Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature 9781628921632, 9781628927184, 9781628921656

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Permissions
1 Beginning Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature
American literature, global connections
The writer’s dilemma
Ceci n’est pas un livre sur la traduction: the task of the multilingual critic
Americanization, discontents: mass immigration and the ever-changing linguascape
Reading wanderwords: theory and practice
2 How Not to Tame a Wild Tongue: Wanderwords in Theory
Wanderwords and bi- or multilingualism: the migrant writer’s languages
Fault lines: against ‘code-switching’
‘Populated, overpopulated with the intentions of others’: when languages touch in text
‘Expropriating the language’: wanderwords and other heterolingual strategies
Babel’s babble: resistant texts, the virtue of unintelligibility and the linguistic unconscious
3 The Promised Land, Lost in Translation: Mary Antin’s and Eva Hoffman’s Wanderwords
The Promised Land and Americanization
Antin on English
Hoffman on language
Hoffman and multiculturalism
Antin, Hoffman and the linguascapes of early and late twentieth-century America
4 With and Without a Dutch Accent: the Life-Writing of Edward Bok, Dirk Nieland and Truus van Bruinessen
Dutch boy made good in English-only: The Americanization of Edward Bok
Yankee Dutch: the funny business of immigrant speech
Yankee Dutch as a mixed language
Life in a box: the bilingual archive of Truus van Bruinessen
Dutch-Canadian migration in the 1950s: gender and language
Writing for pleasure, without leisure: bilingualism and its discontents
English, ‘the intentions of others’ and a bilingual paradox
5 Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish
Psychoanalysis and the abject: Rodriguez and Chicanismo
Public, private and personal: languages, voices and the essay form
Feo, fuerte, y formal: the language of masculinity and desire
Wanderwords: of memory and desire
The question of Spanish, and Richard Rodriguez
6 Fusion Writing: Bharati Mukherjee’s Dangerous Languages
The safety of English
‘To want English is to want the world’: The Tiger’s Daughter and Jasmine
The violence of connection – and the violation of translation
The safety of reading?
7 ‘Words Cast to Weather’: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée
Dictée: reading in circles
Dictée and the question of history
Mouth to mouth: the poetics of speech production
Dictée’s multilingualism and the absence of Korea(n)
Cha’s multilingual aesthetics – and trauma
8 Escribir y Leer, Bilingually: Spanish/English and Spanglish American Literature in the Twenty-First Century
Spanishes
‘English is broken here’: in search of bi- or multilingual writing
How to read bi- or multilingually
‘You (don’t) know what you’re missing’: the paradox of bi- and multilingual reading
Conclusion: Really Reading Junot Díaz and Susana Chávez-Silverman
Ancladas en otros lugares: Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas
Really reading Junot Díaz, or Oscar Wao’s wild tongue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Wanderwords

New Horizons in Contemporary Writing In the wake of unprecedented technological and social change, contemporary literature has evolved a dazzling array of new forms that traditional modes and terms of literary criticism have struggled to keep up with. New Horizons in Contemporary Writing presents cutting-edge scholarship that provides new insights into this unique period of creative and critical transformation. Series Editors: Peter Boxall, Stephen J. Burn, Bryan Cheyette Volumes in the series: Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror by Susana Araújo (forthcoming) Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption by John McLeod (forthcoming)

Wanderwords Language Migration in American Literature Maria Lauret

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Maria Lauret, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. While every effort has been made to locate copyright holders, the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lauret, Maria, author. Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature/Maria Lauret. pages cm. – (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-6289-2163-2 (hardback) 1. American literature–History and criticism. 2. Language and languages in literature. 3. Linguistics in literature. 4. Sociolinguistics–United States. 5. Multilingualism and literature–United States. I. Title. PS169.L36L38 2014 810.9’34–dc23 2014010318 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2163-2 PB: 978-1-5013-1897-9 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2165-6 ePub: 978-1-6289-2164-9 Series: New Horizons in Contemporary Writing Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Voor mi marido querido Paul Roth 1951–2005

Contents Acknowledgements Permissions 1 Beginning Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature 2 How Not to Tame a Wild Tongue: Wanderwords in Theory 3 The Promised Land, Lost in Translation: Mary Antin’s and Eva Hoffman’s Wanderwords 4 With and Without a Dutch Accent: the Life-Writing of Edward Bok, Dirk Nieland and Truus van Bruinessen 5 Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish 6 Fusion Writing: Bharati Mukherjee’s Dangerous Languages 7 ‘Words Cast to Weather’: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée 8 Escribir y Leer, Bilingually: Spanish/English and Spanglish American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

viii x

1 33 67 95 123 151 181 211

Conclusion: Really Reading Junot Díaz and Susana Chávez-Silverman

235

Notes Bibliography Index

253 285 313

Acknowledgements Wanderwords took more than 10 years to write, and I have institutions as well as professionals, colleagues, friends and family to thank for being part of its creation. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom for the gift of time and money to do in-depth research on primary sources. A travel grant enabled me to work in the National Archives of Canada in 2003, and the AHRC’s matching leave scheme funded my research in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 2007. Second, I thank the University of Sussex and, in particular, my colleagues in the American Studies programme for creating a research-supportive environment of collegiality, sustained interest in each other’s pursuit of knowledge, and friendship. Third, of the many scholars whose work has informed and inspired Wanderwords, Werner Sollors and Susan Castillo have been particularly important. Their intellectual generosity and support came at a crucial time and enabled the completion of this book. It is not possible to write a wide-ranging study like this without assist­ ance from experts and native speakers. I thank Pavel Leszkowicz and Charles Prescott for their help with Polish, Fred Gardaphé for checking my understanding of Italian, and Rocio Davis and Richard Follett for vetting my Spanish. I have Daniel Kane to thank for poetry and Sam Solomon for Yiddish. Rocio Davis, Fred Gardaphé, François Grosjean, Andrew Hadfield, Gita Rajan, Carole Sweeney, and one particularly kind anonymous reviewer commented on drafts in ways that have made the book better, and then better still. I am thankful for their interest and attention to my work over the several long years when it remained, at best, in slow progress. These were the coming-to-terms times I had to work through with the insight and endless patience Rosemary Bardelle-Carrier and Jac Matthews

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gave me, for which I am ever grateful. Their help and the lasting friendship of Sue Dare, Richard Follett, Bill Marshall, Carole and Pascale Sweeney, Yola de Lusenet and Kees Versteegh, sustained me in sickness and health, love and sorrow, grief and regeneration. The same is true of Else Marie Lauret and Chris de Mol, and Susan Brown and Ale Roth, who were, quite simply, there. My friend Peter Boxall read and rescued the project when it looked like it might never see the light of day and so became my editor; I cannot thank him enough for introducing my work to Bloomsbury Press. And so bedankt voor alles, un grand merci, muchas gracias, and thank you so much, my multilingual family and friends, for grounding Wanderwords in the reality of your living – and reading – in many languages. This book is for you and for Paul Roth, without whose love it would never have been written and whose death, long before time, made completing it first impossible – and then imperative. I thank him most of all. M. R-L, 2014.

Permissions Part of Chapter 6, ‘Fusion Writing: Bharati Mukherjee’s dangerous languages’, was previously published as Chapter 11, ‘Bharati Mukherjee’s English: the multilingualism of an American writer’, in Post-national Enquiries: essays on ethnic and racial border crossings, ed. Jopi Nyman (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) 170-90. I wish to thank the publishers and poets who have given me permission to quote their work: Tino Villanueva for ‘Convocación de Palabras’; Brian Ellis Cassity of Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe for lines from Franscisco Santana’s ‘Anoche’ in Tristealegría and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat’s ‘Summer Nights’, ‘Son/ Song’, ‘Son-Sequence’, and ‘Provocaciones’ from Bilingual Blues; Genevieve Cottraux and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive for quotations from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée; and for extracts from DUELO DE LENGUAJE/LANGUAGE DUEL. Copyright © 2002 by Rosario Ferré, published by Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. By permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, and Lamy, NM. All Rights reserved. I am especially grateful to Mevrouw Truus van Bruinessen, John and Frank van Bruinessen and the van Bruinessen family for giving permission to quote from Truus van Bruinessen’s letters and her memoir On the Move, deposited in the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

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Beginning Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature

Don DeLillo does it very occasionally, Sandra Cisneros a lot, Junot Díaz all the time. George Pelecanos uses them in some of his crime fiction, Cormac McCarthy in the Border Trilogy and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin is riddled with them. Abraham Cahan did it and Henry Roth too. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are notorious for using them. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has a few, as does Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz did it in the seventeenth century and Joseph O’Neill does it in the twenty-first. From modernist poetry to genre fiction, from colonial and nineteenth century to contemporary American literature and from mainstream to minority writing, fragments of other languages have wandered into American English texts, as if they had a business being there. What that business is, it is this book’s mission to uncover. Clearly such words and phrases in non-English languages import semantic and orthographic difference into the American republic of letters; like migrants, they carry cultural baggage and represent otherness in American English textual environments. Unlike loanwords, they set up camp in English only temporarily, they are there for the duration of their mission to signal the bi- or multilingualism of authors, characters or literary intertexts. Interested in linguistic difference that produces semantic opacity, the following chapters investigate words and passages in other languages that deliberately appear to obstruct the transparency of English. Wanderwords asks what, in the work of particular writers, at particular times and in particular literary forms and genres, the function, meaning and aesthetic effect of such language migration might be. Although now variously described as ‘code-switches’ by linguists, ‘heterolingual’ elements by translation theorists or as markers of ‘conflictive multilingualism’ by some literary historians, it was the Roman rhetorician

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Quintilian who first identified and named them ‘verba peregrina’.1 Quintilian counselled that, lest such foreign words corrupt the purity of Latin, they were best avoided.2 Following Quintilian’s usage – but not his advice to leave well alone – I call them ‘wanderwords’: words and phrases in other languages that disrupt, enchant, occlude or highlight the taken-for-granted English of American literature and can thereby perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique. Usually marked in italics, as if to emphasize their strangeness, wanderwords are freighted with the other-cultural meanings wrapped up in their different looks and sounds. Yet, surrounded by English and swallowed up in the flow of our reading, whether or not they are made intelligible by context or translation, we tend to ignore them. This book shows what there is to be gained by focusing our attention on wanderwords and demonstrates how it is possible to read them as a mode of multilingual signification that is becoming more and more common in twentyfirst-century world literatures. Positioning my reading of American literature in the context of recent scholarship on that literature’s multilingual past and present, I present a theory and a reading practice of bi- and multilingualism in texts written in English that applies to other migrant literatures too, as they become more transnational and yet less inclined to submit to their ‘host’ language’s hegemony. It is my aim to think and read towards a poetics of what is usually, though mistakenly (as we shall see in Chapter 2) termed ‘code-switching’, but the object of study needs further specification if this project is to live up to its farreaching promise. Rather than taking on the intertextual multilingualism of high modernism or the incidental, yet habitual use of words and phrases in languages other than English in nineteenth-century American writing, my discussion is confined to the work of writers concerned with language migration in the past hundred years. Noting the ubiquity of verba peregrina and their thematic as well as formal significance in the literature of American language migrants of several generations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I explore in the chapters that follow a number of texts – some canonical, some not – that can be broadly characterized as ‘migrant writing’. Such writing is the product of what Matthew Frye Jacobson in Special Sorrows has termed ‘migrant cultures’, meaning cultures ‘for which the experience of geographical movement and resettlement was formative’ (‘Note on Usage’, n.p.).

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Crucially I would add to that definition ‘and whose migration involved the crossing of linguistic borders’, so that there is no doubt about the object being literature in which the move from one language into another is a central theme as well as a textual practice. Since Jacobson’s definition helpfully recognizes that the lives and identities of people who weren’t necessarily immigrants themselves may nevertheless importantly have been shaped by the migration of their parents or grandparents, I follow his usage to discuss the literature of second- and third-generation immigrants whose work still partakes of a migrant culture and speaks to it. Such a definition avoids the problematic term ‘immigrant literature’, which suggests the first generation only and does not allow for distinctions to be made between the writing of immigrants, refugees, exiles or sojourners. It also bypasses the, for my purposes, too-inclusive terms ­‘ethnic’ or ‘minority’ literature, which do not necessarily refer to migrant literary production and do not always entail language migration. Of course, ‘being American and being ethnic American are part of a single cultural framework’, as Bill Boelhower has written; strictly speaking, this makes all American literature ‘ethnic’ and English, paradoxically, the ‘ethnic’ language par excellence (10).3 Yet in migrant writing, wanderwords suggest the spectral presence of languages that may have been repressed in American literature and life, but which resurface at significant moments to do a particular job of what Boelhower called ‘ethnic semiosis’, that is, to signal cultural difference of the lived (and often still living) kind. I emphasize this lived connection with languages other than English, because the function and significance of other-language fragments in American literature varies widely. If we go back to the examples at the beginning of this chapter and think of them in terms of the extent to which they partake of migrant cultures, the differences become clear. The Spanish of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy appears in reported speech or dialogue as part of a fictional discourse; its effect is to signify Mexican otherness, but its prime function is mimetic: it is there because ­Mexicans speak Spanish. In Sandra Cisneros’ prose by contrast, the cadences and vocabulary of Spanish are integral not just to characters’ speech, but also to the narrative voice; as a bilingual writer, Cisneros is not concerned to keep her languages apart.4 Susan Abulhawa’s Arabic infuses her novel’s lifeworld in a similar way and is designed to teach the Anglo reader something of that world, whereas Melville’s Latin has little bearing on life on the Pequod in Moby Dick.

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T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound furthermore, like many other high modernists, may have partaken of migrant cultures and inserted other languages (and, in Pound’s case, scripts) into their poetry in English, but they did so primarily by way of heteroglot quotation; their poetic practice was not about representing a multilingual world so much as to produce an erudite, multilingual (inter-) text.5 Setting these practices aside then, I am in this study neither concerned with the mimetic nor with the intertextual use of languages other than ­English, but with the literature of and about migration, in which the sporadic-yetsignificant use of words in other tongues has hardly been studied. This is not a simple scholarly oversight, but an interesting and interested one. Marc Shell has argued, for example, that the recent canonization of ethnic writing in English has displaced the serious study of American literature in languages other than English, a project he and Werner Sollors initiated in their Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, published in 2000 (‘Afterword’, 687). Yet, as we shall see in the following chapters, wanderwords in migrant texts in English highlight – precisely – the presence of other languages in the United States and remind us of America’s past and present multilingualism. Migrant writing, when read against the grain of its dominant English, is thus very much part of the multilingual literature of the United States; all that is needed to see this is a switch in focus from English to the other language(s) used. Furthermore, as I shall explain later on in this chapter, it is largely the coercive Americanization of migrant cultures over most of the twentieth century that has caused the disavowal of the nation’s multilingual past, not the much more recent vogue for ‘ethnic’ writing in dominant English that Shell targets. Attention to wanderwords in migrant writing thus alerts readers precisely to the historical and continuing presence of languages other than English in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, and it connects that literature with the transnational cultures and diasporas which blur the line between inside and outside, nation and community.

American literature, global connections Quintilian’s monolingual, purist desire to keep Latin free from barbarolexis or non-Latin wanderwords sounds a loud contemporary echo in the American

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English-Only movement, and in the triumphalism surrounding the spread of English globally, which is particularly prevalent in Britain.6 To counter such arguments in support of official and imperial English, an initial focus on the spectral presence of other languages in American English texts might enable us to extrapolate from the various case studies presented below to read and think towards a poetics of multilingual writing fit for world literature of the twenty-first century. For, as English spreads across the world and is the lingua franca of most migrant writers in search of an international audience, the appearance of wanderwords is only likely to increase and to offset, as the Latin of ‘lingua franca’ itself does, global English’s imperialism. It is an interesting paradox that the more of the world’s writers write in English, the more they are also likely to seek to represent their cultures and their bordercrossing ways in all the languages they know. Intra-textual multilingualism, as represented by migrant writing sprinkled with wanderwords or, in its more radical manifestations, as fully bi- or multilingual texts, could thus be a defining future feature of global literature – and another reason for this book’s importance and time­liness, as the local analysis of American literature enables global connections. How does this work in practice? If we start with the realization that our understanding of the United States’ literary multilingualism has been hampered by the fact that when it comes to writing, as Sander Gilman has wryly observed, ‘multiculturalism is monolingualism’, then our view of a multilingual American literature need no longer be obscured by migrant writing in English, but can be enhanced by it (21).7 ‘Teşknota’, a key wanderword in Eva Hoffman’s memoir Lost in Translation, signifies a yearning for Polish and Poland in that text which can only be articulated with that word; at the same time, it has become part of my vocabulary, and no doubt that of other nonPolish readers too, because it evokes an otherwise unnameable emotion that has become meaningful to me. And so it makes sense to look for multilingual elements in English texts and to see how words that have strayed from their original linguistic environment to set up camp in English affect and effect multicultural signification.8 My reading of wanderwords in migrant literature as linguistic representatives of migrant cultures and as articulations of a cultural difference that will not be contained in English proceeds from several insights derived from ­linguistic, historical, psychoanalytic and literary scholarship that deserve to be

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spelt out. The first of these follows received wisdom in sociolinguistics, which holds the switch from one language into another to be always motivated and meaningful. Here I adapt the work of various linguists on ‘code-­switching’ and ‘code-mixing’ in bi- or multilingual speech to explain the appearance of wanderwords in migrant writing as never random, but always significant. ­Second, I use V. N.  Vološinov’s philosophy of language to surmise that this significance lies, principally, in the connection between language and culture: wanderwords are in the business of importing cultural difference into the American migrant text, with ideological implications that contest the hege­mony of English. Third, I adopt the views of such very different literary scholars as Doris Sommer, Reed Way Dasenbrock and Marjorie Perloff that wanderwords, even as they inhibit full intelligibility at times (or precisely because of it), can create poetic effect as they rub up against the English of their surroundings and coalesce into something new. Finally, I surmise that a psychoanalytic understanding of what Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri have termed ‘the Babel of the unconscious’ is indispensable to a reading of wanderwords, as well as of more fully bi- or multilingual literature, if we are to open all our senses to such poetic effects and to aural as well as semantic resonances. These claims, which are the premises from which my analysis of wanderwords and other heterolingual textual ­practices proceeds, will be further explored and explained in the next chapter. For the moment more needs to be said about the concept of language migration and the metaphor of wanderwords derived from it. Migration is a fact of contemporary life the world over, as is bi- or multilingualism. Yet in all the attention given over the past few decades to the economic, cultural, social and political changes that global migration brings in its train, the question of migrants’ language-shift, which so often accompanies geographical relocation, has remained relatively unexplored. And so, although it is a truism that moving across national and cultural borders for the long term entails a shift in the migrant’s very sense of identity, it is still worth emphasizing that that shift is primarily lived in language. Sélim Abou’s formulation is particularly felicitous: ‘[L]anguage . . . while being one element of culture among others . . . transcends all other elements in so far as it has the power to name, express and convey [all those other elements]’ (qtd. in Dabène and Moore, 23). Moreover, ‘one’s individual and social identities, and their complex interconnections, are

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inevitably mediated in and through language’, as Steve May reminds us (373–4). The consequences for identity of living – and then writing – in a language other than the one you were born into and grew up with can be many and various, and they need to be investigated if we are to make sense of migrant literature, and of cultural difference as well as adaptation. There is thus no way we can understand that unwarranted-but-necessary generalization, ‘the migrant experience’, nor Jacobson’s ‘migrant cultures’ for that matter, without paying close attention to the language(s) that experience and cultural production are voiced in, which may or may not be the same as the language in which they come to us (in the case of literature in translation). In positing the English of American literature as fixed and other languages as immigrants wandering into it, my assumption is not that English is the native language of the United States whereas all others are intruders. As noted above, in many ways the opposite is true: English is the intruders’ language par excellence, beginning its imperial reign in America and extending it across the globe ever since. Yet because English has been dominant for the past century in the United States, it is the language to beat or displace in public and particularly in literary written discourse, and in this sense any other language looks alien in its presence. Nor does the image of wandering words in migrant writing presuppose a native-language essence breaking through an American English overlay, aiming to recover some ‘ethnic’ authenticity and restore it to its rightful place. On the contrary, the playful coinage ‘wanderwords’ is meant to suggest that words, phrases and passages of non-English in the American English text are markers of migrant writers’ and migrant writing’s wandering and meandering: they betoken routes more than roots. To be sure, some migrant writers, such as Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman in Chapter 3, do use their first and native language as the matrix to measure their English by, but others, like Richard Rodriguez or Junot Díaz, do not, nor is it always the author’s native language that wanders and serves as English’s other (see Chapter 7 on Theresa Cha). Rather than working within the paradigm of compensatory white ethnic revival that Matthew Frye Jacobson, again, has so pithily termed ‘roots too’, my analysis stresses movement and trajectories, rather than attachment to sought-for or invented origins. Alastair Pennycook has observed that ‘[i]f we allow English to continue to be viewed as the language of modernity, development, and progress, while other

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languages are viewed as the purveyors of tradition, history and culture, we will fail to grasp the opportunity to shift the cultural politics of languages’ (‘Lessons’, 216). Rather than think in terms of English and ‘heritage languages’ or, in US parlance, English-Only versus English-Plus, my analysis highlights the hybrid, dynamic and ever-changing nature of migrants’ literary production, whose English accommodates other languages to varying degrees and in different ways. Migrants’ engagement with both US culture in English and those of their (or their parents’) countries of departure voiced in other languages creates an American literature that makes transnational, global connections. Wanderwords in American literature therefore do not denote the ‘foreign’ so much as represent languages that are distinct and different from normative English, but not necessarily alien to the United States. This is important because whenever the ‘foreign’ is encountered, the question is: ‘foreign’ to whom? As Mary Louise Pratt has observed, ‘for those of us working in Spanish, the equation of foreign with non-English has become not just inaccurate but unbearable’, since Spanish is emphatically a language of the Americas (‘What’s Foreign’, 1283). Werner Sollors makes much the same point in his introduction to Multilingual America, where he suggests that it is more accurate to speak of Spanish and Cantonese, French and Italian and Japanese ‘to say nothing of Lakota, Navajo, or Cree’ as ‘American tongues, or the languages of America’ (4). The fact of America’s historic linguistic diversity bears remembering and its present multilingualism celebrating. As Spanish has become the second language of the United States, as Native languages are being revived and Yiddish is recovered, as African migrants (re-) introduce Swahili and Yoruba and as any number of migrants from all over the globe bring their languages with them and find a community of speakers in the United States, American multilingualism may come into its own once more.9 Having established then that this is a book about language migration in American literature with possible ramifications for our reading of transnational and global writing, it is useful to reflect further on the kinds of questions that can lead us to an understanding of how multilingualism works in predominantly English texts. To that end, we need to look more closely at the linguistic predicament of migrant writers and ask what might be involved in a poetics of bi- and multilingual American literature as well as how such a poetics might usefully be developed on a global scale.

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The writer’s dilemma Asking the big questions is a good way to begin, not in the anticipation that they will all be answered, but because they lead us, from the outset, to think about the complexity of bi- and multilingualism in migrant literature. ‘Being bilingual. What does it mean?’ Isabelle de Courtivron asks in her introduction to Lives in Translation: Living in two languages, between languages, or in the overlap of two languages? What is it like to write in a language that is not the language in which you were raised? To create in words other than those of your earliest memories, so far from the sounds of home and childhood and origin? To speak and write in a language other than the one that you once believed held the seamless connection between words and things? Do you constantly translate yourself, constantly switch, shift, alternate not just vocabulary and syntax but consciousness and feelings? (1)

de Courtivron’s questions inform my project too: what happens when writing is written in a language other than the author’s first, or native one? When reading the work of bi- or multilingual writers who, as in de Courtivron’s book, write in English, is it not valid – even necessary – to ask what has happened to their other language(s)? And if the presence of that other language can be glimpsed in the odd word or phrase, translated or contextually explained, or left to speak for itself in its own ‘foreign’ (to most readers) tongue, what then is the significance of this presence? What is the use, and the meaning, of words from another language that wander into the English text? Such questions are bound to elicit complex answers. If language is always already ‘populated, over-populated with the intentions of others’, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous phrase (see Chapter 2), does inhabiting and being inhabited by more than one language bring with it an exponential growth of others’ intentions and of meanings beyond the writer’s control? (294). Do the psychic and cultural worlds that are voiced by these languages split apart or merge? What, in different forms of literature, is the aesthetic effect of such wandering, splitting or merging of languages? Do different forms of writing – autobiography, say, or poetry, fiction, essays – afford different kinds of freedom or restriction for the Wanderlust of non-English words? What theoretical paradigms can help us read migrant writing in English with eyes and ears attuned to the submerged presence of another language?

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Does a monolingual readership, implied, intended or real, constrain bi- or multilingual writing, and if so, does it matter? Or: how do writers negotiate the difference between their bi- or multilingual world in word-ed representation for a largely monolingual audience? And finally: can we speculate about a future when a truly bi- or multilingual literature might be possible? Most of these questions will be addressed in depth later, as we move from basic definitions of bi- and multilingualism in the next chapter towards a poetics of bi- and multilingual literature in Chapter 8, via case studies of wanderwords and other heterolingual phenomena in various forms of lifewriting, poetry, fiction and essays. This search for answers necessitates forays into linguistics as well as ethnic studies and the history of American migrations, theories of life-writing, novelistic discourse and poetic signification, as well as into other areas of research that have a bearing on, but do not directly address, migrant literature’s linguistic formation. The work of reading American writing for its language migration, for the presence of wanderwords, for its signifying by means of heterolinguality, in other words, thus has to be of an interdisciplinary nature. This work started with Eva Hoffman’s path-breaking memoir Lost in Translation of 1989, when Hoffman dared to question for the first time in American literature what effects the acquisition of English has on the integrity of the immigrant’s subjectivity and its articulation in writing. Hoffman made a crucial intervention in the at that time much contested, but nevertheless inexorably advancing multiculturalism of the West, as she put the migrant’s language(s) centre stage and asked, à la de Courtivron, what the consequences of living and then writing in a second language might be. Her memoir posited that there is such a thing as linguistic identity: it can consist in one, two or several languages, whether kept separate in the brain, amalgamated in the mind or experienced as some deeply personal or familial creole of the unconscious, we don’t know. Any which way, this conscious and unconscious store of language that bi- or multilingual migrants have access to (and monolinguals lack) can be a source of creativity as well as anxiety. Although Hoffman’s narrative stressed the latter, Lost in Translation’s zero sum game of acquiring English at the expense of Polish is only one among many possible ways of resolving the migrant writer’s language dilemma, and I am interested to explore all sides of it in the chapters that follow.

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This seems all the more necessary in light of the contemporary US revived multilingualism after almost a century of hegemonic English. In Life with Two Languages the linguist François Grosjean illustrates the many American languages of today by describing a tour of Boston: he hears children speaking Haitian Creole in the street, and sees someone reading an Armenian newspaper on the bus. Shops and restaurants have signs in Portuguese; elderly Americans enjoy a game of cards in Italian, he passes a bilingual Chinese – English school, and checks the times of Spanish films at a local cinema. A trip around Boston is thus a trip around the world, with the sounds and smells and sights of the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, China, Mexico and Latin America thrown in for free. It ‘clearly shows’, Grosjean concludes, ‘the diversity and vitality of minority languages and bilingualism in the United States’ (Life, 42–3). In the early twenty-first century, such an experience of speech diversity is a familiar one for urban Americans, and so we might well ask, with Lawrence Rosenwald, why ‘the literature of so multilingual a world give[s] so imperfect a portrait of that world’s linguistic complexity’ (‘American Anglophone Literature’, 327). Rosenwald’s question is a good one in that it asks for the disparity between multilingual speech and overwhelmingly monolingual American literature to be explained. Do first- and second-generation (im)migrants, who presumably create most of that multilingual speech environment, not write American literature? Of course they do, as they did a hundred years ago too, when American cities last were as multilingual as they are now. Are contemporary American writers, whose migrant parents or grandparents spoke other languages, so completely brainwashed by the English of their American education that all memory of, or facility with, the language(s) they grew up with is erased? Not very likely. Yet authors who have more than one language at their disposal ‘choose’, or so it seems, overwhelmingly to write in English, and this is worthy of note. How free is this ‘choice’? What does it mean for American multiculturalism that many of its main proponents, in literature and the academy alike, assume it has to be voiced monolingually? And is it true that literature written by first-, second- or third-generation migrants in the digital era has to be written in English on pain of remaining unpublished and unread? In the past 20 years or so several collections of essays by and interviews with migrant writers have appeared, which address questions of foreign-ness

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and bi- or multilingualism in cultural work. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, interviewed by Mary Zournazi in Foreign Dialogues, states for example that for migrants, the place of identity is a place of ‘radical multiplicity. . . . The question is no longer: Who am I? . . . but Which self? Which language? When, where, and how am I? Foreignness is both a space of confinement and a space of non-conformity’ (74). Trinh’s answer to de Courtivron’s questions, above, would thus be that different selves are constructed in different languages, but also that identity is always provisional and dynamic and that the bi- or multilingual writer’s difference lies in her innovative and creative non-conformity. In Wendy Lesser’s The Genius of Language by contrast, Leonard Michaels muses that his identity is very much bound up with Yiddish, which means that ‘Yiddish is probably at work in my written English’. He then analyses the following sentence even as he is composing it: ‘ “This moment . . . writing in English, I wonder about the Yiddish undercurrent.” The sentence ends in a shrug,’ he comments, ‘it could have been written by anyone who knows English, but it probably would not have been written by a well-bred Gentile. It has too much drama’ (220). Splitting languages and selves clearly is not an option for Michaels, who is unafraid to let Yiddish infuse and inflect his English. Then again, in André Aciman’s Letters of Transit, the poet Charles Simic writes in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way about the English he acquired as a second language: I had studied English, could read it more or less, but speaking was a different matter. . . . The astonishment and the embarrassment of speaking and not being able to communicate are deeply humbling. Every day in America, I  realized, I would have a fresh opportunity to make a complete fool of myself. (126–7)

Simic’s essay is preceded by one of his poems, ‘Cameo Appearance’, in English, from a collection published in 1996. You would think that being a poet in your second language would be especially difficult, but Simic doesn’t make anything of it. Perhaps writing enables him, like many migrants, to give voice to traumatic experience without the mistakes and the giveaway accent that plague his speech. For this poet and translator, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, it seems that the question of which language to write in is irrelevant compared with that of which country to feel safe in, and to call home. It would seem then that American writers, even when they ‘choose’ English as their literary language, have varied attitudes towards it, and there are many more besides the three examples I have cited here.

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Another conclusion to be drawn from Aciman, Lesser and Zournazi’s anthologies is just how common the plight of migrants writing in non-native languages has become in recent years, which raises the interesting question whether they are better or lesser writers as a result. François Grosjean and Steven Kellman both admire Nabokov, Beckett and Conrad (the holy trinity of canonical and, what Kellman terms, ‘translingual’ literature) for writing well in languages to which they were neither born nor bred, but if we take into account how common bi- or multilingualism is today, as it was a century ago in the United States, then literary production in a language that isn’t your first may not be the prodigious achievement Kellman and Grosjean assume it is.10 Some writers who migrated to the United States as children (such as Edward Bok in Chapter 4) or who spoke another language than English at home (such as Richard Rodriguez in Chapter 5) only became literate in school and in English, so that writing in that language came naturally to them, just as mixing it up and writing as one speaks comes naturally to others who grew up in a multilingual environment (like Gloria Anzaldúa in Chapter 8 and Susana Chávez-Silverman in the Conclusion). Admiration for the linguistic prowess of second- or third-language writers stems from an essentially monolingual vantage point that misunderstands the variegated and partial nature of bi- and multilingualism, and sees it as by definition exceptional individual achievement. This view also forgets that writing in languages other than your native one can answer profound psychological needs; for a refugee like Simic, the need may have been, for example, to distance himself from the emotional, social, cultural or political bonds that his first language represents, or even embodies. Most of all, however, this well-intentioned admiration of bi- and multilingual writers is misplaced, because it assumes that the wholesale adoption of another language (‘translingualism’) implies, according to Kellman, a state beyond any of the natural languages. . . . Translinguals move beyond their native languages, but . . . theirs is an aspiration to transcend language in general, to be pandictic, to utter everything. Impatient with the imperfections of finite verbal systems, they yearn to pass beyond words, to silence and truth. (16)11

Kellman’s translingualism (I have not found the term being used in contemporary linguistics) thus derives from a theory of universal language that assumes all languages to be at best provisional: they can achieve an

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approximation of perfect meaning and intelligibility, but never more than that. In this way of thinking, language diversity ‘after Babel’ means that human communication – now in a very real sense ‘after the fall’ – is forever doomed to misunderstanding, and riddled with irresolvable ambiguity, contradiction and conflict.12 In addition, the trans- in ‘translingual’ suggests a shift from one language to another that is unidirectional and irreversible, as in ‘transformation’ or ‘transition’, rather than the both/and of bilingualism, in which two languages can coexist, and each inform the other. Both tenets of translingualism – its assumed universalism and its unidirectionality – seem to me undesirable and unhelpful in the analysis of the meaning of wanderwords in English texts. Although it may well be true that Beckett’s writing, say, and that of other modernists, ultimately aspires to move beyond language to ‘silence or truth’, it is not at all appropriate to characterize the work of Eva Hoffman or Susana Chávez-Silverman in this way. Where Hoffman is interested both in what gets lost in translation and in getting lost in translation (in the sense of being absorbed by the interplay of two languages), Silverman’s concern is aesthetic and identity-related, but also political and social, since she treats both English and Spanish as American ‘native’ languages. Neither interest therefore offers itself up for analysis in terms of a desire to transcend language – au contraire: theirs is an exploration of language-in-difference, in Hoffman’s case of subjectivity, and in Silverman’s of contemporary sociopolitical cultural formation besides. So, whereas Kellman sees his authors’ aesthetic practice as motivated by a desire to escape the prisonhouse of language, I theorize bi- and multilingual migrant writing here expressly not as a yearning for shared and transparent meaning, but as a revelling in the aesthetic possibilities of semantic, orthographic and aural difference when languages come into contact. I part company here with Jacques Derrida’s argument in Monolingualism of the Other for the same reason: he is sceptical of writers who write several languages at a time, and asks rhetorically: ‘but do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? And in the promise of a still unheard-of language (67)?’ My answer to those questions is ‘no, they don’t’: to writers who relish ambiguity and resonance, and prefer connotation to denotation, bi- and multilingual aesthetic practices have much more – and different – to offer than the arid abstraction of transcendence, transparency and universal meaning.

