• 1 One can also call up Québec director Robert Lepage’s groundbreaking 1989 bilingual production of Ro (...)

1The Africa Trilogy was one of the most successful as well as original theatrical events at Toronto’s annual arts festival, Luminato, in June 2010. The small Toronto-based company, Volcano Theatre, was commissioned to assemble a trilogy of short plays to explore a complex, protean subject: Africa and its relations with the West. Playwrights and directors from three continents contributed to the trilogy. Shine Your Eye, written by Kenyan Binyanvanga and directed by Volcano’s Ross Manson, is set in contemporary axiologically-fraught Nigeria. Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God, written by the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig and directed by Liesl Tommy, takes as its setting an unsettling homecoming party for a couple who has spent six years in Africa as part of a medical aid team. The clever writing and directing, deploying multi-media techniques such as freeze-frame action, video, overlapping, and reprise, clearly borrow from Edward Albee’s landmark play of 1962, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Albee’s play, like its alternative theatre venue, Off-Broadway, significantly having gone mainstream) and takes it global in both content and form. In 2011 Luminato presented the world premiere of an ambitious new adaptation of an ancient literary classic, created by Tim Supple, who in 2003 had adapted and directed Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and then in 2008 staged the unorthodox South Asian version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a multilingual, multiethnic Indian cast which illuminated the play by underscoring the different ways in which Shakespeare “speaks” to, throws into relief, and often even merges with their own worldviews.1 One Thousand and One Nights was a two-part, equally multilingual epic with a cast of twenty-five from the Arabic world.

• 2 Another creation by Lepage deserves mentioning here, namely his work-in-progress Tectonic Plates, a (...)
• 3 I adhere to the useful typographical distinction many critics make and thus use the term “post-colo (...)

2Such cultural events are redolent with global dialogism. No culture is full unto itself, no culture is plainly plenitudinous, Homi Bhabha declared to Jonathan Rutherford over a decade ago, arguing that each culture’s symbol-forming activity and interpellation in the process of representation and meaning-making is in translational relations with other cultures. Also over a decade or a decade and a half ago, other critics and cultural theorists like Elleke Boehmer, Derek Walcott, Michael Dash, and Vinay Dharwadker were already acknowledging that the dynamic mixing of languages, forms, and styles functioning as a catalysis of creation was a global phenomenon, and that publishers were consequently boosting their transnational distribution to reach global audiences (Dharwadker 105-8). The critics linked the poetics of creolization involving linguistic and cultural imitation and reconfiguration to postcolonial concerns and praxis, but also to postmodernism’s suspicion of “sacred origins and pure beginnings” and its preoccupation with displacement and incompleteness (Dash 52). While such transnational interplay in the arts2 is evident in the post-colonial era,3 it is indeed doubtful that its origins can be entirely imputed to the paradigms of 20^th-century decolonization, migration, or even the global marketing of the post-colonial exotic which Graham Huggan has more recently investigated. I propose to reach beyond and engage with the transcultural writing and reading practices on the march well before our current post-colonial period. I wish to explore how the environment of social heteroglossia found in imperial spaces, an environment in which different language consciousnesses with their discrete world views interrelate, catalyzes a process of penetration and stratification which explodes the ossified deposits of closed socio-linguistic systems in which literary language is often rooted. Grounding my analysis in Bakhtinian theories of linguistic heteroglossia, I want to move beyond notions of submission, namely the monovalent submission of one language and its accompanying culture and belief system to a newly dominant language and its cultural baggage, and to explore the complex way in which the alien other-languagedness of English has rather been seized, appropriated, or even expropriated by indigenous writers to fissure the sharply delineated boundaries of their own literary language.

• 4 One can notably call up the Moghul Emperor whose reign strikingly coincided with that of Elizabeth (...)

