Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism Thamyris/ Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race

Series Editor Ernst van Alphen

Editorial Team Murat Aydemir, Maaike Bleeker, Isabel Hoving, Yasco Horsman, Esther Peeren Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism

Editors Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck Colophon

Original Design Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem, The Netherlands www.warmerdamdesign.nl

Design Inge Baeten

Cover image Cover illustration: “Fork in the road”. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use the photograph reproduced on the cover of this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Printing The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence”.

ISSN: 1570-7253 E-Book ISSN: 1879-5846

ISBN: 978-90-420-3856-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1098-0

Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race

Intersecting is a series of edited volumes with a critical, interdisciplinary focus. Intersecting’s mission is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of black and ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and facilitate dialogue and confrontations between them. Intersecting shares this focus with Thamyris, the socially committed international journal that was established by Jan Best en Nanny de Vries, in 1994, out of which Intersecting has evolved. The sharpness and urgency of these issues is our point of departure, and our title reflects our decision to work on the cutting edge. We envision these confrontations and dialogues through three recurring categories: place, sex, and race. To us they are three of the most decisive categories that order society, locate power, and inflict pain and/or pleasure. Gender and class will necessarily figure prominently in our engagement with the above. Race, for we will keep analyzing this ugly, much-debated concept, instead of turning to more civil concepts (ethnicity, culture) that do not address the full disgrace of racism. Sex, for sexuality has to be addressed as an always-active social strategy of locating, controlling, and mobilizing people, and as an all-important, not necessarily obvious, cultural practice. And place, for we agree with other cultural analysts that this is a most productive framework for the analysis of situated identities and acts that allow us to move beyond narrow identitarian theories. The title of the book series points at what we, its editors, want to do: think together. Our series will not satisfy itself with merely demonstrating the complexity of our times, or with analyzing the shaping factors of that complexity. We know how to theorize the intertwining of, for example, sexuality and race, but pushing these intersections one step further is what we aim for: How can this complexity be understood in practice? That is, in concrete forms of political agency, and the efforts of self-reflexive, contextualized interpretation. How can different socially and theoretically relevant issues be thought together? And: how can scholars (of different backgrounds) and activists think together, and realize productive alliances in a radical, transnational community? We invite proposals for edited volumes that take the issues that Intersecting addresses seriously. These contributions should combine an activist-oriented perspective with intellectual rigor and theoretical insights, interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives. The editors seek cultural criticism that is daring, invigorating and self-reflexive; that shares our commitment to thinking together. Contact us at [email protected].

Contents

9 Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism? Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck

15 Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth David Gramling

39 A Case of ‘Fake Monolingualism’: Morocco, Fouad Laroui Diglossia and the Writer

47 Moroccan Literature: A Monster Yet To Be Born? Madeleine Kasten A Response to Fouad Laroui

53 Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? Till Dembeck and Georg Mein

71 Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation: Esther Kilchmann On Contemporary German Literature, with a Side Glance to the Seventeenth Century

87 mi have een droom (with an Introduction by Liesbeth Minnaard) Ramsey Nasr

91 About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Liesbeth Minnaard Performances as Antwerp City Poet and Dutch Poet Laureate

109 Eèchtenteèchtig (with an Introduction by Elisabeth Bekers) Chika Unigwe

117 “Bearing Gifts of Words”: Multilingualism in the Fiction of Elisabeth Bekers Flemish-Nigerian Writer Chika Unigwe

133 Brussels is Europe: Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Thomas Ernst Roman as Multilingual Literature

149 The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism: Outweirding the Maria Boletsi Mainstream in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Performance Literature 171 The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation Yoko Tawada

181 The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics Bettina Brandt

195 The Contributors

199 Index

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 9–14

Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism?

Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck

Moving beyond the myth of monolingualism, the actual aim of this volume, seemed too bold a statement to allow for a central title position. Living, as we do, in a world and age in which the restrictions set by monolingualism in many ways determine our daily existence, made the more moderate claim of challenging the myth of monolingualism seem more appropriate: as a first and highly important step on the road to ‘beyond.’ Surely,the heightened discursivity of terms such as ‘globalisation,’ ‘internationalisation,’ or ‘world society’ seems to suggest that multilingualism—rather than monolingualism— is nothing less than the sign of our present time. Closely connected to the last decades’ unprecedented increase in world-wide mobility—of persons, goods, information and ideas—and global interactions, the co-existence and intermingling of a broad variety of (western and non-western) languages now characterizes West- European societies more than ever. Simultaneously, competence in a whole range of languages as well as proficiency in intercultural communication appear as the keys to success, officially promoted by EU policies. Nevertheless, discussions about related topics such as migration, multiculturalism and integration continue to revolve around the claim that flawless fluency in the ‘national tongue(s)’ is a fundamental requirement for a full-fledged membership to national communities. Simultaneously, this flawless fluency, that not only pertains to grammar, style and pronunciation, but also includes a whole range of hard-to-define, ‘unique’ qualities and affective dimensions of the language concerned, seems strictly reserved for native speakers. The native speaker features as the embodiment of the ‘mother tongue,’ and one might go so far as to claim that in its most radical

Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism? | 9 consequences, speaking about the ‘mother tongue’ is just another oblique way of speaking about race. But even if one does not want to go that far: contemporary discourse on migrants and other newcomers leaves little doubt that the ‘true’ members of the national community are those who speak the national language as their mother tongue. This conflation of national language and mother tongue, two highly controversial constructs, has far-reaching results when it comes to the in- and exclusion of newcomers into the national communities of most West-European countries. Whereas the pursuit of economic interests often results in an everyday practice of multilingual pragmatism, on an ideological level monolingualism, the priority of the—preferably native—national language, still appears as the indisputable norm; the norm that guarantees national belonging and unconditional loyalty to whatever is defined as ‘the national.’ In her monograph Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition Yasemin Yildiz identifies the contradiction between multilingual realities and the seemingly unwavering persistence of the monolingual paradigm as the “key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life” (2). This contradiction, she argues, results in a state of tension that manifests itself in a broad range of situations and phenomena on various levels of society. The present volume, pro- grammatically titled Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, sets out to probe this tension as well as the ways in which it leaves its multi-faceted imprints in the field of culture. By focusing on manifestations of and reflections on this tension in literature, performance art, translation and scholarly work, it aims to investigate the various ways in which prejudices on multilingualism on the one hand, and practices of multilingualism on the other, respectively corroborate and challenge the myth that claims and privileges one exclusive language of national belonging. Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism contains a rich variety of scholarly contributions that discuss multiple negotiations of and challenges to the myth of monolingualism in various cultural contexts. Topics range from the ethics of mono- and multilingualism, the persistent ideology of nativity and the native speaker, the trials and tribulations of translating multilingual texts, to explorations of various multilingual strategies such as code-shifting and -mixing and the use of neologisms, wordplay, and linguistic ‘barbarisms.’ The cases discussed in the various contributions—for example, work by scholars such as Roland Barthes and Theodor Adorno, by performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and by writers such as Herta Müller, Koen Peeters and Ramsey Nasr—not only offer insight in specific examples of mono- and multilingualism ‘at work,’ but also serve as a test-ground for contextualized readings of particular monolingual restrictions and the multilingual destabilizations that are posed in response to these restrictions in specific cultural contexts. That particular attention is paid to examples of the mono-/multilingual tension in Dutch, Flemish and German

10 | Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 9–14 contexts can be seen as a conscious contribution to counterbalancing the dominance of Anglophone contexts in academic research—a dominance that mirrors the currently proliferating notion that competence in English, aside the ‘natural’ mastery of one’s ‘mother tongue’, provides a sufficient degree of multilingualism for anyone. In addition to the scholarly disquisitions on challenges to the myth of monolingualism, the volume also includes four texts by awarded multilingual writers from very diverse cultural backgrounds. These texts, by the Moroccan-French-Dutch writer Fouad Laroui, the Palestinian-Dutch poet Ramsey Nasr, the Nigerian-Flemish writer Chika Unigwe and the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada address the multiplicity of language in literary or poetic ways rather than in the scholarly register. As such, they function as (very diverse) demonstrations of the critical and thought-provoking effects that multilingual writing practices themselves can bring about. Unigwe’s story, cryptically entitled “Eèchtenteèchtig” and set in Flanders, presents the reader with a diasporic situation in which multiple languages mix and mingle. The text thus requires a large amount of readerly flexibility, while simultaneously offering a unique multilingual experience as a reward. Something similar can be said about Nasr’s much-debated poem “Mi have een droom.” This poem, written in a magnificent, streetwise vernacular that—both parodically and provocatively—confers the Dutch language the hybrid stamp of a multicultural future, provides an overwhelming reading experience, both to the Dutchophone and any other reader. Tawada’s text takes the reader on an exploration of the art of reading the alphabet. In doing so, it both reflects on and demonstrates the (productive) confusion inherent in the encounter between different languages. Laroui’s contribution, a text that formally hovers between a scholarly article, anecdotal writing, and the essay, takes a provocative and rather sceptical stance towards a solely positive definition of multilingualism. In this text that can be read as a critical manifesto, Laroui claims that writers of Moroccan origin desperately struggle with their specific (Arab/Berber) multilingualism. Deeming their particular situation as nothing less than a national language tragedy, a situation of ‘fake monolingualism’ that can only be escaped by opting for a foreign language, Laroui’s manifesto makes a heartfelt plea for ‘inventing’ something like a Moroccan literary language. The suggested, artificial distinction between two categories of texts does not mean, however, that this volume is divided into two separate spheres; on the contrary. Madeleine Kasten’s contribution, for instance, takes issue with the proposi- tions made by Laroui and explores the consequences of his bold statements for a future (for) Moroccan literature. Elisabeth Bekers discusses the multilingual strategies at work in the bilingual oeuvre of Chika Unigwe, and positions this writer not only in respect to the Flemish literary field, but also draws connections to other writers of the African diaspora. Liesbeth Minnaard focuses on a selection of texts written by Ramsey Nasr in his capacity of City Poet of Antwerp and Poet Laureate of the Netherlands. She scrutinizes the specific role of language and discourse in relation

Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism? | 11 to these official, representative appointments and the expectations that come with them. Bettina Brandt, who herself translated Yoko Tawada’s contribution to this volume from German into English, offers a critical discussion of the many fascinating intricacies inherent in the process of translation. In doing so, she not only addresses Tawada’s playful use of different scripts, but also investigates the resonances between this author’s reflections on language and translation and those of Walter Benjamin. Her contribution provides insights into how translation might not only be a prosthesis for monolingualism, the indispensable guardian of border-crossing communication between languages, but also a challenge to monolingualism’s most substantial assumption, the integrity of linguistic unities. The contributions by Esther Kilchmann, Thomas Ernst and Maria Boletsi focus on examples of multilingual interventions in particular cultural settings. Esther Kilchmann examines the use of aesthetic devices as a form of cultural critique in contemporary German literature by three writers of migrant background: Herta Müller,José F. A. Oliver,and Yoko Tawada. By relating this strategy to both the poetological reflections formulated— in service of a monolingual norm—by the seventeenth century scholar Martin Opitz and to structuralist theories on the poeticity of language, Kilchmann points out how heterolingualism in literary texts is nowadays praised as an innovative technique of alienation that works to undermine this monolingual norm. The multilinguality of the European Union, as represented in the novel Grote Europese roman (Major European Novel) by the Flemish writer Koen Peeters, is the topic of the contribution by Thomas Ernst. Ernst demonstrates how this novel imagines Belgium in general and Brussels in particular as multilingual sites of political struggle—struggle that, on a higher, European level, strongly debilitates the European Union’s dream of unity in diversity. Central in the contribution by Maria Boletsi is the performance literature by the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña who creatively and provocatively straddles Latino and US cultures and languages. Boletsi argues that the multilingual performances by Gómez-Peña strategically challenge what she calls “the three-headed specter of canonization, commodification, and exoticization of his art in the American (and Western) market.” Taken together these contributions provide a multi-faceted as well as contextualized insight into the various shapes that multilingual strategies in literature can assume and the (subversive) effects that they can bring about. They are preceded by two contributions that critically scrutinize the very concepts of mono- and multilingualism, by posing some more fundamental questions about these concepts’ content and policy. David Gramling’s contribution opens with a critical interrogation of the two central terms that are juxtaposed in the title of this Thamyris volume: myth and monolingualism. By combining a discussion of Barthes’ deliberations on the notion of myth with a close analysis of Franz Kafka’s first novel Der Verschollene (The Missing Person / The One that Got Away), Gramling elucidates how the workings of monolingualism can be examined, despite the fact that monolingualism as such—a

12 | Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 9–14 myth—might not actually exist. Till Dembeck and Georg Mein take a self-critical look on our own scholarly writing practices and, by exploring the limits of the monolingual paradigm as they manifest themselves in key works of philology, pose the question whether it is at all possible to write post-monolingually? This last question can easily be related to the project of challenging the myth of monolingualism itself. It is quite evident that the various works of literature and art discussed in this volume do not actually overcome the constraints of monolingualism. Their challenges are determined to proceed indirectly, or rather: subversively, taking the effect of monolingual policies for a given that cannot simply be eliminated. The resulting—and ongoing—struggle might very well prove to be the source of their creativity. Starting from this assumption, it seems justified to claim that monolingualism is indeed a myth—or at least: a proto-mythical structure—in the sense that Hans Blumenberg discusses this term in his Arbeit am Mythos (Work on Myth). Blumenberg’s seminal study provides an impressive overview of the fate of (antique) myths in Western philosophical and cultural history. His particular interest concerns modern, ‘enlightened’ attempts to “bring myth to an end” (“Den Mythos zu Ende brin- gen,” 291),1 for example in the name of scientific progress. Blumenberg’s detailed descriptions of these attempts clearly show that this goal is never achieved—and that, in its core, the attempt is mythical itself. Blumenberg claims that in its origins myth is directly related to the problem of contingency: “Myth is an expression of the belief that the world and the powers that reign it are not left at the mercy of pure arbi- trariness.” (“Der Mythos ist eine Ausdrucksform dafür, daß der Welt und den in ihr wal- tenden Mächten die reine Willkür nicht überlassen ist.” 50). According to Blumenberg, the ultimate point of reference of all myths is what he calls the “absolutism of reality” (“Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit,” 9): in the end all myths by necessity respond to reality’s status as absolute, non-alterable, and eventually (for humans) un-controllable. If we accept this argument, we might ask ourselves in how far the myth of monolingualism is also related to this very basic problem of the “absolutism of reality,” even if this question certainly transgresses the bounds of philology. It is obvious that the monolingual paradigm, in its conflation of national language and ‘mother tongue,’ aims and pretends to overcome contingencies that inhibit the highly individual process of language acquisition. In this sense, the myth of monolingualism is related to basic contingencies of social life—to the sheer fact that any ‘understanding’ of (and beyond) language is based on mechanisms that communication itself cannot control. Following Blumenberg’s claim that this dependency in fact applies to any myth, this would mean that whoever wants to challenge and ultimately overcome the myth of monolingualism, will have to come up with a ‘better’ myth, so to speak: one that can deal with these contingencies. The challenges that we present in and with this volume, can be seen as explorative first steps in the search for such a new myth.

Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism? | 13 Note

1. Translations from Blumenberg by the authors.

Works Cited

Blumenberg, Hans. Die Arbeit am Mythos. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001 Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham (1979). University Press, 2012.

14 | Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth

David Gramling

Maupassant déjeunait souvent au restaurant de la Tour, que pourtant il n’aimait pas: c’est, disait-il, le seul endroit de Paris ou je ne la vois.1 Roland Barthes, La Tour Eiffel

This volume brings together two touchy words, myth and monolingualism, each of which comes bearing its own high-voltage and ambiguous history of use. Both words conjure a mood of peripatetic belatedness, angling in each case to uncover some hazy assem- blage that appears to have worn out its welcome, luxuriating in the plain sight of theory and practice alike. Myth and monolingualism hail forth for critique two intersecting planes in the same system of regulatory social physics. They attempt to mark the ways in which institutions (in the Bourdieusian sense) self-justify and self-naturalize through forms of speech practice (or what Barthes would call parole) that are generally taken to be shared, common sense, or nonideological. Once invoked—though always somehow retrospectively—both words put their newly adopted objects on notice. Despite this apparent critical kinship between myth and monolingualism, the rift between the two begins with a glance at the morphology of the words themselves. Whereas the first term, myth, comes to us in most languages in a lexical form that is earthy, protocultural, and hardly one syllable in length, the six-syllable latter term, monolingualism, sounds about as engineered, cloying, and parvenu in any vernacular vocabulary as words ever allow themselves to be. The word monolingualism looks recently unpackaged—shipped in from a university laboratory. Indeed, there is no lay equivalent for monolingualism in any language I know of, and there is meanwhile interestingly also no technical equivalent for myth. While the latter term is

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 15 charismatic and ingenuous, the former appears brashly clinical, prosthetic, and alien to vernacular culture as such. So what are they doing, being seen together here? This essay takes the opportunity, presented by this volume, to look closely at the disgruntled juxtaposition of these two words. With Barthes and Kafka, I will suggest that a conception of monolingualism as myth, when pursued with a particular use of the word, is capable of clearing away some of the imperious rancor that the two words tend to trumpet when left to their own devices. Drawing from Barthes’ 1957 essay “Le mythe aujourd’hui,” (“Myth Today,” see Mythologies) together with Kafka’s performances of mythic monolingualism in his first novel Der Verschollene (The Missing Person / The Man who Disappeared, 1911–14), I will suggest that the logic of myth offers subtle resources for discerning how monolingualism works, regardless of whether it actually exists. The concept of myth can also help point out a few discursive formations that indeed look like monolingualism but are not: whether those be linguistic purism or ethnolinguistic nationalism on the one hand, or—on the other—local resistance tactics in the face of global-technocratic translational multilingualism.

A Monolingualism Artist

Kennen Sie außer Ihrer Muttersprache noch andere Sprachen? Welche? Wie weit reichen Ihre Kenntnisse darin? Können Sie diese Sprachen bloß verstehen oder auch sprechen, oder sich ihrer auch schriftlich bei Übersetzungen und Aufsätzen bedienen? (Cermakˇ 59)2

“Do you know other languages beyond your mother language? Which ones? How far does your knowledge reach? Can you merely understand these languages or also speak them, or can you also make use of them through written translations and compositions?” So prompted, on a personnel questionnaire from the Assicurazioni Generali insurance firm in 1907, the 24-year-old law school graduate Franz Kafka wrote back to his prospective employer in longhand: “Bohemian, and beyond that French and English, but I’m out of practice in the latter two languages.” (“Böhmisch, außerdem französisch und englisch, doch bin ich in den beiden letzten Sprachen außer Übung.” Cermakˇ 59) Less than a year later, Dr. Frantisˇek Kafka responded to a another, similar prompt with provident dispassion: “The applicant has mastery over the German and Bohemian language in oral and written form, and further commands the French, and partially the English language.” (“Der Petent ist der deutschen und böhmischen Sprache in Wort und Schrift mächtig, beherrscht ferner die französische, teilweise die englische Sprache.” Nekula 2) Leaving behind the confessional ‘I’ of the preceding response, Kafka now casts himself in the guise of a petitioner, or “Petent,” who commands multiple languages as a regent might administer his revier. This emboldened applicant no longer betrays any

16 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38 hesitation about the extent of his multilingual talents. Though he claims mastery over German and Bohemian, Kafka characterizes his relationship to French and English not through a frank assessment of his practical proficieny, but rather through a rhetoric of distance. The tentative, intimate tone from the previous year has dissolved beneath a spatial metaphor of sovereignty and proximity, in which some languages are ‘closer,’ some ‘farther’ from the writer’s command. The Assicurazioni Generali questionnaire prompt itself—“How far does your knowledge [of other languages] reach?”—seems all but ready-made for the young fiction writer’s figural repertoire. Such questionnaires prompted Kafka to give an account of his own multilinguality in early professional life, nourishing his rhetorical palette with the arid tropes of interoffice communiqué, where affect remained ripe with—because laminated in— spatial metaphor. Indeed, he was generating this kind of clerical ‘paper German’ at the same time as he was composing his first philosophical fictions about cross- linguistic interactions. Meanwhile, public semiotics in early 20th-century Prague flourished amid what could be called a double monolingualism, a strategic constellation by which each of two dominant monolingual ideologies campaigned to secure popular and institutional misrecognition (méconnaisance) of the existence of its respective other language (Bourdieu and Passeron, xiiii). The flammable Bohemian-German language politics of the late 19th century were indeed more than the natural hazard of two (or more) recently nationalized languages abutting one another in everyday life; the double monolingualism of late Imperial Prague was rather the outcome of concerted efforts among urban nationalists to establish and maintain linguistically pure spaces. Indeed, the particular troubles of political “double monolingualism” in the Crownlands were of a different sort than the presumed troubles of social multilingualism when conceived in the abstract. The 19th-century Bohemia of Kafka’s forebears had been less a sectarian battleground between German, Yiddish, and Czech speakers, than an ideological frontier between urban, political monolingual- ists and rural, non-partisan, and multilingual anationals. Pieter Judson stresses that, “[i]n multilingual villages, towns, or regions, early political movements attempted to mobilize popular support by demanding linguistic equality for their side. As political conflicts developed around language issues, representatives of each ‘side’ scoured the region for every potential voter, attempting to mobilize nationally indifferent people into nationalist political parties.” (9) The broiling political culture that ushered in Kafka’s literary figurations was thus one born primarily of a conflict between monolingualism and multilingualism, not between one language and another. By the time Kafka was hired on at the Assicurazioni Generali insurance agency in 1907, the notion that a singular, shared national language was a constitutive pre- possession of Western subjectivity had become as naturalized as Peter Schlemihl’s

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 17 shadow. Composed in the wake of a long century of nation-building, Kafka’s texts are designed to historicize the high-modern myth of monolingualism—of which they are a performative reiteration. In refusing to underwrite modernism’s naturalization of the monolingual, texts from “In unserer Synagoge” (“In Our Synagogue,” 1922) to Das Schloß (The Castle, 1924) pulse with a preoccupation about how a meta-formal ‘myth’ of single-language representation both constrains and constitutes literariness in the peak decades of national philology. But how did Franz Kafka, the multiple-language speaker—the multilingual episte- mologist, even—become renowned as one of literary modernism’s archetypal mono- lingualists? Responding to Sander Gilman’s somewhat severe take on this question, David Suchoff remarks that “If Kafka, like Josef K., does bear any fault, it is for having checked his Jewish languages at the door of his canonical German, which [. . .] tempted him with the lure of literary fame.” (255) In sizing up Kafka’s vested stake in the German-dominated literary-linguistic market, Suchoff and Gilman seem to suggest that the choice to be “bilingual in everything but his writing” (Gilman 40) was evidence of a sheer, if also reluctant, opportunism in Kafka. This view—that the author’s choice of German as his exclusive language of composition is best understood soci- ologically or psychologically—holds an axial, if often rueful, status in Kafka studies to date, despite Deleuze and Guattari’s interventions in 1973.3 If, instead, we were to analyze monolingualism as a binding, yet historically contingent meta-formal ‘myth’ of modern national literatures—one that Kafka recognized as irrevocable already while composing his first parables and stories—then his own endeavor to project multilingual lifeworlds in variously sillhouetted form over the threshold of ‘paper German’ looks more like a critical ambition than a sin of omis- sion. Kafka chooses not German but monolingualism as his aesthetic medium—as an oil painter might restrict herself to pencil and charcoal in order to render a particular kind of figure exquisitely visible. Itself a product of the constitutive friction between imperial linguistic multiplicity and nationalist-monolingual dominance in the high modern public sphere, Kafka’s parables feature the hegemony of monolingualism in ways that free code-switching between languages would be unable to broker.

The Language that Disappeared Literatur, als Vorwurf ausgesprochen, ist eine so starke Sprachverkürzung. [. . .] Die Lärmtrompeten des Nichts.4 Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, August 1917

Rather than understanding literary monolingualism as a cultural politics of affiliation— as siding with a given speech community, audience, ethnic group, or political program—we may read single-language writing by multilinguals as a kind of critical, ascetic praxis, a “hunger art” that invites a new literary-critical response in the

18 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38 twenty-first century. As David Batchelor writes of painting after Rodchenko, the monochrome “is the reminder of the culture we have not been able to create.” (153) Similarly, it is Kafka’s operative principle of negative performativity that distinguishes his own monolingual textuality from that of his other multilingually invested con- temporaries, such as Karl Kraus, Kurt Tucholsky, and Fritz Mauthner. Yet Kafka scholarship, before and after Deleuze and Guattari, has seen this wielding of monolingualism as a reticent devotion to German itself—to the cultural repertoire and symbolic capital of that language—rather than as an experimental performance of the formal constraint of monolingualism. Kafka’s novels, particularly Der Verschollene and Das Schloß offer a sardonic dio- rama of the mythic accumulations of monolingualism, and of how multilingual subjects get arrested in its baffles. Indeed, the unfinishability of each of Kafka’s novels is intimately tied to that particular myth. At the ‘end’ of his first novel, Kafka’s ambitious protagonist, the picaresque English-as-a-Second-Language learner Karl Rossmann abruptly absconds from representability (in German) at precisely that moment in the narrative when he begins to consort with the infinite chorus of trumpeting angels at the Oklahoma theater, which advertises itself as follows:

Das große Teater von Oklahama ruft Euch! Es ruft nur heute, nur einmal! Wer jetzt die Gelegenheit versäumt, versäumt sie für immer! Wer an seine Zukunft denkt, gehört zu uns! Jeder ist willkommen! Wer Künstler werden will melde sich! Wir sind das Teater, das jeden brauchen kann, jeden an seinem Ort! Wer sich für uns entschieden hat, den beglückwünschen wir gleich hier! (Der Verschollene 387)

The Great Theater of Oklahoma is calling you! It is calling only today, only this once! Anyone who misses the opportunity shall miss it forever! Anyone who is thinking of his future belongs in our midst! All are welcome! Anyone who wants to become an artist should contact us! We are a theater that can make use of everyone, each in his place. And we congratulate here and now those who have decided in our favor. (267)

Ultimately, speaking the angel chorus’ standard American English—making the noise of the Engeln in the theater of mythic monolingualism—becomes Karl’s own sacrament of conversion; he and the other angels are constituted anew through their assent to the assimilationist linguistic patriotism that US President Theodore Roosevelt demanded of new immigrant Americans in the advent of World War I (see Pratt). Karl is swept up into the mesmerizing unison of the ensemble and begins to discover its precious subtleties. “You’re an artist!” (“Du bist ein Künstler!”) cheers his friend Fanny as Karl decides to join the chorus of monolinguals as a trumpeter. But Fanny warns, “[D]on’t spoil the chorus, or I’ll be dismissed” (271, “Aber verdirb

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 19 den Chor nicht, sonst entläßt man mich,” 393). The (German) text of Der Verschollene trails off soon thereafter, as Karl’s contract with English monolingualism is sealed:

Karl fing zu blasen an; er hatte gedacht, es sei eine grob gearbeitete Trompete, nur zum Lärmmachen bestimmt, aber nun zeigte es sich, daß es ein Instrument war, das fast jede Feinheit ausführen konnte. (393)

Karl began to play; he had imagined it was a crudely made instrument, only for making noise, but it was in fact an instrument capable of producing almost every refinement.” (271)

Now fully fledged in monolingual English, and taken up into the communal embrace of its institutions, Karl indeed becomes Der Verschollene, the ‘lost one’ who leaves behind the text’s own medium of production, the monolingualism of the (German) other. The novel breaks off as Karl, perpetually lost to us readers, is sublated into his new Anglo-monolingual post in the angel-chorus—a participatory, totalizing myth in which everyone is welcome and everyone has his or her ‘own’ role to play. Rather than setting the tone and terms for future literary endeavors, Kafka’s first novel however offers a revealing anomaly in his career-long engagement with the epistemological clash between multilingual subjectivity and monolingual text. If his later works, like Das Schloß, can be seen as enacting claustrophobic spaces on the ‘here’ side of the monolingual/multilingual threshold, Kafka’s unfinished debut novel dramatizes an aggressive attempt to steal away from monolingualism and to inhabit the multilingual world ‘over there,’ beyond the pale of single-language literary representation. It will be, I claim, Kafka’s one and only sustained work of literary fiction that delights in tramping on the ‘far side’ of this divide between linguistic ipseity and linguistic alterity. Later writings, from “In der Strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony,” 1919) to “Heimkehr” (“Returning Home,” 1920), turn to a somber, if often absurdist, forensics of monolingual restraint. Nonetheless, monolingualism remains one of his career-long epistemological and figural projects—that is, how to textualize not merely the divide between German and other languages per se, but rather the divide between literary monolingualism and worldly multilingualism. Despite the rough-and-ready second-language acquisition adventure that awaits him at the outset of Der Verschollene, Karl Rossmann languishes at first in the endless narrow corridors of the oceanliner that has brought him to America—unwilling to disembark into the English-speaking expanse outside. Indeed, and with good reason, he shares this self-undermining hesitation with the text itself; the performative contradiction that will necessarily arise between Kafka’s erudite German and Karl’s hybrid, mutating spoken English enacts a chronic figural collision in the text. Who speaks English and when? With what accents, constraints, code-switches, and fluency? How can the social consequences and symbolic textures that ensue from translingual

20 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38 exchange be indexed in a monolingual German-language text? From within the metapragmatics of the narrative, we could pose these questions differently: How fast can Karl, fresh off the boat in New York harbor with only rudimentary schooling in foreign languages, plausibly come to speak a standard American English that will not require the novel’s readers to suspend disbelief? Will that plausibility itself play an organizing role in the narrative? How much delay and detour will this problem need to cause for the picaresque adventurer? Indeed, when it comes to other languages in Der Verschollene, narrative coherence and monolingual form appear to be at cross-purposes—already at the outset of the young multilingual novelist’s career. These procedural hurdles notwithstanding, the novel betrays a carefree love affair with language acquisition that seems anything but agonistic in its affect or bearing. The triumphalist tone that characterizes Karl’s personal ambitions vis-à-vis English soars with the romantic rigor of a summer-immersion language-school pamphlet:

Natürlich war das Lernen des Englischen Karls erste und wichtigste Aufgabe. Ein junger Professor einer Handelshochschule erschien morgens um sieben Uhr in Karls Zimmer und fand ihn schon an seinem Schreibtisch und bei den Heften sitzen oder memorierend im Zimmer auf und ab gehen. Karl sah wohl ein, daß zur Aneignung des Englischen keine Eile groß genug sei und daß er hier außerdem die beste Gelegenheit habe, seinem Onkel eine außerordentliche Freude durch rasche Fortschritte zu machen. (61)

Learning English was, of course, Karl’s first and most important task. When the young teacher from a business school appeared in Karl’s room at seven o’clock each morning, he would find him already seated at his desk, poring over his note- books or walking up and down, committing phrases to memory. Karl realized that when it came to learning English, there could be no such thing as excessive haste, and that the best way to give his uncle great joy was to make rapid progress. (40)

More like palliative sidebars to the suspicious reader, such digressions about language offer repeated guarantees that Karl’s deficiencies in English will be nothing more than a quickly overcome social task for the hero—and not a recurrent logical glitch for the text. In a droll gesture to the text’s monolingual form, the narrative rel- egates Karl’s English language learning to the liminal early hours of each day, before the brass tacks of life as a “freshly minted American” (46, “frischgebackener Amerikaner,” 63) get underway.

Und tatsächlich gelang es bald, während zuerst das Englische in den Gesprächen mit dem Onkel sich auf Gruß und Abschiedsworte beschränkt hatte, immer größere Teile der Gespräche ins Englische hinüberzuspielen, wodurch gleichzeitig vertraulichere Themen sich einzustellen begannen. (61)

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 21 And although the only English words in his initial conversations with his uncle were hello and goodbye, they soon managed to shift more and more of the conversation into English, which led to their broaching topics of a more intimate nature. (40)

The text thus seems to dispose of its own cross-lingual dilemma rather urgently, through a progressive marginalization of ostentatious multilingual behavior and setting. On further analysis, however, a pattern of irritations undermines Karl’s (and the text’s) happy struggle toward their respective monolingual manifest destinies, as explicit thematization of language choice gradually fades away over the course of the novel. Like a prosthetic device, Karl’s English professor is kept at his side to complete his utterances, as the young immigrant briskly graduates from rudimentary speech to semi-proficiency.

Je besser Karls Englisch wurde, desto größere Lust zeigte der Onkel, ihn mit seinen Bekannten zusammenzuführen, und ordnete nur für jeden Fall an, daß bei solchen Zusammenkünften vorläufig der Englischprofessor sich immer in Karls Nähe zu halten habe. (62)

The greater the improvement in his English, the more eager was his uncle to have him meet his acquaintances, and he arranged that during these encounters the English teacher should for the time being always remain near Karl, simply in case of need. (40–41)

Soon, Karl undergoes a rite of consecration as an English speaker, for which he had not yet considered himself worthy. At one of his uncle’s get-togethers:

Karl antwortete unter einer Sterbensstille ringsherum mit einigen Seitenblicken auf den Onkel ziemlich ausführlich und suchte sich zum Dank durch eine etwas New Yorkisch gefärbte Redeweise angenehm zu machen. Bei einem Ausdruck lachten sogar alle drei Herren durcheinander, und Karl fürchtete schon, einen groben Fehler gemacht zu haben; jedoch nein, er hatte, wie Herr Pollunder erk- lärte, sogar etwas sehr Gelungenes gesagt. (63)

Occasionally glancing at his uncle, and amid dead silence on all sides, Karl answered at length and, by way of thanking them, sought to make a pleasant impression by using turns of phrase with a certain New York flavor. Upon hearing one such expression, all three gentlemen burst out laughing, and Karl began to fear that he had made a vulgar mistake, but not at all, for as Mr. Pollunder explained to him, he had said something that was actually quite felicitous. (45)

This Mr. Pollunder is Karl’s first monolingual English confidant and benefactor, and Karl’s difficulty understanding this avuncular figure’s English syntax and lexicon is displaced into spatial figurations. Referring to the man’s stately American mansion, Karl

22 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38 complains that Pollunder “talks [. . .] as if he were unaware of the size of this house, of the endless corridors, the chapel, the empty rooms, and the darkness everywhere.” (69, “‘Er spricht,’ dachte Karl, ‘als wüßte er nicht von dem großen Haus, den endlosen Gängen, der Kapelle, den leeren Zimmern, dem Dunkel überall.’” 105) In stark contrast, Karl’s own German-speaking Uncle Jakob’s house “seemed to him a coherent whole lying before him, empty, smooth, prepared just for him, and beckoning him with a strong voice.” (71, “Es erschien ihm als etwas streng Zusammengehöriges, das leer, glatt und für ihn vorbereitet dalag und mit einer starken Stimme nach ihm verlangte.” 108) The two empty residences—one obscure, endless, and unknowable, the other cohesive, servile, and beckoning—index how Karl experiences the respective spoken languages of their inhabitants. Acquiring English is further spatialized in the narrative through circuitous, labyrinthine figures. Karl opts to hold his tutoring sessions on the fly, while driving to riding practice:

Karl nahm dann den Professor mit ins Automobil, und sie fuhren zu ihrer Englischstunde meist auf Umwegen, denn bei der Fahrt durch das Gedränge der großen Straße, die eigentlich direkt von dem Hause des Onkels zur Reitschule führte, wäre zuviel Zeit verlorengegangen. (65)

Karl then took the teacher along in the automobile, and they drove to their English lesson, mostly via detours, since they would have lost too much time going through the bustle of the main street, which led directly from Uncle’s house to the riding school. (42–43)

There Karl meets up with his first English-speaking friend Mack. Again, the dilemmas that speaking English might have posed for Karl (and the novel) are displaced into spatial figurations: detours, indirect routes, and unexpected lateral excursions. Such is also the case when Karl seeks to use his choppy English to order food in a hotel lobby. After some moments of elaborate tactical deliberation, he decides to seek help from the most approachable looking woman on the hotel staff, in hopes of land- ing a successful cross-language transaction. As he stands hesitant on this tense emotional threshold, the foreign language interpellates him instead:

Karl hatte sie noch gar nicht angeredet, sondern nur ein wenig belauert, als sie, wie man eben manchmal mitten im Gespräch beiseiteschaut, zu Karl hinsah und ihn, ihre Rede unterbrechend, freundlich und in einem Englisch, klar wie die Grammatik, fragte, ob er etwas suche.

,,Allerdings“ sagte Karl, ,,ich kann hier gar nichts bekommen.“ (156)

Karl, who had been eavesdropping, had not yet addressed her when she looked up at him and, interrupting what she was saying and using English that was as

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 23 clear as a grammar book’s asked in a friendly voice if he was looking for something. “Yes indeed,” said Karl. “I can’t get anything here.” (104)

This precipitously helpful hotel staffperson enacts, for Karl, the English language as a sublime whole, “clear as a grammar book’s.” Her preemptive address surprises the young man, who had been struggling to muster up the courage to speak to her in an American English register appropriate for the setting. His unwitting and disarmed response, in turn, does not answer her question at all—whether he was looking for something—but rather describes a broader deictic circumstance conditioning their exchange: “I can’t get anything here [at all].” The “here” where Karl “can’t get anything” doubles as physical location (the hotel) and the abstract domain of literary monolingualism itself—a domain in which cross-lingual situations, such as the one at hand, are always already dis-figured. Barred from simulating anything but the most nativist styles of speech, the text instead indexes the translingual impasse through spatial-deictic deferral. The hotel clerk immediately comprehends Karl’s deictically overdetermined riddle, and she responds to him in kind:

,,Dann kommen Sie mit mir, Kleiner“, sagte sie, verabschiedete sich von ihrem Bekannten, der seinen Hut abnahm, was hier wie unglaubliche Höflichkeit erschien, faßte Karl bei der Hand, ging zum Büfett, schob einen Gast beiseite, öffnete eine Klapptüre im Pult, durchquerte den Gang hinter dem Pult, wo man sich vor den unermüdlich laufenden Kellnern in acht nehmen mußte, öffnete eine zweite Tapetentüre, und schon befanden sie sich in großen, kühlen Vorratskammern. ,,Man muß eben den Mechanismus kennen“, sagte sich Karl. (156)

“Then come along with me, little fellow,” she said; then she said goodbye to her acquaintance, who raised his hat, which seemed like an unbelievably polite gesture in these surroundings, and, taking Karl by the hand, went to the buffet, pushed aside a guest, opened a hinged door in the counter, and with Karl in tow, crossed the corridor behind the counter, where one had to watch out for the tire- lessly circulating waiters, and opened a double door that had been covered with wallpaper, and now they found themselves in large cool pantries. “You simply have to know the mechanism,” Karl said to himself. (104)

This savvy and accommodating clerk—a kind of textual concierge of monolingualism— needs no further clarification of the protagonist’s predicament, steering him, upon an uncannily circuitous route, out of the public space of the hotel and into a storage repository hidden away in the bowels of the building. Kafka thus translates the problem of translingual exchange into a kinetic crossing of unknown thresholds—from public to semi-public, from apoplectic frustration to intimate knowledge of the “mechanism,” from deferential etiquette in the hotel lobby to “shoving” guests aside at the

24 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38 buffet table in order to get, urgently, from here to there—from monolingualism to its hypotextual negation. Der Verschollene, however, is one of the few Kafka texts that stage such raucous and felicitous cross-linguistic stuntwork, where the hero both hungers for and suc- ceeds at “intercultural dialogue”—a rare occurrence in Kafka indeed. Especially in the later works, the failure to cross, or even to be dragged across, such thresholds tends to prevail. What Karl finds behind the buffet table, deep in the hypotext of the hotel—the subtext obscured below its surface—, is the inner mechanism of monolingualism-as-myth, a principle that would follow him—Karl as much as Kafka— throughout his career.

Disinventing the Myth of Monolingualism Barriers to analyzing how Kafka’s day-to-day multilingualism animated and structured his writing still linger in the secondary literature on modernist prose fiction, where ‘language’ still tends to be writ large and singular. As the comparatists Hokenson and Munson write, “[b]ilinguality seems to be the one category of language-user that high modernist thought did not, indeed perhaps even refused to, consider.” (137) Relatedly, the notion that an author’s multilingual subjectivity informs and participates directly in his or her textual production has given rise to a hereditary uneasi- ness in literary studies. The composite legacy of New Critical, (post-)structuralist, Chomskyan, and even Lacanian lines of thought about language therefore bear only meager affordances for a critique of literary multilingualism. Quizzically, the most prominent and frequently cited interventions from theoreticians on the subject are autobiographical or confessional in nature (cf. Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre [Monolingualism of the Other], Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes [Strangers to Ourselves]). Arising out of the rigors of formalist foreclosure upon the textual artifact itself, and extending to the muscular post-War dictum that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art,” (Wimsatt and Beardsey 488) the moratorium on authorial reading has scuttled a great deal of scholarly speculation on multilingual authorship within literary studies—as opposed to neighboring fields like linguistic anthropology, pragmat- ics, sociology of literature, and applied linguistics—where such a hereditary proscription as “intentional fallacy” is not in force. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s forensic disarticulation of the author from text, however, overlooked the performative bind arising between monolingual textuality and multilingual subjectivity. The ‘author’ icon that traveled from New Criticism to post-structuralism was an enduring legacy of this elision. When Foucault, for instance, sought to articulate a theory of authoriality, the problem of language multiplicity did not appear anywhere among the “functional conditions of specific discursive practices” that constituted the core of his findings

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 25 (“What is an Author?” 139). Decades later, this legacy leaves scholarship standing, less than nimble, on the edge of aporia when it comes to formulating theoretical discourses that take seriously multilingual authors’ textual dilemmas vis-à-vis the unmarked myth of monolingualism. Meanwhile, critiques of ostensibly monolingual authors’ works are exempted from bearing such issues of ‘language choice’ in mind. In the case of Kafka, monolingualism is a circumstance of literary text alone—not of his ‘consciousness,’ his workplace, his father’s store, his intimate and professional relationships, Jewish Prague, the family home, or even his putative “primitive Czech territoriality” (“territorialité primitive tchèque,” Deleuze and Guattari 30). There is plain and ample evidence that, in each of these latter realms, at least two languages were in furtive and contentious cross-pollination with one another throughout his life, vying each moment for a minute toe-hold into political or situated hegemony (Cermak,ˇ Nekula). Literary text, therefore, is the only domain of Kafka’s work and livelihood in which the ideal of monolingualism could reign expansive and uninterrupted. His works are therefore not a presentation of some aspect of his life; literary text could not be further from the truth of his linguistic subjectivity or his symbolic ecology. To put this in broader terms, the relationship between monolingual texts and their multilingual authors are best seen as apophatic—pulsing with the significance of what is not there. Given the spoils that the high modern episteme of monolingualism offered, literary artisans like Kafka were variously compelled to strike an irrevocable bargain with monolingualism-as-myth—a bargain that resists elective divestiture, particularly if one wishes to publish books. In this vein, we may recall how Barthes described Maupassant’s disgruntled intimacy with the Eiffel Tower:

C’est signe pur—vide, presque—il est impossible de le fuir, parce qu’il veut tout dire. Pour nier la Tour Eiffel (mais la tentation en est rare, car ce cymbole ne blesse rien en nous), il faut, comme Maupassant, s’installer sur elle, et pour ainsi dire s’identifier à elle. (La Tour Eiffel 27)

This pure—virtually empty—sign is ineluctable, because it means everything. In order to negate the Eiffel Tower (though the temptation to do so is rare, for this symbol offends nothing in us), you must, like Maupassant, get up on it and, so to speak, identify yourself with it. (237)

Maupassant’s choice for radical, myopic, and yet disdainful identification with the tower also aptly figures Kafka’s literary habitus vis-à-vis monolingualism. Based in the multilingual provincial capital of a multinational empire, Kafka nonetheless committed himself and his readers to a monolingual contract—purified of local references, social deixis, code-switching, and other ostentatious traces of translingual practice. While Pound and Joyce were promoting a panlingual lyric expansionism,

26 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38

Kafka’s texts abstained from such play across languages, preferring instead to deepen what might be called monolingualism’s vow of poverty. Monolingualism’s mythic effectiveness rests on its familiarizing self-disclosure and its reassuring transposability. All it wants in return is a particular kind of belief in planetary linguistic order that did not exist before the 17th century. Barthes’ famous example of second-order signification, quia ego nominor leo from a Latin grammar book, is ‘mythic’ in Barthes view because it suppresses and mutes its first-order meanings and their historical and social contexts—who is this bold and proud lion? Who is she speaking to? Why is she speaking, anyway?—replacing them with the mythic, second-order message: “I am a grammatical example demonstrating correspondence between subject and predicate in Latin.” From this analysis stems the insight that monolingualism-as-myth performs a different, equally mandatory second-order signification. Under the episteme of monolingualism, quia ego nominor leo becomes: “I am Latin. Latin, like your language—you have one, right?—can say anything. Don’t worry about it too much. We can get it translated.” For an item of speech to qualify as language under monolingualism, it must per- tain to at least one among a set of sovereign, equal, non-overlapping, transposable, possessible, federated, panfunctional integers of systemic languageness—like Dutch, English, or Igbo. (The mythic logic of monolingualism doesn’t even require linguistic territorialization anymore, though Yildiz 2011 makes a strong case that it indeed once did.) In Mythologies, Barthes writes:

Le mythe est au contraire un langage qui ne veut pas mourir : il arrache aux sens dont il s’alimente, une survie insidieuse, dégradée, il provoque en eux un sursis artificiel, dans lequel il s’installe a l’aise, il en fait des cadavres parlants. (241) Myth [. . .] is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses. (244)

While the mid-century Barthes was animated in part by his dismay at what appeared to be indomitable, anachronistic myths of French imperial rectitude, he was careful to pursue myth not in terms of the particular substances under its sway, but rather in terms of myth’s signifying structure. Indeed, Barthes asserted that myth was a structure that functioned with a relative lack of interest in the precise historical nature of the meanings it conscripts. Everything under the sun is equally susceptible to mythologization, and no myth is eternal. Barthes sought to provide what amounts to an absolute grammar of myth, one that was indifferent, universalist even, in its relation to the cultural materials of a particular age. Under the myth of monolingualism, language artifacts—if they are to be considered “language” at all—tell their interlocutor the nature of the bounded system from

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 27 which they issue, and reassure that interlocutor that that system is accessible to her via transposition or translation. Kafka’s famous parable of Odradek, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” dramatizes a scene in which such a linguistic artifact behaves badly vis-à-vis the monolingual episteme that textualizes it: Instead of providing documentation of its linguistic provenance, the creature merely says: “Residence unknown” (“Unbestimmter Wohnsitz,” 282) and laughs at the myth, contented with its performance of monolingual mimicry. Kafka’s legendary 1913 introductory lecture for a visiting Eastern Jewish theater troupe is, in this context, no less than a backhanded gauntlet-throw toward the urban Jewish-German audience, for whom Yiddish/Jargon—a language whose existence was not even registered among the eleven imperial Landessprachen on the 1900 census—tended to signal the provincialism of their grandparents’ generation. The speech begins by suggesting that the performances the guests are about to experience may be both threatening and familiar to those who are in the habit of caring about deceptively subtle linguistic differences. Standing before the assembled members of the Prague Bar Kochba Association to introduce Löwy’s dramatic readings of Yiddish lyric, Kafka forewarns them that any keen attention they might lend to this semiodiverse prism between Yiddish and German will only bring them avoidable dismay and hardship. The myth of monolingualism is far too harmonious to disavow, the epistemological and social implications too perilous:

Wir leben in einer geradezu fröhlichen Eintracht; verstehen einander, wenn es notwendig ist, kommen ohne einander aus, wenn es uns passt und verstehen einander selbst dann; wer könnte aus einer solchen Ordnung der Dinge heraus den verwirrten Jargon verstehen oder wer hätte auch die Lust dazu? (“[Rede über die jiddische Sprache]” 118)

We are living in a downright pleasant harmony; we understand one another when it is necessary, we get along without each other when it suits us and understand each other even then. Who, amid such a state of affairs, could ever understand the confused jargon, or who would even feel like doing so?

The trap Kafka lays here for his audience members—for their curiosity about the exotic, because halfway-familiar, sounds of Yiddish—signals not resignation to a monolingualist future, but rather an incitement to linguistic transgression—similar, in rhetoric and dramaturgy, to the 1915 parable “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Law”), published in the Jewish weekly Vorwärts—a parable uttered, not surprisingly, by a bilingual priest. If these German speakers at the Bar Kochba truly wished to appreciate Yiddish—which was tantamount to appreciating the differences between the two languages—were they willing to accept the epistemological consequences? Why, after all, should one prefer to grasp the difficult polysemy bound up in Yiddish-German homonyms (‘blood’ and

28 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38

‘death’ are the two examples he notes) over syncretic assimilation, an expedient “harmony” (“Eintracht”) between apparent cognates? For Kafka the presenter, Yiddish speech holds this potential to upset the monolingualist’s mastery over signifiers, his penchant for producing and preserving centripetal meanings. Because of its uncanny intimacy with German, Yiddish rescinds the audience’s entitlement to overlook what Halliday, Kramsch, and Pennycook have termed semiodiversity. Kafka’s speech here enacts a dramaturgical space of initiation between languages, a space in which the monolingualist is confronted, at a short distance, with a foreign, familiar parole that threatens to disrupt his authority over even ‘his own’ meanings.

