|
|
Stephanie Horton
Heretical Language
(or)
Language of Identity:
Pidgin, Creole and Vernacular
[Prose of Identity]
in Post-Colonial Fiction
This essay examines the linguistic architecture in Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days, 1997, Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, 1985, and African American writer Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, 1982. These three significant post-colonial black writers are representative of a linguistic and metaphorical continuum. The work of each is centered, quite literally, at critical points along the trans-Atlantic triangular African slave trade route. These writers are concerned in different ways with the reverberant ruptures of that holocaust. The psychic tortures and resonance of Maafa history is present in each work as the link charting disruption, alienation, multiple and/or abstracted identities, hybridity, and self-constituted identity. Lexis, fused to culture and history, is a symbolic leitmotif by which each author confronts the question of identity, the colonialist legacy, neo-colonialism, and the post-colonial individual consciousness vs. the communal or colonial consciousness.
Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Nigeria was colonized by the British, Alice Walker grew up in the apartheid Deep South of North America, and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Martinique remains under French control - as a French possession overseas department. The intercultural linguistic and literary influences each writer was exposed to within the colonial milieu provoke each to wrestle with the questions of language and identity grounding. For, as Harvard professor K. A. Appiah, argues, “Colonial education, in short, produced a generation immersed in the literature of the colonizers, a literature that often reflected and transmitted the imperialistic vision” (55). The transgressive, heretical narrative voice, concerned with cultural repossession, authenticity in cultural representation, intrudes on the narrative perspectives of the colonizer-conqueror to amplify the cultural, historical, political, and social metanarratives of the central characters. The imposed culture and language, whether English or French, is rendered subordinate.
Kenyan novelist, literary theorist, and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o recounts how the African scholar, Micere Mugo, describes feeling “for a long time . . . mortal terror whenever she encountered old African women” after studying King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard in her colonial school (18). Thiong’o offers a specific historical context of the colonization process in Africa as relates to language:
The choice of language and the use to which language is
put is central to a people’s definition of themselves. The
contention started a hundred years ago when in 1884, the
capitalist powers of Europe sat in Berlin and carved an
entire continent with a multiplicity of peoples, cultures,
and languages into different colonies . . . Berlin of 1884
was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the
night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the
morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical
violence of the battlefield was followed by the
psychological violence of the classroom . . . The bullet
was the means of the physical subjugation. Language
was the means of the spiritual subjugation. (4, 9-10)
Thiong’o also writes about children in his primary school being severely whipped for lapsing into their first language, or “made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY,” as well as “fined money,” and being highly rewarded for excelling in English, even if English was their only subject of distinction (11-12).
In Black literatures, the dehumanizing language and iconography of empire, and the degrading processes of colonization provoked the impetus to resist, challenge, deconstruct, and disrupt. There is almost a messianic quality and an unmistakable liberatory inflection in the literary works of Black writers concerned with post-colonial identity. Chamoiseau, Saro-Wiwa, and Walker, however, are less concerned with challenging primitivist/diabolical configurations of the “other” in colonial canonical narratives, or with what Abiola Irele, Harvard University professor of Afro-American Studies, Romance Languages and Literature calls “the literature of combat, both imaginative and ideological” (opening address Wole Soyinka conference). Where the quest is to assert and celebrate identity and chart a new literary terrain, Pidgin, Vernacular and Creole language usage is central to the discursive strategies used to localize, stabilize, unify, signify, and emphasize the self, an “active working out of a moral project through an attentive preoccupation with the vicissitudes of the communal existence . . . a communal significance that makes manifest its essential grounding in a comprehensive ethos . . . not therefore a question of the ostensible craft which the writer displays, not the ‘textual strategies’ which lie at the technical surface of [the] gesture towards meaning, but one of the fundamental quality of expression indicative of a profound engagement with experience” (Irele, opening address Wole Soyinka conference).
It must be mentioned that there are as many schools of thought about what constitutes a Pidgin, Creole or the Vernacular as there are branches of linguistics and literary interpretations. Mufwene argues: “The naming practice of new Englishes . . . has to do more with the racial identity of those who speak them than with how these varieties developed and the extent of their structural deviations” (Mufwene). Generally, a Pidgin is considered to be the initial language in common developed out of the colonial encounter, whereas a Creole arises following a process of indigenization (Mufwene). African American Vernacular English is variously categorized as a Pidgin, a Creole, or a regional dialect, though Turner and others submit that compelling evidence exists for it to be classified as a Creole (Rickford). In their now classic study, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin posit:
We use the term ‘post-colonial’ . . . to cover all the culture
affected by the imperial process from the moment of
colonization to the present day. This is because there is a
continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical
process initiated by European imperial aggression . . . the
literatures of African countries . . . Caribbean countries . . .
are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA
should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its
current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has
played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally
recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre
as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic
for post-colonial literatures everywhere. What each of these
literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive
regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present
form out of the experience of colonization and asserted
themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial
power, and by emphasizing their differences from the
assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes
them distinctively post-colonial. (2)
For the purposes of this essay then, the liminal space African American Vernacular English occupies is situated as cultural reference within the post-colonial paradigm, marking Walker’s intimate reconstruction of standard North American English in The Color Purple; as Saro-Wiwa elucidates his rapprochement of English into culturally coded language, so Walker transmogrifies the marginalized language of formers slaves; and Chamoiseau makes clear his Créolité in the nouveau roman, re-imagined out of the transnational, multilingual, interracial, and multicultural concept of Antillean créolisation (Glissant, Chronicle ix). Significantly, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin stipulate:
One of the main features of imperial oppression is control
over language. The imperial education system installs a
‘standard’ version of the metropolitan language as the norm,
and marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities . . . Language
becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure
of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which
conceptions of ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and ‘reality’ become
established. Such power is rejected in the emergence of an
effective post-colonial voice. (2)
The “effective post-colonial voice” is concerned with reaching toward a new reality, described by Irele as “the new realism . . . a new apprehension of events, social forces and human character as they interact away from the Romantic projection engendered by colonial domination and toward a more realistic engagement with the African situation in the postcolonial dispensation” (213). The “effective post-colonial voice” transcends boundaries, rooted in the collective consciousness of a shared history. Of interest, according to Joseph E. Holloway, “Perhaps the most commonly used African word in the English language (and probably the word used in more countries than any other) is ‘okay’ . . . its African roots were found in the 19th century black-spoken English of Jamaica and Surinam, as well as the Gullah speech of South Carolina . . . Mande and Wolof cultural groups for the use of similar words are o ke, ‘that's it’ or ‘all right’ . . . ‘O.K.’ is first recorded in the speech of black Americans around 1776” (Holloway). As Ruth Finnegan writes in Oral Literature in Africa, Euro-American perceptions of African oral literatures in the nineteenth century devalued the literary complexity of African cultures and languages (26, 48). The retention of Euro-American racist thought in scholarship about Africa devaluing this complexity persists today. Dr. Asa G. Hilliard writes, "For thousands of years, African on the continent of Africa and in its diaspora have operated independently to create sophisticated educational socialization systems, some of which became the envy of the world. Most of us are ignorant of this valuable heritage. Much of it is as meaningful to us today as it was for centuries, and even millennia" (Hilliard).
