The Discourse of Otherness: Language Use in Bessie Head’s Maru

Abstract

This study uncovers how language is deployed in the service of a writer’s reconstruction and configuration of Otherness through a detailed close-reading of Bessie Head’s Maru. This is because of the paucity of scholarship on the ways language is deployed in the fabrication of Otherness in Head’s Maru.The position of this study is that language is integral and focal in discourse formation in the construction of the novel as an art and a genre of discourse. The scope of analysis in this study includes: the use of deixis to mark territorial otherness, the deployment of lexico-semantic infraction for exoticism and defamiliarisation, transitivity structures, and interrogative structures to uncover the discourse tenor, power structures which naturalises otherness. This paper adopts an analytic and descriptive approach within Norman Fairclough’s strand of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter, CDA) which stresses the focal role of language in unveiling the complex realities and regime of social power relations configured in discourse. Fairclough’s strand of CDA draws from the gains of Roger Fowler’s Critical Linguistics model which argues that language put to use in texts or discourses can tell us about a society’s worldview, and cultural practices__ such as ideology, and also from the Social Theory of Michel Foucault where discourse foregrounds asymmetrical social power. Significantly, this paper demonstrates the transdisciplinary synergy between sociolinguistics, theoretical sociology and literature (the novel) by its provision of how linguistic resource deployed in a literary text underscores Otherness as a phenomenon which is social, relational and dialectical. From the analysis, this paper submits that Otherness or the linguistic labelling of a social group and gender as “the outsider†as facilitated by the encoding power of language is man-made, and symptomatic of the politics and dynamics of social power relation.