Towards Othering the Foreign Language
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Towards Othering the Foreign Language
by Hush Thu Jul 30, 2009 5:59 pm
OTHERING AS A DISCURSIVE HABIT*1 can be traced to descriptive ethnology and its antecedent, the portrait of manners and customs. It proves useful when discussing, as Mary Louise Pratt does, nineteenth-century writing about Africa.*2 In this genre, the people to be ‘othered’ are homogenized into a g(r)azing collectivity, further distilled into the iconic, sui-generic African, so dear to the nineteenth-century European imagination. The codification, normalization, and even reification of difference through ‘othering’ is a useful critical tool when approaching the West African writer’s use of both the African and the European language in the europhone novel.
If one extends the act of othering to linguistic difference, the Other’s language, whether it is the indigenous or the auxiliary African language, falls prey to colonial fixity or tyrannical homogeneity. This language is either simplified, as in the hypocoristic renditions of pidgin English or français tiraillou, ridiculed, exoticized, or backgrounded and misrepresented, as in the non-subtitled speech of the ‘restless natives’ in colonial films. Othering thus assumes different functions when the Other’s language is European and the one who ‘others’ is the West African writer. Accustomed to his language being ‘othered’: i.e. codified as patois, dialect, charabia, baragouin, the writer needs to come to terms with the ‘otherness’ of the foreign European language before ‘othering’ it. I shall here refer to the ‘otherness’ of the European language, as opposed to its foreignness, for its otherness may linger after the original, primary foreignness has been dispelled through verbal mastery and oral proficiency in the process of second-language acquisition.
In the West African europhone novel, the African word or phrase is either relexified or cushioned and contextualized, thereby remaining foreign on its own cultural turf. We have seen that the twin methods of shadowing – cushioning and contextualization – reveal the ultimate untransferability of the African logos, ‘othering’ the European language by fixing its function to that of providing an area of immediate context that ‘cushions’ the African word or phrase. Besides the English translation “hut,” which ‘shadows’: i.e. provides a fainter representation or adumbration of the Igbo word obi or homestead in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, such an explanatory tag can ‘shadow’ other languages as well. For instance, Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (1997) refers to the place where the police dump their dead in “dumped in the themmady kuzhy – the pauper’s pit.”*3 Roy’s language is like her native tongue – Malayalam – a palindrome which you can read both ways. One can see in the proximity of these interreferential signs a step towards a reciprocal creolization, as a way of being “at once a native and an alien,” to use Bharati Mukherjee’s phrase.
Thirty years before Roy, the Indian writer R.K. Narayan had, in The Vendor of Sweets (1967), allowed the tag’s shadow to stretch over a whole phrase: “a kapalam, a vending bowl made of a bleached human skull.”4 In terms of contextualization, Narayan, in an earlier novel, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962), provides a good exemplar in the word rakshasa, which is introduced without explanation. Speculation about what it means runs high until it is defined much later as “a demoniac creature who possessed enormous strength, strange powers, and genius, but recognized no sort of restraints of man or God… ’Every rakshasa gets swollen with his ego’.”5 Contextualization, like cushioning, is a way of grappling with the untranslatable in any language.
These two ways of shadowing seem to indicate that the European language is so foreign or, more exactly, so ‘other’ that it cannot convey African or Indian culture. On the other hand, relexification establishes that the European language, when bent to certain artistic exigencies, can be the conveyor of African (or Indian) culture. By ‘indigenizing’ the European language to the point of making it his own and abrogating it, the West African europhone writer interprets, gauges and redefines the otherness of the imposed medium.
Just like colonial discourse produced by the colonized as “a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible,”6 the europhone indigenized novel reveals the otherness of the European language, which, in turn, refracts the otherness of the African language, and produces an ambivalence close to that which permeates colonial discourse.
I have hinted at this ambivalence (at times construed as a duality or double-edged subversiveness) in suggesting that indigenization is both a valid strategy of literary decolonization and a neo-glottophagic enterprise. The latter perpetuates the glottophagic work of colonial language policies (cf. Chapter 2 above) and revitalizes the European language through a decidedly unreciprocal creolization. This ambivalence is also reflected in the europhone writer’s ambivalence towards the (m)other tongue and in his position at an interface, between a past of glottophagia and a future of rehabilitation of his language(s).
As noted in Chapter 3, pidgin English is gradually becoming extinct as a stylistic device in the West African europhone novel. An increasingly creolized variant may prove to be the ideal medium to escape the dichotomy between the target and the source language and
fill the ‘space between’ the sociolinguistic and the literary situation.
This medium could function outside of the europhone novel, in a genre that does justice to its oral quality, like poetry, folk opera or live dramatization. Yet Ken Saro–Wiwa has demonstrated that an artefactual lect such as “rotten English” could be the sustained medium of first-person narratives....
*1 Besides underwriting theories of difference pertaining to gender and the psyche, the theory of otherness has also imbued analyses of colonial discourse, depending as it does on the concept of “fixity.” See Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question... The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,“ Screen 24.6 (November– December 1983): 18. In this article, Bhabha questions the mode of representation of otherness.
*2 See Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,“ Critical Inquiry: “Race,“ Writing, and Difference 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 119–43, as well as her “Reply to Harold Fromm,“ Critical Inquiry 13.1 (Autumn 1986): 201–203.
*3 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1997): 321.
*4 R.K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets (The Sweet-Vendor, 1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 125.
*5 R.K. Narayan, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 9–96. These examples also feature in my “Language, Orality, and Literature,“ in New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 35.
*6 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question...,“ 23.
