ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Academic category.

Living the Toulousain life: My French Integration Experience

By Tolúlọpẹ́ Ọdẹ́bùnmi

In the culture I grew up in, you were trained to look out for a signal from God, nature, the gods or whatever (you choose) especially when you are making and taking a serious decision. My move to Toulouse (Midi-Pyrenees), a southern city in France was one of such decisions I needed to consider carefully. I had been studying in Houghton Michigan for a few years, so it felt like a needed a new adventure.

As a Nigerian, I needed a visa to live and work in France. My visa got approved so I took that as a good sign only for me to miss my flight on the day of departure because I had overslept having spent the previous night doing some last-minute packing for the trip. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I almost got on the flight out of the little old town I lived in the following day although I arrived late again. But alas, I was told that the flight attendant would be needing my seat as hers was damaged so “we’re sorry you can’t get on the flight, but you might still be able to fly out to Chicago from a neighboring city.” I was angry, confused and wondered why life had to be so unfair! My dear friend who dropped me off at the airport had left, but luckily enough I got a ride back home from a stranger. Did I mention that the neighboring city was almost 4hrs away? We made it to Central Wisconsin Airport, Wausau in good time for my flight. Upon arriving in Chicago, I thought to myself, “now you are finally on your way to France.” However, I was told by Aer Lingus Airlines that I needed a transit visa to travel through Ireland which I didn’t have thanks to my travel agent who thought that I was American 😊. My world almost came crashing down, I couldn’t believe that the ‘village people’ (a Nigerian term for negative spiritual forces) were still trying to come after me. I didn’t burst out crying but I shed a tear or two as I walked away from the airlines counter at O’Hare airport. I made some calls and the situation got fixed. My sponsors had to buy me a new flight and this time, I would be travelling through Germany and not Ireland. I thought that I might avoid Ireland for a while, little did I know that an Irish man was waiting for me in Toulouse.

On August 26, 2019, I arrived in Toulouse. It was a warm evening, the airport was moderately busy considering the time of the day it was, French was flowing all around me, but I couldn’t swim in it. That was when it suddenly dawned on me that I had set myself up for something wild. I boarded the tram from la aéroport to Palais de justice. From there, I got a bus to my final destination. Right from when I arrived my broken French was tested, and I also pushed my luck because in my imagination most French people should understand some English expressions so I should be just fine. How wrong was I? The lady who directed me to the bus stop at Palais de justice had been on the tram with me, a young French-Arabic who spoke no words of English but still bothered to speak French to me and used a lot of gestures. Someone else who spoke English on the tram had explained my ordeal to her and so my co French-Arabic passenger had taken it upon herself to help me. I was glad for their kindness but frustrated as I could see a glimpse of what the life of an Anglophone might look like here.

From day 2 in France, google translate became my best buddy. I listened to the voice translation and practiced expressions ahead of a potential interaction in French. Every so often, I blurted out “Tu parles anglais?” Or “Vous parlez anglais s’il vous plaît?” (in a formal context) = Do you speak English? Hoping to be transported back into my Anglophone world. My cliche expression worked sometimes but not nearly enough to make me let my hair down.

A few days upon my arrival, when I showed up for work, my hopes were renewed because my team was made up of native English speakers. Once again, I could express myself freely without feeling inept. Work turned out to be my safe haven since my job was to speak and teach English. The experienced members of my team were very helpful in guiding me and the other newbies into the expatriate resources in Toulouse. The word expatriate had never been associated with me but now as a Nigerian studying in America, I was considered as an expatriate in France where I was offering my English communication skills to French university students. I joined different English-speaking community groups on Facebook, such groups were a constant reminder that many people out there were trying to figure out the French system just like me and I didn’t feel all alone.

The reality of English language in France

The truth is, France is a rich country that educates its citizens entirely in French at all levels of education but can also afford to teach students English starting from primary school. However, many students do not get the opportunity to use and practice their English beyond the classroom so many of them are not likely to improve their English skill to a comfortable intermediate level. Except for kids who were raised bilingual (often with one English parent, or kids of English origin living in France). A good question to ask is why should the average French person care about the English language when they have all that they need available to them in French? A lot of resources are pumped into translation efforts in the French society. Many books, novels, journals, movies, news gets translated into French. Furthermore, prolific dubbing of French over English digital materials makes Grey’s Anatomy (the dubbed version) readily available on TV. I once turned on the TV, saw Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean was being aired, only for me to hear some strange voice when Johnny Depp was supposedly speaking. That was when I realized that it was the dubbed version. Another time, I walked into a lovely librairie (bookstore), in Montauban (a neighbouring town from Toulouse). This store was well furnished with print, digital and multimedia resources of various genres, of course all in French. It was fascinating to see the French version of some novels written by Nigerian authors.

