Helping out linguists

Linguists have a tough time coming to terms with interlingualism. See, for example, the succinct state-of-the-art summary by Mark Fettes in Language in the Twenty-First Century: Selected Papers of the Millenial Conferences of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, edited by Humphrey Tonkin and Timothy G. Reagan (2003), where he identifies five key areas of linguistic investigation, namely, World English, Esperantism, Language Brokers, Plurilingualism, and Technologism. Here is an area where literary critics should be of help. Where linguists have to deal with the entire world (they even call their current studies "world-centric"), literary critics have to deal only with a limited number of words on a page (or on a website). But as William Blake so memorably put it, we can see the world in a grain of sand or, in our context, we can understand how language works by studying how a single literary text uses one or more languages. Just as Albert Einstein figured out how the whole universe works just by staring at a clock while he was on a train, we can solve the problems of interlingualism just by reading a multilingual poem.

Wikcrit in the 1980s

Wikcrit (though not called such) is not new. Here, for example, is an excellent example of what was going on in the 1980s in literary criticism. The passage is about Chicana/o poets:

“In the attempt to identify the audiences, a major factor is language choice. These poets may have the option of writing in Spanish, in English, or in a combination of the two languages, the choice usually depending upon such factors as family background, area of origin, and educational opportunities. They may have had to learn English, Spanish, or even both languages. To some Chicana and Chicano authors only one option may be available; to others, perhaps all three.

“Nevertheless, these languages, whose mixing is a central stylistic feature of this poetry, are combined in at least two ways. First, Chicano authors may write bilingually, using Spanish for one poem and English for another. Tino Villanueva, Bernice Zamora, and Carmen Tafolla all fall into this group. Second, Chicano writers may also intermix the two languages within the same poem, as Alurista, Tafolla, Zamora, Xelina, and José Montoya have done in varying degrees. The cultural and literary phenomenon of using two languages interlinearly has been referred to as ‘interlingualism,’ a term coined to distinguish the mixture of language within one poem from ‘bilingualism,’ the use of English and Spanish in different poems. The difference lies in how the movement takes place. In a bilingual experience, the reader must mentally juxtapose poems in English with poems in Spanish; in an interlingual experience, the tensions in syntax, the connotations, the ironies, and the reverberations of words and images interlock, pulling in two directions at once. Poems written interlingually engage rival sets of reader expectations and desires. They graphically enact on the surface of the page the conflicts and tensions between the two main audiences of Chicana-Chicano poetry, the English-speaking audience and the Spanish-speaking audience.” (Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature, by Marta Ester Sánchez, 1986, pp. 20-21)

Kinaray-a in an American play

A play, entitled Ruby, Tragically Rotund, by Boni B. Alvarez, produced by Playwrights’ Arena in association with the Latino Theater Company, is currently showing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. In an interview by Ruben V. Nepales, the playwright says:

"I have flashback scenes in Ruby which are written in Kinaray-a, a Visayan dialect [should be language - IRC]. It’s my parents’ language. I feel that, compared to Tagalog, Kinaray-a is a more musical language. In these flashbacks, I wanted a very hopeful and romantic mood, so I decided to write them in Kinaray-a.

“Ruby is a very Filipino play because it is infused with Pinoy culture — my experience of it, specifically. Ruby has a Filipino family, but she also has a blossoming relationship with her African-American boyfriend that could lead to a family of her own. At the same time, she has a very diverse group of friends whom she also considers family.

"While Ruby is very Filipino, it’s also very American — not just Filipino-American, but how we fit into the entire American landscape, not only as an individual group, but also in how we live with other groups."

The play was previously mounted at the Scene Dock Theatre at the University of Southern California School of Theatre. It received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Theater has long been multilingual. In fact, having more than one language in the text of a play tends to be the rule now rather than the exception among the leading theatre groups in the world. I will be in the US in a couple of months, too late to catch the LA production. If anyone has seen the play and has comments about it, I would be very grateful.

