22
The Literary Dimension of World Englishes

EDWIN THUMBOO

1 Introduction

Every culture has a literature, whether broadly or narrowly defined, written or oral or both. Each is supported by the relatively deep homogeneity provided by satu negeri, satu bangsa, satu ugama, satu bahasa (Malay “one land, one people, one religion, one language”) Within this singularity of a relatively firm political, cultural unity, virtually all aspects of social life become common through slow evolution that provides, moreover, a high degree of linguistic sharing and predictability. In social and other relationships, cause and effect lie within somewhat narrow but familiar parameters. Moreover, the dynamics of literary creativity, as it is in other major areas of cultural and other substantive activities, are largely generated from within. External influences tend to stimulate rather than confront. An instance of this would be the influence of the Imagist Movement on both Chinese and Indonesian literature.

In the already complex instance of monocultures – as broadly defined by one language, one people, and one religion – structures overlap, extend, at times contradict and compete to create specific and general tensions. But each culture retains its distinctive semiotic system; each occupies the same space‐time continuum; each is gripped by the forces of national development; each is exposed to penetration through the formal and informal political, economic, social, and educational context that often pushes a policy of monolingualism.

In these circumstances, language – and literature – have a special place. As Halliday (1978: 2) points out:

There are two fundamental aspects to the social reality that is encoded in language: to paraphrase Lévi‐Strauss, it is both “good to think” and “good to eat.” Language expresses and symbolizes this dual aspect in its semantic system, which is organized around the twin motifs of reflection and action—language as a means of reflecting on things, and language as a means of acting on things. The former is the “ideational” component of meaning; the latter is the “interpersonal” – one can act symbolically only on persons, not on objects.

A social reality (or a “culture”) is itself an edifice of meanings – a semiotic construct. In this perspective, language is one of the semiotic systems that constitute a culture; one that is distinctive in that it also serves as an encoding system for many (though not all) of the others.

This in summary terms is what is intended by the formulation “language as social semiotic.” It means interpreting language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms – as an information system, if that terminology is preferred.

That participants are able to “predict” with advantage assumes a language in common, extensively embedded in the personal and social realities through its role in “reflection and action.” A sufficient history of usage is implied, one that does not overlap other semiotic systems and subsystems that would introduce new religions, philosophies, myths, and other components that form the cultural semiotic. The literary dimension involves satu bahasa and its literature. Language is therefore both instrument and repository. It has a power within culture, society, and environment.

Like all centres of power, languages tend to perpetuate themselves, projecting a practical and intellectual assertiveness, which is seen at its most potent in the development of colonialism/imperialism. When colonies are formed, it is not merely peoples confronting each other: their cultures and their languages are involved, with the more powerful suppressing the lesser. That is the dynamics behind the emergence of Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French as international languages.¹

This internationalization of languages, as illustrated by English, occurs in a variety of contexts generated between the impact of colonialism on the one hand and the response of the colonized cultures on the other. There are two facets to this, far less interlinked than such terms as “postcolonial” would suggest. For reasons of expediency and good management, colonial powers sought to maintain the same policies for all colonies. There was, in this sense, a kind of colonial homogeneity that contributed to its hegemony and identity. It is remarkable to see the extent to which the same texts, songs, and educational methods were practised in every part of the British Empire. On the other hand, the politics and subsequent history of former colonies tend to break away from that homogenized hegemony in an attempt to recover national shape, rhythm, and identity, the uniqueness of the precolonial – and in some cases, colonial – inheritance. While it anticipates what is to follow, this accounts for the various Englishes that have emerged in Asia (see Kachru 2005 and Bolton 2002). Kachru has been the main driving force in the study of global Englishes by providing a theoretical framework and the major mapping that has led to the opening up and development of this very important field. His recent book, Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon (2005), is a major contribution to that growing body of analysis which we need for the field to develop. Bolton’s work on English in Hong Kong has done much to raise this interesting field of study. It is recovery of both the individual and the national self, whose uniqueness makes for difference that should not be elided by generalizations, such as “Asian English” rather than “Asian Englishes.”

2 The Spread of English

The English language and its literature moved toward multiplicity in three broad sweeps, to (a) Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; (b) North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; and (c) Asia, Africa, the West Indies, the Pacific, and other geographical pockets. Important for my present purpose, in this rough chronology of some five hundred years, are the generalized factors distinguishing each movement.

In the first, the language spread by arms, politics, and culture, as part of an assimilative process, through rearranged fiefdoms, principalities, and kingdoms, of Anglo‐Saxon–Norman hegemonies over Celts. The Irish, for instance, have hardly had difficulty with the English language – only with the English regime. And lest we forget, at the setting of the sun, the greatest English wits have been Irish. Moreover, the differences were part of a symbiotic relationship arising from a large measure of shared culture, if not shared politics.

In the second movement, language and culture spread as English speakers spread. Major institutions of identity were transferred, at times replicated, and grew. Strong, constant contact with England, at times paradoxical, maintained bonds that survived such varied and chronologically separate happenings as the American War of Independence, the Boer War, the reaction in Australia and New Zealand when Britain joined the European Economic Community, and South Africa’s expulsion from the Commonwealth. I do not propose that the historical and contemporary relationships among these nations are simple. John Steed, Rambo, and Crocodile Dundee reflect three unique masculine discourses beneath whose gesture and dress lie complex psychosociolinguistic variables and distillations; they are interesting, but in no way threatening to the deep structures held in common by the Anglo cultural combine.