Nigeria’s Ken Saro-Wiwa wields the “effective post-colonial voice” with a “new depth” in Sozaboy by writing the novel entirely in Nigerian Pidgin English. Though in his introduction to the book, William Boyd describes Sozaboy as “a great anti-war novel, among the very best the twentieth century has produced . . . shaped with a masterful and sophisticated artistry,” the author himself, referring to his work as “rotten English,” feels the necessity to address his choice of language in an authorial foreword to the text, quoted here at length:
Twenty years ago at Ibadan University, I wrote a story titled
High Life and showed it to one of my teachers, Mr. O. R.
Dathorne. He read it, just possibly liked it; but he did say that
while the style I had used might be successful in a short story,
he doubted that it could be sustained in a novel. I knew then
that I would have to write a novel, some day, in the same style.
The Nigerian Civil War which I saw from very close quarters
among young soldiers in Bonny where I was civilian
Administrator, provided me the right opportunity. Mr. Dathorne
later published High Life in a collection, Africa in Prose,
Penguin African Library (1969). The entry against it runs thus
‘ . . . the piece is not in true ‘Pidgin’ which would make it
incomprehensible to the European reader. The language is that
of a barely educated primary school boy exulting in the new
words he is discovering and the new world he is beginning to
know.’ Mr. Dathorne goes on to describe the style in the story
as ‘an uninhibited gamble with language,’ and ‘an exercise in
an odd style.’ Both High Life and Sozaboy are the result of my
fascination with the adaptability of the English language and of
my closely observing the speech and writings of a certain
segment of society. For, as Platt, Weber and Ho accurately
observe in their book, The New Englishes (RKP 1984), ‘In
some nations . . . The New Englishes have developed a
noticeable range of different varieties linked strongly to the
socio-economic and educational background of their speakers.'
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 . . . It borrows words, patterns and
images from the mother-tongue . . . To its speakers, it has the
advantage of having no rules and no syntax. It thrives on lawlessness, and is part of the dislocated society in which Sozaboy
must live, move, and have not his being. (Saro-Wiwa)
Saro-Wiwa’s need to offer an explanation for telling Sozaboy's story in the language of his world provides a context for understanding the controlling, restraining weight of the colonialist legacy, and the heretical nature of crafting an authentic self-identifying language.
Saro-Wiwa weaves the tension and conflict around language into the story as his narrator/protagonist, Mene, nicknamed Sozaboy for his romanticized notion of soldiers, relates the cataclysmic events overtaking his quiet, rural community, Dukana, in the wake of Nigeria’s independence from England, followed by a violent military coup d’etat: “So although everyone was happy at first, after some time, everything begin to spoil small by small . . . Radio begin dey hala as ‘e never hala before . . . Long long words. Every time” (3).
The word “hala” is easily recognized as an African inflection of the English word “holler.” The words “‘e” and “dey” translate as ‘it,’ ‘to,’ or ‘to be’ contextually. As “a ‘continuative verb’ . . . ‘dey’ is the tense marker for present tense,’ and ‘be’ in Nigerian Pidgin fulfills the function of ‘to be’ . . . in terms of providing for individual and characteristic descriptions of people, things, and conditions. Dey as a main verb, on the other hand, implies that the . . . meaning of ‘to be’ is bound to ‘being somewhere’, respectively a certain location" (Coester). Repetition serves as an intensifier. The reduplication of sounds in African oral literatures are “successive rhythm-segments” denoted by “tonal contrasts” (Finnegan 67, 71): “Before before, the grammar was not plenty and everybody was happy. But now grammar begin to plenty and people were not happy. As grammar plenty, na so trouble plenty . . . na so people were dying (3). “Na” signifies ‘so it is that,’ and, as Coester delineates, is intended to “correspond to the meaning of a 3rd singular present tense neuter of . . . ‘to be’ . . . or it refers to something ‘being’ or ‘not being’ in existence” (Coester).
It’s highly probable that Saro-Wiwa’s choice of language was also influenced by Fela Anikulapo Kuti, whose highly political lyrics of social justice and human rights were entirely in Nigerian Pidgin, and whose innovative fusion of indigenous West African instruments and sounds with African American jazz, blues, and soul/rock created the musical genre known worldwide as Afro-Beat. Coester notes, Fela Kuti’s “effort of making up new words by, for instance, compounding (‘Colomentality’ or ‘Sufferhead’), coining new and forceful semantics, directly influenced the English language and the minds of millions of Africans as well as of other people all over the world” (Coester).
Sozaboy is a tightly constructed plot of brutal realism with strong elements of tragedy and dramatic irony. The novel moves at a swift pace through linear time. The choice of the first person narrative point of view enables the reader to see through Mene’s eyes of innocence, and enter his interior life, while also allowing the author to chronicle exterior events through Mene’s thoughts. Through a fratricidal war of terror, torture, betrayals and senseless murders, the reader stays with Mene as he loses his innocence and comes to understand the complicity of his people in the destruction of communal society. Though Mene shares a national and cultural identity with the warmongers, when he is captured and forced to fight on the side of those he was fighting against, he realizes he is no more than a pawn trapped in a larger web of intrigue and violent power struggles.