Ahmadou Kourouma

Here is a quote from "Discourse in Kourouma’s Novels: Writing Two Languages to Translate Two Realities" (2007), by Amadou Koné:

"As Kourouma says, there is 'a deficit of vocabulary in the European language as used by the ex-colonized individual', not because the African fails to understand the French language, but because the French language is incapable of translating an African reality. Thus, without any hesitation, Kourouma is going to compensate for the lacunae of that language in order for it to express a reality related in its fullness. Kourouma asserts his freedom from the beginning:

"'Je n’avais pas le respect du français qu’ont ceux qui ont une formation classique. . . . Ce qui m’a conduit à rechercher la structure du langage malinké, à reproduire sa dimension orale, à tenter d’épouser la démarche de la pensée malinké dans sa manière d’appréhender le vécu.

"'I did not have the same respect for French that those with a classical education hold. . . . This led me to strive for the structure of the Malinke language, to reproduce its oral dimension, to attempt to assimilate the procedures of Malinke thought in its mode of apprehending lived experience.'" (p. 114)

This is an insight applicable to all of Wikcrit: another language is used by a writer because the main language is inadequate to express whatever s/he wants to say, or alternatively if the text appears to be monolingual (as I like to say, following Bienvenido N. Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez), a writer writes in her/his first language using words of the second language.

Multingual writing focused on languages themselves

The abstract of the article "Parallel patterns? A comparison of monolingual speech and bilingual codeswitching discourse" (2000) by Penelope Gardner-Chlorosa, Reeva Charlesc, and Jenny Cheshire points to a direction that Wikcritics could productively pursue:

"The extensive work done on the structure of monolingual discourse is now paralleled by a strong tradition of studies of the conversational functions of bilingual codeswitching (Gumperz, 1982; Myers-Scotton, 1993a; Auer, 1998a). So far, however, no direct comparisons have been made between the two.

"In this paper we compare the way in which four common conversational functions are realised (a) monolingually and (b) through codeswitching by members of a Punjabi and English-speaking network in London. The samples are thus ideally matched - the same speakers in the same context - and we establish that codeswitching may be used in two ways within these conversations. On the one hand it may take the place of monolingual ways of marking significant moves in the conversation (e.g. emphasis, change in voice quality), or add itself to these to reinforce the effect. On the other hand it can be used as a further dimension to the monolingual means which are available, allowing the speakers to introduce structural contrasts, manage the conversational ‘floor’, or highlight the different connotations of each variety as a counterpoint to the referential meaning of their utterance."

In literary texts, a word in another language is often used to alert the reader that what is being said or what will be said shortly needs special attention (e.g., T. S. Eliot's use of French). The "foreign" word then serves the same function as a "wrong" or "irregular" foot in an otherwise monotonous metrical pattern. This reason for being multilingual has been examined quite well and quite often by literary critics.

What Wikcritics can explore, however, is the second reason cited in the linguistics article: the second language may actually be used to comment on the first language. It is not unusual for a writer to write about language itself, not on the external reality that the work is supposed to mirror (I am using traditional mimesis terms). Multilingual texts may be about the different languages themselves, rather than just about whatever the words are referring to. It's certainly food for thought.

Indonesian multilingual novel

A student thesis at the Petra Christian University investigates code-mixing in an Indonesian novel (that later became a film). Writes the student: "The writer has chosen one of the best-selling novels in Indonesia in 2004, 30 Hari Mencari Cinta (30 Days in Search for Love) which was written by Nova Riyanti Yusuf and Upi Avanto. ... The novel itself is so closely related to young people’s love and lives; therefore, the writer thinks it can represent them in a simpler way. The research is based on the language of narration and the characters’ conversation in the novel which often include code-mixing. ... In the novel 30 Hari Mencari Cinta, the writer Nova Riyanti Yusuf often includes code-mixing in the language of narration and the characters’ conversation. However, since it is a novel, she only gives the context without showing any further direction on how the code-mixing is composed there."

The thesis points to two distinct concerns of Wikcrit - code-mixing in dialogue (which is easily explained and often even dismissed as simply reflecting the way people actually speak in multilingual societies) and code-mixing in the narration (which is not as easily explained and which, therefore, needs the sophisticated tools of literary criticism). Unfortunately, I cannot read Bahasa Indonesia (or Bahasa Melayu or Malay) and cannot judge whether the student's work is accurate and useful for us. Needless to say, it is the novel that should be of interest, not the film (where the multilingual narration is, of course, irrelevant).