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Ceci n’est pas un livre sur la traduction: the task of the multilingual critic Language migration in American literature belongs, as an object of scholarly inquiry, to the field of ethnic studies and more specifically to academic investigation of multilingual America. It connects with current concerns in migration history too. In the mid-1990s Matthew Frye Jacobson observed in Special Sorrows that ‘American historians tend to write about immigration as arrival and settlement, but the migrants themselves often experienced the move – and the weight of emigrant cultures perpetually enforced interpretation of the move – as departure and absence’ (Special Sorrows, 2). Jacobson’s desire to counter, or at least ‘fruitfully complicate the usual saga of immigrants coming to America and ineluctably becoming American’, also took its cue from Hoffman’s paradigm-breaking Lost in Translation (10). His book, in which the literary production of Irish, Polish and Jewish immigrants plays a major role, led the way for historians to revisit and revise their account of the process of assimilation as enthusiastic Americanization. Even so, it took some time for multicultural America, ensconced in the academy even as it was still being hotly debated in the 1980s and 1990s, to remember that it is, and always was, also a multilingual America, and this historical amnesia was sanctioned by the campaign to make English the official language of the United States. In response to the movement’s persuasive rhetoric, Werner Sollors’ seminal Multilingual America (1998) called for investigation on a grand scale of the nation’s multilingual literary heritage; the ground for study of American bi- and multilingual writing having been prepared a few years earlier by Alfred Arteaga’s anthology An Other Tongue, about literature from America’s ‘linguistic borderlands’. Around the same time, studies in sociology and linguistics also began to address issues of native language retention or attrition: Portes and Rumbaut’s study of second-generation immigrants, Legacies, includes a chapter on language (echoing Hoffman again in its title, ‘Lost in Translation’) and Sandra McKay and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong edited New Immigrants in the United States for the Cambridge Language Teaching Library series. In the wake of such cross-disciplinary interest in language migration in the United States, several important anthologies and monographs of American

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literature in languages other than English appeared, which inform my thinking about language migration in literature and the way wanderwords may be read. In The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000) Sollors and Shell made available obscure or long-forgotten texts in American languages other than English, to show just how multilingual American literature used to be and may be again. The editors’ framing essays set the agenda for a generation of scholars (most likely bi- or multilingual like themselves) to discover, and recover, and write about and teach multilingual American literature that is mouldering in archives or hidden in plain view on library shelves all over the country. Shell, for example, argued that the story of America’s ‘social engineering’ with regard to language needs to be retold – and I shall do so shortly (‘Babel in America’, 19). Sollors observed that ‘language acquisition may be one way of making voluntary affiliations, widening the circle of the “we,” and at least in part “becoming what one is not,” ’ and this insight will be the basis of my argument against translation throughout and in Chapter 8 (‘Introduction’ to Multilingual America, 4). Sollors’ and Shell’s gargantuan effort to put multilingual America (back) on the map generated new work which advanced a variety of arguments for the study of bi- and multilingual American literature, coming from a number of theoretical directions. Returning to first principles, as it were, by investigating multilingualism in the earliest literature of the Americas, Susan Castillo’s Performing America: Colonial Encounters in New World Writing 1500–1786 surveys plays, travel narratives, dialogues and lexicographic works in a range of languages, in an analysis that is revolutionary in its range and vision. Because she reads Spanish, Portuguese and French, as well as English, Castillo’s colonial American literature is not confined to the writing of the Eastern seaboard, but spans the continent. Her work challenges not only the paradigm of a national ‘American’ literary history, but also puts paid to the idea, enshrined in most anthologies of early American literature, that colonial writing was primarily and most eloquently done in English.13 Echoing the idea of originary American multilingualism and bringing it up to the present, Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics and its edited companion volume Bilingual Games emanate from a clearly bilingual and bicultural awareness of the creative, playful and also political potential of writing in Spanish and English simultaneously; both will be discussed further in Chapter 2. Brian Lennon’s

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In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States draws attention to the formidable institutional obstacles to multilingual publishing and reading; his concern is with the literary apparatus and the national print cultures that define it, which helped me to think through more clearly what role there might be for new media in the creation and dissemination of multilingual literature. Reed Way Dasenbrock’s enlightening multicultural approach in a few articles from the 1980s and 1990s have already been mentioned and I will discuss them further in the next chapter; his distinction between meaningfulness and intelligibility and his avowed tolerance for the opacity of multicultural writing set my experiment in reading bilingually (see Chapter 8 and Conclusion) in motion and kept it afloat.14 Martha Cutter’s important and pioneering study Lost and Found in Translation, which – like Wanderwords – is about ‘ethnic’ writing and the politics of language diversity, employs the paradigm of translation in bridging cultural difference. It has informed my argument, as it were, from the other end, in that I write here against the translation paradigm she develops and uses so deftly in her readings. Lawrence Rosenwald’s Multilingual America too is rooted in translation studies; he writes of the challenges, to reader and translator alike, of multilingual American literature from Cooper’s representation of language encounters between natives and settlers through to Jacob Glatshteyn’s Yiddish poetry and George Washington Cable’s Louisiana creole. Rosenwald’s aim ‘to help create a climate in which gifted writers might dream of [writing a multilingual novel] as a legitimate artistic goal’ is one I share, and it inspired my effort to develop a poetics of bi- and multilingual writing in the final chapters of this book (xx). Because Cutter and Rosenwald aim to show, in their different ways, both how necessary the task of the translator is (and how unenviable, especially when dealing with multilingual texts) and that cultural difference does not necessarily disappear in translation, but can be made legible in another way, their approach deserves further discussion.15 Translation is but the other side of the multilingual coin, and I often resort to it in the ensuing chapters to be able to say what I have to say about bi- and multilingual signification – and to be understood. Yet, as I see it, translation is never enough, and reliance on translation into English in particular allows the would-be multicultural, monolingual reader to stay in the comfort zone of English as a global language, ‘why-would-I-need–to-know-anything-else?’16 Whether literal  or

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metaphorical, linguistic or cultural, translation is not the answer to the kinds of questions I posed earlier in this introduction about the function of wanderwords and other kinds of heterolinguality. Of course, without other languages there is no need for translation, so the two go hand in hand, but they are not the same. The 2010 Modern Language Association (MLA) Presidential Forum ‘The Task of Translation in the Global Context’ is worth a brief discussion in this context, because it illustrates the difference between a translation approach and one based on multilingualism very interestingly. Where some participants advocate the importance and sophistication of translation as an activity and profession, others emphasize the urgency of educating students on the bi- and multilingualism that is its condition. My position in this book is pithily summarized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: ‘We must . . . learn to think of ourselves as the custodians of the world’s wealth of languages, not as impresarios [sic] of a multicultural circus in English,’ she writes, because ‘you do not learn culture as content, you learn language as practice’ (‘Translating in a world of languages’, 36). Furthermore, she regards ‘the idea of the untranslatable as not something that one cannot translate but something one never stops (not) translating’, which makes engagement with cultural difference a dynamic and ongoing interrogation and process, rather than an exercise in de-coding (39). And if practising language(s) is preferable to learning culture as content, her observation that ‘the phonetic elements of languages do not translate’ is particularly useful if we are talking about language migration in literature, and more especially in poetry (40). Marjorie Perloff picks this up in her analysis of teaching a poem by Majakovsky bilingually; her students compare various translations, but they crucially also get to see and hear the poem in Russian as well as in English. ‘What bilingual study does is precisely expose the gap between the original and the translation,’ she notes (‘Teaching poetry in translation’, 103). ‘Any poem should be read in its language of composition,’ because ‘the materiality of the poem in question is always central, even in translation’ (105). For Perloff and Spivak, as for me, the materiality of the non-English wanderword matters and it informs my argument for a bi- or multilingual reading practice over and against one of reading in translation.17 That said and then again, Lawrence Venuti’s view of translation is fully cognizant of ‘the ideological function’ translation can perform on a multivalent

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source text, without imposing it (79). Instead of domesticating and taming otherness, he advocates a translation practice committed to differences that comprise foreign languages, texts and cultures, constantly engaged in signaling those differences to constituencies and institutions in the receiving situation, and constantly inventive in finding the linguistic and cultural means to make a productive difference in that situation. (80)

Venuti’s thought, ultimately derived from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’, comes close to what I want to achieve when reading Spanish/English texts with an eye and ear for cultural difference (in Chapter 8 and Conclusion). However, it still can’t address the phonetic and orthographic otherness of bi- and multilingual texts, nor the way such heterolinguality can exploit lexical overlaps and sounds- or looks-like associations for poetic effect. These broad studies of multilingual America have been followed by more specialized ones as a small, but growing band of bi- and multilingual critics have turned their attention to American literature in non-English languages (Spanish, of course, but also Polish, Chinese, Italian, Norwegian).18 Joshua Miller’s Accented America impressively surveyed and analysed multilingualism in American modernism, while Hana Wirth-Nesher’s study of Hebrew and Yiddish in Henry Roth’s oeuvre, Call It English, cleared the way for the work of a number of critics who read languages other than English, including my own.19 What follows then is a conversation with these (and many other) scholars, whose work I have found insightful or have productively disagreed with or diverged from, as I work towards a poetics of bi- and multilingualism in American literature through a series of case studies and theoretical reflections. I have wanted to see how a variety of literary forms and heterolingual practices pose different problems for the critic, but also suggest their own solutions as they evoke their own contexts and require their own theoretical apparatus and modes of reading. This was particularly evident in the contrast between early and late twentieth-century language ideologies at work in American writing, as the cultural context changed from forcible Americanization in the face of migrant multilingualism to multicultural hegemony in the face of monolingualism (see Chapter 3). As, in the course of 50 years, Theodore Roosevelt’s 100 per cent Americanism gave way to John F. Kennedy’s nation of immigrants, what happened to the languages of migrant cultures as second and third generations

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were born and raised with the injunction to speak English, and English only? And what does the linguistic landscape look like 50 years later again, at a time of renewed mass immigration, but also of global movement, when constant interaction and new communication technologies make it easy to learn or maintain the languages of departure as well as of destination?

Americanization, discontents: mass immigration and the ever-changing linguascape When the British critic Paul Giles first called for a transnationalization of American Studies in 1994, whose methodology would encompass ‘comparativist defamiliarization’ and thus move away from the nationalist paradigm, he argued that to reach out beyond US borders would at the same time return American literary study to its roots, because ‘[t]he first American Literature group which met at the MLA in 1926 believed their field should not be primarily understood in nationalistic terms, but rather as one of the branches of literature in English’ (356; emphasis added).20 Necessary as Giles’ intervention was as a critique of American exceptionalism, in terms of multilingual ­America and its connections to the world beyond Europe, it had little to offer. Yet the reminder of ‘American’ literature’s inception in 1926 tells us a lot about how both language ideology and multilingual practice in the United States have changed in the course of the twentieth century. To describe this changing linguistic landscape that is made up, on the one hand, of people’s multilingual behaviour and on the other of the nation’s monolingual official voice and hegemonic culture, with literature at its heart, I propose the term ‘linguascape’. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s theorization of ethno-, media-, techno-, finance- and ideoscapes, the linguascape betokens ‘not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision’ but rather ‘fluid irregular shapes’ that are ‘inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’ (589). Abstract as this sounds, the American linguascape takes on more concrete form when we consider its development over the past one hundred years and ask what the status of English was at various points in relation to that of other languages. We then see that at the beginning of the twentieth century it was made up, on the one

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hand, of native and migrant bi- and multilingualism and a thriving ‘foreign language press’, and on the other of a dominant political and literary culture in English. By the mid-1920s, however, this fairly complementary dynamic began to change as multilingualism was eroded under the ideological pressure of the Americanization campaign, which deserves brief discussion if we are to read American migrant writing of the twentieth century in a contextually informed way. In a nutshell, the Americanization movement started as a benevolent immigrant aid initiative, then grew into a crusade as fear of ‘foreign’ influence escalated during World War I, and became a veritable hysteria by the time of the Red Scare in 1919–20, only to peter out after the National Origins Act was passed in 1924.21 The Americanization impulse of voluntary organizations to help immigrants settle in America’s overcrowded industrial centres had grown out of nineteenth-century reform efforts to clean up urban ghettoes and aid the poor, as Donna Gabaccia has shown. 22 Under the pressure of nativist anti-immigrant sentiment, however, it morphed into a concerted local and federal effort to civilize ‘the foreign element’ (in the parlance of the time); in the process, the native-born were re-educated in their patriotic duty as they were confronted with stranger danger in the form of un-American political beliefs. Henceforth, the ‘good’ immigrant would be a would-be and should-be American citizen; the ‘bad’ should lose their jobs and return home, or be deported.23 Various kinds of Americanization initiatives were launched in the 1910s, of which the Ford Motor Company’s English School – which was actually a comprehensive and compulsory programme to make the immigrant over into an American worker – is probably the best known.24 The movement was not homogeneous; among Americanizers there were minimalists and maximalists, liberals and right-wingers.25 Some believed that immigrants should be educated to respect the law, learn English (if only to follow industrial and/or military orders) and work hard, so that within 5 years they could apply for citizenship, if they wanted to – but keep their own language and culture. Others demanded that immigrants adopt wholesale the American creed and way of life (including diet, dress and the way they spent their money) and abandon any interest in or allegiance to their country and language of origin.26 Either way, Americanization as a discourse was well-nigh inescapable in the first two decades of the twentieth century; in practice and as a norm to aspire

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to this deliberate and wide-ranging project in social engineering had real effects on real people.27 Reaching into their workplaces, their schools, their homes and kitchens and ultimately their individual psyches, the conception of American identity forged and promulgated in the Americanization campaign in terms of the skills, values, behaviour and political convictions required of American citizens impressed itself upon immigrant and native hearts and minds. Although the movement itself ended by the mid-1920s, its influence was felt for most of the twentieth century – and beyond, if we take the second Bush administration’s initiative to build ‘an Americanization movement for the twenty-first century’ seriously, as in part a re-iteration of the socio-political agenda of the first.28 Because it significantly helped shape Cold War ideology and language policy in the United States long after its active phase was over, the Americanization movement cannot be regarded as some footnote to migration history, epitomized in its most extreme form by Ford’s English School graduation ritual in which workers of various national origins jumped into the melting pot and came out transformed into uniformly clad model Americans.29 Instead, as Michael Olneck has observed: [t]he Americanization movement is significant as an effort to secure cultural and ideological hegemony through configuration of the symbolic order. . . . The symbolic redefinition of American civic culture, not the transformation of immigrants, is the important historical consequence of the Americanization movement. (399)

Nor was the real ideological work of Americanization that of fitting the immigrant to an existing norm of American-ness, but rather of defining, and then firming up that norm for natives and immigrants alike. What better way, after the border effectively closes to new immigrants in 1924, to inculcate loyalty to the American polity than by making recent immigrants feel grateful for the gift of being so included, a gift made all the more precious for its not being available any longer to those of their relatives and countryfolk in Russia, Poland, Greece and Italy who would be immigrants to America too? For the 1924 Immigration (or Johnson-Reed) Act marked the beginning of 40 years of severe immigration restriction and Americanization by stealth, as immigrant gratitude engendered ethnic shame, and mass culture, public schooling and national emergencies such as the Depression and World War II worked against diversity and fostered the use of English for national unity.30

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In his survey of the historiography of Americanization, Gary Gerstle highlights such cultural homogenization: By the 1930s, powerful, national radio stations had marginalized many of the local, foreign-language stations that had flourished in the 1920s. . . . Technological change, middle-class power and assertiveness, corporate consolidation in the media industries, Americanization movements, and generational succession within ethnic communities – all contributed to the collapse of cultural inventions [such as Yiddish theatre and hybrid languages] (546)

When in 1958 Senator John F. Kennedy forged the new American identity of ‘a nation of immigrants’, he criticized the eugenicist tenets of the earlier Americanization movement, but not its championing of English as the (superior) American language. Kennedy argued that a new immigration policy should no longer be based on national quotas, but on family re-unification and the skills immigrants would bring to America; they would be admitted not because of what America could do for them, but what they could do for their country, in other words. This new policy would be the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as Hart-Celler, which removed the taint of immigration restriction-through-selection that had originated in the so-called scientific racism of the early 1920s. Its skills-based meritocracy was, of course, also part of Kennedy’s Cold War agenda, which required that the United States be seen as a free country which, unlike the Soviet Union, promised liberty and justice for all and was open to all comers. When the borders re-opened in 1965, however, and even as the ethnic revival, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, was beginning, English ruled supreme. Not only in the press and on the street, but also in literature and in the home, Americanization – at least as far as language was concerned – and the homogenizing force of popular and Cold War political culture had done their work. English’s undisputed hegemony did not hold, however, as renewed immigration created new speech communities and subcultures in languages other than English. By the 1980s, the influx of Hispanic migrants, in particular, came to threaten American monolingualism, as American citizens from Puerto Rico as well as Cuban ‘refugees from communism’ as well as Mexican workers in California as well as native-born Americans in the Southern states held onto their Spanish, and diversified the linguascape once more. By and by,

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other migrant communities developed enough critical mass to do the same, resulting in the multilingual experience of a walk around Boston that François Grosjean reported on earlier. That the ‘threat’ from Spanish was, and remains, seen as serious is evidenced by the Official English movement, also known as English-Only, which wants to make English the official language of the United States by constitutional amendment.31 Although repeated attempts to pass such an amendment have so far failed, by 2013 a majority of States had made English their official language; only Hawaii is officially bilingual.32 The American linguascape as it stands at the beginning of the twenty-first century is thus again a complex and diverse one, characterized by a still-normative English alongside significant (re-)emerging bi- and multilingualism, as the MLA language map shows. Although inevitably more informed by the relation between English and other-language speakers rather than writers, the map and the concept of the linguascape are nevertheless informative for our investigation of literary bi- and  multilingualism. A dynamic understanding of the relatively rapid and dramatic changes in the US linguascape of the twentieth century enables us to trace how, say, Pietro di Donato’s Italian-inflected English in Christ in Concrete of 1939 is still indebted to Italian (part of turn of the century migrant multilingualism) but already turning into what would become, in Don DeLillo’s words, ‘the Italian American vulgate’ of the 1950s (‘The power of history’, 62). By the end of the century DeLillo speaks of it in interview as one of the ‘virtually lost languages’, a mixture of that of the old country and the slang of American streets (‘An Interview’, 110). Fred Gardaphé’s research in ‘Language in Fiction: Italian at work in Italian American novels’ bears this out. Excluding works written in Italian between 1890 and 1920, his answer to the question of what happens to Italian over the course of the twentieth century is predictable against the backdrop of the general American linguascape I have just sketched out, starkly demonstrating the attrition of Italian in Italian American fiction. Whereas authors in the early period (1930–55) ‘were very close to the Italian language’, he writes, in the second (1955–80) there is still some familiarity with, but much more restricted use of it (183). In the contemporary period, however, he finds ‘a near abandonment’ of Italian by Italian American authors, except for the odd word here and there – complete sentences, let alone passages or dialogues in Italian no longer

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feature (184). Gardaphé’s findings can be used to describe the decline of nonEnglish European languages in American migrant literature generally, and this is as much a question of generational shift as it is of markets and English-only readerships. As he observes, ‘younger writers . . . demonstrat[e] their greater distance from the language and its native speakers’, since they do not hear Italian around them anymore and most likely have not been brought up with it either (185). This development was not inevitable, however. Responsible for the shift, and for the increasing monolingualism of markets and readers, is the combination of coercive Americanization programmes up until the 1920s and immigration restriction between 1924 and 1965, which conspired against the use of languages other than English in literature no less than in the home and street. ‘Think of the family as sentence and the individual as the word,’ ­Gardaphé explains, and it becomes possible to relate the appearance of only the odd Italian wanderword in contemporary writing to lack of new immigration and American individualism; the full Italian sentence, like the extended Italian famiglia, has long since dispersed and moved away. And so, as the second, then third and fourth generations of (im)migrants had their native tongues washed out of their mouths with soap in American schools and homes, as family and community bonds were loosened and traditions faded, only a broken and accented – not English now, but Italian, Yiddish, Russian, Polish or Greek survived in migrant literature: wanderwords scattered and strewn about, but still freighted with others’ intentions and the cultural baggage of the past. Yet this does not mean that migrant languages in American literature are all but lost – far from it. Another way of interpreting Gardaphé’s findings is to conclude that, against all odds, traces of Italian have survived in contemporary American literature, even where it does not identify itself as Italian American anymore (see Chapter 2 on DeLillo). It is worth remembering that, as Alastair Pennycook writes, ‘the choices we make about which language to use in which context are choices that reflect broader cultural and political views; . . . [but] such instances of language use also produce cultural and political views’ (‘Lessons’, 215). As any sociolinguist can tell you, whether people hold on to other languages and keep them alive in a new country depends on that language’s status in the receiving society, and on the existence of a large enough community of speakers; both factors are subject to change. Portes and Rumbaut explain, for example, that Spanish currently flourishes in the

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United States because it is used by ‘a large immigrant population, buttressed by institutions that include ethnic media such as newspapers, radio stations, and even major television networks’. Attrition of Spanish in the second generation is not so marked as it was for Italian a hundred years ago, because ‘parents’ efforts to transmit their language are not isolated but supported by a broader framework’ (Legacies, 127). The concept of the linguascape enables us to keep in mind this larger linguistic context, which can be local for an individual speaker, but will be national or international for an aspiring writer, such as di Donato once was, and Mary Antin, Richard Rodriguez, Eva Hoffman and Bharati Mukherjee used to be. Furthermore, language attrition can be reversed with a change in the social and political climate (the end of the Cold war, for example, in the case of American Polish) or in the life cycle, as sociolinguist Rakhmiel Peltz has demonstrated. As if in anticipation of the contemporary revival of Yiddish in America, Peltz conducted an experiment with elderly second-generation Jewish immigrants in the 1980s and created a social club where only Yiddish would be spoken. Noting the participants’ enthusiasm for the project, he observed that ‘[a]n understanding of lifecycle changes relating to personal and group identity can highlight variations in both language use and ethnic identity’ (183). Peltz’s Jewish seniors felt that in speaking Yiddish they were being returned to their former selves; having lived all of their adult lives in English, and thinking of themselves as fully American, they would not even now speak Yiddish spontaneously, except in the context of the group. Ethnic shame prevented them from doing so; one participant reported that he ‘used to cringe at the sight of the Jewish paper that proclaimed to the world that we were not exactly like our neighbors, that we were not quite Americans’ (191). Another related – heartbreakingly – that members were encouraged to call themselves and each other ‘by names our parents called us’, their own proper names, which they had not heard for decades (193). Noting that Yiddish was welcomed back like a long-lost, but never-forgotten friend, Peltz concluded that language is the marker of a shifting ethnicity and that therefore the dominant view of language as merely an aspect of ethnicity is mistaken. Linguistic difference makes up much of cultural difference, but then the fact that we often take the migrant’s fluency in the new language for the exact measure of her assimilation could already have told us that.

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Peltz’s Yiddish-speaking seniors and current Yiddish-speaking juniors in New York, as well as Native American children learning Ojibway in school (who can only communicate with their great-grandmothers in that language) provide anecdotal, but important evidence that the American linguascape is changing again and becoming more multilingual than it has been at any time since World War II.33 Portes and Rumbaut’s conclusion on the threshold of the twenty-first century that ‘despite the personal and social advantages of multilingualism . . . public education and social pressures in American society will continue to extinguish foreign languages at a brisk pace’ may therefore prove premature and unduly pessimistic (Legacies, 146). For, as Pennycook enables us to see, the language ideologies and practices that make up the linguascape are subject to change and transformation (‘Lesson’, 208). Migrant languages need not be confined and essentialized as part of ethnic ‘heritage’, but can be appropriated for ‘nontraditional purposes’ at the same time as English can be changed ‘to become a language through which other cultures can find expression’, whether that is in the use of wanderwords or by means of other heterolingual or interlingual phenomena, such as di Donato’s literal translations (‘Lesson’, 216). By our own actions – speech, teaching, writing – we make language policy every day, not only responding to or being determined by the linguascape we find ourselves in, but acting on it too. As will be evident by now, this book is part and parcel of such a project, and in the next and final section I shall outline what exactly that parcel contains.

Reading wanderwords: theory and practice Because the questions I asked at the beginning of this introduction need historicized, contextualized and also, in some measure, more theorized answers than the scholarship I surveyed earlier has provided, there is some more linguistic and conceptual groundwork to do before we get to reading migrant American literature to see how wanderwords work in practice. Above I have outlined some of the factors that play a part in the pressure English exerts on other American languages in everyday use and that explain why ‘speak English, you are in the United States!’ has become such a familiar refrain.34 In the realm of American literature, of course, that pressure is even

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greater, for reasons also stated earlier: since English is today’s global language, literature in English has a potentially worldwide market. This is also why the wanderwords and other modes of heterolinguality that American migrant writers have incorporated into their textual practice since colonial times are likely to become a feature of world literature generally, as multilingualism spreads and establishes itself in poetic signification. In Chapter 2 I explain the theoretical apparatus for the study of heterolinguality, as I develop a way of reading wanderwords that does justice to the poetics and the politics of their appearance. Because such a method has to be informed by some knowledge of socio- and psycholinguistics, a survey of linguistic approaches to the study of language migration will take up part of this next chapter. Another part is devoted to philosophy of language, to psychoanalysis and to recent scholarship on the language of emotions. Since languages do not migrate by themselves, but with and through human bodies and behaviour, I use Vološinov and Bakhtin’s conception of language as always inevitably social to explain how wanderwords import otherness into American literature, and the psychoanalysis of multilingualism to inform our interpretation of its poetic effects. These theoretical tenets, together with the concept of the linguascape, inform my case studies of wanderwords in practice: readings of migrant lifewriting in published and unpublished form in Chapters 3 and 4 through to essays and novels in Chapters 5 and 6, poetry in Chapters 7 and 8 and finally bilingual fiction and crónicas in the Conclusion. Since each chapter takes on a particular form or genre of migrant literature, and explores the theoretical and contextual issues it raises, they can be read separately or out of sequence beyond Chapter 2. This is possible also because most of the texts under discussion will be familiar to readers of American literature; my choice of them was driven by the desire to engage in depth with favourites from the canon of migrant writing in English and to show that language migration is represented in a wide variety of ways. To stretch that spectrum of hetero-, bi- and multilingual signification even further and to highlight the role of readership in expanding or delimiting its potential, I also included the work of some lesser known writers who, removed from the literary arena, address only their own bicultural community or family. Ultimately, as the key question of what happens to the writers’ other language(s) elicits different answers every time with each writer and each text, a poetics and

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politics of bi- and multilingual writing unfolds in the course of reading this book, to be finally revealed in the Conclusion. In Chapter 3, to demonstrate the power of the linguascape, I examine the very well-known memoirs of Eva Hoffman and Mary Antin as two diametrically opposed accounts of English acquisition as a result of migration that bookend the twentieth century. Where Hoffman’s migration to English entails a traumatic loss of Polish, for Antin learning English appears to be a joyful gain. Appearances are deceptive, however, and my reading of Lost in Translation and The Promised Land against the grain of English in search of the writers’ other languages turns their surface meanings inside out. I show how, when read in the context of the early twentieth-century Americanization campaign and late twentieth-century multiculturalism, these migrant memoirs, far from being iconic accounts of individual experience, turn out to be formative interventions in the American linguascape. Still concerned with immigrant writing in the early to mid-twentieth century, Chapter 4 takes a step back from migrant writers’ literary aspiration to concern itself with the most basic condition for it: the acquisition of literacy in English as a second language. Opening with a brief discussion of that most famous record of Dutch American immigrant success, The Americanization of Edward Bok, written in English-only, it goes on to examine the aesthetic special effects that imperfect English literacy generates in the work of knowing (Dirk Nieland) and un-knowing (Truus van Bruinessen) amateur writers of Dutch and English. Rather than English-with-wanderwords, here we encounter interlingual creativity in the Yankee Dutch humour of Dirk Nieland’s ’n Fonnie Bisnis, intelligible to bilingual readers only. Truus van Bruinessen’s immigrant letters in Dutch and the English memoir based on them, On the move: a journey of faith, provide a unique insight into the gendered nature of second-language acquisition and what linguists call first-language ‘interference’. Unpublished and unsung until now, van Bruinessen’s work evidences a writing practice of inhibition, rather than inhabitation by English; her palimpsestic writing in Dutch-inflected English represents a common scenario of adjustment to language migration almost never seen in literature. Notions of linguistic purity and integrity are further unsettled in Chapter 5, where I read the first three volumes of Richard Rodriguez’s oeuvre of autobiographical essays, Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown,

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less for what they say about hegemonic English than for what they do with Mexican Spanish. Rodriguez’s solution to the bilingual writer’s dilemma – his ‘choice’ of English as the language of the public sphere versus Spanish as the language of home – is decidedly not free. Reading his work psychoanalytically with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, we find that the split subjectivity he so defiantly assumes, must disavow the mother tongue, only to envelop and contain it as the language of intimacy in the protective embrace of his highliterary English. In Chapter 6 this English, high-literary as well as low-global, comes under scrutiny in two of Bharati Mukherjee’s later novels, Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride. Here, her familiar theme of unpredictable hybridity as a result of contemporary migration is mirrored in linguistic form, as various Englishes and wanderwords in several languages highlight English’s diversity as a (post-) colonial language of India, a global lingua franca and the dominant language of American literature, each with its own history and ideological investments. Mukherjee’s fiction draws on the cosmopolitan resources of a multilingual diaspora that is postcolonial, transnational and American all at once. As fiction, but also as an articulation of global migrant culture on the cusp of the twenty-first century, it enables a different kind of reflection on the meaning of wanderwords in characters’ or narrators’ discourse than the various modes of life-writing hitherto discussed have done, while at the same time shedding light on English’s own ‘glocal’ hybridity. Multilingual wanderwords in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée in Chapter 7 have a different function altogether and serve to mask the enigmatic almostabsence of Hak’s Korean. Unlike any other text I examine, Dictée addresses language migration outside the American context and confronts us with the question of what happens to a native language that is not repressed or forgotten, but forbidden. Charting a Korean mother’s forced migration to China and to speaking Japanese, Cha mourns the loss of that native language in the stifled French/English voice of a daughter honouring her mother(’s) tongue. Having traversed the multilingual experimentalism of Dictée, it becomes possible in Chapter 8 to answer the question of what a properly bi- or multilingual American literature might look like and to shift our attention from the study of English-with-wanderwords to poetry in Spanish and English. Equipped with only beginner’s Spanish, I discuss the poetry of

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Tino Villanueva, Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Rosario Ferré, Francisco Santana and Gloria Anzaldúa as an experiment, to demonstrate that it is not only readable by those fully versed in English and Spanish, but can be deeply rewarding for the novice too. Building on the theoretical foundation of Chapter 2 and the case studies in ensuing chapters, I present here a poetics of bi- and multilingual writing and posit that to do such work justice, we need to learn to read creatively and bi- or multilingually ourselves, rather than rely solely on translation, which domesticates the otherness of other languages and returns them to the English-only fold. This experiment is extended further in my Conclusion, where I discuss the highly innovative work of Junot Díaz and Susana Chávez-Silverman. Fine twenty-first-century multilingual writers both, they have made the impossible possible and the hitherto unlikely likely, by finding their own transnational readership and achieving literary recognition in the process. Both benefit from new modes of writing and scholarship provided by the world wide web, as Silverman writes her crónicas in the form of e-mails and the reading of Díaz’s work is facilitated by online exegesis. And as print ceases to be the royal road to publication and translation into English is no longer the sole gateway to being read internationally, it is likely that more and more migrant readers and writers will take to the internet to create the present and future of bi- and multilingual literary production. Wanderwords then is not a book about ‘foreign’ tongues and translation. As Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, Edward Bok, Dirk Nieland and Truus van Bruinessen, Richard Rodriguez and Bharati Mukherjee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tino Villanueva and Gloria Anzaldúa know, and Junot Díaz and Susana Chávez-Silverman show, it is about the wonder and the wandering of words and meanings in the lingual contact zone of English-with-other-languages that is American literature, belatedly reconnecting with the world.

2

How Not to Tame a Wild Tongue: Wanderwords in Theory

In her seminal book of poetry and theory, Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa has a chapter entitled ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue,’ in which she writes about ‘linguistic terrorism: Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente’, the italics of the Spanish words highlighting both their strangeness and their importance. ‘We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla [derision]’ she elaborates (58). Imposed monolingualism, in Anzaldúa’s thought, is linguistic terrorism and normative English monolingualism therefore ‘deslengua’ (strips of language, ‘de-tongues’ and thereby de-fangs) those who would speak and write a language other than English. With Anzaldúa’s words about the dire and destructive effects of monolingualism in mind, the aim of this chapter is to develop a positive method of reading wanderwords in American texts in English, to be extended into a poetics of bi- and multilingual writing in Chapter 8. In what follows I shall survey a range of theories and strategies that will help us to engage with heterolinguality in literature in a more informed, and yet also more creative way than translation alone allows us to do, since arguably translation is another way of deslenguar the wild tongues of bi- and multilingual writers. So, although a thematic interest in migration and cultural difference, familiar from our study of ethnic literature, will be evident in subsequent chapters, my main aim throughout is to put the writer’s languages centre stage. Where do we look, what do we need to know, to read migrant writing and its wanderwords well, that is, in a way that is sensitive to and appreciative of any particular writer’s bi- or multilingual predicament and aesthetic practice?

