Saturday 12 April 2014

Linguistic Echoes: The New 'englishes' Disempowring English

The politics of Linguistic Recycling and Cultural Regeneration: 

Comparative literature studies the circulation of movements, genres, ideas, themes, images, archetypes, and also language since language is a fundamental constituent of the literary work.

According to Bill Ashcroft:  
Language is a fundamental site of struggle for post-colonial discourse because the colonial process itself begins in laguage. The control over language by the imperial centre – whether achieved by displacing native languages, by installing itself as a ‘standard’ against other variants which are constituted as ‘impurities’, or by planting the language or by planting the language of empire in a new place – remains the most potent instrument of cultural control. Language provides the termes by which reality may be constituted ; it provides the names by which the world may be ‘known’. Its system of values – its suppositions, its geography, its concept of history, of difference, its myriad gradations of distinction – becomes the system upon which social, economic, and political discourses are grounded.

One of the most subtle demonstrations of the power of language is the means by which it provides, through the function of naming, a technique for knowing a colonised place or peaople. To name the world is to ‘understand’ it, to know it and to have control over it. […] To name reality is to exert power over it, simply because the dominant language becomes the way in which it is known .

There are several responses to this dominance of the imperial language, but two present themselves immediately in the decolonizing process – rejection and subversion. The process of radical decolonisation proposed by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is a good demonstration of the first alternative. Ngugi’s programme for restoring an ethnic or national identity embedded in the mother tongue involves a rejection of English, a refusal to use it for his writing, a refusal to accede to the kind of world and reality it appears to name, a refusal submit to the political dominance its use implies. This stance of rejection rests upon the assumption that an essential Gikuyu identity may be regained, an identity which the language of the coloniser seems to have displaced or dispersed.

However, many more writers have felt that this appeal to some essential cultural identity is doomed to failure, indeed, misunderstands the heterogeneous nature of human experience. […]The appropriation of the language is essentially a subversive strategy, for the adaptation of the ‘standard’ language to the demands and requirements of the place and society into which it has been appropriated amounts to a far more subtle rejection of the political power of the standard language. In Chinua Achebe’s words this is a process by which the language is made to bear the weight and texture of a different experience. In doing so it becomes a different language. By adapting the alien language to the exigencies of a mother grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and by giving a shape to the variations of the speaking voice, such writers and speakers construct an ‘english’ which amounts to a very different linguistic vehicle from the received standard colonial ‘English’. […]


The process of language adaptation is linguistically profound because it establishes a medium which fractures the concept of a standard language and installs the ‘marginal’ variations of language use as the actual network of a particular language. (The Post-colonial Studies Reader, P283-4)

Subversive Strategies of Adaptation / Appropriation:  

• Relexification: (not to be confused with other concepts like translation, loan translation, transference, transmutation, nativization, indigenization, interference, calquing or calking…) 
According to Chantal Zabus: Loreto Todd's felicitous formulation - 'the relexification of one's mother tongue, using English vocabulary but indigenous structures and rhythms' - best describes the process at work when the African language is simulated in a Europhone text. […] The making of a new register of communication out of an alien lexicon. […]
Whether Alfred Sauvy meant it or not when he coined the phrase - le tiers monde - after the French tiers état, the 'Third World' has become the site of the 'third code' … This new register of communication, which is neither the European target language nor the indigenous source language, functions as an 'interlanguage' or as a 'third register'   (P314-5)

• Deterritorialization / Reterritorialization of language:
A terminology coined by Deleuze and Guattari in their Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Defining Minor Literature as a literature written in a major language (dominant / imposed language). As language is the product of its native socio-cultural context, its use by minority writers who belong to different socio-cultural contexts causes them to deterritorialize the major language from its original territory. The way the will deal with the impossibility of writing in that major language leads to a reterritorialization of language.     
According to Chen Yongguo: "[…] minor use of language may result in both deterritorialization and reterritorialization of English as the major language at the same time which will usher in a new era not only of minor languages but also of minor literatures in new englishes." (The Politics of Minor Language, P 01)

Study Case: 

• Recycling / Revising / Subverting his-story through the Step-Mother Tongue: 




