The Tortoise and the Leopard, or the Postcolonial Muse

Colonizers' Language/Colonized Language: The Issues at Stake

"You taught me language . . ." assumes that Caliban had no language earlier because he had no language that Prospero could understand. One wonders what his language of communication was before. Does this imply that he did not communicate at all, or that he did so like a non-human? Now that Caliban has learned Prospero's language and even won Bookers and the Nobel using it, does this imprecation still hold true? This brings us to the importance and power of intelligible language while also asking the salient question, intelligible to whom? These are questions that inform the writing of literatures in the colonizers' language and the teaching of those literatures in institutions of the once colonized. I would like to argue, however, that these questions that stem from a literary issue are not confined to literature at all--the power and status of the colonizers' language in the once-colonized country works in complex and subtle ways that permeate the postcolony's social and economic structures. Indeed, the politics of language and its playing out in the interstices of daily life may well be said to characterize the descriptive term postcolonial, a reality that cannot but inflect the work of the academic located in these areas.

In an attempt to understand and theorize these politics, this paper addresses the process of reading the literatures in the language of the colonizer written by the colonized. In all colonized societies, oral and/or written traditions of verbal art existed before the colonizers arrived with their language and the specific structures of socialization based on this language as well as particular hierarchies derived from it. In order to understand the process of production of literatures in the colonizers' language in these societies and offer certain speculations on the communities of reception that these processes interpellate, it is necessary, therefore, to consider the relations between orality and literacy and their implications for development and progress, at the basis of which lies the idea of civilization predicated upon writing and written documentation. I will attempt to show that these fundamental issues, relating to the context and process of producing literatures by the colonized in the colonizers' language, have a crucial bearing upon the academic discipline of literature as it is taught in universities of postcolonial/third world location and elsewhere. As an academic located in India, working on and teaching the literature of Nigeria—two countries that share an erstwhile colonizer and its language—it is of interest to me to see how these similar structures operate in two geographical contexts, in two different literary systems. Both of these are underpinned by a colonial past that bequeathed not only a common educational and cultural policy that included a tradition of language and literature, but also social hierarchies of opportunity and access structured by these policies. This reality leads me, located as Iam, to ask whether the seamless singularity of an "English" literature is adequate to study the varieties of English available across the globe. On the other hand, are the rubrics of "postcolonial literatures" or the offensively titled "third world literatures" adequate in methodology? While it is intuitive that the texts from different geopolitical areas, even if written in the same language, must be differently inflected, this is often ignored in many English literature syllabi in my country that pride themselves on opening the canon to include, say, Chinua Achebe. A comparative approach to the study of an English text from India, Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things,¹ and one from Nigeria, Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah,² enables us to identify the similarities and differences that their respective literary systems represent. Thus before I turn to the actual task of reading the texts that will form the focus of the paper, it is imperative to locate them in the context of the histories of two differing yet related repertoires of colonial practice. Such an approach exposes the fallacy of homogeneity and thereby interrogates the labels "English literature," "postcolonial literature," and "third world literature."

In what follows, I first construct a framework for...