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The beginnings of writing as political propaganda in the Western canon can be traced as far back as Plato’s The republic, where he argues for censorship of artists who do not conform to the state (Utopia) political agenda.
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I suspect we all agree that art assists us in comprehending reality by training our skills of perception. The perennial question, in literature at least, is whether art should have a social function. If not, is it worth the name? In fact, is there such a thing as art without a social function? After answering all that, we still need to understand when art overlaps from having a mere social function into political activism. For that matter, what is political activism in relation to art, and to literature in particular?
The beginnings of writing as political propaganda in the Western canon can be traced as far back as Plato’s The republic, where he argues for censorship of artists who do not conform to the state (Utopia) political agenda. He accuses them of being corrupters of youth. Since what is Utopian to one may be a Hobbesian Leviathan to another, who is to say what is ideal or corrupt? Plato, who took for granted that his views were infallible, doesn’t tell us. He loathed the democratic political system because it made demands of sufficient enlightenment on the demos that were just unachievable in greater masses.
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From Fanon to Robert Sobukwe and Biko, these are prototypes of what Richard Wright called his “split position” and “double vision”, which a Western-educated black man born in the Anglo-American-oppressive zeitgeist has to deal with.
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Very few writers were as able to transform personal drama into political action as Frantz Fanon. In essence, Fanon was a philosopher of language, a historical critic, a visionary literary artist and a lover of the collective power of the people, the Hellenic demos. He emphasised the deterministic relation between linguistic hegemony and imperial cognition, something Steve Biko inherited from him. He studied the power of language’s hegemony to propagate political agendas, with a particular emphasis on Western imperialism. He concluded that to overcome the linguistic hegemony of the colonialist cannot just be a matter of political triumph, since language is a reservoir of culture and identity. We also need to go more deeply into changing perceptions of the superiority of one language over another, which were deposited into our cognition by colonialism. That is how you really decolonise and escape the imperial prison.
Most educated blacks are conflicted between their cultural identity and Western intellectual education. They might react differently, but there’s always a common sense of intellectual schizophrenia in their inherited experiences from colonial and postcolonial situations. (I regard apartheid as the maturing and flowering of the colonial seed.) From Fanon to Robert Sobukwe and Biko, these are prototypes of what Richard Wright called his “split position” and “double vision”, which a Western-educated black man born in the Anglo-American-oppressive zeitgeist has to deal with. WEB du Bois called it his strength of “double consciousness”, from which he derived intellectual strength, allowing him to “see both worlds from another and third point of view”. Most educated black Africans of our age, the current author included, share Du Bois’s sentiment. The strength we derive from the multi-linguistic view gives us a trapdoor escape from a limiting sense of regarding ourselves as permanent victims of Western imperialism. The ideal of my writing project is to express my Xhosa identity, even if through a dominant occidental, intellectual language. This does not mean I think Xhosa is subservient to English, only that English has a global reach. I am just being realistic about the nature of the current global structure and my inherited academic background. Perhaps, in the future, my progeny will be in a slightly different but similar position of having to deal with Mandarin rather than English hegemony. That child will probably be communicating in Mandarin for a global reach – until Xhosa establishes its own dominance that extends beyond the reach of a collection of non-homogeneous people who are known as Xhosas because they speak that language as a mother tongue.
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I believe that one of the duties of a writer – of all artists, for that matter – is to apprehend reality in a visionary, unique way that depicts the value of how culture(s) in evolution influences social change.
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Wittgenstein, in his book Tractatus, is of the opinion that in a world limited by language, what constitutes the world is language itself. This means that language goes beyond the mere function of expressing our thoughts, and has a conventional character that, in its purest form, is spiritual; that it has a mystical value which is linked to individual and collective identity. Its fundamental function is to retrieve, transmute, organise and reproduce knowledge. Hence it is impossible to separate it from the historical identity of the people who created and reproduce it as means of connecting to each other and the world at large.
I believe that one of the duties of a writer – of all artists, for that matter – is to apprehend reality in a visionary, unique way that depicts the value of how culture(s) in evolution influences social change. That’s where it derives its social function from. From here, it is not a long toll to regard artists, writers in particular, as psyche antennae towards the fulfilment of the envisioned and imagined nature of humanity. And because of this, a certain type of double, even triple, consciousness is required as the natural realm writers (artists) exist through. With both feet on the ground, if they’re to imagine a better world to come, they must be tall enough for their heads to eavesdrop on the mischief of the gods up on the clouds. So, I suspect a certain double or triple consciousness is required of all writers, regardless of race or class.
Because language is a tool of mysticism for social evolution, as stated above, I do not see how those who use it can escape the inevitability of being political. The mystical is the invisible force that connects us collectively and provides us with the common ground for our humanity. Toni Morrison, in one of her brilliant interviews, took this further: “All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word politics, made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was: ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.” All authentic artists, writers in particular, agitate to change the status quo. That is what makes them political. Otherwise, what is the point of art, in a world like ours that has gone wrong, mimicking reality?
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But in our case, English as a lingua franca, because of our recent inglorious past, needs to be cleansed from serving the imperial needs of the elite and brought to a local level as a weapon of empowering the people.
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My conclusion is that the language the writer uses most probably depends on the demands of their circumstances and purpose. In our country, for instance, with at least nine officially recognised languages, it makes sense to have a lingua franca we can understand ourselves through. But in our case, English as a lingua franca, because of our recent inglorious past, needs to be cleansed from serving the imperial needs of the elite and brought to a local level as a weapon of empowering the people. Hence decolonisation is an imperative and urgent task. Many anglophone countries and regions, like West Africa and the Caribbean, have shown us realised possibilities of localising English. Even within the UK itself, English is localised according to the history of the regions, like Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc.
We should be unsparing in our indictment of imperialism and all the violence of exploitation and patterns of dependency it imported for our cultural dislocation. The weapons we use to locate our authentic identities, because we’re people of “double consciousness”, may vary, because they might even include the linguistic tools of our former masters, but what we do and how we do it will be determined by our own needs, not foreign ones. In the same breath, we must also be wary of the destructive allure of nativism when it drags us back to the sectarian schizophrenia that limits our human progress in the name of the anti-imperial ticket. Our duty is to bring into humanity’s table the missing puzzle of our own authentic identities that were nearly decimated by the colonial project. It may be that in the long run we’ll need a new language of activism to achieve this. For now, we begin with a deep sense of radical honesty with ourselves to regard with wise discernment what we require to move from our respective positions to where we need to be in order fully to become our true selves.
See also:
Eeufeesviering van Departement Afrikaans en Nederlands, US: Kanselier Edwin Cameron se toespraak
Khawufane ucinge SA schools seminar: Mphuthumi Ntabeni responds