It is the third movement that provides my subject. British expansion overseas had its origins chiefly in trade – new markets for manufacture and fresh sources of cheap raw material. Responding to internal political, economic, and industrial hungers and to competition among European powers, trade gradually mutated into a sustained colonialism. Britain, with the largest muster of dominions and colonies, proved the most successful; English, introduced to facilitate administration and commerce, became transplanted in every colony. Without exception, it remained to flourish variously as national language, official language, or auxiliary language for technology, science, regional and international finance, and education. English links communities, ethnic groups, national regions, and nations within regions such as ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), the West Indies, and the Pacific Islands. It is at the heart of programs to modernize and performs a mixture of roles supported by governments and ambitious parents.

The complex background of the new literatures is manifest in the following divisions of the third movement. First, there are nations that claim long and elaborate written and oral literary traditions, for example India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia. Second are those that possess powerful, sophisticated oral traditions,for example Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, and Samoa. Third, there are areas created by colonial needs, such as Singapore, with a population drawn substantially from the surrounding Malay sultanates, South China, South India, Jaffna in Sri Lanka, and Hadramant; and the West Indies, mainly populated by Africans with East Indians and a smaller number of Chinese, with the Indians as bilinguals and a variety of English as the sole language for the others. There is also a fourth category – and perhaps a fifth, if we were to separate out black North America – areas where the Anglo culture and/or power dominates indigenous peoples, for example, the Maoris in New Zealand and the Zulus in Africa.

3 Broadening Perspectives

Despite the fact that the literatures that developed from the spread of English started to gather momentum only in the last 50 years, there is enough in terms of text and context to require that we take a more open view as regards their description and assessment. Difference has not always been given the force it deserves.

More than for the writer who inhabits one language, one culture, and one literary tradition, the writer’s situation in the new literatures is open to compulsions revealed by the array of forces at work in a multilingual, multicultural, multiliterary society. As implied earlier, where the language goes, the criticism and its key assumptions tend to follow.

Moreover, terms are rendered unsatisfactory by the rapid, extensive, complicated, and still continuing spread of English, which has outstripped the perspectives, concepts, and terminology that sought to describe and assess it. A substantive question concerns orientation. While positions differ and theories/hypotheses compete, the body of scholarly work on language is now steadily augmented by research findings about and from “nonnative” varieties and bases. Similar developments are occurring in the study of the literatures. Criticism still assumes a one‐language, one‐literature equation: varieties of a language lead to varieties of a literature. That is definitely not the case with English. There is obvious concession in the label “new literatures in English,” a label predictably interim. When did American literature emerge as such? We have Australian literature (and a dictionary of Australian English) and New Zealand literature defined by criticism, fuelled chiefly from within, alert to elements – linguistic, attitudinal – that nourish an ethos. Moreover, “new literatures” itself seems a misnomer when applied to India, where the creativity predates Macaulay’s Minute of 1835. Nor is “second tongue” accurate, as a majority of the writers wield English as their first language. Nor is “contact literature” a firmly suitable alternative. The literature in English only starts as contact literature because, after it acquires body, momentum, and contemporary preoccupation, its “contact” character becomes historical, part of origins. Given the fact that there is a substantial body of literature in most of the former colonies, there is no reason why we cannot say Indian Literature in English, Nigerian Literature in English, Jamaican Literature in English, Philippine Literature in English, Sri Lankan Literature in English, Singapore Literature in English, etc. This will do away with both the covert assumptions and the inaccuracies of a phrase such as “postcolonial,” which is historically inaccurate and opened to the suspicion of encoding and perpetuating that link between former metropolitan centres and former colonies, which is no longer there.

4 The Response to English

It should be patent even from these brief examples that two of the many factors influencing literary creativity have special importance. Firstly, the last 50 years, during which the literatures in Englishes emerged, have been a period of rapid change, connected with the internal dynamics of nations, as well as rapid globalization. In both English has played an increasing role. The first has meant rapid shifts in the themes that engage writers. With the exception of India, the first generation of writers by and large wrote about the need to reconstruct society, for a society to explain itself to itself, focus around themes of disengagement from the colonial past.

The writer – dramatist and novelist more than poet – must create a suitable English‐language semiotic system in a non‐English social reality. Powerful elements of culture and attitude come with the language. Present as part of the colonial inheritance, they are maintained, even strengthened, by the formal study of English and the international culture of the mass media, especially television. In order to explore and carry a new social reality, English has to be uncluttered, freed from certain habitual associations; it must develop a new verbal playfulness, new rhythms, additions to its metaphorical and symbolic reach to explain and amplify feelings and ideas about literature and life and cater to the claims of the imagination. The innovations can be as broad, declared, and sustained as Gabriel Okara’s The Voice (see Thumboo 1986 for a discussion) or as subtle as Raja Rao’s short story ‘The Cow of the Barricades’ or Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino. The need to innovate is inevitable because it is connected to reorienting the language to express a set of perceptions, a vision faithful to the collective but varied experience and aspirations of a people.

