Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture

13. A Vision of Unity: Brathwaite, Ngugi, Rushdie and the Quest for Authenticity

13 A Vision of Unity: Brathwaite, Ngugi, Rushdie and the Quest for Authenticity Mac Fenwick This paper addresses three questions. First, how are writers and intellectuals creating, maintaining or giving voice to authentic, local cultural traditions in the face of rapid globalization? Second, is there a global voice or tradition growing up around us that can authentically claim to encompass these local voices? And third, what is the relationship between local and global forms? As I hope that the form of these questions makes clear, I believe that an understanding of the relationship between local and global can be approached through an exploration of the notion of authenticity itself. I would like to begin these notes with three rather lengthy quotations on the nature of the relationship between authenticity and the processes of cross-cultural exchange and encounter. The first two concern the search for forms that authentically represent local traditions, and the third speaks to the creation of an authentically global perspective . The first is from Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820: The single most important factor in the development of Jamaican society was . . . a cultural action—material, psychological and spiritual—based upon the stimulus response of individuals within the society to their environment and—as white /black, culturally discrete groups—to each 181 other. The scope and quality of this response and interaction were dictated by the circumstances of the society’s foundation and composition— a ‘‘new’’ construct, made up of newcomers to the landscape and cultural strangers each to the other; one group dominant, the other legally and subordinately slaves. This cultural action or social process has been defined within the context of this work as creolisation. (1971:296) This next paragraph is from Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: What they [European-language-speaking members of the comprador neo-colonial class] have produced despite any claims to the contrary, is not African literature. . . . What we have created is another hybrid tradition , a tradition in transition, a minority tradition that can only be termed as Afro-European literature; that is, the literature written by Africans in European languages. (1986:26) Finally, Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands: The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things. . . . [P]eople in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier. (1991:124) For Brathwaite, creolization is the ‘‘cultural action or social process’’ that has given rise to the authentic creole culture of Jamaica. He argues that this culture has existed from the earliest colonization of the West Indies, but that it has been suppressed by the dominant (white) society’s continued mimicry of European metropolitan culture. Brathwaite goes out of his way to state that this creole culture is not ‘‘fixed and monolithic’’ and that ‘‘there are infinite possibilities within these distinctions and many ways of asserting identity. A common colonial and creole experience is shared among the various divisions, even if that experience is variously interpreted’’ (1971:310). The authentic culture of the West Indies is, according to this argument, an expression of the ‘‘infinite possibilities’’ and ‘‘various interpretations’’ embodied within the process of creolization. What is authentically West Indian, according to Brathwaite, is the process of becoming creole. Authenticity is thus grounded not in iconoclastic truth, but in a plurality that rejects all absolute positions. It is this process of becoming creole that Ngugi’s stance would seem to reject. His argument that what the Afro-European writer has 182 Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture produced is ‘‘not African literature’’ begs the question ‘‘What is?’’ Ngugi’s apparently iconoclastic answer is quite clear: only a literature that is written in an African language can be authentically African. This difference is not the result of an essential split between the two over the nature of cultural authenticity; rather, their disagreement is the result of their different strategic concerns. According to Brathwaite, if West Indian writers are to authentically express West Indian experience, they must use what he calls the West Indian ‘‘nation language.’’ This nation language, as a...