Short Response #3 – 11/20/2020
Can English as a language be revolutionary?
To be short, no. Kamau Brathwaite, a Barbadian poet, believes that the spirit of revolution does not come from a language, but from a people, and therefore English is not revolutionary in itself. There is no revolution that comes from a language. Brathwaite also goes on to say that the dialect of English spoken in the Caribbean is not “standard… English”, but rather a “nation language” (Brathwaite 1814). I believe, that in this assumption of people vs. language, Brathwaite is correct. Language is not the carrier of revolution, but the people are. In the case of Ni Dhomhniall, she began writing in Irish out of choice- the language called to her, and that she felt right writing in that language. She said, in her New York Times article, that Irish coming back was the “effort of the Irish Revival movement,” rather than the language itself (Dhomhniall). I agree here- the revival and revolution of a language comes from the effort and willing spirit of a people dedicated to a cause. As Brathwaite says that revolution comes from the people, Dhomhniall comes forward as an example of the spirited person.
As a language, English is colonial and colonizing. The language has suffocated culture after culture through the thick fog of pretentious elitism that exists only within a culture built on domination and control. Brathwaite, in talking about the education system, makes note that in the colonization of the Caribbean, schools taught children British literature, forcing people, “to learn things that had no relevance to themselves” (Brathwaite 1813). This is the ultimate example of why language cannot be revolutionary. Intrinsically, it pushes aside other modes of communication, and forces itself onto other places. Any language does this. Language can carry revolution between people, but it cannot be revolutionary. It creates a world which, in an area filled with hurricanes, Brathwaite describes as, “we haven’t got the… syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall” (Brathwaite 1813). When a language suffocates all purposeful words and replaces them with the experiences of a totally foreign place, it bares the teeth of oppression and shows that language cannot be pinned down into one side of a binary. It is too fluid, too mutable to be able to exist for one purpose.
Dhomhniall uses language as a revolutionary tool, but even she knows it is the people who drive the movement. She writes her poetry in Irish not only because it is the “language her soul speaks,” but also because Irish has never been a revolutionary language (Brathwaite). It is a language that has been driven out and squashed down through history, to the point where in 1880, only 14.5% of the Irish actually spoke their own language. It has been pushed down and ignored, ridiculed and gotten rid of to the point of near extinction. Dhomhniall, however, tells us that even other languages became more Irish than irish itself. It is a nationality that doesn’t have its own language to radicalize. I look at Dhomhniall wanting to send her language down the river in a basket, hoping that someone might pick it up and help bear the mantle. There is no colonizer that will leave the language to be, and minority languages in the presence of an English-speaking sphere will become extinct. They will concede to English and bow out of the way. I believe that through Dhomhniall being an Irish writer, she carries revolution. It is not Irish as a language, but her use of it as a tool to show how language is important and how language can be used to fight back.
Ultimately, I do not believe English can be revolutionary, but nor can any other. There are some languages that are more predisposed to being used for revolution (Irish, for example), but Brathwaite and Dhomhniall both show that there is no ability for language to be inherently revolutionary. Language can oppress as fast as it can radicalize, it is a fluid method of communication that has differences and nuances. Brathwaite, in his Barbadian upbringing, knows that English carries another culture with it, a culture built on stealing land and on suffocating others. He grew up learning Shakespeare, but not the tales of his own people. He, as much as Dhomhniall, knows that language will always be malleable to the intent of the person speaking it. People are revolutionary, not languages, and this is shown very clearly through Brathwaite and Dhomhniall speaking about their experiences.