Lucky Thirteenth Week Post

So this is the last post! Like Kelly, I have to say I really liked this reading as I identified with it and like many of you I kept thinking about my exchange programme to the UK and how the Brits and Europeans reacted to me as an English-speaking Asian. What struck me while reading Fanon was the point he makes on the White’s perception of the black man:

“To make him talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible” (35).

And it made me question why Whites would be so concerned about the fluent, intellectual Black in this day and age? Could it be a fear of retribution? That the empire could strike back and the Black could become the coloniser? While the age of colonialism is over,I think a colonial mentality is still alive and kicking in the Whites’ mindset. Why else this fear of the once-colonised’s/seen-as-inferior’s acquisition of the coloniser's language? As already mentioned by some of you, “A man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language…mastery of language affords remarkable power” (18). Through the colonised race’s command of the coloniser’s language, the coloniser’s sense of superiority premised on differences is therefore undermined.

As a side note, thinking about this led me to think about Singapore’s anxieties years back when we heard the mainland Chinese were learning English and were speaking it better than us! I remember my Lao Shis telling us that we'd better learn our Mandarin "hao hao", because the Chinese are learning English faster and better than we are and soon it'll be us going to China to find jobs! I didn't listen and therefore find myself in English Literature :-)Before the rise of China around the earlier part of this decade, we tended to think of Singapore as superior to China (correct me if I'm wrong, I for one did), which we saw as a backward country where all our products were imported from (sound familiar?). Then, suddenly around the period 00'-02'we started hearing our politicians, notably LKY making speeches about "the rising dragon" and their shock on finding China more developed and modern than we were. And boy were we scared! Being fluent in English and being more cultured(!)in the ways of the West was, and I think still is, one of the last vestiges of power that we felt we could wield against them and then even in that they started to threaten us. To some extent, I think just maybe we can see where the Whites mentioned above are coming from...

Yet, I also find it significant that we tend to pride ourselves on our ability to converse fluently in English and in being well-versed in Western culture. We define our modernity as being a society that is largely English-educated, and English-speaking. In maintaining the language of our colonisers as our first language, how much of our identity becomes defined by the West? And therefore, how much of ourselves remains stuck in the shadow of Western colonialism, now in the form of dominantly Western capitalism, if the West is the standard against which we measure ourselves? Like the case of the Negro, can the Singaporean be seen as having "no culture, no civilisation, no long historical past?" (34). Oh dear, I think we need a Dedalus!