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To begin with, we may think about what, for the immigrant in the company of strangers, the learning of a new language is like: you feel yourself reduced to the status of a child, halting, inarticulate, powerless to make yourself known in this new world. Or rather: to make yourself known on your own, old country terms: the terms are set by the new country, the other language, that tongue-twisting tongue that sounds like mere sounds without rhyme or reason at first. Learning English, Junot Díaz has said, ‘is such a violent experience as a kid’, and it may be even more so for an adult (14). Life in a new language is like life in a new childhood: learning the rules of the game all over again, but without the freedom to dawdle or play. And yet, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, in time migrant writers do learn how to play in more than one language, in poetry (see Chapters 7 and 8) as you might expect, but also in fiction, letters, essays and autobiography (Chapters 3–6). Knowing that all linguistic competence is mimicry, is playing by the rules, they start to break them, to wrest poetic possibility from the realm of prohibition. Migrant writers show us that their literature, though written in a language not their first, is about much more than telling the story of ‘the migrant experience’: it is about language itself too, well beyond the communication model of one-to-one correspondences between meaning and intent. Perhaps you need to have another language to see that, in English, the word ‘meaning’, for example, has intent in it but exceeds it at the same time: what words mean may be different, and more, than what I meant to say with them. You don’t have to be a Derridean to understand this, but it helps: signification exceeds itself and doubles back, with startling and sometimes contradictory results, in migrant writing that works with this awareness and with wanderwords. When Eva Hoffman discovers, in Lost in Translation, that English is just a language, just harsh sounds and words compared with the Polish that sings and shapes her world, she experiences ‘this radical disjoining between word and thing [as] a desiccating alchemy’(107). English does not allow her access to the life she knew in Polish in Poland, and she is literally lost in an unworkable translation, a perpetual inarticulate present reminiscent of early childhood, in which neither language squares up to her reality. Decades later, Hoffman explains in interview that there is another way to be lost in translation too: to be lost in rapture at the dazzling possibilities of life in two languages; ‘I was

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entranced and preoccupied and obsessed by it,’ she says (‘Life’, 20). It is the space between these two poles of bi- or multilingual experience, as represented in writing, that I want to trace here: from loss to rapture, and from the zerosum game of language acquisition that is the underlying narrative of most of Lost in Translation to the radically insurgent bi- or multilingual play that fuels the poetic sensibilities of the writers and poets discussed in the final two chapters and in the Conclusion of this book. Developing a theory of wanderwords and a method for reading language migration in texts in English is no easy task, because there is so little precedent. Leonard Forster’s lone book on multilingualism in literature, The Poet’s Tongues, and K. Alfons Knauth’s overview of literary multilingualism in the Western world, are too general and too ‘bookish’ for our purposes. And although linguists like Mark Sebba are now beginning to write about multilingualism in written discourse, this work is still in its early stages, confined to the analysis of relatively straightforward texts like signs and newspaper articles. Meir Sternberg, finally, has usefully attempted to systematize the various modes of signification that result from multilingualism in literature (and I will outline these later) but he has done so primarily to assist the translator of multilingual texts, rather than the reader or theorist. For the latter, for us that is, questions abound in infinite regress, from the very concrete ‘how does Polish work in Lost in Translation?’ to the very abstract ‘how do languages work in the mind, in the unconscious, in the brain?’ which is probably best left for neuroscientists to answer. Questions I will ask in this and later chapters, however, are such as: what cultural or ideological work do wanderwords do in the English text? As we saw in the previous chapter, linguistic difference names cultural difference, but is also part of it. What happens to the representation of cultural difference then when it is part of signification, when languages touch on the page? Should we think of the languages of migrant writing as linguists do, and regard them as rulebound systems, amenable to change, but – unlike ethnicity – not invention? Should we see them, as a psychoanalyst might, as embodied entities, possessed by and  possessing the individual subject? Or do languages, conversely, cut loose and other the self when mediated in writing, literary convention and print? What are bi- and multilingualism anyway, and how does the use of wanderwords in English evoke the presence of another language?

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Linguistics seems the most obvious discipline to provide answers to such questions, and an initial exploration of the migrant writer’s bi- and multilingualism will enable us to identify the factors (contextual, personal, generic, linguistic) that shape the ways in which English, in a variety of textual forms ranging from life-writing to experimental poetry, is shot through, combined with or haunted by another language or languages. But the use of linguistics in this endeavour has its problems and limitations too, as we shall soon see. Reliance on the concept of ‘code-switching’, for example, and on the paradigm of translation to bridge cognitive difficulty when we encounter words in an unknown language, exposes fault lines of methodology and terminology that lead us to look beyond linguistics for thought that can accommodate the poetic and ideological vicissitudes of languages in contact (or conflict) without being judgemental about them. I find such thought in Vološinov’s philosophy of language, in Doris Sommer’s bilingual aesthetics, in Reed Way Dasenbrock’s approach to reading multicultural texts and in the concept of the linguistic unconscious, as forged by psychoanalysts like Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri. Together these provide the paving stones for a way of reading wanderwords (and – later – bi- and multilingual texts) that recognizes and valorizes cultural difference as necessarily inscribed in linguistic difference, by way of a compensatory countermove to the violence and terror of enforced English monolingualism that Anzaldúa and Díaz pointed out earlier.

Wanderwords and bi- or multilingualism: the migrant writer’s languages Starting from the premise that wanderwords in the migrant writer’s English texts are reminders, representatives even, of that writer’s bi- or multilingualism, we need to establish what that bi- or multilingualism consists of before we can think about how it functions in writing. Ask a linguist about bi- and multilingualism, and you are in for some surprises: first, she or he will tell you that linguistics treats bi- and multilingualism in much the same way, because the only important distinction to be made is between monolinguals and those who have ‘more than one’ language, in the words of John Edwards  (33).1

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Second, the  same specialist on multilingualism attributes its status as a ‘widespread global phenomenon’ primarily to migration – of people, but also of languages: Immigrants to a new country bring their languages into contact with each other and with those of existing populations. . . . Sometimes, as with imperialist and colonial expansion, it is not necessary for large numbers of people to physically move; they may ‘move’ their language into contact with others through military and economic pressures. (33)

Edwards’ latter observation explains the global spread of English as a second language; still, his claim that ‘[e]veryone is bilingual’ would be news to most people, certainly those living in the United States or United Kingdom. It all depends on what he means by ‘bilingual’, obviously, and he means that ‘there is no one in the world (no adult, anyway) who does not know at least a few words in languages other than the maternal variety’ (55). True (and impossible to prove) as this statement may be, it is also useless in its universalism; if ‘everyone is bilingual’, the term has no distinguishing function. Edwards does enable us to see, however, as Derrida does in Monolingualism of the Other, but for different reasons, that it is impossible to make a clear and firm distinction between bi- and monolingualism. Languages – like peoples – are always interacting with each other and the two therefore function as poles of a sliding scale, with monolingualism (knowing no language other than one’s native tongue) at one end and a perfect bi- or multilingualism (mastery of two or more mutually unintelligible languages that is indistinguishable from use of those languages by native speakers) at the other. But such a ‘perfect’ bi- or multilingualism may also be a chimera. Someone who is so adept in another language that she or he is ‘taken to be one of themselves’ by the second-language group, as François Grosjean puts it, would need to be able to pass-for-native in all four dimensions of language competence, that is, speaking, reading, writing and listening – an almost impossible task (Life, 232).2 ‘Balanced bilingualism’ has therefore replaced the near-impossible standard of ‘perfect bilingualism’, and is defined as an equal mastery of more than one language, but not necessarily across all four dimensions, nor to a level of native competence. If linguistic received wisdom holds that most people in the world today are bilingual, this therefore means that some of them will speak two languages fluently, but they may be literate

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in only one. Or a multilingual person may be perfectly competent in all four skills in one language, fluent in speech and aural comprehension in another and able to read yet a third.3 Furthermore, as Anatoliy Kharkhurin observes, people ‘acquire and use [their] languages for different purposes, in different domains in life, and with different people’ (xii). This more capacious and multi-dimensional conception of bi- and multilingualism is helpful, because it makes it possible to distinguish between minimal bilinguals, like Richard Rodriguez and Truus van Bruinessen on the one hand, and balanced ones like Susana Chávez-Silverman or Gloria Anzaldúa on the other hand; each writer’s textual practice of heterolinguality varies accordingly. Li Wei lists about a page and a half of further distinctions linguists have made within bilingualism, far too many for us to be working with, yet there are a few that apply to the migrant writer’s position. A common one differentiates active (speaking) from passive (reading) bilingualism, though I find it preferable to adopt Edwards’ more helpful terms ‘receptive’ and ‘productive’ (because reading is not, as we know, passive) (58–9). Second, linguists stress that the history of acquisition of another language shapes the kind of bilingualism that results, and can make for a different cognitive organization of the bilingual mind and brain.4 A common distinction is made, for example, between simultaneous bilingualism (more than one language acquired from birth, or from very early childhood at least) and successive bilingualism (a  second language learnt in adolescence or adulthood).5 In the case of migrant writers, and actually also of non-migrants like Anzaldúa or Villanueva who would have had to learn English at school, successive bilingualism is the most likely scenario, and this is something to bear in mind as we analyse different bilingual practices in migrant texts later. Simultaneous and successive bilingualisms are in turn similar to, but not quite the same as, additive and subtractive bilingualism. Additive bilingualism simply means that acquisition of another language expands the linguistic repertoire a person has at his disposal; subtractive bilingualism means that such acquisition comes at the expense of her first language, and ultimately dis- or even replaces it (Edwards, 59).6 Again, this distinction is relevant when we look at migrant literature and compare the virtual absence of Dutch in Edward Bok’s autobiography with Truus van Bruinessen’s lifewriting in two languages, or when we contrast the standard English of

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Richard Rodriguez with that of Sandra Cisneros, infused with Spanish at every turn. Indeed, the difference between Rodriguez and Cisneros, or van Bruinessen and Bok, illustrates Hamers and Blanc’s insightful, but very much stricter definition of bilingualism than Edwards’ above, as ‘the individual’s capacity to speak a second language while following the concepts and structures of that language rather than paraphrasing his or her mother tongue’ (citing R. Titone, 7). van Bruinessen, an amateur writer as we shall see in Chapter 4, can only paraphrase Dutch when she writes in English, while Sandra Cisneros, as a professional poet and novelist, chooses to translate literally from Spanish to enhance her signification in English. Because Hamers and Blanc’s bilingualism has difference inscribed in it, since it works with the understanding every bilingual person has – that your languages don’t do the same job but mean differently – I shall use their definition of bi- and multilingualism in the following chapters. I further propose to adapt their description of ‘bilinguality [a]s the psychological state of an individual who has access to more than one linguistic code as a means of social communication’ to read: ‘wanderwords are the textual manifestation of a migrant author’s ability to access more than one natural language as a means of creative production’ (6). Inelegant as this formulation is, it helps us to get from definitions of bi- and multilingualism in speech to bi- and multilingualism in texts, and from an instrumental conception of language as social communication to literary language as semantic, syntactic, grammatical, phonological and lexical play or critique. I see play and critique furthermore as sides of the same language-gaming coin that works with linguistic material for aesthetic, but also political gain, as we will see later on. Here, as clearly as we need to have it, bi- and multilingualism thus does not imply ‘perfect mastery’, nor expert and fast translation from one language to another, but the ability to use two or more separate systems (lexical, grammatical, phonological, semantic) and to be able to violate, invigorate, manipulate or expurgate their difference, according to one’s will or wish, consciously or unconsciously. This last is important, because the kind of bi- or multilingualism that leads to language wandering in American literature produces aesthetic effects in the convergence, conflict or radical disjuncture between the migrant writer’s languages. And so we need terms and concepts that enable us to both include

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and distinguish between various uses of migrant languages, in writing practices that range from Edward Bok’s almost complete suppression (or is it repression?) of his native Dutch to Eva Hoffman’s dormant Polish, via Truus van Bruinessen’s strongly Dutch-accented English, Dirk Nieland’s mixing of English and Dutch, and Richard Rodriguez’s impaired Spanish, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s poetic alternation of French, English and Chinese calligraphy, all the way to Susana Chávez-Silverman’s combination of English, various Spanishes and Spanglish. It seems to me that a situational (biographical) definition of bi- and multilingualism is most useful to us here, because in exploring migrant writing for the presence of languages other than English, we are looking, ultimately, for evidence of the author’s other language(s) in the literary text. A migrant writer’s situation, in addition and in relation to his or her history of language acquisition, matters to our consideration of their heterolingual aesthetic practice, because whether or not becoming bilingual was a chosen, forced, traumatic or happy experience will inform one’s use of one’s languages. Gustavo Perez-Firmat, for example, clearly takes aim at the lightheartedness of the concept of ‘language-gaming’ derived from Doris Sommer, which I referred to above, in his study of bilingual Anglo-Hispanic literature, Tongue Ties. For him, as a Cuban exile and poet, bilingualism is not a game and ‘there is no bilingualism without pain’, he writes. ‘For every merry bilingualist who feasts on wordplay – all roads lead to roam – there is a somber bilingual who bites his tongues. . . . We are sometimes too quick in singing the praises of bilingualism’ (6). Perez-Firmat’s book is a thoughtful and important meditation on the bilingual writer’s dilemma – not, now, of what language to write in, but of being forced to choose at all, ‘since bilingualism is not always a choice’ (6). As we shall see in Chapter 8, his poems in Bilingual Blues are tinged with regret, not of the bilingual condition per se, but of its consequence: the loss of Spanish’s primacy. His title, Tongue Ties, in a way says it all, and echoes Hoffman’s grief for Polish in Lost in Translation, since she, too, experiences the acquisition of English as an imposition, and her migration as a kind of exile.7 Then again, there may also be an unacknowledged generational factor at work in Hoffman and Perez-Firmat’s tongue ties, and their implied conviction that breast (the first language) is best. For most of the twentieth century negative valorization of bilingualism was the rule among linguists, regardless

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of the circumstances in which a second language was learnt. Here is an oftquoted passage from Otto Jespersen, articulating what is still a common view among non-specialists: It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with two languages: but without doubt the advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child in question hardly learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would have done if he had limited himself to one. It may seem, on the surface, as if he talked just like a native, but he does not really command the fine points of the language. . . . Secondly, the brain effort required to master two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things which might and ought to be learnt. (from Jespersen’s Language (1922); qtd. in Grosjean Life, 220)

Jespersen here sums up a still widespread fear, among mono- and bilingual people alike, that having more than one language taxes the brain to such an extent that not just the person’s languages but his or her cognitive abilities overall are adversely affected.8 Immediately striking about what has come to be known as the ‘cognitive deficit’ thesis is Jespersen’s assumption of monolingualism as not just the norm, and bilingualism as the exception, but as normative. Yet, as we now know, if most people in the world today are bilingual, then the reverse is true, and only no-migration states (are there any?) and those where English is native still mistake the monolingual exception for the rule. Jespersen’s zero-sum theory of cognition, and of language acquisition in particular, has only been revised in the past 30 or 40 years. Where previously experts and policy makers agreed that bilingual education, for example, would disadvantage and confuse the child and deprive it of access to mainstream society and social mobility (see the twentieth-century American linguascape in Chapter 1), today prominent linguists like Li Wei and Joshua Fishman, as well as cultural theorists like Doris Sommer, make great claims for the cognitive advantages of bilingualism, quite apart from the obvious cultural, social and political benefits of having more than one language in a globalizing world. Greater conceptual flexibility, a talent for creativity and lateral thinking, and even a more democratic mindset that is open to cultural difference are now seen as additional gains of being bilingual.9 Kharkhurin, whose research concerns specifically the relation between multilingualism and creativity, offers

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the sobering thought, however, that such advantages might derive at least as much from bilinguals’ experience of the different cultural settings in which they have acquired their languages – rather than the languages per se (27–31). I will return to this point, which pertains to the relation between linguistic and cultural difference, later on.

Fault lines: against ‘code-switching’ If psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience are the appropriate disciplines to look to for verification of such claims, they also take us very far away from the question of bi- or multilingualism in writing, and even further from wanderwords in migrant literature. In addition, interdisciplinarity between literary and linguistic modes of analysis shows certain fault lines that cannot be ignored, if we are to forge a useful working model from both. Findings that bilingualism is not a pathology but might be a bonus in life, as in art, lead Kharkhurin to posit that ‘individuals’ practice with multiple languages . . . influence[s] specific cognitive processes that in turn may lead to an increase in their creative performance’, which brings us closer to the mark of multilingual writing and creativity (xiii). Such insights, furthermore, modify widely held, but mistaken beliefs with regard to language ‘mastery’ and bi- or multilingual ‘mistakes’ as a result of ‘interference’ from the native language, to which we turn our attention next. The terminology is telling: ‘mastery’ implies conscious control of language, while ‘interference’ suggests that the sovereignty and purity of a language are violated if there is more than one in attendance. Both terms thus imply a theory of natural languages as integral and sufficient onto themselves, not to be contaminated by others or to have their particular rules transgressed, while at the same time acknowledging the permeability of any language’s borders. Anyone interested in the poetic possibilities of language, however, is, I suggest, interested in such permeability and wants to see language taken to its limits and beyond, its borders crossed and re-crossed. Such a person is also aware of how language is submitted to, rather than mastered, how it dictates us (see Chapter 7) at least as much as we are dictating it. Take this awareness to two or more languages combined and the possibilities for ‘making it new’ multiply: in

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the contact zone where languages touch, the poetic effects of ‘interference’ or conscious and ‘masterful’ linguistic play may well be indistinguishable from each other. As Werner Sollors has written: This raises the larger question of how easy it may be, especially in working with ‘mixed’ languages, to confuse language incompetence, resulting in errors that editors have to correct, and sophistication in the conscious and nuanced employment of ‘impure’ language elements for aesthetic or other purposes. Such aspects of the language may be an indication of a ‘mixed’ location, which is also what characterizes whole bodies of literature. (‘The Many Languages’, 79)

Dirk Nieland’s Yankee Dutch, discussed in Chapter 4, is the product of such a ‘mixed location’, and presents an interlanguage that exploits the normative notion of ‘interference’ for all its comic worth, while systematically transgressing the border between English and Dutch and dismantling the idea of ‘code-switching’ therefore as well. For ‘interference’ and ‘mastery’ are not the only unhelpful imports from outdated linguistic parlance into literary study. ‘Code-switching’ – almost ubiquitous in discussions of bi- and multilingual literature – exposes an interdisciplinary fault line that is of even less use, in that it actively inhibits understanding of bi- and multilingual signification. Not only are natural languages not ‘codes’, which merely encrypt the same content in different ways, but they are also not necessarily so distinct from each other that a ‘switch’ is easily detectable. Penelope Gardner-Chloros and François Grosjean come to our aid here in their analysis and critique of the binary model of standard languages that underlies ‘code-switching’ and ‘interference’ as linguistic concepts. ‘In code-switching the switched element is not integrated; instead there is a total shift to the other language,’ Grosjean writes, although what counts as a ‘total shift’ (for how long a unit: a word, a phrase, a sentence, a passage?) is impossible to determine (Life, 146). Besides, in a mixed language like Nieland’s Yankee Dutch, or in Spanglish, for example, ‘a total shift’ is clearly not what happens. When Nieland writes ‘in de veurste plees’ (in the first place/in de eerste plaats) he translates an English expression, but into a Dutch where ‘veurste’ can be a dialectical pronunciation of ‘voorste’ (the first, or the one in front) and ‘place’ would be the only English element – though not in this orthographic form (where it means ‘toilets’ in Dutch slang). Since the ‘switched element’ here is hard to identify and certainly does not

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survive intact, ‘code-switching’ does not describe what goes on in this instance. Hamers and Blanc therefore prefer to use the term ‘code-mixing’ to allow for a wider descriptive model of what bilinguals do: The notion of mixing is close to that of interference . . . that is, a deviation from the norm in each language due to familiarity with two languages. However, mixing is not necessarily a matter of interference but may be the expression of a strategy specific to the bilingual speaker. (35)

This allows for an interpretation of mixed language as not ‘deviation’, not ‘interference’, but ‘the expression of a strategy’ that can be, pace Sollors, aesthetic or – as in Nieland’s example – humorous. In her critique of the concept of code-switching, Penelope Gardner-Chloros remarks trenchantly that a lot of effort has been expended within the field of code-switching on setting up a new orthodoxy to replace the old orthodoxy of monolingual norms. This consists in defining code-switching as a special form of skilled bilingual behaviour, to be distinguished from the aberrant manifestations of bilingualism which involve one language influencing another. (68)

This, she argues, is not much progress and instead of a binary model based on the assumption that natural languages are discrete systems and that they are only themselves in monolingual, standard form, Gardner-Chloros proposes the idea of a continuum of what she terms ‘interlingual phenomena’ where borrowing, pidginization, interference (according to Sollors’ view) codeswitching (in Grosjean’s sense) and code-mixing (in Hamers and Blanc’s definition) all find a place, but are by no means always and easily distinguishable from each other. ‘Certainly the idea that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the type of switching which is used, and the degree of bilingual ability of the speaker, must be seen as an oversimplification,’ she concludes (86). The question, in analysis of bilingual speech, should thus not be how speakers keep their languages separate, but how they ‘manipulate the overall sociolinguistic situation to create their own linguistic sub-groups’ or, as she calls it elsewhere, their ‘we-code’ (86; 82). If we apply Gardner-Chloros’ approach to bi- and multilingualism in writing, what would a ‘we-code’ look like? With respect to the bilingual writer’s choice of what language to write in, competency – however we want to define it –

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is often overridden by more pragmatic considerations. Whereas in speaking the addressee of any utterance also in effect determines the language choice, in writing (for print and publication, at least) the anonymity and potential variety of readerships makes for a greater freedom – but also for more uncertainty. As he has explained in an interview, Junot Díaz may want to create a ‘we-code’ for his Dominican compatriots in his fiction, by using a lot of ‘their’ Dominican Spanish, but this does not preclude me from reading it and trying to understand it as well (Céspedes, 900). So, if Grosjean is right in stating that ‘language use is determined by need’, then migrant writers may need to write bi- or multilingually, or to insert wanderwords here and there, according to what they want to convey and the readership they want to reach (Life, 236). The writer’s history in becoming bi- or multilingual and the troubled waters of translatability play a part here too. In so-called co-ordinate bilingualism different memory stores are employed for the different languages, which are related to the different contexts in which these were acquired. Díaz thus needs to use Spanish and – often – Dominican slang to reach his target audience and to evoke the ‘we-code’ he is after in employing Yunior’s voice. In compound bilinguality, by contrast, ‘the language acquisition histories are very similar for both languages’ and thus the referents and concepts evoked by the different languages are much the same. If you learnt English and French simultaneously as a child at home, ‘home’ and ‘chez moi’ would have the same meaning, whereas for most French people who learnt English at school, ‘chez moi’ and ‘home’ or ‘at home’ would not mean the same thing at all, even if they would translate these words back and forth in this way (Hamers and Blanc, 94–5). Not only does the home-word in the home-language, whatever this is, evoke memories of the place we grew up in, it also carries emotional connotations that ‘(at) home’ in a second or third language lacks. It is because of the importance of such connotations – fine nuances of meaning, or of ‘feel’, of which we are usually barely conscious until we have to translate from one language into another – that the psychoanalytic description of a mind ‘inhabited by’ several languages presents itself as particularly apt for a definition of the bi- or multilingualism of migrant writers. In light of this insight, and especially when read from a bi- or multilingual perspective, Derrida’s thesis in Monolingualism of the Other, ‘I only have one language, yet it is not mine’ is a truism because none of our languages are

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ours (2). Although a very different statement of linguistic dispossession than that of Anzaldúa which opened this chapter, it goes without saying for most migrant writers – especially if they, like the Derrida of Monolingualism, write from the colonial situation – that ‘their’ languages ultimately belong to an ever-distant, ever-deferred other, who makes the rules and sets the standard of linguistic correctness. However, because they do not share Derrida’s desire for an ‘absolute idiom’ or a universal language (see Chapter 1), migrant writers’ use of wanderwords or other heterolingual strategies does not particularly benefit from a Derridean analysis, but is better served by the work of M. M.  Bakhtin (67). The Bakhtinian notion that ‘[e]ach word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’ fits migrant writers’ heterolingual textual practice to a T, the T of a theory that is up to the task of conceptualizing what happens when different languages touch in a given text (293). For this we can, in addition, turn to the related philosophy of language of V. N. Vološinov and his concept of the ‘inwardly impelled word’, which will be the focus of the next section.

‘Populated, overpopulated with the intentions of others’: when languages touch in text ‘A word,’ Vološinov contends, ‘is the purest and most sensitive medium of social intercourse,’ and although the sign in itself is neutral (or ‘arbitrary’ in Saussurean terms) ‘the word functions as an essential ingredient accompanying all ideological creativity whatsoever’ (14–15; italics original). An understanding of all language as rooted in the social, not just in human behaviour but specifically in human interaction, enables us to think of wanderwords in migrant writing as linguistic material that imports not just an alien shape and sound, but more importantly an ideological charge belonging to another culture into the English text. If this seems abstract, in Don DeLillo’s Underworld a perfect example of this phenomenon occurs when overheard Italian propels the protagonist of this part of the novel, Albert Bronzini, unwillingly and unwittingly back into an ethnic past he would rather forget. It is the early 1950s; imagine the conversation of Italian American men in the Bronx, witnessing an eviction: The men spoke mostly English but used the dialect when an idea needed a push, or shove into a more familiar place. And odd how Albert, barely

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nearing forty, could feel his old-manness within him, here in particular, as the voices took him back to earliest memory, the same slurred words, the dropped vowels, the vulgate, so that English was the sound of the present and Italian took him backwards. . . . Porca miseria. (767–8)

I know Latin, but not Italian, and I can’t tell which this is, but the change of language is marked enough (and in italics, to boot) to signal the necessity of a dictionary. Automatic translation on the internet comes up with the deadliteral ‘sow misery’, which is clearly unsatisfactory, while the narrator in the next line explains this bit of urban Italian (so the internet tells me too) for the benefit of the English-only reader as ‘what a wretchedness it was’. This polite non-translated approximation only creates further obfuscation for the reader, however, because the point of using ‘porca miseria’ is that it makes the old country present in the new, something which the grammatical English of its explanation undoes. As the stench and the mess of pigs – and perhaps of ‘living like pigs’ – are likened to the humiliation of an eviction with ‘[a] man’s shoes on the sidewalk’, so does the use of Italian here evoke not just an older world, but also a particular understanding of poverty and degradation that describes this new world too (768). The scene – with a family’s household effects strewn around for all to see – is reminiscent of the eviction in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where old photographs, ‘knocking bones’, and even a man’s Free Papers are turned out onto the street, and the African Americanness of this silent intertextual reference is highly significant (220). In the paragraph that follows Underworld’s eviction scene, this connection becomes clear: There was always the neighborhood and who was leaving and who was moving in, showing up on the fringes. Tizzoons. A word Albert wishes they wouldn’t use. A southern dialect word, a corruption, a slur, an invective, from tizzo, he assumed, a firebrand or smoldering coal, and broadened to human dimensions in tizzone d’inferno, scoundrel, villain. . . . But they spoke it of course, these men, these immigrants or sons of immigrants . . . they half hissed the word in a way that made Albert wish he hadn’t heard. (768)

There is so much going on in both these passages that it is worth analysing them in some detail to see how they exemplify certain Vološinovian and Bakhtinian tenets that might otherwise be hard to grasp. For ‘Tizzoons’ here, other than ‘porca miseria’ and ‘tizzone d’inferno’ (marked for their foreignness

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in italics) is an Italian American word, a hybrid neologism that expresses the speaker’s hatred, contempt and fear of a black other. At the same time, however, DeLillo’s use and Albert’s explanation of that word also reveal something about the language ideologies that English and Italian carry in Albert’s mind, Italian being automatically equated with ‘dialect’ (itself a word burdened with negative value) and the past, whereas English is considered simply ‘the sound of the present’, not to be corrupted with ‘the word they used . . . that made it more unspeakable, in a way, than nigger’ (768). In his 1916 essay ‘On Obscene Words’ the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi already observed that social and emotional taboos and obscenities, when voiced in the multilingual patient’s first language, hit home that much more forcefully, because they revive early and painful memory, and this is in part what DeLillo’s narrator explains here from Albert’s perspective. ‘Nigger’, although a taboo word, hurts less than ‘tizzoon’ not only because the racial abuse does not apply to Albert himself, but also because it is an English word and therefore secondary, whereas against the Italian echo of ‘tizzoon’ he has no linguistic or memory defence. The latter, un-italicized, is like the villain it denotes, an unwelcome intruder in Albert’s present, American English world. His valorization of English over Italian does not stop there: Italian dialect is spoken with ‘slurred words’ – indeed, the words themselves are ‘slurs’. And the ‘Italian [that] took him backwards’ is not merely reviving Albert’s past, but is also regarded as a backward language, useful only occasionally ‘when an idea needed a push, or shove into a more familiar place’. It is not easy to distinguish, in either of the passages quoted above, which is Albert’s and which is the narrator’s or DeLillo’s discourse, which brings my Vološinovian analysis into line with that of M. M. Bakhtin. In ‘Discourse in the Novel’ Bakhtin famously distinguished no fewer than five types of narration and speech which together make up ‘the language of a novel’, and this is without taking the use of a ‘foreign’ language in wanderwords or sentences into account (262). A detailed analysis in Bakhtinian terms of what DeLillo does here would thus be even more complex than what I have just sketched out, but might not yield a great deal more insight. What we have seen in DeLillo’s use of Italian and Italian American wanderwords is not just a realist evocation of ethnic dialogue – actually, we get no dialogue at all in these scenes – but rather a dramatization, in free indirect discourse, of how languages and language

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ideologies work in contact, in a mid-twentieth-century American immigrant setting. Albert Bronzini’s fear and shame on witnessing the eviction and hearing the Italian ‘dialect’ he grew up with again, both reminders of a ‘hellish’ past, exemplify the way in which he has internalized the coercive aspects of twentieth-century Americanization I sketched out in the previous chapter. Whether these scenes reflect or refract some of DeLillo’s own ItalianAmericanness in addition matters less than the evident awareness of bilingual ambivalence represented here: Italian wanderwords are as necessary to the immigrants’ and sons of immigrants’ understanding of the scene as they are despised and feared by the more acculturated Albert Bronzini. But although the latter’s shame is not the novel’s, or DeLillo’s, Albert’s ambivalence can, because of the free indirect form in which it is rendered, be attributed to the narrative voice as a migrant voice all the same. Wanderwords here clearly signal cultural difference; they show that they have ‘lived their socially charged lives’ as Bakhtin put it earlier; they represent immigrant memory and embody an untranslatability that the text both acknowledges and disavows (293). For the ‘tizzone d’inferno’ that ‘tizzoon’ is derived from in Albert’s etymological speculation, harbours Dante’s Inferno and DeLillo’s Underworld in turn. The English-only reader, therefore, in being confronted with the occlusion and otherness of these Italian wanderwords, is also invited to read them for the resonances they afford textually (i.e. not just on the level of plot or character) with the novel’s symbolic project and DeLillo’s magisterial literary ambition. This insight takes us back to Vološinov, who argues forcefully that, if all language is social and if ‘a word is a bridge thrown between myself and another’, then ‘a word is not an expression of inner personality, rather, inner personality is an expressed or inwardly impelled word’ (153; italics original). Vološinov thus does away with the individualism and idealism that inform notions of ‘mastery’ and ‘artistic expression’, to replace them with an ‘ideological creativity’ that consists in the interplay of words in the concrete situation of migrant writing. In the theoretical frame we are developing here, all ‘foreign’ words that wander into the English text are thus ‘inwardly impelled’ words: they carry cultural, ideological and emotional baggage. And so it is not that the author in this scheme is dead, exactly, or that she or he has no agency in the writing, but more that ‘linguistic creativity cannot be understood apart from the ideological meanings and values that fill it’ as Vološinov puts it (98).10

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If we apply this understanding to the situation of the bi- or multilingual migrant writer, then the supposedly free choice of what language to write in is in large part already predetermined by the social context in which that language functions (its prestige, its dominance), yet the ideological logic of an imperial language’s naming of the world is ruptured by the appearance of wanderwords. Vološinov, and Bakhtin, help us to see how the latter’s vaunted internal dialogism of the word is, as it were, externalized in wanderwords that wear their ‘foreign’ colours on their sleeves and challenge the transparency of English-only, whether in novelistic, essayistic, autobiographical or poetic discourse. That ‘language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intention’ but that it is ‘populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others’ is amply demonstrated above, both by Albert Bronzini’s dissection of ‘tizzoon’ and by my reading of DeLillo’s rendering of it (Bakhtin, 294).

‘Expropriating the language’: wanderwords and other heterolingual strategies While my reading of such ‘overpopulation with the intentions of others’ can be fruitful in the analysis of wanderwords in English texts, it can also be paralysing for the bi- or multilingual subject who is aware, to quote Bakhtin one more time, that ‘[e]xpropriating [the language], forcing it to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process’ (294). This is why some migrant writers eschew any mixing of touching of languages in their work. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, writes in his autobiographical essay ‘Dialogism and Schizophrenia’, responding to Bakhtin’s dialogism and the widespread postmodern celebration of polyphony and language-mixing that came in its wake, of the incompatibility of his two languages, Bulgarian and French. The essay begins with a Bakhtinian analysis of the doublethink required in life under Bulgarian communism, where there was one discourse for public affairs, another for private use and each in direct opposition to and contradiction with the other. ‘The two discourses,’ Todorov goes on to say, ‘are characterized by a call for totality, similar to that of the two languages of a bilingual,’ but they are dissimilar in syntax and vocabulary, and most

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of all in their use: ideologically they are completely at odds (205). Todorov literalizes the conflict he experiences between discourses (heteroglossia) as one between languages. He describes how, as a French/Bulgarian bilingual, the difference in the use of his French in the intellectual arena and Bulgarian in the family/private sphere causes problems when he is in a situation that calls for cross-over: translating a French academic paper into Bulgarian requires writing for a different imagined audience. Not only that, but also it requires such a different imagined audience pointlessly, since the Bulgarian intellectuals ‘could not understand the meaning I intended’, because the cultural and discursive distance is so great as to make it unbridgeable (210). Conversely, a visit home to Bulgaria makes speaking to friends about his life in France in Bulgarian equally impossible. Because of the very different ideological moorings of the internal dialogism of the word in French or in Bulgarian at this time, during the Cold War, to live in these two languages simultaneously feels schizophrenic. It leads to insanity – or silence: ‘It was too much for a sole being like me! One of the two lives would have to oust the other entirely’ (213). Todorov’s analysis of his experience of linguistic cross-over, or rather, of the impossibility of it, is instructive because it highlights how the mixing or combining of languages can make for anxiety and incoherence just as it can generate humour, creativity and aesthetic effect. One bilingual person’s schizophrenic Angst may be another’s delight and wonder at what happens when words wander, off the beaten track of their own linguistic environment and into alien territory. What the Vološinovian and Bakhtinian frame enables us to understand, however, is that this ‘choice’ is less a matter of personal temperament than of the particular ideologico-cultural conflict, confluence or conversation that any particular writer’s combination of languages, burdened as they are with their own baggage, is able to engage in. It is therefore not so surprising, given the total oppositionality that existed between Western and Eastern blocs during the Cold War, that Todorov resorts to the schizophrenic model in his representation of bilingualism; Eva Hoffman does much the same when writing about her migration from Poland to Canada and the United States in the late 1950s, as we shall see in the next chapter. But there are other models too: it is not always fear of madness or enforced monolingualism that determines whether or not bi- or multilingual writers use all their languages

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in a single text. It may not be possible to ‘expropriate the language’ and divest it of the intentions of others altogether, but to twist it and turn it to one’s own use is a common enough strategy in migrant writing. Many critics have noted this and made observations on various ways of bending and stretching and puncturing dominant English which are generalizable and can contribute to a theory of wanderwords. Werner Sollors, writing about the glossary Mary Antin appended to her memoir The Promised Land, notes, for example, that Antin acts as mediator between immigrant and native: The author, though striving for a ‘common language’ that unites immigrant and American, also must keep a certain sense of language difference alive, which results in the inclusion of many non-English terms and of the glossary that legitimate the author as a translator of cultures. (‘Introduction to Antin’, xxi)

I would go further, and say that by incorporating Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian wanderwords into her memoir of immigration and settlement in the United States, Antin seeks to educate her English-only readers by turning the tables on them and giving them a taste of what it is like to learn another language. It is a delicate balancing act: Antin had to be strategic in using her multilingualism, and writing in the midst of a nativist campaign to restrict immigration (see Chapter 3) she cannily extols the virtues of English as much as she praises America, because it offers a refuge for Russian Jews. The glossary, then, is little more than a footnote to the enthusiastically adopted English of the memoir, yet it does give the reader the opportunity to learn ‘a minimal vocabulary that replicates at least a small part of the semantic environment of her past’, as Sollors puts it (‘Introduction to Antin’, xxi). And of course, this semantic environment in turn gives access to a cultural world far removed from the urban and secular sphere Antin inhabited and wrote for in the United States. Not unlike Todorov, Antin too felt split between two worlds: ‘I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over,’ begins her hors-texte introduction to The Promised Land, ‘I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell’ (1). At the same time, however, her refusal to purge her English prose of the language of those ‘unassimilable’ others (in the eugenicist parlance of the time), so reviled by her anticipated readership, says something about the

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pride she took in her multilingualism. Her re-birth in English did leave room for her other languages, their intentions (despite her rejection of Judaism’s ‘medievalism’) included. Not long after Antin, Anzia Yezierska employed a different tactic in both assimilating to, and rejecting, dominant American English in her writing. As Delia Caporoso Konzett writes, Yezierska’s ‘use of ghetto idiom, a hybrid of English and Yiddish’ in the short stories of Hungry Hearts bespeaks less her inability to write proper English than her unwillingness to do so (597). Whereas The Promised Land and Antin’s enthusiasm for English became models for the Americanization campaign of the early twentieth century, Yezierska’s immigrant English invited criticism and even ridicule. This, Konzett contends, was because Yezierska’s purpose in grafting Yiddish syntax and vocabulary onto English was misunderstood: Immigrant English, with its pathetic and clichéd interjections, its clumsy syntax and grammar, its conversational spontaneity, and its departures from standard English, properly expresses the hybrid situation of the new immigrant, depicting a new vision of America as seen from the Lower East Side, with its collision of cultures and its radically democratic negotiations of nationhood and identity. (615)

In Abraham Cahan’s Yekl of 1896, a similar Yiddish-inflected immigrant English was a vehicle for comedy and ethnic self-parody, although as Hana Wirth-Nesher points out, ‘the reported speech of characters is always represented in standard English when it is uttered in Yiddish, whereas English words . . . are reproduced in italics to signify their foreignness’ (33). A similar inversion of linguistic power-relations occurs in the immigrant speech of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, where the comic effect is not rendered at the expense of the Yiddish-speaking immigrant, but of the assimilating Jew who would speak ‘Englitch’. Wirth-Nesher charts in expert detail how ‘the theme of Americanization . . . is enacted in the multilingual word play as it moves from the sacred to the profane . . . and from liturgy to literature’ (84). For her, Roth’s high-cultural literary ambition exceeds what she sees as the merely ‘social historical’ of other ethnic writing, because it is concerned to forge a secular Jewish literature in English, while representing non-English words in dialogue as part of the transition.