English is used in addition to French

Despite the large number of English speakers in major cities like Paris, Lyon,Toulouse, Bordeaux, Marseille etc. The English as a Foreign Language (EFL) status undermines the visibility of English in the French society. One might expect that major companies and businesses would have English services just like services in Spanish is a norm in the USA but that is not the case. As an Anglophone, I get lucky every once in a while, when I come across a service provider who is willing to use their English. It doesn’t help that there is a subtle resistance to the English language and in some cases overt resistance. For example, Académie Française is responsible for keeping the French language updated and relevant. They constantly work on metalanguage, hoping to reduce the influence of English on French. The interesting thing is that the English language has borrowed so much from French, the two languages even share some cognates. For this reason, faux amis (literally meaning false friends) is a challenge for English speakers learning French and vice-versa. Yourdictionary.com defines faux amis as “one of a pair of words in different languages or dialects that look related but differ significantly in meaning. Some common examples are jolly in English and jolie (pretty), medicine and médecin (doctor), actually and actuellement (at present) among others.

For sure, English seems to thrive in the French advertisement channels especially in print ads and display ads with English words embedded in them, English phrases somehow find their way into advertisements. Many young French people love English movies. They are quick to mention Neftlix when you ask how they have been working to progress their English skills. The problem is Netflix feeds you movies that do not necessarily engage you. I suggested to a few students that a better way to get more out of Netflix was to see an English movie and then talk to someone about it in English or even write about it in English. In the language acquisition process listening comes before speaking, so you can watch a foreign movie with or without subtitles if you’ve got some level of competence in it and understand most of the storyline. The actors’ gestures as well as other actions or movements you see give you a hint of what’s happening.

The Attitude

The general attitude towards the English language is positive among the young people (especially students since they have to learn it at school anyway) Interestingly, the Macron administration seem pro-English such that the President has been criticized for embracing “English too much.” For instance, the President Macron tweets in English when abroad, grants interviews in English which offends the French language purists. In fact, the French language conservatives believe that the English language is a big threat to the French Language. Afterall, the English language has been called ‘the killer language’ by some Linguists. This fear of French going into extinction is outrageous in my opinion considering that it is a language spoken by about 300 million people (mostly in Africa), serves as the official language in 29 countries and is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic. Maybe this fear keeps the French on their toes and gives them a reason to continue to perpetuate language imperialism or do some people call that globalization? 😉

The fact that some universities in France offer programs in English, such as an MBA program among others is undoubtedly a friendly gesture to encourage Anglophone students in France. But what is the point not being unemployable upon completing one’ studying and because of deficiency in French language? This has been the experience of several students The pickup line is that you can study in private universities in English, but no one tells you your lack of French will lead to no “good” except you plan to leave the country immediately after your studies. Honestly, graduates in Engineering or STEM fields have higher chances of getting jobs that doesn’t require speaking French.

Graphical user interface, text, application, email

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Portraying a positive attitude towards English language

Conclusion

*With colleagues at an Ethiopian restaurant*

France is culturally rich, has a diverse immigrant population and stands as an imperial force in the world today. My appreciation for good cuisine or gastronomy, nature and openness to pets increased from living and experiencing the French way of life. I enjoy baguette, croissant nature but not chocolatine a specialty in Toulouse because I am not a chocolate person. Now, I can properly ask to buy something at the boulangerie without being corrected for wrong grammar – I now say “bonjour, une baguette s’il vous plait and not un baguette ☺ I have also learned about the galettes du fête among other French food and pastry traditions.

Living in Toulouse has helped me reflect on questions like who has the privilege of resisting a (foreign) language, as in the case of English in France. Many people around the world never learn to read and write their mother tongue because of scarce resources but globalization order ensures that some countries remain wealthy while others scramble for leftovers from the wealthy ones. France continues to reassert her dominant power structure and culture on its residents both directly and indirectly. Who is to blame? Those who succumb to linguistic oppression like me? Another thing is does merely speaking the French language make one French?

