Elocution classes
I don’t know exactly where I saw the ad, but it was through it that I got acquainted with the concept of “elocution classes”. This must have been around 2003, when I was still under the illusion that relocating to a different country entailed a process of becoming other, or that at least this process was possible — I thought I could become “English”, to be more precise. This strikes me as cringe-worthy now, now that I know too well that in order to become other you need to be granted a passport to stop being who you are. You need to be invited to become other, that is, and this rarely happens. Don’t get me wrong: you might be forced into being or staying an/other but becoming other by invitation is a different thing.
The conversation with my girlfriend at the time went something like this.
Accented I: So, I want to do these elocution classes and see if I can get rid of this accent…
Unaccented she: What? Why would you want to do that?
Accented I: I would like to sound more English.
Unaccented she: Fernando, without your accent you’d just be a sleazy guy without an accent… Keep your accent, please.
I did.
I would like to think that the “sleazy guy” put down was a joke. In any case, her resistance to letting me part with my accent was justified, and not just because she found it attractive. An accent rounds you up, and without it you would communicate a counterfeit version of yourself. A lot of who I am is contained in my accent, which speaks not only of my provenance and my mother tongue, but also of the places I’ve lived in, my social class, the people I hang out with, my cultural capital, and so on.
Interestingly, we tend to believe a strong accent makes you harder to comprehend but it’s actually the opposite: erase someone’s accent and you end up with an incomplete riddle. And an incomplete riddle — although not necessarily sleazy — is useless.
Stuffed animals
In solitude or sameness there is no such thing as an accent. What’s more, your accent only becomes when you find yourself in a minority1, and not just in a group. When you are surrounded by sameness your accent doesn’t become. It is only when you step out of that sameness that you become accented. In a way, becoming accented always entails being elsewhere, and in the company of others who seem different from you but are apparently equal among themselves.
Your accent, once it becomes, is a tool you can use to speak to the world, and it’s a decryption device for that world to decode you. I think this is what my then girlfriend tried to tell me with her joke: if I had lost my accent I would have stopped broadcasting who I am; but also, more importantly — for her — she would have stopped being able to decode me: “he’s not really sleazy, he’s foreign, and foreign people just happen to be warmer than us”. An accent, then, is about possibilities — communicating your/self — and constraints — those identitarian bullet points put together by others in order to process you. Perhaps because of these constraints it is tempting to get rid of it.
But more than a process of becoming something else, getting rid of your accent involves becoming hollow. You are emptied of your actual self and refilled with identitarian foam and sawdust, much like a taxidermized animal. Who would I be if I opened my mouth and along came an accent a la Laurence Olivier? Would I be Laurence Olivier? Would I be English? Or would I be a simulacrum? I lean towards the second option: a simulacrum of Laurence Olivier. A stuffed Laurence Olivier.
Accented cinema
“Accented cinema”, as coined by Hamid Naficy, refers to a type of filmmaking that operates from a position of cultural, national, or linguistic accent. It often represents an alternative perspective to mainstream cinema, rooted in the filmmaker’s cultural background.
I guess that like with spoken accents, the cinematic accent can become a burden. It can be a tool for speaking films to the world. But it can also become an essentialist pigeonhole, much like the pigeonhole “world music”, that petty cash box in which the music industry locks anything that isn’t created by the unaccented (in the Global North). Difference is a place of possibilities but also a tool for segregation. Because things never stop becoming things never move in just one direction, unless that movement is final, to be wedged into a corner — a movement that turns to stasis.
Constraining or not, like with elocution classes, there’s nothing worse than attempting to hide or faking an accent when making films. And here I think of the Argentine cinema of the 1980s, how it tried to become something else (Hollywood cinema), while amplifying its Argentineanness, so that the films could synchronise with the essentialist expectations of foreign festival audiences (another petty cash box). These were accented films that both didn’t want to betray their accent — formally — and exaggerated an Argentinean accent — thematically and through dialogues2. It was only in the 90s that a real accented cinema was born in Argentina. It was only when filmmakers came to terms with the fact that they were making films in a developing country, that they needed to make “aesthetic virtue out of economic necessity” (Joanna Page), when they started to shoot with a cheap handheld camera, with live sound and non-actors, that a truly Argentine accented cinema became3. This was that cinema embraced everyday life and stopped looking to the past and the marketplace of memory. Here cinema stopped trying and started to speak in Argentinean. Here Argentine cinema became alive, and truly accented4.
The moral of the story is “don’t run away from yourself, but also, don’t force your/self on others; just be whoever you are, man” (spoken with a hippy accent, if you know what I mean, man).
Accented literature?
What would an accented literature look like?
I don’t mean this from an identitarian angle5— I mean it formally. What does an accented literature look like? Or better, since it isn’t that interesting to look at literature, what does it read like? Where is the accent?
