Lifestyle
Something I’ve been thinking about recently: I spell it “colour” and “mum”. I go on “holiday” and to “university”. But I eat “fries” (of the chips variety) and “chips” (of the crisps variety) and call Z “zee”. Uno reverse but I get a driving “licence” and ask for “the bill”. And watch, of course, football.1
For those who think Singapore is in China, which seems to be much of the US Senate, let me give a quick lowdown: Singapore’s a tiny country in Southeast Asia that used to be varying flavours of British Colony (trading post, Straits Settlement, Crown Colony). We’re apparently famous in business and motivational circles for the Singapore Story, which I guess makes us the country equivalent of Ernest Shackleton. Our national language, as defined in the constitution, is Malay, but in practice Malay is considered a ‘mother tongue’ or second language - like Chinese is mine - and everyone learns English as their first. Aside from the usually older folks, our day-to-day2 language, certainly our professional one, is largely English.
Anyway, point being we speak English. The question is: whose?
I’m very aware of the fact that language x colonialism is a topic in and of itself that Very Smart People study for a living (if you can call a PhD stipend a living wage), and I don’t mean to encroach on that. Instead I’ll use a footnote properly to include some resources and readings on the topic - look at me being all nerdy, eugh.3 Go check these out and don’t come back. No, seriously, it’s a really interesting topic and worth your time + being shoved into a locker for!
If you are nevertheless persisting, here’s a mélange of thoughts about language. [Disc 2 animated Tintin voice]4 It all started when the Captain and I was thinking about football. Sorry I’ve mentioned this twice in this post; I promise it won’t happen again. I was thinking we generally call it football here, as does most of the world: fútbol, fußball, voetbal, futebol. Why? Cultural imperialism, of course.
But then I started thinking about the other words I mentioned up top, which are markedly American, and then my brain went poof a little bit and I was all down the ‘language as a weathervane of colonialism’ rabbithole. It’s interesting to me to think about how many of the Americanisms here are commercial in nature; brands, things you buy, ideas that would probably have proliferated during the age of American dominance / global imperialism. Our British inheritance is a lot older, more stolid, unchangeable things like the extra letters and a love of q-ing. (Get it??)
This felt like a sort of violence, or violent encroachment - American on British English, British English on our own languages. Honestly, a lot of language is violence; our government’s attempt to standardise all Singaporean Chinese to Simplified Mandarin seemed particularly vicious.5 So it isn’t only colonialism, but colonialism forms a big part of it.
Recently I picked up Yi Sang: Selected Works on a dear friend’s recommendation. I think I liked it, although some of it was too modernist/abstract for me. What I found most interesting was actually the essays on Yi Sang’s grappling with language and translation and colonialism. To quote one by Don Mee Choi:
Cultural imperialism uses language to produce failure, inferiority…. we did not choose [the colonial language]; it chose us, historically, and that’s the nature of a colonial language. It finds you. It can even track you down … and make a foreigner out of you in your own country, which is to say, your home is no longer your home.
Yi Sang - a Korean poet who wrote in Japanese and also used English and French - is found by these languages. Per Sawako Nakayasu’s essay, he’s able to stretch these languages to ‘accommodate his position as a colonial subject’, or uses these languages, in a way, to critique themselves. One important point, I think: he can do this because he still speaks Korean. In this case, the use of the colonial language is a specific choice. For a lot of Chinese Singaporeans, English has become such a dominant first language that I would never be able to choose, for example, to write this post in Mandarin.
(To sidetrack a bit, this sometimes leads to real, ah, situations. I was once contemptuously told something to the effect of ‘you call yourself Chinese [the ethnicity, not the nationality]?’ by a mainland Chinese tourist to whom I was trying to explain the difficult as fuck concept of 3D printing. Yes, he was uniquely rude; yes, it still made me feel like shit.)
Last year I went to a talk at the Singapore Writers’ Festival (of largely English-language writers) by Viet Thanh Nguyen (a Professor of English), who spoke (eloquently, in English) about ‘English as the domestication of Otherness’; about having to get good at English to be understood; and about being torn between loving the work of English writers while recognising the irony or conflict of this. Language is only one example of this sort of cultural imperialism; Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Map Reading touches on film as another, where children watch and love colonial adventure stories where they are the bad guys, and where the tension of consuming narratives that are against you is possible through an unselfconscious or willful decontextualising of history.6 What if you’re so decontextualised that the colonial language is the only language you speak? If it doesn’t need to track you down - if it’s always been there?