I consider myself privileged to have my level of education and access to opportunities allowing me to master the English language (especially the Nigerian variant). With my international exposure and education, I have observed the fascinating nature of other Englishes like the American, Indian, Ghanaian, British among others. In the same way, I have been exposed to varieties of French dialects and accents from the Caribbean or French Islands, Africa, Italy, Latin America. These varieties have become music to my ears since I am only aware of the mixed melodies but can’t really join in the conversation and interact casually with strangers except in simple sentences. This loss of meaningful interaction, feelings of isolation when surrounded by people speaking, laughing out their hearts be it at the park, the busy streets of downtown Toulouse, or on the metro sends my mind to translation mode especially if I am perceiving connected speech which I struggle to catch up with so that the rhythm around me brings a longing of the faraway atmosphere that I once knew- what home was felt like, at least the romanticized version. In spite of the daunting disconnect due to the language barrier, my love for language keeps me motivated to learn French, thanks to my companion Duolingo. Living in a Francophone country as an Anglophone made me realize that being fluent in three languages may not be enough, it just depends on where you find yourself. My multilingual identity is submerged by my baby French level. What is the point of language without the freedom to rap out your soul, say something pressing on your mind, engage in and with your community, feel heard, help out a lost stranger on the street etc?

__________

Tolulope Odebunmi is a communications strategist, a trained linguist and an educationist from Toulouse, France. Her interests include geopolitics and globalization, development issues and popular culture. She was a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) at Michigan State University, USA. She enjoys learning, travelling and problem solving.

Two Nights in Paris

Last week, I visited Paris as a guest of UNESCO’s International Conference on Language Technologies (#LT4All). It was a large gathering of language practitioners — from linguists to teachers to tech gurus and other executives — under one roof to share ideas, discuss obstacles, and showcase current activities in the sphere of language technologies. The theme “Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide” was part of the framework of the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages.

It was my first time in the city and in the country (since layovers don’t count).

*At the Eiffel Tower during one of the conference breaks.*

The conference was co-sponsored by Google (as a Founding Private Sponsor), The Government of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug-Ugra (as a Founding Public Donor), UNESCO, Japan, France, and NSF as public donors, and others like Facebook, Systran, Microsoft, Amazon Alexa, Mozilla, IBM Research AI, etc, as regular sponsors. Team leaders from many of these companies were around to speak and share ideas from their ongoing work. It was a delight to be able to listen to many of them, and make connections. I met, for the first time, Daan van Esch, who leads Google’s GBoard global efforts, and with whom I’ve worked in some capacity on these efforts while I worked at Google on some Nigerian language projects. His presentation was about GBoard and how it has empowered more people to write properly in their languages on mobile devices.

I also made acquaintance with Craig Cornelius who has done some work for the consortium, but now works at Google as a Senior Software Engineer. This was during a panel on Unicode where I mentioned the fact that Yorùbá writing on the internet has suffered greatly because of Unicode’s inscrutable decision not to allow pre-composed characters. Because Yorùbá diacritics are usually both on top of the vowel and beneath it, one usually has to find so many different Unicode characters to match before one properly tone-marked character can be typed. Beyond the fact that this would be a nightmare for someone having to type a whole passage (or a novel — imagine!), it is usually often still impossible to find the right combinations. And when one manages to find the combinations, the difference between how one computer system or word processor codes its software often makes it impossible for the text to remain readable by a second or third party. I encounter this problem every day while working on the catalogue at the British Library where many of the Yorùbá books listed there appear in a variety of fonts in the BL system, some of which make the titles unreadable or with a different intended meaning.

*Craig Cornelius (left), Mark E. Karan from SIL (middle), and a guest.*

GBoard has mitigated some of these problems. In Yorùbá on the GBoard app, for instance, we now have pre-composed characters like ọ̀ and ọ́ and ọ and ẹ and ẹ́ and ẹ̀, etc, which can be inserted instantly without any secondary combinations. What we need, as I said during the subsequent informal conversation about the subject, is something like that for Unicode so that every new computer user does not have to spend valuable time doing diacritic permutations from the Insert>Symbol field. Or for browsers (Chrome, Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, etc), so we can stop waiting for Unicode to change its ways.

In 2016, through the Yorùbá Names Project that I founded, we created a free tonemarking software for Yorùbá and Igbo, for Mac and Windows, which has been very helpful in writing on the computer — and with which I have typed all the diacritics in this post. It still combines character elements, however, but it is software-keyboard-based, and a lot more intuitive.

The Yorùbá Names Project Keyboard, launched in 2016, can be downloaded at http://blog.yorubaname.com/keyboard

Its limitations show up when a document typed with the software has to be read with another program (like Adobe or Microsoft Word, then the cycle begins again). It would be helpful if the functionality of this nature already came with the computer so there is uniformity. Imagine if every computer sold in Nigeria already suggests to the user to flip the language as I do above so that the keyboard automatically allows for diacritic markings that can transmit across different programs. That would be great, won’t it? The conversation with these gentlemen convinced me that it is doable, but would take time, and different companies coming together to agree that African languages matter on these platforms. It has not always been the case.