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With Antin’s, Cahan’s, Yezierska’s and Roth’s varying textual practice of wanderwords then, we already have four multilingual strategies to counter the dominance of English in migrant writing, all of which can be found in the work of other migrant writers too. Meir Sternberg, addressing translators and theorists of translation, distinguishes four types of representation of multilingual discourse in writing that we can use for our theory of wanderwords too. The first is what he calls ‘selective reproduction . . . of heterolingual discourse . . . in literature as supposed to have been uttered by the fictive speaker(s)’, which often takes the form of expressive interjections such as ‘oi veh!’ or ‘Jesu-Giuseppe-Marieeeeeeeee. . .’; these do not require translation (225). The latter exclamation comes from Pietro di Donato, writing around the same time as Roth, in the Italian-inspired English of Christ in Concrete which almost reads as a textbook illustration of Sternberg’s taxonomy. Unlike Roth, di Donato does not confine his immigrant English to native-language-inflected dialogue (‘Go to the America! Go to the America!’) but uses it in the narrative discourse too, where what Sternberg calls ‘verbal transposition’ frequently appears: With unconscious desire the paesanos sat themselves near to those who gave with soft of eye or with word that which was relished. . . . The chicken soup was rich with eggs, fennel, artichoke roots, grated parmesan, and noodles that melted on lips. They ate leisurely and with the knowledge that there was much to be had and plenty of time in which to put it into their flesh. (di Donato, 190)

You do not have to know Italian to see that di Donato here is translating literally, using Italian grammar and syntax on occasion, which can sound and look awkward (‘word that which was relished’) but can equally easily morph into a new and quite poetic English (‘rich with eggs’, ‘melted on lips’). ‘Verbal transposition,’ Sternberg comments, often results in ‘an interlingual clash’ that, as we saw earlier, sociolinguists might call ‘interference’, yet what happens in this short passage is not so easily dismissed (227). We read here an English that is both di Donato’s own and yet informed by ‘the intentions of others’, that is, paesanos and Americans alike. Sternberg’s third and fourth categories, ‘conceptual reflection’ and ‘explicit attribution’, also make frequent appearances in Christ in Concrete. ‘Fiesta’, a chapter containing a recipe for how to cook

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snails, does not retain ‘the verbal forms of the foreign code’ so much as ‘the underlying socio-cultural norms, semantic mapping of reality, and distinctive referential range’ of Italian, and is therefore an example of ‘conceptual reflection’ in Sternberg’s terms (230). Furthermore, di Donato’s sentence ‘[H]e was always speaking in English while the rest carried on in their native Italian’, a rather clumsy but very common way of indicating heterolinguality to the reader, exemplifies ‘explicit attribution’ in Sternberg’s lexicon (4; 231). All four categories operate on a sliding scale between ‘vehicular matching’ (use of wanderwords or mixed language writing, longer passages of dialogue in the other language, etc.) at one extreme and the ‘homogenizing convention’ of translation combined with Americanization on the other (Sternberg, 232). Both ends of the scale are unlikely to occur in migrant writing, of course, but they do demarcate the spectrum of heterolingual possibility. Voilà: here we have our continuum of bi- and multilingual strategies deployed by early and mid-twentieth-century writers under pressure of Americanization and the homogenizing linguascape of the ‘immigration pause’. In his introduction to Christ in Concrete Fred L. Gardaphé confirms that di Donato’s vocabulary and syntax ‘recreate the rhythms and sonority of the Italian language’, and that, combined with literal translation into English of Italian expressions, di Donato ‘captures Italian-American English, a language that is neither Italian nor English, but an amalgam of both’ (‘Introduction’, xii). Again, I would go further than to say di Donato just ‘captures’ something that exists out in the world; this, in Hana Wirth-Nesher’s terms, would be to read Christ in Concrete for the ‘social historical’ and mimetic dimension of its language. If we say, rather, that he creates an Italian–American English fit for literature, then we recognize his achievement to infuse, or even inspire English with Italian, and to represent this hybrid cultural world in all its richness as a result. Contrast this with Derrida’s admission of guilt – the inevitable guilt produced by deep and early internalization of the imperial call for ‘standard’ language in Monolingualism of the Other: ‘an accent . . . seems incompatible to me with the intellectual dignity of public speech (Inadmissible, isn’t it? Well, I admit it). . . . I cannot bear or admire anything other than pure French’ (46). Here are di Donato, Antin, Cahan, Yezierska, Roth, and even DeLillo writing with an accent, and here is Derrida professing a desire for linguistic

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purity that, even as it runs counter to everything he argues elsewhere (as he acknowledges), also usefully delineates the horizon of (class- and raceinflected) normativity and reminds us of its power. Contrast turns into complementarity, therefore: without the monolingualism of the other, forever distant and deferred yet always present, no heterolingual impurity to resist or critique it. Furthermore, as Aneta Pavlenko notes, writing with an accent is different: use of the ‘foreign’ tongue in writing, in the use of wanderwords or other heterolingual strategies, does not undermine the authority of the author’s voice as an accent does in spoken English (‘In the World of Tradition’, 339). Pavlenko is one of a number of socio- and psycholinguists whose work on transcultural emotion can give us further insight into what happens semantically when languages come into contact, which is so much more complex than the term ‘code-switching’ suggests. If we accept Vološinov’s dictum cited earlier, that ‘a word is not an expression of inner personality, rather, inner personality is an expressed or inwardly impelled word’, then whatever a particular wanderword articulates does not precede or pre-exist it, but only comes into being with that word (153). Nor is there necessarily an active subject to make the ‘switch’. Ethnographic wanderwords, such as Mary Antin’s ‘zaddik’ or ‘Kiddush’ which import the offices and rituals of Judaism into the text, present themselves, since they have no equivalent in English. This is also likely to happen with ‘foreign’ words for emotions, which are even more disruptive of a dominant language’s ideo-logic than ethnographic words are, since they bring a different structure of feeling with them. Mary Besemeres, who is interested in the translatability of emotion concepts, writes, for example, about the different meanings that attach to the English ‘I’m anxious’ and the Polish ‘boję się’. The latter would translate as ‘I am afraid’ or ‘I am scared’, but feels, to the Polish person, not quite like either. Besemeres explains, with the help of Eva Hoffman who writes about the difference in Lost in Translation, that individual emotion concepts are embedded in a particular cultural ‘story’: ‘anxious’ in modern English is part of a story influenced by popular psychology, according to which it is good to be in charge of one’s own life . . . [whereas] ‘boję się’ has no such story attached, but rather . . . is part of a cultural outlook in which feelings are perceived as natural and ‘the most authentic’ part of a person. (‘Different Languages’, 145)

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That expression of (certain kinds of) emotion is more acceptable in some cultures than in others is not surprising, but that certain words, in certain languages, make certain emotions possible is much more so. Besemeres draws on the anthropological concept of ‘lingua-culture’ to describe this phenomenon: ‘[i]f Polish has words like ptaszku and córuchna,’ she argues, ‘this is not an arbitrary idiosyncratic fact about the language unrelated to other aspects of Polish culture’ (‘Different Languages’, 156). Nor is it a matter of what linguists call ‘lexical gaps’ in English that can be filled in translation. Instead, for the English-Polish bilingual, ‘the emotional style made possible by such words is part of the two emotional worlds that she lives in, which engage different parts of herself ’ (‘Different Languages’, 156). Another scholar of cross-cultural emotions, Anna Wierzbicka, writes of the way in which cultural assumptions and expectations are embedded in those cultures’ languages, and form ‘cultural scripts’ that do not necessarily entail particular behaviours or attitudes but ‘shared understandings’ of behaviours or attitudes and their valorization in a particular culture and speech community (580). Pavlenko, in an essay entitled ‘Bilingualism and Emotions’, cites Wierzbicka on the difference between the ubiquity of active ‘emotion verbs’ in Russian (‘to rage’ or ‘to rejoice’) and the way in which emotions are experienced in English: as ‘passive states’ brought about by external causes (‘I am happy, because . . . ’ or ‘I am furious with you about x’) (55). This is fascinating stuff if we are thinking about heterolinguality and what motivates a change of language in mid-sentence; more about this in  Chapter 8. Wierzbicka, Besemeres and Pavlenko’s work is a rare example of interdisciplinary scholarship in which reading of literature and linguistic analysis cross: they often take language memoirs (such as Hoffman’s Lost in Translation) and other forms of migrant life-writing as their source material.11 Caution is advised, however, if we are not to mystify the relation between language, culture and emotions. Besemeres uses the concept of ‘lingua-culture’ to highlight ‘the interconnectedness, indeed inseparability of language and culture’, which is fine (‘Different Languages’, 145). But when Wierzbicka extrapolates from this that ‘by learning another language . . . the language migrant [engages in] a translation of her own self ’, the connection is made so tight as to become constrictive (Wierzbicka, 592, writing about the work of Besemeres). ‘Boję się’, as we saw above, does not translate to

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‘afraid’, nor to ‘anxious’, but to a similar emotion in a different cultural setting altogether. Aneta Pavlenko is closer to the mark when she concludes in her study of emotions and sense of self in Russian–English late bilinguals, that the process of second-language learning and living is additive rather than substitutive: ‘In the process of second language socialization some adults may  .  . . internalize new emotion concepts and scripts’ (‘Bilingualism and Emotions’, 71; emphasis added). The way to think about emotive and identity articulation in cases of language migration is thus to see them as extensions of self and of the emotional and linguistic repertoire: ‘anxiety’ does not replace ‘boję się’, but denotes a different way of thinking about fearful feelings, a way that befits the new cultural environment. This does not mean, however, that bi- or multilingual writers resort to wanderwords to articulate emotion because such words and emotions are untranslatable, as is often assumed. It is, rather, that they are not easily translatable into the new language and the new culture, and they present themselves to the writer’s consciousness most likely in the form in which they were first learnt: the mother tongue (or another language learnt before or alongside English). A bi- or multilingual person’s all too common experience of untranslatability thus does not refer to some essential feature of a particular language, forever inaccessible to those who don’t know it, but to the cultural, social, emotional and political context with which that language is interwoven. Or, in Vološinov’s terms, the sense of untranslatability derives from the wanderword’s ideological or cultural freight – precisely that which makes natural languages so much more ambiguous and interesting than the concept of ‘code-switching’ suggests, and often resistant to full understanding. By way of conclusion of this theory of wanderwords, therefore, we examine in the next and final section the strategy of bi- or multilingual resistance to full intelligibility, and the indispensability of psychoanalysis in our making sense of no-sense.

Babel’s babble: resistant texts, the virtue of unintelligibility and the linguistic unconscious ‘The effort to read responsibly . . . is not an attempt to locate positionality and difference in order to account for (or worse, to explain away) the

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­ ifficulties of a text; it is, rather, a good-faith effort to establish the kind of d regard that precludes total assimilation,’ Doris Sommer writes in ‘Resistant Texts/­Incompetent Readers’ (543). Her admonishment to read responsibly by preserving, rather than seeking to erase, cultural difference is at the heart of my argument about linguistic difference in American texts in English. Sommer, as a Spanish–English bilingual, is a major theorist of contemporary multilingual aesthetics and her ideas inform much of my analysis in the chapters that follow. This is chiefly because her thoughtful-yet-playful theorization of bilingualism in literature enables precisely the kind of reading with eyes and ears attuned to otherness that is needed if we are to take the appearance of wanderwords in English texts to be meaningful. Her main tenet, as she writes in the introduction to Bilingual Games, is that the presence of more than one language in any utterance, oral or written, highlights ‘the aesthetic advantages of uneasiness and estrangement’ (6). Bilingual puns in her writing enact the divergent and creative thinking she associates with bilingualism: they evidence a consciousness of ludic possibility that works with the resonances of languages in contact. Because ‘once you learn a second language, the first can feel foreign too’, both become available for play in Sommer’s work, so that ‘el camino se hace al caminar’ turns into ‘the activity of pathmaking is really pathbreaking’ (Bilingual Aesthetics, 163; 168; 171). Hers is path-breaking and -making work, underpinned by a psychoanalytic sensibility that is indispensable to an understanding of linguistic play as not just a form of gratuitous gaming, but also a way of unleashing a creativity that is otherwise muzzled and silenced by the monolingual norm. Sommer’s bilingual aesthetics insists on the aesthetic potential of embarrassing mistakes, calques and misunderstandings that proliferate when languages meet intra- or intersubjectively. Bi- and multilingualism is not just a matter of aesthetics, however, but also of participatory politics; she exults in its cognitive but also democratic advantages, which crucially entail ‘the mutual respect that comes from never presuming to be at the center’ (Bilingual Games, vi). Inspired by Bonnie Honig’s argument in Democracy and the Foreigner, Sommer posits the democratic potential of cultural and particularly linguistic difference, in a ‘multicultural sublime’ that – precisely – does not translate but affirms difference, and does so in an uncomfortable way (Bilingual Aesthetics, 64). Sommer theorizes, pace Honig, that ‘[h]omegrown diversity and foreign immigration exercise

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democratic institutions,’ which are put through their paces and are stretched and challenged to do better. This is a far more dynamic and fluid model of democracy than that which requires a single language, as English-only adherents advocate (Bilingual Aesthetics, 167). In the study of wanderwords and heterolinguality in the literature of a multilingual United States, the same effect might be achieved: that of bringing the republic of letters up against its hitherto hardly spoken and barely conscious exclusions through the rule, if not quite the tyranny, of English in the public sphere. Fear of alienation and unintelligibility is to be countered, pace Sommer and Honig, not by a pro- or inhibition of bi- or multilingual writing, but by an invitation to readers and writers to confront the ‘multilingual sublime’ of an aesthetics that challenges and provokes, that works through, as Sommer puts it, ‘communication with a cut and a tear’ and stretches political as well as aesthetic sensibilities (Bilingual Aesthetics, xix). In ‘Language in Migration’, an essay on multilingualism in contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff gives some amusing examples from the work of the Japanese German poet Yoko Tawada, which illustrate Sommer’s theory. Using the logic of literalization, Tawada muses on the illogic of gendered articles in German. She wonders whether ‘words have wombs’: ‘Is der Rock (skirt) masculine, while die Hose (pair of trousers) is feminine?’ (qtd. in Perloff, 745). Contemporary global migration entails language migration which challenges the co-incidence of national and linguistic borders, and this awareness informs Tawada’s work: Today a human being is in a place where different languages coexist by mutually transforming each other and it is meaningless to cancel their cohabitation and suppress the resulting distortion. Rather, to pursue one’s accents and what they bring about may begin to matter for one’s literary creation. (qtd. in Perloff, 738)

By ‘pursuing one’s accents and what they bring about’ – which can be irritation, conflict or misunderstanding, but also laughter or poetry – Tawada pathbreaks a poetic practice that can perhaps be described as digging into a linguistic unconscious – not just of a bilingual individual like herself, but also of German and Japanese. If we can ask whether words have wombs, then surely it must be possible to surmise that languages have an unconscious as

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well. Sommer argues that ‘[e]ven if I can say the same thing or idea in more than one language, switching from one to another performs points of entry or exclusion, and it sets off different sounds-like associations or etymological echoes’ (Bilingual Aesthetics, 47). By means of literalizing play, or sounds-like associations or invented etymologies, Tawada reveals language’s unconscious: she makes the German that her readers know well – too well – strange again. As strange as Japanese is to the non-Japanese, or as strange as any language is to a young child that is still exploring what it can do with words. Perloff gives another example: Tawada derives ‘Mundharmonika’ (mouth organ) from ‘Mundhar’ (mouth hair, a non-existent noun) and ‘Monika’ (a proper name) which prompts the question what a mouth hair might be and whether it is in Monika’s mouth (745).12 This is, indeed, child’s play and, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, not by coincidence, since it is to childhood that any learner of a new language is forcibly returned. Children are experts at discovering the kind of false etymo-logic Tawada uncovers in ‘Mundharmonika’, because it enables them to make sense of a word and a world that otherwise seem arbitrary and chaotic. Tawada’s relative lack of an intimate relationship with German by comparison with her native readers gives her the advantage of creative estrangement, which she works to humorous and aesthetic effect. In violation of my earlier embargo on the terminology of ‘codes’ for natural languages, her practice might be described as ‘code-breaking’: she brings an automated, thoughtless, formulaic German back from the land of the dead metaphors and into poetic life again. Tawada’s method of writing – playful, thoughtful, enlivening, estranging – can be adapted to reading bi- or multilingually as well, if we do so with an eye and an ear for where languages touch, and are not afraid to encounter alienation and unintelligibility, as we are confronted with the multilingual sublime of languages we do not know. Reed Way Dasenbrock provides a way of theorizing unintelligibility that supports Doris Sommer’s political agenda for bi- and multilingual reading in the process. His article ‘Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English’ is not about bi- or multilingualism in literature per se, but provides and provokes thought which, together with Sommer’s bilingual aesthetics, makes a positive model for reading wanderwords possible. Dasenbrock opens his argument about multicultural literature in English by observing that most critics have not been able to deal

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adequately with the challenges to intelligibility that such literature can present. Indeed, he detects an underlying universalism in the ‘uncritical acceptance of intelligibility as an absolute value’ in 1980s criticism of multicultural writing, whereas in his view ‘[t]he meaningfulness of multicultural works is in large measure a function of their unintelligibility for part of their audience. Multicultural literature offers us above all an experience of multiculturalism, in which not everything is likely to be wholly understood by every reader’ (12). Dasenbrock’s plea for partial cultural unintelligibility as a virtue can help us to theorize the virtue of linguistic unintelligibility too. Wanderwords in languages we do not know can then come to function like the ghosts in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior which Dasenbrock uses as an example: since there are Chinese ghosts as well as American whites who are called ‘ghosts’ in this text, it is not always clear what cultural significance they carry. But ‘my point is that after a while, we do not bother to decide, as we enter into the semantic world of the book’, Dasenbrock observes (12). ‘Entering into the semantic world of the book’ means beginning to become familiar with strangeness for its own sake and in its own form, as Sommer cautioned us to do earlier, without the need to translate it into words or concepts we already know. Dasenbrock adds that there is the further benefit of looking at ourselves and our semantic world through the eyes of the other language and culture, since whatever unintelligibility we encounter ‘allows us to share for a moment the day-to-day experience of many members of the society the book is about’ (14). He even goes so far as to surmise that through immersion in an untranslated world, the monolingual reader ‘moves toward a functional bilingualism’ that consists in ‘an ability to understand the world of the novel’, without necessarily understanding every word with all its connotations (16). Invaluable and original in Dasenbrock’s argument is his insistence that such gains, for the monolingual reader of multicultural texts, can only be made if the other cultural world, or the other language used, is not translated or ‘tamed’, in Anzaldúa’s terms, but allowed to make its own significations. Like Sommer, Dasenbrock argues that ‘a strategic refusal to accommodate the reader can stand at the very core of a work’s meaning’ and such refusal of the deslenguand-ing potential of translation is deeply political (16). After all, wanderwords and phrases are left untranslated because they represent a difference that would be violated, or cannot be contained, by translation into the

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already-familiar. Extrapolating then from Sommer and Dasenbrock’s work, we can say that a mode of reading based on an (all too often habitual) translation of heterolingual elements into English in American migrant writing effaces or attenuates the very cultural and linguistic difference those elements are there to remind us of. Translation on its own, without awareness of what we might be missing, can even inhibit cross-cultural understanding precisely because it diminishes difference and mis-educates the monolingual reader into a false sense of multicultural security and democracy. Marjorie Perloff writes fleetingly of ‘creative reading’ in her essay on Yoko Tawada and other multilingual poets, and I want to conclude this long chapter with a brief discussion of the role of psychoanalysis in this practice. That creative reading is necessary, in the case of texts in English with wanderwords interspersed, will be clear from the examples already given. Not only is such reading attuned to nuances in meaning through sight and sound, convergence and contradiction, when languages touch in text, but it also makes a virtue of the opacity that often results when we do not know the other language(s) in question. Reading wanderwords creatively means, furthermore, to read for language’s unconscious, for jokes and slips of the pen and the ‘embarrassing mistakes’ Doris Sommer writes about, that indicate ‘communication with a cut or a tear’ (Bilingual Aesthetics, xix). Psychoanalysis is, to my mind, therefore indispensable as part of the theoretical frame in which to read wanderwords and other modes of heterolinguality. In the chapters that follow I shall draw in particular on The Babel of the Unconscious: mother tongue and foreign languages in the psychoanalytic dimension, a major study that addresses multilingualism in clinical practice.13 In it, Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri explain many phenomena accompanying language migration in such a way as to show how complex multilingual existence is, how many different functions it can serve for an individual, how languages are embodied and embedded in an individual’s consciousness, where they touch and whether their creative intercourse is inhibited or liberated not only by political, cultural and social factors but also by psychological ones – with which, in any case, they intersect. The psychoanalysts make clear, for example, that resistance to learning a new language entails fear of returning to a stage in early childhood when we had no control over the world, and that such unconscious memory is riddled with anxiety. The conviction that one’s first (or illusory ‘own’)

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language is best thus often masks the shame and guilt associated with ‘the regression toward the primary processes required in order to understand and speak a foreign language’, they argue (47). Such fear of being reduced once more to the shame and guilt we felt as children learning our first language, and making mistakes in it, can work the other way around too, however: it can generate precisely the desire to learn another language well, so well as to overlay those painful primary processes with other words and other cultural scripts. In this connection Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri recognize that the acquisition of another language as a result of migration, whether it is consciously experienced as liberating or tongue-tying, forced by external circumstance or enthusiastically embraced, can serve unconscious needs. One of these is, as noted above in relation to DeLillo’s use of ‘tizzoon’, the need to avoid taboo words from the native language and to substitute them with obscene words or profanities from a second or third. Another, perhaps more obvious need, is that the second language serves – if not to obliterate, then at least to mask, if only for a time, the painful memories and associations of a past lived in the first. Other than cognitive and neuroscience, which in their empiricism tend to argue for or against bi- and multilingualism’s cognitive advantage, psychoanalysis considers the affective and creative dimensions of living in more than one language too, and its answer to the question of whether this is good or bad is always provisional, always ‘it depends’. When a second language is linked to migration, a ‘complex entanglement of loss, separation, and traumatic experiences connected with settling in a new country’ can result that in turn leads to splittings and repressions, Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri write (103).14 But it is also possible that a new language comes to represent a ‘life-saving anchor’ (108). They consider, for example, the phenomenon of the ‘sleeping dictionary’, of learning a new language through sexual and affective relations with a native speaker, and observe that some of their immigrant patients had fallen in love in and with the new language. An ‘English patient said that exchanging words of love with a companion who said “ti amo” had made her feel as though she were being loved for the first time’ (70).15 Here, the painful break away from the mother tongue, uncovered in analysis, engendered something new that anyone who has ever learnt a new language through falling in love – a common enough experience, after all – will recognize. Such a process can even create new neural pathways in the brain;

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the Babel of the unconscious doesn’t really forget, but neither does it remain static: ‘[t]he forgotten language, the forbidden language, the saved language, the language that saves’ are all encountered in clinical practice and, as we shall see in the following chapters, they exist on and between the lines of migrant American literature too (205). At the conscious level of language use, however, a psychoanalytic approach is no less indispensable, since it enables us as readers to enjoy the sorts of associative meanings that children’s word-play creates, and that poets draw on, as Yoko Tawada did, above. When I read that Wittgenstein did not think of words as having single meanings, but saw them as entities ‘mit verschwommenen Rändern’, I take pleasure in the word ‘verschwommen’ that, from my limited German by association with my native Dutch, means the edges (Rändern/randen) of the words are ‘swimming’ (schwimmen/ zwemmen) around or away (De Mauro, xxi). Words thus have watery edges where fixed meanings can take no hold, yet my made-up etymology for ‘verschwommen’ (which simply means ‘vague’ according to the dictionary) fixes the image of watery words in my memory to support my (psycho-) analysis of wanderwords. And so it goes: whereas in learning to speak or write another language than our own, we may stumble and fall like a child learning to walk, reading and interpreting wanderwords allows for more freedom and play. In reading, the test of correctness is not as exacting as it is in speech (where, if I get it wrong, people don’t understand me) or writing (where I have to conform to rules of grammar and syntax). In reading, I can make my own associative and creative sense, so long as it can be followed and shared by others better versed in the language that wanders. A psychoanalytic approach to the babble that results when languages touch in an individual or textual unconscious is, then, instructive for readers of American migrant writing in English-with-wanderwords, because it allows for the allusive and, at times, elusive meanings of their sound as well as sight, their sense as well as their consensuality. This neologism makes visible that languages consorting with each other can be a sensual and consensual experience, not just in the case of the ‘sleeping dictionary’ but also in general, when languages touch and make new meanings. Creative reading, informed by psychoanalytic insights, enables understanding, or interpretation, of heterolinguality that does not need to revert to the monolingual norm of transparency, but is

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intrigued by and delights in the play of bi- or multilingual signification. We can thus engage with wanderwords and bi- or multilingual writing as we do with other texts whose meanings are deliberately obscure or opaque, such as non-narrative prose or avant-garde poetry. Like the former, bi- or multilingual writing demands attention and effort on the part of the reader, and like avantgarde poetry it works on multiple levels: oral and aural, rhythm and rhyme (or the absence thereof), text and intertext. Most of all, wanderwords work with the alienness, the opacity of language itself as material, but material pregnant with social and cultural meaning and the intentions of others, as Vološinov and Bakhtin explained earlier. As I shall show in Chapter 8, wanderwords and words in more fully bi- or multilingual texts do not signify one-on-one, like a ‘code’, but resonate, differently across and between languages as well as within them. How not to tame a wild tongue? By not seeking to domesticate it in translation or explication, but by reading it creatively, imaginatively and in difference.

3

The Promised Land, Lost in Translation: Mary Antin’s and Eva Hoffman’s Wanderwords

Among the many immigrant tales I’ve come across, there is one for which I feel a particular affection. This story was written at the beginning of the century, by a young woman named Mary Antin, and in certain details it so closely resembles my own, that its author seems some amusing poltergeist, come to show me that whatever belief in my own singularity I may possess is nothing more than a comical vanity. But this ancestress also makes me see how much, even in my apparent maladaptations, I am a creature of my time – as she, in her adaptations, was a creature of hers. (Hoffman, Lost in Translation, 162)

There may be no better opportunity to chart the linguistic climate change in the United States from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century than to compare Mary Antin’s The Promised Land of 1912 with Eva Hoffman’s 1989 memoir, Lost in Translation. In this much-quoted passage Hoffman draws attention to Antin’s memoir as one of her intertexts and it is no wonder that several critics have taken up Hoffman’s invitation for a compare-andcontrast reading: the memoirs relate a similar immigration process as a very different experience, and Hoffman highlights how different contexts of writing make for different attitudes to (language) migration, as the memoirs’ contrasting titles make abundantly clear.1 Where Antin names her book, biblically, for the promise of America, Hoffman opens hers with loss, and whereas Antin titles the chapter charting her passage from Russia to the United States ‘The Exodus’, thus equating it with liberation as in Moses’ leading the Jews out of Egypt, Hoffman relegates the possibility of Life in a New Language to the subtitle of her memoir. Her three-part title is paralleled by the tripartite narrative structure, in which ‘Paradise’ stands for Poland (and loss), ‘Exile’ for Canada

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(and translation) and ‘The New World’ for the life lived in a new language in the United States. Hoffman thus reverses the logic of Antin’s journey: paradise is irrevocably lost and the promise of America is watered down to a neutral newness. Comparison is warranted because, as many others have also observed, the circumstances of their migration and their writing are so similar. Both moved as Jewish girls with their parents and a younger sister from Eastern Europe to North America. Antin was 30 and Hoffman 43 years old when they wrote their memoirs, but both are at their most vivid in their representations of childhood and adolescence. As such we might call them, pace Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Bildungs autobiographies: narratives of social initiation, of finding a place in American society and creating a new self in English (Smith and Watson, 101–2). And what articulate, thoughtful selves: both narratives chart the making of a public intellectual – and a female one, at that, although the successful, adult part of their lives remains largely un-narrated. Gender is important, because in as much as Antin’s and Hoffman’s memoirs strikingly fit Stephen Fender’s characterization of immigrant fiction, they can also be seen as a development of and departure from it: Novels based on the immigrant experience express the crisis of uprooting and resettlement in the imagery of adolescence, distributing the opposing values of Old World and New between the generations of immigrant parents and children. More generally the characteristic focus on adolescence in American fiction – the country’s fondness for stories of good-bad boys like Huckleberry Finn and Alexander Portnoy – reflects and reinforces the national culture of the emigrant’s rite of passage. (Fender, 13–14)

Fender here unwittingly reveals that America’s classic immigration narratives are boys’ stories, and in so doing enables us to see the strong feminist undercurrent in Hoffman’s and Antin’s texts, as they celebrate and critique gender rituals and rights in the Old World and the New. Despite their contiguity with the themes and shapes of immigrant fiction, however, we need to read Lost in Translation and The Promised Land as autobiographical narratives rather than as novels – as critics such as Gert Buelens and Magdalena Zaborowska have done.2 It is one thing to draw attention to the novelistic features of both texts, but quite another to call them ‘autobiographical novels’ because this loses us the referentiality to real lives and real contexts

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that is so necessary to the polemical thrust of Hoffman’s and Antin’s writing. It is to disregard, in Philippe Lejeune’s famous words, the ‘autobiographical pact’ that means we ‘assess the narrative as making truth claims of a sort that are suspended in fictional forms such as the novel’ (22–3).3 Selection, condensation and use of generic convention have long been recognized in the theory of autobiography as aesthetic strategies that life-writing shares with fiction, without such poetic licence undermining the claim to truth. Werner Sollors and Keren R. McGinity have revealed, for example, what Antin chose to leave out of the story of her early life and why, but they have also shown that such omissions served to increase Antin’s credibility as a ‘good’ immigrant and strengthened the text’s rhetorical appeal.4 It is thus perfectly possible to read The Promised Land and Lost in Translation as literary texts and still take their autobiographical claim to truth seriously; indeed it is crucial to do so if we are to analyse their use of wanderwords in the terms set out in Chapters 1 and 2, that is, as evidence of language migration importing cultural difference and of a heterolingual aesthetics able to produce poetic effect. Hoffman’s recognition of her kinship with Antin in the extract above and her emphasis on the contrast between assimilation (‘adaptations’) and dissent (‘maladaptations’) summarizes part of my argument in this chapter, that the language migrations as conceived in Lost in Translation and The Promised Land take their particular shapes because they are addressed to (rather than simply determined by) their particular historical moments. They are the product of early and late twentieth-century modes of thinking about – not just ethnic and gender identity, but more importantly here, immigration and language. This is why in what follows I shall look particularly at how Antin and Hoffman represent their acquisition of English and read their narratives in the context of the early twentieth-century Americanization campaign and the late twentieth-century multiculturalism debate. It will then become clear that The Promised Land and Lost in Translation are not just embedded in the cultural and ideological discourses of their time – no surprise there – but actively seek to intervene in them. Here’s the difference: reading The Promised Land Hoffman sees how, in her mourning of the loss of Polish as she makes her difficult transition to English, she is ‘a creature of her time’ because she writes as a postmodern, fragmented subject who cannot muster Antin’s enthusiasm for English. On the one hand

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Hoffman sees the ‘amusing poltergeist’ as naïve in her acceptance of the dominant discourse of Americanization, but on the other she is herself caught up in it as she recognizes that the new dominant dispensation of postmodernity endorses diversity and, if anything, legitimizes her cultural difference and dissent.5 Yet, to explain Antin’s and Hoffman’s very different accounts of language migration in the terms of modernity versus postmodernity, Americanization versus multiculturalism, is by no means the whole story. This becomes evident when we read Hoffman’s and Antin’s wanderwords as a means of taking issue with the prevailing assimilationist or multicultural wisdom and as we contrast their heterolingual practices with what they preach. Antin, who writes about English with such enthusiasm, first wrote in Yiddish, after all, and appends a glossary to The Promised Land to explain the meaning of her many wanderwords. In a similarly contradictory way, Hoffman’s lament for the loss of Polish never translates into her questioning America’s monolingual, English-only norm, much as Lost in Translation implicitly challenges it. Theory and practice are thus at odds in both texts, leaving us to ask why it is that Mary Antin can write so lyrically about and in English (‘this beautiful language in which I think’) while Eva Hoffman – in no less eloquent English – tinges her memoir from the outset with the melancholy of loss. (164)

