Liberare, Liberation

In his engagement with Kant, Heidegger is positively lyrical about what liberare can do for language. This might in part be because it is Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry that sustains The Principle of Reason and Hölderlin, we know, is a favourite of Heidegger. “As a liberating”, Heidegger writes, using a term that is pertinent to this essay's thinking of Ngugi, “a legacy raises concealed riches of what has-been into the light of day, even if this light is at first only that of a hesitant dawn” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger and Lilly1996: 102). It is in this regard that Heidegger and Ngugi find themselves, unlikely as it might seem, in broad agreement. Heidegger seeks to liberate in order to extend the “day of liberation” far beyond the dim light of that “first hesitant dawn”, as does, in his turn, the anti-colonialist (and even more committedly anti-neocolonialist) Ngugi. For Ngugi, however, much liberation always begins with the “general struggle against colonialism”Footnote ³ – must be understood as the “search for a liberating perspective within which to see ourselves clearly in relationship to ourselves and to others in the universe” (Ngugi 1986: 87). And it is precisely because Ngugi is determined to claim a sovereign “relationship” for the (anti- and) postcolonial subject in its encounters with “others in the universe”, most especially the former colonial masters, that he sets about “discriminating one thing from another”, that he wants to “bring out one thing and put another in the background”. For Ngugi the project of “ʎέλειν” (“stating”) the “λόγος” (“thinking”) of the postcolonial subject is geared toward “κρίνειν” (“achieving” but, more importantly, “deciding”) on the right of language. Specifically, as is well known in Ngugi's case, to “decide for” (‘κρίνειν”) writing in African languages rather than the language of the erstwhile colonizers.

In Ngugi's ʎέλειν” (“stating”) of the postcolonial writer's “λόγος” (“thinking”), languages indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa must be the only language of writing because it performs the political work of return. It is through writing in Gikuyu or Yoruba that the work of restoring the African writer to her- or himself and, most importantly, to the “peasants” who have shown themselves to be “essentially the guardians of language through years of use”, can be achieved (Ngugi 1986: 45).Footnote ⁴

It is precisely the existence of “hidden treasures” within African languages that motivates Ngugi to accuse his fellow sub-Saharan African writers of betraying those languages in favour of imperial languages such as English, French, and Portuguese. Ngugi is entirely unsympathetic to Okara's efforts to make a “Nigerian or West African English”. Indeed, Okara's determination to make an English that can bear African “ideas, thinking and philosophy” is met with a prickly riposte: “How did we, as African writers, come to be so feeble towards the claims of our own languages on us and so aggressive in our claims on other languages, particularly the languages of our colonization?” (Ngugi 1986: 9). Continuing in this vein, Ngugi wonders about his contemporaries’ commitment, Achebe's in this case, to creating something new – something distinctly African – in the English language: “the only question which preoccupied us was how best to make the borrowed tongues carry the weight of our African experience, by, for instance, making them ‘prey’ on African proverbs and the peculiarities of African speech and folklore?” (Ngugi 1986: 7)

For Ngugi, unlike Achebe and Okara, the “weight of African experience” can only be borne felicitously. That is, monogamously, when there is an absolute commensurability between the language of African literature – the “choice of language and the use to which language is put” – and their culture – Africa's “natural and social environment” (Ngugi 1986: 4).

In his project to produce anti-imperialist and anti-comprador nationalist literature, Ngugi finds, for reasons that will become clear soon enough, an odd ally in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In their argument for a “minor literature”, Deleuze and Guattari make clear the relationship between writing and nationalism: “The impossibility of not writing because national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 16). It is against the “oppression” of colonial and neo-imperial languages that Ngugi sets himself. This is because for Ngugi culture, what he names a “specific culture”, is “not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history” (Ngugi 1986: 15).

For Ngugi, writing in European languages – such as the English that Achebe and Okara claim as their “own” – produces what he calls a “minority tradition that can only be termed as Afro-European literature; that is, the literature written by Africans in European languages” (Ngugi 1986: 22). It is, of course, precisely in his resistance to writing towards, for, within, a “minority tradition” that Ngugi misses the point of Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Kafka. All literature, certainly all great literature, Deleuze and Guattari insist, is written in a “minor” language. They offer this insight through a distinction for the literary, a claim they make on behalf of literature, a politics they assign exclusively to the “minor” literary, within a language itself. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “A minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature is in any case that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 16). For the Prague Jew Kafka, writing in German has the effect of achieving an “irreducible distance from” his “primitive Czech territoriality” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 16).

