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13Negotiating language: Postcolonialism and nationalism in Philippine literature in English Lily Rose Tope Introduction The use of English as a communicative and literary medium raises a wide range of issues relating to language and nationalism. As a colonial legacy, English is remembered for the cultural violence it has wrought in colonial classrooms, and has been seen as an instrument of linguistic displacement and social stratification. In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981) traces the colonial process of imposition in his discussion of the dual character of language. In its simpler form, language is communication; it transmits real events, speech and the written word as well as providing the means of exchange in simple relationships and reflexive representations. It provides Ngugi’s Gikuyu child with a serendipitous world of familiar ways and accepted traditions. In its complex form, language is culture; it emerges from shared experiences — attitudes, knowledge, rhythms — which eventually form a way of life distinguishable from other ways of life. As culture, language is transformed into a bearer of values which form the ‘basis of people’s identity, the basis of their particularity’. It thus becomes ‘the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history’ (Ngugi, 1981: 15) and the representation of the image the people make of themselves. Because English has been a language of disruption and a wedge between communication and culture, it is difficult to imagine English performing as a creator of community, as a language of nationalism. Nevertheless, colonialism is not a one-way process, and the colonized have impinged on the language of the colonizer consciously and otherwise. Both New (1978) and Brathwaite (1984) believe that the confrontation of cultures inevitably leads to a ‘new’ language that contains elements of all the cultures involved. For Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989a), literature, particularly narrative, has the capacity to domesticate even the most alien experience, with no need to reproduce the experience to signify its nature. Meaning is formed not in the mind but in the confluent ‘message event’ participated in by language, writer, and reader 262 Lily Rose Tope (Ashcroft et al., 1989a: 59–60). The history of the English language in colonial societies, though, contains developments suggesting and even proving that English can be decolonized and used to express the colonized’s sense of nation. The deliberate sculpting of English to resist the culture originally attached to it and make it speak for the colonized is a significant cultural feat. This implies the unhinging of English from its cultural moorings so that it may be claimed by non-English cultures. Pragmatic concerns make the continuous presence of English essential, and therein lies the contradiction. While the language is purported to be a carrier of colonial attitudes, it too is the language of modernization and international understanding. The cosmopolitan values attributed to its internationalization keep its user in touch with the world and may be a source of liberating concepts, even though the values are also ironically responsible for one’s alienation from his or her community life. Moreover, the cosmopolitanization of English gives it a neutrality that maintains its ‘referential meaning’, but divorces it from ‘cultural connotation in the context of a specific culture’ (Kachru, 1986: 9). And yet, as more people speak English, proponents of the communal languages warn of the power of English to erase ethnicity or identity and unbind one from his or her cultural foundations. English and the Filipino writer English in the Philippines is accepted as the language of technology, diplomacy, and trade; expressions of nationalism seem to be the turf of the national language, Filipino. Hence, advocates of a socially-oriented literary tradition look askance at writers in English, and the allegation that a foreign language is inadequate as a medium of expressing local sentiments has made nationalistic writers suffer problems of credibility, as there is the perception that English cannot serve as the language of the masses. In my opinion, this allegation is simplistic and does not consider the mutability of language or the dynamism of the cultural response to colonialism. Nevertheless, the use of English in the expression of the national spirit is a contradiction and dilemma central to the postcolonial situation. Choosing English as a literary medium can be perceived as a political position that has literary ramifications, and a choice that has forced a number of writers into positions and actions of loyalty (or disloyalty) depending on the dictates of the individual conscience. On the one extreme, there are those...

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