Mandakini Dubey on the Trooth of Defiance
Review of Dohra Ahmad (ed.), Rotten English: A Literary Anthology (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).
By Mandakini Dubey
It may be in English: but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.
Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice [1]
Something like the Zeitgeist – to use one among countless imposter words that claim a home in the English language – is the only explanation for why Dohra Ahmad and I both chose “Rotten English” as an appropriate title for our respective projects in the autumn of 2006. At the very moment, I imagine, that she was finalizing the proofs for her excellent new anthology, I was finishing my syllabus for a course of the same name, trying to articulate vexing questions about the function of language in Anglophone literature. In a literal sense, the category simply denotes literature in the English language. As shaped by the taxonomical compulsions of English departments, however, Anglophone literature routinely excludes literary works from the British and American traditions, instead connoting Caribbean, African, South Asian and sometimes Canadian and Australian literature in English. Although the politics of literary canons are no longer as bloody as in the early 1990s, such occasions of institutional reification as the drawing up of a syllabus or the compilation of an anthology do allow for some reflection upon the assumptions that undergird the definition of a literary tradition; in this case, upon an unexamined homology between language and race.
The phrase “rotten English,” appropriated from the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, is a sly subversion of the standard to which it seemingly defers: the colonial imperative that is part of global English’s recombinant DNA. In a prefatory note to his novel, Saro-Wiwa talks of his subaltern hero Mene or Sozaboy (“soldier boy”), the victim, survivor and chronicler of a monstrous violence that is colonialism’s most brutal legacy:
Sozaboy’s language is what I call ‘rotten English,’ a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English. This language is disordered and disorderly. Born of a mediocre education and severely limited opportunities, it borrows words, patterns and images freely from the mother-tongue and finds expression in a very limited English vocabulary. To its speakers, it has the advantage of having no rules and no syntax. It thrives on lawlessness.” [2]
Rotten English thus claims for itself the space of travesty and disorder, where “rottenness” is replete with defiance and redefinition even as it signifies the ruptures in identity, society, and culture engendered by colonialism.
Ahmad’s choice of the phrase for her anthology’s title is a generous one, passing beyond an expression of the English language as site of postcolonial contestation to a broader inquiry into its transformations in the course of becoming a global language. In her introduction, she writes of the inadequacy of terms such as patois, dialect, creole, and pidgin to describe a literary English deliberately modeled on speech that deviates from Standard English. Instead, Ahmad celebrates the perverse etymology of “vernacular,” which originally described the language of house slaves: as she sees it, the latter-day neutrality of the word measures a historical progression from acute disempowerment to artistic authority. As Ahmad points out, the anthology’s cross-section of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction undermines the implicit hierarchy of such distinctions as “dialect” when contrasted with “language,” both because vernacular English is wielded as literary art here and because so many of the writings remind the reader that Standard English is itself simply one among other dialects; to quote “Bans O’Killing” by the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, Standard English may be “Dah language weh yuh proud o’,/Weh yu honour and respeck,” but, at the same time, the truth is “Dat it it spring from dialect!” [3]
The selections for Rotten English attest to the truth (or “trooth,” to borrow Tom Leonard’s coinage from another poem in the anthology) of Bennett’s words. By juxtaposing postcolonial examples with selections from writers like Robert Burns and Mark Twain, Ahmad reminds us of the rich history of vernacular writing within the literary canon, traditionally used to voice less privileged class and ethnic identities than those presented in the acrolect. Indeed, as she tells the reader, even Chaucer, Dante, or Shakespeare could be classified as vernacular artists who challenged the orthodoxy of what was the standard literary language of their times. Rather than keeping to the strict boundaries enforced by more usual delineations of Anglophone literature, the anthology creatively joins together writers from the margins of the Anglosphere, such as the Papua New Guinean author John Kasaipwalova, with minority writers from within the Anglo-American mainstream, like Zora Neale Hurston or Junot Diaz. It moves fluently, too, from humorists exploring the comical potential of dialect, like Jonathan Safran Foer or Roddy Doyle, to those who clearly wield it as political weapon, such as Saro-Wiwa or Charles Chestnutt. These are brave choices, denaturalizing the dichotomies between Standard and vernacular traditions on the one hand and ventilating our understanding of politics on the other.
That said, it would be erroneous to vacate the specific, radical political content of vernacular writing in the postcolony, to forget Kamau Brathwaite’s stinging judgment that “Dialect is the language used when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect.” [4] Brathwaite’s view insists on the historicity of language, suggesting that when vernacular writing has been an instrument of exploitation, it must be used with power and care towards the opposite end, that of subversion and empowerment. In the selection of essays and manifestos reproduced in the anthology, writer-critics like Brathwaite, Chinua Achebe, and M. NourbeSe Philip champion what Philip calls “Language by the people, honed and fashioned through a particular history of empire and savagery.” [5] Most of these pieces advocate the continued use of English by postcolonial writers as a way of bearing witness to identities formed and deformed by empire: Standard English must therefore be abrogated in favor of vernacular forms that are both more subaltern and more surreal. In such a view, rotten English cannot but be political, and seeming choices of craft, like code-switching between Standard English and vernacular forms within the same piece, are loaded with negotiations of identity and affiliation. A similar significance attaches to any play for a Standard English readership through the choice of glossing vernacular forms of English, as Rotten English makes clear both through its selection of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Glossary of Harlem Slang” and while presenting its own glossary at the end of the volume.