The Promised Land and Americanization ‘Many an American boy and girl is familiar with her fine tribute to the part of the public school in her Americanization,’ wrote Robert E. Stauffer of Mary Antin in The American Spirit in 1922 (82). Referring both to The Promised Land (1912) and to They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914) Stauffer praised Antin’s writing as an example of the new, immigrant Americanism based on ‘the everlasting yea’ of patriotic national feeling, in the face of a rising tide of nativism that would result in the Immigration Act of 1924 (13).6 Like The Promised Land 10 years earlier, Stauffer’s anthology of exemplary immigrant tales was designed as an antidote to the nativism of those ‘alarmists of little faith who, in their hysteria, would completely reverse the tradition of the nation by closing the gates entirely’, and proved to be equally ineffective (10). The 1924 Immigration Act, informed by the 42-volume report of the US Immigration Commission

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(later known as the Dillingham Commission) of 1911, when Antin was writing The Promised Land, introduced highly restrictive quotas on racist and eugenicist grounds.7 In the words of Joseph Leibowicz, the Dillingham Commission had concluded that ‘the new immigrants were inferior intellectually, racially, and educationally; were not learning English, assimilating, or naturalizing quickly enough; and were criminally inclined’, (106) which had necessitated the new legislation.8 Antin’s name, like that of Edward Bok (about whom more in Chapter 4), was well known throughout the teens and early twenties among those Americanization campaigners who opposed nativism and immigration restriction. As we already saw in Chapter 1, the movement to Americanize the immigrant was a far-reaching, but also a complex one, as John Higham made clear in his authoritative study of nativism, Strangers in the Land. Although it had its roots in well-meaning reform and settlement initiatives to improve the lot of the new immigrants in the 1890s, by the 1920s it had transmogrified into ‘a frontal assault on foreign influence in American life’ under the impetus of First World War patriotism and Theodore Roosevelt’s demand for ‘100% Americanism’ (Higham, Strangers, 247). Any well-contextualized reading of The Promised Land must therefore first distinguish between reformers who sought to assimilate the immigrant to the American creed as soon as possible and by any means necessary, and Anglo-American nativists who advocated Americanism through anti-immigration legislation, full stop. It should also recognize that liberal pluralists like Stauffer belonged to yet a third group, one that was more sanguine about Americanization, realizing that it would take ‘decades, if not centuries, to Americanize America’, because that deep-felt American spirit was not something that could be bought or taught as language or dress, but would have to be lived, practised and passed on through the generations (Stauffer, 12). Such reformers also understood assimilation more broadly than most (then and now) as involving newcomers and natives alike, adjusting to each other in the original melting pot meaning of Zangwill’s 1908 play.9 Americanization in the early decades of the twentieth century could thus mean many things, and Stauffer understood that the widespread worry about Americanism originated in the monumental transition from a decentralized and highly stratified nineteenth-century America that was divided along racial and ethnic lines to the modernity, urbanization and ever wider reach of

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federal authority that characterized life in the new century.10 American mass immigration between 1890 and 1920 answered to the need for labour power that was fuelled by rapid industrialization and the centralization it required; anxieties generated by modernity were sharpened in eugenicist discourse and heightened in the question of the assimilability of immigrants.11 That this was a complex debate, all too often simplified in retrospect, Sean Butler makes clear: Nativism posited clear-cut divisions between us and them, [whereas] Americanization sought to ‘join’ the other to the mainstream group with regard to ideology and language (a process that required the immigrant to separate himself from the other), and these two strands of public discourse were counterbalanced by more liberal agendas seeking to weave the immigrant into the diverse fabric of America, where one could be . . . both ‘ethnic’ and American. (6)

This was the climate in which The Promised Land was conceived and read – which does not mean that those critics who characterize Antin’s work as assimilationist in an unqualified way are right, but rather that the variegated context elicited from her an equally variegated response.12 Antin’s famed double- or triplevoicedness in The Promised Land then, seemingly alternating between antinativist polemic, enthusiastic and uncritical assimilation to Anglo-America, and unwavering loyalty to Jewishness and Jews (if not to Judaism), was less confused or contradictory than canny. In using these different voices, Antin could address different parts of her readership and represent the complexity of the immigration debate, rather than simply express a divided-between-Oldand-New-Worlds subjectivity. With Antin as one of his star models, Stauffer’s ‘American spirit’ meant both more and less than citizenship, or the adoption of the English language and American mores and manners. For one thing, ‘countless thousands of native [-born] Americans have little or no realizing sense of the duties of citizenship’, he wrote sternly. For another, his experience of teaching English to immigrants had convinced him of ‘the immense effort necessary to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of a strange language after the plastic period of youth has passed’, so that ‘too much stress may be laid upon the importance of the mere acquisition of the English language by the adult immigrant’ (11–12). Antin seems to contradict Stauffer’s experience with her own ease in learning

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English (‘I was Jew enough to have an aptitude for language’) but confirms it when she writes of her father’s difficulty and refers to his ‘natural inability to learn the English language’ (163; 161). Although they are Jewish in the same measure, it is age that divides them and must account for their difference. Nor does Antin’s spiritual view of Americanism differ much from Stauffer’s ‘true American’, who is not an uncritical patriot ‘but one who realises the imperfections of American society and yet has faith in the ultimate goal towards which the diverse human elements here are struggling’ (Stauffer, 13). With a clear reference to The Promised Land, finally, Stauffer professes the belief that ‘the hope of the nation’ is vested in those who immigrated as children, because they appear to be the most fervent of foreign-born Americans (12). And indeed, The Promised Land reads so well in large part because it is voiced from the perspective of a child, masking a darker underside that was missed by all but her most careful readers a century hence, as we shall see shortly. Today, we read The Promised Land primarily for Antin’s gendered take on immigrant modernity, but its reception in the context of the Americanization campaign was very different, and remains relevant if we want to understand Antin’s achievement. As Werner Sollors notes in his magisterial introduction to the 1997 Penguin edition of The Promised Land, Antin’s autobiography had been, and continued to be, widely used ‘as a public school civics class text’ by the time Stauffer published his last-ditch attempt to stem the tide of anti-immigrant feeling (xxxii). And we can see why: instead of the didactic and often patronizing tone of civics instruction manuals, The Promised Land addresses its readers in the first-person voice of a highly strung child that renders her entry into the new world in the vivid colours of unexpected success and approbation. For a readership of adult immigrants and children needing – and wanting – instruction in the ways and means of making it in American life, Antin was a far more attractive and trusted guide than the official literature of the Americanization campaign, as even a brief look at immigrant handbooks shows. For example, The Promised Land provided the same kind of information on public schooling, American history and the workings of democracy as that contained in John Foster Carr’s Vegvayzer fun di Fereynigte Shtaaten (Guide to the United States), published in Yiddish the same year that The Promised Land came out, or the Committee for Americanism of the City of Boston’s Little Book for Immigrants in Boston of 1921. The Vegvayzer had the advantage

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of explaining America to Jewish immigrants in their own language and their own cultural and religious terms, and it came complete with a how-to facsimile of a money-order to Russia. Yet such texts lacked the engaging story of immigrant progress that Antin provided in The Promised Land, and also its implicit critique: they often promised more than America actually delivered to its newcomers. A Little Book for Immigrants in Boston, for example, addressed them in the patronizing voice of an adult talking to a child, ‘in simple English so that you may be able to read it easily’ and without any apparent awareness of cultural difference and immigrant living conditions (5). A passage from the chapter ‘Health’ typifies the tone: ‘The Immigrant often lives in a crowded part of the city. This is not his fault. . . . The immigrant should try to move into a better part of the city or to a town nearby, where there are wide streets and new houses and little gardens’ (22). So completely at odds was this directive for healthy living with the real conditions of immigrant housing that Antin reveals in her chapters on Boston’s South End (and illustrates with photographs) that the ‘advice’ is simply laughable. The tone of A Little Book also exposes this Americanization programme as social engineering for the benefit of native Bostonians, not for ‘the man or woman, who, having only just come into our midst, is unacquainted with our laws, our history, or first of all, our ideals!’, as Boston’s Mayor writes in his Foreword (3). What a modern reader might criticize as Antin’s overenthusiastic endorsement of American life and values comes to look like a much more level-headed, warts-and-all assessment of the immigrant’s situation when we compare it to the utopian scenario projected – as above – in many official Americanization tracts. And so, once this context of contemporaneous public discourse is taken into account, it becomes clear on careful reading that Antin was not uncritical of conditions in America, and did at times expose its promises as hollow, even if she did not make as much of a song and dance about her criticism as she did about her praise for American ideals and institutions. As Werner Sollors and Jolie Sheffer also observe, The Promised Land is much more complicated than the exemplary story of rapid and happy Americanization for which it was taken by its readers at the time (and sometimes still is). Antin’s enthusiastic embrace of the English language, and her mastery of it as demonstrated in The Promised Land, are key to this surface impression of Anglo-assimilation as a win-win situation for immigrants and

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native Americans alike. In Sollors’ reading, Antin gives an account of being split between worlds (Old and New, Russia and America), people (Jews and Russians, immigrants and natives) and between selves (‘a “dual consciousness”’); in Sheffer’s, the opening paragraph (‘I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over (‘Introduction to Antin’, xxix; 142–3). . . . I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead’) bespeaks a counternarrative of trauma, marking the memoir with deep ambivalence (Antin, 1). To these layers I added the extra complication of Antin addressing different factions within the immigration debate at the same time. Remarkably absent among all these contradictions and tensions, especially when compared with Lost in Translation, is a sense of splitness between mother tongue and adopted English; unlike Hoffman, Antin peppers her prose with wanderwords, choosing to explain them in her glossary rather than to translate or leave them out altogether. Despite her protestations of undying love for the English language, as we shall see below, it seems that Antin finds no problem in the coexistence of English with Yiddish, or Russian or Hebrew, on the same page or even in the same sentence, nor does she appear troubled by language attrition. How can this be, in a setting where – for the ‘good’ immigrant that Antin proves herself to be at least – Americanization and English are mandatory? Closer reading of the passages on language in The Promised Land and better understanding of the actual linguascape (see Chapter 1) in which Antin was working will help us to explain why this is so.

Antin on English English for Antin is part of a modernity she wants and needs as a Jewish girl, and her migration from within-the-Pale Russia to America is represented as a journey from the ‘medieval superstitions’ of religious life to the secular freedom of the twentieth century (Antin, 33). She waxes lyrical at the memory of what it felt like to know that ‘at last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last! The boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. . . . “America! America!”’ (129). Modernity, education, English and Americanism are conflated in Antin’s story as she recounts how America expands her freedom as a woman.13

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Having – like Hoffman – migrated as a child without agency, she nevertheless represents the move as one of liberation and excitement.14 Even the change of name on arrival in her American school – a trope of trauma in most immigrant narratives – does not faze her; if anything, she is taken aback because her new name is not enough of a transformation: ‘With our despised immigrant clothing we shed also our impossible Hebrew names. . . . The name they gave me was hardly new. My Hebrew name being Maryashe in full, Mashke for short, Russianised into Marya (Mar-ya). . . . Mary . . . was very disappointing’ (149–50). Her new name in itself then is not a rebirth; that only comes in the process of writing The Promised Land, as we shall see later on. Antin’s memoir was written as a defence of Eastern European immigrants, particularly of Jews, against nativists.15 In her early chapters she constructs the Jews – despite her critique of their religious ‘medievalism’ – as, in a sense, already American because they prosper, she argues, through trade. Like the Americans of the Progressive Era, they rise through merit rather than privilege. Furthermore, the stranger is welcomed and invited into Jewish communities, just as America welcomes the foreigner, and Jewish respect for Talmudic scholars easily translates into a respect for intellectuals and education in America. Importantly for our purposes (though Antin doesn’t stress it) knowledge of Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish lends the Jews the advantage of being multilingual already and gives them the edge over monolingual others; besides, Hebrew and Yiddish, like the English that they are keen to learn, are transnational languages too. Aware of what will be her largely Christian audience, Antin is careful to avoid the stereotype of Jewish self-styled superiority, but she sails close to the wind at times when she draws on other anti-Semitic tropes to mount her defence of Jewish immigration to the United States. Addressing the reader directly as ‘My American friend’, she describes an everyday city scene: You see them shuffle from door to door with a basket of spools and buttons . . . or rummaging in your ash can, or moving a pushcart from curb to curb. . . . ‘The Jew peddler!’ you say, and dismiss him from your premises and from your thoughts. . . . Think, every time you pass the greasy alien on the street, that he was born thousands of years before the oldest native American; and he may have something to communicate to you, when you two shall have learned a common language. (144)

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What might that common language be? Presumably it is here not simply English, since both parties have to learn it, but a common cultural currency in which the Jew is assimilated to American culture but also recognized as contributing to and changing it. Antin in addition urges her ‘native’ readers to be mindful of their own ‘foreign’ heritage in the melting pot of migrating peoples who now make up the American nation. Perhaps that common language, literally, is the one she employs in relating her story: an English interspersed with Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew words. Some of these are names, some exclamations (‘oi veh!’) and interjections (‘Nu?Nu?’) and many other wanderwords refer to markers of cultural difference, such as clothing (‘knupf ’) food (‘talakno’) and social or religious roles (‘shadchan’, or matchmaker; ‘hossen’, or prospective bridegroom). They occur, in the early chapters, on almost every page and because Antin uses them largely to bring some of the smells, tastes and customs of the old country into the new, we might classify them as ethnographic. Missing from Antin’s wander-vocabulary are words that would describe her own subjectivity and emotions, which appear to have been discarded along with the old immigrant clothes and the ‘impossible’ Hebrew name. Compared to Lost in Translation it is striking how much more heterolingual Antin’s text is, but also how the semantic field of her wanderwords is restricted to cultural rather than emotional signifieds. The concept of a common language recurs in the best-known chapter from The Promised Land, ‘Initiation’. Here, confusingly, it does seem to refer to English and what is more, to English-only: I shall never have a better opportunity to make public declaration of my love for the English language. . . . I am glad . . . that the Americans began by being Englishmen, for thus did I come to inherit this beautiful language in which I think. It seems to me that in any other language happiness is not so sweet, logic is not so clear. I am not sure that I could believe in my neighbors as I do if I thought about them in un-English words. I could almost say that my conviction of immortality is bound up with the English of its promise. And as I am attached to my prejudices, I must love the English language. (164)

As an example of Antin’s different voices, addressing different audiences to persuade them of the assimilability of the Jews, the contrast between this

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passage and the previous one will serve as well as any. It is as if a different Mary Antin speaks here, one who addresses her nativist readers less as an admonishing adult than as an eager child, desperate to convince a stern parent of her earnestness and devotion.16 The passage’s very over the top-ness would have us believe that mastering English is not the laborious, painstaking process it had been only a few pages before, when Mary was mocked for her Yinglish ‘“You can schwimmen, I not”’ (153).17 Now all of a sudden English is a gift, a lucky ‘inheritance’ from the Founding Fathers that is handed to her as a neatly wrapped package in which the promise of America is bound up. Read between the lines, however, the passage shows that for Antin learning English is a leap of faith, a projection of herself into the modern future she so desires. Steven Kellman, who also compares Antin’s representation of learning English to Hoffman’s in Lost in Translation, sees it as an ‘instrumental’ theory of language: English for Antin is simply ‘a tool that can be adopted or discarded not only without trauma but also without distorting thought’ (82). And it is true that what appears to prompt Antin’s declaration of linguistic love is her awareness that English enables her to make her way in American society. This is why the operative sentence in this extract seems to me not the one about happiness and logic, but the more striking ‘I am not sure that I could believe in my neighbors as I do if I thought about them in un-English words.’ There is no room for a native language here; un-English words do not ‘translate’ the neighbours adequately and what is more, they undermine her, the immigrant’s, belief in them – rather than the other way around. Any relationship with Americans therefore has to be lived in their words, and on their terms. While the hyperbole of this passage suggests that Antin seeks to placate her nativist American audience by recognizing their linguistic dominance or even superiority, its underlying conviction that English is not just their language, but also hers because she has honoured its bequest, speaks against a simply instrumental view of language. Linguistic assimilation need not always be reluctant, and we must allow for the possibility that for Antin English does not just afford the desired connection to Americanness, but also forges a different, freer self. Kellman assumes, with Hoffman, that trauma and ‘distortion of thought’ must always be involved in the adoption of a second language, but – as we saw in the previous chapter as well, and will see in the ones that follow – there are many other possible scenarios. As psychoanalysts

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Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri write about their work with immigrant patients, for example, a new language can become ‘the conveyor of new thought and new affect routes’, providing ‘valid and structured introjections on which to reorganise their adult feminine identity’ (71). This insight is particularly apposite because it refers to female subjects, and Antin sees English as the language of progress specifically for a Jewish girl to turn to her advantage. The Promised Land itself, in the end, then is the proof of the pudding: Antin’s facility with English is the secret, and the substance, of her success. For Antin, English is not just a tool for self-advancement and Americanization; beyond its logic and utility she also appreciates the aesthetics of English and the creativity this brings with it. She takes genuine pleasure in learning and playing with new words: ‘Getting a language in this way, word by word, has a charm that may be set against the disadvantages. It is like gathering a posy, blossom by blossom’ (Antin, 166; italics added). Moreover, Antin connects language with memory: ‘Particular words remain associated with important occasions in the learner’s mind. I could thus write a history of my English vocabulary that should be at the same time an account of my comings and goings, my mistakes and my triumphs, during the years of my initiation’ (166). Both observations – gathering words like flowers, gaining a little more pleasure (and power) with each one, and the link between particular words and occasions or people where they were first encountered – are familiar to anyone who has learnt a new language and discovered a new world in it. We are dealing here, furthermore, with Stauffer’s ‘plastic period of youth’, when it is easier to learn a new language – which makes it all the more puzzling that Hoffman’s learning English was apparently so much harder and more traumatic. Antin, as Kellman observes, represents her transition to English as unproblematic and even joyful, and she never writes about the difficulty of ‘translating’ herself into English, as Hoffman does. But this may have more to do with the hostile climate in which Antin was writing than with her own subjectivity – which is more complex than it at first appears, as we shall see later on. For now, we must register that given the pressures on immigrants to learn English, and to do so immediately and well, and given Antin’s purpose to defend Jewish immigrants against the charge of their unassimilability, her representation of the speed and alacrity with which she masters English is particularly charged. On the page that follows the ‘words as flowers’ episode,

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Antin reproduces a (very) short story, ‘Snow’. This is her first published work, written after she ‘had studied English only four months’, having heard it spoken ‘only at school’ (Antin, 167). The success of ‘Snow’ becomes one of the high points in Antin’s career, trumped only by the publication of The Promised Land itself, and shapes the narrator’s self-image as an exceptionally talented young girl who identifies the time of seeing her name in print as ‘the moment when I became a writer’. In the surface assimilative discourse of The Promised Land then, writing in English and seeing her name in print are the rebirth that her immigration and Anglicized name did not fully accomplish; that it is also a kind of death becomes clear only from the framing ‘Introduction’ and ‘Appendix’ which I will discuss towards the end of this chapter. We can conclude that Antin’s positive, charged and unlikely representation of English-in-four-months-without-trauma may be understood through a complex combination of factors, of which Americanization pressures, personal success while writing as a precocious child and anticipated hostile, nativist audience are but a few. An important other is the idea that young immigrants like Antin, fleeing the pogroms in Russia, had good reason to want to assimilate to American mores and values and that her English embodied and gave proof of such assimilation. Finally but not least, Antin’s rosy picture of learning English, however exaggerated, evinces a genuine pleasure in language learning and in playing with words. If, as she notes in The Promised Land, she never quite learnt to speak without an accent, she did learn to write accent-less English. After all, passing in language is much easier in writing than it is in speech, and of all the immigrant tales I have come across there are many in which writing in English liberates the speaker from the immigrant shame of the foreign accent. Whether this was true of Eva Hoffman as well we shall explore in the next section.

Hoffman on language ‘What makes Hoffman’s narrative different from other stories of immigration is her attention to the linguistic dimensions of cultural passage,’ Sherry Simon has said of Lost in Translation (157).18 Indeed, Hoffman’s was the first of the so-called ‘language memoirs’ that have since come to be known as a lifewriting genre in their own right, but as we have just seen, language learning

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was an integral and important part of The Promised Land too, and more so in Hoffman’s retrospect. Still, something remains to be explained in Hoffman’s foregrounding of language migration in this memoir, which is so much more reluctant and melancholy than Antin’s. We can see the contrast between Antin’s declaration of love for the English language and Lost in Translation, for example, in this very well-known, mournful passage: The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. ‘River’ in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold – a word without an aura. . . . I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But it’s a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean I’m free to play with words at my wont; . . . . No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy. . . . It is the loss of a living connection. (Hoffman, Lost in Translation, 106–7)

Hoffman seems to be explaining here what ‘lost in translation’ really means: in moving to another language you lose all your familiar referents; the river of fond childhood memory runs dry in the realization of it being just a word like any other, with no necessary connection to that place and that time, and this recognition of the arbitrariness of the sign (‘words are just themselves’) forever breaks the connection between language and world and word and self. Benjamin (the ‘aura’), Saussure (‘this radical disjoining between word and thing’) and structuralism appear here, along with the Vološinovian insight (see Chapter 2) that she ‘can’t ‘play with words at [her] wont’ anymore, because she now understands that language shapes us as much as the other way around. Hoffman here, unwittingly perhaps, proves herself a ‘creature of her time’ as she articulates her own experience in the theoretical understanding of the 1980s, and calls it a ‘terrible knowledge’, as if acquired after the Fall. It is worth noting this post-lapsarian dimension of Hoffman’s, if only because it differs so completely from the ‘living connection’ that English made possible for Mary Antin between word and thought (‘this beautiful language in which I think’,) and between herself and her American neighbours. Immersion in an alien environment per se thus does not seem enough to explain the difference.

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Yet what stands out most in Hoffman’s analysis of second-language acquisition as loss is the paradox that the ‘river’ in Polish which is so lyrically described here is exactly the same as the ‘river’ in English on the page. To the English-only reader therefore, the vitality of ‘river’ in Polish is described but it is never made palpable because we only experience it in translation. In relation to Antin we see a reversal of values: Hoffman’s English is ‘the loss of a living connection’, not the forging of one, and her awareness of the immateriality of language (its lack of connection to the material world) is at the same time an awareness of its ‘desiccated’ materiality (‘words are just themselves’) a ‘terrible knowledge’, the obverse of the enlightenment, beauty and clarity that Antin finds in English. The Polish word ‘teşknota’, and the yearning it represents, haunts Hoffman’s text like something that is always fleeting but always there, one of the few remnants of that old world where words represented things and feelings. Fittingly, ‘teşknota’ stands for absence: translated by Hoffman as nostalgia, it has ‘the tonalities of sadness and longing’ added to it, as well as melancholia, and something like fidelity (Lost in Translation, 4; 115).19 ‘Teşknota’ connotes not only a yearning for Poland and Polish, but also for a non-divided, nonself-reflexive mode of being, a self held together in the simple and spontaneous language of childhood, which is still inexorably connected to things. For this reason, Andy Mousley writes of Hoffman’s ‘metaphysics of attachment’ in Lost in Translation, an attachment to the mother tongue because ‘teşknota’ yearns for a past that is irretrievably lost except through that word (105). If subjectivity is constituted in language, then loss of that language equals loss of the self, and this is Hoffman’s predicament, or perhaps even her trauma in Lost in Translation. Other than Antin, Hoffman’s sparse use of wanderwords may be motivated – precisely – by a traumatic loss that is inarticulable in English, and can only be brought to consciousness by the irruption of heterolinguality. ‘Polot’ is the other Polish word that occurs repeatedly, and for similar reasons: it connotes a structure of feeling that cannot be directly translated into English. Approximated by ‘panache’, it is ‘a word that combines the meanings of dash, inspiration, and flying’ (Mousley, 71). Like ‘teşknota’, ‘polot’ connotes what is lost, not only in translation from one language to another, but also in the transition from a Polish, confident, whole self to a fragmented, self-conscious adult American subjectivity. Its morphological

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similarity to Polishness (Polski polot) enhances this wanderword’s resonance as it articulates Ewa’s paradise lost that is so deeply mourned in the exile of the New World.20 This use of wanderwords is different from Antin’s in The Promised Land because there, as we have seen, words from Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian appear frequently, and not always with a translation provided. Antin even appends a Key to Pronunciation to her Glossary which, as Hana Wirth-Nesher argues, dramatically reverse[s] the position of that [American] reader, who, in addition to learning new words and new meanings, is invited to reproduce the sounds of the culture that the author left behind (70). Antin is, surprisingly given her rabidly Americanist environment, in many ways more confident in her use of multilingual wanderwords than Hoffman is as a bilingual writer. Antin forces her monolingual English readers to acquaint themselves with the non-English words she needs to describe her early life in Russia, and she invites them, by way of the Glossary and Key to Pronunciation, to put themselves in her shoes as learners of a new, ‘aliensounding’ language. Steven Kellman’s claim that Antin ‘abjures’ or ‘expunges’ Yiddish, like his assumption that Hoffman and Antin are ‘uncomfortable with their designation as Jew’ is therefore puzzling (79; 82; 84). Whereas Antin grows up with three languages and uses all of them in her memoir, Hoffman knows Yiddish only as her parents’ grown-up ‘language of money and secrets’, which is designed to exclude her and so she yearns for Polish only (Lost in Translation, 14; 40). All the same, both firmly position themselves as Jewish in their narratives, and what becomes the absent presence of Yiddish in Lost in Translation thus foregrounds ‘teşknota’ and ‘polot’ (as well as other, less prominent Polish wanderwords like ‘Pan’, ‘Pani’, ‘górale’, ‘ciocia’) and establishes Polish, surreptitiously, as a Jewish language too. There are more echoes from Antin that establish difference at the same time. In a scene reminiscent of that set in the public school, when ‘Mashke’ is changed to ‘Mary’, Hoffman relates how her name was Anglicized so that ‘Ewa’ turned into ‘Eva’ – a slight shift only, yet one that she experiences as ‘a careless baptism’ (105). The emotional violence of this initiation rite (her and her sister’s new names make them feel like ‘strangers to ourselves’, she says) is compounded by the first words she hears in the Canadian playground, ‘Shut up! Shuddup!’ From that moment on, Ewa, now Eva, has no desire to learn English, ‘their harsh-sounding language’ (104–5).21

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Hoffman has explained in essays and interviews published since Lost in Translation that the playground injunction to be silent resonated down the years and caused her to lose Polish quite consciously. ‘I somehow hid my Polish. I suppressed it,’ she told Mary Zournazi, because Polish in Canada was ‘completely unusable’ (‘Life in a New Language’, 18). In an autobiographical essay, furthermore, she has written that ‘like so many emigrants, I was in effect without language, and from the bleakness of that condition, I understood how much our inner existence, our sense of self, depends on having a living speech within us’ – there’s that ‘metaphysics of attachment’ again (‘The New Nomads’, 48). Hoffman is saying something very important here, not just about her own bond with her native language (which by no means all immigrants share, as we shall see in later chapters) but crucially about what I called in Chapter 1 the linguascape of Canada and the United States in the 1960s: monolingualhomophone and intolerant of immigrant languages. Even if Canada and the United States both styled themselves as ‘nations of immigrants to North America’ by 1989, and even in the face of Canada’s official bilingualism, Hoffman reminds us that only a few decades ago immigrants had the choice to speak English (French in Quebec) or to ‘shuddup’.22 Hoffman’s negative portrayal of language migration in Lost in Translation thus involves contextual as well as personal factors, and it is further complicated when read against her own second thoughts since the writing of her memoir. For in a revision of Lost in Translation, Hoffman has explained that in retrospect she feels that Polish was not just lost ‘through some fateful fiat’, but that ‘it was I in fact who lost it, displaced it, abandoned it, in a more active gesture of rejection. . . . I wanted Polish silenced, so that I could make room within myself for English’ (‘P.S.’, 50). This insight, like so many in Lost in Translation, is clearly inspired by psychoanalysis: as the girl must reject the mother to enter the world, so does the mother tongue – Polish – become ‘the loved “internal object” I needed to hate’ lest the anger and unhappiness at having been forced to move to North America would spill out undiluted and overwhelm her (‘P.S.’, 52). What this individual psychoanalysis of the immigrant dilemma leaves out of account is the linguascape; as Hoffman gives herself agency in her active rejection of Polish she forgets that the prevailing North American ideology almost forced such abandonment of the native language and encouraged its rejection.

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Either way, Hoffman’s theory of language posits a binary choice between English and Polish – but not both at the same time. Whether her mourning of Polish stems from the conviction that the native tongue is somehow more essential and truer to the self, or whether Polish is rejected in anger for a lost world, in most of Lost in Translation it remains the lodestar to which English fails to measure up. As we saw earlier, this is in stark contrast to Antin, whose pleasure in learning English is represented as adding another flower to the multilingual bouquet of her youth. Hoffman’s model of linguistic adequacy, competence and freedom then comes into focus as a zero-sum game, and a rigidly monolingual one at that: English only becomes a habit and a home once it has displaced – no, re-placed – Polish. Her metaphor of writing in English as failed self-translation (‘Polish, in a short time, has atrophied’; ‘this language is beginning to invent another me’) is reminiscent of Todorov’s notion of schizophrenia, in Chapter 2 (107; 121).23 It originates in this insistence on serial monolingualism, where two languages cannot exist in the same space, at the same time, in the same subject. Hoffman gives such an evocative and full account of second-language acquisition in Lost in Translation because, from her monolingual mindset, she conceives of learning English as starting over, from scratch. Systematically the memoir takes us through the various stages of being mastered by and mastering a new language, from inarticulacy, embarrassment and frustration to gaining a pragmatic hold on the world through new words, and eventually discovering real pleasure in playing and being played by the new language for poetic licence or a laugh. Frustration is marked when Eva’s attempt to tell a joke falls flat, and she is alienated from herself as her speech ‘sounds monotonous, deliberate, heavy – an aural mask that doesn’t become me or express me at all’ (118). When her mother says Eva is becoming ‘English’, by which she means cold, the narrator feels a painful ambivalence; the language of school and public life distances mother from daughter as it does all first- and secondgeneration immigrants when English comes to stand between them (106). But there are joyful rites of passage too. When Eva discovers she has been dreaming in English, her unconscious has come up with bilingual puns. Pillow talk, being able to speak the language of love and intimacy and to name plants and flowers, as she does on the final page, are other milestones during the years

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and years it takes before English comes to measure up to Polish. Interestingly, this happens only when she can discover music (Eva’s other ‘other language’ brought over from Poland, after all) in T. S. Eliot’s poetry; it is only then ‘that I crack the last barrier between myself and the language . . . as if an aural door had opened of its own accord’ (186). In the previous chapter, François Grosjean explained that second-language acquisition depends less on aptitude than on attitude and need (Life, 193). In Lost in Translation Hoffman shows in painstaking and illuminating detail just how lengthy and complex that process can be when need and willingness are at odds with each other. Antin’s version of becoming fluent – and literate – in English at breakneck speed looks all the less realistic in light of the frustration and growing pains Hoffman’s story entails.