*Speaking with someone from the Woolaroo team, a Googler, who now lives in Australia and wants me to come visit.*

One of the other language products that was showcased there was Woolaroo, created in conjunction with Google Arts & Culture, which is a crowdsourcing visual dictionary for a small Australian language. When publicly launched, users will be able to take photos, and then use that photo to submit words for items in the image, which is then sent to a database and shared with other users. For languages with few speakers, but whose speakers use the tools of technology, it is one way of eliciting lexical items without having to do the physical fieldwork that has characterized most language documentation efforts in the past. There is significance for this type of approach for languages in Nigeria, for instance, where old people who know the name of items are not literate to write, but can perhaps be made to use the visual aid of phones to contribute as much as possible while they are still alive.

*How the Woolaroo app works. It will be launched in 2020, and its API will be made available so others can replicate it in many language communities.*

There were other Nigerians, and Africans, at the conference. I met Dr. Túndé Adégbọlá of the African Language Technology Initiative (ALT-i), Àbákẹ́ Adénlé of AJA.LA Studios, Professor Chinedu Uchechukwu of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, Nigeria, Professor Sunday Òjó, and Adama Samassekou (the founder of the African Academy of Languages), among others. It was a diverse group of people working in different aspects of language revitalization, technology, and documentation. Mark Liberman, whom I was also meeting for the first time, shared my concern about Unicode, having done some work himself in Nigerian languages, and been frustrated by the problem of finding the right diacritics in a simple and accessible way.

Paris is beautiful at night — perhaps much better looking at night actually. The monuments are lit up, and the beauty of the city shines out from within the glow. The language of the city, naturally, is French, but the tourist who speaks not more than a smattering of the language doesn’t run into much of a problem.

It was cold most of the time, which made walking around a bit of an ordeal. It reminds me a lot of the other global city I once attempted to walk around in 2009. A day before I arrived in Paris, there had been a massive strike that paralysed the entire country and rendered public transportation useless. This could explain why Uber appeared a lot more expensive that I’d experienced elsewhere. Would have been nice to see how different the Metro was from the Tube in England. But the strike also meant that the city was less crowded — at least the usually touristic areas — and the public trash cans seemed always in need of emptying.

*The Arc de Triomphe ahead, and a trash bag nearby.*

I had got a travel grant of £1,011 to attend the conference — which covered my visa (~£295), hotel (~£270), food (~63), train (~£500), and Ubers (~£81.77) and was helpful and convenient, especially since I had to pay for the highest end of many of these things due to the rushed arrangement. My visa was issued on the 4th, so I was only able to attend the sessions on the 5th and 6th, leaving the city in the evening of the 7th. Still, it was enough to take in the fine city, sample the food, make connections, and make future plans to return for more adventure.

*The benefit of the strike is fewer tourists, but more overflowing trashcans.*

The train ride on the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Gare du Nord, which took just under three hours, is a story of its own.

Mokalik: Pọ́nmilé’s Day Out

By Tolúlọpẹ́ Ọdẹ́bùnmi

In Mokalik Kúnlé Afọláyan invites his audience into the world of mechanics through the eyes of a 12-year-old who is struggling academically in school. The young boy, Pọ́nmilé, is brought to the village by his father, Mr Ògìdán, to have the apprenticeship experience which the latter thinks may scare Pọ́nmilé to become more serious in school (on the assumption that Pọ́nmilé’s poor performance in school is due to inadequate efforts) since the life of an apprentice is supposed to be full of hardships and lacking in dignity.

By the end of Pọ́nmilé’s day at the mechanic workshop, he decides to continue schooling but also says he will occasionally come back to the village to learn, having realised that such technical know-how can be complementary to his school education. This decision shocks Mr. Ògìdán but he is happy his son’s horizon has been expanded by his experiences in the mechanic village. When Chairman, who serves as Pọ́nmilé’s guardian in the village, reports that the child is exceptional at learning, indeed a fast learner, Mr Ògìdán looks surprised, almost confused as if Chairman was talking about someone else.

Mr. Afọ́láyan’s movie explores a couple of themes often neglected in Nigerian society. First, the misconception about education, the myopic view that education is possible only in the format of a walled school with duly certificated teachers; a general misunderstanding that education is undertaken only in the context of classrooms, prescribed textbooks, regulated syllabi, written exams, etc. In short, the delimitation of education to literacy and instruction in English acquired through formal schoolwork. Another subtle theme in Mokalik is the dignity of labour and the importance of “catching them young”, or encouraging young kids to acquire vocational skills or trades like, in this case, mastery of motor vehicle repair.

