3 Language, Race and Gender – Issues and Debates

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

LANGUAGE, RACE, GENDER: ISSUES AND DEBATES

Aim of the section: To give the student an idea of a living ‘society’ in which the characters and the world of the literary texts may be placed, we must construct the world of the text. This section details some historical factors shaping social life within a few broad but key areas: language, race, gender. These outlines are meant to demonstrate how the student can further her own knowledge of the textual world by locating individual authors in their own contexts. Authors themselves have critically examined these areas and their relation to literature: these texts will be referred to and close reading is recommended.

Importance of the section for the entire course: Since we are studying literature, our concentration, even theoretically, is on understanding the resources available to the author to be moulded into the text such that our entry into her created world is facilitated.

1. Colonial Cultural Policy

As we have already noted (Module 1), the formation of a culture resulting from colonial contact is influenced by the colonisers’ policy on education and social ‘reforms’ including women’s roles in society through regulation of social institutions like marriage. In Anglophone colonies, the concerns of the colonisers’ society as well as the desire of the colonised to emulate, question or refashion colonial culture played a role in the formation of ‘modern’ society following contact with the colonisers. The British followed the policy of Indirect Rule, framed by Lord Lugard (See Module 1). This elicited a particular response, which now appears characteristic of Anglophone colonies. Aspects of this policy and effects upon literary genre are examined below.

Colonial education resulted in the paradox of poets writing in another’s language, when poetry is the idiom of a specific language-culture. Europhone poets in erstwhile colonies are dislocated by their education, literary inheritances, class status and geographic mobility. They have themselves not proclaimed that they wish to interpret their world to the first world, but critics therein, like K.A.Appiah (1994) have read them in this way. Reading this poetry demands a set of tools that we are in the process of forging.

1.1. LANGUAGE: How did English enter the colonies?

The colonial policy on English and vernacular education decided the field of written literature in English. The educational policy of the British facilitated their administrative policy of Indirect Rule. Macaulay’s stated aim was to use English education to create a buffer class between the colonial master and the colonised subject of the British crown. The knowledge of English also served to create a colonised elite, and became the stepping stone to power, as exemplified by Chinua Achebe’s Obi in No Longer At Ease (1960). This laid the foundation of the middleclass in African societies, the readers and writers of African literature in English.

 A CARIBBEAN

The people of African descent were kidnapped from their homes and enslaved. They thus lost touch with their own languages. The slaves of the Caribbean had to fashion a  collective identity based in their common condition, which led to the birth of Creole as a language. It is the most direct response to the introduction of English in the Caribbean, in which the principle of plurality is inherent: it picks up whatever fits the needs of the moment  and  uses  it  to  vividly  express  lived  reality.  Thomas’   book Creole   Grammar exemplifies the attempt to institutionalise the spoken language with rules of grammar so that it could be recognised officially – otherwise“members of Trinidad’s working class were being rendered voiceless by legal and religious institutions. Creole speakers were at a disadvantage” (97). Part of his goal is to prove that Creole was not just “mispronounced French” (97) but rather a distinctive (and distinctively Trinidadian) language. He analysed Trinidadian particularity using the terms and methodologies familiar to the members of the Philological Society, and recognizable to European linguists. In Anglophone African literature, the pidgin of Wole Soyinka’s plays or Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah finds its way into the text only as a special marker of character and situation: in the Caribbean, however, Creole is a literary language, established by local poets and writers.

The institutionalisiation of the language has a history of common people’s struggles. Deprived of education due to their slave status, the newly freed population of African descent in the Caribbean aspired to power and social status by learning correct English. After the first wave of writers who emulated the coloniser’s literature, voices that echoed the local speech and ideas began to appear. The introduction of Caribbean authors into the English curriculum occurred surreptitiously in the 1960s through the efforts of teachers and critics like Kenneth Ramchand (West Indian Narrative : An Introductory Anthology , 1996) followed by the establishment of the Caribbean Examination Council, in 1972. This body gradually built up a literature syllabus for the secondary educational level based on Caribbean literary production.