Literature can only be produced when the writer “deterritorializes”Footnote ⁵ the language: when the writer undertakes the politics of uprooting the language and transforming it into what is not consonant with, not consistent with, not (ordinarily) audible in the language – that is, in the “major”, majority sense of the language – as it exists. All literature is “minor” in that it marks a distinct and radical political break with-in the language itself. Ngugi fears English as a “language and literature” because of its deterritorializing propensities, because of, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the “lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” that it opens up (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2003: 3). English is, as Ngugi puts it, “taking us further and further away from ourselves to other selves, from our worlds to other worlds” (Ngugi 1986: 12). It is only in our “own” selves, according to Ngugi, it is only by remaining absolutely felicitous to that self, that language can be the bearer of the postcolonial self; that language, Gikuyu or any other African language, that can, in the aftermath of colonialism or in the face of the imperial project, restore the African self to itself as it-Self.

It is, then, deterritorialization itself, the deracinating event that produces literature, that Ngugi is resisting, that he is intensely opposed to because in his thinking it is precisely the “lines of flight” that constitute the existential threat to his African self. Deleuze and Guattari's invocation of “flight”, we can well imagine, constitutes for Ngugi a “movement” away from African languages. Deterritorialization is what produces the “[p]rinciple of asignifying rupture”; or, iterated as Deleuze and Guattari's preference for the nature, colonial languages are like “ants”: “You can never get rid of ants” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2003: 9). To cast this as a negative word, Ngugi opposes deterritorialization – his own diffusion, his own disruption into “flights of intensity” – because it is, in essence, his own reterritorialization, his own return to Gikuyu – “But Gikuyu is my mother tongue” – that he wants to achieve, that he wants, impossibly, to preserve (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 13; Ngugi 1986: 27). Ngugi is intent on returning himself to re-stake the grounds of his own linguistic founding, so that he might, as he says, “reconnect myself not to the Afro-European novel of my previous practice but to the African novel of my new commitment” (Ngugi 1986: 71). Ngugi seeks to avoid the inevitability, which is as full of promise as it is of threat, that “these lines”, colonialism and postcolonial sovereign, English and Gikuyu, French and Wolof:

In his steadfast refusal Ngugi is only superficially turning away from English as a language, as the imperial and neo-colonial language with which he wants no truck, Ngugi stands firmly against his own “reconstitution” as the “subject” of deterritorialization, as the subject who will not countenance the prospect of “reencountering” “fascist concretions” (colonial or neo-colonial rule) nor will he admit to the possibility of the “Oedipal resurgence” of English (as a language, as the tongue of the Motherland, there, distant, and yet that at which he first drew the breath of écriture). Philosophically, then, what Ngugi is rejecting is the difficulty of thinking A Thousand Plateaus and Kafka together for a moment, deterritorializing his writing into a minor literature. For his part, Ngugi imagines that simply by writing in Gikuyu he is already writing in a minor tongue as such; that he is, by insisting upon his right to write in this language and not the language of the colonialist or the neo-imperialist, demonstrating his political fealty to African literature as such.Footnote ⁶

For Ngugi, as we already know, “African literature can only be written in African languages, that is, the languages of the African peasantry and working class” (Ngugi 1986: 27). In Ngugi's terms (again with Fanonian undertones, or overtones), the simple act of “transposition” – forswearing this language in order to write in that one, constitutes a literary act – the act of making literature, of having made language capable of bearing the literary. In Luther's terms, the accomplishment of literature is that it is, to render this negation crudely, un-verdeutschen. It is that construction of the language that can only be transmitted to the “mother at home and the ordinary man” in its own, minor – minority – register. In the discourse of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the literary constitutes its own “frequency”. (“Who knows”, Ellison's Invisible Man asks enigmatically at the end of the novel, “but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you?” Ellison Reference Ellison1987: 469).

A minor language is not minor

In his argument for Gikuyu, the language he determines to write in after forswearing English as a neo-imperial tongue, Ngugi seeks to set one Kenyan national language against neo-imperial English. All the while, however, what Ngugi does not recognize is how constitutive politics is of minor literature precisely because it is “minor”. In fact, for Deleuze and Guattari the “second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political … . Minor literature is completely different” because it “absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life and death” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 17).