One of the thrills of Mokalik lies in the fact that the main character is Pọ́nmilé—someone on the threshold of becoming a teenager. There are only a handful of Nollywood movies that feature a teenager in such a role. In short, the movie is Pọ́nmilé’s interpretation of how the unfamiliar world he finds himself in works. His family resides on the Island (most likely Victoria Island, although that is not specified in the film). During Pọ́nmilé’s one-day internship at different workshops within the village—from the motor engineer’s to the panel beater’s to the electrician’s, etc.—he makes connections between the world he is from and the one he suddenly finds himself inserted in; the similarities between the two worlds are key in shaping his ability to learn and integrate in the mechanic village.

Punishment

Pọ́nmilé ends up in the mechanic yard as a “punishment” for not being book-smart. He is considered to be a “dull” student, not good enough for school but could be good as a mechanic apprentice. It is, however, the rare upper-class parent that would want to steer a child along such a path in Nigerian society—yanked from the classroom and thrust into a trade workshop—given the realities of the criteria for class reproduction and upward mobility here. What actually happens in the film is that Ponmile suffers demotion so that he may become determined and thus concentrate on his studies. After witnessing the suffering in the hell of the Nigerian blue-collar world, he would rededicate himself to getting into the heaven that certificates are supposed to open up for the “educated”.

Would Pọ́nmilé’s father have abandoned him to his choice had he opted to become a full-time apprentice in a mechanic workshop? That scenario would seem far-fetched within the Nigerian reality, but films are not meant to be photographic snapshots of life. In a more general sense, though, wrong parental judgment in relation to a child’s career choice is often the cause of untold anguish and self-doubt, not to mention self-rejection, to the latter. If you get good grades or are exceptional in junior high school, for instance, you are expected to get into “science class”; and average students get pushed to “arts” and “commercial” classes. Such divisions may seem sensible for matching kids to their scholastic capabilities, but the problems that may arise from this arrangement become starker when, say, a high-scoring student opts for “commercial class”, or expresses a desire to become a hairdresser. This is a serious issue but not the focus of the present write-up.

Pọ́nmilé discovers that the world of the apprentice mechanic is like the world of the student. Extending the period of learning for badly behaved apprentices is just like the punishment given to students who repeat classes due to poor performance. Just as there are slow-learning students, so also are there slow-learning apprentice mechanics, and all slow-learners are punished. Pọ́nmilé also discovers a whole world of apprentice misdemeanors in the village, things surely far more colourful and earthy than student misdemeanors in the world he is coming from. Having experienced this intriguing world, Pọ́nmilé wouldn’t want to be totally extricated from it. Thus the “punishment” works, even though the consequences are largely unexpected; yet Chairman, that enigmatic chaperon, seems to have always had inner insight that things would turn out very well for everyone, almost like he wrote the script.

Education and job prospect

It is taken for granted in the film that being educated creates the possibility for entry into certain kinds of jobs. Is it really unusual or unheard-of to find the so-called educated working in a mechanic workshop? The Nigerian social space once buzzed with noise over some “revelation” that a couple of PhD holders applied for the position of truck driver with the Dangote Group. Pọ́nmilé informs Kàmọ́rù that people study Mechanical Engineering in school, of course referring to post-secondary-school education. Kàmọ́rù scoffs at this, responding that such graduates end up working in positions not related to their fields of study, which is quite an accurate description of how things often play out in Nigeria and elsewhere too.

However, Kàmọ́rù is saying more than this. He is also arguing that if you studied Engineering in university and you do not work in a technical field, you’ve probably wasted your time in school. He goes further to mock some of the clients who come to the workshop, implying that some of them who are supposedly educated have no clue about how a car functions even though that status symbol is an essential part of their sense of self-worth. The mechanic is thus the sustainer of their status and self-worth. Indeed, the Nigerian middle-class experience is replete with tales of woe at the hands of “sharp” mechanics who keep finding ways of making sure that their clients come back to have this or that part of their vehicles repaired, tinkering with the vehicles, planting hidden faults that will manifest later, in order to ensure constant custom.

Assumptions and points of view

In the film, there are issues of class and the perspectival baggage that comes with it. The whole idea of bringing Pọ́nmilé to the mechanic village has its class overtones, as already hinted at above. The assumption, of course, has to do with how kids from well-to-do families spend their free time. For instance, there are well-founded assumptions, on the part of the denizens of the village, as to what kids from well-to-do families do with their free time, i.e. playing video games, watching TV, or acquiring other “sophisticated” skills like playing a musical instrument. Simi, the daughter of a food seller, expresses this notion when she asks “Báwo ni ọmọ olówó ṣe wá ń kọ́ mẹkáník?” Pọ́nmilé responds: “Wọ́n ni mi ò kí ń ṣe dáadáa ní school.”

