Transformation of LanguageENGE 5850

Semester 2, 2016-2017

Dr. Emily CHOW

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Lecture Outline

• Language and identity, culture, history, politics, and power

• The impacts and legacy of colonial language policy

• Influences do not take place in one single direction but manifests in various ways

• Language Debate

• Ways of Transformation

• The Case of Hong Kong

Recap

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Part 1: Language Debate

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Language and Nation

• Édouard Glissant (1928 – 2011) in CaribbeanDiscourse: Selected Essays

• “There are … no languages or languagespoken in Martinique, neither Creole norFrench, that have been ‘naturally’developed by and for us Martinicansbecause of our experience of collective,proclaimed, denied, or seized responsibilityat all levels. The official Language, French, isnot the people’s language. This is why we,the elite, speak it so correctly. The languageof the people, Creole, is not the language ofthe nation.”

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o VS Chinua Achebe

• “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression” in June 1962 at Makerere, Uganda

• Ngũgĩ’s “The Language of African Language” in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986)

• Achebe’s “English and the African Writer” (1965)

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o• Kenyan

• short stories, drama, essays, and novels

• Features of his works:

• socialist realism

• horrible impacts of colonization onto the Kenyan people

• Weep Not, Child (1964)

• A Grain of Wheat (1967)

• The Black Hermit (1968)

• Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986)

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Imperialism and Language

• “The choice of language and the use to whichlanguage is put is central to a people’sdefinition of themselves in relation to theirnatural and social environment, indeed inrelation to the entire universe. Hencelanguage has always been at the heart of thetwo contending social forces in the Africa ofthe twentieth century.”

• “The title, ‘A Conference of African Writers ofEnglish Expression,’ automatically excludedthose who wrote in African languages.”

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“Fatalistic Logic”

• “the possibility, of using mother-tonguesprovokes a tone of levity in phrases like ‘adreadful betrayal’ and ‘a guilty feeling’;but that of foreign languages produces acategorical, positive embrace, whatAchebe himself, ten years later, was todescribe as this `fatalistic logic of the.unassailable position of English in ourliterature”

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Problems of Writing in English

• Gabriel Okara

• “I have endeavoured in my words to keep as close aspossible to the vernacular expressions. For, from aword, a group of words, a sentence and even a namein any African language, one pan glean the socialnorms, attitudes and values of a people.”

• Ngũgĩ

• “obsessed by taking from his mother-tongue, toenrich other tongues”

• “The literature it produced in European languageswas given the identity of African literature as ifthere had never been literature in Africanlanguages.” 9

Childhood and Education• Gikuyu: local community

• in the fields, at home, with friends and relatives

• Storytelling

• English at school

• after the declaration of a state of emergency over Kenya in 1952

• “In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference.”

• “I AM STUPID” or “I AM A DONKEY”

• “witchhunters”

• “divorced from his spoken language at home […] disassociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment […] colonial alienation”

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Language as a “Collective Memory Bank”

• “Values are the basis of a people’s identity, theirsense of particularity as members of the humanrace. All this is carried by language. Language asculture is the collective memory bank of apeople's experience in history. Culture is almostindistinguishable froth the language that makespossible its genesis growth banking, articulationand indeed its transmission from one generationto the next.”

• History

• Image-forming

• reality11

English and Neo-colonialism

• “are we not on the cultural level continuing thatneo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What isthe difference between a politician who saysAfrica cannot do without imperialism and thewriter who says Africa cannot do withoutEuropean languages?”

• “What we have created is another hybridtradition, a tradition in transition, a minoritytradition that can only be termed as AfroEuropean literature; that is, the literaturewritten by Africans in European languages.”

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A search of a pre-colonial past?

• “I do not want to see Kenyan childrengrowing up in that imperialist-imposedtradition of contempt for the tools ofcommunication developed by theircommunities and their history. I want themto transcend colonial alienation.”

Discussion

Is this a search of pre-colonial past? Ifyes, in what ways do you think it ispossible?

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Abrogation

• “systematic suppression”

• “I started writing in Gikuyu language in1977 after seventeen years of involvementin Afro-European literature, in 'my caseAfro-English literature. […] I believe that mywriting in Gikuyu language, a Kenyanlanguage, an African language, is part andparcel of the anti-imperialist struggles ofKenyan and African peoples.”

