White Tongue, Brown Skin: The Colonized Woman and Language

White Tongue, Brown Skin

White Tongue, Brown Skin

The Colonized Woman and Language

Maya Boutaghou

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

The University of Virginia Press is situated on the traditional lands of the Monacan Nation, and the Commonwealth of Virginia was and is home to many other Indigenous people. We pay our respect to all of them, past and present. We also honor the enslaved African and African American people who built the University of Virginia, and we recognize their descendants. We commit to fostering voices from these communities through our publications and to deepening our collective understanding of their histories and contributions.

University of Virginia Press

© 2024 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2024

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Boutaghou, Maya, author.

Title: White tongue, brown skin : the colonized woman and language / Maya Boutaghou.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024010104 (print) | LCCN 2024010105 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813952208 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813952215 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813952222 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dutt, Toru, 1856–1877—Criticism and interpretation. | Ziyādah, Mayy—Criticism and interpretation. | Djebar, Assia, 1936–2015—Criticism and interpretation. | Devi, Ananda—Criticism and interpretation. | Language and languages in literature. | Multilingualism and literature. | Postcolonialism in literature. | Women in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Asian Studies | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PR9499.2.D88 Z58 2024 (print) | LCC PR9499.2.D88 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9334—dc23/eng/20240511

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024010104

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024010105

The publication of this volume has been supported by New Literary History.

Cover art: MaryliaDesign/istock.com

Cover design: Cecilia Sorochin

For Didier Coste and Françoise Lionnet

For their loyal love of literature

To those who see with one eye, speak with one tongue and see things as either black or white, either Eastern or Western.

—Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Translations

Introduction

1. Who Is the Subject in Translation?

2. Being Cosmopolitan in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta: Toru Dutt (1856–1877)

3. Being Cosmopolitan in Nineteenth-Century Cairo: Mayy Ziyadah (1886–1941)

4. The Maghrebi Bard: Assia Djebar (1935–2015)

5. The Mauritian Bard: Ananda Devi (1957–)

6. Being a Subject in Translation

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

In academia, writing a book is a life journey with many encounters. With this book too I experienced many, and each conversation guided the process. I would like to start by thanking warmly colleagues and friends who were part of the first steps in this journey: my Andrew Mellon Fellows at UCLA who read the early babbling of the project during our monthly seminar, Sze-Wei Ang, Joseph Bauerkemper, Greg Cohen, Marcela Fuentes, Jeannine Murray-Román, Sonali Pahwa, Sarah Valentine, Travis Workman, and our admired mentors, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih. Parts of the project received comments from several colleagues, some of whom are dear friends: Steven Blevins, Caroline Faria, Olivia Harrison, Vrushali Patil, Jean Muteba Rahier, Jahan Ramazani, Janell Rothenberg, Adelaide Russo, Laurie Shrage, and Laetitia Zecchini. A book cannot come into being without important bibliographical work, and I spent time in libraries in different parts of the world. I would like to thank the librarians whose work made this possible in the following libraries: the Librairie Sainte Geneviève (which holds the unique copy of Fleurs de rêve by Mayy Ziyadah); the Bibliothèque nationale de France (which holds one of the very few available copies in French of Le Journal de Mlle d’Arvers); the Jawaharlal Nehru University library in New Delhi; the Jadavpur University library in Calcutta; the University of California, Los Angeles, library; and the University of Virginia library. I am also grateful for the support of the University of Virginia’s Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and of New Literary History.

Note on Translations

All translations from French and Arabic are mine unless indicated otherwise.

Words and texts in Arabic are transliterated using the simplest method.

White Tongue, Brown Skin

Introduction

Contexts: Place and Time

White Tongue, Brown Skin considers colonialism a disease that introduced symptomatic multilingualism and cultural pluralism in former colonized regions: India, Egypt, Algeria, and Mauritius. White Tongue, Brown Skin explores multilingual writings in two periods (the end of the nineteenth century and the second half of twentieth century) and four different colonial contexts while addressing a long-term history of connections between India and Mauritius, as well as between Egypt and Algeria. A synchronic perspective justifies the link between India and Egypt, on the one hand—they both witnessed similar Renaissance movements—and, on the other hand, Algeria and Mauritius as both young, plurilingual, decolonized nations arising in the second half of the twentieth century after gaining their independence in 1962 and 1968, respectively.

