This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Tender Tongues,” edited by Natália Affonso. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here.
I. A Proposal
A person’s linguistic literary palette is a function of schooling, environment and, ultimately, choice. It is not predicated only on the presumed ethnic origin or nationality of the writer. Choosing to write primarily in a language other than one’s native tongue can be liberatory and also a means by which to practice (in)visibility, to varied degrees of intelligibility, mediated by aspects beyond linguistic proficiency.
The capacity to utilize English, the West’s “lingua franca,” as a carapace or as camouflage does not diminish the problem of existing in a world in which words have currency not for what they convey but for who does the conveying. Such a choice does not diminish the force of Eurocentricism, racism, and other marginalizations. As such, I ask myself several questions: How can the use of an acquired tongue assist the postcolonial writer in making herself legible in a world in which her invisibility is prescribed? In other words, when the racialized postcolonial writer is made to occupy a space of subalternity through her very being, what choice(s) does she have? My belief is that an acquired tongue—as opposed to a first or native language which may belong to the colonial past—can be put into the service of defying imposed invisibility. I am aware that its usage cannot supplant the desire of others to render the legible unintelligible. Still, it can offer an invitation into a space in which language may serve other gods, other meanings, and create new ways of seeing.
II. Borrowed/Father Tongue
In her foreword to River in an Ocean, a collection of essays on the practice of decolonization and translation, French Reunion thinker Françoise Vergès offers that, in response to the impossibility of completely escaping the cultural prejudices of the global North within the process of translation, including racial stereotyping that may either exist in the original text, or embedded in the target language, many questions arise. She writes:
Can I say I have a “native tongue?” What is my relation to translation? Do I translate? I cannot say that I have a “native” tongue as I circulate among Creole, French, and English, and each language has its own status, role, and place in my life. My first words were certainly in French—but I never had the passion for the language that French education requires. French, for me, is deeply tied to the creation of the colonial republic, with its expression of regional languages and its contempt for languages in the colonies. . . . French, for us, was the language of (post)colonial rule and power in Reunion Island, and I was a good student in French classes and an avid reader of its literature. Creole was the language forged in resistance, and our language of intimacy, but it was forbidden at school and in the media, and presented as a mere dialect. (xii)
Reflecting on the number of times I have been asked why I write in English when my first language is French and the language of most Haitians is Kreyòl, I found the questions raised here by Vergès to be pertinent to the process by which I seek to answer this question. Though, unlike Vergès, I do think of myself as having a “first language”: French. I also perceive myself shuttling in and between it and Kreyòl, my heritage language, with which I was surrounded since birth, and the language I think of as my “everyday” tongue or language of professionalization, English. I translate myself at every moment between these three languages, even as others have been added or subtracted—Spanish, Italian, at one time Japanese, and, lately, Brazilian Portuguese—navigating between thought, emotion, and articulation, for the write right words to express that which I think, feel, and desire to convey.
Not everything is expressed, but, when it is, it will most likely be written in English, after having traversed other tongues, other landscapes, and, through this process, been transformed from the place of conjuring to that of writing. Like Vergès, I, too, was a good student of French, an avid reader as a child, but, unlike her, I had the good fortune of being presented Kreyòl as not only a language of resistance, but as one that could transmit culture, art, one’s thoughts. Though I was not formally taught the language, it was all around me, and I was taught to read Kreyòl in its first iterations from first texts written in the 1950s to those emerging in the early 1970s. I, then, went on to read in Kreyòl on my own as a scholar in the 1990s to the present day, even as the orthography of the language has changed over these decades. For me, Kreyòl was not forbidden, but it was, in some respect, presented as a lesser language, one that could not advance me into the future. It reflected my culture, nothing more, and it was made clear that it could not open doors for me beyond this. Like Vergès, I, too, come from “a country whose language, Creole, is barely recognized . . . whose aspiration to internationalism requires one to read in at least one other language.” Though Haiti’s Kreyòl is spoken by members of its Dyaspora, and in some of its neighboring countries, particularly St. Lucia, it remains a hermetic language, and knowledge of French, English, or, increasingly, Spanish, offers a way out and into a broader world.
