Filthy English, page 33
In early 2008, New York rapper Nas announced that his next album would be called Nigger. It eventually arrived in the shops as ‘untitled album’. His projected title was supported by Ice Cube, Alicia Keyes, LL Cool J and Jay-Z but criticized by 50 Cent, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP and Brooklyn assemblyman Hakeen Jeffries, who wanted to withdraw state pension fund investment in Universal, the parent company of Nas’s label, Def Jam. Dania Ramirez is the Dominican-born actress who played the (Dominican) girlfriend of Tony Soprano’s son A. J. A couple of months before Nas released his nameless album, she went to the Grammys with him. She wore a black T-shirt with the word ‘nigger’ on it – as did Nas and his wife, the black-Chinese-Puerto Rican R&B singer Kelis. Nas told a CNN reporter: ‘We’ve all at some point felt discriminated on, whether it’s in the Dominican Republic, whether it’s in China, whether it’s in Iraq with soldiers getting their heads blown off for reasons we don’t know why … so no longer are black people still niggers, it’s also me and you.’ The CNN interviewer was white.
These days, it seems, you don’t even have to be black to call yourself nigger. It’s turning into something of a franchise. It’s part of daily language in West African cities such as Freetown and Accra. Dania Ramirez is not the only New York Latino to have taken to using it. A 2009 article in The Village Voice quoted Immortal Technique, an Afro-Peruvian hip-hopper who calls himself nigger. ‘The European Spaniards have left a legacy of self-hatred and racism among the Latino population; without acknowledging that, we will not evolve past our own inequity. Racism in America, as horrible and ugly as it may be, still isn’t as bad as what it is in Latin America, and the sad part is that we are being racist against ourselves.’ There is also cocolo – another black word with Spanish roots. It’s what Dominicans call Haitians and what established Nuyoricans (New York Puerto Ricans) call Haitian immigrants – or at least those who look like they might be Haitians. It’s now also being used by Latinos the way nigger is used by black Americans.
‘Punks are niggers,’ said Richard Hell, songwriter and guitarist with Television, wearer of that Please Kill Me T-shirt, born Richard Meyers, son of an experimental psychologist (who died when Richard was seven), educated Sanford prep school. In Roddy Doyle’s 1987 book, The Commitments, manager Jimmy Rabbitte told his band: ‘The Irish are the niggers of Europe and Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The northside Dubliners are the niggers of Dublin.’
In his 1957 essay, The White Negro, Norman Mailer laid out his idea of ‘hipsters’ who because they had ‘absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro’ could therefore be considered, ‘for practical purposes’, a White Negro. He was, I guess, thinking of hipsters like … Norman Mailer. He wasn’t the last to essay this colour blend. Or the first. In the nineteenth century, white nigger was, successively and probably overlappingly, a deferential black person, a white manual labourer and an American slur on the Irish. In late nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, it referred to a European. In the 1960s, it was what the most militant of Québécois separatists called themselves, after a 1968 book WhiteNiggers of America. In the late twentieth century, it became a word for young whites who aped black street style, in clothes, tastes and speech†. Sometimes, it’s crunched down to wigga – which has also been used as a disparaging word in black America where it indicates a black person who apes white people.
So, on one hand, nigger has become the preferred black word for blacks in general while on the other it has been euphemized out of existence, to Afro-American to African-American to Person of Color. In Britain, government ethnic monitoring documents – which divide us all into twenty categories – use the phrase ‘Black or black British’ with the sub-divisions Caribbean, African and ‘Any other black background’. One word that’s not there is Afro-Saxon, introduced to the language in 1962 by Trinidadian academic Lloyd Best, as a descriptive but not pejorative term for the dark-skinned ruling elite of newly independent nations in the West Indies – who he saw as having ‘adopted, absorbed and internalized the values of the White colonial masters’. Because it’s never become a universally used word, its current usage epitomizes the slipperiness of language. As of writing, it can mean one of three mutually contradictory things. One, a person of mixed British and African descent. Two, a white British person acting black. Three, a black British person acting white. As ever, context is all.
