The great West Indian writer and historian, C.L.R. James, once asserted that cricket and Shakespeare were the two great gifts brought to him as a young boy at a colonial school in Trinidad. The attraction of each was the same: a bright local youth could reformulate either, restoring to the art of cricket or to the interpretation of Shakespeare a beauty and rigour which once they had, before they were commodified by the mindset of commercial and imperial Victorians.
In his classic Beyond a Boundary, James suggested that the lure of cricket for colonial peoples lay in its notion of a boundary drawn by the white man but breachable by his opponent.
The mastery of cricket by Indian or Caribbean peoples may be likened to what is now achieved in literature by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Amit Chaudhuri or V.S. Naipaul. A persistent theme of these authors is that of an affluent, charismatic person who comes from India or Jamaica to an England which looks increasingly like a Third World country and which frustrates all his or her high expectations of it. "For a man like Saladin Chamcha," writes Rushdie of the protagonist of The Satanic Verses, "the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too terrible to contemplate."
Yet an even stronger undercurrent in this writing is a sincere admiration for the lost values of English culture and a desire to restore and repair those broken traditions, often very different from the clapped-out codes of Hooray Henrys. It was in Beyond a Boundary, for example, that C.L.R. James revealed that cricket was by no means an upper-class game, but one whose nuances of rule and skill were the creation of the working class. Numbed by the routines of factory life, these people invested all their repressed artistry and bodily grace into the sport's ever-more-complex protocols. Only later did cricket become routinised along the professional lines of an industrial society with "stock" change-bowlers and "all-rounders". It would not be fanciful to compare the contribution made by overseas players in restoring the full expressive potential of the game in recent years to that of writers from the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean islands.
The underlying issue was broached directly in The Satanic Verses. Saladin Chamcha tells his English wife that if she and her sort persist with their alterations to English society, soon people of real culture (like herself) just won't exist any more. "He was a real Saladin . . . a man with a holy land to conquer, his England, the one he believed in."
Each autumn, while the English broadsheets are filled with Oxford dons lamenting that their students can no longer construct clear paragraphs, the short-list for the Booker Prize is filled with names of authors from former colonies: if not Okri, Mistry and Mo, then Kureishi, McGahern or Arundhati Roy. So influential has this movement become that Rushdie's jocular slogan "The Empire Writes Back" is now the title of a much-cited critical book.
In this literature - which, of course, extends to the poetry of a Derek Walcott or Vikram Seth - the formerly silent speak in a language and on a territory reclaimed from the coloniser. For a writer like George Lamming, the arrival of the novel in the West Indies turns out to have been an event as momentous as the discovery of the islands themselves. The novel as a form provides these artists with a priceless instrument by which to investigate the meaning of their own experience, a means by which to ask themselves how they know what they know. Not surprisingly, many of the best books - from V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas to Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place - take the form of a Bildungsroman.
Perhaps the first great post-colonial Bildungsroman was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916. James Joyce's unfinished sentences and gapped narratives all through that book alert the reader to the helplessness of its hero, Stephen Daedalus, in the face of language. The infant is helpless when he, the young man, mis-repeats a given phrase at the start; and yet the young man is even more strangely helpless when he masters all phrases at the end.
Of course, the very success of the book which records Stephen's private humiliations merely confirms his double bind, since it adds yet another volume to the glories of English literature. No wonder Stephen finds English both "familiar" and "foreign", something which will always be for him "an acquired speech", deployed to brilliant effect but with "unrest of spirit".
Joyce felt such scruples because he knew that, by rights, he should have been speaking and writing in Irish: but, after the trauma of 19th-century Ireland, English was the only language available to him as a literary medium. By the time he was embarking on Finnegans Wake in the 1920s, he had resolved to put standard English "to sleep", making way for a medley of languages all inserted into a text composed in a base-language very close to Hiberno-English.
The "writing back" in post-colonial literature is based on a frequent reinterpretation of the masterpieces of European culture. If Joyce's Portrait is a subversive revision of the Bildungsroman, a novel such as Things Fall Apart by the Nigerian Chinua Achebe is written to question and rewrite the portrayal of Africans in Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson. In these books, native intellectuals often learn how to criticise masterpieces which misrepresented them, or which were written on the blithe assumption that they might never intervene in literary debates, much less write their own books about them.
EQUALLY, a novel such as Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North is a clever inversion of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: for in this case an Arab worker leaves his people and goes to Europe in search of employment, finding in the process that he has indeed entered his own heart of darkness. Such writing has its counterpart in the literary criticism practised by a Palestinian such as Edward Said or an Indian feminist such as Gayatri Spivak: each fulfils the role of "reverse anthropologist", for instead of moving from First to Third World, to use there the sophisticated techniques of an advanced society in the study of a "primitive" one, they invert the trajectory, often bringing the critical insights of an Arab or Indian upbringing to bear on a culture of Europe or North America.
This has led to some hugely interesting results. For example, in the classic literature of Europe - from Sir Thomas More to Joseph Conrad - there has been a favourite narrative in the course of which civilised persons relocate in some exotic setting, where they can test and redefine the nature of the home society. Often this was, as in More's Utopia, a way of implying strict criticisms of life at home, without exposing oneself to the charge of direct disloyalty. Gulliver's Travels or, much further back, the voyages of Herodotus were other instances of this narrative.
It would be perfectly possible to interpret The Satanic Verses as an updated inversion of this genre, in the course of which Rushdie uses England as a crucible in which to reformulate ideas of Islam and India. Those who accuse him of writing in English from a western standpoint may seriously underestimate the extent to which he has produced a state-of-India even more than a state-of-England novel. He is, in fact, one of the first writers to realise that to compose one is necessarily to make the other. A more recent and modest example would be Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, split evocatively between Oxford and Bombay.
The central question in such writing is this: how can people achieve a true multi-culturalism? It is a question burningly raised by the fate of The Satanic Verses itself: how meaningful are appeals for artistic licence when made in the name of a secular world to an Islamic one which regards the fetishising of art and artists as barbarism? By giving priority to scepticism and doubt, Rushdie leaves all believers - whether they follow Marx, feminism or Allah - at a disadvantage. Yet there is a real nobility in his celebration of the hybrid nomad as a representative hero of modern life. This has become his own destiny. Disliked by his protectors in Europe, reviled by those whom he tried to represent in the East, largely unread or banned in his own part of the world, he is the most telling example of a post-colonial intellectual since Joyce: a global author who has no place to hang his hat.
The choice by such figures to write in an "imperial" language has come under negative scrutiny in recent years: yet there are so many local languages (many without a written code or typography) that it is not always clear what other languages an Indian or African author might have decided to write in.
Caribbean writers have no real choice, for there is no native language as such in the islands. Dialects exist in abundance, but a poet like Walcott may declare himself "unwilling to sacrifice the syntactical power of English" to the energies of a local dialect. Out of the creative clash between the two, however, he has fashioned a poetry which owes as much to Wordsworth, Auden and Heaney as to any tradition of his home island, Saint Lucia. The irony was not lost on him, as he tried in his earlier years to teach "proper" English to island boys.
The discipline I preached made me a hypocrite; their lithe black bodies, beached, would die in dialect
For a revolutionary agitator such as Frantz Fanon, the choice was even more complicated. Radio Fighting Algeria, set up to combat French colonialism in the late 1950s, faced an agonising decision: in which language should it make its broadcasts? There were many tongues in Algeria and none was dominant. Eventually, the rebels resolved on French. Their thinking was as interesting as it was surprising. Up to then, every speech made in French had been "an order, a threat or an insult", but by pressing the language to contrary uses they would manage (in Fanon's phrase) "to liberate the enemy language from its historic meanings".
THIS was exactly the view of English taken by Yeats and Synge in the early days of the Irish National Theatre. They were acutely aware that the creation of a national literature in the language of a colonial power might seem like a contradiction in terms: but, on the other hand, they had to face the fact that there was no theatrical tradition in Irish and that English gave them access to an international audience, before which they might make an effective cultural claim. Moreover, they could do this in an English powerfully remoulded by the syntactical energies of Irish, an English that would be as Irish as it is possible for that language to be.
