We(st), the Inaccessible Blackness: The Role of Colonial Languages In Perpetuating Perceived Difference
It can only be interesting to ponder the role of language in perpetuating the subsistence of wrongful, Western beliefs of racial, civil, and moral superiority. For instance, the French believed their language to be ‘universalist’, ‘superior’, and ‘more developed’ as a direct result of the language’s unique grammatical complexity. Thus, once they came to colonize countries, they banned the use of native languages (the West called these languages ‘dialects’, placing the English and French ‘languages’ above them) in schools. Teachers from France would corporally punish anyone who used the native ‘dialect’. In doing so, they instilled in their colonial subjects the belief that their native languages were inferior to the French, more ‘civilized’ language.
The death of the native languages through the emphasis of French education precipitated the famous suicide of Edmond Laforest, a revolutionary Haitian writer (member of the literary movement La Ronde). Edmond Laforest tied a French Larousse dictionary on his neck, and drowned himself. Laforest’s death symbolizes the dissonance faced by colonial and post-colonial writers, who face the dilemma of writing in their native or colonial tongues.
Such a linguistically ‘suicidal’ dilemma is thoroughly examined in Albert Memmi’s text “The Colonizer and the Colonized”, Gayatri Spivak’s text, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, and Edward Said’s text ‘Orientalism’. In reading and researching these three texts, I’ve found that critics criticize these academics for using Western, academic language to ironically substantiate their points on the death of native language. In essence, postcolonial scholars like Memmi, Spivak, and Said are often accused of hypocritically silencing the voices of the colonized, especially the ones who solely communicate in their native tongues. For instance, Spivak attempts to Derrideanly deconstruct the self so as to answer the question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and in doing so, ironically speaks for the subaltern. In her work, she even qualifies the subaltern as being an ‘inaccessible blackness’, yet proceeds in her attempts to access that blackness.
I am not saying that Memmi, Spivak and Said’s arguments are invalid, but rather that they highlight the cultural proliferation and perceived superiority of Western languages, as well as the dying nature of the colonized language as a direct result of colonialism. In this essay, I highlight the warped representation of the precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial world as it pertains to history, creativity, and reality to convey the fact that We(st) are the ‘inaccessible blackness’. The proliferation of Western languages in writing (especially English and French) has created an inaccessible, false-conscious reality in the Western world. The problem is twofold: We(st) are an inaccessible blackness. The subalterns are an inaccessible blackness. Thus, we must focus on accurate translation of texts to amplify colonized voices. To prove these points, I will first touch upon the substantive and salient points made by both Spivak and Memmi respectively, then work to demonstrate how the West is only speaking to itself, largely leaving the colonized and their native languages in the dust.
From a substantive and metaphysical standpoint, Spivak’s text “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a good ground under which to argue in favor of my previous points. Substantively, like Said in “Orientalism”, Spivak denotes the warped depiction of the colonial world in Western creativity. She argues that the two films Body Heat and Gandhi show that the West places its history above that of the colonized. In Gandhi, Spivak argues that it is hard if not impossible to tell the time period under which the film was filmed. The backdrop and backgrounds of scenes over the forward movement of historical time never change. In contrast, Body Heat pays special attention to fine-tuning the historical backdrop and backgrounds to meticulously and accurately depict ‘the nostalgia of the Pax Americana 1950s’. This shows that for the West, history in the Orient is ‘stagnant’, ‘spatial as opposed to temporal’ whereas history in the West ‘marches forward in the temporal world’. I have provided this example to convey the idea that implicitly and explicitly perceived Western cultural and historical superiority seeps and permeates through the West’s creativity. Western creative enterprises perpetuate illusional differences between real (but nevertheless distinct) colonizer and colonized history. In other words, the West has implicitly failed to account for the fact that there was history before colonialism. In the words of Cezaire, “These Madagascans who are being tortured today, less than a century ago, were poets, artists, administrators? Shhhh! Keep your lips buttoned!”
Going back to Spivak, from a metaphysical standpoint, she adheres to my depiction of the We(st) as an inaccessible blackness. First and foremost, she chooses to write in pompous, Western academic discourse to substantiate her points on colonialism. She writes with the same type of words as an Oxfordian, choosing to use words like ‘genuflection’, ‘inimical’, ‘tendentious’, while going on rants about Derrida, Deleuze, and poststructuralist philosophy. By and large, her work is made to be read by academics, specifically highly educated Westerners. Her work is by no means accessible, and although she makes wonderful points, one of which I mentioned above, overall, the form of her work perfectly exemplifies the West as a false conscious, inaccessible blackness. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”? Yes. Are we listening to them? Absolutely not. We(st) are only listening to ourselves, as Westerners. By using high-level, Oxfordian English our audience is limited.
Such an idea is exemplified by this quote: “Said believes that a powerful colonizer has imposed a language and a culture, whereas cultures, histories, values, and languages of the Oriental peoples have been ignored and even distorted by the colonialists in their pursuit to dominate these peoples and exploit their wealth in the name of enlightening, civilizing, and even humanizing them” By writing in the colonized language, the formerly colonized implicitly implicate themselves in this process of ‘distortion’, ‘ignorance’, ‘civilizing’, ‘humanizing’. To write in the colonial language is to say, I am now civilized and enlightened enough to reach my ‘civilized’ colonial counterparts! Scholars like Said, Memmi, and Spivak attempt to ‘represent’ the colonized, ‘representation’ being a Western democratic obsession and social construct.
