6

Expressing “the Real You”

A few tips can loosen the tongue, but a way with words comes slowly. Something has to drive the effort. One motivator is the power of self-expression, or the ability to reveal the inner you. This bursting open like a milkweed, this dehiscence, is an exhilarating prospect; but self-revelation is also self-exposure, which can feel as strange as wearing underclothes on the outside. Contradictory humans that we are, we want the world to know our authentic selves without encroaching on private territory.

Yet what private domain are we protecting? Do we know who we are until we come to articulate that inner ooze called self? Of all the rewards of expressiveness, self-knowledge gained through language may be the most thrilling.

THE REAL SELF

Who are we?

At first we are who the world says we are: “What a good girl!” or “You’re just like your meshuge (nutty) father!” We may chatter away, snap up new words, say the darnedest things—but as children we are essentially a patchwork of received and imitated selves.

Into our teen years we glimpse an “authentic” self, one that cries out for expression. In actions we might pursue some madcap rebellion, dyeing the hair green or swallowing goldfish, but in words—even in soul-searching poetry—we find it safest to go with the herd or the sub-herd as the forces of peer approval rein us in. The outer reaches of language seem lonely and foreboding. Which words, which idiom, which voice would represent us as we “really” are—and which would project some alien geek?

The longing for self-revelation remains, but now the way of words is clogged. Something has atrophied since childhood. Fears and inhibitions pile up. Looking in on a university’s core literature classes, professor and poet Marvin Bell noted that students “from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds like mine…lack the courage to be articulate, so they speak in an all-purpose colloquial flow designed to show how well they fit in rather than how they stand out: plenty of ‘you knows’ and ‘I means’ and ‘kind ofs,’ lots of ‘likes.’ …They seem to understand what they mean, but they never quite say it. Ultimately, …when the conversation grows more complex, they will be able to say neither what they understand nor what they do not understand.”¹

THE ARTICULATE SELF

“They lack the courage to be articulate,” says Bell. Now, there’s a word people like to throw around. An articulate young woman. An articulate candidate. An articulate applicant. Or the backhanded compliment, She’s surprisingly articulate for a __________ (fill in the blank).

Articulation has been used in English for at least seven hundred years. Along with the later-appearing articulate, it probably derives from árthron and artus, the Greek and Latin words respectively for “joint.” The Romans used the verb articulare in the sense of dividing meat (and perhaps captives) into single joints. Today the words have to do with connecting joints or parts or differentiating single parts from the connected ones. In speech to articulate means “to utter clearly in distinct syllables.” Joint by joint, we distinguish connected sounds. We enunciate. (Comedy host Milton Berle used to pinch the lips of his guests, urging them to “e-nun-ci-ate!” He might have said “ar-tic-u-late” had he considered it as funny a word.)

The sense of articulate expression as “clear and intelligible” expression goes back at least to 1830, and today its sense extends to “precise and effective use of words” and “easy and fluent use of language.” In these uses we still see a relationship to joints, their singularity and connectivity. When communication is so inarticulate as to be unintelligible, we call it “disjointed.”

Here is our articulate job applicant, facing the dreadful task of describing her “management style”:

I’d call it upbeat. Open. Assertive. I’m drawn to ambitious projects, even the insanely ambitious, but I approach each in sane increments, and my record shows the results. Having achieved equilibrium in my own life, I can focus on people and problem-solving at work. Colleagues praise my rapport with staff of all backgrounds.

Nothing lyrical here, but the message is delivered in sturdy, connected statements. Compare with the loose-jointed version:

Hey, I’m a manager and a half. I’m a positive-type kind of person, I mean, my head’s in the right place and I can handle a whole lot of grief sans getting weirded out. Where are we going with this? Okay. I’ve got my act together, so I’m majorly into people. No matter who it is, I’m like, how’s it going? You know?

Or the stiff-jointed:

I’m a goal-oriented self-starter whose facilitative skills assure the effectiveness and efficiency of the team-building process and the promulgation of strategic managerial objectives.

Early in our lives it seems easy to join words to convey a personal truth. With a few articulated phrases we differentiate our child selves and situations from the rest of the universe. Within a few years, however, everyone seems to be saying the same things in much the same patterns: “I am totally against violence to women.” “I’m an animal-rights-type person.” “I’m really into parenting.” No longer distinctive, our statements have become mass-manufactured labels. To differentiate ourselves we must now (1) break free of such categorical or generic utterances; (2) join words in fresh, elastic ways. This, says Professor Bell, takes courage. Bell faults students who lack “the courage to be articulate.” Why is courage necessary? Because most of us live in the domain of the inarticulate, where clear, honest, and precise expression sticks out like exposed buttocks. How many kids are whacked for being “wise-assed”? Who dares to be the well-spoken “snobs,” “suck-ups,” and “phonies” of public school? What happens to the articulate in the world’s killing fields?

