Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Language in
African Literature
(Republished)
Update: The following is a post I made in 2009. Since its publication, there have been many changes in the world, but one striking one is the demise of Borders Books. The bookstore at which I was browsing the Paris Review has since been closed. It was my favourite location of the then large chain. This is a topic for another day, so for now, enjoy the (re)-post on language in African Literature.
Yesterday (1 January 2009) I stood in a Borders bookstore for thirty minutes, reading an interview the Paris Review did with Chinua Achebe in 1994. It's a brilliant interview, dealing with the usual arguments we have come to expect from Achebe: what prompted him to write, racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the birth and importance of the Africa Writers' Series, the issues of writers and audience, advice to budding writers, and how creative writing should not be taught, etc. It was a good Achebe refresher, which one needs once in a while, but I realized that Achebe's works had not been translated into his native language. When asked if he would consider doing so, he answered (then) that what was labelled his native language would not be able to carry the experience of his fiction because its standard version was not a representation of the full potential of the language. His argument was that the standardized version of the language was put together for his people by an Anglican missionary, who helped impose one dialect to be the standard of all the others.This got me thinking again about the state of what we call standard written Shona (or Ndebele for that matter) as inventions done by missionaries who were not native speakers of the language. I studied Shona to the university level, and I was nervous, starting at A - Level, about how we had to use English to analyze Shona literature. Then all the Shona grammar I learned was explained in English. So if you were good in English, learning Shona literature and grammar became easier. I remember one essay I wrote in Form 6 in which I was analyzing a Shona poem. The teacher used it as an model to the whole class, but I remember one student commenting that the analysis wasn't that great but the English analytical terms were "well-executed". I appreciated his critique then, and we had a talk about how I could perhaps try to do the same analysis in Shona (There was an option of using Shona too, but the teacher preferred English), but he said that wasn't necessary.
Then when I went to the University of Zimbabwe I took Shona, together with English and Linguistics. Initially, I had been offered the option to study Romance Languages with Eng/Linguistics/Afrikaans, but I was allowed to substitute the Romance Languages with Shona, which had well-known professors like Solomon Mutswairo, Emmanuel Chiwome and others I wanted to work with. It was easy dumping Afrikaans then. The Shona curriculum was great, but the use of English intensified. One professor, I think it was Mberi, amazed us with his command of Shona as he explained Shona grammar concepts, but most of us appreciated the ability to continue using English. Of course, I decided not to major in Shona and focused on English and Linquistics, but the two years I studied Shona left me with mixed feelings about this approach of using English to do literary and grammatical analyses. I was happier analyzing the language through Linquistics, where we were also looking at phonological, syntactical, lexical, and semantic patterns of different languages, including Esperanto, the made-up language of linguists.
So now, looking back, I often wonder if one day the Shona scholars may come up with a new alphabet for Shona, or if that's too much to ask, at least an approach to the study of the language that utilizes its different dialects, perhaps designing a better standardized version of the language.
As a teacher of English in the United States, I have developed an appreciation of the value of my own language, and I have continued to write poetry and fiction in Shona. I have noticed that my Shona has moved away from the fake standard imposed in secondary school; it is now predominantly Karanga (I grew up in Zvishavane), with traces of Manyika (my brother married a Munyika woman), some words of Ndau (I lived in Chimanimani for four months), sizable phrases of Zezuru (all those years in Harare), and five words of Korekore(three of my friends are from Mount Darwin and I once dated a girl from Madziwa). I don't know how publishers would react to my cocktail of Shona phraseology, but the works make me happy.
On Christmas day, 2008, a Zimbabwean scientist who was visiting in Sacramento pointed out that one reason many African countries have lagged behind in developing scientifically and technologically is that they have not trusted their languages to handle scientific concepts. I enjoyed the discussion and we ended up looking at countries like Japan, China, and most European countries that have trusted their languages to express advances in technological advancement.
I applaud those who have already begun to write their blogs and emails in Shona or other African languages. Now, more needs to be done to make our languages more desirable in Africa and beyond. One day there can be a Things Fall Apart in Shona, and I have a title: Pakakoromoka Zvinhu. Imagine House of Hunger in Shona, or Bones, or An Elegy for Easterly, or Harare North, etc. It's time we think again about what we mean when we say we are arguing about language in African literature.
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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011
Importance of
African Languages
in African Literature
Once in a while, I check the search engines terms that are driving the most traffic to my blog, Wealth of Ideas, and the searches are often revealing of what kinds of information people are looking for at any time. Today, of the several interesting ones, "the importance of African languages in African literature" stood out. It's a topic I too am passionate about. I have written about it before in a post entitled "Language in African Literature", but even this doesn't begin to cover the most important facts about the issue. Perhaps one day I will write treatise on the topic of language in African literature, and mini posts like this are my way of mapping a project description. But now let's go to some serious stuff on African languages in African Literature.
