As I mentioned on Twitter, I just read Ngugi* Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. I really need more time to digest it (and read more of his work), but I’m extremely glad I read it, and I feel I learned something important from it. I love how he explored the connections between languages, imperialism, literature, and liberation, as well as his accounts of his own experiences and his decision to move from writing in English to writing in Gikuyu, his native language. I’ll probably have more to say about this later, but for now a quote from page 29:
We African writers are bound by our calling to do for our languages what Spencer, Milton and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them, which process later opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the other areas of human creative endeavors.
My native language is English, a language that’s just exploding with quality (and non-quality) literature. But this quote – and the whole book – helped me understand the importance of writers using in native/minority/indigenous/endangered languages. It’s not for the readership – obviously English would make a work accessible to more readers – but it’s for the country, the community, the people who speak the language.
*Sorry, there should be marks over the vowels here and in Giyuku, but I can’t get them working right on WordPress.
