Wholly Female, Partly Foreign

Abstract

The preceding chapter explored the meeting of cultures in the perspective of sense of belonging and in terms of language, showing how language is not only a medium of communication, but also, as a cultural fabrication inclined to inertia but capable of innovation, a forceful symbol of appropriation and change. Language is the barrier first met by the one attempting to straddle cultures, but at the same time the inevitable channel for any experience that wants communication. Language both mediates and forms experience, and to the extent that new kinds of experience settle as part of the common culture, language is invariably accommo-dating. But, of course, only up to a point. If the very structure of a given language, or even more radically, of language as cognitive structure, is claimed to be insufficient to give expression to experience different from the one that fostered the language, the barrier is indeed unsurmountable. In his poem ‘Turner’, David Dabydeen made the case for such a lack of common ground, as did J.M. Coetzee in his Robinson Crusoe make-over Foe (1986), but in most cases a more pragmatic attitude prevails, with the more moderate aim of creating space in English for a variety of experiences which, each in their way, require linguistic accommodation.

standing without words but

without need of them, being at home.

(Jane Griffiths, ‘Emigrants’, in Astley, 1999:238)