Introduction

English as the global (if not the universal) language reflects both a hegemony of the past as well as of the present: it is both a continuation of the British Empire and thus demonised as a colonial language; and, as the preferred language of international business and of the capitalist development throughout the world, resented as a powerful neo-colonial language. Yet, the English language is capable of acting against its own imperialisms, to undermine its own hegemony. Edward Said, a Palestinian, Gayatri Spivak, an Indian born in Calcutta, and Homi Bhabha, a Parsi descended from Persian migrants to India from the seventh century, and raised in Bombay – all three bring their personal experiences to bear in their anti-colonial diatribes, but they composed their tracts in hegemonic English – not in Arabic, Bengali or Persian. If, indeed, English is the world's language, and if the world is being increasingly subsumed in English, both of which may be effectively, if not totally, true, then asking how that which is foreign to English might be comprehensibly represented in English is not a marginal question. How, in other words, can anti-hegemonies be articulated in a hegemonic discourse, when the discourse itself may occlude if not obstruct challenges to its own authority? This is another form of a wider conundrum: how to depict the Other to the Self, without the Other being merely an obverse version of the Self? What I wish to explore in this chapter is how certain ethnic writers, in two contrasting cultures, by using different fictionally mimetic techniques, embody both the strangeness of a minority culture in a majority language, and yet manage to make that strangeness accessible to the reader.

In his seminal 1981 article, 'Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis', Meir Sternberg considers this intercultural problem: how can the foreign be depicted comprehensibly to the native reader?