Language and time in postcolonial experience.

ABSTRACT

I examine the relationships between language and time from the standpoint of postcolonial experience. While focusing materially on language, I explore, on one hand, the concept of time from the point of view of experiences usually characterized as postcolonial. On the other hand, I think through what the expression "postcolonial" could mean from the perspective of a general concept of time. These approaches lead one to understand in what ways we could reasonably argue that, more that in any other modes of consciousness in any disciplines, both the times and the experiences of postcolonialism in continental Africa can be most insightfully traced in the histories of what has been called the African experience in literature.

1

I wish to examine the relationships between language and time from a postcolonial standpoint. On one hand, I will explore the concept of time from the point of view of experiences usually characterized as postcolonial. (1) On the other hand, I will think through what the "postcolonial" could mean from the standpoint of a general concept of time. These two interrelated approaches, I hope, lead us to understand in what ways one could reasonably argue that, more that in any other modes of consciousness in any disciplines, both the times and the experiences of postcolonialism in continental Africa can be most insightfully traced in the histories of what has been called the African experience in literature. (2)

My material focus in this essay is language. (3) This emphasis should justify, or at least partially excuse, what otherwise could be seen as a neglect of detailed attention to one novel or one play; or lack of even a focus on a tight body of work by one or the other of a reader's favorite postcolonial writer. I have momentarily privileged the general textual idea of the modern and the postcolonial because I want this to be an inquiry conceptually centered on the meaning of time in its relation to language. I want to examine constitutions of ideas of time in the history of a literary tradition--the modern, postcolonial African tradition. In due course I will explain the significance of this foregrounding of the idea of time. Suffice to say now that it allows one to highlight both the temporality of language in African writing as well as the writing's self-constitutions as a composite tradition, or as a series of related traditions.

Speaking about African writing in African languages, Karin Barber and Graham Furniss recently noted: "African-language writing in general offers an unparalleled laboratory in which to ask questions about innovation and creativity about new genres and how they come into being; about the innumerable, protean ways in which orality combines with literacy; about the changing constitution of publics and imagined communities; about cultural nationalism and forms of the imagination that exceed cultural nationalism; and about the self-conception and representation of the individual through writing" (1). I want to generalize this observation about African writing in African languages to the postcolonial writings. By this account, African writing in any of its languages is about persons or peoples but also about processes of constructions of self and communities of persons. The processes connote not just places but also movement; they aspire to and announce possible unities of cultures and traditions but are themselves also modes of existence in tensions, conflicts, and change. In short, just as Barber and Furniss want us to see that, in the examples they studied, African writing in African languages are not self-enclosed, I want to explore in what ways it could be true to say that postcolonial African writing, as an artistic tradition, is an embodiment in thought of time-in-motion. How should we go about analyzing that thought? How can we analyze the thought that, for example, Achebe's and Soyinka's works are literary representations of experience in an effort to grasp the meaning of time? (4)

What conceptual issues emerge in modern African literatures when we try to think together the necessary relations between postcolonial writing, time, memory, and history? For a start, I assume a hypothesis that it is not conceptually possible to separate the problem of postcolonial history from the question of language, especially the language of history. This is so because the nature of language is itself a problem not only for epistemology in the abstract but also concretely for matters concerning historical representation. For example, when examining the uses of language in works that harbor cultural memory--let us focus on the most defining works in modern African literature--it is evident that if we must isolate a common element in the works of the postcolonial writers, that element should be concerned with experiences of the historical break in Africa's language traditions. In anglophone Africa, one could think about the earliest works by novelists or poets: Chinua Achebe (e.g, Things Fall Apart), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (e.g., Weep Not Child), Christopher Okigbo (Labyrinth) and Wole Soyinka (Death and the King's Horseman). In francophone Africa, Camara Laye's African Child, Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure, and Leopold Sedar Senghor's numerous poems and critical essays come to mind. The African writer, it seems, not only writes about African cultures as "broken" by the experiences of colonialism (and the economic forces of an ideologically cultural modernity), but also appears to experience language itself--in this case, the language of writing--as re-enactment of otherwise de-centered traditions. The writers mentioned seem to write the modern histories of Africa's traditions as a series of events--as historical process. This observation is more than the allegation that all postcolonial writings are allegories of the nation or an imagined community. Made with only the temporality of the language of the writing in mind, it is to say that the African writers' discourse on tradition, much better than some exclusive colonial scientific claims about Africa's pasts, presents itself as a site of a different kind of historical signification.