Hoffman and multiculturalism This is less surprising, if we consider that Hoffman is continually in dialogue with her ‘amusing poltergeist’, as we saw at the very beginning of this chapter. In the next passage, Hoffman envies Antin for her Americanism: A hundred years ago, I might have written a success story. . . . I might have felt the benefits of a steady, self-assured ego . . . the excitement of being swept up into a greater national purpose. But I have come to a different America. . . . I have been given the blessings and terrors of multiplicity. . . . From now on, I’ll be made, like a mosaic, of fragments – and my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all, an immigrant. (Lost in Translation, 164)24

The Promised Land and Mary Antin are inscribed here as the ‘success story’ and the ‘self-assured ego’ that are both envied and considered outdated. Postmodern diversity engenders ‘the blessings and terrors of multiplicity’, and after the breakdown of the master narratives in the post-war, post-Shoah, post-1960s’ period only uncertainty is left. What is more, in the final sentence Hoffman claims that her own uncertainty is exacerbated by the migrant condition: although we all are ‘made of fragments’ now, the ‘observing consciousness’ that knows the difference between a whole and a fragmented subjectivity is the blessing – and the terror – of the immigrant.25

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And of course, in Lost in Translation it is in language, or rather, in the gap between two languages, that that observing consciousness is located. The immigrant’s difference is for Hoffman, as it was for Antin, cultural and gendered, but above all it is linguistic – and this is where we see the shift from early twentieth-century Americanism to late twentieth-century pluralism at its most marked. Instead of celebrating diversity, Hoffman seeks to question a multiculturalism that disavows ‘the terrors of multiplicity’ and fails to recognize the alien-ness of another language. Writing in the 1980s, she senses all too clearly that cultural relativism and valorization of cultural difference do not in practice extend to linguistic freedom in the United States. Nor does she find this surprising, because the difference of a ‘foreign’ language is, for Hoffman, irreducible: ‘[F]undamental difference, when it’s staring at you across the table from within the close-up face of a fellow human being, always contains an element of violation,’ she remarks; we ‘find it an offence to our respective identities to touch within each other something alien, unfamiliar, in the very woof and warp of our inner lives’ (Lost in Translation, 209–10).26 That ‘something alien’ is the other’s other language, by which Hoffman means not just the ethnographic untranslatability Antin drew attention to in her use of wanderwords, but rather the otherness of the ‘foreign’-voiced self itself. With this critique of postmodern pluralism Hoffman created a paradigm shift in the study of migration as well as American literature: by asking the question of multiculturalism’s tolerance of languages other than English she created room for the study of multilingual American writing, and also highlighted how migration scholarship in general had hitherto neglected the significance of language in processes of acculturation, citizenship and identity formation.27 Irony demanded, however, that, using her authority as a writer on The New York Times and her credibility as an immigrant, she wrote her polemic with liberal multiculturalism in English – if not quite in English-only. Such irony – as the monolingual linguascape of 1980s American multi­ culturalism rubbed up against linguistic difference – further complicates the contextual, personal and theoretical issues at stake in explaining Hoffman’s and Antin’s contrasting accounts of language migration. For, just as Antin’s native and nativist readership shaped her pro-immigrant polemic in The Promised Land, so also does Eva Hoffman’s intervention in the culture wars engage with the liberal American intelligentsia at century’s end. We see this clearly in the

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autobiographical persona each writer creates. Retrospection – the backward gaze – is, of course, a sine qua non in the writing of autobiography, but it can be more or less disguised according to the writer’s wont or skill. Whereas Antin convincingly adopts the perspective of a child when writing about her early life in Russia and that of a teenager in Boston, Hoffman’s voice in Lost in Translation is always that of a reflective, melancholy adult. There is thus a difference in the nature of the ‘narrating I’ as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson call these autobiographical personae (169). Hoffman’s retrospective construction of the past is evident as she filters her view of her adolescence in the conformist Canada of the early 1960s, and her subsequent student years in the United States, through poststructuralist theory and psychoanalysis, the lingua franca of academic discourse of the day. Hoffman herself comments very interestingly on this reflective, interpretative bent, as she describes that ‘when I discovered the present tense . . . that absolutely freed me to start writing. . . . It freed me to do reflections on my subject – transculturation – rather than tell my story which I did not want to do’ (Tuffield; emphasis added). Indeed, Lost in Translation reads very much as a self-interpreting memoir, where thoughts on the process of transculturation coalesce around formative memories that do not add up to the story of a life. Hoffman’s narrative is thus fittingly fragmented in time and space, in the same way that Antin’s linear story is in keeping with her subject: the radical transformation of a gender-restricted Jewish girl in Russia into a successful writer and participant in the Americanization debate. Hoffman’s melancholic adult persona thus contrasts strongly with Antin’s precocious child – however much that child’s perspective is also informed by the Transcendentalist thought of the adult writer, whose present tense informs the narrative throughout.28 Antin is as aware of her novelistic impulse as Hoffman is of her need for analytic reflection, and we see this in the oft-quoted passage on dahlias versus poppies in The Promised Land: ‘Concerning my dahlias I have been told that they were not dahlias at all, but poppies. . . . I have nothing against poppies. It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality’ (66). It is because she remembers herself as a fanciful child whose foibles are gladly indulged that Antin is such an engaging narrator and advocate for English.29 Eva Hoffman therefore was by no means the only one to fall for this persona of a ‘steady, self-assured ego’ in The Promised Land, nor was she alone in misreading that surface representation; in the service of her language polemic with Antin,

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Hoffman needed to heighten their difference, drawing attention to Antin’s bright ’n breezy attitude to language migration only. Evelyn Salz and others have shone a different light on Antin’s autobiogra­ phical persona, however, by pointing to the author’s attachment to her own image as a child prodigy and the rather short-lived nature of her success.30 In a letter to Israel Zangwill from 1900 Antin reportedly wrote: ‘I tell you that it nearly broke my heart to become “grown up,” and it made me positively ill. Wouldn’t you let me be a girl until I was tired of it?’31 Antin’s success as a public figure did not last much beyond the age of 35, and that growing up made her ‘positively ill’ was evidenced by repeated episodes of mental illness.32 Salz speculates that Antin ‘may have suffered from what is now called bipolar disorder’, which would certainly explain the overenthusiasm and highly strung tone of much of The Promised Land.33 A much darker Antin than the persona of the main narrative also appears in the Introduction and the Appendix ‘How I Came to Write The Promised Land.’34 Here, the writer represents herself as ‘just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell’ (The Promised Land, 1). This other Antin also warns the reader against writing autobiography, ‘unless you are willing to exchange quivering butterflies for dried specimens’, almost as if in anticipation of Paul de Man’s theory of autobiography as ‘de-facement’ (298).35 On the opening page the division between narrated and narrating I is strikingly put in terms of life and death (‘My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began’), while on the final one the process of remembering – delightful as a reliving of the past – is considered deadly when committed to paper (‘Facts – dead facts that you can share with your neighbor’ (The Promised Land, 1; 298)).36 Contrary to the impression given in The Promised Land’s main narrative, Antin thus considers her life in America not as steady progress, but as in some way ruptured by the autobiographical act itself. All writing – especially writing of the self – is fixing, in a way, and othering, and Antin seems to be articulating this rather melancholy insight in these darker passages that frame the memoir proper.37 Mary Antin visited Plotzk only once after moving to America, but although she never abandoned her Jewishness, she never sought to re-connect with Judaism or with Russia either. Eva Hoffman’s journey after Lost in Translation by contrast took her back to Poland repeatedly; her disaffection with the

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United States furthermore resulted in a move to London, where she has lived for many years. Hoffman has also given us her afterthoughts on the writing of Lost in Translation but, rather than using the divided voice of Antin’s child-/ adult narrator whose ‘life ended when mine began’, she has articulated her revisions in interviews and in her later work. In ‘The New Nomads’ Hoffman describes, for example, how her return to Poland in 1994, so different an experience from previous visits because of the lifting of the iron curtain, necessitated a re-think of her memoir as ‘the various divisions and oppositions I had set up in my inner landscape were shifting and blurring, too. . . . Now I would have to live in a world in which the bipolar structure was gone. . . . I would have to change my narrative’ (46–7). In later work, such as Exit into History (1993) and Shtetl (1997), Hoffman’s dialogue with that former, narrated self develops at the same time as her stature as a public intellectual on the international stage grows. Her revision of the ‘bipolar’ narrative of America versus Eastern Europe and English versus Polish in Lost in Translation is therefore an ongoing project as she continues to reflect on, and write about, the relation between subjectivity and language. How identity changes with language migration is for Hoffman a real question again as she has become an active speaker of Polish once more, and has witnessed her native language changing under Western influence. ‘As it spawns new expressions and zestful slang,’ Hoffman writes, Polish begins to adopt its own wanderwords and – expressions, such as ‘the road to Europe’, or ‘joint venture’, or ‘man of money’ (Exit into History, 24–5). Furthermore, Exit into History charts change not only in Eastern Europe, but also in the linguascape of the United States, or at least of New York, where today ‘Polish is one of the seven languages routinely spoken’ (361). But then, as Hoffman explains in an interview with Mary Zournazi, Lost in Translation was never meant to be her final word on life in a second language, but rather came from ‘the sense that nobody really heard or understood’ this particular experience: I wanted to play on the two senses of the word ‘lost’. There is a Frost poem that says ‘what’s lost in translation is the poetry’, and on many levels I think this is true. But I also wanted to play on the connotation of ‘lost’ as in being absorbed, being sort of entranced by translation, because the process of selftranslation has become very absorbing to me. (‘Life in a New Language’, 20)

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Instead of the serial monolingualism of Lost in Translation, Hoffman now theorizes her bilingualism as an ongoing process of translation of the self that is increasingly two-way because of a re-activation of her latent Polish. Keren McGinity shows that Antin, similarly, continued to see herself as multilingual despite her professed belief in her neighbours in English-only in The Promised Land, because in earlier drafts she wrote to former friends in Russia ‘I am both of you and of them: I speak both your languages,’ but this passage was excised from the published version of her memoir (McGinity, 298). Antin’s enthusiasm for English therefore did not at all imply loss of her Russian, Hebrew, or least of all her Yiddish; instead it was probably informed by these, her ‘other’ languages, which she continued to hear around her, and to speak. A comparative reading of Lost in Translation and The Promised Land is illuminating because it reveals the very different ways by which Hoffman and Antin render the experience of language migration, despite the many parallels in their situation. As we have seen, different historical contexts, different temperaments in different autobiographical personae and different intended audiences all play their part, and we can see Hoffman’s and Antin’s different attitudes to, or theories of, language migration as distillations of all these factors. Noting this goes well beyond the banal statement that Antin and Hoffman are both ‘creatures of their time’, who are writing to different agendas regarding gender, ethnicity and American identity, modernity and postmodernity. To put it that way is to misjudge the authors’ actual historical situation. Their different representations of what it is to acquire English – bluntly put, English as new home or as exile – are conditioned by the real-life language options open to them, and once we take those into account, the whole picture changes.

Antin, Hoffman and the linguascapes of early and late twentieth-century America Mary Antin came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century when mass immigration from Eastern Europe was at its height; Eva Hoffman’s family came over from communist Poland in the 1950s, during

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the Cold War, as a single family unit. Both were writing at a time of cultural crisis: Antin, who advertised her love of English, wrote under the pressure of Americanization in defence of immigrants, whereas Hoffman bemoaned her loss of Polish at a time when talk of multiculturalism was rife. Antin interspersed her English with wanderwords from three other languages in The Promised Land; Hoffman’s can be counted on the fingers of one hand. How can this be? The answer is as simple as it is also startling: what I referred to in Chapter 1 as the immigration ‘pause’ between the 1924 Immigration Act and that of 1965 not only ‘Americanized’ the United States by stealth (of mass culture and consumption) in a way that campaigners at the turn of the century could only have dreamed of, but it also engendered an English monolinguascape that lasted until the end of the century. Theodore Roosevelt’s call for ‘One Nation, One Flag, One Language’ in 1907 was issued in the face of what many perceived as the foreign threat of dissident political ideologies and a widely read ethnic press in many languages, and such fears were exacerbated during World War I when many of those publications fell victim to censors and legislators, and German was outlawed in the schools.38 Despite significant changes in racial and ethnic thinking over the century, America was in many ways a more multicultural and multilingual society in 1900 than it was when Lost in Translation was published, in 1989. On the one hand, it is as if the dominance of English since – roughly speaking – the Immigration Act of 1924 has eradicated the memory of this multilingual metropolitan environment at the turn of the twentieth century. On the other, that dominance made it seem natural for the late twentieth-century’s new creed of multiculturalism to be forged in a taken-for-granted English (see also Chapter 1) at the same time as a new multilinguascape was developing in America’s major cities in the wake of the 1965 Act. Linguascapes change slowly; it takes a generation for new norms and practices to establish themselves, which is why it was possible – as Lawrence Rosenwald reminds us – for H. L. Mencken to list in The American Language no fewer than 28 ‘non-English dialects’ spoken in the United States as late as 1937 (Rosenwald, ‘American Anglophone Literature’, 341). There are many more today, but the point worth stressing is that they were much less in evidence at the time of Hoffman’s writing, when English still ruled.

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In Antin’s time there was a thriving Yiddish theatre and cabaret scene, and a Yiddish publishing industry. The same was true of Italian, German, Polish, Greek and other non-English presses and entertainments. Antin’s enthusiasm for English was thus made possible by – and perhaps depended on – her continued access to Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. Indeed, the changing fortunes of Yiddish, Rosenwald once more explains, show just how strong the power of American linguistic assimilation in the twentieth century was: Yiddish survived for hundreds of years in hostile environments in Eastern and Middle Europe, but for only a few decades in the United States. It is now being revived, but less because parents and grandparents have passed it on than because younger people want to learn it again, and can often only do so through formal instruction.39 It seems then that in the cases of Antin’s and Hoffman’s representations of bi- and multilingualism we are dealing with something rather more complex and variegated than a simple contrast between modern and postmodern ways of conceiving of language migration. Ultimately, it is the enthusiastic reception of The Promised Land by Americanization campaigners that constitutes Antin’s successful acculturation to America, while the influence that Lost in Translation continues to have shows that hegemonic multiculturalism needed the challenge of multilingualism by century’s end. It is fitting to close this chapter therefore by quoting Hoffman one more time, both to show how her thinking has developed since Lost in Translation and to set us up for the different scenarios of language migration we will encounter next: while the process of linguistic transmogrification is never easy or painless, its emotional and sometimes unconscious meanings can vary greatly. There are people for whom leaving one’s mother tongue is a liberation; they feel they can invent new personae in new words, or finally express their true personality. . . . There are others who refuse the graft of an acquired speech altogether, perhaps because of some initial psychic rigidity, or just because the prospect of such profound change is too frightening. There are those who feel it is easier to say forbidden things in a language that does not brim with childhood associations and taboos and those for whom the adopted speech is a formal instrument, a psychic mask within which no transgression or breakage of decorum is possible. In other words, what I recognized more clearly in the last few years . . . is

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that the kind of relationship one develops with an acquired language is deeply influenced by the kind of bond one had with one’s mother or father tongue. (‘P.S.’, 53)

Hoffman’s intervention in the multiculturalism debate was timely: adding language to the study of migration and ethnicity requires us not only to conceive of cultural difference in a new and more profound way, but it also leads to new readings of migrant writing in which linguistic difference finds its rightful place.

4

With and Without a Dutch Accent: the LifeWriting of Edward Bok, Dirk Nieland and Truus van Bruinessen

‘Being bilingual – what does it mean?’ Isabelle de Courtivron asked at the beginning of this book, and we have seen how this question elicited very different answers in Lost in Translation and The Promised Land. Indeed, it may be that Antin and Hoffman are limit-cases in the way they represent language migration; as Hoffman herself surmised at the end of the previous chapter, there may be many other ways of experiencing bi- or multilingualism that do not feel like either loss or gain, to be mourned or celebrated. Nor, as we saw in previous pages, is the choice of which language to write in always and simply a matter of what Perez-Firmat called the ‘affect’ of different languages; it can depend on the intended readership, the surrounding linguascape or the circumstances and degree of learning the second language just as much. Later in this chapter we shall see how much this matters, as we examine three scenarios of representing language migration, all still in life-writing, but all very different, even in their common Dutchness. The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920) is very well known and considered a classic of American autobiography; Dirk Nieland’s humorous sketches in ’n Fonnie Bisnis, first published in 1929, are much less known but worth the trouble for their use of Yankee Dutch; and the completely unknown bilingual archive of Truus van Bruinessen presents a unique opportunity to examine the lively letters of a Dutch housewife who immigrated to Canada in the 1950s and witness her difficulty in learning English. Edward Bok’s autobiography, as its title indicates, is a celebratory narrative of Americanization at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the vein of The Promised Land, only more so. Together with his narrated achievements

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in the  American public sphere, it is Bok’s narrating voice that proves his credentials as a bona fide American. He writes a smooth, professional, standard English, from which any Dutch accent is completely erased, even if traces of ethnicity (‘the Dutch character’, in the parlance of his time) remain. Like Antin’s memoir, Bok’s autobiography became a propaganda tool in the Americanization campaign, and was a set text on many a civics syllabus in American high schools.1 The Dutch that is so conspicuously absent from Bok’s account of Americanization is omnipresent in Dirk Nieland’s sketches of immigrant life in ’n Fonnie Bisnis (a Funny Business), which are written in a ‘Yankee Dutch’ that is hard to analyse but very effective, in a humorous and at times satirical way. Bok and Nieland, like Antin and Hoffman before, thus represent contrasting choices in the representation of language migration: where Bok erases Dutch from his written discourse, Nieland delights in the play and interplay of Dutch and English in speech and successfully reproduces it in writing, less to poetic than to comic effect. Truus van Bruinessen’s archive presents a different case again, as she begins her writing life with a journal and correspondence in a vivacious and supple Dutch, and concludes it with a memoir in heavily Dutch-inflected English. So lacking in sparkle by comparison with the Dutch of her journal and letters, the memoir both reflects, and reflects on, van Bruinessen’s struggle to learn English properly, and to keep on writing in an environment that was hardly conducive to creative effort: the life of an immigrant housewife and mother in 1950s small town Dutch Ontario.2 All three, whether they are aware of it or not, have a monolingual and standard-language norm in the background as they write; Bok, obviously, because he uses English only; Nieland implicitly, because there would be no fun in using a mixed language if it weren’t non-standard and full of intentional ‘mistakes’; while van Bruinessen visibly aspires to a standard English she can never achieve. But all three also, professional and amateur, published and unpublished, write for the love of it – van Bruinessen and Nieland do so playfully and with humour. As migrant writers in two languages they delight in the plasticity, perhaps even the sensuality, of their material: the sound and the look of words, the play of meanings between Dutch and English, the scent of memory that is evoked by particular words and phrases, as Mary Antin did in the previous chapter. Mobility within and between two languages then

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here does not primarily consist in the use of wanderwords, but rather in the splitting (Bok), mixing (Nieland) and sequencing (van Bruinessen) of English and Dutch. These alternative strategies give us an opportunity for reflection on the connections between bilingualism, subjectivity and memory, as well as speech versus writing, which will stand us in good stead as we examine the work of Richard Rodriguez, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Junot Díaz in later chapters.

Dutch boy made good in English-only: The Americanization of Edward Bok Today, The Americanization of Edward Bok is chiefly of interest for what Bok has to say about his time as editor of the Ladies Home Journal; as such, he was a major player in forging the new discourse of modernity of early twentieth-century America. As a representation of language migration it is of no obvious consequence, except insofar as the English monolingualism of the autobiography was the result of a split Bok consciously engineered, between his public and private personae and between writing and speech. Important also was – again – the linguascape: the early 1920s, when The Americanization of Edward Bok achieved instant popular success and won a Pulitzer Prize, was a boom time for Americanization pundits and Bok clearly was able to capitalize on that trend. Extracts from his book were quickly anthologized; Robert Stauffer’s The American Spirit in the Writings of Americans of Foreign Birth (1922), which lauded Antin’s The Promised Land also includes a chapter on Bok and characterizes its author as ‘one who realizes the imperfections of American society yet has faith in the ultimate goal toward which the diverse human elements here are struggling’ (Stauffer, 13). Bok’s biographer Hans Krabbendam describes him similarly as ‘an ardent, almost dogmatic believer in the American Dream [who] . . . kept his faith until the very end’, so there can be little surprise that The Americanization of Edward Bok was marketed as a manifesto for Americanism and continues to be read in that vein today (71). Unlike Antin’s, however, Bok’s Americanism did not stem from a need to defend new immigrants against nativism and xenophobia, but from a desire to preach the gospel of American opportunity from the insider position of

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a successful man of business, looking back over 40 years in public life.3 In this respect Bok answers to a wider agenda for immigrant assimilation than just night school English classes and training for citizenship. In the words of Ruby Boughman, writer of another Americanization tract, this agenda calls for ‘the arousing of ambition, the stirring of a complete sense of responsibility and opportunity in the alien members of the community’ (28). In his traditional (white, male, chronological) autobiography Bok documents a successful career in publishing, with the aim of portraying an exemplary American immigrant life. ‘What I Owe to America,’ its final chapter, eulogizes that Americanization, which can be summed up in one magic word: ‘opportunity’ (448). Nevertheless, Bok attributes much of his success to his Dutch roots. When he is critical of America the critique comes from his attachment to the values of the old country, such as thrift, respect for authority and durability – Dutch quality over American quantity, we might say. More liberal Americanization campaigners than Boughman welcomed such criticism from an insider/ outsider perspective and believed it could be harnessed for the common good, benefiting immigrants and natives both. Indeed, the liberal Carol Aronovici saw Americanization as ‘peculiarly the task of the foreign born’ because they ‘have felt the influences of American institutions and have accepted American methods of living and thinking as their own’, as he put it in 1919 (n.p. Preface). Down on those immigrants who are ‘so absorbed and assimilated as to leave no trace of their original identity’, and equally critical of those Americanizers who want immigrants ‘to be kept on a low social level as a much needed industrial group’, Aronovici advocated an Americanism very like Bok’s (9). Interestingly, such Americanism was to be expressed in English, but not necessarily completely lived in it: on the one hand, a common language was necessary to establish ‘communion between people’ (remember Antin and her American neighbours) but on the other ‘love of country requires no special language’ and ‘the peaceful teaching of a language is not synonymous with the forcible abolition of the mother tongue’ (Aronovici, 23; 25; 28). That immigrants learn English was considered necessary for integration and advancement, but it was not the sine qua non of Americanization. Bok’s name and fame, as the editor who increased the circulation of Ladies Home Journal from 488.000 in 1889, when he took it on, to 1 million in 1903 and 2 million by the time he retired in 1919, were already established when he

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came to write his autobiography. His fortune, amassed through hard work as a journalist as well as a canny investor, was therefore only part of his success; his cultural authority as editor and as friend of the celebrities of his day was at least as important. That he wrote his autobiography in standard American English was neither a surprise nor a particular achievement, since he was in a very real sense capitalizing upon his notoriety as a journalist and opinionmaker on the social issues of the time. That he should do so without using even a single Dutch wanderword is much more puzzling, but here we need to take the circumstances of his migration into account too. Bok was, in the terms of contemporary linguistics (see Chapter 2), a successive bilingual who acquired English only on arrival in the United States. Yet – other than Hoffman and Antin – he was probably not bi-literate. Having come from Holland in 1870 at the age of 6, it is doubtful that he would have learnt to read and write by the time he was sent to the Brooklyn public school, so that he would have attained literacy only in America.4 His fluency in written English is thus less remarkable than he makes it out to be: Here was a little Dutch boy unceremoniously set down in America unable to make himself understood . . . his education was extremely limited, practically negligible; and yet, by some curious decree of fate, he was destined to write . . . to the largest body of readers ever addressed by an American editor. . . . He made no pretense to style or even to composition: his grammar was faulty, as it was natural it should be, in a language not his own. Yet, it must be confessed, he achieved. (Bok, viii–ix)

In fact, he achieves so well in English that no Dutch appears anywhere in The Americanization of Edward Bok, not a single word, although, according to Krabbendam, Bok continued to speak Dutch in his everyday life. We are left to conclude then that however much he styles himself as a Dutch boy made good, Bok’s native language had no public presence at all: it was so private, because oral-only, that it found no articulation in the autobiography. Still, that there is no Dutch in Bok’s writing does not mean that the trope of language migration is absent altogether. The Americanization of Edward Bok opens with a chapter on language: Thanks to the linguistic sense inherent in the Dutch, and to an educational system that compels the study of languages, English was already familiar

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to the father and mother. But to the two sons, who had barely learned the beginnings of their native tongue, the English language was a closed book. (2)

Nicknamed ‘Dutchy’ in his youth, and lacking the means to defend himself with words, Bok begins his American school career in the ‘one language understood by boys the world over’: fighting. But soon he begins to learn English and finds he can do so easily, both because of that ‘national linguistic gift’ and because ‘the roots of Anglo-Saxon lie in the Frisian tongue’, so that ‘with a change of vowel here and there the English language was not so difficult of conquest’ (4). Again we find echoes of Mary Antin (see Chapter 3) here in the attribution of a ‘natural talent’ for languages to the Dutch, and in the spur to learn English that comes from abuse and ridicule at school. In a passage reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography furthermore, Bok uses his editorship by way of metaphor. Where Franklin wrote of his ‘errata’ which, as an editor, he always had the power to erase, Bok explains that at school he flatly refused to learn the flourishes of the Spencerian model of handwriting, because a simpler, more legible hand would serve him better. Handwriting is then transposed into style: ‘a readable, lucid style is far preferable to what is called “a literary style,” ’ the latter being ‘a complicated method of expression which confuses rather than clarifies thought’ (296). From the outset, Bok thus constructs his autobiographical persona in Franklinian terms as critical of convention, simple, enterprising and continually self-improving. When he later makes his home in Philadelphia and pursues a variety of charitable causes with all the reforming zeal of the Progressive Era, this parallel with Franklin’s life is drawn even more thickly, so that The Americanization of Edward Bok almost reads as a palimpsest of his eighteenthcentury precursor.5 Almost, but not quite – the autobiographical persona of Edward Bok is a hyphenated one that constructs Americanization as a melding of national characteristics, but not as a complete makeover or rebirth. Bok’s youthful resistance to authority at school, for example, is explained by ‘that Dutch stolidity that, once fixed, knows no altering’ (Bok, 6). This Dutch stubbornness is put to good use when Bok invents his new modern style of writing, and in the Franklinian vein he turns a difficulty into an opportunity: ‘even at that age he already understood Americanization enough to realize that with any

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American institution, one must be constructive as well as destructive’  (6). Dutchness and Americanism are thus a winning combination in Bok’s philosophy, and it fuels his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. And so, as Krabbendam reports, when the President denounces hyphenated Americans at the height of his 100 per cent Americanism campaign, Bok disagrees vehemently and reminds his friend of their shared Dutch ancestry in no uncertain terms (Krabbendam, 112). That his native Dutch language was precious to him as well is illustrated by Bok’s alarm, upon returning from his only visit to Holland, in 1921, at the German and French words he heard there. Like Quintillian at the very beginning of this book, and like most language professionals of that time, the adoption of non-Dutch loan- and wanderwords in his view threatened ‘the purity of the Dutch language’ (Krabbendam, 171–2).6 We hear in this last remark a familiar complaint of the bilingual immigrant whose native language has survived, but also to some extent ossified in him, through lack of a speech community or contact with the home country. And so, when the Dutch that is buried inside encounters the living, changing language spoken communally by others, the painful psychic split that may have happened quite unconsciously comes to the surface all of a sudden. We see here a parallel with Eva Hoffman (see Chapter 3), whose return to Poland similarly confronted her with language change in an uncomfortable and disturbing way. Although Holland and Poland have long since ceased to be their ‘home’ countries, it seems that for Bok and Hoffman Dutch and Polish still afforded them at least some feeling of home, of solid ground, that upon their return felt more like shifting sand. Finding a live, changing and modern Polish in the old country underlines, in Lost in Translation, the violence done to the self when the native language is repressed, entombed and as a result idealized; in Bok’s autobiography, which lacks any such self-reflection, modern Dutch is simply an abomination and should be kept pure. Absence of Dutch in The Americanization of Edward Bok then, which at first glance seems remarkable, is explained first of all by his established fame as a writer and editor in English, second by his probably not being literate in Dutch and third by his decision to split private and public personae and divide his languages between writing and speech. Other Dutch immigrants, in other circumstances and with other motivations for their life-writing,

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also made other choices in deciding what language to write in, but linguistic purity – whether violated or preserved – was important to them too.

Yankee Dutch: the funny business of immigrant speech While the bilingual Bok opted to write in English, the prestige language in America, Dirk Nieland did the opposite and chose Yankee Dutch, a mixed language spoken by first-generation immigrants only and regarded as decidedly substandard.7 François Grosjean unwittingly describes some of the languagemixing techniques Nieland uses in his vernacular sketches of Dutch American life in ’n Fonnie Bisnis (1929) when he outlines the kind of linguistic play bilingual children engage in – for the fun of it, and to annoy adults who insist on ‘correct’ usage. His Yankee Dutch is directed exclusively at an audience of insiders, that is, those familiar with Dutch and English, but also with Dutch/ American biculturalism and the conflict and confusion it can entail. Like the children Grosjean observed, Nieland takes an English verb and conjugates it according to Dutch rules, as in ‘gewurried’ (Nieland, 89). Other games children play with language, like using content words from one language and adding endings of another, translating idiomatic expressions literally and speaking the second language with the pronunciation rules of the first, Nieland employs too (Grosjean, Life, 206–7). ‘Overloeken’, for example, takes its sound and meaning from ‘to overlook’ but is given the form of a Dutch infinitive; ‘ik mijzelf ’, translated literally from ‘I myself ’, is comically bombastic and non-idiomatic in Dutch; ‘ ’n man die in front niet weet dat ’ie behain leeft’, uses mixed English/ Dutch vocabulary and is a literal translation of the Dutch expression ‘ ’n man die van voren niet weet dat hij van achteren leeft’ (a man whose front doesn’t know that his behind is alive). Another example is ‘Mijne billetjes’, a not-quite phonetic transcription of ‘my abilities’, which in Dutch means ‘my ass-cheeks’. Here the humour derives both from the scatological inference and from the contrast between the archaic and formal ‘mijne’ with the diminutive ‘billetjes’ (a word usually reserved for diaper adverts: it means ‘baby’s bottom’) (Nieland, 13; 93; 104). At other times Nieland exploits what linguists call ‘lexical gaps’ in English and Dutch, so that they come to supplement and enrich each other. ‘Monkiederij’, a Yankee Dutch noun derived from ‘monkey business’ and

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‘monkeying around’, comes to mean a kind of mischief-making that is not captured by any single word in Dutch.8 This apparently simple mixing of and messing around with languages turns out to be highly complex when we try to analyse it. Take, for example, the title ’n Fonnie Bisnis, in which the Dutch phonetic transcription of an American expression (a funny business) collapses, in the English ‘funny’, meanings that are distinct in Dutch (‘raar’ = ‘strange’ or ‘peculiar’, and ‘leuk’  ‘humorous’). It also plays on the double meanings that both ‘business’ and its Dutch translation, ‘zaak’, have as ‘thing’ and ‘commercial enterprise’. The business referred to is the painting and decorating firm of Lou Verlak, the narrator, but it is also the funny business of turning an oral language (call it a dialect, a pidgin or a degraded English/Dutch mishmash) into a written one, as well as the business of learning to get by in America in the first decades of the twentieth century. The name ‘Verlak’ is a pun, in that ‘verlakken’ means to cheat or deceive, whereas ‘lakken’ on its own is to varnish, or apply a coat of paint. Our narrator Lou is thus both a ‘varnisher’ of the truth and a deceiver. His trade as a decorator, furthermore, is not as respectable in Yankee Dutch as it is in English: the transcription ‘dikkereeter’ makes him a ‘fatass’ in Dutch slang. As humour goes this is fairly childish and innocent, but it does fit in with the use of taboo language that is often seen in bilingual subjects. As noted in Chapter 2, bilingual people happily utter obscene words in their second or third language(s) that would be unacceptable in their mother tongue.9 From the outset then Nieland’s Yankee Dutch looks funny, sounds funny and intends to make mischief. His sketches are comic and at times selfsatirizing tales of Dutch immigrant life in a small, homogeneous religious community in Michigan, where so many of the Dutch immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth century settled. This migration was very different from Bok’s. Pushed by agricultural crisis in the northern Netherlands, and pulled by the promise of free land in the American West as well as freedom from state interference in the practice of their religion, the Dutch of Nieland’s world established tight-knit rural settlements with the strict Dutch Reformed Church at their centre. As Robert P. Swierenga notes, ‘The goal was to preserve family ties, faith commitments, and cultural values and institutions in a strange and sometimes unfriendly environment’ (‘Dutch Immigration Patterns’, 39–40). In other words, the Dutch came to

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North America ‘to be more Dutch than the Dutch’, as Herbert Brinks puts it (11). This migration was thus markedly different from that of most other Europeans around the turn of the twentieth century, not because the Dutch had no economic motivation – they did, and rural migrants certainly came in the hope of buying land – but because their religious commitments were so strong. What did this mean for the language maintenance of the Dutch? Elton J. Bruins writes that during the earlier colonial Dutch settlement of New York and surrounding areas, the church had still been under the control of the classis of Amsterdam, and ‘there was no question about the use of the Dutch language because, of course, the language of the colony was Dutch’ (176). For the nineteenth-century Dutch immigrants by contrast, the situation is very different since the linguascape has changed to English, which leads James Bratt to observe that ‘the language question becomes a “higher” language question, one quite basic but so often ignored. Granted the shift to English, what was the new language used to say?’ (194). As in part economic migrants, the Dutch could be expected to take to America and English readily; as migrants who wanted to keep their religion pure and self-governed, however, the Dutch language needed to be maintained as the preserver of scriptural truth. Bratt never quite answers his own astute question, but we can surmise that, with the accelerated arrival of modernity’s trappings in the United States, what ‘the new language would be used to say’ was likely more worldly and materialistic than the religious Dutch would be comfortable with (it might indeed be the entrepreneurial and self-promoting prose of The Americanization of Edward Bok). According to Annemieke Galema, in the rural Calvinist areas Dutch persisted therefore as the language of home and church, side by side with English, into the fourth and fifth generations, whereas among urbanites like Bok and Catholic Dutch immigrants the language had disappeared by the second or third (Galema, 26). Loe Verlak’s world is somewhere in between; neither rural nor plagued by big city depredations, it is a well-established Dutch settlement peopled by tradesmen and small entrepreneurs, and in transition to full-scale American modernity. It is not unlike the religious and relatively homogeneous ethnic community of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Dirk Nieland lived and worked as a real estate broker, which may explain his choice of writing in the Yankee

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Dutch he would have heard around him. Yet it would be a mistake to confuse Nieland’s bilingual writing and bicultural attitudes with those of Lou Verlak, who firmly holds to the values of the old country and believes he still speaks a perfect Dutch. Whereas Nieland is a canny manipulator of the overlap between Dutch and English, and mines the confusion it causes for all it is worth, his linguistic play very obviously originates in knowledge of both standard English and standard Dutch – his visual and aural puns and word games would not work if this were not so. At the same time Nieland mimics, in the vernacular voice of Lou and his compatriots, a pidgin created by people ‘few of whom had ever had any formal instruction in the language of their new land’, as George G. Harper writes in his Foreword to ’n Fonnie Bisnis (x). An ironic gap thus opens up between a knowing, bilingual author and a narrator who only picks up bits of English as and where he can find them, in which mimicry of this Yankee Dutch cannot but be read as mockery. Even if, as the Preface observes, ‘Mr. Nieland worked in complete sympathy with the character [of Loe Verlak]’ still Nieland’s humour turns into ethnic self-parody as we are invited to laugh at, not with, the hapless narrator (Ten Hoorn, xv). Such parody – a peculiar mixture of ethnic shame in the face of modern America and attachment to old-world values – is characteristic of first-generation migrant writing. Peter Conolly-Smith finds it in the work of the German American playwright Adolf Philipp, for example, which ‘poked affectionate fun at the community and its habits and, in so doing, encouraged. . . . German Americans’ adaptation to American life and the English language’ (215). Nieland’s portrayal of the provincial and pettily competitive world of the first-generation Yankee Dutch, controlled and policed by the church, is affectionate but also uncomfortable and ambivalent. Clearly this is a world and a language in transition, and ’n Fonnie Bisnis shows not only how, but also why some of the women and children (in particular) want to escape it and how English will make such escape possible. Dutch thrift means, for example, that ‘baaing aan taim’ (buying on time) is taboo and is, indeed, only possible in English as there is no Dutch equivalent; participation in American consumer culture is therefore impossible. Education beyond the public school (except for the ministry) is considered unnecessary, which means that for aspiring immigrant children the American way to social mobility is effectively barred.10 Yet if the text thus mildly criticizes the community’s strict and self-limiting

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social norms, it does not exactly endorse American values either, for ’n Fonnie Bisnis saves its most savage satire for those who would submit to the lure of Americanization. Verlak’s wife (‘wijf ’, meaning ‘slattern’ in Dutch), for example, has adopted American clothes and ways and she claims to speak perfect English, and to be ‘heelemaal gemerrikenaisd’ (completely Americanized) (Nieland, 53). This is a pretentious form of self-delusion, because her speech, rendered in the same phonetic mimicry as Verlak’s own, suggests she hardly knows any English at all. Nieland thus invites his readers to laugh at his characters’ comic vanities, particularly at their speech, and relies on the aural impact of the stories when read aloud for their full (self-)parodic effect.

Yankee Dutch as a mixed language This aural/oral dimension of Yankee Dutch is important to note, because beyond that it is hard to determine what the comic, self-parodying and sometimes slapstick mode of writing that Nieland employs yields for our analysis of language migration in migrant writing. On the one hand, we could say that Nieland works in a Twainian vein to elevate an American vernacular and turn it into a lively, creative written language. On the other, we have also noted that the comedy and parody arising from the constant orthographic/ phonetic jokes (‘stommerik’ [dummy] for ‘stomach’; ‘gebild’ [assed] for ‘built’, etc.) prevent this Yankee Dutch from being emancipated fully into the kind of literary language Zora Neale Hurston forged out of the African American vernacular, for example, at around the same time Nieland was writing. This is largely because Yankee Dutch is a mixed language, inaccessible to those who do not know Dutch. Although Hurston certainly showed the humour in Black speech, she also showed its poetic promise and fulfilled it in her own literary prose, for example, in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Yet such serious, aesthetic use of Yankee Dutch is hardly imaginable, less because of its oral qualities per se than because its aural and visual effects, its funny sounds and looks, would be lost on non-Dutch readers. A sociolinguistic analysis as outlined in Chapter 2 gives more interesting results, especially if we take Nieland’s idiom as an example of what happens when languages live in close contact and their speakers’ culture is in transition.

