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8 Talking back and writing back Introduction In its genre, that of face-to-face interviews, Interviews with Writers of the PostColonial World is rewarding, stimulating, and extremely informative.1 The team of two skilful interviewers, Jussawalla and Dasenbrock (hereafter, J and D), have made this fine book a resource for both scholars of language and literature of ‘new literature in English’ (1992: 3). They rightly hasten to explain, however, that ‘some of them [new literatures] are not so new’. One example of a long tradition of writing in English is India, as Indians began to write in the 1820s and a continuous tradition of Indian writing in English descended from that time (p. 141). The book includes interviews with fourteen writers in English representing diverse sociocultural and multilingual contexts from Kenya, Somalia, Nigeria, Trinidad, India, Pakistan, New Zealand, and ‘minority writers’ from the USA. The writers included are: Ngugi wa Thiong’o (pp. 25–41), Nuruddin Farah (pp. 43–62), Chinua Achebe (pp. 64–81), Buchi Emecheta (pp. 83–99), Sam Selvon (pp. 101– 16), Roy Heath (pp. 118–39), Raja Rao (pp. 141–55), Anita Desai (pp. 157– 79), Zulfikar Ghose (pp. 181–96), Bapsi Sidhwa (pp. 198–221), Witi Ihimaera (pp. 223–42), Rudolfo Anaya (pp. 244–55), Rolando Hinojosa (pp. 257–85), and Sandra Cisneros (pp. 287–306). A detailed introduction (pp. 3–23) provides both a backdrop for understanding the selection criteria and a brief discussion of the shared concerns of the writers. There is an index (pp. 307– 12) and each interview includes a picture of the interviewee. The introduction provides a profile of English as medium of literary creativity which encompasses practically all the continents, almost all major countries of the world, and many small nations. These include diverse cultures and language backgrounds. A significant fact is that ‘writing in English is now being done all over the world, not just in North America and the British Isles’ (p. 3). In short, the sun never sets on the writers of English, and ‘the Empire writes back with a vengeance’ (Rushdie, 1982). There is much more to it — ~ ~ 156 Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon the centre for creativity, as Steiner affirms (1975), has shifted from what used to be the citadel of the Raj, the United Kingdom. What J and D have done to focus on this international literary creativity in English is ‘to interview some of the best writers from the new literatures in English, bringing together writers from former British colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Subcontinent, as well as minority writers from New Zealand and the United States’ (pp. 4–5). The ethnic or minority writers of the USA (Rudolfo Anaya, Rolando Hinojosa, and Sandra Cisneros) are included with other writers interviewed for ‘their multilinguality and their multiculturalism’ (p. 7). Three basic questions The focus of the interviewers is on three intriguing questions concerning literary creativity in world Englishes: (a) What does it mean to write in a language that is not one’s own? (b) What does it mean to have more than one language to write in? (c) How does this affect one’s approach to English? (p. 7) These are the questions that have been asked by linguists and literary scholars for several decades now. In the case of India one thinks of, for example, P. Lal’s extensive empirical study addressing these issues (Lal, 1969). The answers by Indian English poets to Lal’s questionnaire were very perceptive. In answers to these questions one detects both agony and ecstasy for using English as the medium of creativity. This agony continues, and now years after Lal’s study, J and D have understandably not come up with a new or definitive answer. However, their interviews confirm what other studies have shown, that every writer interviewed ‘had an answer — some explicit, some implicit — to this question, but the variety of answers indicates no clear consensus’ (p. 8). There are also intriguing and provocative questions concerning what may be termed the multi-canons of Englishes and the critical criteria for evaluating these canons. One asks: To what extent can Eurocentric critical approaches be applied to Asian or African writing in English? In Africa, these questions have been articulated by Chinua Achebe and Chinweizu; in South Asia by C. D. Narasimhaiah, P. Lal, and Thiru Kandiah; and in Southeast Asia by Lloyd Fernando and Edwin Thumboo, just to name a handful of scholars. The questions raised by these scholars...

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