Let me start by saying that I am annoyed by glossaries. Their intent seems to be to appeal to a foreign audience, or, most importantly, to any speakers for whom the glossaried language is foreign. I also hate parenthetical translations of things written in African languages. The in-line translations make for awkward reading and are a waste of ink or bytes. Maybe not exactly in these words, but as you read you get the feeling that the writer is doing too much, or is writing too much, or is making it too obvious, whatever it is. Here is what I want: If you are writing in French, English, Spanish, or any other language that's "non-African", and you feel the need to sprinkle the prose with African language phrases and words, go ahead and do so, in a way that does not confuse the reader. The story should still make sense despite the use of this drizzle of words. No need to translate, or glossarise. Suppose it's critical that readers know what that Shona word of phrase means, the writer could just creatively contextualize the unstranslatable concept. Write so well that the reader still understands your prose even though it contains unstranslated material. I am currently reading two books by African writers, 'One Day I will Write about this Place' and 'That which Has Horns'. In the first one, the author, Binyavanga Wainaina, problematizes the whole issue of the co-existence of English and indegeneous languages. You get the sense that English is now an African language, which it is now, but it has a higher status than other African languages, it is the most official and preferred of them all. What Binyavanga does then is to dramatize this linguistic conflict as characters judge each other by how well they can speak English and how their use of the most official language becomes an identitarian index, marking Wambui, for instance, as existing between the axis of several conflicting linguistic positions: her identity is revealed most when the strength of her Gikuyu impinges upon her ability to speak and process English, and she doesn't seem to care that people laugh at her when she inflects English words inappropriatlely. Then there are other uses of English which seem more desirable than others--the Kenyan use, often influenced by languages like Swahili, Gikuyu and others, then the use which imitates the Queen's English (the almost-royal-not-London-cockney use); then most interestingly, the American use, which draws most of the people of the narrator's generation, the use that gives access to Michael Jackson's lyrics, of one that seems to open doors to Hollywood (in terms of comprehending the Hollywood nuances, if that's what we can call them). Reviewers have praised Binyavanga's language craft, how he makes it musical, sometimes lyrical, but most importantly playful, the deconstructive effect, the deconstructive angel, how structure, in the Derridean sense, becomes play. Binyavanga becomes increasingly playful, as if he has the license to make fun of the medium of expression; and indeed, he has the license, and he uses it in a memoir, uses it well, I think, making up words as he goes. And he italicizes. Binyavanga italicizes the element of play in his writing. But elsewhere in much of African writing, italics have been used to apologize for including African words, phrases, and sentences in English text. That has been the norm for a long time, the etiquette of showing the untranslatable, or the gratuitous, and the indulgent. Here is what I mean: Translating certain African concepts into English can be daunting, if not outright impossible. So some well-meaning writers will italicize those untranslatable concepts and offer an explanation. Well-known African writers have done this--Achebe, Ngugi, Mungoshi, many others. The native speakers of the untranslatables will not have a problem understanding the concepts; in fact, most would appreciate their use as is, a sign, celebratory almost, that here is a concept English cannot convey. But most of such people, though, have not been a source of bread and butter for the publishers, and for the writers, so we have gone ahead and italicized and explained, giving the writing an expository quality, taking away the creative element, even if for a brief moment. Such maneuvers take us out of the story's dream. Some would argue that the purpose of writing is to communicate; and that's true, especially in non-fiction, or in business writing, where communication alone is the goal. Here we are talking about art, and even where we are talking about memoir, as in the case of 'One Day I Will Write about this Place', the creative element makes the reading trip worth taking. In 'That which Has Horns', Miriam Shumba gives her "contemporary romance" readers some extra perks in the form of sprinkles of Shona thoughout the book. Each chapter has a bilingual heading, for example, "Rudo-Love". Now, I liked that when I was reading, first because she convinced her publishers to let this happen, in a book published on US soil. This fits in very well with a lot of what should be happening in US publishing, something that should reflect the linguistic diversity of the country. Second, Shumba, who already is a teacher, was giving a language lesson to her readers. And these are just headings, no one is confused, no one is delayed. I know this because, as a reader, I should be able to represent what a lot of readers think, or, at least, to joke about it. Now as we get into the novel itself, we continue to see more Shona. As a Shona speaker, I am not bothered or distracted by the Shona; I am even already looking for more of it. But I get annoyed when I see italics, followed by translations. Perhaps this is the critic in me. Maybe other readers want these translations. And, if that's what they want, then they should get it. But I suspect, as I always have, that sometimes what we think readers want is based on some practice passed from generation to generation, passed by publishers who are concerned more with the sale than the promotion of the literature. To publishers, this obviously does make sense. If they were not in it for the sales, would we even call them, at least in the American model, publishers? The pressure then is on the writer. To remember that offering those in-text translations, glossaries, and italics of African languages when writing in English is not always the most effective way to craft our literature. I challenge writers to learn to capture all the untranslatables without attempting a single syllable of apology.