March'19
The IUP Journal of English Studies
Focus
However, the oil industry, bolstered up as it is by powerful yet impersonal forces of economics and technology and shrewd business tycoons and unscrupulous politicians, has increasingly come under scrutiny and criticism with the advent of the environmental movement that holds the indiscriminate supply and use of oil and its byproducts such as plastics as the prime reason for land and air pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change. Added to that is the indiscriminate exploitation of oil reserves in developing countries by multinational oil corporations that show scant regard for the sustainability of the land and the wellbeing of its inhabitants.
Nigeria is a case in point. Nigeria has the largest oil-producing mines in Africa, and the bulk of its crude lies beneath the farmlands and rivers of Ogoniland-a Delta region of southern Nigeria that is home to about 500,000 indigenous Ogoni people, who form less than 0.05 percent of Nigeria's population. Oil majors like Shell extract about hundred million barrels of crude every year from this region, generating billions of dollars in revenue. However, the revenues have not in any way benefited the Ogoni people, 70 percent of whom still live in poverty. On the other hand, the oil-extracting activity, which was supposed to bring development and prosperity to the region, has laid waste vast tracks of fertile land in the Niger Delta largely due to the reported mismanagement by Shell company of its 5,000-km long network of pipes that are more than six decades old and have become corrosive and weak, leaking oil and destruction along its length, making Ogoniland one of the most oil-polluted places on the earth. The successive federal governments of Nigeria, dominated by ethnic majorities, have been accused of being in cahoots with the oil multinationals and indulging in systematic oppression and exploitation of the Ogoni.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a well-known Nigerian author and president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP)-an organization set up to defend the environmental and human rights of the Ogoni people-led, in January 1993, a peaceful march of 300,000 Ogoni, demanding a share for the Ogoni in oil revenues and asking the oil companies to begin environmental remediation and pay compensation for past damage. He was arrested by the oppressive Nigerian government for his role in the protests, and his memoir A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary gives a first-person account of his detention and the Ogoni issue where a resource has turned into a curse. That brings us to the literary genre "memoir."
In this digital world where people have taken to narcissistic self-portraiture like a duck to water making readily accessible representations of their lives through video blogs, electronic diaries, and selfies and posts on social media like Facebook, memoir, as a genre, is increasingly emerging as the preferred form of literary life writing. The phenomenal growth in the total sales of memoirs, compared to other genres, in recent years is a testimony to the growing popularity and critical esteem of memoir.
Unlike an autobiography which focuses on the chronological telling of the writer's entire life and experiences, a memoir can choose to cover selected aspects of the writer's life. A memoir, in other words, provides a more specific and often immediate timeline and is thus much more intimate to the writer's memories, experiences, and feelings.
Since memoirs are rooted in the real and immediately identifiable world and make truth claims, they can generate controversies and counterclaims. On the other hand, this element of memoir gives the silent and marginalized populations a literary voice, thus marking a historically and culturally significant development in the literary history of the world.
Niyi Akingbe, in his paper, discusses the interplay between history and memory on the one hand and autobiographical narrative and self-(de)construct on the other in Ken Saro-Wiwa's memoir A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary that calls for an end to the exploitation of the oil reserves of Ogoniland and continued marginalization of the Ogoni by successive Nigerian regimes.
Justy Joseph and B Padmanabhan trace the traits of "reciprocal determinism"- which holds that the environment influences behavior, behavior influences the environment, and both influence the individual-in Helen Macdonald's memoir H Is for Hawk.
Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi illustrate with examples from Omprakash Valmiki's autobiography Joothan: A Dalit's Life how Valmiki situates his traumatic life in the sociopolitical context of India's caste system with a view to renegotiating history and reframing identity.
Fazel Asadi Amjad, Mohsen Hanif, Tahareh Rezaei, and Maryam Jalali Farahani apply Henry Louis Gates' term "Signifyin(g)"-a verbal device that profits from the gap between denotative and connotative meanings of words and is accessible only to those who share homologous cultural ties-to Lorraine Hansberry's play The Drinking Gourd to underscore the Signifyin(g) elements in the play.
Roghayeh Farsi applies the concept of construal-how people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the world around them-to Alice Munro's short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" to examine the narrative slippages and the interplay between different construals in Munro's story.
Krupa Sophia Jeyachandran and Urvashi Kaushal offer a humanistic geographical approach-which focuses on the relationship between people and place and their mutual influence on each other-to analyzing the character of Karsan Dargawalla, the protagonist of M G Vassanji's The Assassin's Song.
Sarah Siddiqui and Shahida present a brief survey of the Sufi poets of India and their literary contribution that has enriched the syncretic religious and social culture of India.