Multilingual literature is natural for many

To Ruth Vanita's observation in her "Gandhi’s tiger: multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India" (2002) --

"The average university graduate in Victorian England and in the early twentieth century could read and write English and French as well as Latin and some Greek. An average graduate in north India in the same period could read and write English, Hindi, Urdu, and the mother tongue (such as Punjabi) and also some Persian and/or Sanskrit." (p. 97)

-- we can add the Philippine equivalent: The average university graduate in the Philippines today can speak and/or read Filipino (the national language), English (the medium of instruction in most universities), the lingua franca (Cebuano, Ilocano, or Tagalog), and the mother tongue (Adasen, Yogad, or any of the 171 Philippine languages). If the graduate has Chinese blood and/or studied in a Chinese-medium school, s/he will also know how to speak, if not to read, Mandarin Chinese (taught in schools) and Fookien Chinese (the Chinese language most Chinese-Filipinos use). If the graduate is Muslim, s/he will know how to read Arabic. If the graduate has wealthy parents, s/he will know how to speak Spanish. If the graduate has a parent working overseas, s/he will have a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese, Italian, or whatever the language is in the country where the parent is (about 10 million adult Filipinos now work outside the country). To the British in Victorian England, to Indians, and to Filipinos, literary texts that use more than one language would be the rule rather than the exception.

Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista on code-switching

In the August 29 issue of the newspaper Manila Bulletin, linguist Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista summarizes current linguistic theory about code-switching:

"There was a time, some 40 years ago, when Taglish [Tagalog + English] was frowned upon. This was because Taglish was associated with a speaker’s inability to use either Tagalog or English in complete discourse. It was a sign of lack of proficiency in one of the two languages. This can be called 'deficiency-driven code switching.' ...

"But the more common kind of code switching now can be called 'proficiency-driven code switching.' This is the kind used by people who are proficient in both languages and who code-switch for purposes of communicative efficiency. I believe that bilinguals (and most Filipinos are bilingual, even trilingual) have the strategic competence to 'calculate,' in a sense, which language would provide the most expressive, most concise way of saying something. This kind of strategic competence is currently very evident in texting [SMS] – the texter can choose between English, Tagalog, or Taglish to state the message in the fastest, easiest way possible."

As it has always done, literature leads the way in the uses of language. Multilingual literary texts are written by writers proficient, not deficient in language skills. The general population (those using SMS) are reaping the benefits of the efforts of literary writers (admittedly and necessarily, a small percentage of the world's population) to break down the barriers between languages and to harness the best qualities of every language in the service of effective and pleasurable communication. Linguists explore universes of discourse where literary writers and critics have gone before.

Assia Djebar

For insights on Assia Djebar, look into Anne Donadey's World Literature Today essay: “The second half of the essay explores Djebar’s own practice of multilingual writing in the three published novels of her Algerian Quartet. Djebar is one of the foremost Maghrebian writers, and her work on language is truly remarkable. I analyze her use of Arabic words in her texts in French to argue that she creates a multilingual palimpsest which both reflects the process of violent French colonization of Algeria and subverts it linguistically by ‘arabiciz[ing] French.’”

Donadey's "arabicizing French" is like Gemino Abad's observation that Filipino writers have "colonized English." The often asked question of whether English should be considered an Asian language has been answered decisively in conferences and books: yes, English is not just the "language of yesterday's enemy" nor is it only the current international language, but it is an Asian, specifically a Filipino language. The Maghrebians have colonized French, just as Filipinos have colonized English. And as wikcrit shows, it is not just a matter of inserting Arabic or Tagalog words in a French or English text, but the French and the English itself being qualitatively different from the French and the English of "yesterday's enemies."

