Language and time in postcolonial experience.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 01-JAN-08

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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.

Rather than repeat therefore the valid arguments about the national allegoricity of most postcolonial writings, I want to show how the discourses of, in our example, modern African writings operate on several other historical levels. On one level, the traditions one presumably writes about, or out of, is experienced by the writer as alive--a source of inspiration and creativity. But on another level, the writer also knows that the tradition in question has been "damaged" and transformed in an irreversible manner. In fact, the act of writing is itself both a mark of the time of deconstruction, transformation and renewal. This multilevel experience of history in language is of course not all that peculiar to the modern African writer. Its universality is apparent in, for example, the Irish experience as represented by W. B. Yeats, or the Anglo-American experience as can be seen in T. S. Eliot. In Germany, in the 1930s, Jewish writers who wrote in German also knew that the tradition of Jewish writing in the German language was under a specific kind of stress: the writing tradition itself was confronted--as Hannah Arendt remembered about some of her German-Jewish colleagues--by the possibility of its own extinction (see her "Walter Benjamin." I will return to these comparisons in section 2). Thus, much like Soyinka's preoccupation in the 1960s and 1970s with issues of "transition," we can read in a general way, in the dilemma of the African writer faced during those decades with the possibility of a useful past and a historically hopeful but anxious future, both the reason for writing and reasons for choice of a language of writing. Caught between a series of African artistic traditions in need of a modern retrieval, and the exciting but uncertain future of a new and untested form of a postcolonial existence, the transition the African writer had in mind must be seen as a form of work of both artistic invention and existential repair. (5)

But an act of invention or re-invention is always accompanied by an acute sense of the contingency of history. Because theirs was a time of colonialism, a time out of joint, the language to mend time itself is one through which the writers strived to invent new meanings of culture for themselves and for their societies. Among the writers mentioned Achebe, it seems, was the first to grasp--and in a series of criticisms, aesthetically articulate--the full dimensions of the modern African sense of tradition as that which is in need of artistic healing and repair. In addition to the title of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in an interview we had on 11 January 2000, he argued that writing in general is a way of weaving what he called a second handle on reality. (6) This practice would be consonant with an idea, a theoretical ideal which we elaborated earlier, on how a thinker, a writer, or an artist might go about mending a broken tradition, a tradition in ruin. Such a tradition, certainly, demands of its subjects a second handle--second, and perhaps third and fourth, points of view. I will discuss more, in section 3, the implications of these Achebe's comments.

In his introduction to Michel de Certeau's The Writing of History, Tom Conley argued that historians, often in the name of pursuit of the shape of evidence of a past, end up silencing the past (2-6). This is a significant methodological problem. Today's best historians deal with it. In addition to de Certeau, we can mention John Gaddis, Joseph KiZerbo, Michel-Rolph Truillot, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. In their different ways, when they explicitly write historiographically, Rolph Truillot and Chakrabarty, for example, eloquently analyze the reasons for the unusual phenomenon: the phenomenon of historians silencing--for a second time as it were--the past in the name of a search for acceptable scientific evidence of the truth of the past (see Truillot, Silencing the Past and Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe). Departing from an intuitive certainty that "the writing of history can begin only when a present is divided from a past," as Conley put it, we can explain how this apparently simple act of division also profoundly constitutes an original act of exclusion: it marks a separation between current time and past time, and between the living and the dead. Once this act of division and separation has been committed--and it must be committed if the science of history, the act of writing history, will at all start--the historian begins the work of objectivation. Thus, the work of writing an objective history derives its objectivity precisely from that initial act--the labor--to objectify the past. For, how could one write history objectively unless the past about which one writes can itself be objectively positioned in the past, as the past? In this, though, we can see quite clearly in what ways this same objectivity has been dearly purchased. History, it seems, can occur as history only through the requirement that the historian breaks what Henri Bergson called duration--an own inner experience of time--in order to posit the pastness of the past. In addition to Bergson, St. Augustine of Hippo, in the Confessions, understood the meanings of this problem in history writing. As if by a bargain with the Devil, in an initial and absolutely necessary methodological act to divide and separate the past and the present, the historian finds the past but only by repressing it: the past is not the present.

The ideal task of the scientific historian thereby appears as heroic. On one hand, in order to be able to objectively attribute meaning to the past, the past both must and cannot be present. It is only by establishment of the boundaries of this time that the historian is able to legitimate his or her interpretation of evidence as recovered fact. Without this time-boundedness, no history of the fact can be produced. And it is precisely in this act of production of histories of facts that the historian justifies his or her commitment to a profession, to a science of the past. Scientific representation allows the past to emerge as, literally, a different time.

For the rest of society, however--and without denying the objectivity of the past as objectivated by the historian--it is easy to see that, because of its own paradoxes, the scientific account of the past cannot be the end of history. Even after we acknowledge the absolute requirement that the scientific historian--say, an archeologist--must draw a line between...

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