Pass/words

SHIBBOLETH

One didn't know the name of Tarzan's monkey.
Another couldn't strip the cellophane
From a G.I.'s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We'd become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.


The morning of the first snowfall,
I was shaving, Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
"Maxine, Laverne, Patty."
                                      Michael Donaghy, Poetry*

"Pass" is an interesting word--it's extraordinarily versatile.  One might say that the word "pass" is passing strange (a fun yet archaic phraseology).  I can pass as in a lane, I can pass on having some of that haggis (thanks but no thanks), pass a class, a kidney stone, muster.  I can complete or dodge a pass, as well pass by, through, over, around. I can pass away.

In a racialized world there are people who pass for being of a "race" that might otherwise not be assigned to them. The use of that meaning of "passing" is commonly associated with African Americans describing folks passing as white and is documented in 1935. It originates in use as in "pass oneself off as" in 1809. In other words, when we pass as we internalize a movement through and around our identity in order to project something altered and outwards as our identity. Concerns around these notions of "passing" was especially acute in 19th century New Orleans, where the extraordinary confluence of cultures and colors produced such human variety in appearance that it altered the racial vocabulary throughout the nation and the era.

Sometimes at the gate we must offer a "password."  But once we pass and enter daily life,  there is the shibboleth--the test of pronunciation that gives lie to one's belonging or estrangement.  In the biblical passage the pronunciation of the the word "shibboleth"*** by refugees from a war was the marker of belonging; know it and live, mispronounce and die.  In old New Orleans the shibboleths had names like "octaroon" to denote degrees of racial complexity (and expected accompanying social behavior)and gens de couleur libres, free from the start and rendering moot the simplistic shibboleth of skin tones adding layered challenges of historical and linguistic interplay.  In old New Orleans one wanted to speak with an accent, be fluent in French. 

These ideas--passing for, passing through-- checked me when I recently visited the city of New Orleans.  In order to make the most of that visit I felt I needed to remember how I carried myself in a former life living in downtown Indianapolis.  I needed to pass for/as (at least) a street-wise visitor, someone not worth messing with as I wended my way through a French Quarter festival.

As my city ways came back to me, I reflected on my fear of the city as a kind of "stuck-up-ness"--an estrangement tinged with judgment. The term "siddity" surfaced--a term taught to me by the elder African American women I worked with when I lived in downtown Indy.  These women were old enough that many remembered crossing the Mason-Dixon line with family to find work during the Depression and World War II.  

These women knew the siddity--folks who denied their past and put on airs, viewing as lesser the very people who helped them get their new positions in life. Someone who's siddity is nervous about remembering where she comes from, tries to claim belonging in world she's moving to not from.  Siddity-ness claims this displaced belonging in a way that renders that already impossible belonging even more impossible. The siddity are "faking it." This leaves the siddity people without belonging. Labeling someone siddity carries its own smugness, as well, being breezy in its tone of knowing that the siddity ones lose what is most precious--belonging anywhere--in the end.

As a white gal, I might have no business looking for the siddity in me; there's no belonging for me in the lexicon of African-American social life.  But this white gal found it useful to learn what I could from a new world of racial awareness.  I was dropped into the midst of a racialized high-school when I was 16. (That I could make it to 16 without a lived racial awareness points to my white privilege.)  This once near-suburban school in Indy had recently been white-flighted into a majority black population.** And I had just moved there from another city. The layers of reaction/interaction, denial and disavowal around this population shift were confusing and fascinating. Besides learning not to "cut my eyes" at anyone (looking too long or closely), I also learned to listen to the unique languages around me; my inner poet was inspired by the sly lexicons and spoken rhythms of my African American schoolmates.

I don't remember hearing the old fashioned word "siddity" until working with the elders. I was a stranger in their strange land, too--a young white mother working with grand-parent-aged African American women and men. So they patiently explained things to me, like siddity, jazz and gospel music, and how to get by in hard times (the little, really important things).

They taught me that it was considered rude to pass by a black person on the street without making eye contact and saying "Hi.  How are you?"  That was a revelation.  The white practice of a curt nod, or even aversion of the eyes--essentially what's considered polite distance in the white city world--is, or at least was (I've been small town/rural for a while here), considered cold and stand-offish in the black city world.  The office manager once explained it to me:  If you're black--even if you're different from one another in many ways--you share the way the white world treats you because of your skin tone; you recognize a related, even familial-flavored humanity in one another...in a world that otherwise won't. 

