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NOUS, women, zamen —what do these words mean? Since I ask the question in English, the reply, in English, will be “adult human females” for the second term, women , pronounced (despite orthography) “wimen,” not “wohmen” or “wahmen.” As for the first and third words, if we knew Greek, we might remember that nous , pronounced “noos,” refers to “mind” or “reason,” but in English the answer for both nous and zamen is nothing.
I focus on these words to emphasize the implicit ground of meaning that underlies the first person plural, which each of these locutions designates in another language: the first in French, the second and third in Chinese. Translinguistic associations may have their uses, just as bilingual puns have their fascination: one speculates that the intersection of nous (“noo”) meaning “we” in French and nous (“noos”) meaning “mind” in Greek may have intersected fruitfully in Cartesian philosophers conversant with Greek. The two Chinese words are useful in illustrating an aspect of we references that may not always be obvious: first-person-plural references are sometimes not equivalent, even in the same language. For the Chinese women —pronounced“wohmen” but orthographically identical with English women —refers generically to any group subsuming the speaker or writer. (A “feminist” clothing store in New York called itself “WOMEN”— meaning, in Chinese and in English, “We, women.”)
The Chinese word zamen , however, immediately identifies the speaker as coming from north China, specifically from the city of Beijing, and it embodies a subtle modification of the inclusive first-person-plural reference: zamen refers not to any group that includes the speaker or writer but only to those who are both present when the word is spoken and attending to the speaker. How useful this delimited first person plural may be will be obvious to anyone who wants to define a group within a crowd—say, at a cocktail party—solely by a responsiveness to the sound of a speaker's voice. In other words, anyone present who listens to what is said is part of the “we”; anyone, even if physically present, who does not hear and attend to the message is not part of the “we.” This discrimination of first-person pluralities, between those who are “attending” and those who are not, serves to highlight the ambiguities implicit in the pronoun we ; these ambiguities will also serve to underscore the diversities in US.
We may ask, Of what (or whom) is the pronoun we a sign? In addition to the editorial and the imperial wes , are there other varieties? And does the use of this sign involve problematics that generally escape notice? Are there implicit as well as explicit wes ? Can a careful analysis of different uses of we reflect some light on ourselves and on our pluralities of self?
Let me begin with a personal anecdote. As a young man, I worked in a publishing house securing reprint rights for the prestigious Anchor Books line. One of the books I was interested in was published by Oxford University Press, which—at the time—denigrated paperbacks and was loath to release its titles for reprint. When I recommended to my superior that we try to get this work for Anchor, his reply was hard for me to forget: with a resigned sigh, he said, “We don't have a Chinaman's chance.” I agreed with him, somewhat flushed and self-conscious at my Chinese descent, and hoped he wouldn't notice that he was talking about my chances. This was my first encounter with what I came to characterize as the uses and abuses of we . Since then, the same notion has been embodied in a joke that has circulated about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Surrounded by hostile Indians, the Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “Tonto, we are in trouble.” To which Tonto replies, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”
It is, of course, the white male's meaning of we that has been the target of feminist and black critiques of the dominant ideologies. This is the meaning, implicit or explicit, that has prevailed, significantly since the first words of the United States Constitution: “We the people.” Never mind that “we the people” did not include black males, who were not granted the right to vote until 1868, when the fourteenth Amendment was ratified; nor did “we the people” include women, who did not win the right to vote until 1920, when the nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
But there are other instances of the co-optive we , in which disparate voices are subsumed and erased in a homogenous collective. Having grown up in the United States, I am as susceptible as anyone else to the charms of Cole Porter, one of whose most memorable songs is “Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love.” Imagine my chagrin when, in reading the lyrics of this song in The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter , originally published in 1928, I discovered that the first refrain began—instead of the now famous “Birds do it, bees do it”—“Chinks do it, Japs do it.” Fortunately, Porter changed these lines when he thought they might prove offensive (Kimball 72). But what surprises me, even in retrospect, is that for certain mentalities—including those of sophisticated and educated individuals like Cole Porter, who was, after all, a Yale man—Chinks and Japs were as far from the human experience as the birds and the bees. The implied “we” or “us” in Cole Porter's song was a sign that designated “American,” but it was a notion of “American” that did not include some Americans.
It would be easy to dismiss these concerns as an overpreoccupation with the waywardness of the past: people didn't know any better in those days, we might be tempted to say, implying thereby that the problem is solved and that we, today, do know better. But, alas, there are virulent signs that this anglicization of the oriental, this occidentalizing of the East, this homogenization of the heterogenous, is occurring today in these United States.
