The main arguments of W.H New in favor of commonwealth literature

Commonwealth Literature

The entire arguments of postcolonial critics revolve around commonwealth literature. The term ‘commonwealth literature’ is used to cover the literary works from territories that were once part of the British Empire, but it usually excludes books from the United Kingdom unless these are produced by resident writers who originate from a former colony. These writers include V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), Salman Rushdie (India), Ben Okra (Nigeria), Timothy Mo (Hong Kong), and the late Jean Rhys (Dominica). ‘Commonwealth Literature’ is really an academic label which means public do not have to deal with it much.

Main arguments of W.H. New

W.H. New in, ‘New Language, New World’, discussed the argument, whether English is acceptable as commonwealth literature. There are commentators who believe English is not capable enough to be accepted as a commonwealth literature. While some writers believe, absorptive language like English must be accepted as commonwealth literature. The article, W.H. New discussed the views of several writers who were in favor of English as a commonwealth literature. In the following section, we are mentioning them.

English as a commonwealth literature

As W.H. New mentioned, “Some critics have rejected the English language as a suitable vehicle for local expression, asserting the incompatibility of local thoughts and English words, English syntax, English style.” Shows that there is huge controversy about English is an acceptable literary language in the commonwealth.

W.H. New also mentioned number of points trying to explain why this point is not true as it seems. He said, “whether the impulse is to attach oneself to Great Tradition or to sever oneself from them, there is a general agreement in all these stances about one thing: language affirms a set of social patterns and reflects a particular cultural taste.”

He also said that “English is an absorptive language and takes words like Kookaburra and tomahawk quite readily into its lexicon.”

We have observed that, words – invented, borrowed or devised in any culture, have their own resonance, and demand a formal context to use. While using these words, writers generally face problems to deliver exact context associated with words. While this problem is even more acute in the case where a society has adapted old words to new situations and the context lies somewhere in between.

Whenever a writer tries to evoke the voice of a culture and paint their writings with feeling and expression of any society, they use the creative words of the society. The combination of these words creates a formal context and a literary world. These words establish sound, structural order, and structural rhythm both as inseparable extensions of a lexicon and inherent contributors to meanings.

While English language is being used outside the English cultural ambience, it is not the lexicon alone which creating the difference. We have also observed that the combination of a non-English vocabulary with English principles of structure is as of a marriage between the poem’s structural organization and its dependence on idiom and accent. The very example of these beauty is the poem of Allen Curnow 1941 ‘House and Land’. John Figueroa has also observed this kind of standard and non-standard lexical and grammatical item in a tightly controlled relationship in Derek Walcott’s ‘Tales of the Islands’.

Edward Brathwaite did a marvelous work, in his trilogy The Arrian’s, focusing our attention on sound itself. You will feel that both rhythm and syllable communicate meaning. The way Brathwaite makes deliberate use of several different rhythms in his poem is obvious even at first listening. His words like Calypso, limbo, blues, Reggae, speech rhythms, drum rhythms, syllables that mimic crow noise and syllables that emulates rain are some of the clearest examples of poetic lines being crafted with movement in mind as well as literal meaning.

Some writers themselves have been among the clearest observers of their own linguistic environments and amount the clearest commentators on the relation they find between the language they live with, they culture they live in, and the world they created. Dave Godfrey ran into problem while using the words from outside of English tradition. He said, “one of the problems is that I work a lot backwards from language, you know; that is, just almost visually I work with words, and musically I work with words.... I start with the words, put the words together and the content of the people grows out of the words...in a sense you are trying to say things in a different way. You are really trying to open the language and then you move back to the form part of it. Now in Africa that was very easy to do. I mean you have different dialects, different languages, you have strange kinds of English, you have a lot of new writers writing in different ways. You have a real richness in the people's vocabulary, in the conflicting vocabularies of a different culture and whatnot. Once you start writing about Canada you get into the problem which I ran into in DEATH GOES BETTER WITH COCA COLA, and that is, reticence is the natural form, you know, and you write these kinds of tight-lipped stories.” They are examples, how one can face problems while going beyond English tradition.

Indian writer, Raja Rao observed that, “we cannot write like the English. We should not… our method of expression therefore must be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.” In his believe, whenever we try to express a culture, it should be enriched with words, expressions, dialects, lexicons of that culture. It must not be exactly as English tradition. It should be as new, distinctive, and beautiful English as the Irish and American English is.

Chinua Achebe, in his collection ‘Morning Yet on Creation Day’ calls openly and directly an end to Colonialist Criticism. He clearly enunciated his feelings that, “the English language will be able to carry the weight of African Experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African Surroundings”. He also supports Raja Rao’s observation. According to him, English is absorptive enough to marry African experience. Its okay! If its not a pure English. It does not need to be. It must be a new English.

Conclusion

From all the above points and discussions, we can conclude that, it does not matter if English is traditional or non-traditional, it must be accepted as commonwealth literature. Writers from all the territories have worked, contributed, observed, and expressed a lot and will keep doing it. There must be possibilities to accept English literature in the commonwealth. They are constantly showing evidence, opinion, and contributions they made in English.