The Inadequacy of English... in English

English is my native language. I love communicating and words. I love seeing words fit together into stories and poems; I love reading and writing. English is the only written language that I know and therefore the only language in which I read and I write. That is why reading Decolonization of the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong'o was a sad experience for me.

It's sad for me to see how my language was used to oppress Ngugi and the people around him. It's sad for me to read Ngugi's conclusion that English is not a language in which he wants to write. It's as if the English language were a mallet used to hammer young Ngugi into the ground, and now that he has clawed his way out of the soil he feels the need to hammer right back. I know English has been used to make beautiful things, not just oppress the people of Kenya. Is English in all its forms forever tainted by this misuse?

Reading this essay, I cannot help but reverse the situation. What if I were to learn Ngugi's mother-tongue; Kikuyu? What if I were to become proficient enough in Ngugi's language to write in Kikuyu? Could Kikuyu carry the weight of my experience? Is Ngugi saying that English is unsuitable for his purposes simply because it was not his first language, or because it was the language that was used to colonize him?

When I first read the name Dodge W. Livingstone, Jr. in Wedding at the Cross I thought it was simply a way for Ngugi to illustrate how ridiculous it is for an African person to seek colonization (where is Dodge W. Livingstone senior?). Then somebody pointed out that his name was Dodge Living. After some thought I have realized that his name is also Living Stone.
Wow.
That name alone is enough to prove to me that Ngugi is brilliant.

What was the Name of the Narrator Again?

That's right, it's time to talk about Nadine Gordimer's writing, and that includes her habit of not naming her characters and especially her narrators.

Of Gordimer's unnamed narrators in the three stories that we read, I found the woman in Amnesty the easiest to identify with. Let us call her the Woman. Gordimer intended for the Woman to be easy to identify with because she didn't name the character: the Woman is meant to be every woman. But I think there was more to it than that. Both the narrator of Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants and Six Feet of the Country are by my standards extremely racist. I was raised to believe that racism is a very bad thing, and so it's difficult to align myself with the Gordimer's racist narrators. The Woman in Amnesty is not racist. Furthermore she has beautiful thoughts. An example of this is when the Woman's perspective husband (the Man) is sent away to an island prison. She tries to image the place where he is, but she's never seen the ocean. "But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn't imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it." I there are many reasons to feel sorry for the Woman: the father of her child is in prison, and when he gets out of prison the Man treats her as a child and not as an adult. But out of all these big reasons, I pitied the Woman for a little reason: she has never seen the sea. And when she attempted her trip to the Island I was delighted as the Woman saw the ocean. "And there it was- there was the sea. It was green and blue, climbing and falling, bursting white, all the way to the sky." It's easy to sit inside this woman's head and watch her beautiful thoughts.

Although I learned about apartheid in highschool when I read Cry, the Beloved Country, I haven’t really thought about the possibility of white men getting lost in the system. It was strange to think about Gordimer's Six Feet of the Country in which the narrator, a white man, is rendered powerless inside the beast that is apartheid. The system gives him power, how can he be powerless? Six Feet teaches me about the complexities of apartheid and racism. In my simplified brain, people who perpetrate racism and apartheid are committing evil acts against humanity. Gordimer is trying to tell me that they are only a tiny cog in the great machine; helping the machine to function because they are being turned by the machine.

Hopefully Achebe is not Falling Apart

While Girls at War and The Madman take place on the other side of the planet, Chinua Achebe's essay An Image of Africa is specifically directed at Americans in the academic world. I've never read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness but if it's ever assigned to me I will know what to expect. Reading An Image of Africa was a less conflicting experience for me than reading The Stranglehold of English Lit. because I haven't read the novel that Achebe finds so repulsive. It's much easier for me to agree with an author that a book I haven't enjoyed is evil.
From Girls at War I learned more about the horrors of war. I've heard about how terrible being a soldier on the front lines of a battle is, but this story helped me to see how difficult things are for the "civilians". It's horrible how desperate Gladys is; she has to be willing to do anything to survive.

All of Achebe's works that we read this week contained elements of fighting against oppression which is something that is very important to me (and to the vast majority of human beings on planet earth, I expect.) I think it is Achebe's excellent writing on this topic that grabs my emotional and mental attention.

It's obvious from Achebe's masterful lecture-turned-essay that he is a very intelligent man and well versed in the world of academia. As a student that's not enough to make me enjoy his work, but it makes me consider to recommending him to my father who is an academic and a reader. I really enjoyed reading both of Achebe's short stories even though they were written with the purpose of communicating to his readers bad things about colonialism, not to entertain. It's quite tricky to write an enjoyable story on unpleasant topics, and I think this shows that Achebe is an excellent writer.