1.1 B AFRICA

In Africa, the educated middleclass consisted of members of the colonial bureaucracy. Their counterparts were the babus of India, beginning with the ‘writers’ hired by the East India Company to administer its Indian trade. These men were allegedly the backbone of the Nigerian nationalist movement (See Module 1). The leaders of these anti-colonial movements were directly influenced by the liberal and socialist ideas formed in Britain and transported to the colonies through the English language press and publishing. Many young men from the merchant/ trader class of Indian society also won scholarships to study in the ‘mother country’ and while in England, became sensitive to issues of race and national sovereignty . British political thought and its popular manifestations influenced the formation of nationalist movements in Africa and the Caribbean, as in India. The problem was cobbling together a ‘nation’, theoretically perceived as a homogenous entity, from a diverse population brought under one administrative unit for the convenience of the colonial rule. This single entity functioned successfully as long as the struggle was against a physically present common antagonist, the British coloniser. Once the coloniser departed, the ground for commonality shrank. Shared history of anti-colonial nationalist movements gave way to group interests. The British policy that tended to divide African populations on the basis of similarity rather than localised difference, constructed the ‘tribes’. After independence, these ethnic communities, welded together in a single nation by colonial policy framed at the Berlin Conference, started competing for what on the African continent was known as a ‘slice of the national cake’. The conflict over these diminishing slices is part of Africa’s troubled history today.

Following European contact, most of sub-Saharan Africa, that used to transact in local languages without scripts or written literature, now came into contact with European languages disseminated through colonial education with written literatures. The  latter  claimed civilised status on the basis of the written corpus, and attempted to mould the colonised in their own image, disseminating civilised culture through the language of the coloniser. So a tension between the local language writer and the English writer characterises the literary scene in multilingual African nations, much as is the case in India. The politics between English writing and writing in African languages form two sides of the Language Debate considered below. In the Caribbean however, since there was no living local language, English itself had to be remodeled for adequate expression of the lives and struggles of the slaves and their progeny.

THE LANGUAGE DEBATE

IN JUNE 1962, there was a writers’ gathering at Makerere titled “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” In the essay “English and the African Writer” (1965, Transition 8) Achebe clarified the relation between the colonised writer and the colonial language. Prior to the publication of Achebe’s report and ruminations on the  1962 meeting, the Nigerian writer and activist Obi Wali had reported on the conference in the essay, “The dead end of African Literature” and argued that African literatures must be written in African languages or lose their artistic validity and autonomy. This appeared in Transition, the same journal which later published Achebe’s essay. According to Wali, “The whole uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium of educated African writing is misdirected and has no chance of advancing African literature and culture” (1963, Transition 6, 20). His advocacy of African languages as a way out of a dead end clearly influenced Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o when he was chair of the English department at Nairobi University. He and his colleagues Taban LoLiyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba proposed the ‘Abolition of the English Department’, to be replaced with a department of Literature. Ngugi explains this proposal thus:

In asking for a change of name from the English Department to simply Literature and the reorganisation of the curriculum so that African literature and the related literature would constitute the inner circle with English and other European literatures in translation in the outer circles, (the paper) questioned the cognitive process, what was central and what was ancillary and their relation in the acquisition of knowledge in a post colonial context. A debate followed, in which the proposal was rejected in the academy.

Wole Soyinka (1975) argues for a continental language; a pan- African language, chosen from one of the indigenous African languages to be taught and spoken across the continent of Africa. Again, Soyinka’s pro- Africanism is commendable but unfeasible because the English language as a means of communication in some parts of Africa was learnt by force. But now, we have independent African states. So, it becomes a daunting task how to evolve a common language that everybody from the Arab world to the Zulu can identify with.

Achebe proposed that English must be “tamed, nativized and actively manipulated to admit its foreign surroundings”. Thus, English must be compelled to blend with the environment (of its users), thereby producing artistic works that will be aesthetically pleasing. It is by so doing that Africans can hope to have the best African literary works in English and to achieve “an extra- ordinary novelty of expression and yet all of them blossoming on the native root”.

