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#1357: The Kreyol discussion : Bell comments
From: madison bell <mbell@goucher.edu>
I have laid out of the latest Kreyol debate out of fatigue, boredom with
being slapped upside the head by specialists armed with appropriate
methodology, &c. However the mere knowledge that the debate was raging has
caused me to be visited by these wandering thoughts:
What is actually going to happen in this and other matters may not be what
one would theoretically desire. For example, I wish that the system of
educating Haitians in French (as it exists at the best schools, not the
worse ones) could be preserved alongside of whatever else develops
educationally. It is a great cultural resource to have a nucleus of people
around whose education is exactly that devised by the 18th century
Philosophes. It would be a shame to lose that. My wish is consonant with
Richard Morse's idea about trilingualism but I don't know if it is likely
to be gratified.
Here is something positive I think probably will happen, unplanned as
likely as not. It came to me by way of an analogy which I think is
pertinent, though weird.
For a very long time (ever since the Westernizing efforts of Peter the
Great) the elite of Russia all spoke French, wrote French, were educated in
French, and basically did everything in French except communicate with
their vassals. Russian was considered to be a backward and barbaric
tongue. Then, in the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia turned back to
Russian, as a language for writing and for intellectual discourse. The
result was an incredible flowering of national literature which includes
the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov and so on.
Something similar is going on in Haiti now, that is in at at least one
literary circle that I know of, Kreyol is the language for all purposes--
discussion, novel and poetry writing, everything. This in the sort of
group which I'd guess would have been functioning entirely in French a
generation back. This shift in cultural values is right for
producing masterpiece literature (and certainly there is no shortage of
subject matter....)
If a masterpiece literature emerges in the next generation or so, then an
educational system fully centered on the language in which the masterpieces
are written is likely to follow.
msb