Mastery of language - whose power

Sorry, just got to share this. Just to add to Kelly’s experience, I was in Sweden (many years ago) at some international camp and someone asked us (we were all female!) if we lived in trees in Singapore and if the women stayed at home to cook!?! (No he was not trying to be funny. He thought Singapore was in China!) Talk about ignorance right?

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power” (Fanon 18). Let us rephrase that “Mastery of the colonial language affords remarkable power”. The colonial language continues to be a powerful medium and this is evident in the sheer number of English books we find in bookstores around the world. Fanon states that the one “who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is” (Fanon 38) but we see in Stephen that the more he acquires the colonial language, the more aware he becomes of his alienation from it:

The language in which we are speaking is his before mine. How different are the words . . . on his lips and on mine . . . His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired language. (Portrait 205)

The question is how does one reconcile the use, or need for the English language with preserving cultural identity? I think Yeats and Joyce have done that. They have appropriated the English language and blended it with their own culture to create an “Irishness” that people will study for a long long time (English Literature students at least). They are examples of how a colonized people can ‘fly by those nets’ (Portrait 220).