(source: Chantal Zabus, THE AFRICAN PALIMPSES: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007)
If one extends the act of othering to linguistic difference, the Other’s language, whether it is the indigenous or the auxiliary African language, falls prey to colonial fixity or tyrannical homogeneity. This language is either simplified, as in the hypocoristic renditions of pidgin English or français tiraillou, ridiculed, exoticized, or backgrounded and misrepresented, as in the non-subtitled speech of the ‘restless natives’ in colonial films. Othering thus assumes different functions when the Other’s language is European and the one who ‘others’ is the West African writer. Accustomed to his language being ‘othered’: i.e. codified as patois, dialect, charabia, baragouin, the writer needs to come to terms with the ‘otherness’ of the foreign European language before ‘othering’ it. I shall here refer to the ‘otherness’ of the European language, as opposed to its foreignness, for its otherness may linger after the original, primary foreignness has been dispelled through verbal mastery and oral proficiency in the process of second-language acquisition.
In the West African europhone novel, the African word or phrase is either relexified or cushioned and contextualized, thereby remaining foreign on its own cultural turf. We have seen that the twin methods of shadowing – cushioning and contextualization – reveal the ultimate untransferability of the African logos, ‘othering’ the European language by fixing its function to that of providing an area of immediate context that ‘cushions’ the African word or phrase. Besides the English translation “hut,” which ‘shadows’: i.e. provides a fainter representation or adumbration of the Igbo word obi or homestead in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, such an explanatory tag can ‘shadow’ other languages as well. For instance, Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (1997) refers to the place where the police dump their dead in “dumped in the themmady kuzhy – the pauper’s pit.”*3 Roy’s language is like her native tongue – Malayalam – a palindrome which you can read both ways. One can see in the proximity of these interreferential signs a step towards a reciprocal creolization, as a way of being “at once a native and an alien,” to use Bharati Mukherjee’s phrase.
Thirty years before Roy, the Indian writer R.K. Narayan had, in The Vendor of Sweets (1967), allowed the tag’s shadow to stretch over a whole phrase: “a kapalam, a vending bowl made of a bleached human skull.”4 In terms of contextualization, Narayan, in an earlier novel, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962), provides a good exemplar in the word rakshasa, which is introduced without explanation. Speculation about what it means runs high until it is defined much later as “a demoniac creature who possessed enormous strength, strange powers, and genius, but recognized no sort of restraints of man or God… ’Every rakshasa gets swollen with his ego’.”5 Contextualization, like cushioning, is a way of grappling with the untranslatable in any language.
These two ways of shadowing seem to indicate that the European language is so foreign or, more exactly, so ‘other’ that it cannot convey African or Indian culture. On the other hand, relexification establishes that the European language, when bent to certain artistic exigencies, can be the conveyor of African (or Indian) culture. By ‘indigenizing’ the European language to the point of making it his own and abrogating it, the West African europhone writer interprets, gauges and redefines the otherness of the imposed medium.
Just like colonial discourse produced by the colonized as “a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible,”6 the europhone indigenized novel reveals the otherness of the European language, which, in turn, refracts the otherness of the African language, and produces an ambivalence close to that which permeates colonial discourse.
I have hinted at this ambivalence (at times construed as a duality or double-edged subversiveness) in suggesting that indigenization is both a valid strategy of literary decolonization and a neo-glottophagic enterprise. The latter perpetuates the glottophagic work of colonial language policies (cf. Chapter 2 above) and revitalizes the European language through a decidedly unreciprocal creolization. This ambivalence is also reflected in the europhone writer’s ambivalence towards the (m)other tongue and in his position at an interface, between a past of glottophagia and a future of rehabilitation of his language(s).
As noted in Chapter 3, pidgin English is gradually becoming extinct as a stylistic device in the West African europhone novel. An increasingly creolized variant may prove to be the ideal medium to escape the dichotomy between the target and the source language and
fill the ‘space between’ the sociolinguistic and the literary situation.
This medium could function outside of the europhone novel, in a genre that does justice to its oral quality, like poetry, folk opera or live dramatization. Yet Ken Saro–Wiwa has demonstrated that an artefactual lect such as “rotten English” could be the sustained medium of first-person narratives....
*1 Besides underwriting theories of difference pertaining to gender and the psyche, the theory of otherness has also imbued analyses of colonial discourse, depending as it does on the concept of “fixity.” See Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question... The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,“ Screen 24.6 (November– December 1983): 18. In this article, Bhabha questions the mode of representation of otherness.
*2 See Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,“ Critical Inquiry: “Race,“ Writing, and Difference 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 119–43, as well as her “Reply to Harold Fromm,“ Critical Inquiry 13.1 (Autumn 1986): 201–203.
*3 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1997): 321.
*4 R.K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets (The Sweet-Vendor, 1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 125.
*5 R.K. Narayan, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 9–96. These examples also feature in my “Language, Orality, and Literature,“ in New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 35.
*6 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question...,“ 23.
(source: Chantal Zabus, THE AFRICAN PALIMPSES: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007)
Hush- Number of posts : 529
Age : 39
Location : Dreaming land
Registration date : 2008-09-17
Re: Towards Othering the Foreign Language
by Hush Thu Jul 30, 2009 6:30 pm
As an artistic embodiment of that (ambivalent) interface, indigenization is both an heir and a witness. It is heir to colonialist discourse which demoted the African language and it is a witness to a situation in flux, where the literary parole as the individual manifestation of language fails to represent the langue or the social facet of language.
