The books that line the shelves of the McMillan Memorial Library in Nairobi reflect the interests of their original owner. The spines of Governing Without Consensus or Economics and Empire 1830-1914 can be spied from where I sit. This is the second-oldest library in Kenya and until 1958 it was open only to whites.
Outside the library, among the vendors selling mandazi, a type of fried bread, you hear a language that reflects this complex colonial past. Sheng, or Swahili-English, is a mixed language born from a barrage of lingua francas. It is a living language that changes every day with new slang from the slums and the buckling and reshaping of English or any of Kenya’s myriad indigenous languages. Sheng is a language unafraid of its own metamorphosis. It is the product of a collision and the reimagining of what it means to be Kenyan.
In 1986, Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant examined their own language, Creole, in the manifesto Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness). Similar to Sheng, Creole is a mixed language but as the writers argue, it also transcends its obvious pragmatic function and renders and encapsulates the identity of a place and its people. The manifesto begins with the writers announcing themselves, “neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles”.
In 1992, Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco won the Prix Goncourt Prize for French literature. This was significant because the novel was heavily laced with Creole. This recognition of Martinican Creole’s entwinement with French was to the horror of the Académie Française, an institution founded in 1635 and charged with the protection of the French language.
The trouble with languages is they grow and morph and envelope one another. English is a perfect example of this, with its staggering number of words, a good portion of which are unashamedly borrowed from other languages. Chamoiseau’s achievements illustrate the futility of controlling language because language is inseparable from identity and identity is defined by the people, not an institution.
Blending the language
When Keri Hulme’s Booker prize-winning novel The Bone People was published in 1984, New Zealand celebrated because we finally had a piece of literature that captured something of our identity. And no, Katherine Mansfield wasn’t it, just as the sentimental poetry of the late-19th century wasn’t it. The reason Hulme’s heart-wrenching novel changed the literary landscape in New Zealand was that it sought to blend Māori and Pākehā worlds in a way that hadn’t been done before. Hulme wrestled with her own identity as a white-passing Māori and, like several of her characters, possessed a cultural hybridity.
Like Hulme, my identity as a New Zealander has always felt ill-defined and perhaps even fragile. These past few years, which I’ve spent overseas, have highlighted this feeling.
Chamoiseau’s work offers not answers, but the right questions, like what happens to our identity when the language itself reflects a hybridity. In New Zealand, our language is becoming increasingly mixed with the revival of te reo Māori but many are opposed to its use. In fact, among the claims of restricted freedoms and Jacinda Ardern being a communist shapeshifting lizard, the assertion that the previous government was forcing all things Māori down the throats of New Zealanders was one of the loudest grievances to reach me overseas. Now, with the current government, the shoe is on the other foot.
It should be noted that aside from Hebrew, government-driven revivals more often achieve a perfunctory persistence than widespread fluency. The New Zealand government’s attempt to suppress te reo Māori in the 20th century was equally unsuccessful. Remember, policy led teachers to beat children with rulers for speaking Māori in schools and it was the people who revolted against this.
In the end, I believe the language we speak, and so, by extension, our identity and culture, will be dictated not by whichever government is in power but by the people. That is to say, writers, musicians, comedians, film-makers, dancers, chefs, 17-year-olds with fake IDs, businessmen, builders on smoko, hunters with bumper stickers, baristas, drunkards slumped over pokies, sausage-sizzlers, Saturday sport supporters. You, me, us. I speak what Māori I know because it is one of the brushes with which I chose to paint my identity as a Kiwi.
While this is a nice belief, things become less charming when we consider the reality of a mixed language. For example, the increased use of Māori words in everyday New Zealand-English can be viewed as a failure and a success.
If we abandon hope of fluency in Māori and merely sign off emails with “ngā mihi”, it could be said we are bowing to the dominance of English and giving up on Māori as a language in its own right. However, it could just as easily be said we are in support of a kind of mixed language and so a continuation of te reo Māori. This is, of course, reductive but it demonstrates the complexity of coalescing and mixed languages.
There is also a deeper, less obvious root that exists in the psyche of many New Zealanders. The historical narrative of New Zealand has been challenged in recent decades. For those descended from colonial peoples, ties to a homeland have been long forgotten and ties to New Zealand are now being questioned, however subliminally. For many, the increased presence of te ao Māori in day-to-day life brings to bear questions of one’s right to the New Zealand identity and the degree to which they render and reflect it. This is rarely discussed because it is seen as fickle, but I suspect it plays a larger role than most care to admit.
To muddle the equation further is overseas influence. In our increasingly connected world, New Zealand accepts culture and language from abroad with open arms. If we are moving towards a more global culture, what does it mean to be Kiwi?
It’s important to remember that Creolity comes out of places where slavery was rife and that our circumstances in New Zealand are exceedingly different. But similar to the concept itself, I believe there is something to be gleaned from outside what we readily know. I cannot, however, present it as an answer to the polarisation that seems to define our time. In many ways, Creolity is counter to the goals of tangata whenua or any of the communities in New Zealand concerned with preserving tradition. Under a certain light, it appears indistinguishable from neo-colonialism. It is at once protection and sacrifice, egalitarianism and inequity, oneness and a denial of the beliefs laid out in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. And yet, it can be strongly argued that we already possess a kind of mixed identity. If you call yourself a Kiwi, you count yourself part of it. If you read the written words of te reo Māori, you read a collision of languages and ideas.
Outside the McMillan Memorial Library, the street is flooded with people leaving the Jamia Mosque. I enter the slipstream and race towards Kenyatta Ave to meet a friend for a beer. These are my last days in Kenya. My partner and I will be moving back to New Zealand soon. While New Zealand’s past is rich and vital to understand, it is the future that makes me most excited to be a New Zealander. What exactly that means, I don’t know yet, but I live that question and let its possibilities enrich my life.
Benn Jeffries is a Wellington-born writer. Previously an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York, he divides his time between Mombasa and Wellington.
Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) runs from September 14-21.
