“I gotta use words when I talk to you”: so grumbles a character
in (I think) a story by Raymond Chandler.
Whose words? In what
language? With what level of
understanding and intelligibility?
Embodying what hidden power dynamics?
In the welter of current debates about education, cultural
diversity, and curricula, from primary school to university, these questions
are inescapable. Hardly a week goes by
without the print media fielding an article about language. To take just two recent headlines: “Othering
SA languages stops here”, and “Language can be a powerful cohesive tool”. The first article laments the destructive
influence on ‘minor’ languages of world-dominant languages (pertinently,
English); the other reminds us that language, in the broad sense, can bind us
together, too.
We have recently commemorated the 40th anniversary of the
Soweto uprisings, in which the imposition of Afrikaans on certain school
subjects ignited deeper embers of dissent.
Also recently, schools in Thembisa demonstrated because Afrikaans as a
teaching medium was being threatened.
The country’s African languages are
almost all feeling beleaguered to some
degree. Another newspaper columnist a
few weeks ago lamented that she was losing touch with her original isiXhosa,
because she used English more in her working life; she even described her isiXhosa
as “corrosive”, which – if she meant what I think she does – is a terrible
shame.
World-wide, unhappily, from the Amazon to Australia,
dialects and complete languages, only ever spoken by tiny groups of people, are
becoming extinct at almost the same rate as natural species. Some feel this is tragic, others that it’s just
the course of things, the ‘natural’ progression of a kind of Darwinian ‘survival
of the fittest’. Throughout history, ‘imperial’
languages have usurped or snuffed out others.
As Nicholas Ostler details in his wide-ranging book, Empires of the Word, these languages have included Aramaic and Arabic, Greek and Russian, Bantu
and Austronesian, Chinese and Egyptian. Sometimes the process is imposed by conquest ,
at other times it’s more willingly accepted or assimilated. Mostly there’s a complex mix of motives and
cross-influences. While the ‘Nguni’
languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa can be said to have had an ‘imperialistic’
role in marginalising San/Bushman communities and their multiple dialects, the reverse influence of Bushman language
on isiXhosa is obvious in the clicks and in certain vocabulary. Nothing is static in language, yet we cling
so tenaciously to notions of purity!
My university has been debating and re-formulating its
language policy for years. The bottom
line is that (despite it being the first language of only some 10% of South Africa’s
population) English is apparently unassailable as our lingua franca. This is
obviously firstly due to our imperial-colonial history, secondly to the global
dominance of American media. It has gone
beyond mere forcible colonisation, though: when a Moroccan umpire oversees a
tennis match between a Serb and a Spaniard in Beijing, he uses – English. So while we might deplore the violent aspects
of colonial-language dominance in certain places and phases in the past, and
continue to deplore the decline of other indigenous tongues in the present, the
current mantra of ‘decolonisation’ is likely to prove an unattainable chimaera.
Colonisation is not something like the
common cold that we can just exorcise or get over, returning to some former state:
it’s more like an amputation, something whose consequences we will have to live
with forever. We just have to get on
with it, finding creative ways of responding to the current state, in whatever languages available to us.
I have travelled enough to understand the frustrations and feelings of disparagement suffered by the ‘second-language’ speaker – the Xhosa
person obliged to use English in new contexts, for example. (I don’t even have a competent second language – only a slew of more or less
dodgy ‘third’ languages: Shona, French, bits of still others. My most recent efforts to learn isiXhosa are
bedevilled by uncontrollable spasms of French or German or Spanish which pop up
instead.) At the recent National Arts Festival,
the conceptual artist Lerato Shadi fielded
a video of herself (?) wrapping her tongue round and round with red wool, then taking the whole bundle into her mouth – a vivid representation of the muffling, even choking
experience of having to use another language.
She eventually works her tongue free and spits the bundle of wool out: ‘decolonisation’,
I guess. But I think we all know it’s
never going to be so simple.
In our local Tower of Babel, I don’t know how to navigate all
the splits and dilemmas. I don’t want any language die out or be demeaned: I
find all languages equally fascinating and valid and beautiful. Time, resources and unstoppable global forces
make it hard to implement equality, though.
At the same time, it’s unthinkable that we devolve into another form of
conflictual apartheid – languages in silos.
We have to talk to each
other. Learning one or another local
language can take us only part of the way, but it’s a start. Translation studies should be a much more
fundamental part of education curricula than they are.
Most of all, I think, learning another language – even if it’s
one with a problematic colonial history – is best seen as an expansion of
oneself, a fund of new opportunities. It
doesn’t automatically demean my home language to learn another. Moreover, there is no longer a single ‘English’
anyway – and never was. Even in England, Standard or Queen’s English is only spoken by a minority: the rest is a
patchwork of dialects and accents, many of which even I have experienced as almost unintelligible. (I felt hardly more at home in Putney than in Patagonia!) And English is so successful partly, perhaps,
because it seems to be unusually flexible and able to assimilate local
influences and varieties.
Hence writers globally have been able to reinvent ‘English’
continually to their own purposes. The
late Russell Hoban, for example, reinvented a rural English dialect for his
post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker
(still one of the very best of the genre).
It opens like this:
On my naming day when I come 12 I
gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the
Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint
looking to see none agen. He dint make
the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come onto my spear he wernt all
that big plus he lookit poorly. He done
the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and
there were wer then. Him on 1 end of the
spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’
Once you tune your ear into this, it becomes quite
bewitching. Never mind what Scots
writers and poets, from Robbie Burns to Hugh McDairmid and Kathleen Jamie, have
achieved in Scots English.
And writers across the globe, from the Caribbean to Kenya,
have set about reinventing the language of their oppressors for their own
ends. Nigerian writers have been especially
inventive, it seems. This is the
opening of Gabriel Okara’s little novel, The
Voice, a kind of metaphysical search story which deliberately uses indigenous
Igbo grammatical and idiomatic constructions to lift English into a distinctly
new register:
Some of the townsmen said Okolo’s
eyes were not right, his head was not correct.
This they said was the result of his knowing too much book, walking too
much in the bush, and others said it was due to his staying too long alone by
the river.
So
the town of Amatu talked and whispered; so the world talked and whispered. Okolo had no chest, they said. His chest was not strong and he had no
shadow. Everything in this world that
spoiled a man’s name they said of him, all because he dared to search for it.
He was in search of it with
all his inside and with all his shadow.
Even more inventive is Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, related through the naive viewpoint of a youngster caught
up in civil war. It draws on Nigerian
Creole (or Krio) – creoles are themselves astonishing inventions – as well as
on highly individual quirks and neologisms.
No one on earth speaks exactly this language, yet we as we read we get
to comprehend it entirely. Again, the
opening:
Although, everybody in Dukana was
happy at first.
All
the nine villages were dancing and we were eating plenty maize with pear and
knacking tory under the moon. Because
the work on the farms have finished and the yams were growing well well. And because the old, bad government have
dead, and the new government of soza and police have come.
Everybody
was saying that everything will be good in Dukana because of new
government. They were saying that kotuma ashbottom from Bori cannot take
bribe from people in Dukana again. They
were saying too that all those policemen who used to chop big big bribe from
people who get case will not chop again.
At perhaps no time in our history has such creativity been more
necessary. And with all our global media
resources, never have opportunities for fruitful interchange been more
available. Precisely because the clashes
of established identities and historical grievances bedevil our desires for
peace, we have to have faith in the endless human gift for inventiveness. Such acts of the imagination are acts of respect, empathy,
possibility and connection.
***
Excellent article. Who knows: Nigerian English or Indian English might, one day, become the standard.
ReplyDelete