Unlike Vergès, I learned English not in adulthood, but as a child, between the ages of eight and ten. I soon learned that in order to disguise my foreignness, I needed to shed my accent. I had to pretend to be otherwise or risk being ridiculed; attached to this ridicule was others’ sense of my otherness, to which was also attached their fabrication (or perpetuation) of my racialized self, or, in effect, their perception of my subalternity, regardless of whether our skin tones were similar or not. (There were South Asian, Indigenous, and Filipina children in the first English school I attended in that forbidding Canadian prairie.) This process of modulation I remembered while watching Masterchef: Generations (2024) as I listened to an Eastern European contestant explaining her presence in a voice that sounded faintly like Celine Dion’s. I recognized in this similarity what both the contestant and Celine had tried to achieve: assimilation, acceptance, and ascension through language, but not just the language itself but an approximation of how it is spoken in the American Midwest. I, too, attempted this shift, albeit from a different geography not unlike theirs and, though I don’t sound like Celine, it would be difficult to place my accent now, or to imagine that I was born so many decades ago in Port-au-Prince. Yet, like her, like the Eastern European contestant, and older Haitian family members, I recognized the immigrant’s need to sound as if they were from the center to which they had moved. Amusingly, Celine Dion, in Haitian circles, is thought of as a Haitian icon, and I wonder now if this is not only because of her unmatched musical talent, but also because she achieved what many Haitians dream of, success in America. Most people assume that I was born in Canada, or the US, while I was naturalized in both, and born elsewhere, achieving a degree of success reserved for those who can pass for something other than what they are even if they are not trying to do so. Not correcting this assumption, at times, means that I can keep my inner self (and her languages) to myself, and like Vergès, escape detection by the powers that be; I can, at the very least, escape some forms of cooptation and coercion and remain unknown or even unknowable in my totality. This also means that I might remain unknown or unheard, or misunderstood.
Of English, Vergès writes, “Paradoxically, adopting the language of a colonial empire (England) that has been the rival of the other dominant colonial empire (France) has allowed me to write more freely about colonial slavery, colonialism, racism, feminism, Frantz Fanon, and decolonization.” She goes on to write about using the first person in English, something she does not do in French, because “I did not want the French to learn about my inner life or my feelings and emotions” (xi–xiii). In other words, for Vergès, English provides a prism through which voice the personal while keeping a certain invested audience at bay, perhaps without access to the personal which, within the paradigm of colonial power, would undoubtedly be exploited or exploitable for further subjugation. It is not that English culture proves more liberatory but that the English language, thanks to its indirect relationship to Vergès, offers another pathway for articulation. She is not its targeted subject and she can thus wield it for other ends.
English provides me an avenue by which I can articulate, as Vergès stipulates, “more freely” countless issues that face Black subjects in the present day, particularly from the Caribbean and from Haiti, and in terms of gendered identities, sexuality, class, color. Because English is not the language of colonial relationship with Haiti, it cannot operate as French does, as a language of policing or interdiction with a long history. I do not have to think about how the language might have been wielded against ancestors to curtail their speech, as does Jamaica Kincaid in her 1988 book A Small Place, when she details how the British compiled a list of West Indian curse words to better police Black British subjects in the metropole. Working in English, I do not have to negotiate, as Kincaid does, the limitations of the imposed tongue. As Kincaid’s persona writes:
For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me. (32)
The imposed language cannot admit its traffic in dehumanization, exploitation, and other ills; it can only atomize the experience of the colonized and gaslight the speaker when they attempt to relay a reality that clashes with accepted truth or that lays bare their irreality.
In her 1988 poetic text, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote about the negating effects of colonization through language. Specifically, she wrote from the perspective of a Toboggan-born writer writing in English about the tensions between a “mother tongue” and “a father tongue:” naming the former as the language(s) one is born into, and the lands those languages tether us to, the land of one’s people, and the latter as the land of colonial powers. Philip wrote about the negating effects of this tension, ultimately claiming that English is “a foreign anguish” (32), a phrase that has come to be synonymous for postcolonial theorists with the imposition of, usually, European languages upon the formerly colonized. Philip’s multi-pronged text propels the reader through hundreds of years of inequity codified with the imposed language of conquest. But what happens to the writer who writes neither in their first language or the language imposed upon their land by foreigners? What does it mean to adopt yet another language for artistic expression that is neither one’s first language or that of the colonizers who imposed it upon one’s culture of origin, even if that adopted language might, for others, represent an uneasy colonial relationship not one’s own? Many authors who are multiply displaced from their land of origin, or who come to live in a country where a language not native to their own dominates, use the lingua franca of that land to navigate the new culture and to express themselves fully within it, while still retaining, at home and in other spaces, their native language(s).
Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali Indian American author whose first language is Bengali, and her second, English, shifts as an adult to speaking and writing in Italian. “My relationship with Italian,” she writes, “takes place in exile, in a state of separation.” She goes on to explain that her relationship to language is “exilic” because, in the US, her first language, her “mother tongue” is considered foreign and she, herself, knows the language only rudimentarily. “When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence with the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you” (19). But, like Vergès with English, Lahiri finds freedom through Italian, the possibility of imperfection, but also freedom from an identity of authority: “What does it mean, for a writer, to write without her own authority? Can I call myself an author, if I don’t feel authoritative?” (83). Lahiri wrote these questions in her first book written entirely in Italian, In altre parole, translated by Ann Goldstein as In Other Words, and it seems that she has answered them through this writing, and in her subsequent Italian-language books and translations (of others works as well as her own). For me, Lahiri’s questions resonate at another semantic level: What does it mean to write in a relationality that does not necessarily involve mastery of the (colonial) word or the desire to subjugate others through language?
What if the movement to another language makes room not only for imperfection but for another form of intelligibility that allows for the fullest expression of oneself without having to police one’s meaning from within language? Moving into another language without a foundational historical tie creates an opportunity, a space within which one can mold the language—word use, order, meaning—in new and unexpected directions. One does not have to grapple, as one might need to do, in one’s native tongue, with the inherent embeddedness of one’s non-existence or subjugated reality within it. In other words, English does not strip me of my ability to speak of crimes and traumas suffered by myself or my ancestors; it does not have the rhetorical capacity to blunt my tongue as I am not searching from within it for its capacity to reveal the ways in which it has served as a tool for negation or silencing.
If one has not been directly affected by the people wielding that tongue, its edges don’t feel as sharp. The language, if not its history, becomes a tool among others to effectively communicate one’s realities or the realities of another people one is attempting to represent who are themselves, too, removed from that language’s direct incision. If the language of a particular form of colonial contact is its dagger, then shifting to another tongue is a way to shift the blade from making contact with the most vulnerable parts of oneself.
III. Kreyòlizing as Method
It is one thing to recognize the power of a language and to borrow from it, it is another to inhabit that language or have it live within oneself as a native or heritage language. Haitian writers writing in English for whom Kreyòl is such a language—and not one from which we seek distance—kreyòlize English in such a way that Kreyòl is present both overtly and covertly. We may include Kreyòl phrases in our works just as we may infuse the very cadence of our sentences and our imagery with kreyòlisms that bridge the gap for the reader between a Kreyòl they may not know or understand, and the meaning beneath our words in an English that may appear normative but is not. Other writers have shown by example that it is, of course, possible to render oneself through the imposed/ mother tongue and, in this sense, kreyòlization becomes a method of articulation cross-linguistically and intra-culturally, mobilized with similar intent, though having different audiences in mind.
Aimé Césaire made clear in his groundbreaking Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land) of 1947, the importance of breaking through the silence imposed by the colonial tongue. He did so by exploding the bounds of that very language, fracturing and remodeling it so as to reflect the experience of an African diasporic sensibility fighting against imposed caricatures, identities and psychological pigeoning. Césaire breaks the French language by imbuing his “Cahier,” his notebook, with obsolescences, neologisms, onomatopoeias, Africanisms, and Martinican Kreyòl terms throughout, to create a new imaginary that might correspond to the realities of new Africans—that is to say, a new consciousness for people of African descent in the Americas that belies their negation and marginalization (albeit from within the French nation-state). So, as translators Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith note in a 2001 translation of the Cahier, Césaire utilizes a wide variety of Latin and antiquated terms when referring to the natural fauna of Martinique (“mentula” to designate a stem, “jiculi” for a nineteenth-century indigo variety) while elsewhere invoking African terms and places such as a reference to the Likouala River, in the Congo, or the “cailcedra,” a Wolof word for African mahogany. The text is replete with such references in ways that are immediately disruptive for the French-speaking reader. It brings into the text a new sensibility which realizes what Césaire and poet Senghor termed “négritude,” a neologism which reflected a long history of new world insurrections crystallized for Césaire by the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, Césaire’s first use of the term in the text appears in direct connection with the first appearance in a reference to Haiti:
Et mon île non-cloture, sa claire audace debout à l’arrière de cette polynesie, devant elle, la Guadeloupe fendue en deux de sa raie dorsale et de même misère que nous, Haiti ou la négritude se mit debout pour la premiere fois et dit qu’elle croyait à son humanité et la comique petite queue de la Floride ou d’un nègre s’achève la strangulation, et l’Afrique gigantesquement chenillant jusqu’au pied hispanique de l’Europe, sa nudite ou la Mort fauche a larges andains.
