Why do I write in English?
 

English and the inheritance of loss

The question 'Why do you write in English?' has an inescapable accusatory ring when thrown at people for whom it isn't the first language. This is especially true if they are from a country that has had a troubling colonial past, like ours where the British consciously tried to create a class proficient in English to help them rule over the rest.

They might have been born two generations after the nation broke off its colonial yoke but translingual writers, even dabblers, creating literature in English from any state in India inevitably have to annoy themselves with the question. If not anonymous enough, they must also be ready to engage with salty sub-nationalistic rubs on linguistic trauma from fellow language writers and even total strangers.

The question is powerful enough to elicit a bleeding confessional. Language, to borrow Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, is a war zone. The tongues of the colonized are stifled while that of the colonizer grows subsuming everything in its path. Which makes you a traitor or an imperial mercenary at war with your own culture—enough guilt-tripping for the rest of your sad literary life.

Poet and linguist Rukmini Bhaya Nair doesn't mince words while evoking the beast in 'Ode to our Languages':

English, smart, jack-booted, of our languages
the one we fear the most...
drunk on ambrosia, lover, cut-throat, fratricide
language with a thousand heads, each wittier
and more voracious than the last, swallower of destinies
To this divinity we have willingly sacrificed
our children, to it we kneel, babbling...

Most Indians who write in English and come from a milieu similar to mine must have had a difficult relationship with the language. The ambivalence towards an oppressor language with historical dominance is easier to understand if you went to schools that penalised students for speaking in their mother tongue. In the two schools where I studied, there was a silent resistance to the dehumanising diktat, ostensibly aimed at making students fluent speakers of English. 

Hurling newly learned cuss words and creating ruckus inside the classrooms and corridors demanded the spontaneity of Malayalam, not the rigours of non-native English. During the recess loud speakers blared phonetics lessons in the voice of our Anglo-Indian tutor Vivian D'Moraize. It was through these broadcasts that we learned the sounds of words like 're-st?-ränt and f?-'tä-gr?-f?r. They felt distant, comical and a quiet terror, animated torture for the tongue's musculature which remained loyal to the curvy registers of palindromic Malayalam. The confusing orthography of English and the messier pronunciations of its many loan words seemed unsurmountable. Those who could master it were definitely privileged but the rest of us felt like semi-literates for life. As a poet, I have often realised with horror such faux pas haunting my writing in the form of rhymes and alliterations that are not.

The academic world has a word to denote the practice of creatively expressing oneself in a language that's not one's mother tongue: Exophony. It's an unkind word for many reasons and the equivalent of a straight-faced literary insult if the binding parts are analysed. While 'exo' means external and 'phony' in Ancient Greek represents voice or sound, it could also mean fake or not genuine from Latin roots.

I have felt that exophonic writers, having distanced themselves from their mother tongue, are already émigré writers. They might not have been displaced physically but are, linguistically and culturally, adoptees in exile. The dissonance is not deep for bilingual writers and those like me who move back and forth between the two languages as literary translators. For some writing in English is also a question of readership, after all, literature is a product and languages are markets for publishers.

I moved away from Malayalam, the language in which I began writing, because of the career I chose—an English language journalist. Language is a cultural shorthand with embedded codes of history and collective memory and I often wonder what I lost by embracing another. But then no language is truly ours if we continue to imitate and not make it our own, feed it with our own “distortions and queerness” and through it mirror the self and the world as we have experienced. No home, rented bought or inherited, is truly ours unless we feel at home.

 

WRITINGS
 

POEMS

1.    PATTANAM

in the summer, the roots // In the rains, stones
of the strychnine tree went // agate, amethyst,
deep into the earth // beryl and quartz,
full of bitterness past // garnet and carnelian
the bones of the dead // rose up from the depths
and clasped the cool, lustrous // like memories of lost love,
pearls from a broken anklet // played hide and seek
mistaking the seeping light // with seeds ousted from
for spring water // twisted pods of coral trees.
 

2.    ARTIST SUKU

The ground beneath the cassava
plants had measured his footprints,
year after year from heel to toe
as they grew playing hide ‘n
seek & hopscotch in the summer,
waiting for the rain's ploughshare
rite over the sward of nutgrass
and sting nettle to heave
lustrous riddles one after the
other. Moist beads of colour
and an endless supply of flats
flung on numbered squares they
hopped on with one leg, time
traveller’s earthen dials
that could have been wine-
stained rim-sherds of amphorae
from the island of Kos.
 

3.    THULATHUMBI *

From the deck of Eleutheria
the slave boy watches a pair
of Wandering Gliders skate
the breezy Empyrean, hyphens
of gold—their frail gossamer
wings shimmering in the Abyssinian
sun's evening light. After a while
the luminous appendage would land
on a puddle of rain next to a coil
of sail rope, where the female, still
clasped by the twirling male, will lay
a clutch of eggs. The moulting nymphs
from the batch will join the swarm
riding the moist Hippalus winds
to the shores of Nelcynda and Muziris
where they will warm the wings
hovering over children with sleep
in their eyes out in the morning
sun looking for flowers.
 

*These poems are part of Muchiri, a portfolio of poems that explores a lost city (Gr. Mouziris; Lt Muziris) and ancient port in Kerala, which had trade relations with the Graeco-Roman world and a multitude of cultures for several centuries. A sphinx intaglio was found during excavations at Pattanam village, widely believed to be Muziris. *Thulathumbi is the Malayalam name for the dragonfly Pantalaflavescens, a migratory species that travels long distances crossing the seas.