In “The African Writer and the English Language,” Chinua Achebe writes: “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.” Would you agree with this claim? Respond on the basis of our discussion of the texts in class so far, paying special attention to Riders to the Sea, A Small Place, and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. “I feel that English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” Languages are of a fluid and static nature. They draw from various origins, and grow constantly, changing with trends and tongues. A world language must …show more content…
Mother tongues are so deeply ingrained in a person that it is practically impossible to stop it from interweaving with any second language. It would be quite a feat to be able to express feelings without using words of the very country that evokes these. Though it may be hard to find direct examples in any text or story, the text itself often proves this point. Riders To The Sea by J.M. Synge seems practically illegible because of the strong Irish influence that pervades it so deeply. In A Small Place, the author Jamaica Kincaid conveys her distress over the fact that the natives can only express themselves in the language of those who colonised and suppressed them. This language, however, is still far from perfect. Despite the colonisers intentions and the natives efforts, the resulting language is a love-child of what was and what would have been. As seen in You Can’t Get Lost In Cape Town, the story Bowl Like Hole shows the natives fascination with the colonisers language,followed by the assurance, “I knew that unlike the rest of us it would take her no time at all to say bowl like hole. smoothly, …show more content…
It is not only the universal language that suffers when it crosses spatial bounds but its rules that are constantly bent, twisted and altered with the expansion of geographical areas. The world language, often spread through a forced influence is used as a means of catharsis against itself. Poetry by African authors such as Sipho Sepamla and Karen Press shows that writing can never be devoid of the native influence. The prose of Ama Ata Aidoo’s, Our Sister Killjoy and A Small Place redefine the boundaries of genre. The cathartic nature of both these stories makes it harder for them to be genre-specific. The sprouting of several hybrid languages in the world with English as their basis has managed to redefine the English language with respect to writing styles and vocabulary. Having spread around the world through its colonial influence, the Queen’s English, what is the original language is scarcely known, giving way to the more popular vernaculars such as American English. The world language has been stripped of all conventions, having been ‘chutneyfied’ in the form of Hinglish or the more trending Franglais, a marriage of French and English. The original language has been peppered with
“Se Habla Español,” is written by a Latin author, Tanya Barrientos; and Amy Tan, a Chinese author, wrote “Mother Tongue”. In both literate narratives the authors write about their experiences with language and how it impacted their lives. In This essay we will be discussing the similarities as well as the differences in the stories and the authors of “Se Habla Español” and “Mother Tongue”. We will discuss how both authors use a play on words in their titles, how language has impacted their lives, how struggling with language has made them feel emotionally, and how both authors dealt with these issues.
Have you ever been to another country, state, or even city and realized how different your accent may be? Have you been asked to repeat a word or phrase that you may say differently? Sometimes we were asked for a good laugh, but that’s not always the case. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldúa and “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, both authors use personal narrative to demonstrate how their lives and identity are affected by their language and culture.
Language is an important part of who we are. It influences the way we think and behave on a great scale. However, sometimes it is forced upon us to go in different directions just so we can physically and mentally feel as if we belong to the society in which we live in. Just as we see in Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Richard Rodriguez’s “A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, both authors faced some challenges along the way by coping with two different languages, while still trying to achieve the social position which they desired.
The Essay written by Amy Tan titled 'Mother Tongue' concludes with her saying, 'I knew I had succeeded where I counted when my mother finished my book and gave her understandable verdict' (39). The essay focuses on the prejudices of Amy and her mother. All her life, Amy's mother has been looked down upon due to the fact that she did not speak proper English. Amy defends her mother's 'Broken' English by the fact that she is Chinese and that the 'Simple' English spoken in her family 'Has become a language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk' (36). Little did she know that she was actually speaking more than one type of English. Amy Tan was successful in providing resourceful information in every aspect. This gave the reader a full understanding of the disadvantages Amy and her mother had with reading and writing. The Essay 'Mother Tongue' truly represents Amy Tan's love and passion for her mother as well as her writing. Finally getting the respect of her critics and lucratively connecting with the reaction her mother had to her book, 'So easy to read' (39). Was writing a book the best way to bond with your own mother? Is it a struggle to always have the urge to fit in? Was it healthy for her to take care of family situations all her life because her mother is unable to speak clear English?
