Tuesday, October 26, 2004

English for Witi Ihimaera

This morning I was reading Witi Ihimaera's interview (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock, eds., Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World, 1992) and found his following statement quite interesting:

"Luckily for Maori writers who write in English, the English word is not sacred, it's profane. English is a profane language."

To him, the foremost English-language Maori writer, Maori is a tapu language, it is sacred, and used carefully with all its inhibitions. English offers him a much freer frame and realm of work.

To me Japanese has never been a sacred language, but it has its own inhibitions, both conscious and (probably) unconscious. English comes in as a neutral medium, devoid of my own biography, by which I can explore a new terrain without too much worrying about what NOT to write. Of course my English is way too limited. Still, it gives a certain sense of freedom that is never attainable in my own so-called mother tongue.

My mother (now 77) never writes anything, by the way. I suspect she NEVER wrote anything but occasional postcards since she graduated from her pre-war girls school at 18. She had her tongue, I have my keyboard. A motherless keyboard, so to speak.