Unless we identify and connect these and other preoccupations, it would be difficult to see in perspective the impulses behind the emergence of the new literatures in English. First are the reasons for writing. These include explaining society to itself, reconstructing the past, exploring the binding of diverse peoples and cultures with the idea of commonality, and giving imaginative expression to the array of forces fashioning society. Other attendant themes include the effect of political and moral corruption – catastrophes played out in the lives of ordinary men and women – or the ambiguous changes wrought by modernization. In a very real sense, themes have often chosen writers, a phenomenon neatly summed up by Nadine Gordimer (1973: 11): “Black writers choose their plots, characters and literary styles; their themes choose them. By this I mean that themes are statements or questions arising from the nature of the society in which the writer finds himself immersed, and the quality of the life around him. In this sense the writer is the voice of the people beyond any glib political connotations of the phrase.” Gordimer’s remarks pertain to South Africa, where apartheid has perpetuated the worst features of a colonial regime hardened by the fact that the colonizers are themselves white natives. The blacks there live under an unremitting oppression so extensive that black poets cannot help but feel its tragic intensity, as revealed in Stanley Motjuwadi’s White Lies (Royston 1973: 12). Motjuwadi’s passion, in less intense form, can be found in the earlier phase of most new literatures, in variations of themes from those touching on racism, political suppression, and economic exploitation to those about snobbery and intellectual inequality.

5 Impulses behind the New English Writing

In these literatures there is an attempt to restore dignity, to reestablish the self, and to compensate for deprivation and depersonalization. The Australian aboriginal novelist and poet Cohn Johnson says, “Creative writers like myself can re‐decipher and reinterpret mythology, legends and stories, to a certain extent modernise it or give it relevance and have that tradition going from the ‘dreaming’ of the beginning to 1983 and onwards. That is where we will link up again with what has been lost somewhat by relying on alien forms of literature” (Breitinger & Sander 1985: 2). Such connections between writer and society, almost compelled by a reading of contemporary events, are often sanctioned by tradition. It is not unusual for the artist to see himself as a medium, a shaping conduit. Kofi Awoonor, whose poem‐novel This Earth My Brother remains among the most profound explorations of individual psyche and society, describes a role that Hoggart and others, bred by a different intellectual, aesthetic climate, would possibly find strange. The artist lives in a society where “forms and motifs already exist in an assimilated time and world construct, and so he serves only as the instrument of transforming these into an artistic whole based on his own imaginative and cognitive world, a world which exists and has meaning only within the larger world. He is not a visionary artist, per se, like the European artist who projects into space and time structures which simply were not there before. There is no otherness locked in the private psyche of his vision” (Awoonor 1976: 166). Although the artist, his function especially, was not always this tightly circumscribed, firm conventions generally governed the choice and treatment of subjects. Nonetheless, it provides for a sharp contrast to Hoggart’s writer– partly of and partly out of society, and of a culture not “formally organised.” In third movement paradigms, the writer is moved by a sense of the contemporary that converts into powerful injunctions.

Nor is the dissimilarity confined to conceptions of the artist’s role. Perceptions of the world as physical construct likewise differ. While making it clear that she is generalizing, Kamala Markandaya (1973: 22) states that for the West “the earth was created for man: an assumption that seems to be used, consciously or unconsciously, to justify almost any kind of assault upon the animal kingdom and upon the systems of the earth itself.” I have had occasion to suggest that prior to the mid‐nineteenth century – later, if we exclude Japan – there was a broad contrast between European and Asian attitudes to scientific discoveries. Asia did not fully exploit their practical value, while Europe did, mainly because Asia went more fully into metaphysics while Europe delved predominantly into physics. I find it intriguing to speculate on whether the fact that Europe was dominated for so long by one religion which, despite schisms, allowed a fairly stable view of man and his universe, of man and God, of the separation of the sacred from the secular, encouraged a concomitant scientific spirit and method. Did such earlier centres of scientific inquiry as Egypt and Greece lose the capacity because new religions and fundamentally disruptive new worldviews broke their continuities?

Physics and metaphysics: Markandaya’s own background urges that “everything exists in its own right” (Markandaya 1973: 22). She goes on to say that while she does not import that perception directly into her work, nonetheless it seeps in. The sacredness of the Earth – in a Blakean sense, interestingly enough – and the conviction that it is the source of life are to be found in almost all her novels. The conviction generates a kind of fortitude embodied, for instance, in Rukmini in Nectar in a Sieve, as well as in The Coffer Dams, where the Europeans find “tropical” nature discomforting although the “natives” are fully at home. Without an understanding of the vision behind notions of the luminous, the cosmic, the nature of human beings and their place in the universe, our perceptions would be impoverished.

For many writers the establishment of a refurbished, complete self and society, with history and a sense of recovered dignity, was a primary function. Elechi Amadi’s The Concubines, Ngu͂gĩ’s The River Between, and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart have for their themes the imaginative reconstruction of life in traditional society either before or at the time when the force of the white man was felt. The Concubines and Things Fall Apart are essential to a sense of continuity through the values embodied in the past and for images of the complex humanity that marked traditional life before the coming of the white man. As Albert Wendt put it, “The imagination must explore with love, honesty, wisdom, compassion; writers must write with aroha / aloha / alofa / loloma, respecting the people they are writing about, people who may view the void differently and who, like all other human beings, live through the pores of their flesh and mind and bone, who suffer, laugh, cry, copulate and die” (1982: 123).