Qualifying ‘Myth’ Myth, as we mentioned, is a broad and unwieldy term. I would propose that a vernacular use of the concept myth—along the lines of: ‘It’s an (urban) myth that Army-trained dolphins armed with anti-terrorist laser beams are still loose in the Gulf of Mexico’— leads us immediately into a cul-de-sac when thinking about monolingualism. Tinged as it is with a general admonishment toward naiveté, this use of the word myth sets up two classes of people—believers and critics—who deal with myth in ways that are fundamentally at odds with another, but are in some ways mutually reliant. Myth-believers are held under myth’s sway and are therefore unchanged and unchangeable in their stance toward myth. Myth-critics have, in contrast, furnished for themselves a lateral glance at the myth, are able to minoritize its role in their lives, and are therefore changed in their general apprehension of the world. This evangelical approach envisions a threshold of conversion by which a myth-believer can become a myth-critic when she divests from the myth, at which point she is no longer beholden to its message. I suggest that any such apprehension of monolingualism-as-myth, one that underwrites a temporal or intellectual threshold between participants and critics, or that relies on the notion of “divesting” from monolingualism through critique, is inclined to underestimate the mythic power and structure of monolingualism— misapprehending it as a small-minded, coercive, and propagandistic ideology that should have been debunked long ago. Furthermore, to pan monolingualism as an custom of by-gone days (say, in the Netherlands) or as a jingoistic farce (say, in the United States) would opportunistically overlook the many things the myth of monolingualism has been effective enough to invent and institutionalize over the past three centuries—including highly advanced popular literacy, mutual comprehensibility between states and their citizens, technical standardization, the publishing industry as we know it, and also, indeed, ethnolinguistic nationalism. As an historically contingent episteme, monolingualism has brought forth a bundle of inventions that even the most vigorous celebrants of multilingual subjectivity would have a hard time doing without. But if a discourse on monolingualism (as myth) pursues as its primary analytical objective the relative truth or falsity—or the ontological status—of monolingualism,

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 29 that discourse will be forced into a stalemate of rebuking, rebutting, or correcting positive claims, by replacing them with other claims that, nonetheless, still avail themselves of the myth’s originary terms—essentially impugning the said myth with items borrowed, as Audre Lorde remind us, directly from it. For instance, we could indeed choose to take a vigorous debunking stance toward monolingualism-as-myth, such as a) Monolingualism has never actually existed in human language practice, given the dialogical, centrifugal nature of speech itself, or b) Speech communities, particularly those emerging over the 18th and 19th centuries from war-nationalized societies in Northwestern Europe, became monolingual by force but never were monolingual in essence. We could continue with c) Anglophone Americans do not on average prefer to remain life-long speakers of one language only, and they in fact vigorously oppose English-only legislation, or d) Learning and mixing multiple languages does not aggra- vate children’s developmental aptitude and educational achievement; poverty and exclusion do this. These we could call respectively the ontological, historicist, correc- tive, and redistributionist arguments against the myth of monolingualism, and there is assuredly ample evidence and scholarship to defend each of those interventions. Having done so, however, we encounter the problem that ‘debunking myths’ may indeed lead to gradual policy changes and consciousness-raising, but tends to leave the generative template that makes and remakes the factual distortions of monolingualism relatively untouched and durable. As a matter of course, we also are then compelled to take refuge in logical premises produced by that generative structure itself. In the case of monolingualism, myth-debunking projects require us to make affirmative counter-distinctions, using terminology such as multilingualism, plurilin- gualism, “codes,” “switching” and the like—namely, constructs that take as their jus- tifying basis a natural or heuristically sound cleavage between monolanguage and multilanguage. The statutorily multilingual European Union, for instance, now finds itself several decades into just such a experimental dilemma around hundreds of language pairs (for 24 member languages), such that the socially multilingual United States can only wonder hopefully at the whole affair. And yet, such state-centralized planning around universal trilingualism compels policy-makers—at each turn, and often against their better wishes—to essentialize, delimit, individualize, and institutionalize categories of speech experience and linguistic identity that often have only the most tenuous historical grounding themselves (Yngve). Compelled by civic expediency and technological urgency, monolingualism and multilingualism remain the heuristics of choice—absent other categorizations that might enjoy more subtlety of social analysis while retaining sensible applicability in public affairs. Similar and notoriously freighted double-binds persist in how the US Census Bureau reports ethnicity/race, whereby a given respondent’s civic desire to ‘be counted’ as something relatively commensurate with who they are often conflicts with the principles of enumerability, singularity, and individuality with which s/he is

30 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38 interpellated as a citizen/denizen. Even when laid bare as violently inaccurate, such myths of category remain central, untroubled, and authoritative. Both the compulsion to produce evidence of a documented language and a documented ethnicity/race tend to effect “a kind of arrest, in the physical and legal sense of the term. [. . .] For this interpellant speech is at the same time a frozen speech at the moment of reaching me, it suspends itself, turns away, and assumes the look of a generality: it stiff- ens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent” (Mythologies 235, “une sorte d’arrêt, au sens a la fois physique et judiciare du terme [. . .] Car cette parole interpellative est en même temps une parole figée: au moment de m’atteindre, elle se suspend, tourne sur elle-même et rattrape une généralité : elle se transit, elle se blanchit, elle s’innocent,” 233). Given how swiftly these umbrella categories of multilingualism and monolingualism are being operationalized for the purpose of statescraft, any scholarly analysis that instrumentalizes the one to debunk the other—or that affirmatively elevates the one as a civic or moral virtue over the other—will suffer a certain methodological top-heaviness and fragility. What’s more, the kind of multilingualism that is often elected to stave off monolingual parochialism is deeply at odds with existing popular multilingualisms, leading to new discourses of verbal hygiene for postmulticultural societies (Cameron, Verbal Hygiene, “The One”). The multieth- nolects and language permutations that are most common among pupils in Dutch and German schools, but are not predicates of the EU’s 24-member-language civic subjecthood, defy and irritate the visionary programmatic status of multilingualism on the European (Union) stage. German-born secondary school students are more often users of Turkish, Kurdish, English, and German together than they are of French, Italian, English, and German together, and yet the actual multilingualism of the former is eclipsed by the idealized multilingualism of the latter. It will be equally insufficient, however, to debunk the multilingual/monolingual binary wholesale as a ‘myth’ or logical fallacy, because this option contents itself too quickly with the idea that these categories, once discovered to be ontologically unten- able, are also therefore ineffective, or will soon grow to be so, as the work of debunking them marches forth. Regardless of their truth or falsity, myths are, if anything at all, effective, and it is precisely myth’s effective, modest, and yet unsuperable performativity and interpellary stride that distinguishes it from other things: natural orders, fables, stories, tales, rumors, ideologies, pleas, policies, legends, polemics, patholo- gies, movements, backlashes, alibis, or orthodoxies. I would like to suggest that monolingualism is indeed none of these latter things, and that notions of monolingualism that see it as one or the other among them both over- and underestimate its signifying logic. Rather than a program of ethnolinguistic supremacy or a movement of ressentiment, monolingualism is a relatively modest kind of signifying structure—in Barthes’ characterization, a kind of speech or “parole”—which will use anything at its disposal to preserve its appearance of

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 31 timeless and pacific self-evidence. Indeed, to do so, monolingualism will continue to marshal all the resources of multilingualism, multiculturalism, diversity, plurality, and democracy as the source materials for its own second-order signification. As I have suggested, Kafka’s fictions may be reread as studies of the modest yet totalizing ambitions of global monolingualism amid its uneven emergence in modernity. Among Kafka’s preferred textual operations is, for instance, to displace linguistic multiplicity into spatial figures and deictic malaises—into oddly menacing thresholds and neighboring rooms, unreachable and distant surfaces, obscure cir- cuits of hallways and detours, troubling ruptures between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Often, the textual format itself tends to stagger laterally at the level of the syntagm, sentence, or chapter, giving rise to a loose and troubled contiguity—of “many lower, tightly packed” (8, “vielen eng aneinander stehenden niedrigen Bauten” Schloß 18)—one way the landsurveyor K. beholds the architectural structure of Westwest’s residence in Das Schloß. Given this lingual-spatial analectic in Kafka and elsewhere, hypotextuality is a particularly germane concept for understanding multilinguality’s troubled structural relationship to literature (Genette). While a digraphic medium like film (with subtitles and visual cues) can represent milieus where multiple languages are used simultaneously, literary texts are hard-pressed to signify such spaces. Genette’s concept of hypotext accounts well for the fractious relation between monolingual literary texts and multilingual life worlds—a relation in which a single-language text signals and indexes, often urgently, a patently cross-lingual set of signifieds, oral histories, or collective experiences. Though the term hypotext suggests one text ‘below’ another, Kafka’s manifest monolingualism rumbles with a lively und unrepresentable language event happening ‘in the other room.’ For instance, the late text “Heimkehr” collides and colludes with monolingualism as meta-formal constraint. The dilemmas this parable foregrounds are: How is an irrevocably multilingual lifeworld to be rendered into monolingual text? At what expense and by what means does this ‘translation’ of lived multilinguality into textual monolingualism take place? The parable’s first- person narrator paces up and down his father’s courtyard, where old, unusable appliances block his way to the stairwell. Smelling the coffee coming from behind the kitchen door, the narrator poses a question to himself: “Do you feel at home?” The voice that answers, again his own, begins to falter.

Ich weiß es nicht, ich bin sehr unsicher. Meines Vaters Haus ist es, aber kalt steht Stück neben Stück, als wäre jedes mit seinen eigenen Angelegenheiten beschäftigt, die ich teils vergessen habe, teils niemals kannte. Was kann ich ihnen nützen, was bin ich ihnen und sei ich auch des Vaters, des alten Landwirts Sohn. (573)

I don’t know. I am very unsure. It is my father’s house, but each item stands cold beside the next, as if it were already occupied with its own concerns, some of

32 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38

which I have forgotten, some which I never knew. How can I be of any use to them, what am I to them, even if I am my father’s—the old landlord’s—son?

Cold ‘pieces,’ the surplus material of other-language signification, populate the disor- derly courtyard, yet the narrator can have no use for them in the monolingual, German narration at hand. After some deliberation, the narrator demurs from knocking on the kitchen door, choosing to listen only from afar to the muffled, inchoate voices within. “What else is happening in the kitchen is the secret of those sitting there [. . .] The longer one stands before the door, the more foreign one becomes.” (“Was sonst in der Küche geschieht, ist das Geheimnis der dort Sitzenden, das sie vor mir wahren. Je länger man vor der Tür zögert, desto fremder wird man.” 573) What the narrator fears most is that someone might come through the door toward him, without his having knocked, and ask him something in a language for which he is ‘responsible’ but has not mastered—just as the English-speaking hotel clerk had done in Der Verschollene. Neither the text nor its narrator ever enters or witnesses this other room; the monolingual ‘here’ of the narrative must remain outside, increasingly foreign, yet always surrounded by entropic piles of unusable words that nonetheless belong to the narrator by inheritance. Still, the text rumbles with a lively and unrepresentable language event happening ‘in the other room.’ Next door to the manifest text is the space of formally interdicted and therefore unpublishable language—of the unruly and mundane admixture of dialectal usages of Yiddish, Czech, and the local argot of German Prague—which, like the silent appliances in the yard, for Kafka could not ‘be of use to’ his literary fiction. Indeed a great proportion of Kafka’s writing is, in both spatial and critical senses, ‘about’ what is being said by the muffled, other- languaged voices in the kitchen, where the coffee is brewing and the hearth is lit.

Conclusion In one of the countless passages that Franz Kafka forbade his friend Max Brod to publish, he again articulates this double-bind between language and literary monolingualism in architectural and spatial terms:

Das Schreiben versagt sich mir. Daher Plan der selbstbiographischen Untersuchungen. Nicht Biographie, sondern Untersuchungen und Auffindung möglichst kleiner Bestandteile. Daraus will ich mich dann aufbauen, so wie einer, dessen Haus unsicher ist, daneben ein sicheres aufbauen will, womöglich aus Material des alten. Schlimm ist es allerdings, wenn mitten im Bau seine Kraft aufhört und er statt eines zwar unsichern aber doch vollständigen Hauses, ein halb zer- störtes und ein halbfertiges hat, also nichts. (“[Das Schreiben]”)

Writing fails me. Therefore, a plan of autobiographical investigations. Not biography, but investigation and discovery of the smallest possible constitutive parts.

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 33 Out of these, I will build myself, like one whose house is unsteady and wishes to build a steadier one next to it, when possible out of the material of the old one. But it is indeed a bad thing if one’s energy gives out during construction and, instead of having an unsteady yet complete house, has a half-destroyed and a half-constructed one, i.e. nothing.

This anxious parable presages the delicate interdisciplinary positions in which we literature and language researchers may find ourselves in the first decades of the twenty-first century, between monolingual myth and multilingual world. The comforts of working and teaching in a single, ‘unsteady yet complete’ philological discipline have delayed the project of designing steadier fields of inquiry for the new century and its languages, with the assistance of the “smallest possible constitutive parts” of their predecessors. Both a source of comfort and an epistemological constraint, the monolingualist legacies of our disciplines are causing their foundations to tip and rumble, as global migration, affective interconnections, and translingual flow across borders confound national narratability. A shift away from monolingual constraints in research and teaching is thus an unavoidable, and yet daunting, task of de-mythologization, requiring new conceptions of linguistic analysis and literary authorship themselves. Barthes insisted that myth can appropriate substances and signifiers that appear fundamentally opposed to the myth itself. For instance, an African boy in French mil- itary uniform saluting the tri-couleur of the Republic (on a Paris news magazine cover) was in effect the “speaking corpse” into which the ultimate righteousness of French imperialism “settles comfortably.” Indeed, the myth of monolingualism has other speaking corpses, many of which look as if to be acting in open opposition or rejection of monolingualism, given their celebratory air of diversity and cosmopolitanism. (See for instance Yildiz’ analysis of Karin Sander’s multilingual art installation “Wordsearch.”) Kafka’s monolingual performativity, in a sense, pre-imagined the kind of “homogenous, empty” meaning that many latter-day platforms of monolingual myth-production have been able to monetize and multiply: including certain forms of automatic translation technology; post-ethnic logics of linguistic citizenship, naturalization, and verbal hygiene (Cameron); certain traditions of immigrant writing animated by state-sanctioned generate and subsidy that prize monolingual multiculturalism; certain exigencies of the globalized publishing industry for translatable content; certain protocols for multilingual Research and Development in software optimization and marketing; as well as new forms and formats of cognitive capitalism, in which hypom- nesic offshoring and linguistically engineered divisions of labor have been able to take hold. All of these mythic resources could also easily traffic under the name ‘multilingualism,’ and often do. Yet monolingualism-as-myth is able to harness the

34 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38 meaning-filled traffic of these domains, in order to reinstate its simple message: integrity, indivisibility, sovereignty, transposability. Collectively, Kafka’s parables pulse with far-off signals of a linguistic life banished from the textual domain in early 20th-century European publishing, and equally so in the translational ideologies of 21st-century global traffic. The thresholds that threaten with utterances from the elsewheres of language—the closed kitchen door in “Heimkehr,” the hatch in the console in Der Verschollene—were nascent fissures in the myth of monolingualism. Kafka’s corpus may be understood anew as an experimental divestiture from this myth, a comical and solemn study of its mandate. In a twenty-first century scholarly sphere that can no longer withstand monolingual foreclosure, Kafka’s writings may assist literary criticism anew in revising the monolingualist tenets that have defined authoriality, textuality, and literary style, and revisit the multilingual concerns that, for Derrida, lay at the foundation of post-structuralism:

If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d’une langue—more than one language, no more of one language. (Mémoirs 14–15)

In grasping literary monolingualism not as a natural state of things, but as a procedural and epistemological malaise, Kafka’s texts turn upon themselves, straining against “the bias of the artifact” endemic to high-modern national literatures (Morson 595). They endeavor to perform—not describe—the intrusion of the multilingual world into the mythic monolingual significations of literature, reminding us, again and again what is becoming of—and unbecoming in—language under the episteme of monolingualism.

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 35 Notes

1. 27. “Maupassant often lunched at the 3. On the sociological bias towards restaurant in the tower though he didn’t care multilingualism in literary studies generally, much for the food. It’s the only place in Paris, he see also Kremnitz 8 ff. used to say, where I don’t have to see it.” (236) 4. 818. “Literature—expressed as an 2. Unless otherwise noted, translations allegation—is such a drastic curtailment of are my own. See also Gramling, Where language. [. . .] The noise trumpets of Here Begins. nothingness.”

Works Cited

Anders, Günther. Kafka: Pro & Contra. Munich: Derrida, Jacques. Mémoires: for Paul de Man. Beck, 1951. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du 1986. (Orig. Mémoires. Pour Paul de Man. Paris: Seuil, 1957. (Mythologies. The Complete Edition. Gallilée, 1988.) In a New Translation. Trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.) ———. Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée 1996 (Trans. ———. La Tour Eiffel. Paris: Delpire Editeur Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of 1964. (Trans. “The Eiffel Tower.” A Barthes Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and University Press, 1998.) Wang, 1982, 36–50.) Dowden, Stephen. Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Batchelor, David. “In Bed with the Monochrome.” Imagination. Columbia: Camden House, 1995. From an Aesthetic Point of View. Ed. Peter Osborne: London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000, 151–176. ———. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Bulletin de la société française de philosophie. 22 février Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1969: 75–104. (Trans. “What is an Author?” La Reproduction: Éléments pour une théorie du Critical Theory since 1965. Hazard Adams and système d’enseignement. Paris: Editions de Leroy Searle, Eds. Tallahassee: Florida State Minuit, 1970. University Press, 1986, 138–147.)

Cameron, Deborah. Verbal Hygiene. London: Gelb, Ignace. A Study of Writing. Chicago: Routledge, 1995. University of Chicago Press, 1952.

———. “The One, the Many, and the Other: Gérard Genette. Palimpsestes. La Littérature Representing Multi- and Monolingualism in post- au second degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982. (Trans. 9/11 Verbal Hygiene.” Critical Multilingualism Palimpsests: Reading the Second Degree. Trans. Studies 1:2. 2013. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.) Cermak,ˇ Josef. “Franz Kafkas Sorgen mit der tschechischen Sprache.” Kafka und Prag. Gilman, Sander. Kafka: The Jewish Patient. Eds. Kurt Krolop and H. D. Zimmerman. Berlin: New York: Routledge, 1995. de Gruyter, 1994, 59–66. Gramling, David J. Where Here Begins: Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka. Pour Monolingualism and the Spatial Imagination. une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975. PhD Diss. Berkeley, 2008.

36 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 15–38

———. “The New Cosmopolitan Monolingualism: Lande” und andere Prosa. Frankfurt am Main: Linguistic Citizenship in Twenty-first Century Fischer, 1992: 118. Germany.” Die Unterrichtspraxis. 42.2 (2009), 130–140. ———. “[Das Schreiben versagt sich mir].” Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Max Brod et al. 12 vols. Halliday, Michael. “Applied Linguistics as an Vol. VII: “Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Evolving Theme.” Plenary address to the Lande” und andere Prosa. Frankfurt am Main: Association Internationale de Linguistique Fischer, 1992: 388. Appliquée Singapore. 2002. Kramsch, Claire. “The Privilege of the Non-Native Hokenson, Jan Walsh and Marcella Munson. Speaker.” PMLA 112.3 (1997): 359–369. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Kremnitz, Georg. Mehrsprachigkeit in der Self-Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Press, Literatur: Wie Autoren ihre Sprachen wählen. 2007. Vienna: Praesens Verlag für Literatur und Sprachwissenschaft. 2004. Judson, Pieter. Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006 Fayard, 1988. (Trans. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia Kafka, Franz. Das Schloß. Frankfurt am Main: University Press, 1991.) Fischer, 1982. (Trans. The Castle: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text. Trans. Makoni, Sinfree and Alastair Pennycook. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books, Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. 1998.) Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2006.

———. Der Verschollene. Frankfurt am Main: Morson, Gary Saul. “Sideshadowing and Fischer, 1983. (Trans. Amerika: The Missing Tempics.” New Literary History. 29.4 (1998): Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored 599–624. Text. Trans. Mark Harman. New York, Schocken Books, 2008.) Müller, Max. “On Henotheism, Polytheism, Monotheism, and Atheism.” The Contemporary ———. Kritische Ausgabe: Tagebücher. By Kafka. Review 33 (1878): 707–734. 3 vol. Eds. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, Müller, Willibald. Urkundliche Beiträge zur 1990. Geschichte der mährischen Judenschaft. Olmütz: Kullil, 1903. ———. “Die Sorge des Hausvaters.” Kritische Nekula, Marek. Franz Kafkas Sprachen: “ . . . in Ausgabe: Drucke zu Lebzeiten. By Kafka. 2 vols. einem Stockwerk des innern babylonischen Eds Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Turmes . . .” Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, Neumann. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994, 2003. vol. 1: 282–284. Pennycook, Alastair. “English as a Language ———. “Heimkehr.” Gesammelte Werke. always in Translation.” European Journal of Ed. Max Brod et al. 12 vols. Vol. VII: English Studies 12.2 (2008): 33–47. “Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande” und andere Prosa. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992: Pratt, Mary Louise. “If English Was Good Enough 573. For Jesus: Monolinguismo y mala fe.” Critical Multilingualism Studies. 1:1 (2012). ———. “[Rede über die jiddische Sprache].” Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Max Brod et al. 12 vols. Suchoff, David B. “Kafka’s Canon: Hebrew Vol. VII: “Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem and Yiddish in The Trial and Amerika.”

Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth | 37 Ed. Doris Sommer. Bilingual Games: Some Yildiz, Yasemin. “In the Postmonolingual Literary Investigations. New York: Condition: Karin Sander’s Wordsearch and Palgrave/MacMillan, 2003: 251–274. Yoko Tawada’s Wordplay.” Transit. 7:1.

———. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Wagenbach, Klaus. Franz Kafka. Reinbek bei Postmonolingual Condition. New York Fordham Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991. University Press, 2012.

Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. Yngve, V. From Grammar to Science: New “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54 Foundations for General Linguistics. Amsterdam, (1946): 468–488. PA: John Benjamins, 1994.

38 | David Gramling Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 39–46

A Case of ‘Fake Monolingualism’: Morocco, Diglossia and the Writer

Fouad Laroui

Fake Monolingualism and the Writer Every writer finds himself at the confluence of several forces that determine his work: First, there is the language in which he expresses himself. It is a given, perhaps the essential given. That language is dynamic on a scale of centuries but remains more or less stable on a generational scale. The language is his and not his: he is born into it, becomes aware within it, gives voice to his thoughts in it, searches within it for the expression of his emotions, but the language does not belong to him. Next, there is the writer’s personal style, which is his way of taking hold of the language, of manipulating it, of bringing it into line with what his body and psyche compel him to write. More precisely, it is the manner in which his body and psyche perceive the world. Thus, the contradiction “the language is his and not his” can be partially solved by the notion of style. Finally, there are the codes that indicate to readers, colleagues and institutions the particular tradition within which the writer places himself: social positioning, literary heritage, political engagement, etc. Of course, the outline just sketched (which owes a lot to Barthes) can be expanded upon and refined in a number of ways. Even within a given linguistic region, we must talk about languages in the plural. We also need to introduce the fundamental question of register, that is, to define within a language certain subsets: registers such as vulgar, colloquial, formal, heroic, etc.; professional jargons; regionalisms; baby talk, teen slang; the list is long. On the question of style, we must take into account both innovation and imitation. It might be necessary to define certain limits beyond which the question is no longer one of style but of solipsism. As for codes, we must make a distinction between those that are quite easy to discern

A Case of ‘Fake Monolingualism’: Morocco, Diglossia and the Writer | 39 (that which differentiates a poem from the text of a law, for example) and those that are not (the elusive literariness). Given this framework, the Moroccan writer can only envy his European or American colleagues, maybe even his colleagues the world over. They know where they stand. They can afford to offer themselves the luxury of perverting this fine schema: to do so is, in fact, the very work of a writer. The language can be replaced by a potpourri of languages, in which one can do whatever one likes: at the limit is Finnegan’s Wake or some of Pierre Guyotat’s later texts. Style can be characterized by its absence, as with practitioners of Oulipo, who delegate to abstract rules the task of producing a text from a language, a lexicon. There is no longer a body or psyche of the author. Lastly, codes are made to be subverted or mocked. One can write as if drafting directions for the use of a medication. One can describe a city as if one were drawing up a bill of indictment. The possibilities are endless. As already said, the Moroccan writer looks upon these intellectual games with envy. He, himself, is confronted with much more serious problems. To begin with, there is the question of language, more precisely of diglossia. All Arabs, without exception— though to differing degrees—speak one language (their dialect) and write another (Classical Arabic). This arises from the fact that ‘written’ Arabic, sacred because it is the language of the Koran, remains virtually unchanged since the time of Muhammad’s preaching, fourteen centuries ago. Admittedly, linguists could point out that there are now only ten ‘verb forms’ instead of fifteen; that certain ways of expressing the intensity of a verb are in practice no longer used although they are common in the Koran, etc. But the fact remains that the Arabic in which one pursues an education and in which scholarly lectures, political speeches, and judicial verdicts are delivered, is not the Arabic that is spoken in the street, between friends, with family. The situation varies according to country but the general problem exists throughout the Arab world. And it is not close to being resolved. In 1936, Bichr Fares published an article in Revue des Études Islamiques entitled “Des difficultés d’ordre linguistique, culturel et social que rencontre un écrivain arabe moderne, spécialement en Égypte” (“The linguistic, cultural, and social difficulties a modern Arab writer encounters, especially in Egypt”). Seventy years later, in 2006, Chérif Choubachy, a former Egyptian Vice-Minister of Culture, published a violent tract against Classical Arabic, which he accused of restricting the creativity and development of the Arabs . . . Between these two dates, hundreds of articles were devoted to this question. It is difficult to explain to a non-Arabist, without going into technical details, why this problem is so complex. Indeed, he might protest: ‘But the solution is simple: write in dialect! Rabelais did, and so did Céline . . .’ A number of Arab authors are already doing so, or attempting to, more or less successfully. Others, like Mahfouz, the 1988 Nobel Prize winner, are trying an intermediate solution: they write in Classical Arabic but switch to a dialectal form for the dialogue. Indeed, when it

40 | Fouad Laroui Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 39–46 comes to dialogue it is impossible to maintain the fiction that Arabs express themselves in the language of the Koran. Classical Arabic is the mother tongue of no one. Consider just two grammatical examples. In addition to the singular and plural, Classical Arabic has a third form, the dual, which appears often in the Koran, for example in Sura II where God is supposed to have addressed Adam and Eve using this form. And yet it does not exist in any dialect. No Arab uses it in everyday life. The second example concerns the conjugation of verbs, where the third person feminine plural is frustratingly similar to the first person plural. Thus, ‘we entered’ is dakhalnâ (with a long a at the end), ‘they [feminine] entered’ is dakhalna (with a short a). Long or short, this a is a source of confusion. In any case, the dialects have resolved the problem: they do not distinguish the feminine plural from the general plural in the third person at all . . . We give these two examples because Choubachy mentions them as easy and urgent reforms to Classical Arabic. His book includes few other practical examples. Nevertheless, he provoked a political storm in Egypt and an uncommonly fierce press campaign. Choubachy was accused of nothing less than wanting to destroy Islam and the Arab nation. These grammatical suggestions are very nearly the only ones he made and they were enough to almost have him declared persona not grata in his own country. However, it would require not two or three, but several thousand modifications to Classical Arabic in the areas of grammar, syntax, lexicon, etc., to bring it closer to the dialects . . . So, clearly, the scope of such an endeavor is colossal. (Besides the perceived attack on the ‘sacredness’ of Classical Arabic, the outrage that Choubachy provoked had another cause: most Arabs do not even consider Dialectal Arabic a language. They assume that it is not suited for precise, scientific usage, that one cannot teach in it, etc. Of course, such a view is simply wrong. Any dialectal form of Arabic is a language. French, Spanish, Italian were once dialects.) Let’s digress for a moment in order to respond in advance to those who would say: ‘Well, no writer, whether French, Flemish or Finnish, ever writes in his mother tongue because the written language is always a distinct entity (that’s what makes it the written language). So why don’t Arab writers just continue to write in Classical Arabic; and so what if it’s not their mother tongue?’ The objection is valid but we could respond as follows: there is no continuity between the two languages in the same way that there is continuity between the language of a French youth who left school at fourteen and the formal French of, say, a Pascal Quignard. The young man could read a text by Quignard (although he would certainly have to consult a dictionary from time to time). In contrast, an uneducated Arab youth could not even begin to read a highly literary text written in Arabic: for him, all the words, syntax, verb forms, etc., would be foreign. Returning to the outline sketched in the introduction, we can conclude that for the Moroccan writer the language itself, in other words the very foundation of his work as a writer, poses an almost insurmountable obstacle.

A Case of ‘Fake Monolingualism’: Morocco, Diglossia and the Writer | 41 But let’s continue nonetheless. On the subject of style, as defined above, the nature of the problem is immediately evident. That body and psyche color the mother tongue in an original and unique manner specific to each individual is entirely conceivable (writers would not exist otherwise). Let’s say, to paraphrase Baudelaire, that ‘scents, colors, and sounds’ are echoed in every person in a unique way, because each person has encountered them—in his flesh, in his childhood, in his discovery of the world—in the unique way that is his personal trajectory, his identity. But what happens when one wants to transcribe into another language this form of identity that constitutes style? It is possible that certain geniuses—Conrad or Nabokov come to mind—are capable of it. But for common mortals, and most Moroccan writers fall into this category, it is practically impossible. I remember my own trepidation when, beginning to learn Classical Arabic, I was faced with a list of the names of fruits: hardly one corresponded to the names belonging to Dialectal Arabic (Moroccan, in my case) I had learned in my earliest childhood. But there is more: it is not just the lexicon that is different but also the syntax. If I think ‘the man entered the house’ in Dialectal, then I must write ‘entered the man the house’ in Classical. And here too, different words are used to express the idea ‘house.’ As for false friends, they are legion. One example among thou- sands: rtab means ‘damp’ in Classical and ‘soft’ in Moroccan Dialectical. Thus, in a text incorporating both Classical and Dialectal, the sentence ‘this fabric is rtab’ would be intrinsically ambiguous. Developing a style under these conditions is clearly difficult. As for codes, certain of them were, of course, established over a thousand years ago. The poetry of the Arabs is considered their civilization’s most beautiful contribution. Major contemporary poets, like Adonis or Mahmoud Darwish, are continuing this tradition. But in the case of prose, and the novel in particular, things are much less clear. Recalling the link between the appearance of the European novel and the rising power of the bourgeoisie is a sufficient reminder that a literary genre is never free of ties to society. Theory aside, all the surveys show that the ‘bourgeoisie,’ or let’s say the middle classes in the Arab world, hardly read at all (expect for works of religious edification) and that they are not seeking a reflection or glorification of their existence in the novel. Even the most celebrated of Arab writers, Mahfouz, is more widely known than read and the print runs of his works in Arabic do not surpass ten thousand for a potential readership of two hundred million people. This phenomenon is explained in part by the linguistic problems outlined above. So what is left for the Moroccan writer who insists on taking up the pen? Those who do so in Arabic form an elite who write for an elite. One of them, Ahmed Bouzfour, was awarded an important literary prize in Morocco a few years ago but declined it with these bitter words: “You are giving me an award for a book that has sold 500 copies . . .” There are others who write in French or Spanish. And although the

42 | Fouad Laroui Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 39–46 demise of French-language Moroccan literature was announced more than half a century ago, it has never been more prevalent. Admittedly it poses formidable problems. The Moroccan writer uses the language of the Other or the language of others: either way, it’s mission impossible . . . Eppur, si muove. Joining the language debate that started with independence is the Berber question, which has begun to gain momentum in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Here is the response of writer Moha Souag when I asked him, in 1999, why he wrote in French: “I’m Berber. For me, Classical Arabic is just as much a foreign language as French.” It is true that in 1999, Berber was not yet a written language, at least not officially. It was essentially oral. Since then, the King of Morocco has created IRCAM (Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe), an institute for Amazigh (Berber) Culture that has established the basis of an adequate written form. But we are just at the beginning of a venture that could—possibly—lead to the balance of language, style, and codes that the Moroccan writer so cruelly lacks. (However, there is an ironic twist in this story: one of the aims of IRCAM seems to be to ‘invent’ a new Berber language, synthesizing the three major existing Berber dialects, Tarifit, Tamazight and Tachelhit, corresponding respectively to the north, the center and the south of the country. One could argue that such a synthesis is in fact an artificial language . . . Still, it has been declared the second official language of the country in the new Constitution from 2011. This has made Morocco the only country in the world with two official languages, Classical Arabic and ‘synthetic- Tamazight,’ that nobody actually speaks . . .) Other Moroccans are betting on the codification of the dialect, which they would like to see recognized as an entirely separate language. Linguists generally support their point of view. But this demand is causing outrage among proponents of a pure Classical Arabic, be it for religious reasons (‘it’s the language of the Koran, and therefore of God’), or out of Moroccan nationalism (‘it’s the official language of the country and it embodies a certain ideal of national unity’), or on behalf of pan-Arab nationalism (‘Classical Arabic is almost the only thing the twenty-two members of the Arab League have in common’). This is why one can speak of ‘fake monolingualism’: the official ideology says that ‘Arabic’ is the language of the country, but any citizen— an writers in particulars—are caught between classical Arabic, various dialects, the language of the ex-colonizer (French) and even languages with no local ties (we’re beginning to see Moroccans, Laila Lalami for example, who publish in English . . .).

The Specific Case of Francophone Moroccan Literature If the Moroccan writer as an individual encounters the formidable problems outlined above, Francophone Moroccan Literature meets with others, clearly linked to the former. Firstly, is Francophone Moroccan Literature a national literature? One of its features immediately calls this into question: can a national literature exist in a language

A Case of ‘Fake Monolingualism’: Morocco, Diglossia and the Writer | 43 that is not the language of the nation in question? It is tempting to respond at once in the negative: certainly not! How can a literature be called ‘national’ if the nation— save an educated élite—cannot read it? Therefore, Francophone Moroccan Literature cannot be the national literature of Morocco. Then the related question arises: what is the national literature of this country? The official language is Arabic (Classical). But as we’ve seen above, texts written in this language can be read by only a minority. Again: can a literature be described as ‘national’ if the ‘nation’ cannot read it? In the language (Dialectal Arabic, or ‘Moroccan,’ or darija) that everyone speaks there exist almost no texts. Can a literature be called national in absentia, or—to be optimistic—in potentia? Another, rather outlandish, possibility exists. What if no reference was made to the language when speaking about a national literature? That sounds like a joke, but is not one. In his prologue to the first issue of Souffles, of great importance in the literary history of Morocco, Abdellatif Laâbi writes the following: “There remains the problem of the communication of this poetry. On the one hand, and it has already been said (but strangely never taken seriously), there is the possibility of translating these works if one considers, however slightly, that they have their place and their role to play within the body of our national literature.” What Laâbi says in this sentence is aston- ishing: take a poem written in French and published in Souffles. If “one” (who?) considers that that poem “has its place and its role to play” within the body of “our national literature,” then it needs to be translated. Into which language? Laâbi does- n’t say, but I suppose he is imagining Classical Arabic, because at that time darija was practically never ‘imagined’ a language. In other terms, the national literature is a pure essence that can imagine itself without reference to the language: a poem in French and also its translation into Arabic have their place within it, ipso facto! The incongruity of that statement appears when one tries to imagine Nabokov’s Lolita as a classic of Russian national literature or Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve as a Romanian classic. Secondly, the novel in Morocco is a genre from elsewhere written in a language from elsewhere. The novel was born in neither Mexico nor Colombia, but that has not prevented these two countries from producing excellent novelists. That a genre originates elsewhere is not in itself a problem. Morocco’s singularity lies elsewhere: the first Moroccan novel written in French appeared in the 1930s, ten years before the first Moroccan novel in Arabic. Francophone Moroccan Literature therefore is not grafted onto a preexisting genre: It created this genre. Literary filiation in Morocco passes rather naturally from francophone writer to francophone writer: Chraïbi is the anti-Sefrioui; Laâbi, Khatibi, and Ben Jelloun have closely read Chraïbi; the third generation knows it predecessors and dreams sometimes of achieving the success of Ben Jelloun, etc. All this gives the novel written in French a semblance of legitimacy: it was there first and it developed organically. The problem, then, stems from the conjunction of the two facts: a genre from elsewhere in a language from elsewhere.

44 | Fouad Laroui Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 39–46

The novel developed in Europe, especially in the nineteenth century, in a context marked by the emergence of a national bourgeoisie, with access to education and with leisure time, that was seeking a sort of mirror in which to regard itself, better understand itself, even glorify itself. Take France as an example: from Balzac to Flaubert, from the latter to Proust and Mauriac, there is an evident balance between, on the one hand, the writer’s objective, the language he employs, the characters and situations he presents; and on the other hand, the expectations of the public. Even when the objective is, as the saying goes, ‘to shock the middle classes,’ the fact is that the middle classes are there, ready to be shocked and even to pay for someone to ridicule them . . . The arrival of Céline does not fundamentally upset this balance. Neither his adoption (invention?) of working-class language, nor the sympathy he ostensibly displays for the proletariat prevent Céline from gaining the recognition of a large public. The same can be said of the public favor shared by Camus, Sartre, and Mauriac in the immediate post-war years. It is at that point in time exactly that the French-language Moroccan novel appears. And so it is immediately in a precarious position: First, it appears suddenly in a society (Moroccan society) that is not expecting it. When Sefrioui publishes his first novel, in French, how many Moroccans are capable of reading it? (Almost none.) And is he writing for them, anyway? Second, it is born in a language that developed historically elsewhere and thus corresponds to a culture that is other. Third, it is born in a living language, French, a circumstance that sets a terrible trap: one either conforms to the language’s aesthetic canons of the time, but then where is the style, originality, irreducible personality of the Moroccan author? Or else, one transforms and enriches the language, but in this case, how does one avoid exoticism? And what influence will one have, in return, on the appropriated language? Fourth, it is immediately caught up in extra-literary preoccupations. Ahmed Sefrioui is both the first and the last to apparently produce ‘art for the sake of art;’ but even in this case, to paraphrase Sartre, ‘refusal to engage is a form of engagement.’ With the appearance in 1954 of Le Passé Simple by Chraïbi, the tone is set: the novel is engaged, in phase with the concerns of the time. Is it a coincidence that during the time of struggle for national liberation there appeared themes of acculturation, rift and revolt? The most spectacular case in this regard is that of the review Souffles, which (beginning with its fifth number) published only articles of political, social, or economic analysis, even though it started out as a literary review. In conclusion, this situation of ‘fake monolingualism’ in which a foreign language (French) represents the only way out is quite unique within ‘postcolonial literature’: an improbable conjunction between history, linguistic circumstances, politics, etc., has produced a ‘monster,’ Francophone Moroccan literature; but it is a monster that refuses to die and still expresses the dreams, the aspirations, the hopes of many writers; and will do so as long as the Moroccan ‘language drama’ has not been solved.

A Case of ‘Fake Monolingualism’: Morocco, Diglossia and the Writer | 45

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 47–52

Moroccan Literature: A Monster Yet To Be Born? A Response to Fouad Laroui

Madeleine Kasten

To provide a framework for my reading of Fouad Laroui’s essay, I would briefly invoke Jacques Derrida’s essay Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine (Monolingualism of the Other or The Prothesis of Origin): “I only have one language; it is not mine” (1, “Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne,” 13): this contradictory claim sums up the theme of Derrida’s rich text. In fact his whole essay can be read as an elaboration of this initial aporia, which concerns the fundamental impossibility of inhabiting the one language that nevertheless constitutes one’s mother tongue. However, even if the truth that is at stake here ultimately takes a philosophical turn it should be noted that within Derrida’s oeuvre, Le monolinguisme de l’autre combines philosophical argument with personal history to an unusual degree. As a Franco-Maghrebian Jew who grew up in Algeria during the Second World War, Derrida had his French citizenship temporarily taken away from him under the Pétain government. For him, the connection between mother tongue and group identity was thus by no means a ‘given;’ if anything, the violent disruption of this connection caused him to suffer a “disorder of identity” (14, “trouble de l’identité,” 32). Any culture starts with an act of linguistic colonization (“La maîtrise [. . .] commence par le pouvoir de nommer,” 68 / “Mastery begins through the power of naming,” 39). Consequently, when Jewish francophones in colonized Algeria found themselves disowned by the very language that had named them, to the exclusion of both Arabic and Berber, they were faced with nothing less than a cultural interdict. For the only way in which a subject thus afflicted could hope to speak his experience ‘from within’ language would be by fulfilling the impossible task of simultaneously inventing himself (the ‘I’ in language) and the language to speak that ‘I’ in.

Moroccan Literature: A Monster Yet To Be Born? A Response to Fouad Laroui | 47 Monolingualism, as the authoritative “language of the Law” and as “the Law as Language” (39, “langue [. . .] de la Loi” / “la Loi comme Langue,” 69), was imposed on Derrida from without, by the distant French ‘Metropole;’ a fate that, far from being unique or limited to French-speaking Jews in Algeria, binds him to speakers of ‘minor’ languages all over the world. From this last insight, however, he moves towards an even more general conclusion:

[D]e toute façon on ne parle qu’une langue – et on ne l’a pas. On ne parle jamais qu’une langue – et elle est dissymétriquement, lui revenant, toujours, à l’autre, de l’autre, gardée par l’autre. Venue de l’autre, restée à l’autre, à l’autre revenue. (70)

In any case we speak only one language—and [. . .] we do not own it. We only ever speak one language—and, since it returns to the other, it exists asymmetrically, always for the other, from the other, kept by the other. Coming from the other, remaining with the other, and returning to the other. (40)

None of us, whatever our individual circumstances, can claim ownership of the language that named us in the first place. Any such notion, with its concomitant suggestion of linguistic purity, relies on an artificial construct of origin—the prosthesis mentioned in the essay’s subtitle. It is interesting to note that where Derrida freely extends personal experience to encompass philosophical truth, Fouad Laroui’s argument resists such a generalizing move. Quite the contrary: his thought-provoking paper reminds us that Arab-speaking authors in Morocco—and by extension, throughout the Maghreb—characteristically lack the freedom to manipulate linguistic registers or stylistic and generic codes that is too often taken for granted by their European and American colleagues. For while these others can usually build on a continuum between their mother tongue and literary language, Arab-speaking Moroccans find themselves confronted with an inevitable gap between their dialectal variety of spoken Arabic, Darija, and written, Classical Arabic, “the mother tongue of no one” (41), a language that has remained unchanged for many centuries and that is read by few Moroccans anyway. Laroui observes that this diglossia constitutes a serious problem for authors who want to express themselves in Arabic; indeed it may well explain why, more than half a century after the official termination of French colonial rule in Morocco, Moroccan literature written in French still prevails. Other Moroccans have resorted to writing in English or Spanish, while Laroui himself, who lives in Amsterdam, switches between French and Dutch. Tamazight or Berber, spoken by roughly half of the Moroccan population, was recognized as an official language only in 2011 after have been repressed for many years, and according to Laraoui it is too early still to predict whether this measure will yield a flourishing literary practice. As a result of this contemporary Babel, says Laroui, the Moroccan writer will find that “the language itself, in other words the very foundation of his work as a writer,

48 | Madeleine Kasten Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 47–52 poses an almost insurmountable obstacle” (41). On the face of it, this verdict would seem to condemn Moroccan authors to the ‘disorder of identity’ described by Derrida. Yet where Derrida is able to express and philosophize about his predicament in impeccable French, the very language that once disowned him, Moroccan writers have no literary language at their disposal that would allow them freely to do so. Instead, they find themselves saddled with a predominantly francophone literary heritage that shows no linguistic or cultural continuity with their Arab or, alternatively, their Berber roots. Language is thus dissociated from everyday life in a way that puts me in mind of the migrant woman in the first poem of Laroui’s own volume, Hollandse woorden (Dutch Words):

Holland Hollanda Men zegt haar dat het heel mooi is maar vanaf hier ziet zij dat niet zij ziet Holland niet alleen Dirk van den Broek en de hoeren om de hoek

Holland Hollanda People tell her it is very beautiful but from here she cannot see this she doesn’t see Holland only Dirk van den Broek [name of a cheap Dutch store chain] and the whores around the corner1

Just as the woman whose experience is related here knows the word ‘Holland’ but cannot connect it to anything she sees around her, so Moroccan authors are forced to express themselves in a language bearing no connection to the world they inhabit; hence that world as well as their own place in it are bound to remain a mystery to them. It would not do to play down the consequences of this problem—not even in the context of a volume whose stated aim is to challenge the myth of monolingualism. On comparing the accounts of Laroui and Derrida, one is forced to admit that the interdict operates differently in either case: obviously there are different, culturally and historically determined degrees of linguistic disownment. Even so, I would venture two questions:

1. My first question concerns the ‘curse,’ or, as Laroui puts it, the “language drama” (34) of the Moroccan writer (my emphasis); a tragedy whose dimensions I have recapitulated above. Yet how could such a creature as the Moroccan writer exist, given the discontinuity between Classical Arabic and Darija on the one hand, the gap between both of these languages and Tamazight on the other, and finally the continuing influence of French and French literary history? Even if there

Moroccan Literature: A Monster Yet To Be Born? A Response to Fouad Laroui | 49 were a lingua franca, a language common to all (which is not the case!), would not each linguistic community inflect that common language in its own way, bringing its own cultural outlook to bear on it while subjecting it to yet further modifications determined by gender, social class, sexual identity, religion, etc.? Talking of literary language—in the sense of a culturally determined set of stylistic and generic codes—we may see such strategies of inflection at work in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel L’Enfant de sable (The Sand Child), to mention just one slightly older example. Not only does this novel thematize the problematic construction of individual and collective identity in a postcolonial Moroccan context; it reflects this problem on the level of representation by mixing codes pertaining to literary realism with classical formulas of Arabic story-telling. This is not to deny, of course, that the absence of a common linguistic basis is bound to complicate the process of intercultural communication in countless ways. Yet, given the current of modernization and constitutional reform in Morocco that has already resulted in the recognition of Tamazight and the Arab-Hassani language spoken among the people of the Western Sahara as official languages alongside Arab, would it be too far-fetched to imagine a future in which Morocco might begin to capitalize on its linguistic and cultural differences rather than suf- fering from them? Or, if such a possibility seems too remote for the time being: could Laroui envisage a literature that would at least question rather than confirm what Yasemin Yildiz calls the homology between language and ethno-cultural identity installed by the “monolingual paradigm” (26)? 2. In the second part of his paper Laroui raises the “outlandish [. . .] possibility” (32) of a national literature without a common language; a possibility which he rightly dismisses as an impossibility, since it presupposes the existence of a pure national literary essence outside language. My question here would be whether Morocco still needs one national literature today, as it did in 1966 when, as Laroui recalls, the Moroccan poet and novelist Abdellatif Laâbi made his plea for such a literature in the preface to the first issue of his magazine Souffles. Berber culture is today officially endorsed, and for many speakers of Darija, code switching between Darija and French, or between Darija and Spanish, has long been a necessary part of everyday reality. We find this practice of code-switching fore- grounded, for instance, in Laila Marrakchi’s 2005 film Marock, where an interreligious love affair between an Arab boy and a Jewish girl necessitates frequent code-switching between Darija and French. Indeed Marock constitutes an interesting test case, since it was criticized for its possible anti-Islam sympathies—perhaps in part, though not exclusively, because of the challenge it posed to the myth of Arab monolingualism.

50 | Madeleine Kasten Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 47–52

In addition to these cultural changes in Morocco itself I would point to the estimated four and a half million Moroccans living abroad nowadays, like Laroui himself, who writes and publishes both in French and in Dutch. If diglossia, or even heteroglossia, affects the lives of most Moroccans today—even more so, I imagine, than back in 1966—then could not this open up avenues for the birth of a new, enabling ‘monstrosity’: a transnational literature that might help Moroccans both in the country itself and abroad to consider their multilingualism a strength rather than a curse?

Moroccan Literature: A Monster Yet To Be Born? A Response to Fouad Laroui | 51 Note

1. My translation.

Works Cited

Ben Jelloun, Tahar. L’Enfant de sable. Paris: Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, Seuil, 1985. (Trans. The Sand Child. Trans. Alan 1998.) Sheridan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.) Laroui, Fouad. Hollandse woorden. Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine. Paris: Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Galilée, 1996. (Trans. Monolingualism of the Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick University Press, 2012.

52 | Madeleine Kasten Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually?

Till Dembeck and Georg Mein

Es gibt eine Nachreife auch der festgelegten Worte. Walter Benjamin: “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”1

In Berufsgruppen, die, wie das so heißt, geistige Arbeit verrichten, zugleich aber unselbständig und abhängig sind oder wirtschaftlich schwach, ist der Jargon Berufskrankheit. Theodor W. Adorno: Der Jargon der Eigentlichkeit2

The monolingual paradigm—the idea that each individual ‘owns’ the one language in which he or she has been socialized, and that this language therefore offers the best possible opportunities for expression—is becoming increasingly fragile. Scholars have pointed out, and rightfully so, that this idea is a modern Western construction that is meant to produce cultural homogeneity in the service of ‘nation building,’ to create a uniform space of communication. For Germanophone areas, this linkage between language and nation is associated in particular with Jacob Grimm, who invoked this connection repeatedly and emphatically in his many writings. He writes in his Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the Origin of Language): “the power of language forms nations and holds them together; without such a bond, they would scatter” (“die kraft der sprache bildet völker und hält sie zusammen, ohne ein solches band würden sie sich versprengen,” 30).3 Yet, if the monolingual paradigm no longer applies, then what will take its place? Critics of the monolingual paradigm seem to agree that it is not possible to simply return to some ‘primordial’ multilingual world. Yildiz has written about the “postmonolingual condition,” signalling uncertainty about what would and should take

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 53 the place of monolingualism. The sociolinguists Makoni and Pennycook argue that if multilingualism means to supplant the monolingual paradigm, then multilingualism cannot just be the simple pluralisation of monolingualisms.4 Instead, we must begin “disinventing” linguistic homogeneity. Or, to use a category proposed by Stockhammer and others, one must destabilize the simple ‘linguism’ (“Sprachigkeit”) of linguistic elements and structures, meaning their assignability to one language (in the sense of langue; see Stockhammer et al.). The following remarks are dedicated to assessing alternatives to the monolingual paradigm. We use an example that affects us philologists in the emphatic sense of the word: we focus on ‘our’ own language and inquire into the possibility of a postmonolingual philological writing. We begin our discussion by first dealing with the reasons for the efficacy of the monolingual paradigm, particularly in the sciences and in philology (section I). Second, we turn to evaluate the relationship of philology and foreign languages, a problem that is particularly well illustrated in the field of translation and the use of foreign words (section II). Third, we return to address our initial question, which explores the limits of and alternatives to the monolingual paradigm in the discipline of philology (section III).