As indicated in Chapter 2, a thorough analysis in applied linguistics would reveal fundamental discrepancies between the synchronic and the diachronic practices. If one posits that the literary language is inevitably transformed by its social objective, it can be argued that the indigenized novel, despite its subversiveness, remains a hermetic artifact ‘created’ by hegemonic producers of literature. As such, it provides a valid solution to an immediate artistic problem but ‘fixes’ the otherness of the African language and therefore fails to link up language with the sociopolitical structure. Once indigenization is achieved, the europhone novel fails to engage itself as a tool of social change as, for instance, Onitsha Market literature qua national literature did and still does, to some extent.7 Yet, when consulting the MLA Bibliography on CD-ROM in 2002, Christian Mair only found 31 hits for “Onitsha” and, what is more, “many were not about Nigerian writing at all, but about J.–M. G. LeClézio’s Onitsha, or represented an ethnographic rather than a literary-critical perspective.”8 To make matters worse, Obiechina’s anthology of Onitsha Market literature (1972) has long been out of print.
The ambivalence characterizing indigenization and, by the same token, that awkward yet fertile interface, is gradually being subsumed under a healthy coexistence of the ‘othered’ European language and the African tongue outside of the indigenized novel. This process was already at work in the very corpus of methods of indigenization, where relexification points to a stasis while the twin methods of cushioning and contextualization – our two ways of shadowing – point towards further ‘othering’ of the European language.9
This progression towards ‘othering’ the foreign language is reflected in post-independence glottopolitics, which have aimed at reducing the two main colonial and postcolonial functions of English and French as media of instruction and official languages. The premise is that the once demoted and repressed African languages can be rescued from colonial domination and glottophagia and that their rehabilitation will lead to the psychic liberation of the African peoples.
This artful synchronization of europhone and African language writing is reflected in the glottopolitics promoted in West African nation-states. For instance, Senegal’s new politique linguistique argues for a “balanced bilingualism and demotion of the status of the European language to that of ’foreign tongue’.”10 On the other hand, Nigeria’s new policy will make the English language “an ‘associate’ official language [which] will be studied as a second language from primary to secondary level,” as is the case in present-day India. To A. Babs Fagunwa in the late 1980s, this signified the promotion of the main national languages as media of instruction and of Hausa as a lingua franca,11 when in fact Nigerian Pidgin is a more likely candidate.
On the East African front, the Kenyan ‘Ngugists’ (and I, erroneously I believe, was labelled Ngugi’s “unofficial proxy” by Nairobi’s Sunday Standard in 200312) have campaigned in favour of KiSwahli for the roles formerly played by English, whereas the ‘Anglicists’ uphold the language of a tiny elitist majority and an all-English language policy.
The way out of this infernal binarism is, as Kembo–Sure has suggested, a third alternative: “plurilingualism.” This plurilingualism should also include Sheng, “a symbolic system outside KiSwahili and English,”13 spoken by young people but spreading to homes and offices, the way Nigerian Pidgin spread throughout the coastal cities of Nigeria. Safari T.A. Mafu draws the same conclusion regarding Tanzania. In 1964, when the United Republic of Tanzania was created out of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, KiSwahili was established as the official language and the ideal medium to transmit the message of nation-building, whereas Arabic and English were banned. However, English has continued to be the medium of secondary and higher education, and the Tanzanian situation is now that of triglossia.14 From these recent language policies, we can conclude that the European language is gradually being relegated to a peripheral role.
The glottopolitical ‘othering’ of the European language is paralleled in the new options that West African writers are envisioning within and beyond europhone writing. In the late 1970s, Egejuru’s interviews of African writers in her Towards African Literary Independence (1980) confirmed that writers were increasingly writing in their mother tongue or, at least, are doing so concurrently with europhone writing. Indeed, she remarks that African writers are now writing in their mother tongue or at least introducing their own local expressions into their works without footnotes. For instance, Sydney Onyeberichi of Nigeria has […] published [in 1980)]a collection of poems in which Igbo words and expressions are freely used without translation.
Robert Mukuni of Zambia writes in Shona. Chinua Achebe indicated that he was writing an important poem in Igbo, while Cheikh Hamidou Kane said that the book he is now writing would be very different from his Ambiguous Adventure because he intends to introduce a lot of words and expressions from his mother tongue – [Pular].15
To this list, we could add the fact that the Malian Amadou Hampaté Bâ writes in Fulfulde and Peulh (Pular) and then translates his text himself; Alexis Kagame writes in Kynyarwanda and translates himself into French; Jean–Joseph Rabearivelo writes in Malagasy and is translated from the Malagasy; Charles Mungoshi from Zimbabwe writes in Shona and in English; Catherine Acholonou writes in both Igbo and English; Mazisi Kunene writes in Zulu and translates himself into English; Anicet Kizamura from Tanzania writes in Kikerebe and is translated into KiSwahili. Although this is contested, the Kenyan James Mbotela wrote the first Swahili novel, Uhuru wa Watumwa, in 1934, a year after the first novel in Igbo, Omenuko by Pita Nwana English translation better than the KiSwahili original. The best-known Tanzanian writer, Mohamed Said Khamis, said in 2004 that Swahili prose narratives, as distinct from utensil or narrative poetry, wasifu or biography, kumbukumbu or memoir, and safari or travel account, had a bright future, as did its translations.16 In some cases, the novelist has come to the conclusion that the European language cannot convey African culture and social stratification. He then finds an outlet that takes the form of another genre. For instance, pidgin is being increasingly used in such forms of verbal expression as poetry and drama, including radio plays. Also, the impracticality of cushioning and contextualizing the African word in the novel has led some novelists to consider film as the ideal medium.
Already Baako, the Ghanaian ‘been-to’ of Ayi Kei Armah’s Fragments, had thought of giving up writing because “film gets to everyone […] doing film scripts for an illiterate audience would be superior to writing […] it would be a matter of ‘images’, not ‘foreign words’.”17 On the other hand, Wole Soyinka, as head of the National Road Safety Board, is reported to have said in the early 1990s that he first conceived The Road as a film and that he was thinking of making it into a film.18 This has been put into practice in Ousmane Sembène’s cinema.
