I’m good with words. I grew up in a bilingual French-Canadian community and have picked up bits of several other languages, shaping me into the word nerd I am today. I love wandering through the dictionary, following etymological threads—the history of people speaking. I remember diagramming sentences in middle school English: those fascinating, slightly neurotic chalkboard maps of how language works.
Loosely, grammar is defined as a set of rules to describe and elucidate the structure of a language as is demonstrated by its speakers or writers. When approaching Jonathan González’s new book Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, I was faced with a use for this word I don’t often encounter, one that led me to second language acquisition as a means to explore the work.
The book is a small dark green object in a sleeve that holds it closed. It talks about ways of being and sets of practices. It allows itself to be poetry, prose, travel journal, and musings. It delves into history, exposes places of experience in Black expressive arts and where this practice lands in this language of uprising—namely that Black expressive practices have necessarily been insurgencies.
And the book is dense, but also light, full of air and love and ease. It holds together multiple forms of writing that collectively point to Black gatherings and Black commons. But, as Gonzalez states, it’s not all at a frequency sensed by the hegemonic. It is for and of Black spaces first.
Second language acquisition offers a useful metaphor here. When we learn a new language well, we learn that fluency is not vocabulary alone. It is rhythm. Timing. Gesture. It is knowing when not to speak. It is understanding that meaning lives in tone, in shared reference, in history that precedes us and may never fully belong to us. There is always a point at which the learner must surrender mastery and accept proximity instead—listening more than producing, absorbing more than explaining.
González’s framing of insurgent grammars asks for something similar. These grammars are not simply alternative structures that can be diagrammed, catalogued, or admired from a distance. They are practices of relation, motion, refusal, survival. They are ways of making life possible. If traditional grammar seeks stability—agreement, order, coherence—insurgent grammar makes room for rupture. It permits improvisation. It privileges response over rule.
To observe such grammars, then, is not an analytical exercise so much as a reorientation of attention. It requires noticing where meaning gathers outside sanctioned forms: in repetition, in silence, in collective movement, in sound that exceeds semantic clarity.
For white readers like me especially, this requires a particular kind of labor. Not the labor of interpretation alone where they are domesticated into familiarity, but that of recognizing we are not their intended speakers. It’s the labor of unlearning the assumption that everything meaningful must become legible to us. The impulse to categorize, to clarify, to render transparent—these are habits shaped by power. They are grammatical reflexes of dominance, structuring recognition as knowledge.
Ways to Move seems less interested in teaching readers how to read Black insurgent grammars than in demonstrating that they are already in motion—circulating through gatherings, performances, intimacies, everyday gestures. The book does not pause to define them because definition would imply containment. Instead, it gestures, accumulates, revisits. It moves the way memory moves: nonlinear, embodied, associative.
Reading Ways to Move feels less like receiving information and more like adjusting one’s perceptual field. Perhaps this is the most striking shift the book invites: the recognition that grammar need not be a system that organizes language into correctness but is also a pattern of living that organizes people into relation. A choreography of attention. A shared sense of how movement, sound, and presence hold meaning together.
If grammar is, at its root, a description of how language lives among its speakers, then insurgent grammars describe how life persists among those who must continually invent its terms.
And maybe that is what I return to, word nerd that I am: grammar not as rules on a chalkboard, but as evidence of people speaking themselves into being—again and again—refusing silence, refusing erasure, making structure where none was meant to hold them.
A way to move, indeed.
Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars by Jonathan González, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025