4The emergence of cultural and ideological interstices is particularly discernible in spaces such as Northern India where Turks, Mongols, and Persians had always intermingled and conjoined, in a process reflecting the collapse and rise of multiple, overlapping empires.4 Indian writers are thus well positioned to decentre the postcolonial commonplace investigating British imperial and post-imperial space and to substitute for the centre/edges paradigm a vision of flux. Their more distanced, syncretic vantage point contends with the cyclic nature of history and the building and crumbling of empires which readers also find in Western reflections on dying world orders, from Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, William Faulkner’s Light in August, and Derek Walcott’s “Ruins of a Great House.” Indian fiction in English can thus be considered exemplary of global literature which can be collocated within cross-cultural as well as culture-specific frameworks, and which undermines monologic axiologies by multiplying the sources from which it freely and shape-shiftingly borrows. The Indian writers I focus on chose or have chosen to write in English when conditions were often inimical to such an adherence, for as Amit Chaudhuri observes in the introduction to his anthology of modern Indian fiction, “What is perceived to be, or even constructed as, standard English is seen to be linked to an alien sensibility and to the verbal traditions of colonialism” and thus less compatible with the hybrid, multilingual nature of Indian consciousness. Chaudhuri judiciously points out, however, that hybridity “need not be worn like national costume” (xxvi).

• 5 Geetha Ganapathy-Doré points out the discrepancy between such a stance and that of certain Caribbea (...)

5Why should Anita Desai declare in the early 1980s that she was “very glad to be writing in a language as rich, as flexible, supple, adaptable, varied and vital as English”? (“The Indian Writer’s Problems” 1) Over a century earlier, further back than the British Raj, why should the renowned Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873) declare as early as 1854 in his essay “The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu,” “I love the language of the Anglo-Saxon. Yes – love the language – the glorious language of the Anglo-Saxon!” (Chaudhuri 6, original stress). An explanation is subsequently offered indirectly, through a combination of personification and extended simile. What Dutt values in the English language is that “It laughs at the limit which the tyrant Grammar would set to it,” and that “It flows on like a glorious, a broad river, and in its royal mood, it does not despise the tribute waters which a thousand streams bring to it” (7). The geographical analogy configures a reversal of the stereotype of the English language as a subjugating force, recalling rather that it has undergone and been nourished by successive waves of occupation and conquest, from the Saxons and Danes to the Normans, which have enriched it with a complex verbal-ideological history and heteroglossic dynamics. Dutt exults, “There is no one to say to it – thus far shalt thou go, and no farther! Give me, I say, the beautiful language of the Anglo-Saxon” (7). Dutt’s celebration paves the way for Salman Rushdie’s statement a century later that “to conquer English is to complete the process of making ourselves free” (Imaginary Homelands 17) linguistically as well as politically.5 What especially appealed to Dutt, and then Rushdie subsequently, is apparently the incremental language-bending the pliable system offers, absorbing and passing on portmanteau neologisms from Lewis Carroll’s chortle to Rushdie’s chutnification. In other words, what appeals is the absence of regimentation encountered in single, closed language systems which privilege unity and purity.

• 6 An analogy closer to home for today’s Western audiences and allowing them a clearer picture of the (...)
• 7 The divorce between literary language and the language in people’s mouths has been extreme even in (...)

6That Dutt should have regarded his own mother tongue, Bengali, as a confining system from which English provided an opening is corroborated if we look at how another major figure of the Bengal Renaissance, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), steered and tacked between poetry and prose, Bengali and English, and classical and modern registers, all of which amounted to choosing between a stilted book language that had become ossified over the centuries (sadhubhasha) and the colloquial living language of contemporary everyday speech (chalitbhasha).6 As Amit Chaudhuri points out, “the hegemonies Bengali writers were concerned with subverting […] had less to do with Empire, the colonizer, or the English language” than with “traditions and hierarchies embedded in the Bengali language itself” (106). The older Tagore rebelled against the normative linguistic and generic stratifications which were coterminous, for traditional verse was by definition (and has always been) more closely shackled by the sclerotic deposits of convention than the more recent, imported, hybrid genre of prose. He initially introduced spoken language in dialogue all the while keeping the classic language for the narration, a compromise which anticipated the mixed diction practices of Caribbean writers such as V. S. Naipaul, tending to deploy standard English – deemed elegant – for the narratorial voice and to keep the local idiolects – deemed vulgar – for the direct speech of the characters, while in other writings such as Sam Selvon’s the vernacular began to invade the narration itself (“The Cricket Match,” 1957).7