Sembène’s itinerary from his early novels to cinema reflects the progression implicitly outlined here, from europhone writing through relexification to new forms of African-language writing or other genre. Sembène’s first novels, Docker noir (1956) and Ô pays, mon beau peuple (1957), have recognizably French titles with the contemporaneous colour tag “noir,” as in Léopold Sedar Senghor’s “Femme noire,” Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir, and Sembène ‘s own early short subject, “La Noire de….” The title Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, on the other hand, is relexified from Wolof: “banti-am-yalla,”19 whereas his Véhi-Ciosane (1964) is cushioned with the French tag “Blanche Génèse.” Véhi-Ciosane was made into his second short subject in French, Niaye, but it has a Wolof title, which, Sembène insists, “est au singulier en Volof. Les colonialistes l’écrivaient au pluriel.”20 Following this trajectory, Le Mandat (1968) has become the featurelength film Mandabi, a word that Sembène had to coin by using the definite article bi, as in Wolof suffixation: Faut-il forger un nouveau mot? Je crois qu’il faut prendre le mot français que tout le monde connaît et l’intégrer au Wolof.21 After this intermediary phase, the titling was done exclusively in Wolof. Thus Xala (1971) stands on its own in Wolof (it means ‘the curse resulting in sexual impotence’) without the French tag, and the movie is a bilingual version in French and in Wolof, which appropriately precedes Ceddo, a novel conceived entirely in Wolof, as was the subsequent movie adaptation. Both the novel and the movie were banned in Senegal. The pretext the Government advanced for its suppression was that Ceddo should be spelled with a single ‘d’, as opposed to the gemination of the ‘d’ prescribed by Kaddu, the Wolof-language journal founded by Usmann Sembeen and the linguist Paate Jaañ (cf. Chapter 3E). Incidentally, the bilingual version of Xala calls to mind Malian Bartholomé Koné’s novel, which was meant to be “a bilingual novel in French and Bambara.”22 Yet such films as Sembène’s, including his most recent films Faat Kiné and Moolaadé (2003) (‘sanctuary’ in Pular), remain silent for non-Wolof (or non-Pular) speakers but still very African audiences. That silence may be overcome through the ironic form of French and English subtitles, which would complete the process of othering by relegating the European language to a subtitle, the way the African language was relegated to a footnote or ‘subtext’ in the europhone novel.
This progression from French titling through relexified and cushioned titles to Wolof (and even Pular) titling reveals that relexification and cushioning are strategically poised half-way between French and Wolof titling. These titles function as ‘a request to the floor’ that we can also observe in the turn-taking procedure in other speech-acts such as storytelling or conversations.23 With the possible exception of Ayi Kwei Armah, who often exhibits a francophone intellectual allegiance, titling in the novel and film of French expression is a more forceful ‘request to the floor’ than its anglophone counterpart. The
glottopolitics of repression in francophone Africa, which in the sociolinguistic area, allowed only for the partial pidginization of French, resulted in the spasmodic occurrence of African words in the cushioned text and in movie titles. It also forced the francophone novelist, whose progress in language experimentation has trailed that of anglophones, to seek other outlets for expression beyond the novel.
7 See Virginia Coulon, “Onitsha Goes National: Nigerian Writing in Macmillan’s Pacesetter Series,“ and Virginia Coulon, Bernard Mouralis & Alain Ricard, “Foreword,“ Research in African Literatures 18.3 (Fall 1987): 304–19, 270.
8 Christian Mair, “Linguistics, Literature, and the Postcolonial Englishes: An Introduction“ (2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, xiv.
9 I have expanded on this point in my article “Othering the Foreign Language in the West African Europhone Novel,“ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 17.3–4 (September–December 1990): 348–66.
10 See the AUPELF report (Comité Régional des Études françaises et du dialogue de cultures en Afrique Noire francophone): 6. My translation.
11 A. Babs Fafunwa, “A National Language,” West Africa (9 March 1987): 466–68.
12 Tony Mochama, “Modernity Dilemma in Kenyan Literature,“ Sunday Standard (Nairobi; 2 November 2003).
13 Kembo–Sure, “The Democratization of Language Policy: A Cultural-Linguistic Analysis of the Status of English in Kenya“ (2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, 258. Sheng is also called “Matatu Sheng.“ See Raoul J. Granqvist, The Bulldozer and the Word: Culture at Work in Postcolonial Nairobi (London: Peter Lang, 2004).
14 Safar T.A. Mafu, “Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania: What Are the Difficulties and What is the Way Out?“ (2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, 276.
15 Phanuel Egejuru, Towards African Literary Independence, 7.
16 Mohamed Said Khamis, “The Swahili Novel“ (LLACAN Seminar, CNRS, Paris: France, 16 January 2004).
17 Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments, 114–15.
18 I owe this remark to James Gibbs (personal communication, Liège, Belgium, September 1990). Note that Blues for the Prodigal (1982–83) was made under cover during the last years of the Shagari regime and that, as a result of subsequent realignment, it became an inferior B film. Soyinka also played the role of Kongi in Kongi’s Harvest but disliked the production.
19 Alioune Tine, “Wolof ou français: le choix de Sembène,” Notre Librairie 81 (October–December 1985): 46.
20 Ousmane Sembène, Le Mandat précédé de Véhi-Ciosane (Paris: Présence africaine, 1966): 19.
21 Quoted by Alioune Tine, “Wolof ou français,” 46.
22 See Bernard Mouralis, Littéraure et Développement, 132.
23 Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country,” 114.