6 The Writer and the Milieu

The writer has interests, values, and a vision of life constructed out of satisfactions and dissatisfactions with his immediate situation and its larger milieu. The milieu – whose possible complexity is limited only by the semiotic systems referred to earlier as defining the total content of society – provides an inheritance that is simultaneously a constraint and a challenge. On the one hand are the forces of conformity, which are powerfully conservative; on the other are the impulses of an international culture, strongly “western” and riding upon the global jet stream of American English. To maintain tradition and to modernize are seen either as a dilemma or a challenge whose dialects impinge upon and revise the notions of life and its contexts. Reorientations and retrievals apart, modernization means, among other things, the creation of new intellectual reflexes, the enlargement of freedoms, the creation of a new order for the betterment of both individual and society. The emergence from colonization involves at least four freedoms. The political is in some ways the most clear cut, though the routes to it have been various. Brunei was granted independence without a fuss; Kenya had to fight a bloody war. Next comes economic freedom, a difficult task, but one to be accomplished in some measure if a nation is to have stability. It requires planning, sustained effort, and noncorrupt governments, all of which are not always in sufficient evidence. The third freedom requires internal all‐round strength—political, economic, social, and cultural—to maintain independence, to be able to withstand the more ambiguous pressures exerted by power blocs. Finally, there is psychological independence, which is perhaps the hardest to achieve.

Figure 22.1 reflects the situation of the writer in any one of the World Englishes. The assumption is that he is bicultural, therefore part of a continuum that has roots in his own culture as well as what comes with English, which I would prefer to call his main language, as distinguished from mother tongue or second language, which I believe are misleading and less reflective of the facts than the label “main language.” I have divided the diagram into nine items excluding audience/reader, to represent the following:

Both vision and interest depend on his/her background, personal history, formative influences, point of view, agenda of interests, dominant themes, choice of genre. These, in turn, are influenced by
which constitutes his/her shaping inheritance as transmitted through the determinants ranging from folkways to myths, religion, national history politics, social structures, and values, etc. These are transmitted through both formal and informal institutions that shape his society. Given his/her vocation, (a) and (b) are intimately connected with
and (d), which have both the acquired that is associated with English and its literatures, and the other, which the writer has inherited under (b). If s/he is an Indian of Tamil origin, s/he may be familiar with the Kurunthokai and use some of its conventions and techniques, as well as the distinction it makes between personal and public poetry. Those who are familiar with Bahasa Melayu may be able to recreate, to utilise, some of the internal delicacies of the pantun in quatrains they write in English. Moreover, as part of creating their own idiolect, and adding through their work to the evolving tradition of writing in English, they could use simile and metaphor based on their other language(s). Both should not be seen as monumental, adding to the surface texture of a poem. They are explorations and restatements with the metaphor commanding the greater directness and complexity. Similes compare, metaphors fuse ideas, experiences. Those familiar with Okara’s The Voice will recall how he exploits the praise poem structure to add both drama and texture to his narrative. Examples can be multiplied and it is here that the writer’s creativity, his/her ingenuity, shows. And in so doing, s/he adds to the reach of English, and in ways that may enable the instruction of his/her creativity to travel. This leads to

Figure 22.1 The situation of the writer in world Englishes.
the writer’s orchestration of language, where the indigenization of English, the genre s/he’s using, and how his/her sense of the function of literature informs the way s/he organises and directs his/her discourse. That, of course, is linked to
where s/he brings as much as possible of his/her experience, memory, etc. to help deepen elaborate the discourse,
giving the best articulation to realise
the play, poem, or novel.
The point has been made that the writer is at the same time his/her own critic, and brings all from (a) to (f) to bear upon that act of creation, of investing his/her text with as much power and articulation.

The boldest arrows suggest the flow of self‐instruction and experience that helps the writer acquire confidence, maturity, new directions, change of priorities, technique, and so on. The best illustration of this is when we compare the early to the later W. B. Yeats, or see the progress in Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o’s novels from Weep Not, Child (1964) to Devil on the Cross (1980).

Including audience/reader is merely to raise the point that how much of the writer, in terms of (a) to (f) should we know if we are to try best to understand before assessing his/her work. The point of course is, how much preparation does one need to understand Shakespeare, or James Joyce, or C. J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously?

Given the forces at work in his/her situation, the writer’s interest, expectations, and response to the riddles and enigmas of this society translate into essential notions about life and contacts. As Gordimer has noted, the writer’s themes have chosen them. These themes are connected with what I have elsewhere described (Thumboo 1984: 24) as a series of grammars the chief of which comprise “interests” and “motives”:

The sets of interests which accrue constitute what may be described as a grammar for living, one governing action, thought, the way we view events and experiences.

Like anyone else, the writer is subject to the same process but with two notable differences. The first is that the grammar of his interests nourishes a deeper, more personalised grammar of motives – to borrow Kenneth Burke’s phrase – generated by and connected to the demands of his vocation. The grammar links life and art and is partly inherited, partly made, augmented, and modified by him. When we identify cardinal influences, primal vision, key themes or structural, metaphorical, and imagistic traits or sources of iconography and the assemblage of their elements that give singularity to a writer’s work, we are in fact mapping this narrower, specialised grammar. These features have to do with technique and substance. Technique derives from and returns to sources in his basic or adopted literary tradition or traditions. The second concerns contacts between the writer as individual and the total environment of which he is a part. But as both individual and environment alter, so does the grammar whose pattern is forged, after all, by the organic interplay between self and society.