One example of the pseudo-homogenous we is the rampant and unabashed anti-Japanese sentiment that seems pervasive today. The purchase of Rockefeller Center by Japanese investors offended the sensibilities of Andy Rooney, the wag of Sixty Minutes , the socially conscious activist television news magazine. 1 Deftly, but disingenuously, Rooney related some vicious ethnic jokes, hypocritically distancing himself from them: “The day it was announced that the Japanese had bought Rockefeller Center for $846 million in cash, the joke around the office was, ‘Did you hear about Lockefella Centa?’’ With scarcely disguised lack of irony, Rooney concludes: “I don't like Japanese real estate giants buying our country. I don't defend it on intellectual grounds. This is just the gut reaction of an All-American boy who was brainwashed during World War II. I know it's wrong, but I can't help myself.” It is understandable that one might be upset about fighting for one's country only to lose it to the enemy. But what about fighting for one's country only to have one's property stolen by one's own government? This is precisely what happened to Japanese Americans who fought valiantly in World War II while their relatives were sent to relocation camps and the families’ property put up for sale at bargain-basement prices. Some of the most prosperous landowners in California today are the beneficiaries of property illegally confiscated by the United States government from its Japanese American citizens. The reparations to the Japanese Americans voted in 1988 by Congress but not yet funded are a pittance of the value of the land that the Japanese Americans lost.
Andy Rooney's indignation over the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center does not stem from a zealous nationalism. Japan does not rank first among foreign countries in holdings in the United States: Great Britain, Canada, and West Germany, by some counts, own more of this country than Japan does. Yet one does not encounter anti-British slurs or “north-of-the-border” slanders or “Kraut” jokes; indeed, the purchases of American corporations, real estate, and property by the English or the Canadians or the Germans hardly makes the news at all. There is a scarcely disguised racism in Rooney's remarks, the same racism that was a factor in the seizure, nearly fifty years ago, of thousands and thousands of acres of choice California land from Americans of Japanese descent. No holdings were taken during that period from Americans who traced their ancestry to Germany or Italy, although this country was also at war with those countries. One wishes that Rooney could have been as upset about his government's theft of the patrimony of Japanese Americans as he is about the Japanese buying an American landmark. His “gut reaction” engenders anti-Japanese feeling. What “gut reactions” might there be in Japanese American soldiers who also fought (many even died) for the United States in World War II (indeed, the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which served in Italy, was one of the most decorated in the war)?
Another example of the co-optive, homogenized we can be found in the pseudopatriotic atavisms of the “US English” movement. English, in the view of these dictators of the first person plural, must be made the official language regardless of the demographics and regardless of the will of the majority. If the population becomes increasingly Hispanic—in California and Florida, Hispanics are approaching the majority—they must be prevented from imposing their language on the English-speaking minority. Where is it written that the majority rules except when that majority is not English-speaking? Except in South Africa, the majority rules, regardless of its ethnic makeup. Even there, the situation is changing. Democracy is not defined as rule by a white, English-speaking majority.
The national opinion survey on language usage in the United States sent out by the United States English movement contains the following question: “Do you favor providing election materials in foreign languages?” The wording begs the question, for what is foreign to one American may not be foreign to another American; foreign here means only “foreign to monolingual speakers of English.” 2 The “we Americans” whom the question implicitly addresses excludes all those naturalized citizens for whom English was a foreign language; the “we” excludes those who may be comfortably bilingual or trilingual, who may be “naturalized” citizens of the United States who came from another country, whose native language was not English. Then, attributing to a multiplicity of languages all the ills of the world, the form asks, “In order to avoid the political upheavals over language that have torn apart Canada, Belgium, Sri Lanka, India, and other nations, would you favor legislation designating English the official language of the United States?” There may have been virulent controversies over language in Belgium and Canada, but these countries can hardly be considered the trouble spots of the world. Notice that no mention is made of peaceable Switzerland, where more than one language is spoken. There is also no mention of Northern Ireland, where the common language spoken by Catholics and Protestants doesn't seem to have reduced their “political upheavals.”
The English-only movement overlooks the rich linguistic heritage in these United States. It forgets that at one point German almost became Virginia's official language; it overlooks the potential advantage that a multilingual population has in commerce and international relations. Switzerland again comes to mind: that country is important to world affairs out of all proportion to the size of its population or the extent of its natural resources or the power of its armies. The movement also ignores the real secret of the economic miracle in Japan: the Japanese have learned English as a second language in the last twenty years—and learned it well. 3
Advocates of an official language for the United States seek in an Anglo-English hegemony the true identity of America, overlooking all the evidence to the contrary: the railroads in this country were built by Chinese; the cotton plantations were tilled by blacks from Africa; the French and Germans, along with the Scandinavians, settled the Midwest; until Thomas Jefferson, the French owned much land between the Mississippi and the Rockies; and the Southwest was, until the second half of the nineteenth century, Mexican territory. The United States is not—despite the myths about the Mayflower—New England writ large. The greatest irony is that the US English movement is spearheaded by a visible immigrant, S.I. Hayakawa, whom many blueblood descendants of the Mayflower would doubtless have spurned. Some Japanese Americans have become so occidentalized that they themselves become advocates of a cultural racism—in favor of an Anglo-American ideology and against their own heritage.