Scholarly Politics of Monolingualism Derrida’s famous sentence—“I only have one language; it is not mine” (Monolinguisme 1, “Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne,” 13)—suggests that our very own idiolect still remains unavailable to every one of us. Everything that we say is (pre-)formed in its units and structure by other people, and this is not changed by the fact that we appropriate language for ourselves in a unique way and piece it together into ‘our’ language. The monolingual paradigm conceives of monolingualism as a phenomenon located beyond each individual speaker’s unique linguistic competence as well as the idioms of communication in which multiple idiolects enter into play with one another. It ignores how in these situations different linguistic standards grate on each other, and the narrowness of every isolated language, as well as the unambiguous linguism of the structures used, is potentially called into question. The monolingual paradigm would define language as a precisely delimited communal property, free of the effects of idiolects and everyday creolization. Nevertheless, this line of argument can only scratch the surface of the monolingual paradigm’s social efficacy. This limitation is also due to the fact that this paradigm ‘only’ forms the ideological superstructure for politico-linguistic strategies that have changed the sociolinguistic setting tremendously. In the service of monolingualism, innumerable pedagogical and political institutions have worked, and continue to work, to invent linguistic standards and to sanction deviations. The enforcement of the monolingual paradigm has been and is accompanied by the establishment of linguistic borders and the removal of linguistic variance and transitional

54 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70 phenomena. A standard language is used in place of every singular language that the individual learns as his or her first language, which for example could also be a vari- ant of a local dialect. This standard language is from then on used as the native language. In the context of the monolingual paradigm, a native language is constituted paradoxically by the suppression and overcoming of the language that an individual first spoke. Because the monolingual paradigm makes one believe that it is not the language of the family, but rather the standardized language of the school that is the native language, speakers of dialect are not the only speakers affected by the suppression or overcoming of the original language. In principle, all speakers are impacted. Yet the care taken by linguists to rescue ‘dying’ languages tends to impose the ‘actual’ native language on speakers who belong to ‘ethnic’ language communities. The language situation in Luxembourg is a recent example of a situation where the status of ‘native linguism’ is anything but clear, yet Luxembourg’s position as an intermediating space of contact between ‘Germania’ and ‘Romania’ reflects “a situation that is shaped by the coexistence of German and its regional varieties, alongside the French language” (“die von einem Nebeneinander des Deutschen, bzw. regionaler Varietäten des Deutschen und des Französischen, geprägt ist,” Gilles et al. 63). The country’s current triglossic situation, meaning the coexistence of Luxembourgish, German and French, raises the question of who can and should speak Luxembourgish—which was elevated to the level of a national language in 1984—as a native language, and which role both other languages assume in this context. Makoni and Pennycook are right to point out that in such situations “rights are attached to languages rather than to their speakers” (149).5 This mechanism has created and continues to create linguistic realities whose artificial constitution does neither mitigate their tenacity, nor their functionality. It is obvious that there must always be tendencies towards the standardisation of linguistic norms if we intend at all to receive answers to spoken statements.6 If we wanted to take this a bit further, we could on the one hand say that the assumptions behind the monolingual paradigm are simply wrong—there are neither fixed linguistic boundaries and strictly distinct linguism,7 nor do speakers have access to a native language. On the other hand, unitary languages are something that we have to deal with in a very real sense. This finding can be explained to some degree by differences of scope: monolingualism is real to the extent that modern so-called national languages represent effectively standardized consolidations of possibilities for verbal expression. These standardisations are successful because they—in reliance on the media available in respective areas—guarantee that language can be used regardless of the situation.8 Even if these languages begin to fray at the edges or if they host a variety of linguistically ‘alien’ structures, words, sentences and texts can still be regularly classified with a high degree of reliability as part of individual languages, and ‘errors’ made by different speakers can be confirmed unanimously. Whether we see ‘major’ language

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 55 units in the sense of the monolingual paradigm, or a colourful chaos of unique idiolects, seems to be a question of how closely we choose to assess language. It seems, however, that at least ‘scientific’ approaches to language cannot be content with the fuzziness of such a gradual differentiation: If capturing language unity depends on a perspective that overlooks ‘small’ differences, how can language itself guarantee precision? The monolingual paradigm’s insistence on more clarity vis-à-vis an imprecise description of linguistic standards, can therefore not only be traced back to projects of ‘nation building,’ but also to the prevalence of ‘rationalist’ theories of scientific language use—which, at least partly, are also relevant to philological research. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalist models of thought sought to posit the idea that languages can be consolidated as autonomous systems of expression, closed against outside interference, thereby affirming language’s ability to articulate truths. In its manifold forms, rationalism assumes among other things that language and thought are equivalent to one another and are fundamentally able to comprehend the world clearly and consistently.9 Rationalism therefore relies on modes of communication that call for clear descriptions (clarity and specificity) and internal consistency. Against this background, every whiff of idiolect or creolization must be considered a disruption, anomaly or noise because it calls into question the singularity of descriptions.10 The attempt to monitor language in such a way that it provides precisely one system of expressive options is a correlate of basic rationalist principles—and these fundamental principles are used at least part of the time for scholarly arguments that properly call into question the ability to delimit language features and the other basic principles of the monolingual paradigm. Viewed from this vantage point, the idea of monolingualism seems to serve a regulative role (in Kant’s sense) for all communication forms that share basic rationalistic assumptions, especially those of many sciences (Sakai 73–74). We assume that it is possible to isolate unitary languages, even if only the language of mathematics can currently claim that it actually fulfils the requirements posed by a rationalist ideal of communication. What does this mean for those scholarly disciplines whose inheritance we confront in this volume: the national philologies? We can hold on to two fixed points: first, subjects such as Germanic studies developed in the context of nineteenth- century nationalism. Fohrmann’s Das Projekt der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (The Project of German Literary History) lucidly traces the constitutive efforts of German national philology from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, to describe the history of German literature as the entelechy of a national character. The cultivation of a German scientific language was of course one of their central objectives. Jacob Grimm’s work on the history of the Germanic languages, among them the previously mentioned Über den Ursprung der Sprache, as well as the dictionary project he started in cooperation with his brother Wilhelm, are prime examples of the cultural politics underlying the discipline of Germanistik in the 19th century. Second, however,

56 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70 there was a transition ‘from a scholarly community to a disciplinary one,’ as the eponymous title Von der gelehrten zur disziplinären Gemeinschaft of an anthology dedicated to the history of German literary studies suggests. This implied a shift towards terminological and methodological standardisation that was meant to guarantee the general accessibility of results. This shift led to a compulsion to cultivate clarity in the sense of a rationalist ideal of communication. Philology increasingly included the production of standardized editions and firmly established traditional contexts, as well as the development of terminologies unique to their specific field of scholarly inquiry. We may still be moving within this context today, at least partially, if we attempt to describe the problem of monolingualism. Our discipline derives at least some of its existential justification from the fact that it lays claim to precise languages of description that are ostensibly better suited to our purposes than other languages—be it analytical sets of text description as provided by rhetorics, metrics, or narratology, or the ‘critical’ concepts of cultural studies. Two examples can demonstrate how effective the aim of establishing linguistic unity as an epistemological means has been in the recent past of the humanities. Philosophical hermeneutics as developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), envisions the overcoming of linguistic difference in the process of interpretation. Understanding, he writes, “is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition” (293, “selber nicht so sehr als eine Handlung der Subjektivität zu denken, sondern als Einrücken in ein Überlieferungsgeschehen,” 295, emphasis in the original). By definition, however,the stranger and therefore the foreign language do not par- ticipate in such a tradition. Transmission consists here in nothing other than the probative reproduction of limits to understanding—even if these limits are meant to be pushed in the process. Although, as Gadamer emphasizes with a view to the prejudicial structure of understanding, “what leads to understanding [. . .] must be something that has already asserted itself in its own separate validity” (298, “was zum Verstehen verlockt, [. . .] sich selber schon zuvor in seinem Anderssein zur Geltung gebracht haben,” 304), otherness is always only the starting point for a transfer from the foreign to the self. Understanding always remains the notorious process of fusion of “horizons supposedly existing by themselves” (305, “vermeintlich für sich seiender Horizonte,” 311, emphasis in the original). Although the hermeneutic approach’s claim to universality is derived from the constant irritation of the ‘other,’ the other’s status is immediately levelled in the stroke of comprehension. It can be levelled, because the alien must inscribe itself in linguistic—and to Gadamer, this means: shared—contexts: “being that can be understood is language” (xxxi, “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache,” 478, emphasis in the original). Gadamer understands language as such to have no insuperable interior boundaries:

Die Unverständlichkeit oder Mißverständlichkeit überlieferter Texte, die sie [die Hermeneutik] ursprünglich auf den Plan gerufen hat, ist nur ein Sonderfall

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 57 dessen, was in aller menschlichen Weltorientierung als das atopon, das Seltsame begegnet, das sich in den gewohnten Erwartungsordnungen der Erfahrung nirgends unterbringen läßt. Und wie im Fortschritt der Erkenntnis die mirabilia ihre Befremdlichkeit verlieren, sowie sie verstanden worden sind, so löst sich auch jede gelingende Aneignung von Überlieferung in eine neue, eigene Vertraulichkeit auf [. . .]. Beides fließt zusammen in die eine, Geschichte und Gegenwart umspan- nende, eigene und miteigene Welt, die im Reden der Menschen miteinander ihre sprachliche Artikulation empfängt. (Gadamer, “Rhetorik” 237)

No less universal is the function of hermeneutics. The lack of immediate under- standability of texts handed down to us historically or their proneness to be mis- understood is really only a special case of what is to be met in all human orientation to the world as the atopon (the strange), that which does not “fit” into the customary order of our expectation based on experience. Hermeneutics has only called our attention to this phenomenon. Just as when we progress in understanding the mirabilia lose their strangeness, so every successful appropriation of tradition is dissolved into a new and distinct familiarity in which it belongs to us and we to it. They both flow together into one owned and shared world, which encompasses past and present and which receives its linguistic articulation in the speaking of man with man. (Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics 24–25)

Certainly, Gadamer does not claim that an appropriation of all language differences, and thus the establishment of one universal descriptive language for the humanities could ever be accomplished. However, it is language unity, not language difference that guarantees understanding. Contrary to this, if only at first sight, our second example celebrates language difference. In the context of the continuing debates about German as a language of scholarship, Ehlich has defended multilingual scholarly discourse against the supremacy of English in several talks and papers since the mid-1990s (see “Deutsch als Medium,” “Mehrsprachigkeit,” “Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache”). Ehlich argues against the view that a single language is beneficial to scholarship and that it would be reasonable to agree upon a lingua franca to facilitate scholarly progress. Despite first appearance, however, Ehlich’s own arguments are shaped through and through by the monolingual—and partly the rationalist—paradigm. Ehlich—relying on a body of thought derived from Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt that typically runs through language debates in a trivialized form—begins with the idea that language not only determines the cultural identity of its speakers, but that language also represents an epistemological framework of conditions. Accordingly, every insight depends on the possibilities inherent in the language in which these insights are rendered. This means in turn that knowledge is always fundamentally shaped by the language in

58 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70 which it is developed—which explains for Ehlich the phenomenon of national cultures of scholarship. Ehlich argues that the attack on these cultures of scholarship is therefore equal to an attack on the diversity of sources for scientific knowledge. This especially holds in the humanities, in which according to Ehlich the central performance of cognition is inherent to the search for proper linguistic expression. In contrast, the disciplines based on mathematics enjoy the option of using techniques of cognitive expression that do not depend on culture or language. If we were to give up the diversity of national scholarly languages, this could lead to the impoverishment of cognitive potential in the humanities. It would even cause an impoverishment of the national languages whose expressive diversity depends upon the preservation and cultivation of a scholarly language. Ehlich shows that scholarship’s enforcement of different national standardized languages was a decisive and crucial contribution to the modern age. But ultimately, his promotion of scholarly multilingualism merely duplicates rationalist striving for clear linguistic uniformity. According to Ehlich, every individual language develops its own unique perspective on the world, yet these languages always remain translatable into each other, thanks to their collective orientation towards the truth. It is no coincidence that Ehlich calls for more intense scholarly translation activity.11

A Postmonolingual Ethics of Translation? As far as concepts such as Gadamer’s and Ehlich’s are still valid, the humanities, and the national philologies in particular, are still indebted both to ‘national’ language unity and to the postulation of a universal, culturally independent descriptive language, as originating from the rationalist tradition. Nevertheless: the classification of philology among those sciences that harbour the ideal of one unitary descriptive language (or: languages) comes with reservations. In its origins, long before the enforcement of the monolingual paradigm, philology arose in the confrontation with the alien and difficult to understand. Indeed, a philological text, in its original sense, wins its (precarious) unity from the interaction between multiple languages and the crossing of linguistic boundaries that takes place within philology itself. Therefore we must inquire into the degree to which philology can be obligated to a rationalist standard at all, as well as examine what alternatives there are for the establishment of scholarly linguistic standards. In order to find these alternatives, it is helpful to consider the relation between ‘philology,’ translation, and the use of ‘foreign’ words. Friedrich Nietzsche once described philology as

jene ehrwürdige Kunst, welche von ihrem Verehrer vor Allem Eins heischt, bei Seite gehn, sich Zeit lassen, still werden, langsam werden –, als eine Goldschmiedekunst

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 59 und kennerschaft des Wortes, die lauter feine vorsichtige Arbeit abzuthun hat und Nichts erreicht, wenn sie es nicht in lento erreicht. [. . .] sie lehrt gut lesen, das heisst langsam, tief, rück- und vorsichtig, mit Hintergedanken, die offen gelasse- nen Thüren, mit zarten Fingern und Augen lesen. (17)

that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to become still, to become slow – it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. [. . .] it teaches how to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers. (5)

We are rather certain today that Nietzsche’s understanding of philology adheres to neither the national-philological style of the nineteenth century, nor the rationalist tradition. For Nietzsche, who was educated as a philologist, the problematic area of translation was within his professional territory. We should therefore understand Nietzsche’s description of philology as a description of the central concern of classical philology. It is not necessarily surprising that questions regarding translation threw a new light on the understanding of philology’s proper area of inquiry and of philology as a discipline. The encounter with the strange, the unusual, the new, and thus dealing with linguistic and cognitive boundaries, is precisely what motivates the activity of interpretation in all of its facets, and Nietzsche certainly was willing to have his own writing affected by linguistic estrangement. This he has in common with Jacques Derrida who, in the face of Gadamer’s emphasis on linguistic unity, asked whether we really should demand from the stranger, “before and so that we can accept him among us,” that he understand us, that he speak our language, in all of the meanings contained in this expression (21, translated from German translation). It is obvious, however, that a person with whom we already share all of that which is part of a language can no longer be properly described as a stranger. He would already be familiar, indigenous, native and readable in a specific way. His texture would be clear, his code decrypted and his meaning exhausted. He would cease to irritate us in our ‘linguism.’ Therefore, Derrida’s ountlines a form of ‘hospitality’ which avoids any kind of ‘appropriation’ of the stranger and of strangeness, and recognizes their irreducible withdrawal from ‘our’ understanding. This notion of ‘hospitality’ is certainly also applicable to ‘foreign’ text if it is object to translation or other philological care. At first sight, the gesture of translation tends to level linguistic irritations. The intention of a translation is to achieve clarity, the transcription of what is said and what is meant, to the exceedance and overcoming of linguistic boundaries. However, this promise of clarity is deceptive. In fact, a translation that seeks to fulfil this promise has a structurally ingrained problem and is missing an intrinsic dimension of

60 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70 language. Something else must be brought to bear in the act of translation, and we want to illustrate this with perhaps the most canonical work of German literature: Goethe’s Faust I. At the beginning, in the Study scene, the devil—in the form of a poodle—is already on the scene. Faust, still completely immersed in the celebratory mood of Easter, wants to dedicate himself to the challenges of translation: perhaps not the worst moment to take on this challenge.

Wir sehnen uns nach Offenbarung, Die nirgends würd’ger und schöner brennt Als in dem Neuen Testament. Mich drängt’s, den Grundtext aufzuschlagen, Mit redlichem Gefühl einmal Das heilige Original In mein geliebtes Deutsch zu übertragen.

Geschrieben steht: ‘Im Anfang war das Wort!’ Hier stock’ ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort? Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen, Ich muß es anders übersetzen, Wenn ich vom Geiste recht erleuchtet bin. Geschrieben steht: Im Anfang war der Sinn. Bedenke wohl die erste Zeile, Daß deine Feder sich nicht übereile! Ist es der Sinn, der alles wirkt und schafft? Es sollte stehn: Im Anfang war die Kraft! Doch, auch indem ich dieses niederschreibe, Schon warnt mich was, daß ich dabei nicht bleibe. Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh’ ich Rat Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat! (43–44)

We pine and thirst for Revelation, Which nowhere worthier is, more nobly sent, Than here, in our New Testament. I feel impelled, its meaning to determine, – With honest purpose, once and for all, The hallowed Original To change to my beloved German.

‘Tis written: ‘In the beginning was the Word!’ Here I am balked; who, now can help afford? The Word? – impossible so high to rate it;

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 61 And otherwise must I translate it If by the Spirit I am truly taught. Then thus: “In the Beginning was the Thought.” This first line let me weigh completely, Lest my impatient pen proceed too fleetly! Is it the Thought which works, creates, indeed? “In the Beginning was the Power,” I read. Yet, as I write, a warning is suggested, That I the sense may not have fairly tested. The Spirit aids me now: now I see the light! “In the Beginning was the Act,” I write. (44)

The poodle’s cries of lamentation during the course of these reflections show that Faust is certainly heading down the right path. And in fact, this short scene makes it quite clear why the question of translation and its relationship to the original attracts such major interest. Translation aims, in Faust’s words, at a (philological) revelation that is not yet visible in the original—and which, in the end, is obtained by departing from it. More general speaking, every translation, because it broaches the issue of questioning the original, at least implicitly, also addresses the difference between the original and the translation. According to Benjamin, it is precisely in this difference to the original that the constitutive moment of translation emerges. Because “fidelity in the translation of individual words” can almost never fully replicate the meaning of the original, the task of the translator is to change the original (21, “Treue in der Übersetzung des einzelnen Wortes,” 17). “A real translation,” according to Benjamin, “is transparent; it does not cover the original [. . .], but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium to shine upon the original all the more fully” (21, “Die wahre Über- setzung ist durchscheinend, sie verdeckt nicht das Original [. . .], sondern läßt die reine Sprache, wie verstärkt durch ihr eigenes Medium, nur um so voller aufs Original fallen,” 18). Translation is therefore not about the rehabilitation of a meaning established by the original unity of the original, it is about “the liberation of the language imprisoned in a work” (22, “die im Werk gefangene [Sprache] in der Umdichtung zu befreien,” 19). This suggests that translation is not just shaped by the aporia between freedom and fidelity to the text; instead, because the translation touches upon the original only in an infinitely small point of meaning, the translation can liberate language as language motion in an almost deconstructive gesture. In this way, translation can unmask the original’s ostensibly inherent unity of meaning as a mere surface appearance. The original itself seems as though it is shot through with internal linguistic boundaries and is deeply ambiguous in its linguism. It is therefore only logical, as the famous translation scene from Goethe’s Faust shows, that an adequate

62 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70 translation of the Latin or Greek text of the Bible cannot be done with fidelity to the word; instead, it has the character of a rewriting, an (alienating) reinstantiation. It is true to the original in that it liberates its own language as well as the language of the original from its inherent limitations, thereby subverting the lingualism of both. It is certainly not by coincidence that the aporetic requirement that a translation must simultaneously ‘domesticate’ the original and ‘alienate’ the target language occupies the centre of recent ethics of translation as formulated, for example, by Lawrence Venuti. In his essay “Wörter aus der Fremde” (“Words from Abroad”), published in 1959, Theodor W. Adorno argued in a very similar vein when he attributed foreign words with the potential to form “little cells of resistance against nationalism” (186, “[w]inzige Zellen des Widerstands gegen den Nationalismus,” 218, cf. Yildiz 67–108). What is so fascinating about foreign words, according to Adorno, is a certain “exogamy of language” that points beyond the “sphere of what is always the same” (187, “Exogamie der Sprache, die aus dem Umkreis des Immergleichen [. . .] heraus möchte,” 218). The German language assumes a special position, vis-à-vis French, for example, because in Germanophone Europe the “Latinate civilizatory components did not fuse with the older popular language but instead were set off from it through the formation of educated elites and by courtly custom” (187, “die lateinisch-zivilisatorischen Bestandteile nicht mit der älteren Volkssprache verschmolzen, sondern durch Gelehrtenbildung und höfische Sitte eher von jener abgegrenzt wurden,” 219). Because a pax romana was never concluded, the German language is more and less at the same time, as Adorno emphasizes:

weniger durch jenes Brüchige, Ungehobelte und darum dem einzelnen Schriftsteller so wenig Sicheres Vorgebende, wie es in älteren neuhochdeutschen Texten so kraß hervortritt und heute noch im Verhältnis der Fremdwörter zu ihrer Umgebung; mehr, weil die Sprache nicht gänzlich vom Netz der Vergesellschaftung und Kommunikation eingefangen ist. Sie taugt darum zum Ausdruck, weil sie ihn nicht vorweg garantiert. (“Wörter” 220)

less by virtue of the brittle and unfinished quality that provides the individual writer with so little that is firm, a quality that stands out crassly in the older New High German texts and is still evident in the relationship of foreign words to their context; and it is more because the language is not completely trapped within the net of socialization and communication. It can be used for expression because it does not guarantee expression in advance. (188)

Foreign words “stick out unassimilated” in the German language, which is why a carefully chosen foreign word can be inserted like a silver rib into the body of language (187, “unassimiliert heraus,” “Wörter,” 219). In this way, foreign words contribute to overturning the restorative conviction that language is an organic entity or

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 63 something natural. The latent tension between a foreign word and ‘normal language’ (and how would this be defined?) interrupts the conformist moment and the accompanying reassurance that ascriptions of sense and meaning are to be viewed as safe, stable and uniform. In other words, the discrepancy between foreign word and language steps into the service of an anti-rationalistic Enlightenment. This difference becomes an agent of those truths that appear whenever something we have always known is unmasked as an illusion or ideology. Yet Adorno goes one step further by referring the potential of a foreign word to the promise of language itself. To be more precise, the foreign language exposes how things actually go with all words: “that language imprisons those who speak it, that as a medium of their own it has essentially failed” (189, “daß die Sprache die Sprechenden nochmals einsperrt; daß sie als deren eigenes Medium eigentlich mißlang,” “Wörter” 221). This applies both for every language-related ontological promise of salvation and for the idea that language, as a universal component of a communicative community, is equally obligated eo ipso to the truth.

Das universale System der Kommunikation, das scheinbar die Menschen miteinander verbindet und von dem behauptet wird, es sei um ihretwillen da, wird ihnen aufgezwungen. Nur das Wort, das, ohne auf seine Wirkung zu schielen, sich anstrengt, seine Sache genau zu nennen, hat die Chance, eben dadurch die Sache der Menschen zu vertreten, um die sie betrogen werden, solange jede Sache ihnen vorgespiegelt wird, als wäre es jetzt, hier die ihre. (“Wörter” 223–24)

The universal system of communication, which on the face of it brings human beings together and which allegedly exists for their sake, is forced upon them. Only the word that takes pains to name its object precisely, without having an eye to its effect, has an opportunity to champion the cause of human beings by doing so, something they are cheated of as long as every cause is presented as being theirs here and now. (192)

Adorno’s plea for foreign words is, in the final analysis, a plea for some shocking, inherently suspenseful moment of resistance within language itself that cannot be redeemed by any translation. Instead, such moments must appear in the translation as alien, as the unuttered and unspoken of language. Benjamin writes in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” of a “pure language” (“reine Sprache”) that a good translation uses to liberate the original, a process through which the actual essence of the language— one might add: its differential quality beyond its seemingly clear linguism—surfaces. According to Benjamin, the task of the translator is therefore “to release [better: redeem] in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another” (22, “[j]ene reine Sprache, die in fremde gebannt ist, in der eigenen zu erlösen,” 19).

64 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70

Surprisingly, Adorno also arrives at a conclusion very close to this idea—a concept which for Benjamin connotes messianic thought—when he stresses:

Damit können die Fremdwörter etwas von jener Utopie der Sprache, einer Sprache ohne Erde, ohne Gebundenheit an den Bann des geschichtlich Daseienden bewahren, die bewußtlos in ihrem kindlichen Gebrauch lebt. Hoffnungslos wie Totenköpfe warten die Fremdwörter darauf, in einer besseren Ordnung erweckt zu werden. (“Wörter” 225)

In this way foreign languages could preserve something of the utopia of language, a language without earth, without subjection to the spell of historical existence, a utopia that lives on unawares in the childlike use of language. Hopelessly, like death’s-heads, foreign words await their resurrection in a better order of things. (192)

Overcoming Jargon? The use of words like ‘revelation,’ ‘redemption,’ ‘resurrection’—even though the latter term is a not so accurate translation of the German “erwecken”—clearly signals that Faust, Benjamin, and Adorno consider the absolute suspension of lingualism to be beyond the limitations of human speech. The juxtaposition of Gadamer’s fantasy of linguistic fusion and Derrida’s objection in the name of hospitality, exactly like Benjamin and Adorno’s ethics of dealing with foreign languages and linguistic boundaries, provide hints to the obstacle that lies in the path of overcoming the monolingual paradigm—also within philology. Derrida’s reference to the necessity of recognising the alien as inappropriable, and Adorno’s metaphor of foreign words as ‘hopeless death’s-heads,’ both demonstrate that monolingualism and the variety of monolingual environments cannot be avoided by relativising the basic otherness of other languages. Even if we decon- struct the concept of linguistic borders and of the clear linguism of linguistic structures, this does not mean that all languages actually ‘fuse’ with one another into a new whole. Rather, the idea that foreign languages retain their non-assimilable strangeness must remain intact. On the one hand, a philological, post-monolingual mode of writing would therefore have to leave behind, in an unmistakeable way, the rationalist regulative of a uniform language of description, an idea that, at least to some degree, remains foreign to philology. There are at least two options that are unproblematic in terms of their practical applicability. First, a practice of citation that focuses on reproducing the original language version and considers the problems of each translation cited. Second, an open interaction with ‘foreign language’ terms in the sense of Adorno and Benjamin. Both procedures should not, however, be some simple incorporation or appropriation that impugns the strangeness of the ‘alien’ material—integration must remain ‘hopeless’ in this sense. One could, however, go one step further and pick up on Adorno’s

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 65 remarks in Der Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (The Jargon of Authenticity), which although they refer to a very specific historical situation remain quite open to generalisation (see especially 10–11, 14, 51). Adorno points out that jargon is defined as the prevalence of a specific number of individual words that suggest a deeper meaning without truly being integrated into the respective context of speech or without even having to be incorporated into this context due to their seemingly apparent meaning. This description refers not only to one of the risks of using foreign words. It also hints at the fact that significance is not something that results seamlessly from the clarity of the words used, but something that must be constituted anew upon every formulation. Ehlich’s observation in the field of cultural studies that the act of formulation already contains the actual act of cognition can be reframed for a multilinguistic philology: if the belief in the unambiguous reliability of words is only jargon, then the philological formulation must always demonstrate its openness to the possibility that the seemingly clear linguism of words that are used shall be called into question. In her analysis of texts by Tawada, Özdamar and Zaimoglu—and she might have added Benjamin here –, Yildiz attempts to do precisely this by introducing at least three strategies for post-monolingual literary writing, and these strategies may be of interest for philological writing as well. For all three authors, writing in a post-monolingual manner means making the compactness of one language fragile from within, especially in the confrontation with other languages. The intrinsic poly-lingual character of this language thereby becomes visible, an excess that flows beyond the ostensibly strict boundaries of the language without denying its ‘alien’ characteristics. One might very well imagine that practices like this could also take place in philological texts—even if philologists still resist the idea that many texts by Tawada can already be called prototypes not only of post-monolingual literature, but also philology—see, for example, her reading of Celan. But still, we feel compelled to ask ourselves what effect such methods may have on philology—and to what extent the utopia articulated by Benjamin and Adorno is compatible with philology’s self-imposed disciplinary constraints. An adequate definition of philology, meaning a definition that would take into account the considerations raised by Benjamin and Adorno, would have to view philology as an instance that does not simply describe the relationship of several languages within each individual language and with all other languages—philology would have to be these relationships. In that case, philology would be nothing other than—and here we quote Werner Hamacher—“the continued extension of elements of linguistic existence” (“die fortgesetzte Extension der Elemente sprachlicher Existenz,” 2). This understanding of philology, which without a doubt fulfils the requirements of postmonolingual processes of composition and comprehension, raises a few systematic difficulties. A conception of philology that understands the discipline as the manifestation of the release of language from language (Hamacher 49) would become art,

66 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70 an aesthetic gesture without a methodological core. Is this acceptable to philology as a discipline? Is philology able to cope with higher doses of scholars such as Derrida—who certainly qualifies as one of the most important philologists of the twentieth century, yet whose writing style demolished a great many of the discipline’s conventions—or would philology begin to lose its contours? Is the inheritance of the rationalist tradition perhaps necessary after all, if philology wants to exist as a science, as a discipline, or even as science? There does not seem to be an immediate answer to this question. We will have to try it out.

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 67 Notes

1. “Even words with fixed meaning can undergo topic, especially on Herder’s concept of the a process of maturation.” Water Benjamin: The native language, see Martyn, Literatur als Task of the Translator. Zweitsprache.

2. “In professional groups which, as they say, 7. On the impossibility of counting languages carry on intellectual work, but which are at (and for an early deconstruction of the concept the same time employed, dependent or of ‘native language’), see Thümmel. From the economically weak, the jargon is a professional perspective of translation theory, see Sakai. On illness.” Theodor W. Adorno: The Jargon the problem of delimiting languages by means of of Authenticity. correctness, or more precisely, on the fundamental indistinguishability of errors and (rhetorical) figures, see David Martyn, “‘’.” 3. If not otherwise indicated, all translations of quotes by Lee Holt. 8. Giesecke analyses the correlation of different language standards to respective leading media 4. Makoni and Pennycook argue that “there are technologies, focusing on the development of strong arguments for mother tongue education, German-language prose after the establishment for an understanding of multilingualism as the of printing (280–334). global norm, for understanding the prevalence of code-switching in bi- and multilingual 9. On the ‘axioms’ of rationalism, see Bunia, communities, and for the importance of 13–19. language rights to provide a moral and legal framework for language policies. Our 10. It would be worthwhile to take a closer position, however, is that although such look at the legacy of rationalist thinking in arguments may be preferable to blinkered views contemporary analytical philosophy in the that take monolingualism as the norm, they context of questions regarding monolingualism. nevertheless remain caught within the same Since the appearance of Russell’s Principia paradigm. [. . .] [M]ultilingualism therefore mathematica (1910–13), philosophers have simply becomes a pluralization of focused their efforts on reducing their monolingualism” (147). arguments to uniform, formal linguistic structures. According to Schnädelbach, the 5. For a criticism of ‘eco-linguistics,’ see transition to a post-analytic phase in Pennycook. Davidson leads to a “new monism in linguistic dealings with the world” (“ein neuer 6. Another distinction must be made here. In Monismus des sprachlichen Umgangs mit der historical terms, this could be described in a Welt,” 39). much more nuanced and detailed manner, because of course there are effective cultural 11. With Pennycook, one could state more policies that enforce linguistic standards and precisely that Ehlich conceived of multilingualism have existed for a long time—for example, for as heteroglossia, meaning the diversity of the purpose of preserving ‘sacred’ languages. options to express one and the same thing. What is remarkable about the modern idea of Gramling points out that the modern (rationalist) monolingualism is the prevalence of the notion concept of monolingualism is directly associated that standard languages are also embodied with the idea that statements can be transposed in their native speakers. For more on this seamlessly into other languages.

68 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 53–70

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. “Wörter aus der Fremde.” ———. “Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache Gesammelte Schriften. By Adorno. Ed. Rolf für das 21. Jahrhundert.” Forschung. Politik – Tiedemann. Vol. XI. Frankfurt am Main: Strategie – Management 2.3ϩ4 (2009), Suhrkamp, 2003, 216–232 (Trans. T. W. A. Notes 89–95. to Literature. Vol. 1. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, Fohrmann, Jürgen. Das Projekt der deutschen 1991). Literaturgeschichte: Entstehung und Scheitern einer nationalen Poesiegeschichtsschreibung ———. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen zwischen Humanismus und Deutschem Ideologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964 Kaiserreich. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989. (Trans. T. W. A. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Knut Tarnowski, Frederic Will. London: Routledge, Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. 2002). Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 6th ed. Tübingen: Mohr, 1990 (Trans. H.-G. G. Benjamin, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Gesammelte Schriften. By Adorno. Ed. Rolf onald G. Marshall. London, New York: Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Continuum, 2004). Vol. IV, I. Ed. Tillman Rexroth. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971, 9–21 (Trans. “The Task of the ———. “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Translator.” Trans. Harry Zohn. The Translation Ideologiekritik. Metakritische Erörterungen zu Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London Wahrheit und Methode.” Gesammelte Werke. By and New York: Routledge, 2000, 15–23.) Gadamer. Vol. 2. Tübingen 1999, 232–250 (Trans. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. and Bunia, Remigius. Romantischer Rationalismus. ed. David Linge. Berkeley: University of California Zu Wissenschaft, Politik und Religion bei Novalis. Press, 2008). Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013. Giesecke, Michael. Sinnenwandel. Sprachwandel. Derrida, Jacques. Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou Kulturwandel. Studien zur Vorgeschichte der la prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée, 1996 (Trans. Informationsgesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: J. D. The Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Suhrkamp, 1992. Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Gilles, Peter, Sebastian Seela, Heinz Sieburg, and Melanie Wagner. “Sprachen und Identitäten.” ———. Von der Gastfreundschaft. Trans. Markus Doing Identity in Luxemburg. Subjektive Sedlaczek. Vienna: Passagen, 2001. (Orig. J. D. Aneignungen – institutionelle Zuschreibungen – and Anne Dufourmantelle. Anne Dufourmantelle sozio-kulturelle Milieus. Ed. IPSE – Indentités, invite Jacques Derrida à répondre: De l’hospitalité. Politiques, Sociétes, Espaces. Bielefeld: Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997). Transcript, 2010, 63–104.

Ehlich, Konrad. “Deutsch als Medium Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Der wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens.” Englisch oder Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust. Ed. Erich Deutsch in Internationalen Studiengängen? Ed. Trunz. München: Beck, 141989. (Trans. J.W.v.G. Markus Motz. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, Faust. Trans. Bayard Taylor. Leipzig: F. A. 2005, 41–51. Brockhaus, 1872.)

———. “Mehrsprachigkeit in der Gramling, David. “On the Other Side of Wissenschaftskommunikation.” Die Wissenschaft Monolingualism: Fatih Akin’s Linguistic und ihre Sprachen. Ed. K. E. and Dorothee Heller. Turn(s).” German Quarterly 83.3 (2010), Bern et al.: Lang, 2006, 17–36. 353–372.

Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? | 69 Grimm, Jacob. Über den Ursprung der Sprache. Schnädelbach, Herbert. “Analytische und 4th ed. Berlin: Dümmler, 1858 (1851). postanalytische Philosophie.” Analytische und postanalytische Philosophie. Vorträge und Hamacher, Werner. 95 Thesen zur Philologie. Abhandlungen 4. By Schnädelbach. Frankfurt am Holderbank: Engeler, 2010. Main: Suhrkamp, 2004, 9–44.

Makoni, Sinfree, and Alastair Pennycook. “Disinventing and (Re)Constituting Languages.” Stockhammer, Robert, Susan Arndt, and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. An Dirk Naguschewski. “Einleitung. Die International Journal 2.3 (2005), 137–156. Unselbstverständlichkeit der Sprache.” Exophonie. Anders-Sprachigkeit (in) der Literatur. Martyn, David. “‘’.” Rhetorik. Figuration und Ed. R. S., S. A., and D. N. Berlin: Kadmos 2007, Performanz. Ed. Jürgen Fohrmann. Stuttgart, 7–27. Weimar: Metzler, 2004, 397–419. Tawada, Yoko. “Das Tor des Übersetzer oder Paul ———. Literatur als Zweitsprache von Leibniz bis Celan liest Japanisch.” Talisman. By Tawada. Tawada. Paderborn: Fink, forthcoming in 2013. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 1996, 121–134. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Morgenröte.” Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. By Nietzsche. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Thümmel, Wolf. “Kann man Sprachen zählen? Montinari. Vol. 3. München: dtv, 1988, 9–331 Bemerkungen zu einigen begrifflichen (Trans. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Unterscheidungen bei Harald Haarmann.” Morality. Eds. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 4, 1977, Leiter. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University 36–60. Press, 1997). Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translations. Pennycook, Alastair. “Language Policy and the Towards an ethics of difference. London, New Ecological Turn.” Language Policy 3.3 (2004), York: Routledge, 1998. 213–239.

Sakai, Naoki. “How do we count a language? Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Translation and discontinuity.” Translational postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham Studies 2.1 (2009), 71–88. University Press, 2012.

70 | Till Dembeck and Georg Mein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation: On Contemporary German Literature, with a Side Glance to the Seventeenth Century

Esther Kilchmann

In occidental poetics, deviation from linguistic norms has always been considered as constitutive of literary language. In particular, formalist theory has shown how poetic innovation is closely linked to deviation as well as alienation (Fricke). Umberto Eco characterizes poetic deviation as a sort of introduction to the poetic experience because by irritating the reader it incites toward the discovery of an unexpected flexibility in the language (263). By referring to Aristotle, Sˇklovskij stresses in his manifesto (“Art as Device,” 1917), that poetic language is always marked by alienation—and can therefore even appear as a ‘foreign’ language (22). Could we turn this argument around and argue that the appearance of a ‘foreign’ language in an otherwise monolingual text is therefore always poetic? On the one hand, the global phenomenon of heterolingual techniques in contemporary literature, widely considered as innovative (Sturm-Trigonakis), seems to support such a conjecture. On the other hand, there is traditional poetics which seems to distinguish rigorously between alienation and innovation as literary merits, and considers the mixture of languages as an objectionable language use and a potential danger to the purity of poetry. In my article I wish to investigate the connection between poetic language, deviation, alienation, and the use of ‘foreign’ languages (i.e. languages deviating from the monolingual standard) in literary texts. I will do so by considering exemplary texts

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 71 from contemporary German literature as well as rulebooks of poetics from the seventeenth century, which tried to formulate rules for a literature in Modern High German. As I will show, both groups of texts negotiate the question of poetic innovation between the poles of monolingual and heterolingual writing. Following Grutman, I use the linguistic term “heterolingualism” to denote the phenomenon of language- mixing within a text (Grutman). My article aims to contribute to current discussions on literature and mono/ multilingualism first, by briefly extending the discussion historically to the emancipation of vernacular as literary languages. And second, by asking for the specifically poetic structure of heterolingual texts (Kilchmann, “Mehrsprachigkeit”). This leads towards a reconsideration of older theories, such as formalism, which combine literary studies with linguistic questions. However, I would like to emphasize that the focus on aesthetic devices and recourse to theories of poetic language does not mean to deprive the texts here discussed from a socio-cultural and political reading. Rather, and in accordance with actual studies on the subject (Konuk, Ette, Yildiz), a close affiliation between the styling of language and criticism of cultural patterns is assumed. Situated at the crossroads of cultures and languages, contemporary heterolingual literature closely links socio-political meaning and poeticity by developing “rev- olutionary experimentations in language and style” (Seyhan 107), thereby creating a new language for experiences of migration and alterity beyond the aesthetic norms shaped by the concept of national literature. According to Jakobson, we could argue that it is exactly this affiliation of language-work and criticism, which marks these texts as poetic:

Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality. [. . .] Why is it necessary to make a special point of the fact that sign does not fall together with object? Because besides the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object, there is a necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequacy of that identity. The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to halt, and the awareness of reality dies out. (750)

Finally, it should be emphasized that it is no coincidence that my article looks at literary as well as poetological texts. Not only is it remarkable that a high proportion of authors writing heterolingual texts hold degrees in philology themselves. As Elke Sturm- Trigonakis rightly points out, the peculiarity of contemporary heterolingual literature lies not only in its quantity and presence as a global phenomenon, but also in its methodological aspirations: heterolingualism is being used systematically and framed by poetological

72 | Esther Kilchmann Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86 reflections (160 ff.). In metatexts, such as interviews, essays or lectures, the authors reflect elaborately on questions of code-switching, writing in a second language and its poetic and socio-cultural significance. The techniques of heterolingual writing, as applied in the literary texts, are thus framed by a pronounced methodological and poetological claim. Again, this situation has its historical correspondence in the early modern period, in which poetic and metapoetic discourse were not as strictly separated as they would be after 1800. Hence, the texts under discussion are also heterolingual in the sense of combining poetic and academic discourses. In the field of heterolingualism, literary and theoretical discourses seem to interlace exceedingly, thereby providing mutual inspiration. The literature under consideration is therefore not so much a definite object of literary study and just as little an object yet to define conclusively. It is rather a dialogue partner in an ongoing reflection on language(s).

1624: Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and German Literature in Martin Opitz’ poetics First, I will explore the transition from monolingualism to multilingualism that is currently a topic of debate by considering a corresponding historical situation: the transition from multilingualism (i.e. the coexistence of the lingua franca Latin and the vernacular) to monolingualism in the early modern period, when modern High German was established as a literary norm. By thus bringing the present into connection with the seventeenth century, I do not wish to sketch a linear historical development. Rather, I wish to bring together two different points in time to open up a constellation of readability, as Walter Benjamin proposes in his “Thesen über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“Theses on the Concept of History”). Thus, by juxtaposing two specific moments of history, which are taken out of the chronological sequence, a double insight can be gained, providing, as I hope, a further perspective on today’s tension between monolingual norms and heterolingual writing practices. In the early seventeenth century, authors began to tackle systematically the question of what represented correct German poetry. This process resulted in the compi- lation of poetic rulebooks. Here, the foundation of modern German as a literary language is characterized by two movements which, one might say, work in opposite directions. On the one hand, there is a movement of translation: In prosody, Latin norms are taken over for the composition of German poems, and generally, German words need to be created as substitutes for Latin expressions by translation. On the other hand, the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ character of German is being highlighted, scholars claim to keep German ‘pure’ (Jervis Jones, Manger). Between these two poles, the function and form of poetic language is being negotiated. Last but not least, the conflict between the multilingual reality of discourse and a monolingual ideal shows in the metapoetic studies on the concrete level of language; their point- edly polylingual forms often stand in a sharp contrast to their claim of purity.

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 73 In 1624 Martin Opitz published the first German poetics, entitled Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (“Book of German Poetry”). Here, a comprehensive set of poetic norms is gained out of the process of translation. His work of unification and standardization is based on a comparatist, even intercultural constellation of Latin, Greek, and French on one side, German on the other. The text itself has a heterolingual appearance with many (non translated) Latin, French, Greek and Italian words and phrases. The poeta doctus Opitz can, as a matter of course, assume that his readership is equally learned and multilingual. This stands in marked contrast to the heterolingual literature of the present, which—irrespective of the fact that its ‘real’ readers might be familiar with several languages—seems to address a rather monolingually socialized implicit reader by providing translations or playing with non understanding of ‘foreign’ words. In the context of the early modern period, the poetological (and called-for poetic) innovation was the creation of unity—with regard to poetic norms as well as language. Crucial here is the sixth Chapter of the Buch von der deutschen Poeterey, “von der zuebereitung und ziehr der worte,” covering “composition and embellishment of words.” The nouns of the title are gained from translation, and Opitz explains the new German words with the aid of their Latin equivalents: “elegantz oder ziehrligkeit [. . .] composition oder zuesammensetzung [. . .] dignitet oder ansehen” (24, “elegance or gracefulness [. . .] composing or putting together [. . .] dignity or prestige”). It is in this context, that Opitz raises the problem of linguistic purity:

Die ziehrligkeit erfordert das die worte reine und deutlich sein. Damit wir aber reine reden mögen, sollen wir uns befleissen deme welches wir Hochdeutsch nennen bestens vermögens nach zue kommen, und nicht derer örter sprache, wo falsch geredet wird, in unsere schrifften vermischen (24).

Elegance requires that words be pure and clear. Yet because we want to speak clearly, we should dedicate ourselves to emulating what we call High German as much as we can, and not to mix the language of other places, where German is spoken improperly, into our writings.

This means that poetic language requires the words to be ‘pure’ and ‘clear,’ the poet must therefore conform entirely to High German language and avoid a ‘false’ usage of language as it occurs, according to Opitz in the common oral speech. Opitz here criticizes the use of oral expressions and dialects, he rejects them along with foreign, “außländischen” (24), words: “Thus it is most impure if all kinds of Latin, French and Spanish words are being patched into the text.” (“So stehet es auch zum hefftigsten unsauber, wenn allerley Lateinische Frantzösische, Spanische und Welsche wörter in den text unserer rede geflickt werden.” 24) By using words like “patch” (“flicken”), Opitz maps out contemporaneous German out as a kind of rag rug, inept for literary and academic use. As a consequence, a main function of German poetics as well as

74 | Esther Kilchmann Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86 poetry is seen in the work of (re-)constructing: German words have to be created or revived to join together an incomplete language. Opitz as well as, after him, Gottsched and Breitinger delegate this duty above all to the poet. But it is not only the literary text which benefits from poetic innovation, but German and its linguistic community as a whole. Poetic innovation is directly linked to the project of creating a homogenous language, a monolingual norm, and, one could argue, a collective unity of its speakers and writers. As a consequence of this wider requirement, poetic creation on the linguistic level has to submit to rules. Above all, new words must be created according to the grammatical and orthographical guidelines of German in order to sustain them. In this context, the possibility of literary language to alienate—later on a much praised capacity of poetry—is explicitly problematized when Opitz calls for moderation in the invention of totally new words: “In order to speak immaculately, we have to avoid foreign words as well as everything which renders our words dark and incomprehensible.” (“Wie nun wegen reinligkeit der reden fremde wörter und dergleichen mußen vermieden warden; so muß man auch der deutligkeit halben sich für alle dem hüten, was unsere worte tunckel und unvers- tendtlich macht.” 27) It is to be noted, that foreign and poetic words are linked in the quotation by their alienating potential. It is this very effect of literary language which has to be kept at bay by Opitz’ poetics in order to engage poetry respectively literature in the service of the monolingual norm.

2000: Heterolingualism and Poetic Innovation As the analysis of Opitz’ Buch von der deutschen Poeterey has shown, at the very beginning of modern German literature, literary production is constitutively bound up with monolingualism in the metapoetic discourse. It is exactly this link which is becoming fragile today, as, as Otmar Ette put it, German literature is undergoing a translingual continuation in the writings of authors who learnt it as a second language. The innovative potential is now seen in the transgression of language barriers. In the following, I will study the poetics of heterolingual writing and its innovative potential by discussing three contemporary authors exemplarily: Herta Müller, José Oliver, and Yoko Tawada. They are part of a (fast growing) group of authors with bi- or multilingual biographies, who use their language skills literally. It needs to be noted that this group of authors is quite heterogeneous: migration and the acquisition of German as a second language are part of the biographies of some, though not all of them. For others, such as Herta Müller, German is the first language, but they come from countries in which German is spoken by a linguistic minority. This experience as well as their second language (in Müller’s case, the Romanian) are inscribed into their texts. Other authors, again, draw attention to the fact that even in the so-called German speaking countries, the linguistic situation has never been purely monolingual, for

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 75 example by discovering the poetic potential of dialects and sociolects. Here, contemporary Swiss and Austrian literature needs to be mentioned (Baumberger et al.). Diverse as all these texts are, they all have in common that they challenge the paradigm of “purity” and unity of literary language. German as a literary language is explicitly nourished from the intimate knowledge of another language through an experimental clash of languages (Weissmann). The fact that the writers are perfectly proficient in two or more languages should not mislead into concluding, that the language mixing they practice in their texts, is a purely realistic or linguistically correct mimesis of multilingualism. The authors understand—and make use of—code-switching as an “artistic stimulus” (“künstlerische[r] Stimulus,” Rakusa 10), their writing in a foreign language is seen as an “artistic experiment” (“künstlerisches Experiment,” Tawada, Verwandlungen 10; see also Hein-Khatib). Literary heterolingualism is the result of an artificial process, a “stylized mimesis of form [. . .] an interpretive hypoth- esis accounting for verbal tension, deviance and incompatibility within a given unilin- gual discourse.” (Sternberg 228) Therefore, the borders between the mixture of language in a linguistic sense and a poetic invention of language become blurred, and likewise the borders between the so-called ‘natural languages.’ It is constitutive for heterolingual texts to make this apparent limit productive for creating an innovative literary language. By confronting and blending different languages, a language that is initially foreign to the implicit reader, is styled as perceptible to the senses, and in turn the main language of the text (and first language of the implicit reader) is alienated. It thus suddenly resembles the foreign word.

Herta Müller In her lecture In jeder Sprache sitzen andere Augen (Other languages have other eyes), Herta Müller discusses how her bilingualism affects her writing, and asks the question whether it has a surplus value for her literature. First, she argues like other biographically bilingual authors, that thanks to her bilingualism, there is more than one significance, more than one view to a single thing. According to Müller, by not addressing a thing in only one language, its signifier remains flexible, and new perspectives on seemingly familiar things emerge:

Lilie, crin, ist im Rumänischen maskulin. Sicher schaut DIE Lilie einen anders an als DER Lilie. [. . .] Wenn man beide Sichtweisen kennt, tun sie sich im Kopf zusammen. [. . .] Was wird die Lilie in zwei gleichzeitig laufenden Sprachen? Eine Frauennase in einem Männergesicht [. . .]. Man sieht in ihr mehr als in der ein- sprachigen Lilie. Von einer Sprache zur anderen passieren Verwandlungen. Die Sicht der Muttersprache stellt sich dem anders Geschauten der fremden Sprache. (25)

Lilie, crin, is masculine in Romanian. Certainly THE Lilie (feminine) sees things differently than THE Lilie (masculine). [. . .] If you know both perspectives, they come

76 | Esther Kilchmann Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86

together in your head. [. . .] What will Lilie become in two simultaneously running languages? A woman’s nose in a man’s face [. . .]. You see more in her than in the monolingual Lilie. Transformations happen in the shift from one language to another. The native language’s perspective surrenders to the different-looking face of the foreign language.

First, the quotation illustrates that Müller, as Paola Bozzi put it, benefits from her bilingualism in order to create verbal imageries (120). Second, by inscribing another language into the German text, Müller renders “the different-looking face of the foreign language” (“anders Geschaut[e] der fremden Sprache”) visible even for the implicitly monolingual reader, who thus is enabled to share the experience of multilingualism. Altogether, heterolingualism is used as a technique to create ambiguity and polyvalent meanings. Heterolingualism in this sense is, as Müller states, central for her writings: “Of course Romanian is always with me as I write because it has become part of my apperception.” (“Selbstverständlich schreibt das Rumänische immer mit, weil es mir in den Blick hineingewachsen ist.” 27) Does the reader thus need to learn Romanian in order to understand her texts ‘correctly’ and ‘comprehen- sively’? As I will argue in the following, such an interpretation would be misleading. Rather, Müller’s heterolingualism has to be analyzed as a literary technique, which is systematically used to undermine the notion of any correct and complete understanding. As a matter of course, this should not imply that proficiency in Romanian cannot be useful to decipher some of Müller’s wordplays (Hergheligiu). How a foreign word is poetically processed can be studied exemplarily in the following quotation:

Welch anderer Blick auf die Schwalbe im Rumänischen, die rˆinduni´ca, die REI- HENSITZCHEN heißt. Wieviel mehr ist darin als im deutschen Wort. Im Vogelnamen wird mitgesagt, daß die Schwalben in schwarzen Reihen, eine dicht an der anderen, auf dem Draht sitzen. Ich hatte es, als ich das rumänische Wort noch nicht kannte, jeden Sommer gesehen. (27)

Another look at the swallow in Romanian, the rˆinduni´ca, which means A LITTLE SITTER IN A ROW. How much more is contained therein than in the German word, Schwalbe. The bird’s name in Romanian also describes how swallows sit in black rows, one close to the other, on a wire. I had seen this every summer before I even knew the Romanian word.

The heterolingual character of this text consists in a quotation of a Romanian word and its subsequent transformation into a German neologism by ‘literal’ translation. As a result, the rather neutral term ‘swallow’ becomes a more figurative term, ‘a little sitter in a row.’ Finally, Müller comments on her impetus to find a new German word through translation: rˆinduni´ca creates another view on the bird, as it focuses on

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 77 its habit to sit in rows. The foreign word therefore reveals a constitutive aspect of the ‘thing,’ which could not be articulated in its German name. On a typographical level, the foreign word is, as usual in German, marked by italics, whereas the neologism is highlighted by capitals. What is, according to this quotation, precisely the benefit of such language mixing? I would argue that by breaking the rules of monolingualism, Müller aims to break the rules of everyday perception in order to see things anew und more immediately. Thus, “Reihensitzchen” is a word that lives up to the standard of art as defined by formalist theory, i.e. in its function to restore the perception of life (Sklovskijˇ 13). In “Reihensitzchen,” the narrator “becomes able to see things instead of merely recognising them” (Sklovskijˇ 13). Hence, heterolingual devices are applied in order to break an automatism of perception, which causes, according to Lachmann, the form, word or thing to freeze and become a pattern (227). Here, art can provoke a process of de-automatization, for example by inserting incomprehensible linguistic elements. One could say that foreign words fulfill this condition perfectly by interrupting the monolingual text and irritating the reader through their incomprehensibility. Heterolingualism works immediately as alienation and is therefore similar to the language of art on a structural level. Together with linguistic and aesthetic norms, cultural norms of foreignness and belonging are being thwarted. Heterolingualism therefore works as a device to interfere the automatic connection between word and thing and is therefore able to encourage a new perception. In this sense, heterolingualism is more than a stylistic device, it is a method to generate alienation and de-automatization, and thus to prevent an all-too easy understanding of the text. It is under this perspective that Müller’s statement that Romanian always co-writes her texts has to be read. It does not mean that a comprehensive understanding of Müller’s texts could automatically be achieved through the mastery of Romanian. Rather, the combination of different languages and the poetic effect it generates highlight her point that the idea of a comprehensive understanding of, and a complete reliance on, language as such is misleading. Heterolingualism thus can be apprehended as one of Müller’s methods to discuss the unreliability and untrustwor- thiness of language as such.

José A. Oliver José Oliver, born in 1953 as a son of Spanish immigrants (“Gastarbeiter”) in the Black Forest, writes mainly poetry. He works with German and Spanish as well as Andalusian and Alemannic dialects. His texts thus not only deviate from German language as such, but also—by including oral forms—from the written High German. Moreover, Oliver also alienates German through his use of punctuation, which seems to be Spanish-inspired. Consequently, he sometimes inserts an exclamation mark before a German verse or colons between words. Thus, he highlights that while using

78 | Esther Kilchmann Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86 the same words, he approaches them from a different angle, from a different cultural and linguistic context. This shift especially becomes obvious in texts which discuss experiences of migration and exile, by reading and re-writing texts by Hölderlin or Peter Härtling. By inserting a different punctuation into the otherwise unchanged German vocabulary, Oliver marks the historical and biographical difference between the uses of the same words: “der FLÜCHTLINGE die von Birkenwäldern erzählten und / Riga und Dresden :und / ich in fremdSPRACHEN heimisch wurde im / anderDEUTSCH FLUCHT” (“Die unerwarteten Wörter” 6, “the REFUGEES who told of birch forests and / Riga and Dresden :and / I became at home in foreign LANGUAGES in / other-GERMAN FLIGHT”). Here, Oliver’s heterolingual writing combines a synchronic deviation from orthographical norms with an intertextual deviation, marking a distance towards the cited literary tradition. In his poetological as well as autobiographical collection of essays on an “Andalusian village in the Black Forest,” Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf, Oliver emphasizes—similar to Herta Müller—that the acquaintance with several languages enriches one’s view on life with more meanings and different perspectives. In addition, Oliver points out that he uses heterolingual techniques to be able to deal with movement. His biographical experiences do not fit into fixed paradigms, such as identity, hometown, mother tongue etc., and neither can he therefore write alongside the guidelines of monolingualism as defined by the Duden dictionary: “I cannot write solely within the confines of a language as established by Duden” (“ich [kann] nicht nur an den dudenkorrekt ausgelegten Richtschnüre [sic!] einer Sprache entlang schreiben,” Schwarzwalddorf 54). This sentence could well serve as a motto for Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf where Oliver develops a poetics of heterolingualism closely tied to the autobiographical remembrance of his childhood in a transcultural setting. As I will demonstrate in the following, heterolingualism here also follows the patterns of de-automatization and alienation, which have already been analyzed. First, there are some crucial Spanish words in Oliver’s narration of a Spanish- German childhood. He, for example, tells how the Andalusians from the little village in the Black Forest met on Sundays for a walk: “Just to get a change of air, to dream of eggplants, dates, and fat red tomatoes; on these Iberian paseos (walks) to blur the boundaries between Andalusia and the Black Forest village, between everyday life and longing” (“einfach nur um luftzuwandeln, von Auberginen, Datteln und fetten, roten Fleischtomaten zu träumen und auf diesen iberisch spazierten paseos die weltverlorenen Meilensteine zwischen Andalusien und dem Schwarzwaldstädtchen, zwischen Alltag und Sehnsucht verwischen zu lassen,” 24). On these Sunday prome- nades, the German paths become paseos to the past: the immigrants recall their hometown and—this is crucial—pass these memories over to their children. In their imagination, the paths in the Black Forest blend over with the boulevards of

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 79 Barcelona: “We children were always along for our Alemannic Ramblas (rambles), [. . .] which brought memories to life before our very eyes on the boulevard on Sundays” (“wir Kinder waren immer dabei [,] [. . .] gingen [. . .] unsere alemannische Ramblas entlang, [. . .] die am Sonntag auf der Prachtstraße der Erinnerungen vor unseren Augen zum Leben erwachte,” 24). Here, the alienation generated by foreign words does not only reflect the foreignness of the Spanish immigrants in the Black Forest (Schmeling/Schmitz-Emans 16), but also the distance between the narrated Spanish world of the past and the present situation. On a formal level, “paseos” and “Ramblas” are conventionally marked by italics, and listed in a glossary at the end of the book, offering translations for the expressions in other languages. On a first glance, this suggests a clear and conventional separation between German and ‘foreign.’ However, this separation becomes increasingly doubtful in the progress of the text. For one thing, there are Alemanic expressions, which are also set in italics and can be found in the glossary together with Spanish words—between “Agria” and “Al-Andaluz,” for instance, ranks “Aktebäbber.” There are even some words a reader inexpert of Spanish as well as Alemanic might not be able to ascribe to either of these ‘foreign’ languages (for instance, “fongis” or “hogar”). Unlike a conventional glossary, Oliver’s glossary does not indicate the linguistic provenience of a single word—a proceeding which underlines the cross-fading of languages, as practiced by Oliver. In a further step, Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf even contains standard German words which are set in italics. This is the case where the narrator speaks about his father’s life and his insufficient mastery of German. Emigration, the narrator tells us, was a list of simple everyday words: “Fish and meat and bread” (“Fisch und Fleisch und Brot,” 38). In a sharp contrast to the ‘Spanish’ Sundays, the German workdays are shaped by a frugality which stretches out to the use of language in several dimensions. The Spanish immigrants cannot speak German properly, the German-speaking environment does not speak to the immigrants properly, communication is bound to basic every day functions. It is this foreignness of language which the text represents by typographically marking German words as foreign. On the other hand, the narrator remarks that in contrast to the frugal work-day German, his father is a passionate narrator in the evenings, and he states: “The elegance of language always requires its opposite” (“Die Eleganz der Sprache braucht immer auch ihr Gegenteil,” 35). A sentence which can be read as a poetological program en miniature, stating that it is precisely the reduced knowledge of a language (and not its mastery) which can generate wordplays and poetic potentials. Oliver agrees on this point with other authors of heterolingual literature, who suggests that foreign words have a increased poetic function because of their reduced communicative function. They are mainly perceived in their written form and their sound. Here again, the perception of a foreign language meets the perception of art,

80 | Esther Kilchmann Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86 which, according to formalism, also focuses on the form rather than the content (Löve-Hansen 70).

