AYANA SMITH
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: University Heights High School
BORN: Brooklyn, NY
LIVES: Bronx, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Published in The Grade, New York Daily News
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: When Cecily said “I love window-shopping in Walmart,” I knew that we would be a pair that can’t be beaten. Over the course of Girls Write Now, Cecily has done what other adults in my life have discouraged me from doing: writing how I speak. Through working with Cecily, I’ve gained confidence in my most authentic writing, and I’ve gained confidence in challenging people who try to strip my writing of its voice.
CECILY ROBINSON
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Teacher, Great Oaks Charter School
BORN: Jersey City, NJ
LIVES: Oldbridge, NJ
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Distinguished Educator Award, Outstanding Student Achievement Award; featured in The Wall Street Journal
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Thank you, Ayana, for making me a mentor. We have been able to learn and grow together, which has been the utmost pleasure. We are one and the same! Thank you to Girls Write Now for having such a phenomenal program to provide opportunity and access for girls.
For a society where we are taught that everything is black and white and that the standard conventions of English are the only correct way to express ourselves, perhaps language can be organic.
Language: the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured or conventional way.
This is the definition of language I was taught to follow in school from pre-K to twelfth grade. In the eyes of my teacher, or at least the eyes of the curriculum, our sentences were to remain simple: Keep the sentences concise, short, and sweet; keep the message as concrete as possible. There was never room for creativity or ambiguity. Do so in a fashion that didn’t compact more than a simple sentence’s worth of information in a single sentence, periods and commas preferred, while all other punctuation was snipped from the paper.
I mastered this language, and for a while, I was a firm believer in enforcing the standard conventions of English onto everyone. I would rain down on my peers when they misplaced commas and spellcheck my teachers throughout the lesson.
Although I had only ever gotten the occasional eye roll, I never truly faced the repercussions of my incessant grammar policing until one of my middle school peers stopped me and said: “Yo, Ayana,” one of my peers said, “you talk White.”
For those who do not know, this is bigotry. Maybe not bigotry verbatim because the way I speak is not an opinion; however, the implications of the statements perpetuate an opinion held by members in my community (and surely communities beyond the South Bronx). White Americans speak one way, and Black Americans speak another way.
And from then on, I had a new identity attached to me. It came with a slew of names. Smarty-pants. Know-it-all. Dictionary. And it came with a myriad of false equivalencies. Because Ayana speaks like that she must be a nerd and too smart for us. Because Ayana speaks like that she must be stuck up. Because Ayana speaks like that she must want to be White. Feeling isolated within my own community, I looked outward. If I speak White, why not speak to White people? However, when the voice I had cultivated through listening to my mom and aunties’ kitchen banter and from running around the park with the other neighborhood kids bore into conversations with White Americans, I was always given this look of bewilderment. I would pronounce “ask” as “ax,” say “be” instead of “are,” and overemphasize my vowels when expressing excitement and outrage. No longer was I Ayana-the-know-it-all-who-talks-White.
This caused me to rethink the way I saw language. Perhaps language is something fluid and malleable; perhaps pronunciation is the result of our history. The way we speak is never something to be ashamed of, nor should it be something divisive.
In life, I have always felt that most White Americans do not understand my language, Ebonics, where singular verbs are seldom used and a soft “uh” sound replaces phonetics like “ay” and “ah.” Ebonics, a proverbial that’s inextricable from my skin color and features—typically various shades of brown skin ribbed by wide bridged and flat noses, thick lips, and small ears. Ebonics, a language that perpetuates the poverty we live in: Academia is written in terms that only the educated may understand, anything watered down and translated runs the risk of succumbing to political propaganda to push an agenda; and who would be willing to hire someone who sounds like they are flailing in the high tides of the million rules of standard conventions of American English?
And in life, I have always felt that most Black Americans do not understand that I do not speak or write like this because I wish to bathe my skin in baths of bleach. Rather, I enjoy it. Expanding my vocabulary to create tasteful sentences that normalize uncanny phonetics and words. Making my peers flip through dictionaries and snidely remark that I must “read thesauruses all day.” What I don’t enjoy is language being used as a barrier set in place by notions passed off as community imperatives—“Talking like that is talking White”—which serves only to alienate members who have tongues that orchestrate new and different sounds. I will always be unapologetically Black:
I will never be ashamed of my ancestors who toiled underneath the sun in sweltering heat, I will always be a firm believer in Black Lives Matter, and I will continue to go up in arms whenever the media portrays “Ebonics” as the result of dim-wittedness rather than a product of the faults in American history.
I will always unapologetically speak and write as I do: I will never be ashamed of how flowery my voice is when I put pen to paper. I will always be a firm defender of treating language as an organic being that can have its rules broken and bent. I will continue to go up in arms against people who have a narrow view of language—as if its gradient can be reduced to solely Black and White.