For her third year dissertation, Hollie Whittle explored representations of sexuality, identity and trauma in Keisha the Sket by Jade L.B. and Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. The following extract is from her section on “code-switching”. Hollie is currently studying for her PGCE at York St John University.
From the 2000’s Black British culture in literary texts increased visibility. Novels written by young black writers meant that young black readers could relate and recognise themselves through fictional characters. The fictional icon at the forefront of Black girl history is that of Keisha the Sket (KTS), written by 13-year-old Jade L.B in 2005. Completely unaware of her impact, Jade began her chapters on Piczo, and became a naughties viral sensation. As stated by Jade in the 2021 published version, it is “a tale of this black girl from inner-city London, and the politics that governed her womanhood and sexuality” (2). […] With its use of slang and ebonics , KTS spoke to black teenage London youths. Carty-Williams was highly inspired by Jade L. B’s work when becoming a writer, describing the story as an “entry point to understanding what sex was” as a teenager and “where (I) understood the perceived value of the Black female body” (323).
The act of code-switching is when “a speaker moves according to context” (Rob Drummond, 642). The language that the younger characters in Queenie and KTS use is known as “Jafaican”, different from both the patois spoken by their family and the language they use outside of their communities. “Jafaican” is a combination “of two crucial (yet incorrect) assumptions about this kind of language”, known as “Jamaican-ness” and “fakeness”. Jafaican was first identified in 2006 (Kerswill, 2014), but was renamed as Multicultural London English (MLE) through Mohammed Emwazi. MLE has created a stir of negative comments by older generations, believing that youths are “literally talking their way into unemployment” (Harding, 2013).
Through the different generations in the novel Carty-Williams explores the variety of experiences within Queenie’s family. Queenie’s grandparents identify less as “Black-British” as they had grown up in Jamaica, compared to Queenie and her mother who grew up in the UK. Queenie’s stepfather, Roy, calls Queenie, who works in the primarily white publishing industry, a “bounty”, suggesting that she is “white on the inside” and “brown on the outside” (297) as Carty-Williams represents Queenie as having a literary ‘formal’ way of speaking. This insult may be also to do with the white settings that she is found in, as Queenie and other young black women navigate a very different environment from previous generations.
Keisha’s world is very small when referring to location, which emphasises the use of MLE, and code-switching seems to be non-existent in her small life of being at school, home and other local youths’ houses. Queenie understands the act of code-switching due to the area that she grew up in, along with her friends and family despite not speaking it herself. Queenie expresses the frustrations of code-switching in order to remain more ‘professional’ in the workplace due to the negative connotations with MLE. Queenie’s friend, Kyazike, converses with Queenie: “Fam, did you hear how I have to switch up my voice out there? The new manager, some prissy white woman, has told me that I need speak ‘better’. Doesn’t want me to ‘intimidate customers’. Can you believe that? The only person I’m intimidating is her, fam” (360). Despite Kyazike’s well-paid job in a bank and hard work, she has to code-switch in order to match her location and the people that she is surrounded by.
Ironically, the inspiration for Queenie would have the original MLE of the title, Keisha Da Sket, later replaced to Keisha ‘the’ Sket when picked up by a mainstream publisher, Penguin. In the original KTS chapters Jade L.B uses constant MLE for all the characters speech and Keisha’s narration, along with a 2000’s text style of writing such as “Ne wayz cum 2 ma yrd in lyk half an hour?” (22). The original KTS chapters created a niche piece of cultural fiction for a targeted audience which is based of life events of youths that Jade L.B was surrounded by. In Keisha Revisited Jade still includes MLE slang in the characters speech, but uses standard English in the narrative. This new publication not only creates an easier understanding to wider audiences, but, the author feels, it also gives more humanity; “Revisiting the text now, attempting accountability and acknowledging my internalised misogynoir is central to embracing and feeling some pride in my role in creating a cultural work that a generation enjoyed” (14).
Due to Keisha the Sket being such a locally popular literary piece from inner-city London, and not aimed for audiences outside that region, there is no definition as to what certain words or phrases mean. Queenie does discuss how the black working-class community area that she grew up in, has become a whiter liberal area that has had small black businesses’ taken over; The sense of community that Queenie had felt as a child has left her when she comes back to visit it when she feels a sense of loss in her own identity.
The beauty in the writings of Black-British writers is that there is always a sense of uncertainty when referring to identity, place and belonging, as woman, working-class and non-white. Candice Carty-Williams and Jade L.B have written about where they grew up and what and where they find familiarity, which is a comfort for readers who might find relation to it but is also an insight for readers that do not. These novels are not meant to generalise the Black-British experience, but to embrace the topics that are very real within communities.
Bibliography
Carty–Williams, Candice. Queenie, 2019
Drummond, Rob. (2017) “(Mis)interpreting urban youth language: white kids sounding black?” Journal of Youth Studies, 20:5, 640-660, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2016.1260692
Harding, Nick. 2013.“Why Are So Many Middle-class Children Speaking in Jamaican Patois? A Father of an 11-year-old Girl Laments a Baffling Trend.” Daily Mail, October 11
Kerswill, Paul (2014) “The objectification of ‘Jafaican’:the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media.” In The Media and Sociolinguistic Change, edited by Jannis Androutsopoulos. Berlin: De Gruyter, 428–455.
L.B, Jade, Keisha the Sket, 2021