Melville in Lagos

Poet Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh pointing to painting of Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge in the entrance to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, June 25, 2019. Photo courtesy Robert K. Wallace.

To speak or write in a language, a particular language, is a political act. As Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, "to speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (17–18). Fanon appreciated, better than anyone, the vital importance of the linguistic strand in the discourse too narrowly called "identity politics." Language is a broader theme than identity, for the language one speaks conditions what one's identity is and means, and everything else besides.

What language will you speak—or if you are a poet, what language will you write? Will you accept the standards of a given language as valid? Will you aspire to conform your speech to its rules and ingratiate yourself among its speakers? Do you thereby acknowledge its authority? These questions apply to everyone, but they are of double importance to the denizen of a colonized or previously colonized country. For as Fanon described, with special but not exclusive reference to the French Caribbean, the colonial situation establishes a hierarchy of languages: on top, the language of the colonizers; on bottom, the mixed languages, the creoles and pidgins. And a poet in this context is a political actor from the very start: their first decision, in which language to write, is a political one.

Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh is such a poet; and her new poem, Ishmael Na My Name, published in the 2019 anthology After Moby-Dick, answers these questions provocatively, through a novel configuration of language, form, and subject matter.

Its language is the Nigerian Pidgin of Uwolloh's native Lagos. Formally, it consists of 136 haiku, each of which summarizes a chapter of Moby-Dick. These elements are in tension: that is part of the point. The poem is a kind of alchemical experiment, remixing Melville's already heterogeneous concoction of voices and themes until its central "message" falls away, replaced by something new. Oyinye's response to "the great American novel," to its language-games, its theology, its ambiguous homages to indigenous peoples, may be among the widest-ranging interpretations of Moby-Dick by an African author, and much of the interest of her work arises from her use of an African language, Nigerian Pidgin, in the presentation of her material.

Two notes on the language itself. First, Nigeria, unlike Fanon's Martinique, has been an independent country since 1960, and the Nigerian Pidginspeaking community is enormous, with upwards of 70 million speakers, many of whom are also fluent in one or more regional languages. Pidgin, therefore, does not stand in exactly the same marginal relation to English as Caribbean Creole does to French. The contempt that Fanon describes, of the white Frenchman toward the "jabbering" of his Carribean concitoyen, does not have a precise parallel in the case of Nigeria. Other forms of contempt certainly persist. In a recent study of Pidgin's "metacommunicative lexicon," meaning, the words with which the language reflects upon itself, Theresa Heyd gives the following Nigerian politics-forum post as her key example: "omo, if na that one dere r 20 thousand fgce boys that qualify. one of them called me d other day frm scotland forming yeye foneee because oyibo babe dey I'm side." Translation: "Friend, if this is what we're talking about, there are twenty thousand Federal Government College Enugu graduates that qualify. One of them called me the other day from Scotland faking a stupid British accent because he had his white girlfriend with him" (Heyd 669; emphasis in original). The poster implicitly reflects on and rejects a form of linguistic domination in which one's native language becomes a source of shame: "forming yeye foneee" here means to disclaim Nigerian Pidgin and grasp after a standard English, implicitly affirming the hierarchical...