Language, History and Hybridity

1
Language, History and Hybridity

• From Margaret Atwood to
• Laiwan, M. Noubese Philip,

2
Starting Questions Language, History and Identity

• How do the four novels deal with history
  differently?
• General Qs
• Does being able to speak in English have anything
  to do with your sense of identity?
• What do you feel about the All Peoples English
  Movement (??????)?

3
The Blind Assassin (2000)

• Coral Ann Howells
• Asmulticulturalism Canadian Multiculturalism
  Act in 1988has been a major force in
  transforming Canadas discourse of nationhood,
  opening up the nation-space to accommodate the
  heterogeous histories of its citizens, so in her
  recent historical novels Atwood has been engaged
  in a somewhat similar project, opening up English
  Canadas colonial history and its heritage
  myths. (26)

4
Several Female Historians/Artists

• in Atwoods novels The Handmaids Tale, The
  Robber Bride, Alias Grace, etc.
• The handmaid framed by the male historian
• Atwoods use of the Gothic to introduce the
  uncanny in history. (28)

5
Hybridity

• Generic hybridization in BA the Victorian
  sensation novel, science fiction, modernist
  female romance and American detective pulp
  fiction. (28)
• The fictive autobiography becomes a kind of
  textual theater where a changing self displays
  and hides itself through a series of disguises
  and a parade of doubles, aways eluding fixed
  representation. (29)
• P. 49 a strangely duplicitous novel with its
  ghostly voices, multiple narrators, and
  overlapping texts

6
Different Kinds of Languages and Silences

1. Self-Defense. Communication Language for
   Artistic Self-Expression (The Blind Assasin)
   (Disappearing Moon Cafe)
2. Languages as systems of beliefs (Discourse on
   the Logic of Language)
3. Hierarchy of Languages//Races (Imperialism of
   Syntax)
4. Distortion, Fiction and Lies. (Universal
   Grammar)

• Silence is gold. Forbearance.
• Secrecy Repression
• (Disappearing Moon Cafe) Silence of History (The
  Blind Assasin)
• Silence as a kind of language Attentive Silence
  (e.g. Obasan).
• Ethnics Being Many-Mouthed or Losing a
  Language (SFG)

7
Hybridity and Hyphen

• Fred Wah Half-Bred Poetics p. 73 hyphen
• Though the hyphen is in the middle, it is not in
  the center. It is a property marker, a boundary
  post, a borderland, a bastard, a railroad, a last
  spike, a stain, a cypher, a rope, a knot, a chain
  (link), a foreign word, a warning sign, a head
  tax, a bridge, a no-mans land, a nomadic,
  floating magic carpet, now you see it now you
  don't"
• The issue of names (pp. 80-82)
• Code-switching ? contact language
• To emphasize the blank space both to preserve and
  perpetuate the passage position(92)

8
Creative Usages of Two Languages or More

• Laiwan Imperialism of Syntax
• M. Nourbese Philip

9
Laiwan

• Laiwan was born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents.
  She immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war
  in Rhodesia. She is an interdisciplinary artist
  and writer based in Vancouver, BC. (source
  http//artgallery.dal.ca/engaging/LAIWAN.html)

10
???????

• Who is the you in this poem, Laiwan herself?
• What does syntax here mean?
• What does the it refer to in still it
  happened/?
• What do you think about the Chinese translation?

11
Imperialism of Syntax (2)

• ??,??????????????
• ?????,???????
• ??,
• ??????????,
•         ????,???????.
•         ???????.

• . . . those rules of grammar were the forgetting
  of yourself.
• Those letters never pronounced before
• became the subject of your ridicule.
• The bitterness on your tongue became hidden in
  need for survival
• a proof of assimilation,
• the invisibility of yourself . . .

12
M. Nourbese Philip

• born in Tobago, Trinidad
• Nourbese "noor-BEH- seh"
• BA-- at the University of the West Indies,
  Kingston, Jamaica.
• 1968 -- Arrived in Canada
• 1973 -- a law degree from the University of
  Western Ontario
• 1982 -- gave up law completely to write full-time
• Harriet's Daughter novel for young adult
• She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks.
  (the Casa de las Américas prize)

http//www.nourbese.com/
13
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
"And Over Every Land and Sea,--Ovid's version of
the story of Ceres searching for Persephone
(mother searching for her daughter)

• a woman growing through adolescence into
  adulthood becomes aware of language as a barrier
  to expression. In the last poem, the speaker is
  ready to try her language, always counterpointed
  by quotations . . .

• Cyclamen Girl,"
• "African Majesty,"
• "Meditations on the Declensions of Beauty by the
  Girl With the Flying Cheek-bones,"
• "Discourse on the Logic of Language,
• "Universal Grammar,"
• "The Question of Language is the Answer to
  Power,
• "Testimony Stoops to Mother Tongue,"
• "She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly
  Breaks"--

14
Her Views of Language English

• English as a "father tongue" for those of
  African-Caribbean heritage ("Absence" 276).
• demotic (???) or creole English as the "mother
  tongue.
• "For the many like me, black and female, it is
  imperative that our writing begin to recreate our
  histories and our myths, as well as to integrate
  that most painful of experiences--loss of our
  history and our word."

