Standing by the university cafeteria under the massive maple tree breaking into new leaves, we’re engrossed in a discussion about the use of the F word in literature –how much F is too much. Just then, a jet of white bird dropping splat on the Juliet sleeve of my sap green top.
Chi! Cheee… OMG! And I leave for the washroom with the same speed as the ‘h’ consonant sprung in the syllable ‘Chi!‘ A lanky boy dragging a deep puff from a fag in another group nearby looking at the world with hooded eyes, nods his head meaningfully. ChiChi, he says as his friends look back at me.
I guess Chi is not a taboo word yet. But the other day, I come across a six year old boy enrolled in the university day nursery school complaining that his friend is mouthing a racist word. The complaint being: He’s saying Chi eats! When I explore a bit, it’s actually the name of a toy car the other child has been trying to pronounce which is called Chic Hicks (A Car movie toy). So I explain him. Chi is a profound word -the twenty second of the Greek alphabets, the twenty second star in a constellation and in Chinese it means life energy. Then, why do they make it a Bad word?
The phrase ‘Bad Word’ from a child reminds me of author ZZ Packer’s cleverly crafted story Brownies about two groups of little girls -black and white who’re so over sensitized about the Bad Word (‘N*gger’) that one of them almost hears a white girl abuse it. Ms Packer has so artfully captured these racial undercurrents in children in hyper-cosmopolitan cultures.
Over the last five years or so, these race battles, or friction may be the right word, has spilled beyond the black-and-white territory and formed a world of racial jargon. Subtler may be they are than the White Vs Black battles, yet, the psychological ripples of these can get tenaciously upsetting. Kids know the Bad Words before they know anything about it very much like the rosy cheeked ‘baby pigeons’ in Ms Parker’s story who are all cute little squealing dolls. Sssssshh! Baaaad Word! That’s a bad word. Let’s tell teacher.
Racial undertone and tension in any read turns it into a suspense and a thriller story at the same time. In Brownies the reader is helplessly stuck to the prose every second, every moment until the great reveal unfolds. Did she say the racist word!? Then, No she didn’t, and you exhale as the story comes to an end.
Racisistic play of words changes its swing and the temperature incredibly. Maybe that’s exactly why top poets pepper poetry** with tongue-in-the-cheek syllables like ChiChi and ng ng and ck and pw.
ChiChi originates from the land of the Stanis -the Pakistanis, the Hindustanis, Afganistanis, may be , but more precisely from Hindustan which is India. It basically refers to Indianised English which the native English speakers like to call – a ‘hybrid minced English’ spoken by ‘Indian half-breeds’.
English is spoken in different ways in India than in the UK or in the US or in Scotland or may be in China, or Korea. But the fact that the racial jargon is spreading its tentacles to these language areas invading the little innocuous pockets of languages like Hinglish (Hindi plus English), Chinglish (Chinese plus English), or may be Bengalinglish, Nepalinglish, or Pakistaninglish.
But the point to be alerted here is that it’s no more what we like to call ‘just Campus Racial Jargons’ but it has entered the world of the intellectuals for ‘artistic’ or ‘musical’ reasons.
The obscure use of ChiChi, ‘ng ng’ in world class poetry ** is probably a thing of art because of the sound and look of it or may be for some other reason which the egg heads are yet to fathom. But we should probably mind the meaning here which is ‘ a bunch of Chinese people with names ending with ‘ng’ like Cheng, Zhang, Dang, Cong. This is like the ‘traditional’ (racist?) old land lady of my Delhi paying guest accommodation during my early college days who I heard calling all girls from the north east corner of India with chink eyes, spaghetti straight hair and high cheek bones ‘look the same’. They all are the same where individual identity doesn’t matter as if they’re no more than a spawn of tadpoles in a swamp.
Now, when I and my friend from the university come across world class poetry with a salad of sprinkled syllables on it (Cks, Pws etc ) we can’t help but suspect they might be acronyms for other racist words. The other day my friend caught in the same whirlpool of art and racisistic suspicion, arrived at the diagnosis that Pw in a certain piece of art means Psycho ward (reasons best known to her) whereas I with my feministic antennas on thought the ‘w’ would invariably stand for woman and the P in that case, must be a derogatory adjective describing a woman (most likely a dominant powerful woman) considering the very fact that the poet is of the male gender. About Ck, together we came to a conclusion that it could be something to do with a Chinker (c) and ‘k’ could be some race Korean or African or Latino -may be just anything.
As these remarks may churn stomachs or turn off mind or turn on heat, for some other privileged people these are manifestations of aesthetics mixed with feelings of superiority. Mystery of art it must be.
This jargon menace based on looks, twist and stutter of tongues, and English abilities needs to be tackled at this early stage of Twenty first century before they start echoing around the streets making us hear even more racist words than there actually are and which in turn may precipitate racial skirmishes and the worse -unspoken war and friction between people.
Wiping the bird dropping off my sleeve in the washroom as I walk across the university campus amidst a scatter of balls -the Stani ball, the Latino ball, the black ball, the white ball, my ears get extra alert of any stray words out in the air that has any hint about my looks or my tongue or the place I come from.
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** Referring to poem Hot White Andy by Keston Sutherland published in 2007 in Barque Press/Chicago Review
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