The major argument presented by writers like Achebe or James Baldwin in the anthology’s most polemical section is that rotten English offers both a space for the formation of new collective identities and a medium through which to articulate them. There’s a palpable absence of those, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who instead call for an outright rejection of English as fundamentally and unavoidably radioactive with its colonial agenda. Ahmad references Ngugi’s argument that African writers must return to indigenous languages (as he chose to do with Gikuyu), but an excerpt from his 1986 work Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature would have presented a more complete picture of the polarization that takes place around questions of identity in the use of rotten English. Instead, that argument is left for readers to infer as they read Thomas Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Indian Education (1835), in which he called for a colonial education in English in order to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste” to whom empire “may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country… to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” [6] In the years since, Macaulay’s words have had a notorious afterlife through their implication that the spread of global English is necessary to doing empire’s work. When I taught my “Rotten English” class, I found the Minute to be a useful counterpoint to historical selections from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography or the first ever Indian novel in English, Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife.
Along with offering a few selections from the nineteenth century, Rotten English does sketch a historical overview of vernacular writing over the last three centuries. Since Ahmad refuses the usual distinction between Anglophone literature and the high literary traditions of the British or American canons, she is able to link, for example, the Modernist emphasis on orality (in the writings of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, among others) with the artistic innovativeness of postcolonial Anglophone literature. She offers a quiet reminder that the aims and accomplishments of many writers who work outside Standard English are artistic rather than documentary, “works of art, not of reportage.” [7] That could be a useful corrective in the undergraduate classroom; many of my American students were intent on fixing upon transparent, authentic cultural representation in the Anglophone works we read, perhaps as a way of negotiating their own unease in the face of alterity. Often, it was a real struggle to convince them that the linguistic experiments of a Jean Rhys, a Wole Soyinka, or a Salman Rushdie are artistic choices rather than “how people there spoke in those days.”
For these and other reasons, Rotten English would be a fine addition to the Anglophone literature syllabus, especially if supplemented by works from the mid-20th century (such as V.S Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur) where it is possible to trace the formation of a self-consciously political “misuse” of the English language from out of a longer tradition of dialect writing. Along with an introduction that skillfully maps the terrain of language in Anglophone literature, the anthology thoughtfully traces some of the thematic threads that run through the texts presented here, such as the ubiquity of hucksters and hustlers in shorter fiction in the vernacular tradition, or the continued utility of the Bildungsroman formation for Anglophone novels. The excerpts chosen generate interesting questions, productive not only in an academic context but for the casual reader: why is it that poets who work in rotten English are so much more politically confrontational than their counterparts in fiction? How does the cultural affiliation of a writer in relation to Standard English shape the narrative distance from the vernacular? In what significant ways does the gendering of rotten English manifest itself?
These are not issues that just happen to trip into view. Indeed, one of the many strengths of Ahmad’s editorial framework is precisely a clear-eyed awareness of how the anthology intervenes in the field of literary studies. She explicitly questions the point of standardizing a literary form whose most powerful claims are located in the rejection of the standard; as the introduction puts it, “anthologization can represent a significant step in the often unsavory direction of canonization.” [8] And yet, the understanding of language as irresistibly fluid, at all times ahead of laws and rules, enables the anthology to be an open-ended invitation to consider the nature of a tradition in the making, rather than a disciplinary and disciplining move. As such, Rotten English lives up to the radicalism of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s formulation, its texts firmly inscribed by the play of subversion, appropriation, abrogation and mimicry in language, even when they are not obviously political. To read through its juicy offerings is to see English at its most creative and daring artistically, its most responsive to the meanings and burdens of lived experience, rendered broken and beautiful by history.
[1] Ahmad, 458. See: Kamau Brathwaite, “(From) History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry,” Rotten English, 459 – 468.
[2] Ken Saro-Wiwa, “Author’s Note,” Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (New York: Longman’s African Writers Series, 1998).
[3] Ahmad, 40 – 41; Louise Bennett, “Bans O’Killing” (1944).
[4] Ahmad 464-5; Kamau Brathwaite, “(From) History of the Voice” (1984).
[5] Ahmad, 491; M. NourbeSe Philip, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy” (1993).
[6] Ahmad, 474, Thomas Macaulay, “(From) Minute on Indian Education” (1835).
[7] Ahmad, 25.
[8] Ahmad, 31.
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