Some Fruit-y Thoughts On Dialect

I hate tomatoes.  I loathe bell peppers and red peppers and, well, any peppers at all.  And even after two years of eating berries and drinking smoothies for my health, I still don’t like fruit.
These are legitimate dislikes.  They taste bad to me.  I’m quite justified in not ordering the peppers-and-tomato dish at the local Italian restaurant.
But I can also acknowledge that though my dislike is genuine, I may have some pretty awful underlying reasons for not liking veggies and fruits.  I got targeted hard by General Mills and other food corporations when I was a young kid, with thousands of advertisements aimed at deepening a nascent addiction to sugar and fat – no, seriously, read how they planned to warp my tastebuds – and when they were done, what tasted “real” to me were processed foods.  To this day, I’ll choke down some berries and a salad, but what really satisfies me is a bacon-burger and a milkshake.
I don’t like fruits and vegetables.  But I was also trained by people of varyingly active agendas that hey, these Pop Tarts are much tastier, they come in a fun box, all the other kids are eating them.  And so I have to acknowledge:
My dislike may well have emerged from some pretty fucked-up underlying reasons.
I’m not saying I should like bell peppers, but I am saying that the problem may not lie with the bell peppers.  Maybe the problem’s with me, and the culture I grew up in.
The reason I am in a fruit-discussing mood today is because a reviewer at Strange Horizons said this about a story:

Troy L. Wiggins’s “A Score of Roses” features heavy use of phonetic dialect, a literary trick which works perhaps one time out of a hundred—a shame, because the story underneath all the “chil’ren”s and “yo’self”s is charming.