Columbus Ghost

i am Christopher columbus
just call me cris
i am de who  did  miss  the  land
india
i thought i'd discover
that which was never
how clever of me to see  the land
beyond
i came to tame
and claim
in the name of spain
i am cris
dont  dis
my his-story
i  inspired  hawkins   livingston
musolini botha
bush
i exterminated
perpetuated
hatered
against redmen  yellowmen
with blackmen i make no friend
i attack arawak
cut off their  head
wrote instead
that the caribs ate them like bread
i never told you this before
but my chief navigator was a
   MOOR
you know the moors
they discovered spain
those blacks who came from the
   afrikan  terrain
the idea that the world was round
i got from these same b acks in
   some little spanish town
now you may ask what was
   blacks doin there
but they ruled us for over 700
   years
they made a great mistake then
instead of enslavin us they made
   us their  friend
some survived
stayed alive
fought the invasion
european   division
english   agression
the fight between europe and
   european expansion
i wrote your history for you
did not tell you  true
not all blackmen came as slaves
listen you will know the truth in
   the waves
that brought the ships
lips lie
to keep intact
oppression of black skin
a sin
a myth
i am cris
the church perch on the
   opportunity to spread
the religion of the dead
through misconception
the assumption
that this world was new
the wind blew us to save the
   earth
from  beast  like  men
friend i am not
blot out the spot
that claim they are men like us
i am Christopher columbus
i gave europe pwer over all the
   earth
500 years of your blood sweat
   and tears
now you celebrate
recreate  your   death
let the glasses  touch
with the blood of your fathers and
   mothers
give a toast
HOST
my arrival
your dyin my  survival
the land is sti I mine
the pope is still the divine
yes
drink your  own  blood
call it wine
nothin in the pages of my history
will blot out your  misery
you shall celebrate my victory
your  children  praise  me
i am their only history
i am Christopher columbus
i died
but you made me live
give me the sea once more
let me discover you again
the stain
my fathers sons rule
fool
you  celebrate  my   comin
i will not go
not from your mind
restore me for all to  see
keepers of life
shepherds  of  my   people
lead them to the altar of lies
your ancestors cries will not be
   heard
word after word
pages of  history  written
the victims are once more bitten
1492 to you the beginnin of
   western world democracy
1492 to me the beginnin of white
   supremacy


• Recycling Caliban’s Curse From the Caribbean:

You taught me language ; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse : the red-plague rid you
For learning me your language !

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, ii


[…] And so all this fuss over empire – what went wrong here, what went wrong there – always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong : they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they love so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England ; everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that […]
In the Antigua that I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around us were named after some other English maritime criminals. There was Rodney Street, there was Hood Street, there was Hawkins Street, and there was Drake Street. There were flamboyant trees and mahogany trees lining East Street. Government House, the place where the Governor, the person standing in for the Queen, lived, was on East Street. Government House was surrounded by a high white wall – and to show how cowed we must have been, no one ever wrote bad things on it ; it remained clean and white and high. […]
Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget ? […]
[W]hat I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans : no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime ? And what can that really mean ? […]
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place      

• Prison language vs nation language       


Ashanti, Congo, Yoruba, all that mighty coast of western Africa was imported into the Caribbean.  And we had the arrival in our area of a new language structure.  It consisted of many languages but basically they had a common semantic and stylistic form.  What these languages had to do, however, was to submerge themselves, because officially the conquering peoples -- the Spaniards, the English, the French, and the Dutch -- insisted that the language of public discourse and conversation, of obedience, command and conception should be English, French, Spanish, or Dutch.  They did not wish to hear people speaking Ashanti or any of these Congolese languages.  Its status became one of inferiority.  Similarly, its speakers were slaves.  They were conceived of as inferiors -- non-human, in fact.  But this very submergence served an interesting interculturative purpose, because although people continued to speak English as it was spoken in Elizabethan times and on through the Romantic and Victorian ages, that English was, nonetheless, still being influenced by the underground language, the submerged language that the slaves had brought.  And that underground language was constantly transforming itself into new forms.  It was moving from a purely African form to a form which was African but which was adapted to the new environment and adapted to the cultural imperative of the European languages.  And it was influencing the way in which the English, French, Dutch, and Spaniards spoke their own languages.  So there was a very complex process taking place, which is now beginning to surface in our literature […]

