The late, England-based, Polish-born writer Joseph Conrad once said:
I began to think in English long before I mastered, I won’t say the style (I haven’t done that yet), but the mere uttered speech… Is it thinkable that anybody possessed of some effective inspiration should contemplate for a moment such a frantic thing as translating it into another tongue?
No. That’s the short answer to Conrad’s question. Leaving aside the controversy surrounding his famous novella, Heart of Darkness (Chinua Achebe’s 1975 public lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a good starting point), what should be clear is that Conrad is one literature’s foremost non-native English-speaking writers.
Not everyone was enthused about Conrad’s writing, though. He came under fire from fellow Poles for “betraying” his language. But he persevered and the literary canon is a better place because of his contributions.
What compels a non-native English speaker to pick up a pen or switch a laptop on in order to put their thoughts on paper in a language so different from theirs?
It’s a question I asked myself fourteen years ago when I started my blog, A Cuban in London. At the time I’d been living in the UK for almost ten years. Writing in English gave me a sense of freedom. It did away with any natural inhibitions that might have prevented flair. It also presented challenges. Not just the challenge of keeping an online journal (which is what a blog is effectively), but also the regular generation of ideas in another lexicon.
At this point I must add that I was no novice when it came to writing in English. I’d studied the language in university and taught it straight after (as a fully qualified ESOL and EFL teacher, I’m still involved in English language teaching). However, it’s a different ball game when you’re writing creative non-fiction, essays and articles for both online and hard copy publications.
My journey in the English language started as a reaction to my parents’ relationship woes. In Year 6, the first cracks in my folks’ marriage appeared and English was the refuge I sought and found amidst the constant bickering and arguing. Squeezed in a one-bed flat with five other occupants, I tried to find time and space to sound out the strange words staring out at me from my dad’s Basic English.
Unsurprisingly, this first foray became a lifelong affair with the language of Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi and Angelou. By the time I started uni, I could read in English without the help of a bilingual dictionary. Before the end of my second year, I was already thinking in the language.
Thinking in the language. Thinking in a foreign language.
Let’s pause here and ask ourselves what this really means and the implications for us, English as an Additional Language (henceforth EAL) writers.
More people speak English in the rest of the world than in native-English-speaking countries. The cultural richness that each of us brings to this linguistic melting pot is hard to quantify. But easy to highlight. English might lag behind both Mandarin and Spanish as the third most spoken language in the world, but it reaches further than the other two. This translates in local accents, grammar and cultural concepts, rendering the language ever-changing.
This is one of the elements that made me sign up to Medium years ago. As a member of a worldwide multicultural and multilingual community, I don’t want to be exposed to just one kind of writing. EAL writers bring their own flavour to English, be it essayists from Senegal, cook writers from Viet Nam or memoirists from Colombia.
Yes, there are hurdles to overcome when writing in a foreign language. Some ideas don’t travel well from Spanish to English, for instance. Grammatical structures might trip up even the most confident writer. And clear-cut concepts in an author’s mother tongue might be too ambiguous in English. My way to deal with these issues is by appealing to my two good friends: The Guardian Book of English Language and The Economist’s Style Guide. If you’re unsure when to use “like” or “such”, for example, a journalist’s guidebook offers handy and much welcome tips.
Yet, despite all this, I still advise non-native English speakers to pen their posts in the language of Zadie Smith. One of the main reasons is that as writers we ought to think always of how to challenge ourselves. In the same way our literary muscles need flexing, so do our linguistic ones. Another reason is that for many of us, migrating to another country brings in the immediate erection of a past. This past starts the minute we arrive at the airport or port. A past we’re likely to return to and plunder in the need to churn out ideas for our story-telling.
In a letter to New Zealand-born, British novelist Hugh Walpole, Joseph Conrad declares that:
English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption‑‑well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language.
That genius doesn’t exist in isolation. We’re all part of it. Both those born with the language and those who come to it later in life. Let’s enjoy our ride together.