• 8 Interestingly, Beckett (another Nobel Prize recipient) was an avowed admirer of Kafka.
• 9 Murphy and Watt, for instance, were published in English in 1938 and 1953, rewritten and published (...)
• 10 Beckett then pushed his linguistic experiments in Shklovski’s ostrenie to an extreme by writing his (...)
• 11 With respect to standard English, this notably involves inversion and dislocation, but especially t (...)
• 12 Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.
• 13 Walcott declared in an interview that he embraced such models because what he had “was the same thi (...)

7The Missing Links in these stylistic wars over a spoken-tongue prose linked to notions of identity and nationhood and stretching from the Indian subcontinent and Europe to the West Indies may be exemplified by the figures of Tagore in the East and his admirers Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats in the West. Modernism was espousing common language. This involved rehabilitating the ordinary as appropriate subject matter and vocabulary for even poetry (for instance T. S. Eliot’s chimney pots, vacant lots, newspapers, and window-blinds in “Preludes” or his factory and by-pass, figures of mass production and mass transport, in “East Coker”). But also the manner in which Modernists like Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos were imposing an idiomatic North American English in place of the high style still required by standard literary decorum. Another identifiable connection is Ireland’s sense of place and the turn of the century Celtic Twilight or Irish Literary Revival, which created subsequent shock waves in the analogously insular and colonised spaces of the Caribbean. Yeats is a key piece in the global jigsaw puzzle reconciling contemporary reality, writerly trans-lation/transmutation, and readerly recognition. The author of Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and founder of the Irish National Theatre Company admired Tagore’s early writing, notably the Gitanjali prose poems which Tagore had auto-translated, or rather re-composed, or even re-incarnated. As Samuel Beckett8 would go on to do with his frictional auto-translations and fraught tradaptations,9 Tagore confessed to wishing to “rekindle” his poems “through the medium of a foreign language” (Letter 65, 117). Yeats lightly edited the poems and had them published, garnering for the Bengali writer the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), ironically a decade before Yeats himself was awarded the same prize. What arguably pleased the Irish poet in Tagore’s English recasting of Gitanjali was the other-languagedness flavour which Beckett would go on to pursue,10 and its successful effect of stretching and deforming the literary language. This was precisely what Yeats and his fellow Irish playwright John Millington Synge were undertaking to do by deploying the rhythms, syntax, and musical intonations of Irish speech11 complete with unfamiliar, unglossed local words in, for example, Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), whose first performance caused an uproar at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Synge, too, is an important piece in our interlocking global jigsaw. Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott12 has freely proclaimed Synge’s Riders to the Sea to be his model, an intertext as well as a hypotext, for his first folkplay, The Sea at Dauphin (1957).13 Adhering to the linguistic, dialectological torsions of his fellow Modernists, Walcott’s writing of (re)locatedness involves not only the use of Antillean idiom, but also the transposition and transliteration provided by a multilingual, bi- or multi-cultural society. Michael Malouf’s study of how Walcott’s dissimilation of Riders to the Sea resides in the way it transmutes an Irish nationalist aesthetics to a Caribbean federationist aesthetics has wider reverberations. Its inter-peripheral comparisons engage a reflection on cross-cultural encounters on the margins of dominant modernisms not so much in terms of identity as in terms of recognition and collocation.

• 14 Frame was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989.
• 15 The Dialogical Imagination 262. Unless otherwise specified, further allusions to Bakhtin refer to t (...)
• 16 Besides the stylization of the forms of oral everyday narration, the others are: direct authorial n (...)
• 17 While a literary award for her newly published Lagoon story collection did raise interest in her wr (...)
• 18 See my essay “Frame-Breaking: ‘neither separate nor complete nor important’,” in the special issue (...)

