Mixture of Language Varieties

As a typical postcolonial writer, Achebe sometimes chooses to alternate between language systems or varieties. Zabus (1991: 6) talks about the process which involves the fusing of European languages by writers as a way of decolonizing them. For example they use code­ switching (CS) and code-mixing (CM) as “poly-lingual writing techniques” (Zabus 1991: 6) to assign roles to their characters. Hudson (1996: 51) explains that CS occurs in a bilingual or multilingual situation where anyone who speaks more than one language chooses between them to suit a particular occasion. People switch codes because each language has a social function which no other language can perform. Hudson adds that CS enables individuals to manipulate the norms governing the use o f language varieties instead of acting “as sociolinguistic robots [who are] able to talk only within the constraints laid down by the norms of their society” (Hudson 1996: 53). While CS occurs in situations where language changes to correspond to changes in situation, CM is used by bilingual speakers without any change in situation. They use a few words of one language and then a few words o f another. In this case, speakers balance “two languages against each other as a kind of linguistic cocktail” (Hudson 1996: 53). The type of CS and CM practised by Achebe is quite different from the typical form described above by Hudson, which applies to a bilingual or multilingual situation where speakers and their listeners are all bilingual or multilingual and understand each other. On the other hand, Achebe is addressing an audience which includes

non-Ibo speakers. It is for this reason that he uses Ibo words only occasionally and in a way that their meanings can be deduced contextually. In addition he provides a gloss or a glossary to which readers can refer. Bandia (1996) explains that African writers sometimes resort to CS and CM when they cannot adequately express African socio-cultural reality and they find the use of indigenous words as the only way out. The following examples from Things Fall

Apart illustrate Bandia’s point:

1) He remembered how he had laughed when Ikemefuna told him that the proper name for a corn-cob with only a few scattered grains was eze-agadi-nwayi, or the teeth of an old woman (TFA, p. 25).

2) On her arms were red and yellow bangles, and on her waist four or five rows of

jigida, or waist-beads (TFA, p. 49).

In example (1), Achebe could have said “the proper name for a corn-cob with only a few scattered grains was the teeth of an old woman” but he creates a situation to enable him include an indigenous expression, eze-agadi-nwayi. Similarly, he uses the word jigida in example (2) and then explains that it means waist-beads. This technique of placing indigenous words side by side with European ones is a way of making the text less foreign through “Africanization” or “indiginization”.

Achebe also resorts to direct “borrowing” of Ibo words and expressions whenever he cannot find appropriate English words to express some typically traditional conditions or when he deliberately intends to “foreignize” the English language. The word iba, for example, is defined in the glossary as “fever”, but, as Kortenaar (2003: 127-29) explains, the author chooses not to translate the word because while fever, in English, can be diagnosed and treated with medicine, iba cannot. A careful reading of the story then reveals that iba is seen in the Ibo community as a spiritual disorder which, upon further probing, has something to do with an ogbanje. The word ogbanje has also been reproduced because the frequent death of

children in the traditional Ibo community is not just an issue of infant mortality but seen to be a spiritual problem related to one’s chi. This is to be distinguished from code-mixing and code-switching which involve mixing language in speech as opposed to borrowing or loaning an item from one language to become part of the other language. For example the writer introduces the word egwugwu (p 4) in a way that one would think it is an accepted English word, although it is has been put in italics to draw attention to its status as a decolonizing device. This practice is different from the way eze-agadi-nwayi and jigida are introduced in the examples given above. These two Ibo words are juxtaposed with English words to make it easier for non-Ibo readers to understand them. Another example of borrowing is in the sentence, “He could hear in his mind’s ear the blood-stirring and intricate rhythms o f the

ekwe and the udu and the ogene, and he could hear his own flute weaving in and out of them,

decorating them with a colourful and plaintive tune” (p. 5). The writer retains the names of these musical instruments in Ibo not only because they seem not to have exact English equivalents but also to preserve their onomatopoeic value. A more typical example of borrowing for sound effect is seen in ^"Gome, gome, gome, gome, boomed the hollow metal” (p. 7). It is the way Achebe wants the reader, Ibo or non-Ibo, to experience the sound o f the town-crier’s ogene “piecing the still night air” (p. 7) in Umuofia, a typical indigenous Ibo Community.

These local words and expressions, introduced gradually, become a frequent phenomenon in the novel as the reader reads on and steadily gets used to them. In this way, their use becomes more frequent and longer expressions are used without any gloss or footnote, since the reader is expected to have familiarised himself/herself with them: “The egwugwu house was now a pandemonium of quavering voices: Aru oyim de de de de dei! filled the air as the spirits o f the ancestors, just emerged from the earth, greeted themselves in their esoteric language” (pp. 62- 63). Indeed the esoteric language of the spirit cannot be easily translated into a foreign

language. It is therefore normal for the writer not to attempt to do so since he has no intention to betray the invisibility of the egwugwu. The writer is also by this technique asserting the African identity of the text through the decolonisation of the English language.