Once more, I resort to Argentina and Spanish in order to unpack something I’m working through in English. I think of Roberto Arlt, once more Roberto Arlt, since one can’t ever have too much Robert Arlt. It is said that Roberto Arlt wrote in an awkward Spanish — I prefer to say he wrote in accented Spanish6. The son of immigrants — German-speaking Prussian father; Italian-speaking Austro-Hungarian mother — Cervantes’ tongue was his third language. But accent isn’t just about linguistic accent, and Arlt’s prose is accented in many other ways:
Through his choice of vocabulary, with archaic words sprinkled here and there, words he probably picked up reading bad translations of classic authors7.
Through the use of lunfardo, the argot of the Argentine underworld and immigrants in the early 20th century.
Through a staccato punctuation that privileges the flow of ideas over complex and never-ending sentences (something that the Spanish language tolerates quite well, due to its solidly-structured grammar8).
Thematically: through the outsider perspective he assumes for his chronicles and stories; through the central place the underclass occupy in his writing; through his relentless exploration of the margins; through his characters, always marginally sane and about to cross to the other side.
I’m not sure whether Arlt was aware of his writerly accent but I’m pretty sure that he didn't suffer from “imposter syndrome” because of it. “Just be whoever you are, man,” spoken in Arlt’s accented Spanish. In English.
The accent and the accident
“Who the fuck wants purity? The idea of hybridity, of intermixture, presupposes two anterior purities… I think there isn't any purity; there isn't any anterior purity…Cultural production is not like mixing cocktails.”
Paul Gilroy
Accented literature, accented cinema, accentedness of any kind, reveal that culture never originates in purity but in cross-contamination and cross-pollination, that everything depends on its context, that the context is ever moving. Accent, always two letters away from accident, the accident the most interesting way to arrive at an idea. The accent and the accident as a cure to the essentialism of purity, all types of purity — including purity disguised as progressive purity.
The point, perhaps, isn’t to look for the accent in the accented but to look for the accent in what appears neutral and pure. The point, perhaps, isn’t to fake an accent, but to stop thinking of oneself versus others, until the real accent of everything accidentally comes through.
Or until all things are perceived as they truly are: pure difference.
I mean this as in a numerical minority, not in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.
“At some point in the 1980s, I was sitting in a semi-empty room on Lavalle Street in Buenos Aires, watching the images of an Argentine film parade by, the name of which I do not wish to recall. To alleviate the typical feeling of frustration and powerlessness that Argentine cinema of those years evoked, in my capacity as a young aspiring filmmaker, I tried to distract myself with an imaginary exercise: thinking about how that same story could have been told differently, with different dialogues, different performances, different images. But it couldn't be done... It was as if filming in “Argentinian” was impossible without affectation, without rhetoric, without that grammar of shots and reverse shots where with each cut, you could feel the weight of an entire team languidly shifting from one camera setup to another... When I hear or read someone doubting the existence of a New Argentine Cinema, I remember those sensations as a viewer of national films, and I have no doubt that something profound has changed.” Words by Andrés Di Tella (my translation).
I’m tempted to use the phrase “be/came to be” but I don’t want to test your patience.
The accent was mainly Rioplatense — with filmmaking condensed in Buenos Aires and some other big cities. It was also very middle-class. But then, as I have written above: the process of becoming never stops.
For an exploration of literature and subaltern identity (though not necessarily in these terms) I will refer you to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, particularly the chapter “What is a Minor Literature”. In this brief text I’m more interested in form than in identity, ergo my use of “accented” instead of “minor”, though of course, minor literature is accented (but not vice versa).
Deleuze and Guattari, once more Deleuze and Guattari, would say Arlt makes Spanish “stutter”.
It was customary for classics to be translated into unaccented Spanish, neither Latin American, nor Iberian, in order to please audiences both sides of the Atlantic; as a result, neither audience was pleased. Some of these poor translations are still doing the rounds, eternally recycled by hungry publishers milking public domain works.
Reflexive pronouns, direct and indirect object pronouns, the ubiquity of articles, gender and number concordance, among many other grammatical elements, make Spanish a much more structured language than English, to name just one synthetic language. It isn’t rare to find paragraph-long sentences in Spanish — the language is very good at holding them together. Camilo José Cela, in his experimental novel Cristo versus Arizona (1989), takes this to the extreme, with a sentence that stretches for almost 240 pages. But then, this is experimentation and I’m talking about “common” uses of the language and the ubiquity of long sentences in them.
While not specific to accented literature...(maybe?): in the BBC episode where Chris Power talks to Teju Cole about his new novel, Tremor, I found what Cole had to share about the voices in his latest fiction fascinating. Essentially he said that we aren’t lyrical in our internal monologues, we just try to make sense.
This of course made me think about those who of us who can code-switch accents anywhere with anyone. Anthropologists wouldn’t say that was useless--blending in like a chameleon--but it makes one wonder about those who can.
English -British-is the only accent I can’t carry.
The southern accent always comes in handy when you can’t curse out a group of teenagers in a classroom. 🤣 like a charm. 🪄
There is some remarkable Scottish novels that use the mix of spoken Scottish dialect and the straight English for the other text. I think the use of dialect in that way both supports your point but also pushes the logic further. In print it works well - when watching Korean drama you are reminded that the meanings of the dialect and the language always escapes you...