8I have been demonstrating the malleable English language’s ability to bridge cultural divides. The plasticity which allows it to take on the rhythms, say, of South India’s Kannada vernacular in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1939), or, in Narayan’s terms, to “take on the tint of any country” (Walsh 7, my stress), has been addressed by Feroza Jussawalla. Jussawala has identified nativization strategies used by Rao, Anand, and Narayan (but which resonate with my discussion of Synge and Walcott and are transferable to, say, a Nigerian writer such as Chinua Achebe [Things Fall Apart, 1958] or a Canadian writer of Italian descent such as Nino Ricci [Lives of the Saints, 1990, set partly in Italy]). Such strategies range from interpolating indigenous terms or their literal translations (calquing) to “syntax whose disconcerting simplicity [a metropolitan English] readership finds alien” (Jussawalla 79). In fact, even a native Anglophone, also exemplary of peripheral modernisms, namely New Zealand novelist, poet, and short story writer Janet Frame,14 initially outraged critics, fellow writers, and general readers by her style consisting of “simple statements, endlessly joined by a chant of ‘ands’,” and of dialogue “all run together into long paragraphs, and plenty of New Zealand slang and colloquialisms” (anonymous 1951 Christchurch Press review of The Lagoon: Stories, qtd. in King 108). Interestingly, the very qualities which critics disparaged in Frame’s writing were those which Bakhtin has identified as the key dialogical qualities of novelizing. The Russian formalist has judiciously defined the novel as “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.”15 Frame’s style is exemplary of the stratification of language into the disparate social dialects, professional jargons, generational, tendentious, and authoritative languages of interest groups, each with its own formulae, which Bakhtin argues had never been combined before the unfurling of the hybrid genre of the novel. The everyday-conversational style which the late Modernist from the antipodean periphery (like her early Modernist predecessors) adopted in her first short fiction collection moreover corresponds to one of the five basic types of compositional-stylistic unities into which Bakhtin breaks down the novelistic whole,16 namely skaz, the Russian term for textualized orality, or “the stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration” (262). The features that make Frame’s writing sound like spontaneous speech are the repetition, colloquialisms, stereotyped sentences, and parataxis – the extremely simplified syntax consisting of placing one clause after another with no connectors except for a string of “ands.” I have discussed how Samuel Beckett unsettled the stock phrases of socio-ideological language shot through with the intentions and accents of countless other speakers by approaching one language through another (writing in a learned language rather than the mother tongue, then transliterating back into a deliberately fraught English). Frame went about the war on trite language from the opposite pole of the axis. She took the words in people’s mouths and injected their everyday-conversational language into the still sharply defined borders of written language, and on the whole the New Zealand literary establishment did not like it.17 It went against the grain of the coherent, unified segments of narrative at the heart of the realist aesthetic which in the early 1950s was still dominant in societies inhabiting the edges, and which was entrenched in the notions of an abstract-linguistic unity of (high) literary language. “The Day of the Sheep” is exemplary of Frame’s mercurial shifts in voice and point of view, flitting from dialogue to inner focalization inhabited by the speech of others.18 Asked by his wife Nance if his bringing home handkerchiefs forgotten in the pockets of coats left at his Dye Works might amount to stealing, Tom’s voice answers, then with nary a transition, mutates into Nance’s interior monologue, indissolubly mingled with what Bakhtin terms “common language” (301):

• 19 A cinematic analogy comes to mind: Le Fantôme de la liberté [The Phantom of Liberty or The Specter (...)

