ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore the views of some writers about writing in English. It focuses on what have sometimes been called ‘the new English literatures’, and specifically on a number of writers for whom dilemmas over the language have been pressing ones, since they approached writing and English through schooling within a colonial or ex-colonial society. The chapter then explores a contemporary woman writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, who writes from experiences of exile and dislocation, and from the strengths as well as the drawbacks of becoming a writer in English. It concludes by returning to Seamus Heaney and to the continuities that exist between writers entering English from the peripheries, as it were, and writers whose relation to what Edward Said, the Palestinian American writer, called ‘the metropolitan centres’ seems less problematic.
