Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Whenever there was some public event, ten or so of us showed up. Afterward, we walked back slowly under the broad Iowa sky, struggling to converse in English, not an easy task for many. The weather remained clear day after day. If you didn’t notice that the leaves on the trees were turning yellow, it was as if time had stopped. Debating in any language is not my forte, so I did not bring this up while walking with the others, but I grew more and more haunted by the idea that we might be a group of people headed for a downfall. Every time we went on an excursion, we boarded the two minibuses, always more or less divided along the lines of whites and Asians. But in the sense that we might be headed for a downfall, we were all the same.

There was an exception. In addition to our two Anglophone writers — Gregory from England and Paddy from Ireland — Barolong, the poet from Botswana, wrote not in his mother tongue but in English instead. He was a manly man, big both in height and in weight, and I found his physical presence too intimidating to chat with him casually. He probably had no idea that a small Asian woman like me was interested in his being there. His participation seemed to me to symbolize one of the paths that more and more writers like him could take in the future.

Checking the map I had bought, I found that Botswana is just north of South Africa. It became independent from Britain and formed a republic in 1966. Barolong, born in 1957, must have been in elementary school at the time. His family could not have been poor, for he told me he had lived in England with his family for a while and attended secondary school in London. Yet — contrary to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that writing requires “a room of one’s own”—according to an anecdote he shared with us in his talk, his first published poem was written kneeling at the side of his bed, the only space that was all his own; so perhaps his family was not rich enough to let him continue his education in England.

For most people in Botswana, including Barolong, their mother tongue is something called Tswana. Under the British protectorate rule, English was the sole official language. It was only after Botswana’s independence that Tswana became a legitimate medium of written communication and gained the status of official language, alongside English. Now some Botswanan writers write in English and others in Tswana, and between the two there is tension. When I asked Barolong why he chose to write in English, he answered that the secondary school years he had spent in England made him more adept at it — at least, that was his explanation. And, as if to atone for the sin of ethnolinguistic betrayal, he was working on English translations of Tswana proverbs. I found it fascinating that Africans with a command of Western languages are now taking over the task of those Western missionaries and anthropologists who once traveled to far-off Africa to collect regional folktales.

Already numerous writers from former British colonies write in Standard English, and some, like Barolong, are from sub-Saharan African countries that historically had no written language of their own. I used to wonder what it would feel like to write in a language not one’s own. I also used to wonder if such writing could be considered part of “national” literature. Not anymore. Now these African writers seemed to me to be heralding a new era by embracing the English language and opening a new world with their writing. This may be a perverse thing to say, but they even seemed like a blessed group — not only because they could adopt the English language with such ease but also because they, at least, would not have to watch their literature and language irrevocably fall.

One French expression began coming back to me: une littérature majeure (a major literature). Someone used this expression in reference to Japanese literature when I was in Paris many years ago. I felt that these words, uttered casually at the time, were trying to tell me something important, but I could not pinpoint what that something was. One, two, then three years passed, the expression slowly fading from my memory, only to resurface on rare occasions. And then this invitation to participate in the IWP came to me — providentially, in retrospect.

As I lived under the blue Iowa sky while the leaves turned yellow, surrounded by writers all writing in their own language, and as I began to think that they and I might alike be on the road to a downfall, I began gradually to understand what it was that the expression une littérature majeure was trying to convey, assuredly far beyond the intent of the one who had uttered it. My thoughts turned to Japan’s modernity. And I saw for the first time how extraordinary it was that my country had such an extensive body of modern literature, dating back to the late nineteenth century. I even allowed myself to call the phenomenon a “miracle.” Yet this did not make me feel elated. On the contrary, the more I marveled at the good fortune of Japanese literature in the past, the more despondent I grew about where it was headed in the future.

The month I spent in Iowa felt long. The tension of living an unfamiliar life while enduring poor health made the time pass slowly. Still, the laws of nature ruled as they always do, the sun kept rising and setting, and finally my day of departure arrived. I was planning before returning to Japan to visit New York to see some old friends. Since my heart never took root in America the whole time I lived there, I had few friends worthy of the name. The following scene took place with one friend I did have, a Japanese woman roughly my age, known for her brilliant mind. We went to the same graduate school in the United States, and she was now a professor at a prestigious American university. I had heard the rumor that while working on her M.A. degree in Japan she had knocked other students out by reading Balzac’s entire oeuvre in the original. What knocked me out was her nonchalant remark, “I was good in math, too.” We nevertheless had one thing in common: our love of the classics of modern Japanese literature.

We met one evening at a Chinese restaurant uptown. Neither of us is much of a drinker, but we held our beer mugs like grown-up women should and picked up the dumplings with the long plastic chopsticks that Chinese restaurants in America invariably provide. In our tipsiness, we fumed as we lamented the world and bemoaned Japan.

Her face now red from the bit of beer she had had, my friend said saucily, “You know, when I was little, I used to think that novelists were incredibly smart people with really serious ideas — the most respected people in the whole world. And look at the writers now in Japan. They’ve got no brains. I just don’t feel like reading the crap they write.”

I have no idea what she thought of me. She has a vivacious mind with plenty of room for mischief, so she may have been coolly including me in the category of brainless writers of crap. But rather than feeling hurt, I nodded my own reddened face and eagerly acquiesced: “True, so true!” All the thoughts I had had during my month in Iowa came rushing back and circled in my inebriated mind.

Perhaps both she and I belong to a generation so thoroughly imbued with the classics of modern Japanese literature that we don’t know how to appreciate newer writing. Or perhaps most of the newer writing is in fact of lesser value. Long ago, while I was still living in the United States, whenever I thought of what it would be like to finally go back to Japan and start writing novels in Japanese, an image presented itself before my eyes of a deep forest where stately trees stood tall. I would write in their shadow, quietly and modestly, bits of trivial things befitting a woman. Though this was a sorry image for someone who was already getting a taste of gender equality, I had somehow assumed that my country would still be inhabited by men like the giants Fukuzawa Yukichi, Futabatei Shimei, Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ōgai, Kōda Rohan, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō—men of frightening intelligence, knowledge, and wit. It had never occurred to me that once I was back in my home country I might not be able to find any deep forest where stately trees stood tall. Yet that was what happened. I spotted a tree here and a tree there, but mostly the scenery was flat. Unsuited even for a poetic description like “bleak wasteland,” it was more like a playground where everything was small and clamorous — just juvenile. I was left to wonder whether my compatriots had forgotten that those men I so admired had even existed.