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Chinua Achebe

• Nigerian

• novels, short stories, poetry, and essays

• Features of his works:

• socialist realism

• political and social crisis faced by Africa with the advance of colonialism

• Things Fall Apart (1958)

• No Longer at Ease (1960)

• Arrow of God (1964)15

Defining African literature

• “Was it literature produced in Africa or aboutAfrica? Could African literature be on anysubject, or must it have an African theme?Should it embrace the whole continent orSouth of the Sahara, or just Black Africa? Andthen the question of language. Should it be inindigenous African languages or should itinclude Arabic, English, French. Portuguese,Afrikaans, etc.?”

• “you cannot cram African literature into asmall, neat definition. I do not see Africanliterature as one unit but as a group ofassociated units-in fact the sum total of all thenational and ethnic literatures of Africa.”

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Language and Reality

• “I have indicated somewhat off-handedlythat the national literature of Nigeria andof many other countries of Africa is, orwill be, written in English. This maysound like a controversial statement, butit isn't. All I have done has been to lookat the reality of present-day Africa. This‘reality’ may change as a result ofdeliberate, e.g. political, action. If it doesan entirely new situation will arise, andthere will be plenty of time to examine it.At present it may be more profitable tolook at the scene as it is.” 17

Language and Reality

• “when in 1960 I was travelling in EastAfrica and went to the home of the lateShabaan Robert, the Swahili poet ofTanganyika, things had been different.We spent some time talking aboutwriting, but there was no real contact. Iknew from all accounts that I was talkingto an important writer, but just howimportant I had no idea. He gave me twobooks of his poems which I treasure butcannot read-until I have learnt Swahili.”

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Writers’ Autonomy

• “The real question is not whether Africans couldwrite in English but whether they ought to. Is itright that a man should abandon his mother-tongue for someone else's? It looks like a -dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling.”

• “But for me there is no other choice. I have beengiven this language and I intend to use it. I hope,though, that there always will be men, like thelate Chief Fagunwa, who will choose to write intheir native tongue and ensure that our ethnicliterature will flourish side by side with thenational ones. For those of us who opt for Englishthere is much work ahead and much excitement.”19

Appropriation

• “The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.”

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Appropriation in Arrow of God

• “I want one of my sons to jointhese people and be my eyesthere. If there is nothing in ityou will come back. But if thereis something there you will bringhome my share. The world is likea Mask, dancing. If you want tosee it well you do not stand inone place. My spirit tells me thatthose who do not befriend thewhite man today will be sayinghad wie known tomorrow.”

• I am sending you as myrepresentative among thosepeople-just to be on the safeside in case the new religiondevelops. One has to move withthe times or else one is leftbehind. I have a hunch thatthose who fail to come to termswith the white man may wellregret their lack of foresight.

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o VS Chinua Achebe

Discussion

• Which strategy, abrogation orappropriation, do you prefer,as a writer or as a reader?

• Other than the argumentsraised by Ngũgĩ and Achebe,are there any other factorsyou will considering in choosinga language to write in?

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Part 2: Transformation

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Rationale

• Bill Ashcroft in Post-colonial Transformation(2001)

• “while meaning in texts is ‘socially’constituted, difference and alterity may besimilarly constituted within thetransformed discourse.”

• “‘metonymic gap’, a sense of distance thatcomes about through the use of certainlinguistic strategies.”

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Rationale

• “the importance of a situation in whichmeaning can occur, and at the same timesignifies areas of difference which may liebeyond meaning, so to speak, in a realm ofcultural experience. The distinctive act ofthe cross-cultural text is to inscribedifference and absence as a corollary ofcultural identity.”

