Teaching Shakespeare's sonnets in Botswana: the challenges of culturally-inscribed symbolism

Abstract

In the English speaking world, the teaching of Shakespeare has historically been lauded as a prerequisite for cultural sophistication, and despite the 21st Century’s post-colonially sensitive African academia, it remains compulsory on many University curricula. Shakespeare, it sometimes seems, is uniquely transcendent of Western imperialist propaganda of race and culture. Notwithstanding such naivety, when Batswana students study Shakespeare’s poetry, they encounter the confusion of culturally-inscribed root metaphor, or put another way, canonical Western literary symbolism. As the eminent postcolonial critic Edward Said argued, many of the major cultural debates of recent years depend upon deciphering the real meaning of metaphor. Focusing on the teaching of Shakespearean sonnets to Batswana students, this article seeks to interrogate the hermeneutic aporia caused by divergent cultural understandings within several specific types of conventional Western literary symbols. For instance, in the category of “the weather”, the symbolic connotations of the Shakespearean lexis “rain” are contradictory to those understood culturally by Batswana, regardless of whether it is translated into its equivalent of “pula” [rain] or “go na” [to rain] in the Setswana language or not. Three of the four instances of “rain” in the sonnets function as a synecdoche for bad weather and thus a symbol of life’s unhappiness – a meaning problematically antithetical to the univocal Batswana understanding of “rain” as a synecdoche for good weather, the harbinger of fertile soil, and hence a symbol of life’s blessings. The result is exegetical confusion, caused fundamentally not by the problems of translation, or even of language per se, but of cultural symbol.