What about the actual people who have to make that choice, though? What do they call themselves? Would they rather be called nigger or person of color? Well, in 1991, a black-oriented American research institute, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies asked black Americans how they liked to be described. Even after years of public pushing for Afro-American, African-American and Person of Color, more than 70 per cent of them said ‘black’. A similar survey, in 1994, of mixed-race South Africans found 75 per cent liked the supposedly derogatory ‘coloured’.
Henry Louis Gates Jr does, too. Currently a professor at Harvard, Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, he wrote a memoir of his small-town childhood in Piedmont, West Virginia. It was called Colored People. In it, he writes about the lexical (and political and psychological) shift from ‘black’ to ‘African-American’ and on to ‘people of color’: ‘I don’t mind any of the names myself. But I have to confess that I like “colored” best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother’s voice and in the sepia tones of my childhood.’
Which seems to me to offer an Alexandrian sword for the nigger knot. It really is a matter of personal choice how you choose to identify yourself, in the private sphere anyway. Myself, when asked for my ethnicity, I often put down ‘north Londoner’. Nigger can be similarly arch – and self-dramatising. I’m sure, too, that it can, for some, evoke the same maternally sweetened past Henry Louis Gates Jr finds in ‘colored’. It can certainly be nasty. White people saying to each other ‘Wassup, my nigger’? Well, that’s just embarrassing. Personally, I’ve never called anyone nigger – or nigga – and currently have no plans to start.
Nigger is far from being the only reappropriated group description. There’s queer and dyke, of course. Since the 1980s, Australian Greeks have taken to using ‘wog’ as a positive self-description, ‘a badge of pride’ according to one account. In 2007, Hanif Kureishi – who is of south Asian descent – was staying in a faded grand hotel on Lake Garda in north Italy, with his twin teenage sons. ‘Where is everyone?’ one of them asked him. Kureishi knew what his son meant: ‘Are we the only Pakis?’
I first came across another reappropriation early in the morning of Wednesday, 9 May 1984. Very early. I was on a coach, one coach in a giant convoy of coaches – an invasion of coaches – which was snaking its way through the London dawn towards Dover. And from there to Ostend harbour, the medieval city of Bruges and, finally, the Brussels suburb of Anderlecht.
By the time the coach retraced its route, almost twenty-four sleepless hours later, there had been a fatal stabbing, some violent scuffles and a 1–1 draw between Spurs and Anderlecht in the first leg of the UEFA Cup Final. On our return, as we disembarked from the ferry at Dover, we would be greeted by a dozen or so reporters, a flash of bulbs and a predictability of questions.
That was nearly a day in the future, though. That would be the final stages of the ritualistic sequence of events for English football followers venturing to European away games in the 1980s: long coach journey, drink, more drink, fear, anger, confused local citizens, drink, boring match, violence, drink, long coach journey, home, hangover, work.
But, for now, in the grubby London dawn, hope and anticipation were still trumping memory, knowledge and bitter experience. For everyone on the coach apart from me, that is. They were actual fans. I was merely working. I was there on the coach to write about the experience of being on the coach. I was doing the leg-work for a piece about travelling with football fans, at a time when travelling English football fans were ‘the scourge of Europe’, a ‘blight on the beautiful game’, ‘a rabble of hooligans’ etc. That was no mere loudmouthing editorialising either. A year later, in another suburb of Brussels, at another European final, thirty-nine Juventus fans would be killed.
No-one on the coach was interested in me, not in the slightest. They were interested in being together. They were a group, a small crowd. They sang, they chanted – in dawn’s early light. They were teenagers, mostly. All boys, of course. Polite mostly, not at all hooligany and, I soon discovered, nearly all Jewish. I probably would have figured that out anyway, for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that my own sons are half-Jewish. But I didn’t need to. The chants did it for me. This was their favourite:
If you’re proud to come from Israel, clap your hands. (Clap, clap, clap.) If you’re proud to come from Israel, clap your hands. (Clap, clap, clap. Pause.) Yiddooos! Yiddooos!