Another question relating to labour, and specifically child labour in the case of Pọ́nmilé, can be raised here. No doubt, learning does take place in the mechanic workshop, but the workshop is not just a learning centre but a business venture also—one can argue that it is indeed primarily a business. The apprentice makes a direct contribution to income-earning activities in the workshop. The modalities may be different from workshop to workshop, but apprentices often earn a living from what they do in the workshop and may save up money towards the day of their “freedom”. Of course, such income-earning chances improve as the apprentice becomes more experienced and expert in the trade, earning the trust of the master to even run the workshop.

A child like Ponmile would make a great apprentice, from what we see in the film, and as confirmed by Chairman when his father comes to fetch him home. But would he not have been an exploited child in that context if he made contributions to his master’s income, and without receiving due remuneration? Maybe we should dispense with such a prism in this case? But considering what we know of what sometimes goes on in such places in real life—the corporal punishment that may come with the territory, especially for young apprentices, the risk of exposure to alcohol and drugs, etc.—the film may be charged with some degree of feel-good narrowness in its vision. Be that as it may, the film highlights an aspect of education that cannot be overstressed, namely, the fact that it is a learning process for both the “teacher” and the “learner”, rather than the view of the teacher as all-knowing and not capable of making mistakes. Part of the story in Mokalik relates to debunking the myth that knowledge comes with age, yet the story does not downplay elderly wisdom. These aspects play out several times between Pọ́nmilé and his teachers in the various workshops he visits in the village. It takes humility for a teacher to accept that they do not know everything as regards their trade; it takes humility and does not suggest incompetence.

Pọ́nmilé appears to have found himself in the perfect world. We see a child with heightened curiosity, eager to learn. He asks questions. Many questions. And he gets answers. But he is a privileged kid in that setting. Pọ́nmilé is treated with such care that may not be accorded to another young boy from the underclasses. His curiosity is entertained even on those occasions when it causes some annoyance or perplexity. He seems also to be protected by his naivety in that, though not rude by nature, he asks direct questions and offers criticism without quite observing the cultural form of deference to age. This naivety works well for him in the scene where he critiques Taofeek (the painter). Taofeek reluctantly accepts Pọ́nmilé as the necessary critical eye of the outsider.

But in the end, the world we see in the film is not Pọ́nmilé’s world. It is the rich world of the mechanics and other denizens of the mechanic village. Their lives open up before us; we see the simplicity and complications of their intertwined existence in that space, a world-within-a-world, for there is more to them than what they do and experience in that space. There is in the village the genius who is able to identify an airline by the sound of the engine of the plane flying overhead; there is that knowledgeable and yet dubious citizen of the world who calls himself Obama. The mechanic village itself is a shapeshifter. It can suddenly become a wrestling arena, only for it to transform into a wedding party the next moment. And the people there embody that thing we find hard to define, the dignity of labour.

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Tolúlọpẹ́ Ọdẹ́bùnmi is a critical discourse analyst, a trained linguist, and a PhD candidate at Michigan Technological University, USA. Her interests include politics, globalization issues, gender politics and popular culture. She was a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at Michigan State University, USA. She is currently a visiting scholar at Jean Jaurès University, Toulouse, France where she teaches English communication.

Another Kind of Poverty Gap: The Erosion of Language Diversity

(Being a paper delivered at the PyeonChang Humanities Forum at the Seoul National University Seoul, South Korea, on January 20, 2018 by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀ṣún. The audio recording of the talk can be found here)

Ẹ káàrọ̀ o. Good morning. Annyeonghaseyo.

First of all, let me express my profound appreciation to the organisers of this event for choosing me out of many to be here, among all these important people from around the world, to give you my own perspective on an important discussion. These are precarious times. And to be here in this place at this time to give a talk on a topic that is dear to my heart, is an honour. So, thank you. As we say in my language, adúpẹ́. I bring you greetings from West Africa.

I am here to speak about poverty. But before you assume that I am going in a predictable direction you have been familiar with from watching cable news from your different parts of the world about Africa, let me advise that you set a different expectation. My talk is about a different kind of poverty, one caused by exclusion, and one relating to one particular type of exclusion: language.

