The English Language as a Possibility

As you should know by now, I am not too enthusiastic about using the English language. I think others do it better anyway. However, I am currently working on a pre-written (pre-prepared? ha ha ha) entry for my Irish pages, and before I am able to paste that one there and here simultaneously, I am not going to try my hand at anything else in Irish. So, you will be forced to put up with my execrable English. You might not believe me, but it is a fact that I haven't made much use of it for years, except when teaching Irish to Americans by e-mail.

When I was young, foolish, and prone to left-wing Utopianism (which I never uncritically endorsed in any fashionable and pre-digested form though, because, heaven be thanked, I was never admitted into a tightly knit group of left-wing alike-thinkers - those were rather thin on the ground anyway, new ones have only mushroomed recently), I hated English as the language of international cocacolonialism. Or that is what I told myself. Later, I have come to realise that my opposition to it was much more about Finnish cultural nationalism - the kind of cultural nationalism I was raised with. I learnt that things such as good Finnish usage mattered, and that sloppy speech habits - which, in my generation, practically means the same as using raw English loan-words in your Finnish - indicated a general sloppiness, even of character and thinking. I am these days much less "anti-American" than I used to be - actually, I have recently read widely in the history of the United States, and I deeply feel there are good reasons why Americans behave the way they do - though it be an unacceptable way, for a European - and it is interesting to try and find out about those reasons. In fact, the only - really the only - exception I take, these days, to the omnipresence of American culture and the English language in countries such as my own, is the fact that, at the end of the day, we have not chosen it voluntarily. To understand more is not always to forgive more; but while acquiring a new insight into American culture reading about the way it originated and developed to what it is, I have also come to see why the "American dream" can still inspire love, patriotism, and affection.

Emma Lazarus's sonnet The New Colossus, dedicated to the Statue of Liberty, does indeed express an idea, or an ideal, that is highly endorseable: send your wretched to my shores, I'll nurture them. Indeed, this ideal is very much alive among Americans today. Once, as I was browsing the Amazon.com web pages, I accidentally came upon the advertisement for some racist crackpot's book about how the United States were being invaded by people of inferior colour (or whatever - please note my stubborn insistence on British spelling!) - I never as much as thought of actually purchasing that piece of shit, but the readers' views were interesting. Most were right-wing loonies who found in the book the kind of confirmation they were looking for, but others, though they seemed quite white-minded and Republican, rejected the book on purely patriotic grounds. For them, the fact that foreigners - even non-whites - wanted to be Americans was something to be proud of, an indication that they were lucky, indeed God's elect, to be Americans, and that their country was being strengthened and reinforced in its vitality by immigrants - any immigrants. Now, I don't say that that view is entirely sensible, but it is at the very least consoling that Americans can be right-wing patriots without being racist. It is a Good Thing^tm, because it contributes to what we in the European Union call "social cohesion".

European Left - and it is hard to imagine a good European these days who were not in some sense "left-leaning" from the American point of view - tends to poke fun at the "American Dream", seeing it as a corrupt lie to fool the naïve with; but I am getting tired of this. Of course, I am always happy to denigrate the United States in order to provoke such Finnish people as have acquired an outlook Americanised (or American-Republicanised) enough to put them out of touch with the mainstream of Finnish life. (There are an awful lot of these people around in the Finnish Usenet, you see. A thoroughly rotten lot I would call them, a servile breed always happy to side with the stronger one; and regrettably the fact that the most vocal admirers of the United States are like them, is bound to give Americans an undeservedly bad press in countries such as mine.) But if the intricacies of the internal political feuds of us Finns are left out of the picture, I would be less keen on attacking the very pillars of the "American Dream". Instead, I think the trouble with Americans is, that they often fail to live up to that Dream, and if Americans are to be criticised, they are entitled to be criticised in terms of that dream.

This megillah - or paidir chapaill, as we say in Irish - might have got somewhat out of hand, but anyway, I thought it necessary to give some hints about my ambiguous relationship to English, as I speak a small national language myself, as well as being an active participant in the attempts to revitalise Irish. I called this entry The English Language as a Possibility, because English is not only a threat - seeing it as a menace comes naturally to the Irish-speaker - but also a possibility. It is well known that several anti-imperialist and nationalist writers (if we include purely defensive or celebratory cultural nationalism in the definition of "nationalism" here - vide Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities), for example, have written their most influential works in the language of their so-called oppressor. One case in point Benedict Anderson introduced to his readers was José Rizal, the Philippine patriot, whose last poem, Mi Último Adiós, was not only written in the language of the colonial masters, Spanish, but also lacks any explicite referral to Spaniards as oppressors. Another one is, of course, Frantz Fanon, in French; and the bulk of Irish rebel songs have been written in English. (The genre of the Irish rebel song is, in my honest opinion, an English-language genre. In Irish, any comparable poetry is Jacobite in outlook - certainly not Republican in any modern sense. Contemporary song lyrics in Irish are more about "our boys" winning a boat-rowing contest in America or a football game in England, or about the plight of the Irish navvy on a building site, or even about the emigrant's nostalgia for the old country - tá an long ag dul anonn inniu, a Chóilín Phádraig Shéamuis. I cannot think of any contemporary rebel song in Irish.) And of course, Irishmen have been, and still are, great writers in English, although I definitely disagree with the suggestion that modern literature in Irish is somehow inferior to modern Irish literature in English. I do agree that, say, John McGahern and Jennifer Johnston are quite outstanding; but they are, too obviously and too provincially, Irish writers. In comparison, Mícheál Ó Conghaile's enigmatic, Borgesian short story Seacht gCéad Uaireadóir ("Seven Hundred Clocks") is certainly supranational world literature.

So, though English be seen as the language of English, British, Anglo-American, Yankee or whatever imperialism, it can be, has been, and is being appropriated by non-native speakers, even of very anti-English disposition, to their own ends. Why shouldn't I? After all, I could do it. When I was, say, seventeen years old, I found German and Swedish much easier than English, because English seemed to be full of irregularities to be memorised one by one, while German had an iron logic to it, and Swedish was, basically, just a kind of camouflaged German. (Actually, my Swedish used to be very much influenced by German, and only with years did the insight come that Swedish is indeed an independent language. In fact, I think my Swedish even today tends to have longer sentences and more German-type Verschachtelungen, or multi-layered sentence structures, than that of a native speaker.) But now, I think my English has improved to the point that I could consider taking up a writer's career in the language. Well, of course, I would need some stylistic training; but I am fairly familiar with English classics as well as contemporary literature; and in order to write prose in a language, does one really need more?

Probably not. However, I think writing in English is not necessarily the easiest way to international recognition, fame, fortune or immortality. As Irishmen have found to their cost - you should read the concluding chapters of J.J.Lee's history of modern Ireland, the language shift to English, - whether on personal or on national level - does not necessarily open the skies. In fact, it might be the other way round - it might condemn you to perpetual provinciality. Good old Julius said, when travelling through the Roman province of Spain (wasn't it Spain? if I remember right, Spain was one of the provinces that Romans acquired during the Punic Wars), that he would prefer to be the first one there to being the second one in Rome. And this is the point. When Ireland jettisoned her language, it became virtually impossible to be the first one in Ireland in any meaningful sense, because Ireland was no more a world to herself - she was only a province of the wider English-speaking world. Indeed, Irish writers in English rarely get much recognition outside their country if they are not able to write in terms of the stage-Irish cliche, either reproducing or purposefully undermining it, but anyway relating to it some way or the other.