[And my unfenced island, its bold flesh upright at the stern of this Polynesia; and right before it, Guadeloupe slit in two at the dorsal line, and quite as miserable as ourselves; Haiti, where negritude stood up for the first time and swore by its humanity; and the droll little tail of Florida where a Negro is being lynched, and Africa caterpillaring gigantically up to the Spanish foot of Europe, its nakedness where death cuts a wide swath.] (66–67, trans. Emile Snyder)
Césaire’s text signals the way a postcolonial writer might make their way through an inherited colonial tongue but it simultaneously signals the incapacity of that tongue to bespeak the postcolonial condition, and more precisely, the African diasporic condition. In order to use that tongue, one has to destroy it from within and though it is possible to do, it is difficult to repeat. Not only does it require knowledge of many registers of language at once, as Césaire’s text demonstrates (and the many translators’ glossaries it has engendered); it also requires an audience ready to take it on. Today, the Cahier is mostly read in graduate seminars and requires, in my experience of teaching it, multiple translations for students to decipher and appreciate its tapestried layers of meaning.
If, however, the textual realization of the Cahier is difficult to master and replicate, its methodology can be deployed by other means, in what Glissant called “creolization” but which I term “kreyòlization” to enfold within the former term a Haitian sensibility of textual actualization.
Kreyòlization means not only adopting a rhizomatic sensibility that encompasses the beliefs of a dispersed African gnosis from the continent through its diasporas, it also reflects a sustained and deepened understanding of the specifics of Haitian realities at both a cultural and linguistic level wherein language encodes cultural shifts and practices. This African Diasporic sensibility in turn reflects a history of insurgency, of revolutionary action and thought that condemns and rejects colonial practices and inheritances. We can understand Césaire’s work as exhibiting kreyòlization in this sense, as we can also see the work of Alejo Carpentier (Kingdom of This World) or of André Breton, and others, impacted by their coming into contact with Haiti’s place in the hemisphere and its historical disturbance of colonial, raced, and linguistic hierarchies.
We can also see evidence of kreyòlization in unlikely places, such as in the work of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, as I have argued elsewhere. Hurston wrote Their Eyes in Port-au-Prince while researching vodou and learning Kreyòl, as a multimedia biography by her niece, Lucy Anne Hurston, Speak So You Can Speak Again (2004), reveals. Close examination of the novel illustrates that it is replete not only with real-life references to happenings in Port-au-Prince at the time of its writing (for example, a reference to a state funeral for the then-President’s mule) but usage of Kreyòl proverbs and phrases, adapted for use in a novel about a Black woman coming to realize her freedom in her own terms within the segregated South. While some of these Kreyòl phrases are adapted and simulate African American vernacular (but did not, then, exist in that language), some remain unchanged, though translated. Janie is said to tell her story of three marriages to her “kissing friend,” Phoebe: ”Dat’s just de same as me ‘cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf.” In Kreyòl, the phrase is “bouch an bouch, yon di lot” (mouth in mouth, one tells the other). Though this phrase has been interpreted variously through the years, it has rarely been read as a Kreyòl reference in the text. For me, recognizing this feature of Hurston’s work is to recognize that Hurston borrowed kreyòlisms, and through them, Haitian independence, and grafted this notion onto her character, at once tracing a path for Janie’s actualization aided by their activation in the novel, but also by simulating, through the pithy phrase of sharing “one tongue” with Phoebe, the concept of the konbit or community model around which much of Haitian life is built. In doing so, she shows that Haitian Kreyòl is not just a tongue for a people isolated from others but that its concepts are life-giving, that they can be applied beyond the nation-state to others also seeking freedom’s way.
I kreyòlize my English, transforming a borrowed tongue into a vessel of my own through which I can express Haitian and Haitian Diasporic realities that hew close to those in Haiti itself. For instance, I write “M” characters who might be read as “queer” in the Global North, but whose realities are driven by a desire to be salient and accepted within their communities, not divorced from them or absorbed into LGBTQ2+ discourses that may exclude concepts of the lakou (yard) or of the konbit. To reflect this in my work, I privilege Kreyòl “M” terms rather than those of Global North LGBTQ2+ designations, even if this makes their presence, at times, undetectable or glossed over by readers. Sonia, in What Storm, What Thunder, enlarges the sense of the term, saying, “If you were a hustler, you were always in some way M, queer, even if you didn’t know what that meant, had never touched someone of your own sex with desire, or love.” So, I, too, then, stretch English to encapsulate other meanings that the language can yield, making it tentacular, elastic, resonant with other tongues, queer, “M,” another dimension within the words that can speak to other layers, other worlds, without being confined to the colonial “anguish” that lay within its syllables for those whose tongues were cut out for its (mis)use. I am not a Caliban nor a Sycorax returned from the dead.
