The essential laceration of the colonized is particularly expressed and symbolized in colonial bilingualism. The colonized is saved from illiteracy only to fall into linguistic dualism. If he has that luck. The majority of the colonized will never have the good fortune of suffering the torments of the colonial bilingual. They will never have at their disposal anything but their mother tongue; that is to say, a language neither written nor read, which allows only the uncertain and impoverished oral culture. Small groups of the lettered, to be sure, persist in cultivating the language of their people, in perpetuating it in its learned and bygone splendors. But these subtle forms have long since lost all contact with daily life and have become opaque to the man in the street. The colonized regards them as relics, and these venerable men as sleepwalkers living out an old dream. If only the maternal speech allowed at least a present-day grip on social life, if it passed through the wickets of the administrations or ordered the postal traffic. Not even that. The whole bureaucracy, the whole magistracy, all technicality understands and uses only the language of the colonizer, as do the milestones, the station signs, the street plaques, and the receipts. Equipped with his sole language, the colonized is a foreigner in his own country. In the colonial context, bilingualism is necessary. It is the condition of all communication, of all culture, and of all progress. But the colonial bilingual is saved from immurement only to undergo a cultural catastrophe never completely overcome. The non-coincidence between the mother tongue and the cultural language is not peculiar to the colonized. But colonial bilingualism cannot be assimilated to just any linguistic dualism. The possession of two languages is not only that of two tools, it is participation in two psychic and cultural realms. Now here, the two universes symbolized, borne by the two languages, are in conflict: they are those of the colonizer and of the colonized. Moreover, the colonized’s mother tongue — the one nourished by his sensations, his passions, and his dreams, the one in which his tenderness and his wonderings are set free, the one, finally, that harbors the greatest affective charge — that one precisely is the least valued. It has no dignity in the country or in the concert of peoples. If he wants to obtain a trade, to build his place, to exist in the city and in the world, he must first bend to the language of the others, that of the colonizers, his masters. In the linguistic conflict that inhabits the colonized, his mother tongue is the humiliated one, the crushed one. And this contempt, objectively founded, he ends by making his own. Of his own accord, he sets about pushing aside this crippled language, hiding it from the eyes of strangers, appearing at ease only in the language of the colonizer. In short, colonial bilingualism is neither a diglossia, in which a popular idiom and a purist’s language coexist, both belonging to the same affective universe, nor a simple polyglot richness, which enjoys a supplementary but relatively neutral register; it is a linguistic drama.
And the situation of the writer
One is astonished that the colonized has no living literature in his own language. How would he address himself to it, when he disdains it? As he turns away from his music, from his plastic arts, from his whole traditional culture? His linguistic ambiguity is the symbol, and one of the major causes, of his cultural ambiguity. And the situation of the colonized writer is a perfect illustration of it. The material conditions of colonized existence would suffice, to be sure, to explain his rarity. The excessive misery of the greatest number reduces to the extreme the statistical chances of seeing a writer be born and grow. But history shows us that only a privileged class is needed to furnish a whole people with artists. In fact, the role of the colonized writer is too difficult to sustain: he embodies all the ambiguities, all the impossibilities of the colonized, carried to the highest degree. Suppose that he has learned to handle his language, to the point of recreating it in written works, that he has overcome his deep refusal to make use of it; for whom would he write, for what public? If he persists in writing in his language, he condemns himself to speaking before an audience of the deaf. The people are uncultivated and read no language at all; the bourgeois and the lettered understand only that of the colonizer. A single way out remains to him, which is presented as natural: that he write in the language of the colonizer. As though he were doing anything more than changing dead ends! He must, of course, overcome his handicap. If the colonial bilingual has the advantage of knowing two languages, he masters neither one totally. This also explains the slowness with which colonized literatures come to birth. Much human material must be wasted, a multitude of throws of the dice, for the chance of a fine accident. After which there resurges the ambiguity of the colonized writer, under a new but graver form. A curious destiny, to write for a people other than one’s own! More curious still, to write for the conquerors of one’s people! One has been astonished at the harshness of the first colonized writers. Do they forget that they address themselves to the very public whose language they borrow? Yet it is neither unconsciousness, nor ingratitude, nor insolence. To this public precisely, the moment they dare to speak, what are they going to say if not their unease and their revolt? Did one expect words of peace from him who suffers from a long discord? Gratitude for a loan so heavy with interest? For a loan that, moreover, will never be anything but a loan.
To tell the truth, we leave here description for prediction. But it is so legible, so evident! The emergence of a literature of the colonized, the coming-to-consciousness of the North African writers, for example, is not an isolated phenomenon. It partakes of the self-coming-to-consciousness of a whole human group. The fruit is not an accident or a miracle of the plant, but the sign of its maturity. At most, the upsurge of the colonized artist precedes a little the collective coming-to-consciousness in which he partakes, which he hastens by partaking in it. Now the most urgent demand of a group that has taken itself back in hand is certainly the liberation and the restoration of its language. If I am astonished, in truth, it is that one can be astonished. This language alone would allow the colonized to knot together again his interrupted time, to recover his lost continuity and that of his history. Is the French language merely an instrument, precise and efficient? Or is it that marvelous coffer in which the discoveries and the gains of writers and moralists, of philosophers and scholars, of heroes and adventurers accumulate, in which the treasures of the spirit and the soul of the French are transformed into a single legend? The colonized writer, having painfully arrived at the use of the European languages — those of the colonizers, let us not forget — can only make use of them to plead in favor of his own. There is in this neither incoherence nor pure demand nor blind resentment, but a necessity. Were he not to do it, his whole people would end by setting about it. It is a matter of an objective dynamic that he feeds, to be sure, but that nourishes him and would continue without him. In doing so, if he contributes to liquidating his drama as a man, he confirms, he accentuates his drama as a writer. To reconcile his destiny with himself, he might try to write in his mother tongue. But one does not redo such an apprenticeship within a man’s lifetime. The colonized writer is condemned to live out his divorces until his death. The problem can be closed in only two ways: by the natural drying-up of colonized literature; the coming generations, born in freedom, will write spontaneously in their recovered language. Without waiting so far off, another possibility may tempt the writer: to decide to belong totally to the metropolitan literature. Let us leave aside the ethical problems raised by such an attitude. It is then the suicide of colonized literature. In both perspectives, only the deadline differing, colonized literature of European language seems condemned to die young.
[extract from* Portrait du colonisé (The Colonizer and the Colonized*) (Payot 1955–56)]