Prof. Mahmud Hasan Khan: Featured Speech at the ULAB National Symposium 2025 on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o скачать в хорошем качестве

Prof. Mahmud Hasan Khan: Featured Speech at the ULAB National Symposium 2025 on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

LA LUTA LITERÁRIA: NGŨGĨ AND THE BATTLE FOR LANGUAGE AND LIBERATION July 31, 2025 FEATURED SPEECH “'Language' and 'Being': The Relevance of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Heidegger in Ethnomethodology" DR. MAHMUD HASAN KHAN Professor, Department of English and Humanities, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh ABSTRACT The house that human beings live in is the house of language. “Language speaks” or “language is the house of being,” Heidegger once proposed. A linguist whose aim is to write a thousand-page long reference grammar of a specific language, and a grammarian for whom the target is to write a prescriptive grammar, albeit their different epistemological biases study language as a specific articulation, no matter how fluid, dynamic and constantly changing a phenomenon language is. Insights from different disciplines (e.g., linguistics, philosophy, literary criticism and sociology) can be useful to conceptualize language both as (1) a means or a set of tools used by beings-in-the-world or members of a speech community to make sense of their concrete ontic everyday being; and (2) a norm-based phenomenon meant for ideal competent language users within a speech community who have access to what de Saussure defined as la langue. Heidegger did not focus on a specific language while using concepts like articulations, assertions, language and discourse. He had a general view in his mind, i.e., the ontological properties of language, and not the ontical properties, a linguist’s reference-grammar. Ngugi wa Thiong’o on the other hand, had a specific language, Gikuyu, his mother tongue, in his head. In his Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi remembers fondly his days growing up in the village speaking Gikuyu “in the fields” and “in and outside home.” For him, the language of their “evening teach-ins”, of “immediate and wider community” and “the language of our work-in-the fields” in the village “were one” (Ngugi, 1996). Instead of essentializing Ngugi as someone playing the narrow ethno-nationalist card, it is useful to see his approach as merely an advocacy for "the primacy" of mother tongue education. The use of mother tongue would allow the child to view the world in harmony, and not in conflict, as the child’s world is not ready yet for too much contradiction. Simultaneously, Ngugi had a bigger enemy to fight, the empire. Language for him was a site for struggle with specific historical nuances and consequences. Ngugi’s creative work in Gikuyu and critical work in English was already a message to the world that he was not fighting against a specific language but the language of the empires – French, Portuguese or English. His plea to abolish the English department in Kenya was never a plea to get rid of the literary canons. The third element of my paper deals with a sociological approach to language, i.e., ethnomethodology. For an ethnomethodologist, the use of language by the members of a speech community is done locally, endogenously “everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely [as] members’ work” (Garfinkel, 1996, p. 11). Language that we speak shapes us and we shape that language in turn. Ngugi and Heidegger, although they had entirely different political projects in mind, share some common grounds on “language as the house of being” and thus help widen an ethnomethodologist’s views of language.