As the poem above notes, in times and places of heightened hostility, knowing the right words, the nuanced signal, might keep you alive. "The devil is in the details:"  Our signaling of threat, of dominance or privilege, rests in the gesture, the eyes, the cant of the body; these are the signals that get us through the checkpoint.   Indeed, with a new awareness of how the others might prefer to be addressed on city streets, I travelled through Indy, D.C., New York and Boston, with a different eye to and a different greeting for the people around me.  But our belonging is carried in the details--the pronunciation, knowledge of baseball, musicians and singers--these are the things that allow us to settle in, cleared of deadly label "infiltrator." 

There are plenty of "wanna-bes" (wanna belong) for black culture and other cultures, as well; but, unlike wannabes,  infiltrators refuse to recognize that their belonging is born of hospitality. No, the infiltrator is pretending, is trying to pass, without having lived the belonging. The infiltrator tries to appropriate the language and the music of the language, both, without so much as a "thank you." How much of our life is now infiltrated?  These day the market seems to appropriate any and all cultural gifts to sell us back our belonging.  Rappers--just recently the outsiders raging against the machine, cleverly sampling the past and spinning it on its head--now provide the soundtrack for car commercials.   

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

(Alfred North Whitehead)

Our belonging lives in how we roll our "r," the elongation of "ah," the how-to's of the minutiae--how to pour the tea, offer bread, unwrap the smokes.  That our belonging rests in such knowledges is dangerous if they become life/death shibboleths--for how can we ever master all the details, know the names of all the icons?  And which gesture, pronunciation, knowledge is the one to know? There are shadings and details as multiple as individuals.  We traverse through belongings, fluid and nomadic "selves" absorbed to greater and lesser degrees, into the various fabrics of daily life. Today we may pass as American, or Latina, big-city or rural resident; tomorrow's checkpoint may find us suspicious. 

The poet above knows finally, as he looks into a cold mirror, that even he is an infiltrator at some level, needing to practice, in the ultimate alienation of war, the most mundane of details so that he might pass, pass through this impossible test of belonging. As I walked  through a strange city--my head full of memories, my feet moving toward new belongings--I knew in my heart how temporary "I" am--defined and outlined by my accent and skin tone, my carriage, my clothing, my breasts, my stride.  Some day I may not speak in the right way at the right moment and then where will I belong?  Will my very life be forfeit?

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.              (Bertrand Russell)

So we do this, we aspire to pass if it gains us a life (as it does for the defeated or the oppressed, besieged or bereft, the seeker and the beginner) and we seek to root out the infiltrator (and yet, we are infiltrated most insidiously by structures and economies), even while knowing we might ourselves fail in the belonging someday.  Do we gain a better belonging in not allowing the refugee in?  Is passing such a sin?  When does passing betray our past life and peoples and when is it simply the seeking of a new life in the name of having life at all?  A password is a secret word to get us in somewhere we might otherwise be locked out from.  It overrides our surface appearance, the perceptions of the gatekeeper, confirms our belonging through an agreement of shared knowledge.  But the shibboleth, the shibboleth will catch us out once we are nearly inside. The shibboleth is the stare at our accent or dress, how we address our child, wear our hair. "So cool" coos the rural white girl serving the ice cream to my son's African American/multi-racial girlfriend. She grimaces when we get to the car, "It's just so...I don't know...Why always about my hair?" "It's really about your skin?" I venture.  "Yeah," is the quiet reply.

Like the warrior poet in the mirror, we know that the shibboleth does not serve us, does not serve our life in the long run. It points to the sweetness of belonging--the cadences of particularity but uses them to exclude, even to kill.  If we realize belonging, at best, is shifting and temporary, could we begin to recognize the refugee, the newcomer-- even those "passing"-- in ourselves?   In the long run,  I think we are all refugees, immigrants and strangers, learning to pass... and our checkpoint is on the nearing horizon. 

Pictures:

"checkpoint charlie by night" from the old Berlin Wall site, by open mindedly

"Wheat near Nemrut" Ferrel Jenkins 

The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo

Shibboleth

Tate Modern, Terbine Hall

9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008

photo Suzy Bower (http://suzybower.wordpress.com/tag/shibboleth/

 

*Vol. 152, No. 6 (Sep., 1988), p. 342 Published by: Poetry Foundation

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20601768

**I mix my term usage because "black" was the preferred term at the time I gained racial awareness. Because I was initiated into my lived racial understandings when the term "black" was the empowering label, it feels more "true" or respectful to me to use that term. However,  I agree that African-American is more accurate and appropriate (unless Haitian or Caribbean-American, of course) even while ultimately finding racial labeling problematic, however necessary at times.

***the actual meaning of the word "shibboleth" is the head of a grass that contains the multiple seeds, a head of grain.   There is some irony in this, I think, given the deep meanings of grain, of bread, and the life-sustaining pluralism of the seed head.