• “the basic function of languageappropriation: to convey the attitudes andbeliefs of a non-Western culture in thedominant language”

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Transformation

• Glossing

• “The local writer is thus able to represent his or her world to thecolonizer (and others) in the metropolitan language, and at thesame time, to signal and emphasize a difference from it. In effect,the writer is saying, ‘I am using your language so that you willunderstand my world, but you will also know by the differences inthe way I use it that you cannot share my experience.’” (Ashcroft2001)

• E.g. “He took the man into his obi (hut)”

• Untranslated words

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Transformation

• Interlanguage

• Code-Switching• “specifically illuminates the political and cultural gap

installed through language”• “The ability of the writer to move between the codes

indicates his subtle awareness of the power relationships involved”

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Amos Tutuola (1920-1997)

• Nigerian

• Features of his Works:

• influenced by the oral tradition of African literature

• incorporates Yoruba myths and legends into loosely constructed prose with traditional themes of Yoruba folktales

• creates a world of fantasies of religions and myths

• The Palm-Wine Drunkard (1952)

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Amos Tutuola (1920-1997)• The Palm-Wine Drinkard

• “I was a palm-wine drunkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money except cowries, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in town.”

• Achebe

• “In this respect Amos Tutuola is a natural. A good instinct has turned his apparent limitation in language into a weapon of great strength-a half-strange dialect that serves him perfectly in the evocation of his bizarre world.” 29

Linton Kwesi Johnson (1952 – Present)

• Lives in London since the age of 11

• Dub poet

• Reggae

• experiences of being an African-Caribbean in Britain

• Jamaican Creole / Patois

• “Inglan is a Bitch”

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMjvRpAckU

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Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987)

• born in Zimbabwe

• wrote novels, poems, short stories, drama, children’s short stories, and also essays

• radical individualism

• refused to embrace his racial, ethnic, and national identity and tried to celebrate himself as an individual only

• stream of consciousness writing style

• House of Hunger (1978)31

Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987)

• Introduction to The House of Hunger

• the political significance of language

• “as far as expressing the creativeturmoil within my head wasconcerned, I took to the Englishlanguage as a duck to water. Iwas therefore a keen accompliceand student in my own mentalcolonisation.”

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Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987)

• Introduction to The House of Hunger

• “English is my second language, Shonamy first. When I talked it was in the formof an interminable argument, one side ofwhich was always expressed in Englishand the other side always in Shona. Atthe same time I would be aware ofmyself as something indistinct butseparate from both cultures. I felt gaggedby this absurd contexts between Shonaand English.”

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Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987)• Interview with Flora Veit-Wild

• “in terms of technique and style and use oflanguage in The House of Hunger and BlackSunlight and especially in Mindblast I try tosabotage the very language I am using. Thismeans certain innovations in terms of grammaror in terms of juxtaposing disparate phrases orconcepts to hammer out a new resonance interms of meaning. The creativity comesthrough as subversion. There is thiscontradiction that through destroying theEnglish language I actually achieve higher levelsof meaning through the same language.”

• “new conceptual and political space” 34

Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987)

• “The African Writer’s Experience of EuropeanLiterature,”

• “[f]rom early in my life I have viewedliterature as a unique universe that has nointernal divisions. I do not pigeon-hole itby race or language or nation. It is an idealcosmos co-existing with this crude one.”

Discussion

To what extent do you agree withMarechera’s idea that the literary spaceis a cosmos with no internal linguistics,national, racial divisions? 35

Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987)• Interview with Flora Veit-Wild

• “I think I am the doppelgängerwhom, until I appeared, Africanliterature had not yet met. And in thissense I would question anyone callingme an African writer. Either you are awriter or you are not. If you are awriter for a specific nation or aspecific race, then f--- you. In otherwords, the direct internationalexperience of every single livingentity is, for me, the inspiration towrite.”

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Part 3: The Case of Hong Kong

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“Finding My English: One Hong Kong Writer’s Evolution”• Xu Xi 許素細

• The title of the essay!

• “Finding language for your fiction is rather like finding language for love.”

• Parents: part of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora from Central Java i.e. Wah kiu / hua qiao

• Father: Javanese and Mandarin (Fujianese)

• Mother: Javanese and limited Mandarin

• Both studied english at school

• Playground language: Cantonese38

Complexity• “As a young writer, however, my written

English was ‘World English,’ in much theway that Cantonese was ‘WorldCantonese,’ because these were thelanguages that made my imaginaryworld exist. Our relatives and friendsspoke multiple languages and inflectedtheir English with a variety of accents.”