Karina Vidal examines the relationship between phonological process of assimilation and elision and ESL learning proficiency and finds that while recognition of assimilated and elided forms has no bearing on ESL listening success, the mastery of this process is an added advantage to students who seek to acquire near native command of English.
Bijay Kumar Das takes a close look at the various theories and the eastern and western traditions of translation and shows how the praxis of translation can help in the creation of World Literature.
Consulting Editor
Writing Against Tyranny: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Burden of Ogoni Nation in A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary
This paper seeks to articulate the interplay between history and (autobiographical) narrative spaces, and the relationship between those spaces, and the shifting role of memory in the delineation of self-construct against tyranny in Ken Saro-Wiwa's memoir A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. The paper engages with Saro-Wiwa's twofold campaign against ecological degradation of Ogoniland by Shell and quest for resource control of the crude deposit found in Ogoniland in order to counterbalance its successive exploitation by the Nigerian ethnic majorities in his memoir. Saro-Wiwa, in the memoir, turns away in disgust and despair from the inglorious platitude that calls for the sustaining of Nigeria nation-state's theft of Ogoni and other Delta minorities' wealth by the ethnic majorities. The paper argues that Saro-Wiwa is convinced that the exploitative economic system, which impoverishes millions of oil-bearing Ogoni and other Delta nationalities for the benefit of Nigeria's ethnic majorities, would be unthinkable without the total political emasculation orchestrated by the country's defective federal structure. Suffice it to say, this anomalous appropriation has divided Nigeria into a deeply antagonistic nation-state where the Nigerian ethnic majorities perpetually dominate the Delta's minorities through a sustained military might.
The Traits of Reciprocal Determinism in Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk
Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event, including human interactions, there exist conditions that could cause no other event. Albert Bandura, through his idea of reciprocal causation, accepts the chances of a person's behavior being conditioned. Keith E Rice suggests that reciprocal determinism considers how what we do and who we spend time with-our behavior-impacts upon and changes the life conditions in the environment we experience and how we respond cognitively and emotionally, and possibly psychologically too, as a person to the environmental feedback we then receive. This paper attempts a study of Helen Macdonald's heart-wrenching, talon-sharp memoir H Is for Hawk based on reciprocal determinism and triadic reciprocal causation.
The Social Struggle: Deconstructing the Dalit Subalternity in Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan: A Dalit's Life
The paper begins with the notion that autobiography is the most important and emphatic tool of self-narrative because it is an ideal blend of reality and imagination. Taking its illustrations from Omprakash Valmiki's autobiographical narrative, Joothan: A Dalit's Life, which retells his experiences of torment, neglect, domination, and coercion since his childhood, this paper elucidates the socioeconomic circumstances that not only questioned the Dalit subalternity but also emphasized the importance of constructing a new identity and rewriting history.
Lorraine Hansberry's The Drinking Gourd in the Light of Henry Louis Gates' Notion of Signifyin(g)
Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American female playwright and writer who had her best-known play A Raisin in the Sun performed on Broadway. Her dramas are often taken to be the best representatives of African American identity. Racism, segregation, and African Americans' difficulties in a capitalistic society are some of the issues which had occupied her mind, career, and plays. Henry Louis Gates is the most contemporary dominant figure in African American Studies. He has taken Saussure's "signification" and redefined the term. He states that "Signifyin(g)" in African American discourse is a linguistic wordplay, a deferral of meaning, a self-conscious manipulation of meanings that underscores the playfulness of language and meaning-making mechanisms. The African American concept of "Signifyin(g)" is totally different from its Saussurean meaning in Standard English. By "Signifyin(g)," the difference between the meanings of "signification" of Standard English language and that of the African American vernacular is emphasized. The Standard English meaning functions according to the Saussurean law of meaning making, whereby the signified differentiate themselves from other existing signifiers. But the vernacular meaning is made quite differently. This paper applies the notion of "Signifyin(g)" to Hansberry's play The Drinking Gourd. The paper first introduces and describes the notion, then discovers some examples of the same in the said play, and finally discusses the connotations of the "Signifyin(g)" parts. Thus, the paper describes how this technique has enriched Hansberry's works.
Narrative Slippage and Construal in Literature: Alice Munro's "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage"
This paper applies "construal," a concept from Cognitive Grammar, to Alice Munro's short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage." Like (post)modernist stories, Munro's story has multiple plots and narrators and develops out of constant spatiotemporal shifts. Such features mark the story with narrative slippages, that is, smooth shifts and turns of perspective. The study examines the applicability of construal for literary interpretation. It provides a close reading of Munro's story in the light of cognitive construal, dividing the story based on its narrative slippages and investigating the perspective and construal of each scene. The analysis shows interplays between subjective and objective construals in each slippage. Also, the paper discusses the tensions between narrative points of view and construals and takes them as the limitations of the concept of construal when applied to a complex literary work. Cognitive Grammar does not address such tensions in complex narratives; it, therefore, needs to expand its potentials in this respect.