The first period discussed in this book will be end-of-the-nineteenth-century India and Egypt. The question here is not about tracing back the history of multilingual writing, but about the constitution of a multilingual, colonial, and postcolonial self in nineteenth-century India and Egypt and twentieth-century Algeria and Mauritius, mainly perceived through the paradigmatic literary production of the women writers of these regions. Historically, Egypt and India constituted the models of cultural development for Algeria and Mauritius. At the turn of the century, India and Egypt shared some structural and historical similarities, which permits this comparison between them. My approach therefore sheds light on what is still not commonly recognized in postcolonial studies: a sense of cultural continuity despite colonial intervention.

Moreover, there is a horizontal connection between Egypt and Algeria in terms of cultural and political models of national identity construction. Indeed, both were parts of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, both were under French influence during the nineteenth century, and both exemplify the Pan-Arab/Pan-Islamist affirmation in the early phase of the twentieth century during the rise of nationalism. Finally, India and Mauritius are highly connected in terms of migratory flows; in Mauritius, the most important diasporic population came from India. Mauritius was also colonized by the French and the British.

The writers whose texts I present and analyze are Toru Dutt (1856–1877) from India, Mayy Ziyadah (1886–1941) from Egypt,¹ Assia Djebar (1935–2015) from Algeria, and Ananda Devi (1957–) from Mauritius.² For each author, a rich intellectual and historical context will be provided, showing their agency in the cultural life of their time. Regarding Toru Dutt, one cannot ignore the conversation about the modernization of Hinduism (around the Brahmo Samaj movement), nor the impact of nationalist writers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894); Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941); Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), a leading Bengali poet during the Bengali Renaissance; or Dutt’s uncle, Romesh Chandra Dutt (1848–1909), who is considered the father of modern Indian history. Between 1913 and 1936, during the Nahda (Arab renaissance), Mayy Ziyadah organized a very successful salon littéraire in her house in Cairo. Famous intellectuals were part of the weekly gathering, including Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963); the Egyptian politician, judge, and poet ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Fahmi (1870–1951); the Syrian poet Sulayman al-Bustani (1856–1925); Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932); and Khalil Mutran (1872–1949). Assia Djebar, the author and filmmaker, celebrated in the 1950s as the new Françoise Sagan, was by the same token an anticolonial fighter and a member of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale), whose friendship with Frantz and Josie Fanon, Alice Cherki, and others in her midst are important to understanding her impact as both an engaged intellectual and one of the most internationally acclaimed Francophone Algerian writers. Finally, Ananda Devi, one of the most visible Mauritian authors, is the uncontested leader of contemporary writing in the Indian Ocean, a region that counts among its luminaries such creatives as Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Shenaz Patel, Nathacha Appanah, Sydley Richard Assonne, Yussuf Kadel, Khal Torabully, and Barlen Pyamootoo. Even though the focus of White Tongue, Brown Skin is on these specific figures, the project extends beyond their work to include a large, modern, postcolonial, cultural, and intellectual history in cosmopolitan contexts. My goal is to elaborate a broader understanding of the local histories specific to the emergence of a multilingual subject. I shed light on colonized subjectivity by focusing on reading, speaking, translating, and hearing the colonial language, while also bringing into conversation and comparison diverse histories of emerging subjectivity.³ Postcolonialism from below, or from localized histories, starts with an approach grounded (linguistically) in textual analysis in historical contexts—such is the perspective I have developed in my previous books: Occidentalismes, romans historiques postcoloniaux et identités nationales au dix-neuvième siècle (Occidentalisms, postcolonial historical novels, and national identity in the nineteenth century, 2016) and Ernest Renan: "Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?" (Ernest Renan, 2020). Though the object of this book is philosophical, it is also deeply rooted in history and semiotics to address the specificity of each region and to escape the risk of overlooking cultural differences.

Born to Translate

White Tongue, Brown Skin is the result of a long, inherited struggle against the mainstream discussion around the guilt involved in speaking and writing in the colonial language—here mainly French and English—in formerly colonized regions. This book originates in the following question: What does it mean to be the heir, as a woman writer, of a colonial and postcolonial culture where the use of a European language is perceived as a colonial legacy?

