Voice Against Language: A Critical Reading of Decolonising the Mind

Voice Against Language: A Critical Reading of  Decolonising the Mind         Antony George K

Ngugi wa Thiongo’s name is so beloved in India for his unconditional support to the revolutionary politics and his position as a writer of social commitment. His career as a writer and academic is the history of a long journey from the war torn Kenya to the academic world of the U.S. His work Decolonising the Mind (1981) is the result of a debate about the contentious issue of language and its political implications. Ngugi made a lasting critique of Chinua Achebe’s position of writing in English to reach a wider audience, which was endorsed by many writers from the entire postcolonial world. Achebe made the observation of a beneficial appropriation of English in the postcolonial world way back in 1965 in a speech titled “The African Writer and the English Language”. He states: “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 its new African surroundings”(in Spillman 12). Ngugi took language, not as a mere tool of communication or representation but as a weapon of colonization. He compared the language of the colonizer to bullet and interpreted the hegemony of colonial languages as a nuanced form of subjugation. Famously, he stopped writing in English for his own language Gikuyu in 1981 with the publication of the book. But he had to come back to English, despite his plea for the abolition of the English department in African universities. As Bill Ashcroft says: “The claim that cultural experience is inherent in language would be a similar order of assertion as saying that the mental experience of people who used that language were the same; that signifieds and signifiers were naturally linked” (Caliban’s 5). The view of Ashcroft that the postcolonial writer can write in the colonizer’s language retaining the voice of the colonised is more important after 40 years of Ngugi’s observations. The possibility of Caliban speaking in Prospero’s language but with his own voice reminds me of Ambedkar’s position regarding English and colonial modernity. Seeing colonial modernity as an “enabling wound” is the strategic position taken by Dalit intellectuals like Kancha Illia.

            Although the African writers of 1970s who engaged in the language debate did not speak in terms of poststructuralism the key issue of language and representation was there at the centre of their debate. Achebe’s own reply to Ngugi in Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature (1989) negated the possible return to the native tongue and denied the Manichean division of languages into the colonizer’s and the colonized’s. Echoing Fanon’s rejection of a world view based on stark and everlasting dichotomies Achebe writes: “It would seem then that the culprit for Africa’s language difficulties was not imperialism, as Ngugi would have us believe, but the linguistic plurality of modern African state”(in Ashcroft et al 271). The exoticization of Africa’s past by Ngugi is obviously an orientalist action of creating attraction and repulsion at the cost of a glorious past and inglorious present. Similarly the problematic of nation as a troubling and inevitable legacy of colonialism is a serious issue that was not touched by Ngugi.

            After two decades of Ngugi’s plea for the nativization of literary expressions, Mia Couto from Mozambique unambiguously voiced the emancipatory dimension of a polyglossia that enriches the writer and culture. He puts it as: “What I am advocating is a plural man, equipped with a plural language. Alongside a language that makes us part of the world, there should be another that makes us leave it. On the one hand, a language that creates roots and a sense of place. On the other, a language that is a wing upon which to travel” (in Spillman 241).  It is no wonder that Ngugi made a somewhat self-critical turn in his 1996 speech at Delhi University that he firmly stated he would not advocate for the abolition of English in the changed reality of crossing“borders"  and building "bridges” that signifies the new cosmopolitanism in the world. Instead of an ambivalence seen by people like Homi Bhabha a multivalence is being shaped to confront the colonial legacy of language and culture. Apollo Obonyo Amoko’s criticism of Ngugi’s nationalist literacy and the problems hidden in the post-colonial consciousness regarding the academic reception of literature as an expression of school culture necessarily points out the intractable dilemma of post-colonial writers. Yet the reading of Ngugi is essential to understand the lingering oppressive logic of representation in the cultural discourses of the day without the conceptual infrastructure of colonial social sciences.

Bibliography

Anthologies

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader- Ed.Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin.

            London: Routledge.2009.

Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing- Ed. Rob       Spillman. New York: Penguin.2009.

Books

Amoko, Apollo Obonyo. Post-Colonialism in the Wake of the Nairobi Revolution: Ngugi wa           Thiongo and the Idea of African Literature.

Ashcroft, Bill. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures.London and New York: Routledge.2009.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back:Theory and Practice      in Post-Colonial Literatures.London: Routledge.2002.

MacLeod, John. The Routledge Companion to Post-Colonial Studies. London:                                 Routledge.2008.

Articles

“Ngũgĩ's Conversion: Writing and the Politics of Language”. Simon Gikandi Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 23, No. 1, The Language Question (Spring, 1992), pp. 131-144: Indiana University Press. http://www.jstor.org/ 06-11-2015.

“What Makes a Native Speaker?: Nativeness, Ownership and Global Englishes”. Emily Brown      Coolidge Tooker. Minnesota Review, Number 78, 2012 (New Series), pp. 113-129.     http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mnr.