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| On the Altar of Rhetoric, Death, and Sacrifice |
I don't have an altar with photos of ancestors, nor do I have little shots of tequila, a Dos Equis, or chimichangas should they decide to visit. Anyway, my mom would be furious if I left liquor for my dad. I can hear her now, "It took me a lifetime to get him to stop drinking, and here you are encouraging him to drink again, what? For eternity."
If anything, I believe my ancestors' spirits live within me. I can hear Pops. "Don't go to the cemetery, Mijo. Save your gas money. Altar? For what?The Bruins are on TV Saturday. I'll be here to watch it with you."
I'm not much on myth or Aztec ancestors. Chances are I'm not Aztec anyway, Chichimeca, if anything. I haven't done any Ancestry swabs, don't need to. Why waste $150. I'm fifty percent indigenous something or other, forty percent Iberian, five-percent other European, probably by way of France, and a few percentage points sub-Saharan Africa, probably North Africa."
What does interest me is language, past and present.
Bob Marley got me to thinking when I heard him sing, “Old soldiers, yes, they rob I/ sold I to the merchant ship.”
Now, most music lovers recognize this line from the first verse of Marley’s classic reggae hit, “Redemption Song.”
The words are powerful and drive home an important message about slavery. The problem is that Marley’s use of the personal pronoun “I” is grammatically incorrect. Stands out like a sore thumb. It should be “me”. Now, don't start yelling at me. Give me a chance to think this through.
Here is the edited version: “Old soldiers, yes, they robbed me/ sold me to the merchant ship”.
Most of us don't give it a second thought. We accept Marley’s misuse of “I”, except, maybe, the language police. And, no, not all English teachers are rigid about language. Some of us have gone over to the dark side to join Kurtz. After all, language is as much cultural as it is grammatical.
I learned, over 30 years of teaching composition and literature, English teachers don't know everything about grammar. It’s way too complex. This surprised many of my students. That's why Strunk, White, and Google were created.
But the good English teachers, regardless of how much grammar they knew, could effectively communicate the basics of grammar so that students could understand and apply the rules to their writing and speaking. After all, that is the main point, right? Effective communication--rhetoric.
When I complained on Facebook about the overuse of the word “literally,” a friend, Aaron Casillas, responded, and rightly so, that “Language is alive.”
Right! Language is alive. It's transitional. It changes. There can be no such thing as "Make English Great Again." It is only great if it progresses and matures. What was ungrammatical for one generation might be perfectly acceptable to another. It’s kind of like the Bible.
Fundamentalists believe we should follow the Bible today as in the times it was written.
Did those who wrote the Old and New Testaments know that in 2019, most people around the world would be able to read and write, to watch live newsfeeds on electronic pocket devices, and fly from LAX to Jerusalem in a matter of hours?
In Genesis, Moses (or Noah, the judge is still out) writes about God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. For her disobedience, Sara, Lot’s wife, was turned to salt, which meant the end of Lot’s bloodline. So, to solve the problem, his daughters filled the old man with wine, had sex with him, and bore his children. Would any rational, moral human beings today, who lost mates, consider modeling themselves after Lot’s daughters just to keep their bloodline from dying out? I don't think so.
Did anyone tell Bob Marley he used the personal pronoun “I” incorrectly? I don’t think so, either. If we take Marley in context, his word usage is perfectly fine. In the Caribbean, Africa, and good ol’ jolly England, many people speak as Marley does. I once heard Rod Steward, in an interview, say something like, "Me 'n me mates was...."
Historically, as Chicanos, we know the impact of Spain on the Americas. I remember in a bar in Granada, I used the Spanish word asina, as in "that's how" or "like that." I followed it up with, a pata, as in "walking" or what I thought was "on foot." My Spanish companeros burst out in laughter. One said, "Those words haven't been used since the 17th century." So I say thanks to my ranchero grandparents holed up in the mountains of Jalisco for who knows how many generations before coming into the light.
But, we should also understand the linguistic impact of British and French colonialism on Caribbean islands, as well as the invasion of pirates who ravaged and raped much of the region. I don't think the outlaw mariners had much regard for grammar.
They didn’t educate the natives or the slaves. In fact, I’d venture to say that few pirates and low-level administrators had much education themselves. I’m sure they didn’t give a hoot about the use of the personal pronoun “I”.
Marley constructed the lines in his song as he knew people understood them, in their proper colloquial use, the poetry of people. As musical lyrics, in Marley’s song, “Old soldiers, yes, they robbed me,” doesn’t flow, as does “Old soldiers, yes, they rob I.”
Here, it all becomes as about the sound, a clear mellifluous resonance pleasing to the ear, especially the Jamaican ear. The “me” is harder sound, nearly stopping the cadence, as do many consonants. Whereas “I” is a vowel, and all vowels have a soft, lilting sound.
By using the "I” instead of the "Me," Marley turns the object into the subject, if not grammatically, then in usage. The “I” becomes the hero, the dominant figure, doing the action, instead of the object, the victim, which receives the action. In a way, Marley’s verse offers the captured slaves dignity, placing them at the same level as their pursuers, the old soldiers.
The grammatical explanation is the "I" is always the subject of a sentence, and the "Me" an object.
