Unthinking Mastery

88 chApter two

does not long for African writers to master the languages of his colonizers;

he envisions instead an African literary landscape that implicitly engages

newfangled forms of the colonial language that redraft rather than master

the colonial linguistic tradition. Even while he wants English to “submit”

itself to various uses, this submission does not for him entail wholesale

domination. In turn, Ngu ̃gı ̃ articulates a desire for writing in African lan-

guages that reflects specific historical, cultural, and spiritual realities, even

while he looks back to European literary masters as inspiration for African

language revival and literary production. Postcolonial literary debates are,

like the discourses of decolonization, fundamentally concerned with lan-

guage politics. Yet quite unlike the colonial- era debates that continuously

returned in more and less explicit ways to the need for language mastery,

these writers take up a relation to language that is ambivalently situated

between masterful and unmasterful forms. While there is much disagree-

ment in these debates, the will toward language mastery begins to dissi-

pate and is replaced by the possibilities that languages embody—or can be

crafted to embody—through the pens of colonized writers. Anticolonial

thinkers tended to insist (even sometimes despite themselves) on language

mastery as a crucial practice aimed at undoing the force of colonial rule

in the colonies without theorizing the inextricable relations among forms

of mastery. Postcolonial writers like Achebe and Ngu ̃gı ̃, while positioning

themselves in opposition to each other, share a desire for unmasterful ways

of formulating the relation between language and the postcolonial imagi-

nation.

World (Literature) Mastery
In Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (2008), the Moroccan writer Abdel-
fattah Kilito asks: “Can one possess two languages? Can one master them
equally?” Although Kilito’s central concerns are with translation and with
the problems that mastering multiple languages poses for translation, he
steps back to ask:
Can one possess any language? I remember hearing something, the
source of which I have not yet been able to find, about one of the an-
cients who described his relationship to language in this way: “I de-
feated her then she defeated me, then I defeated her and she defeated