A FOCUS ON DR.RUFUS'S LECTURE: LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND RESISTANCE

-Sridevi Meenal Shanmugam

The Department of English Aided recently inaugurated the “Literary & Debating Association” for the year 2024-2025. III year UG students and I and II year PG, research scholars and department professors were the audience of this insightful event. This inauguration was a grand success accompanied by an invigorating lecture on the topic, “Poetics & Politics in Post-Colonial Studies” by the renowned resource person, Dr. Samuel Rufus.

To say the lecture was an eye-opener for the audience would be an understatement. The knowledge imparted by Dr.Rufus was significant, it didn’t just apply to students who studied literature as a subject as it was addressed to everyone who speaks any language. Setting aside the fact that this was a literature lecture, the way Dr.Rufus beautifully explained how language impacts, affects and influences people day to day was remarkable and could have easily made anyone with little interest in language listen to what he had to say.

The lecture started off with discourse on stereotypes and how harmful it could be or impact a person, how language itself could be derogatory based on how a user chooses to use it and how the user is directly influenced by their culture and the people around them, how language can and could be used as a micro-aggressive tool that targets a specific group of people, delightfully depicted how language evolved along with its users.

Addressing “Mass Culture”, a very valid and essential factor that drives the general crowd into the ‘sheep mind-set’. The ‘My favorite actor endorsed a Prada Bag and I want it’ sort of influence that media and people have on us.

Diving nextly onto how language is a tool, an identity, an innate object that connects inherently to the user. Of how language can be used to degrade and uplift. The same people that derogated the ethnic culture of African-American or any Black people enjoying rap, reggae, blues and jazz without understanding the underlying meaning of ‘fighting back against the discrimination through music, language or by any means at all’. 

Words aren’t just words, they are an expression that etches themselves deep into our eroding bones. The same words that have the power to make a young girl wonder why she isn’t beautiful because her skin isn’t fair and praised in books, media or by people, the same words that have the power to make a woman believe she is phenomenal and that she doesn’t need anyone else’s approval to be unashamedly her authentic self because at the end of the day people are still going to be talking whether it be praise or hate that is set forth.

Language has the potential to target and it does it very effectively which is why a little negative something that someone has told stuck through your mind fighting time and a little positive something that someone has told instantly brightened your awfully boring and dull day, making you think about it for the rest of your life.

Linguistic Resistance, an awe inducing movement that reformed the lives of every non-native English speaker covered in the lecture. The very ability someone has to entirely change a language and make it their own. “The Language I speak, becomes mine” [Kamala Das in her poem, ‘An Introduction’] and so it does, Language is like water that readily flows and takes any form, you pour it in a cup and its a cup of water, your pour it in a bottle and its a bottle of water.

Likewise, the language spoken by the user takes many forms, AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is a wonderful example of this. A more common example would be how a certain language has its own lingo that varies from generation to generation, currently its GenZ lingo but when someone who’s 20 now reaches a prime age the lingo would have been passed down and undoubtedly changed for better or worse.

The hierarchy that stereotypes build and influence was a great point covered in the lecture. Dr. Rufus iterated that stereotypes always have one at the top of the hierarchy and one at the bottom, it’s inter-dependent and doesn’t make sense without one another. We can only call someone short because we are able to compare the shorter person to someone taller. Short and Tall, a categorisation from keen observation and comparison. But do comparisons have the capacity to be harmless? The same comparison in a different context causes stereotypes, Pretty vs Ugly, Skinny vs Fat, Fair vs Dark. Why do we call people ugly when how a person looks differs in different perspectives? How can language be so demeaning yet still be accepted worldwide? Continuous stereotypes that target a specific group of people turn into stigma, a malicious way of dehumanizing someone through language, a very real factor that can very well ruin a person’s life by putting them in the lowest of the human chain and giving them no space to fight back. So, how can we fight back? The answer is simple, resistance. The will to not surrender and keep fighting back. We only have vernacularity in language thanks to the numerous amount of ethnic groups and people in it who strived to not let a language colonize them. Resistance is the only reason people have their own, colloquial way of using a language. The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage is a great example of resistance helping people mold and bend language according to their will.

Another important point emphasized in the lecture was how euphemisms and metaphors have always been used to dehumanize us in a hidden context. Virginia Woolf was the first one to point out how women have always been addressed with ornamental titles like angels, honey and what not. Woolf wrote “Killing the Angel in the House” where she insisted that women be addressed as women not degraded, not adorned with metaphors that men use for their advantage, but as their own authentic selves, she wrote that killing the ‘angel’ that caters to men’s need disregarding their own and becoming a numb shell of someone’s shadow was a part of being a woman writer. Following Woolf, many feminist writers emerged like Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott and so on.

Dr.Rufus ends his insightful lecture by remarking a quote that says “Humans are textual beings” and bringing attention to the most important takeaway from this lecture, that only through true liberation in mind and language can we truly enter true celebration. Time flew by so fast that the two hours Dr.Rufus had lectured us had seemed like mere two minutes maybe it was due to the fact that the lecture was interactive from the start to end and left the audience wanting for more, the fact that it literally grasped the attention of even a single fly passing by idly minding its own business.

Well, as Dr.Rufus mentioned, that is the power that language holds, the power that makes people listen, learn and change their perspective and thus broadening it. As literature students and aspiring writers, we promise to hold this power with respect and use it to its fullest potential. A successful inauguration with a mind-blowing lecture, one down and many more to go.

*Picture in Header : Dr.Rufus addressing the gathering (Picture credit: Vismaya V)