Postcolonial issues

Actually appreciating multilingual literature is complicated by the ideological battles being fought on the postcolonial beachheads of literary theory. Why is language such a big issue among multilingual writers? Anne Donadey gives an account of the critical war:

“The question of the language of writing is overdetermined in the context of anti- and postcolonial literatures. If postcolonial authors write in ‘la langue de l’adversaire d’hier’ (the language of yesterday’s enemy), even writers with a clearly anticolonial agenda are regularly accused, at worst of betrayal, at best of not being able to reach their intended audience. For female writers, it is often seen as a double betrayal, both of the national language and of a nationalist ideology in which women are viewed only as allegories of the nation. These questions, which are unavoidable in the francophone context, are also foregrounded in anglophone Africa, as evidenced by the controversial arguments of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Yet the great theorists of decolonization such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Albert Memmi all wrote their electrifying manifestoes in the colonizer’s language, using French as ‘une arme de combat, pour une littérature nationale’ (a weapon in the struggle for national literature). Writers and critics have treated this issue in many different ways.” ("The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian Palimpsest" in World Literature Today, 2000)

Having spent the greater part of my life doing literary theory and having realized, like Terry Eagleton and several other theorists, that the moment of literary theory has passed, I suggest that we roll up our sleeves and start actually reading texts within a multilingual and/or multicultural context. We might come up with conclusions quite different from what we get using mere theoretical reasoning. As Samuel Johnson so famously illustrated, there might be no way to prove philosophically that anything or anyone exists outside of ourselves, except by kicking a stone:

"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- 'I refute it thus.'" (from Boswell)

Once we start reading literature in the "language of yesterday's enemy," we might find that such literature is as subversive and as anticolonial as the "language of our blood."

Ike Muila

Here's a blog entry about the poetry of Ike Muila:

"though there is an increase in the number of poets with poems that utilize hybridization, fusing english and african languages with slang\iscamtho, rasta and rap-speak, ike mboneni muila of the botsotso jesters is probably the only south african poet who writes\performs solely in a mix of languages, and is very passionate, irrepressible and unrepentant in calling the playful mixing of languages and slanguages, the sampling of folk-songs and children’s tales and snap-shots of township and village scenes art\poetry:

i am into creative writing as a poet artist performer
my narrative mix is in eleven languages spoken in south africa
by and bye trapped in one poem
the so called tsotsi taal
iscamtho lingo alive and kicking sense of humor in you and me
mixing of languages into a witty lingo
a language of identity
a language of an ordinary person in the street
a language of unity in diversity

"his poems bodly declare that his mission is to make art\poetry out of the mixing of languages and slanguages, out of the recollection, reconstruction, re-mixing and adaptation of children game-songs, folk songs\african classics games\songs\township classics\township tales and the exposition of everyday real-life stories in the streets, villages, townships and inner-city of azania."

Multilingual poetry is indeed - instead of an esoteric exercise for the elite of the linguistic and artistic world - the revolt of the unlettered against the miseducated.

Literature in a colonial language

Today, we call it multilingual or mixed-language literature, but during the European Renaissance, it was “the language question,” that is, the ideological struggle of the vernaculars against the international languages of that time.

The study by David Holton of the dialectal literature in Crete at that time is typical of scholarly work on that period. This is part of what he says:

“Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries we can therefore observe an upward movement in the status of the vernacular [in Crete]; we might compare the rise of English in the period from the Norman Conquest to the age of Chaucer. The parallels are quite striking: in both cases we have to do with a colonial situation in which the conquerors speak a different language (Norman French or Italian), while the native population has both a vernacular and a formal or learned language. Of course the extent to which English was influenced by contact with French is much greater than the influence of Italian on Cretan dialect, which is mainly restricted to vocabulary. It is, however, noteworthy that the common language of Crete was Greek, that is Cretan dialect, and by the end of our period the use of Italian was more or less restricted to the realms of administration and culture. Educated men would of course be bilingual, but it is clear from documents of the sixteenth century that women, even from noble Venetian families, would usually know only Greek. Greek was written in both the Greek and Latin alphabets, and a number of manuscripts of literary works survives in Latin script.” (p. 14 of Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete, 1991)

We are privileged to watch a similar phenomenon unfolding in our time. The use of Filipino as a literary language is growing as an ideological protest against the continued dominance of English (the language of 20th century American colonizers) in literature classes in schools and in government in the Philippines. The Filipino language itself has a huge number of words borrowed from English, analogous to the situation of Chaucer with French and the Cretan writers with Italian. The Philippines is undergoing what Europe underwent five or six centuries earlier! Five or six centuries from now, if we will follow the logic of the European model, Philippine literary texts written in English will be, if I may borrow Holton's words (used in another context), "of much smaller literary significance."

