You Are Not Alone in This Question
If you have found yourself typing “always italicise how to write while colonised” into a search bar, you are carrying a specific and profound weight. It is not a query about grammar. It is a search for a method, a protocol, a way to navigate the impossible space of creation under constraint. You are likely a writer, an academic, a poet, or a storyteller working within a legacy of colonial language, trying to make your truth visible without having it be swallowed whole by the very structures you critique.
The act of writing while colonized is an act of translation and resistance happening simultaneously. The language you must use to be heard is often the language of the colonizer, carrying with it assumptions, hierarchies, and a worldview that seeks to erase your own. The directive to “always italicise” emerges as a tactical response. It is a way to mark the foreign, but in doing so, it forces a confrontation: what is truly foreign here? The word, or the power structure that demands its marking?
This guide is for you. We will move beyond the simple stylistic rule to explore the philosophy, the practical application, and the profound implications of italicizing your voice. This is about making your positionality visible, not as an apology, but as a critical framework embedded in the text itself.
Understanding the Weight of the Italic
Before reaching for the keyboard shortcut, it is crucial to understand what that slanted text actually does on the page. In standard English typographic convention, italics have several accepted uses:
– Emphasizing a word within a sentence.
– Denoting the titles of books, films, or other major works.
– Setting off foreign words or phrases that have not been fully adopted into the English lexicon.
It is this third use that becomes the battleground. The style guide rule seems neutral: “Italicize non-English words.” But this neutrality is an illusion. The decision of what is “foreign” and what is “domestic” is a political one, rooted in a center-periphery model where English is the unmarked, default center.
When you write while colonized, you are constantly navigating this center. Your world, your concepts, your ancestors’ words are perpetually pushed to the margins, visually set apart as “other.” To “always italicise” in this context is to consciously adopt and subvert this rule. It becomes a strategy of hyper-visibility. By italicizing not just the obviously “foreign” term but the entire texture of your thought, you force the reader to acknowledge the act of translation happening at every moment. You refuse to let your experience be absorbed seamlessly into the colonizer’s narrative.
The Colonized Writer’s Dilemma: Assimilation or Exoticization
This practice sits between two dangerous poles. On one side is complete assimilation: writing in flawless, unaccented colonial English, allowing your specific context to be smoothed over into universal (read: Western) experience. Your story becomes palatable but loses its distinctive truth.
On the other side is exoticization: deliberately peppering your text with untranslated, italicized “native” words to create local color for an outside audience. This turns your language into decoration, a spice for the main dish of English prose.
The instruction to “always italicise how to write while colonised” seeks a third path. It is not about sprinkling in foreign terms. It is about consistently marking the *condition* of writing itself. It makes the medium part of the message. Every sentence becomes a testament to the struggle of its own making.
A Practical Framework for Italicizing Your Voice
How does this theoretical stance translate to practical writing? It is more than a blanket “italicize everything.” It is a conscious, strategic application of typography to signal different layers of resistance and presence.
1. Italicize the Untranslatable
Start with concepts that have no direct English equivalent. These are words that carry entire worldviews, relationships to land, or social structures. For example, a Hawaiian writer might use *aloha ʻāina* (love for the land that is familial), or a South African writer might use *ubuntu* (the interconnectedness of humanity).
Do not just italicize and move on. Use the sentence structure to explain through context. “Her actions were guided by *ubuntu*, a understanding that her own humanity was tied to the community’s well-being.” The italics mark the word as a key, while the explanation refuses to let it be mere ornament.
2. Italicize the Adopted Word to Expose Power
Consider words that the colonial language has adopted but stripped of context. Take the word “taboo.” In English, it means a social prohibition. Its origin is the Tongan *tapu*, a sacred, spiritual restriction.
By writing “The missionary called their sacred practices *taboo*,” and italicizing it, you visually highlight the act of translation and reduction. You can even juxtapose: “What was *tapu* (sacred) became merely *taboo* (forbidden).” The italics create a critical distance, allowing you to show the transformation of meaning under colonial force.
3. Italicize the Narrative Voice
This is where the “always” in the phrase becomes most radical. You can italicize entire passages where the narrative voice is operating from a specifically colonized perspective, especially when describing encounters with colonial systems.
For instance, a passage describing a character navigating a British colonial bureaucracy could be rendered in italics, not as a flashback, but to visually set that reality apart from the “standard” narrative flow. It signals: “This experience is filtered through the distorting lens of colonial logic.” It makes the reader feel the disorientation.
4. Italicize English to Defamiliarize It
Flip the script. Italicize English words when they are being used as the invasive, administrative, or violent language of the colonizer. In a story, a decree read aloud by a colonial officer could be presented in italics: *All land not privately registered will be considered crown property.*
This technique robs the colonial language of its normative, invisible power. It frames it as the foreign, imposed text that it is, turning the typographic weapon back on itself.
Beyond Italics: Complementary Strategies
Italicization is a powerful tool, but it is one of many. A robust practice of writing while colonized employs a full toolkit to assert presence and complexity.
Code-switching without translation is a bold move. It trusts a segment of your audience to understand and leaves others to do the work of looking up or inferring meaning. It asserts that your primary audience may not be the English monoglot.
Strategic footnotes or endnotes can be used not just for citation, but for counter-narrative. Use a footnote to provide the history of a colonized term that the main text presents in its colonial form. This creates a layered reading experience.
Finally, manipulate syntax. Let the grammar of your ancestral language influence the structure of your English sentences. This creates a unique rhythm and logic that cannot be easily assimilated, performing the hybridity of your position in the very form of the prose.
Navigating the Institutional Gates
You may be writing for an academic journal, a mainstream publisher, or a grant committee whose style guides mandate the italicization of “non-English” words. How do you practice this critical italicization within, or against, these rules?
First, know the rules thoroughly. Then, write a compelling author’s note or preface. Frame your typographic choices as a critical methodological stance, essential to the work’s meaning. Cite scholars of decolonial theory to ground your approach.
In academic work, you can often negotiate this as part of your scholarly voice. For fiction or non-fiction, a sensitive editor may understand the artistic and political rationale. Be prepared to advocate for it as non-negotiable, as integral to the work as its plot or thesis. Your persistence redefines what is considered “standard.”
When Editors Push Back
An editor might say, “The italics are distracting,” or “We need to translate for the reader.” Be ready with a principled response.
Explain that the “distraction” is the point—it is meant to pause the reader, to make them conscious of the act of reading across difference. Argue that immediate translation can be a form of epistemic violence, simplifying complex concepts. Offer the compromise of contextual explanation, as mentioned earlier, rather than a parenthetical translation.
Your goal is not to be difficult, but to educate the gatekeepers on the politics of form. Each successful negotiation expands the space for the writers who come after you.
Your Voice, Your Rules
The search that brought you here—”always italicise how to write while colonised”—is a search for agency. It recognizes that the battlefield is often the page itself, and the tools are the very conventions meant to constrain you.
This practice is not about finding a single, correct formula. It is about developing a conscious, critical relationship to the language you use. It is about making the marks of power visible, and in that visibility, creating space for a different kind of story to be told.
Start by reading the work of writers who navigate this space: Jamaica Kincaid, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tommy Orange. See how they bend language to their will. Then, return to your own work. Look at a draft and ask: Where is the colonial logic hiding in my plain text? Where can I use an italic, a untranslated phrase, or a syntactical twist to assert my own reality?
Write. Italicize. Code-switch. Disrupt. Your voice, in all its complex, colonized, and resisting glory, is not a footnote to a dominant narrative. It is the main text. It is time to format it as such.