I consider these grammars essential to an appropriate orientation for the study of new literatures in English, for it is precisely the absence of such orientation (and not a lack of intelligence) that leads to confident but misleading criticism and discussion. The grammars alter, in response to changes in society and in the individual, in writer and reader. The writer’s dilemma is whether to maintain a consistency or to run the risk of apparent contradictions. Faint hearts do not found literatures or new varieties of languages. Such grammar formation is not new to English. American, Australian, and New Zealand literature share a great deal with English literature and with each other; they are linked by deep‐rooted religions and by philosophical, scientific, intellectual, and other traditions. The new literatures are seldom, if ever, linked to the same extent. They share the language, the major genres, and certain creative strategies— such as those deriving from oral narrative – and critical practices. Their literary ecology, if inclusive, is shaped by the literary traditions of their other languages. The literature in English in India, in Nigeria, in Singapore, is part of Indian, Nigerian, and Singaporean literature. The writer is formed by two worlds, at times belonging to richly complicated multiliterary ecosystems (see Thumboo 1985). He has twin perspectives, one established by English, the language of his creativity, the other by his mother tongue and its associated literature or literatures. It is worth remembering that the literary system of Europe that T. S. Eliot outlined in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” – especially the specific lines of descent from Homer, through Virgil and Dante, down to the national literatures – has counterparts in other literary ecosystems. In India, for instance, there are Sanskrit texts and the great epics.

Moreover, historical parallels arise in the writer’s reshaping of English and his material, subject, and themes. There is the case of Anglo‐Irish literature, one of whose dominant figures, W. B. Yeats, I see as a Third World poet of a special kind. Familiarity with the growth of American English and American literature, or with specific topics such as sociopolitical themes, in say, recent Arabic and Israeli literature or the frame of nationalism in French Canadian fiction, would certainly create a fuller sense of the issues taken up in the new literatures. One must look at them from within, on their own terms, through a paradigm that is flexible yet structured enough to power reorientations.

Each language harbours its own logic, its own system of latent and manifest content. English is no exception. Its prestige originally made it attractive to the indigenous ruling/upper class; they were the first bilinguals who knew a foreign language. Siblings and children benefited through an earlier start and the higher status enjoyed by their families. English became a second language and, in some cases, a first language. Here is Lewis Nkosi’s experience: “I was reading an incredible amount, reading always badly without discipline; reading sometimes for the sheer beauty of the language. I walked about the streets of the bustling noisy city with new English words clicking like coins in the pockets of my mind; I tried them out on each passing scene, relishing their power to describe and apprehend experience” (quoted in Alvarez‐Pereyre 1984: 5–6).

One feels the excitement in discovering the ability to name things and experiences and to apply words to give some order, thus setting up a personal semiotic system. That modifying ability engages what Markandaya has called the cortex—that part of the mind, mysterious and not fully known, that enables the person to become a writer, broadly similar to the capacity that Coleridge described as the primary imagination. While Markandaya sees culture, ethos, and roots as being powerful, fundamental, and self‐sustaining, what really matters is the “extraordinary cortex that exists in all of us, a cortex that, as it were, governs morality and the sensibility of creation, and like anything else can be cultivated or neglected” (1973: 15–16).

Such a cortex, revealed through the power of its metaphors and images, is essential both to the writer’s development and to the reshaping of English in new environments. It is behind the creation of idiolect. It helps the writer negotiate between the demands of two traditions, one inherited, the other brought by English and its great literature. Its new users feel impelled to adapt, to orchestrate a thrust reflecting everyday realities as well as the nuances of its new home. Yet that undertaking cannot always be embarked upon easily. There are those who, like Parthasarathy, feel comfortable in English and (in his case) less so in Tamil, a fact that set up “painful but nevertheless fruitful tension with regard to poetry” (Parthasarathy 1973: 27).

This challenge confronts almost every bi‐ or multilingual writer. His bilingualism is one of three broad types – proficient, powerful, or limited; his position in this cline is not static, because quite often one language gains dominance. A bilingual person has at least two language universes, and each language works with its own linguistic circuits. How the two associate depends on whether the languages as neighbours inhabit the same space and time and can bend to serve creative purposes.

7 Multilingual Context and Linguistic Innovations

Language in a sense determines not only consciousness but also one’s perception of reality. This suggests a kind of linguistic determinism close to that proposed by Whorf’s Mirror of Language, from which it follows that speakers or users of different languages possess different patterns of thought. The Whorfian hypothesis has taken hard or soft forms. The soft form is useful especially in its suggestions that there is a tendency for the individual to think along avenues that have been defined by the whole of language. Scope for initiative and variation allows the proficient bilingual to bring into his creative language (in this case, English) some of the strategies and other resources of his native language and its literature. It also provides for the possibility that the proficient bilingual has a sharper perception of reality because he is bifocal.

Be that as it may, the search for idiom and idiolect is ongoing. What F. W. Bateson (1934; quoted in Wellek and Warren 1955: 177) said about the changing language of poetry would apply to the language of literature as a whole: “the age’s imprint in a poem is not to be traced to the poet but to the language. The real history of poetry is, I believe, the history of the changes in the kind of language in which successive poems have been written. And it is these changes of language only that are due to the pressures of social and intellectual tendencies.”

