Hello Alamo!
February is busy over here. A bunch of people in my family, including yours truly, have birthdays this month, so I’m preparing for quite a bit of travel. But I still wanted to push at least this out.
I’ve always loved sharing my birthday month with Black History Month. Though over the years I’ve gotten way more informed about just how deeply racism is imbedded in our society, and I must admit I’m a little angry that we have to have a month just to appreciate history that isn’t shaped by the status quo of abled cishet white men.
Either way, I do love a theme. I also happen to love linguistics even though I’ve forgotten most of my German and am barely passingly familiar with Portuguese and Spanish.
I’m sure many of you have heard of Creole as it refers to the culture of peoples in New Orleans. As a language, it can also be referred to as its earlier iteration, a pidgin: a contact-based language developed when several languages mix. In the case of Gullah-Geechee, the trans-Atlantic slave trade brought together English and several languages from West and Central Africa in parts of Florida, Georgia, South-, and North Carolina.
Where it became a full-fledged creole language was when these people started having children who primarily spoke Gullah-Geechee.
According to Brittanica, this is just one theory as to how they developed. One downside to creoles and oral traditions is that they aren’t developed in the written form and therefore can’t be tracked easily. Still, this is a wildly interesting way of oppressed groups retaining what dignity they could despite obstacles.
This entire time, the Gullah Geechee people of the coastal lowlands have retained their unique culture in cuisine, artwork, music, language, and spiritual practices. In fact, I first learned about Gullah-Gechee from a Harvard professor by the name of Sunn m’Cheaux, a Charleston native committed to preserving this important and impressive piece of America’s brutal yet beautiful history.
Salud!
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