Yoko Tawada The thesis that an unknown language is read “externally” is at the centre of Yoko Tawada’s writing: “If you cannot understand a language, you read it from the outside. You take its appearance very seriously.” (“Eine Sprache, die man nicht versteht, liest man äußerlich. Man nimmt ihr Aussehen ernst.” Talisman 34) According to the German-Japanese author, writing in a foreign language as well as heterolingualism are shortcuts to the mimetic and magical potential of language, which is obscured by its communicative use in the mother tongue:

In der Muttersprache sind die Worte den Menschen angeheftet, so daß man sel- ten spielerische Freude an der Sprache empfinden kann. Dort klammern sich die Gedanken so fest an die Worte, daß weder die ersteren noch die letzteren frei fliegen können. In einer Fremdsprache hat man aber so etwas wie einen Heftklammerentferner: Er entfernt alles, was sich aneinanderheftet und sich festklammert. (Talisman 9)

In the native language, words are stapled to people in such a way that one can seldom feel playful joy within a language. Thoughts cling so tenaciously to words that neither thoughts nor words can take flight freely. In a foreign language, however, it is as if you had a staple remover: it removes everything that creates these static bonds and latches on so tightly.

Here, the alienation from the mother tongue is a starting point for a creative approach to language. Not to master a language—in a figurative as well as a literal sense—opens up the possibility of a free floating of signifiers and their poetic dis- position. In contrast to the poetological considerations of Oliver and Müller, however, Tawada is less interested in the possibility of understanding more, which heterolingualism might offer (however devious this hope may be). Tawada’s stories rather revolve around moments of non- or misunderstanding, they deal with the process of learning a language, with the incomplete mastery of a language or with the failure of communication. By doing so, Tawada systematically lays out processes of mis-hearing and mis-reading, and uses them to generate stories as well as new meanings of words, which are simultaneously poetic and comic: “Heidelberg, what a strange name; in Japanese, ‘del’ means ‘to emerge’: ‘Heidelberg’ therefore means the mountain on which a shark emerges.” (“Heidelberg, was für ein seltsamer Name, ,del‘ heißt auf japanisch ,auftauchen,‘ also bedeutet ,Heidelberg‘ der Berg, auf dem ein Hai auftaucht.” Überseezungen 113; for Tawada’s specific “poetic of translation,” see Genz.) Instead of offering a higher degree of communication and understanding,

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 81 or any deeper insight into the core of things, heterolingualism is here used to dis- tract; by de-automatizing the well-known German name “Heidelberg,” it becomes a polyvalent word play. In the quest for a poetics of heterolingualism, Tawada perhaps goes furthest by stating that a foreign language that is only mastered partially is the real language of literature, as in this situation the word is conceived only as a word, and not as a representative for some other thing. For the reader of Tawada’s texts, this experience is re-staged in German (for instance, in the Hei-del-berg example). By reading German words ‘wrongly’ or rather literally, Tawada enables the German reader to experience de-automatization not only with a foreign language, but also with his, or her, mother tongue. This results in alienation as well as in a distancing effect—and, in addition, it has a comical effect, as the following example demonstrates:

Noriko rief ,Nasu!‘, das bedeutet auf japanisch Aubergine. [. . .] Als Lektor Heinz Schmidt uns sah, rief er uns etwas zu. [. . .] ich hörte nur das Wort ,nasu‘ heraus [. . .] Was ging es ihn an, wenn zwei Mädchen in einer Regennacht eine rohe Aubergine miteinander teilten? Heute denke ich, dass der Lektor das deutsche Wort ,naß‘ gemeint hatte. (Überseezungen 43)

Noriko cried out, ‘nasu!,’ which means eggplant in Japanese. [. . .] When the teacher, Heinz Schmidt, saw us, he shouted something to us. [. . .] I could only make out the word ‘nasu’ [. . .] What did he care if two girls shared a raw eggplant with one another on a rainy night? Today i think that the teacher meant the German word ‘naß’ (wet).

The heterolingualism-enforced process of de-automatization enables Tawada’s German readers to laugh at a strange-sounding word, which happens to be a word of their mother tongue—an occurrence we could interpret with Freud as a moment of relief: after all, the mother tongue is not different from any other ‘weird’ sounding, or looking, language. This funny as well as subversive effect is heightened according to the emotional or historical connotation of the specific word, undergoing this poetic operation of wordplay, as Tawada’s “Derrida–Dreirad” (“Derrida–tricycle,” Überseezungen 100) or “Muttersprache–Sprachmutter” (“mother tongue – tongue mother,” Talisman 9) shows. In the confrontation of different mother tongues, the existence of one neutral and not-funny mother tongue is questioned. Instead, the comic and nonsense potential of every language and language per se is highlighted.

Conclusion By contrasting what we could call the beginning and the end of monolingualism as a literary norm, 1600 and 2000, I hope to have shown how the tension between multi- and monolingualism shapes literary production as well as metapoetic discourses.

82 | Esther Kilchmann Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86

Early modern poetics sees the innovative duty of poets in their contribution to the project of monolingualism (i.e. deviating from multilingualism). In contrast, today heterolingualism is praised as an innovative poetic deviation from the (apparently) stable monolingual norm. Turning to contemporary literature, we could observe how heterolingual writing practices are closely linked to poetic devices by deviation, alienation and de-automatization. This, together with their aim of cultural critique, marks them as essentially poetic according to Jakobson. In a further step, heterolingualism turns the experience of being foreign back to the reader, who is suddenly faced with an alienation of his mother tongue. Alterity is thus being experienced, as Sturm-Trigonakis puts it, not by reading on alterity, but by reading alterity in the text (163). Being able to read alterity in the mother tongue itself must subsequently shake the notion of a total mother tongue-mastery. In other words, it renders the concept of total mastery of any language, of language as such, illusionary. Simultaneously it is this very lack of (language) control which today becomes the source of poetic creation.

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 83 Works Cited

If not otherwise marked, all translations from Eds. Ana M. Palimariu and Elisabeth Berger. the texts of Opitz, Müller, Oliver, and Tawada by Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre, 2009, 391–404. Lee W. Holt. Jervis Jones, William. Sprachhelden und Baumberger, Christa, Sonja Kolberg and Arno Sprachverderber. Dokumente zur Erforschung des Renken, eds. Literarische Polyphonien in der Fremdwortpurismus im Deutschen (1478–1750). Schweiz / Polyphonie littéraires en Suisse. Bern: Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995. Peter Lang, 2004. Jakobson, Roman. “What is poetry?” Selected Benjamin, Walter. “Thesen über den Begriff der Writings. Vol. III. Ed. Stephen Rudy. The Hague: Geschichte.” Gesammelte Schriften. Eds. Rolf Mouton Publishers, 1981, 740–51. Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Vol. I/2, Kilchmann, Esther. “Mehrsprachigkeit und 693–704. deutsche Literatur: Zur Einführung.” Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 3.2 (2012), Bozzi, Paola. Der fremde Blick. Zum Werk Herta 11–19. Müllers. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. ———. “Poetik des fremden Wortes. Techniken Bürger-Koftis, Michaela, ed. Polyphonie – und Topoi heterolingualer Gegenwartsliteratur.” Mehrsprachigkeit und literarische Kreativität. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 3.2 Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2010. (2012), 109–29.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. London: Konuk, Kader. Identitäten im Prozeß. Literatur von Bloomington, 1976. Autorinnen aus und in der Türkei in deutscher, englischer und türkischer Sprache. Essen: Die Fricke, Harald. Norm und Abweichung. Eine blaue Eule, 2001. Philosophie der Literatur. München: Beck, 1981. Lachmann, Renate. “Die ‘Verfremdung’ und das Freud, Sigmund. “Der Witz und seine Beziehung ‘Neue Sehen’ bei Viktor Sklovskij.”ˇ Poetica 3.1/2 zum Unbewussten.” Studienausgabe. Eds. (1970), 226–49. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, Manger, Klaus, ed. Die Fruchtbringer – eine 1989. Vol. IV, 9–221. Teutschherzige Gesellschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. Genz, Julia. “Yoko Tawadas Poetik des Übersetzens am Beispiel von Überseezungen.” Müller, Herta. Der König verneigt sich und tötet. Etudes Germaniques 65.3 (2010), 467–83. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2009.

Grutman, Rainier. Des langues qui résonnent. Oliver, José F. A. “Die unerwarteten Wörter. Peter L’hétérolinguisme au 19ème siècle québécoise. Härtling: Ins Poetische der Trauer.” Erinnerte Québec: Fides, 1997. Wirklichkeit – erzählte Wahrheit. Die Städte Hansen-Löve, Aage. Der russische Formalismus. meiner Kindheit. Ed. Peter Härtling. Dresden: Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Thelem, 2007, 5–14. Wissenschaften, 1996. ———. Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf. Hergheligiu, Raluca. “‘Augen, die in der Sprache Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. sitzen’: zur Latenz des Rumänischen bei Herta Müller.” Die fiktive Frau. Konstruktion von Opitz, Martin. Das Buch von der deutschen Weiblichkeit in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Poeterey. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954.

84 | Esther Kilchmann Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 71–86

Rakusa, Ilma. Zur Sprache gehen. Dresdner Sturm-Trigonakis, Elke. Global playing in der Chamisso-Poetikvorlesungen. Dresden: Thelem, Literatur. Ein Versuch über die Neue Weltliteratur. 2005. Würzburg: Königshausen&Neumann, 2007.

Schmeling, Manfred and Monika Schmitz-Emans. Tawada, Yoko. Talisman. Tübingen: konkursbuch, “Einleitung.” Multilinguale Literatur im 20. 1996. Jahrhundert. Eds. Schmeling and Schmitz- ———. Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik- Emans. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, Vorlesungen. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 1998. 2002, 7–35. ———. Überseezungen. Tübingen: konkursbuch, Seyhan, Azade. Writing outside the Nation. 2006. Princeton: University Press, 2001. Weissmann, Dirk, ed. Littérature et migration. Sklovskij,ˇ Viktor. Theorie der Prosa. Ed. and Écrivains germanophones venus d’ailleurs. trans. Gisela Drohla. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, Special issue of Dossier Allemagne d’aujourd’hui 1984. 197 (2011).

Sternberg, Meir. “Polylingualism as Reality and Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Translation as Mimesis.” Poetics Today 2.4 Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham (1981), 221–39. University Press, 2012.

Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation | 85

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 87–90

mi have een droom

Ramsey Nasr

Introduction by Liesbeth Minnaard

“mi have een droom” is a phrase that triggers strong historical resonances; a phrase that almost automatically evokes Martin Luther King’s famous dream of a tolerant future in which people live together in peace and unity, despite their differences. In this particular case it seems that the ingrammaticality of the sentence, or better: its linguistic hybridity, epitomizes this future in which people of different cultures and languages mix and mingle. The English “have,” the Dutch “een droom” and the “mi” that is neither Dutch nor English, but nevertheless resonates meaning as (a) first person pronoun in “weird English”—a bastardisation of “me” which, according to English grammar rules, should have been “I” to qualify as “proper English”. It is this phrase, “mi have een droom,” I have a dream, that signifies a future that is self-evidently multilingual, even for the lyrical I who, in contrast, comments very sceptically on the multicultural present of the poem, the year 2059.

“mi have een droom,” first published in 2009, is probably the most popular poem by the Palestinian-Dutch writer and actor Ramsey Nasr. The poem’s playful and elated language undoubtedly makes up an important part of this popularity; and also the recording of Nasr’s own impressive oral performance of the poem, set in a typical Rotterdam cityscape and viewed online by a large audience, has surely added to its cultural capital.1 Moreover, the theme of the poem seems to neatly fit the general cultural mood in the Netherlands of that time, a tense mood that hovered between the growing realisa- tion of multiculturality as lived reality on the one hand, and worries about a loss of “Dutch identity” (however defined) on the other. The poem skilfully addresses this

mi have een droom | 87 tension: it gives voice to the nostalgic fear for change, while simultaneously performing multicultural mixing on the level of language.

In Mijn nieuwe vaderland. Gedichten van crisis en angst [My new fatherland. Poems of crisis and fear], a collection of texts that Nasr wrote in his capacity as Dutch Poet Laureate (2009–2013), he himself introduces the poem as follows:

Een ode aan mijn geboortestad Rotterdam: ooit de grootste haven ter wereld, met een weggebombardeerd hart als eeuwig litteken en de helft van de inwoners van buitenlandse afkomst.

Vroeger was het altijd beter. Een gedicht over nostalgie in de toekomst. (62)

An ode to my city of birth Rotterdam: once the largest harbour in the world, with a bombed-away-heart as everlasting scar and half of its population of foreign origin.

It was always better in the past. A poem about nostalgia in the future.

This striking transposition of feelings of nostalgia—about lost ethnic homogeneity and the dissolution of white dominance—to the future appears to be an effective strategy of offering the reader a mirror. This mirror almost magically reflects some of the current blind spots in Dutch society, in particular in relation to the Dutch self-image. Moreover, the fact that the aforesaid nostalgia is conveyed in a self-confident and streetwise multilingual vernacular further destabilizes the speaker’s discourse. In the light of the poem’s multicultural present, his language paradoxically functions as proof of the untenability of his opinions. It is the apt way in which the poem’s combination of multilingual language with a monolingual gist gives short shrift to the myth of monolingualism that made us, editors, decide to include this hybrid Dutch poem in an English-language volume. Fully aware of the difficulties that the text will certainly pose to the non-Dutchophone reader, we nevertheless hope and think that it is exactly the multilingual quality of the poem’s language that also provides a challenging as well as rewarding boundary-crossing reading experience. As a 21st century example of language experimentation, the poem won- derfully demonstrates that multilingual writing, carried by rhythm and poeticity, does not necessarily need the reader’s clear-cut understanding in order to produce meaning.

Note

1. http://www.nrcnext.nl/blog/2009/09/25/ ramsey-nasr-mi-have-een-droom/. Viewed 27 March 2014.

88 | Ramsey Nasr Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 87–90 mi have een droom (rotterdam, 2059) wullah, poetry poet, let mi takki you 1 ding: di trobbi hier is dit ben van me eigen now zo 66 jari & skerieus ben geen racist, aber alle josti op een stokki, uptodate, wats deze shit? ik zeg maar zo mi was nog maar een breezer als mi moeder zij zo zei: ‘azizi doe gewoon jij, doe je gekke shit genoeg, wees beleefd, maak geen tsjoeri toon props voor je brada, zeg “wazzup meneer”, “fawaka” – en duh beetje kijken op di smatjes met ze toetoes is no trobbi beetje masten, beetje klaren & kabonkadonk is toppi aber geef di goeie voorbeeld, prik di chickies met 2 woorden’ zo deed mi moeder takki toen & boem tranga! kijk, hier staat ik hand in hand, harde kaas, api trots op di belanda, niet dan? now dan, want mi lobi roffadam & deze stitti is mi spanga ja joh, tantoe bigfoot long ago, toen was geluk gewoon da shit wij rampeneerden & met mate, heel di hoed was 1 famiri weinig doekoe, aber boieee: keek me gaan, keek me lopen met me broekoe, keek me clippen met me ketting, wullah mi was di grote otochtone condoekoe van vele boezoemies op leip lauwe pattaas kwam ik vet binnensteppen van pompi doppe loperdelopi door di stad, dat met ze gebouwen botertje bats aan di bigtime poenani-master ze voets lag & keek ze now leggen: moeilijk lekker roffadam, met ze amperbroeki an, heet & klaar in spleetlauwe stegies & zij zo: ‘kom kill, wandel dan, moeni worri tab je lippi, play mi down op plattegrond, breek mi billen, gimmi bossi’ & bakoekoe jawohl, daar gingen wi dan, mi & di stitti, kierend van mond tot mond – mi schudde di doesji, zi schudde mi hard terug & lang & op & down tot binnen in ons (oh blueberry yam yam) di zon lijk een smeltende bal naar omhoog kwam: knetter & glowy opende zich di stitti ze eigen, rees op & kwam roze rondom mi te leggen dát was roffadam: wi wandelden strak & di regen was gone zo ging dat dan, in di goeie ouwe klok van glim & gouwe tiffies aber now wullah, now dat ik old & bijna didi, now zit ik hier game over te kniezen op me stoeroe, in een kapot veranderde stitti word ik remi da rimpel, weke pampa achter glas & ik zweer je gast deze land is niet meer wat ze was – sjoef dan habibi, sjoef door di ruiten al di toelies, al di tuigkoppen uit di tegenwoordige tijd, oyooo

mi have een droom | 89 di playen biggi pompoe pompoe, aber komen niet van hiro & di zuigt maar & di praat maar habbi dabbi & di doet maar takki takki poep & ik zeg you di bokitoos hebben geen props of respect, di hebben da dockz in da fitti gezet dus poetry poet, kijk me ogen, luister me oren, want hier is mi torri hardcore & luid: mi have een droom, vol is vol, belanda boven sluiten di shit & alles wordt wider basis controller, luchtdicht lijk da weerga terug naar di wortel – vóór alle stitties zwaar paraloezoe & dikke ruïna ja mi have een droom, dat me matties & ik ooit di zon wider clearly omlagi zien komen, groter & groter, om dan benoekoe vaarlijk & slow hier boven di straties, di cribs & di homies van roffadam nider te dalen lijk een warme babeloeba in me gezicht – mi have een droom vandaag lang bewaard & opgezwollen, dat heel di stitti wider lijk vroeger over mi komt & mi wegpakt, in ze wreed tedere vel van di nacht & vroeger nog, toen di dag nog niet dwars door mi heen kwam gewaaid lijk gruis in me wijdopen hart – tantoe vroeger, daar have ik een droom blakka-zwart & wit lijk snow, want daar bleef alles lijk het was daar zijn da pieps nog keurig & strak – mi have een droom van brekend glas ik droom achteruit, van een stitti die stilstaat & thuis op mi wacht

90 | Ramsey Nasr Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances as Antwerp City Poet and Dutch Poet Laureate

Liesbeth Minnaard

Introduction Ramsey Nasr, actor and poet, is a well-known figure in the Dutch and Flemish public arena. Since the publication of his debut, the poetry collection 27 gedichten & Geen lied (27 poems & No song) in the year 2000, he has presented a broad variety of texts—poetry and more—on various media and at various occasions.1 While notions of the ivory-tower-poet and his ivory-tower-poetry have become rather outdated in general, Nasr takes these notions in the complete opposite realm: not only has he made himself known for his virtuoso performances of language, both in text and on stage, in his work as ‘representative poet’—poet of Antwerp and poet of the Dutch ‘patria’—he also persistently addresses and criticizes contemporary culture and socio-political states of affairs in the Low Countries. During his 2005 term as Antwerp’s City Poet he himself defined his specific task as writing in “an extreme here and an extreme now” (Reynebeau). And also his most recent publication Mijn nieuwe vaderland. Gedichten van crisis en angst (My new fatherland. Poems of crisis and fear), a collection of texts that Nasr wrote during his term as Dutch “dichter des vaderlands,” poet of the fatherland (2009–2013), testifies of his determination to write poetry of the now that quite explicitly takes position on topical matters. What interests me in this article is the language that Nasr uses to fashion these officially representative texts and to achieve the goals that he sets himself. Obviously, an appointment as Poet Laureate2, whether on a local or national level, entails answering to certain expectations, even meeting certain demands. The representative poems are supposed to speak to and for ‘the people’—the inhabitants of Antwerp and the citizens of the Netherlands—by addressing issues, in whatever

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 91 creative form, related to these respective spatial realms. In the first situation this realm is the lived space of a city, in the other it is the more imaginary construct of a national community. Obviously, these realms accommodate many positions, identities, and voices—especially now, in an age that is characterized by transnational mobility and migration in unprecedented dimensions. While the nineteenth century idea of ethnically homogenous nations has appeared highly questionable in general, this myth proves particularly obsolete in the twenty-first century. Thus it seems that the difficult, if not impossible task of being representative as a poet in this age, is to write poetry that, in one way or another, appeals to and simultaneously gives voice to the broad spectrum of people that inhabit these spatial realms; to write poetry that re-presents the full breadth of this multitude. This article discusses various examples of Nasr’s representative work in order to examine what it means or can mean to “be representative” as a poet, both on the level of form/language and of content. In doing so it focuses in particular on the intri- cate and in many ways pivotal intersection between language, nativity and belonging, as it is presented and explored in Nasr’s poems. By critically juxtaposing the way in which these intersecting issues feature in a selection of the “Antwerpse stadsgedichten” (“Antwerp city poems”) with their representation in the collection Mijn nieuwe vaderland, the article aims to shed light on the problematic of performing as an officially representative poet. In order to do so, it seems inevitable to shortly elaborate on the representative appointments themselves as well: in case of a Poet Laureate who is expected to perform as a public figure and as an ambassador of poetry, it appears difficult to keep the author’s biography out of the analysis of both his position and work. Not only do his public performances as a poet make up an important part of his official responsibilities, also the textual material under examination is directly linked to extra-textual factors and circumstances. This is work that Nasr wrote in commission, and in response to actual happenings in Antwerp and the Netherlands during his official appointments.3 The fact that especially the Antwerp poems explicitly stage a Poet Laureate called “ramsey” further reinforces the necessity to consider, at least for a moment, a reading that identifies the poetic persona “ramsey” with the author Ramsey Nasr.4 And finally, it appears that nativity plays a decisive role in discussions on the question of legitimacy: who is allowed to speak and on behalf of whom? It is here that the monolingual paradigm comes in, the highly influential and simultaneously extremely limiting paradigm that in many ways works to cover up multilingual realities, as Yasemin Yildiz eloquently argues in her study Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition.

Nasr’s Position as Antwerp City Poet The city of Antwerp is central to the ten poems that Nasr wrote during his appointment as City Poet in the year 2005.5 Its urban geography, its population, its traditions,

92 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108 its politics and its discourses: all feature in poems that thus present the reader with a multi-faceted image of the Flemish metropolis. This Antwerp is home to many and not only to the so-called Sinjoren, the proud if not arrogant class of born and bred Antwerpians. To fully understand the particular position of this group it is important to realize that the Antwerp population is traditionally categorized according to a strict hierarchy. This hierarchy positions the Sinjoren, as ‘truly native’ inhabitants of (old) Antwerp and as native speakers of the Antwerp dialect, at the top.6 The local expression Pagadders is used for inhabitants of Antwerp who were born in Antwerp as well, but of parents from elsewhere.7 As a result they are placed below the Sinjoren in the Antwerp hierarchy. At the very bottom of the hierarchy sit all others, including ‘newcomers’ from other Belgian regions, the Netherlands, the Maghreb countries, and Congo, for example. Persons from the other side of the river Scheldt disputably occupy the lowest position in the Antwerp hierarchy. This stratification of the Antwerp population is a clear example of the powerful technology of nativity at work. As Thomas Paul Bonfiglio convincingly argues in his study Mother Tongues and Nations. The Invention of the Native Speaker the popular notion of the native speaker that is “invariably taken to indicate an objective description of someone possessing natural authority in language” (1), is in fact tightly bound up to highly problematic and strongly hierarchized constructions of race and ethnicity. Rather than as a linguistic concept, language, and in particular the idea of a national language, is conceptualized as a natural, birthright factor, indicative of belonging or non-belonging. Being a native speaker who has ‘natural’ possession of the national language becomes a prerequisite for membership of the ‘organic’ national community. The idea that the native speaker automatically possesses a higher level of authority in a language “stratifies speakers into the more native and the less native and valorizes those ‘real’ natives in ownership of the power discourse” (4). For this (problematical as much as powerful) phenomenon Bonfiglio proposes the term ethnolinguistic nationalism; it designates “the confluence of folkloristic notions of ethnicity, nativity, maternality, and exclusive ownership in the discourse of the national language.” (6) With this nativity-based hierarchy in mind, it does not surprise that the appointment of Nasr as officially representative poet of the Flemish city of Antwerp in 2005 caused quite some controversy. This controversy was partly stirred by doubts about the (in)appropriateness of Nasr’s non-native background. First of all, Nasr is not ‘from Antwerp’: he was not born in the city, although at the time of his nomination he had been a relatively long-term citizen there (Nasr had been living in Antwerp for over a decade). Following from the fact that Nasr is not a native inhabitant of Antwerp, he is also not (or not considered) a ‘legitimate’ (while native) speaker of the Antwerp dialect. Secondly, Nasr is not Belgian, but Dutch—‘een Hollander,’ a Dutch-man. Again language is an important factor of difference here. Although the status of

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 93 Flemish as a language (rather than as a Dutch dialect) continues to stir debate, the distinction between the two language varieties is unmistakable. And thirdly, Nasr has what is sometimes called a hyphenated identity: he is of Palestinian-Dutch descent. In the eyes of strict believers in the ethnolinguistic determination of the Dutch mother tongue, this makes him a disjunctive speaker of the Dutch language: someone whose relation to this language is, for whatever reasons, not always culturally sanctioned (Yildiz 169–74). Adding to this, Nasr’s mixed Palestinian-Dutch descent officially makes him a non-western “allochtoon” in the identitarian vocabulary used by the Dutch state.8 This is another marker that traditionally stands in the way of considering Dutch as someone’s ‘mother tongue’ (which in the case of Nasr it factually is: Dutch is the native language of his mother and his first language). Interestingly, this last aspect of Nasr’s identity did not directly function as a dis- qualification in the specific situation in Antwerp (as, embarrassingly, it still does in other situations, as he explains in his speech of acceptance of the E. Du Perron Prize 2012).9 On the contrary: it even appeared as if Nasr’s marked Dutchness brought him in a certain sense closer to the likewise marked, Dutchophone identity of the Flemish.10 Indirectly, however, Nasr’s Palestinian background did feature as an obstacle in the discussion about his position. In 2004 Nasr had published a rather outspoken essay about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, titled “Eigenbelang. Onvermogen. Onverschilligheid” (“Self-interest. Impotence. Indifference”) in both the Flemish newspaper De Standaard and the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. This essay came to function as a bone of contention.11 Referring to the essay the liberal councilman Ludo van Campenhout as well as the xenophobic party Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) vehemently objected to Nasr’s election. They argued that it appeared that Nasr was going to use his public position as City Poet for propagating and furthering the Palestinian cause. This, they proclaimed, would mean a politicization of the City Poet institution in unwanted and intolerable ways. Although, in the end, these adversaries could not prevent Nasr’s appointment, their protest caused a roar of media attention. Obviously, when it comes to interpreting literature, these observations problemat- ically revolve around extra-textual matters and emphasize the author’s biography. As I will show in my analyses, however, being foreign (or: being non-native) is also an important theme in Nasr’s poems, which lends my discussion of Nasr’s position (or: the emphasis on his foreign background) a content-based motivation. In the following, I will discuss two specimen of Nasr’s city poems. With the previous elaboration on Nasr’s position as a first-language-speaker of Dutch and as a Dutch citizen in mind, it is striking to notice that the language of these poems has a strong Flemish touch to it. The poems make use of a vocabulary, idiomatic expressions and forms of address that qualify as typically Flemish. And, it needs to be mentioned, this is not only true to my own Dutch-conditioned ears (which is quite easy), but also to the ears of the native Antwerpians that I consulted in this matter.12

94 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108

The Language of a City The very first poem that Nasr published in his official role as City Poet features a lyrical subject that names himself “ramsey.”13 This poem, titled “stadplant” (“city plant”), can easily be read as a response to the turbulence caused by Nasr’s election. The poem stages a dialogue between two distinct speaker positions: a City Poet that appears as ‘lyrical I,’ not only in this but in several of the city poems, and what appear to be his opponents, a group of native Antwerpians who are skeptical, if not downright negative about the idea of being represented by him. “stadplant,” a title that presents the city as a living organism, consists of three parts—dissecting the city plant into roots, stem and flower—and an “envoi,” a dedica- tion. The first part of the poem, titled “de wortel” (“the root”), positions the poet in the Antwerp locale. It uses standard Dutch to describe how ramsey’s attitude towards the city forcedly changes from carefree enjoyment of the city to a struggling sounding out of its hidden layers. The second part of the poem, titled “de stengel” (“the stem”), introduces ramsey to its inhabitants and gives voice to the Sinjoren. A clear shift in language helps to illustrate the transition from the poet’s perspective to that of the Antwerp locals. Immediately during their first performance the Sinjoren articulate their fear and their mistrust about what is supposed to be ‘their’ City Poet: “natuurlijk had- den we bang” (“of course we had fear”14, 143) and “wat hij daar deed / we weten het niet” (“what he was doing there / we do not know,” 143). As it turns out, the threat that they perceive mainly lies in ramsey’s practice of “versifying,” of turning his impressions and experiences of the city into poems. They object to this practice through which ramsey appropriates in words what they consider to be their city. In their eyes this practice of “versifying” adds up to his ‘impudent’ exploration of their city, of their territory. The Sinjoren phrase their indignation as well as their rejection of his project as follows: “wat wil de dichter? Hij wil kansloos paren met onze stad” (“what does the poet want? He wants to mate with our city without standing a chance,” 143).15 This formulation of their aversion in sexual terms is reminiscent of the nineteenth century discourse of miscegenation, thus suggesting that what is at stake here is fear for the loss of an assumed purity. The adverb “kansloos” (“without standing a chance”) not only gives voice to the skepticism of the Sinjoren, but also seems to function as a kind of conjuration. It colors the poet’s (assumed) attempt at union, at mating with Antwerp, as failure already at forehand. The use of the possessive pronoun “our” (our city) in the answer functions as a means of exclusion. It constructs a “we,” a community to which the “I” does not belong. This community is specified as:

[. . .] (wij: clémentine, thérèseke, onze frans ons milou, marjetje, de swa, de mil, de neus, onze rudy moustache ons florreke, de senne, de fonne, den tuur, ons yvon en de schele mon) (143)

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 95 [. . .] (we: clémentine, thérèseke, our frans our milou, marjetje, the swa, the mil, the neus, our rudy moustache our florreke, the senne, the fonne, the tuur, our yvon and the cross-eyed mon)

The typically local names and the sense of intimacy conveyed by the locally specific use of possessive pronouns, abbreviations (e.g. swa for François) and the diminutive form (ending on the Flemish “-ke” rather than on the Dutch “-tje”), make the “we” appear as a truly native collective. However, it seems that ramsey—the stranger, the outsider—is determined not to let himself be held back by this native “we” from poetically representing Antwerp. He responds to the suspicion by offering his auditors “ongevraagd” (“unasked for”) a “citytrip lyrisch aufsteigen.” This sudden, mixed expression of foreign words, English and German, the German in italics, stands out within the Dutchophone text. It is as if this awkward word-combination functions to underline ramsey’s foreign, supposedly non-Antwerpian character to the addressees of his friendly offer. Simultaneously it illustrates, in a rather ironic, over-the-top manner, the supposed impurity of his language as opposed to theirs. The fact that only the German “lyrisch aufsteigen” (“lyrical ascension”) is written in italics seems to indicate that “citytrip” can be considered as a foreign-derived word that has been integrated in the Dutch/Flemish language. It is a term that has lost its marked status and that causes no difficulties in understanding (although, obviously, it does undermine claims to monolingualism). The “lyrisch aufsteigen” is of a different order: apparently this word-combination is less straightforward in its intended signification. This partly has to do with the metaphorical meaning attached to the term “aufsteigen” in relation to the term “lyrisch.” In this rather odd combination the phrase seems to hint at the ascending, elevating power of poetry, thus referring to a rather moralistic understanding of the uplifting value of art.16 This interpretation, however, is complicated by the events in the subsequent scene. ramsey literally takes the Sinjoren with him on a “lyrical ascension,” whilst the figurative interpretation of the term remains present in the background. This city trip of a very special kind takes place in the third part of the poem, titled “de bloem” (“the flower”). This part puts the city itself in the center of attention. Up in the sky, looking down on Antwerp that lies spread out below them, ramsey invites his involuntary travel companions to show him, the foreigner, her secrets. He encourages them to teach him the language of ‘their’ city and to initiate him into what he himself calls her “code” (145), a term that in this context seems to refer to the often unspoken rules of (Antwerp) ‘autochthony.’17 We find a suchlike request for instance in the following stanza:

zeg mij a. u. b. A waar het verschil zit tussen kipdorp en klapdorp B wat de kern is, C wat het sas is, D wat bist, E wat zand, F dries onderwijs me in de raadsels van wapper, klipper- en klamperstraat (145)

96 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108

please tell me A what the difference is between kipdorp and klapdorp B what the kern is, C what the sas is, D what bist, E what zand, F dries teach me of the mysteries of wapper, klipper- and klamperstreet

The playful language of this request, reminiscent of a nursery rhyme, presents a striking rupture with the serious, even hostile tone of the Sinjoren’s discourse. Whereas the close-to-nonsense content works to undermine this seriousness of the code and light-heartedly bypasses the animosity, the playful rhyme and rhythm further put the authority of its code into perspective. Thus, the form of ramsey’s request works to parody this code of autochthony that so effectively works to exclude newcomers. After finishing the lyrical city trip ramsey asks his passengers: “en, hebben we het gezellig gehad” (“and, did we have a good time,” 146), thus inviting them to enter into a form of community based on this shared experience. The Sinjoren, however, respond with silence. That is, until one of them, Milou, softly mutters a rejection: “wa wette gai van ongs stad?” (“what do you know of our city?” 146). This renewed expression of exclusion in hard-core Antwerp dialect, phoneticized and in this form marked as different, or even deviant, within the poem, puts an end to ramsey’s patience. His initial acknowledgement of the Sinjoren’s special status and his willingness to reckon with their air of autochthony, now gives way to a strategy of subversion in a language that harks back to Antwerp’s urban cartography. ramsey responds in a vocabulary of Antwerp street names that reveals the Sinjoren’s myth of purity as an illusion. By referring to, among others, “de hollandstraat en de rotter- damstraat,” “de haifastraat” and “de jeruzalemstraat” (146) ramsey demonstrates the historical presence of the foreign in Antwerp’s urban make up. In combination with more conceptual street names like “de weerstandlaan” (“the resistance street”), “de goedendagstraat” (“the good day street”) and “de goede hoopstraat” (“the good hope street,” 146), Antwerp’s city map is turned into a discourse that not only features various influences from abroad, but also testifies of transnational encounters in the urban contact-zone. Whereas in this third part’s final stanzas the poet thus shows the actual presence of the foreign, of the world, in the names of Antwerp streets and squares, in the envoi the voice and focalisation shift once more to a Sinjoor speaker. He again replies to the City Poet by making clear that the Sinjoren refuse to partake in what he calls “uw zweverig straatnamen-tric-trac-spel” (“your esoteric street name tric-trac game,” 147). ramsey’s style, although clearly connected to the Antwerpian locale, is not their cup of tea. He emphasizes that the Sinjoren will not give in to ramsey’s playful poetic performances, unless the poet actually approaches the city. With the words “we zijn echt meneer, wij leven” (“we are real, sir, we are alive,” 147) he encourages ramsey to bridge the distance between his elevated and elitist poet position and life, everyday life in the streets of Antwerp. Unless ramsey really “ruikt [. . .] de geurende

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 97 boezem van onze stad” (“smells [. . .] the scented bosom of our city,” 147), unless he actually participates in the urban organism, the “stadsplant,” he will merely occupy a position at the sideline rather than inhabit a representative position. In the envoi the Sinjoren confront ramsey with the following choice: if he promises to avoid an objectifying, stifling mode of representation but instead guarantees their freedom and autonomy in the process of their representation, they are willing to at least consider joining him on another citytrip lyrisch aufsteigen. They encourage the City Poet to adopt an acknowledging, intersubjective approach and language to forestall the situation in which the inhabitants of Antwerp feel like “gevangenen in zijn gedicht” (“prisoners in his poem,” 144). All in all, one can say, that Nasr’s first city poem represents the “stadsplant” Antwerp as an organism made up of dissent and dialogue. It stages the encounter of two almost opposite positions—the City Poet and the true native—that both claim a certain representativity, and demonstrates their tense but productive interaction. In the poem two positions, two languages, two discourses meet, with a mutually self- reflective and thought-provoking effect. In this quasi-democratic mode of representation, Nasr’s poem closely resembles Bakhtin’s idea about the (novelistic) text as a “zone of dialogical contact” (Dialogic Imagination, 45) in which various voices—each with their own particular languages, styles, discourses and world views (46)—ideally enter into a dialogue. I use the term ‘ideally’ to also give space to the sometimes ‘less successful’ forms of dialogue: misunderstanding, disagreement, and conflict. As Bakhtin explained, heteroglossia, as opposed to the authoritarian monoglossia, allows for clashing positions and internal differentiation within one national language that is stratified into various positions of power and ideology. Whereas Bakhtin focuses on the novel and locates its innovative, democratizing force exactly here, as a specific characteristic of the novel’s narrative form, I perceive a similar dialogized structure of interaction and exchange in Nasr’s “Antwerp City Poems.” Here too various positions, of language and power, meet in the heteroglossic make-up of the poetic text, thus reflecting Antwerp’s dynamic urban diversity.

Representation in Plural Also the poem “Achter een vierkante vitrine” (“Behind a square showcase”), the second city poem, stages a situation of poetic encounter. Once again we are presented with a poeticized account of an encounter between two strongly divergent positions under the shadow of mutual mistrust.18 This poem was written at the occasion of the opening of the so-called Kubus at the De Coninck Square, a modern building housing a municipal library in an urban renewal area in Northern Antwerp. In the poem this library appears as a strange element in the urban surroundings described: it is out of place, incongruous both in terms of architecture and in terms of its intellectual

98 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108 functionality. This new library functions as the trigger, the provocation that makes two opposite discourses bounce. On the one hand there are the locals of the formerly deprived urban area, who witness a radical transformation of their territory. On the other hand there are the readers—“taalpooiers” (“language pimps,” 153) and sufferers of “lettervraat” (“letter gluttony,” 157) as they are condescendingly called in the poem—who visit the newly built library. Also this poem makes use of a racializing, xenophobic discourse to give voice to the local skepticism about the intellectual intruders: “t is een ander ras” (“it’s an other race,” 149). Here the nativity of the locals is constructed in racial terms: the visiting readers are racially different. At the same time, through this racialisation of nativity, the divide between locals and readers is naturalized. Not much later language comes in when a local gives voice to his frustration in colloquial Flemish (with markers such as “dees,” “enfin,” “gij” and “goe”):

dees hier was altijd een nette buurt met fatsoenlijke hoeren afrikanen verslaafden [. . .] enfin marginalen gelijk gij en ik alles ging goe en nu krijgen we dit (149)

this here used to be a neat neighborhood with decent hookers Africans addicts [. . .] well marginals like you and me everything went well and now we get this

The poem here presents the reader with a tongue-in-cheek repetition of a discourse that is ‘normally’ applied to exclude these marginals themselves. Full of nostalgia the speaker voices his regret about the supposed loss of status (neat and decent) of his square, caused by the reading intruders. The romanticizing of the past and the ideal- izing of a lost unity (as in one of the following lines: “met zijn allen” (“all together”) harks back to the familiar discourse of center and margin, only the roles have ironically shifted. A spokesman for the original inhabitants of the square, in fact the social ‘scum’ of dominant society, now expresses these marginals’ negative feelings about what they perceive as “lettertuig” (“letter-trash,” 150): the readers (and writers, present in the form of their books) that are about to seize their territory. Ironically, here it is the “language mafia,” the users of the sophisticated, elitist language of reading and writing, that is perceived as threat to a local Antwerp community. As already mentioned, these locals, despite their marginal position, also perceive of themselves as ‘native,’ as the only legitimate inhabitants of the now renovated square. Like the poem “stadsplant” also this second poem stages a heteroglossic collision between two different positions, between two stratified languages and the

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 99 accompanying worldviews. But what happens again as well, is that the collision transforms into an encounter. The city square local, after venting his anger about the readers’ invasion, is miraculously caught by the power of the written word in the moment that he aggressively (and determined to put a stop to this act of gentrification) enters the library. There the man of the margin meets the man of letters and what follows then, despite the first’s initial reluctance, is again another moment of approach, of two positions nearing each other. The poem relates how the local is overwhelmed by the power of words, of language and how he cannot but develop an immediate addiction to letters.19 The thematic of encounter across boundaries of language, worldview, class and nativity recurs in various other city poems. Taken together these staged encounters work to present a poetic image of a multi-faceted Antwerp that speaks in many tongues and discourses. The poems make this diversity audible. They show an Antwerp that is regularly a site of conflict and that has difficulties straddling its diversity, but that simultaneously cannot but try. In the poems the position of ramsey, the poet figure, shifts: he appears in changing constellations—as an active interlocutor, but also, in other poems, as a mere observer of Antwerp city life—with more or less legitimate speakers and Antwerp citizens. In the dialogized structure of the poems he lends his ear to them all. In this sense Nasr’s ‘representative poems’ do not speak exclusively on behalf of any of the (groups of) inhabitants, but imagine their interaction in the far from homogenous Antwerp contact-zone. The City Poet himself—in the poems as well as in the extra-textual world—occupies an ambivalent position: he is out of place (as outsider) and representative (as City Poet) at the same time. On an extra-textual level this ambivalent position turns out to be an asset: Nasr’s outsider status combines with his ‘being representative’ in such a way that his representative position becomes non-fixed and multiple.

Nasr as Dutch “Dichter des vaderlands” (“Poet of the Fatherland”) Let me now move on to Nasr’s second ‘representative position’ and to the texts that he wrote in his capacity as Dutch Poet Laureate. As already mentioned, in 2009 Ramsey Nasr was elected the third “Dichter des Vaderlands,” poet of the fatherland, in the Netherlands. Other than in the United Kingdom, where the so-called Poet Laureate tradition was established as early as 1616 (Ben Jonson being the first poet laureate at the court of King Charles I), the representative position in the Netherlands only originated in the year 2000.20 With the institution of the four-year honorary position, which is the result of a joint initiative by the Dutch Royal Library, the quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad, the television broadcast company NTR and the “Poetry International” foundation, the organizers strived to further poetry among all layers of society. The Poet Laureate was expected to perform as an ambassador of poetry, and to stir attention and enthusiasm for poetry in whatever way deemed suitable by the poet him/herself. The position entailed no fixed obligations, only

100 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108 the request to write a poem at a “cultural, political, sportive, or social” occasion of one’s own choice four times a year.21 These poems were to be published in NRC Handelsblad, thus guaranteeing a sufficiently broad readership. It is interesting to notice that the establishment of the Poet Laureate institution coincided with what in the Netherlands came to be called “the multicultural drama” debate, a heavily mediatized debate about the assumedly failing integration of newcomers into Dutch society.22 Closely linked to, if not a direct result of this debate was the increased interest in the question what it means to be Dutch. At that time a widely-felt sense of a lacking, or threatened national Dutch identity resulted in several initiatives that aimed to rediscover, redefine, and also revalue a shared Dutch history, a common cultural heritage and even ‘typical Dutch characteristics’ (although, not surprisingly, these proved difficult to define) as buttresses of this Dutch identity. Although assumedly not intended as such by the initiators, the concept of a ‘Poet of the Patria’ theoretically fits this desire for a re-invented and reinforced national identity perfectly well. All the more interesting is the fact that, especially in the case of Nasr, the Poet Laureate turned out to be the fiercest critic of an all-too provincial and exclusionary Dutch self-orientation—an issue to which I will come back later. From 2000 to 2013 the Poet Laureate was elected during a public contest: poets were to organize their own PR campaign in order and to collect as many votes as possible. This procedure certainly stirred a lot of media attention, but was also heavily criticized by poets and cultural critics alike. The fourth Dutch Poet Laureate, Anne Vegter, who succeeded Nasr in January 2013 is the first Poet Laureate that was appointed by a committee of experts. The organizers explain this decision by referring to the success and advanced visibility of the Poet Laureate, and to the increased number of responsibilities attached to the position. It is general agreement that Nasr in particular has made a decisive contribution to the popularity and the strong critical impact of the Poet Laureate institution in the Netherlands.23 Or as journalist Rien van den Berg writes at his abdication: “Ramsey Nasr was [. . .] de eerste Dichter des Vaderlands die zijn functie volkomen waarmaakte” (“Ramsey Nasr was [. . .] the first Poet of the Fatherland who fully fulfilled his appointment”). The hybrid collection Mijn nieuwe vaderland, a combination of poems, short comments and two essays, divided into three sections and preceded by a preface, testifies of this critical, if not outright political impact of the texts that Nasr wrote in his capacity as Dutch Poet Laureate. These “Poems of Crisis and Fear,” as the subtitle of the collection labels the texts, are, in a very outspoken way, driven by anger and frustration, by Nasr’s anger and frustration at what he perceives as the moral downfall of “his fatherland” the Netherlands. Already the first poem, titled “Ik wou dat ik twee burgers was (dan kon ik samen- leven)” (“I wish I was two citizens [then I could live together],” 11–3),24 provides a bleak sketch of a loss of community: the downfall of a Dutch ‘we,’ of a shared Dutch

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 101 identity. Instead, the poem speaks of two groups of people that appear as “twee onverenigbare republieken” (“two incompatible republics,” 12), and of a “land dat werd opgeheven” (“country that was being abolished,” 13). This idea of national polarization, of a division of the Netherlands into two strongly opposed groups, per- vades the whole collection of texts. The trend is already set in the preface. Here Poet Laureate Nasr, in a first person plea for “onzuiverheid” (“impurity,” 7), speaks of polarized division. He sketches a people dissatisfied with the state of their nation, but strongly divided in their analyses of the reasons for the perceived state of crisis. What both groups share, according to Nasr, is a feeling of estrangement; They are, as it were, united in their fear and worries about the future of the Netherlands, a country that they no longer recognize. In a certain way this diagnosis of a divided nation- state echoes the words (from a speech of 2008) of populist-right politician Geert Wilders, that are used as a motto for the second section of the volume:

Er zijn twee Nederlanden. Aan de ene kant: onze elite met haar zogenaamde idealen van een multiculturele samenleving [. . .]. Er is ook een ander Nederland. En dat is mijn Nederland, [. . .] een sociaal Nederland. (39)

There are two Netherlands. On the one hand: our elite with its so-called ideals of a multicultural society [. . .]. There is also an other Netherlands. And this is my Netherlands, [. . .] a social Netherlands.

The crucial difference between these two views of a divided society, it seems, concerns the identification of the speakers. Whereas Wilders clearly positions himself opposite to the elite and their ‘dream’ of a multicultural society, Nasr in the conclusion of his preface disputably attempts to bridge the gap between the “two Netherlands” by looking for commonalities between the opposed groups of Dutch(wo)men, even if these lie in the realm of mutual mistrust. However, this is just part of the picture that Nasr draws in the preface. The other part addresses the task and responsibilities of a poet in “[o]ns huidige politieke klimaat” (“our current political climate,” 8). It is in this respect that Nasr cites three Dutch voices, “fanmail” (7) as he ironically calls them, that articulate their opinion of Nasr as Poet Laureate. Two short examples suffice to get a taste of their aggressive and xenophobic discourse that not only rejects Nasr’s national representativity, but also connects this rejection to the issue of nativity: “Dit is geen dichter des vaderlands, maar een vijand des vaderlands” (“This is not a poet of the fatherland, but an enemy of the fatherland”) and “je bent [. . .] een nep Nederlander. Man flikker op naar je zandbak waar je vandaan komt” (“you are [. . .] a fake Dutchman. Man, fuck off to the sandpit that you come from,” 7). Evidently, the rhetoric and content of these messages are shocking but, thus the adumbration, this is how “the Netherlands” (7) speak at the moment. They work to illustrate the idea that the current Netherlands are ruled by fear of the foreign.

102 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108

What seems problematic to me here, in terms of representativity, is that there is a suggestion of giving voice to various opinions, of a form of heteroglossia, while the choice of responses to Nasr’s representativity is in fact highly one-sided, as if this is the voice of the Netherlands. As a consequence, we are presented with a mislead- ingly homogenous image of “the Netherlands” (as xenophobic) and simultaneously Nasr himself is placed in a clearly-defined, ethically motivated, oppositional position.25 One could argue that in order to illustrate his diagnosis of Dutch polarization, he repeats the polarizing discourse and subsequently positions himself at one particular side–the ‘good’ side. Whether Nasr is involuntarily pushed into this position by the racialized technology of nativity that is activated in the citations, or whether he actively chooses this position is open to debate. He actually replies to the technology of nativity later in the preface, when he states that though this might sound strange for someone “met mijn achternaam” (“with my last name,” 8), he too feels afraid about not recognizing his country anymore. The preface positioning turns out to be decisive for the texts that follow. In general the poems address occurrences of national importance that vary from 400 years New Amsterdam, to cutbacks in government support for culture, to the brutal attack on the royal family during the 2009 celebrations of the Queen’s anniversary. In almost every poem the assumption of polarization is re-invoked and it is the poet who, in line with the Dutch ‘clergyman tradition,’ occupies the position of the nation’s moral conscience from which he warns those who are at risk of going astray.26 The language and discourse of most of these poems is straightforward and monoglossic. A standard, even slightly formal Dutch (especially in its address to the politicians) is used to bring about a unisonous message: turn around, reconsider, this is not the way that ‘we’ want to go. It is the specificity of the poems’ moral targets (those held responsible27) and the employment of what could be called a leftist intellectual discourse that lends these “pamphlets for the preservation of civilization” (Monna), as one reviewer called them, a rather univocal signature. There is one important exception to the collection’s monoglossic language. The poem “Mi have een droom (Rotterdam, 2059)” (“Me have a dream [Rotterdam, 2059]”) which is included in this volume and is probably Nasr’s best-known and most popular poem, is overwhelmingly multilingual. It is written in a synthetic, streetwise multilingual vernacular of great poeticity that testifies of the multiple foreign influences on the Dutch language.28 See, for instance, the poem’s opening sentence, an address to the Poet Laureate by the poem’s “otochtone” (“autochthonous,” misspelled in Dutch) lyrical I: “wullah, poetry poet, let mi takki you 1 ding.”29 What is striking, however, is that this poem only falls out of the collection’s larger bipolar frame on the level of language. On the level of content, the nostalgic monologue of the lyrical I, fits in perfectly with the collection’s fundamental discursive division in two polarized positions. The ‘I’ looks back at his younger days when his city Rotterdam

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 103 was, as he insists, still familiar and not yet taken over by “al di tuigkoppen [. . .] niet van hiro” (“all those scumheads [. . .] not from here,” misspelled/in sociolect). The parodic effect of this poem lies in the speaker’s blindness for his own implication in the cultural transformations brought about between his youth and 2059, most strikingly illustrated by his own multilingual language. He himself is, apparently without realizing this, far beyond his own plea for purity. In a tongue-in-cheek mode the poem gives voice to and simultaneously undermines the xenophobic discourse of monocultural nostalgia. But back to the collection as a whole now. Irrespective of whether one agrees with the poems’ analyses of the current Dutch state of affairs (which I tend to do) or not, clearly these poems do not speak in a mode that stands above the parties and that tries to represent the multitude of voices and positions in the Netherlands. Other than in the city poems where Nasr, as an outsider, impersonated the many voices and discourses of Antwerp, here the Poet Laureate emphatically performs as an insider, as a legitimate (albeit disjunctive in the eyes of some) speaker of the Dutch language and as a committed member of this national community in crisis. It is precisely his representative position as Poet Laureate that, according to Nasr (as he explicates in the preface), obliges him to take his responsibility and to speak out for the sake of the fatherland. Apparently, this is not the time for language games and code-mixing and -shifting; There is an important message to be brought about and the gravity of the situation does not allow for possibly dis- tracting, multilingual language experiments. That the resulting—monoglossic—discourse stands in the way of the dialogized, multiple and shifting representativity that we saw in the Antwerp city poems seems to be the unavoidable consequence of Nasr’s conviction that “[o]ns huidige politieke klimaat” (“our current political climate,” 8) is in dire need of a politically committed Poet Laureate.

Conclusion As I have shown Nasr’s “Antwerpse stadsgedichten” playfully speak in many voices, and, in doing so, come close to actually being representative (as far as this is possible in the first place) of the many-faced population of this multi-faceted city. In a playful and multilingual Dutchophone language, that makes extensive use of code-shifting and -mixing, these poems present the reader with an image of Antwerp as a city of diversity and polyglossia. Nasr’s “Poems of Crisis and Fear,” on the contrary, make use of a completely different register. They answer to Nasr’s determination, as laid out in the preface to My new fatherland, to take an oppositional stance to the xenophobic tendencies currently overshadowing the Dutch multicultural society and to correct the Netherlands that have gone astray. In his “Poems of Crisis and Fear” Nasr’s downright political understanding of his task as a Poet Laureate has resulted in a straightforward, one-voiced language geared to spreading a unisonous message.