People were forced to learn things which had no relevance to themselves.  Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other 'cultural disaster' areas), the people educated in this system came to know more, even today, about English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes, our own slave rebels, the people who helped to build and to destroy our society.  We are more excited by their literary models, by the concept of, say, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood than we are by Nanny of the Maroons, a name some of us didn't even know until a few years ago.  And in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious (in terms of sensibility) of the falling snow, for instance [...] than of the force of the hurricanes which take place every year.  In other words, we haven't got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall. […]
the language which is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/Caribbean heritage.  English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features.  But in its contours, its rhythm and timber, its sound explosions, it is not English, even though the words, as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree. 
Kamau Brathwaite, The Story of the Voice

Bans a Killin 
So yuh a de man me hear bout!
Ah yuh dem seh dah teck
Whole heap a English oat seh dat
yuh gwine kill dialec!
Meck me get it straight, mas Charlie,
For me no quite understand –
Yuh gwine kill all English dialec
Or jus Jamaica one?
Ef yuh dah equal up wid English
Language, den wha meck
Yuh gwine go feel inferior when
It come to dialec?
Ef yuh cyaan sing 'Linstead Market'
An 'Water come a me yeye’
Yuh wi haffi tap sing 'Auld lang syne’
An ‘Comin through de rye'.
Dah language weh yuh proud a,
Weh yuh honour an respec –
Po Mas Charlie, yuh no know se
Dat it spring from dialec!
Dat dem start fi try tun language
From de fourteen century -
Five hundred years gawn an dem got
More dialec dan we!
Yuh wi haffi kill de Lancashire,
De Yorkshire, de Cockney,
De broad Scotch and de Irish brogue
Before yuh start kill me!
Yuh wi haffi get de Oxford Book
A English Verse, an tear
Out Chaucer, Burns, Lady Grizelle
An plenty a Shakespeare!
When yuh done kill 'wit' an 'humour',
When yuh kill 'variety',
Yuh wi haffi fine a way fi kill
Originality!
An mine how yuh dah read dem English
Book deh pon yuh shelf,
For ef yuh drop a 'h' yuh mighta
Haffi kill yuhself!
So you’re the man I hear about!
You’re the one that’s made
A whole lot of English oaths that say
You’re gonna kill dialect!
Let me get it straight, Mr. Charlie,
For I don’t quite understand –
Are you gonna kill all English dialects
Or just the Jamaican one?
If you’ve examined the English Language,

Then what makes you feel inferior when
it comes to dialects?
If you can’t sing ‘Linstead Market’
And ‘Water come a me yeye’
Then we have to stop singing ‘Auld lang syne’
And ‘Comin through de rye’.
The language you are so proud of,
Which you honor and respect—
Poor Mr. Charlie, don’t you see that
It springs from dialects!
They've tried to turn it into a language
From the fourteenth century –
Five hundred years have passed and now
They’ve got more dialects than we do!
You would have to kill the Lancashire,
The Yorkshire, the Cockney,
The broad Scotch and the Irish brogue
Before you start to kill me!
You would have to get the Oxford Book
Of English Verse and tear
Out Chaucer, Burns, Lady Grizelle
And lots of Shakespeare!
When you’ve finished killing ‘wit’ and ‘humor’,
When you’ve killed ‘variety’,
You will have to find a way to kill
Originality!
And how are you gonna read those English
Books there upon your shelf,
‘Cause if you drop a ‘h’ you might
Have to kill yourself!
                                                                               Louise Bennett

• Colonizing the Colonizer's Language

Colonization in reverse


Wat a joyful news, miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in Reverse
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town,
By de ship-load, by de plane load
Jamica is Englan boun.
Dem a pour out a Jamaica,
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
What an islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An turn history upside dung!
Some people doan like travel,
But fe show dem loyalty
Dem all a open up cheap-fare-
To-England agency.
An week by week dem shippin off
Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.
Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see da turnabout?
jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout’.
For wen dem ketch a Englan,
An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.
Jane says de dole is not too bad
Because dey payin she
Two pounds a week fe seek a job
dat suit her dignity.
Me say Jane will never fine work
At de rate how she dah look,
For all day she stay popn Aunt Fan couch
An read love-story book.
Wat a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wonderin how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse

Louise Bennett



• Caliban's Curse from UK: 

Linton Kwesi Johnson - Inglan Is A Bitch






Original Text in Jamaican Creole (“Patois”)
Version in Standard English

w´en mi jus´ come to Landan toun
mi use to work pan di andahgroun
but workin´ pan di andahgroun
y´u don´t get fi know your way around 
 

Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no escapin it 
Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no runnin´ whey fram it 
 


mi get a lickle jab in a bih ´otell 
an´ awftah a while, mi woz doin´ quite well 
dem staat mi aaf as a dish-washah 
but w´en mi tek a stack, mi noh tun clack-watchah 
 

Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no escapin it 
Inglan is a bitch 
no baddah try fi hide fram it 
 

w´en dem gi´ you di lickle wage packit 
fus dem rab it wid dem big tax rackit 
y´u haffi struggle fi mek en´s meet 
an´ w´en y´u goh a y´u bed y´u jus´ can´t sleep 
 

Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no escaping it
 Inglan is a bitch, fi true
a noh lie mi a tell, a true 
 

mi use to work dig ditch w´en it cowl noh bitch 

mi did strang like a mule, but bwoy, mi did fool 
den awftah a while mi jus´ stap dhu ovahtime 
den awftah a while mi jus´ phu dung mi tool 
 
Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no escapin it 
Inglan is a bitch 
y´u haffi know how fi survive in it 
 
well mi dhu day wok an´ mi dhu nite wok 
mi dhu clean wok an´ mi dhu dutty wok 
dem seh dat black man is very lazy 
but if y´u si how mi wok y´u woulda sey mi crazy 
 

Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no escapin it 
Inglan is a bitch 
y´u bettah face up to it 
 

dem a have a lickle facktri up inna Brackly 
inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry 
fi di laas fifteen years dem get mi laybah 

now awftah fifteen years mi fall out a fayvah 
 
Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no escapin it 
Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no runnin´ whey fram it 
 

mi know dem have work, work in abundant 
yet still, dem mek mi redundant 
now, at fifty-five mi gettin´ quite ol´ 
yet still, dem sen´ mi fi goh draw dole 
 

Inglan is a bitch 
dere´s no escapin it 
Inglan is a bitch, fi true
is whey wi a goh dhu ´bout it? 


when I’d just come to London town
I used to work upon the underground
but working upon the underground
you don’t get to know your way around


England is a bitch
there’s no escaping it
England is a bitch
there’s no running away from it


I got a little job in a big hotel
and after a while, I was doing quite well
they started me off as a dishwasher
but when I took a stack, I didn’t turn clock watcher

England is a bitch
there’s no escaping it
England is a bitch
no bother trying to hide from it


when they give you a little wage packet
first they rob it with their big tax racket [fraud]
you have to struggle to make ends meet
and when you go to your bed you just can’t sleep

England is a bitch
there’s no escaping it
England is a bitch, for true
it’s no lie that I’m telling, a truth


I used to work digging ditches when it was cold 
no bitching [no lie]
I was strong like a mule, but boy, I was foolish
then after a while I just stopped doing overtime
then after a while I just put down my tool

England is a bitch
there’s no escaping it
England is a bitch
you have to know how to survive in it

well I did day work and I did night work
I did clean work and I did dirty work
they say that black man is very lazy
but if you had seen how I worked you would 
have said I was crazy

England is a bitch
there’s no escaping it
England is a bitch
you had better face up to it

They have a little factory up in Brackly
in this here factory all they do is pack crockery
for the last fifteen years they have got my labour
now after fifteen years I’ve fallen out of favour

England is a bitch
there’s no escaping it
England is a bitch
there’s no running away from it


I know they have work, work in abundance
yet still, they make me redundant
now at fifty-five I’m getting quite old
yet still, they send me to go draw dole [unemployment benefit]

England is a bitch
there’s no escaping it
England is a bitch, for truth
It’s what are we going to do about it?