I come from Nigeria, a country of about 170 million people with over five hundred different languages and cultures. It is a place that offers as diverse a landscape in terms of both viewpoint and attitude to life. On the one hand, binaries can be found: The north is mostly conservative while the south is mostly liberal. The north is mostly arid and desert while the south is mostly rainforest and humid. On the other, we have an assemblage of cultures and languages which range from mildly intelligible dialects to distinct languages with no discernable cognate, even when they live around each other. This has made my country, Nigeria, a country created from a British colonial experiment, a very interesting place. From what I have read, this is not the same as what obtains here on the Korean peninsula, where Korean is generally described as a “language isolate”, with no discernable genetic or genealogical link with any neighbouring tongues.

Human migration and mandatory inter-mingling of tribes ensured that we are all exposed, in some way or the other, to characteristics of each other’s culture. Through warfare, conquests, and other forms of domination, a number of us have also become subservient, linguistically, to some larger languages around the country, such that, before the British came to colonize the whole swathe that makes up the country Nigeria, a certain linguistic mosaic had emerged. A mosaic, because it was not just one language which every others must speak, but several big languages, and several small ones, each occupying a particular space in the society, fulfilling particular roles in facilitating contact.

I bring up the linguistic character of my hometown to create an image in your minds of both diversity and richness. Even many decades after the colonial processes that were set in place to create a homogenous society out of colourful and diverse peoples, the mosaic is still evident, though not in as bold a colour as was many years ago. The changes started with colonialism, and the prevailing mindsets of the invading strangers from Europe and newly “educated” Africans that our languages could be discarded without consequences. It was a gradual change, reinforced with every government policy, every textbook recommendation, every change in the educational syllabus, and every recommended dress code in government offices. Today, we are a people whose worldview is being conditioned and defined by competence in a new language, English, to the exclusion of our own.

Let me address an important irony: that which concerns the fact that I am presenting this talk in English and not in my own language. I have, after all, advocated that Nigeria’s president use his own language (Hausa/Fulfde) whenever he is out of the country. If I were the president of Nigeria in this instance, Yorùbá nìkan ni mo máa sọ. Aá fi sílẹ̀ fún àwọn ògbifọ̀ láti ṣàlàyé (I’ll be speaking only in Yorùbá, leaving it to the translators to explain). This is a suggestion borne out of my belief that the head of state represents the country and its multilingualism. His or her decision to speak the nation’s language outside shows a pride in the language and provides jobs for translators living in that foreign country while portraying a complexity of that country’s cultural landscape.

The irony comes because the purpose of my talk here is to advocate for a return to the local language use and support, and to explain why I believe that the poverty of imagination is equally as tragic as a poverty of the stomach. You, my hosts in Korea, don’t seem to have this dilemma. Your language is one (unless we discuss the widening gap that is happening between the version spoken here in the South, and that one spoken in the North). You don’t have too many dialects of the language, and citizens of this country do not have hundreds more competing for attention. But you are also lucky in another way. Even though English is spoken here as a second language, Korean still holds an important place as a vessel for the culture of the people. You can think in the language. You can conduct all your daily activities in it. It has a distinct writing style, and children are taught how to use it. And big technological giants care enough about it, and your buying power, that they carry it along with every new tool they create.

This is not the same for the languages in my country.

The problem, like I mentioned earlier originated in the over-simplistic tools we chose for dealing with diversity, and in colonialism. But it has also been carried along by an attitude of the population that rather than assert individual identity or spend valuable time developing each language through use in literature and other means of transmission, we might as well surrender and adopt English as the only “uniting” language. Don’t ask me how successful that drive for unity is. But the result is a gradual attrition of local languages. As at the last count, about twenty-seven languages in the country are either vulnerable, critically endangered, or severely endangered. It doesn’t look like the situation will improve anytime soon because unlike what obtained in the country a couple of decades ago, we no longer teach local languages in schools. The new students we produce from schools each year will only claim English as their first language. This doesn’t mean that they will be accepted abroad as first language speakers since the term “native speaker” is imbued with more than mere language competence, but with both political and cultural characteristics. I’ve spoken about this in other forums. This leaves us, Nigerians, and many other post-colonial outposts around the continent, at a terrible psychological, social, economic, and even political disadvantage.

A more noticeable example of this kind of poverty comes with technology, which is my current focus as a writer and linguist. In some ways, it will be proper to look at the progress of today’s modern inventions through the lens of colonialism, carried into every part of the world on the back of convenience. From my part of the world, where we consume technology much more than we create it, a pattern has emerged. The new technological tools created to make life better for us are monolingual in nature. For an environment where thousands of languages are spoken, this is grossly deficient. And there’s no poverty as great as one that prevents a person from interrogating life in the language with which they are intimately familiar.