Thus, I must reemphasize that the most viable solution to bridging the gap between subaltern and Western inaccessible blacknesses remains in the form of translation, under which the goal remains to capture the exact language, and rhetorical aura of the creative piece. The emphasis shouldn’t be on representation, it should be on amplification. In essence, Memmi and Spivak are like political representatives who ‘represent’ people. A representative is not a translator. All representatives do is bridge the inaccessible gap between the colonizer and the formerly colonized, or subaltern. A translator should work to freeze language in time, along with its cultural, historical backdrop (as is the case for 1950s movies in which Pax Americana was nostalgized).
Back to the use of the colonial language in academia, Memmi posits that the colonized writer is more compelled to write in the colonizer’s language because he is formed and educated to do so. In other words, the colonized writer has been conditioned to forge his creative craftsmanship in the colonizer’s language because he was taught to analytically read and write in it. The colonized writer can express himself well in the colonial language now, and only later in the postcolonial world could he adequately and “spontaneously” express himself in the native language. Memmi says that most colonized writers will not possibly exude and exhibit such patience. And thus, they will choose to write in the mother country’s tongue. This solution, filled with “ethical problems”, leads to the “suicide of colonized literature”, as metaphorically but quite literally exemplified by the suicide of Edmond Laforest. I believe that as a matter of moral principle, the colonized should not give into his former colonizer. The colonized should work to completely erase the colonial language from his consciousness. Also, to add fuel to a fire, Memmi decided to become French, giving in to the French ‘assimilationist principle of making all Africans French cultural clones’. Because French is taught as the language of civilization in schools, children are conditioned to place the French language above their native tongues. They begin to exude an obsessive tendency of perfecting their articulation, and their grammar so as to speak the language of ‘culture’.
This is exemplified by the quote: “The imposition of French at the earliest stages of schooling, accompanied by a curriculum valuing exclusively French civilization, created an unnatural dichotomy in the mind of the child: French becomes the language of literacy, modernity, and culture, the mother tongue being relegated to the oral vehicle of a supposedly outdated tradition”. Thus, it remains evident that Memmi gave into this constructed linguistic and cultural superiority. Memmi directly states: “But it is so easy to read, so obvious. The emergence of a literature of a colonized people, the development o f consciousness by North African writers for example, is not an isolated occurrence. It is part of the development of the self-consciousness of an entire human group. The fruit is not an accident or miracle of a plant but a sign of its maturity.” If such a fruit was mature enough to bloom, mature enough to precipitate the rise of consciousness by North African writers, then why deny it? Memmi said it himself, “it is so easy to read… so obvious.” If people are reading, then Memmi could have written for them instead of only speaking to the inaccessible blackness that is the West.
To conclude this essay, I will revert back to Spivak and Memmi’s claims so as to summarily analyze the inaccessible blackness that is true both of the West and of the subaltern. First and foremost, as delineated in Spivak’s analysis of Body Heat and of Gandhi, the West provides biased depictions of the subaltern’s history and culture but accurately and meticulously depicts its own history and culture. This fact goes to show that there is dissonance in Western creativity. Moreover, Spivak (especially), Memmi, and Said use Western academic language to adhere to Western scholars and Western norms. This occurrence highlights their ‘inaccessible blackness’, given that those who are reading them are most likely privileged Westerners. Similarly, on a personal note, having lived in Tunisia, I noticed the warped perceptions of the West on the part of the formerly colonized firsthand. There is this glorification of European luxuries and stores like Zara which are associated with status, civilization, and wealth. Memmi says that to the colonized and the Jew, “the West was the paragon of all civilization, all culture. He chose the French language, dressed in the Italian style and joyfully adopted every idiosyncrasy of the Europeans.” The legacies of this quote are palpable and its realities are still standing to this day. Its legacy, specifically in Tunisia, demonstrates the fact that some subalterns still perceive the West as more ‘civilized’, ‘educated’ and even ‘human’. The West continues to have conversations with itself on colonialism, prioritizing Western academic languages, especially English and French. The only way to bridge the inaccessible, black gap between Western and formerly colonized societies is through responsible translation. Although Spivak, Memmi, and Said make salient, crucial points as it pertains to denoting the cultural misrepresentation of the colonized, overall in a metaphysical sense, their use of colonial, Western academic jargon to convey their points has silenced the voices of the colonized and has fed the West’s academic ego. Like scholar Jay Maggio, I argue that the best way to amplify the voices of the colonized (or the ‘subaltern’) is by way of translation, whereby the translator attempts to freeze the writer’s language in time, along with its cultural, tonal and historical backdrop so as to capture the writer’s reality instead of warping or even embellishing it.
Works Cited:
“The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957).” In The Albert Memmi Reader, edited by Judaken Jonathan and Lejman Michael, 57–68. LINCOIN: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Accessed April 17, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctv1ddd1m8.8.
Michelman, Fredric. “French and British Colonial Language Policies: A Comparative View of Their Impact on African Literature.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 4 (1995): 216–25. Accessed April 17, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820239.
Maggio, J. “”Can the Subaltern Be Heard?”: Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32, no. 4 (2007): 419–43. Accessed March 30, 2021. doi:10.2307/40645229.
Hamadi, L.. “EDWARD SAID: THE POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND THE LITERATURE OF DECOLONIZATION.” European Scientific Journal, ESJ 10 (2014): n. pag.
Césaire, Aimé, Joan Pinkham, and Robin D.G. Kelley. Discourse on Colonialism. NYU Press, 2000. Accessed April 17, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfkrm.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? : Reflections on the History of an Idea
Maggio, J. “”Can the Subaltern Be Heard?”: Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32, no. 4 (2007): 419–43. Accessed March 30, 2021. doi:10.2307/40645229.