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.
Language is such an emotional topic that once it has been used as a hammer, it is tainted in that context. For Ngugi, his English is excellent, better than most native speakers of English, but it has the smell of the hammer on it, so it can never be as beautiful, for him, as Gikuyu. That's okay. It's not to say that English cannot express things beautifully, but just that any language cannot be used as a hammer because language speaks to the heart of a person's expression, and this therefore at once delicate and powerful. One must be quite careful in situations like this.
ReplyDeleteNice commentary on the name. I think that is spot on.