From an old news report (2006):
"Since the 1960s, South Asian Canadian writers have been contributing to the richness of Canadian literature. The immigrant writers that arrived in the Sixties were writing in Punjabi, Urdu, and Gujarati, while later immigrants started writing in English as well. But while writers writing in English have been recognized for their work, those writing in their heritage languages have often been ignored. Asma Sayed, for her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Hart, is interested in studying the politics of language in South Asian Canadian writing.
“'My study is two-fold: on one hand, I analyze the use of heritage languages in the writings in English; on the other, I study the literatures solely created in those heritage languages. I intend to study the interrelationship of language, culture, and diaspora.'” Asma’s interest in this area is backed by her knowledge of Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Punjabi languages and Kachchi dialect.
"The first part of Asma’s research focuses on how heritage languages are used in English writing. 'These writers are experimenting with English to create a hybrid language. This is a language which mixes Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, or others with English. By bringing their different cultural backgrounds from around the world to their writing, and thus creating a hybrid or neo-language, they are extending that culture within Canadian society.'
"While these neo-languages speak volumes about resistance and culture-retention, there has been no extensive study to demonstrate the use of heritage languages by these ethnic writers. 'In fact, at times, their use of heritage languages in the English-Canadian texts has been received negatively. I think it is important to address this issue as I believe that these writers use this mixed language for a purpose. Language has been one of the primary means of struggle in the post-colonial literary world. While this linguistic hybridity challenges hegemony of English, it also serves the objective of retention of cultural identity.'”
Does anyone know Ms. (perhaps now Dr.) Sayed? It would be good to know what she now thinks.
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A blog by Isagani R. Cruz. Dedicated to Old King Cole, who first suggested a blog devoted to literary works written or read in languages other than the mother tongue/s of the author/s. For info about blogger, go to http://www.isaganicruz.net.
I have not read any recent work of Dr.Sayed on multilingual and multicultural writing, but I am probably doing what she suggests as a neo-language that extends one's culture within the Canadian milieu.
ReplyDeleteYou might be able to glean this from the recent poems I have written --- in "A Lullaby", I wove the cultural energies of a native/regional language to create a lullaby in English which lends itself to any rhythm of music, thus creating a multi-cultural lullaby rooted in universally recognizable images and poetic figures. (See http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com May 3 post)
In the "Haiti Poems", I used creole, French, and Spanish as strands of worldviews braided into the Haitian central image of a catastrophic temblor. (See the group of poems in the same blog, January 30 post).
Since I needed to concretize the experience of ballerina's dance in another poem ("A Ballerina on the Window"), I felt it functional to use the terminology of ballet en Francais to lend the poetic utterance with the verve and traditions of the dance.
In "Basura Days", I used Spanish, American, and Filipino to encapsulate the pre- and post-colonial nuances of a worldview that finds its central image in "garbage" (as in objectifying the experience via "past baggage" and a gestalt of diverse cultural residues --- the ethnic diaspora).
Did these somehow enrich the poetic utterance? As espoused by Dr. Cruz -- and maybe Dr. Sayed in "resistance/culture retention" -- multilingual tools make for the multicultural (and perhaps universal) ambiance if not cosmopolitan orientation of the poems.
Is this a challenge to the hegemony of English or "the retention of cultural identity"? If multilingual/multicultural literary tools are handmaidens to these political agenda, multilingual writing would unnecessarily be delimited. I do not subscribe to "retention of cultural identity" via literature. Literature must always enrich itself as a cross-cultural medium. Linguistic jingoism is not, a fortiori, acceptable.
What Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot meant to accomplish with the interweaving of poetic utterance in other languages into the core English is the "importation" of cultural slices into the central imagery of their poems to figuratively expand its worldview, a Weltanschauung the poem is leaner without.
-o0o-
(I just got back from a Caribbean cruise which somehow reinforced my bias for cosmopolitanism --- I am happiest at a polyglot table where toasting is done in as many languages I can understand and inebriatingly try to speak. I imagine humans were meant to remain in Babel, so they could also blissfully return to silence which is, after all, the language of the soul.)
---ALBERT B. CASUGA
http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com