Why Wikcrit is soooo difficult

Here is the abstract of a paper entitled "Once Again on Khitan Words in Chinese-Khitan Mixed Verses" by Alexander Vovin (published in Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae in 2003):

"The present paper deals with identification of the Khitan words preserved in Late Middle Chinese transcription in mixed language verses from the Qidan Guo Zhi. I argue that the only cogent way for identifying these Khitan words correctly is using the up-to-date version of Middle Chinese reconstruction, and not viewing them through the anachronistic prism of Modern and/or Early Mandarin readings of Chinese characters. On this basis I provide critical assessment of certain identifications proposed by my predecessors as well as several new identifications."

It is so easy to use "the anachronistic prism of Modern" language to read texts done before our century. The New Critics had lots of fun pointing out how what we now view as colorless words used to be pregnant with other meanings in 17th century England (such as John Donne's to die as to have an orgasm). Wikcritics find themselves in double trouble: they have to think in two or more languages at the same time, and they have to place themselves in another century.

My latest play

Just a little something to show you where I am coming from. Here are some lines from my musical play Baler sa Puso Ko [Baler in My Heart], which opened last Aug. 12 in the Philippines. The play is all in Filipino, except for lines sung by the Spanish and the American characters. Examples:

From the opening scene introducing the characters:

MGA KASTILA
Todos lahat magdiwang sa Baler, Baler
Porque ngayon ay fiesta de Baler, Baler
Kahit kailan, kahit saan, mula noon
Hanggang ngayon sikat el pueblo de Baler

From a scene much later when American soldiers arrive:

ANTERO AMATORIO [the leader of the Filipino soldiers]
Wat you sey wat you sey my Amerikeyno
Why you sey why you sey kami ay sa inyo

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 1
I can talk a little Tágalog brown brother
We bili na you mura mura brown brother

ANTERO AMATORIO
Wat you mean wat you mean tarantado kayo
Hindi kami mabibili kahit nino

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 1
Ang mga Espanyol because natatalo
Binayaran namin sila bargain you know

ANTERO AMATORIO
Weyt a minit weyt a minit we panalo
We not for seyl we not for seyl no no no no

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 2
What is this jerk talking about ignorant fool
We came to liberate this barbarian cesspool

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 3
These monkeys have no tails they speak real funny
They do not even know manifest destiny

(I apologize to those that do not understand Filipino.)

Henry Roth

Check out Judith Oster's excellent analysis of this scene from Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream:

Mom, attuned to sorrow as she was, ... stroked his arm. “Mein orrim kindt. Sit down. Sit down, pleese .... So is it shoyn millt alle fon us, vee menshen. You should excuse mine English.... Alles mus’ go sleep, mein kindt, tsi rich, tsi poor.” ...

“Talk English, Mom,” Ira rebuked....

“I don’t mind your mother speaking Yiddish,” Larry assured Ira earnestly. “You seem to think I do. I really don’t. I can’t tell you why.”

“It’s atavistic,” Ira quipped uneasily.