Articulate self-expression risks the scorn not only of peers and goons, but of the more articulate: the word masters and other intellectual superiors standing by in judgment. The risks are enough to seal one’s lips until curmudgeonhood, and even then there is no free passage. Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, describing himself as an “elderly white male,” once noted: “We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists, or fascists.”²

STATEMENTS

Still, people want to reveal themselves, and many try doing so in shows of identity called “statements.” You are AGRESV 1, your vanity auto plate. You are the songs you download and lip-synch. You are what you eat, what you drive, what you wear. What you tattoo on your skin or dab behind your ears—you Poison, you. Naturally, advertisers recognize this quest and cast their wares as self-expression. To promote a clothing boutique, a Chicago billboard campaign showed a sexily attired and supine woman with the legend “Your most influential statements are made on your back.”

In the popular view everything “makes a statement,” a quality that lends dignity to looting a minimart or trashing the Champs-Élysées. Action-based statements get special attention if not always desired or enduring responses. From Gary Cooper to Clint Eastwood, the hero of big actions and few words is an American icon. Eastwood’s advice in one macho military film is to “Shut that hole under your nose!” Unfortunately, in doing so the inarticulate must then state themselves within the limitations of No Fear T-shirts, big hair, generic grunts, and a few slick moves. Many young people believe they can make their statements through music, particularly soulful rock. “I don’t talk or express myself that well, that’s why I do music,” said singer Kurt Cobain. But Cobain shotgunned his brains out in the spring of 1994.³

Life, most will agree, can dump heaps of toxic waste upon the struggling self. Articulate self-expression helps us dig out. Music, action statements, and babbling on social media may relieve some pressure but rarely get us out from under. When novelist Henry Roth said “language transmutes [transforms] the dross [refuse] of experience,” he was talking not only about elevating the commonplace into art but of expression as survival. He was eighty-eight when he said it, still writing and articulating himself.⁴

THE REAL VOICE

“Language transmutes the dross of experience.” Can those fancy-schmancy words be the real voice of Henry Roth, a child of the New York slums? If “real” means the voice that best delivers a thought, the answer is yes. Do the words deliver the authentic Henry Roth? Partly. They reveal a part of the mix that makes up Roth’s unique self. Transmute and dross are literary words that Roth used to express a certain sentiment to a literary audience. He would not use them hollering for the garbage to be taken out. He would use other voices for other purposes, a range with no upper or lower limits.

Compared to the average person, writers take easily to self-transformation through language. In fact, if their publishers encourage it, some writers shed voices like old skins and leap into more crowd-pleasing selves. But for most other people—especially youth—a sudden leap into expressiveness may seem like dancing across the bowling lanes in a tutu. True, your inner transformations may be crying for expression, but you express one thing and (inarticulate) people suspect you of another. Originality is suspect. Soon the transformations themselves become suspect and you sweep them under the rug.

From English class or an overheard remark, a new word comes to light on your tongue and feels good there. “Transcendent.” You try it privately; it carries a meaning you used to grope for with phrases such as “far out”—but no one ever realized just how far out you meant. “How’d you feel when the ball landed in your mitt?” Or “What was it like when he put that flower in your hair?” Transcendent! A transcendent moment! That’s exactly what it was; but unfortunately you can never tell anyone because that word ain’t you.

But it is you. It is you, the evolving you. Maybe “transcendent” doesn’t fit the you defined by the rest of the world, but it can fit the emerging self or the self you decide to nurture and extrude. Monkeying with the self may seem artificial and even schizoid, but to accept false limitations betrays human potential. The notion of a predetermined self buried in you like some time-release capsule is Broadway fantasy, from the school of someday I’ll find my destiny.

Writer V. S. Naipaul remarks, “One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas—and you have to work through it all.”⁵

If expressiveness doesn’t seem to fit the natural you, then consider reshaping the bona fide real you. Don’t waste time finding your single real voice. We rarely find our real voice, plumbing the depths until we snare one that sounds right. Our voice can be a new voice—or several—that we make real, a voice in harmony with our roots but capable of expressing the full flower of the evolving self. Like everything that breaks from the ordinary, the new voice entails risks, apprehensions, missteps. These are reasonable costs of liberation.

