Wake Up to The Code-Switching In Your Written World

The Mid-week Conversation Continues, Part 2

Keith Haring @ Luna Luna, photo by author

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This is Part 2 of The Conversation Continues, a midweek mini-series for paid subscribers, following up on a few thoughts raised in my recent evening with Percival Everett and David Mas Masumoto. In case you missed it, here’s Part 1:

Where Does Writing Fit in Your Hierarchy of Needs?

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Hi Everyone,

If you’ve read any books by Percival Everett, you’ll know that code-switching is one of his recurrent themes, especially central in the new novel James, which tells the story of Huck Finn from the POV of Huck’s companion, the fugitive slave Jim/James. As Tyler Austin Harper explains in this review in The Atlantic :

Whereas Jim speaks in the demotic dialect of an illiterate slave, James code-switches. When he talks to white folks, he adopts the heavy southern lilt of Twain’s character. When he talks to fellow enslaved people, he and they speak in the refined English of the educated elite.

This linguistic subterfuge alternately reveals and conceals James’s true nature while turning racist codes of power inside out: Everett’s specialty.

Code-switching plays a more subtle role in Mas Masumoto’s memoir Secret Harvests, in which Mas describes his family’s multi-generational history as Japanese American peach farmers who were interned in detention camps during WWII, losing Mas’s aunt Shizuko for 70 years in the process. Codes of race, ethnicity, spirituality, and ability play into this story. Untreated meningitis at age 5 had left Shizuko disabled and mute; fearing she would die in the camps, her parents surrendered her to the state of California before they were exiled. After the war, they had no way of finding her within the labyrinth of institutional care homes— until 2012, when her hospice worker located Mas. At first he could not understand her silent code, but he came to realize that it represented a uniquely liberated form of power and agency.

As I was reading these books in preparation for our talk, the complex role that code-switching plays in the work of both authors reminded me of its central importance in my own novel, Glorious Boy:

The Critical Importance of Allied Code Switching in WWII

I wanted to dive deep into this topic, but when we got together our focus quickly shifted, so here in Part 2 of The Conversation Continues, I share a few thoughts about code-switching that never made it to the stage.

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So many codes, so much hidden switching!