Around the Christmas season, many Americans make the blithe assumption that all the world is Christian, that the holiday belongs to everyone alike. Well, some of us Americans are not Christians and do not consider ourselves heathens. There are among us, Americans all, devout Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, some resolute atheists, and doubting agnostics. Some of us celebrate Hanukkah at this time of year. Yet, our greetings presuppose a “we,” an “us,” that imposes a homogenized image on others, as if any departure from the model were an imposture or a social deviation. These inadvertent put-downs pervade even ordinary speech; they are not limited to special occasions. I remember hearing a radio interview in which Joseph Papp, born Joseph Papirofsky to Polish Jewish parents in Brooklyn, was invited to comment on his long and distinguished career in the theater. When the director of Shakespeare in the Park, the founder of the American Place Theatre, and one of the major forces in American drama for the last generation was asked the usual fatuous question: “Mr. Papp, when you started out forty years ago, did you ever imagine that you were embarking on a glorious crusade for American theater?” he replied, as near as I can recollect, “First of all, the Crusades were not glorious, and second of all, ‘crusade’ is not a Jewish word.”
Our uses of language, overtly or covertly, embody attitudes we may not recognize, imply a “we” that may not be as inclusive as we imagine. Precise usage is not only a matter of good manners, of avoiding language that may offend other people, it's also a matter of clear thinking, of understanding the import of what we are saying. Anyone who has spoken of“Jewing someone down” or of“finding a nigger in the woodpile” or of “hitting a Chinese home run” is reflecting a bigotry, advertently or inadvertently, that needs to be extirpated—all the more because such remarks are insidious and infect the thoughts of even well-meaning people. “Chinks and Japs” are not interchangeable with “birds and bees.”
New Yorkers are familiar with the celebration that occurs each New Year's Eve when television channels and radio stations all focus on that magical moment when the ball drops from the Times Tower at the stroke of midnight. Yet, when I grew up in New York, it didn't dawn on me until quite late that at the very moment when that ball magically descends, the New Year has already passed—or has yet to arrive—in twenty-three other time zones in the world. It would undermine the heightened drama of the occasion for the announcer to stress that this precise moment is important only to those living in the region that follows Eastern Standard Time. Somehow, it takes the edge off things when you are told about a universal moment that applies only to a twenty-fourth of the world. New York may be—as the promoters say—“where it's at,” but it is not the world, even if some New Yorkers think so.
There are, to be sure, inclusive wes and surrogate wes , and both have implications worth examining. The inclusive we may be represented by this flatteringly comprehensive opening of an article by Carl Sagan: “In October 1957, we humans launched a machine into space that could orbit the earth. Now, less than a third of a century later, we have visited the outermost known planet in the Solar System. We have passed beyond the planetary frontiers. We have explored close-up more than 50 worlds” (6). No one can read this without some sense of pride in belonging to the marvelous species that has accomplished all these things. I suppose human beings could be criticized for arrogance by all the other species, all the other life-forms, if they only had the intelligence to be captious. Sagan inculcates all of us in “man's glorious achievements” (it is significant that man is used). But, try as I might, I resist this supererogation of credit: I do not feel that I contributed in any way to these achievements, not even with my tax dollars. Despite my allegiance to the human race, and flattered as I may be that I conceived, planned, and implemented the Voyager probes, this bit of courteous credit sharing is not—for me at least—credible. And despite my sense of relatedness to all human beings, I cannot imagine that every human being had a part in this triumph: some of us may even have opposed these intrusions into the heavens. If I pursue the question, I may have to entertain alternatives that are either ludicrous or offensive. Does the “we” in Sagan's “we humans,” the “we” who have explored the solar system, include the Bushmen of Africa, the Eskimo, the drug addicts, the insane? If the“we” does not include them, is it because I do not consider them human? This inclusive “we” may be safe enough when triumphs are being recounted: most literate human beings would not object to being included in such glorious achievements. But, then, what about unconscionable evils. Are “we” equally inculcated there? Yet there is an exclusivity here as well, not unlike the zamen expression I began with, because the medium of discourse, the written word, immediately excludes those who cannot read and who, therefore, will not discover all those ventures into the solar system that “we humans” have accomplished in the last thirty years. The point here is not to censure Sagan for his generosity in sharing the achievements of the space program with all human beings; it is to question a co-optive definition of human that he may not, in fact, subscribe to.