Mene’s nickname, Sozaboy, also signifies his wish to be someone important. Poor, with a minimal education, having had to drop out of school for lack of school fees, he is a hard worker and devoted son, his mother’s only child. Mene thinks of himself as an “apprentice lorry driver,” but works as a carboy, a helper on a bus that runs between the smaller and larger towns in the countryside. He dreams of saving up enough to buy his own bus and become a man of independence and financial security. In the larger towns, Mene is exposed to some of the values and imported material things of the colonial world. He meets his future wife, Agnes, in a bar, where she works as a waitress. He’s impressed by the respect soldiers enjoy, and dazzled by the soldiers’ smart uniforms and symbols of power. He’s also captivated by the highly embellished stories told by old veterans, sans the horrors of war, about hunting Hitler across Europe and Asia. It is a military speech in proper English, “Big big grammar . . . Long long words,” which shatters all his illusions. His life is overturned and he is propellled hurtling into the larger world, when the police and armed forces arrive in his peaceful hometown in the countryside to forcibly enlist soldiers for the Biafran war:
“Silence! Shouted the police. “Silence, I say!” The people
cannot understand him. They were laughing because of how
he was shouting. Myself too, I was laughing. Then the police
came to where I was sitting and used his stick on my head. Everybody kept quiet. I stopped laughing by force. This is
how my own things are. Every time trouble. Always. So I
kept quiet with several people shouting little shouts inside
my head from the policeman’s stick blows. I said to myself,
‘trouble don begin.’ The man with fine shirt stood up.
And begin to talk in English. Fine fine English. Big big
words. Grammar. ‘Fantastic. Overwhelming. Generally.
In particular and in general.’ Haba, God no go vex. But
he did not stop there. The big grammar continued.
‘Odious. Destruction. Fighting.’ I understand that one.
‘Henceforth. General mobilisation. All citizens. Able-bodied. Join the military. His Excellency. Powers
conferred on us. Volunteers. Conscription.’ Big big words.
Long long grammar . . . Everywhere was silent like burial
ground. They then begin to interpret all that long grammar
plus big words . . . what the man is saying is that all those
who can fight will join army. My heart begin to cut . . .
Join army? . . . I begin to shout, No, No. The man with fine
shirt was looking at me . . . I jumped out of that church and
started to run. Then I heard Chief Birabee and the others
shouting “Hold am! Hold am!” They were shouting from
every side. Then the sozas started running after me.
Pursuing me. I ran and ran like a dog. (47)
Boyd, unlike Dathorne, perceptively grasps the author’s intent: “This mode of literary demotic is a highly impressive achievement. Saro-Wiwa has both invented and captured a voice . . . One not only bracingly authentic but capable of many fluent and telling registers. I cannot think of another example where the English language has been so engagingly and skillfully hijacked – or perhaps ’colonised’ would be a better word” (Boyd, Sozaboy). The reader is given a panoramic view of Mene’s world as it was, of the implosive clash of traditional and foreign cultural values, of the old world splintered and dying, and the coming into power of the new, post-colonial dispensation. Chief Birabee and his cohorts mirror the elite/overseer class throughout the global colonialist domain. The pursuit and the symbolic comparison of man in flight to dog is a powerful dialogic image linking Saro-Wiwa’s narrative ethic to African American and Caribbean slave narratives—runaway slaves chased and hunted by dogs—emphasizing what also transpires under direct or indirect colonial rule on the African continent. The site of the church as the location where the implosion occurs situates religion as a locus for oppression within the colonial mileau.
Boyd describes Mene as an “African Candide . . . like Voltaire’s Candide - Sozaboy is also an archetype and a victim . . . One needs only to glance at the recent history of Africa to see how paradigmatic Sozaboy’s story is: young men in uniforms, clutching their AK47s, spread fear and desolation, march and die all over the continent” (Boyd, Sozaboy ).
The character Bullet, who loans Mene books, and whom Mene serves under and grows to love as a brother, is English-educated. Bullet represents the English-educated African who is neither disconnected from nor has a superior attitude toward illiterate Africans. He moves easily between standard English and Nigerian Pidgin English. His language is rich with oral wisdom. To Mene’s barrage of questions, Bullet invariably replies, “One thing at a time and that well done” (73). When Mene asks, “But which time de war go finish?”, Bullet philosophically replies, “War will finish when everybody don die finish” (90). Bullet is set-up, betrayed and murdered by a man of many names and no name, a man Mene nicknames Manmuswak upon first encountering him, literally translated ‘man must walk/man must work,’ symbolically meaning ‘he who will do anything to get over.’ As Boyd notes, Mene’s description of Manmuswak walking, “that tall man with plenty tooth . . . like tall snake passing through the bush, making small noise” beautifully captures the essence of a sinister personality with imagery drawn from the oral tradition (94, 97).
When Mene must leave home to fight, his mother blesses him poignantly in the traditional manner by pouring water on his legs with the words, “You were born here. You must return here. And return walking by your leg: Yes, my son, return with both leg. Because I am your mother. I am the one who born you. I want you to return to me” (67). Tragically, when Mene does return after surviving torrents of abuse, tortures and dangers, his village is destroyed and empty, and his mother and his new wife, Agnes, have both been killed:
There were many things I was thinking. First that soza captain who gave Bullet urine to drink, Manmuswak who gave us cigar and hot drink and then killed our people and then he was chooking me to make me live again, then Dukana without goat and chicken and people and now this rotten rubbish human compost pit they are calling refugee camp. And my mother and my young wife Agnes . . . So as I was lying down on the ground and looking into that black night, the only question I ask myself is ‘which one I dey?’ ‘Which one be my own?’ (157)
These murders and ruptures and Mene’s soul-cry crystallize the deeper meaning of the novel as a text of fractured identity—Who am I? Where do I belong? What’s mine?—bearing witness to what Glissant calls “a brutal emergence” into Black reality (Caribbean Discourse 146).
Significantly, the linguistic features of the novel are derived from West African oral forms, characterized by word play, repetition, riddles, proverbs, verbal formulas (Finnegan 335, 444). Saro-Wiwa is speaking against war, colonialism, neo-colonialism, injustice, psychic scarification, against the powers internal and external that create these interlocking systems of oppression, and for those, like Sozaboy, the emergent underclass, whose lives hang by a tenuous thread across a catastrophic landscape and are disrupted, often irreparably, on multiple levels: "I was just thinking how the war have spoiled my town Dukana, uselessed many people, killed many others, killed my mama and my wife, Agnes, my beautiful wife . . . and now it have made me like porson wey get leprosy because I have no town again" (181). Within this framework, Saro-Wiwa individualizes a poor country boy who is neither heroic, English-educated, activist, nor politically driven, but rather simply a young man of stoic dignity coming into consciousness in a world inverted by violence and cultural erasures.