104 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108

Notes

1. This poetry collection 27 gedichten & Geen born within the old city borders, in the area lied was nominated for both the Hugues C. bordered by the central avenues called “Leien,” Pernath- and the C. Buddingh-prize. In 2010 a and by the river Scheldt. selection of his poems has been translated into English by David Colmer (Heavenly Life). 7. The term “pagadder” also originates from the time of the Spanish occupation: it derives from 2. The English term poet laureate derives the Spanish term “pagadores,” the paymasters from the Latin term “poeta laureatus.” The of the Spanish soldiers. term originally referred to “an eminent or distinguished poet, thought worthy of the laurel 8. “Allochtoons” (as opposed to “autochthons,” crown of the Muses” (OED). Nowadays the term from the Greek roots ␣’‘ ␭␭␱␵ other, ␣␯’ ␶ó␵, “Poet Laureate,” with capital initials, is more same, ␹␪␻‘ ␯ and, soil) is the official terminology extensively used. It is the title given to a poet in the Netherlands to refer to Dutch citizens of that is officially appointed to write poetry for migrant background. According to the court (in the UK, as officer of the Royal government CBS (Centraal Bureau voor de Household) and for national—or other public— Statistiek/Central Office for Statistics), an occasions. “allochtoon” is a person of whom at least one parent was born abroad. The CBS distinguishes 3. During his term as Antwerp City Poet Nasr between first-generation “allochtoons” who was bound by contract to write at least six city themselves were born abroad and second- poems. His poems were not only published, but generation “allochtoons” who were born in the also read at public manifestations throughout Netherlands. Besides, the CBS make a the city. Two of the city poems (‘UtopiA’ and ‘Een distinction between western and non-western minimum’) are still present in the Antwerp “allochtoons” on the basis of a long list of “non- cityscape as murals. western” countries. As Anita Böcker and Kees Groenendijk demonstrate, this terminology is not 4. All Antwerp city poems are written without without controversy, as it often works to use of capitalisation. This includes the spelling stigmatize non-indigenous Dutch as other of names like “ramsey.” In the following I will (306–7). stick to this lower case spelling of ramsey, without quotation marks, to refer to the figure 9. This speech was published in De Volkskrant. of the poet in the poems. The E. Du Perron Prize is awarded yearly to “mensen of instellingen die zich middels een 5. These ten poems (nine so-called city poems actieve bijdrage aan de cultuur verdienstelijk and one poem on personal title) were first hebben gemaakt voor de bevordering van published in Nasr’s third poetry collection onze- wederzijds begrip en een goede verstandhouding lieve-vrouwe-zeppelin (our-sweet-lady-zeppelin) tussen de in Nederland woonachtige (2006) and reprinted in the anthology Tussen bevolkingsgroepen” (“individuals or groups who, lelie en waterstofbom. The early years (Between by means of an active contribution to Dutch lily and fusion bomb. The early years) (2009). All culture, have helped to advance mutual respect Antwerp city poems are also available on the and understanding between the various ethnic website of Antwerp Book City: http://www. groups living in the Netherlands,” Mooren 19). antwerpenboekenstad.be/stadsdichters/4 /Ramsey-nasr. 10. The relationship between Dutch and Flemish is not only contested in terms of status, but, 6. The term “sinjoor, derived from the Spanish linked to the history of Dutch domination (and “senor,” has been in use since the Spanish perceived continuation of a position of occupation. The use of the term is sometimes dominance in the present), regularly proves even further restricted by only including people ideologically charged as well.

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 105 11. The website http://www.epibreren.com 20. For more information on the Dutch Poet /nasr/rumoer.html#abchor-bio (by the online Laureate visit: www.dichterdesvaderlands.nl. poetry magazine ‘Rottend Staal’ [rotting steel]) lists the various contributions to the 2004 media 21. Citation from the text on the website debate about Ramsey Nasr’s essay. mentioned above.

12. It might well be that the language that 22. This debate was initiated by the publication qualifies as Flemish to Dutch readers, is of the essay “Het Multiculturele Drama” in the perceived as ‘broken,’ ‘rotten’ or ‘weird’ Flemish Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad (on (Ch’ien Nien-Ming) by Flemish readers. 29 January 2000) by Paul Scheffer. For a more elaborate discussion of the multicultural drama 13. A previous version of my analysis of Nasr’s debate see Minnaard, New Germans, New Dutch “Antwerpse stadsgedichten,” focusing on their 15–50. representation of flanerie, was published in the journal Dutch Crossing (2013). 23. Jan Konst and Arnoud van Adrichem, for instance, argue that Nasr opts for a “politically 14. This is a literal translation of the Flemish motivated authorship” (52). In his ‘application expression rather than a translation into ‘proper letter’ Nasr formulated “searching for the Dutch English.’ The same expression in the Dutch identity” as one of his major tasks as Dutch Poet language would be: “natuurlijk waren we bang” Laureate. (“of course we were afraid”). 24. The title of this poem echoes the well-known 15. Here as well as in several other passages, final sentence “Ik wou dat ik twee hondjes was / the poem reverts to a strongly sexualised (and dan kon ik samen spelen” (“I wish I was two also very common) imagination of the urban dogs [then I could play together]”) from the poem space as female: the city as a woman, “Spleen” by Godfried Bomans. This sentence lasciviously waiting to be explored, to be can be considered general knowledge in the penetrated by the poet performing as a male Netherlands. flaneur (Gleber, Parsons). 25. By pointing this out I am not saying that 16. Moreover, the use of the German language there are no such voices in the Netherlands, on in relation to poetry also reverts to the popular the contrary. An other, much-discussed example trope of the German “Dichter und Denker,” of this discourse/position is the response to poets and thinkers. Nasr’s new “national anthem” by Dominique Weesie, anchorman of Pownews and a 17. For a discussion of the divisive use of the representative of the populist right (that is far concept of autochthony in the Netherlands and from marginal in the Netherlands at the Flanders see Ceuppens and Geschiere. moment). One day after Nasr’s public presentation of this poem on 28 October 2010, 18. “Vitrine” is also the term that in Flemish is Weesie declared on Dutch television that Nasr is used to denote the windows behind which “not my poet of the fatherland” and underlined prostitutes offer their sexual services to his statement by showing his middle finger to the passers-by. The area that features in the poem eye of the camera. is well known as a red-light district. 26. See also Laurens Ham’s insightful article on 19. The depiction of the emancipating power of Nasr’s poetics. Ham argues that Nasr combines the library in the poem can be considered quite belief in poetic communication with a rather stereotypical and does not fully fit in with the moralising approach of his readership. idea of mutuality that characterized the poem ‘Stadsplant’: here the language of literature 27. In the poems the former prime minister captures the local, whereas his impact on the Balkenende is exposed as a liar, ministers are library and its visitors remains unmentioned. called hypocrites and the current government is

106 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 91–108

said to be supported by a fascist (not hard to mode. In my opinion, however, these two track this reference to Geert Wilders). discourses are again juxtaposed diametrically and hierarchically, and as such they repeat—in a 28. In a careful analysis of the language of this very playful and effective way—the volume’s poem, Konst and Van Adrichem argue that it fundamental assessment of a divided Netherlands. accommodates multiple meanings and that it works to undermine the idea that political 29. The only original Dutch word in this discourses are one-dimensional and multilingual street language sentence is “ding,” straightforward. I agree with their argument thing. Translated into OE the sentence means as insofar that I also consider “Mi have een droom” much as “I swear, poetry poet (which I interpret a dialogical poem that brings two different as ‘major poet,’ poet of the fatherland), let me discourses up to each other in a strongly ironical tell you one thing.”

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk. Flanerie, Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton: Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Princeton Univ. Press, 1999.

———. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by Ham, Laurens. “(Niet) van deze tijd, (niet) van M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael deze wereld. Over het werk van ‘pletterloper’ Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, Ramsey Nasr.” Ons Erfdeel 54:1 (2011), 50–57. 2006. Konst, Jan and Arnoud van Adrichem. “Skerieus Berg, Rien van den. “Landsdichter legde ons ben geen racist. Het politieke dichterschap van bloot; O, zoete onbereikbaarheid.” Nederlands Ramsey Nasr.” Parmentier 19:2, (2010), 52–61. dagblad (30 January 2013). Minnaard, Liesbeth. New Germans, New Dutch. Böcker, Anita and Kees Groenendijk. Literary Interventions. Amsterdam: Amsterdam “Einwanderungs- und Integrationsland University Press, 2008. Niederlande: Tolerant, liberal und offen?” Friso Wielenga and Ilona Taute, eds. Länderbericht ———. “The Postcolonial Flaneur. Ramsey Niederlande. Geschichte – Wirtschaft – Nasr’s ‘Antwerpse Stadsgedichten.’” Dutch Gesellschaft. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Crossing 37:1 (2013), 79–92. Bildung, 2004, 303–361. Monna, Janita. “Voor Behoud Van Beschaving.” Bonfiglio, Thomas P. Mother Tongues and Nations. Trouw (19 November 2011). The Invention of the Native Speaker. New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010. Mooren, Piet. “In naam van E. Du Perron. Geschiedenis van een prijs.” Cahiers voor een Ceuppens, Bambi “Allochthons, Colonizers and lezer 25: November (2007), 18–37. Scroungers: Exclusionary Populism in Belgium.” African Studies Review 49:2 (2006), 147–186. Nasr, Ramsey. “Eigenbelang. Onvermogen. Onverschilligheid.” De Standaard (16 October Gilroy, Paul. After Empire. Multiculture or Postcolonial 2004). Melancholia. London: Routledge, 2004. ———. Tussen lelie en waterstofbom. The early Geschiere, Peter. The Perils of Belonging. years. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2009. Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: London: The University of ———. Mijn nieuwe vaderland. Gedichten van Chicago Press, 2009. crisis en angst. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2012.

About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Performances | 107 ———. “De term ‘multicultureel’ ontneemt mij Reynebeau, Marc, “I am sorry zenne – de mijn Nederlandse identiteit.” De Volkskrant stadsgedichten van Ramsey Nasr.” De (12 May 2012). Standaard (2006, 12 May). . Viewed 18 May 2012. ———. Heavenly Life. Selected Poems. Translated by David Colmer. London: Banipal Scheffer, Paul, “Het Multiculturele Drama.” NRC Books, 2010. Handelsblad (29 January 2000).

Parsons, Deborah L., Streetwalking the Yildiz, Yasemin, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. University Press, 2012.

108 | Liesbeth Minnaard Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 109–116

Eèchtenteèchtig

Chika Unigwe

Introduction by Elisabeth Bekers

This short-story was given a lively reading by its author at The Myth of Monolingualism conference at the University of Leiden in May 2012, only a few months after its first publication in the Flemish literary journal Dietsche Warande en Belfort (vol. 165), in a special issue dealing with literary works inspired by Belgium’s multilingualism entitled “Babelgium: Onverbiddelijke veeltaligheid” (“Babelgium: Inescapable Multilingualism”). Unigwe’s multilingual story suited those earlier occasions as well as it does this volume: it categorically refutes the myth of monolingualism by introducing four polyglot characters who, as nimbly as their creator, move between the various languages and varieties they have at their disposal. Although the story’s setting is not identified, the Dutch (Flemish) dialect spoken by the characters is that of the region of Turnhout, a provincial town in the North of Belgium and Unigwe’s prime place of residence since 1995.

A series of short scenes consisting mainly of multilingual conversations give the reader insight into the lives of two couples, the Nigerian immigrants Prosperous and her husband Agu, who have been in Flanders for some time, and their newly-arrived Nigerian friend Godwin and his white Flemish wife of convenience Tine. Presented from the perspective of Prosperous, in whose home the conversations take place, the story takes the reader on a linguistic roller coaster ride that mercilessly switches between BBC English, Nigerian English, English slang, Igbo, Standard Dutch, Turnhout dialect and Flemish slang, without ever stopping to properly contextualize or gloss the story’s non-English words and conversation fragments. Despite, or really

Eèchtenteèchtig | 109 because of, Unigwe’s refusal to accommodate those who do not share her own complex linguistic background, the story gives its readers a unique impression of the multilingual and multicultural reality of contemporary Flanders. The linguistic agility of Unigwe’s four characters, moreover, reflects the pragmatic economic and psycho- logical flexibility with which they, Nigerian- and Flemish-born characters alike, deal with migration-related issues. Such elasticity is not just the hallmark of the postcolonial and postmonolingual world Unigwe creates in her fiction; ideally, it is also the attitude that Unigwe’s readers are to adopt in real life, well beyond their experience of reading her text. This much-desired flexibility is already captured in the short- story’s linguistically challenging title. The latter refers to the lighthearted manner in which Tine finally discloses her own supple pragmatism to an unsuspecting Prosperous: an emphatic ‘really true’ or, to use Tine’s lively Flemish slang, “Eèchtenteèchtig.”

A man’s got to do what a man’s gotta do, Prosperous heard him shout into the living room one January evening. Godwin was small, new in town, and struggling. Prosperous did not know his story. Not entirely. But she knew that like all of the other men, he was a hustler. He had the same tired look in his eyes, the same high pitched tone when he spoke, as if he wanted to convince everyone of his optimism, his certainty that he would achieve whatever it was he had come to Europe for. A man’s got to do what a man’s gotta do! And what a man’s got to do apparently was marry a white Belgian woman. Four months later, Godwin came to visit with his fiancée. Tine was round and soft. She was the colour of dough. She looked like her skin was the consistency of dough too, like she would dent wherever you touched her, pockmarked by curious fingers press- ing her skin.

She took time finding, Agu told Prosperous later. O fi.alu aru nchota, nwanyi. Godwin aa. Certainly longer than Godwin chelu na o ga-adi.. O che na o ka-adi. easy. He thought white women were lining up waiting for ndi. oji to fall for and marry. O akuko a na-ako na Naijeria. O che nonno .i bi.ara umu nwanyi. ndi. ocha a na-achu gi. n’azu, na-eso gi. n’ike n’ike ka nki.ta no na heat. O ro ife fa na-anu na Naijeria, Prosperous said. Oyibo women want black men. I remember years ago, nwa neigbour anyi si America nata, na-akolu anyi. maka umu nwanyi. ndi. ocha na-achulagh .i ya. O si. anyi., everytime I go out I have to fend off the legion of white women wanting a piece of my black ass!. We all believed him. O si. even sef na o nwelu mgbe o na-achi.gahli. umunwanyi. six at the same time. Ma ndi. blonde, ma ndi. isi oji, ma ndi. di.ka supermodel!

Yes, the irrestibility of the black man. .i kpara aka, onye ocha e sobe gi. Until you get here and find out that like almost everything else we hear back home about this

110 | Chika Unigwe Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 109–116 place, that that also is a myth, Agu said. Folded into the edges of his voice was something she could not immediately recognize because it was new, it was nothing she had heard before. This is Tine! Godwin shouted into the room once Prosperous let them in. His smile was too wide. His small frame dwarfed by the woman beside him. His tired eyes gleamed as if they had been miraculously polished. Tine smiled a nervous smile and said Hello! unsure whether to give the traditional three kisses on the cheek or hold out a hand. In the end she did neither. Godwin held her around her massive waist and even when they sat down, would not let go of her hand. It was as if he was afraid of her slipping away once he let go. Love nwanti nti, Agu joked. No wound me with your love ooo! Godwin snorted and said, Nwoke ma-ife o na-eme. Tine had large wooden earrings. The sort of earrings that would be described as African because they did not fit anywhere else and Africa was the continent of woods, was it not? That night, after Tine and Godwin had left and Prosperous was lying beside Agu in bed, she said, Ah, that Godwin woman na room and parlour sha, as if the thought of

Tine’s corpulence had just occurred to her. O buka. O di. ka hippo, Agu said unchari- tably. But Godwin ma .i fe o na-acho, and he’s a hustler so o ga enweta ya. Prosperous thought Tine seemed too eager to please, too eager to belong. She insisted on eating the poundo with her fingers even though Prosperous had offered her a fork and a knife. And alternative food. Should I make you some frietjes? Some chips and fish? Or something easy like rijst? Ik kan het nu maken. Niet mogelijk. No, no, niet mogelijk, moeilijk, she corrected herself. Het is niet moeilijk. I didn’t know you were coming, sorry. Godwin didn’t say. I’ll make frietjes, now. No, it’s fine, Tine said. I’ve eaten poundo before. Godwin showed me how. Her earrings dangled as she spoke. Prosperous could not tell which animal shape they represented. Ah, Tine is African woman oo! Godwin said. She’s my African queen! She eats fufu well-well. He turned her face to his and kissed her on the lips. Love nwanti nti Agu said again and laughed. Love in To-Ki-yo! Then he broke into Two Face Idibia’s African Queen. Godwin joined him. You are my African queen The girl of my dreams You take me where I’ve never been You make my heart go ting a ling a ling Then they high fived each other like teenage boys and started laughing again. Prosperous felt a twinge of something in her. Agu no longer sang for her. Not even in jest.

Eèchtenteèchtig | 111 Tine rolled the poundo expertly and if Prosperous had not been observing her, would not have noticed that her nose ran from the pepper in the egusi soup, even as she denied that the food was too hot for her. No, no, it’s not pikant. ’t Is goe. I like it, she said each time Prosperous asked solicitously if she would not have preferred something milder. Prosperous had to fight the urge to tell her, No need to impress this man. He’s the one who’s too scared to lose you. Instead, she said, Lovely earrings, for Tine had caught her staring. Thanks. Godwin bought them for me. Her voice had the choked tone of a throat burning with pepper. She stoically struggled on, stopping only to sip some water when her plate was empty. That earned her Prosperous’ admiration. But what wasted stoicism, Prosperous said to Agu plumping up the pillow under her head. The girl is happy. Godwin is happy. Ke zi ka osi di wasted? Prosperous did not answer but reached above her head to switch off the light, plunging the room into darkness. How could Tine have missed it all? The laughter that was too loud, the waist holding that was too tight? She had control. She, not he. Oh, how she, Prosperous, had wished several times during the day that she could shake that pink doughy body and tell her, He needs you. Do you need him? Two months later, with flowers in her short boyish hair and a red flowing dress, Tine got married to Godwin. Agu and Prosperous and several of their friends, represented. Tine danced and danced, the dress flowing around her hips like waves and in a corner, her parents sat smiling tightly, intimidated by the too loud music and the too wild dancing and the conversations in a language they did not understand, surrounded by a sparse gathering of white, middle aged couples with identical tight smiles on their faces. My family, Tine had introduced them earlier. They do not understand a Nigerian wedding, she told Prosperous. But I wanted this. I said to Godwin, You must give me a Nigerian wedding. Godwin had a gold stud in his left ear. I di ka Hollywood star today oo, Agu told him. Nothing do you nwoke m! Bibe ndu n’onwero ife mee gi. I feel like a Hollywood star today! O di m ka m ga efe efe, he replied as though it was this wedding, this union with Tine which made him feel like a star, which made him want to float. But then he grumbled about how much the wedding had set him back, complaining, I thought white women were all for equality. Na fa na like i. share bills with di fa. But I paid for everything. Even her clothes. Tine did not contribute shi. shi..

Kedu ife .i na a complain, nwoke? O ego ga-amutalu gi. nwa, Agu reminded him. You’ve got to put something in to get something out.

112 | Chika Unigwe Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 109–116

True. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, he said before he floated off to join his bride again on the dance floor, his brown tie flapping as he moved. Prosperous avoided Tine’s eyes all through, afraid of what the girl might read in them and when she went to say goodbye at the end of the party, did not say any of the things people said at weddings. Instead she said, See you around. She could not stand the late nights, Tine said to Prosperous. He goes out a lot at night. Every night. I wish he’d stay home. As em mer is tois bleef mer aai gaot elken aovend oit. It’s a man thing, Prosperous said, hoping she sounded sincere but at the same time wishing she could tell this woman in her kitchen the truth. But sometimes, I want to go with him. I married him. We should go out together, no? We should do things together as a. . . . a . . . koppel, no? Well, you married a Nigerian man. They do not carry their wives around like a . . . a chakos. They need to do a lot of things alone. He never takes me anywhere. I am afraid I’ll lose him. Prosperous wanted to take this woman in her arms and knead her, knead her the way she did chin chin dough , slapping it on the kitchen counter and roughly knead- ing it until it becomes stretchy before flattening it out, porous enough to let in light. She said nothing. She tried not to think of Tine with flowers in her hair dancing at her wedding two weeks ago, her world obviously perfect, everything where she wanted it to be. She felt sorry for her. Do you not go out sometimes with Ah-gu? Tine asked. Blefde geullie altê tois? Agu has no time to go out. So what do you do together? This was something Prosperous could never understand. These people–oyibo people–asked lots of questions. They were never satisfied with subtle answers. They demanded precise, direct responses. Everything had to be measured and set out correctly. If they asked, How old are you? You could not get away with saying I am in my thirties. They wanted to know how old exactly. The system of age grade where one was not a particular age but belonged to an age group would never work here. Prosperous sighed. When we are together, we talk. But always inside? You do not go out for dinner? Nee. Nee. We do not go out for dinner. Nooit. Whatever we want to eat, we make at home. We eat at home, thuis eten, everyday. The thought of Agu suggesting a dinner date was almost laughable. Every penny made had to be counted and preserved. Back home in Nigeria, they had gone out a few times a month to a fancy Chinese where they ordered the same dependable dish each time: fried rice with sweet and sour chicken sauce. They were the yuppie couple. But here, going out was a frivolity they could not indulge in. And besides the person Agu had become here was not the sort that would take her out. He had changed in so many ways.

Eèchtenteèchtig | 113 Altijd? Tine said. She sounded like she did not believe Prosperous. Her face was flushed from the heat in the small kitchen. Her cheeks were the red of the plastic apples Prosperous kept in a bowl on top of the fridge to brighten the kitchen, although she did not think they brightened it up at all. Her forehead was beaded in sweat. She had insisted on helping Prosperous cook. I want to learn his food, she said, as if every Igbo dish Prosperous made was specifically for Godwin. Always. Sometimes, I insist. I insist very much. I nag and nag. Then he takes me to a lovely Greek near the markt. But not often enough. Maybe I should nag more, no? Tine came every other weekend for her cooking lessons with Prosperous. She was a keen learner and prosperous began to grow very fond of the girl. She no longer referred to her as room and parlour, but defended her enormous girth when Agu or anyone else made fun of it. Rapu nu nwa mmadu aka biko. O nwelu ife o melu unu? She said then. The girl is healthy. She’s not chewing stick-thin like all those models on TV with not a single ounce of fat on their bodies. Or she said, It’s all baby fat. How old is she? Twenty- two? She’s a child. She’s young. She’ll lose all that fat once she gets older! And When Godwin said one thing in Igbo and translated something else when Tine asked, Prosperous bit her tongue and said to herself, There is no justice in this world. In bed, when she told Agu of Tine’s progress in making egusi and okra soup, he said, she’ll find another Naija man to practice it on. Ejuru ha eju, ndi. be anyi. na-acho umu nwanyi di. ka ya. Tine ga-achota onye ozo. A d i. gha ka aja. Ndi na-acho o tu fa ga-esi nwete permanent residency. She heard that something new in his voice again. Could it be she asked herself, that he regretted not having had the chance to take the short cut ? Marry a white woman, get your papers in order, divorce her and go back home and pick a proper bride. Everybody knew the deal but the woman herself. In three years time Godwin would have a Belgian nationality. He would carry that red passport, be able to get in and get out. That passport was the Holy Grail. It would take Agu longer with her, his Nigerian wife to get that far. And yet Agu had been in the country longer than Godwin had. Tine na-shine zi kwa a shine ooo, she told Agu another night. Each time she saw Tine, even though the girl kept up her litany of complaints and questions, her skin looked more and more lustrous and shone with a brightness that only the truly happy could have. She said, Godwin speaks Igbo all the time so I don’t know what he’s talking about, but her eyes glittered like stars. And when she told of Godwin’ sister visiting and spending so much time with Godwin that she his wife hardly saw him at all, her lips stretched into a smile. They stay up all night talking, she said. Altijd. He stays home most nights now. I should be happy, no? But all day when Godwin is home, they talk, Godwin and his sister. I wonder what they talk about? What do they talk about

114 | Chika Unigwe Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 109–116 that never finishes? She follows him around like a shadow. Da meske angt aon z’n nielen. Prosperous thought, what a foolish girl, can’t she see that this sister is no real sister but most likely a girlfriend, waiting in the wings for the marriage to run its useful course so that she can move in properly? She felt the anger that should have been really Tine’s settle on her and she sliced the yam with which she making pottage with a ferociousness that baffled even she. Prosperous looked at the woman Godwin referred to in her absence as Humpty Dumpty and wondered if all that fat made her impervious to the truth, the bare facts staring her in the face. She wished- like she always did- that she could tell her the truth. But she could not. She had her own life to save. And besides what could she say? Godwin is taking you for a ride. He doesn’t really love you. He’s using you. He’s just with you for his papers. And then it would be her word against his. Any idiot could see how besotted she was with Godwin. One day, Tine came looking like she had been dipped in oil from head to toe, that was how lustrous her skin had become. Her dark hair shone. Her green dress stopped at the knee and her arms spilled out luxuriously from the short sleeves. She wore silver sandals even though it was gone October and the days had become colder. Don’t you feel the cold? Niet brrrr koud voor jou? Prosperous asked, showing her how to wash beans for akara. No, she shook her head, sending her boyish curls flying. ‘k emt nooit te kau. I never feel cold. Besides I just had a pedicure done. I must show off my painted nails. Mooi, no? Schoon, Prosperous said. Lucky for some. She had not had a professional mani- cure since moving to Belgium. In Kaduna, she had had her nails and toes done every fortnight by Tinuke, the skinny, talkative girl who ran a mobile beauty service. Tine’s dangling gold earrings caught the light of the fluorescent bulb and sparkled. You like my earrings? They are presents from Godwin. ‘k Em da veur meunne ver- jaordag gat. They are beautiful, no? Yes. They are very beautiful. Prosperous passed her a second bowl of beans soak- ing in warm water. It’s a very difficult thing to do, getting all the skin off, she warned Tine. Akara is very easy to make but its preparation is hell. It takes a while to get the hang of it, so if it’s too difficult for you, don’t worry about it. Tine dipped her hands in the warm water with the beans and followed Prosperous’ lead, her fingers like pink sausages rubbing the beans against each other with a quiet rhythmic determination, her arms touching Prosperous.’ Nothing is ever too difficult for me, she said, not breaking the rhythm of her washing. Her voice was like a knife slicing into the kitchen. It sent shivers up Prosperous arms.

Eèchtenteèchtig | 115 Yes, Prosperous said, for it was the only thing she could think of to say. That voice was a stranger’s voice and Prosperous had no idea what it meant. She had always been afraid of the unknown. She moved one step away from Tine so that their arms no longer touched. Prosperous? Tine said the name like a question. Prosperous? She kept up the washing, not even raising her head. Yes? I know what you think of me. I know. Wha-? I know what you think. k Weet et. All of you. John. Oh-geh. Ah-guh. Godwin. Awuli. All of you. I know . . . I know that you maybe want to protect me so when I ask you things you do not tell me the truth. What are . . . No. Please. Let me finish. She lifted a hand out of the water and held up a palm to signal to Prosperous to stop. Water trickled down between her fingers like tears. You’re my friend Prosperous so I’ll tell you this, it’s okay because you see, I use him too. I prefer my men tall. She put her hand back in the water and continued to wash the beans. And one day when I get tired, I’ll tell him it’s over. Finito. Gedaan. Eèchtenteèchtig. I’ll get rid of him like dirty water in a poembak. Whether he has his papers or not. But right now, he’ll do. It’s fair, no? It was Prosperous who started to laugh; releasing peals of laughter into the kitchen and soon Tine joined in too and the kitchen swelled up with their laughter. There is justice after all, Prosperous shouted, pumping the air and sending a bowl of water with beans flying off the kitchen counter. There is justice in this world after all!

116 | Chika Unigwe Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132

“Bearing Gifts of Words”: Multilingualism in the Fiction of Flemish-Nigerian Writer Chika Unigwe

Elisabeth Bekers

“And before all that . . . The pilgrims came Each one bearing gifts of words Of worlds Of lives Of truths.” (On Black Sisters’ Street 16)

In 2003 the Flemish unemployment office VDAB organized a writing contest to promote the profession of fiction writing to young people in Flanders, the northern and Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.1 The ten winning short stories were published by the Flemish literary publishing house Manteau,2 in a volume suitably entitled De eerste keer (2004), meaning ‘the first time’ in Dutch. One of the winning stories, “De smaak van sneeuw” (“The Taste of Snow”), poignantly captures how a young African immigrant is bitterly disappointed with the utter tastelessness of snow upon her arrival at Heathrow Airport. The girl’s reaction implicitly connects her with the disenchanted migrants already living in Europe and presumably foreshadows the disillusionment that she too will experience as a “second-class citizen” in Europe, to borrow the title of Nigerian-born author Buchi Emecheta’s 1974 novel. The story was submitted by Chika Unigwe, a female student who had relocated from Africa to Europe in 1995. Born in Nigeria in the year that her fellow countrywoman and literary example published Second-Class Citizen, Unigwe had followed her Belgian husband to the provincial Flemish city of Turnhout and had become an “allochtoon,” to use what was then in Flanders and the Netherlands regarded as the politically-correct term for (descendants of) migrants hailing from outside Europe.3 “De smaak van sneeuw” was

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 117 Unigwe’s first piece of writing in Dutch, and Dutch her third language after Igbo (her mother tongue) and English (her “stepmother tongue”4), but her talent impressed the competition’s jury. Two years later,when reminiscing on his first reading of Unigwe’s story, one of the jury members still waxed lyrical about its literary merits: “the daringness of its simplicity,” “the careful build-up of narrative tension,” and “especially the merci- less rhythm of the sentences” and “the powerful language.”5 This article focuses on the last-mentioned quality of Unigwe’s writing, namely her use of language, and more specifically the multilingualism of her writing.6 My aim is not a linguistic analysis or an aesthetic impression of Unigwe’s literary multilingualism, but rather an examination of its critical effect. Concretely, I explore how Unigwe’s polyglot writing challenges the strictures of what Yasemin Yildiz terms the “monolingual paradigm” (2) in her study of multilingual writing Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012). Since the emergence of nation states in Europe in the late 18th century, Yildiz explains, active processes of monolingualization have tended to obscure historical multilingual practices as well as contemporary realities of multilingualism across the world. However, as Yildiz also notes, globalization and migration are not without linguistic impact and “have begun to loosen the monolingualizing pressure” (3). They have given rise to “changed linguascapes” inhabited by increasingly multilingual communities and “speakers of languages that are not supposed to be ‘their own’ by right of inheritance” (169), at least not in a monolingual understanding of the world. I will show how Unigwe’s fiction helps to promote a postmonolingual world view and to “create a readership that is more open to linguistic and cultural differences” (87), as Lawrence Venuti words it in a discussion more specifically focused on translation practices. Unigwe does not directly attack the homogenizing tendencies of the monolingual paradigm, for instance by exposing the linguistic dilemmas faced by non-native speakers. Instead, she envisions, through and in her fiction, a globalized postcolonial world in which linguistic pluralism is the standard practice, as I will demonstrate in my discussion of On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), the novel in which Unigwe’s creative use of multilingualism is at its most powerful.7 Asked recently whether she felt Belgian or Nigerian, Unigwe responded wittily that “it depend[ed] on the time of day,” and the same was true for her writing, she explained. Some stories needed to be written in English, whereas others could only be told in Dutch (qtd. Hutchison). From the onset, Unigwe’s career has been characterized by multilingualism. Before she entered the literary scene in Flanders, notably as the only non-native speaker out of the 450 contestants to have won the VDAB’s Dutch-language writing competition, she had already published creative writing in English: two easy readers for adolescents with the internationally-renowned publishing house Macmillan, A Rainbow for Dinner (2002) and Ije at School (2003) and two volumes of poetry with publishers in Nigeria (Tear Drops, Richardson, 1993; Born in Nigeria, Onyx, 1995). Unigwe went on to establish herself as a professional writer and

118 | Elisabeth Bekers Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132 has received international acclaim for her short fiction and the three novels that she published in quick succession.8 Although after “De smaak van sneeuw” she returned to writing in English,9 each of her novels has first appeared in Dutch translation—De feniks (2005), Fata Morgana (2007), and Nachtdanser (2011), a practice that seems to be gaining ground in Flanders and the Netherlands.10 Unigwe’s novels have reached an increasingly global readership through translations into additional languages and especially thanks to the success of the anglophone originals. Whereas her debut novel The Phoenix (2007) was published with an independent Nigerian company targeting primarily the African market and received to mixed reviews, the English- language editions of her subsequent novels, On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and Night Dancer (2012), have been picked up by the prestigious international publishers Jonathan Cape in the UK and Random House in the US and have enthused readers across the world.11 Unlike many later-generation migrants, whom Turkish-German theatre maker Shermin Langhoff aptly labels “postmigrants” as they have migrant backgrounds rather than actual experiences of migrating (qtd. Yildiz 170), Unigwe, who migrated from Nigeria when she was in her twenties, still speaks her ancestors’ language fluently. Nevertheless, she feels incapable of writing fiction in a language that is not widely used for written communication. Raised and educated in the former colonizers’ language, she “rather automatically” ended up writing in English.12 Although English is also for Unigwe “the language of the master”—in both senses of the word, the schoolteacher and the (former) imperial controller—she does not share Derrida’s philosophical unease about speaking and writing in “a language that one could [never] call ‘entirely’ maternal” and that “never will be [one’s own]” (42, 36, 2). Neither does she, and with her many contemporary postcolonial and diasporic writers, share the strong objections that especially early anti-colonialists have raised against using the colonizers’ tongue. One of the most vocal advocates of “decolonising the mind,” the Kenyan literary pioneer and postcolonial critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for instance denounced the “total dependence on, and literary enslavement to, foreign languages” (Writers in Politics 54) and warned fellow writers against the counter- productivity of “add[ing] life and vigor to English and other foreign languages” while neglecting their own languages (Decolonising the Mind 8).13 However, contemporary plurilingual writers, especially in the diaspora, tend to adopt a more pragmatic stance towards English as lingua franca for both global interaction as well as national communication across intra-national linguistic divides. Today, to adapt Christopher Miller’s statement, “unlike in the 1960s, it matters less why than how [anglophone] writers are writing in [English]” (190). Like many fellow writers, Unigwe creatively appropriates the former colonizers’ language and takes her cue from the intensified multilingualism that has been in practice in Africa since colonization (but certainly also preceded it) to move beyond past and present monolingualizing pressures that

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 119 European nation states have exerted at home and in their (former) colonial territo- ries. Taking full advantage of her own plurilinguality, she infuses her anglophone fiction with various other European and African languages and varieties, ranging from Igbo to the local dialect of Turnhout.14 The literary multilingualism Unigwe offers in her fiction differs from the hybridized literary language invented by (post)migrant writers, such as Japanese-German Yoko Tawada’s poetical translingualism and Turkish-German Feridun Zaimoglu’sˇ Kanak Sprak.15 What Unigwe produces is neither a “synthetic vernacular,” as Matthew Hart writes of Tawada (qtd. Yildiz 173), nor a “rotten English,” as the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa labeled his own usage of the language in the subtitle of his 1986 novel Sozaboy. Instead of hybridizing her characters’ and/or narrator’s language into a “forked tongue” (Anzaldúa 77), Unigwe hybridizes her anglophone text by infusing it with words, phrases, and even full sentences borrowed from other (existing) languages and varieties, each employed in agreement with its own linguistic rules.16 Her approach, however, differs substantially from the one adopted in a landmark multilingual work such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Although Eliot’s polyphonic poetical collage—he even considered the Dickensian phrase “He Do the Police in Different Voices” as the title of the first two parts (Eliot 4, 10, 16, 125)—similarly contains fragments in a wide range of foreign languages (French, German, Italian, Sanskrit, Classical Greek, and Latin), they are generally not utterances by the poem’s speakers, nor are they designed to give an impression of an actual (if imagined) multilingual world. Most are erudite, intertextual allusions to canonical Western literature, carefully crafted into the text to endorse its modernist impression of the prevalence of human wastelands throughout time and across the West. As Marjorie Perloff notes, the foreign languages “give the reference a mysterious aura as well as a certain distance” and serve to “heighten the authenticity, as well as the exoticism, of the allusion in question” (726). Perloff here significantly speaks of the exoticism and authenticity of the references, not of the universe created in the text. The intertextual, referential multilingualism of The Waste Land does not highlight the heterogeneity of the ruined cultures, but rather their common fate, as is confirmed by Eliot’s juxtaposition of the “Falling towers” of the historical and contemporary capitals of “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London” (vv. 456–458).17 The foreign-language allusions moreover reveal that Eliot’s modernist world in turmoil is essentially europhone and Western, even if (uncertain) salvation is sought in the teachings of Buddha and the ancient wisdom of the Upanishads. An “‘epochal sense of disorientation’” has also been found expressed in contemporary “literature of migration,” which in Leslie Adelson’s view “is not necessarily written by migrants alone” but includes all literature reflecting on migration (15, 23). Here, conversely, the readers’ attention is drawn to the diversity and multiplicity of the contemporary postcolonial world in the face of the homogenizing processes of monolingualization, neo-colonization, and right-wing extremism.

120 | Elisabeth Bekers Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132

Unsurprisingly, the literary multilingualism in a text such as On Black Sisters’ Street operates rather differently than it does in The Waste Land. In Unigwe’s polyphonic novel multilingualism as a literary strategy emerges from the multicultural world presented in On Black Sisters’ Street, which introduces a larger cast of mostly plurilingual characters and locates these in a broader range of contemporary geographical settings than her other two novels do. The anglophone novel’s frame story is set in Het Schipperskwartier (lit. the skippers’ quarter), the red light district of Antwerp, Belgium’s largest port and the largest city in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders. It is the work and living place to four African women whose des- peration to improve their own and their children’s lives has made them an easy prey for the unscrupulous Lagos sex-trafficker Senghor Dele and Madam, the Nigerian woman who manages his brothel in Antwerp. The violent death of one of the women encourages her mourning housemates to bond and regain agency by narrating their well-hidden pasts. In the text, fragments of the murdered Sisi’s life history alternate with the other women’s extensive flashbacks18 to their lives in Africa, whether this is in the populous coastal city of Lagos (Efe and Sisi; later also Ama and Joyce), in the green hill-top city of Enugu in inland Nigeria (Ama), or in a rural Sudanese village over- run by Janjaweed militiamen (Joyce). Despite the novel’s occasional dab of magical realism—the reader learns how Sisi’s soul returns to Nigeria to have her revenge on Dele—the novel’s multilingualism on the whole gives a realistic impression of the characters’ linguistic backgrounds and environments. While the narrator adopts Standard English throughout the narrative,19 the four protagonists belong to and fluently move between various speech communities, in their adoptive countries as well as in their countries of birth. For instance, in Antwerp the Igbo-speaking Sisi responds to the locals’ Dutch (albeit in English) or pretends to be a heavy-accented American tourist visiting the town’s historical centre (256). In Dele’s Lagos office she listens to him talking on the phone “in rapid Yoruba”—presumably his mother tongue—while she herself converses with him in Nigerian Pidgin (34). However, she slips in the Yoruba word “owo” (34) when she indignantly reacts to his demand of “Taty t’ousand euro” for organising her journey to Europe; that the italicized foreign word means ‘money’ can easily be inferred from the context. This code switching demonstrates the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of continents and communities that are all too often incorrectly presented or “regarded as unified wholes,” a heterogeneity that is also illustrated elsewhere in the story, for instance by the multinational African guests attending Efe’s party in the novel’s second chapter (Tunca, s. p.). With her (mostly) italicized insertions of Igbo and Yoruba words and phrases, Unigwe continues the practice of Nigeria’s earliest generation of anglophone authors writing in the context of decolonization. Despite their use of the (former) colonizers’ language, they were intent on demonstrating that literature need not limit itself to Western topics such as “daffodils and snow” (Ngugi, Writers in Politics 132) by creating fictional worlds

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 121 that are unmistakably African. They wanted to teach their readers “that there is nothing disgraceful about the African weather, that the palm-tree is a fit subject for poetry” (Achebe 3), and, one may add, that African languages are an integral part of these African worlds. The Nigerian literary pioneers Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa, for instance, both include the occasional Igbo word in their English-language texts (such as Achebe’s use of “chi” for an individual’s personal spiritual guardian in his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart) or provide literal English translations for Igbo terms and phrases (Nwapa’s “bath” for the purifying ritual of female genital excision in her 1966 novel Efuru). Although Ngugi dismisses this practice as “‘pilfering’ from the African lexicon in a bid to infuse English with markers of African experience” (Decolonising the Mind 7), Achebe and Nwapa are effectively enhancing the verisimilitude of their stories about pre- independence rural Nigeria by inserting Igbo songs, greetings, titles, clothing and food items, and other such culturally specific items. In On Black Sisters’ Streets Unigwe is similarly countering colonial and postcolonial practices of cultural and linguistic homogeniza- tion by integrating into her narrative Igbo, Yoruba, and other African words whose general meaning easily can be inferred from the context. Her characters are said to be eating “eba and egusi soup” (69) and “jollof rice and moi-moi” (123), drinking home brewed “ogogoro” (62), wearing “kente[s]” (14) and “boubou[s]” (153), and riding “molue” buses (158) to work. Although the African characters’ speech is habitually rendered in Standard English or Nigerian Pidgin, it is characterized by Igbo interjections or exclamations such as “Tufia!” to express disgust (39), “ndo” for ‘sorry’ (153), and “Eziokwu” for ‘truly’ (154). Not surprisingly, these words and phrases all refer to local objects or customs and belong to those categories of vocabulary that are most commonly kept in the original language: flora and fauna, food and drink, clothes, local/domestic infrastructure, family relationships, common expressions etc. (Donadey 29; Zabus 169). However, Unigwe in her contemporary novel of migration takes her literary multilingualism further than Nigeria’s pioneers, further even than a notable contemporary such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Firstly, Unigwe’s anglophone text borrows from a wider range of African and European languages, and with far higher frequency. In addition to the earlier-mentioned languages of Igbo, Yoruba, and Nigerian Pidgin, On Black Sisters’ Street includes interlinguistic Southern African slang, such as “makweremakwere” (12) for ‘foreigner;” French phrases when Sisi remembers her school days (23); the American-Italian slang “Capeesh?” (120) for ‘Do you understand?;’ Dinka such as Joyce’s grandmother’s “E yin nyan apath,” translated as “be a good girl, my daughter” (186); Dutch interjections uttered by clients and Sisi’s boyfriend, such as “schat” (281) meaning ‘darling.’20 Secondly, although English is the “dominant language clearly identified as [the] central axis” of On Black Sisters’ Street, Unigwe does more than “add a liberal sprinkling of other languages” (Grutman 19). She presents (substantial parts of) her characters’ conversations in Nigerian Pidgin and even in Igbo,21 so that for readers unfamiliar with either of those languages her text is effectively riddled with foreign passages.

122 | Elisabeth Bekers Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132

Whereas the Japanese-born Tawada builds “on the presumption that her audiences do not understand one of the two languages she uses” (Yildiz 15) and constructs a hybrid language that her German readers can grasp with some effort, Unigwe confronts her readers with phrases in multiple languages, not all of which they are likely to understand, unless they share the author’s complex linguistic background. In accordance with recent guidelines in contextualized language learning (e.g. Snow & Brinton), they are made to work out the foreign-language text by themselves, without the help of a glossary of foreign words or a list of explanatory endnotes.22 In order to piece together the meaning of the foreign-language passages, Unigwe’s readers have to rely on the context as well as on the (literal or more idiomatic) translations that are generally provided before or after the foreign-language quotations, even if readers non-conversant in the foreign language at hand can never be entirely sure that the preceding or succeeding text offers an exact translation or even a translation at all. Nevertheless, through the respective strategies of “contextualizing” and “cushioning”23 Unigwe ensures that her readers do not feel “[trapped] in a semantic guessing game” (Tunca, “Linguistic Counterpoint” 208). For instance, it is not difficult to comprehend the Igbo pleas of the woman who is “extending a metal begging bowl towards the bus” on which Ama is travelling, not just because of the contextual information that is provided but in particular because of what one (correctly) takes to be the English translations tagged onto the foreign words: “Nyenu m ego. Give me money please. God go bless you. Chuwu gozie gi.” (138–139). Similarly, when Sisi’s father refers to his own youth to encourage his daughter to excel at school, he tells her “I had bookhead. Isi akwukwo” (19), whereby the reader (rightly) presumes that the preceding English sentence is a literal translation of the Igbo that follows. These explanatory strategies enable Unigwe’s readers to catch the general drift of those speech fragments that fall outside their linguistic competence while they help to “[maintain] the rhythm and continuity” of the original language, as another African diaspora writer explains (Fischer 56). However, the reading of Unigwe’s text is further complicated by the fact that English translations are not always on offer, or that they deliberately alter the original meaning, as is the case with the novel’s English title (spelled without apostrophe in the American edition). Although it is nowhere stated explicitly, it is clear to those who have read On Black Sisters’ Street and have some knowledge of Dutch that the novel’s English title makes reference to the setting of the narrative frame as well as to the narrative itself. On the one hand, On Black Sisters’ Street refers to the street on which the four protagonists live (“Zwartezusterstraat” first mentioned in the chapter title on p. 5); on the other hand, the title also evokes the content of the novel, which presents a forceful indictment against the invisibility of Antwerp’s black sex workers and sketches the fragile but growing bond between them. The name of this street, which is used as title for all the chapters devoted to the frame narrative and consistently given in Dutch

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 123 except in the title of the novel itself, is inspired by the name of an actual street on the edge of the Antwerp red light district. A busy shopping street in medieval times, the quiet coble-stone street with gabled houses is today more infamously known as the location of the racially-motivated lethal shooting of a Malian nanny and her ward on 11 May 2006 by a young Flemish skinhead, an event that is not only mentioned in the novel (111), but also connected with the murder of Sisi, which takes place the following day according to the date provided in the title of the first chapter. The Antwerp street is named after the order of Augustinian or Cellite sisters whose mother house until recently was located in the same street and who are popularly named Zwartzusters after the color they don (cf. the Dominican Blackfriars, whose name features in British place names). By subtly altering its spelling24 from Zwartzusterstraat into “Zwartezusterstraat” (with an additional ‘e’), Unigwe shifts the meaning of its name from ‘black-clad nuns’ (Black Sisters, with emphasis on the adjective) to ‘black-skinned female siblings’ (Black Sisters, with emphasis on the noun). By broadening the referential scope of the street name and the novel’s title, Unigwe is able to connect both to the novel’s thematic concern with the lives of black street workers in Europe. Following Caryl Phillips’s 2004 suggestion in The Guardian, Unigwe is using her fiction to challenge the voicelessness and invisibility of this “silenced minority” (Phillips), not just by highlighting their growing bond and increasing agency, but also by drawing the readers’ attention to the characters’ multilingual narratives and the critical significance of the latter. In this context, the italicized poetic fragment that is used as epigraph to this article—an eye-catching passage because it is the only text printed on that page—can be read as a postcolonial and postmonolingual version of the Magi’s visit to the Manger. Instead of presenting gold, frankincense, and myrrh and subsequently spreading the Grand Narrative of Christianity, Unigwe’s “pilgrims” are offering the novel’s readers a set of gifts that testify to the heterogeneity of the contemporary postcolonial period: the four black female protagonists are drawing the readers’ attention to the multiplicity of truths, the diversity of lives and the variety of worlds that the present era contains. But first and foremost, the four street workers, representing the migrant multitudes and acting as postcolonial versions of the prostitutes and Samaritans despised in biblical times, come “bearing gifts of words” spoken in various languages, as once were the apos- tles’ fiery tongues at Pentecost. In On Black Sisters’ Street Unigwe has envisioned a globalized postcolonial world in which multilingualism is the standard practice. Her characters wear the linguistic plurality of their existence with striking ease and effortlessly “deal with the reality of belonging to several speech communities that each have a claim on their whole self” (Kramsch 329). They meet many obstacles in the course of their lives, but language does not appear to be one of them. More than simply imagining a postmonolingual world, Unigwe is also giving her readers a taste of what it is like to operate in such a

124 | Elisabeth Bekers Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132 world. Firstly, she confronts her readers with multiple foreign languages which they are unlikely to (all) understand, making the readers aware of their own multilingual realities, whether that simply is the reality of their experience reading On Black Sisters’ Street or also of their lives beyond their reading activities. Secondly, Unigwe gives her readers a practice run of how to operate in the non-fictional postcolonial and postmonolingual world. She invites them to perform an active and open-minded reading of the multilingual text, undeterred by those linguistic and cultural details with which they are be unfamiliar. The flexible multilingualism of the novel’s characters can be taken as exemplary for the desired attitude of the readers, their linguistic agility seen as the hallmark of true global interaction.

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 125 Notes

1. Dutch is one of Belgium’s three official Monolingualism conference at the University of languages and the principal language of 60% of Leiden in May 2012 for their insightful the population. In Flanders and the Netherlands comments and suggestions on an earlier version combined, Dutch is the principal language of of this article; I also wish to thank Sarah De Mul wider communication for some 23 million and Daria Tunca for enthusiastically sharing, on people. For more information, see Vandeputte. various occasions, their insights into Unigwe’s fiction. My particular gratitude goes to Chika 2. Manteau went on to publish the Dutch- Unigwe for her untiring willingness to elucidate, language translations of Unigwe’s first two at every given opportunity, those aspects of her novels, in co-publication with Meulenhoff, a multilingual writing that are beyond my own literary publisher in the Netherlands. In 2011, linguistic competence. The responsibility for any after a major shift in the Dutch and Flemish errors or mistranslations, however, is mine. publishing scene, Meulenhoff/Manteau became De Bezige Bij Antwerpen, which likewise aims at 7. All subsequent references to On Black disseminating literary fiction and non-fiction in Sisters’ Street are to the UK edition. Dutch in both Flanders and the Netherlands. Throughout these changes Unigwe has continued 8. Unigwe has won various literary prizes, with the same editor for her Dutch translations. including the 2003 BBC World Service Short Story Competition and the 2012 Nigeria LGN 3. The term “allochtoon” (allochthonous) Prize for Literature, and has been nominated for originates in geology, where it refers to sediment several others, including the 2004 Caine Prize or rocks found in another place than their site for African Writing, a.k.a. the African Booker Prize of formation. As I have pointed out elsewhere (see Bekers, “Chika Unigwe”). (“Chronicling” 61), in demographic discussions in Flanders and the Netherlands the term is 9. Although Unigwe was hailed as the first rarely used in the neutral geological sense ‘from Flemish novelist of African descent, some critics elsewhere’ and tends to be reserved for non- have objected to this label because her creative Western immigrants and their descendants, even language is English. On occasion, Unigwe does when the latter are born in the Low Countries. In write in Dutch, such as her contribution to Hard recent years, critics of the term have proposed en Teder (2011), a collection of erotic stories by alternatives such as “Nieuwe Belg/Vlaming” Dutch and Flemish authors, and the short story (New Belgian/Flemming) or “Marokkaanse/ “Duister Hart” (“Heart of Darkness”) (2012), Turkse Belg” (Moroccan/Turkish Belgian), but which was published in Dutch (and in English these alternatives have not yet caught on, and French translation) as an online text and despite the fact that in the meantime the term audiobook as part of the international literary “allochtoon” has been abolished by some media project CityBooks project (with support from the and institutions in Flanders and the Netherlands. Flemish-Dutch cultural organization deBuren). She has also written a collection of stories 4. Unigwe, public interview with Elisabeth entitled De smaak van sneeuw in an elementary- Bekers at the What is Africa to Me Now? language series published for Wablieft by conference, Liège (Belgium), 21 March 2013. Manteau.

