Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

My paper focuses on Pakistani writers who have chosen to write in the English language in their quest for creative self-expression and self-actualization. I study the phenomenon by surveying the work of selected poets and fiction writers from Pakistan in order to delineate and assess the possible influences and consequences of their choice and to determine the nature of their relationship to the medium of their creative expression. In the process, I address the following questions, among others, with an aim to discover ways and means of recuperating the socio-cultural resources necessary to the health of a pluralistic, polyglossic society that the choice of the Master’s language may have compromised: What is at stake when an implanted language is deployed for creative and personal self-expression? Is the use of such a language, to begin with, a matter of choice, or a function of one’s class and environment? Is it a burden in itself, or release from the burden of one’s cultural identity or identities? What is the relationship of the adopted, grafted language to the vernacular, or vernaculars native to the place and its people? And how far is it possible to shape the implanted language to make it serve the purposes, needs, and aspirations (creative, as also personal and political) of the people to whom it is neither endemic nor natal, in that it lacks the social practice, cultural symbology and markers of allusion for the original and spontaneous speech communities to which it is introduced?