As indicated in Chapter 2, a thorough analysis in applied linguistics would reveal fundamental discrepancies between the synchronic and the diachronic practices. If one posits that the literary language is inevitably transformed by its social objective, it can be argued that the indigenized novel, despite its subversiveness, remains a hermetic artifact ‘created’ by hegemonic producers of literature. As such, it provides a valid solution to an immediate artistic problem but ‘fixes’ the otherness of the African language and therefore fails to link up language with the sociopolitical structure. Once indigenization is achieved, the europhone novel fails to engage itself as a tool of social change as, for instance, Onitsha Market literature qua national literature did and still does, to some extent.7 Yet, when consulting the MLA Bibliography on CD-ROM in 2002, Christian Mair only found 31 hits for “Onitsha” and, what is more, “many were not about Nigerian writing at all, but about J.–M. G. LeClézio’s Onitsha, or represented an ethnographic rather than a literary-critical perspective.”8 To make matters worse, Obiechina’s anthology of Onitsha Market literature (1972) has long been out of print.
The ambivalence characterizing indigenization and, by the same token, that awkward yet fertile interface, is gradually being subsumed under a healthy coexistence of the ‘othered’ European language and the African tongue outside of the indigenized novel. This process was already at work in the very corpus of methods of indigenization, where relexification points to a stasis while the twin methods of cushioning and contextualization – our two ways of shadowing – point towards further ‘othering’ of the European language.9
This progression towards ‘othering’ the foreign language is reflected in post-independence glottopolitics, which have aimed at reducing the two main colonial and postcolonial functions of English and French as media of instruction and official languages. The premise is that the once demoted and repressed African languages can be rescued from colonial domination and glottophagia and that their rehabilitation will lead to the psychic liberation of the African peoples.
This artful synchronization of europhone and African language writing is reflected in the glottopolitics promoted in West African nation-states. For instance, Senegal’s new politique linguistique argues for a “balanced bilingualism and demotion of the status of the European language to that of ’foreign tongue’.”10 On the other hand, Nigeria’s new policy will make the English language “an ‘associate’ official language [which] will be studied as a second language from primary to secondary level,” as is the case in present-day India. To A. Babs Fagunwa in the late 1980s, this signified the promotion of the main national languages as media of instruction and of Hausa as a lingua franca,11 when in fact Nigerian Pidgin is a more likely candidate.
On the East African front, the Kenyan ‘Ngugists’ (and I, erroneously I believe, was labelled Ngugi’s “unofficial proxy” by Nairobi’s Sunday Standard in 200312) have campaigned in favour of KiSwahli for the roles formerly played by English, whereas the ‘Anglicists’ uphold the language of a tiny elitist majority and an all-English language policy.
The way out of this infernal binarism is, as Kembo–Sure has suggested, a third alternative: “plurilingualism.” This plurilingualism should also include Sheng, “a symbolic system outside KiSwahili and English,”13 spoken by young people but spreading to homes and offices, the way Nigerian Pidgin spread throughout the coastal cities of Nigeria. Safari T.A. Mafu draws the same conclusion regarding Tanzania. In 1964, when the United Republic of Tanzania was created out of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, KiSwahili was established as the official language and the ideal medium to transmit the message of nation-building, whereas Arabic and English were banned. However, English has continued to be the medium of secondary and higher education, and the Tanzanian situation is now that of triglossia.14 From these recent language policies, we can conclude that the European language is gradually being relegated to a peripheral role.
The glottopolitical ‘othering’ of the European language is paralleled in the new options that West African writers are envisioning within and beyond europhone writing. In the late 1970s, Egejuru’s interviews of African writers in her Towards African Literary Independence (1980) confirmed that writers were increasingly writing in their mother tongue or, at least, are doing so concurrently with europhone writing. Indeed, she remarks that African writers are now writing in their mother tongue or at least introducing their own local expressions into their works without footnotes. For instance, Sydney Onyeberichi of Nigeria has […] published [in 1980)]a collection of poems in which Igbo words and expressions are freely used without translation.
Robert Mukuni of Zambia writes in Shona. Chinua Achebe indicated that he was writing an important poem in Igbo, while Cheikh Hamidou Kane said that the book he is now writing would be very different from his Ambiguous Adventure because he intends to introduce a lot of words and expressions from his mother tongue – [Pular].15
To this list, we could add the fact that the Malian Amadou Hampaté Bâ writes in Fulfulde and Peulh (Pular) and then translates his text himself; Alexis Kagame writes in Kynyarwanda and translates himself into French; Jean–Joseph Rabearivelo writes in Malagasy and is translated from the Malagasy; Charles Mungoshi from Zimbabwe writes in Shona and in English; Catherine Acholonou writes in both Igbo and English; Mazisi Kunene writes in Zulu and translates himself into English; Anicet Kizamura from Tanzania writes in Kikerebe and is translated into KiSwahili. Although this is contested, the Kenyan James Mbotela wrote the first Swahili novel, Uhuru wa Watumwa, in 1934, a year after the first novel in Igbo, Omenuko by Pita Nwana English translation better than the KiSwahili original. The best-known Tanzanian writer, Mohamed Said Khamis, said in 2004 that Swahili prose narratives, as distinct from utensil or narrative poetry, wasifu or biography, kumbukumbu or memoir, and safari or travel account, had a bright future, as did its translations.16 In some cases, the novelist has come to the conclusion that the European language cannot convey African culture and social stratification. He then finds an outlet that takes the form of another genre. For instance, pidgin is being increasingly used in such forms of verbal expression as poetry and drama, including radio plays. Also, the impracticality of cushioning and contextualizing the African word in the novel has led some novelists to consider film as the ideal medium.
