Wednesday Post: The Silencing of Language

I, Rigoberta Menchú has me thinking a lot about voice and language. I can’t help but think that because this book has been translated so many times, its original emotional power has been diluted. I am sure her tone must have been musical and her language colorful, despite and perhaps because of the anguish that she has faced in life, but so much of that is out of our reach because of the repeated translation. I was also thinking a lot about the protagonist/writer’s constant ache to tell her story in the dominant language. She says to her father that she “[wants] to read or speak or write Spanish…perhaps things were different if you could read” (105). This becomes her main reason for leaving her home to go to Guatemala City to work as a maid. Spanish, here, is the language of the colonizer and of the dominant power, so it makes sense that she would want to learn it. But some would argue that by learning Spanish and desiring to learn it, she is turning her back on her people. There some different narratives around languages of postcolonial theory: one states that by learning the dominant, colonizer’s language, you become an instrument to the colonizer, proving that your own language is less worthy of respect. Fanon, for example, was one writer that I read about last semester. He wrote about the Algerian revolution from the French and said that you cannot learn the language of the colonizer without subconsciously imbibing racist cultural symbolism within the language. Another narrative seeks to subvert the mainstream language by learning it, and by mastering it to an even greater extent than the colonizer. However, there is yet another narrative that points to hybridity as the ideal solution; it cannot be denied that some of the colonizer’s culture directly influences the colonized, so creating a hybrid language and culture is more inclusive of identities.

I am trying to connect all of this to the concept of silence. Obviously, the multiple translations have a silencing effect on Rigoberta Menchú’s narrative. Language, our primary mode of communication, is silencing because it encounters power and systems of oppression. It is both a means of liberation and a means of silencing a marginalized narrative.