‘N u there p?
L yes b.
N Working on this Diego thing
L how is it
N It’s making me think about my Kreol. Did I tell you
how I lost it?
L I know you mourn it
N It was the first language I knew
L the first one you spoke?
N y. the only one. Til I went to nursery school and no one understood me. They told my folks to speak English to me. So Kreol became language of adults/familial authority
L Didn’t you
know any kids who
spoke it?
N nope.
N I never stopped understanding it
N but the speaking seized up
L Funny when you think how under colonialism, use of pidgins/creoles by colonised subjects = justification for colonials to infantilise them, while English = language of authority…
L Have you read Moten’s ‘Blackness and Nothingness’?
N No. Send!’ – from Enn Gramaten

A cautionary tale of academic privilege and misadventure in Diego Garcia via a Kreole translation, and parallel live chat.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

Publication in December 2018 at a launch event celebrating the Dialecty series:

‘Sometimes Here Has No Walls’
Saturday 8 December 2018, 15:00 – 18:00
The Common Guild
21 Woodlands Terrace
Glasgow, G3 6DF

along with:
New Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
Harry Josephine Giles & Martin O’Leary
ISBN 978 1 906012 92 2
Skrubolz Garbillkore
Robert Herbert McClean
ISBN 978 1 906012 94 6
It Disappears In Blue and Red and Gold
Helen Nisbet
ISBN 978 1 906012 93 9
Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship
Lisa Robertson
ISBN 978 1 906012 97 7
Notes on Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer
Adam Pendleton
ISBN 978 1 906012 96 0