“The nuisance one learns to put up with”
English as a Linguistic Compromise in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Fiction
In: The Politics of English as a World LanguageSearch for other papers by Richard Samin in
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Abstract
Es’kia Mphahlele’s commitment to and pronouncements on the use of English as a creative medium in black South African literature situate him squarely within a postcolonial problematic of abrogation and appropriation whose ambivalence is implicitly predicated in the statement which serves as a title for this essay: “English, the nuisance we have to put with,” taken from an article written in the US (Mphahlele 1973: 37) after almost twenty years of exile. In numerous articles and essays, Mphahlele has repeatedly justified his choice of English as a medium for creation in a colonial context and carefully analysed how a colonial language can be used to convey African experience and as an instrument of self-discovery and social mobility. In this essay I want to show how Mphahlele’s ambivalent stance towards English can be accounted for in terms of a tension between abrogation and appropriation (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 39) and results in a form of writing which is both a cultural act and a literary creation.