At other times, as translators (into French) of my work have discovered, this means kreyòlisms appear in my work through relexification. The word order of my sentences are often French. Though grammatical in English, translation reveals the lexicon to be French in derivation. But, by the same token, the images I reach for in English are culturally varied, enriching the imagery of the English text in ways that make sense in a Haitian imaginary, connecting land to sea, to the spiritual, in unexpected ways. For instance, Ma Lou, in What Storm, What Thunder, speaks of herself and other market women who lived through the January 12, 2010 earthquake as “land whales, made for swimming through dust-laden air, made for parting human waves,” suggesting that they have become terrestrial sea mammals with extraordinary gifts. Another character, Leopold, a trafficker, reflects on the fragile life of sea turtles while trapped in an elevator shaft, he wishes to become like them:
He wondered what it would be like to be a sea turtle now, to know the secret of survival beneath the water, to plunge deeper down knowing how to survive for a time without the need for air, collapsing into a smaller mass, having faith in an inner circuitry designed for collapse in atmospheric pressure, not being afraid of cold, of heat, of darkness.
Here, Leopold becomes “reptile,” earthbound, but having garnered the qualities of sea life.
How one marries images with words is a consequence of the cultural imagination and if one imbues kreyòlisms in both ways in another language, one has kreyòlized it, both for oneself as writer and for the reader.
IV. “Can the subaltern speak?”: Spivakian Turns
Having said all this, I must return to the initial question: Why, if French is my first language, and Kreyòl my heritage language, do I write primarily in English? There is another question hiding behind this one that is not as pleasurable to contemplate. The easy answer is, of course, that one writes in the language of one’s immediate environment, tutelage, or profession. Having acquired multiple upper degrees in English and literary studies, it stands to reason that I don’t write in a language other than English. Writing in French or Kreyòl would mean that more Haitians would have access to my work, perhaps (this presumed access might be hampered by barriers to literacy), but translation could also enable a similar access. Writing in French or Kreyòl, would, however, mean that I would lose entry to a field in which these conversations occur; it would mean that the stories would not be as widely read or have a limited audience.
Is it possible that the question behind the initial query hides a more straightforward demand cloaked as inquiry, that is, why do I write these stories that do not quite fit, about discomfiting subjects? A rhetorical question: Why am I making certain readers uncomfortable with interrogations of postcolonial realities in a place such as Haiti? Is it possible that behind these reformulations of the question hides a more stark belief, that these stories shouldn’t see the light of day or circulate in wider reading communities?
I am rarely asked why I don’t write in French or Kreyòl because the interlocutor shares those languages and wishes to read me plainly, without a barrier or the need for translation. Most often, I am asked this question as a form of dismissal; I am not “authentic” enough to represent Haiti, or Haitians in the diaspora, or to be a Haitian-born Haitian who has lived outside of Haiti now for most of her life. This, to me, means being fixed as a “native informant” who serves the whims of the interlocutor and who is not being read to alter the views of the questioner but to confirm them as one does the views of an anthropologist (if we remember here Bourdieu’s interventions, pointing out that classic anthropology was a means by which colonizers refracted those they colonized as an extension of their phantasms, rarely reflecting others as they were but as they imagined them to be). It is a way of saying, in a roundabout way, why have you made your way to my center? Why have you not remained in the periphery? It is a way of saying, in other words, how did you escape this cage we made for you, despite your resistance (Kreyòl), despite our shared history (colonial) where you were meant to stay in your village, island, etc, and not make your way out, especially away from the powers that displaced you in the first place (French)? Why did you leap from one ground into another? For now, the interlocutor has to deal with your language in their own field of referents, without necessarily sharing a history, even though a colonial and imperialist history does exist between themselves and others to whom you do not belong.
So many decades ago, Gayatri Spivak opined in her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that women of color who are often not subalterns at all, are reduced to subaltern status (“without lines of mobility”) by virtue of their gender, class, or politics, and that their speech is rendered null when those in power misrecognize their acts of rebellion. Without rehashing her complex argument here, I would end by saying that the question posed to a postcolonial writer of varied linguistic background should not be one aimed to have them defend their authenticity as their interlocutor’s other, but should be one seeking to understand what is being said through a common tongue, borrowed or otherwise transformed, and fashioned into a meeting ground. It is there in that common linguistic space that new imaginaries can flourish and, just perhaps, shift realities to better, deeper understanding.
For a full list of references, consult the Full Stop Quarterly issue “Tender Tongues.”
Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author most recently of the novel Village Weavers (Tin House). Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, and The Globe and Mail ; shortlisted for the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize; longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize; and awarded an ABA from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her past novels include The Loneliness of Angels, Spirit of Haiti, and Scorpion’s Claw. She is the author of several nonfiction works, most recently: Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
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