I’d not heard it before. I had to stifle my giggles. I knew that none of them were Israelis. I could hear that in their London accents. The Israel thing was part joke, part identification with something powerful that was theirs – and not, say, Arsenal fans’. Tottenham was a ‘Jewish club’ and they were set on making that clear – with the assertive brittleness you’d expect of minority group teenagers. How long Spurs has been a ‘Jewish club’ – and why – has never really been that clear. It only gets the most passing of mentions in Hunter Davies’ 1972 book on the club, The Glory Game. Even then, it’s half in code. Davies is talking to Morris Keston, a ‘Hanger-on’ as he disparagingly refers to the club’s wealthy fan. Why do so many of the Hangers-on seem to be from the rag trade? he asks, somewhat disingenuously. ‘There’s always been a big following amongst Jewish people in the East End for clubs like Tottenham and Arsenal,’ replies Keston. Not just a Tottenham thing, then. There’s no further reference to the subject in either the 1985 or 1990 editions, either. My guess is simply that it’s the nearest club to Stamford Hill. And that its fans’ self-conscious Jewishness only started to emerge around the time I found myself sitting on a smelly coach to Belgium.
This ‘yiddoos’ thing was interesting. I’d never heard it used by Jews before, only by racists and other teams’ fans. This was the most glorious, self-conscious act of reappropriation. As rappers and hip-hoppers would take over nigger, as homosexual academia would construct (and deconstruct) queer theory, so these teenage Jewish boys had taken an insult and turned it, made a double agent of it. It was as if gypsies took to calling themselves gypos.†
Over the next few years, all Tottenham fans, not just the Jewish ones, took to calling themselves yiddoos or yids. When Jürgen Klinsmann joined the club, they chanted ‘Jürgen was a German but now he’s a Jew’, to the tune of the Sherman brothers’ Mary Poppins song, ‘Chim Chim Cheree’. Other European clubs in Europe – Bayern Munich, FK Austria Wien and AS Roma, for example – are similarly ‘Jewish’, for various historical and cultural reasons. Fans of Amsterdam’s Ajax wear red Stars of David and spread giant blue and white Israeli flags across their terraces. These Spurs fans’ chants and songs were never mentioned by commentators or football writers but you could hear the chants at every game. Why didn’t they mention it? Because it would mean using the word ‘yid’ or ‘yiddo’. They worried – probably rightly – that just saying it or writing it would inevitably draw them into uncomfortable areas.
This reappropriation unsettled the racist mind, of course. Slowly, over time, other fans stopped calling them Tottenham yids. Not because they didn’t still think of them that way and not because the word’s meaning had changed but because the word’s association had changed. The thought may have remained the same but the word itself had been flipped, like a pancake. What had been bad had been made good. There’s no power left in an insult when the person you’re trying to insult has ironized it into a proud self-description. At least, you’d think so. But it’s not so. Chelsea fans have long chanted: ‘Gas a Jew, Jew, Jew, put him in the oven, cook him through.’ There is also a story that when Manchester City fans sang a song about foreskins, Spurs fans pulled out their penises and waved them at the Mancunians. Other fans, West Ham fans, in particular, still talk (and chant) about Tottenham yids. And their voices and hearts are still filled with hatred. As with nigger, it’s the thought that counts, not the word.
† When General de Gaulle came to London as an exile in the Second World War, he was provided with a fine house on the south west slopes of Hampstead, at Frognal Lane – an old thoroughfare named for its abundance of frogs. I have always assumed, completely without any evidence of any kind, that this was a wry joke on the part of British officialdom.
† That’s the OED’s view. Other suggested derivations include: griego, Spanish for Greek and therefore any foreigner; ‘green, go home’, from the colour of dollar bills; ‘Green Grow the Rushes’, a song favoured by US soldiers.
† A far less angry cousin is trustafarian – a trust fund income supported pretend-Rastafarian, mostly found in a one-mile radius of Hugh Grant’s fictional travel bookshop in Notting Hill.