Already Baako, the Ghanaian ‘been-to’ of Ayi Kei Armah’s Fragments, had thought of giving up writing because “film gets to everyone […] doing film scripts for an illiterate audience would be superior to writing […] it would be a matter of ‘images’, not ‘foreign words’.”17 On the other hand, Wole Soyinka, as head of the National Road Safety Board, is reported to have said in the early 1990s that he first conceived The Road as a film and that he was thinking of making it into a film.18 This has been put into practice in Ousmane Sembène’s cinema.
Sembène’s itinerary from his early novels to cinema reflects the progression implicitly outlined here, from europhone writing through relexification to new forms of African-language writing or other genre. Sembène’s first novels, Docker noir (1956) and Ô pays, mon beau peuple (1957), have recognizably French titles with the contemporaneous colour tag “noir,” as in Léopold Sedar Senghor’s “Femme noire,” Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir, and Sembène ‘s own early short subject, “La Noire de….” The title Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, on the other hand, is relexified from Wolof: “banti-am-yalla,”19 whereas his Véhi-Ciosane (1964) is cushioned with the French tag “Blanche Génèse.” Véhi-Ciosane was made into his second short subject in French, Niaye, but it has a Wolof title, which, Sembène insists, “est au singulier en Volof. Les colonialistes l’écrivaient au pluriel.”20 Following this trajectory, Le Mandat (1968) has become the featurelength film Mandabi, a word that Sembène had to coin by using the definite article bi, as in Wolof suffixation: Faut-il forger un nouveau mot? Je crois qu’il faut prendre le mot français que tout le monde connaît et l’intégrer au Wolof.21 After this intermediary phase, the titling was done exclusively in Wolof. Thus Xala (1971) stands on its own in Wolof (it means ‘the curse resulting in sexual impotence’) without the French tag, and the movie is a bilingual version in French and in Wolof, which appropriately precedes Ceddo, a novel conceived entirely in Wolof, as was the subsequent movie adaptation. Both the novel and the movie were banned in Senegal. The pretext the Government advanced for its suppression was that Ceddo should be spelled with a single ‘d’, as opposed to the gemination of the ‘d’ prescribed by Kaddu, the Wolof-language journal founded by Usmann Sembeen and the linguist Paate Jaañ (cf. Chapter 3E). Incidentally, the bilingual version of Xala calls to mind Malian Bartholomé Koné’s novel, which was meant to be “a bilingual novel in French and Bambara.”22 Yet such films as Sembène’s, including his most recent films Faat Kiné and Moolaadé (2003) (‘sanctuary’ in Pular), remain silent for non-Wolof (or non-Pular) speakers but still very African audiences. That silence may be overcome through the ironic form of French and English subtitles, which would complete the process of othering by relegating the European language to a subtitle, the way the African language was relegated to a footnote or ‘subtext’ in the europhone novel.
This progression from French titling through relexified and cushioned titles to Wolof (and even Pular) titling reveals that relexification and cushioning are strategically poised half-way between French and Wolof titling. These titles function as ‘a request to the floor’ that we can also observe in the turn-taking procedure in other speech-acts such as storytelling or conversations.23 With the possible exception of Ayi Kwei Armah, who often exhibits a francophone intellectual allegiance, titling in the novel and film of French expression is a more forceful ‘request to the floor’ than its anglophone counterpart. The
glottopolitics of repression in francophone Africa, which in the sociolinguistic area, allowed only for the partial pidginization of French, resulted in the spasmodic occurrence of African words in the cushioned text and in movie titles. It also forced the francophone novelist, whose progress in language experimentation has trailed that of anglophones, to seek other outlets for expression beyond the novel.
7 See Virginia Coulon, “Onitsha Goes National: Nigerian Writing in Macmillan’s Pacesetter Series,“ and Virginia Coulon, Bernard Mouralis & Alain Ricard, “Foreword,“ Research in African Literatures 18.3 (Fall 1987): 304–19, 270.
8 Christian Mair, “Linguistics, Literature, and the Postcolonial Englishes: An Introduction“ (2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, xiv.
9 I have expanded on this point in my article “Othering the Foreign Language in the West African Europhone Novel,“ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 17.3–4 (September–December 1990): 348–66.
10 See the AUPELF report (Comité Régional des Études françaises et du dialogue de cultures en Afrique Noire francophone): 6. My translation.
11 A. Babs Fafunwa, “A National Language,” West Africa (9 March 1987): 466–68.
12 Tony Mochama, “Modernity Dilemma in Kenyan Literature,“ Sunday Standard (Nairobi; 2 November 2003).
13 Kembo–Sure, “The Democratization of Language Policy: A Cultural-Linguistic Analysis of the Status of English in Kenya“ (2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, 258. Sheng is also called “Matatu Sheng.“ See Raoul J. Granqvist, The Bulldozer and the Word: Culture at Work in Postcolonial Nairobi (London: Peter Lang, 2004).
14 Safar T.A. Mafu, “Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania: What Are the Difficulties and What is the Way Out?“ (2003), in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Mair, 276.
15 Phanuel Egejuru, Towards African Literary Independence, 7.
16 Mohamed Said Khamis, “The Swahili Novel“ (LLACAN Seminar, CNRS, Paris: France, 16 January 2004).
17 Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments, 114–15.
18 I owe this remark to James Gibbs (personal communication, Liège, Belgium, September 1990). Note that Blues for the Prodigal (1982–83) was made under cover during the last years of the Shagari regime and that, as a result of subsequent realignment, it became an inferior B film. Soyinka also played the role of Kongi in Kongi’s Harvest but disliked the production.
19 Alioune Tine, “Wolof ou français: le choix de Sembène,” Notre Librairie 81 (October–December 1985): 46.
20 Ousmane Sembène, Le Mandat précédé de Véhi-Ciosane (Paris: Présence africaine, 1966): 19.
21 Quoted by Alioune Tine, “Wolof ou français,” 46.
22 See Bernard Mouralis, Littéraure et Développement, 132.
23 Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country,” 114.