“No, there’s something warm about it. Honestly. Please don’t stop her. Don’t be embarrassed, Ira. Some of it I think I understand. Your mother is very eloquent, do you know? She’s really comforting. I mean it.” (Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature, 2003, pp. 90-91)

Bani Basu

I wish I could read Bani Basu in the original. She is reputedly the first major Bengali Indian literary writer to use the actual language of people, rather than (as happens too often with writers in other languages) an artificial literary register: "One can take Moom (1998) which focuses on a Marwari family settled in Kolkata for generations. The language is Bangla laced with Hindi, the kind many Marwaris in Calcutta use. Such a hybrid language - if used at all in Bangla literature in the past - has only been done for comic effect, and always briefly. Bani Basu dares to write an entire novel in this mixed language quite seriously, without any trace of condescension or mockery." (Meenakshi Mukherjee, "Bani Basu's Novels")

LibriVox

I appreciate the heroic efforts of LibriVox to popularize non-English language readings through the Web, but I wish it had spent its time and money on something other than Ursula O. Maderal's poem "Araw ng Kamusmusan." There are better, more critically-acclaimed, more representative poems in Tagalog. In fact, if it can, it would be good for LibriVox to have more Filipino poems read on mp3. The 10 million or so Filipinos that live outside the Philippines should certainly welcome such readings. (I know that LibriVox depends almost completely on volunteers and cannot really choose what its readers read, but there must be a way to encourage more discriminating readers.)

Rekhti poetry

Very interesting is a study by Ruth Vanita entitled “Eloquent Parrots: Mixed Language and the Examples of Hinglish and Rekhti.” She defines rekhti poetry this way: "Rekhti is a genre of Urdu poetry, purportedly composed in ‘women’s language’, which arose in the 18th century and came into prominence in the early 19th century. Early literary Urdu, called rekhta, has a preponderance of Persian and Arabic vocabulary, but the language of rekhti, which approximates more to the non-literary language of everyday speech, incorporates words and idioms from north Indian languages and dialects." She traces today's Hinglish (Hindu + English) to rekhti. Here is yet another proof that literature precedes language, or as Jacques Derrida famously put it, writing precedes speech.

Tistarangit

The histories of writing and publishing are, to use a mathematical analogy, inversely proportional to each other. Writing started with multilingual texts (because languages themselves were born from other languages) and gradually became mostly monolingual. Publishing started with monolingual periodicals, moved to periodicals with monolingual texts in two or more languages (separate but equal, as in race relations), and now (principally on the Web) is moving towards multilingual or mixed texts. Literature, like everything else in history, swings like a pendulum, and writers are once again writing mixed or multilingual texts, primarily because languages themselves are moving from "pure" to "pidgin" forms (both linguistic adjectives, of course, are oversimplifications). Having monolingual texts in different languages is a necessary but I hope short-lived step towards truly multilingual publications.

I take as a case in point Tistarangit, the first online literary magazine of Sikkim. This magazine features texts in either English or one of the Indian languages, but as far as I know, not in the multilingual or mixed mode. Of course, using Wikcrit, we can analyze a poem such as this one and see that Indian languages determine the English syntax, but to move forward, Indian contributors to the magazine should start writing mixed verse (which, elsewhere in India, has gained a respectable following):

Cannibal Times
Raja Puniani

Come
I’ll eat you all

See
World has become
So much religious
(Even physics!)
And living so much expensive

You all are gods
Gods of your own world
I want to listen to your
Frustrations first
And
Wish to see
Masturbating
Before your own porno self

Go and
Sleep with the capitalists
In a city of communal riots

Class struggle
Demonstrates itself in
Class adjustments

All are violent and disturbed
In this risky
Peaceful co-existence

Democracy is
What people earn
Just as a bonded labour earns his privileges

Come
And
I’ll eat you all

I see me
In all of you

I see nothing
While I look at myself
Though I see
A lot

My mirror
These days
Scare me

I can’t keep gazing sky

Keep away that sky from me
The sky falls
On me

Nevertheless, I like the poem and wish I knew the Indian language that gives rise to the kind of English it uses.

Computer-assisted literary analysis

I wish I had time to try out computer software that is supposed to make the work of multilingual literary critics easier. For example, the CCS software colors every word according to its source language. With one look at a screen and without actually having to read a text, we can tell if a text is multilingual or not. The Palimpsest software apparently can help identify and count words in languages other than the main one of a text. Stylistic critics have been using computers for a long time to do their mechanical chores of counting. Perhaps computers can raise the level of literary criticism from the purely qualitative to a more quantitative one. Maybe C. P. Snow's classic divide (suddenly back again in the newspapers) can finally be bridged.