The demand for African languages as the medium of written literature, and the encouragement of knowledge in the local languages culminated in writers and scholars from all regions of Africa gathering in Asmara, Eritrea from January 11 to 17, 2000 at the conference titled “Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century”, asserting that African languages are essential for the decolonization of African minds and for the  African  Renaissance. This was the first conference on African languages and literatures ever to be held on African soil, with participants from East, West, North, Southern Africa and from the diaspora, to examine the state of African languages in literature, scholarship, publishing, education, and administration in Africa and throughout the world.

2.  RACE

Critics have pointed out that anthropology, the study of ‘man’ is a discipline related to colonisation; western scholars began to ‘study’ the populations they encountered in their travels to find resources for capital. Wole Soyinka was given a year’s appointment at Christchurch College , Cambridge and found himself lecturing on literature and society in the Cultural Anthropology department, as the literature department had still to acknowledge “ a mythical beast as African Literature”(Soyinka 1976) . This prompts Soyinka to review his theory of literature, combining it with performance and linking it to the world which produces it.

The image of the primitive African scientifically and morally justified the treatment of the slave and the colonised as uncivilised and sub-human. The theories that tried to explain mental and physical capacity by skin colour and biometrics were formulated and then institutionalised as the basis of racial discrimination and exploitation. This reached its height in the apartheid doctrine of racial segregation and ‘separate development’ propagated by the Boers, i.e. the Dutch settlers in Southern Africa. Racist ideology played a great role in the formulation of colonial policy.

In the Caribbean, the tripartite racial structure of white, mulattos and blacks is intertwined with a class conflict peculiar to the plantation economy of the Caribbean. Francophone Caribbean theorist Frantz Fanon affirms that “the fact of blackness” lies not in the body but in the cultural disciplining that teaches us what to see : “below the corporeal schema” is a “historical-racial schema”, constructing a racial narrative through which we come to understand and interact with our world .As a result, black people tend either to succumb to a “mimetic impulse,” through which they try to imitate white values, or they resort to the valorization of blackness that Negritude writers promoted. Neither of these responses to colonialism, according to Fanon, offers a viable alternative to the black man”.

Historically, colonial hierarchies moulded the different races in the Caribbean into their social roles, beginning with specific types of education : analysis of the educational system of that period reveals the consistent concern that the lower classes should be anglicized but not encouraged to pursue social mobility and that the postprimary education system . The colonisers carefully regulated access to social mobility. For example, the stated aim of the Boys Model School was to prepare its students to ‘fill any position short of that requiring classical attainments’ . The Protestant, state-funded Queen’s Collegiate School and the Catholic St. Mary’s College of the Immaculate Conception disagreed about the relative importance of a classical or technical education. The colonial educational system itself worked to shape the colonised and limit them to fit different slots in the colonial social hierarchy. This was the mental colonisation against which grew the ideal of transnationalism, a strategy adopted by the self- taught Afro-Caribbean intellectuals of the Anglophone islands, who aspired to best the coloniser in the performance of his own culture. For instance, the valuing of and opportunity to master classical studies became a way for intellectuals of color to claim and demonstrate their equal capacity for civilization. Pierre Bourdieu (1986) calls this educational capital. It is a common phenomenon in the earliest stages of the colonies, encouraged by benefits, both of financial and social status, in acquiring the education of the coloniser. The very notion of the learned man in the nineteenth-century English world carried within it an expectation of international sophistication. The colonised intellectuals proved that this sophistication was not limited to the white man, as presumed by the English world.

2.1. Transnationalism

Race is also the foundation of solidarity in the Caribbean as it was the cause of the oppression of the slaves of African descent. Thus the Caribbean linguist Thomas argues that “the relationship between ‘educated black men’ and their ‘unenlightened fellow-blacks’ has nothing of the ‘cynicism’ of Englishmen towards ‘their less favored countrymen’ ” (162). The common yoke of racism creates a commonality between different classes of colonised society and extends across the African continent and the diaspora.

The community built upon racial exploitation and dispossession also connects Africa with those of African descent who were forcibly scattered across the world as slaves. The common problems of racial discrimination and the history of slavery and colonisation of different kinds have created shared political and cultural agendas across national boundaries, thus leading to internationalism in ideologies like Pan Africanism and Negritude. Race relates Africans on the continent to those in the diaspora, while the diaspora shares a common origin in the continent. Hence African diasporic cultures in the Americas is rooted in the remembered or retrieved culture of Africa, giving rise to a confluence of identities based on race, location and history, resulting in a politics and aesthetics of transnationalism.

