Entwisted Tongues: Comparative Creole Literatures (review)

Entwisted Tongues: Comparative Creole Literatures, by George Lang. Studies in Comparative Literature 23. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 318 pp. ISBN 9042007370 paper.

George Lang will be pleased to learn that FOKAL (Fondayson Konesans Libète) has just reissued, in Port-au-Prince, Georges Sylvain's Cric? Crac! That was a wish he formulated in his book. This intuition serves all the better as a gauge of the pertinence of his analyses since the materialization of that wish seemed hypothetical to him: "It is possible to imagine a future edition of Sylvain transcribed into a consistent orthography, much like the modernized editions of Chaucer or Rabelais, but this hypothetical text will be contingent upon events which may or may not occur, to wit the development in Haïti of a large pool of readers desirous of reading one of their classics in more digestible and less embarrassing form" (209).

This study of comparative literature—a "survey history of several creole literatures is fundamentally the history of intellectuals who have chosen to construct a sense of the world around them" (299)—is a good measure of the intentions of the author of Entwisted Tongues, which is not to offer so much a history of objects, that is, texts, as of the men and women who are the authors of those texts. That explains the great erudition of this work which is based on an imposing bibliography. And that in turn derives as much from linguistic phenomena as from economic and political history or geography and demography.

Thus we speak of plantation societies for the creole language countries, but those plantations were above all the basis of a sugar industry, the principal activity of American economies. Now there is a direct link between the sugar industry and enslavement of blacks, just as there was a striking analogy between the profusion of Baroque art and the proliferation of creoles, a point that Lang brings out very well in the case of the Netherlands: "This historical period [Baroque] indeed overlaps with the genesis of the Atlantic creoles. [. . .] Still, there is something baroque in the profusion of creoles and in their entwisted irregularity" (71). The vision of History, in this book, is thus global.

The principal merit of this erudition is to support the method, or theoretical perspective, that guides the author. This perspective is characterized first of all by a sociological sensitivity that allows the author to distinguish between the creolist and the creolophone. The first, most often, is not a creolophone, which gives the effect, according to Lang, of creating "a division of labour between those who produce and those who analyse creole language" (16). And that explains why "creole studies remain distant from the interests of creole speakers" (16).

Native scholars, however, reflect upon their upon their practices and succeed in doing so, in creole languages. Lang cites with admiration the cases of Manual Veiga, for his Diskrision strutural di lingua Kauverdianu, and Martha Dijkhoff, for her Gramatika moderno di Papiamentu (274-75). That is why he has the objectivity, or honesty, to conclude his introduction by signaling: "Entwisted Tongues, for better or worse, is in English" (20). The theoretical perspective is also announced in the introduction from other statements such as "[. . .] creoles are thus in some sense streamline languages which display the resources, not the limitation of the mind. It may even be true, as Louis Hjemslev suggested, that 'the grammatical system of creole languages is the optimal one.' Though his assertion is difficult to prove in the court of science, its spirit underlies my argument" (3).

That idea runs through the book's analyses and interpretations and one must link it to the author's wish to study not so much a discourse upon objects, but upon speakers, human beings: "I submit that creoles themselves are prima facie evidence of the human will to articulate speech, even in the face of penury and oppression" (299). Such a view allows the author to be even more...