Exophonic[1] writing

Scrolling through my weekly podcasts on a Sunday, as I do, I was taken by a discussion on writing in a language other than one’s first language. The poet, George Szirtes, explained why he writes in English and talked of others; Samuel Beckett and T.S. Elliot (they wrote in French), Vladimir Nabakov (English), and Joseph Brodsky, “I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an English essayist.”[2] As a monolingual person, this struck me as having great skill.

A friend (first language Mandarin) and scholar of Chinese literature, is writing novels in English and I am reading the early drafts. It is a difficult task as I have little experience with the Chinese style – flamboyant is the closest I can get. This comment reflects my monolingual, Australian, not overly well read background, so that we have to find common ground for my input. Style is a critical matter that I need to understand more of and in particular, the styles employed by modern Chinese writing in English. Style:

…implies choice on the part of the author, whether conscious or unconscious, and these stylistic choices provide the reader with clues which help him or her construct the attitude of an inferred author, of a character, narrator or text. From a cognitive stylistics point of view therefore, to disregard style is to severely limit one’s reading of a text[3].

Considering ‘style’ and the project of reading the drafts of the novel, I turned to Chinese and Japanese writers, writing in English and German, to see if this ‘style’ exists. The first influence was Chantal Wright’s, “Writing in the ‘Grey Zone’:…[4]. She discusses (among other matters) the influence of Italian and Turkish speakers who migrated to Germany and then wrote in German, and viewing the German social environment rather differently to native Germans. She quotes an Italian, Franco Biondi:

Non-native-speaker writers … defamiliarise German for the German reader, creating their own ‘metonymic gap[5]’, reminding themselves and their readers that language belongs to nobody and that one should never feel too comfortable there.

Wright then establishes ‘exophonic writing’ as:

The term ‘non-native speaker’, while being technically correct, is unsuitable. Biondi, Oånzdamar and Tawada are, in terms of fluency and facility with the language, on a par with native speakers of German, but their childhoods were spent in other languages, and this experience of other languages and cultures makes itself felt in their writing. I am aware that the search for a label for this type of writing continues the tradition of terminological squabbling, which has often prevented true engagement with these texts. My intention, however, is to clearly demarcate this body of writers and to draw attention to the innovative stylistic features of their work.

Exophony has also been formulated in English as ‘literatures in assumed languages … prose which makes use of code-switching, literal translation and lexical repetition to create a new literary register[6].

Considering the ‘style’ in Bi Xian’s writing, the work I am currently reading is set during and post Cultural Revolution so that Wright’s comments on exophonic writers writing in German about Germany are not entirely relevant. This also applies to Ha Jin’s (2002), The Crazed, (Viking) which offers a similar style when writing of a crazed scholar during the Cultural Revolution[7]. Ha Jin is a Chinese exchange student who stayed on in the USA in the wake of Tiananmen Square and has dissected the politics of writing in an adopted tongue.

I took up this ‘writing in a second language’ with a Montrealer who has lived in Sydney for many years and teaches English at a tertiary level, and was surprised at this response:

Szirtes is about my age, I guess, and would have left Hungary in 1956. It’s surprising how heavy his accent is if he was in England at the age of 8. The sense that in a second language you are always a bit of outsider rings true. Even though I have used English since before I was 5, I don’t feel I have the kind of connection to it that a native speaker has. After all, my parents, like Szirtes’, spoke limited English and unlike his, spoke to me in their language. For that gift, I am very grateful. I think the difference can be found in idioms, the special preserve of native speakers. I think there is a slightly formal ‘learned’ quality to the English of non-natives that never goes away.

Another interesting point was that the acute listening to the learned language can actually be an advantage for exophonic writers. Like anything you are born with, you take it for granted.[8]

Moving away from Chinese writing in English for a moment, it is useful to read what other exophonic writers have to say. Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s.  After growing up in Germany, he attended university in the UK, and now lives in Canada.

Why settle on a tongue that is not your own? ….The answer is that English is my own, never mind when I acquired it. That I chose it the way one chooses a spouse, which is to say I fell in love with it.  I wrote my first cheque in English; met my life’s companion in English. I can no longer remember a day when I did not think, and dream, in English. There was never a question in my mind that I would write my books in anything else.

It is true that for many of us our relationship to our adopted language is not territorial. Mine is an English that I cobbled together from the many places I have lived and the books I have read, a transnational quilt. It limits me in some respects, and opens avenues in others. The Quiet Twin is set in the Austria of 1939, amongst speakers of Viennese German. My (northern, “Prussian”) German would struggle to capture the time and place. I have spent years in Vienna, and am familiar with its patter; I may be able to imitate it, but it does not belong to me. In English, by contrast, I was free to create a language precisely suited to its purpose, neither British nor Canadian, inflected with the rhythms of German grammar and that joy of expression peculiar those reluctant Habsburg sisters, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In English, then, it came alive, this city of a bygone era, spontaneously and without effort, spilling out with every chapter that I wrote. As a writer, one cannot receive a greater gift than that[9].

Chinua Achebe (1965)[10] has been criticised for writing in English rather than a Nigerian language. As there are over 500 recognised languages in Nigeria[11], which one should he choose to gain the greatest audience? And, traditionally, story telling has been an oral activity; writing in an indigenous language was introduced by the colonial incursions – Arabic in the north; English, French, Portuguese and Afrikaans in the south. A survey of African writers that I completed on the Internet, shows that the majority are exophonic and the exceptions write as a deliberate nationalist action to draw attention to the indigenous languages. Examples are:

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writing in Gikuyu; and
• Rachid Boudjedra, an Algerian who initially wrote in French but now works in Arabic.

Returning to Chinese-Japanese writing in a European language, Yoko Tawada finds that writing in German has an expressive strength that is not available in Japanese[12]. She uses wasser as a comparison with misa as an example for water in German and Japanese and prefers the former.