It is not, to state the obvious, that Ngugi is any less committed to politics than Deleuze and Guattari. As has been well established since its publication in 1986, Decolonizing the Mind is nothing other than a manifesto for African languages, conceived as the rejection of “Afro-European” languages.Footnote ⁷ The rhetorical thread that runs through Decolonizing the Mind is unarguably political, no more so than at the end of the work. Arriving at his conclusion, Ngugi, straying into universality, asserts that the “real language of humankind” is the “language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of our history. Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and our being” (Ngugi 1986: 108). Salient about this impassioned declaration is a telling irony. In his struggle to make a literary language that can bear the weight of his anti-neocolonial being, Ngugi, at the crucial moment, at the moment of struggle, turns away from the most political of literary struggles: the project to make a literary language, a process that is not to be confused with writing literature in another language.

It is not, Deleuze and Guattari remind us, the work of the literary to speak as (in the language of) the majority. On the contrary, the work of literature is to produce out of the majority's language a literature. It is the literature that makes (a) language minor, not the language that, in, by and of itself, constitutes a literature. To extend this thought, perhaps to questionable lengths, let us propose that what is at stake in producing an African literature is, in the terms of Ngugi's argument, best understood through an inversion of his opposition: it is not that Ngugi must reject English in order to produce an African literature, but, on the contrary, that English needs all the writers it can attract to produce a minor literature in English. Or, to offer this critique as a caution against Gikuyu or any other language, anywhere: the simple act of commitment to a “minor” language does not mean that a literature will be produced. Rendered as a declarative: the mere act of pledging himself to Gikuyu does not mean that Ngugi will produce a Gikuyu literature.

In this regard Deleuze and Guattari's question about the violence necessary to produce literature obtains with a special force, one that ends with the prospect of a self-induced deracination. Deleuze and Guattari frame the question – which is, in truth, nothing other than a citation for writing literature – as follows: “how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language?” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 19). It is the work that requires the writer uprooting her- or himself, the difficulty, for Ngugi specifically, of “tearing” Gikuyu – or any other African language that has been surpassed by imperial tongues – from the majority of Gikuyus (those in whose name, in whose language, he writes) that Ngugi does not, will not, cannot, conceive of. Kafka presents the challenge of deterritorializing Gikuyu in order to make it follow a “revolutionary path”. Reterritorializing himself into Gikuyu is in itself neither a sufficient political nor literary act because the “ants” will “start up again” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2003: 9). Reterritorializing the writer into the language is, we can go further, by itself not a political act. To recast Achebe's assertion as a question: now that Ngugi has reterritorialized into his “given language”, how does he intend to use it?

Can he make for the peasants and the working, those made “wretched” by neocolonialism, class a language that, as much as it is not his own, is capable of forging itself into the language of revolution that can stand against, as he says, the “neo-colony that was Kenya under both Kenyatta and Moi” and now again under the younger Kenyatta, named, as if to mock history openly, Uhuru? (Ngugi 1986: 80) Is Ngugi willing to commit violence against the Gikuyu language, to “tear” it not only away from its “own language” but to tear it apart in the cause of making it foreign to itself? Can Ngugi inhabit Gikuyu as, not to put too fine a point on it, he has lived in English? Can he undertake the work of making himself a nomad, an immigrant and gypsy in his own language? In other words, can he make of Gikuyu a political language and not the language of comfort, a language that cannot, can never, guarantee its own political credentials as a language worth writing in? That is, can Ngugi approach Gikuyu as the language that “unhomes” him into politics, as if for the first time, that has the potential to render him unheimlich in his “mother tongue?”Footnote ⁸ Can he make a minor language out of this national language that he so venerates?

Minoritization

The effect of Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Kakfa is that it completely reconfigures the minor into the articulation of a universal politics. Recalibrated as such, the “minor no longer designates specific literatures” – as Ngugi wants us to – “but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 18). So conceived, the element of revolution resides not in the “specific language” or literature but in the minoritzation – the act of making minor – of the language of literature. So conceived, it is almost – perhaps entirely – possible to say that it is not so much the language that counts, as what one does with it, as what the writer consciously sets out to craft a literature out of, against, the language; the work is to make a language minor to itself in order to make it literary. It does not matter, then, in what language the writer works. It could as easily be English or Gikuyu, French or Wolof, Portuguese or Makonde.