There is one notable difference between these changes in a monolingual situation and in a bilingual or multilingual situation. When we talk about the spread of English, we usually have in mind its spread to countries. What is more important at the micro level is its spread within so‐called second‐language areas. The learning of English is at a premium, both as a foreign language and as a second language. In Singapore, for instance, it is the medium of instruction throughout the educational system. The model adopted seeks to reflect an International Standard English close to British English. But the writer’s innovations in order to create an idiolect quite often do not follow the general drift of the language as it is promoted educationally. This generalization must be modified to take into account the genre in which the writer works. As a rule, poetry is acrolectal, although there are instances where basilect is used. In drama the characters speak or ruminate in the lect appropriate to their intellectual and social background. Fiction claims a larger number of registers. Even with the first‐person narrative we can assume that if the narrator is an acrolectal speaker, it would be possible for him to narrate across the lectal range of the world depicted. Many writers are concurrently attempting to evolve their own idiolect.

Whatever their stance, their choice of genre, their choice of material, writers portray individuals and the warp and woof of society. At times their writing consists chiefly of their own reactions to and seekings about life, in a language that is simultaneously a private and a public possession. Language is the chief medium of consciousness, the instrument through which the external world is received, analyzed, and internalized; it is the instrument of creativity, of reaching out. It mediates upon the flow between the writer and his social reality. Creativity pushes him beyond mere description – meaning as it is – to assemble new meanings that capture the temper, the quintessential flavour of the times, linking generations and roving among decades. He takes his substance from the unique, the perennial, and the temporary, the buoyant and the ordinary—which may prove unexpectedly unique to others. He examines the surface and deep structures of his material and themes, exploring in a single moment the vocabulary of understanding and expression, inventing in order to extend the depth and power of both. English for the writer is a language that gives and a language that receives.

Yet the work has to be done if we are to increase our understanding of the back, middle‐, and foreground to the new literatures in English. Although they may write in English, virtually all writers of these literatures are bilingual, bicultural, and (for those in multicultural societies) touched by more than two semiotic systems. The result of that search for an idiolect is a verbal edifice that is under constant enlargement and modification, responding to shifts in the grammars of motives and interests. The edifice has two main doors: one to the world of English, dominated by its linguistic and literary systems; the other to the systems (linguistic, literary, social, philosophical) of the social reality or realities the writer inhabits.

8 New Contexts for English

Questions about language dominate part of the social reality. The place of English, especially as a bridge between ethnic groups, as modernizing, as a creative instrument, forms a set of concerns inevitably reflected in the new literatures. Colonial and postcolonial politics are involved, as are ethnic rivalries and suspicions; the implications of caste and class, of being “educated” and “less educated.” Life is always firmly behind language and literature. Each character, whether partially or fully developed, is a pool of consciousness, of understanding and ignorance, of darkness and light, of enlightenment and prejudice. The difficulty is not merely one of an appropriate lect. It extends to forming a lectal range that can reflect a multilingual or bilingual situation. The following passage from Achebe’s Arrow of God is exemplary. The Igbo Unachukwa uses fractured English when speaking to an Englishman; yet when he speaks to a fellow Igbo, the English must improve, as we are to assume that his Igbo is at least good:

“Dat man wan axe master queshon.”

“No questions.”

“Yassah.” He turned to Nweke. “The white man says he did not leave his house this morning to come and answer your questions.”

(1989 [1964], p. 83)

In order to sustain the impression of the shift from English to Igbo, queshon becomes questions.

While we are concerned here with creativity in English, it should be noted that the problems are equally present for those who use “indigenous” languages such as Tagalog, Bengali, and Malay, or other migrant languages, of which Tamil and Mandarin in Singapore and Malaysia would be instances. The human situation is complicated by bi‐ and trilingual, polydialectal factors, not so much for the individual participants as for those who wish to grasp the whole. The writer is concerned to articulate his interest, his vision, and the themes ensuing therefrom. When he reads contemporaries and predecessors, whether in the original or in translation, his motives differ from those of a critic; it is part instruction, part nourishment. If he essays criticism, the practice is informed by writerly insights. The frame of reference for the critic is significantly broader, for while he may be engaged with a particular text or writer, his very role implies a concern with a literature or literatures. He is concerned, in varying degrees, with periods, with movements, with judging writers, preferring one to another and providing grounds for his preferences. His view combines a sense of the contemporary and a sense of the past, the writer with the production of the literature. The writer installs his vision in his work; the critic considers this vision as well as that of other writers. In the context of African literatures in English, it means no less than finding a frame for discussing and evaluating the works of, say, Kofi Awoonor, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi, Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o, and Oko p’Bitek. Extend the list to include the Anglophone writers in Heinemann’s African Writers series – then Indian, West Indian, Southeast Asian, and South Pacific literatures in English, not to mention their links with “indigenous” literary traditions – and you have a fair conception of the critical tasks. For each writer there is perception and performance, active and passive stance ranging from a feel for the larger political and social realities to the specifics of individual thought and feeling.

