“Language is also a place of struggle” – bell hooks
One chilly February evening, a friend of mine, who also happened to be the president of the Caribbean African Association on campus, pulled me aside. Having seen me perform spoken word poetry a few times at various campus events, she wondered if I would be able to write and perform a piece for a festival she and her executive team were organising, named “The Black Monologues: A Call for Dialogue”. The purpose of the project was to give students an opportunity to share their experiences with blackness through a medium of their choosing, and to tackle the misrepresentation of identity that often occurs on the University of British Columbia campus by speak about their experiences from their own unique standpoints.
At first I was extremely grateful and flattered to be offered such an opportunity. Upon further reflection, I inevitably came up against the many feelings and anxieties I have when thinking about my complicated experiences with blackness. Having lived all my life in South Africa prior to moving to Canada for university, race was something that I always felt, yet rarely thought about. Moving to Vancouver and meeting other students and faculty from the African continent and Diaspora precipitated a violent change in how I began to think about my own identity. In the many conversations I have had about national identity, African identity, race and gender, I began to get a sense of the way in which how I thought about myself was very different from how many of my contemporaries from other parts of Africa constructed their own identities. I did not feel the same sense of nationalism for South Africa as my roommate expressed for her home country, Kenya. I did not wholly define myself as a ‘post-Apartheid’ black, as implied by a professor in a conversation one mid-October day. At first, all the ways in which I deviated from the conceptions of blackness, ‘Africanness’ and diasporic identity caused me to question myself. I felt as if I lacked the authenticity that I saw reflected in the some of the faces and lives around me. Eventually, however, I began to see how all of the diverse, incomplete and often conflicting moving parts of my identity were essential and undeniable. It was out of this realisation that the poem, Contra, was born.
Contra, at its heart I think, is about my love of language. In her book, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks writes that “language is also a place of struggle” (hooks, 145), a feeling that I continue to identify with greatly. Contra is a multi-lingual poem that functions as a site of the struggle I have with my own multilingualism and how this informs my idea of blackness. The poem is mainly written in three languages: English, Sesotho (my mother-tongue, a language originating from Lesotho and widely spoken in South Africa), and Afrikaans (a daughter language of Dutch, historically, also widely spoken in South Africa).
English is the language in which I communicate the most fluently, freely and articulately of the three languages mentioned, an aspect that was perhaps the most surprising for some Canadians upon my arrival in Vancouver. The way that I speak English, with a South African accent, often confused as an English accent, is a clear marker of both the level of my education and my privilege. In many of the conversations had, I am frequently met with surprise when speaking about my educational background, a topic where preconceived ideas of education in ‘Africa’ are often revealed. I was fortunate enough to attend private schools throughout my primary and secondary education, where English was the primary language of instruction. Because of this, I was sometimes perceived as a ‘coconut’ back in South Africa, a term used to describe a person ‘brown’ on the outside, ‘white’ on the inside, and yet essentially hollow. The struggle I have had with my love of the English language and its consequences on how I speak my mother tongue is reflected within Contra as I describe English as “a language with a hand to cover and/smother the one I’ve had since birth/with a tenderness only a lover could know”.
My mother tongue features in Contra when I switch from English to Sesotho:
Empa. Ha ke batla, nka bua le wena ka Sesotho saka. Sesotho saka se robeileng.
Sesotho saka se snaaks. Sesotho saka sa Jozi, e ke buang, ke Sesotho
se nyamelang.
[But. If I want, I could speak to you with my own Sesotho. My broken Sesotho. My strange Sesotho. My Jozi (a nickname for Johannesburg city) Sesotho, the one that I am speaking, is a disappearing Sesotho]
The lack of connection I feel with my mother-tongue is only heightened by my living in Vancouver, where English is my primary means of communication. This is compounded by the fact that the English I am increasingly using is not South African English, but Canadian English with its own nuances, inflections and intricacies. In many ways, this new use of language is an addition to the many moving parts of my ever-evolving identity, in which some aspects are resisted, some are consciously accepted and other aspects of who I am and how I use language are transmitted to others in the ever-moving exchange of words and ideas.
Another language that features prominently in Contra is Afrikaans. The struggle I experience in having an affinity for the language is expressed in the lines:
As ek wou, ek kon hierdie taal gebruik. Die taal van ‘Voetsek!’, en ’Pasop!’ en ‘Doen dit nie!’. Maar ook die taal van granate, van liefde, en “die kind is nie dood nie…”
[If I wanted, I could use this language. The language of “Go Away!” “Beware” and “Don’t do it!” But also the language of pomegranates and love and “the child is not dead…”]
Here, I am referring to my feelings towards Afrikaans and how the language has been used historically in complex and conflicting ways. On one hand, Afrikaans was viewed by many non-white people under the Apartheid regime as the ‘language of the oppressor’, being the official language of the dominant Apartheid government and National Party from 1948 to 1994. One the other, Afrikaans was used by poets such as Ingrid Jonker, a South African Afrikaans poet, who made use of Afrikaans as a tool of resistance against institutionalised racism, discrimination and violence. In the above passage, I reference her poem, Die kind wat dood geskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga about a child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga, a South African township.
In this way, for me, language becomes a place of complex possibility. Where words can be simultaneously shackled and reconfigured by history. Where I can shift and switch within language and between languages and have aspects of each inform and speak to each of my multiple identities. Through language, I can conceive of my ideas of multiplicity, blackness, belonging and home.
I can articulate the fact that I am a young black woman who enjoys and respects Afrikaans. I am an educated black woman who has a deep love for the English language. I am an African black woman who speaks a flawed, yet distinct Sesotho. And that I am a fortunate and privileged black woman who comes from South Africa, and lives in Vancouver, and considers both places home.
bell hooks articulates this idea of home being a space in which new possibilities can be found. She writes that:
Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference. One confronts and accepts dispersal and fragmentation as part of the construction of a new world order that reveals more fully where we are, who we can become, an order that does not demand forgetting. (hooks, 152)
Vancouver, in many ways, is that home. Where my ideas of being South African, African and black are only sharpened and made more vivid by distance; a place in which new ideas of self can be experienced and expressed, without forgetting or erasing. And finally, perhaps becoming a space in which identity can be reflected in the poetry of possibility.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Work Cited
hooks, b. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Chapter 15: Choosing the Margin as a Space for Radical Openness, (pp. 145-153). Boston, MA: South
End Press. 1990. Print.
Submission by Maneo Mohale, South Africa.
No comments:
Post a Comment