Believe it or not, I remember my first days of school and my excitement. Then somewhere up the line, teachers started throwing jargon at us, like object of the preposition, split infinitives, and past, perfect tense, without giving us proper explanations.
I tuned out, early, maybe fourth or fifth grade, not just for a semester, but for the rest of my K-12 education. I wish my teachers had shown me the beauty of language, how the sounds were like music, not only as in musical instruments, but nature’s music, like the sound of a woodpecker striking a tree trunk and its echo in the forest, sparrows singing to their mates over the hum of electric wires, the breeze and fluttering leaves in the early afternoon, or squirrels chirping at each other from one tree to another. The sounds rising from our voices are much the same, life's music.
Marley was trying to capture a sound, not a rule. In fact, one might argue, our greatest human advancements come from those who do not accept society’s cherished rules but challenge and break them, like Galileo fighting the pre-renaissance notion that the world was flat. How many men and women did Church and Society punish, torture, and execute for holding such crude, paganistic beliefs as a globe-shaped world?
Or how about Willie, Waylon, and Cash, Owens, and Haggard challenging country music’s 1960s Nashville tradition, to the point of having their music banned for its rebellious sound. They were even dubbed “Outlaws?”
Consider Chicano 1960s educators, putting their degrees and reputations on the line by arguing against an entrenched academy the validity of Chicano, Latino, or Mexican Americans Studies in the traditional college curriculum. Or a politician like Edward Royball, the first Chicano congressman from East L.A., whose house was firebombed and his family threatened, for doing his job of advocating for his mostly Chicano constituency. The power structure of Los Angeles and the Southwest wasn’t ready for a courageous Chicano voice.
We call these folks iconoclasts. Those who fought to be "subjects" when the world wanted to keep them "objects."
Just as is in our own day how some would have us believe our world is not heating; that it is all a political hoax meant to kill jobs, even if those jobs pollute our planet. To them, the world is still flat. They decry the rebellious voices trying to sound the alarm.
Yet, there is something to be said for rules, for order, reflecting God’s symmetry, or the order of the cosmos, as the old poets, like Blake, Shelly, Alexandre, Whitman, and Paz wrote, lines with rhyming couplets, perfect repetitions of sounds, exact feet and meter, the antithesis of "free and blank verse," postmodernism anathema.
Of course, we must have some order, God's order.
After all, farmers set their clocks to the sun's rising and setting, or, at least offers us that poetic illusion. We now know the sun and moon remain relatively still, and it is we who move. Either way, there is order everywhere around us. If we think the world is disorderly now, look back 150 years.
In the old west, horses dropped their waste on Main Street. Maybe, eventually, somebody would come by and clean it up, maybe not. People placed their waste in buckets, went out back and tossed it into an alley, behind businesses, homes, or in holes. There were no showers, so perfume was used to hide the reek of human odors. Women used bees’ wax to hide the pits and other imperfection on their faces. Consequently, in winter, if a woman stood too close to a fireplace, the wax on her face would melt, hence the old adage, “Mind your own bees’ wax.” Talk about disorder, and that was during a time when 300-400 people lived in a town.
Today, in Los Angeles alone, we have upwards of 20 million people living in close proximity to one another. Even with all our problems, I marvel at the order of it all.
Our streets, as a rule, don’t reek of human waste. Garbage disappears each Friday morning in large trucks that pass by, often before any of us is awake. In the bathroom, a push on a small metal object, and the body waste is flushed away. A turn of two knobs gives us hot and cold water to shower, daily, if desired, wash our faces, and brush our teeth. There are metal boxes in our homes to place our dirty dishes and clothes, where in a matter of an hour or so, our dirty utensils, plates, and clothes are clean and placed back in their proper spaces. We have other metal boxes, well, today, they are more like fiberglass and plastic, with four wheels, that in minutes, will whisk us around town to complete tasks.
Of course, I hear the complaints about homeless camps, traffic, illegally dumped trash, etc. However, when one considers multitudes living in relative luxury and, I’d go so far as to say, peace, that is a marvel in itself. The reasons for this order, I’d have to say, are society’s rules.
So, can we use the pronouns "I" or "Me" however we choose, or are there rules?
I cringe when I hear someone say, “Me and Mary are going to the mall.” If we remove Mary from the sentence, the speaker is saying, “Me is going to the mall.”
My bet is the speaker really wants to say, “I am going to the mall.” Let's stick Mary back into the sentence. The speaker should say, “Mary and I are going to the mall.”
The only reason Mary comes first is what we call “usage.” We don’t want to appear arrogant, as if the “I” is more important, so we give Mary a little dignity, and place her first.
The grammar rule for this is simple. The subject, or the person or thing performing a function, is always “I”. The object, or the person or thing receiving the action, is an object, and will always be “me.”
Consider, “He threw the ball to “me.” That’s how we’d say it, right? Let’s get Mary back in, and the sentence becomes, “He threw the ball to Mary and me.” Get it? Whether Mary is a part of it or not, the pronoun will still be “me.”
I am sure Bob Marley, an iconoclast, knew this. The man was a musical genius. Carlos Santana called him a prophet. Hyperbole? Maybe.
They say rules are made to be broken. But they also say only those who know the rules should break them, true genius. Either that, or the ancestors will come to haunt me for refusing them an altar with tequila and a homecooked meal.