I’ll tell you what - it can feel fuckin’ bad, man. For what it’s worth, I think my English is good. I know a bunch of words, I read a lot, I’ve always done well in it, I’m a decent writer, despite the regularity with which I fuck the rules of grammar up.
When I applied for my masters in the UK, a uni called me up and asked me if I could do an informal interview to prove that I spoke English. It wasn’t that the prof didn’t believe me - it was so that he could wave the requirement that I do an English test.
Getting good at a language you have because of the colonial power only for them to turn around and say are you sure you speak it properly? That’s rough, buddy.
I don’t really have a moral of the story here, just an experience of my home momentarily not being my home - in the opposite way, I think, of what Don Mee Choi meant. A language can leave you as easily as it finds you.
So whose language is it? How do we mount a resistance to a language in that language? One interesting case is Hong Kong, which uses Cantonese - a dialect - and Traditional instead of Simplified Chinese, although of course being an ex-British colony there’s a lot of baggage on the other side too.7 I don’t know if we can call it resistance, but pidgin languages have been around forever. Singapore has Singlish, which is this mangling of English with various loanwords from various dialects and languages.8 It does have its quirks - I have been called not Singaporean enough for not speaking it ‘properly’ (so really, what the hell am I? A gelatinous cube?) - but somehow these accusations have never bothered me as much as with the other two languages. Maybe because I know it’s made up, and so some part of it will always be mine anyway.
History
Two related and museum-y asides today: firstly, I caught this cool portrait at a recently-closed exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum of Hasekura Tsunenaga, ostensibly the first Japanese ambassador to Europe and the Americas. Apparently he came back to a completely different, insular, anti-Christian Japan and died soon after he returned. It is interesting 2 me how political cultural exchanges used to be - not saying that colonialism no longer exists, but I like that I can now have friends from different countries not as a result of it.
Secondly, I were lucky enough to be invited to ArtScience’s new9 exhibition (curated by ACMI) Goddess. Something extremely cool was seeing an outfit worn by Anna May Wong, to me this sort of legendary figure lost in the heady mists of ‘paved the way for’.10
Technically not any more, but I am legally obliged to mention this.
For any Singaporeans reading this, yes I know Singlish is probably more accurate, but sekali they dun understand den how.
[PDF link warnings] This seems to be a fairly comprehensive overview of the State of Translation, written by the same author who did this chapter on translation and colonialism in a Routledge guide. Here’s another, older article on postcolonial translation. This looks like an interesting, albeit paywalled, chapter on the subject. (🏴☠️;)) The only book I’ve read properly on this subject is The Empire Writes Back, available in full here, and while there’s interesting stuff in there it is also very dated, so be warned. I’ll mention this in a bit up top, but the essays accompanying Yi Sang’s Selected Works were great to read. Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman was an incredible piece of postcolonial literature I’m really grateful my JC* teachers introduced me to. On translation itself, not necessarily postcolonial, I like reading Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on it. Some here, itself rather fittingly translated into English via a French site. Isn’t language wonderful?
*Footnote to the footnote: I found myself worrying about translating this to the American context of high school as the central world view. I may also talk about this in a bit up top, or I may forget about it completely.
Do you ever say something with the very visceral memory of a certain way of it being said, kind of like as a quotable Vine, but with the realisation after you say it that only you understood that reference? Haha couldn’t be me.
It wasn’t physically violent, and they’re reneging on it now, and a lot of the old folks still speak dialect, but the damage has been done; I think I know maybe two people my age who speak anything other than Mandarin, as Chinese goes.
Gurnah also quotes Derek Walcott on the sense of implication in the coloniser’s narrative. Here’s a cool article that expands more on that. There’s also a bit on this in Empire Writes Back, I think, on the debate between finding/going back to a ‘precolonial’ identity and acknowledging the impact of colonialism.
It might also filter though here; the Hong Kong Cantonese wiki page is how I found out that 巴士 (bā shì), which is used in Singapore, is not an actual Chinese phrase but an English loanword (bus). What the hell, man!
Interestingly, this is itself if not colonialism then privilege; Chinese people are terrible at spelling the Malay loanwords properly.
Twon’t be new by the time this goes out, but shhh.
Amanda Lee Koe tried her hand at demystification with Delayed Rays of a Star.
Rachel- Thanks for sharing these. I particularly love your point on: "Anyway, point being we speak English. The question is: whose?" My observation has been that this is likely an amalgamation of whoever controls the presiding medium of distribution for both text and verbal language in different points of history. And since those mediums evolve with technology, your point is quite accurate here.