The Brooklyn Rail

In March of this year, Donald Trump signed an executive order making English the official language of the United States. Like so many actions performed by our feckless and fear-mongering president, it seemed to be more about pleasing his base than addressing any real national problem, as a large majority of Americans already speak English as a first language. It is all of a piece with a wide-ranging us vs. them mentality, a relentless insistence upon creating an America that stands alone and apart from the rest of the world. Grew up speaking Spanish or Mandarin or any of the more than four hundred languages spoken in the United States? “Get with the program or get out” is the message.

This is more than a falsehood—though it is that, too. It is a repudiation of what made this country an engine of growth for decades, as well as a source of fascination to so many others around the world. A person’s ability to succeed here was not predicated on an ability to speak English, but on a willingness to contribute in some way. The acceptance of people from around the world literally defined this country, and made it stand out from more homogeneous societies.

Buried in the insistence on a single national language is some misguided notion of purity. If we safeguard English, the thinking goes, we protect our American identity. But English is a mongrel language to begin with, a mash-up of Anglo-Saxon, German, and a host of other influences. In that way, it’s well suited to a wildly heterogeneous country. It has no purity, and it doesn’t need any. Instead, it evolves with every new wave of immigrants, who sometimes add to the language and other times maintain their native speech. And like most admixtures, the result is something stronger and more supple than the original.

This chasing after purity poses a fundamental threat. It consumes thought and leaves us poorer for it, unable to accept our own inevitably jumbled identities. A rigid mentality can also move from our general sense of self into our physical state. It brings to mind the gloriously unhinged speech of General Jack D. Ripper in the film Dr. Strangelove, in which he rants about impurities in the water supply, and how these are enemy tricks to undermine our national strength. And in a stranger-than-Strangelove irony which might be comic if it weren’t terrifying, our utterly unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is peddling similar crackpot theories about fluoridation, autism, vaccinations, and a host of other issues, all in the name of the body’s supposed natural purification systems, but without the benefit of scientific accuracy.

Lost in the insistence on purity and a single national language is any appreciation for the concept of syncretism, in which different traditions combine to create an enlarged method of communication. Music is a natural wellspring for this kind of cross-current refreshment. When American R&B got picked up by Jamaican musicians, the beat slid over and reggae was born. When English musicians heard American folk-blues, they amplified it and transmogrified it into a potent strain of rock ‘n roll. The process is never neat and tidy, nor is the result, but the vitality of the expression is enhanced.

What makes a language exciting is rarely the textbook recitation of it in its accepted form, but the vernacular, how it is adapted and spoken by ordinary people. We are drawn to the elisions, repetitions, odd amalgams and curious phrasings—the slang that infiltrates ordinary speech and enriches it. The same is true in music. Once Thelonious Monk had mastered the stride piano of James P. Johnson and the melodic grace of Duke Ellington, he could fracture and recombine them into something new, a pungent dialect that was originally shunned for its peculiarities before being revered for its originality.

Some aspects of the vernacular can be represented in writing or musical notation, but a number of them resist the categorization. They fall into the category of “it ain’t what you say, it’s the way that’cha say it.” Little Richard once told a hilarious story of Paul McCartney trying to nail the big “whooo” in “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” huffing and puffing until he finally broke through to its intensified form. In this ongoing synthesis, the language inherited from our original colonial overseers gets run through the ringer and given back in a different form. It doesn’t adhere, it adapts. There are regular twists to this phenomenon; American actors once imitated their English forebears, while more recent decades have seen British actors schooled in American movies bring the vernacular of this country to bear on their performances. That’s because the King’s English, as it’s sometimes known, really belongs to all of us.

The push-pull of artistic creation finds a natural home in hybrid states. The recently departed accordionist Guy Klucevsek, a mainstay of the alternative music scene for many years, once cited the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus saying, “If the white man wants to develop something, he should develop the polka.” Instead of responding to the seeming putdown in the remark, Klucevsek did just that, he took the polkas he had been taught on the accordion and recombined them with everything from Albert Ayler to Aaron Copland. His resulting recordings and performances changed what was considered possible or suitable for his instrument, and carried with them an indelible, highly individual beauty. I’ve had Klucevsek’s “Sylvan Steps” on repeat since I learned of his passing, and its strong emotional undertow gets me every time.

Purity only gets in the way of making art, both as a goal and as a mode in which to work. The painter Willem de Kooning (a Dutch immigrant with his own distinctly hybridized way of speaking English) once remarked, “Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.” At first, this seems like a knock on his own efforts—who wants their art to be considered vulgar? But a different reading allows for a much wider mode of expression. A de Kooning painting contains everything from lyrical passages to frenetic ones, states that encompass both grace and rage. It’s what gives his art an intimate relationship to lived experience.

In the end, designating English the official language of the United States has a self-defeating quality. Language lives in the way people use it, and no decree can contain it. We don’t need to prohibit the broken beauty of the vernacular but to celebrate it. And the scores of other languages we can encounter just by riding the 7 train (there are more than 160 languages spoken in the borough of Queens alone) are living proof of the strength in diversity that has long defined the United States. Resistance against tyranny, against corruption and graft, are required right now to keep the country from giving over to full-blown autocracy. But the great thing about language, in all its astonishing varieties of expression, is that we don’t have to resist it. We just need to open the door to let language, and the music it contains, reach us.