CUTE FLAVIO

“Flavio is, like, so cute” is one way to describe a new heartthrob, an ordinary way that takes no chances. Here’s another:

God made you from red clay, Flavio, with his hands. This face of yours like the little clay heads they unearth in Teotihuacan. Pinched this cheekbone, then that. Used obsidian flints for the eyes, those eyes dark as the sacrificial wells they cast virgins into.… Flavio, with skin sweet as burnt-milk candy, smooth as river water.⁶

Now we know precisely how cute Flavio is, distinguished from every other cutie. This is a voice of writer Sandra Cisneros, expressed through a character in Woman Hollering Creek, a voice Cisneros forges from her Mexican American heritage and Chicago-neighborhood street talk, her readings and studies and listening, and the courage and will to go beyond ordinary self-expression.

Cisneros speaks in many voices, child-innocent, goddess-all-knowing, drawing on any word that expresses the heart, including Spanish words—mi vida, mi preciosa, mi chiquita, mi chulito, mi bebito—Strunk and White’s advice against foreign phrases notwithstanding. (“That language,” she writes of Mexican Spanish. “That sweep of palm leaves and fringed shawls. That startled fluttering, like the heart of a goldfinch or a fan. …” ¡Ay, qué linda.’)

Speaking in many voices—a trait that might have gotten one burned at the stake in earlier times—is a sweet privilege of modern Western culture and one that offers new freedom in expressing the multifaceted self. According to at least one reputable psychiatrist, the self that is capable of shifting and adapting to different roles is a source of strength and not pathologically fragmented. Unlike the “fundamentalist self” or consistency freak who sees change as menace, the “willful eclectic” better reflects (and expresses) the disorderliness of life and varieties of reality.⁷

Many of us have marveled at our multiple personalities as we shift from street to bedroom to boardroom selves, from mystic to manic to skeptic. Although we might still cling to the idea of one authentic self and one real voice, in truth we are free to embrace as “real” any voice that helps us process experience and adapt to the world.

“GET OUT OF HERE WITH THIS NERD STUFF”

A case in point is the ongoing question of so-called black dialect or black English versus Standard (“white”) English, and how to reconcile the two in school and beyond. Current debate echoes the 1994 reporting of New York Times writer Felicia R. Lee, that black vernacular has steadily diverged from Standard English, and that as an inner-city dialect it may have a stronger grip than ever on young people.⁸ To encourage students to learn Standard English, Lee reported, some educators were teaching it as a second language; others stressed the payoffs of speaking the Standard English of business and the professions. But several teachers faced cynicism and even rage over what the black students called “talking proper.” At one school students shouted, “Who are you trying to be?” when peers used Standard English in class. Elsewhere, a senior described a similar attitude: “That’s like, ‘Get out of here with this nerd stuff.’ They say you’re trying to be white. It’s a stereotype that white people are so proper and that black people are real.”

One New York City teacher noted that attitudinal changes are difficult but essential. For career success, for broader empowerment, “the African American inner-city kid has to turn it off and turn it on and be, in effect, bilingual.” Linguist Geneva Smitherman, interviewed by Lee, felt that this bilingualism must work both ways. In the sixties to the eighties, she said, black English was a language to be recognized for its patterns, its system, its rules. “Now we are at the point where we need a multilingual policy that means that everybody would learn one other language or one other dialect.”

Is it phony to equip oneself with all the means of expression within reach? One needn’t abandon roots, home, and soul to exploit the breadth and structure of Standard English. What if “talking proper” helps give voice to your feelings, distinguish your ideas, signal affinities with like-minded people, and empower you in the broader world? What “self” does that betray?

Is it phony for Standard English speakers to embrace ethnic vernacular? They try it often enough, if not always successfully. Is there a white person who hasn’t wished to borrow the expressiveness of black English or other ethnic patterns? Comedian George Carlin would get a knowing laugh when reminiscing about white boys talking “black” on the street corners—and never a black group chattering “white.” How quickly do white vacationers adopt black-islander dialects, saying to each other over dinner, “How you keepin’, mon?” and “What you got for me, cool mamma?”

You will always face interference when extending your “real” voice. “Who are you trying to be?” people will demand. Let them think what they want. You are trying to be someone you were not: an expressive person adapting to a changing world.

THE STABLE SELF

As multifaceted as the self might be, it cannot keep dividing like cells out of control. Eventually the sum of your parts will take on a personality. If your courage holds out, it will be an adaptable and ever-evolving personality, but it will have a dominant tone that shapes your self-expression. You will have many real and expressive voices: public, private; casual, formal; spoken, written. But among them you will seek harmony, rather than shift personalities willy-nilly. Together, they will articulate who you are: a force to be reckoned with.