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Comparison of Nieland’s written Yankee Dutch with that of the speech of Dutch immigrants in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1940s and 1950s gives us some idea, both of how accurately Nieland captures the Dutch accent in immigrant speech and of how ’n Fonnie Bisnis exaggerates and caricatures it. According to George W. Harper, Nieland’s Yankee Dutch is basically ‘Dutch, with phonetically spelt adapted English words and phrases’, but on closer analysis it is nothing so simple (ix). With Dutch rendered in bold, and overlaps between Dutch and English in italics, an arbitrarily chosen sentence comes to look like this: ‘Hij was in poertaims opgrood en had poedienier no schoeling gehad’ (hij was in arme tijden opgegroeid en had bijna geen scholing gehad/he had grown up in poor times and had pretty near not had any schooling). Harper postulates that Dutch is the ‘base’ (or matrix) language in ’n Fonnie Bisnis, meaning ‘the language which provides the morphosyntactic structure of an utterance in which code-switching or code-mixing occur’ (Wei, ‘Glossary’, 494). Word order and conjugation of verbs here clearly derive from Dutch, but there is a good deal of lexical overlap (grown up/opgegroeid; scholing/ schooling; was/was; had/had) between English and Dutch, with ‘poor times’ and ‘pretty near’ being the only distinctly English words. Twenty-plus years later, Yankee Dutch speech as reported by Dorothy DeLano Vander Werf in 1958 and Peter Veltman in 1940 shows a predominantly English vocabulary in Dutch word order and pronounced with a Dutch accent. Yet expressions such as ‘I cannot much pay,’ or ‘I want that you should come tomorrow’ are perfectly intelligible to an English speaker, whereas Nieland’s Yankee Dutch is not (Veltman, 82). This is true of written Yankee Dutch identified by Vander Werf too, as in an advertisement for a gas station in Grand Rapids: ‘De best of der lifes dey gif te you/To service you all and rescue too/If je have trouble mit your car or truck/Phone de number below and you’ll never be stuck’ (301). Word order and vocabulary are completely English here, with the exception of ‘mit’ (met/with) ‘je’ (you) and the Dutchphonetic spelling of the first sentence (‘the best of their lives they give to you’). Now, whether these real-life examples of Yankee Dutch speech and writing are a later development in the transition to English (recorded between 20 and 30 years after Nieland) or whether Nieland exaggerates the Dutchness of Yankee Dutch is impossible to determine. Which is the base language, and whether we are dealing with ‘code-switching’ or ‘code-mixing’ (see Chapter 2) in these

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instances is hard to say too, perhaps because – like Nieland – they exploit the considerable lexical overlap between English and Dutch that makes these statements intelligible to monolingual Dutch and English speakers, however much they might cringe at grammatical and syntactic incorrectness. ‘Interference’, as we saw in Chapter 2, is the linguistic term for such intrusions of one language’s structure and vocabulary onto another’s, but it is not a useful term even here, since Nieland’s Yankee Dutch is a mixed language that was born in a mixed location. Analysis of ‘interference’ (with all the normative connotations that concept brings with it) therefore would obscure rather than clarify Nieland’s conscious and modulated representation of Dutch American speech in, and as, ’n Fonnie Bisnis. With this gloss on notions of incorrectness and interference, it becomes easier to analyse what goes on in Nieland’s use of Yankee Dutch, in the particular kind of humour it generates and in its written rather than spoken form. To call this vernacular an ‘interlanguage’ is to give a neutral, nonnormative name to a linguistic formation whose complexity and potential richness would otherwise be veiled by the assumption that mixed languages are a product of ‘semi-lingualism’, that is, imperfect mastery of both languages.11 Second, if we adopt an interlingual rather than a code-switching/ interference/semilingual approach it becomes clear that, in the analysis of Nieland’s bilingual writing, English and Dutch are just as permeable at all levels (syntactic, grammatical, semantic, lexical, phonological) as they are in speech.12 Finally, the self-parody generated by Nieland’s transliteration of Yankee Dutch speech depends in large part for its comic effect on normative assumptions about standard English and standard Dutch as discrete systems. ‘Wij hebben plentie monnie gereesd’ is funny as a grammatical, orthographical and lexical corruption of both English ‘we have raised plenty of money’ and Dutch ‘we hebben veel geld opgehaald’. This is its strength and its limitation: beyond the humour that results from persistent stretching of each language’s rules, it is not easy to see how this Yankee Dutch could come to serve more serious aesthetic purposes. Nieland’s linguistic play is always playing for laughs, and does not appear to be able to do anything else. In The American Language of 1921, H. L. Mencken makes affectionate mention of Nieland’s first book of sketches, Yankee Dutch, and explains why he thinks that ‘[t]his curious dialect promises to be short of life. On the one hand

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the leaders among the colonists strive to make them use a pure Dutch and on the other hand the younger members, particularly those born in America, abandon both good and bad Dutch for English’ (Appendix II, Section 2).13 Mencken turned out to be right: as a spoken interlanguage, Yankee Dutch was a transitional phenomenon lasting barely two generations.14 As a written one, it lives on in the pages of Nieland’s work as a creative achievement that gives a humorous insight into an immigrant world in transition, even if it depends for its comic effect on mastery of English and Dutch in their standard forms.

Life in a box: the bilingual archive of Truus van Bruinessen Such bilingual manipulation of two languages to generate a third, comic one was beyond the realm of possibility for the only unpublished writer in this study, Truus van Bruinessen, whose English remained fairly rudimentary throughout her migrant writing life. van Bruinessen’s papers in English and Dutch, deposited in the National Archives of Canada, are unique in that their bilingual nature gives us a rare glimpse of the difficulty of second-language acquisition for women living in a migrant environment. Dutch-Canadian rather than American, the archive is discussed here because it is so unique and because van Bruinessen’s world, dominated by the Christian Reformed Church, was a distinctly transnational one, held together by the ties of language, religion and family. National borders did not mean much in this religious environment. It was, as Suzanne Sinke observes, a ‘patriarchal world that continued to set its beat to another drummer than the American legal system, one much more akin to early colonial New England’ (Dutch Immigrant Women, 6). Yet although van Bruinessen’s small town Canada was very similar to Nieland’s Grand Rapids across the Great Lakes, the way she wrote about that world and the languages and discourses she employed to do so are completely different.15 Truus van Bruinessen came to Canada with her husband and two young children in 1950, in the wake of the devastation caused by German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, and attracted by the widely advertised opportunities for Dutch tradesmen and agricultural workers that Canada offered. Before leaving the Netherlands, van Bruinessen had started a journal, in which she reflected on her reasons for emigrating, but on arrival in Canada

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this became obsolete as she engaged in a lively correspondence with family to report on her experiences in the new country. With little English to begin with, she frequently comments in her letters on the difficulty of learning this new language. Living in a Dutch immigrant community, she has, as a wife and mother, little access to the Canadian-English public world of school and work that her husband and children inhabit with apparent ease. All the same, the love of writing that comes through so clearly in her emigration journal and her letters home survives even the shift into English when, 40 years later, van Bruinessen joins a life-writing class in Canada. Here she produces, with help from her teacher, a memoir in English entitled On the Move: a Journey of Faith, which is clearly based on her early journal and letters in Dutch and focuses on her migration experience. All of these – memoir, letters and journal – plus a selection of letters from family in Holland, now live in a box in the National Library, Ottawa, where I discovered them. The van Bruinessen archive gives a unique insight into a thoroughly gendered experience of Atlantic migration in the 1950s, and – more importantly for our purposes here – into the bilingual life-writing of an ordinary woman who crosses linguistic borders. Unlike that of Edward Bok and Dirk Nieland, van Bruinessen’s writing has no literary pretensions and has remained private – but for its having been deposited in the National Archives, of course – and unpublished. Yet a comparative analysis of the journal, letters and memoir – and in particular of the contrast between van Bruinessen’s writing in Dutch and English – reveals cultural, stylistic and identity differences consonant with different audiences, genres and moments in the life cycle. These highlight the complex processes whereby subjectivity and memory are formed and transformed when worded, and worded in different languages, moreover. van ­Bruinessen’s life-writing, rich as it is, in part exemplifies the problem ­Tillie Olsen identified in Silences: how class, gender and race can thwart creati­vity and inhibit artistic production. That this issue is exacerbated by language migration the archive shows most clearly of all, because it enables us to trace what happens when a talented writer’s mother tongue is tamed, and forcibly twisted into English translation. Analysis of this archival production is by no means straightforward, however. If, as François Grosjean showed in Chapter 2, the choice of what language to speak or write in is largely determined by whom we wish to speak or write to, then we need to pay attention to the various addressees of van

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Bruinessen’s writing, who range from herself (in the emigration journal) to parents and close family (in the letters) to a potentially public and unknown readership (for the memoir On the Move).16 Second, when we read this gendered and largely private writing by the light of Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation and regard it as a ‘language learning memoir’, we treat it as something it was never intended to be.17 The van Bruinessen papers are not only much less self-conscious, but also much less polished or articulate: this is writing in its raw form, unedited, unfinished and largely unaware of its possible reception, except for the intimate sphere of family and friends. Where Hoffman’s is the voice of the New York Jewish intellectual – erudite, well-versed in Western literature, critical and highly self-reflexive – van Bruinessen’s writing persona shows a woman of great wit but limited education, with a reading experience that is largely confined to the Bible, religious poetry and popular magazines. So, although van Bruinessen tells us much about learning a second language necessitated by migration, her archive cannot count as a ‘language learning memoir’ because it is generically heterogeneous. To complicate matters further, it is also bilingual as a whole but monolingual in its constituent parts, and incomplete – between the time of the early letters and the memoir written in old-ish age there is a gap of about 40 years, not covered in the writing.18 How to approach such disparate, unpublished material? How to engage with life-writing not in a book, but in a box? In Moving Stories historian Alistair Thomson examines materials and experiences similar to the van Bruinessen archive, of British women immigrants to Australia. Thomson notes that Precisely because these women were migrants they recorded their lives in the letters (and photos) they sent home, and because they wanted to describe, compare and explain their new life in Australia they wrote in intimate detail about aspects of everyday life and women’s experience that are often lost to history.19

In other words, if not for their migration, these women might never have put pen to paper at all and this may be true of van Bruinessen also: it is the migration which motivates the writing. Still, rather than read the archive as social history, I want to read it as writing, with due attention to style, discursive construction and genre convention as we move from journal to letters to memoir, and from Dutch to English.20 As David Gerber reminds us, for example, ‘immigrant

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letters are not principally about documenting the world, but instead about reconfiguring a personal relationship rendered vulnerable by long distance, long-term separation’ (143). Gerber’s point is well taken: immigrant letterwriting seeks to maintain the emotional bond with home first and foremost; its primary purpose therefore is not necessarily to report the truth about the migration, but to be upbeat and reassuring to the home front. Bearing this in mind, as well as the different addressees of van Bruinessen’s work and the different demands that various genres of life-writing make of the reader and writer, we can return to earlier questions regarding writing in two languages: what self is being constructed in what language? Do the two languages interact in writing and, if so, how? What is the impact of the surrounding linguascape? And what does gender have to do with it all? A  little context on Dutch migration to Canada in the 1950s and women’s position in this particular migrant culture, followed by a comparative analysis of van Bruinessen’s letters and her memoir, will reveal a different scenario again from that of Bok’s splitting and Nieland’s mixing of Dutch and English.

Dutch-Canadian migration in the 1950s: gender and language Truus van Bruinessen’s journal begins on 10 November 1949, when her husband Peter has an appointment at the Emigration office. This is ‘een heel belangrijke dag in ons leven’ (a very important day in our lives) she writes, as if already aware that migration would radically change her life and turn her into a writer – albeit an amateur one.21 The van Bruinessens were not alone in venturing overseas to make their future; after the United States’ and Canada’s role in liberating the Dutch from German occupation in World War II, North America became the promised land for many Dutch would-be émigrés, and particularly for those of strong religious faith and socially conservative disposition. As van Bruinessen remarks in her journal, most Dutch emigrants belong to the Christian Reformed Church and in Canada ‘wordt zelfs iedere Zondag in het Hollandsch gepreekt’ (sermons are given in Dutch every Sunday). Echoing the propaganda leaflets her husband brings home from the Emigration Office, van Bruinessen writes furthermore that Canada appeals

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‘omdat de bevolking uitsluitend uit blanken bestaat en dus weinig kans op rassenhaat’ (because the population is exclusively white and so little chance of racial hatred [sic]) – but this motivation is tactfully left out of the English memoir 40 years later.22 Like the migration Herbert Brinks described earlier in terms of the desire to be ‘more Dutch than the Dutch’, this one was motivated by old-world religious principles as much as economic opportunity.23 Anne van Arragon Hutten goes so far as to argue – rather more cynically – that the Holland-Canada route was well-nigh a ‘planned migration, conducted under the auspices of two governments with the cooperation and assistance of commercial interests looking for profit, and of churches seeking to bolster their number and influence’ (35).24 On the Move: a Journey of Faith, the title of van Bruinessen’s 1990s memoir, thus tellingly captures the dual meaning of a religious journey and of the leap of faith that transatlantic migration itself represented. In her letters she frequently refers to the biblical injunction to ‘go forth and multiply’: ‘[dominee preekte vandaag] dat we er altijd om moeten denken dat we niet in de eerste  plaats naar Canada gekomen zijn om rijk te worden, maar om een Goddelijke opdracht te vervullen’. ([the minister today] reminded us that we had not come to Canada first and foremost to get rich, but to fulfil God’s mission).25 As van Arragon Hutten also notes, these immigrants certainly wanted a better future for their children, but – unlike Mary Antin – they did not associate that future with modernity. Again, they replicated Brinks’ Dutch migrants decades earlier and sought to establish in Canada what they felt they could no longer have at home: the opportunity to earn a living without bureaucratic restriction, and more so to continue to practise their faith in homogeneous religious communities, at a time when Europe was rapidly industrializing and secularizing (van Arragon Hutten, 129).26 Part and parcel of these communities’ conservative values was a strict division of labour between the sexes, so that women did not work outside the home but devoted their lives to the welfare of husband and children. This religious/economic motivation for migration, combined with strictly defined traditional gender roles, had serious implications for women’s integration into Canadian life and in particular for their ability to learn English. While van Bruinessen’s husband Peter spoke some English, she herself had but a few words when she arrived in Canada in 1950, and her

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position as a housewife ensured that she remained immersed in a Dutch linguascape for many years, even as husband and children gradually became conversant with English. Integration and the learning of English were inhibited by other factors too. The Dutch experience in Canada was a typical result of chain migration, so that family and church played a major role in settling the newcomers and finding them housing, employment and a faith community to belong to. But such aid did not help new immigrants with their integration in Canadian life, nor did it spur them to learn English. Again gender makes a difference here; writing generally about immigrant linguascapes, Louise Dabène and Danièle Moore observe that women were the most affected by such ‘autonomization’ of migrant communities, because ‘[t]heir central position in families impose[d] the extensive usage of the original language as the privileged code for daily conversation. It [was] then essentially through the mediation of school-age children that the majority language penetrate[d] the home context’ (22). To add to this isolation, church services were held in Dutch so that van Bruinessen did not hear any English there either for the first few years. ‘The church kept them thinking along Dutch lines for a much longer time than would have been the case had they plunged into existing, English-speaking churches,’ van Arragon Hutten notes (232).27 Women, according to Suzanne Sinke, thus ended up at the extreme ends of language shift: young, single immigrant women (rather like Mary Antin in Chapter 3) generally embraced English enthusiastically, seeing it as the language of freedom and modernity, whereas married immigrant women only learnt English slowly, poorly and often reluctantly, either because they did not feel the need for it or through lack of access (‘Gender in Language’, 130).28 The latter, much more than lack of need or a reluctance to learn, was the main problem for van Bruinessen, who frequently expresses her frustration at not being able to learn English in her letters: ‘o dat Engelsch, ik geloof dat ik het nooit leer, voor de kinderen is het hier fijn die leeren de taal vanzelf, en Peter spreekt het zoo makkelijk als Hollandsch.’ (Oh this English, I don’t think I’ll ever learn it, it is fine here for the children they pick it up automatically and Peter speaks English just as easily as Dutch).29 She often states her intention to take English lessons and voices her frustration at feeling – and being made to feel – like a child: ‘tot nog toe heb ik er nooit gelegenheid voor gehad, ‘k hoop

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nu maar dat ik ‘t gauw leeren zal, want ik voel me soms net een klein kind dat om een boodschap gestuurd wordt’ (I have never had the opportunity so far. I really hope that I will learn it soon, because sometimes I feel like a child being sent on an errand.)30 At other times van Bruinessen gives a humorous twist to her predicament: ‘Wat koomen er toch veel, straks is ’t haast niet meer nodig om Engelsch te leeren zelfs Hollands is dan overbodig, je kunt je dan met plat Schevenings redden’ (So, so many are coming over now, soon it won’t be necessary to learn English at all anymore even Dutch will be superfluous then, you’ll be able to get by just fine in broad Schevenings [her native dialect from the town of Scheveningen].)31 The conversational, erratically punctuated style in these letters is engaging and often amusing, but the tone in On the Move, looking back at van Bruinessen’s difficulty in learning English, is more wistful. Although the memoir is clearly based on events related in the letters of the 1950s, the two forms of life-writing do not map onto each other seamlessly; absent from the letters, for example, is this early episode about learning English the haphazard way, from a Canadian neighbour: During the afternoon Mrs. Ratcliffe and I found out that ‘school’, ‘school bus’, ‘radio’, ‘stop’ and ‘wringer’ were the same in both English and Dutch. We spent part of our time together to point out things in the house and said to each other what it was named in our language. It was fun in the beginning, but in the end we both got tired of it. (25)

The words these women have in common (they invent ‘lexical overlap’ all by themselves) also delimit their housewifely domain: children, housework and the radio, which is their only link to the Canadian-English public sphere. Rather than getting them out of the house, this language game ties them more firmly to the kitchen sink; no wonder they soon get tired of it. What significance we should give to these extra scenes that appear in the memoir, but not in the letters, is an intriguing question. A vignette such as this one may well have been prompted by van Bruinessen’s life-writing teacher, whose correcting and editorializing hand is visible when contextual information and retrospective opinion supplement, clarify or qualify the material mined from the letters. Yet to put it this way is to see the letters as some truth-telling UR-text and the memoir as derivative, which is too simple.

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It is quite possible, for example, that van Bruinessen remembered different episodes from her early years in Canada in old age, or that her perspective changed with hindsight. Besides, as we learnt from David Gerber above, not only is truth-telling not the primary purpose of immigrant letter-writing, but correspondence and memoir have different intended audiences and engage different memory functions in the writing process too.32 Another, equally striking feature of van Bruinessen’s writing is the difference in letters and memoir between religious discourse and the stories of everyday life. This religious discourse, frequently used in letters to her parents, is shot through with biblical citations and is a world away from the conversational, humorous narrative style in which she normally writes, reminiscent of the popular fiction of her day.33 Interestingly, Suzanne Sinke observes the same extreme change of register in her study of Dutch immigrant women’s writing earlier in the twentieth century: ‘Women shifted into a formal biblically based language for certain topics. I had a hard time translating these passages adequately, since the difference in levels of language involved was profound. For some individuals it was as though two different people were writing’ (Dutch Immigrant Women 193; emphasis added).34 These different people, in a very real sense I think, were the dutiful daughters who remembered the religious teachings of their youth in the institutional language of biblical citation and the women, who would chirpily report on their progress from the immigrant frontier. It is because the Dutch sought to preserve their religion in Dutch – as we have seen – that Sinke has such difficulty in translating it, and it is because the daughters want to demonstrate their common faith that they use the religious discourse of old. An ocean apart from their parents in more ways than one, these women could but write home frequently and at length to maintain the familial bond, in those days when even the telephone was a luxury and air travel a distant dream.

Writing for pleasure, without leisure: bilingualism and its discontents For van Bruinessen, however, there was more at stake than simply keeping in touch with home and family. Most striking about the archive as a whole is the

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importance she evidently attached to documenting her experience in writing. Not only had the impending migration prompted her to start a journal, not only did she start to write long and frequent letters home upon arrival in Canada (and even distributed a typed version of her report on the Atlantic crossing to family and friends) but she also complains continually that she lacks the time to write as much as she wants.35 All this suggests that writing for its own sake is important to her and that she takes pleasure in it, as she says in the Preface to her memoir: I hoped that one day I could sit down and do nothing else but write, write, and write some more! That was something I really would like to do. But until the children would have grown up and life not be so filled with all the things a busy mother is supposed to do, my dream of writing would have to sit on the shelf. Luckily, I liked looking after my family even better then [sic] writing. (On the Move, 84)

Although the life-writing class does enable her to ‘write, write, and write some more’, the contrast between the letters’ liveliness and the stilted style of the memoir suggests that this freedom came too late. By the 1990s, Dutch migration had long since dried up and the language had withered with it, and because van Bruinessen’s story was rapidly becoming history, she had to write it in English. With time on her hands to write to her heart’s content at last, van Bruinessen has to do so in her second language – and it does not work. Nancy Morrow explains why this often happens in immigrant autobiographies in English: ‘[the problem of self-representation] is compounded by the author’s need to express herself in a language with which she has a less intimate relationship than do her readers’ (178–9; emphasis added). Not only did van Bruinessen have to negotiate the difference between letter-writing and the composition of a memoir when she was working on On the Move, but she also had to redirect her writing to a different readership, whose first language was English. And so, where the letters and journal are vibrant and alive, whether chatty and entertaining or serious and biblically poetic as the occasion demands, the memoir is flat-footed, and written in a basic and often ungrammatical English. Little is left of the laconic humour and linguistic play of the letters, which evidenced their author’s pleasure in writing and navigated domestic and religious registers with ease. van Bruinessen is, moreover, very much aware that her English does not stretch as far as she would like

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it to. Looking back on her experiences of 1952, when she was trying to learn English from a Dutch neighbour, she explains: ‘I talked what we called in Dutch “steenkoolengels” (pigeon [sic] English); a lot of Dutch words with a few English words in between’ (On the Move, 68). Unlike Dirk Nieland’s Yankee Dutch, whose comic effect derives from his implied bilingual readers’ knowledge of both standard languages, van Bruinessen’s ‘steenkolenengels’ aims to be understood by monolingual readers of English, but it is hardly likely to be appreciated by them. Dutchisms are evident on every page: instead of ‘I took the film to the shop today to be developed,’ she writes ‘I brought the film away to be developed,’ which is a direct translation of the Dutch idiom ‘film wegbrengen’, for example (69). Dutch expressions, such as ‘dat was niet aan dovemansoren gezegd’, are translated literally as ‘that was not told to a deaf man’s ears’. ‘John had great fantasy. He also took things very serious, sometimes too serious I think’ adopts Dutch vocabulary (‘fantasie’, which translates as ‘imagination’) and adverbial form in not adding the suffix –ly to ‘serious’, even if the meaning in English is clear (52; 129). By comparison with the flexibility and liveliness of van Bruinessen’s epistolary Dutch, the English of On the Move thus reads as a record of loss: loss of confidence, of immediacy and of intimacy with her readers. In the Dutch letters, van Bruinessen’s pleasure in playing with language is evident: far from seeing her native tongue as one where word and thing are intimately connected (as Eva Hoffman did) she is acutely aware of the mutability and plasticity of language. For van Bruinessen words are ‘playtoys’ – a likeable Dutch/English pleonasm that occurs in her English memoir and is derived from Dutch ‘speelgoed’ (collective noun for toys; literally ‘playthings’ or ‘playstuff ’). In one of her letters she delights, for example, in the synthetic nature of Dutch morphology: ‘schoonmaakgeneugten, kraamverpleegsters­ weeen en groentewinkeljuffrouwsmiseres dat laatste woord is werkelijk een prachtvinding zeg dat eens vlug tien keer achter elkaar Co’. (cleaningjoys, midwivescontractions and greengrocersshopassistantstroubles that last word really is a great find try saying that ten times in quick succession Co).36 In this passage van Bruinessen is not only practising linguistic synthesis. She is also commenting, with a characteristic irony bordering on sarcasm, on the kind of news that is being exchanged in her correspondence with family and friends: she satirizes the trials and troubles of the gender-segregated

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domestic sphere. Such humorous teasing even extends to religion occasionally, as when van Bruinessen suggests to her father that he should try to sell his shop by placing an advert in ‘De Gereformeerde Kolenboer, of hoe dat blaadje heet’ (The Christian Reformed Coalmerchant, or whatever that rag is called).37 Nor is this delight in language entirely confined to Dutch. Almost as soon as she begins to write from Canada, English wanderwords creep into the letters, often to intentional comic effect. She refers to her husband Peter as ‘mijn huisband’, playing on the literal meaning of ‘domestic tie’, and inverting the sexist tropes ‘ball and chain’, or ‘trouble and strife’. Here, the meaning is ‘my husband who ties me to the home’ – which makes a nice change. There are interlingual anecdotes too, often occasioned by the speech of her children, as she witnesses their progress in English in blissful unawareness of the differences between languages. van Bruinessen relates how one of her little boys believes God created the world with a shovel: ‘In Dutch, creation is schepping and a shovel is a schep’ (On the Move, 63). One of her sons has invented a language of his own: ‘hij wordt door niemand verstaan maar door iedereen begrepen’, she remarks dryly (nobody can quite make out what he says but everyone knows what he means).38 In English translation the subtle and humorous difference between ‘verstaan’ en ‘begrijpen’ gets lost, so that van Bruinessen cannot use this anecdote in her memoir. Instead she describes the friendship between her own and a neighbour’s son in neutral, abstract terms: ‘there was no language problem between them; they talked a mixture of English and Dutch and were having a great time’, which is much less pithy (On the Move, 117). None of the anecdotes are as animated, as vividly rendered or as funny in the memoir as they are in the letters. This may be, as van Bruinessen herself remarks, because letters home have to be jolly and reassuring: With five children in this small place and no plumbing or electricity I often felt at my wits’ end. And I couldn’t write home about all this nitty-gritty. Also, my contact with the outside world was very limited; church and the grocery store were the only contacts I had. (On the Move, 128)

Without knowing it, she articulates here what the function of immigrant letters is generally: they should be uplifting and maintain emotional bonds.39 Yet the passage also speaks of her loneliness; acutely aware of her audience,

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she describes here how she censored herself in the letters but also sought to relieve her isolation. Letter-writing could not always be truthful, but at least it connected her with a wider world. Perhaps such awareness of audience can also give us a clue as to the comparative flatness of the English memoir. On the Move is clearly based on letters from the early years of van Bruinessen’s migration, and when the letters run out, somewhere in 1952, so does the memoir. Nothing more than a postscript recording the births of more children, deaths, real estate purchases and frequent house-moves is written about the next 40 years, and this lacks even what little animation the memoir has. On the Move is not the record of an immigrant life, but of the migration and early years of settlement in Canada, and we may well wonder why this should be. If the cultural script for immigrant life-writing is economic mobility, then her inability to conform to this demand may be one reason; the letters express the constant anxiety ‘dat we nu maar snel vooruitgaan’ (that we’ll do better soon) but the postscript makes it clear that their progress was at best unsteady.40 Like a modern-day Mary Rowlandson, van Bruinessen represents hard times in biblical terms, as when she writes that the family were ‘reduced to carriers of water and cutters of wood, like the people of Gideon’ (On the Move, 88). If the full story were told, this migration was not an immediate and unmitigated success: although the van Bruinessens stayed in Canada and multiplied, their hold on prosperity was often tenuous. But then, material success had never been the primary goal, and the most likely and interesting reason van Bruinessen’s memoir does not reach beyond the early 1950s has nothing to do with memory or immigrant success, but with English. It is because she felt compelled to write her life-narrative in English, a faltering, hobbled and forever Dutch-inflected English, that her self-expression was hampered, precisely at the point when she finally seemed to have world and time enough to write freely. van Bruinessen’s case shows clearly that language migration is a far more important factor in a writing life than most critics of migrant writing have given it credit for. Whether never fully mastered, or never fully submitted to, a creative and imaginative use of English for van Bruinessen remained out of reach, and was less a playtoy than rough-hewn raw material (‘steenkool’, coal) refusing to be moulded to the shape of her Dutch letters.

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English, ‘the intentions of others’ and a bilingual paradox Bakhtin’s dictum in Chapter 2 that language is always ‘populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others’ can be usefully applied to van Bruinessen’s predicament in On the Move: her English is still ‘populated, overpopulated’ with the intentions of the Dutch, and this is why the memoir falls flat (294). Because the intentions of others that populate English are very different from those that overpopulate Dutch, Edward Bok, Truus van Bruinessen and Dirk Nieland’s North American writing success depended on their understanding and anticipation of English audiences’ expectations. As the longstanding editor of Ladies Home Journal, Edward Bok was a past master at such anticipation, which explains both the success of The Americanization of Edward Bok in the United States and its dismissal, on translation into Dutch, as ‘too American’ in the Netherlands. It also explains why he chose to write in English-only, of course. Truus van Bruinessen and Dirk Nieland dealt differently with the dilemma of what language to write in, and for whom. As we have seen, it was in the confusion, overlap and uncertain distinction between Dutch and English as related languages that their bilingual mistakes and discoveries could be made, which in turn created both the comedy and the tragedy of ’n Fonnie Bisnis and On the Move. Mistakes and discoveries, because whether we designate the visible contact between English and Dutch (in words like ‘playtoy’ or ‘huisband’ or ‘monkiederij’) as ‘interference’ from the matrix language or as an example of interlingual touching that can result in pleasing neologisms depends on our reading of language migration as an inherently mixed-up funny business or as an exercise in linguistic correctness that can only ‘recognize’ such words as markers of a ‘semilingual’ transitional stage on the road to standard English or Dutch. Because, as Penelope Gardner-Chloros explained in Chapter 2, we can draw no clear line between code-switching and code-mixing, one writer’s error is another reader’s play or joke, and vice versa. And here an interesting paradox presents itself, because which path to choose depends not only on one’s theory of language migration but also on one’s competence in both or either of the languages in question. A bilingual reader like me, strangely enough, is as much at a disadvantage when reading van Bruinessen’s archive along interlingual and creative lines as she or he also,

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and obviously, has an advantage over the English-only or Dutch-only reader whose understanding of what goes on linguistically can only be partial. This is because it is almost impossible, for someone who knows Dutch and English intimately and well, not to see the Dutch poking through van Bruinessen’s English and therefore to judge the English as deficient. It is knowledge that can’t be undone, but it is also judgement that has been learnt, and maybe someone who does not know Dutch finds van Bruinessen’s English delightfully different, as I enjoyed reading Pietro di Donato’s Italian-inflected English (in Chapter 2), not knowing Italian. This is writing with a foreign accent, after all, twisting the familiar into new shapes. It is with such a much more open-minded, open-eyed and open-eared attitude that we move onto the next chapter on Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish. Here, my dis/advantage will be reversed as I read Rodriguez’s sparse wanderwords and rare interlinguality not as a bilingual and bicultural reader, but as an outsider looking in. In the late twentieth century, and when the ‘other’ ­language is Spanish, ‘Being bilingual, what does it mean?’ becomes a particularly charged question, as we shall discover next.

5

Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish

I am on my knees, my mouth over the mouth of the toilet, waiting to heave. It comes up with a bark. All the badly pronounced Spanish words I have forced myself to sound during the day, bits and pieces of Mexico spew from my mouth, warm, half-understood, nostalgic reds and greens dangle from long strands of saliva. (Days, xv)

This is how Richard Rodriguez, celebrated and controversial (Mexican) American writer and public intellectual, begins the second volume of his trilogy of autobiographical essay collections, Days of Obligation.1 It is a shocking beginning: a scene of abjection, ‘on my knees’, vomiting, with a dog-like bark, Spanish words, expelling ‘bits and pieces of Mexico’, the narrator’s motherand fatherland, in the ‘reds and greens’ of the Mexican flag. Vomiting Spanish, vomiting Mexico, vomiting parents and family and home and heritage – an act of betrayal, ostensibly, so strong as to bring to mind immediately the accusations of ethnic self-hatred that were levelled at Rodriguez after the publication of his first collection of essays, Hunger of Memory. If memory, the reader can’t help thinking, is to be expelled so violently as it is here, then it is no wonder hunger remains. A man emptied of memory cannot live; hunger cannot be satisfied except in the ritual repetition of ingestion and expurgation, absorption and ejection. If those last two words are already reminiscent of the migrant’s predicament (to be absorbed or ejected by the ‘host’ country), then there is more in this passage that pertains specifically to this writer’s migrant culture: Mexico, the United States and Richard Rodriguez’s presence in either – or the presence of both in Richard Rodriguez.2 Yet the being ‘on my knees’ and the ‘my mouth over the mouth’ of the first line suggest another scene of abjection too: the bark and heave and ‘spew from my mouth, warm’ of orgasm in fellatio. It is as if the passage says one thing and enacts another, lust and disgust in one go, language disgorged by a body

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in distress, ‘on my knees’ as if in an act of supplication, of prayer. But such discomfiture is quickly dispelled, as the passage continues: I am crying from my mouth in Mexico City. Yesterday, the nausea began. Driving through Michoacán with a television crew, I was looking for a village I had never seen. . . . We had been on the road since breakfast. I was looking for the kind of village my parents would have known as children, the kind they left behind. The producer was impatient – ‘What about that one?’ – indicating with a disinterested jerk of his head yet another church spire, yet another configuration of tile roofs in the distance. The British Broadcasting Corporation has hired me to serve as the ‘presenter’ for a television documentary on the United States and Mexico. A man who spent so many years with his back turned to Mexico. Now I am to introduce Mexico to a European audience. (‘Introduction’, in Days, xv–xvi)

Here the camera zooms out, creating distance between the spewing and the speaking narrator, to exacerbate the alienation already evident in ‘the badly pronounced Spanish words I have forced myself to sound during the day’. There is distance also in ‘I was looking for the kind of village my parents would have known as children, the kind they left behind,’ as if this were a generic Mexican, not a specific, named, place of origin: ‘that one’, ‘yet another church spire, yet another configuration of tile roofs’. The ignorant, ‘disinterested’ producer’s voice is channelled through that of the all-too-knowing, alienated and embarrassed narrator. The British Broadcasting Corporation is spelt out in full as if to emphasize its institutional weight and cultural distance; ‘presenter’ is put in scare quotation marks to highlight the narrator’s unease in this role. ‘A man who spent so many years with his back turned to Mexico’ is hardly qualified for the job, and the irony of having him – me, this autobiographical narrator – ‘introduce Mexico to a European audience’ is heavily underlined.3 Irony, distance, abjection, dis-identification, dissociation, alienation: Latinate, theoretical, abstract English terms to characterize a passage about visceral Spanish and Mexico, expelled from the American imaginary. How are we to understand this in relation to the language migrations of previous chapters, to bilingualism and subjectivity in Antin, Hoffman, Bok, Nieland and van Bruinessen’s writing, to the linguascapes of early

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and late twentieth-century America, to the absence or presence of nonEnglish wanderwords in migrant literature generally? Interestingly, the title Hunger of Memory can itself be read as an Hispanicism, a literal translation of ‘hambre de’, meaning ‘hunger for’ (memoria, or hambre de recuerdo). In English, ‘hunger of memory’ is awkward, meaning perhaps hunger for memory, or memory’s hunger – in which case ‘the hunger of memory’, including the definite article, would be more apposite. Either way, the Spanish that lingers in the English of Hunger of Memory immediately complicates interpretations of language betrayal and self-hatred; it may be that Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish is not always abject and objectionable, and in this chapter I will be  tracing its remnants to see what they might contribute to our reading of the work. Looking for a connection between Hunger of Memory’s opening scene – ‘I remember to start with that day in Sacramento . . . when I first entered a classroom, able to understand some fifty stray English words’ – and the in-your-face start to Days of Obligation, we will discover how an overt message of forgetting or rejecting Spanish may in fact be undone by a bilingual literary practice that – as with Antin and Hoffman’s use of their native languages in Chapter 3 – seeks to keep the mother tongue alive (11, emphasis added).