Patrick Chamoiseau’s Caribbean novel School Days provides a highly stylized example of the linguistic unifications found in Walker’s and Saro-Wiwa’s texts. Beautifully translated in English, though written in Martinican Creole and what Milan Kundera has described as a “Chamoisified” French (Coverdale 215), with its polyphonic composition, the novel is drenched in archetypes and meanings found in the “African collective imaginaire” (Mbembe). While it is African ancestry and the African slave ancestor invoked in this work, Beverley Ormerod explains that Chamoiseau “has revalorized racial diversity in French Caribbean literature in order to illustrate [his] conviction that modern ‘Creole society’ cannot be encompassed by a simple black-white definition” (Ormerod).
It is, however, specifically to those victimized by the violent convulsions of the colonial educational experience that Chamoiseau dedicates the autobiographical School Days, a deeply moving slave song of a novel about childhood and adolescence:
Youngsters, of the West Indies, of French Guyana, of New Caledonia, of Reunion, of Mauritius, of Rodriguez and other
Mascarenes, of Corsica, of Brittany, of Normandy, of Alsace, of the Basque country, of Provence, of Africa, of the four corners of the Orient, of all national terrortories, of all far-flung dominions, of all outlying posts of empires or federations, you who have had to face a colonial school, yes, you who in other ways are still confronting one today, and you who will face this challenge tomorrow in some other guise: This voice of bitter laughter at the One and Only—a firmly centered voice challenging all centers, a voice beyond all home countries and fully diversal in opposition to the universal—is raised in your name. In Creole friendship. (7)
Here Chamoiseau is the African town crier or griot storyteller calling out to the village of the African world entire within whose boundaries those of African ancestry share a common colonial experience. He lays claim to a pluralistic identity, subverting the colonial realm of conquered territories to "terrortories," underlining his gesture of crafting a language to translate the specificities of this reality. Chamoiseau seeks to overturn the uses of language to inculcate low self-esteem, low self-worth, racial inferiority, subordinate slave status and powerlessness. Omerod writes that Chamoiseau considers “the Creole language as the great unifying force which has arisen from racial diversity and resisted centuries of imposed education, despite the official policy of ‘assimilation’ to France” (Omerod). In Owen 'Alik Shahadah's essay, "Linguistics for a New African Reality," he confronts the interplay of the uses of language to identity, the construction of normative in conflict with the "other," speaking to Chamoiseau's philosophy of a "great unifying force" – a thematic unification that Shahadah projects in his multi-award winning films, his music and his academic writings:
Words play a critical role in articulating our reality within an Indo-European linguistic framework. We must, as long as we speak non-African languages, find ways to control word usage when it speaks to our condition through a process of assimilating and normalizing words that serve in our interest. It is ignorant to ignore the significance of making a universal Pan-Africanist lexicon, which is adopted across the board. And just like as there is a body which, monitors, controls the English language we need such a body for serving our linguistic interest. (Shahadah)
Though Chamoiseau won the prestigious French Prix Goncourt for his 1997 novel Texaco, he is no ivory tower intellectual. Engaged at ground zero, working full-time as a probation officer in Fort-de-France, the capital city of his homeland, he discloses: “I trained as a lawyer at university in Martinique and in France and I’ve been working with young offenders for 15 years, going to court, getting to know their problems, trying to help them sort out their lives . . . understanding these people’s experiences has helped me hugely as a writer, as it has allowed me to look into aspects of life that you wouldn’t normally encounter” (Ferguson). Chamoiseau’s preoccupation with the marginalized and oppressed is not surprising, given his commitment to the all-inclusive concept of Créolité, a literary movement he co-founded with another Martinican writer, Raphaël Confiant, which emphasizes the literariness of the often maligned Creole language (Omerod). Coverdale writes that “Chamoiseau has sought to give voice to the powerless, to those who have been marginalized . . . so that they may question this otherness that has been imposed on them” (Coverdale, Chronicle 213). Chamoiseau’s 1989 manifesto, In Praise of Creoleness, explicates “the most explicit attempt to redefine Caribbean culture through the language and folkways that are the common denominators of this diverse population” (Omerod) as an assertion of Creole identity and language in all its diversity, from the countryside to the teeming slums to the elitist mulatto world of the post-plantation class. Omerod observes, “It praises Caribbeanness allusively through some of its chosen Terminology (“we were the anticipation of the relations of Cultures”) . . . describing itself as “the interactional or transactional aggregate of Caribbean, European, African, Asian, and Levantine cultural elements, united on the same soil by the yoke of history” (Omerod).
Glissant writes that Chamoiseau “sees himself as a “marquer de paroles” (a “word scratcher”), a “Chamgbier or oiseau de Cham” (a “bird of Ham,” son of the biblical Noah), rapt, serious, “listening to a distant voice whose echo hovers over the scenes of our collective memory” (Chronicle, ix). “Chamgbier” or ‘bird of Cham’ is of Chamosiseau’s own invention as a derivative of his name and word play on the literal French translation for bird, ‘oiseau’. Externally-defined as a son of Ham, he ‘scratches’ out new words and new meanings in flight from the curse, in an inventive gesture of self-definition. As his African Ancestors scratched the soil to plant seeds, so, too, does the son, Chamoiseau, scratch the fertile ground of language in the world to which he has been transplanted by the holocaust of slavery; a world he survives by the inventiveness and self-assertion of one who refuses to be spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, or lingusitically enslaved. Chamoiseau’s penchant for creating new words, “the bawoufeur (“to snatch with a grasping hand”), a kind of grabbalicious buccaneer” (101), is emblematic of “the reenergizing contact between orality and literature” (Coverdale, Chronicle 213). In the afterword to Texaco, Réjouis writes that “Chamoiseau creates a text whose French matrix is scattered with Martinique’s flora and fauna, with Carib, Old French, Spanish, English, East Indian, Arabic, and African words, with multiple Weltanschauungen, registers, meanings, and word play” (Réjouis 395).
The central conflict in School Days centers on the assimilation process, “under the multiplied eye of a vast conscience” (87) via the school system, “where a crippling self-loathing” is inculcated in Creole and Creole speaking Martinican youths, “along with a foreign ‘mother-tongue’” (Coverdale, Chronicle 213). The schism between the colonial French school environment and home life is immense: “everything else . . . pleasures, shouts, dreams, hatreds, the life in life . . . was Creole” (47). Written from the third person point of view through the lens of memory and circular, revolving realities, the novel is separated into two sections, “Longing” and “Survival,” with a glossary of Creole phrases and words, and new words coined by the author.