It took some time to appreciate how the argument of this book was more than my own remix of mainstream discourses on the linguistic violence of colonialism established, among others, by Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1938–), and Louis-Jean Calvet (1940–). With this book, I intend to shed light on writers who endorsed the double nature of the colonial experience taking place from the second half of the nineteenth century onward: the birth of a female subjectivity in the alluring yet ambiguous moment where the colonized learns the colonizer’s language: the birth of a me that leads to an I.⁴ The ontological naissance of the writers analyzed in this book will offer a structure that is applicable to myriad users of colonial languages, including those beyond the gender divide.

First, I must describe and define this ontological subject—sujet, as in the French, whose meaning is closer to agent, rather than the English, which is closer to topic or subject matter. In fact, the dynamic of this subject is to be prone to perpetual translation. The Babelic existence of this subject finds its origin in a collectively traumatic experience, grounded in the global history of colonialism. The condition of the colonized subject is rooted in a violently imposed multilingualism embedded in the mind of the individual as the burden of a permanent self-translation between two or more languages with unequal political and emotional power. Multilingual by definition, the colonized subject who endures a plural perception of the self, in the psychological sense, must also endure the restless movement of self-translation to maintain a form of sanity, a form of continuous communication between their disparate selves. Even after the twentieth-century decolonization movements and subsequent declarations of independence, this ongoing burden of a permanent self-translation has yet to end. The process of a hidden self-translation is addressed in depth here, confirming the actual translation, linguistic, and poetic turn in postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and Francophone studies.⁵ In the timeline of intellectual history, the first wave of postcolonial theory was based in an English-speaking context. White Tongue, Brown Skin aims to acknowledge the work of theoreticians who initiated the difficult task of addressing the enunciator behind translingual texts. Lise Gauvin’s immense contribution to the field of translation is one such, and her concept of surconscience linguistique (linguistic overconsciousness) is central to the understanding of the subject in translation.⁶ While it is crucial to pay tribute to that first generation of cultural theorists who had the courage to move between two or more languages of empires (French and English), I am both using their legacy and trying to push further that which they have cultivated in the first decades of postcolonial studies. My recognition goes to the work of Françoise Lionnet, who has positioned herself at the intersection between literary criticism, philosophy, and gender studies, putting in dialogue voices twice minoritized: in the realm of literature in general, and in postcolonial Anglophone studies in particular.

The newness of this book is to view colonial experience as an essentially multicultural and multilingual reality that transformed, in depth, any language reflected in literary and cultural forms: its goal is to induce multilingual processes of reading and interpreting in postcolonial era.⁷ The previous statement echoes Mary Louise Pratt, who has urged scholars to think linguistically: "It is impossible to think seriously about intercultural dialogues without coming to grips with the linguistic dimension of today’s planetary social, ecological, political and imaginary realignments."⁸ The ambitious project of a new generation of scholars is to return to a literature that functions as a tool for decolonizing discourses and their episteme, in general. Simona Bertacco, in her edited volume Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures (2014), announced this need to dig deeper in textual analysis using a linguistic approach:⁹

This volume addresses the issue of language and translation in postcolonial literatures. [. . .] (i) It insists on a return to a closer attention to the formal—and linguistic in primis—features of the postcolonial literary text in order to address its multilingual concerns; (ii) it aims at showcasing a critical praxis able to relate those aesthetic features to real-world issues, and it does so by focusing on language, the most pervasive, yet invisible, element in our lives. [. . .] Working on textuality implies working on how the text is composed, the way in which words are selected and put together, the lines arranged, and this is rarely found in current studies of postcolonial literatures. (21–25)

The linguistic dimension that Bertacco evokes is essential in reading those writers who write under situations of Western colonial domination. Such is the primary topic of this book: the birth of a subject whose experience of the world is rooted in a dynamic, multilingual, urban, colonial situation. This special kind of multilingualism reshaped regions known for their ancient pluralism (mainly in terms of languages, ethnicities, and religions).¹⁰ It is also the birth of a subject whose self emerges in the experience of translation. In a way, I am distinguishing against, and developing on, Georges Herbert Mead’s theory of intersubjectivity in colonial contexts,¹¹ using the process of translation as a form of relation to the other represented by the dominant language.¹² This permanent self-translation has deep implications for interpretation and language: it calls for new ways of reading.

From a New Semiosis to a New Semiotics

Another related question guiding this project is: How do multilingual aesthetic experiences define the emergence of this ambiguous subjectivity in those colonial contexts where encounters between different languages are inextricably connected to coercions of colonial domination? The forced imposition of a colonial language implies a hidden new semiosis, one that is rooted in a process of translation that transforms the act of interpreting any artifact, be it literary, musical, visual, or spatial. The immediate consequence is the emergence of a new system of signification, or what I call a new semiotics, a postcolonial semiotics, specific to the context of linguistic colonization. In this book, I am unfolding this new semiotics at work.

In Bilingualism and Literature, Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) defines the notion of bi-langue (translated as bi-language).¹³ First, it describes the linguistic reality of Francophone Maghrebi writers, meaning that the context of Francophone literature is informed by a multiplicity of languages. Khatibi elaborates a fundamental statement that readers from other cultural backgrounds, especially monolingual ones, should consider carefully when speaking, thinking, or writing about Francophone writers—indeed, about any writer who evolved in a system of linguistic domination: "As long as the theory of translation, of bi-language and pluri-language has not advanced, certain Maghrebian texts will remain impregnable through a formal and functional approach. The ‘mother’ tongue is at work in the foreign language. From one to the other takes place a constant translation and a conversation en abyme, extremely difficult to bring to light" (Plural Maghreb 117).¹⁴

In White Tongue, Brown Skin, I provide a methodology to achieve the difficult task of making the presence of the native hidden language visible by focusing on a variety of Francophone writers from Bengal, Egypt, North Africa, and Mauritius. Although it originated in the Maghreb, bi-language is applicable to all Francophone regions, where it becomes a systematic response to colonialism whose major consequences are a cultural and linguistic destruction of the native episteme. The agency of the writers as subjects of colonialism is rooted in their experience as listeners and readers of multiple languages, in their decision to write in a hidden multilingualism, and in reconciling their plural, ambiguous lives. Their multilingualism is hidden because of the original guilt of an illicit tie to the colonial language and the vital need to perform a whitened tongue.

White Tongue, Brown Skin interprets some lesser-known texts with multilingual linguistic, stylistic, poetic, and symbolic tools. In a way, I am constructing an analytical approach, making possible the encounter between two or more semiotic systems, keeping in mind that the text is the privileged site that performs the encounter. In doing so, I am questioning the ambiguous relation to the colonial language and how it transforms the link to the other languages in the region and to the body, to quote Khatibi again.¹⁵ I am also developing the idea of an unexplored enunciator of the text, a being that is in relation to a changing world and in a hidden translation to make this new world familiar. It is time to see the dilemma of colonial domination from the perspective of the colonized, who is not simply a submissive receptacle of cultural and linguistic domination, but is also an active agent of this domination. It is not just the French language that transformed the colonized, but the colonized who transformed the French language, making it their own.

The relation between all the internalized—not always expressed—languages of the colonized woman writers in this book forms the core of the study, as the relation that is at the starting point of the transformative colonial presence in the colonized landscape. This argument makes my approach slightly different from Steven Kellman’s in The Translingual Imagination (2000), among other such approaches to translingualism, in that it tries to provide the poetic and linguistic tools to read multilingual authors whose other language, due to colonial domination, is not a choice. White Tongue, Brown Skin positions itself at the heart of these linguistic and semiotic processes mainly because of my knowledge of both forms of Arabic (دارجة/darija and فصحى/fusha), English, and as a result of my exposure to Bengali during fieldwork in India and to Creole through my proximity to an important Mauritian community in France and the United States. My claim works toward truly reading and seeing these postcolonial writers, with all their languages and cultural and literary heritage, without reducing their existence to the languages that we, in our mainstream assumptions, tend to see and read in them naturally. Their being is both translingual and multilingual, and I call on the reader to adapt their modalities of readings instead of reducing these writers to the familiar. Writers are still colonized, as they are read in a monolingual lens dominated by Western languages; thus, developing a multilingual way of reading and interpreting is now an urgent task to improve our globalized modalities of communicating. Scholars from the previous generation did not have a wide range of linguistic tools to develop multilingual modalities of reading and interpreting—the new generation does. It is up to us to use them for good.

As a follow-up to my initial question, we can ask: How is multilingualism in colonial and postindependence situations negotiated through literary writing as a site of repair?¹⁶ In this argument, I acknowledge the colonial experience as a relation whose site of repair is deeply textual because colonialism is, first and foremost, a system internalized through those discourses communicated in texts, in schools.¹⁷ Consequently, postcolonial literary texts are epiphenomena, revealing the losses of the native tongue and decolonial strategies of repair.¹⁸ Embedded in this project—and driving its development—is the assumption of a strong link between being a reader, being a writer, and being a translator. This connection is obvious when it comes to canonic European writers, but it is rarely a way to analyze writers in postcolonial contexts. Critics often forget that postcolonial writers were readers of the canon of classic, colonial literature, that they were embedded in a profoundly colonial and white culture, though they knew that it was a culture of domination and injustice. Is that a reason for these postcolonial women writers to reject the part of their being that was influenced by the canon of Western literature and its languages? While they are readers of multiple languages and products of a dynamic, creolized imaginary, they were pushed to write for monolingual readers, resulting in a hidden multilingual text. In postcolonial studies and other disciplines, their political agency has been studied, but not their existence as always-translators, in between languages, and, moreover, in-between worlds. Their fundamentally ambiguous status has been condemned but not analyzed enough in the flesh of the text. I aim to capture this multilingual poetics at work.

Of course, critics like Gauvin might object to my argument about postcolonial intersubjectivity and language, saying that any writer is writing in a foreign language, that any writing is a translation in a way, and, to quote Sartre, on parle dans sa propre langue, on écrit dans une langue étrangère (Les Mots 140; we speak in our own language, we write in a foreign language), which is fair enough. But, for the first generation of colonized writers, this language is twice foreign: foreign as it is for any writer, and foreign as it is imposed to erase the sounds of the mother tongue. Questioning the complexity of the signifier (primarily as an acoustic image) is at the heart of this new semiosis.

A Chutnified Theory of the Subject

Long before the development of network theory and theories of fluid identities, the writers studied here illustrate models of self-proclaimed plastic subjectivities (Malabou, L’Avenir de Hegel). They peel back the different layers of their lived experience of multicultural, urban colonial histories, which are reinforced by their unique journeys as readers of texts. This subject claims and performs a relation to the world through texts, reading it as such. Well before current conceptualizations of diversity, colonization imposed a de facto multiculturalism, which these writers performed, producing texts that celebrate plurality, in stark opposition to the hegemonic self, prescribed in successive waves by colonialism, anticolonialism, and nationalism. I address multilingualism as the urgent task of new theories of the subject that emphasize the linguistic and acoustic experience as fundamental to subject formation.¹⁹ This expands on Khatibi’s work by addressing the particularly complex legacy of colonization, the aesthetic of the bi-language in a global context. My goal is to establish a conceptual frame that articulates the postcolonial subject as a multilingual reader whose transformative process is performed within the text; this subject is the one who builds bridges to repair and to survive the destruction of colonialism. Languages in texts are bridges between scattered parts of the self. As discussed by Nita Kumar in Women as Subject (1994), referring to Foucault and Derrida, the notion of subject can be contested; at the same time, the poetics of it in specific regions of the world are different. White Tongue, Brown Skin approaches subject formation as a response to the historical context of colonial trauma, which no general discourse about the subject can express.

Sometimes, theory is a way to oversimplify or transcend what is rooted in place and time, which is enough to be specific. The argument herein situates the subject’s ontological birth in this historical trauma. Therefore, regarding the concept of the subject, I address the hegemony of the Western tradition over a tradition that has not yet been spoken into existence in academia. Important theories about the subject often overlap, although not emerging from the same object of study, as the concept itself seems outdated. But, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, in order to announce the death of the subject one must first have gained the right to speak as one (Nomadic Subjects 141). My aim in this book is to go back to the writings by women who are emerging as subjects in their own colonized/postindependent culture. Putting their histories of coming to subjectivity into dialogue allows me to elaborate on broader reflections about the multilingual subject and its visions of the world. The history I want to locate and to look at is the specific constitution of the subject as a being in relation with languages, a being of plural encounters expressed in the experience and praxis of multiple languages, each as a manifestation of a repressed reality. I am, in a sense, stubbornly convinced that there is an important insight behind the emergence of a multilingual subject whose existence as a writer is the product of a specifically colonial traumatic experience. It is time to observe the existence of these subjectivities without the political guilt of postcolonial discourse and to see anew the complex fabric of their languages as masked translations. The contours of this subject emanate from a poetic experience full of sounds and words without referentiality, those very words carried by conflicting sounds embedded in their multilingual soundscapes. The I is the result of antagonist tensions and attempts at repair. The affirmation of a self through writing is not a new concept in