ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing ktravula – a travelogue! blog archives for May, 2011.

Time after Time

The motions are the same: a year rolls by with such thrills and frills that when one looks back at it, it looks so short, and one is left wondering just where all the days went. A school year begins in August and ends in May, or July depending on what one has to do.

For the two visiting scholars to this institution, their program is now over and they will return to their country in less than a week. I know this process. A roller-coaster year of both honeymoon and depressing loneliness comes to a certain end and the travellers are filled with the mixed feeling of longing for a long-left home, and missing a bond of affection with the present location. They will be gone and new people would come, and the process will continue, new bonds, and new departures a year from now.

I don’t envy them because my own time here will soon wind down to an end, sometime, again. I think it will become inevitable after some time – if I ever return here – to get inured to the process of bonding, socialization and departures. It might be time to set my sights to another faraway place, maybe Europe, or South America, or Asia, for a different breath of fresh air, languages and surprises. Then with new eyes to look at the world and events, there might be a different kind of thrill and adjustment processes. Just a thought. In any case, this semester will be over in a few days, and I’ll be left with the new dilemma of filling my time with a less exacting routine. Or not. We’ll see how it goes.

(Picture taken at the foot of the Monk Mounds the tallest of the man-made mounds at the old Mississippian heritage site at Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, yesterday.)

Time after Time was published on May 1st, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Soliloquy, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Nativizing English

Kachru’s concentric circle includes my country Nigeria as part of the outer circle where English is spoken only because of historical contingency. This is true. Along with India, Philipines and a host of other nations of the world, English is spoken in Nigeria as a result of colonization. This took place in the 1800s and ended in the 1960s. The inner circle countries where English is spoken as a first and only language is the UK, the US, Austrailia, Ireland, New Zealand, etc. People who live in those countries are called native speakers of English perhaps because that is the only language they speak.

The idea of a “native” language however presents an interesting question to my curious mind. Is a language native to those who speak it only because it is the only language they speak or because they speak it with such total and infallible competence? Going by the name, a language is native to those who speak it as their own perhaps only language. I am a native speaker of Yoruba. It is not my only language, but I speak it since birth and have a native-like competence over it. I can teach it. I know the rules of speaking a behaving in the language without any more prompting. I have acquired the language without knowing it. Yes.

The same, however, applies to English for me. I have acquired it from birth, subconsciously and simultaneously with Yoruba so much so that I can’t tell apart which one of them I speak more frequently. I think/dream in either. I have Caucasian  friends who have learnt the Yoruba language almost to the point of native-like proficiency. If they were born in Nigeria, they probably would speak it just like me. They would be native speakers – like thousands of people in the carribbeans whose only language is English (and a creole). So two weeks ago, I asked on Facebook if I would be considered a native speaker of English – for the purpose of applying for a job in the US, and the majority of the responses was “no”. The consideration was that since I speak another language from birth, I cannot be considered a native speaker. Besides, Kachru has put me in the outer rather than the inner circle.

I believe that native speaker language stipulation falls flat when defined only by place or circumstance of birth rather than levels of proficiency. As output in English literature from Africa and other post-colonial societies have shown, what makes a good speaker of a language is not really where s/he is born as how much s/he has applied himself/herself to mastering it. Wole Soyinka (Africa’s first Nobel Literature Prize Winner, and Nigerian) is as much a native speaker of English as Karin Barber (Yoruba scholar in Birmingham) is a native-speaker of Yoruba going by proficiency and the corpus of their literary output in the language. I doubt that anyone would doubt as well that Salman Rushdie or VS Naipaul are native speakers of English either because of their Indian ancestry.

I suspect however that this misunderstanding of what is a native speaker comes mostly from American purism – a kind of desire to protect one’s position by claiming total control of all its parts.  By this policy, I suspect that citizens of Liberia or South Africa would be given a pass as a native speaker in a job requiring that, ahead of citizens of Nigeria or Ghana. The last time I checked the TOEFL exam requirements, students from Liberia and South Africa were exempt from taking it. Go figure. If an American couple living in Nigeria gives birth to a child and raises him there for ten years, s/he would become a proficient native speaker of at least one Nigerian language and could, if s/he pursues it, be able to teach it too. The same should apply to a Chinese couple living in the United States. Their child would become proficient enough in English to be able to do anything with it.

I hope that the definition of what makes a native speaker of a language is revised to exclude stipulations of ethnic belonging to the target language. I suspect however that it already has, just that some people haven’t caught up with the news yet. 🙂

Nativizing English was published on May 1st, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

When the World Ends

One of my earliest curiosities must be tugging at my mother’s wrapper in a tenacious effort to get her to answer a simple question: who created God? I don’t remember how we got there, or how young I was, but I remember her replying “Well, you can’t understand now. Nobody understands. Just content yourself with the fact that He created the world. How He himself got created is beyond us.” I found it very unsatisfactory and resolved that she was not the one to trust with the big questions trolling my very young mind. Since then, or since many months before, the idea of God, Christianity and the way the world was formed, or will end, took on a sharp turn and ceased to make as much sense to me as it should have, considering the amount of exposure I had. It however never failed to keep me questioning, looking for right answers.

If God created us, and the world, then someone or something must have created him – I thought – or it all makes no sense. Of course, I later encountered evolution and its sharp contrast with the story of the Garden of Eden – except of course we agree that the Garden came after very many years of evolution and is just a metaphor for the very beginning of consciousness. The idea of an all-knowing, all powerful priest/pastor/preacher never made sense to me either as it always sought to cast them as possessing of something bigger and purer than us ordinary folks. It was an unnecessary distraction, as all I always wanted to know after meeting any one of those holy men was the ordinary detail of their lives. That always yielded enough to justify my constant skepticism.

And so one day in 1994, some rumour started that the world was going to end, and the whole country – at least my circle of friends – went into a frenzy. Then the day went by and nothing happened, as we already guessed it would not. It however confirmed what I’d always thought: no one knew jack about anything, but it didn’t stop them from making things up that suited their imagination. In this case however, mother had a different nugget of brilliance: “Rapture is individual, and it comes to you when your time on earth is up.” Finally, that made some sense. I had got the right response to throw at the silly circle of impressionable friends who believed that the world was going to end and we were all going to go flying into the sky all at once – in spite of time zone differences (This bit made it seem a little unfair, in my opinion. No doubt, the right time of the rapture would definitely fall during the sleeping hours of people in some countries.) In any case, that was that.

 

 

When the World Ends was published on May 1st, 2011, under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.