The struggle for literature, Deleuze and Guattari might say, is against the majoritarian impulse of language. The writer's work is to ensure that all languages contain within them a minor language. That should be the “universal commitment underlying all politics” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze and Patton1994: xxi). That is, in a word, politics itself. To be minor: to be as minor language within all major languages. On this matter Deleuze and Guattari are emphatic, carrying, as it were, their counter-intuitive notion about the elevated political status of the minor to its logical conclusion: “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all languages of masters” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 26). The literary begins, as it were, with “hatred”, with an intense opposition to “all languages of masters”. The effect of the minoritization of (all) language(s) is to make, at once and as a sustainable (necessary) contradiction, the work of the anti- or postcolonial writer utterly unexceptional by making the anti- and postcolonial author exemplary. As the postcolonial author seeks to write in a “minor” language, so must all authors. It is for minoritarianism and no other standing that all writers must strive. No writing is writing unless it can write itself as a minority language. Literature is minoritarian or it is not literature. Minoritarianism makes of all writers a minority in their own language.

Every language, then, not only the imperial languages, has its major articulation, Gikuyu included. Every language, therefore, has to be made a minor in order to achieve a “great” literature, every language, never excluding Gikuyu or Zulu or Lingala. Where does Ngugi stand in relation to Gikuyu? What kind of work would it take to make a minor language out of what, to Ngugi's mind, has been made a subjugated if not a minor language? (Ngugi describes colonial language as the “means of spiritual subjugation” (Ngugi 1986: 9).) This minor language is one that ranks, as it were, below English; and it is English, which he describes as “the language”, the one before which “all others had to bow in deference”, to which Ngugi is most firmly opposed (Ngugi 1986: 14). How does a subjugated language struggle to reveal its own liberatory possibilities? What kind of nomadism and migrations does such a language allow? What kind of mapping does an Ngugian return to Gikuyu admit, make possible, make politically necessary? Surely return cannot in itself constitute a sufficiently political act? Or would such an interrogation, the striving for the minor within (surely it must exist, even if only as a “tentative dawn”) the subjugated, constitute for Ngugi a betrayal of the language itself?

What kind of politics abjures interrogation? What kind of language resists its own constitutive political? What kind of subjugated language stands against Deleuze and Guattari's second characteristic of minor literatures: “everything in them is political?” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 17). Unless this prescription is adhered to, then the threat incarnated by the subjugated language itself becomes a paradox: the political threat that follows from a return to the uninterrogated reterritorialized language is that language becomes, for all intents and purposes, a major language: hostile to literature, hostile to politics, hostile to thinking. Why turn to such a language when it is possible to produce a major literature in a major language, as well of course, as producing a major literature as a minor language in a dominant (the) language? Why betray the politics of the minor, is that not the most infelicitous political act of all? Why not follow the Benjaminian thread and confront directly the matter of “translatability”? Is there, and this is Benjamin's signal challenge, any possibility that there is a “specific significance inherent” in the first (“original”) writing that can only be accessed through translation? Does translation, and translation alone, reveal this “significance” to the world? Can meaning only truly be laid bare through “translatability”, through what is made “visible” through the re-rendering of the “original”? If the “specific significance” of the “original” is only discernible through translatability, then it might be possible to understand Benjamin's “translatability” – the work of making accessible, making immanent – as an argument for literature as an inexorably minoritarian act. Benjamin's essay on the translator prepares the philosophical ground for Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Kafka.

The work of the writer is, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms that resonate especially with Ngugi's anti-neo-colonial politics, to make language take flights of intensity, as well as flights of fancy, by “finding his own point of underdevelopment [how are we not to hear Walter Rodney here?], his own patois, his own third world, his own desert” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 18). The writer must strive towards the minor in order, under all and any circumstances, to “reterritorialize the function of language” because of the political questions that the “vernacular language” in itself poses (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 20). Like Deleuze and Guattari, Ngugi assigns writers a particular political significance. In order to found a “truly African sensibility in the written arts”, Ngugi argues, “it is the writer who is best placed to break through the vicious circle and create fiction in African languages” (Ngugi 1986: 85). In order to “break the circle”, we can now say that it is not enough to “create fiction in African languages”. What political weight can these African languages bear? How can they bear this weight, of culture, the desire for a radically transformed political, if they are not minor, if their first task is not explicitly revolutionary, if the first question asked of them is not: is everything in you political? What lies obscured until the work is subjected to the interrogative pressure of “translatability”?