2.1A

As a political ideology, transnationalism means the ability to judge when, and how to invoke or construct local roots and global routes in the fight for equality and freedom. For most inhabitants of the Caribbean, this is a known condition, beginning with the movement to the island, from the place of their origin. For the slaves and later the indentured labourers from Asia, the place of origin’ was lost; for the English who went back and forth, it was a long and tortuous absence, and a return filled with great wealth but also great danger – ranging from the perils of sea-voyage to voodoo. This creates a transnational solidarity and a community characteristic of the Caribbean.

2.1 B

Another form of transnationalism results from the culture of colonial education. This was of a special nature in the Caribbean (See Module 3.) Its effects may be seen in the rebuttal by Thomas of the English travel writer J A Froude. The latter described the Caribbean as a place of sterile imitations. Thomas criticised Froude’s own limited international knowledge: given that slaves were all over the world – in the Americas, in the Caribbean, even in parts of Europe – what did Froude know about the world if he did not have any idea that “the Caribbean’s ‘Negro inhabitants’ are distinguished not only by differences in ‘local surroundings and influences,’ . . . but also by ‘the great diversity of their African ancestry.’ ”Thomas constructs the idea of transnationalism on the very basis which leads to the maximum oppression of the peoples of African descent: race. He attempted to explain the natural crossing of national boundaries by Caribbean individuals with reference to regional and racial similarities rather than through the relations to the colonising or slave-owning societies.

 2.1C           

As an aesthetic that guides the creation of  literature, transnationalism may be exemplified by  the venerated oral poet Louise Bennett who apart from being a national poet in Jamaican Creole, is also influential in black British poetry, resulting from her residence in Great Britain in the mid-1940s and early 1950s. Her writing shows the result of contact across national boundaries, intertwining cultures, histories, and topographies from the coloniser’s culture with one’s own dispossessed cultural memories, to create a Caribbean culture, whether it is called Jamaican, Trinidadian or Barbadian. This is made possible by melding both imported and local traditions, responding to global migrations, modernizations, and decolonizations that have shaped the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Besides this, in current times, the many varied and tremendously popular forms of music derived from African sources across the world offer many sources to study the aesthetics of transnationalism.

3. GENDER

Gender is both a social construct, helping us make sense of temporally and spatially located social worlds and a social relation that enters into and constitutes other relations in society. Like all social relations in colonised space, relations of gender are also influenced by the nature of colonisation and the policy of the metropolis towards the periphery (or the ‘mother’ country and the colony, or the colonising ‘first’ and the colonised ‘third’ worlds). These relations differ in specific stages of the process of capital formation and accumulation. The demands of capital and particular forms of gender hierarchisation were simultaneously imposed upon colonised societies, through the attempt to integrate the colonised economy into the structure of colonial and then global capital. The entirety of women’s lives in ‘post’colonial ‘third’ world societies is affected by such policy and ideological interventions and so the space for feminist struggle here includes all areas of women’s lives. Contact with the colonizing societies could be realised in the form of resistance, negotiation or assimilation. Generally, colonial contact resulted in the convergence of three interacting influences: the gender organisation and gender ideology prevailing in the society to which the coloniser came; the gender ideology and organisation that the coloniser brought, and sought to impose upon the colonised society, in a bid to civilise the natives; and finally, the gender ideology and relations based upon the dynamics between existing gender organisation and colonial policy (Chanda 2000). The interaction between these influences form the materiality of gender relations in a postcolonial society. Scholars have identified the difference in goals and strategies between feminism located in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, as different from western feminisms that were responses to metropolitan industrial societies.