Criticism is simultaneously a generalizing and a specifying activity. There is the tempting assumption that a work is to some degree characteristic, that its distinctiveness can be accounted for within the prevailing semiotic systems. Moreover, a work that demonstrably cuts against the grain, however powerfully disturbing (Joyce’s Ulysses is an obvious example), can be accommodated; it does not bring in the context of another linguistic‐literary semiotic system. The literature and its language continue to change through revolution and evolution. Donne, Dryden, Fielding, Wordsworth, Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats were innovators, major figures who opened up new possibilities of language and structure that influenced their contemporaries. Thus the revolution settles down to an evolution, establishing a mode, a period. It makes for a degree of acceptable generalization in which the discussion of text or issue has force beyond the specific occasion. Instances are the metaphysical conceit or the theory and practice of Augustan poetic diction. Continuities of literary history encourage the emergence of a critical tradition vigilant of the literature in the language.

The situation is radically dissimilar within the new literatures. They have variety best understood in terms of origins, antecedents, and contemporaneity, attempting to retain much that is traditional in various spheres of life and yet wishing to incorporate change. For the writer, every attempt is a new beginning whose relevance is best judged retrospectively, as the means for judgment are themselves being formed. Innovations are not calculated to alter or refurbish a creative tradition; rather, the tradition, in some instances barely discernible, is emerging. Robust as well as lesser talents are equally in search of creative means, of shaping vision. The overall frame within which specific as well as more general studies can profitably proceed will incorporate a number of foci to sharpen our response. The first focus is for linguistic and literary studies to link up wherever possible, and so avoid what Quirk (1974: 65), referring to the study of Old, Middle, and contemporary English literature, described as “a dichotomy between the relatively modern writings that can be ‘appreciated’ (these are called ‘literature’) and the relatively early writings that cannot be (and these are called ‘language’).” The danger would arise from the divergence in the varieties of English that have resulted from the formal and informal adoption of English within a polity where writers have quite different mother tongues, to the greater divergence between the clines of English in, say, the West Indies, the Philippines, and India. Literature draws upon the full stretch of language. While the standard educated varieties are mutually intelligible in a substantial way, the pidgins and creoles have a local habitation and a name.

9 Models for the Spread of English

The two most recent models for the spread of English are proposed by Kachru and Quirk. They raise important issues whose full implications for nations in the third movement will emerge increasingly from theoretical and applied research. But comprehensive, sustained language surveys require substantial funds and specialists. Language is power.² Given limited resources and unlimited needs, governments of third‐movement nations are forced into pragmatism, a formula of priorities. The concentration on language in education stresses its practical value, which is quite rightly paramount. Fortunately, scholarly enterprise, however modest in isolation, has a cumulative effect. The study of language and the application of linguistic concepts and methods have contributed to the greater definition of our understanding. An increasing number of texts have attracted stylistic/linguistic analysis. Emmanuel Njara (1982), for instance, has done very useful work on a selection of African novels. And Winfred Lehmann’s treatment, sensitive, discriminating, and precise, of Raja Rao’s short story “The Cow of the Barricades” both enriches and structures our understanding, linking the linguistic and literary interest:

[Lehmann’s] presentation proposes within a model of communication three strata; a phonological, a grammatical, and a semiological. Assuming these strata, a text linguist interprets the linguistic material relating the physical phenomena or articulatory and auditory mechanisms using sound waves with the communication situation, including the referential realm, the culture, the language, the social setting and the participation of communicator and audience. These distinctions already make up a rich area for analysis by the text linguist and literary critic. But the three strata provide grounds for added richness. In each of these linguistic strata there are sub‐strata with their own elements; the elements are interrelated by means of the formulae known in linguistic study as rules. For illustration I list the seven sub‐strata in the grammatical stratum. Beginning with the largest entity these sub‐strata are: discourse, paragraph, sentence, clause, phrase, word and the smallest segment of grammatical form, the morpheme. Exploring the treatment of these substrata and of their characteristic elements by a poet might well occupy any literary critic. Phrased differently, the exploration of such well‐ identified arrays corresponds to the literary critic’s task: making explicit the characteristics of their critical procedures in “der Kunst des Lesens—the art of reading.”

(Lehmann n.d.: 20–21)

Such analysis via strata and substrata will, as Lehmann suggests, make “explicit the characteristics of critical procedures.” The other point apposite to the general thrust of what I have been saying is that while the procedures have been applied to native‐based English literatures, they have yet to be systematically employed in the study of new literatures. Starts have been made, but they do not always take into account “the referential realm, the culture, the language, the social setting and the participation of communicator and audience”; that is, the social reality and the constituting genetic/semiotic systems. And where they do, there remain problems of balance between the emphases on each realm.

The network of issues connected with criticism of and creation in the new literatures is endless. It metamorphoses as life and language move. But two further suggestions may provide a useful concluding note. The first concerns the formation of an idiolect; the second, critical approaches. Quarrying into English – or any language – to secure an inwardness sufficient to manage irony, pun, paradox, specific rhythms, striking metaphor, intricate patterns of images, and shades of meaning is never easy. Moreover, the process of formulation is not always conscious. The writer judges as his own critic, but what he judges is both consciously and unconsciously formulated. The mind has its secret thesaurus in which words long unused emerge aptly. The general process includes using language to explore and define an idea, a feeling; the contrary state is an idea, a feeling in search of words. For the writer in the third movement the challenge is complicated by a bilingual, bicultural inheritance. Concepts, the link between custom, behaviour, the cosmos, and language as posited by the mother tongue often cannot move across into English. Achebe did not see this as representing a serious problem, but others have. Perhaps it depends on one’s experience with English, with the conception of creativity’s demands in a polydialectal situation. Writers as geographically dispersed as Edith Tiempo (Philippines), Derek Walcott (Jamaica), and Gabriel Okara (Nigeria) have thought it necessary to bend English to achieve satisfactory statement (see Thumboo 1986: 253–254). Acts of translation and transcreation mark their creativity, though in this case critical judgments do not possess an original text as benchmark. Nonetheless, the methods of translation, especially those used in English and indigenous languages and covering work in both directions, are useful, if we keep in mind the essential spirit of freedom noted as far back as John Dryden’s preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680, n.p.):

All translation, I suppose, may be reduced to these three heads. First, that of metaphrase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another. The second way is that of paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not altered. The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the ground‐work, as he pleases.