Hush- Number of posts : 529
Age : 39
Location : Dreaming land
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Re: Towards Othering the Foreign Language
by Hush Thu Jul 30, 2009 6:30 pm
In the light of Sembène’s cinematographic pilgrimage, his later novel (if we except his short stories, Niiwam), Le Dernier de l’empire, written and titled in French, stands as the
last bastion of linguistic imperialism in his fictional work. With its air of finality, it recalls Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s farewell to English in Decolonizing the Mind, and appropriately so, since both books in their own way are manifestoes advocating the promotion of indigenous
languages in all spheres.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s own itinerary is charted along a similar course, from romantic individualism to a truly epic form, and confirms the progression from europhone writing to a new African-language writing. Although Ngugi occluded the phase of relexification, he had previously used unglossed words in KiSwahili and Kikuyu in his Petals of Blood (1977), for which he had been chastised by the American novelist John Updike. In a review, Updike had argued that this device hampered the anglophone reader’s reading process.24
Ignoring this opinion, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s outlet for expression became writing in KiSwahili and in Kikuyu, where there was little tradition of narrative, let alone critical, writing. In a 2000 article, Ngugi raised the issue of the native tongue of the critic: is such a critic’s tongue Kikuyu, Lingala, Pular, Wolof? Admittedly, this ‘europhonism’ needs to be addressed.25 Writing in Kikuyu does not preclude the filmic medium, since Ngugi believes that the non-atavistic return to orature and to the masses as a source of inspiration and stamina is feasible through radio, video, and film. These media are indeed busy tap(p)ing orality out of the past and broadcasting it into the future.
The ultimate ‘othering’ takes place in auto-translation and in translation. Although Ngugi wa Thiong’o is not the first African writer to practise it, he is he first African writer to dramatize it as a stage beyond europhone writing. It is in this way that his odyssey is relevant to the West African othering discourse. He reverses the missionary enterprise by translating his own novels from Kikuyu into English. As already observed, he translated his Kikuyu novel Caitaani-Mũtharaba- Inĩ (1980) into Devil on the Cross (1982) and the play Ngaahika Ndeend (written with Ngugi wa Mirii) into I Will Marry When I Want. He thereby
set himself up as a translator of his own original, revising the dichotomy between mother tongue and other tongue in the practice of auto-translation. Let us note, however, that a later play like Matigari (1987), which was seized in Kenya, was translated from the Kikuyu by his compatriot Wangui wa Goro in 1989. The translation is into English, a now ‘othered’ exolect.
Unlike the relexifier and the translator of the Other’s work, the auto-translator ceases to be an ‘eternal guest’ in his own work, and feels at home in the mother tongue. He also encourages his people’s participation in an African-language literature and sets the stage for both the simultaneous development of African writers and their proper audience,
and for his own development, after Rilke, Beckett and Julien Green, as author qua translator qua author. In this secure, unequivocal position, the auto-translator thus completes the othering process by redefining the dialectic of mother tongue vs. other tongue, bridging the gap between culture and language, and possibly the literary diglossia
between the early ethno-literary and folkloric modes of African orature and European-language writing.
Auto-translation does not preclude translation in its interpretative aspect, since Ngugi wa
Thiong’o himself hoped that “through the age-old medium of translation [he will] be able to continue dialogue with all.”26 This is exactly what he is currently doing at the international Centre for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine. His already
mentioned concept of “translation-as-conversation” rests on the principle that previously marginalized languages such as Gujarati, Yoruba, and Zulu should ‘talk’: “translation can be seen as a language through which other languages can – and should – talk.” He further
conceptualizes translation as a step beyond ‘mental translation’: i.e. relexification, for “what happens in that process is that there is an original text which should have been there but which is lost.” Con-versely, “when you have a true translation, you do actually have two texts.” 27
Auto-translation and, by extension, translation move beyond the mere recovery of the trace (cf. Chapters 4 and 5 above) to recover the original itself. Instead of a relexified
palimpsest, two separate texts emerge: the African text and the europhone ‘translation’, which will host the trace of a visible original. Note that translation is here understood in its most orthodox sense as the linguistic operation that consists in transporting meaning
from one language to another. This differs from the unorthodox sense that Heidegger (Übersetzung), Benjamin, Derrida, Blanchot, and Khatibi gave to the word:
an operation which allows for the presence within one linguistic system of several tongues, an operation of thought through which we must translate ourselves into the thought of
the other language, the forgotten thinking of the other language.28 The hybridized African-language text and its translation comment on and refract each other, in that the African language is the One and the European language the Other.
At the outset of the twenty-first century, the African palimpsest is now ready to harbour the ‘othered’ European language, the revived African languages, and the new Atlantic
creoles. As the major icon of cross-cultural syncreticity and linguistic métissage, the new Africanlanguage palimpsest has indeed become the ideal site for translation into English, French, and other foreign languages.
24 John Updike, “Petals of Blood by Ngugi,“ in Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983): 697–701.
25 See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Europhonism, Universities and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship,“ Research in Afrcan Literatures 1.1 (2000): 1–12.
26 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, xvi.
