Poetics of the Iterative: On the N-Word in Black Poetry & Language (Part I)

A Conjure Word

In Black language and life the word “nigga” has become a key to a very peculiar process of attempting to alter the racialized realities of the United States. This particularly Black form of amelioration, the conscious decision to change the meaning and application of a pejorative slur, operates endlessly to subvert the extreme terrorizing systems from where the word derives. The word “nigga” itself now appears as a sign of this never-ending project. While not every Black American may agree that the word “nigga” is any less harmful than its incendiary predecessor “nigger,” the ameliorated version is a little bit more than an epithet considering its ever-shifting rhetorical use. The energy generated by the history and ironic social utility of this term has imbued it with an unwieldy spirit, transforming it fully into a conjure word. And when one says this word, they conjure a shade every time—either a beneficent or a gloom. Call someone a “nigga” at the wrong impasse, or with the wrong mouth and you may very well summon the flashes of every “nigger” brought to the kill. This is the invocation of the denotative and the detonative.

Though the use of the N-word will largely remain a project of ambivalence (the pains/haunts of history in contrast to the flights/fights for freedom), it is still a cultural priority to continue appraising the word while speculating on its implications for Black futurity. Because of and counter to the recursive grand narratives bound within “nigga” and its linguistic structure, the everyday practices and cultural productions of African Americans reveals the ongoing project of resituating its meaning through a polyvalent set of language games. Consider here styles and forms apparent in Black storytelling, poetry, social games like the dozens, shit talkin, hip-hop/battle rap, visual art, sound art, and other experimentations, all of which I refer to as participating forms in the poetics of the iterative—a Black methodology of craft which strives for a resistance to and refusal of imposed stereotypes by constantly generating, reproducing, transmediating, and reiterating alternative narratives about Black embodiment.

These language games constitute both the product and process of sociolinguistic resistances created by African American Vernacular English, which enacts what Geneva Smitherman describes as “a very conscious attempt on the part of those in enslavement to represent an alternative or a different reality through language—through a language which is based a lot on irony, on ambiguity, on what Henry Lewis Gates calls ‘double voicedness.’” It is this “conscious attempt” which must be enacted over and over and over again to counter and confound the deeply codified white supremacist cultural attitudes/perceptions indoctrinated by the word “nigger,” in order to produce the poems, stories, music, social interactions, and other sound experiments of African Americans that give the word nigga alternative meanings, and allow for new sociopragmatic deployments in the performance of identity. 

A Praxis of Ambivalence

My obsession with the word nigga is invested mostly in the study of and dialogue about its performance as a sign of a particular quandary of language and life—one so perplexing that perhaps there isn’t enough language for it and there is no other language for it at all. In Stereo(TYPE), the word is deployed over 126 times in a series of recontextualized utterances to enact deconstructive performances that critically attend to the ambivalences of its use. One conceptual piece in particular, “Black Existentialism No. 8: Ad Infinitum; or Ad Nauseam,” has multiple iterations where it appears as a concrete poem, a generative sound piece, and in other variations to re-enact the iterative process of unending changes in articulations, vibrations, meanings, and affects the word nigga has with and on the body— whether spoken, read, or heard; whether alien or familiar.

Prompted by Will Daddario to write a one-word poem, I became even more deeply fixated on the plural and possessive forms of the word. While “nigga” itself already conjures so much, “niggas/nigga’s” raises some uncanny implications of plurality and ownership. To consider and construct the possible concepts of “Black Existentialism No. 8,” I catalogued what I came to understand of how the word is shaped in language, consequently seeing just how much language is shaped by ideology. I wanted to really understand what the word was made of linguistically, what materials constructed its meanings, and what one’s mouth had to do in order to speak it. Together, this catalogue and the conceptual piece it informs provide the basis of this exploration into an iterative and ambivalent practice of poesis that illuminates what is truly present in and represented by the N-word.

The word “niggas” is constructed through the mobilization of two morphemes (the free: “nigga” + the bound inflectional: “s”). We can assume here that the symbol “s” may suggest both a duration in the subsistence of the regular noun “nigga” as the plural marker “s,” and multiple articulations (or instances) of the referential nigga, or the “nigga(s)” meant to be reified by the presence of its sign. “Nigga,” as a free morpheme is so because, on its own, it creates a word full with pragmatic and/or semantic meaning. “S” as a bound inflectional morpheme is given to the rules of all inflectional morphemes: a. create a differentiation of a word; b. never change the category of the word; and c. attach to only relevant members of a category. Acting together, the free morpheme and the bound inflectional morpheme conjoin to create the irregular noun “niggas.” The structures of master and slave are everywhere in this language.

In the international phonetics alphabet (IPA), the phonetic rendering of the utterance of the word “niggas” is represented as [nIgәs]. The “en” [n] sound is categorized as a voiced nasal stop—the vocal cords vibrate, air is blocked from cupping the lip as the tongue hems itself against the alveolar ridge of the mouth. After this articulation, the tongue pulls, the back of it raises to produce the high lax front vowel sound of [I] (splayed “eah”) before quickly rebounding off the back palate to make the voiced velar stop sound of “gh” [g] where a puff of air is forced suddenly into the middle lax vowel sound “uh” (represented by the swa: [ә]) which emanates from the center of the mouth. As the air is again made mutable, the tongue returns to tuck under the alveolar ridge, the teeth closing, a small wind kicks up, blowing through the enamel summoning the sound [s] is. Essentially, the word is made of two voiced consonant sounds, two lax vowel sounds, and a voiceless consonant sound dramatizing the presence of both plurality and seriality. This close look at the linguistic features of the word “niggas” provides some interesting inferences to the grand narratives all seen, heard, and told within it. Voice. Voicelessness. Loud. Lax.