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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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