That new literatures are at least bicultural formations – in which English and its literary inheritance are common – has not been sufficiently realized, except by those who belong to the social reality or one that is comparable. This has led, among other things, to the feeling in certain quarters that criticism from the outside, the mother‐tongue bases especially, remains metropolitan centered and, at times, imperial. The sense of distance, of minimal sympathy was never a widespread sentiment in the Anglo diaspora. The coming of age of their literatures was not traumatic: their social realities were offshoots, grafts. The new literatures, which belong to ex‐colonies, are a different case altogether.

Nor have critics belonging to the third movement been innocent of misinterpreting works that rest on their own or other social realities. But greater difficulties are faced by those from outside these realities. Some have worked through these; their work shows that without that grasp, inappropriate assumptions or questionable points of departure may misdirect attention. The most potent sin is the tacit assumption that as they use English, or a variety of it, the new literatures are an extension of English literature, and that its critical practice ought to cope with these fledglings comfortably. This is hardly the case when put to the test. Where the criticism has been illuminating, we find reorientations that take into account the contexts of the work.

10 Conclusion

We ought to treat the new literatures as separate in certain essential aspects despite their sharing of English. Moreover, they are – with the exception of West Indian English writing – but one of two, three, or more literatures within the social reality. The focus on English should be balanced by the realization that the literature in it is part of a national literary system upon which its survival and growth depend. Such are the complexities to be unravelled that the methods of comparative literature may be adopted with profit. The justification strengthens as we move into each literature and discover its distinctiveness, its unique place in a possible whole. Provided that the comparative spirit is sensitively attentive and exploratory, its methods will take us further toward understanding and judging new literatures, individually and as a group, how they relate to each other and to mother‐tongue‐based literatures, and whether we can ultimately attempt an overview of all literatures in English.

I have sought to suggest what historical and contemporary forces lie behind the emergence and shaping of the new literatures in English, and possible ways of looking at them. The preoccupation with theme, with linguistic and literary resources within and in response to main and subordinate social realities, is by no means exhaustive. This chapter is a plea for constructive understanding as a prelude to literary judgment. There are no conclusions, only beginnings. The urging of more sharply focused and informed criticism of the individual literatures must resist irredentist impulses. Collectively, such criticism should form part of a common enterprise that will, over the long term and especially if it combines literary and linguistic studies, bring about a clear, richer sense of how English has not only spread but also brought forth new literatures upon which the sun will never set.

REFERENCES

Achebe, Chinua. 1989 [1964]. Arrow of God, 2nd edn. New York: Anchor Books.
Alvarez‐Pereyre, Jacques. 1984. The poetry of commitment in South Africa. London: Heinemann.
Awoonor, Kofi. 1976. Tradition and continuity in African literature. In Rowland Smith (ed.), Exile and tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean literature, 166–172. Dalhousie: Dalhousie University Press.
Bolton, Kingsley (ed.). 2002. Hong Kong English: Autonomy and creativity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Breitinger, Eckhard & Sander Reinhard (eds.). 1985. Studies in Commonwealth literature. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Gordimer, Nadine. 1973. The black interpreters: Notes on African writing. Johannesburg: SPROCAS/RAVAN.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Arnold.
Kachru, Braj B. 2005. Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Lehmann, Winfred. n.d. Literature and linguistics: Text linguistics. In C. D. Narasimhaiah & C. N. Srinath (eds.), English, its complementary role in India, 18–29. Mysore: Dhvanyaloka.
Markandaya, Kamala. 1973. One pair of eyes: Some random reflections. The Literary Criterion 11(1). 14–25.
Njara, Emmanuel. 1982. Stylistic criticism and the African novel. London: Heinemann.
Parthasarathy, R. 1973. The Indian writer’s problems: Poet in search of a language. The Literary Criterion 11(1). 126–129.
Quirk, Randolph. 1974. The linguist and the English language. London: Arnold.
Royston, Robert (ed.). 1973. Black poets in South Africa. London: Heinemann.
Thumboo, Edwin. 1984. The writer and society: Some Third World reminders. Solidarity 99. 24–32.
Thumboo, Edwin. 1985. Twin perspectives and multi‐ecosystems: Tradition for a Commonwealth writer. World Englishes 4(2). 213–221.
Thumboo, Edwin. 1986. Language as power: Gabriel Okara’s The Voice as a paradigm. World Englishes 5(2‐3). 249–264.
Wellek, René & Austin Warren. 1955. Theory of literature. London: Jonathan Cape.
Wendt, Albert. 1982. Towards a new Oceania. In Guy Amirthanayagam (ed.), Writers in east‐west encounter: New cultural bearings, 202–215. London: Macmillan.