autobiographical persona, Stephen Dedalus, reflects on his conversation with an academic dean, an Englishman: 'The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. .. . I cannot speak or write these [English] words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.' Yet Yeats and Joyce, despite this vexed relation to the language, wrote some of the most innovative English-language poetry and fiction of the twentieth century. Indeed, their conflicted relation to the English language and its literary inheritance?that 'unrest of spirit' in its shadow?may paradoxically have impelled their massive literary achievements.
Transplanted in different parts of the world, English has sometimes seemed strange and estranging. When African and Caribbean schoolchildren with British colonial educations tried to write poems, as Kamau Brathwaite and other writers have attested, they would follow the conventions of English poetry, composing iambic pentameter verse about snowfall or daffodils, which they had never seen. English language and
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English literature thus risked alienating colonized peoples from their local environments and distinctive cultural histories.
The feeling that the English language is alienating, inextricably bound to colonialism, has led some nativist writers, such as the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, to reject it outright. If language is a 'collective memory bank,' then a people cannot recover its colonially suppressed identity and history without returning to an indigenous language. But the novelist Salman Rushdie, who often writes in an Indianized, or 'chutnified,' English, takes the opposite stance: 'The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago,' he asserts. English has become a local language even in parts of the world, such as India, where it was once imposed. Rushdie and other cosmopolitan writers reject the assumption that the English language has an inherent relationship to only one kind of national or ethnic experience. 'The English language is nobody's special property,' asserts the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott.
For the colonial orpostcolonial writer who embraces English, the question remains, Which English? The imported standard or a local vernacular? Or if both, should they be intermingled or kept apart? At one end of the spectrum are writers, such as V. S. Naipaul and Wole Soyinka, who think Standard English, perhaps slightly altered, can bespeak a postcolonial experience of race, identity, and history. At the other end are vernacular writers who feel the language of the center cannot do justice to their experience at the margins of empire. The poet Louise Bennett, for example, gives voice to everyday Jamaican experience in her witty and wily use of Jamaican Creole or Patois; she mocks its denigration as a 'corruption of the English language,' pointing out that Standard English is but an amalgam of dialects and foreign languages. 'It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master,' Brathwaite has written, 'and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he perhaps most effectively rebelled.'
Between the Standard English writer and the vernacular writer range a host of other possibilities. Some poets and novelists, such as the Jamaican-born Claude McKay and the Scottish nationalist Hugh MacDiarmid, spend a substantial part of their careers writing in one version of English and then shift dramatically to another. Others employ either Standard English or a local vernacular depending on the perspective they are presenting. Two of Caribbean-born writer Jean Rhys's stories written during the same period offer two distinct points of view, one in the normative English of a white West Indian child, the other in the creolized (or hybridized) English of a mulatto immigrant in London. Finally, many writers, such as Walcott, Brathwaite, and the Yorkshire poet Tony Harrison, switch between standard and 'dialect' within or across individual works, creating juxtapositions, tensions, and new relationships between languages that have traditionally been kept hierarchically discrete. They linguistically embody their interstitial experience of living in between metropolis and margin, canon and Creole, schoolbooks and the street.
Whether using slightly or heavily creolized English, or a medley of both, writers from across the world?Barbadians and Bombayites and 'Black Britons'?have employed a diverse array of distinctive idioms, dialects, Creoles to defy imperial norms, express emerging cultural identities, and inaugurate rich new possibilities for literature in English.
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CLAUDE McKAY 1890-1948
Claude McKay was born into a poor farmworking family in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, and spent the first half of his life on the British Caribbean island. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker and then a wheelwright and served for less than a year as a police constable in Kingston. An English linguist and folklorist, Walter Jekyll, encouraged him to write in Jamaican dialect, or Creole. Drawing on the example of the Scottish- dialect poet Robert Burns, McKay harnessed Jamaican idiom in poems collected in two books published in 1912, Constab Ballads and Songs of Jamaica, including 'Old England,' a seemingly reverent imaginative journey, in a new literary language, to the imperial 'homeland.' The first major poet to make effective literary use of Jamaican English, he influenced many later Afro-Caribbean poets who went further, such as Louise Bennett.
For his poetry McKay won a prize that enabled him to travel to the United States and study at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute and at Kansas State College, before moving to Harlem in 1914. Switching in his poetry from Jamaican to Standard English, he helped precipitate the Harlem Renaissance with his Harlem Shadows (1922), which included sonnets addressing the vexed racial experience of an Afro-Caribbean immigrant. For most of the 1920s into the mid-1930s, McKay, identifying with the radical left, lived and wrote novels and short stories mainly in England, France, and Morocco. He died in poverty in Chicago, where he taught in his last years for a Catholic youth organization. His sonnet 'If We Must Die,' written in response to the American antiblack riots of the summer of 1919, became a World War II rallying cry after Winston Churchill read it, without attribution, to the British people.
Old England
I've a longin' in me dept's of heart dat I can conquer not, 'Tis a wish dat I've been havin' from since I could form a t'o't,' thought 'Tis to sail athwart the ocean an' to hear de billows roar, Whe n de m ride aroun' de steamer,0 whe n de m beat on England's steamship shore.
5 Just to view de homeland England, in de streets of London walk, An' to see de famous sights dem 'bouten which dere's so much talk, An' to watch de fact'ry chimneys pourin' smoke up to de sky, An' to see de matches- children, dat I hear 'bout, passin' by.1
I would see Saint Paul's Cathedral,2 an' would hear some of de great
10 Learnin' comin' from de bishops, preachin' relics of old fait'; I would ope me mout' wid wonder at de
