Fanon makes clear the immense role language plays in constructing the identities of the colonizer and colonized and states, “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” (38) The French that the Antilles Negro speaks seems self-empowerment, but is also complicity with a culture that deems him inferior. In Portrait Stephen refuses to learn Irish: “this race and this country and this life produced me…I shall express myself as I am.” (220) By Fanon’s formulation, Stephen’s attempts to forge an Irish identity through his colonizer’s language is paradoxical, self-defeating – by using English, he is already “tak[ing] on [an English] world.”
However, I find it a problematic conclusion - Stephen’s discussion of the tundish with the Dean reads on one level like Fanon’s examples of European enforcement of black inferiority by talking down in pidgin Creole, with Stephen’s morose reflection that “the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205) when the Dean takes the word as a lowly Irish construction. As it turns out, it is “English and good old blunt English too,” (204) while “funnel,” conversely, is of French origin, a remnant of the time England itself was ‘colonised’, or conquered, by the Normans. The Dean’s identity as an Englishman and Stephen’s identity as an Irishman, however, define the identity of the respective words in their conversation – the French word appears more English than the English word that appears Irish, and Stephen’s revelation arguably does not make the Dean any less English nor he any the more.
This perhaps demonstrates that the identities of the colonizer and colonized also play an immense role in constructing their languages, and redeems somewhat Stephen’s decision to refashion English for an Irish identity – as well as Fanon’s contradictory usage of French for his theses.
Showing posts with label black skin white masks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black skin white masks. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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:
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!
“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!
Language: The Colonized and the Colonizer
It is ironic that Fanon uses the language of the colonizer (French in his case) to present the case about language as an instrument of imperial ideological domination. Like Joyce, and like many post-colonial intellectuals and writers from Acebe to Edward Said, he faces the paradox of needing to present the state, the case of his people and culture in a language that does not belong to him. In Joyce's case, he fights that paradox by, among other things, calling into question the Englishman's own command of language. The word 'tundish' comes to mind; in Portrait the professor thinks that it is an Irish word, when in truth it is as English a word as words can be (Heaney in his notes mentions that 'tundish' is in fact a mid-Elizabethian word). The slave knows the master's language better than the master. Ellis from Burmese Days would not have stood for this; "We shall have to sack [the native butler] if he gets to talk English too well," he says.
And yet English can itself be termed a 'colonized' language. It has roots in both Germanic languages and Latin, with a liberal helping from latter-day French and German, not to mention Hindi, Mandarain, Chinese, Malay, and a whole host of other languages. English is probably unique in this among imperial languages. Is it truely 'colonized', or does the very act of borrowing transforms the word into another instrument of ideological domination? 'Anime' in its native Japanese context refers to any animated work, including 3D modelling; in English it has come to mean cell-shaded animation from Japan or done in 'the Japanese style'. Is this an ideological stereotyping, or is this a simple case of borrowing from another culture? Is the act of 'borrowing' in language ever free of power implications? These are questions that I have yet to come up with answers for.
Black Skin, White Masks - gods, frauds
According to Fanon, "[t]he colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes white as he renounces his blackness, his jungle" (18). But the colonized is only "elevated" amongst his people - "In France one says, "He talks like a book." In Martinique, "He talks like a white man"" (21). This is evident in the conversation between Ellis and the butler in Burmese Days, Chapter 2:
'How much ice have we got left?'
''Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.'
'Don't talk like that, damn you--"I find it very difficult!" Have you swallowed a dictionary? "Please, master, can't keeping ice cool"--that's how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can't stick servants who talk English. D'you hear, butler?'
'Yes, master,' said the butler, and retired.
''Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.'
'Don't talk like that, damn you--"I find it very difficult!" Have you swallowed a dictionary? "Please, master, can't keeping ice cool"--that's how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can't stick servants who talk English. D'you hear, butler?'
'Yes, master,' said the butler, and retired.
There seems to be no win-win situation between the colonized and the colonizer - if he speaks the language of the colonizers he's a fraud, if he doesn't, he's a savage.
One question though..
At the end of Fanon's paper is the excerpt by Michel Leiris.. Is he talking about the French language when he says "resort to a mode of speech that they virtually never use now except as something learned" (40)? or is he referring to French-Creole?
Anyway just some other random thoughts/things:
I found this rather interesting, something I yahoo-ed..
But our histories, for once generous, gave us a second language. At first, it was not shared by everyone. It was for a long time the language of the oppressors - founders. We did conquer it, this French language. If Creole is our legitimate language, we gradually (or at once) were given and captured, legitimated and adopted the French language (the language of the Creole white class). Creoleness left its indelible mark on the French language, as did other cultural entities elsewhere. We made the French language ours. [. . . ] Our literature must bear witness of this conquest. [. . . ] Creole literature written in French, therefore, soon invest and rehabilitate the aesthetics of our language. Such is how it will be able to abandon the unnatural use of French which we had often adopted in writing.
From Eloge de la Créolité -- Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, 1990 (1989)
(The three authors represent a new wave of French Antillean intellectuals; this book is their poetic manifesto, their aesthetic genealogy, their statement of Creole identity. Translated by M. B. Taleb-Khyar, it first appeared in English in the journal Callaloo.)
And another thing: Me and my friend were having a random conversation about Gong Li and her Singaporean citizenship, and when talking about what if a famous Singaporean was to become the citizen of another country, what would happen? Would there be outbursts like those in China? My friend said that it was unlikely cause we're apathetic. Are we?
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