The reader is never given the name of the child protagonist in School Days; representative of the archetypal child of Africa, the protagonist remains “the little boy” or “the little black boy” throughout the text, evoking Caribbean slave history, the commonality of black childhood experience across colonial boundaries.
“Survival,” part two, chronicles the racist deculturation processes of the colonial school system which produce a “crippling inner ruination” (144), an initiation so searing “that, he could tell, was estranging him from his family by opening pockets of solitude in the core of his being” (74). The schooling experience, a journey “into a foreign country from which he could never return,” (Glissant, School Days viii), creates a psychic fissure and “meant surviving . . . and dying at the same time” (75), provoking the imperative for “the little black boy” to fashion for himself “an inky lifeline of survival” (144).
School Days opens with one of the most shocking and piercing sentences ever written in post-colonial literature from a child’s perspective: “My brothers and sisters O! I have something to tell you: the little black boy made the mistake of begging for school” (13). The rituals of yearning to enter the world of his older siblings, the Baroness, Marielle, Jojo the Math Whiz and Paul the Musician, his “obsession to go” (14), and the traumatic consequences are detailed with symbolic exactitude: “he saw himself there, captured whole in a chalk mark. Which meant he could be erased from the world!” (21)
The erasure of Creole identity is linked to the attainment of a self-alienating education as a religious rite. On his way to nursery school with Mam Ninotte, his mother, where the initial colonial indoctrination occurs: “He held tight to his mama’s hand and swung his satchel as though it were a censer” (24). “Papa” thinks of school as a place “you went in a sheep only to come out a goat” (30). When the boy is introduced to the history, iconography and geography of the alien colonial world, “the blue eyed Gaul with hair as yellow as wheat was everyone’s ancestor” (121), Papa exclaims, “this kid is drawing apples in the middle of mango season! He needs a soothing mint bath!” (33)
The voices interrupting dialogue in the text to comment in verse are identified as the “Répondeurs,” introduced with the word “summon” (12): “you who have crafted a human memory in the living flesh . . . see, he summons you, still at a loss, as bereft as ever, hardly more stalwart than in those tender years of wonder . . . Here is my command: Answer me! . . .” (20). The “Répondeurs” function as a chorus of spiritual witnesses and guides, ancestral presences in participatory, emotive engagement, drawn from the oral ‘call and response’ African storytelling tradition (the ellipses and italics are Chamoiseau’s):
Répondeurs:
The walls have preserved the age of petroglyphs.
Oh, I can still see them!
I can still see myself . . . (19)
There is the invocation of aid from these spirits:
O humble relics . . . be my Répondeurs . . . (19)
The call above elicits the response below, in which Chamoiseau plays with language, both to expand, invert and Creolize the imposed supposedly superior French language, while jabbing at the arrogance of Euro-American structuralism. Glissant writes that Chamoiseau’s words “are often and ingenuously rooted in what are quite literal transpositions” (Chronicle, ix):
Répondeurs:
Inscribe, scribe!
Scriven without scribbling!
Inscribe! (19)
The irony surrounding Creole and French as a dominant vs. inferior construction modeled on the master/slave relationship is cleverly “inscribed” in this passage:
Répondeurs:
All along the horizon in a calm sea
use your Creole.
If the weather changes
surging billows
wallowing troughs
gird your loins
get a grip on your French. (48)
With the poignant proclamation opening the novel, and Chamoiseau’s pointed critique and interrogation of what forms French civilization, School Days reads as a post-modern slave song. As Coverdale emphasizes, Chamoiseau’s “bilingual heritage . . . did not evolve smoothly from a native oral tradition of linguistic creativity but sprang instead from a fundamental discontinuity: the gap between the morality of Creole, a language born of cruel necessity in the days of slavery, and French, the language of a colonial power that proudly, ruthlessly, and efficiently discredited almost all Creole culture in the name of la civilisation française” (Chronicle, 213). Chamoiseau often uses humor to satirize and deconstruct these ideas: “Here now, what’s this about a zombie?! Haven’t you ever heard of elves, gnomes, fairies, and will-o’-wisps? Spare me your soucougnans and three-leg-horses!” (66).
Certainly, it is to address the concept of racial superiority, French language supremacy, and the color caste boundaries the boy encounters in school, inextricably linked to the colonialist worldview, that Chamoiseau describes in exacting detail the spaces of what Anzaldúa elsewhere defines as “cultural tyranny” and “linguistic terrorism” (16, 58): “Without even giving the order to sit down, the Teacher started haranguing us about Negro-Creole customs and the hopeless perdition of that barbarous people” (83).
Beatings, vicious verbal abuse and humiliating ridicule typify the school environment: “We went to school to shed bad manners: rowdy manners, nigger manners, Creole manners –
all the same thing . . . The vibrant spirit of learning and our Creole beings seemed to be in insurmountable contradiction" (97). The classroom is an archetypal space of colonial oppression, as the teacher proclaims: “The superior races—this must be said openly, following the example of Jules Ferry—have, with regard to the primitive races, the right and the duty of ci-vi-li-za-tion!” (122) The caveat is to become French: “the Teacher always seemed more attuned to the intricacies of French than to the vulgar science of numbers” (78).
Big Bellybutton, a major character in the novel, “a little boy with blue-black skin, sharp eyes, hair scorched rusty-red and frazzled by the sun, a body that was already tough and muscular” (76), with no name other than a Creole name, who has never spoken French, but “possessed arcane expertise in the plant kingdom” (69), shocks the teacher with his nimble mind for numbers, but is nonetheless relentlessly persecuted and finally ignored: “Skipping over Big Bellybutton as usual during arithmetic, he hounded him when it was reading time” (114).
Big Bellybutton does not figure as one of the teacher’s favorite pupils, who are all light-skinned, “fancy-mouthed” French speaking, and more French than Creole. Knowledgeable in the legends, myths and plant lore of his immediate Creole environment and culture, but unfamiliar with the French language and French culture, Big Bellybutton is Creole from his name to the bone, and thus, a nobody.
