QWF Writes

Tag: politics

  • Writing Between Languages—by Veena Gokhale

    Writing Between Languages—by Veena Gokhale

    What do you do when a lot of the reality you portray in your fiction does not take place in English? Easy answer: you sprinkle your prose with words from other languages. As it turns out, this is not without its problems.

    Growing up in India, I learned my first language, Marathi, at home. I was sent to an English school right from kindergarten, where I had also learned Hindi, the language of the state I lived in. In the Indian Constitution, Hindi and English are designated languages of the Central Government. Presently, India has twenty-one other “official” languages. Generally speaking, every time you cross a state boundary you are in another “language territory.”

    English, though not my mother tongue, is nevertheless my “principal” language. I was in my twenties when I came across an essay by a Hong Kong-born writer of Chinese origin who described English as his principal language. I cannot thank him enough for giving me a way of describing the place of English in my life!

    When I became a journalist, I worked for an English-language magazine in India. But I had always loved mixing languages, using non-English words when I spoke in English. As a writer, I exuberantly introduced some Hindi words into my English articles. This was around the time that Salman Rushdie “decolonized the English language,” as he put it, through the innovative use of multiple languages that included sprinkling Hindi and Urdu words throughout the English text of Midnight’s Children, his groundbreaking Booker Prize winner. He did not translate the words.

    “But I had always loved mixing languages, using non-English words when I spoke in English.”

    I, on the other hand, was immediately challenged by my editor when I employed Hindi words. She came from southern India and knew little Hindi. Reluctantly, she allowed me to retain a few words, with the English translation in brackets.

    Fast forward to Canada in 2012. Guernica Editions had accepted my manuscript entitled Bombay Wali and other stories. Characteristically, the book contained some Hindi, Urdu, and Marathi words. I suggested putting an asterisk next to the words and explaining them in footnotes. My editor, Michael Mirolla, rightly protested. Some pages then would have had five asterisks or more! A solution was found by explaining a word here and there in the main text itself and adding a glossary explaining other words and phrases.

    In my forthcoming novel, Land for Fatimah, the protagonist takes a posting in Kamorga, an imaginary east-African country. This time, I introduced a made-up language for Kamorga, and named it Morga. Despite knowing five other languages to some degree, Anjali, the Indo-Canadian protagonist, is struggling with Morga.

    I used words in Morga in much of the dialogue. I italicised the “foreign” words and phrases and put the translations right next to them. For example: Kabari ani? How are you? Hoori. Good. Perhaps this is awkward and breaks the not-to-be meddled-with flow of the text. But to hell with it!

    Why this insistence on using words from other languages? As I explain in a note on language in Land for Fatimah, “I strongly believe in using non-English words and phrases in my fiction to bring home to the reader, directly and tangibly, the fact that s/he is reading about a non-Anglo culture.”

    “Why this insistence on using words from other languages?”

    There is a much-quoted speech by Indian freedom fighter, Bal Gangadhar Tilak: “Swaraj (self rule) is my birthright and I shall have it.” This original quote has gone around translated as “Freedom is my birthright and I shall have it.”

    Why couldn’t they have let the word “swaraj” be? Some might argue that keeping “swaraj” is awkward and unnecessary, and that freedom resonates more than self-rule. But such misquotation can be seen as a form of linguistic colonialism.

    Inspired by Tilak, I have my own writerly warrior cry: multiple languages are my blessed heritage and reality, and I shall flaunt them! Back when I lived in India, I loved switching between English and Hindi in mid-sentence. Now that I live in Montreal, I use French words when speaking English. Old habits die hard!

    I end Land for Fatimah’s note on language with these words: “Long live the diverse languages of the world! They bring us unfathomable riches.”

    I would love feedback on how other writers deal with the use of non-English words in their text and how readers respond when they come across them. Thanks in advance. Merci. Shukriya.

    VG wt flowersVeena Gokhale, an immigrant shape-shifter, started her career as a journalist in Bombay. This tough, tantalizing city inspired Bombay Wali and other stories, published by Guernica Editions in 2013. Veena first came to Canada on a fellowship, then came back again to do a master’s degree. After emigrating to Canada, she worked for non-profits. Land for Fatimah (to be published in 2018) is partly inspired by the two years she spent working in Tanzania. Veena has published fiction and poetry in anthologies and literary magazines and received writing and reading grants. veenago.com

    Photo credit: Shawn Leishman (header banner)

  • Writing About Ukraine by Alexandra Hawryluk

    Kyiv_at_night

    Seeing the images on my television screen, I froze in shock and anguish. People running for cover behind piles of rubber tires, a man being struck down by sniper fire. This was Maidan – Independence Square in the centre of Kiev, a place where I had talked to the book vendors, met friends, watched a busker do a routine with his two little monkeys. Those were the paving stones my feet had crossed and re-crossed and now those stones were stained with blood. In that one moment, as I watched the scene unfold from my living room couch, I understood something of how the people who had entrusted their stories to me may have felt as eyewitnesses to the destruction of their homeland under Soviet rule.

    As the Maidan revolution in Ukraine turned into an international story, I developed an almost obsessive need to know what was happening there hour by hour. It took a good dose of fatigue and a beautifully reasoned e-mail from a friend in Kiev to make me realize that it would be more useful to finish writing about my 1998 trip to Ukraine than to trade second-hand opinions about events in which I played no part. Weeks had gone by without my adding a single new page to my book.

    To take my mind back into the 1990s, the heady time of Ukraine’s newly won independence, I listened again to the interviews I’d done, re-read passages in my favourite reference books and immersed myself in Ukrainian music and contemporary literature. I remembered the impassioned, witty conversations in Lviv’s coffee houses with writers, publishers, students and community leaders. We’d talked about the function of opposition in a democracy, the ethics of responsible journalism, the role of education and religion in building a new civil society. Students, once they found out I was Canadian, wanted to know how we had achieved a peaceful pluralistic society. If I mentioned multiculturalism and inter-faith dialogue they inevitably wanted to know which group was winning. A discussion about Western wages always led to an explanation of income tax, medical insurance, mortgages, the cost of university education and personal accountability – concepts entirely foreign to the Soviet world view and social order. Political pundits at the table said that it would be more than twenty years before the prevailing mindset could change.

    Sometimes, I lost the thread of a story because people alternated freely between place names from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Polish Commonwealth, the Russian Empire and the USSR. (In the 18th century, Ukraine was partitioned between three political entities before being annexed by the Soviet Union in the 20th century.)

    Eventually the Ukrainians told me their side of history: World War II and the successive advance and retreat of Nazi and Soviet armies across their country, Nazi and Soviet labour camps, an atmosphere of relentless suspicion and fear. The elderly would talk about those who perished in Stalin’s deliberately planned famine of 1932-33. Many regretted that Communist war criminals had never been brought to justice. Writers complained that the only change undertaken by the newly elected deputies was to replace the hammer and sickle on their lapel pins with a trident.

    As these tales of loss, death, sorrow and anxiety poured out, my writer’s objectivity often abandoned me, and I silently grieved with the storyteller. All I understood then was that after seventy years of state-enforced silence, there was a great need to speak and to be heard. Now it is the young Ukrainians born and educated after the fall of the USSR who are speaking out. And the world is listening.

    Alexandra HawrylukAlexandra Hawryluk, an editor and translator, was a correspondent for Radio Canada International. At present, she’s writing a memoir about her time in Ukraine during the 1990s.

    Photo of Kiev, top: Anton Molodtsov/Tony Wan Kenobi [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons