We/They and Me: Decoding a Bilingual Text

Paper delivered to the Applied Linguistics Research Working Group, Glendon College, Toronto. April 9, 1994

 

by Maria Casas

This paper is a study of the literary function of code-switching in Dionne Brand's "No Language Is Neutral". The text switches between the language of Trinidad English Creole speakers in Toronto and the language of the predominantly white Canadian literary elite. Brand uses "Black" English to say something which is not contained in the words directly or in the immediate situational context, but which is nevertheless stated through her choice of dialect, or code. The paper tries to make explicit the things which are stated implicitly by the poet's choice of code; and to make explicit the meanings that are made by the fact of her switches at particular points in the text.
     Sociolinguistic models of code-switching are applied to the problem of describing how the switches work in the text because language variation in sociolinguistics is seen as indexing broad social categories such as race and gender. Sociolinguistics is also based on concepts such as communicative competence, which is the premise that speakers' knowledge of language includes knowledge of the social functions and characteristics of language (see Hymes 1972). In much recent sociolinguistics, model-building and research has focused on the ways in which language users manipulate this knowledge in order to create and communicate meaning. The problem under investigation in this paper can thus partly be formulated in sociolinguistic terms as: what communicative competence must a reader have in order to understand this text?
        A linguistic model is applied to a literary text on the assumption that dialect variation is rule-governed, and that the communicative competence of readers does not disappear when they are confronted by a literary text. Both writers and readers depend on the same systematic rules of communication, whether they are syntactic rules or social rules, that they use in spontaneous exchanges. Although there is a common conception that the task of poetry is to free the language of "rules", or that poetic language, by definition, bends rules, the most powerful poetry is effective precisely because it conveys things which are otherwise resistant to communication. It is partly the poet's better-than-average communicative competence that produces poetry.
     Implicit in the overall approach is an exploration of the social dimensions of language in literary texts. Contemporary literature often exploits a wide range of types of language as they are defined by their function in social context. These functions are seen in literary and linguistic theory as "registers" (Halliday 1978); a register is the immediate, site-specific context in which the language is normally used. However, Brand's poetic language reaches beyond the immediate situational context to make meaning, indexing larger cultural contexts. These cultural contexts, and their relationship with language, is part of the domain of sociolinguistics.
           First, some practical and theoretical issues must be considered before the text can be analyzed. In beginning a study of code-switching in "No Language Is Neutral", a close look at the text shows that the separability of the two codes is not a given; and so the question of whether it can be said that they are two different codes, and how one tells them apart, must first be answered. A complicating factor is that one of the codes involved is a creole, Trinidad English Creole (hereafter TEC). Because of the English-based nature of TEC and the nature of variation within it, utterances or conversations include elements that are not necessarily creole as well as elements that are undoubtedly creole. And yet all of these elements are, in some over-arching definition of "code", considered TEC. We will turn to pidgin and creole linguistics to see how variation is modeled for TEC speakers, who incorporate dialectal variation as part of their communicative strategies.
            When creoles are in contact with the language that supplied their lexicon, or "lexifier language", a huge amount of variation develops that bridges the linguistic and social space between creole and lexifier language. This is called a creole continuum. Although there is disagreement over whether the continuum contains one grammatical system or two, there is agreement that the grammars at either end of the continuum are quite different. However, there seems to be no way to distinguish a cut-off point between one system and the other. Although the continuum model has been able to explain the seamless nature of variation in creole speech, recently other models of variation have been proposed. What they have in common is an attempt to explain the flexible, communicative aspects of creole variation. It is as if linguists in this area are looking for a model of communicative variation that has the same qualities language itself needs in order to be a successful communicative system -- instability in its ability to change, stability in the fact that it is a system. In the case of a creole system of communicative variation, I suggest that the instability is located in the infinity of points along the continuum, while the stability is supplied by the idealizations of "codes" that people use as reference points in the production and comprehension of speech.
            The transplantation of TEC to the Toronto speech community further distinguishes TEC as a "code" in the perception of both TEC speakers and non-creole English (hereafter NCE) speakers. To TEC speakers it becomes an in-group language. It also becomes one of the codes in the type of speech community in which code-switching is very often studied--urban minority groups (Gumperz 1982:64). It is the binariness of the variation, not the range of forms between two codes, that becomes salient both to the users of code-switching and to researchers on code-switching variation. The way in which the two codes are distinguished is via the perception of a relatively small number of variables that signal the identity of the new "code". Readers/listeners "respond to the presence or absence of certain key, surface grammatical elements," according to Gumperz (1982:85).
            In this paper I will adopt Blom & Gumperz's (1972) distinction between metaphorical and situational switching; and also Myers-Scotton's (1993) Markedness Model of switching in which speakers increase or reduce the social distance between them via code choice. Neither of the two models explains all the instances of code-switching in NLIN by itself, but both together, with a distinction between them as "discourse-related" and "participant-related" covers the range of functions of code-switching in this text. In addition, empirical findings in code-switching studies confirm the observations of creolists, that there is in fact often a continuum of variation between codes rather than a sharp line of division. This type of switching has been called "code-mixing", and it, too, has its own function in bilingual communities and in this text. Finally, the last type of code-switching used in "No Language Is Neutral" is "borrowing". As we find out when we examine the text, borrowing has certain very important functions, often in the realm of literary ambiguities that contribute to literary-metaphorical meanings in the text.
            In order to answer the question of whether the two codes can actually be distinguished in "No Language Is Neutral", TEC-speaking informants were consulted to answer questions about the identity of elements that can be shared between NCE and TEC, as well as about elements that may be either poetic or TEC. Informants with a range of native speaker knowledge were consulted. It was found that linguistically-aware, bidialectal informants were the most valuable because of the limitations of unidialectal informants in distinguishing two codes that share as much as TEC and NCE.
           In what follows, the poem as a whole is first explicated in thematic terms. Although it is an autobiography of a sort, narrative is not as important in the poem as explorations of certain themes, clustered around major topics such as identity, history, place, and language. As a whole, the poem is divided in half. The first six paragraphs describes Trinidadian landscapes, family history, characters in it, and how oppression has spread from the historical institution of slavery to family relationships in the present of the speaker's life. History is seen as strongly influencing the present, and at first is something that must be escaped. Code-switching carries out a wide range of functions, but much switching is participant-related; the concern of the poet in many of the paragraphs is with the attempts of a young Trinidad girl to negotiate a personal identity while trying to access the identity of an ancestress, Liney. Liney is felt to be a bulwark against oppressive cultural and historical forces in Trinidad.
            With her escape to Toronto, the young girl's language is decisively taken away, and TEC becomes a new type of "they" code, that of an alienated self. This is a fascinating literary extension of Gumperz's division of codes into "we" codes and "they" codes. In the last seven paragraphs, then, code-switching into TEC signals alienation rather than Gumperz' we-code connotations of in-group affection and personalization of messages. Code-mixing also occurs as the code of expatriates, who do not give up their membership in either group indexed by the two codes, but who, in this poem, live an uncommitted "between" existence that prolongs the poet's period of alienation. In the last few paragraphs code-switching does not occur at all, and this is partly because the poet is narrating a time when she is beginning to find a new identity, or to be able to integrate all of her old identities and develop a voice/code of her own. One last borrowing, in the penultimate paragraph demonstrates that TEC is not rejected, but integrated seamlessly into a personal, poetic language.

       The movement of the text in and out of different codes is the focus of this analysis, and the demonstration of the poem's initial thesis that "no language is neutral". Every switch into a different code signals a new position in the poet's struggle to establish an identity for herself. Codes symbolize identities, experiences and points of view, which the poet must integrate in order to achieve and articulate self-acceptance. The language of the text demonstrates attempts to create a "neutral" or mixed language, to borrow language, and to negotiate ambiguities of code. Finally it settles into a personal, flexible, integrated language in which a discovery is expressed: that because each person, and their language, their utterances, their style, their code, their identity, is embedded in the imperatives of personal and political history, language is indeed not neutral: it is "faultless".          
           "Language" therefore also refers to the act of speaking itself: no act of speaking, or of doing, is neutral. Since the sum of one's actions is one's experience, and identity is based on personal experience, no person is  "neutral" in the sense of having no identity; and no one can choose neutrality.
           The social identity of the poet is affected by her origins as an inhabitant of Trinidad, a post-colonial state. Post-colonial states must come to terms with their identity, both politically and culturally, for formerly they were members of an empire, and identified themselves with a metropolitan culture whose centre was far away. In colonies, the best, the centre, the source of cultural identity, is always somewhere else. The local identities are always therefore second-rate. With independence comes the struggle to acquire a collective local identity, or to valorize the local identity already in place.
           History is also a major theme in the poem, both "private" or family history and "public" or socio-political history. "Private" history is one's experience, and therefore language and identity. "Public" history has as much to do with slavery as with colonialism. In the Caribbean there is a history of institutionalized slavery to be integrated into the collective identity. In the consciousness of the people, there is awareness that the ancestors of much of the population were enslaved by the ancestors of the remaining population. The social structure and many markers of identity, including language variation, which were shaped by the deep divisions and hierarchy of the slave states, are still in place. If the historical awareness of the collective is not to include only the identification of itself with an imperial culture, it must include identification of itself with a formerly enslaved people, and come to terms with that identity.
            Although the historical identity of all the non-aboriginal inhabitants of the New World includes deracination, the African ancestors came to the New World under duress to enter a life of slavery. Their descendants have lost contact with the cultural and geographical locus (African) of their historical identity. African New World family history ends with the arrival of the first slave ancestor in the New World. The poet's concern with her identity is therefore as much a concern with the political position of her culture in a post-colonial era as with her position as an immigrant in Canada; and her personal identity is deeply affected by the realities of her social position.
           Language is also inextricably bound up with place. The language of experience is entwined with the landscape because the experience is entwined with the landscape. For example, silence is the language of slavery - slaves are silenced, both verbally, and by having their actions controlled and circumscribed. As a way of identifying place with experience, the poet writes "Silence done curse...god and beauty here": the sounds of beauty become the sounds of slavery when it is the slaves' silence that is replaced by the sounds of beauty in nature, in the countryside. This is why "here was beauty and here was nowhere" (Paragraph One); on the other hand, for Toronto, "it don't have nothing call beauty here, but this is a place" (Paragraph Eight).

            In Paragraph Two, the speaker makes ontological statements about the Trinidad landscape, which is interwoven with the history of slavery and oppression. Both landscape and history are part of the language of "here", in Trinidad, because a new language was formed in slavery, a language of silence. In the silence, the sounds of nature, the chains, and the whips, all became part of the experience of slavery. This experience created and structured a "language", according to Paragraph Two.
            The paragraph appears monolithically NCE to NCE speakers, except for the lines "Silence done curse god and beauty here, people does hear things". This is a metaphorical code-switch, since nothing in the text warrants a judgement that the situation has changed. The two clauses, excluding the adjunct of the second clause, are taken as the unit of the code-switch because they are two units of meaning. The code switches back to NCE at "in this heliconia peace", because "heliconia" is exclusively NCE.
            The function of the switch is Gumperz's (1982:80) "personalization", which relates to an increase in the involvement of the speaker with the message. The two clauses are the culmination of increasing personal involvement by the speaker in the passage. At first the protagonists are "they": "they must have been dragged through the  Manzinilla"; then the topic is "this road" in "this road could match that"; then the focus moves to the body in "A backbone bending...these lungs"; until finally, the speaker is part of the experience in "The malicious horizon made us the essential thinkers of technology". The personalization function of the code-switch renders the identification of speaker and slaves complete.
            At the same time, the code-switch is a signal of stronger affect on the part of the speaker. This makes the TEC unit the emotional climax of the passage. In Riesman's discussion of the symbolic functions of Creole in an Antiguan village, he notes that "breaking the norms of non-confrontation is regularly associated with the use of Creole. When one can hold it no longer, one "gets  vex" and one's feelings pour out in a stream of Creole."  (140) This is a culture-specific report of an important function of code-switching into creole. It also applies here, where emotional amplification is in the direction of anger or intensity. While word "barracks" has regimented, military connotations for NCE readers, to TEC readers from Trinidad the word "barracks" has a very specific local reference. This kind of code-switch is effective in conveying something in NCE for which there is only a TEC word available; it is Saville-Troike's "lexical need" function (69).  A barracks is a kind of housing, formerly for slaves, now for workers on estates and for the poor in Port of Spain  (Winer, Letter).

            Between Paragraph Two and Paragraph Three the topic changes from public history to family history. The focus in this paragraph is on characters in family history: Liney, Liney's daughter, who is the speaker's "mama", Liney's two husbands, and an uncle, Ben. The speaker is caught between the past, which is largely a mystery in its details, and which is truncated at the point of arrival of the ancestress Liney on the island; and the present, which is unattractive, neutral, "in the middle of a plane ride."
             This paragraph switches back and forth in tense, between simple past ("even she daughter didn't know"), present ("I always have to go  back"), and uninflected Trinidadian verbs that are ambiguous in tense. The ambiguity of these uninflected verbs is the reason why the poet can conjure Liney up from the past, so to speak, in "Liney / when she live through two man, is so the second one / bring she here... and she / come and sweep sand into my eye."
            However, there is no stable referent for "here" in the above lines. The change to the equally ambiguous "there" in the next clause, which could be cataphoric or anaphoric, contributes to the disorientation in space. Could the referent of "here" and "there" be "in... a plane ride"? Could it be in a story told by Ben (the second man through whom Liney lives in the present)? Could it be the "here" of the first two paragraphs? The last seems the most likely, but the references to a "plane ride now" confuse both the time of the event and the place. The reader must work hard at creating meaning out of these tangled lines, then finally be content to float in a universe of no-time and no-place, where language is neutral and the power of "between" reigns.
            For there is a third place that is neither Trinidad nor Toronto: in between. This is made concrete while the speaker is in an airplane, in between two places, but it is also symbolic of a loss of identity, or a refusal to accept an identity. It is a place of neutrality, silence, or non-language (because no language is neutral). To be between places in this way is to be in "neutral", and therefore, since no language is neutral, to have no language; to be a slave.
            Complex interweavings of TEC and NCE syntax also encode the "in betweeness" or code-neutrality of the speaker. The first line, for example, is reminiscent, but not typical, of TEC fronted constructions. Usually only one phrasal constituent is fronted in Caribbean English creoles. Here, two phrases have been fronted, so that the sentence is an exaggerated version of Atlantic creole constructions in which a be or a clause containing be is inserted in sentence-initial position (Winer 1993:40-41).
            A transformational analysis will demonstrate this and help make the meaning of this sentence clear. The pre-fronted structure is "I hear about up to the time when Liney reach here." The unit "up to the time when Liney reach here" is fronted and be inserted, to produce "Is up to the time when Liney reach here I hear about." Then the subordinate clause "when Liney reach here" is fronted to produce the sentence we have in the text: When Liney reach here / is / up to the time I hear about.
            The second line of the paragraph is also quasi-creole. Although it has TEC question order, i.e., no auxiliary or reversed auxiliary-verb order , it also has the word order of an NCE pseudo-cleft sentence, so that the reader processes the phrase "Why I always have to go back to that old woman" as either TEC or NCE, depending on their native dialect. However, the second half of the pseudo-cleft NCE sentence appears after a delay, and the structure metamorphosizes into the NCE "Why I always have to ... I never understand".
            However, that isn't the end of the story, because the word "never" in TEC is a simple negator, comparable to "no" or "ent" (Winer 1993:47), so that a more fluid reading of the lines "I never understand but deeply as if is something that have no end" is with "never" as TEC rather than NCE. An NCE paraphrase would be, "I don't understand except deeply as if it is something that has no end." This reading is reinforced by other signs of TEC syntax in the latter part of the sentence (such as existential be and third-person "have").
            But it is not satisfactory to go back and change one's judgement of the entire sentence. This is because the copula ("wasn't" in "who wasn't even from here") is not common in a TEC subject + locative complement construction. Furthermore, the term "barracoon" is a literary allusion (from the title of V.S. Naipaul's The Overcrowded Barracoon), but it is not a TEC word. So we are left with a mixed sentence that begins ambiguously with double syntax, switches to NCE for an embedded clause, and ends in TEC.
            Similar interweavings of TEC and NCE syntax continue to symbolize the position of the speaker. The third sentence is not pure creole because it uses a past-tense morpheme in "didn't know"; but elements such as "she daughter", "she life", and the second verb, "leave", are TEC. The fourth sentence, like the second sentence, sets one type of reader up for a certain reading and then reverses the code. NCE readers will insert a pause between the subject and preposition ("I[,] in the middle of a plane ride now..."), and expect a main verb later in the sentence; TEC readers will perceive a subject + zero copula + locative, identifying two separate sentences: "I in the middle of a plane ride" and "around me is a people I will only understand as full of ugliness". NCE readers, finding no main verb to complete the subject "I", will either maintain their NCE reading and assume poetic license (as at least one NCE reader did), or go back and read the sentence as TEC.
