An exploration of language and identity among young black middle class South African women

Abstract

The purpose of the research was to explore issues of identity amongst young, English speaking black middle class women focusing on belonging and alienation. Qualitative research using narrative interviews was conducted with 10 middle class women, aged between 20 and 35 years, who were among the first cohort of black children to attend model C schools at the end of the apartheid era and be taught in English. Several themes and findings were identified, starting with the multigenerational influence on the journey into being assimilated into the English language and culture. Grandmothers and parents experienced tensions between loss of indigenous languages and gaining class mobility for their daughters. Participants also unpacked their journeys of being assimilated into the English language and whiteness and the traumatic experiences they went through as their childhoods were racialised and they became positioned as inferior black people. These traumatic experiences of race continued into their adulthood and intersected with gender, class and language, as the women were positioned as ‘cultural clones’ in the workplace. Language also influenced the women’s intimate relationships as they positioned English speaking male partners as providers and therefore potential life partners. Issues of hair and skin colour were also found to be significant identity markers through insertion into western culture through language, and blackness is actively redefined, resisted and reclaimed. This shows how our identities are fragmented and fluid, allowing the women to experience multiple identities and make them work. The women experience tensions between the loss of their mother tongue and culture, and the positive gains of class mobility that they attribute almost solely to their adoption of the English language as their primary (or only) language of communication. They are alienated from their communities because of their immersion into English and western culture but they are actively generating a new sense of belonging and identity within a new imagined community of English speaking black middle class women