![]() But if I take the beauty of these works and filter my own experience through them, I can create something that is mine. Nor does Pound’s version of The Seafarer. James’s Portrait of a Lady doesn’t do this. But at my grandmother’s house, her experiences and the memories have filtered through her to us and by extension become our own. Each event is buttered thick with experience and language. Having majored in English with a concentration in British Literature and Middle English, I have come to love all aspects of the English language - have come to love sitting down with the writings of James and Pound as much as I love sitting down to Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s house. Like putting on a nice suit - one that you feel good in in the outside world but wouldn’t choose for a lazy Sunday afternoon. I had always thought of it as the language spoken on the outside, the language one used to procure scholarships, employment, promotions. I had never thought of standard English as that. You just need to have been a part of the experience.Ī friend once asked if it was hard to speak “standard” English. You don’t have to be a part of my family to understand what my grandmother means when she turns a phrase in a way that makes some friends knit their eyebrows and glance at me for help. It tells its own story, our language does, and woven through it are all the places we’ve been, all that we’ve seen, experiences held close, good and bad. It is not the stereotypical “I be, you be” that has made its derogatory way into others’ perception of ‘black dialect.’ And it is more complex and less frustrating than the whole ebonics argument, although the seed of the argument is truly the essence of our language. What is spoken in her house is the language of a long time ago, before we were shipped off to college, before my exposure to Chaucer and James and the Brontës. We speak this language to those who understand and then we come home and this language gets blended into the language that is spoken in my grandmother’s house. My younger brother and I listen to music that plays with language, that pushes against grammatical and linguistic walls. What was once great was then hype and now phat and so on. When the family is alone together or with close friends, our language flows into a southern dialect essenced with my younger brother’s (and sometimes my own) hip-hop of-the-moment idioms - what was once good became fresh and is now the bomb. Told with raw emotions and ferocious honesty, this is the real, on-the-record, story of one woman’s descent down the rabbit hole of gangland, and her efforts, as a daughter, mother and girlfriend, to claw herself out.We speak a different language in my grandmother’s house. Motherhood will be a rude awakening, but it may also be her saving grace. Waking for the second time in two weeks in a hospital bed, to the news that she is pregnant, she realises it’s time to turn her life around. She believes she is invincible.īut the consequences of her actions are soon to catch up with her. ![]() ![]() At the age of fifteen, she stabs an innocent man in the street, earning her unrivalled respect and ‘Top-Dog’ status amongst her crew. She never leaves her house without a knife. A member of the Younger 28s, a notorious gang that terrorised the postcodes around Brixton in the 90s, Sour escapes a troubled family life to immerse herself in the street life of likking and linking. Sour is the true story of a former Brixton gang girl, drug dealer and full-time criminal. And the reason I reckon I got away with it for so long? Because I was a girl.” Shanking, stabbing, steaming, robbing, I did it all, rolling with the Man Dem. ![]()
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