When I was in the university between 2000 and 2005, I used to wonder why Microsoft Word underlined my name with a red wriggly line whenever I typed it. But the answer was simple: Microsoft simply didn’t recognize a Yorùbá name. As long as the name wasn’t an English name, the red wriggly line showed you that something was wrong. So when I wrote my long essay, I did it on a project called a Multimedia Dictionary of Yorùbá Names. It was my way of introducing Yorùbá names to technology. Ten years later, I expanded the project to a fully functional and crowdsourced multimedia dictionary to which people can add new names, and improve current ones. And I did this not just for Yorùbá this time, but under the umbrella of what we called the African Language Project, we want to document all African languages and other intangible cultural materials like names, customs, norms, and words. As at this moment, there is no multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá on the internet. None that Africans can access on their phones at a moment’s notice. We are trying to create one. If more Africans who do not speak English at all, or as a first language, cannot interact with technology in their own language, then they are being left behind in the progress of technology. And that’s a powerful kind of poverty.

Around Nigeria today, there is barely any ATM machines that one can use in a local language. This means that people who only speak a local language will not put their money in banks, since the process of getting it out is onerous. Because of this, they are excluded from the big economy and thus remain poor. In a part of Northern Nigeria, poor farmers who need to work with modern implements have to first learn English before they can understand how to read the manuals. I know a couple of my friends who are working on artificial intelligence applications that can help these farmers communicate in Hausa and get access to all they need in a language they speak. But these efforts are far in-between. There’s a lot of work to be done, not just with widening the access that technology provides, but also in reading and producing literature, in engaging with participating in and discerning the details of our politics, and engaging with our everyday life. Like we say in Yorùbá, ọwọ́ ara ẹni la fi ń tún ìwà ara ẹni ṣe (“we have to use our own hands to fix our own issues”).

There are different kinds of poverty, all of them damaging to the dignity of man. A deprivation of language is one that is more pernicious than the rest because it deprives not just the body, but also the mind. The world is a colourful and delightful place to be in because of the multiplicity of languages and culture. I do not want to live in a world where only ONE language is spoken. That is a world that has lost its storehouses of wealth. We are all richer by the experiences we share from participating in each other’s cultures, language, worldview, and way of life. By working hard, and fighting hard in my own part of the world, to make sure that the movement of technology does not leave us behind in our own languages, we attack poverty, and build a new and exciting future that better reflects the mosaic; the colours, and the realities of the African – and our global – existence.

Thank you for listening. Kamsa hamida.

Reviewing the 2017 Nigerian Literature Prize Trio

I have just finished reading the third of the books on the 2017 Nigerian Prize for Literature shortlist, and I’m overwhelmed by the range, depth, and quality of their offerings. It is such an impressive collection.

When I started, last week, with one of the books, I was sure that I had found the winning work. But after having read the three, I’m no longer that certain. Each book brings to the table an array of class, style, content, beauty, and a lot of pedigree. Contrary to social media jabber, I can say that this is an impressive shortlist, each writer deserving of their place on it.

In the next couple of days, perhaps one per day, I hope to post my thoughts on each these books as I see them.

Needless to say, reviews and criticism of works selected for public fêting are essential to the growth of a literary industry. From Facebook to Twitter, we have seen no shortage of individual opinions on the Nigerian Prize, its shortcomings, and other matters. What we haven’t found are sustained conversations about each of the works shortlisted. Aside from book readings organized by Cora and sometimes by NLNG itself, there haven’t been many avenues to engage with the work and the writers themselves. Not even in our newspapers, except for scattered profiles and op-eds on the nature of prizes. And that is a shame.

One of the reasons the Caine Prize (and other prizes smaller than it) have earned such a reputation as important relevant prize institutions is the level of engagement that each of their annual prize seasons brings to literature and to the writers themselves. We can complain all we want about what NLNG is or isn’t doing, but as an industry of writers, much of the fault lay with us and our inability to engage in a constructive, intellectually satisfying way when it comes to book shortlists. It is not the size of the prize pot that brings prestige to a prize. It is the type of value that the conversations around the prize add to the standard of subsequent entrants which then hopefully spirals forward into an improved culture and tradition of writing across the country. Without critical attention on a sustained basis, we are equally as complicit in whatever downward spiral attends our inactivity.

Tomorrow on Lagos Island, I will be engaging the three writers in a televised interview. I intend to post the full videos here when they are ready. I also intend to talk with the prize administrators, as well as a member of the prize advisory on a number of issues that have been raised over the years about the prize and its role in shaping the writing culture around Nigeria.

But before then, watch out for my review of each of the three books on the 2017 shortlist.

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UPDATE (September 25, 2017)

The first review is of Ogaga Ifowodo’s A Good Mourning. Read it here.

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