Here it is worth recalling Kafka's understanding of politics: “The literary struggle has its justification at the highest possible levels” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 6). It is worth recalling that Deleuze and Guattari understand Joyce and Beckett: “As Irishmen, both of them live within the genial conditions of a minor literature. That is the glory of this sort of minor literature – to be revolutionary for all literature” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 19). Joyce and Beckett write the “sort of minor literature” that is committed to the revolution as such through its intense commitment to transposing English into a minor language, a language into which they burrow in order to make a new intensity, a language that deterritorializes, relentlessly, all the while fully aware that you can never “get rid of the ants”. The language of literature is that language that “absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life and death” because this is the world that the minor language must confront, a world that is intimately, tragically, familiar to a writer such as Ngugi.

After all, Deleuze and Guattari remark, “How many people live today in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Polan and Bensmaïa1986: 19).

The unexceptional condition

Where Ngugi claims exceptionality, African difference both within and in relation to the world, Deleuze and Guattari propose exactly the opposite. They advocate living in a language not one's own. They do so because in our world the dominant figure of the political is the refugee and the immigrant, a figure for whom linguistic deracination is the lived reality of everyday speech, a figure for whom “collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within machinic assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2003: 7, original emphasis). If “living in the language” of the other is not a universal condition (a claim that will shortly be revised), it is decidedly a mode of being that is widespread and familiar. And, as such, it must be apprehended and accounted for; more than that it must be figured politically, if for no reason other than these “collective assemblages of enunciation” reveal the imminent need for “translatability”.

To live in a language not one's own, as has been just been argued, is an eminently recognizable condition given that we know its name and its profile intimately. It is the figure of the refugee and the immigrant. It is, however, not only the refugee and the immigrant who is compelled to live, “poorly” (or not), in a major language. It is, potentially, all of us, so that we can offer a critique not only of Ngugi's essentialist claim for Gikuyu but raise the political prospect that it is only a minor literature that can demonstrate to us how poorly we live in a major language; it is only a minor language that can teach us how to live in a major language. In this way the lived reality of the refugee and the immigrant conditions our relationship to language and the world as such, because it demands a confrontation with the question of record: what kind of relationship, surely there must be a bond of some kind, exists between a minor literature and the condition of being in the world as a minority?

What this line of thinking makes clear in relation to Ngugi is the philosophical unsustainability of his politics of language. It is not that Ngugi has any real difficulty in understanding what it takes to live in a major language. No, it is rather that he is dogmatically opposed to learning to live like all of us – insofar as the problem of a minor literature is a problem for all of us. By pledging himself to Gikuyu, Ngugi seeks to perform a politically impossible act. He wants to reterritorialize himself, the violent act of deracinating himself from one language (let us accede and name it “major”) to another, returning himself to the language that he proclaims his (to take possession of Gikuyu, again, or, to give himself over to Gikuyu, this time as a writer), without running the risk of deterritorialization.

That is, Ngugi understands his return to Gikuyu as the political act of “fixing” himself in “his” language without opening himself to the political struggle of what it means to write. To produce a minor literature means, at base, that one must work against the language in which one is living. Insofar as there is a political problem that is shared, it is this one: learning to live in a minor language is, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, a “problem for all of us”.

If what is revolutionary exists only outside what is major, that is, in what is minor, then it would seem that in order to “hate all languages of masters” that this politics begin with interrogating, if not actually “hating”, first the language over which one has “mastery”. To phrase this in that recognizable Deleuze and Guattari logic, “The line of escape”, such as it is, “is part of the machine” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2003: 7). The writer, as much as anyone, is part of the machine of the master, part of the machine one has sworn oneself to protect; the political effect of this being made part of is that it limits the writer's (and all of ours, of course) ability to protect the self against the political force of the colonialists and their neo-colonial successors. You cannot get rid of the ants.

The line of escape runs through the very machine to which Ngugi has pledged himself. To act with political fidelity is to unmake, un-Verdeutschen, the machine in order to achieve the minor so that the revolution begins with undoing that in which one's mastery is most evident, is most closely to hand. It is to know that, to draw into question Achebe's certitude (“the English language can carry the weight of my experience”), in order for a language to bear the weight of political experience, it must be made minor.

As such, no one owns – or has the inherent right to – a minor language. What is required, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, is that “expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and new sproutings” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2003: 28). The form must be made but there is surely something disorderly, scattered, random and violent about it; out of this, for the sake of argument let us name it the “wreckage” of living in a major language, and out of this alone will a language be made that is capable of bearing the weight of a revolutionary politics. The only way in which one should commit to using a language is through the politics of making it minor.