There is a cultural fascism afoot, with the likes of Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and now Francis Furuyama, that sees the triumph of the West as the salvation of the world. Its proponents preach a return to the core values of Western civilization and vaunt the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Even if one could justify a return to feudal thinking in these days of the global village, even if one could somehow sanction the cultural imperialism that preaches the Westernization of the world, one would have difficulty with the monolithic, purist—one might almost say Aryan—version of history that these cultural reactionaries purvey. For their vision of a straight-line inheritance from Greek civilization through Europe to the modern Western world cannot be sustained by history. Their view is self-serving and carefully selective. They distort history in the same way that Americans have distorted Thanksgiving by celebrating the holiday as a tribute to the pilgrims, rather than to the Wampanoag Indians who welcomed the pilgrims. The demagogues of Western civilization disregard the contributions of non-Westerners to the development of civilization. Where would the revival of classical learning be without the great Arab thinkers Avicenna (980–1037) and Averroës (1126–89)? Where would the great explorers be without the compass, which was not a Western invention? Where would the spread of learning be without the invention of rag paper and printing, neither of which was perfected in the West?
When Francis Furuyama writes, in his “End of History?” “For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind” (9), he is mouthing arrogant provincialities. Egypt and Algeria are farther away from the Eurocentric center of civilization and might be as remote from Furuyama's greatest Neoplatonic thinker of the early Middle Ages, who in his youth sought out the wisdom of Persian and Indian philosophy after pursuing his studies in Alexandria. Yet on 12 November 354, the little Algerian town of Souk-Ahras (a name more farfetched than Burkina Faso, at least to Western ears) produced one of the greatest Christian philosophers, Augustine. The “strange” thoughts in upper Egypt, where Plotinus is said to have been born, and in Souk-Ahras, Augustine's birthplace, managed to transform Western thought. Their origins outside the Western citadels are, of course, forgotten in the hegemonic interpretation of civilization as an exclusively Western invention. For Furuyama's purposes, the thoughts of the Japanese Zen masters or of the Chinese Confucians or Neo-Confucians matter little, despite their having influenced more than half the world, not all of which is uncivilized.
Even those raised to believe in the canonicity of the Western tradition are beginning to see the light. In a tortuous retrospective article on T S. Eliot, Cynthia Ozick reveals both admiration for and revulsion against the Anglo-American poet-dramatist and begins to see her blithe and youthful self as somehow mesmerized by the compulsion to be aristocratically English. Her characterization of Eliot demythologizes him; it also reflects a certain self-recrimination. “It may be embarrassing for us now to look back at that nearly universal obeisance to an autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman—especially if we are old enough (as I surely am) to have been part of the wave of adoration. In his person, if not in his poetry, Eliot was, after all, false coinage” (121). Those who deny their heritage, even if they achieve eminence, are not worth a plug nickel: their species is specious. For Ozick, a Jew, Eliot's anti-Semitism is a bitter pill to swallow. She winces at such excerpts from Eliot as “The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot” and “Rachel née Rabinovitch / Tears at the grapes with murderous paws.” Ozick realizes that Eliot's “we” does not include her and that in order to relate fully to his words, she must betray her Semitic self.
But for every Ozick who has removed the scales of another's prejudice from her eyes, there are many who are still unaware of the self-deprecations involved in their espousing the Western doxology. Furuyama uses the phrase “universal homogenous state” several times, without apparent self-irony. One thinks of the Anglo-American fondness for homogenized white milk, which is offered as a universal panacea to build healthy bodies and wholesome minds. This vision of homogenized culture has no room for anyone who may suffer from “lactose aversion.” But Furuyama's vision is jejune: “[I]n the universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs are satisfied.” He relegates the major human problems to a parenthetical aside: “While there was considerable work to be done after 1806—abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers, women, blacks, and other racial minorities, etc.—the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon” (5). The onslaught of a white, Western, Eurocentric hegemonic ideology in this age is breathtaking; there is a heedlessness in these sweeping formulations. The irony is that they are made by an American whose skin is yellow and who is descended from Japanese. Furuyama is himself an exponent of what he is striving for: a universal homogenous state where everyone will look alike and think alike and the reigning thought pattern will be Western, liberal, and democratic. Orwell presented no prospect more horrific.