Indeed, the dialect of Hiberno-English, as pioneered by Synge and Augusta Gregory, seemed (in the judgement of Thomas MacDonagh) to be more vibrant and more subtle than either the standard Irish or standard English between which it had emerged. It was almost - if not quite - an autonomous language.
The example of the Irish renaissance has been followed across the post-colonial world. Many authors remind their readers of the linguistic compromise involved by leaving some native words untranslated in their English texts, much as the Irish left words like thraneen, smithereen, sugawn, aisling in their works. Others revert, at moments of intense emotion, to a key sentence in their native language. These are all ways of trying to have the best of both worlds, mediating elements of a native culture to a world audience.
For some, however, the price paid is just too high. The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote his early novels in English before reverting to Gikuyu, so that ordinary people could read his books. His theoretical study, Decolonising the Mind (1988), he describes as "my farewell to English", a phrase which had already been used in the 1970s by the Irish poet Michael Hartnett, when he resolved to write henceforth only in Irish. Yet, almost inevitably, both have returned to English without wholly abandoning the other language: and, as long ago as the 1950s, that was seen by Behan as the best solution.
This entire debate has implications for educational theory. Back in the 1920s, Daniel Corkery complained that the curricular study of classical English literature in Irish schools encouraged children to see their own surroundings as second-rate and to internalise the values of a distant society. Much the same complaint has been voiced by figures as different as Naipaul, George Lamming and Ngugi: that education set up a dispute between intellect and emotion, since it provided (in Corkery's telling phrase) "an alien medium through which the student is henceforth to look at his native land".
Ngugi's conclusion was that reached by many a Gaelic Leaguer: the native language was not something to be restored after a successful revolution but one of that revolution's most potent weapons. Against that approach, one might place the claim of Leopold Senghor of Senegal who said: "We express ourselves in French since French has a universal vocation and since our message is addressed to French people and others." Ngugi, for his pains, did a spell in a Kenyan jail; Senghor was elected to the Academie Francaise.
A more modulated, Joycean position has been taken by Chinua Achebe, who admitted in 1964 that the abandonment of his mother tongue "looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling, but for me there is no other choice. I have been given the English language and I intend to use it".
That language has indeed tuned itself to the tones of his Nigerian experience, winning him readers across the globe: and in periods of political stress the Nigerian has found in English university departments a welcome and an asylum. In taking up such a position, Achebe has also done much to restore older, near-lost traditions of English writing.
Yeats also felt that he was doing no less. He brought the plays of the Abbey Theatre to great English cities not only to demonstrate the worth of Irish art but also, by the Irish example, to restore the poetic drama of the Elizabethans to its proper primacy on the English stage. In inventing Ireland, he hoped that he might also be helping to reinvent England.
That - or its equivalent - has been the dream of many a postcolonial writer since, and in pursuing that agenda, they have remodelled English into a global literary language, by which any people might eventually come to know itself.
There are three basic phases in the process of cultural decolonisation. The first is when a native elite is taught the master's language in order to serve his interests (Crusoe and Friday, Prospero and Caliban, etc). The second occurs when the native intelligentsia reclaims a once-despised local lore, but expresses it in the language of the coloniser. The third - less often reached - is when the artist chooses to write in the vibrant language of his or her own people.
THAT option may be available still for Ngugi in Gikuyu - it is based on the assumption that the native language is still flourishing and widely-spoken. But such cases are rare enough today. Either there is a plethora of languages (as in India or Algeria) or the native language is weak (Ireland) or else non-existent as such (West Indies). Yet the third phase has been reached by many West Indian and Irish writers, who have simply assumed that English is indeed the vibrant language of their people.
Corkery's ideas had some validity when he voiced them in the 1920s but, as reapplied by Ngugi now, they may overstate the "colonialist" mindset at work in English or French at the end of this century. After all, far more decolonised people have left their imprint on these languages, both spoken and written, in the past 40 years than may speak or write them in their home countries. Nowadays, African children who study English are more likely to read a book by Achebe or Ngugi than one by Dickens, just as Irish students of the new syllabus are well enabled to understand their own surroundings through the poems of an Eavan Boland or a Michael Longley.
Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD and author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
