Decolonizing the Mind

 Gearóid Denvir  Decolonizing the Mind: Language and Literature in Ireland The story of Ireland in the nineteenth century may be read as a classic colonial endgame. After the political subjugation of the country by an alien power, and, indeed, after the earlier plantation of a significant population from that power, the nineteenth century saw the cultural and linguistic assimilation of much of the native population into a provincial version of the culture of the colonizer. This process of assimilation was most pronounced in the Catholic middle and upper-middle classes, the so-called leaders of their society, which became prominent after the dismantling of the Penal Laws through the various acts of Catholic relief from the s onwards down to Catholic Emancipation in . This influential group of lawyers, doctors, merchants, and senior clergy—"men of the pale" as they were described by the first official historian of Maynooth College which educated them—were pragmatically intent on reaping the harvest of emancipation. Either consciously or subconsciously, they accepted the psychocultural and, indeed, political superiority of the outsider. They took upon themselves the mannerisms, the patriarchal attitude, the worldview, and above all the language, and, religion excepted, much of the cultural value system of the invader. Many of this class would have had no problem in agreeing fully with Sir George Baden-Powell who said, in , that "Ireland does not contain the necessary elements of a separate nationality—for among the inhabitants there is no unity or individuality of blood, religion, laws, occupations , sentiments, history or even tradition." Moreover, they would have had no difficulty in proclaiming along with one George Story, who wrote some two hundred years earlier in A true and impartial history of the most material occurrences in the kingdom of Ireland (), that the mere Irish were "perfect barbarians . . . till at length they were partly ci- . John A. Murphy, "Religion and Irish Identity," in Irishness in a Changing Society (Totawa, NJ, ), p. . . George Baden-Powell, The Saving of Ireland: Industrial, Financial Political (Edinburgh, ), p. . Quoted in Luke Gibbon,"Identity without a Centre: Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism," Cultural Studies, ,  (October, ), . Decolonizing the Mind: Language and Literature in Ireland  vilised by the English conquest of that country." This same conquest, in the earlier words of Barnaby Rich in his New description of Ireland (), sought of necessity to "draw after it the Lawe, Language and Habit" of the conqueror. The language shift from Irish to English in the nineteenth century was by any standards swift and dramatic. In the period from  to , a mere three generations, the number of Irish speakers declined from some three million, the great majority of whom would have almost certainly been monoglot, to the , monoglot speakers recorded in the census of . Many reasons have been advanced for this shift: the Great Famine, the education system and the consequent growth of literacy in English; the urbanization and commercialization of the country; the role of English in political, legal, and administrative life; the desire of Irish speakers to abandon the language. Thus Irish became, during the nineteenth century, the language of the outsider, the marginalized, the dispossessed, the rural backward poor; and English during this same period became the language of political and cultural hegemony, spoken by the insider, the privileged, the ruler and the urban middle and upper classes. The native speaker of Irish no longer perceived himself as being at the center should he adhere to the native language, and the mental eye was thus focused on another linguistic reality. This process of language change was not so passive or voluntary as is sometimes claimed, and it is not just the inevitable result of the modernizing process during imperialist times. Language change and cultural shift is, I would claim, the second phase of the colonial process, the subjugation of the mind and the spirit after the subjugation of the body, and it is often brought about with the full cooperation, indeed connivance, of certain elements of the colonized group. This concept lies at the heart of much postcolonial analysis, and it gives rise to some hard questions, and, indeed, in the Irish situation, to some uncomfortable answers. In his penetrating and challenging book Decolonising the

Linguistics · Irish and British Studies · Migration, Policy, and Dickens Studies · Psychology · Translation Studies and Practices · History · Philosophy

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