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue." 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. 4th Edition. Ed. Samuel Cohen. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 417-23. Print.
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 603-07.
English is an invisible gate. Immigrants are the outsiders. And native speakers are the gatekeepers. Whether the gate is wide open to welcome the broken English speakers depends on their perceptions. Sadly, most of the times, the gate is shut tight, like the case of Tan’s mother as she discusses in her essay, "the mother tongue." People treat her mother with attitudes because of her improper English before they get to know her. Tan sympathizes for her mother as well as other immigrants. Tan, once embarrassed by her mother, now begins her writing journal through a brand-new kaleidoscope. She sees the beauty behind the "broken" English, even though it is different. Tan combines repetition, cause and effect, and exemplification to emphasize her belief that there are more than one proper way (proper English) to communicate with each other. Tan hopes her audience to understand that the power of language- “the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth”- purposes to connect societies, cultures, and individuals, rather than to rank our intelligence.
Despite growing up amidst a language deemed as “broken” and “fractured”, Amy Tan’s love for language allowed her to embrace the variations of English that surrounded her. In her short essay “Mother Tongue”, Tan discusses the internal conflict she had with the English learned from her mother to that of the English in her education. Sharing her experiences as an adolescent posing to be her mother for respect, Tan develops a frustration at the difficulty of not being taken seriously due to one’s inability to speak the way society expects. Disallowing others to prove their misconceptions of her, Tan exerted herself in excelling at English throughout school. She felt a need to rebel against the proverbial view that writing is not a strong suit of someone who grew up learning English in an immigrant family. Attempting to prove her mastery of the English language, Tan discovered her writing did not show who she truly was. She was an Asian-American, not just Asian, not just American, but that she belonged in both demographics. Disregarding the idea that her mother’s English could be something of a social deficit, a learning limitation, Tan expanded and cultivated her writing style to incorporate both the language she learned in school, as well as the variation of it spoken by her mother. Tan learned that in order to satisfy herself, she needed to acknowledge both of her “Englishes” (Tan 128).
In the essay “Mother Tongue” Amy Tan, the author, gives a different, a more upbeat outlook on the various forms of English that immigrants speak as they adapt to the American culture. Using simple language to develop her argument, she casually communicates to the audience rather than informing which helps the audience understand what is being presented at ease. Her mother plays an important role in her outlook of language, because she helps her realize that language not only allows one to be a part of a culture but create one’s identity in society. Amy Tan shares her real life stories about cultural racism and the struggle to survive in America as an immigrant without showing any emotions, which is a wonderful epiphany for the audience in realizing
• AW’s work is deeply rooted in oral tradition; in the passing on of stories from generation to generation in the language of the people. To AW the language had a great importance. She uses the “Slave language”, which by others is seen as “not correct language”, but this is because of the effect she wants the reader to understand.
Dawson, Ema, and Pierre Larrivee. “Attitudes to Language in Literary Sources: Beyond post-colonialism In Migration Literature.: English Studies 91.8(2010): 920-932. Literary Reference Center. Web. 30 Jan. 2014
—. Language: Readings in Language and Culture. 6th ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. Print.
Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." Across Cultures. Eds. Sheena Gillespie and Robert Singleton. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. 26-31.
Antoinette’s occupation of a hybrid position dismantles the stable binary of white/black, colonizer/colonized. Hybridity interrogates and deconstructs the western hegemonic assumption of stable subjectivity and meaning. Destabilising the notion of the self and the Other as envisioned by the western grand narratives hybridity proposes that the self is constructed by multiple ideologies and multiple discourses at the same time. Antoinette’s frustration and instability stem from her inability to belong to any particular community and culture. As a white creole, she oscillates between the European world of her ancestors and the Caribbean culture into which she is born. The fact that she is born in Jamaica as a white creole with a European background problematizes her identity belonging to neither of them fully thereby creating a hybrid status. Rhys through Antoinette’s ‘in-between space’ or a ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha argues, takes a position that identity is ambivalent and crucially challenged in the hegemonic colonial setting.
Hepworth, M. D. (2012), Tutorial Notes, '69214339 TMA01', Unpublished Work. Leith, D. and Seargeant, P. (2012), 'A Colonial Language', in Seargeant, P. and Swann, J. ed. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a. a History, Diversity, Change (U214, English in the World), Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 113-117. 101.