† Well, maybe not quite. ‘Gypsy’ is a result of a misplacing of that group’s origins in Egypt rather than India. Yid is, at least, a Jewish word. Similar to the German Jude, it’s derived ultimately from Judah (or Yehuda), the three-thousand-year-old name for the mountainous area which runs along one edge of the Dead Sea south from Jerusalem towards the Sinai desert. It was the bit ruled over by King David. The northern section is now usually referred to as the West Bank. It was Jews who first called themselves yids. Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, says they pronounced it to rhyme with ‘need’, though. Only racists rhymed it with ‘did’.
Chapter Ten
*********, Bleeps, Censorship, — — — — — — and Euphemism
I must have seen the Sex Pistols’ appearance with Bill Grundy but I’ve no idea where. It can’t have been at home. I didn’t have a TV. You didn’t then, not if you were young and writing for the weekly music press. I worked for Sounds at the time. I was out every night and by the time I was home, TV was already in bed, asleep. Not just that, I was an anti-TV snob – and not alone in my snobberies. To me, to us, TV was vapid, unexciting, carpet-slippered. Fucking rubbish, basically. And that’s the word we’d like to have used when writing about it in Sounds. Rolling Stone magazine printed the word. The NME did, too. So why couldn’t we? It seemed important to be able to describe something as fucking brilliant rather than merely brilliant. More sensibly – significantly more sensibly – it seemed important to record the way people actually talked. (Which, as anyone who has compared a verbatim interview transcript with its final shaped and ordered appearance will know, is a far from straightforward matter.) And people, not just punk people or pop people, but people people said and say fuck (etc.) a lot. Some of them say it far more than they realize – which was part of the fun of printing it.
So we campaigned for it like it really mattered, arguing week after week with the editor and publisher. We never won. We achieved the occasional **** or ******* but never the noun or adjective sheltered behind them. Once, we sneaked a fuck through right up to the presses. When the printers noticed it, they said: there’s women working here, you know, we’re not having them see that, stop the presses right now, we’re on strike till it’s taken out. It was taken out. We were told off, like schoolboys.
As most people – everywhere and throughout history – have sworn, so some people have always tried to stop them swearing and cursing. Or conceal the fact. Or attempt to conceal the fact while retaining part of it, with asterisks or dashes, or the mere imagination of it – a bleep, a circumlocution, a rhyme.
As someone born, bred and fed within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, I’ll start with the third of Moses’ Ten Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.’ Which refers not, as most people think, to swearing at God but rather, by God – as when you swear to tell the truth in court, for example. (By the by, if you read the Mosaic commandments carefully, there are actually fourteen or maybe even fifteen of them.) Leviticus, the ever-grumpy and dictatorial third book of the Old Testament/Torah, added its own supposedly God-given instructions. As Leviticus imposes a ban on eating pork, lobster (lives in the sea but not a fish), camel (too many toes), skate (no scales), partridge (unless caught by falconer) and cheeseburgers (mix of meat and milk), so it also weighs in with ‘He that blasphemeth the name of the Lord shall be put to death’.
An afternoon in the British Library turned up centuries of ragings against swearing and advice on how to stop it. The sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justinian prescribed death for swearing by the limbs of God. The tenth-century Scottish Kings Donald VI and Kenneth II introduced the punishment of cutting out the tongues of swearers. Phillip II of France (1165–1223) favoured punishment by drowning in the Seine. The Council of Constantinople introduced excommunication. Henry I, son of William the Bastard, had a sliding scale of fines for swearing in the royal precinct – 40 bob for a duke down to a quid for a lord and a whipping for a page. Louis IX of France (1214–70), the man they named St Louis after, said swearers should be branded on the face.
There was then something of a lull until the anti-swearing lobby returned in Puritan clothing during the reign of Elizabeth I, calling parliament to control ‘Idell pamphletts & dire leud & wantn [sic] discourse of love of all languages leud’. What kind of leudness and wantness are we talking about? Well, a man called Wither published a collection of religious songs, Cantata Sacra, which sold astonishingly well. Why? Because it contained the Song of Solomon, the most lubricious section of the Bible. Pornography is always a powerful motor for new technologies. The Stationers’ Company, who then held a monopoly on printing in London, tried to have it banned.
