Decolonising the Canon: Language, Power, and the Politics of World Literature (MAY, 2021)
Section A (Critical Commentary):
To deliver a critical commentary on Bennett’s piece, would require some historical exercise on the major political and social events that occurred as a backdrop during her active years and a look at the ‘imperialist period’ of the early twentieth century that preceded it. Whilst the following commentary is in no way meant to be patronising or detract from ‘Jamaica Language’, I believe a commentary would not be possible without a focus on the macro and the micro. Which, in this instance, is the history and social conscience that circulated Bennett. This in turn will give the reader a new vantage and greater appreciation of the text whilst, at the same time, delivering a commentary that highlights the values of writing in one’s language. I will look at African novelists and theorists, Thiong’o and Achebe, who contributed to a literary movement during the fifties and sixties, in aid of redefining Africa’s narrative, in a period of colonised nations gaining back their independence. I will then turn my gaze back to ‘Jamaica Language’ in relation to the matters discussed above. This, I hope, will advocate for the select few who maintain the dignity of expressing thoughts in their own language and by doing so, are taking a stance against the imposing force of English as a ‘world language’. As Baldwin once said, “The responsibility of a writer to is excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”[1]
On February 26th, 1885, German Chancellor Bismarck, the most powerful man of his time, invited to his palace sixteen representatives from leading western countries to convene and, over the course of three months, negotiate rules for the invasion, occupation and eventual colonisation of Africa by the United States and several other European colonial powers. Africa’s fate in the infamous ‘Berlin Conference of 1884/85’ was to be decided without the presence, or consultation, of any African representatives. In the years that followed, the unedifying course of imperialism on the ‘Black continent’ lead, not only to the theft of its riches and resources but, to a desecration of its many cultures and languages. Berlin of 1884 was effected through sword and bullet, but when these forces were withdrawn, it was in the chalk and the whiteboard that the gentler, more obscure, force of neo-colonialism began to find root. This introduction of bourgeois ideals and external, western influence would soon strip the entirety of ‘the black continent’, native to many dialects, languages, and cultures, of its spirit. Thereby forcing it to recentre and orientate around a foreign, white, euro-centric gaze. One that taught the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another.
This parasitic process of imperialism that contributed to the erasure of a people’s history and language is best described by Kenyan novelist and academic, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o, a leading figure who has contributed massively to the discourse of African language and literature to both the motherland and western thinking. Thiong’o writes: “The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”[2]
With the arrival of bible-wielding missionaries and introduction of colonial schools, indigenous learning structures were being uprooted in favour of a system that taught the language of the colonisers. In the classrooms, language was used as a vehicle of subjugation in equal, though covert, measures to that of the physicality of imperialism. The hegemony of the English language and its gripping power is what Thiong’o later expresses on: “In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference.”[3]. There were now two dominating forces within Africa: The imperial and anti-imperial mindset. One method of the rebellion was the refusal to adopt English as the new vernacular. Instead, continuing to express themselves in the languages of their mother-tongue; the revival of languages that were being degraded and slowly erased.
As we turn our gaze back onto ‘Jamaica Language’, we can see this same anti-imperialist stance within Bennett’s text in which she is challenging the narrative that Jamaican patois is not viewed as a form of standard English, but a ‘corruption of [the language]’[4]. It is necessary to understand that, in colonial nations, such as Jamaica, the English Language was introduced with a sense of reverence and nobility whilst the native tongues were smeared as ‘inferior’.
The imposition of a foreign language, to a colonist child, staggered the translation from his thoughts to now a foreign expression. Making any reference a cerebral activity rather than a felt experience. For colonialism to work, the geography, values, systems, culture, language, education, religion, and art of the colonised needed to be destructed or undervalued to create space for the coloniser.
The colonial child was forced to see the world outside himself and never within. Yet despite all attempts, the native tongues of the colonised refused to die; kept alive by the peasantry and the working class who blended their dialect with that of the imposed. Now, in the 1950s, when colonised nations were gaining back their independence, writers like Louis Bennett, Chinua Achebe and Thiong’o - and the voices that composed the ‘African Writers Series’ - a series of books by African writers set in response to the desecration of a people - began to fuse the language of the oppressors and Africanise it with the rhythm, syntax and spirit of the oppressed.
