The half-light of foreign tongues

Writing from his own experience of postcolonial displacement, Homi Bhabha observes in The Location of Culture that

Such ‘disseminations’ are at the heart of contemporary experience, whether those of migrant workers collectivised in the very process of their individual displacements, or of poets who, like Derek Walcott – as his early and uncollected poem ‘Postcard’ records – had to learn in his expatriation to ‘slough off / This love of landscape that's self love’, and recognise that ‘To change your language you must change your life’. What Walcott calls here the condition of being ‘Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles’, in which ‘I earn / My exile’, corresponds to Bhabha's ‘gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues’. The process of inward migration to the old imperial centres over the last half-century has had a profound transformative effect on the language of the metropolitan culture, an effect summed up in what Walcott calls, in The Arkansas Testament, the ‘mongrel … black vowel barking’ of a ‘darkening English’ (pp. 10, 15). The displacement of the semi-colonial peripheries to the capitals of the global economy produces, that is, a displacement in the language of the hegemonic culture, appropriating, transforming, repossessing its discourses, alienating ‘native’ English into a world of difference where, in the terms of an archaic imperial narrative, it ‘goes native’. Language is never innocent. A struggle for owner-ship, a logomachia, is perpetually being fought on its terrain.