Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture by Gilmour Rachael Steinitz Tamar

Author:Gilmour, Rachael,Steinitz, Tamar.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

The role of Kriol as a lingua franca amongst the highly diverse population here serves as an explanatory factor for its overt prestige in Belize, which presumably is one of the reasons why Kriol eventually has developed into an index of ‘Belizean’ identity in real-life everyday interaction too. In this respect, it is similar to European national languages, despite its lack of a written standard. Although the text is almost exclusively written in English, it is Kriol that is, in the passage above, declared as the means of communication and thus vital in the creation of national unity, where diversity and mixing—“miscegenation”—is what unites Belizeans. We see this mixing in linguistic terms where English mixes with West African languages, and the passage above even constructs this as analogous to biological ‘mixing.’ Although Kriol is used rather cautiously in Beka Lamb, its symbolic meaning is crucial in Belize becoming a nation—a nation that regards mixing and not purity as constitutional.

Moreover, the use of Kriol in the novel interacts with Beka’s appropriation of colonial discourse. In the second half of the novel, Beka starts to accept the past and the tragic history of Toycie, and begins to behave as a responsible and hard-working pupil.74 She then succeeds in winning the essay contest where the task is to present an aspect of Belize’s history—the history of the Sisters of Charity, the rulers of the convent school, and their workings within Belize. Although the act of writing a historical account of the Sisters is very much based on cultures of colonialism and imperialism, it is vital that it is here not someone from outside—someone from Great Britain or the US—who writes and produces a text that constructs Belize as a nation. It is the Creole girl Beka who is presented as having the power to define discourse. Her essay-writing defines Belize as a cultural entity and the American Sisters of Charity as outsiders. The colonial institution of the Catholic Church is not destroyed and not even called into question as an institution of power. The novel never makes mention of the content of the essay, nor does it mention in which language it is written—the unmarked status of English for written language is beyond question. And yet, with Beka writing history, the perspectives have changed: the colonial object becomes a writing subject. The act of essay-writing and winning the essay contest can thus be interpreted as Belizean Creoles beginning to appropriate colonial power structures, which are changed “according to the articulations of desire and the social field.”75 This is a central element of the novel, which, we should remember, states on its first page: “Befo’ time […] Beka would never have won that contest” (1).

Beka has started to create her own normativity, adapting to the colonizers’ values but also appropriating them where she presents her views of history in the essay. And despite the essay being written in English (implicitly, and thus all the more naturalized), the novel dramatizes a return to Kriol. While

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