Postcolonial literature is about reclamation of a people’s identity and the telling of their own stories after a period of white rule. Yet, for Chinua Achebe, the English language that had dominated Africa in the last century came with it an opportunity to be a carrier of change in challenging the two-dimensional narratives and attitudes that had polluted the minds of many. After ‘The African Writer’s Conference of 1962’, Achebe wrote: “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.”[5]
As such, we are given such a rich record of postcolonial literature that does just that. When we take the example of Bennett’s text, she is quite clearly challenging and taking a stance against the propagandic campaign of the colonisers. Her polemic against the imperialist regime is purposefully infused with the syntax of her native tongue and the linguistic body of the collective oppressors. Though her work speaks volumes on injustice, part of me believes that Bennet isn’t coming to the gatekeepers seeking an apology or permission in using ‘their’ language but rather coming to them, only to stifle them with their own ignorance and logic.
Word count: 1000
BIBLIOGRAPHY (PART A)
Achebe, Chinua. "English and the African Writer." Transition, no. 75/76 (1997): 342-49. Accessed May 6, 2021. doi:10.2307/2935429.
Baldwin, James. ‘Full Conversation with James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni in London, 1971. YouTube, 1:56:38, posted by I Love Ancestry, May 27, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL_cM7SXfbo
Bennett, Louise. ‘Jamaica Language’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, tenth edition, edited by Jahan Ramazani. 856-7. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2018).
Thiong’o wa, Ngũgĩ. ‘Introduction’, in Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African literature 1-3. (East Africa: East African Educational Publishers, 1986)
Thiong’o wa, Ngũgĩ. ‘The Language of African Literature’, in Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African literature, 4-33. (East Africa: East African Educational Publishers, 1986).
Section B (Essay):
‘World Literature will never fully belong to the English canon’. Discuss.
This essay will be a detailed continuation of the ideas and events touched on above, but with a greater theoretical focus on if ‘Weltliteratur’, as coined by German author and theorist Goethe, belongs in the English canon. My aim is to bring about a weighted discussion, exploring if this notion, ‘never fully belonging’, is a by-product of the gatekeepers of the industry or by the resistance of the African and international diaspora who contribute to it. I will then, in turn, look at the prevalent attitudes to foreigners, immigration and race in in the western world today. A black-and-white statement of the above magnitude would not be possible or fair to answer, of course, without the inclusion of voices of whom it affects or involves. As such, I will be drawing, once again, from African novelists and essayists, Achebe and Thiong’o, this time highlighting their famous debate on translation and the English language during the emergence of postcolonialism as a way of determining if international writers view the inclusion of their works within the English literary structures as something worthy of assimilation. I will then draw this essay to a close by touching briefly on Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie, his role within the discussion, as well as the attitudes towards world-literature within non-literary mediums.
From the 1950s, as colonised nations were gaining independence, Black-African writers seized the English language novel as a carrier of their experience as a way of telling their own stories to the English-speaking world. Yet, for Kenyan novelist and theorist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the adoption of English language by African writers was something that should not be treated with such reverence. Thiong’o believed that the colonisers left behind a ‘cultural bomb’. The missionaries and soldiers may have retreated, but what they left behind was a colonial mindset that taught the inferiority of Africa and its languages. For Thiong’o, the penetration of Africa into the western stratosphere was secondary to the needs of healing the damaged conscience of the African people as a result of imperialism. Thiong’o eventually moved away from writing in English. A move that many said was a poor decision, including Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, whose masterpiece, Things Fall Part, remains a seminal masterpiece, not just in the Western audience, but also is the most widely read book in modern African literature. Achebe’s reasoning was that by keeping the print language in English, it was the best way for Ngugi’s novels and consequently his mission in ‘decolonising the mind’ to transcend, as Damrosch states, the ‘linguistic and cultural point of its origin’[6], and into a wider readership. With Thiong’o’s audience stretching to the British elite, it would be very alluring to never change the language. But his mission was always for the people. And he wouldn’t be achieving this if his own mother, through barriers of translation, couldn’t read her son’s books.
Thiong’o’s stance against the English language highlights that, for some international novelists, the English canon isn’t the ‘Promised Land’ that it esteems itself to be nor should Africa be treated an extension of the West. Why, according to Thiong’o, should Africa, after slowly beginning to garner back self-reliance after authoritarian regime, drop back to its knees and wish to orientate, once again, around a ‘European intellectual scholarly axis’[7] and merit system?