Language, class, and skin pigmentation within the hierarchal color spectrum are the loci of power and oppression in the classroom: “Sitting next to him, the little boy . . . could see the energy in Big Bellybutton’s hands, his secret determination to survive, the wariness in his eyes (a vigilance he knew how to conceal), the firm set of his mouth, and the strength of that body mobilized to read the mood of the class, withstand assaults, deflect attention, lie low, keep calm . . . And above all, the little boy saw that Big Bellybutton hadn’t lost his ability to smile . . . (77). As a transmitter of colonialist knowledge in whom self-hatred has been well inculcated, “The Teacher associated dark skin and Negroid features (even though he had them) with the same no-account world that had produced the Creole culture: each barbarous element implied the other” (79). Ironically, “In his frustration, the teacher himself might relapse into Creole” (63).
Chamoiseau magnifies the systemic ways in which Creole language is assassinated and French language super-inscripted: “For the sound ou, [the children] suggested the manicou possum, the balaou needlefish, the boutou truncheon, words that don’t exist in French . . . When the children spoke, they had a natural tendency to change every u to an i. Juste became jiste; refusé degenerated into refisé . . . eur slipped into ère . . . Then the teacher would go on a rampage of mocking, teasing, scolding, wailing, yelling . . .” (62).
Big Bellybutton is as fluent in Creole as he is in knowing the myths and legends of his African Creole world: “he would rumble on in forbidden Creole about . . . the dangerous water sprite called a Manman Dlo, flying sorceresses . . . He told us up-country tales of the elegant Glanglan Bird, the occult virtues of curlytailed chicken feathers, the foolishness of Brer Tiger, the trickery of Brer Rabbit, the brainstorms of those rascals Ti-Jean-Lorizon and Ti-Sapotille” (128). His intimate cultural knowledge from the oral tradition, which would enrich the school curriculum and enhance Creole self-esteem is not only dismissed but repeatedly devalued and savaged.
Chamoiseau’s portrait of Big Bellybutton reveals the ways in which a racist act mutilates a victim’s soul; for Big Bellybutton, the daily psychological assault becomes intolerable: “His body had lost its sap . . . Big Bellybutton had called it quits. He seemed to have accepted what the teacher decided he was” (138).
Chamoiseau maximizes the emotional impact of the psychic scarification: “Big Bellybutton kept his face turned toward the winds . . . impervious to punishments, blows . . . But the little boy, now, sitting right next to him—he saw, he saw, oh nothing, just a shudder, just the confusion and distress . . . Fleeting Collapses” (139). To encompass and reconcile this painful history, Chamoiseau the storyteller, “the Word Scratcher,” honors the victim. Creole language is the author’s medium.
Like Saro-Wiwa’s Mene in Sozaboy, Alice Walker’s protagonist/narrator Celie in The Color Purple is a barely literate twentieth century young person of African descent, situated within the colonial boundary at the bottom of all hierarchies. Unlike Mene, however, Celie, as a black female heir of the brutal American matrix slave system whose very humanity is called into question, is rendered mute by sexual violence and male authority, imprisoned in her skin color, filled with a crippling sense of powerlessness and a distinctly African American “cultural sensibility . . . the deep blues” (Wasserman). Celie’s cry in the first half of the novel, “Nobody ever love me” (97), cuts the soul. Walker’s psycho-discursive text demarcates the correlation of racial and gender experience to oppression, domination, and subjugation, articulating what Ralph Ellison describes as the “concord of sensibilities” that shape African American identity (124). Walker totalizes and confronts hegemonies in hierarchical relationships, interpreting the connections between colonization, patriarchy/sexism, racism, heterosexuality, class, and gender-specific sexual exploitation and degradation through the precise structure of Celie’s “black folk speech” (The Same River Twice 25).
The novel opens with Celie writing letters to God in lieu of voicing aloud her unspeakably turbulent and miserable existence. Walker never flinches from the ritualistic gaze to name mutilating realties: “he grab hold of my titties. Then he push his thing inside . . . When that hurt I cry . . . You better shut up and git used to it” (1-2). Raped and pregnant by Fonso, her “Pa,” the man she believes to be her biological father, her mother dies blaming Celie in the classic sexist/patriarchal blame the victim paradigm: “my mama cuss me . . . Trying to believe his story kilt her” (15). Celie is given away in marriage to another abuser, Albert, whom she calls Mr.__, evoking the master/slave relationship, for she dares not address him directly by name.
The Color Purple is epistolary, “an oral hieroglyphic” composed entirely of letters, structured to serve “the bivocality of free indirect discourse” (Gates 239, 243) and “a woman’s struggle toward linguistic self-definition in a world of disrupted signs” (Abbandonato 296). Celie’s act of writing—the “[writing] herself into being” (Gates 245-46)—privileges a spiritual renewal and physical liberation from bondage. Walker foregrounds her text in the oeuvre of African American historical experiences, the literary themes of the slave narratives, calling on the blues, spirituals, slave language, as historical survivalist codes. Elena Shakhovtseva observes:
The Color Purple presents a socio-historical picture of the
rural South in the twentieth century . . . Walker shows that
racism informs all aspects of black life in the South. The
novel reveals racial tension on every page, by illustrating
how “isolated incidents can set off long strings of racist interactions” . . . Celie's whole story is based on, or derived
from an incident of the lynching of Celie's real father. This
ultimate act of racism defined most of Celie's early life,
making way for her rape by “Pa,” the giving away of her
children, her marriage to Mr.__, and her unknowing
dispossession of her home and inheritance. (Shakhovtseva)
When first we meet Celie as a girl of fourteen, she has internalized the external definitions and destructive patterns of racist and patriarchal victimization. Her mother, dying of illness and heartbreak, rightly suspects that Celie is being sexually molested by her stepfather, but does nothing to protect her. Her mother cannot bear to face the truth and thus abandons her daughter. Albert marries Celie only because she is offered to him by Fonso and he needs someone to take care of his children. Prior to Celie’s marriage, her future husband receives a cow, in an inversion of African dowry practices, as in Africa it is the bride’s father who receives gifts. Before Mr.__ finally decides to marry Celie, desperate for a full-time babysitter, she is paraded before him like a slave on the auction block:
Mr.__ come finally one day looking all drug out. The
woman he had helping him done quit. His mammy done said
No More. He say, Let me see her again. Pa call me. Celie,
he say. Like it wasn’t nothing. Mr.__ want to take another
look at you. I go stand in the door. The sun shine in my eyes.
