Abstract
This paper intends to address the dichotomy of choosing English as a means of literary expression by writers who belong to the postcolonial domain simply by the virtue of being born in countries where the colonial construct has ceased to exist. It aims to transcend the familiar post-colonial trope of English as the idiom of choice vis-a-vis that of compulsion and tries to locate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s take on the politics of linguistic choice when it comes to literary creation. Taking active clues from her interviews and public lectures, this paper tries to situate the author’s point of view within the nativist and globalist language debate in African writing by comparing her to her literary predecessors Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, who have been prolific writers in the English language. It aims to study Adichie’s authorial perspective and narrative ideology in terms of language, literature, bilingualism, identity and power.
Keywords: post-colonial, bilingual, linguistic choice, narrative ideology, identity
Introduction
Language and linguistic expression remain critically enmeshed with one’s individual and communal identity. A sociological construct, language is not only a tool of cultural expression but also a vehicle for the cultural transmission of an entire value system that holds within itself popular norms, societal modalities, customs and simply a way of life for a group of people at a particular period. This attribute of language possibly lends itself to a deep contestation in postcolonial studies due to the very nature of the discipline that studies the impact of colonial and imperial forces on the landscape and mindscape of the colonized. This paper looks at the language debate situated in Anglophone African writing, reviews the predominant scholarly and critical leanings and locates Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ideology in using English as her authorial medium of choice, as one of the representative third generation Nigerian authors.
Contextualizing the Literary-Language Debate in African Writing in English
The postcolonial narrative places English as a distinctly political language. The primary means through which linguistic imperialism was sustained in the colonial times was through the codification of a “standard” English that was inherently imposed through a rigid educational framework. As Ngugi Wa Thiong’O believes, the domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonizing natives was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized (Decolizing the Mind 1986:16).
The resistance within this paradigm came from the pre and post-independence literary output, voices from the colonies that have used the Centre’s language to talk about the peripheral experiences. However, the post-colonial discourse on writing back and appropriating a master’s tongue to reclaim power can sometimes be simplistic, problematic and limiting in its scope to understand the entire nature of the language debate.
The argument for and against using English to identify African literature began at the language conference at the Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda in 1962. The most famous voice from the nativist camp is perhaps that of Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, a Kenyan writer who renounced writing in English after having a successful career, and started writing in his native Giyuku and Kiswahili languages. On the other side of the language debate is the pro-Anglophone writing, whose biggest advocate is the Nigerian Chinua Achebe. Achebe’s vision is more global in his understanding of the use of English and the interconnectedness of his audience.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Literary Praxis
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been a productive and well-published writer since 2003, who has dealt with important issues of humanizing Igbo history, personalizing stories especially from a gendered perspective, elaborating on issues of race, class and gender politics, both on the national and international stage. Adichie’s position as an African writer in the twenty-first century differs from Achebe’s in the second part of the twentieth.
Adichie speaks of her native tongue Igbo as the language of emotion and warmth but not one in which she feels that she can convey profound matters that interest her. But unlike Buchi Emecheta or Achebe before her, she does not feel the compulsion to write in English merely to reach a wider African audience. English for Adichie comes more naturally as a tool of expression. She posits bilingualism as a reality in her country, something she feels finds reflection in the linguistic devices in her work. She writes in an English that is not the standard British English, but of her country and her people.
Adichie feels that the term “African writer” brings with itself an incumbent implicature of loyalty to the continent, of inevitable positive representation, which may not be true. The pressures of citizenship, the proud avowal of African nationhood she feels reinforces the centre-periphery binary, one that she rejects completely.
Conclusion
This paper is aimed at locating Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s position on the English literary-language debate within the African Anglophone postcolonial paradigm. A careful observation of the canonical postcolonial writings and attitudes towards the use of English has revealed the Foucauldian correlation of a discourse and its inherent cultural power. The choice of a language for literary expression, especially for representation is of course an ideological decision. However, as Adichie attests, the discourse about language use needs to move from the notion of English as a foreign entity, a colonial baggage in the postcolonial times to a naturalized and normative presence in an increasingly globalized world. English needs to be conceived as a language that is not a stagnating and fixed colonial enterprise, but an ever-expanding, responsive, flexible medium of representation in African writing.
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