Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."

But things are never this simple. When Wangero greets her mother in Lugandan ("Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!"--52),(5) she affirms her repudiation of English, the language of slavery. By implication, she indicts the practice of authors--Joyce, for example, or Walker herself--who decline to abandon that language at the bidding of political visionaries. Thus Walker remains enmeshed in problems of cultural access and linguistic authenticity, for writers at the American margins have long struggled with a paradox basic to their artistic identities: their language and their craft are inextricably intertwined with the hegemonic Anglo-Saxon culture that has systematically denied them their own voice, their own autonomy, their own identity. Black writers, their very tongues colonized, find themselves torn between the language they grew up speaking and some more authentic language or cultural orientation. How, demand artists like the American James Baldwin or the Caribbean George Lamming, can they ever achieve a voice of their own, a cultural authenticity, when they remain in linguistic bondage? Such writers fashion work that exists in a precarious and almost parasitic relation to a dominant and more or less unfriendly cultural and linguistic mainstream. They create what has been called a "minor literature."

Deleuze and Guattari, who refer briefly to "what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language," say that in "minor literatures . . . everything . . . is political" and that "everything takes on a collective value" (17). They argue, too, that the minor writer--notably Kafka--often effects revolutionary advances in literary sensibility. I remain doubtful that such an argument is really needed to explain the ability of marginal writers to produce substantial work across a broad spectrum. I would argue that in the hands of a sufficiently resourceful literary practitioner language can always be made to subvert hegemonic structures. Walker casts her lot with writers who remain confident of the boundlessness of literary affect achievable in English--writers like the Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison, who seem effortlessly to transcend the kind of anxieties Deleuze and Guattari would wish on them. These writers believe that culture is naturally enough eclectic, and that a language as rich as English, not to mention the manifold cultures that speak or are spoken by it, provides plenty of latitude for new voices, however subversive. They seem to view the possibilities of literary art as affording sufficient latitude to circumvent linguistic colonization. They prefer to see the resources of the English language and its canonical literature, as well as the larger cultural resources of the West, as theirs for the appropriating. Thus in Beloved, as Ellen Pifer has argued, Morrison rewrites Huckleberry Finn (511), and thus in Omeros Walcott reimagines several millenia of colonial history and culture to shape a vision that remains wholly of its Caribbean time and place. Thus, too, Walker loses nothing when she opts not to write in dialect--or Lugandan.