Hybrid

Auteur: Beatrice Waithira

 “‘They don’t understand Shona very well anymore’ her mother explained. ‘They have been speaking English for so long that most of their Shona has gone’.   What Maiguru said was bewildering. Besides, Shona was our language. What did people mean when they forgot it?’ ” [1]

 

“‘Actually we were frightened that day. And confused. You know, it’s easy to forget things when you’re that young. We had forgotten what home was like. I mean really forgotten-what it looked like, what is smelt like, all the things to do and say and not to do and say. It was all strange and new. Not like anything we ere used to. It was a real shock!’ ”[2]

 

“‘We shouldn’t have gone [to England]’ Nyasha was saying. ‘The parents ought to have packed us off home. They should have, you know. Lots of people did that. Maybe that would have been best. For them at least, because now they’re stuck with hybrids for children. And they don’t like it. They don’t like it at all. It offends them. They think we do it on purpose, so it offends them. And I don’t know what to do about it, Tambu, really I don’t. I can’t help having been there and grown into the me that has been there. But if offends them. I offend them. Really, it’s very difficult’”[3]

 

The narrator Tambudzai (also referred to as Tambu) is a young girl growing in a village in Zimbabwe. The first excerpt recounts Tambuzai’s shock when she learns that her cousins have forgotten their native language Shona upon their return from England.   Her reaction is typical of someone who has not lived abroad and hence, cannot comprehend the transformation that living abroad entails.  I personally would place the bulk of the blame on Tambuzai’s cousins’ parents. They could have prevented this loss of language by speaking to their children in Shona while living in England. For instance, in my case, I was born in an English-speaking country and I moved to a French-speaking country at the age of three. Even though we attended French schools, my mother enrolled us for English tutoring classes; she also spoke to us at home in English and in Gikuyu, the native language of the Gikuyu tribe of Kenya.  Thanks to my mother’s efforts I was able to retain my African language.

 

The second excerpt also resonates with my personal experience because it summarizes quite well the unpleasant aspects of the condition of living abroad. One experiences culture shock in one’s own native culture and one does not know exactly what to do with this state of shock. It is quite disheartening to feel that way. One also feels awkwardness, frustration and extreme discomfort. 

 

The third excerpt is particularly interesting for in it Nyasha tries to explain how living in England has transformed both her and her brother into hybrids. Nyasha also feels that her parents resent her hybrid nature. This notion of hybrididity brings to mind the following a passage from Michael Cronin’s Across the Lines: travel, language and translation. “science fiction […] portrays the translator as necessarily a hybrid creature. This hybridity allows for communication to take place in the journey to other places and times and often proves a more effective means of survival than the monoglossic rhetoric of the translator’s fellow beings” [4]. Although the notion of hybridity in this passage is specifically applied to the translator, it can be applied to Nyasha and other people who are polyglots and who have lived abroad. Once a person lives abroad, a transformation always takes place. That person can never return to the person they used to be before they moved abroad. However, I don’t agree that “[hybridity] proves a more effective means of survival than the monoglossic rhetoric of the translator’s fellow beings” because being a hybrid alienates you from your native culture. You are in a constant state of in between, entre-deux, neither here nor there. I don't see how this is a more effective means of survival, because it can lead to depression, bulimia or other disorders that are the outward manifestation of the internal state of confusion and turmoil of the hybrid individual.