This political and social control of the marginalised, long after the physical chains have been dropped, is too described by Civil-rights leader, Malcolm X, who writes an coming-to-age account of the time he sought out the hairstyle of ‘the white man’, denouncing the idea of assimilation within a dominant white culture: “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: When I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh with lye, in order to cook my natural hair until it was limp, to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’ and white people ‘superior’ - that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.”[8]
However, whilst some denounce the idea of integration and conformity into a ‘white society’, others see this as a golden ticket to break the two-dimensional stereotypes that are prevalent within the West. Since the 1950s, stories from the different corners of the world have now entered a global, mainstream appeal. Novelists throughout the African and Eastern diaspora are now occupying spaces in many spheres previously deemed ‘white’. We only need to take the example of Buchi Emecheta and her novel ‘In the Ditch’ - which details the disenchantment of sixties United Kingdom and the disillusion that Nigerian woman, Ani, has upon migrating to a London council estate. Emecheta’s work was gradually accepted by the cultural establishment. Her second novel, ‘The Joys of Motherhood’, propelled her onto the Western literary scene, securing her a place amongst Granta’s 1983 ‘Best, Young, British Novelists’[9]. Where she featured alongside the likes of Ian McEwan, Pat Barker and Kazuo Ishiguro.
We also see the acclamation of other novelists from across the diaspora celebrated throughout the Western world. Salman Rushdie, a writer of Indian descent, is one such figure, who in ‘Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights’, a reinterpretation of Middle Eastern fables and Quranic lore, brings Islamic mythology to the west. Rushdie’s continuing success, that comes at the cost of growing fatwās and death threats, alongside the aforementioned and contemporary novelists highlights, not just a hunger for stories or the invitation for western audiences to see themselves from the other side but, that ‘international stories’ will continue to strike a deep resonance that connects with readers beyond their cultural origin. As Goethe wrote: “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”[10]
We must also look beyond the English Canon as something to base the merit of world literature on and look towards the break-through of international art beyond the literary medium. In instance, the case of South-Korean filmmaker, Kim Boon Hong, and his critically acclaimed black comedy ‘Parasite’ that won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, at the 2020 Oscars. I will conclude this essay with a short quote Hong made as he accepted his award to a crowd of Hollywood elite. Which I believe is an encapsulation of the benefits of world literature opening us up to a universe of rich, international stories that remain unheard and unread. Stories beyond Shakespeare and Keats. He said: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films”[11].
Word Count: 1100
BIBLIOGRAPHY PART B
DAMROSCH, DAVID. What Is World Literature? PRINCETON; OXFORD: Princeton University Press, 2003. Accessed May 10, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctv301fqn.
The Guardian, ‘Then and now: Granta’s Best Young British Novelists’, The Guardian, 6 April 2013, Accessed 10 May 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/06/then-now-granta-best-novelists
Thiong’o wa, Ngũgĩ. Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African literature (East Africa: East African Educational Publishers, 1986), 93.
D’haen, Theo. ‘Naming World Literature’, in The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (USA: Routledge, 2012). 5.
Sandra E. Garcia, ‘’After ‘Parasite’, are subtitles still a one-inch barrier for Americans?’, The New York Times, 12 February 2020, Accessed 10 May 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/movies/movies-subtitles-parasite.html - :~:text=“Once you overcome the one,traction that “Parasite” has.
X, Malcolm. ‘Homeboy’, in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 4th Ed, ed. Alex Haley (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 138.
FOOTNOTES
[1] James Baldwin, ‘Full Conversation with James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni in London, 1971’, YouTube, 1:56:38, posted by I Love Ancestry, May 27, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL_cM7SXfbo
[2] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, ‘Introduction’, in Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African literature (East Africa: East African Educational Publishers, 1986), 3.
[3] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, ‘The Language of African Literature’, in Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African literature (East Africa: East African Educational Publishers, 1986), 11.
[4] Louise Bennett, ‘Jamaica Language’, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, tenth edition, edited by Jahan Ramazani (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2018), pp.856-7.
[5] Chinua Achebe, "English and the African Writer." Transition, no. 75/76 (1997): 342-49. Accessed May 6, 2021. doi:10.2307/2935429.
[6] David, Damrosch. ‘What Is World Literature?’, (Oxford: University Press, 2003). Accessed May 10, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctv301fqn.
[7] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African literature (East Africa: East African Educational Publishers, 1986), 93.
[8] Malcolm X, ‘Homeboy’, in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 4th Ed, ed. Alex Haley (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 138.
[9] The Guardian, ‘Then and now: Granta’s Best Young British Novelists’, The Guardian, 6 April 2013, Accessed 10 May 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/06/then-now-granta-best-novelists
[10] Theo D’haen, ‘Naming World Literature’, in The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (USA: Routledge, 2012). 5.
[11] Sandra E. Garcia, ‘’After ‘Parasite’, are subtitles still a one-inch barrier for Americans?’, The New York Times, 12 February 2020, Accessed 10 May 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/movies/movies-subtitles-parasite.html - :~:text=“Once you overcome the one,traction that “Parasite” has.