He’s still up on his horse. He look me up and down. Pa rattle
his newspaper. Move up, he won’t bite, he say. I go closer to
the steps, but not too close cause I’m a little scared of his
horse. Turn round, Pa say. I turn round . . . She good with
children, Pa say, rattling his paper open more. Never heard
her say a hard word to nary one of them . . . Mr.__ say,
That cow still coming? He say, Her cow. (20)
In this graphic scene with its implicit, distilled language and fluent imagery, Walker deftly reveals how patriarchy mirrors enslavement. With improvisational use of punctuation and no quotations marks, Walker’s words float like lines of raw poetry on the page. The dialogue is taut, terse, ironic, rhythmic, lyric, visual, tragic, often painful to read. This mythic, folkloric, poetic language, it appears, fills some African Americans with shame, given their internalization of racist stereotypes associated with African American Vernacular English. Walker reports the rejection of her submission of an excerpt of the novel to “a leading Black women’s magazine,” returned with the terse note: “Black people don’t talk that way” (Clarke).
Celie’s “narrative is about breaking silences,” a personal and intense “counternarrative” inverting the “ideological masternarratives” of the black woman as “subject-object” (Abbandonato 296). The Color Purple takes on a specific meaning in establishing symbolic connections to such authoritative texts as Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black; Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself; The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts; works which reveal the historical to present-day profane, inhumane, dehumanizing treatment of African females in North America. Celie’s literate sister, Nettie, reminiscent of Wilson’s and Jacobs’ fugitive slave narratives, is forced to flee the overwhelmingly misogynistic and racist environment, extending the metaphor of flight prominent throughout African, African American and Caribbean literatures. Nellie ends up as a missionary in West Africa, allowing Walker to subjectively depict black women’s diverse experiences, often typified as monolithic. Walker’s motifs, characterizations and allegorical continuities are “a repeated topos of the black tradition . . . unifying metaphors, indigenous to the tradition” (Gates 239).
In her discussion of the works of eighteenth and nineteenth century black women writers, Barbara Christian offers a keen analysis of Wilson’s and Jacob’s narratives in relation to language:
One critical way in which these writers were restricted is their
very medium, that of language. Since slaves were hardly
conceived of as human beings who had a culture, their
language was emphatically discredited. Such a devaluation is
central to what experiences could be passed on, for language
is the repository of anyone’s point of view on experience,
whether it is that of oppression, resistance to it, or a value
system. Yet African-American language could not be seriously
fashioned by nineteenth-century writers to dramatize their
characters’ essence; for that language was considered at best
to be comic, at worse, a symbol of ignorance . . . If there is
any one false sounding note in nineteenth-century novels . . .
it is the language of the characters, the way the imagination of
the authors is constrained by the language their characters use. (332)
Like any physically and psychologically enslaved subject branded by violence, Celie’s traumatic life of sexual assault, and emotional, verbal, and physical abuse renders her powerless, paralyzed, numb, subservient and submissive: “I don’t say nothing . . . What good it do? I don’t fight, I stay where I’m told. But I’m alive” (29). Walker’s unitary identifications constantly invoke the horrors of slavery, the emotional anguish encoded in the blues, and, when Celie grows into autonomous personhood, the transfiguring power of African American spirituals called forth by the crisis of the soul.
Walker moves toward resolving Celie’s alienation by constructing “a double-voiced narrative strategy . . . as a sign both of the formal unity of the Afro-American literary tradition and of the integrity of the black subjects depicted in this literature” (Gates 239). As Walker states, the language of the book is drawn from the “re-created world” of her childhood in Georgia: “the way my mother talked, which was always fresh, honest, straight as an arrow” (The Same River Twice 25). Mary Helen Washington avers that Alice Walker is “a writer especially concerned with the need for black people to acknowledge and respect their roots” (45). From nigger to colored to Negro to Black to Afro American to African American and Afra American, the quest for the descendents of African slaves in North America has been to self-define and self-constitute their own identity beyond the imposed stereotypes. Elena Shakhovtseva contends, “Walker does not merely reiterate the past canons, but rather, in a post-modern way, reinterprets different genre components for them to serve a contemporary ideal of ‘unity in diversity’” (Shakhovtseva).
Tracing the blues aesthetic in the text, Wasserman writes:
Walker's protagonist, Celie, erases herself. “I am,” she writes,
striking out the word “am” and correcting herself, “I am I have always
been a good girl” . . . Later her husband further (un)defines her:
“You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say,
you nothing at all” . . . From this condition of absence, of ostensible nothingness, Celie learns to make herself present and real. She
achieves subjectivity and agency under the tutelage of Shug Avery,
blues singer. (Wasserman)
Walker’s individualization of Celie’s “enclosure . . . within a series of related imprisoning structures—her illiteracy; the sexist role that Mr. constructs for her as his wife . . . and the entire racist political, economic, and social structures of the South” (Mason 126) offers yet another theoretical deconstruction of integrated systems of oppression, confluent with Saro-Wiwa’s dialogism, none of which can be analyzed in isolation. As Lauren Berlant argues:
Celie’s crisis of subjectivity has both textual and historical
implications: her status as a subject is clarified, in the course
of the novel, by her emergence from the enforced privacy of
a prayer-letter to God . . . to public speaking . . . during a
community celebration on the Fourth of July . . . a ratification
of Celie’s own personal liberation at the nation’s mythico-
political origin, the birth of the American “people.” But what
Independence Day resolves for the identity of Anglo-Americans
it has raised as a question for Afro-Americans: along with
narrating Celie’s history, The Color Purple stages . . . [a]n
instance of black America’s struggle to clarify its own
national identity . . . The Color Purple problematizes
tradition-bound origin myths and political discourse in the
hope of creating and addressing an Afro-American nation
constituted by a rich, complex, and ambiguous culture. Rather
than using patriarchal languages and logics of power, Celie’s
narrative radically resituates the subject’s national identity
within a mode of aesthetic, not political, representation. (211)
Walker’s purpose also seems to be a re-imagining of the artist’s role against creative constraints, against textual censorship, against self-destructive kinship claims and chains, against conventionally-accepted and/or familiar structures of control. Relieved to discover that her real father was not an incestuous rapist, she also finally expresses anger at her mother who, in swallowing whole the convoluted morality of the black community, and the patriarchal construction of black females as sexually deviant amoral seductresses, had not told her about her paternity, had believed her stepfather’s lies, and had ultimately abandoned, betrayed and condemned her to continued abuse within a restrictive environment, misogynistic and racist in social construction and orientation:
Dear Nettie, I don’t write to God no more, I write to you.
What happen to God? ast Shug . . . She look at me serious.