11The concluding part of this paper will address how the writing subject, disembodied yet rooted in personal authorial experience, interrelates with the extratextual reality he/she shares with a protean addressee, shifting and merging between local and global audiences. The mixed-race, Indo-Irish novelist and essayist, Aubrey Menen (1912-1989), bridges and mediates between London (where he was born) and Trivandrum, in Kerala (where he died), underscoring cultural convergences by stressing cultural divides. In his satirical, autobiographical investigation of identity construction, Dead Man in the Silver Market (1954), Menen defamiliarizes by inverting traditional Orientalist discourse on social issues ranging from the petty to the grand, from plumbing to racism. The boy of twelve is summoned for the first time by his paternal grandmother to Malabar, whose traditional matrilinear basis of social organization promises to upset the patriarchal assumptions which the English-educated child has absorbed and brought with him. The grandmother is a mighty dowager from the Nayar warrior-ruler-caste who demonstrates her female power by receiving him bare-breasted, in other words formally baring the attributes which only a flirt would coquettishly cover. As the eye and voice of eastern doxa, she reflects and deflects a series of stereotypes corresponding to entrenched Western prejudices, by objecting to the dirty English, their bestial manners, and their barbaric customs. She scornfully dismisses the “backwardness of the white man’s bathroom” in which “you sit in dirty water like a buffalo” (Menem 352). She is not surprised that the English should eat ham and beef, for she admits in an eloquent analogy that after all the outcastes who clean the latrines also eat anything. What she expresses particular disgust at is the European shamelessness regarding the intimate act of eating: rather than secluding themselves, the English “watch each other thrust food into their mouths, masticate, and swallow” (350).19 She expresses surprise that in England “a woman could have more than one husband” (350) and accuses the English of neglecting their children by not marrying them safely off when young to a carefully chosen partner so as to discourage subsequent lewdness and promiscuity.

• 20 See how, using Anita Desai’s novel In Custody as a test case, I investigate transnational writing r (...)
• 21 Toronto Luminato performance, June 2010.

16The spectrum of works I have discussed deploy both horizontal and vertical distributional relations of discourse involving, on the one hand, combination, and on the other, substitution and layering. The displacements and palimpsestic superimpositions can be identified on sundry levels – semantic, stylistic, narrative, and intermedial.20 The textual spaces which they occupy illustrate the slippages between different worlds of lived and storied experience and the manner in which societal perceptions, practices, and predilections crisscross, carve, scrape and scour, deform, diffract, and interlock, in fruitful friction which mutually shapes and illuminates. It is useful to recall that the very concept subtending earth-moving tectonic processes involves construction, deriving from the Greek tekton or builder, and related to tekhnē, skill or industry, without which the perceptible human world would be merely what Virginia Woolf in the neoplatonic Modernist vein playfully dismissed as “a vast upheaval of matter” (10). I am not going to align myself with the oversimplified position of the naïve Hungarian-Canadian character, Janet, in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s story “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit,” who is convinced that “people all over the world are the same, just with different languages, art, and music” (Baldwin 103). The Toronto production of Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God did transpose the complacent frustrations of an idle Western married couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf onto a global stage. But when the white female character who has worked in fraught situations as a nurse in Africa finally cries out to the couple who has never left the West, “You have nooooo idea,”21 the audience is brought to realize that there are things which can never be adequately represented, and that storied experience may not be apprehended by those who have not lived such trauma. The principal cultural divide has perhaps best been identified and synthesized by A. K. Ramanujan as the clash between context-sensitive and context-free societies, analogous to the two kinds of grammatical rules. In context-sensitive systems, behaviour and values are inherently relational, dependent on place, time, and social role, even on the nature of the listener. Context-free societies with egalitarian, democratic ideals rather paradoxically “espouse both the universal and the unique, insist that any member is equal to and like any other in the group. Whatever his context – birth, class, gender, age, place, rank, etc. – a man is a man for all that” (Ramanujan 434, original stress). Globalization may well be tied to what Ramanujan identified as modernization in India, notably as “a movement from the context-sensitive to the context-free in all realms: an erosion of contexts” (436). It may be useful to return spiral-fashion to the exemplar of cultural subduction I alluded to in my introduction, namely the iconic work One Thousand and One Nights revived and reinvented for the stage by renowned Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, dramatized and directed by the theatre and opera director from Sussex, Tim Supple, commissioned by the Toronto-based festival Luminato, produced by London-based Dash Arts, and created and performed (in English, Arabic, and French with surtitles) by actors, musicians, and designers from across the Arabic-speaking world. Do the processes of its production and subsequent participation in the Edinburgh International Festival and then its world tour celebrate the powerful influence of Eastern cultural and artistic traditions on the cultural landscapes of the West or contribute to an erosion of contexts? Or do they admirably illustrate the very possibility of reconciling construction and erosion?