Hello and goodbye to English

Writing in English is a political statement, but so is the decision to eschew English. Most people in the world are inundated with English on the pretext of its (false) universality. No other language is supposed to be universal (well, may-bee French and Spanish, since on account of their illustrious imperial past and Europeanness they can be construed as sisters to English).

My little person who “happens to be” (as George Carlin defines it) literate not just in English, but also in the language of her ancestors (and a few others as well) has decided to ignore it. As I am not selling anything, not even myself, my aim here is not to reach as many “customers” as possible, but to speak to myself and my people, especially since they supposedly do not exist any more.

Why? For instance, because I was educated in my first language, and my people paid for that education. I am not like so many members of the pseudo-intelligentsia who strut their way into international schools and then cannot even write a high school essay in their original languages — yet they presume to rule over the rest of us. In addition, my people’s connection to English is not very deep — even in the 1950s, most intellectuals did not speak it (we had other colonizers). English is not my primary medium, nor should it ever be.

In my language and culture, I mostly play the role of a “cosmopolitan” intellectual, but I can also speak with a discontent peasant tongue. “I descend from no name, poor from my mother’s womb” , or, to be precise,

“Pauvre je suys de ma jeunesse,

De pauvre et de petite extrace.

Mon pere n’eut oncq grand richesse“

sang a medieval poet. So, I owe it to peasant monolinguals — my grandparents among them — to write in something else but the boring standard store of languages.

Within this particular limitation also reside universalist dreams of previous generations. I hope the day comes when we are all tempted to learn Songhrai, Warlpiri and Aymara for the sake of great literature written in them. To my great astonishment, not only the great Ngugi Wa Thiong’o agrees with me, but even a Cameroonian prince does. ‘Tis a rare moment for me to agree with an aristocrat.

I will link to materials in English, but it is merely one among many languages in the world, and I will not grant it any VIP status.

For some underpinnings, go read Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas.

With all due respect to Fela Kuti and Amos Tutuola, who handled the beast of Englishes as well as anyone.

To express myself somewhat less elegantly and more belligerently: if you believe in the existance of the white race (beyond an ideology and a powerful tool of oppression), western civilization aka mission civilisatrice, or something called free trade, this is no place for you. Even if you are able to figure out some of this blog’s content, or if you were born to my people, I do not want you as a reader.