ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Soliloquy category.

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.

On the Way Home

There blows a dusty wind, removed from my already sweaty face by just a thin sheet of glass. It is night. The cemetry on the way back from town lay spread as it always did to the left of the road. There are flowers of many colours on the tombstones, marking spring, marking memory. They spread further into the thicket, with little colour snippets out of the dark. A racoon creeps across the road onto the other side, moving like a crippled dog. It looks like a baby fox brightened only by the little light slivers bouncing off the dark stones of the grave back onto its skin. The distance of a mile or a little more separates me from home in the little town. It feels like the harmattan season in another home far, far away. There is no uncertainty, or dread, or a once-familiar worry. There was however a thumping of heart, and a gait propelled by soothingness.

 

 

On the Way Home was published on April 13th, 2011, under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Here’s (to) The Future

“Unconfirmed reports that forces loyal to Cameron are attacking rebels in Trafalgar square.” – As seen on twitter (@ssafac)

Watching and reading daily news, I am wondering if this is the future we have all been preparing for. (No, not you already above thirty-five, please 🙂 ). First Tunisia, then Algeria, and then Egypt, and Bahrain, and Libya. And Nigeria. And Wisconsin. And now London. Young people all over the world are standing up to define what their generation is going to look like. There is a pleasant bubbling feeling in my gut that goes with thinking about it all. I bet it must feel like this during the Industrial Revolution too.

There are snags though, for me: the still unclear role of the American might in Libya, the Saudi role in suppressing the Bahrain uprising, the silent “educated” population of Zimbabwe still dithering under Mugabe, Lauren Gbagbo’s iron fist over Ivory Coast, Moammar Gadaffi’s very elaborate family connection all over Libya, and the greed and tribalism that sometimes raises their ugly heads in my own homeland, among many others. What is promising however is the prospect of a new world, under which our children will grow, where the pursuit of happiness and the determination of our destiny would be in the hands of a new generation of well informed youths. Here is the beginning, it seems, and it is fuelled by the Information Revolution.

Forty years from now, I look forward to seeing the new kind of world we would have built by that time. In our hands, the youths of today, are the keys to that future in India, China, Mexico, Honduras, Jamaica, Korea, Japan, Haiti, Tibet, Benin, Iraq, and several other places in need of a new direction to the future out of the hands of the old, tired hands. The biggest challenge, of course, is being able to transition into a long period of stability and concrete global direction without a debilitating period of war the type that defined the post Industrial Revolution era. Maybe this Information Revolution will come with it the tools of negotiating world peace without bloodshed that the world has always seen. Again, now I’m mostly curious, yet jubilant that at least the generational hand of the clock is moving, and it is touching all corners of the globe as it must, one after the other. There’s something good about that.

Here’s (to) The Future was published on March 27th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

On World Forestry Day

Kenya’s Nobel Laureate Professor Wangari Maathai’s Facebook update of a few minutes ago asked us all to plant a tree today. I live in the United States, so the message wasn’t meant for me. On the campus where I live at the moment, the gardens and things that have to do with planting are handled by a special group of volunteers who make sure that the campus remains green, and beautiful. It is the same for my University in Ibadan. The last time I visited it, I was greeted by fresh scents of breeze blowing through leaves of newly planted trees.

Were this not the case however, I still would not know how to plant trees. I do not know what a tree seedling looks like. I can recognize a few trees by name: mango, guava, iroko (barely) and teak but I have never been good at tree planting. Growing up as a child in a large compound with trees of guava, iyeye and a few others of plantain and banana littered around the house, I am appreciative of their enticing pleasures. The first time I was stung by a bee was from throwing stones at their mound seen on the iyeye tree within our compound. I spent other countless moments of childhood revelry bouncing on top of branches of the guava tree behind my mother’s bedroom. I can’t imagine what childhood would have been like without those experiences. Just thinking about them brings the feeling of cool breeze back around my head.

Plants, greenery add colour and lustre to our lives in many ways than one. On this day designated to celebrate the planting of trees and the contribution and value of forests and forestry to the community, I join those who know how, with only words alas, but also with fond memories of climbing on trees.

And oh, it’s also World Poetry Day. Now what does one have to say about that?

On World Forestry Day was published on March 21st, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.