• “My linguistics path might have beenless fraught had I grown up in Jamaicaor Singapore where you could at leaseshape a brand of English that would beyour own and have national resonance.” 39

Mutation, Transformation, Evolution

• “Consciously adopted American grammar and syntax in an attempt to unlearn and eradicate the British one”

• “It became clear to me that try as I would, I could not hear, feel or experience English as only American”

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Transnational Qualities

• Can Gao Xinjian and Ha Jin beregarded as Chinese writers?

Discussion

• What is Hong Kong Literature?Are Xixi’s My City, RichardMason’s The World of SuzieWong, or Martin Booth’s Gweiloexamples of Hong KongLiterature?

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• “Was it literature produced in Africa or aboutAfrica? Could African literature be on anysubject, or must it have an African theme?Should it embrace the whole continent orSouth of the Sahara, or just Black Africa ? Andthen the question of language. Should it be inindigenous African languages or should itinclude Arabic, English, French. Portuguese,Afrikaans, etc.?”

• “you cannot cram African literature into asmall, neat definition. I do not see Africanliterature as one unit but as a group ofassociated units-in fact the sum total of all thenational and ethnic literatures of Africa.”

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Mutation, Transformation, Evolution • “Blackjack”

• “They are not my people, no Hong Kong yan, because they haven’t been infected by our linguistic schizophrenia. I dream in psychedelic Chinglish, with bits of Putonghua hovering around, in preparation for my future masters.”

• “In a way, I was searching for a kind of World English voice to articulate the global nature of my life experience in fiction”

• “I am aware that my English has grown back into what I first began writing, which is in fact the ‘World English’ of my childhood. […] This consciousness comprises a global culture that happens to finds its voice in English.” 43

The Future of Hong Kong Writing

• “the next generation of Hong Kong writers in English will likely be those who write bi-lingually or tri-lingually, who fully embody a bi- and tri-cultural sensibility that is Chinese Hong Kong. I do not mean “Chinese” as an ethnic adjective, but rather, the political and national one.”

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Language and Literature

• “In the end, at least from the writer’sperspective, language is simply themedium to articulate the consciousnessrooted in the human condition andemotions, like love.”

• “What determines the language ofliterature depends, at least in part, onthe seductive power of the voice of thebeloved.”

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Louise Ho

• One of Hong Kong’s most recognized contemporary poet in English

• Born and brought up mostly in Hong Kong• Has lived in Mauritius, England, America and

Australia• was an associate professor of English at the

Chinese University of Hong Kong, teaching creative writing, Shakespeare and English poetry

• 2 poetry collections• retired and now lives and writes in Australia

and Hong Kong

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“What’s in a Name”

Discussion

What aspect of the relationship between language and literature does Ho highlight? What is the significance of it?

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Renee Liang

• a second generation Chinese New Zealander

• Poem, play, novel

• http://chinglish-renee.blogspot.hk/

• “Banana” and “Chinglish”

Discussion

What aspect of the relationship between language and literature does Ho highlight? What is the significance of it?

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Discussion

If you were going to publish a creative work about Hong Kong, what language(s) would you choose to write?

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Conclusion

• Caliban in The Tempest• “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know

how to curse.”

• Next lecture• Theory literary text• Read Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English• Presenters get ready!

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Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “English and the African Writer.” Transition 18 (1965): 27-30.

Ashcroft, Bill. Post-colonial Transformation. London: Routledge, 2001.

Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989.

Johnson, Linton Kwesi. “Inglan is a Bitch.” in Linton Kwesi Johnson: Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 2006.

Marechera, Dambudzo. “The African Writer’s Experience of European Literature.” Zambezia 14, no. 2 (1987): 99-105.

---. The House of Hunger. London: Heinemann, 1978; London: Heinemann, 2009.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986.

Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.

Veit-Wild, Flora. “Interview and discussion with Dambudzo Marechera about Black Sunlight.” In Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work, edited by Flora Veit-Wild, 217-221. Asmara; Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004.

---. “Interview with Marechera on Mindblast, language and audience.” In Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work, edited by Flora Veit-Wild, 310-312. Asmara; Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004.

Xi, Xu. “Finding My English: One Hong Kong Writer’s Evolution.” In Hong Kong ID: Stories from the City’s Hidden Writers, edited by Dania Shawwa, 175-189. Hong Kong: Haven Books, 2005.

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