            In either case, the code of the entire sentence shades back and forth, in and out of TEC. "Their living", for example, seems a NCE nominalization; the verb "make" is TEC; the phrase "full past" is of the category of quasi-creole. "Full" is not a NCE intensifier, so NCE speakers identify it as TEC, but it is not an all-purpose intensifier in TEC either.  "My own tears" is NCE because of the plural inflection, as is "before hers", because of the possessive inflection.
           The symbolical meanings of the switches in the first part of Paragraph Three are based on a TEC/NCE distinction around the topic of knowledge. The past, and an ancestress, Liney, seem to the speaker to hold out some hope of understanding herself and her position in the world; yet knowledge of the past has very definite limitations. TEC therefore symbolizes an arcane, unreachable knowledge; NCE symbolizes knowledge of public things, a painful, alienating knowledge that is difficult to escape: "around me is a people I will only understand as full of ugliness that make me weep". Code-switches in the first part of this paragraph communicate a distinction between public knowledge/ prescribed history/fact on the one hand and private knowledge/family history/intuitive knowledge on the other. In each of the codes, however, there is a limit to knowledge, and a sense of frustration and confusion.
            The first sentence establishes the importance of Liney together with the tension between knowledge and mystery around her. The speaker "hear[s] about" (presumably in family stories) and learns everything about her family's past, but only up to a certain time. There is a lost history before Liney's arrival on the island that creates a sense of loss. Although the historical identity of all the non-aboriginal inhabitants of the New World includes deracination, African ancestors came to the New World under duress, to enter a life of slavery. The speaker, like all exiles, has lost contact with the cultural and geographical locus of her historical roots and thus a part of her identity.
            The distinction between fact/prescribed history and intuitive knowledge/family history is carried out in the first four sentences. The lines that signal that the speaker is presenting facts of a public nature are in NCE: "who wasn't even from here but from another barracoon"; and "a good century from their living or imagination". These are also, incidentally, both examples of Gumperz's "message qualification": they are an embedded clause and a modifying noun phrase giving more information about the main part of the message of each sentence.
            Between these statements of fact, locating the protagonists and the action away from Liney's reality, are TEC sentences that speak about an intuitive, mysterious knowledge of the past: "I never understand but deeply as if is something that have no end" and "she daughter didn't know but only leave me she life like a brown stone to see". Within the fact/intuition distinction, a further opposition places willed/volitional knowledge and/or future knowledge (in NCE) against intuitive knowledge. An example of this willed/future knowledge is: "a people I will only understand as full of ugliness" (NCE). This knowledge is actually a limiting knowledge that drives the speaker back to Liney for understanding. Liney, however, met in a timeless "between" place of ambiguous verb tenses, has no sympathy, and rejects and intentionally confuses the speaker: "and she come and sweep sand into my eye".
            From the phrase "make me weep", the switches between TEC and NCE create a sharp distinction between Liney's identity and others'. Liney's identity, her presence and will, is reinforced through the use of TEC; her separateness from the others is reinforced through code-switches into NCE when denoting others. Both "into my eye" and the complement phrase "my own tears and before hers" in the fourth sentence are in NCE; and the code also switches to NCE to reinforce the non-Liney identity of Liney's husband at the phrase "on his penultimate hope". The speaker has tried to get closer to Liney in various ways, but Liney remains different and apart. This type of switching imitates participant-related switching in a conversational setting when the participants want to signal as much social distance between themselves as possible. However, Liney is not really present, but only represented in the imagination and desire of the speaker. Even so, the closer the speaker tries to get to Liney, the more Liney's identity becomes distinct, and therefore not amenable to appropriation by the speaker in her struggle to establish an identity for herself.
            From "So is there" to the end of the paragraph, TEC is used not just for Liney's identity (e.g. TEC "Liney daughter"), but also as the code in which the Romance of Liney is told. This includes "So is there I meet she", "water of his eyes swell like the river he remember, and he say...". ("Recollection" is NCE, but it is probably a malapropism, and therefore belongs in the same story-telling code.) The ambiguous element "water of his eyes" is from the creole "eye-water", another instance, like "full past" and "sweep sand into my eye", of NCE allusion to a TEC idiom.
            The rest of the passage is unfocused for any particular code. The exceptions are the borrowing "saga boy", a pun; it means "flashy dresser" in TEC, but its denotation in English is approximately "story teller" (this may in fact be its etymology in TEC--saga boys are womanizers); and "Liney daughter" (mentioned above).

 

 

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