My Quarrel with the English Language
Part I
It was at my French school in the colony where I was first introduced to the English Language. I was five years old. At first, I felt liberated from the shackles of the French Language and its rules—grammar in particular, but then, after my first trip to England I resented the language terribly as much as I resented its people. I found them cold and calculating. They smiled and smiled and smiled but underneath the wonderful smile they wore with skill on their milky faces lurked a hypocrisy they somehow managed to disguise well. What I did not like at all was the way they set out to ask me questions, all sorts of questions as if I were interrogated. The questions turned around my family, my country, my race, my life, and even my intimacy. I felt as if they were setting a trap for me to fall in. And so I grew up literally hating the language and possibly its people whom I thought preached one thing and did another. They would lecture me about honesty and fair play and justice and generosity and kindness and even their prowess as colonizers the proof of which I saw when my host family took me to visit the so-called British Museum—a kind of Ali Baba cave full of artifacts they plundered and took away by force when Britannia ruled the world. I then realized that people who deliberately set out to deprive other people of the things they hold dear to them—let us remember how by the end of the 19th century the English people despoiled 25% of the planet—cannot be all that good no matter how hard they tried to convince me.
Ever since that visit to the British Museum, I decided to play the English Game which consisted of temperance i.e. think like an English person, behave like an English person, write like an English person, speak like an English person, knowing fully well that with time one would become a mimic man.
And when my mimicry became adept, I began cavorting with the English Language. I would frisk and frolic with her late into the night. The exercise has been like an intense game of chess during which you must sacrifice the queen and the two knights every time you play in order to win, if at all. There were times when I was rough with her: taming her, cajoling her, caressing her, kissing her, loving her, fucking her, impregnating her, forcing her to abort and at times to give birth to Zombies and Fridays and Calibans. What I also found out along the way of learning and/or writing is that she in turn has forced herself on me as if she were a hard-hearted rapist intending to not only fuck me real hard but also leave a trace, a wound, a blessure that never heals. And no matter how feelingly I have performed, I have ended aping my Masters—the English. With time, I have realized I can never get out of the web that the English Language has spun for me. The more I have tried to free myself from her embrace, the more I have felt entangled. Like a black widow, she has devoured me with sang froid. Or has she?