27 Harish Trivedi, “Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Conversation,“ 7.
28 On the polylingualism of every language, see Peggy Kamuf, tr. The Ear of the Other (Texts and Discussion with Jacques Derrida) (New York: Schocken, 1985): 93–161. On translation between a bilingual writer’s two L1s, see Julien Green, Le Langage et son double: The Language and Its Shadow (Paris: Editions de la différence, 1985). See also Louis Wolfson, Le Schizo et les langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
last bastion of linguistic imperialism in his fictional work. With its air of finality, it recalls Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s farewell to English in Decolonizing the Mind, and appropriately so, since both books in their own way are manifestoes advocating the promotion of indigenous
languages in all spheres.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s own itinerary is charted along a similar course, from romantic individualism to a truly epic form, and confirms the progression from europhone writing to a new African-language writing. Although Ngugi occluded the phase of relexification, he had previously used unglossed words in KiSwahili and Kikuyu in his Petals of Blood (1977), for which he had been chastised by the American novelist John Updike. In a review, Updike had argued that this device hampered the anglophone reader’s reading process.24
Ignoring this opinion, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s outlet for expression became writing in KiSwahili and in Kikuyu, where there was little tradition of narrative, let alone critical, writing. In a 2000 article, Ngugi raised the issue of the native tongue of the critic: is such a critic’s tongue Kikuyu, Lingala, Pular, Wolof? Admittedly, this ‘europhonism’ needs to be addressed.25 Writing in Kikuyu does not preclude the filmic medium, since Ngugi believes that the non-atavistic return to orature and to the masses as a source of inspiration and stamina is feasible through radio, video, and film. These media are indeed busy tap(p)ing orality out of the past and broadcasting it into the future.
The ultimate ‘othering’ takes place in auto-translation and in translation. Although Ngugi wa Thiong’o is not the first African writer to practise it, he is he first African writer to dramatize it as a stage beyond europhone writing. It is in this way that his odyssey is relevant to the West African othering discourse. He reverses the missionary enterprise by translating his own novels from Kikuyu into English. As already observed, he translated his Kikuyu novel Caitaani-Mũtharaba- Inĩ (1980) into Devil on the Cross (1982) and the play Ngaahika Ndeend (written with Ngugi wa Mirii) into I Will Marry When I Want. He thereby
set himself up as a translator of his own original, revising the dichotomy between mother tongue and other tongue in the practice of auto-translation. Let us note, however, that a later play like Matigari (1987), which was seized in Kenya, was translated from the Kikuyu by his compatriot Wangui wa Goro in 1989. The translation is into English, a now ‘othered’ exolect.
Unlike the relexifier and the translator of the Other’s work, the auto-translator ceases to be an ‘eternal guest’ in his own work, and feels at home in the mother tongue. He also encourages his people’s participation in an African-language literature and sets the stage for both the simultaneous development of African writers and their proper audience,
and for his own development, after Rilke, Beckett and Julien Green, as author qua translator qua author. In this secure, unequivocal position, the auto-translator thus completes the othering process by redefining the dialectic of mother tongue vs. other tongue, bridging the gap between culture and language, and possibly the literary diglossia
between the early ethno-literary and folkloric modes of African orature and European-language writing.
Auto-translation does not preclude translation in its interpretative aspect, since Ngugi wa
Thiong’o himself hoped that “through the age-old medium of translation [he will] be able to continue dialogue with all.”26 This is exactly what he is currently doing at the international Centre for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine. His already
mentioned concept of “translation-as-conversation” rests on the principle that previously marginalized languages such as Gujarati, Yoruba, and Zulu should ‘talk’: “translation can be seen as a language through which other languages can – and should – talk.” He further
conceptualizes translation as a step beyond ‘mental translation’: i.e. relexification, for “what happens in that process is that there is an original text which should have been there but which is lost.” Con-versely, “when you have a true translation, you do actually have two texts.” 27
Auto-translation and, by extension, translation move beyond the mere recovery of the trace (cf. Chapters 4 and 5 above) to recover the original itself. Instead of a relexified
palimpsest, two separate texts emerge: the African text and the europhone ‘translation’, which will host the trace of a visible original. Note that translation is here understood in its most orthodox sense as the linguistic operation that consists in transporting meaning
from one language to another. This differs from the unorthodox sense that Heidegger (Übersetzung), Benjamin, Derrida, Blanchot, and Khatibi gave to the word:
an operation which allows for the presence within one linguistic system of several tongues, an operation of thought through which we must translate ourselves into the thought of
the other language, the forgotten thinking of the other language.28 The hybridized African-language text and its translation comment on and refract each other, in that the African language is the One and the European language the Other.
At the outset of the twenty-first century, the African palimpsest is now ready to harbour the ‘othered’ European language, the revived African languages, and the new Atlantic
creoles. As the major icon of cross-cultural syncreticity and linguistic métissage, the new Africanlanguage palimpsest has indeed become the ideal site for translation into English, French, and other foreign languages.
24 John Updike, “Petals of Blood by Ngugi,“ in Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983): 697–701.
25 See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Europhonism, Universities and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship,“ Research in Afrcan Literatures 1.1 (2000): 1–12.
26 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, xvi.
27 Harish Trivedi, “Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Conversation,“ 7.
28 On the polylingualism of every language, see Peggy Kamuf, tr. The Ear of the Other (Texts and Discussion with Jacques Derrida) (New York: Schocken, 1985): 93–161. On translation between a bilingual writer’s two L1s, see Julien Green, Le Langage et son double: The Language and Its Shadow (Paris: Editions de la différence, 1985). See also Louis Wolfson, Le Schizo et les langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
Hush- Number of posts : 529
Age : 39
Location : Dreaming land
Registration date : 2008-09-17
Re: Towards Othering the Foreign Language
by Ezinma Thu Jul 30, 2009 10:18 pm
Thanks a million, I'm really grateful .
Ezinma- Number of posts : 491
Registration date : 2009-02-25
Re: Towards Othering the Foreign Language
by Hush Fri Jul 31, 2009 4:01 pm
You're welcome I hope it's useful.
Hush- Number of posts : 529
Age : 39
Location : Dreaming land
Registration date : 2008-09-17
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