that Grandma and Grandpa took them off to the grave when they passed, too, like their friends and neighbors. But I’m still here, still here in the middle of the tumult of all this sickness that has been festering in our country since my ancestors’ bodies and minds were forced into the soil of this land to build it into the power it is today.
I’m still here because of them, but I’m also not here, and I’m also somewhere else, depending on the point from which you decide to view me. Where you are, I am sitting on Grandpa’s lap watching the deep ebony of his lips rounding the shape of his cigar as I peer towards the sun of his features. Where you are, I can smell the sharp sweetness of those breaded tomatoes, and I can feel it as Grandma keeps cooking, cooking, conjuring a swelling spell of heat that grips the whole house and won’t let go. The neighborhood folk come by for dinner, and she feeds them, because not a single one of God’s children should go hungry, and “Can you imagine going hungry in such a rich land,” Grandma asks. Now, in the dreamy waves of this song, I can hear that someone else knows this confusion, too, now, now . . .
I’m still here, but also there and also somewhere else. Where you are, I am coming home after school, running inside from the car, my hands sticky and grimy, my throat sore, and I scrub and scrub while Grandma tells us that she knows what it’s like, her mother passed when she was four, your father, when you are eight, and . . . How old are you? How old were you? What is age? Do she know? Do they?
Almost thirty, I’m still here. Almost eternal, I’m still here, and I can still hear the sounds of the universes where I’m alive, but somehow absent from their rooms and floors, the carpet gone and replaced because we had the house remodeled a decade ago – over a decade ago.
We be livin’ in this house. We be in this house day in, day out. We been in this house.
1 Throughout this piece, I will refer to AAVE as Black English, which is the name that Geneva Smitherman (1977) uses in her ground-breaking book Talkin’ and Testifyin’: The Language of Black America. Other scholars of BE prefer to refer to the variety as AAVE or Black Language (BL).
2 The term Internet English is a new one. There is scholarship from as far back as Sun Hong-Mei’s (2010) study that refers to the variety as such. Recently, scholars at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Linguistics (Pierce 2019) have referred to it with this term, too.
3 In his work on the language of hip hop worldwide, H. Samy Alim (2002, 2015, and 2018) refers to the variety of English widely used across this cultural movement as “Hip Hop Nation Language.”
4 ARMY translators wisha (@doyou_bangtan) and doolset (@doolsetbangtan) provide lyrics both in the original Hangul and with English translations.
5 The pronoun everybody is considered a universal pronoun and is grammatically singular.
6 In an interview with The Korea Herald, “My Time” producer and writer Sleep Deez recounts his creative process and the experience of working with co-producer and writer Pdogg and writers Jayrah Gibson, Printz Board, and Richelle Alleyne. BTS members RM and Jung Kook are also credited as writers on the track. In the interview, Sleep Deez attributes the idea for the use of “finna” in this way to Jung Kook.
7 Teen Vogue writer Lauren Michele Jackson, UC Berkeley scholar Erinn Wong and video essayist and commentator Khadija Mbowe, who refers to them in their work, all come to mind.
8 Nakia Smith – known by her sign name Charnay – helped popularize BASL on TikTok last year. Organizations such as The Language & Life Project, operated by North Carolina State University, are working to preserve this language.
Artist Statement
The work submitted here represents the thoughts that have followed me for over a year now since I first heard the track “My Time” from BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7. It is not a linear narrative; instead, the text is structured out of time, out of order, to represent how the song and the timelessness that it conveys through the process of code switching between Korean and Black English (BE) have impacted my thinking over this year and a half.
I wanted to capture timelessness and the confusion that often stems from it. I also wanted to capture the ways that our identities can meander between different facets of ourselves. Though the piece is written in an “essay” style in some areas – and, in some areas, more like a linguistic analysis essay to show how the grammar establishes this timelessness – it also includes parts that read like my journal entries, which often shift between “standard” and Black English. This balance represents who I am: a teacher, a scholar, a Black woman, an ARMY.
The story comes to no resolution, contains no climax and none of the other elements that we normally associate with Western-style storytelling. It is ruminative, and it is meant to represent the way that we grapple with ideas over time, the ways that we navigate memory, and the impact that the spaces in which we live have on our process of coping with loss and grief.
“My Time” is my favorite track on Map of the Soul: 7 because it captures all the layers of the mind that the album as a whole navigates across the 20 tracks that are included. It is a song touched by something spiritual, and I wanted to converse with the layers of linguistic nuance that help to infuse this song with that spiritual depth. The Black English present here establishes and reinforces the “out of time”-ness that is the center focus of this song, and the feelings that this has inspired in me are ones that continue to make me pause and consider how I, too, live inside and out of time. My hope is that this piece helps ARMY understand how complex and beautiful this song is and that it also helps them to see how important Black English – and, therefore, Black culture, Black life, and Black existence – is to the development of the feelings it conveys and inspires. I am so impressed with the way that Jung Kook’s voice relays this complexity here and bridges the gap between our two cultures to convey something we all feel. I hope others are able to understand just how important this is, too.
— Kimberly Miller
A seeker, a linguist and an ARMY learning to be a fortress by the meadow (USA).
Illustration By: Circa, @circadraws
References
Barry, A.K. (2013). English grammar: Language as human behavior. Boston: Pearson.
doolset (2020). doolset lyrics, BTS lyrics in English, Map of the Soul 7: 시차 (My Time). Retrieved from https://doolsetbangtan.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/my-time/
Sleep Deez, RM, Gibson, J., Pdogg, Printz Board, Alleyne, R., and Jung Kook (2020). My Time [Recorded by Jung Kook]. On Map of the Soul: 7. Seoul: BigHit Entertainment.
Smitherman, G. (1977). Talkin’ and testifyin: The language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
wisha (2020). BTS translations (do you, bangtan/do you bangtan): 시차 (My Time). Retrieved from https://doyoubangtan.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/my-time/
Suggested Citations
APA Citation
Miller, K. (2021). 90002 Parallax: BE and “My Time”. The Rhizomatic Revolution Review [20130613], (3). https://ther3journal.com/issue-3/90002-parallax-be-and-my-time.
MLA Citation
Miller, Kimberly. “90002 Parallax: BE and ‘My Time.'” The Rhizomatic Revolution Review [20130613], no. 3, 2021. https://ther3journal.com/issue-3/90002-parallax-be-and-my-time.
90002 Parallax: BE and “My Time” by Kimberly Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
@Kimberly Miller, 2021