5. Erwin Mortier, Flemish author and editor of De 10. “De smaak van sneeuw” attracted eerste keer, in his laudatio on the occasion of the Manteau’s attention to Unigwe’s long fiction and book launch of Unigwe’s first novel, De Feniks they published her debut novel in Dutch (Turnhout, 15 September 2005), my translation. translation no less than two years before the anglophone original appeared (Unigwe, personal 6. I am grateful to the editors of this volume communication). Since in Flanders and the and to the participants of The Myth of Netherlands many readers also read fiction in

126 | Elisabeth Bekers Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132

English, the Dutch translation of new anglophone short story “Eéchtenteéchtig” (‘Really True’), fiction tends to closely follow or even precede which also contains substantial conversation the publication of the original text for commercial fragments in Igbo. The story was published in reasons, the argument being that Dutch-speaking the Flemish literary journal Dietsche Warande en readers will hopefully buy the translation rather Belfort in 2011 and given a lively reading by than (or at least alongside) the original. This has Unigwe at the previously-mentioned conference been the case not just with anglophone authors in Leiden. It is also included in the present (once) resident in the Low Countries, such as volume. Unigwe and the Uganda-born Moses Isegawa, but also with popular writers living abroad, including 15. For a discussion of Tawada’s and Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan and Zaimog˘lu’s literary multilingualism, see Yildiz. Jonathan Safran Foer. 16. Instances of grammatical hybridity 11. On the belated emergence of ‘migrant’ nevertheless occur in On Black Sisters Street in writing in Flanders, see Bekers (“Chronicling references to locations identified by means of a Beyond Abyssinia”) and De Mul; on the different proper noun. Although in English syntax proper reception of Unigwe’s writing in Flanders and the names of streets, stations, and shops are abroad, see De Mul and Ernst. not modified by a definite article, Unigwe systematically applies Dutch syntactical rules by 12. Unigwe, public interview with Liesbeth inserting the definite article ‘the’—a near Minnaard, at The Myth of Monolingualism homophone of its Dutch equivalent ‘de.’ conference, Leiden (The Netherlands), 23 May Presumably out of habituation to the Dutch 2012. At the same time, she also presented speech pattern, she will, for instance, write that herself as an active and committed speaker of something is located “close to the Central Igbo, to which testifies her involvement in an Station” (10) or can be “found in the HEMA” (2). Igbo dictionary project aimed at expanding the In addition, some expressions testify to a language by collecting and inventing new Igbo cultural hybridity, as for instance when a Nigerian words that are needed to articulate the diasporic character living in Belgium thinks of banknotes experience, such as a word for ‘snowman’ or as “new and fresh and the healthiest shade of ‘buffet.’ Most Nigerian authors of Unigwe’s green” (1), while neither country has generation write in English and many, including monochrome banknotes let alone uses the color Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, that is characteristic of United States currency. Helon Habila, Helen Oyeyemi, to name but a few, are diasporic writers, with novelists of Igbo 17. As also the allusions to Cleopatra and Dido descent featuring prominently among them in “A Game of Chess” suggest, Eliot is using (Nwakanma 3). Jerusalem and Alexandria to evoke the empires of antiquity, whose spheres of influence 13. When Ngugi broke through as a writer in the stretched across the Mediterranean (see early 1960s, he was publishing in English as Chambers for a postcolonial reading of the James Ngugi. In the late 1970s his political fundamental fluidity of this region). belief in Kenya’s indigenous languages as instruments of mental decolonization prompted 18. The women are presented not as narrators him to renounce writing in English and to turn to but as focalizers of their own life-stories; for a his native Gikuyu for his creative as well as his more detailed analysis of the narrative structure critical expression. Notwithstanding Ngugi’s of On Black Sisters’ Street, see Bekers (“The continued commitment to his mother tongue, the Mirage of Europe”) and Tunca (“Redressing the realities of his exile and professional career in ‘Narrative Balance’”). the United States have not been without their impact on his writing practices (see Gikandi). 19. Other novelists may opt for linguistically complex narrative voices; Gbenga Agbenuba, for 14. The Turnhout dialect gives a wonderful example, alternates between Standard English, Flemish couleur locale to Unigwe’s anglophone Nigerian Pidgin, Caribbean Creole/English, and

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 127 Yoruba in the narrative passages of Gbenga when he claims that “in the literary world we are Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner (Tunca, living in, it is a matter of choice whether to use “Linguistic Counterpoint”). italics or not, whether to have a glossary at the end or not. It’s not really an argument any more, 20. Compare Ungiwe’s inclusion of relatively we all are much more secure” (Fischer 56). As minor languages such as Igbo and Dutch to recently as 2012, Unigwe’s new editor at Eliot’s intertextual references to canonical Jonathan Cape insisted on including a glossary Western texts mostly written in the more in Night Dancer; by way of compromise, Unigwe dominant European languages. agreed to publish it online (personal communication with the author at the Leiden 21. The Sudanese Joyce, known as Alek before conference). Compare Unigwe’s reluctance to her arrival in Antwerp, is the only major character include glossaries in her novels with the long list whose speech is exclusively rendered in of explanatory and bibliographical notes that Standard English, even in conversations with Eliot willingly provided for The Waste Land, even if immediate family members, presumably because they were mainly intended to facilitate his efforts the character’s linguistic competence is partially to have the poem republished as a small book beyond the author’s own. Although the reader is after its initial journal appearance. informed of the pronunciation of Joyce’s birth name and her grandmother slips in a foreign 23. “Contextualizing,” refers to the furnishing of phrase, the reader can only infer from the “areas of immediate context” (Zabus 158), while context that Joyce’s people speak Dinka. “glossing” (Ashcroft et al. 62) or “cushioning” Nevertheless, the text illustrates the linguistic refers to the tagging of “an explanatory word or flexibility of the teenage Joyce, who is able to phrase” onto the foreign word (Zabus 158). converse effortlessly with the Nigerian peacekeeper Polycarp and can even read the note he gives her (199), although she cannot 24. Although ‘Zwartzusterstraat’ is the understand the conversations he has with his commonly used spelling (including in the street mother in Igbo later on in the novel (225). sign), the City of Antwerp’s official list of street names has ‘Zwartzustersstraat’ (with double ‘s’). 22. In a 2006 interview with Susan Fisher, This list (“Straatnamenlijst”) can be retrieved the Kenyan-born Canadian writer and editor from the official website of the city of Antwerp M.G. Vassanji suggests that the practice of (Stad Antwerpen at www.antwerpen.be). Other accompanying glossaries disappeared when misspellings of proper names are unintentional postcolonial writers entered the canon of and should have been silently corrected by the literature in English. “Initially, you were editor, including “Ekxi on the Keyserlei” (2) for compelled to have a glossary and to italicize, the health food chain restaurant ‘Exki’ located and then Rushdie came along and he didn’t do on the commonly mislabeled ‘De Keyserlei,’ the it. So everybody said, ‘We don’t have to do it!’” nearby “UCG cinema on the Annessestraat” (Fischer 56). However, even in the early years of (283) for ‘UGC’ and ‘Anneessensstraat,’and an anglophone African literary publishing, houses incorrect British spelling of United Colors of such as the East African Literature Bureau and Benetton. A different matter is the misspelling Heinemann, publisher of the well-known African of “een afrikaanse” (178, meaning ‘an African Writers Series, did not provide glossaries, woman’). Although unintentional (personal Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) being a communication), the uncapitalized spelling of the notable exception. On the other hand, Vassanji noun may be read as a visual sign of the seems all too optimistic about the devalorization and objectification of black street disappearance of “metropolitan censors” workers by their Belgian clients.

128 | Elisabeth Bekers Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “The Novelist as Teacher.” Defining Flemish Literature, Desiring allochto- 1965. African Writers on African Writing. Ed. nous writings.” Literature, Language, and G.D. Killam. London: Heinemann, 1971, 1–13. Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. Ed. Wolfgang Behschnitt, Sarah De ———. Things Fall Apart. African Writers Series. Mul, and Liesbeth Minnaard. Amsterdam, New Oxford: Heinemann, 1958. York: Rodopi, 2013, 123–146.

Adelson, Leslie. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary De Mul, Sarah, and Thomas Ernst. German Literature. Toward a New Critical “Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave Contemporary Prose in Flanders: The Writings Macmillan, 2005. by Chika Unigwe, Koen Peeters and Benno Barnard.” Literature, Language, and Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low 2004. Harper Perennial, 2005. Countries. Ed. Wolfgang Behschnitt, Sarah De Mul, and Liesbeth Minnaard. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2013, 283–313. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera. 1987. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunte Lute, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (Trans. Monolingualism of the Other, or, the The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.) Routledge, 1989.

Donadey, Anne. “Overlapping and Interlocking Bekers, Elisabeth. “Chronicling Beyond Frames for Humanities Literary Studies: Assia Abyssinia: African Writing in Flanders, Belgium.” Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Gloria Anzaldua.” Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in College Literature 34.4 (2007), 22–42. Europe. Ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff, and Daniela Merolla. Matatu: Journal of African Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Waste Land: A Facsimile Culture and Society 36. Amsterdam/New York: and Transcript of the Original Drafts. New York: Rodopi, 2009, 57–69. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. ———. “Chika Unigwe.” Dictionary of African Fischer, Susan. “History, Memory, Home. An Biography. Vol. 6. Ed. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong Exchange with M.G. Vassanji.” Canadian and Henry Louis Gates. Oxford University Press, Literature 190 (2006), 49–61. 2011, 101–103.

Gikandi, Simon. “Traveling Theory: Ngugi’s Return ———. “The Mirage of Europe in Chika Unigwe’s to English.” Research in African Literatures 31.2 Fiction.” (forthcoming) (2000), 194–209. Bonfiglio. Thomas Paul Mother Tongues and Nations. The Invention of the Native Speaker. New Grutman, Rainier. “Refraction and Recognition: York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010. Literary Multilingualism in Translation.” Target 18.1 (2006), 17–47. Chambers, Iain. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, Hutchison, Michele. “‘Where are you really N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. from?’: High Impact in Birmingham.” High Impact. Literature from the Low Countries. UK Tour of De Mul, Sarah. “‘The Netherlands is doing well. Dutch-language writers 14–19 January 2013. Allochtonous writing talent is blossoming there.’ 16 January 2013.

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 129 .com/2013/01/16/high-impact-in-birming- ———. “Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga ham/>. Viewed 3 March 2013. Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner.” Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Kramsch, Claire. “Multilingual, Like Franz Kafka.” Europe. Ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff, and International Journal of Multilingualism 5.4 Daniela Merolla. Matatu: Journal of African (2008), 316–332. Culture and Society 36. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009, 193–209. Miller, Christopher L. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Unigwe, Chika. A Rainbow for Dinner. London: Africa. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1990. Macmillan, 2003.

Writers in Politics: A Ngugi wa Thiong’o. ———. Ije at School. London: Macmillan, 2003. Re-engagement with Issues of Literature and Society. London: Heinemann Educational Books, ———. “De smaak van sneeuw.” De eerste 1981. Rev. ed. London: James Currey, 1997. keer. Tien jonge talenten aan de start van hun schrijversloopbaan. Ed. Erwin Mortier. Antwerp: ———. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics Manteau/Standaard, 2004, 82–97. of Language in Africa. London: James Curry, 1986. ———. De feniks. Tr. Hans van Riemsdijk. Nwakanma, Obi. “Metonymic Eruptions: Igbo Amsterdam, Antwerp: Meulenhoff/Manteau, Novelists, the Narrative of the Nation, and New 2005. Developments in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel.” Research in African Literatures 39.2 ———. The Phoenix. Lagos: Kachifo, 2007. (2008), 1–14. ———. Fata morgana. Tr. Hans van Riemsdijk. Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. Oxford: Heinemann, 1966. Amsterdam, Antwerp: Meulenhoff/Manteau, 2007. Perloff, Marjorie. “Language in Migration: Multilingualism and Exophonic Writing in the ———. On Black Sisters’ Street. London: New Poetics.” Textual Practice 24.4 (2010), Jonathan Cape, 2009. 725–748. ———. On Black Sisters Street. New York: Phillips, Caryl. “The Silenced Minority.” The Random House, 2009. Guardian, 15 May 2004.

———. “Nkiru.” Hard en teder. Nederlandse en Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy. A Novel in Rotten Vlaamse Erotica. Ed. Thomas Blondeau. English. Harlow: Longman, 1994. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2011.

Snow, Marguerite Ann & Donna Brinton, eds. The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on ———. “Eèchtenteèchtig.” Babelgium. Integrating Language and Content. New York: Onverbiddelijke veeltaligheid. Spec. issue of Longman, 1997. Dietsche Warande en Belfort 156.4 (2011), 527–533. Tunca, Daria. “Redressing the ‘Narrative Balance’: Subjection and Subjectivity in Chika ———. Nachtdanser. Tr. Hans van Riemsdijk. Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street.” Afroeuropa: Antwerp: De Bezige Bij Antwerpen, 2011. Journal of AfroEuropean Studies/Revista de Estudios Afroeuropeos/Journal des Etudes ———. De smaak van sneeuw. Wablieft. Afroeuropénnes 3.1 (2009), s. p. Antwerpen: Manteau, 2012.

130 | Elisabeth Bekers Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 117–132

———. “Heart of Darkness.” Citybooks: Vertel of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. me een verhaal. 2012. . Viewed 3 March 2013. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue. ———. Night Dancer. London: Jonathan Cape, The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: 2012. Fordham University Press, 2012.

Vandeputte, Omer. Dutch. The Language of Twenty Million Dutch and Flemish People. Tr. Paul Vincent Zabus, Chantal. The African Palimpsest. and Theo Hermans. 7th rev. ed. Rekkem: Ons Indigenization of Language in the West African Erfdeel, 1997. Europhone Novel. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. “Translation and the Formation of Cultural Identities.” The Scandals

“Bearing Gifts of Words” | 131

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148

Brussels is Europe: Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman as Multilingual Literature

Thomas Ernst

In the last years, a huge financial crisis forced the European Union to change its rules and its economic and political self-images in many ways. A key question evoked by these ongoing processes of rebuilding the ‘European house’ is to what degree its richer inhabitants will show solidarity with their struggling neighbors. Or, in other words: in how far do EU-citizens really believe in the official motto of the European Union: ‘united in diversity’? In this context, the discussion on whether there is already a common ‘European Culture’ rather than just a European internal market is pivotal. Still unanswered is especially the question of how a suchlike common European culture can accommodate 28 different national states, 24 official languages and an innumerable amount of (conflicting) cultural identities. In this complex debate, the Humanities can help to clarify the categories and ideas involved. Literary studies, for example, could produce knowledge on how European languages and concepts of identity are archived, reflected and problematized in literary texts. This article concentrates on the question of how Europe and ‘European identities’ are represented and reflected in multilingual literary texts – a genre of texts which is still neglected by most national philologies.1 To do so, it is essential to choose significant and representative literary examples as objects of analysis to broaden the European knowledge on the connection of identity and language. This article focuses on the novel Grote Europe Roman (2007; Major European Novel) which is written by Flemish and Belgian writer Koen Peeters and deals with Europe, Belgium and Brussels. Belgium, being a multilingual and federal nation- state, could be seen as Europe en miniature with its capital Brussels bringing many

Brussels is Europe | 133 of the central problems of Europe into focus: intercultural conflicts, complex and contradictory political structures and huge economic differences between the rich and the poor. But there is even more that justifies the choice of Peeters’ novel: with its ongoing political struggles on solidarity and separatism between the (richer) Flemish and the (poorer) Walloons, with the hybrid inhabitants of its multicultural capital Brussels and with its small German-speaking Community in its eastern parts, Belgium represents the European struggles of today in an exemplary way. Before analyzing Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman, I will give a short introduction into the discourses on mono- and multilinguality in Belgium, Flanders and Brussels (1.). My analysis of Grote Europese Roman is split in two parts: the first part deals with the characters of the novel and their (multicultural) identities and experiences (2.1.); the second part focuses more on the multilingual elements within the novel (2.2.). In the conclusion, I will argue that the novel on the one hand counteracts the separatist imagination of a self-contained monolingual and homogenous Flemish culture, thus opening the door to a hybrid or diverse understanding of European culture. On the other hand, however, I will point out how the multilingual strategies of the novel still reproduce the hegemony of national languages and testify of a specific Flemish understanding of certain connotations of European standard languages.

Belgium, Flanders and Brussels: Discourses of Mono- and Multilinguality One of the starting points for the analysis of multilingual literature is the differentiation of forms of languages in literary texts since they link the text with a specific culture, milieu or literary discourse. In multilingual literature, we find five different forms of languages: Firstly, standard languages like Dutch, English, French, or German; secondly, varieties such as dialects, ethnolects, slang, or technical terminologies; thirdly, words of foreign origin as fragmentary representations of the other (see Levin); fourthly, hybrid or creole languages that could be called “multispeak,” implying “speaking in different languages” (“Sprechen in verschiedenen Sprachen,” Erfurt 16)”, for example “Kanak Sprak,” “Franglais,” or “Swenglish” (Hinnenkamp/ Meng); finally, the artificial literary languages of the avant-garde, for example the sound poetry of the Dadaists. Discourses promoting multilingual cultures on a European level, as well as theoretical and literary reflections on multilinguality, seem directly opposed to the discourses of national language and culture. Belgium as a specific multilingual European national state – like Luxembourg or Switzerland – has established a complex federal structure that contains several levels: firstly a federal Belgian government; secondly a structure of the language communities (the Dutch-speaking Flemish, the French-speaking Walloons and the small German-speaking Community); thirdly the geographical structure of the regions (Flanders in the North, Walloon Region in the South and the officially bilingual capital Brussels in the centre).

134 | Thomas Ernst Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148

As the communities composing the Belgian state structure are primarily demar- cated along linguistic lines, language plays a crucial role in the current tensions that have historically accumulated in complicated ways. The contemporary political landscape of Flanders is characterized by hegemonic media discourses directly and indirectly fed by notions of a homogenous Flemish identity. The policies and practices of ‘unmixing’ cultures and languages are visible in Brussels as well. Although the soci- ologist Dirk Jacobs observes a “mix character of Brussels” and predicts that in Brussels “Dutch and French schools [will] offer very gradually forms of multilingual education,” current political developments indicate that the opposite may well come true (Jacobs 232, 237). Critics of nationalist discourses in Belgium have underscored that the perspective of cultural identity does not support an appropriate approach to the multilingual, globalized, fluid and transitory forms of life, economy and communication presently char- acterizing the Western world. In the introduction to the volume of essays Waar België voor staat (a phrase that suggests the double reading of “What ‘Belgium’ stands for” as well as “What Belgium has to overcome”), editors Geert Buelens, Jan Goossens, and David Van Reybrouck argue that “the future of Flanders and Belgium [will be] multilingual, intercultural and opposed to any form of identitarian or nationalistic form of thought – be it Flemish, Francophone, Belgian or of Brussels” (“dat de toekomst van Vlaanderen en België [. . .] meertalig, intercultureel en haaks staand op gelijk welk eng identitair of nationalistisch denken [zal zijn], of het nu Vlaams, Waals, Brussels of Belgisch is,” Buelens et al. 22).2 In a similar vein, author and translator Geert Van Istendael underscores that the construction of a pure Flemish identity is by definition impossible:

You can be both a Belgian and a Fleming. Or a Belgian and a Walloon. Without the slightest effort. Or Belgian and a Brusselaar and a Berber-speaker and on occasion a French-speaker. Or Belgian and Walloon and a German-speaker and quadrilingual too. Lots of combinations are possible, conceivable, and real. (Van Istendael 35)

There is an increasing public visibility of suchlike counter-discourses promoting multilingual, transnational, and anti-identitarian aspects of Flemish and Belgian culture, the multilingual strategies deployed in a series of Flemish prose texts imagine a world beyond Flemish monolingual nationalism, and, as such, gain social and political relevance. A large number of (mainly) Dutch-writing Belgian or Flemish- or Flemish-migrant-authors use multilingual writing-strategies in their texts. Besides Koen Peeters, whose Grote Europese Roman features as the object of analysis, I could also have chosen work by other ‘ethnic Flemish authors’ such as Tom Naegels or Tom Lanoye. These two authors deal with issues of multiculturality and insert fragments of non-Dutch languages in their texts. An example is Los (2005,

Brussels is Europe | 135 Loose), a novel written by the Flemish journalist Tom Naegels. This novel tells the story of the protagonist’s relationship with a Pakistani asylum-seeker and addresses the clashes in the Antwerp migrant quarter Borgerhout. Los has become a bestseller in Flanders and has been turned into a feature film. Other examples are Tom Lanoye’s short prose pieces “Johannesburg, le bain (een reisverhaal)”, “Kaap de goede hoop”, and “Gezond verstand in ’t buitenland” (all 2004, “Johannesburg, le bain [a travel story]”; “Cape of Good Hope”; “Common Sense Abroad”). These three texts, inspired by Lanoye’s adopted home in South Africa where he spends half of the year, are partly in Dutch and partly in English. Apart from these ‘Flemish writers,’ there are other writers of multilingual texts who live and publish their texts in Flanders but do have a migrant or non-Flemish background. Chika Unigwe, for instance, is a Nigerian-born writer who is living in Flanders and writing in Dutch and English (see the contribution by Elisabeth Bekers in this volume). Benno Barnard is a Dutch writer who has been living in Brussels and Flanders for many years and who reflects on language and identity, for instance in his work Eeuwrest. Een genealogische autobiografie (2001, Century Rest: A Genealogical Autobiography). Theatre group Union Suspecte with members of Moroccan, Iranian or South African backgrounds (although most of them have grown up in Belgium) use different languages in the play Onze-lieve-vrouw van Vlaanderen.

Brussels is Europe: Multilinguality and Multiculturality in Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman Koen Peeters was raised in Flanders and is currently living in Leuven. He has been awarded several literary prizes, such as the NRC Literatuurprijs (1994) and the Bordewijk-prijs (2001), and his work was nominated for the AKO-literatuurprijs (2001) and the Gouden Uil (2008). Characteristic of Peeters’ œuvre is a formal and thematic preoccupation with the practices of categorizing and collecting, an element generally linked to postmodern literature. In his novel Grote Europese Roman, Peeters undertakes an attempt to “sum- marize Europe’s history in an ambitious and epic way, but seen from the minute perspective of people working or living in Brussels” (“Groots en episch ... de geschiedenis van de Europese mensheid samenvatten, maar dan vanuit het kleine perspectief van mensen die werken of leven in Brussel,” Peeters 4). The subject matter of the novel reveals Peeters’ interest in European, rather than Flemish identity, although his perspective on this European identity is localized and expressively ‘Flemish.’ In the novel, Europe’s history is reflected through the imagination of Brussels – the geographical space which is often presented in media discourses as synecdoche for the European Union and its legislative

136 | Thomas Ernst Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148 power. Simultaneously Brussels functions as the prism through which European diversity is addressed.

From Bern to Ankara and Brussels as Transitory Space: Multiculturality in Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman In Grote Europese Roman, a Belgian company employs the protagonist Robin. His superior, named Theo Marchand (nomen est omen), instructs him to travel across Europe and visit business partners. Robin is expected to write an extensive report about his deliberations (“een mooie SWOT-analyse,” Peeters 216, “a beautiful SWOT- analysis”), hoping that this will yield the necessary innovative inside knowledge that can rescue the company from downfall. In this set-up, Europe is imagined as a mon- strous multinational construction where countries wage economic wars against each other and where encounters between firm representatives, who are in fierce competition, can only be superficial.3 In transitory non-places, such as hotels, bars, taxis, and business rooms, Robin meets his colleagues. His attempts to reach meaningful communication regularly fail and his meetings are hasty and unsatisfactory, lending a reading that the protagonist experiences Europe as a capitalist non-space of fleeting professional encounters. The novel consists of thirty-six chapters titled by the names of capital cities of European nation-states – from Bern to Ankara – although the chapters are not necessarily situated in the capitals announced in the respective titles. Robin composes his report as a collection of scenes, experiences and observations:

Een mens is altijd onderweg, en soms wil hij bijzondere woorden die hij vindt, meenemen. Ook al is hij ondertussen aan het werk. Mijn schriftje is de opsom- ming van die vondsten. (Peeters 231)

One is always on a journey, and sometimes, one would like to take along particular words one finds along the road. Even if he is working meanwhile. My little notebook is a record of these discoveries.

This specific form reinforces the aesthetic principle of collage, gathering heterogeneous elements that illustrate in their diversity the hybrid and globalized world of Europe. During a nocturnal moment of self-reflection towards the end of the novel, Robin reviews his notes and formulates his ideal of a fundamentally diverse Europe:

’s Nachts begrijp ik Europa, als mijn raam openstaat en de bloemen in het perk beneden Europees ademen. Of als je een gesprek begint in Boedapest, en iemand antwoord je in Praag. Of je vindt Lissabon terug in Brussel. Je spreekt met een blanke Noor die blij is vanwege de zon, en je kijkt in de Kroatische hand van een Kroatische vrouw. Je hoort de woorden van de Portugees in het vliegtuig.

Brussels is Europe | 137 In de krant zijn Grieken verongelukt, en je lacht met het lawaai van de Nederlander, en de Duitser speelt Bach in de kerk, en in een kille straat in Warschau besef je dat je bestaat. . . . en dat allemaal samen is het profetische portret, het periodiek systeem van Europa. Het stijgt op uit mijn schriftje. (Peeters 263)

At night, I understand Europe, when my window is open and the flowers in the flowerbed downstairs are breathing in a European way. Or when you start a conversation in Budapest, and someone is answering in Prague. Or when you discover Lisbon in Brussels. You talk to a white Norwegian who is thankful for the sun, and you look in the Croatian hand of a Croatian woman. You hear the words of the Portuguese in the plane. In the newspaper, some Greeks are reported dead in an accident, and you laugh with the noise of a Dutchman. And a German plays Bach in a church, and in a chilly street in Warsaw you realize you’re alive . . . . And that all together is the prophetic portrait, the periodical system of Europe. It arises from my notebook.

In this passage, Europe is a transnational patchwork of people, cultures, and artifacts united by history, in a good and ugly sense: “Europe [. . .] is a melting pot, a mixing container, a steaming pot. Europe is Goethe and Vergil and Napoleon and Hitler.” (“Europa [. . .] is een mengvat, de smeltpot, de stoofpot. Europa is Goethe en Vergilius, Napoleon en Hitler.” Peeters 124) At stake in the novel is an unresolved tension between Robin’s ideal of a humane Europe which is one in diversity and the described reality of Europe, in which economic rivalry among the nation-states makes any form of human contact almost impossible. Europe is at once the object of a utopian desire and a questionable reality. This ambivalence determines the two central lines of action, which can be identified as such particularly towards the end of the novel, before they eventually merge. Robin, the business traveler across economic Europe, narrates Theo Marchand’s family history. Theo Marchand’s father Robert was a Lithuanian Jew who felt threatened by the pre-war rising national socialist sentiments and committed suicide in Brussels. Theo, who had to rebuild the company from scratch, is regularly confronted by anti-Semitic comments. He is fed up with the European economic sphere and is forced to sell his company: “Theo’s world was falling to pieces. Most of all he would have liked to evaporate namelessly.” (“Theo’s wereld viel zo ongeveer uit elkaar. Het liefst van alles zou hij naamloos verdampen.” Peeters 252) Not only the bad conditions of his company and its eventual take-over by a Bulgarian investor are haunting Theo, but the past is also chasing him. When he is looking over the canals in Brussels, he sees blood and pogroms in the sky. Theo’s perception of Europe is a morbid version of Robin’s happy picture of unity in diversity, referring to the victims of European wars and especially of the Holocaust as a shared legacy: “My father committed suicide to avoid being murdered . . . . Europe, it is the names of the dead

138 | Thomas Ernst Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148 buried in our common graveyards.” (“Mijn vader pleegde zelfmoord om niet vermoord te worden . . . . Europa, dat zijn de namen van de doden op onze gezamenlijke kerk- hoven.” Peeters 216–7) In this, rather problematic way Peeters connects the story of a hegemonic capitalist Europe with the stereotype of the Jewish businessman who is ‘destroyed’ by history: Theo Marchand, who has seen his father being eliminated by the processes of nationalization and imperialism of a neighboring European country, is now in his turn destructed by the economic globalization of Europe. This crossing of the history of the European Jews in the 20th century (especially the memories of the Holocaust) with the contemporary capitalist business world culminates in the moment when Robin is dismissed. In the context of this volume, the specific multilingual quality of the following quote, representing the dismissal, is very interesting, although Robin’s analogy is both ahistorical and politically problematic:

Op kantoor word ik direct gebeld . . . . ‘Je hoeft niet weg’, zegt Remco. ‘Maar de voorwaarden zijn nu erg gunstig.’ Hij zegt wat, maar ik versta hem niet. Ik zie de deur. Daarachter de smalle trap. Staan zij daar en sta ik hier, en mijn handen stijgen belachelijk in de hoogte. ‘So, und jetzt bist du an der Reihe’, en daar verschijnt een kluwen van mensen. Uitgerekt, naakt. De lijken verstrengeld als ze uit de gaskamers worden gehaald. (Peeters 284)

In the office, I am instantly called . . . . ‘You don’t have to go,’ Remco says. ‘But the conditions are presently very interesting.’ He is saying something, but I cannot understand him. I see the door. Behind it, the small flight of stairs. They are standing there and I am standing here, and my hands are ridiculously getting up in the air. ‘So, und jetzt bist du an der Reihe [There, and now it’s your turn; T.E.],’ and a bunch of people appears. Stretched out, naked. The bodies are entangled when they are taken out of the gas chambers.

In this quotation Europe’s history of the Holocaust and the Second World War are juxtaposed with the present-day Europe of neo-liberalism. Whereas Jews were eliminated out of the ‘Volkskörper,’ in the present scene employees are being made redundant in the world of trade, which is a rather ahistorical analogy. The motif of the Europe of war-waging nations is repeated, while capitalism is described as present- day fascism. Peeters’ imagery links up historically unconnected European histories into a whole which is at the same time provocative and problematic. Apart from this, it is clear that Theo and Robin represent two different European types. Theo is the pessimistic-ironic intellectual of the post-war era and Robin is the younger, self-reflexive homo economicus of the new millennium, eventually both drown in the waves of globalization. They share their unsuccessful professional life and the inability to engage in a meaningful human relationship, but also the love for Brussels, which is the topographical as well as thematic centre of the novel. Theo’s

Brussels is Europe | 139 company is located in Brussels and he remembers his family history during a walking tour around the city (Peeters 246). Robin is visiting the social world of the Brussels’ ‘Bildungsbürger’ such as the KVS theatre, the cultural centre De Markten, or renowned restaurants as Bonsoir Clara in the Dansaertstraat (Peeters 40, 224, 226). Brussels reflects European diversity in the sense that the Flemish, Belgian, and European capital is topographically composed of numerous smaller cultures. It is a liminal space of cultural encounters:

Podgorica. In deze straat doe ik mijn Brusselse truc. Via één straat van de ene wereld in de andere stappen . . . . Wie door de Montenegrostraat loopt, stapt door een spiegel, hij reist, hij wordt iemand anders. (Peeters 207)

Podgorica. On this street, I do my Brussels trick. Stepping via one street from one world into the next . . . . Walking in Montenegrostraat is like stepping into a mirror, travelling, becoming someone else.

Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman imagines the ideal and reality of the European Union through Brussels, which is portrayed as a transformative, multicultural Europe en miniature. In so doing, the novel anticipates in a literary way what Geert Buelens, Jan Goossens, and David Van Reybrouck in their volume Waar België voor staat observe in the political and cultural domain: that Brussels

dwingt ons om na te denken over de grote samenlevingsvraagstukken in België en Europa. Alle grote en kleine gemeenschappen in Brussel, en dat zijn er dus veel meer dan twee, zullen moeten samenwerken om die vraagstukken aan te pakken en op te lossen. (Buelens et al. 20)

is forcing us to think about the large social questions in Belgium and Europe. All the large and small communities in Brussels, and there are much more than two, will have to cooperate in order to deal with and solve these questions.

From this perspective, Brussels becomes the multicultural avant-garde city of the European integration process. However, because it is bound up in discourses of homogenous Flemish identity, it turns into an alterity space again and again.

“So, jetzt bist du an der Reihe” and the Names of the Birds: Multilinguality in Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman deploys strategies of multilingualism, the main one being a form of textual multilingualism that inserts foreign standard languages into the Dutch main text. This counters the imagination of the Dutch language as a closed-off entity. In addition to the deployment of colloquial Dutch (Peeters 43) and various quotations from Latin (Peeters 20, 56, 66, 152–153, 156, 164, 209, 228, 242, 248, 256, 266, 269, 276, 278), a range of words, idioms and sentences from

140 | Thomas Ernst Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148

Europe’s languages are quoted in Robin’s notebook during his travels. Romanian, Estonian, Slovakian, Hungarian, Czech, Lithuanian, Serbian, Swedish, Slovenian, Italian, and Polish are used (Peeters 42 and 44 [Romanian], 61–62 [Estonian], 73–74 and 78 [Slovakian], 85–86 [Hungarian], 89–90 [Czech], 104 [Lithuanian], 118 [Serbian], 144 [Swedish], 148–149, 151 [Slovenian], 169, 171 [Italian], 190, 196–197 [Polish]). These short multilingual sentences, performed by the main character in the novel, represent different relations one could have with (foreign) languages. Firstly, foreign languages are used to mark the ‘otherness’ of a foreign culture. In Budapest, for instance, he is “wondering about the inscriptions on the shops: completely incomprehensible, untranslatable, very long as well, with an accumulation of accents to all directions: Ááé áíró áó u˝ ú o˝á.” (“Ik verwonder me over de opschriften op de winkels: compleet onverstaanbaar, onvertaalbaar, erg lang ook, met een opeenstapeling van accenten naar alle kanten: Ááé áíró áó u˝ ú o˝á.” Peeters 84) Not only the foreign characters amaze Robin, he also confronts us with complete sentences he does not understand. In a bookshop, he starts reading a book by Imre Kertesz: “‘”Nem!“ – mondtam rögtön és azonnal, habozás nélkül és úgyszólván öbztönösen. . .’ Is this an essay, a novel, a thriller? I cannot imagine anything.” (“[. . .] Is het een essay, een roman, een thriller? Ik kan me er absoluut niets bij voorstellen.” Peeters 85) Additionally, he is reflecting on non-Latin alphabets, amongst others the Slavic or Hebrew ones: “At noon I get an e-mail by Theo entitled ‘Slavic characters.’ I am immediately thinking of [. . .] Caucasian receding hairlines. But he is just writing on how you have to type ˇz, oˆ, ˇc, ˇs, ´y é, ó, ú en á in Word.” (“’s Middags krijg ik een mail van Theo met als titel ‘Slavische karakters’. Ik denk direct aan [. . .] hoge Kaukasische voorhoofden. Maar het gaat gewoon over hoe je de ˇz, oˆ, ˇc, ˇs, ´y é, ó, ú en á moet intikken in Word.” Peeters 67–68, see also Peeters 195). Secondly, on his business trips through Europe Robin collects elements of European cultures, with fragments of languages being a part of this fleeting treasury. In Bratislava, for instance, his Slovakian driver teaches him some Hungarian words which he writes on his hand, since Budapest will be his next destination: “He gives me the Hungarian words gólya, szél and pipacs for free, which I am writing on my hand, too.” (“Hij geeft me er nog gratis de Hongaarse woorden bij, gólya, szél en pipacs, die ik ook op mijn hand schrijf.” Peeters 77) Robin consciously collects these bits and fragments of languages, words, and meanings and portrays them as an important part of the fascinating diversity of which Europe is composed (Peeters 77, 231). Thirdly, the novel shows us how intercultural contacts do not work without a common language or minimum knowledge of a foreign language, in a huge number of every-day-situations Robin uses short sequences of the foreign language to communicate. For instance, when he is paying his cab driver in Warsaw, the driver thanks him in English, whilst Robin thanks him in Polish (“Als ik hem betaal, zegt hij: ‘Take care’.

Brussels is Europe | 141 Ik zeg: ‘Dziekuje˛.’” Peeters 196) In addition, these short dialogues help Peeters to locate the chapters in a certain linguistic culture. Opposed to the smaller European languages, the larger languages – notably English, French, and German – are given a particular status and connotation. English is the novel’s principal language to proclaim all of the problematic effects of European economic globalization. Striking in this respect is that the personalized and French- oriented ‘authentic’ name of Theo’s company (“Marchand”) transforms into the busi- nesslike English name “CSP – Communications & Sales Partnerships” (Peeters 255). In some cases, English is deployed as the language of human rights (Peeters 134) or the expression of poetical lyrics (Peeters 138, 285), but its main connotation is as a vehicle of neo-liberal globalization. This is exemplified by terms from business jargon such as “e-auction,” “workflow,” or “city-marketing,” to name just a few examples (Peeters 88, 82, 132). In a similar vein, a virus-infected email conversation is held in English (Peeters 33). This conversation symbolizes the Anglo-dominant economic sphere of Europe, particularly its aggressive forms of communication. Perhaps not surprisingly, the German language is similarly inscribed with emblem- atic meaning, as the language of National Socialism. It is of course hardly neutral when particularly the instructions on the Zyklon-B boxes (“Nur durch geübtes Personal zu öffnen und zu verwenden,” Peeters 283, “only to be opened and used by experienced staff”) or the death proclamation in the gas chambers are quoted in the original German (“So, und jetzt bist du an der Reihe,” Peeters 284, “And now it’s your turn”). By implementing these German sentences, Peeters reproduces the idea of the German language as one of the central media of National-Socialist ideology. As opposed to English and German, the French language is deployed in a more neutral way. This point can be considered as a statement, particularly when seen from the perspective of the long-standing history of communitarian tensions in Belgium. In fact, the two major languages of Belgium are portrayed to coexist fruit- fully, which suggests a functioning bilingual Belgium (Peeters 25–26, 53–59, 293). The novel refers to officially bilingual street and square names in Brussels by alternately using the Francophone and Dutch denominations (Peeters 293).4 Peeters’ imagination of a Europe in which equal languages thrive side by side is also visible in a particular trope which underlines his utopia of Europe. Throughout the novel, specific nouns are mentioned as a list of translations in Dutch, English, French and German, sometimes including even more languages (Peeters 109, 122–123, 125–130, 156–159, 186, 189, 229, 235, 249, 272, 290–292). This trope is a formal representation of Theo’s interest in language acquisition during his childhood: “Theo inserted a new ink cartridge into his pen, and wrote in slow, school-blue letters: Vader, Vater, father, père. Moeder, Mutter, mother, mere.” (“Theo deed een nieuw inktpatroon in zijn vulpen, en schreef in trage, schoolblauwe letters: Vader, Vater, father, père. Moeder, Mutter, mother, mere.” Peeters 126) Theo has a

142 | Thomas Ernst Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148 particular interest in the study of bird names in various languages and it is characteristic of birds that they are able to fly across territorial and linguistic borders. The multilingual relation to borderless birds opens up a new, utopian perspective, which is stated explicitly in the envoi which ends the book:

Ik wil graag op beschaafde wijze met vogels praten . . . . Zij zijn de echte internationalen, de handelsreizigers, die vertegenwoordigers . . . . Ach, mijn Deense rødhals, mijn Zweedse rödhake, mijn Noorse rødstrupe, mijn petirrojo van Spanje en pettirosso van Italië, Erithacus rubecula, mijn Poolse rudzik, cˇervenka van Tsjechië en Slowakije, mijn Finse punarinta en mijn Ierse spideog, mijn sympa- thieke ␬␱␬␬␫␯␱␭␣␫␮␩␵ van de Grieken. (Peeters 293–294)

I would like to speak in a civilized manner to the birds . . . . They are the real internationals, the business travelers, the representatives . . . . Alas!, my Danish rødhals, my Swedish rödhake, my Norwegian rødstrupe, my petirrojo from Spain and pettirosso from Italy, Erithacus rubecula, my Polish rudzik, cˇervenka of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, my Finnish punarinta and my Irish spideog, my sym- pathetic ␬␱␬␬␫␯␱␭␣␫␮␩␵ of the Greeks.

The unbound freedom of birds and the possibilities of multilinguality beyond the limitations of people and their monolinguality are promoted as the novel’s main image. This stands in explicit contrast to the dominant language and identity discourses which serve to support Flanders as a closed-off, monolingual space.

Subverting Monolingualism, Reproducing Language Hegemonies: A Conclusion Belgium as a multilingual and federal nation-state and with its political discourses on how its ‘unity in diversity’ could be realized can be seen as a smaller representation of Europe. Especially the separatist Flemish discourses which question the necessity of a federal nation-state in times of globalization are fundamentally interesting in this context. As I have argued before, these discourses are currently being contested, not only in public debate but also in literary texts. To substantiate this argument, I have examined different narrative and linguistic strategies in the novel Grote Europese Roman by Koen Peeters, in which monocultural and nation-based ways of thinking and being are being abandoned. Peeters deploys strategies of literary multilingualism in order to scrutinize the authority of the dominant national language in Flanders. Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman shifts the focus to Brussels, a liminal space where the possibilities and limitations of European identity are played out and where the ideal of a ‘unity in diversity’ cultural model is made to clash with the reality of a neo-liberal economic Europe. We have seen that the novel uses strategies of literary multilingualism, notably the insertion of foreign phrases into the main Dutch text and the insertion of strings of translated words, in mainly three ways: firstly, to mark the

Brussels is Europe | 143 ‘otherness’ of a foreign culture; secondly, to collect fragments of different languages or spelling as a part of the hybrid European culture; and thirdly, to show the need of a common language or the ability to communicate in a foreign language as a pre- condition for a ‘real European Union’ to work. On the one hand, Peeters’ use of multilingual sentences instantiates the idea of a European commonality across cultural difference. On the other hand, however, they also highlight the critical dimensions of this happy multicultural and multilingual idea of Europe. Whilst Peeters’ novel subverts the idea of a functioning and closed monolingualism, it simultaneously reproduces certain language hegemonies. Moreover, the multilingual construction of his novel can be critically discussed on four levels. Firstly, we have seen that multilingual literatures can use different languages on five different levels: standards languages, varieties like dialects or ethnolects, words of foreign origin, hybrid languages like multispeak, or the artificial literary languages of the avant-garde. In his novel, Peeters mainly uses the first category of literary multilingualism, standard languages, and only rarely also words of foreign origin. This indirectly shows that he does not give the minor or poorer milieus a voice (for example, by implementing their dialects or ethnolects) and that his novel is less interested in spaces in-between the cultures (for instance, by presenting forms of multispeak). By this, he positions his novel in the (upper) middle classes and meets the demands of the classic ‘Bildungsbürger’. Secondly, it is striking that the main standard languages used in the novel – English, French and German – reproduce the hegemonic language structures of the European Union. So whilst subverting hegemonic Flemish discourses of a homogenous Dutch-speaking population, Peeters strengthens hegemonic discourses on a European level. Moreover and thirdly, the major European languages English and German are constantly connotated in a negative way: English is stereotypically linked to the economic system of neoliberalism, German to the political system of National Socialism. At the same time, the major languages of Belgium, French and Dutch, are used in a rather neutral way – which indirectly reproduces national distinctions from a Belgian view. Finally and fourthly, corresponding to the content of the novel, non- European languages are completely excluded from the book, which underlines its Eurocentric perspective. Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman can count as an instructive example of subversive and multilingual literature, but is nevertheless entangled in an aporia. On the one hand, it subverts discourses of strong and homogenous regional and monolingual identities from a Belgian perspective, promoting Brussels as representative for a common European culture, and collecting cultural and linguistic fragments from many different European national states. On the other hand it reproduces hegemonic discourses of identity and languages on a European level and takes a Eurocentric perspective. In doing so, Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman insists on the claim that we

144 | Thomas Ernst Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148 cannot do without an identity or without the decision for a certain main language of communication or literary writing – the central question is where to set up our identity and which language(s) to choose. The novel definitely transcends the discourses on Flemish identities and Dutch as the sole language of identity and culture, but is not convincing in constructing a ‘European writing’ or in ‘writing Europe’ (and does not aim at ‘writing cultural globalization,’ anyway). So finally, Brussels becomes Europe, not Antwerp, not Bern, not Ankara.

Brussels is Europe | 145 Notes

1. This contribution is partly based on the 3. Here Peeters reproduces the topos of the article “Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in primacy of economy in capitalistic Europe foiling Contemporary Prose in Flanders: The Writing by the idea of a humanistic Europe. A similar Chika Unigwe, Koen Peeters and Benno argument can be found in Tom Lanoye’s drama Barnard,” co-written with Sarah De Mul and Fort Europa (2004) (see Ernst, “Europa,” published in Literature, Language, and 268–270). Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (Behschnitt et al. 2013, 4. In Jamal Boukhriss’ and Saddie Choua’s 283–313). prose pieces for the first Flemish anthology of “migration-literature,” the multilinguality of 2. All translations of Peeters’ quotes are my Brussels is turned into an important aesthetic own (partly supported by Sarah De Mul, see principle. See Boukhriss, “Alleen/Seul,” and footnote 1). Choua, “Les Chips.”

Works Cited

Barnard, Benno. Eeuwrest: Een genealogische Ernst, Thomas. “Europa zwischen Fluchtfabeln autobiografie. Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Atlas, und Luftwurzeln: Der belgische Autor Tom Lanoye 2001. über Kapitalismus, Wissenschaft und Biopolitik in seinem Stück ‘Festung Europa.’” Ökonomie im Behschnitt, Wolfgang, Sarah De Mul and Theater der Gegenwart: Ästhetik, Produktion, Liesbeth Minnaard, eds., Literature, Language, Institution. Eds. Christine Bähr and Franziska and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Schößler. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009, 259–78. Countries. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. ———. “Die deutsche Sprache als Minorität? Boukhriss, Jamal. “Alleen tegen de wereld/Seul Multilinguale Gegenwartsliteratur in der contre tous.” KifKif: Nieuwe stemmen uit Deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft Belgiens und in Vlaanderen. Ed. KifKif. Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Luxemburg.” Re-Visionen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Meulenhoff-Manteau, 2006, 45–65. Herausforderungen interkultureller Germanistik. Ed. Ernest W. B. Hess-Lüttich (in cooperation with Buelens, Geert, Jan Goossens, and David Van Corinna Albrecht and Andrea Bogner). Bern et al.: Reybrouck. “Introduction.” Waar België’ voor Lang, 2011, 621–636. staat: Een toekomstvisie. Eds. Geert Buelens, Jan Goossens and David Van Reybrouck. Hinnenkamp, Volker, and Katharina Meng, eds. Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Manteau, Sprachgrenzen überspringen. Sprachliche 2007, 9–23. Hybridität und polykulturelles Selbstverständnis. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. Choua, Saddie. “Les Chips au Paprika.” KifKif: Nieuwe stemmen uit Vlaanderen. Ed. KifKif. Jacobs, Dirk. “‘Brussels, do you speak-a my Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Manteau, language?’ Enige toekomstscenario’s gewikt 2006, 87–99. en gewogen.” Waar België’ voor staat. Een toekomstvisie. Eds. Geert Buelens, Jan Goossens Erfurt, Jürgen. “De même I hope j’te bother pas: and David Van Reybrouck. Antwerpen/ Transkulturalität und Hybridität in der Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Manteau, 2007, 223–38. Frankophonie.” Transkulturalität und Hybridität: L’espace francophone als Grenzerfahrung des KifKif, ed. KifKif: Nieuwe stemmen uit Vlaanderen. Sprechens und Schreibens. Ed. Jürgen Erfurt. Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Manteau, Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, 2004, 9–36. 2006.

146 | Thomas Ernst Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 133–148

Lanoye, Tom. Fort Europa. Hooglied van de Kessler and Jürgen Wertheimer. Tübingen: versplintering. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2005. Stauffenberg, 1995, 77–90.

———. “Gezond verstand in’t buitenland.” Naegels, Tom. Los. Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Vitriool voor gevorderden 1994–2003. Meulenhoff-Manteau, 2005. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2004, 224–43. Peeters, Koen. Grote Europese Roman. ———. Het derde huwelijk. Amsterdam: Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Manteau, Prometheus, 2006. 2007.

———. “Johannesburg, le bain (een Unigwe, Chika. de feniks. roman. reisverhaal).” Spek en bonen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Meulenhoff-Manteau, Prometheus, 2004, 102–15. 2005.

———. “Kaap de goede hoop.” Vitriool voor Union Suspecte: Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van gevorderden 1994–2003. Amsterdam: Vlaanderen. Teksten van Erwin Jans, Joost Prometheus, 2004, 92–142. Vandecasteele en Union Suspecte. Brussels: Vlaams Theater Instituut, 2005. Levin, Thomas Y. “Nationalitäten der Sprache— Adornos Fremdwörter: Multikulturalismus und Van Istendael, Geert. “Dear Patrick Roegiers.” bzw. als Übersetzung.” Multikulturalität: Passa Porta_Magazine: Frontières, Grenzen, Tendenzen, Probleme, Perspektiven. Eds. Michael Borders 0, 2011, 35–36.

Brussels is Europe | 147

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism: Outweirding the Mainstream in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Performance Literature

Maria Boletsi

“Just recently a New York art critic referred to me as a (quote/unquote) ‘Mexican classic. Ouch!” These words captured Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s discomfort at this critic’s recognition of his classic status as an artist and writer. They were addressed to his audience during a solo lecture-performance in Amsterdam in October 2012, entitled “The Return of the Border Brujo,” which I happened to attend. In this performance, the Mexican-born and San Francisco-based performance artist and writer, dressed as a shaman in Native-American drag and addressing the audience in multiple languages, accents, and styles, shared his fear of becoming canonized. And let me note that the “ouch!” was particularly loud and protracted. Born in Mexico City, Guillermo Gómez-Peña moved to the United States in 1987, where he established himself as a performance artist and writer. In his art projects, performances, and books, he explores cross-cultural and hybrid identities, migration, globalization, the politics of language, border cultures and border crossings, and the interface between North and South (especially the U.S.–Mexican border) and between mainstream U.S. and Latino culture.1 Gómez-Peña’s resistance to being received as a ‘classic’ is hardly surprising given his commitment to challenging the ‘mainstream’ through his artistic practices and writings. Acquiring canonical status in U.S. culture would more or less equal a death sentence for this ‘border brujo,’ dedicated to countering the totalitarian impact of English as a lingua franca and confusing the center through the dissonant, mistranslated, mismatched languages of a heterogeneous ‘we’ at the margins of mainstream American culture. In his performances, Gómez-Peña uses English, Spanish, mixtures of both (Spanglish), and several other languages. In this essay, I read parts of Gómez-Peña’s

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 149 performance script “Brownout 2” (2000–2003), in order to probe the functions of multilingual forms and of linguistic barbarisms in it.2 I use ‘barbarism’ here as a countable noun, based on the term’s definition as “an offensive word or action, especially a mistake in the use of language” (The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2003), or, in a more extended definition, as:

The intermixture of foreign terms in writing or speaking a standard, orig. a classical, language; a foreignism so used; also, the use of any of various types of expression not accepted as part of the current standard, such as neologisms, hybrid derivatives, obsolete or provincial expressions, and technical terms, or any such expression used in discourse. (Webster’s New International Dictionary, 1913)

Based on these definitions, barbarism can be an element that deviates from (linguistic or other) norms and conventions; an offensive element that unsettles traditional frameworks; an insertion of foreign terms and elements “not accepted as part of the current standard.” Consequently, barbarisms signal encounters between heterogeneous spatial or temporal frames, linguistic registers, and discursive orders. They bring the familiar in contact with the foreign by introducing foreignisms in classical idioms. They confront the old with the new, and vice versa, through “neologisms” or “obsolete” archaic expressions. They disrupt an elevated language with “provincial expressions.” They join heterogeneous elements in “hybrid derivatives.” Pushing these definitions a bit further, I identify barbarism as an invasion by foreign, disruptive elements into dominant discourses and modes of thinking. Barbarisms can be transgressive elements that cross boundaries and form new, unexpected combinations; elements that cause misunderstandings, and invite counterintuitive modes of reading. Barbarisms appear in a zone of error as well as of hybridization and syncretism.3 Barbarisms in Gómez-Peña’s performance literature take the form of neologisms, unorthodox word-combinations, hybrid linguistic forms, errors, misspellings, mistranslations, surprising alliterations, puns, and polylingual linguistic games. They generate misunderstandings, defamiliarization or unexpected correspondences between languages, and linguistically perform the challenge of the polylingual margins to a monolingual center. Significantly, as I will show, they also alter the English language—its sounds, the way it is perceived, its meaning-producing mechanisms, the discourses it evokes. By making English foreign to itself, they help envision new or alternative grammars, communities, subject positions, and modes of belonging and relating to others. Gómez-Peña’s polylingual practices do not amount to an unconditional celebration of multilingualism in an egalitarian, postnational world. Rather, this essay shows how they stage the painful tensions and power relations between multilingual practices and a still pervasive monolingual paradigm. As Yasemin Yildiz argues in her recent

150 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170 study Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012), some multilingual practices still structurally depend on the hegemony of monolingualism: the idea that having one primary, natural language is the norm, which Yildiz sees as a primary structuring principle of modernity. In our current “postmonolingual condition,” as Yildiz calls it, the increase of multilingual practices has to be viewed against the backdrop of a still persistent “monolingual framework” (4).4 The attempt to understand contemporary multilingual forms in relation to a dominant monolingualism makes the notion of multilingualism more ambiguous and complex than it is often assumed to be. The visibility of multilingual practices today increases their potential to contest the monolingual paradigm. Nevertheless, it also makes multilingual practices themselves contestable: their critical potential, Yildiz shows, should not be taken for granted, and their performative force—how they function in relation to monolingualism—should be cautiously assessed in each case. Multilingual forms sometimes conceal the pervasive force of the monolingual paradigm, thereby reinforcing it. Ideology is, after all, at its strongest when it remains invisible, cloaked under the colorful veil of a ‘happy’ multilingualism. Following her approach, cultural objects featuring multiple languages do not necessarily promote pluralism, but may sustain the monolingual paradigm and contribute to a celebration of neoliberal globalization (25). The relation of the monolingual paradigm with neoliberal capitalism is certainly not stable or self-evident. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the two often support each other. Although neoliberal capitalism depends on (the illusion of) variety and change—“in order for consumers to be consumed by the need for apparently new goods” (Hawthorne 620)—it has to make change and difference manageable, translatable, subordinate to a homogenizing language (in the broadest sense), and therefore marketable. Making multilingualism a more controversial and ambivalent concept allows us to be alert to its ideological operations. Thus, I scrutinize the functions of Gómez-Peña’s multilingual practices in relation to the monolingual paradigm they converse with and try to challenge. As the statement cited at the beginning of this essay already hints at, Gómez-Peña is very conscious of the specter of canonization that threatens to blunt his transgressive artistic practices and writings. As he performs his challenge to what he calls the “shareholders of monoculture”—a phrase he uses to refer to mainstream U.S. culture and the neoliberal ideology undergirding it—he realizes the constant risk of losing his critical edge by being received as an ‘exotic other’ in the American or, more generally, Western market.5 The fear of becoming harmless or even ending up serving the exact structures he tries to confound—be it the monolingual paradigm, American “monoculture,” or neoliberal capitalism—permeates his work. This anxiety, I contend, may even function as a motivating force that leads him to develop creative linguistic practices. Thus, in reading “Brownout 2,” I unravel those strategies in which I trace an attempt to conjure away the three-headed specter of

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 151 canonization, commodification, and exoticization of his art in the American (and Western) market. In order to conjure away this specter, I argue that he has to daringly conjure it up in his multilingual performance literature.