What God do for me? I ast . . . he give me a lynched daddy,
a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably
won't ever see again . . . the God I been praying and writing
to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling,
forgetful and lowdown . . . If he ever listened to poor colored
women the world would be a different place, I can tell you. (175)
Celie’s letters evolve beyond tortured whispers to God to wider reflections and meditations on her circumscribed world, extending into the social, spiritual, economic, and political spheres. Her definition of divinity expands. As Celie grows in awareness, the expressive hermeneutical voice remains fertilized by the metonyms and metaphors of the oral tradition. It’s instructive to note here that Turner points to the retention of “African elements” in the “sounds, syntax, morphology and intonation” in black language “on the mainland of both South Carolina and Georgia” (v, 219). Celie’s diction governs the story, imposing balance, structure and meaning in the text.
As Shakhovtseva observes, “the novel’s narrative structure has everything to do with the novel’s main thematic motifs – of gaining an identity, of rebirth, of survival. The form also allows Walker to link a formal and western tradition to an oral and distinctly African American folk expression. Celie’s letters transpose a black and oral mode into a Western epistolary tradition” (Shakhovtseva).
The precarious, barbaric and treacherous world Celie is born into does not prevent her from attaining agency through the arc of new experiences and relationships. Walker suggests that the lingering trauma and scars of racism, sexism and physical brutality can be mediated, if not transcended, with communal support. For Walker, the movement from object to subject must emphasize the intimate unifying of the personal to the historical, the indivdual to the communal, the self liberated.
Chamoiseau, Saro-Wiwa, and Walker write against a condition Coverdale describes as “the amnesia of a people deprived of collective memory by an ancient wound” (Chronicle, 214); as well, and more importantly, these writings accentuate the self-constituted thematic convergence of a mutilating and violent historical situation of global circumference. These works create their own canonical meanings, forming a self-consciously constructed post-colonial canonicity. The power of these texts lies not so much in their successful infusion of oral expressiveness into traditional western literary forms, as in the revitalizing, exacting spirit they bring to literature, their epical themes and transoceanic consciousness birthed from the sovereignty of a monumental human drama of universal scope and import. In the interstices between the oral and written, the self exiled from its familiar, maternal moorings obeys the impulse to mediate, transcribe, and reclaim its human coherency out of an 'unspeakable' existence.
WORKS CITED
Abbandonato, Linda. “Rewriting the Heroine’s Story in The Color Purple.” Alice
Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands /La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
Berlant, Lauren. “Race, Gender and Nation in The Color Purple.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993.
Boyd, William. Introduction. Sozaboy. By Ken Saro-Wiwa. London: Longman, 1985.
Chamoiseau, Patrick. School Days. Trans. Linda Coverdale. UP of Nebraska, 1997.
Christian, Barbara. “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something”: African-American Women’s Historical Novels.” Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. Eds. Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990.
Clarke, Patrick M. “The Color Purple by Alice Walker: Rationale.” The National Council of Teachers of English. 2 Aug. 2005.
http://www.ncte.org/about/issues/censorship/resources/113739.htm
Coester, Markus. “Language as a product of cultural contact: A linguistic approach to Fela Kuti's lyrics.” Aug. 9, 1998. 11 June 2005
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Ferguson, James. "Return of the Creole." The Unofficial Patrick Chamoiseau Website. 5 June 2005 http://www.patrickchamoiseau.cwc.net/interview.htm
Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Nairobi: Clarendon Press, 1976.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “Color Me Zora.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993.
Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989.
----. Foreword. Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows. By Patrick Chamoiseau. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 1999.
Hilliard, Asa G. III The Maroon Within Us: Selected Essays in African-American Community Socialization. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1995.
http://www.africawithin.com/hilliard/education_of_african_people.htm#FN4
Holloway, Joseph E. “The Impact of African Languages on American English.” Slavery in America. 3 Aug. 2005 http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_languages.htm
Irele, Abiola. “The Achievement of Wole Soyinka.” Opening address presented at the Wole Soyinka conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Apr. 2004. 24 June 2005 http://www.africanreviewofbooks.com/Reviews/essays/irele0804.html
-----. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
Mason, Jr., Theodore O. “The Dynamics of Enclosure.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993.
Mateata-Allain, Kareva. “Ma’ohi Women Writers of Colonial French Polynesia: Passive Resistance toward a Post(-)colonial Literature.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 7.2 (2003). 3 June 2005. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7i2/mateat.htm
Mbembe, Achille. “African Modes of Self-Writing.” Trans. Steven Rendall. Public Culture. 14.1 (2002). 5 Aug. 2005. http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/PDF%20Files/wirs%20-%20mbembe.PDF
Mufwene, Salikoko S. “Creoles, Pidgins and the Evolution of Languages: The Legitimate and Illegitimate Offspring of English.” The University of Chicago Library Digital Collections Fathom Archives. 9 June 2005. http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701718/
Ormerod, Beverly. “The Martinican concept of ‘creoleness’: A multiracial redefinition of culture.” Mots Pluriels et Grand Themes de Notre Temps. Ed. Maureen Perkins. 7.1 (1988). July 2005. http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP798bo.html
Réjouis, Rose-Myriam. Afterword. Texaco. By Patrick Chamoiseau. New York: Vintage International, 1998.
Rickford, John R. “The Creole Origins of African American Vernacular English: Evidence from copula absence.” African American English. Ed. Salikoko S. Mufwene, John Guy Bailey and John Baugh. London: Routledge, 1998. 21 July 2005. http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/papers/CreoleOriginsOfAAVE.html
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy. London: Longman, 1985.
Shahadah, Owen 'Alik. "Linguistics for a new African Reality." African Holocaust.
http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/language%20new%20reality.htm
Shakhovtseva, Elena. “The Heart of Darkness in a Multicolored World: The Color Purple by Alice Walker as a womanist text.” Speaking In Tongues, Guided by Voices. (2003). July 8, 2005. http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/shakhovtseva2.htm
Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Turner, Lorenzo D. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1949.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: HBJ, 1982.
----. The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult. A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film The Color Purple. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Washington, Mary Helen. “An Essay on Alice Walker.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993.
Wasserman, Jerry. “Queen Bee, King Bee: The Color Purple and the Blues.” Canadian Review of American Studies. 30.3 (2000). July 18, 2005. http://www.utpjournals.com/product/cras/303/Wasserman.html
wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1981.
Copyright © 2006 Stephanie C. Horton
|
|
|
