Tongue and root
That is the title of the essay of the Chinese Malaysian writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim appended to her collection of prize-winning poems entitled Monsoon History. Born in Malacca of Chinese immigrants, she learned English in school, took her PhD in the United States, and decided to stay there when Bahasa Malaysia became the regnant language in her homeland.
Thus, she became a hyphenated writer: a peranakan Chinese-Malaysian-American, feminist writer of postcolonial texts, growing up speaking in Chinese but later writing in English. She descends directly from the line started by Maxine Hong Kingston, whose The Woman Warrior, published in 1975, kicked open the door of Asian-American writing in English to the world. She also belongs to the illustrious company of non-native speakers of English who — by dint of hard work, if not the brilliance of their genius — produced some of the most enduring works in world literature. Among these were Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness), Isak Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), and Jamaica Kincaid (Lucy).
What about the kind of English they spoke, if not pinned down in their books? Generally, it was a melodious and lyrical kind of English. Because transplanted from the soil of a non-English or American imagination, the prose is luxuriant, colorful, and even strange. The grammar is perfect, but the rhythms glide and roll and fly, as if to capture the tropical weather, or the baroque tradition, from which the writers sprang.
In the case of Geon lin-Lim, she says that “English is my calling. I make my living teaching it to native speakers, I clean up the grammar of English professors, I dream in its rhythms, and I lose myself for whole hours and days in its words, its syntaxes, its motions and its muscled ideas. Reading and writing it is the closest experience I have ever had to feeling infinity in my presence.”
Her poems show this creative tension between past and present, words and worlds. One of them is called “Modern Secrets.” It sounds like a confessional poem.
“Last night I dreamt in Chinese. / Eating Yankee shredded wheat/ I said it in English/ To a friend who answered/ In monosyllables: / All of which I understood. / The dream shrank to its fiction. / I had understood its end/ Many years ago. The sallow child/ Ate rice from its rice bowl/ And hides still in the cupboard/ With the china and tea leaves.”
Thus, even if the persona already lives in the West and breathes the English language, the native language flows like blood inside her. And ancient societies consult the configuration of tea leaves in the bottom of their cups to divine what the future might be. What might the future hold for our persona, who exemplifies the 21st-century person inhabiting one and many worlds, all at the same time?
A sharper protest poem is found in “I Defy You,” where the poet erects a brick of reality as counterpoint to the world of the Western imagination, as exemplified by the poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens, a vice-president of an insurance company, wrote cerebral poems that looked like detective stories the readers had to unravel. Ranged against Stevens’ “exquisite truth” is the truth of the developing world, out there, like grainy black-and-white photographs: the young Cambodian whose father drowned in the ocean while fleeing the Khmer Rouge; a woman raped by soldiers; the poor men and women of Africa skittering on the TV screen. In the end, our poet calls Stevens a mere “American fiction.
And yet, she continues to write in English, publishing a well-received book of nonfiction, a collection of short stories, as well as a first novel. Shirley Geok-lin Lim says that the English-language user “is grafting himself not only to a tree of language but to a larger history of human development. English is no longer that Anglo-Saxon-based speech of a few million people living on a small northern island off the Atlantic Ocean . . . . it is, factually, a global language, the first of its kind; serving more than the needs of empire, unlike Latin; more than the prestige of the originating nation. Right now, it serves the needs of every human being whose understanding and imagination would overlap tribal and national boundaries. The student in Beijing who practices her English with tapes imported from Ohio; the Nigerian who studies for his O levels in his village school; the Indian journalist who writes his copy in English while he interviews in Marathi; to these and many more, the English language is the means by which they communicate as a species. Independent nations today no longer see English as a tool of western imperialism, but as a medium for trans-national speech communications.”
Thus, for non-Anglo American writers now using English look at it as the “language of their blood,” as Dr. Gemino H. Abad would put it. Or as National Artist Jose Garcia Villa (Doveglion) said: “Have come, am here.” That grand announcement is as real now as it was, when Garcia Villa first pronounced it magisterially more than half a century ago.
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