“…So we learnt the music of our languages on top of the content” (438) writes Ngugi wa Thiong’o about the oral heritage and the importance of storytelling in Kenya. I perceived the echo of this voice, that craves moments of creative co-operation, in the frustrations of young Freire trying to grasp the shortsighted methodologies of still persistent oppressing system of education in the so-called “post-colonial” times. The same echo touched Donaldo Macedo, writer of the Introduction to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, who found shelter in his reading of the book, a text that gave him “a language to critically understand” (11). I want to highlight the transatlantic and transcontinental connection, or resonance to keep talking in Ngugi´s musical terms, of the problem of finding a proper language to communicate after the violent expansion of Europe and the not less violent independence of the nations of Africa and Latin America (just to give an example).
In Ngugi’s, Cesaire’s, Freire’s and in Boal’s work, the same questions appear, how to think about “my” language when it has been taken away? How to reclaim, and re-own communication when all the channels and lessons were gestated by an “other”, who calls me “the other”, and diminishes my voice? The question of finding a voice and a language motivates the texts, for Césaire the strategy is to re-read canonical texts of Europe’s Illustration as well as literary accounts to problematized limited conceptions of “civilization”. For Ngugi and Freire is necessary a revision of pedagogy and our childhood experiences to rephrase the learning methodologies that shaped our “oppressed” mentality. For Boal it has to do with incorporating conflict resolution and community cooperation in theatre or, the other way around, seeing life as a theatre of mediations.
Even though I do not agree, for example, with using concepts rooted in Marxism to talk about the frustrations and constraints of the dialectical divisions between civilization and barbarism or bourgeoisie and proletariat as Césaire explains in his Discourse on Colonialism (these terms somehow repeat a European rationale that starts as a critic to capitalism). I do believe that these texts are necessary to demystify ideas of “progress” and “civilization”, who are the “real” in-humans? What’s behind “civilization”?
The readings revised what we have been taught as “proper” of our culture, race, ethnicity, and identity, and find tools in consonance with that identity, like storytelling, theatre, or music.
I want to finish this intervention with the question of translation.
Aren’t we all translating our experiences of the world into our creative and academic practice? Isn’t Césaire translating Marx to own his argument? And Ngugi translating (or incorporating) the native language into English? And Boal translating embodiment into politics? Thinking in terms of translation, of oral, written, musical and body languages, allows us to speak with the language we have been taught, the one we crave to create but also to borrow others that might enrich our work; because like Ngugi writes, the music of language goes on top of the content.
Freire, Paulo. "Introduction" Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000. 11-28. Print.Ngugi, wa Thiong's. "The Language of African Literature" Colonial Dicourse and Post´-Colonial Theory, A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams, and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 435-455. Print.