File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0006, message 55


Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 09:09:58 -0400
From: Mac Fenwick <macfenwick-AT-home.com>
Subject: Re: Why language is still important


The discussion re the arrogance of English-speaking monoglots is
interesting to me in my context as a part-time (i.e. powerless) teacher
at a small university in Canada that is slowly building a post-colonial
component into its curriculum. So far, there's a single "Commonwealth
Literature" course at the third year level (primarilly novels from India
and the West Indies) and a six week unit of "Post Colonial Literature"
in the first year course. Through this first year course, I've been able
to observe the reactions of hundreds of young Canadians coming face to
face with non-Anglo-American writers for the very first time in their
lives. One of the most troubling aspects of this is the obvious comfort
they take from the fact that their assumption that the rest of the world
really does speak English is, in fact, true. They read Achebe,
Markandaya, Walcott and Fugard and decide that English truly is the only
language one needs know.

This attitude has always seemed exceedingly strange to me in Canada. We
are not, nor have we ever been, a Colonial power like Britain or the US.
Our entire cultural identity, in fact, has been built around the dual
rejection of both those identities (with a now-formalised rejection of
America, brilliantly summed up in a very popular beer commercial that
got a lot of play during the recent Stanley Cup playoffs). Our retreat
into a solid wall of monoglot English with the complete rejection --
rendered politically effective and populist in the western provinces,
and even, increasingly, in Ontario -- of the "other" Canadian languages
(French, First Nations', the "new" migrant languages as well as the
"old") is perplexing to say the least if we think about it purely in
terms of imperial arrogance.

I think that Canadian adherence to English, and even the increasingly
desperate (and fruitless?) attempts within academic circles to define
and create a truly Canadian "e"nglish, is the best manifestation of the
fact that Canada is still very much a (neo)colonial nation. We have no
sense of ourselves in the way our cultural masters do (just look at the
last thirty years of Canadian constitutional debate -- all of it
centering around the question, "what is Canadian identity?"), so we
cling to the "universalilty" of English as a way of reassuring ourselves
that we are, in fact, in the majority and even, perhaps, on the "winning
side": we have a "real" culture that the rest of the world is slowly
taking up. England, The United States and Canada are the homes of a
truly "world language" (Australia and New Zealand, Ireland, Wales and
Scotland all have their own versions of English with funny/interesting
accents). This is not a manifestation of imperial arrogance, but of the
lamentably-familiar colonial sense of insufficiency -- precisely the
same situation that Brathwaite describes as having taken place in
Jamaica with the white settler culture's mimicry of the "metropole".
Brathwaite argues that this adherence to the imperial culture and
language was indicative of the white settler culture's insistence upon
(and inability to see in any other way) their society as being divided
by the "separate nuclear units" of black and white, master and slave.

In Canada, it seems to me that what afflicts "us" (i.e. the white
settler majority culture) is not master and slave, but "English" and
"non-english". The arrogant monoglossia (is this even a word?) of the
students I see rolling through that first year course, then, is not the
expression of imperial arrogance, but of the most insecure form of
colonial mimicry you can find, with little or no sense of the disruptive
or ironic elements available within the cultural action of mimicry.

By way of confession: I speak little French, I can order a beer in
Spanish and lunch in Dutch. Living and teaching where I do, I don't
really "need" anything else.

Mac Fenwick
Trent University


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