Contemporary Multilingual Practices and Their Challenges In literature, use of foreign-language citations, multilingual forms, and linguistic forms that diverge from standard English are not new phenomena. They are, for example, popular practices in the work of modernist authors such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and others (Ch’ien 11–12, Perloff 726–727). Foreign citations, for example, were often used to enhance the authentic or exotic aura of an allusion and were part of a “self-conscious and learned linguistic display” (Perloff 726–727). The functions of multilingual practices or linguistic experiments in contemporary literature are partly distinct from those of the modernists. As Marjorie Perloff notes, in a globalized world “of shifting national identities, large-scale migration from one language community to another, and especially the heteroglossia of the Internet,” the objectives and effects of literary language games have changed con- siderably (726). Evelyn Ch’ien locates the difference between modernist writers and contemporary authors of what she calls “weird English” in the fact that the context of the latter group is globalization: these authors often write in a non-native language or in two (or more) languages rather than experiment with one language.6 The authors Ch’ien refers to are bilingual or multilingual immigrant or postcolonial writers who employ “unorthodox English” (17). Ch’ien scrutinizes the phenomenon of “weird English”: the use of incorrect, altered, or hardly intelligible English, often created by mixing English with one or more other languages in literary works that would be classified as “ethnic” or “minority” literatures (4). For postcolonial and immigrant writers, “weirding” English becomes a strategy of redescribing their realities “in a language which did not have all the vocabulary they require” and, in the case of postcolonial writers, presented the world from the (former) colonizer’s perspective. Ch’ien argues that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the practice of “weirding English” has taken explicit political dimensions, as authors opt for this “appropriation of hybridity” to “transcribe their communities” and “build identities” (4–5). The resulting new forms of English as “forms of polycultural expression” are not just marginal phenomena in the literary scene, but change English itself, increasing its potential to express new, different modes of experience, relationalities, and worldviews, thereby also renewing its “aesthetic experiential potential” (6). English is remolded through the eyes, ears, and voices of non-native speakers who have different ways of embodying this language. The weird English of bilingual or polylingual postcolonial and immigrant writers often involves use of vernaculars, which are being revalued through their employment in literature. If “vernaculars and pidgin speech were once dismissed as an undignified

152 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170 representation or parody of ethnic groups,” Ch’ien writes, “now the use of accented English has aesthetic capital” (19). Use of vernaculars, “accented English,” non-standard language, mistakes, or stutters by second-language speakers are being recast by artists and writers as acts of resistance to “the cultural hegemony of language acquisition that smoothes over the stutter, the atypical pronunciation” (Spahr 131). The shifting status of the vernaculars towards an “aesthetically positive” “rhetoric of coolness or deviance,” to which literature also contributes, can be related to the general trend of “ethnic cool” (Ch’ien 20). In this context, the aesthetic revaluation of vernaculars and even the affirmative recasting of injurious, racist utterances by minorities against which such utterances were directed, is often a strategy of oppos- ing the racism of previous decades. For Ch’ien, the “weird English” writers also contribute to this trend. These are “outlaw writers” who “refuse to follow the law in any form” and have their writing turn into “innovative, experimental uses of language, diction, style, and content” (23). Weird English and multilingual practices in postcolonial and migrant literature have recently received much critical attention. They have been positively received as part of the trend of “ethnic cool” and praised for their potential to challenge a “monolingual paradigm” that wishes to preserve a “homology between language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality” (Yildiz 23). Nevertheless, one should also be alert to the pitfalls in the celebratory reception of such literary and artistic practices. When the ‘outlaw’ status of these writers, their transgressive linguistic acts, and their provocation to mainstream culture are heralded (and marketed) as fashionable and ‘cool,’ their works are often promoted as ‘exotic’ products in the Western market. The domestication and commodification of the margins, when they are marketed for consumption by Western audiences, may turn them into cases of “the postcolonial exotic”—a phenomenon that Graham Huggan scrutinizes in his homonymous study (2001). According to Susan Hawthorne, the marketing of marginal and ‘exotic’ authors and artists to the mainstream Western public is a symptom of the West’s “cultural voyeurism”—the attraction of the dominant culture to the cultural production of other cultures, which often leads to exoticizing and commodifying the latter (623).7 There is a seeming contradiction, Hawthorne notes, between the “economic, political, and cultural exploitation of so-called ‘minorities’ and their success as ‘exotics’” (622). The use of multiple languages and weird English by immigrant and postcolonial writers can be viewed as their way of resisting their marketing as ‘exotics’ or examples of ‘ethnic cool’ by counterpoising the untranslatability and irreducible difference of other languages (next to English) and cultures. Nevertheless, multilingual forms are also subject to the exact process they often try to counter. As they are formed in dialogue with (and opposition to) a dominant monolingualism that tries to ‘translate’ and domesticate difference, they risk being appropriated and ‘consumed’ by this powerful interlocutor.

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 153 Gómez-Peña’s multilingual performance literature would place him in the group of (migrant) writers and artists that set out to ‘weird’ English and challenge the monolingual paradigm from the margins of American culture. What is more, his performance art—solo performances, photo-performance projects, collaborative performances with his troupe, La Pocha Nostra etc.—involves taking on several ethnic identities and accents, and could be seen as partaking in the trend of ‘ethnic cool.’ Gómez-Peña’s artistic practices stage an outspoken provocation to the monolingual paradigm. His frontal confrontation with this paradigm, however, also brings him in dangerous contact with it, raising questions about the functions of multilingualism in his literature. Does Gómez-Peña’s performance literature manage to challenge the monolingual paradigm? Or are his language games and ‘ethnic cool’ personas easily consumed by Western audiences, falling prey to Western cultural voyeurism? Concerned about the effectiveness of his transgressive practices, Gómez-Peña writes towards the end of “Brownout 2”:

In this time and place, what does it mean to be “transgressive”? What does “radical behavior” mean after Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Bin Laden, Ashcroft, Cheney, six-year-old serial killers in the heartland of America, [. . .] an AA theological cowboy running the so-called “free world” as if he were directing a spaghetti Western in the wrong set? Conan the Barbarian running for governor in California? Coño, I ask myself rhetorically, what else is there to “transgress”? Who can artists shock, challenge, enlighten? (214)

Even though a strong opposition between transgressive art and mainstream culture permeates his writings, in the above lines this dichotomy is questioned, without, however, being erased. A seemingly surprising reversal takes place: mainstream culture threatens to dull the transgressive force of art not by censoring it or sucking it into a monocultural vortex, but by being so transgressive itself that it leaves no borders for art to cross. Significantly, these lines also suggest that ‘transgressive’ is not an absolute quality inherent in a work. Rather, it is a performative function of the work in a shifting context, without guarantees as to its outcome. Gómez-Peña’s lines constitute a critique of the absurdities of mainstream U.S. culture that are often naturalized and go unnoticed. There is a cloaked violence in these transgressions by the mainstream (‘transgression’ here acquires a negative valuation), which Gómez-Peña addresses

154 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170 by pinpointing their abnormality. But his indictment of the “mainstream bizarre” (214) also betrays his mindfulness to the performativity of his own artistic practices and writings, the transgressive function of which cannot be seen as self-evident. Their transgressive force does not only emanate from the artist’s intentions, but also from their functioning in the context in which they are performed. If this context is already bizarre, artists are faced with the challenge of renewing their practices and establishing their difference in a context in which the actual meaning of ‘transgression’ is anything but stable. Thus, the above lines from “Brownout 2” add another dimension to the predicament of migrant writers writing from the margins of U.S. culture: In “the age of the mainstream bizarre” (214), how can the ‘outlaw writer’ be truly transgressive? Although Gómez-Peña claims to be asking this question rhetorically, I take it as a real question to pose as I probe the operations of his multilingual practices and language games. How does his performance literature try to ‘outweird’ the mainstream bizarre without becoming part of it?

Barbarizing the Mainstream in “Brownout 2” “Brownout 2” is a performance script Gómez-Peña started working on as he was gradually recovering from a severe health crisis in 2000. The script contains pieces in various styles and languages and is structured as a series of daily journal entries, interrupted by diverse separately titled pieces (“Mojado Existentialism,” “Dwelling in Unnecessary Wounds,” “Postscript: Millennial Doubts” etc.). All these pieces comprise a “sort of hospital-bed soliloquy, a meditation from the edge of death on the meaning of life and the possibilities of art” (“Brownout 2” 176). Written as a performance script by an artist confronted at that moment with the possibility of losing his main medium of expression—his body—“Brownout 2” underscores the indissoluble link between language and the body. Body and language almost turn into interchangeable entities, as when the body is imagined as an open book, hosting Gómez-Peña’s Spanglish poetry:

My tattoos are like scripted words as opposed to my scars which are like unscripted sentences in the open book of my body. My forty-six-year-old brown body, densely covered with Spanglish poetry unedited still . . .” (183)

The intimate link between body and language is here suggested both metonymically, as a relation of contiguity (the language tattooed on the body) and metaphorically, as

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 155 a relation between interchangeable entities (the body as book). This combination of metaphorical and metonymic relations, through which language is both inscribed on, and stands for, the body, signals the need of the writer’s ailing body to transpose its creativity into language: language is remolded, dissected, and transformed, turning into the carrier of a creativity that the writer’s body vicariously experiences but cannot fully carry out at the moment of writing. The body-language link is also projected in conceptions of language as a dynamic organism—a body that transforms and evolves, generating new acoustic, semantic, and aesthetic possibilities. In the beginning of the piece “Inner Infomercial (en Gringoñol)” we read (181):

I love . . . Galapagos - I said [Mispronounce] I mean, Galapenos, digo, Gala-pennis Jala-penis Jala-pedos Jala-peños perdoun

Following the tagging of the piece as an infomercial, the first line seems to mimic the commercial language of telemarketing, advertising the Galapagos islands, a popular tourist destination. The following lines, however, turn into a linguistic experiment that explores the acoustic correspondences of “Galapagos” with other words and sounds when one mispronounces, misspells or dissects it. The word is recast through a series of barbarisms. First, we encounter the non-existent word “Galapenos,” which evokes jalapeño peppers, which also appear correctly spelled but cut in two in the seventh line. “Jalapeños,” both acoustically and perhaps also through their shape, evoke “penis” (in English) but also the Spanish ‘pedos’ (farts) and “peños” (teeth). The proximity of “peños” and “penis” also raise the fear of castration of the (English) “penis” by those Spanish teeth. The acoustic associations between these Spanish and English words shift our perception of the proper name “Galapagos” and the associations it evokes. They also implicitly comment on, and subvert, the formulaic language of an infomercial, suggesting that advertising does not just describe, but shapes realities and false needs for consumers. Besides its rich acoustic dimensions, the choice for “Galapagos” for this linguistic game also activates Darwinian connotations. It was Darwin’s close study of the variety of endemic species in the Galapagos Islands that led to the inception of his theory of evolution based on natural selection. In these lines, the word “Galapagos” evolves into a different ‘linguistic creature’ with its teeth, penis, bodily functions (farts) etc.—and it is, notably, a hybrid creature, made up of Spanish and English words and sounds. If, as Robert Young notes, in nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific

156 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170 theories hybrid organisms were considered weaker or infertile and likely to eventually die out (Colonial Desire 6–19), these lines debunk such theories by giving form to a linguistically hybrid creature strong enough to unsettle the Anglo-American monolingual paradigm from within: by drawing attention to the intrinsically hybrid nature of English itself, containing foreign sounds, words, and allusions within its structures. The word “inner” in the title of this piece points perhaps to this process of internal ‘barbarization’ of the English language. ‘Pure’ English does not exist, as all languages are hybrid organisms. “Spanglish poltergeist, y que?” we read in the last line of this piece. A restless bilingual poltergeist animates Gómez-Peña’s performance literature, unsettling the certainties of the English language and projecting it as a dynamic multilingual organism. Even though this piece (including the lines that follow) is written in Spanglish (containing English, Spanish, and made-up words), Gómez-Peña insists in the title that it is an infomercial “en Gringoñol”: a word through which the English language is viewed from an outsider’s perspective. ‘Gringo’ is a derogatory term for ‘American’ in Spanish slang used by Mexicans and other Latin Americans. The term “Gringoñol” in this piece has a double function. First, it purposefully (misre)presents a bilingual piece as written in a single language (“en Gringoñol”), thereby indicating the hybrid nature of English itself, as already containing its own internal foreignisms. The second function of the term “Gringoñol” lies in decentering English by renaming it from a foreign perspective: that of Latin American communities in the U.S. The worldwide hegemony of English establishes this language as the center, to which other languages often relate in an unequal center-periphery relation. The term “Gringoñol” aims at provincializing the U.S. and the English language by presenting English as simply another language, seen through the eyes of its polylingual margins. Gómez-Peña’s language games in “Brownout 2” aim at disturbing the power relations between English and other languages, without, however, suggesting that the dominance of English would simply disappear just by mixing different languages. As the text stages the correspondences and tensions among languages, it explores their functions in relation to the monolingual paradigm. The piece “Lección de Geografia Finisecular en Español Para Anglosajones Monolingues,” is a case in point. As the title announces, it is a lesson in turn-of-the-century geography in Spanish for Anglosaxon monolingual speakers. It follows that this lesson in Spanish is not meant to be understood by them. Already from the title, monolingual speakers of English are faced with their limitations. What follows is a listing of Spanish toponyms of cities, states, and countries around the world, presented in pairs and equated through the word “es” (Spanish for “is”), as in the following examples:

México es California Marruecos es Madrid

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 157 Pakistan es Londres [. . .] Turquia es Frankfurt Puerto Rico es Nueva York Centroamérica es Los Angeles

The list goes on. The use of Spanish names in this alternative world map resists the dominance of English as the lingua franca in a globalized world. The resemblance of the Spanish with the English names, however, reminds us not only that Spanish and English have common roots (primarily Latin), but also that Spanish itself is not a marginal language. As the language of a former colonial power, it also enjoys global expansion and shares the discursive structures of other major colonial languages. The challenge to the contemporary hegemony of English comes from the strange equations in these lines. Mexico is California, Pakistan is London or Turkey is Frankfurt because of the increasing presence of diasporic communities and their cultures in all these major cities of the Western world. The border-crossings as a result of globalization lead to Western centers being invaded by ‘barbarians’ from across the borders. As these ‘barbarians’ occupy Western metropolises and barbarize English (or other Western languages), they are perceived as threatening to the monolingual paradigm. The final lines of this piece address the postulated monolingual audience of the piece in their own language: Your house is also mine Your language mine as well And your heart will be ours one of these nights. The threatening tone of these lines teases out and parodies the Western fear of invasion by these migrant ‘barbarians’ from beyond the borders.

The Functions of Errors and Misunderstandings Multilingual forms in “Brownout 2” assume various, sometimes even contradictory functions. In some of the examples discussed above, multilingual practices aim at provincializing the English language, disorienting monolingual speakers, exposing the limitations of their vision or confounding the idea of absolute translatability. Elsewhere, the mixing of linguistic codes reveals unexpected associations between languages. These emerge through barbarisms in the form of misspellings, mistranslations or misunderstandings. The piece “Border Love/Linguistic Misunderstandings” explores hidden correspondences between words which the ‘I’ used to confuse with each other, due to his professed poor command of English. We read: If only I had a decent command of English when I got involved with my past lovers.

158 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170

If only I had known the difference between jerk around and jerk off, between napkin and kidnap, between prospect and suspect, [. . .] between desire and redemption between political correctness and personal computers between us and US between humanity and mankind We’ve only got one word for both in Spanish: Humanidad, perdóname por ser tan bi-rollero (196)

The reader is invited to compare these linguistic pairs in order to determine what motivated their interchangeability in the speaker’s language in the past. In some cases, this common ground lies only in the sound (“napkin” is a near anagram of “kidnap”). In other cases, the assonance and alliteration between semantically unre- lated words urges us to think about hidden semantic connections: with “prospect and suspect” one senses a clash between the migrants’ dreams about their future prospects in the new land and the discrimination they end up facing in a host culture that treats them as “suspects.” This association is supported by “us and US,” where the acoustic identity of the two words is contradicted by the implied processes of exclusion in American society (US), in which the “us” is constructed based on the expulsion or marginalization of others—in this case, the Mexican migrant with the poor command of English. In other cases, however, there is no clear criterion that motivates the misunderstandings. What makes one confuse “desire” with “redemption,” where no acoustic link is traceable? And even though “political correctness” and “personal computers” form the same acronym (p. c.), in which ways are personal computers vehicles of political correctness? With the synonyms “humanity and mankind” the difference lies in the patriarchal connotations of the latter. The reminder that there is only one word in Spanish (“Humanidad”) underlines the fact that different languages entail different understandings of the world, while it also accentuates the interconnectedness of languages, since “humanidad” has the same Latin roots as “humanity.” The title of the piece seems to link “love” with “misunderstandings”: the migrant’s arrival in, and first encounter with, the new land is implicitly likened with the antici- pation of a new love affair, which goes hand in hand with a series of misunderstandings. “If only I had known the difference” implies that the speaking ‘I’ does know the difference now. The “misunderstandings” have thus cleared up now that this migrant has gained experience both in English and in U.S. society. But at what cost? The

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 159 cost may be the loss of the initial feeling of being in love, which sprang from his excitement and hope for a life full of prospects in a new land. The lovers the ‘I’ evokes in this poetic text belong to the past. And the anticipated love affair with the new land has eventually given its place to disillusionment, as the prospect of hospitality turned into hostility. The continuation of this piece confronts us with the violent ending of the illusions and misunderstandings that accompany the beginning of this love affair, as his new country makes clear to the migrant that he is no longer welcome:

But if only I had known the gringo implications of “mi casa es su casa” meaning, y tu pais también or “Hasta la vista babe,” meaning, die fuckin’ meskin Or vaya con dios vatous locous, meaning, deported back to the origins. (197)

The repetition of the verb “meaning” in these lines, which announces the consecutive explications of the meaning of the previous line, creates a chain of interrelated sentences that signal the migrant’s current awareness of the racist discourse of the host country. There is no misunderstanding any more: the U.S. wants the Mexican migrant to go back where he came from. With “die fuckin’ meskin,” the prospect of a loving relationship turns into abuse and rejection.8 The conditional with which the mis- understood words and phrases in this piece are introduced (“If only . . .”) yields an elliptical sentence, which is never completed, as the main sentence is missing. What would have happened “if only” the migrant had the knowledge then that he has now? Even though no answer is given, it is suggested that those misunderstandings, and the linguistic barbarisms they generate, are indispensable elements in a learning process, and not simply mistakes that the subject would have corrected if he had the chance to go back in time. Misunderstandings are cast here not only as ingredients of an exciting love affair, but also as promises for a different future from the one the migrant meets, as they leave room for alternative, surprising meanings and associations. The production of clear-cut meanings (“meaning . . . meaning . . . meaning”), as we see it in the second part where misunderstandings end, is associated with violence and exclusion. The exclusionary and discriminatory practices “Brownout 2” addresses are not at odds with U.S. multiculturalism, but the very ingredients in which it is grounded. U.S. culture, Gayatri Spivak writes, is “the dream of interculturalism: benevolent, hierarchized, malevolent, in principle homogenizing, but culturally heterogeneous” (“Acting Bits” 785). As this culture establishes its global dominance, however, one forgets perhaps that the word “American” accompanies every manifestation of U.S.

160 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170 interculturalism—as in “African-American,” “Mexican-American,” “Muslim-American” (885). Thus, in U.S. interculturalism there is still an overarching cultural authority, a hegemonic “monoculture” as Gómez-Peña calls it, to which other cultural forces are subordinated. This hierarchized interculturalism tolerates minor identities and (sub)cultures as long as they comply with the homogenizing principles of U.S. culture and with a monolingual paradigm that acknowledges English as the language of communication. The polylingualism in “Brownout 2” unravels against the backdrop of monolingualism in U.S. society:

It’s scary, but we are all writing this text as I speak. I spik, you gringo . . . no I speak, you listen. Voice change; special effect # 187: [Mute language for 30 secs] (203)

Instead of a monologue by an excluded other, the ‘I’ perceives this text as collective and dialogically written. The ‘we’ writing the text involves all groups that make up U.S. society, including “gringos” and “spiks.” The word “spik” is offensive slang for Mexican, suggesting a Mexican’s poor and erroneous command of English. This word is contrasted with “gringo,” a derogatory term for Americans.9 Both words tag these two groups from another’s perspective: American and Mexican/Latino respectively. The inclusion of both perspectives projects the text’s polyphonic character. But there is also an unequal power relation between the two groups, as the “spiks” find themselves in a marginal position in U.S. society. This power relation is unsettled in the text. The parallelism between the third and fourth line emphasizes the reversal of their usual roles: despite the “spik’s” erroneous and goofy English, the “spik” is the one that “speaks” in this text, while the “gringo” has to listen. Nevertheless, what follows is not speech, but “mute language for 30 secs.” The “gringo” is called to listen to the silence of the Mexican. The 30-second silence is identified as “mute language” in order to counter its perception as lack of speech, and thereby invests it with agency.10 This mute language performatively enacts the muting of the other’s speech by a dominant language that appropriates difference.

Towards a Polylingual Paradigm? Against the backdrop of the monolingual paradigm, “Brownout 2” envisions a polylingual paradigm in the form of a hybrid language that accommodates difference without suppressing it. This takes the form of a language comprising diverse languages without hierarchical ordering and without a recognizable center. The piece “Poema en Robo-Esperanto” offers us a taste of this language, described in the piece itself as “a postcolonial robo-baroque Esperanto/composed of five European languages/plus

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 161 Latin, Nahuatl, and Chicano slang.” What would the mix of these eight languages sound like? Here is a sample:

I wonder que would happen if, wenn du open your computero, finde eine message in esta lingua poluta et dissoluta? No est Englando, no est Germano, nor Espano; tampoco Franzo; not even Spanglish ese. No est keine known lingua, aber du understande! Coño, merde, wat happen zo! habe your computero eine virus catched? Habe du sudden BSE gedeveloped o que? No, du esse lezendo la neue europese lingua de Europanto uno cyber-melangio mas avec la Chicanoization del mondo (189)

For a speaker with basic knowledge of the widely spread European languages used in this excerpt, this linguistic mix is fairly comprehensible: “No est keine known lingua aber du understande” (my emphasis). Indeed, we do. But how come we “understande”? The intelligibility of these lines is somewhat at odds with the confusion that Gómez-Peña’s multilingual games usually yield. This “neue europese lingua” is “poluta et dissoluta,” but its comprehensibility can be attributed to the hegemonic character of all these European languages (English, French, Spanish, German), most of which were globally disseminated as languages of colonial powers. The hybrid yet comprehensible character of this “europese lingua” suggests that an Esperanto combining all colonial European languages could yield absolute translatability because they all share comparable hegemonic structures. Other minor, ‘barbarian’ languages are excluded from this mixed language of power. They do, however, interfere in the second part of this piece, in which the language gets more complex and a lot less comprehensible. This second part relocates us from Europe and the West to the Americas, and from a ‘light’ European multilingualism to a postcolonial Esperanto that performs the true “Chicanoization del mondo.” The audience is warned before this second Esperanto is launched: “In the Americas, / things are even more complicated / regarding l’identité.” As we read in the stage directions, the speaker—loyal to his practice of switching identities and accents throughout “Brownout 2”—now switches from a “Gringoñol” to a “Vato loco” accent.11 The language of this part is less accessible to a Western audience, as it involves Chicano slang and minor languages like Nahuatl, a language with a long history, which is now

162 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170 spoken in scattered communities in Mexico, overshadowed by Spanish after the colonial conquest of Mexico.12 These lesser known languages (from a Western perspective), as well as the neologisms and other barbarisms with which this piece is fraught, complicate the idea of absolute translatability that the European Esperanto advocated, decentering the reader again. This postcolonial Esperanto requires a complex process of decipher- ing, which does not yield fully translatable meanings. It is an Esperanto for advanced learners—one in which dominant and minor languages interact on an equal level. As meaning-production becomes slightly protracted (or suspended) in this part, language acquires an intense affective dimension: foreign words (to some readers) are experienced, heard, and felt through their differences but also correspondences with familiar words (“Toyota,” for example, turns into the Nahuatl neologism “toyó-tl”; 190). Experiencing linguistic forms before trying to invest them with meaning renews and transforms our experience of English itself. The foregrounding of the experiential dimension of language here is attuned with the thematic return of the body-language association. The speaker’s body is recon- structed through multiple languages and neologisms, as in the following:

tlacanácatl el mio il corpo pecaminoso hurts un chingo especially my feet ikchitl pero también otras partes del cuerpo

If language is formative of subjects and their bodies, then perhaps this weird, not (fully) translatable and yet affective linguistic mix forms the language that is best suited to ‘produce’ the speaker’s sinful (“pecaminoso”) body in pain. The frag- mented, contaminated language of this “Poema en Robo-Esperanto” gives expression to the speaker’s multiple belongings and identities. All these languages and affiliations, however, do not dissolve into a meaningless play of signs: we are reminded that they are grounded in the singular body of a human being, in which they find a kind of unity in their diversity. The speaking subject in “Brownout 2” constantly switches accents, languages, and personas, projecting his conflicting identities. The stage directions indicate this switching too. They announce, for example, that the following lines will be uttered “in a nasal voice,” in “Donald Duck speak,” in “Indian tongues,” “chanting,” in “Drunk- like/misspelled gringoñol,” or in “fake Nahuatl” (180–182, 187, 208), or that the performer puts on a “stetson hat” or a “bandana and dark glasses” or that he will “take off or put on glasses every time [he] shift[s] voices” (195, 198, 200). Consequently, a contradiction permeates “Brownout 2” between a seemingly

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 163 nonchalant process of ‘identity hopping’ and the suggestion of an integral link between body, language, and identity. In fact, I argue, the subject needs to sustain this contradiction, because its two constituent parts function as each other’s control-mechanisms: the body-language bond produces a unified subject, without, however, lapsing into essentialism, because the multiple personas and affiliations of the speaking ‘I’ preclude the reconstruction of an original ‘true’ or ‘pure’ identity, language, and culture behind all accents and masks. Conversely, the ‘I’ of multiple allegiances, languages, and identities endorses the malleability and constructed- ness of language in order to remold reality, without, however, lapsing into an uncritical celebration of multilingualism. The body-language homology constitutes an anchor to which all centrifugal and conflicting forces are drawn. Moreover, this homology evokes the pain involved in embodying several languages or identities simultaneously—the pain of the severing of the ‘I’ from an irretrievable origin, but also the fatigue and physical deterioration when language- and identity-switching take their toll on this nomadic performer’s body. The languages and identities parading in “Brownout 2” are not interweaved by a disembodied ‘I’ that stands above them and plays a game of mixing and (mis)matching, but by an ‘I’ that physically experiences all the mutations and identity transformations he performs in this polyphonic text, undergoing physical pain just as much as the thrill of poiesis.

Multiple Selves and Consistent Inconsistencies The speaking subject in “Brownout 2” becomes an embodiment of contradictions. When a nurse asks him “Perdone señor, what did you say you were?,” he replies:

A contra-dic-tion in terms—respondo A straight transsexual—elaboro a wrestler without a ring a rocker without a band a cyber-pirate with “access” a theorist without methodology a shaman expelled from his tribe a poet who writes his metaphors on his body (207–208)

These personas—the “seven locos” as Gomez-Peña calls them—are marked either by contradictions (e.g., “a straight transsexual”) or the absence of a key element that prevents the subject from achieving self-identity (e.g., a rocker lacking a band or a shaman without a tribe). The emphasis on contradiction and incompleteness as the backbones of the subject’s mode of being, and the resulting deferral of presence, completeness, and finality, puts the subject’s identities under erasure. Each persona simultaneously says ‘I am’ and ‘I am not.’

164 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170

Related to this questioning of self-identity and presence is the ambivalence, stuttering, and self-doubting that typifies the language in “Brownout 2.” The ‘I’ may sometimes appear as a shaman, but he also identifies himself as “El phony Shaman” (208), thereby undermining his own preaching and preventing it from crystallizing into dogmas. Many statements that may appear authoritative are either contradicted or retracted. The order “Delete!” often follows the performer’s utterances, especially when these seem to be invested with authority. After chanting three lines in Latin, for example, the ‘I’ feels the need to dispel the impression of religious authority:

Ay! qué Catholic I sound! Delete! (183)

Significantly, despite the speech act that orders the deletion of the previous lines, these lines do remain registered on the page. The ‘I’ simultaneously assumes and denounces authority, without, however, erasing its traces. He thereby challenges dogmatic discourses, like that of Catholicism, but simultaneously employs them as tools in his syncretic language, after he strips them of their absolute authority. In so doing, he encourages us to receive them with a bit less seriousness and a bit more irony. “Performance is a weird religion, I told you,” we read in “Brownout 2”: a hybrid, barbarian religion perhaps, but a religion nonetheless (208). The self-undermining practices of this phony shaman suggest that authoritative discourses could be effectively countered when one recasts them otherwise, as bits and pieces of an eclectic anti-authoritative language. Similarly, when the poet writes

“Enough pretentious language poetry GP” -Myself#12 scolds Myself #7 he questions the value of the preceding polylingual piece without refuting it. Perhaps the only consistent ‘truth’ of the text is its commitment to contradictions. Consequently, the ‘I’ creates a poetic space in which commitment and affective engagement becomes possible without turning into dogmatic allegiance, and, conversely, self-questioning takes place without turning into free-floating relativism. The antidogmatic commitment that emerges from “Brownout 2” belongs to a voice seeking, perhaps, a third space: an alternative position in-between a paralyzing relativism (often—though not always rightfully—ascribed to postmodernism) and an exclusionary public rhetoric in the West that, especially since ‘9/11,’ tends to divide the world into forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and perceives difference as threatening.13 This alternative space does not fully dismiss the discourses that sustain the monolingual paradigm and mainstream culture in the U.S. It rather ‘barbarizes’ them and refash- ions them as ingredients of a new language, beyond the exclusionary logic of binary oppositions.

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 165 As a “theorist without methodology” Gomez-Peña proposes a theorizing committed to barbarisms, understood here as the inconsistencies of an ambivalent but engaging voice. In another text entitled “Activist Commandments of the New Millennium,” Gomez-Peña writes: “Be an ‘outsider/insider,’ a temporary member of multiple communities” (Dangerous Border Crossers 93). This provisional belonging to different communities counters the blind spots of being confined within a single framework. In the spirit of self-critique, even in prescriptive texts Gomez-Peña makes sure to insert self-undermining barbarisms. Thus, among his “Activist Commandments of the New Millennium,” we read: “question everything, coño, even these commandments” (93). The manifesto of his troupe “Pocha Nostra” is described as “an ever evolving manifesto” (Ethno-Techno 78), while the ending of “Brownout 2” is labeled as a “temporary end,” resisting finality. I contend that contradictions and self-doubting form a strategy that prevents Gomez-Peña’s poetic texts from being easily domesticated, categorized, and com- modified within American culture. Inconsistencies, retractions, identity-switching, all confound the idea of a single (ethnic, sexual, religious, ideological) identity and deter the market from classifying Gomez-Peña as an exponent of a specific dogma, ethnic group, language etc. Destabilizing the ground on which he stands is a means of avoiding the objectification of his artistic practices by readers and audiences. The diversity of writing styles in “Brownout 2” is also telling in this respect: next to polylingual pieces, for example, there are poetic texts written only in English or Spanish. Although he can harness different languages, he does not fully commit to any idiom or style—not even a multilingual one.

Multilingualism for Sale: Beware of the Side Effects “Hell, I am a walking contradiction,” Gomez-Peña calls out to his audience in “Brownout 2,” “and so are you . . .” (179). Gomez-Peña’s performance literature accommodates dissensus, misunderstandings, contradictions not as problems to be resolved, but in order to counter false expectations of congruity in culture, interrogate the premises of ‘proper’ speech and determine which voices are perceived as ‘barbarian noise’ within an American monolingual paradigm. According to Chantal Mouffe, in our post-political era the universalization and monopoly of liberalism has led to the establishment of a model of “consensus democracy,” leading to the banishment of real conflict from political life. This development followed from the end of the Cold War and the fall of Eastern-bloc communism after 1989, which left neoliberalism unchallenged. As a result, Western politics celebrated the disappearance of antagonism in a “post-politics” without a “they” (31). This model of “consensus democracy” is typified by an anxiety for impropriety or incomprehensibility, seen as “something to be shut down in the name of communication and consensus” (Bouchard 12). The consensus model eliminates

166 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170 inconsistent, improper elements—the barbarisms—that block communication (11). Viewed in this context, the monolingual paradigm shares the tendency of the consensus model to domesticate or exclude improper, conflictual elements. If monolingualism is based on consensus among a group of users, Gomez-Peña’s multilingual texts confuse the premises of this consensus by staging encounters between ‘agree- ments’ from several linguistic registers. These encounters expose the exclusionary premises of the consensus in which the monolingual paradigm is grounded: the fact that it bans uncategorizable, untranslatable difference. His text forms an eclectic language that ‘cannibalizes’ various linguistic codes and discourses, making space for dissenting voices and disenfranchised subjectivities, excluded from a ‘monoculture’ of consensus. The resistance of the margins in Gomez-Peña’s literature is not immune to appro- priations by the dominant culture. As Huggan’s study has shown, the projection and promotion of marginality as a profitable intellectual commodity often leads to the commodification and exoticization of difference and the margins. The market is able to anticipate and neutralize attempts to resist it: “Capitalism has [. . .] managed to commodify resistance to itself to the extent that it also organizes and increases the production of that resistance” (Young, Postcolonialism 137). In this context, do Gomez-Peña’s performance practices ‘sell’ an exotic experience of occupying the margins and resisting the mainstream? Absolutely. I argue, however, that the way this ‘transaction’ takes place in his work foregrounds the commodification and exoticization of difference in order to make it an issue. Gomez-Peña is conscious of the danger of his resistance being consumed by the capitalist market as a product the system can domesticate. Although there is no guaranteed strategy for evading this danger, his provocative gesture lies in blatantly projecting his resistance as a sellable product, in order to make the commodification of otherness visible and thus, hopefully, contestable. All the eccentric personas (“existentialist mojado,” “El Narco Mariachi,” a “radical geography professor,” “sleazy Latino TV announcer,” “El phony Shaman,” politician, wrestler, cyber-pirate, lover, patient, “postethnic cyborg” etc.), as well as the accents and tongues parading throughout “Brownout 2” (Indian tongues, Donald Duck speak, French, Latin, Chicano, Hindu accent, religious chant, “misspelled gringoñol,” “stereotypical Vato Loco accent,” “hyper Chicano accent,” fake Nahuatl etc.) are presented as (artifi- cially) constructed products on display. This mimics the process by which the Western market commodifies ethnic, religious, or sexual identities by typecasting individuals in order to fit them within stereotypical identity groups. This neat com- partmentalization of difference ensures that manifestations of multiculturalism and multilingualism are controlled by, and subordinated to, the rules of the market. “Brownout 2” seems to play along with this process and simultaneously seeks ways to sabotage and denaturalize it. The personas staged in the text are not easily

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 167 categorizable. The ‘barbarian’ language emerging from the interpenetration of various idioms is not easily translatable. Moreover, by making it impossible for us to pin down the true identity ‘behind’ all these masks and accents, Gomez-Peña underscores the unsustainability of the idea of a pure identity or language. The language of his performance literature does not correspond to, or represent, a specific identity group. The new community fostered through this literature exceeds the Mexican and Chicano ties of the artist. The collective ‘we’ voiced through this language is a heterogeneous ‘we,’ forged by communities and individuals whose voices cannot find representation in the social order because they do not fit its tight categories. Thus, if the market tries to ‘sell’ Gomez-Peña as an exotic other, it will have a hard time finding the right niche to place him. His performance literature confounds this attempted categorization. The ‘I’ in “Brownout 2” puts all his different selves on sale and dares the Western market to consume him. But in doing so, he hopes to give it indigestion. This indigestion is caused by the barbarisms his multilingual literature generates: those indi- gestible, untranslatable, improper, inconsistent elements that constitute the stubborn remainder that resists the attempt to translate, categorize, market, and canonize him as an artist and writer. Through the self-commodification of his performance art, Gomez-Peña suggests that he plays the game, but in order to sell products with unpleasant side-effects. This mode of resistance subverts the market’s language by cannibalizing it. It resists the commodification and exoticization of difference by being one step ahead of the market: instead of shying away from its processes, he mimics and ‘barbarizes’ the discourse of Western consumerism, before giving the market the chance to market and canonize his art on its own terms. Gomez-Peña tries to prevent the market from consuming him by consuming the market first. His performance literature spits out the internal contradictions, absurdities, and irrational sides of American mainstream culture, but also the inherent multilingualism of the English language, that the monolingual paradigm tries hard to suppress.

168 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 149–170

Notes

1. This information is drawn from Gómez-Peña’s and a concern with untranslatability: for the books The New World Border (1996), Dangerous modernist, that would be “the untranslatability Border Crossers (2000), and Ethno-Techno of experience (the horrors of war)” and for (2005). the nonnative contemporary author “the untranslatability of experience (culture) and 2. The script of “Brownout 2” is included in language (foreign)” (288). Gómez-Peña’s Ethno-Techno (2005). As this essay discusses the performance script and 7. Of course, ‘ethnic’ traditions from various does not consider the actual performance, it cultures have been borrowed, copied, and centers on the functions of textual elements refashioned by the West for mass consumption rather than the totality of parameters that make in different historical periods (e.g. in fashion or up a performance (e.g., the setting, visual aids, music). The exoticization of other cultures has sounds, the musicality and intonation of the also led to their expropriation by Western performer’s voice, physical movement, gestures literature and art. Western artists and writers or interaction with the audience). Nevertheless, have systematically expropriated the artistic the performance script offers us a taste of the production of “tribal cultures” and, as Gloria performance itself due to elaborate stage Anzaldúa writes, “called it cubism, surrealism, directions (e.g., “From now on I take off or put on symbolism” (68). Some critics ground this glasses every time I shift voices;” “Bold lines tendency in the “emptiness” or “rootlessness” delivered in normal voice / others in hyper- of Western culture, due it its global expansion. Chicano accent;” “Blackout/I put on a wrestler As a result, the West seeks (and constructs) its mask;” “Shamanic tongues intertwined with spiritual roots elsewhere, in a process that words,” etc.; “Brownout 2” 198, 207, 209). entails exoticizing and expropriating artefacts and concepts from other cultures (Hawthorne 3. This delineation of the concept of barbarism 620–621, Anzaldúa 68). is drawn from, and further developed in, my study Barbarism and Its Discontents (5–6). 8. “Meskin” can be read as “Mexican” pronounced with a Southern accent. 4. In that respect, Yildiz’s approach is in tune with other recent studies that probe the 9. According to the online Urban Dictionary, persistence of borders and nationalist modes “spik” is used offensively by Americans to of belonging in a globalized and supposedly address Mexicans and generally Spanish postnational landscape. Wendy Brown’s Walled speakers who would speak bad English States (2010) on practices of walling worldwide and say “no spika da english.” today or Arjun Appadurai’s The Fear of Small (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php? Numbers (2006) on the relation between termϭspik). globalization, nationalism, and ethnic violence are two examples of the increasing critical 10. Although the difference between these two preoccupation with the tension between forms of silence is explicit in the performance globalization and the nation state as interrelated script, enacting this “mute language” in the forces. Yildiz extrapolates this tension to the actual performance would certainly pose a bigger realm of language. challenge.

5. The phrase “shareholders of monoculture” is 11. “Vato loco,” according to the online Urban used in the performance script “A Declaration of Dictionary, is a “crazy gangster” “usually of Poetic Disobedience from the New Border,” hispanic origin” (http://www.urbandictionary written in 2004 (Ethno-Techno 231). .com/define.php?termϭVato%20Loco).

6. Ch’ien notes, however, that both groups 12. “Nahuatl” refers to the Uto-Aztecan share a “self-consciousness about language” language of a group of peoples native to

The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism | 169 southern Mexico and Central America, including 2011. Much of Gomez-Peña’s recent work the Aztecs. It is estimated that is now spoken by responds critically to U.S. political rhetoric after 1.5 million people. 9/11 and the attitude of fear, hostility, and suspicion toward Arab-looking others (including 13. “Brownout 2” started being written in 2000 Latinos and other dark-skinned people). but was completed in 2003, after September 11,

Works Cited

Anzaldúa,Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. New Hawthorne, Susan. “The Politics of the Exotic: York: Kitchen Table Press, 1987. The Paradox of Cultural Voyeurism.” NWSA Journal 1.4 (1989), 617–629. Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: University Press, 2006. Marketing the Margins. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. Bouchard, Danielle. “‘A Barbarous, Rude or Debased Language’: Jargon Democracy.” Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. Abingdon & Contretemps 6 (January 2006), 11–24. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Perloff, Marjorie. “Language in Migration: New York: Zone Books, 2010. Multilingualism and Exophonic Writing in the New Poetics.” Textual Practice 24.4 (2010), 725–748. Boletsi, Maria. Barbarism and Its Discontents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Spahr, Juliana. Everybody’s Autonomy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. Ch’ien Nien-Ming, Evelyn. Weird English. Cambridge (Massachusetts) & London: Harvard Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Acting Bits/Identity University Press, 2004. Talk.” Critical Inquiry 12.4 (1992), 770–803.

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. The New World Border: Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham Century. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996. University Press, 2012.

———. Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Talks Back. New York and London: Routledge, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. 2000. ———. Postcolonialism: A Very Short ———. “Brownout 2.” Ethno-Techno: Writings on Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy. New York 2003. and London: Routledge, 2005, 175–214. Zein-Elabdin, Eiman O. “Articulating the ———. “A Declaration of Poetic Disobedience Postcolonial (With Economics In Mind).” In Eiman from the New Border.” Ethno-Techno: Writings O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela (eds.) on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy, Postcolonialism Meets Economics. London and 227–234. New York: Routledge, 2004, 21–39.

170 | Maria Boletsi Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 171–180

The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation

Yoko Tawada

Translation by Bettina Brandt from the German Original: “Die zweite Vorlesung: Schrift einer Schildkröte oder das Problem der Übersetzung.” In: Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998.

Reading the alphabet is an art. The other day I suddenly realized that I am unable to read a German book. The longer I interact with the German language, the more its complexities catch my eye. But I am used to that by now. These difficulties shed light on the body of the language and, in doing so, render it visible. In matters you have mastered, on the other hand, you tend to remain blind. For a long time I was oblivious to the fact that I can almost never completely lose myself in a German book. As a kid I ran into a book like you dash into your house. I would submerge myself in the world that it depicted and no longer see the language. To walk into a book like you set foot in a house, you have to rev up the reading so that the letters disappear. But maybe it is not about the speed with which you read but rather the mode of reading. In theory, I already know how to read phonetic script: you have to translate it quickly into the corresponding sounds inside your head; otherwise the meaning of the words will remain concealed behind the wall of letters. I am not permitted to look at the written characters but have to fly over them. After just a few minutes, however, my gaze starts to linger on each letter. My head is flooded with silence and meaning disappears. Maybe you need a vehicle to drive across the landscapes of the alphabet. The rhythm of a language, for instance, could serve as such a vehicle. It would swiftly carry me across the meadow so that the cannibalistic cacti characters cannot capture me.

The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation | 171 I enjoy listening to readings on the radio to strengthen the rhythm of the spoken language in me. How accessible this language sounds when it flows from the radio! No sooner do I turn the radio off and start looking at a page of a book however, than the speaking voice in my head, which should be carrying me across the letters, is silenced once again. At every single letter my gaze comes to a halt as if each letter were a painting. Like in a museum I drag myself from picture to picture. Words don’t remember their meanings when they become images—they transform into colors and shapes. Unfortunately, the analogy with the museum simply does not hold water. I realized namely at some point that phonetic script readers behave quite differently in a museum than I do. They seem to perceive images as phonetic script as well. That is to say, instead of contemplating a painting in silence they promptly translate it into spoken language. They are constantly asking themselves: what do I see in the painting? What is being represented? What is the concept of the artist? The visual images are thus transformed into words and form sentences. I, on the other hand, often stand in front of an image and watch language dissolving. In those moments I resemble a musician who cannot produce sounds from her instrument because she treats the musical notes as if they were calligraphy. During the first twenty-two years of my life, I read only books that were written in Japanese. While I did read shorter pieces in other languages at school, I never sub- merged myself in the reading of a foreign book. Reading Japanese means, first of all, reading from top to bottom. An athlete who has been training for the high jump requires a rather different work out to get ready for the long jump. But that was seemingly not all that difficult—at least I did not end up with sore muscles around the eyes. What was difficult was that one has to convert the text inside one’s head into spoken language. When I read Japanese, I do not convert the ideograms into phonemes. I recognize a sign as an image and understand its meaning. In this process spoken language plays no role. Therefore it does not bother me that, occasionally, I am familiar with the meaning of a sign but not with its pronunciation. Traveling from image to image I move across the text while the syllabic script creates tiny bridges that connect the ideograms with one another. Reading modern poetry out loud was long frowned upon in Japan. When you read out loud the artistic composition of the chosen characters cannot be communicated. Written language is typically also more nuanced than spoken language. The Japanese word for “aunt,” for example, is always pronounced “oba” but which ideogram you use depends on whether the aunt is younger or older than the parent of the speaker. An enormous number of ideograms already exists before we ever start to think or speak. Cultural history is inscribed in the vast corpus of these ideograms. In Japanese two writing systems come together: the Chinese pictorial script of the ideograms and the syllabic script that was developed in Japan afterwards. There are

172 | Yoko Tawada Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 171–180 in fact two types of syllabic script, but that is not relevant here. In Japanese culture, abstract appeal is attributed to the ideogram, whereas the syllabic script, supposedly, smoothly describes the flow of emotions. Many abstract notions that formerly were unknown in Japanese came over from China along with the characters. A character is delivered like a package of significance. Over time, many attempted to interpret the content of the package and to analyze it but failed, because the package cannot be opened. Because the package only consists of wrapping paper and strings, as is the case with all characters. A character always maintains its particular shape even when times change and people read or interpret it differently. Such a writing system gives you the impression that the world is made up of a determinate number of indissoluble elements. Immediately after the Second World War a debate was held about whether to abolish the Japanese script and to introduce the alphabet. There are various reasons for the retention of the Japanese script. One of them, surely, was the desire not to weaken the tradition of Confucianism. The ideogram and Confucianism are historically interlinked. The ideograms are maintained in the same way as the portraits of the ancestors are nurtured. Even in the People’s Republic of China, where all words related to Communism were translated into ideograms, care for the old tradition is also maintained. The word that is used to translate the European concept of revolution, for instance, consists of two ideograms and literally means that the heavens have changed their minds and that, as a result, a new dynasty is being installed. Thus, traditional ideas continue to live on in the word “revolution.” A sign is a curious unit that resists being taken apart. When I feel the need to use words such as bird, stone, fish or tree in a text, these should neither be understood as symbols nor as metaphors but simply as signs. A bird in a poem is similar to an Egyptian hieroglyph in the shape of a bird. That sign has nothing to do with a bird. Hieroglyphs are interesting precisely because they make clear that the pictorial aspect of the script need not necessarily have anything to do with a concrete image. Rather, the visual refers to memories. Wolfgang Schenkel once wrote an interesting article about this question entitled “Why the Egyptians needed a script.” He describes how the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphs had thus far been linked to the rise of a historical consciousness, to economic factors, and to cultic functions. Though hieroglyphics had indeed been used for all of these purposes, Schenkel asserts that in all texts of the early period they also fulfilled a very different task: they documented the legal entitlements and requests of the dead—they were used to record the name of the person to be in charge of the funeral, for instance, the person who through performance of this act would become the legitimate heir. In this respect, the glyphs resemble tombstones that remind the living of the words of the dead. In his Schrift und Gedächtnis, the edited volume that includes Schenkel’s

The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation | 173 essay, Jan Assman writes that the inscriptions on tombs can be understood as a preliminary stage of written literature in ancient Egypt.1 The body of an ideogram is not mysterious: it represents, after all, what it means. I can peacefully let my gaze rest on it. There is no danger of stumbling into nonsense, though ideograms, typically, have more than one meaning that they accumulated over time. Occasionally, it also happens that the diverse meanings of an ideogram are in contradiction or seemingly have nothing to do with each other. A sign is an image that has been painted over repeatedly. Each letter of the alphabet, on the other hand, is a mystery. What is the letter A for instance trying to tell me? The longer I look at a letter, the more mysterious and the livelier it gets: lively, because a letter is not a sign that stands for a meaning. It is neither a representation nor a pictogram. You are not allowed to look at it, but rather have to translate it into a sound and make its language material disappear. If you do not do so, the letter will become alive, jump out of the sentence and change into an animal. The letters of the alphabet are slippery fantasy animals. As single individuals they are free of meaning, and because of that, unpredictable. Words are created purely through combinations. While you can’t take an ideogram apart, all words written in alphabet can be cut up and reassembled. You can destroy the meaning of an entire sentence through this superficial, technical operation. Simply rearranging the letters in a different order creates an entirely new meaning. The art of the anagram is based on the magic of the alphabet. I often think of one of Unica Zürn’s beautiful anagram poems. In this poem there is talk about a prohibition on play, perhaps a prohibition on language play. A banter ghost (“der Spassgeist”) errs through a wet, dark garden in which letters are scattered around like rice kernels or grains of sand.

“Das Spielen der Kinder ist streng untersagt. Satt irrt der Spassgeist in den Dunkelregen, satt des Kreisens in Polunder. Geigend starrt er in den Garten. Der Spass litt den Tigerkuss. Kinder, rettet den Sprung! Sagt leis: Reis, Sand . . . Spart die Genien des Sterns! Irrstunde klagt. Das Spielen der Kinder ist streng untersagt.”2

It can be risky to send a letter into the world since the author or rather the typeset- ter cannot ever know what will become of it. You write a B that may grow into a bee but it can also turn into a bomb. That’s how unreliable, unpredictable, and surprising each letters of the alphabet is. Once I wrote a story about tree spirits. When some old trees had to be cut down to make room for a city wall the people later needed to appease the anger of the tree spirits. This story was to be included in one of my short prose collections. When I

174 | Yoko Tawada Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 171–180 received the proofs, however, I discovered a builder (“Baumeister”) on the spot where the tree spirits (“Baumgeister” ) ought to have been. Just a single letter had dashed off, the letter “g,” and in this one departure the entire text had been turned on its head. The builder, after all, was supposed to go home once the city wall was completed so that the spirits might appear who demanded a sacrifice for the cut trees. Instead, the builder stayed on and repressed the tree spirits in turn. Such typographical errors make the capriciousness of the letters seem almost uncanny. Once in a while I wonder what exactly the letters have up their sleeves. Composing texts on an alphabetic keyboard always brings out my insecurities. My typing fingers then remind me of legs that are jumping from rock to rock to get across a stream, especially when I am writing in Japanese. Sometimes rocks can be wobbly and tip over. Then the body loses its balance and falls into the water. When I write in Japanese I type with the letters of the European alphabet, which a computer program then changes into ideograms and syllabic script in a next step. My computer program has about 8500 ideograms. Still, the process of transformation does not always work out so very well. Compound words, for instance, occasionally get separated in undesirable fashion: every time I write the word “work space,” (“shigo- toba”)—“shigoto” means “work” and “ba” means space—the computer writes “shigo” (“after death”) and “toba” (bird feather) instead. So now when I think of a workspace the expression “after death bird feather,” comes to mind as well. The computer also incorrectly transposes the notion of “secret” (“kakushigoto”), that is to say the program separates it into “kaku” (to write) and “shigoto” (to work). Perhaps the computer is trying to tell me that writing produces secrets. Writing, first of all, means to assemble letters and, in the process, to create alphabetic bodies, while never giving any thought to their sheer unlimited potential to undergo metamorphoses. But it also would be a mistake to believe that I have a grip on ideograms. The myth recounting the origin of Chinese script talks about uncertainty—even illegibility. It describes how the ideogram creator was inspired by the footprints of birds. The oldest existing Chinese ideograms were scratched into tortoise shells or in animal bones. On the one hand this old script, called “kookotsumojii” (shell-bone-script), gives me confidence. Some of the old signs resemble signs that are still being used today. I even recognize the signs for “legs,” “shell,” or “ship.” On the other hand I am constantly reminded of the bird footprints. They did not originate out of human thought and always remain inaccessible. Cracks and crevices generally remind me of signs. On the surface of a scorched dirt road, on a wooden door, or on a leather bag I discover letters: H, E, L, P etc. When compared to the Chinese ideograms the alphabet gives the impression of being a script from nature waiting to be deciphered. Adam’s offspring can read these letters but they always escape meaning.

