The Accent Committee
On accents, sounding white, and finally sounding like myself.
Hiya friend,
Greetings from a sunny and cool day on Martha’s Vineyard. Last week, we invited cookbook author and writer Nicole A. Taylor to the show to discuss her creative practice and her book, Watermelon and Red Birds.
Nicole gets into the nitty-gritty about what it takes to write a book and chats about accents. In particular, she shared how she used to get nervous about her Southern accent while living in NYC.
After I talked with Nicole, I kept circling back to how we come to break our mental models. In my case, a mental model around accents. Since English is my third language, my relationship with that language and how I express myself took the form of a committee that would rate how well I could pronounce words without a heavy Haitian accent.
Every word coming from my mouth would first roll down a factory line for review. Was I emphasizing the right syllable? Did I sound too Boston? Which syllable in economics gets stressed? What is the difference again between which and witch? Is wich a word? It would take me years to fire this darn committee.
Even now, while on the podcast, I take care to enunciate and pay attention to where syllables go. I want the words to land clearly.
The Table Where Nobody’s Voting
I grew up in Boston, and if you attended our summer family BBQ, your ears would get the best treat. We all grew up in the same family compound, yet my cousins and I speak English with different accents, while our mannerisms reflect our shared childhood. At these family gatherings, our sentences slide into Kreyol, they take a right turn into English, and another right back into Kreyol mid-sentence as we sip Coronas or a Cola Lakaye.
One group of cousins carries a flat Boston accent. Another set speaks English with the cadence and dimensions of Kreyol, and it comes out joyfully. As cousins, the way we enunciate came from whoever stood at the front of our classrooms, be it a teacher from South Boston or a nun from Ohio. Our schooling determined how we spoke; we lived with the results.
For a long time, I thought the Thanksgiving table, or the hovering over burgers, ribs, and hot dogs at the BBQ, was loud in a chaotic way. In retrospect, it’s not chaos; it’s just a room with no committee in it.
When the Committee Got Hired
I remember being eleven, a year after learning English, when the teasing started about how I pronounced my “th.” I couldn’t produce the sound.
I had spent ten years of my life speaking French and Kreyol, two languages in which the “h” after “t” stays silent. “Thigh” became “tigh.” Thursday arrived as “Tursday.” And let’s not even talk about how I pronounced “the.”
I spent years practicing my “th” in front of the mirror. I watched television shows to get the sound right. In doing so, I opened the door to that darn committee.
And once a committee’s on staff, it doesn’t clock out. It stops reviewing what I said and starts grading how close I came to sounding normal, whatever that means.
If you sound too American, does that mean you sound like a white American? My cousins who learned English from Black teachers sounded “Black.”
I remember waiting in line at orientation for the first day of high school, talking to a friend. A group of students stood behind us. One girl stage-whispered, “She sounds so white. Who does she think she is?” I was quiet the rest of the line.
The Rooms That Do the Deciding
Without meaning to, I took somebody else’s rules and staffed a committee to enforce them, right down to how I talk on a client call. Someone else decided what a credible voice sounds like, and mine wasn’t on the list. My committee just enforced the decision.
As a photographer, my portfolio is supposed to do the talking, and it does, right up until the kickoff call. The work gets me in the room. Then I open my mouth, and I can feel the recalibration on the other end of the line. I sound American, but not the American they were expecting. Often, there is a brief pause as someone decides whether the person who made those images matches the voice describing them.
Most of us who came to this country know that pause. Our accents judge us before our work judges us, and sometimes instead of it. I just did the additional labor of enforcing that standard on myself so nobody else had to.
It’s likely, my dear friend, that you have a committee as well. Here’s the danger: with every sentence the committee reviews, half your brain is busy fact-checking the one you just said. That’s the censorship. It’s your silent, constant frenemy.
I don’t yet know whether firing the committee makes the work better, or if it just makes the work survivable. I’d love to tell you that those are the same thing. I’m not sure they are, and I’d rather leave that open than hand you an answer I haven’t figured out yet.
Firing Them
On episode 218, Nicole A. Taylor mentions how she used to get nervous about her voice too: whether she was using “the right words,” whether people would judge her Southern accent. She would later stop this mental model.
“I realized that my intelligence is not wrapped up in splitting my verbs or if I’m putting an R on something, if I am using African-American Vernacular English,” she told me. “It is my superpower.”
Nicole said it like she’d had to fight for that sentence. Reflecting on my interview with Nicole, I realized I’d been caught, still measuring myself against a “neutral” accent I’d never signed off on.
My voice was not the problem. Turns out the belief that I needed to have the “right” accent to be accepted was the issue.
Committee’s fired.
Stay Creative, friend,
Martine xx