Negotiating Place, Memory, and Identity in M G Vassanji's The Assassin's Song: A Humanistic Geographical Perspective
The paper explores the concepts of place, memory, and identity in M G Vassanji's The Assassin's Song in the light of humanistic geography which arose as a reaction to spatial sciences in the 1950s and the 1960s. As far as the basic meaning of the word "place" is concerned, it involves location, an area, or a specific direction. In the realm of humanistic geography, place is endowed with meaning, memory, and experience, and it provides a base to carry out the sociocultural practices associated with daily life. Karsan's life in Pirbaag as an adolescent and as an aspiring student at Boston-Harvard, his married life with Marge Thompson in Canada, his new identity as Krishna Fazl while working as a professor in a college in British Columbia, his familial life and tragedy in the form of his only son's death, his return to India, his research period at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and finally his getting back to his roots and assuming the role of the Saheb (spiritual leader) of Pirbaag are a testament to the view that place determines one's experiences and thereby plays a decisive role in the shaping of identity.
A Brief Survey of Folk Sufi Poets of India
Sufism represents the inward or esoteric side of Islam, often contested as an alternate form of Islam. Studies show that the first Sufi to visit India was Mansur al-Hallaj, but this fact is contested as many believe that al-Hujwiri, commonly known as Data Ganj Baksh, was the first Sufi to visit India in the eleventh century. When the Sufi poets from Central Asia arrived in India, the land was already dominated by Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism. Thus, the Islam practiced in this region had already been colored by the local cultural norms. As Ira Lapidus and Ishaq Khan have mentioned, the foreign Sufis formed a body of ulema representing the "normative" Islam or high tradition, while the masses or the common folk followed the Islam of their venerated Sufis, forming another form of Islam, namely, "popular" Islam or low tradition. This created, as Ishaq Khan mentions, a cleavage between the foreign culture and the indigenous culture, which was later on bridged by lesser known Sufi poets across India singing Sufi ideology in the form of folksongs and folktales. This paper studies these lesser known or indigenous Sufi poets who were very popular among the masses but find little mention in the academia. The paper focuses on the literature produced by these Sufis and how they filled the gap between the normative Islam and the popular Islam prevalent among the common people.
Perception of Phonological Assimilation and Elision by ESL Learners and Its Impact on Listening Proficiency
This paper studies the relationship between the perception of phonological assimilation and elision and ESL (English as a Second Language) listening proficiency. It is believed that variation in word-final consonants tends to cause ESL learners problems with word recognition in connected speech. However, research findings do not conclusively support the relationship between this phenomenon and ESL listening success, since, among other things, the range of mechanisms analyzed has not been carefully controlled. This research was intended to throw light on the relationship between two processes of reduction-namely, assimilation and elision-and ESL listening proficiency. One hundred sixty-nine first-year undergraduate English Studies students and twenty undergraduate native speakers participated in this study. They were asked to discriminate thirty-two elided and thirty assimilated forms from their canonical counterparts. The results revealed that recognition of assimilated forms does not seem to be related to ESL listening success. Recognition of elided forms, however, was found to be weakly related to ESL listening proficiency. The results showed that release burst of first word final stop appeared to contribute to successful discrimination between forms. The results also revealed that ESL learners recognized more easily those instances of assimilation and elision in which the word final consonant was /t/ rather than /d/. On the basis of these findings, implications for the teaching and learning of ESL listening and reduced forms are drawn.
Translation Across the World: Theory and Praxis
Translation has variously been described as "transfer of meaning," "substitution of meaning," "carry-over of meaning," "regulated transformation," etc. If in the West it is attributed to the second fall of man, meaning loss of common language of mankind, in India, it is taken as "new writing." It involves both the processes of reading and writing and is a bilingual activity. The safe and sound definition of translation could be "new creation" in the target language. The best examples could be the different versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in different regional languages of India based on Valmiki's The Ramayana and Vyasa's The Mahabharata respectively. The major theories of translation are Polysystem theory of translation propounded by Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury; Canadian feminist theory of translation by Susan Bassnett, Barbara Godard, and others; Deconstructive theory of translation by Jacques Derrida; and Cannibalistic theories by Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos. The praxis of translation helps the cause of nation-building and moves toward the creation of World Literature, transcending the boundaries of a nation.