Existing gender organisation in African societies could be matrifocal as well as patrifocal, i.e. the family was organised around either the male or the female lineage. In the former case it was matrilineal, in the latter patrilineal. In some societies, women relocated to their husbands’ houses, but some societies were not virilocal : men relocated to their wives’ villages, in matrilocal societies. The practice of polygamy and the organisation of gender forms the basis of pre- colonial society. The introduction of western gender ideology distorted the local gender practices and created a social ideology of gender in which the oppressive practices of western patriarchy further exacerbated the oppression of traditional local patriarchies, without providing women the support of existing gender and age based societies that used to protect them earlier. In Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story or Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde, this clash of gender ideologies and the effects upon women in traditionally polygamous matrifocal societies, i.e. the Fanti and the Igbo respectively, are represented. The gradual adaptation of western gender practices and the effect upon women who were themselves opened to the influence of colonisers’ cultures as a form of modernity through colonial education, is explicitly dealt with in Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions or Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood . In Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, we meet a West African female protagonist who resists this colonisation of the mind.

The interpretation of traditional gender ideology hinges on the economic system of polygamy. In societies where men were allowed to take more than one wife, they could do so only when they provided enough land for the woman to farm, so that she was independent of her husband economically. This was necessary as the mother was responsible for the upbringing of her own children, and she provided for them from the land given to her by her husband at marriage. This led to a family unit being composed of the mother and her children. In a matrilineal polygamous society, the father has rights over the children, but little role in their daily upbringing, as we see in the polygamous compound of Okonkwo, in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The role of the father is thus not the same as that of the patriarch of a monogamous Christian family, where the father controls the lives of the family. In African societies, complementarity between the genders, rather than a hierarchy was imposed, since women’s ability to give birth was seen as beyond male control or comprehension and hence respected. Women’s societies and age sets were important institutions of equal power in village organisation, parallel to a male structure with a voice and representation in village affairs. Other forms of organisation, like among the Akan speaking peoples of West Africa, the Queen Mother was the source of power and governance. However, the introduction of colonial administrative and economic structures followed the colonial gender ideology. Parallel female organisations, whether political or social, were ignored and suppressed, causing all social power to pass into male hands. The colonisers also were unaware of the customary agricultural practices, with some crops designated as women’s crops and some as male. Generally, the former were food crops. All economic support to agriculture that came from the colonisers was given to men rather than women, because the colonial gender ideology did not differentiate between crops and could not conceive that conjugal partners, i.e. a husband and wife, could hold property separately. Thus the impoverishment of women in the colonies went hand in hand with less support to traditional food crops grown by women, leading to severe food crises in the continent. Both these were results of the patriarchal gender economy imposed by the colonisers.

Reference

1. Achebe, Chinua (1987) Anthills of the Savannah
2. Achebe, Chinua (1958) Things Fall Apart
3. Achebe, Chinua (1960) No Longer At Ease
4. Achebe, Chinua (1965) Essay in Transition 8 “English and the African Writer”
5. Aidoo, Ama Ata (1977) Our Sister Killjoy
6. Aidoo, Ama Ata (1993) Changes: A Love Story
7. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) The Forms of Capital
8. Chanda,I. (2006) “Feminsim in Perspective” in Schwarz and Ray eds Companion to Postcolonial Studies
9. Dangaremgba, Tsitsi (1988) Nervous Conditions
10. Emecheta, Buchi (1979) Joys of Motherhood
11. Emecheta, Buchi (1994) Kehinde
12. Fanon, Frantz (1967) Black Skin, White Masks
13. Froude, J.A. (1887) The English in the West Indies: Or, The Bow of Ulysses
14. Ngũgĩ, Wa Thiong’o (2012) 26, Globalectics: Theory and Politics of Knowing
15. Oyewumi, Oyeronke (2003) Abiyamo: Theorizing African Motherhood
16. Ramchand, Kenneth (1996) West Indian Narrative: An Introductory Anthology
17. Soyinka, Wole (1976) Myth, Literature and the African World
18. Thomas, J.J. (1869) The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar
19. Wali, Obi (1963) “The Dead End of African Literature” Transition 6: 20
20. www.culturalsurvival.org/…/asmara–declaration-african-languages-and-li…
21. Appiah, K.A.   (1994)   Race,   Culture   Identity   :       Misunderstood Connections http://philpapers.org/archive/APPRCI.pdf
22. Soyinka, Wole , “Telephone Conversation” www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP2yLdmn_bg