15
Her Views of Language English

• My quest as a writer/poet is to discover my
  mother tongue, or whether or not peoples such as
  us may ever claim to possess such a thing. Since
  I continue to write in my father tongue, what I
  need to engender by some alchemical process . . .
  is a metamorphosis within the language from
  father tongue to mother tongue. In that process
  some aspects of the language will be destroyed,
  new ones created. (278) (Cf She Tries 27)

16
Her Views of African Use of English

• The formal standard language was subverted,
  turned upside down, inside out, and even
  sometimes erased. Nouns became strangers to
  verbs and vice versa tonal accentuation took the
  place of several words at a time rhythms held
  sway. (She Tries Her Tongue 17)

17
Her Styles

• Multiple styles

Apparently official documents
Orality rhythmic creole language
Parody
Re-defining, changing the meanings
Combined search for the mother tongue
18
Her Styles

• asymmetrical patterning of free verse. Discourse
  on the Logic of Language
• a Collage of ?

a search for mother (tongue)
A critique of medical, scientific discourse
other authorities.
a personal statement of ones linguistic identity
and anguish.
19
English as a "father tongue"

• English is my mother tongue. A mother tongue is
  not not a foreign lan lan lang language
  l/anguish anguish a foreign anguish. English
  is my father tongue. A father tongue is a
  foreign language, therefore English is a foreign
  language not a mother tongue. (She Tries 30)

20
mother tongue connected disconnected

• What is my mother tongue
• my mammy tongue
• my mummy tongue
• my momsy tongue
• my modder tongue
• my ma tongue?
• I have no mother
• tongue
• no mother to tongue
• no tongue to mother
• to mother
• tongue

The capitalized part Connected and nourished
physically by the mothers tongue in the past.

• (cannot create tongue to create tongue)

21
Critique of Authorities (1)

• "EDICT I Every owner of slaves shall, wherever
  possible, ensure that his slaves belong to as
  many ethno-linguistic groups as possible. If they
  cannot speak to each other, they cannot then
  foment rebellion and revolution" (She Tries 56).
• ? control the slaves by destroying their language
  community.

22
Note language switch

• However, as is becoming evident in more recent
  Africanist research, ethnic identity in West
  Africa was fluid and multiple, and people could
  belong to several different communities,
  including groups based upon shared language.
  Certain Africans' ability to language-switch thus
  served as a site of resistance in the Americas
  the aptitude for languages enabled them to avoid
  slave masters' attempts at complete control of
  their interactions and experiences.(Anatol)

23
Critique of Authorities (2)

• the theories of Drs. Karl Wernicke and Paul Broca
  on the parts of the brain responsible for speech
  and the racist theories of Broca as to the
  superiority of Caucasians

24
Critique of Authorities

• What are the answers to these multiple choice
  questions? Which authorities are parodied here?
• From critique of male and educational
  authorities, Eurocentrism, to rejection of being
  subject to the existing or absent languages.

25
Her Styles

• Universal Grammar a Collage of ?

Making a sentence about Man
Universal Grammar
Breaking down to the smallest fragments? cell
Re-member the African origins and history of
exploitation
26
Critique through redefinitionTongue penis

• She describes the cultural violence practiced
  upon non-Europeans in the Caribbean as
  "linguistic rape. (p. 66)
• What does the tall, blond, blue-eyed,
  white-skinned man represent? (63, 65, 67)
• Man ? governing the verb is and woman.
• Male, White domination of the third world (and
  the animal world) through their language
  (English?) and their cultures.
• Rape

27
Self-Assertion through parsing and redefinition

• Parsing ? into fragmentary cells? to re-member.
• The smallest cell smallest an unsuccessful
  definition.
• Remember ? re-member
• O pain ? God ?African goddess
• Ex exodus, exorcize? whom? The Other or the
  white devils?
• Explosion of tremble and forgetting.

28
Self-Assertion through Rejecting Oppression

• If the word gags
• Spit it out/Start again.
• This is How to make a language yours and Now not
  to get raped.

29
References

• Marlene Nourbese Philip. She Tries Her Tongue,
  Her Silence Softly Breaks. Ragweed P, 1989.
• Anatol, Giselle LizaSpeaking in (M)Other
  Tongues The Role of Language in Jamaica
  Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother.
  Callaloo - Volume 25, Number 3, Summer 2002.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 157
  Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African
  Writers, Third Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman
  Book. Edited by Bernth Lindfors, University of
  Texas at Austin and Reinhard Sander, University
  of Puerto Rico. The Gale Group, 1996. pp.
  296-306.