The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation | 175 Sometimes I look at my hand and try to find all the letters of the alphabet on the surface of my skin. This is palmistry in the literal sense of the word. Finding an E is simple. A G it is a little more difficult and finding an O is really tricky. If I were older and my hands more wrinkled this game would be easier to play to the end. Having a body made only out of the alphabet could well be lethal. It might easily fall apart. I once wrote a text in which the Gotthard tunnel plays an important role: “A ray of sunshine suddenly pierced through the window: ‘Airolo.’ The two “O’s” in this name seemed to be mimicking the shape of the tunnel exits from which we had just emerged. From Airolo onwards place names that contained double tunnel exits continued to surface: Lavorgo, Giornico, Bodio etc. I glanced at the map trying to decide where to go. To Como or to Locarno: in these names the letter “O” also opens up twice. All place names made me think of tunnel entrances and I understood that all I wanted to do was to return to Göschenen.”3 When I once read this text at public reading somebody from the audience pointed out that in my first name, Yoko, there are two O’s as well. I had not been aware of this until then. Upon hearing this I experienced the power that the alphabetic script had over my body that now ran the risk of turning into the letter O. Two tunnel entrances were piercing their way through the text into my body. In that instant I swiftly rewrote my name in ideograms as if this gesture were a new self-defense technique: the character for “yo” means “a leaf of a tree,” and “ko” means “child.” As if I had saved myself, I thought: you cannot liken these two notions to tunnel openings because these ideograms are, after all, filled with meaning. Even if you were to separate the “yo” from the “ko,” the meaning does not fall apart. By transforming my body into an ideogram, I avoid the risk of being taken apart by the alphabet. Letters cannot be translated. In the end it is not so much the text that escapes translation but the script. When I want to translate the meaning of a text I start by removing myself from the materiality of the letters. I read the German sentences out loud, translate the spoken content into thought images, and then try to describe these images in Japanese. The result is a communicative translation not a literary one. A literary translation ought to pursue the literal meaning obsessively until the language of the translation shatters conventional aesthetics. A literal translation should take untranslatability as a given and face it rather than eliminate it. It is rather easy to criticize a translation. Generally when the topic turns to modern poetry, both educated people and snobs love to deride the poor achievement of the translator. What typically gets overlooked is how the translation has dealt with untranslatability. Isn’t an interesting displacement, a refreshing twist or a manic shift into one’s own language rather an accomplishment of a translation? On the other hand, praising a translation is just as easy. When the language of the translation sounds natural, people who are quick to judge sing its praises. This type of translation, so the argument goes, allows the reader to forget that they are

176 | Yoko Tawada Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 171–180 reading a translation. This praise bears witness to a twisted logic however. Nobody says: this is great literature because you forget that it is literature. The appeal of a translation resides for me in providing the reader with a feel for the existence of a totally different language. The language of the translation gently palpates the surface of the text while remaining independent of its nucleus. There are some texts that appear to be translations even though they are not. Kleist occasionally wrote such texts, Kafka too. The writers possessed the ability to write translations without an original. When I initially read the following Kleist sentence I wondered whether it had not been translated from a secret language: “Herzog Wilhelm von Breysach, der, seit seiner heimlichen Verbindung mit einer Gräfin namens Katharina von Heersbruck, aus dem Hause Alt-Hüningen, die unter seinem Range zu schein sein, mit seinem Halbbruder, dem Grafen Jakob dem Rotbart, in Feindschaft lebte, kam gegen das Ende des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, da die Nacht des heiligen Remigius zu dämmern began, von einer in Worms mit dem deutschen Kaiser abgehaltenen Zusammenkunft zurück, worin er sich von diesem Herrn, in Ermangelung ehelicher Kinder, die ihm gestorben waren, die Legitimation eines mit seiner Gemahlin vor der Ehe erzeugten natürlichen Sohnes, des Grafen Philipp von Hüningen, ausgwirkt hatte.”4 “Duke Wilhelm von Breysach, who after his clandestine marriage to a lady of ostensibly inferior rank, the Countess Katharina von Heersbruck of the house of Alt- Hünigen, had been at daggers drawn with his half-brother, Count Jacob the Redbeard, returned home St. Remigius’ night toward the end of the fourteenth century from an audience with the German emperor in Worms, whose consent he had won—seeing that all his legitimate children had died—to legitimize his natural son, Count Philip von Hüningen, whom his wife had borne him before their marriage.”5 I had to invent a fictitious source language that now would allow for an infinite number of subordinate clauses. Just as in a Matryoshka doll—you could then place one sentence inside another and into that one place an even smaller one. In this kind of a language you could not walk straight ahead. Instead, the reader would, so to speak, have to open the doll, take out the next smaller doll, open that one as well in order to take out an even smaller doll. Eventually, you would be holding the smallest doll in your hands but you wouldn’t remember what the largest doll looked like. Next, in reverse order, you would put the smallest doll back into the next bigger doll until everything would be placed back inside the largest doll. But it is really even more complicated than that. Because the “Duke Wilhelm von Breysach,” grammatically speaking the largest doll, contains not just one doll but in fact two: the duchess and the half-brother. The duke and his half-brother have been foes from the time he has been having a secret relationship with the countess. According to rules of German grammar the countess is subordinated to the half-brother because she resides within in a secondary clause that has been placed into a relative clause. Her existence only

The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation | 177 functions as an indication of how long the duke has been foes with the half-brother. Still, the countess is mentioned before the half-brother. She is also more powerful than he—she enforces her rule over her son through the whole long sentence. Moreover, it is odd that both the description of the relationship between the countess and the duke and the hostility towards the half-brother are introduced with the preposition “mit.” The sentence part that mentions the procreation of the child also starts with that same preposition. This long sentence gives me the impression that with one simple stroke of the brush someone tried to paint a tree with many branches. It is hard enough to describe a simple family tree in words. You can do so only if you leave out the mother and say, for example: “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brothers.” But if secret or fictitious extra- marital love relationships are to be accounted for, as well, it becomes almost impossible to narrate these stories in a linear fashion. It is this impossibility that creates productive gaps all through the text. A short prose text by Kafka, “Zerstreutes Hinausschaun,” (absent-minded window- gazing) instantly reminded me of a translation from Old Japanese. For a long time I was not quite sure why. “Was werden wir in diesen Frühlingstagen tun, die jetzt rasch kommen? Heute früh war der Himmel grau, geht man aber jetzt zum Fenster, so ist man überrascht und lehnt die Wange an die Klinke des Fensters. Unten sieht man das Licht der freilich schon sinkenden Sonne auf dem Gesicht des kindlichen Mädchens, das so geht und sich umschaut, und zugleich sieht man den Schatten des Mannes darauf, der hinter ihm rascher kommt. Dann ist der Mann schon vorübergegangen und das Gesicht des Kindes ist ganz hell.”6 “What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement. The sun is already setting but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her. And then the man has passed by and the little girl’s face is quite bright.”7 My eyes roamed from word to word just like I stroll from one painting to the next in a museum: “spring,” “fast,” “sun,” “to look about,” “shadow,” “face,” and “light.” Suddenly I realized why this text gave me the impression of being a translation from a different script: the concepts “Frühling (spring),” “rasch (fast),” “Sonne (sun)” “umschauen (to look about),” “Schatten (shadow,)” “Gesicht (face),” and “hell (bright,)” when written in Chinese ideograms, all include the sign for “sun.” This list of words made me realize for the first time that in the middle of the sign for face (pronounced either as “omo,” “omote,” “men” or “tsura,”) the sign of the sun is to be seen. You see the sunlight on the girl’s face. I am not at all implying that Kafka

178 | Yoko Tawada Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 171–180 knew of this ideogram. Rather, I suspect that a literary text can later find the original from which it might have been translated. Typically, there are in fact several original texts that can be found or invented. Even the beetle in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” might be the translation of a sign, perhaps of a certain Egyptian hieroglyph in the shape of a scarab beetle. A standard question about languages and dreams goes as follows: “in which language do you dream?” There is nothing special, however, about talking in a foreign language in one’s dreams. The spoken word is quick to slip into and leap out of the mouth. You do not need to fully incorporate a language to make use of it in your dream. Script, on the other hand, takes a very long time before it finally dwells in the body. It resides deeper, is almost unreadable. Once I had a dream in which I saw people with two dots on their foreheads. Those dots must have been the Umlauts because I knew right away that my dream was taking place in Germany. The Japanese syllabic script has those two dots as well. They are situated at the shoulders of the letters, however, not above the eyes. Certain landscapes also tend to recur in my dreams. A hilly landscape full of rubble, for instance, which I have had to cross in many dreams. Usually it was very hot there and I tended to feel bummed out. Rubble and trouble are a bummer in the summer. In the middle of these last two words, there are a couple of round hills made up of double “m’s.” This is how a dream that I have dreamt in German might look like. Therefore I would like to rephrase the question about language and dreams posed to a dreaming foreigner. I would ask: “in which script do you dream?”

The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation | 179 Notes

1. Assmann, Aleida and Jan, and Christian 5. Heinrich von Kleist “The Duel,” In: The Hardmeier, eds. Schrift und Gedächtnis. Marquise of O and other stories. Translated by Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation, Martin Greenberg. New York: Frederick Ungar Munich: 1983. Publishing, 1982, p. 287.

2. Unica Zürn, Gesamtausgabe, Berlin 1988. 6. Franz Kafka, Erzählungen, Frankfurt: Fischer, Vol. 1, p. 9. 1996, p. 15.

3. Yoko Tawada, Talisman, Tübingen: Claudia 7. Franz Kafka, “Absent-minded Window- Gehrke Verlag, 1996, p. 98. gazing,” In: The Penal Colony. Stories and Short Pieces. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. 4. Heinrich von Kleist, “Der Zweikampf,” New York: Shocken Books, 1976, p. 33. Sämmtliche Werke, Munich, 1984, Vol. 2, p. 227.

180 | Yoko Tawada Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 181–194

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics

Bettina Brandt

Yoko Tawada, the name with which the author signs her German writings, and , the name with which she signs her Japanese work, are, of course, one and the same writer. Few, however, are able to read her entire oeuvre. Not only because bilingual German-Japanese scholars are a minority in the ever growing global community of Tawada scholarship, or simply because it is hard to keep up with the prolific writer who, so far, has put out more than forty-four titles consisting of poems, novels, short stories, dream texts, plays for the radio and theater plays, as well as scholarly essays in German and in Japanese. Instead, the avant-garde author strategically blocks the reader’s attempt from understanding her work as a whole, both on the micro level—that is to say on the level of the individual text—and on the macro level, or on the level of the of her multilingual Gesamtwerk. Through experimental writing techniques, many of which are linked to formal translation practices both within one text and between different texts, in the same, or in two or more languages, Tawada’s poetics point to the reverberation and figurations of languages. These translation-related experimental writing techniques include, for instance, imaginative forms of literal and interlinear translation, translations featuring certain characteristics of computer translation, surface translations, strategic non-translations, and self-translations within one work, from German works into Japanese or vice versa. In most writings, Tawada has recourse to all of the above-mentioned techniques at once. Let us look more closely at these translation techniques. In Tawada’s fiction, literal and interlinear translation can appear in text passages that are marked as dream fragments for instance. How this type of translation functions, and which language (natural or not) serves as the original from which the literal or interlinear translation is

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics | 181 derived, varies in each particular dream fragment since those decisions often depend on such factors as the gendered geopolitical setting of the text in question. The imaginative labor performed by literal and interlinear translation in Tawada’s work, differs, in other words, from text to text. This is, of course, true for the other forms of translation that the author uses as poetic techniques as well. Interlinear translation appears, for example, in “Bioskoop der Nacht” (“Bioscope of the Night”), a narrative that revolves around a Japanese traveler who resides in Germany, but is now visiting post-apartheid South Africa, because she wants to learn Afrikaans, the language in which, somewhat to her surprise, she has been told that she dreams. This complex text contains, for instance, three particularly odd language “exercises” (“Übungen” 82, 83, 91) that are visually set off from the rest of the prose narrative through spacing and indentations.1 These exercises are made up of German sentences modeled on dialogues found in phrase books, favored by globe trotters who do not speak the language of their travel destination, but are composed following particular linguistic features of Afrikaans including, for instance, the use of the double negative. This technique then produces sentences in an ‘Afrikaanized German’ such as: “müssen-nicht besorgt sein nicht,” or “must not be worried not,” both to a poetic and to a political effect (82). Another text in which Tawada makes use of interlinear translation is, for example, “Arufabetto no kizuguchi” (“the wound in the alphabet”), a text written in Japanese but whose sentences, as Matsunaga explained, were composed according to the rules of German syntax. This invisible underlying structure leaves an uncommonly poetic impression on this Japanese reader.2 Tawada uses the poetic practice of surface translation to create, for instance, bilingual poems such as the unpublished poem / Kot Wahr which is written in the tradition of Ernst Jandl’s translation of William Wordsworth “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold / a Rainbow in the Sky” or “mei hart lieb zapfen eibe hold / er renn bohr in sees kais,” a translation in which the Austrian poet separated form from content carrying over the phonetic aspect of the English language only, a type of translation which he called “surface translation.” The first two Japanese lines of Tawada’s poem read: . Pronounced as “kotoba/kuchi no naka kara” the German “surface translation” reads: “Kot wahr / Kutsche Nagel Kakoa Rad.” A conventional English translation of the two Japanese lines would have read “a word/from within the mouth” and the German sentences would have been rendered as “faeces true / carriage nail cocoa wheel.” This kind of linguistic estrangement, in which only the original sound has been carried (though only in refracted manner of course) while the original content remained behind, is part of the twentieth-century experimental poetic tradition which produced a new ear for the utopian, the unexpected, and the humor inherent in language as such. When Yoko Tawada performs “ / Kot Wahr” she is joined by another reader and the two then read in alternating voices and languages. A recording of a multilingual poetry reading that took place in February of

182 | Bettina Brandt Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 181–194

2006, which also includes a reading of this particular poem that Tawada and I performed together in Tuscon, can be found in VOCA, the digital archive of the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona where it has been stored (“Überseezungen”). Translations based on selection processes typical for computer translation, as Genz suggests, structure several of the narratives included in Überseezungen, for instance “Zungentanz” (“Tongue Dance”), “Der Apfel und die Nase” (“The Apple and the Nose”), or “Wörter, die in der Asche schlafen” (“Words Asleep in the Ashes”) while to a certain degree also determining the organization of the collection as a whole (see Genz).3 Strategically inserted non-translation occurs in Tawada’s writings from the start. These range from the inclusion of select untranslated foreign words or graphic characters in short essays to the scattering of two-hundred-and-seventy-five kanji throughout a German text (the novel Schwager in Bordeaux, 2008) and to an early play such as “Till.” In this last case, two languages and two scripts face each other throughout, but, translation is provided only for the narrated parts of the play which, as Tawada explains, are to be understood as backdrop images to be freely adapted (“Bilder, die man frei bearbeiten kann,” 43) The German and Japanese dialogues that are spoken in the play are not translations of each other and are not translated either. The stage directions, moreover explicitly state to leave these dialogues as is, while attempting to create a “collective world on the stage,” (“gemeinsame Welt auf der Bühne” 44) with the help of “gestures, facial expressions, speech sounds, or choreography” (“Gesten, Mimik, Sprachklang oder Choreographie,” 44) When staged, following these directions this produces an experimental play in which “part of the stage” (“ein Teil der Bühne” 44) remains “a mystery” (“ein Geheimnis” 44), at least for those viewers who know only one of the two languages , though access to the mystery should still be possible through “musical or visual” (“musikalische oder bildliche” 44) means.4 Tawada’s self-translations include translations of German texts into Japanese and vice versa. Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen (Opium for Ovid. A Pillow Book of 22 Women), for instance, was published in German in 2000 and in 2001 appeared in Japanese translation as Henshin no tame no opiumu. An example of a self-translation-in-progress from Japanese into German is, for example, the novel Yuki no renshusei, or “Apprentices of the Snow.” But these self-translations never simply carry a message across (as if that were possible) and are always constructed with the help of several of the poetic translation techniques discussed earlier: separating form from content, sound and materiality from communication, they zoom in on literality and are, at least partly, written in a “Germanized” Japanese and a “Japanized” German.5 Additionally, to complicate matters further, they can contain a new protagonist or even entirely new scenes that make certain self-translations four times as long as the original (Matsunaga, 538 ff). When Tawada writes an entire work based on this kind of experimental self-translation the result is the novel, Das nackte Auge,

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics | 183 or The Naked Eye. The author referred to that particular creation process in an interview with the Japanese journal Eureka as “an uninterrupted translation,” (“eine unun- terbrochene Übersetzung) and further commented that the self-translation was constructed by “translating the smallest sentence parts alternately into Japanese and then into German” (“jeden kleinsten Satzteil abwechselnd in die japanische oder in die deutsche Sprache übersetzte”) (Saito 285), a novel, in other words, build on the poetics of back translation. For an author, who first appeared on the market in translation (in Nur da wo du bist, da ist nichts (1987) or Only There Where You Are There is Nothing), and who since the 1990s writes alternatingly in German and Japanese, though as we have seen neither according to a certain pattern nor using one and the same language for one and the same genre, nor using a single language or a single script throughout the writing of one single work, translation is also a form of writing.6 Both opaque and transparent, writing as translation, or translation as writing, is both an obstruction that can block the reader’s view and a passage through which rays of light, highlighting the shape and the forms of glyphs, and waves of sound, bringing out the echoes of his- toric contact or imagining new potential futures, can travel and be experienced. This allows therefore both the readers of her many texts and the audience members at her bi- and often multilingual public readings all over the world in which she often visualizes the reading process as performance and the performance as text, to have a momentary illumination of the bones that make up the constellation of Tawada’s body of writing. This thought brings us to the second part of this article in which the affinitive proximity and the critical distance between Yoko Tawada’s and Walter Benjamin’s thought on translations will come to the fore.

Benjamin and Tawada on Translation Several critics such as Hilturd Arends, Bernard Banoun, or Livia Monnet, for instance, have examined Walter Benjamin’s imprint on Yoko Tawada’s language philosophy. For Tawada’s essay, “Schrift einer Schildkröte oder das Problem des Übersetzens,” or “Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation,” under discussion here, Benjamin’s essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” or “The Task of the Translator,” has a particular resonance, though noticeable echoes of other texts such as Berliner Kindheit um 1900 can be heard in Tawada’s essay as well.7 Before analyzing a key Benjaminian Denkbild or trope, common to both essays, which will allow us to bring out the contours of each, let us briefly take a look at the broader context in which the two essays are embedded. When Walter Benjamin’s essay first was published in 1921, it served as an introduction to his German translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens. Though today the essay is typically printed as an autonomous piece, that is to say, without being followed by the German translation as a companion piece, the “Task of the

184 | Bettina Brandt Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 181–194

Translator” was originally embedded in a French-German cultural and linguistic context in which Benjamin, who wrote in both languages and lived in both countries, was most at home. But even as a stand-alone essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” still bears the marks of Walter Benjamin’s own practical translation experience. Though Benjamin includes names of translators who have translated from a variety of languages (such as Voss who translated Homer or Schlegel who translated Shakespeare), the only lengthy foreign quote included is in French, and the only concrete example of a translation problem that he raises in this entire essay is the lack of equivalence between the French and the German word for bread, in other words ‘pain’ versus ‘Brot.’ ‘Pain’ calls to mind the baguette, the ficelle, or the bâtard, to use Paul de Man’s examples, whereas ‘Brot,’ on the other hand brings forth the Pumpernickel, or the Dreikornbrot or, more recently, the Dinkelbrot (87). This is a translation problem, in other words, that with Barbara Johnson can be summarized as “how to translate to the denotations and the network associations called up by every sign” (55). Yoko Tawada’s essay, on the other hand, dates back to 1997 when it was originally conceived as the second of three public lectures on poetics that the author gave at the university of Tübingen as part of the Poetikdozentur that she held at that institution.8 A year later the three lectures “Stimme eines Vogels oder das Problem der Freiheit” (“Voice of a Bird or the Problem of Freedom”) “Schrift einer Schildkröte oder das Problem des Übersetzens” (“Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation”) and “Gesicht eines Fisches oder das Problem der Verwandlung” (“Face of a Fish or the Problem of Metamorphoses”) were published in a slim volume entitled Verwandlungen or Metamorphoses. In “Schrift einer Schildkröte” Yoko Tawada examines the problem of translation in a extensive cultural and linguistic context that reaches far beyond contemplating how to translate French into German or vice versa—two European languages that though ‘non-related,’ are neighbors and share, among other things, the same script.9 One can only speculate what form Benjamin’s essay would have taken if it had been written in the late instead of in the early twenties after he had started Hebrew lessons, a language and a script he quickly would give up on again. When translating from one script into another, as is the case when translating from German into Japanese, not only do all concepts undergo a metamorphoses— the German word ‘Brot,’ for instance, to stick with Benjamin’s example, would turn into the Japanese word ‘pan,’ a Portuguese loanword (from pão) that entered the Japanese language during the seventeenth century when Jesuit priests introduced besides a new religion and new technologies also an array of new products including white bread rolls—, all written signs do as well. On the level of the script, this means that, besides a change in the direction of reading and writing, as Tawada explains in “The script of a Turtle,” the letters of the alphabet are also transformed into

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics | 185 Japanese kanji (or ideograms used to represent blocks of meaning such as nouns, roots of adjectives or verbs) and the Japanese syllabary known as hiragana and katakana. Writing Japanese then requires combining kanji with hiragana (used to express the relationship between kanjis, i.e. particles, verb and adjective endings) and katakana (used to write loanword or to write non-Japanese names.)10 An example of the latter is the transcription of the word “pan,” which in Japanese becomes . The name “Walter Benjamin,” on the other hand, would be transcribed as . The presence of a second writing system produces an awareness of the optical elements of the text.11 When a translator is conscious of these particular elements he or she can become what Tawada, when writing about poet and translator Paul Celan, has called an “Augen-Übersetzer” or “eye-translator,” (“Die Krone,” 68) that is to say, a translator with a sensibility not just for the content of a text but also with a keen eye for the typeface of the source and the target language. This particular awareness that views the poetic text as a graphic-visual unit directs the attention of the translator to the poetic medium, i.e. the material of language, itself. In Tawada’s oeuvre the graphic gaze falls both on the foreign language (and the letters of the alphabet) and on Japanese (with its Chinese ideograms and the two Japanese syllabic script), rendering both equally ‘strange,’ while simultaneously making the point that the supposed completeness inherent in the so-called mother tongue is an illusion that can only be maintained as long as it is presented in isolation. In “Schrift einer Schildkröte,” an essay in which the letters of the Roman alphabet are systematically defamiliarized through a juxtaposition with the Chinese script, on which Japanese script is largely based, Tawada includes estranging examples from each writing system and one in which both come together—in the context dependent writing of her name. While Benjamin reflected less on the materiality of the script and differs from our author in other significant ways as well—most sharply perhaps in his messianic versus her non-religious approach—central thoughts of Benjamin’s translation essay reverberate in Tawada’s own all the same. Of the many thoughts that the two critics share about translation let me here highlight only the destabilization of the relationship between mother tongue and foreign tongue or original and translation (through a broadening of the target language by means of elements from the source language), the valuation of translation as a critical activity, and, most powerfully so, the emphasis on literalness in translation—an approach that, as we saw in the first part of this essay, Tawada carries out throughout the entire creative process of her work.

Metamorphoses of Benjaminian Translation Tropes in Tawada’s Script of a Turtle When using Benjamin’s ideas and particularly when appropriating his Denkbilder (literally “thought images”), Tawada typically expands these tropes, turns them on

186 | Bettina Brandt Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 181–194 their head or breaks them down into pieces before embedding them in her own writing. Let me illustrate this with two examples. One of the critical points that Walter Benjamin makes in his essay is that translations are important because they give the original what he calls “sein Fortleben,” or what Anglophone Benjamin translators tend to call an “afterlife.” In translations, Benjamin argues, the original continues to live on, even evolve over time:

Denn in seinem Fortleben, das so nicht heißen dürfte, wenn es nicht Wandlungen und Erneuerungen des Lebendigen wäre, ändert sich das Original. Es gibt eine Nachreife auch der festgelegten Worte. (53)

For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meanings can undergo change a maturing process. (256)

Tawada picks up on this remarkable idea but radicalizes it when she writes in “Schrift einer Schildkröte,” (in relationship to Celan’s poetry) that she suspects that “a literary text can later find the original from which it might have been translated,” (“ein literarischer Text später seinen Originaltext finden kann, aus dem er übersetzt worden sein könnte,” 39) and that “typically there are in fact several original texts that can be found or invented” (“meistens existieren mehrere Originaltexte, die gefunden und erfunden werden können,” 39). Our author, in other words, is effectively suggesting that a translation can be prequel, rather than a sequel to the original, or what we could call, analogous to Benjamin’s terminology, a “Vorleben” of the original rather than a “Fortleben.” Of the several tropes about translation included in Benjamin’s essay—the image of the seed and the rind, or the trope about the tangent and the circle, or the broken vessel for example—none is more fundamental or more frequently cited than the Denkbild of the wall and the arcade. This trope is our second example and, as we will see, particular appropriate to reflect once more on the importance of translation in the architecture of Tawada’s oeuvre as a whole and in the “Schrift einer Schildkröte,” in particular. In the latter, she thrice redeploys this distinct translation trope—an image that brings to the fore how the process of translation simultaneously obstructs (the wall) and provides insight (the arcade) into the original. But let us once more briefly return to Benjamin’s “Aufgabe des Übersetzers” to take a closer look at the context and the form in which the ‘wall’ and the ‘arcade’ appear in this text.

Die wahre Übersetzung ist durchscheinend, sie verdeckt nicht das Original, steht ihm nicht im Weg, sondern läßt die reine Sprache, wie verstärkt durch ihr eigenes Medium, nur um so voller aufs Original fallen. Das vermag vor allem Wörtlichkeit in der Übertragung der Syntax und gerade sie erweist das Wort, nicht den Satz als das Urelement des Satzes. Denn der Satz ist die Mauer vor der Sprache des Originals, Wörtlichkeit ihre Arkade. (59, my emphasis)

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics | 187 A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the purer language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax, which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. (260)

Here Walter Benjamin contrasts common language translation, of which he is critical, because in his words, it acts like a wall before the language of the original, thereby de facto blocking it from view, to a particular kind of literal translation, which he praises, because this kind of translation carries over the syntax of the source language into the target language. As a result of this invisible underlying structure the estranged target language now contains gaps, or openings in the structure, through which the light of the original or source language can shine. Therefore, this kind of translation can be compared to an arcade, that is to say, to a solid construction that contains a succession of arches through which the wall of the building behind it can be seen. In Tawada’s translation essay Benjamin’s ‘wall and arcade’ trope pops up in several prominent spots. The image first appears in a recognizable reiterated form on the very first page at the point of the narrative when the narrator explains what is involved in learning how to read the alphabet. The presence of the wall in this text fragment is fitting, because learning how to read the alphabet is presented here as a process analogous to learning how to translate (umsetzen) a written into an oral text inside one’s head.

Theoretisch weiß ich schon, wie man phonetische Schrift liest: Man muß sie im Kopf schnell in die entsprechenden Wortlaute umsetzen, weil sonst der Wortsinn hinter der Mauer der Buchstaben versteckt bleibt. (25)

In theory, I already know how to read phonetic script: you have to translate it quickly into the corresponding sounds inside your head; otherwise the meaning of the words will remain concealed behind the wall of letters. (142, my emphasis)

Though in this first reference Benjamin’s trope is still clearly recognizable, Tawada does alter, ever so slightly yet quite significantly, the context in which his trope appears in her text. Most importantly, Tawada shifts the focus in literal translation, which in the Benjaminian quote lies on the “word,” that he sees as the primary element in translation, to the “letters,” or the single elements that make up the words. The second reference to Benjamin’s ‘wall’ appears in the middle of Tawada’s essay when the narrator discusses the risks involved in a different kind of translation issue: the mysterious changes letters can undergo in the process of typesetting, or the medial translation of a manuscript into a publishable book. In the following example the “Mauer der Buchstaben,” or “wall of letters,” encountered earlier, has been broken even further. One fragment consists of the “Mauer,” or “wall,” the other of the

188 | Bettina Brandt Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 181–194

“Buchstaben” or letters, which are unpredictable and can cause havoc in a text. The intentionality that some ascribe to authors, Tawada passes over to the letters in her script and their uncanny ability to re-arrange themselves with an apparent purpose in mind. The relevant text fragment with the second wall reference reads as follows:

Es kann gefährlich sein, einen Buchstaben in die Welt zu setzen, denn der Autor oder genauer gesagt der Setzer kann nicht wissen, was aus ihm wird. Man schreibt ein B, es kann eine Blume daraus werden, aber auch eine Bombe. [. . .] Einmal schrieb ich eine Geschichte, die von Baumgeistern handelt. Da alte Bäume gefällt wurden, um die Stadtmauer zu bauen, mußten die Menschen später die Wut der Baumgeister besänftigen. Diese Geschichte sollte in einem meiner Bücher gedruckt werden. Ich bekam die Druckfahnen und fand darin einen „Baumeister“ an der Stelle, an der „Baumgeister“ sein sollten. Nur ein einziger Buchstabe, das „g“, stahl sich aus dem Wort davon, und schon war der ganze Text auf den Kopf gestellt. Denn nach dem Bau der Stadtmauer sollte der Baumeister eigentlich nach Hause gehen um die Geister erscheinen zu lassen, die ein Opfer für die gefällten Bäume verlangten. Stattdessen kam der Meister zurück und ver- drängte die Baumgeister. In solchen Druckfehlern wirkt die Unberechenbarkeit der Buchstaben fast unheimlich. Ich unterstelle ihnen sogar manchmal, daß sie eine Absicht haben. (32f., my emphasis)

It can be risky to send a letter into the world since the author or rather the type- setter cannot ever know what will become of it. You write a B that may grow into a bee but it can also turn into a bomb [. . .] Once I wrote a story about tree spirits. When some old trees had to be cut down to make room for a city wall the people later needed to appease the anger of the tree spirits. This story was to be included in one of my short prose collections. When I received the proofs, however, I discovered a builder (“Baumeister”) on the spot where the tree spirits (“Baumgeister”) ought to have been. Just a single letter had dashed off, the letter “g,” and in this one departure the entire text had been turned on its head. The builder, after all, was supposed to go home once the city wall was completed so that the spirits might appear who demanded a sacrifice for the cut trees. Instead, the builder stayed on and repressed the tree spirits in turn. Such typographical errors make the capriciousness of the letters seem almost uncanny. Once in a while I wonder what exactly the letters have up their sleeves. (145)

Distancing herself once again from Benjamin’s emphasis on the word as the basic element in literal translation, Tawada underscores its instability instead. At the mercy of the capriciousness of the individual letters, which might just dash off, the word can easily unravel or decompose with ricocheting consequences (Baumgeister becomes Baumeister) for the entire text.

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics | 189 Now let us take a closer look at the third and final time the Benjaminian wall trope materializes in Tawada’s “Schrift einer Schildkröte.” In this example, which is marked as taking place in a dream, that is to say in a Tawadian space in which literal and interlinear translations from different languages come together, the wall (of letters) has been reduced to piles of rubble (or a series of double m’s).

Es gibt auch Landschaften, die in meinen Träumen immer wiederkehren. Eine hügelige Trümmerlandschaft zum Beispiel, über die ich in vielen Träumen laufen mußte. Es war meistens heiß dort, und ich hatte viele Sorgen. Kummer und Trümmer kommen immer im Sommer. Diese Wörter haben in der Mitte eine Reihe runder Hügel, die aus zwei „m“ bestehen. So sind zum Beispiel Träume beschaf- fen, die ich auf Deutsch geträumt habe. Daher würde ich die gern an träumende Fremde gestellte Frage nach der Sprache im Traum anders formulieren. Meine Frage würde lauten: „In welcher Schrift träumen Sie? (39 f., my emphasis)

Certain landscapes also tend to recur in my dreams. A hilly landscape full of rubble, for instance, which I have had to cross in many dreams. Usually it was very hot there and I tended to feel bummed out. Rubble and trouble are a bummer in the summer. In the middle of these last two words there are a couple of round hills made up of double “m’s.” This is how a dream that I have dreamt in German might look like. Therefore I would like to rephrase the question about language and dreams posed to a dreaming foreigner. I would ask: “in which script do you dream?” (150)

This final pile of rubble is the result of pushing the logic that drives the metamorphosis of the Benjaminian wall and arcade trope in Tawada’s essay to its very limit. The letter B (B for Buchstabe or letter from Tawada’s earlier example) now has indeed turned into a bomb and not into a Blume (flower) or a bee. What remains are Trümmer. This word, like the word ‘Brot,’ in Benjamin’s “Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” calls up a (particularly loaded) German network of denotations and associations. But unlike Benjamin’s example, which addresses the lack of equivalency between different kind of nourishments, Tawada’s post-war writings brings a darker association to the fore: that of the destruction of peoples and their languages, cultures and structures. Semantically speaking Trümmer, or piles of rubble are, or course linked to World War Two—a time period in which Germany and Japan were fascist allies. But by again shifting the emphasis from the word, as a semantic unit with a strong cultural meaning, to the two “round” letters in the middle of the word Trümmer (twice the letter ‘m’ that as such does not carry a meaning), Tawada’s critique of wholes (from words and languages to nations, peoples and their histories) or container models of understanding cultural difference is highlighted once more. When a certain Benjaminian kind of “literalness” in translation has been replaced by, what could be

190 | Bettina Brandt Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 181–194 called, a Tawadian “letteralness” in translation, all that is solid melts into air. Blasting the continuums of cultures, Tawada’s late twentieth century writing builds new holy structures out of the remaining and disseminated rubble and fragments of bones. *** As must have become clear by now, translating the writings of Yoko Tawada is both a challenging and a delightful task. Select titles of her German and Japanese oeuvre have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Swedish and Chinese. Individual Tawada stories or fragments of her novels in translation also have been published in journals and anthologies in Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Norway, and in Korea. The essay “Schrift einer Schildkröte oder das Probleme des Übersetzens,” which in this volume appears in my English translation for the first time, also exists in a Swedish translation by Linda Oestergaard. The very first translation of Yoko Tawada’s “Schrift einer Schildkröte oder das Problem des Übersetzens” was a Dutch translation, a creative task that I undertook a few years ago together with my Dutch co-translator Désirée Schyns.12

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics | 191 Notes

1. With Désirée Schyns, I have recently Schildkröte mit sich zu führen. Das gibt einen explained how this dream text can be read as a Begriff vom Tempo des Flanierens in den critical translational intervention in the politics Passagen.” (532, “In 1839 it was considered and policies of Apartheid. elegant to take a tortoise out walking. This gives us an idea of the tempo of the flânerie of the 2. Matsunaga, professor of German language arcades.” 422) and literature at Waseda University in Tokyo—the same university where Tawada once studied 8. In the last twenty-five years Yoko Tawada has Russian language and literature—and Japanese given more than 800 lectures. She links the translator of Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser was growing interest in the author as a public figure the first to publish about Tawada’s poetics of to the unique position of the writer in the age of translation. technological reproduction—an age in which a text is quickly copied, scanned and put up on the 3. ‘Überseezungen’ is a neologism made up of internet but the writer as human being can not a poetic contraction of the words “Übersee,” or yet be promptly cloned. overseas, “Übersetzung,” or translation, and “Seezungen,” or a certain type of edible fish 9. The title of Tawada’s three lectures, typically called “sole,” but when undergone a Verwandlungen, carries within it both echoes from literal translation could instead be called “sea Ovid’s Metamorphoseon libri translated in English tongue.” as The Metamorphoses and, of course, from Kafka’s novella “Die Verwandlung,” or “the 4. The theater play was originally published Metamorphosis” in which a certain Gregor Samsa together with the radio play “Orpheus oder struggles to get out of bed one morning after Izanagi,” in 1998. For an outstanding analysis having taken on the shape of an oversized of the withholding of translation in Tawada’s “Ungeziefer,” which German-English translators “Till” see Yildiz, 119 ff. tend to translate either as “beetle,” or “bug.” Kafka’s description does not neatly correspond to 5. Occasionally Tawada also translates the either. Though metamorphoses from human to works of others, including select poems of Peter animal are often seen as abject in the Western Waterhouse, Barbara Köhler and Durs Grünbein World these transformations regularly occur in for the Japanese literary journal Gendaishi techo, Tawada’s texts, most humorously perhaps in The and two prose texts of Japanese Taeko Tomioko Bridegroom was a Dog, a text for which the author for the German journal Manuskripte. won the prestigious Akatugawa Prize, where the experience is not an entirely negative one. 6. Tawada’s first published texts, which appeared in Germany in the second half of the 10. The practice of using Katakana to write 1980s, were translations from the Japanese by loanwords goes back to the thirties of the Peter Pörtner, at the time assistant professor of previous century and has lead to an increased Japanese at the university of Hamburg where presence of the script in the contemporary Tawada was enrolled as a student. Currently Japanese landscape. When considered purely Pörtner is professor of Japanese in Munich. from the point of view of the typeface, marked by a relative scarcity of katakana, Tawada’s 7. The image of the turtle can be found in Japanese writings come across as having been Benjamin’s writings as well. In the convolute of written before World War One and make an the flâneur, the Passagenwerk, for instance, he archaic impression, one that gets contradicted describes a short-lived, unusual Parisian fashion the moment one starts to read her texts. in which the slowness of the turtle is set off against the speed of industrialization as follows: 11. Paul Celan was a prolific translator. His “1839 war es elegant, beim Promenieren eine translations include German translations of

192 | Bettina Brandt Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 181–194

Russian literature (Alexander Blok, Ossip journal of translation studies in the Low Mandelstam, Vladimir Majakowskij, Boris Countries. Dutch translations of all three Pasternak, Velemir Chlebnikov) of French Poetikvorlesungen are included in De literature (Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Michaux), or of berghollander (Amsterdam: Voetnoot, 2010), a English literature (William Shakespeare). For collection of Tawada’s German work in Dutch more detailed information see “Fremde Nähe.” translation, selected, edited and translated by Brandt and Schyns. The Swedish translations of 12. The Dutch translation of “Schrift einer Verwandlungen are included in Talisman / Schildkröte oder das Problem des Übersetzens,” Förvandlingar, Stockholm: Ariel Förlag, 2009. was published in 2005 in Filter, the premiere

Works Cited

Arends, Hiltrud. “Das kurze Leuchten unter dem Johnson, Barbara. Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Tor oder auf dem Weg zur geträumten Sprache: Trials, Motherhood, Translation. Cambridge, MA: Poetological Reflections in Works by Yoko Harvard UP,2003. Tawada.” Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Ed. Doug Slaymaker. Lexington Books: Man, Paul de. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s Asiaworlds, 2007: 59–75. ‘The Task of the Translator’.” The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Banoun, Bernard. “Übersetzen als Press, 1986: 73–105. Durchscheinen-Lassen. Gedankengänge eines Yoko Tawada-Übersetzers.” Yoko Tawada, Poetik Matsunaga, Miho. “Schreiben als Übersetzung: der Transformationen: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk. Die Dimension der Übersetzung in den Werken Ed. Christine Ivanovic. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, von Yoko Tawada.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 2010: 455–468. 12.3 (2002): 532–546.

Benjamin, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Überset- Monnet, Livia. “L’arcade de la littéralité ou la Illuminationen zers.” . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, profondeur de l’immédiat. Poétique des surfaces 1977: 50–63. (Trans. “The Task of the et traduction dans Überseezungen de Yoko Selected Translator.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Tawada.” Études Germaniques 65.3 (2010): Writings I . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,2000: 483–509. 253–263. Saito, Yumiko. “Zur Genese der japanischen ———. Das Passagenwerk. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, Textphasen von Das nackte Auge.” Poetik der 1983. (Trans. Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Transformationen: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk. Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Ed. Christine Ivanovic. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, Harvard UP 1999.) 2010: 285–297. Brandt, Bettina and Désirée Schyns. “Neu Tawada, Yoko. Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik- vernetzt: Yoko Tawadas ‘Bioskoop der Nacht’ Vorlesungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag auf Niederländisch” Études Germaniques 68/4 Claudia Gehrke, 1998/2001. (Dutch in: De (2010): 535–553. berghollander. Swedish in: Talisman. “Fremde Nähe”: Celan als Übersetzer. Eine Förvandlingar.) Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs. 2nd Ed. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche ———. “Schrift einer Schildkröte oder das Schillergesellschaft, 1997. Problem der Übersetzung.” Verwandlungen. 23–40. (English in this book: 142–150. Dutch: Genz, Julia. “Yoko Tawadas Poetik des “Schrift van een schildpad of het probleem van Übersetzens am Beispiel von Überseezungen.” de vertaling.” Trans. Bettina Brandt and Désirée Études Germaniques 65.3 (2010): 467–482. Schyns. Filter. Tijdschrift over vertalen 12.3

The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics | 193 [2005], 3–11. Reprint: De berghollander. ———. Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik. 108–119.) Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2010. ———. Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia ———. De berghollander. Trans., ed. and with Gehrke 2000/2001. (Japanese: Henshin no an introduction by Bettina Brandt and Désirée tame no opiumu. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001.) Schyns. Amsterdam: Voetnoot Publishers, 2010.

———. Überseezungen. Tübingen: ———. Talisman. Förvandlingar. Trans. Linda Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2002. Östergaard. Stockholm: Ariel förlag, 2010.

———. “Bioskoop der Nacht.” Überseezungen. ———. Yuki no renshusei. Tokyo: Shinchosha, 61–91. 2011.

———. “Überseezungen. Transcultural Language ———. Orpheus oder Izanagi. Tübingen: Games.” Reading 10 October 2006. Ͻhttp:// Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 1998: voca.arizona.edu/index.php?reading_idϭ689Ͼ. 43–82. Viewed 15 August 2013. ———. The Bridegroom was a Dog. Trans. ———. “Die Krone aus Gras, Zu Paul Celans Margaret Mitsutani. Tokyo: Kodansha ‘Die Niemandsrose”. Sprachpolizei und International, 1998: 7–62. Spielpolyglotte. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham ———. “Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte.” University Press, 2012. Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007: 25–37.

194 | Bettina Brandt Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 195–198

The Contributors

Bettina Brandt grew up in Germany, the participant in the Cornell School of Criticism Netherlands and in French-speaking and Theory. She has published several Belgium. She received MA degrees in French articles and co-edited Inside Knowledge: and German Literature from the University of (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Utrecht and a Ph.D. in Comparative Humanities (Cambridge Scholars Press, Literature from Harvard University. Brandt 2009). With Christian Moser she is currently taught at MIT, Columbia University and editing the volume Barbarism, Revisited: New Montclair State University before joining the Perspectives on an Old Concept (Rodopi, faculty of the Department of Germanic and forthcoming 2014) and is involved in an Slavic Languages and Literatures at The international collaborative research project Pennsylvania State University. Her research on the modern history of barbarism. Her interests include twentieth and twenty-first latest book is Barbarism and Its Discontents century transnational literature, literatures (Stanford University Press, 2013). and theories of the avant-garde(s); the literatures of migration; literary Till Dembeck is Adjoint de recherche at the multilingualism and translation studies; Université du Luxembourg. He received his gender studies and performance studies, Ph.D. from the Universität Siegen and held German-Jewish literature and the Holocaust; positions in Hagen, Mainz and Riga before and early modern global relations. he came to Luxembourg. His research interests are German literary history from Elisabeth Bekers is Lecturer of British and the 18th to the 20th century, cultural, Postcolonial Literature at the Vrije literary and media theory, history and ethics Universiteit Brussel. Her research focuses of philology, literary multilingualism, history on literature from Africa and its diaspora. of linguistics and the history of German lyric She is currently working on Black British poetry. Recent book publications: Texte Women’s Writing and Criticism, co-directing Rahmen. Grenzregionen literarischer Werke an international project on Imaginary im 18. Jahrhundert (Gottsched, Wieland, Europes, and co-editing books on Brussels in Moritz, Jean Paul) (de Gruyter 2007); Literature and Creativity and Captivity. She is Handbuch Medien der Literatur. (ed. with the author of a comparative study of African Natalie Binczek / Jörgen Schäfer; and African-American literature on female de Gruyter, 2003); Philologie und genital excision (Rising Anthills, University of Mehrsprachigkeit. (ed. with Georg Mein; Wisconsin Press 2010) and co-editor of Winter, 2014). Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (Rodopi, 2009). She has also Thomas Ernst is Assistant Professor of published on postcolonial rewritings of Literary and Media Studies in the German Robinson Crusoe and literature by Flemish Department at the University of Duisburg- authors of African descent. She is co- Essen. He is an expert on 18th to 21st director of the international Platform for century German literature, literary and Postcolonial Readings. media theory, intercultural and multilingual literatures and literature in digital media. He Maria Boletsi is Assistant Professor at the is the author of Literatur und Subversion. Film and Literary Studies Department of Politisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart Leiden University. She received her Ph.D. (transcript, 2013) and Popliteratur (Rotbuch, from Leiden University and has been a 2001/2005), his recent co-edited volumes visiting scholar at Columbia University and a include Guy Helminger. Ein Sprachanatom bei

The Contributors | 195 der Arbeit (Synchron, 2013), Verortungen der Hohenstein, Kadmos 2011); Sprache(n) im Interkulturalität (transcript, 2011) and Exil. Exilforschung. Ein internationales SUBversionen. Zum Verhältnis von Politik und Jahrbuch Bd. 32/2014, forthcoming (ed. Ästhetik in der Gegenwart (transcript, 2008). with Doerte Bischoff and Christoph Gabriel). Currently he is working on a project examining the history of intellectual Fouad Laroui is a Dutch-Moroccan writer property. See also www.uni-due.de/ who teaches French literature at the germanistik/ernst and www.thomasernst.net. University of Amsterdam. His latest book, L’étrange affaire du pantalon de Dassoukine David Gramling researches at the (Paris, 2013) has been awarded the prix intersections of social multilingualism, Goncourt in the short-story category. He literary translation, mass migration, queer also publishes poetry in Dutch. studies, nationalism, and critical theory. He publishes regularly on multilingual film and Georg Mein is Professor at the Faculty for literature, Turkish German migration and Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts literary history, theoretical approaches to and Education at the University of monolingualism, foreign language pedagogy, Luxembourg. Since 2013 he has also been gender and LGBT studies, and the medical Dean of this Faculty. Before coming to humanities. He is currently completing a Luxembourg in 2006, he was Assistant monograph entitled The Invention of Professor of German Literature and Literary Monolingualism. Didactics at the University of Bielefeld. In 1999, Georg Mein received his Ph.D. from Madeleine Kasten is Assistant Professor of the University of Bonn (thesis: “Die Literary Studies at Leiden University, Konzeption des Schönen. Der ästhetische Netherlands. She is the author of a study on Diskurs zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik. medieval allegory and philosophy of Kant – Moritz – Hölderlin – Schiller”: language titled In Search of ‘Kynde Aisthesis, 2000) and, in 2006, a Degree of Knowynge’ (2007), and of various articles on Habilitation from the University of Bielefeld cognitive allegory and Voltaire’s (thesis: “‘Und wozu Leser in dürftiger Zeit.’ philosophical tales. A second and more Literarische Bildung und soziokulturelle recent focus of her research is the politics Milieus”). Georg Mein is Founding Editor of literary translation. She co-edited the (2010) of the Journal Zeitschrift für bilingual volume Hermeneutics and the interkulturelle Germanistik and of the Humanities: Dialogues with Hans-Georg German edition of the Gesammelte Schriften Gadamer / Hermeneutik und die by Pierre Legendre (with Clemens Geisteswissenschaften: Im Dialog mit Pornschlegel). His research interests include Hans-Georg Gadamer (Leiden University German Literature from the 18th to the 21th Press, 2012). See also www.hum. century, theories of culture(s) and media, leiden.edu/lucas/organisation/members/ literary sociology and theories of literality. kastenmja.html Liesbeth Minnaard is Assistant Professor in Esther Kilchmann is Assistant Professor Literary Studies at Leiden University. Her (“Juniorprofessorin”) for German Literature research focuses on interculturality in at the University of Hamburg. Her current literature and on cultural effects of migration book project investigates the history of and globalization, particularly in Germany multilingualism in German literature from and the Netherlands. Other areas of her 1700 to 2000. Published books: interest are gender and sexuality, exoticism, Verwerfungen in der Einheiten. Geschichten and constructions of (national) community. von Nation und Familie um 1840 (Fink, She is the author of New Germans, New 2009); Topographien pluraler Kulturen. Dutch. Literary Interventions (Amsterdam Europa von Osten her gesehen, (ed. with University Press, 2008) and co-editor of Andreas Pflitsch and Franziska von Thun Literature, Language and Multiculturalism

196 | The Contributors Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 195–198

in Scandinavia and the Low Countries writes in both Japanese and German, and (Rodopi, 2013, with Wolfgang Behschnitt has published several books—stories, and Sarah De Mul) and of the novels, poems, plays, essays—in both kultuRRevolution issue Nach der einen languages. She has received numerous Sprache: literarische Mehrsprachigkeit awards for her writing including the (2013, with Till Dembeck). Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Ramsey Nasr (1974, Rotterdam) is a Dutch- Medal. New Directions publishes her story Palestinian poet, author, actor and director. collections Where Europe Begins (with a Testifying of a love of art and an interest in Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the politics, Nasr’s writings appeal to a broad Bridge, and her novel of Catherine Deneuve audience. In 2005 he was city poet of obsession, The Naked Eye. Antwerp. The following year Nasr was named Journalist for Peace by the Humanistic Chika Unigwe is an Afro-Belgian writer of Peace Council for his contribution “to a Nigerian origin. She is the author of fiction, culture of peace, nonviolence en justice.” He poetry, articles and educational material. also received an honorary doctorate from She has won the 2003 BBC Short Story the University of Antwerp and was Poet Competition for her story “Borrowed Smile”, laureate of the Netherlands (2009 to 2013). a Commonwealth Short Story Award for Furthermore, Nasr has received many “Weathered Smiles” and a Flemish literary literary awards such as the E. du Perron prize for “De Smaak van Sneeuw”, her first prize. His work has been translated in short story written in Dutch. In 2012 she English and published by Banipal Publishers. won the prestigious Nigerian Prize for Literature for her novel On Black Sisters Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, Street. Chika Unigwe holds a Ph.D. in moved to Hamburg when she was Literary Studies from the University of twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She Leiden.

The Contributors | 197

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 199–200

Index

Achebe, Chinua, 122, 128 Halliday, Michael, 29 Adelson, Leslie, 120 Adorno, Theodor W., 10, 53, 63, 64, 65–66 Jakobson, Roman, 72, 83 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 120 Johnson, Barbara, 185

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 98 Kafka, Franz, 12, 16, 17–18, 19, 20, 24, 25, Barnard, Benno, 136 26–27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 177, Barthes, Roland, 10, 15, 16, 26, 27, 34 178–179, 192n9 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 62, 64–65, 66, 73, Kleist, Heinrich von, 177, 180n4 184–188, 189–190 Kramsch, Claire, 29, 124 Blumenberg, Hans, 13 Kristeva, Julia, 25 Bonfiglio, Thomas P., 93 Bouzfour, Ahmed, 42 Laâbi, Abdellatif, 44, 50 Lanoye, Tom, 135, 136, 146n3 Cameron, Deborah, 31, 34 Laroui, Fouad, 11, 39, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51 Celan, Paul, 66, 186, 192n11 Ch’ien Nien-Ming, Evelyn, 106n12 Makoni, Sinfree, 54, 55, 68n4 Choubachy, Chérif, 40, 41 Martyn, David, 68n6 Müller, Herta, 10, 12, 75, 76–78, 79, 81 Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 19, 26 De Man, Paul, 185 Naegels, Tom, 135, 136 Derrida, Jacques, 25, 35, 47, 48, 49, 54, Nasr, Ramsey, 10, 11, 87, 88, 91, 92–94, 60, 65, 67 95, 98, 100–104, 105n4 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 119 Ehlich, Konrad, 58, 59, 66, 68n11 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 60

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 57, 58, 59, 65 Oliver, José F. A., 12, 75, 78–81 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 61, 62, 138 Opitz, Martin, 12, 73, 74–75 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 164, 166, 167, 168 Grimm, Jacob, 53, 56 Peeters, Koen, 10, 12, 133, 134, 135, 136, Grutman, Rainier, 72, 122 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, Guattari, Felix, 18, 19, 26 144, 146n1,3

Index | 199 Pennycook, Alastair, 29, 54, 55, Tawada, Yoko, 11, 12, 66, 75, 76, 81–82, 68n4,11 120, 123, 127n15, 171, 180n3, 181, Perloff, Marjorie, 120, 152 182–183, 184–191, 192n2,5,9,10 Pratt, Mary Louise, 19 Unigwe, Chika, 11, 109, 110, 117–125, Rakusa, Ilma, 76 126n2,4,8,10, 127n12, 127n14, 128n22, 136 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 120 Schmitz-Emans, Monika, 80 Venuti, Lawrence, 63, 118 Sklovskij,ˇ Viktor, 78 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 160 Yildiz, Yasemin, 10, 27, 34, 50, 53, 63, 66, Sternberg, Meir, 76 72, 92, 94, 118, 119, 120, 123, Stockhammer, Robert, 54 150–151, 153, 169n4

200 | Index