But if certain intellectuals are retreating into feudal and racist thinking, there are signs that the populus is not convinced that a monocultural hegemony lies in the future. North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arizona have all passed legislation that will mandate a second language in elementary school by the early nineties. One should not be distracted by the bilingual debate: the issue should not be whether instruction is offered in either Spanish or English. Bilingualism should be a matter not of either-or , as it was in the sixties, but of both-and . The goal should be to ensure that no American in the future is limited to one language, whatever that language is, and there must be a second-language movement dedicated to achieving that goal. Almost certainly one of those languages will be English, since in the rest of the world English is the second language of choice, but the United States must also be competitive in its command of second and third languages.
The external pressures for achieving this end need no repeating, but the internal mandate is not as often recognized. I have attacked the practice of using “foreign” to designate languages other than English, for it privileges the monolingual English-speaking American. But fairness and equitability are not the sole considerations: we Americans must recapture the multilingual heritage of our own country. This nation was not developed by people who spoke English exclusively. Our textbooks have taken note—perhaps because they are in English—only of records written in English. The need to teach a second language in this country is, therefore, not merely a response to external pressures, it stems from an obligation to rediscover our own multilingual past, which, ironically, the early immigrants, as well as more recent ones like Hayakawa and Furuyama, have assiduously denied.
We must henceforth be distrustful of any unambiguous “we.” With the onset of the European Community due in 1992, I find it telling—reflective of both the past and the future—that Otto van Habsburg, who is the seventy-seven-year-old son of Charles IV, the last monarch of the Austro-Hungarian empire, holds Hungarian, Austrian, and West German citizenship and speaks Hungarian, German, English, and French. His example is a reminder that the past was neither monolingual nor monocultural; nor will the future be monolingual or monocultural. We have been misled into believing the myth of monolingualism and the false concept of a “universal homogenous state.” We have been deluded into thinking that unity depends on uniformity. But our strengths come from diversity, and we are skeptical of the single-valued “we.” “We, the people” in the United States are many and many-splendored: we have been the crossroads of cultures for all the exiles and idealists in the world, for the despised and the enterprising. The Statue of Liberty does not say, “Give me your tired, your poor—provided that they promise to learn English”! We will, henceforth, be skeptical of “we,” mindful of the pluralities in the first person plural that offer a “conjugation” of the first person plural to reinforce that skepticism: he men; we, men; wee men; women; wo-men . These locutions may stretch our concept of collective self: perhaps they will remind us.
The author is Professor of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington, and is Resident Director ofthe university's East Asian Summer Language Institute. An earlier version of this paper was presented before the panel Defining What We Do: A Discussionof the MLA's Statement on Language Study in the United States, at the MLA convention, 27 December 1989, Washington, DC.
1 This was written before the more recent controversy developed over Rooney's allegedly racist comments about blacks, reported by the Advocate . In retrospect, the interesting thing about these two incidents is that the anti-Japanese slur hardly made a ripple, but the antiblack remark caused a commotion.
2 I have written about the neglected pluralism in American culture and the incipient bias of designating languages other than English as “foreign” in “Taking the ‘Foreign’ Out of Foreign Language Teaching.”
3 Some advocates of English as the official language exhibit a command over English that is, as James Kilpatrick points out, none too sure: “[L]et me cite a few Horrible Examples of pronouns gone beserk. The first comes, alas, from a bulletin put out last year by English First, an organization that seeks a constitutional amendment declaring English to be our official language: ‘Last year, Congressman Don Edwards made you and I a promise … ’ Aaargh! This kind of English?”
4 A Jewish colleague points out that the term Judeo-Christian is not favored by “identified Jews”: “The phrase strikes me as an attempt by members of either group,” he writes, “to erase cultural, religious, and sociopolitical differences that first became insignificant (except as stumbling blocks) in assimilationist climates in nineteenth-century western European countries.”
Eoyang, Eugene. “Taking the ‘Foreign’ Out of Foreign Language Teaching.” ADFL Bulletin 20.2 (1989): 5–10. [Show Article]
Furuyama, Francis. “End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18.
Kilpatrick, James. “ ‘Whom’ Not Yet Ready for the Scrapyard.” Universal Press Syndicate 11 Feb. 1990.
Kimball, Robert, ed. The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter . New York: Knopf, 1983.
Ozick, Cynthia. “A Critic at Large: T. S. Eliot at 101.” New Yorker 20 Nov. 1989: 119–54.
Rooney, Andy. “The Selling of America.” Tribune Media Services 6 Nov. 1989.
Sagan, Carl. “The Triumph of the Voyager.” Parade Magazine 26 Nov. 1989: 6+.
© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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