Now, this caused – well, not quite an uproar, but a lot of discussion, because dialect is actually a really powerful tool.  Tobias Buckell discusses it in much better detail than I do – and I’d advise you to go read the entirety of his essay, because it’s that good – but basically, by squashing everyone’s native dialect into clean, white-friendly English, you erase whole cultures.  People around the world do actually talk in dialect, this is an authentic representation of the way they speak and their lifestyles, and asking them to write in the words designed by people who wear bowler hats and drink proper tea under the British flag actually kinda erases them.
And I get that.  If I had to write my stories exclusively in African-American Vernacular English, they’d lose a lot of the flavor that represents my view of the world.  The tale would be less me, filtered through someone else’s cultural perspective, and maybe it’d still work but it’d be as different as an indifferent translation.  (You can actually see a fascinating comparison over at Abyss and Apex where they have a “mostly-dialected” published story intended to be readable by English-speaking readers, compared with the original “full-dialect” version submitted to them.)
Thing is, though, I totally agree with what that reviewer said.
As a reader, I don’t like dialect.  I’m a huge fan of transparent prose – I like to fall into the story, just lose myself in the plot and characters and forget entirely about the words.  There are times I like a dense, chewy-prosed novel, but mostly I read very pulpy stuff.
And that applies to pretty much anything that gets in the way of my reading, including weird other-languages or complex worldbuilding infodumps I have to spend too much time on.  There’s the infamous Junot Diaz quote about “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and [white people] think we’re taking over,” but that doesn’t apply to me – it took me four or five separate tries with Dune to get into it, because I didn’t know what the fuck a gom jabbar was and what the hell is going on and fuck it, I’m putting this book down.
I probably never would have read it, too, if it wasn’t my sainted Uncle Tommy’s favorite book.  And when I got through it, I felt somehow more educated, stronger for having stuck with it, having learned fictional lessons about a new world – but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience of reading the book all that much, merely the satisfaction I get from solving a hard programming problem.
So hand me a book like Trainspotting and I’ll read a page or two and decline.  I don’t wanna work that hard at reading, man.
Yet that’s my dislike of bell peppers, coming to the fore.
Because yeah, I love transparent prose, but that prose is transparent to me because I was lucky enough to have the New England language my family and friends spoke marked as the language of the whole world.  Any book I picked up when I grew up in the 1970s was damn near guaranteed to have people who spoke pretty much like me.  Publishing industries had decided that this was how people spoke, and so like the Pop Tarts in their brightly-colored boxes this became my comfort reading, and even now when I settle in with a good book I’m feeling the echoes of cultural decisions made for me years before I was born.
I don’t like dialect, but I can also acknowledge that this genuine dislike is not necessarily a good thing.
Plus, as Joe White Dude, dialect is something that is often cringeworthy.  I don’t have the ear to know whether dialect is good or bad, and unless I know the author well enough to trust them, I have this nagging fear that maybe I’m reading something hideously insulting and actually demeaning to the people who genuinely speak this way.  There’s a lot of talk about “Hey, people should feel great about reading dialected books!” but what I don’t see anyone invoking is The Help, which has a lot of fairly wince-inducing dialect in the early chapters, used to propel a story that a lot of people feel was written by a white woman in a way that actually made a story about the African-American Civil Rights movement mostly about white people.
(I read the book, and I didn’t feel that way – I quite liked it – but The Help is still a point of controversy.)
Thing is, dialect is really good when written by people who know it well.  I’ve read pretty much all of Nalo Hopkinson‘s books and enjoyed the fuck out of them.. but I think that’s because with Nalo, I have the trust that I’m learning something genuine and real.
If I read Dune, and internalize its concepts, and start dropping muad’dib references in public, then I’m being a big fucking nerd but I’m not actually hurting anyone.  If I read Joe White Dude’s Badly-Researched And Poorly-Done Assimilation Of Someone Else’s Culture and start going, “Yeah, boy, you new hair a total dreadnut!” then I’m actually kind of a douche.
So with Nalo, I have the twin joys of reading a fun story – seriously, try Midnight Robber or Brown Girl in the Ring – and when I’m done, I have that programmer-like satisfaction of having inhaled some new concepts and slang that I know to be either completely manufactured or accurate representations of her culture, and if I decide that I start liking the word “bumbaclaat” then hey, it may be cultural appropriation but at least I’m using the fucking thing accurately.
But yeah.  For me, dialect involves some serious trust on the part of the author, because I’m simply not educated enough to know when it’s done poorly.  So when I’m reading dialect by an unknown author, I have this constant ongoing question of “Can I enjoy this?  Or should I be irritated?”
And honestly?  A lot of the people who try dialect are uneducated people who are stretching their wings as writers in some experiment – hey, can I write like the dudes I hear down at the barbershop? – and fucking it up.  Maybe not all of ’em, but enough that I can’t dismiss ’em.
Yet again, it’s like unpacking all my seething hatred of strawberries – and I do not like strawberries, Sam-I-Am, unless they’re coated in dark chocolate – in that I have an instinctive dislike, but that dislike stems from pretty sucktacular reasons.  Hey, I don’t like reading about dialect because I’m too lazy to do the research on someone’s culture enough to be familiar with it!  So I rarely read dialect!  Now there’s a vicious circle, ain’t it?
There’s not a good ending to this essay, though.  It’s messy, like real life.  I’ve made a conscious effort to eat fruit more over the past two years, and my palate has expanded considerably; I can eat bananas, don’t mind blackberries, and you put a few blueberries into my cereal and I can deal with that.  But still, when I’m having a bad day and I just need to comfort-eat, I have never once gone, “Awww, yeah, frickin’ banana in the house.”
Yet my cardiologist will tell me: You’d be better off if you did.
Likewise, dialect is almost certainly never gonna be my go-to reading preference for the reasons I’ve outlined.  But I do read occasional stories with dialect as a change-up, and I can acknowledge that my dislike of dialect is a flaw not necessarily within dialect itself, but rather a flaw instilled upon me for a myriad of really complicated cultural reasons, and I should occasionally get out there and challenge myself because dude, there is a whole fucking world out there with people who don’t speak like you, think like you, believe like you, and shouldn’t you creep outside of your nice suburban house every once in a while to explore the great and meandering halls the world has to offer?
Yes.
Yes, I damn well should.