The Loss of the Native Language and Post-Imperial Narratives (Yeats and Joyce)

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of language in colonial and post-colonial contexts and its role in delineating authentic features of national identity. The first part tackles African and Irish theorists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Douglas Hyde whose views of clinging to the native tongue promote the politics of an essentialist identity. According to them, the loss of the native language brings about feelings of inferiority and estrangement which serve only to empower the colonizer. The article, then, proceeds to more tolerant writers who believe in the colonizer’s share in the making of the present of the colonized and favor hybrid identities. For them, it is impossible to reduce the polyvocality of the moment into the too-familiar, too-reassuring fictions of the old days. Finally, this work focuses on the Irish context through Yeats and Joyce who radically transform the idea of the nation theorizing for style as an agent of redemption from colonial artistic and political confines. Their cosmopolitan techniques allow the breakthrough of a new context, a post-imperial writing. The loss of the native language, therefore, opens alternative artistic paths to experiment with the language of the colonizer fostering a modern, cosmopolitan and continuously changing “national” identity.