Psychoanalysis and the abject: Rodriguez and Chicanismo In ‘Europhilia-Europhobia’, Julia Kristeva revisits her earlier theorization of abjection as a psychic economy in which ‘separation of subject and object are not yet complete’. Instead, subject and object engage in a dynamic of repulsion and fascination that ultimately harks back to the primary and problematic relationship with the mother, ‘the mother being the primary ab-ject’ (260). In the passage above, abjection is already writ large in the act of vomiting the mother tongue, and in the equation between the mother, Spanish and Mexico that had been established in Hunger of Memory. Kristeva’s addendum to the theory of abjection is a useful reminder of the critic’s role, nay duty, to understand – if not to pardon – that which is difficult to stomach (aesthetically, politically, psychologically) in literary texts.4 As is well known in the United States, but much less so in Europe where he is hardly known

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outside ethnic literature circles, Rodriguez’s work was lapped up by right-wing critics and  opponents of multiculturalism, affirmative action and bilingual education from the moment Hunger of Memory appeared in 1982. Conversely, it was difficult to swallow for the liberal and left intelligentsia, for those trying to clear a space for migrant writing in the academy, let alone for Chicano/a critics. With hindsight, it becomes clear that Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory exposed fault lines in the way critics think of migrant writing and of the migrant subject as inevitably representative of political and cultural interests larger than him(or her) self. These fault lines, deriving from identity politics, are still worth investigating and addressing, even if the initial critical debate between Chicano/a movement critics of Rodriguez and his defenders is long outdated.5 The first is the assumption, so obviously provoked in the opening to Days of Obligation, that Rodriguez’s apparent rejection of Spanish means betrayal of the homeland, of parents, of heritage and of family.6 A second, which pertains to pop-psych culture as much as to migrant writing, is the idea that, deep down and most of all, we ‘just want to be ourselves’, that migrants want to ‘belong’ or to go ‘home’ again and that all these notions are rooted in the soil of our native culture and language – regardless of what happens to us afterwards.7 Writing about such clichés as a form of creeping essentialism, Michael Garcia points out that Rodriguez wants the ‘white freedom’ of selfreinvention that is habitually denied racial and ethnic subjects, ‘a dress code that permits only one “ethnic suit” to be worn by everyone who shares a similar background’.8 Rodriguez’s distinction in his third volume of essays, Brown, between ‘costumbre’ and ‘cultura’ is insightful in this connection, the more so because he can only make it by using Spanish wanderwords. He explains that whereas ‘costumbre’ (custom, habit or tradition) is concrete and changeable, ‘cultura’ signifies something much more indelible, and also insidious: ‘cultura’ ‘was always used against me, but as indistinguishable from me – something I had betrayed’ (129). ‘Cultura’ then is something like faith, something you are born into and must not lose. ‘Culture’ in English, and in America, on the other hand means the opposite of ‘cultura’: ‘a belief in the individual’s freedom to choose, to become a person different from her past. [It] separates children from grandparents, the living from the dead’ (130). Rodriguez’s resistance to essentialist notions of identity and authenticity is not merely a restatement of the American dream of self (re-) invention that

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is predicated on historical amnesia. In an essay entitled ‘Asians’ he gives an accurate diagnosis of the dilemma of migrant culture for the second generation: ‘The child of immigrant parents is supposed to perch on a hyphen, taking only the dose of America he needs to advance in America’. How can such a dose be measured? How can a desire for more be contained? And who gets to say? The passage continues: ‘At the family picnic, the child wanders away from the spiced food and faceless stories to watch some boys playing baseball in the distance’ (Days, 159). Of course the stray child will be called back, but the implication is that – like those ‘fifty stray words’ of English earlier, on the threshold of American school – it cannot be restrained forever. In exposing such fault lines in the discourse of migrant and ethnic culture as some kind of ‘home’, when in fact you are already living – and have always lived – in what Werner Sollors in Chapter 4 called a ‘mixed location’, Rodriguez’s work importantly bridges canonical American and counter-canonical transnational literatures. He does so precisely in the awareness that, as he tells Susan Lerner, ‘the price of inclusion is segregation’ which is as pithy a statement as I have ever seen of the (bilingual) migrant writer’s paradoxical position (6). Fernando Delgado put it another way, back in 1993 when the culture wars were still raging: ‘Rodriguez is safe; his story . . . comforts mainstream America’, and it is this that makes him ‘the token Latino entrant into the American consciousness’ (9). Much of the argument of Hunger of Memory revolves around bilingual education, the Chicano/a movement and affirmative action – political formations and achievements which Rodriguez sees as misguided, romantic and ultimately damaging to the interests of Americans of Mexican descent like himself, cross-over migrant subjects in search of a wider world than the one they came from. He refuses to be seen as representative: ‘I write of one life only. My own. If my story is true, I trust it will resonate with significance for other lives . . . my history deserves public notice as . . . a parable for the life of its reader. Here is the life of a middle class man.’ (Hunger, 7) Now, whatever the deliberate provocation in this faux-naïf invocation of American individualism, the middle-classness of this man is crucial: Rodriguez’s voice, as a polemicist in this text, is emphatically not that of a disadvantaged barrio boy made good. He insists that the point of being, or having, made good is that he can precisely never be part of any working class or ethnic ‘we’ anymore, by virtue or fault of what education and English have brought in their train.

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Nor does he want to. Embracing English – though not, as we’ll see, Englishonly – Hunger of Memory argues against those who, in his view, disavow their class privilege: educated and socially mobile Chicanos and Chicanas. Their romantic view of la raza obscures, not the oppressive and patriarchal nature of Mexican American culture (as Gloria Anzaldúa argued) but their own distance from family and community – the price of education and social mobility, as Rodriguez sees it. In the essay ‘An American Writer’, he explains this further: ‘I think it is no coincidence that there has been a middle-class chase for ethnic roots. Such a celebration of continuity becomes a denial of loss’ (6).9 In Days of Obligation he adds: ‘Chicanismo blended nostalgia with grievance’ (66). Offensive and merely dismissive as these words may seem, the psychoanalyst Anne Anlin Cheng enables us to interpret them differently when she writes: ‘grief is the thing left over after grievance has had its say’ (172). We can take this to mean that once the forces of discrimination have been fought and overcome, and the Chicano/a subject has gained recognition, then grief for the loss of belonging to the community from which she or he came becomes apparent. When read closely, not for polemic fireworks but for overdetermination and contradiction, Rodriguez’s first two volumes of essays are underwritten by loss and grief.10 Again Anne Anlin Cheng is insightful when she observes that melancholia and grief can be transmuted (by which I mean expressed yet stilled) into what she calls the practice of ‘insistent remembrance’ (98). The phrase captures Cheng’s revision of Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, and needs further explanation if we are to make it work for Rodriguez’s writing. Whereas in Freud’s essay mourning is seen as a healthy working-through of loss that ends in the replacement of the lost object by another, available one, melancholia is defined as grief about a loss (or losses) turned against the self and become neurotic. Cheng, however, establishes a continuum between mourning and melancholia, which abolishes the healthy/neurotic distinction and makes room for ‘insistent remembrance’ as a way of keeping the lost object alive without necessarily damaging the ego. ‘What if melancholia is a necessary, perhaps even continuous, stage of mourning?’ Cheng asks, what if ‘there is progress only through raw, insistent remembrance?’ (98). It is a question pertinent to Rodriguez’s work, as we’ll find later in this chapter, because that work ‘insistently remembers’ Spanish, family and the transformative impact of

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education; it looks back at least as much as it projects forward or looks around at contemporary America. Class in Hunger of Memory then is all-important, but it is so not just as a theme, and a cause of loss and grief, in the personal story of the protagonist’s progress, but also and precisely – remember we are in the early 1980s when this volume is published – as a repressed concept in American political discourse, where race always takes centre stage.11 Yet again we have, as in the quotation from Days of Obligation with which I began this chapter, a double movement in Hunger of Memory, variously identified by Nidesh Lawtoo as ‘a conscious political program’ versus an ‘underlying (i.e. unconscious) radical drive . . . the return of the repressed private sphere’ and by Gustavo Perez-Firmat, pace Paul John Eakin, as the ‘active’ essayist versus the ‘passive’ autobiographer’s voices (227).12 I would characterize this double movement as consisting of an overt argument, ostensibly conservative and uncritically assimilationist, against bilingual education, multiculturalism and affirmative action, that is both supported and undercut by the much more oblique narrative of the scholarship boy who wants to become a public man. That covert story of loneliness and isolation – as well as success – is intimately bound up with monolingual education, with the American monoculturalism of the immediate post-World War II period and with class and racial discrimination. Rodriguez accurately diagnoses the American dream of the Cold War as promising social mobility on certain conditions: migrant writers must master English if they want their voices to be heard or their work to be read, and second, but not least, they can garner such influence and achieve such success only as individuals. ‘America is irresistible. Nothing to do with choosing. Our parents came to America for the choices America offers. What the child of immigrant parents knows is that here is inevitability,’ Rodriguez writes in Days of Obligation, typically juxtaposing choosing (the first generation) with having no choice (the second), as if to exemplify the double movement once more (158). Sweeping statements like these, part of an argument against multiculturalism, are undercut by the autobiographical narrative of the scholarship boy. Rodriguez’s familiar view that education should not be about affirming, but about expanding someone’s world, turns against itself as a top-notch English-only education at Stanford and Columbia makes of the young protagonist a lonely and disaffected graduate student, lacking in confidence

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and self-avowedly incapable of original thought, but desperately in need of articulation of his predicament. Rodriguez finds this in, of all places, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, which he discovers and devours in the British Museum reading room.13 Hoggart’s account of the dilemma of the English ‘scholarship boy’, which seems so provincial and specific to British class society in the mid-twentieth century, becomes emblematic for Rodriguez and shapes his own Bildungs-narrative in Hunger of Memory. For, ‘The scholarship boy of working class origins,’ writes Hoggart, ‘cannot go back; with one part of himself he does not want to go back to a homeliness which was often narrow: with another part he longs for the membership he has lost, “he pines for some Nameless Eden where he never was” ’ (301). This last phrase directly parallels Rodriguez’s critique of Chicanismo and of Aztlan. And so, in as roundabout a way as it gets, Hoggart’s analysis of class alienation and loss through education comes to inform Rodriguez’s ethnic, linguistic and sexual abjection in the prologue to Days of Obligation as well.

Public, private and personal: languages, voices and the essay form I began with the opening of Days of Obligation because this scene of abjection is pivotal in Rodriguez’s oeuvre in its representation of Spanish and homosexuality as both double defilement of, and double attachment to father, mother, Mexico and the dark masculine body feminized by its love of literature.14 That body cannot but give voice to itself in staging the act of purging what is unclean; at the same time, that taboo-d feminized self cannot but give voice to itself in the Puritan idiom of American English. Abjection, we need to remember, is related to the ‘rejet’ of the child’s libidinal separation from the mother. As Anne-Marie Smith explains it, abjection is a ‘boundary state’, between ‘pre-verbal infancy we associate with the imaginary, and access to language’ (32–3). In the vulgar use of Kristeva’s theory, abjection is characterized by revulsion and disgust – the vomiting of Spanish – but we must add that this happens as a result of ‘confusion of contact/separation, inside/outside’ and as a ‘visceral reaction’, which is a ‘representation of what is happening in the psyche’ (Smith, 33). The theory of abjection then is useful for reading Rodriguez in Mexico firstly because it articulates a physical

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translation of psychic events in the dramatized erasure of bodily integrity and containment that happens in vomiting, defecation, or indeed orgasm. Second, it revolves around confusion, blurring and unclear boundaries between language and non-language, presence and absence of mother, and dependency and control. In that complex of anxieties, confusions and physical expression where symbolic language fails, Rodriguez’s determined textual practice of English, his self-representation as a public man in the distanced-but-personal form of the autobiographical essay, comes into focus. In my reading of the ‘vomiting Spanish’ scene, male homosexuality, the mother tongue and Catholicism are condensed in a single drama of abjection, articulated in a precise English in order to master, with irony and publicly, the private and intimate grief that cannot be lived with except through ‘insistent remembrance’ and ritualized, repetitive return in representation. This interplay between the private and the public is crucial in understanding Rodriguez’s work, in which confession (another kind of expurgation after all) does not come easy, even if St Augustine frequently figures in it by way of literary, but also self-conscious reference. Again, Rodriguez’s use of Spanish is illuminating in this regard. He has explained in a conversation with David Cooper how important it is to distinguish between the private and the personal, as exemplified in Spanish and English modes of address. The private stands for the kind of intimacy that can and must never be communicated, whereas the personal signifies a use of the self and of individual experience that lends itself to representation, and indeed to unexpected identifications by others.15 In Spanish, he continues, the pronoun ‘tú’ (as distinct from the more formal mode of address, ‘usted’) evokes the realm of privacy, the intimacy of family, whereas the inclusive English ‘you’ became for him a way of speaking to strangers about the personal, released from the familial ties that bind because the family assumes that they own your voice, that they know what your real voice is. . . . [W]hat education had given me was a way to escape. But I would have said too that I didn’t belong only to her [his mother], that I belonged also to you, my dear reader, and that in some way I needed to leave the house. (Cooper, 108)16

English ‘you’ then becomes a way of speaking to strangers, a way of leaving the house. Strangers become familiars – ‘my dear reader’ – through the act of

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writing in English, but that kind of familiarity is at the same time circumscribed and controlled, because voiced in this public language that holds no danger of confusion or blurring because it is, precisely, disembodied and written. Rodriguez grew up in Spanish until he was 7 years old and went to school, so Spanish was the language of his early childhood (‘I was an extremely happy child at home’) and of intimacy: My parents would say something to me and I would feel myself specially recognized. . . . I would feel embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking with ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family. (Hunger, 16; italics original)

Interestingly, Rodriguez still speaks of ‘los gringos’ in interviews to this day, as if to delineate the circle of the Mexican American ‘we’ by referring to outsiders as outsiders in Spanish – even, or perhaps especially, when he is talking to one.17 Moreover, there is real pleasure in the sensuality of Spanish: Tongues explored the edges of words, especially the fat vowels. And we happily sounded that military drum roll, the twirling roar of the Spanish r. . . . Voices singing and sighing, rising, straining, then surging, teeming with pleasure that burst syllables into fragments of laughter. (Hunger, 16–18)

Gustavo Perez-Firmat notes this pleasure too, but takes it to illustrate that Rodriguez ‘strips Spanish of everything but its voice print’, and adds polemically that ‘in English, Rodriguez is an articulate artist; in Spanish, a hiccupping baby’ (Tongue Ties, 152). This, as we have already seen, is hyperbole, because Rodriguez’s Spanish is nothing so simple as mere sound; nevertheless, that it is this language which is vomited up at the first sight of Mexico, years later, must be significant. Why does a language of tongues, of fat, of surge and burst – an embodied language that comes with ease – have to be so violently expurgated? Of all Rodriguez’s unpalatable opinions, his insistence on a division between English as the public language and Spanish as the private language has drawn the most criticism.18 Tomás Rivera, in a famous review of Hunger of Memory, took Rodriguez to task for – as he saw it – his denigration of Spanish, but he also perceptively referred to the difference between ‘ser’ and ‘estar’ in Spanish (as denoting a private/familial and a public/learned way of being, respectively).

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Rivera thus unwittingly identified a Hispanicism in the deep structure of Rodriguez’s thought, as some kind of linguistic unconscious enabling us to read the irony of (what linguists would call) Spanish as the ‘matrix’ language underpinning, but also undercutting, the surface argument about English (Rivera, 8). For, as seen earlier, the polemical Rodriguez is but one voice in the text; there are others that ‘threaten to disrupt the boundaries between inside and outside, “private” and “public,” which the author consciously construes’, as Nidesh Lawtoo writes (227). For him, these other voices constitute a ‘textual unconscious’ (to which the other Hispanicisms noted earlier also belong) that it is the critic’s job to uncover and articulate. In my view, the countervailing forces to Rodriguez’s polemical and monolingual English voice are the ‘confessional’ autobiographical returns (more about them later) which are every bit as conscious and constructed as the overt argument is, and just as stylized. A literary analysis of Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation and Brown furthermore shows a widely noted change in tone and argument from the first to the second volume, and then again from the second to the third, which revolves around brown as a trope of hybridity and mestizaje (apparently in direct contradiction to the binary divisions of Hunger of Memory). This change is revealed to be less dramatic and more continuous once we take the always-already contradictory currents in both Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation into account, as well as the essay form itself. That form, after all, although a mode of life-writing like the memoirs, autobiographies and letters we have examined in previous chapters, has its own conventions; the essay derives its wanderful meaning from the French ‘essai’, and ‘essayer’ ‘to try’, or ‘to attempt’. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher-Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman add to this that ‘[t]he very indefinability of the essay opens up interesting spaces for a variety of discussions and approximations, for a certain intriguing freedom’ (16). Rodriguez really exploits this liberty to wander. As Michael Garcia has observed, his ‘essays – pensive and poignant – scintillate with the prismatic refraction of complex thought, tacking one direction and then another in a style that resists a literal reading’ – this should be a warning to us. Laura Fine, likewise, has drawn attention to the form and to Rodriguez’s ‘simultaneous and paradoxical drama of self-assertion – through the claiming of multiple identities – and self-concealment’; she notes, for example, the subtly circular structure of ‘My Parents’ Village’, and the irony

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of ‘In Athens Once’, in which the days of Holy Week structure a decidedly worldly visit to Tijuana (120; 131; 132). ‘Late Victorians’ plays with its title in many resonances and connotations, from San Francisco architecture to the mourned-for dead of the AIDS crisis, while an essay like ‘The Missions’ has the structure of a journey, literal and metaphorical, into the history of California, ranging from its most garishly commercial manifestation (the mission as theme park) to the most warily and dustily guarded repository of sources (the archive). Rodriguez exploits the ‘intrigue’ the essay form affords him no less than its freedom: close analysis reveals a rhythm of ellipses, repetitions and compulsive returns, as well as silences, that is motivated by the dynamic of private/public, English and Spanish, body and book. This dynamic is, as Lawtoo usefully observes, unequal: English, writing and bookishness usually win out, but this does not mean that Spanish, intimacy and the body are therefore denied, betrayed or repressed. Instead, as noted earlier, Rodriguez’s representation of loss and of intimacy is figured in a compulsive return to and ‘insistent remembrance’ of childhood, of parents, of those among his acquaintance who have died of AIDS, and in Days of Obligation also of Mexico; in Brown, desire and miscegenation are celebrated as the foundation of a new American identity, no less. Whereas on page one of Days of Obligation 10 years earlier, Rodriguez had pithily summed up American race relations by observing that ‘My face could not portray the ambition I brought to it,’ and whereas Hunger of Memory had analysed those relations in terms of class, Brown was conceived as ‘an erotic history of the Americas’ (Days, 1). Here the dialectic of past and present, the United States and Mexico, success and remembrance finally achieves a synthesis that begins to theorize mixture and celebrate mixture’s offspring: brown people, brown thought, brown sexuality and brown literature.19 Even the rigid binaries of English/America and Spanish/Mexico appear to be shaken up in the ethnic mix of San Francisco, Rodriguez’s home town: ‘I marvel at the middle-class American willingness to take Spanish up. . . . And it occurs to me that the Chinese-American couple in front of me, by speaking Spanish, may actually be speaking American English’ (Brown, 115). Rodriguez recognizes here that the linguascape has changed since the days of Hunger of Memory, that Spanish and English can coexist in the American public sphere and that this is not to be lamented. Times have changed, as Román De la Campa writes:  ‘Today’s

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Latino . . . must speak more Spanish than ten or fifteen years ago. Newly arriving Latin Americans, on the other hand, find a U.S. Latino culture that precedes them, largely articulated in English’ (381). This paradoxical linguistic environment, De la Campa emphasizes, is still in flux and has left its mark on literature too: Latin and Anglo-American literatures . . . can no longer ignore the wealth of an in-between culture for which English may have become a linguistic home, but whose cultural references and tonalities require interpreters skilled in Spanish language and Latin American cultures. (381)

What is more, literary representations of this ‘in-between culture’, as we will see in Chapter 8 and the Conclusion, are most effective when they are also bi- or multilingual, as in the work of Junot Díaz, for example, or Gloria Anzaldúa long before him. Such a mixed-language practice is a step too far for Rodriguez, however, even in Brown. To accept the coexistence of languages is not the same as to celebrate the mixture or miscegenation of them. Although Rodriguez critiques the common practice in libraries of shelving ‘ethnic’ and ‘mainstream’ literature in different places, ‘lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse’, languages in contact are a very different thing (Brown, 11). His realization in Brown that ‘Our borders do not hold. National borders do not hold. Ethnic borders. Religious borders. Aesthetic borders, certainly. Sexual borders. Allergenic borders’, does not include linguistic borders; languages, unlike books, are still not allowed to ‘consort’ with each other, or to ‘confuse’ (213). Yet Brown, insofar as it really is a celebration of mestizaje, of the erotic logic of miscegenation underlying American race relations, is a radical book. It might just as well have been entitled Queer, since in Rodriguez’s querying of the black/white racial binary and of borders, sexual and otherwise, he is queering American identity in a fundamental way.20 Brown questions race and it questions sexuality; most interestingly and path-breakingly, it addresses the connection between racial, gender and sexual hierarchies by highlighting the continual violation of them throughout American history. As Rodriguez explains in an interview: The feminine history of the Americas is full of stories of women, African, Indian, white, becoming bilingual, bicultural, falling in love outside

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their  tribe. No coincidence either was it . . . that Richard Rodriguez as a boy – a queer little boy – was enchanted by the legend of Pocahontas. I was enchanted by the subversion of eroticism. (Arias, 278)

If the dirty secret of race in America is miscegenation, then Rodriguez chooses to regard it in this book as the coffee-and-cream-coloured love-child of desire, rather than the bastard offspring of rape and pillage that is the more common  – and more politically correct – view of miscegenation. This is certainly a queer argument; we have here another example of Rodriguez being deliberately provocative in attributing miscegenation to desire (women’s desire, at that) while apparently leaving relations of power and patriarchy out of the picture. On closer inspection he doesn’t, however; in arguing that America has been brown since its beginning he is acknowledging a truth universally unacknowledged: that to men in possession and in want of wives or mistresses, race was never a barrier. Desire – as well as, not instead of, violence – between and among the sexes brought brownness and queerness into the New World from the day Europeans set foot in it.21 Brown, however, may be safer than Queer; at the insistence of his publishers and publicists, the book’s original subtitle, ‘an erotic history of the Americas’, was changed to The Last Discovery of America. It is rather a telling change, and it may be more fitting after all, because Brown is an un-erotic book. Just as in the ‘vomiting Spanish’ episode the narrator quickly distances himself from his own physicality, his own Spanish and his own role in ‘presenting’ Mexico, so also in Brown does the Rodriguez persona shy away from the title’s most obvious and abject connotation: homosexuality. Sodomy is mentioned, but in the most prurient of prudish terms, as ‘among the brownest of thoughts. Even practitioners find it a disagreeable subject’ (207). Although the collection is dedicated to Rodriguez’s lover Jimmy (mentioned here for the first time) and despite his insistence on the richness of mixture and impurity in Brown, the two kinds of mixture and impurity conspicuously elided in this work are bilingual and queer.22 As Jeehyun Lim remarks, ‘[t]he Rodriguez who declares that “To be really brown is to be impure” almost seems to be a different Rodriguez than the one who tautly declares . . .“you can’t be promiscuous with language” ’ (535).23 Yet Rodriguez’s queerness and his bilingualism are intimately bound up with each other. Randy Rodriguez already argued in his ‘queering’ essay

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of 1998 that for Richard Rodriguez, ‘mastery of English and education in American/queer – culture was not as readily available in his Mexican American community and Spanish language experience [sic]’ (‘Reconsidering’, 411). I take, if anything, the opposite view: that Rodriguez’s queerness comes out not in English, but in elision, secrets and silences – as well as in sporadic and overdetermined Spanish. We will get to the textual evidence towards the end of this chapter; extra-textual insight comes from an interview with Hector Torres, in which Rodriguez talks almost within the same breath of the ‘sexual secret’ he experienced as a child with homoerotic desires, of his embarrassment at being dark-skinned in a white world and of his inability to speak Spanish (which he understands and reads perfectly): ‘To this day I am eared, but not mouthed. . . . I don’t speak [in Spanish]’. Even more tellingly, he adds here Lim’s ‘you [can] not be promiscuous with language’ and then, startlingly: ‘It’s like being bisexual; you just can’t do it’ (H. Torres, 180). The equation of bilingualism with promiscuity is as striking as it is confused, of course. In combination with his objection to bisexuality and the word ‘gay’, language in this binary logic is to sexuality as monolingualism in English is to monogamy and homosexuality: one tongue, one same-sex love-object, and both far removed from mother, so there can be no confusion, no memory of and no consorting with her abject body. Perhaps it is not surprising then that in Rodriguez’s textual practice we find little Spanish and an almost – but not quite – complete absence of eroticism. And of course it is because of this conspicuous near-absence that the question how Spanish and sexuality figure in Rodriguez’s texts presents itself. As well as his stated convictions about linguistic and sexual promiscuity – the mixing of languages, and the mixing of objects of desire – what do Rodriguez’s texts disclose, despite themselves perhaps, about the interplay of tongues as language and desire? Why abjection, instead of jouissance?

Feo, fuerte, y formal: the language of masculinity and desire A childhood scene in Hunger of Memory when the boy Richard, still Ricardo then, is playing with a gringo friend when his grandmother calls out to him in Spanish gives an indication of how intimacy functions not in, but as Spanish:

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My companion . . . wanted to know what she had said. I started to tell him, to say – to translate her Spanish words into English . . . though I knew how to translate exactly what she had told me I realized that any translation would distort the deepest meaning of her message: It had been directed only to me. This message of intimacy could never be translated because it was not in the words she had used but passed through them. Finally, I decided not to tell my friend anything. I told him that I didn’t hear all she had said. (Hunger, 31)

The irony of this scene is that, although the incident is narrated, its content – what Grandma has said – is not disclosed to the male companion (compañero) – and not to the (gringo?) reader, either.24 In her essay on resistant texts Doris Sommer singles out this scene as an example of how Rodriguez ‘stops Anglos in their reading tracks’ and ‘marks [readers] as strangers, incapable of – or undesirable for – conspiratorial intimacy’ (‘Resistant Texts’, 525; 527). Here the difference between the public ‘you’, of ‘my dear reader’, and the ‘tú’ of familial address that remains a private code becomes abundantly clear. In Days of Obligation Rodriguez comments repeatedly on the distinction in Spanish also between ‘tú’ and ‘usted’, contrasted with the English ‘you’ which addresses everybody the same way. ‘“You” was everything outside the home, but “Tú” is the condition, not so much of knowing, as of being known, of being recognized. Tú belongs within the family’ (54). Moreover, ‘Tú’ is not just intimate but also erotic, like Mexico: Mexico was mysteriously both he and she, like this, like my parents’ bed. And over my parents’ bed floated the Virgin of Guadalupe in a dimestore frame. In its most potent guise, Mexico was a mother like this queen. Her lips curved like a little boat. Tú. Tú. The suspirate vowel. Tú. The ruby pendant. The lemon tree. The song of the dove. Breathed through the nose, perched on the lips. (53)

The lyrical prose, the ‘Tú’ shaped and sounded like a kiss: Rodriguez’s use of Spanish wanderwords has its origin here, in the memory of ‘Tú’ as intimate address. It is the call of grandmother, of parents and finally of Mexico itself once he returns there as a stranger to make a BBC documentary for other gringos: foreigners, Europeans. It is not always obvious in Rodriguez’s use of Spanish that it is his native language. At times, his wanderwords (gringo, cerveza, mañana) look like they could be anyone’s: loanwords from a stereotypical español are used to parody

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a certain kind of gringo lingo, never to be returned to their rightful, original Spanish. Here by contrast, in the explication of the pronoun ‘Tú’ as a hymn to intimate desire, it is quite clear that Spanish is not only known, and therefore available for parody, but that it is also lived and felt. ‘Nosotros’ gets a more detached, but no less interesting, treatment than ‘tú’ in Brown, where it is related to the anti-assimilationist collectivity of Chicanos, though also – again – to desire: ‘Hispanics nevertheless trust most the ancient Spanish pronoun, the first-person plural pronoun, the love-potion pronoun – nosotros. Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight’ (Brown, 163–4). Again, the comment is ironic: the ‘love-potion pronoun’ ‘nosotros’ joins, morphologically, the ‘we’ of ‘nos’ with the ‘others’ of ‘los otros’; the desire of ‘nosotros’ is for the other, the gringo – though ‘by moonlight’ only. Contrast this with the imperious will of the American ‘I’ of ‘I have my rights’ or, more comically, ‘Very interesting, but now I have to go to the bathroom’ (Brown, 199). That ‘I’ is also ‘the lodestar for Protestant and capitalist and Hispanic memoirist[s]’; autobiographical writing cannot do without it (111). Spanish, of course, does not have such an ‘I’ except in situations where emphasis and self-assertion are required, and even then ‘soy Hispanic is a brown assertion’, not in need of a separate ‘Yo’ (‘I’) (Brown, 110). Self-assertion, first-person singular and individualism, Rodriguez implies, come naturally to Americans, and they come with the language as well as with the territory. Brown is the book of America Mexicanized, but it still does not have much Spanish in it. Paradoxically, in Brown’s America Rodriguez can announce ‘soy Hispanic’ (an appellation he had rejected hitherto) without abjection, distancing or irony because ‘to call oneself Hispanic is to admit a relationship to Latin America in English’ (Brown, 110; emphasis added). In other words, since the border does not hold anyway, you don’t have to speak Spanish to ‘admit a relationship’ (you can do so in English, in the dedication to your third volume of essays, for example). Hunger of Memory, likewise, has little Spanish, it being the book of separation and of public achievement, of the flight from Spanish. The times when Spanish does seep through, not as the absent presence of family secrets as in the grandmother episode above, but as an alien appearance in an otherwise all-English textual landscape, are therefore all the more significant. ‘Feo, fuerte, y formal’ – ‘ “The three F’s,” my mother called them’ – describe the ideal Mexican masculinity that Rodriguez attributes to his father and

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spends a lifetime trying to live up to. ‘Feo’, usually translated as ‘ugly’, the narrator takes to mean ‘ruggedly handsome’; fuerte ‘strong’, ‘dependable’; ‘formal’: ‘A man of responsibility, a good provider’ (Hunger, 128–29).25 Here, as elsewhere, the narrator connects the role of the provider with that of the macho, whom he interestingly does not reduce to the stereotype of brutalizing manhood that ‘macho’ has become in English. He represents it, rather, as the masculine ideal of seriousness, valour and even chivalry (Days, 56).26 And of silence too: although the true man speaks at times (he may be a storyteller, for example), he is not loquacious: there is no gossip and no idle talk, as with women. And so the Rodriguez of Hunger of Memory is forever anxious that his talking (though outside the home, in English) and later his writing (in published form, in English) feminize him: ‘I even suspected that my nostalgia for sounds – the noisy, intimate Spanish sounds of my past – was nothing more than effeminate yearning’ (129). This anxiety about effeminacy is fed by homophobia, of course, and it becomes a trope in Rodriguez’s writing.27 It is foregrounded, for example, in the one other Spanish-inflected chapter in Hunger of Memory, ‘Complexion’, where women talk of gringo skin that is too pale (‘como los muertos’, like the dead) or Mexican skin too dark for comfort or beauty (‘mi feito, my little ugly one’) (116). In contrast to the women’s fear of sun exposure, Rodriguez relates his secret admiration for the braceros who do not care about the darkening of their skin: I envied them their physical lives, their freedom to violate the taboo of the sun. Closer to home I would notice the shirtless construction workers, the roofers, the sweating men tarring the street in front of the house. . . . I was unwilling to admit the attraction of their lives. I tried to deny it by looking away. But what was denied became strongly desired. (Hunger, 116–19; 126)

This is as close as Rodriguez ever gets in Hunger of Memory to an expression of homoeroticism, and it is easy to miss in the context of the race discussion in which it is set. For, despite his professed fear of effeminacy, frequently reiterated in interviews as well, the persona of Richard Rodriguez that emerges in the essays is manly, serious and reserved – or, as Gustavo Perez-Firmat puts it, ‘nothing if not formal’ (145). Rather than attribute this to overcompensation, I think that this masculine effect of ellipsis in the essay form, transmuted into an impression of reserve and reticence, is the result of deliberate stylization, arising from cultural and linguistic difference. As Rodriguez explains in an

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interview with David Cooper, ‘In the culture I grew up in I always thought of myself as feminine in that way,’ ‘that way’ referring to his being talkative – albeit in English. In Anglo-American culture, by contrast, ‘the liturgical notion of confession has been replaced by a notion of self-revelation: the act of my saying it automatically becomes its own forgiveness. . . . And I don’t know if I believe that’ (111–12). The tension – between taking the liberty of English on the one hand and being embarrassed at the self-revelation (abrirse) it permits on the other – creates silences and the occasional wandering into Spanish, the language of secrets, especially where sexuality and desire are involved.28 Hence bracero, macho, feo, fuerte, y formal: Spanish erupts and enacts (‘not in the words, but passed through them’) homoerotic desire, precisely there where English cannot reach and congeals into a bland, blank statement – como los muertos.

Wanderwords: of memory and desire Days of Obligation: an Argument with My Mexican Father is, of all three volumes, the book of Spanish and of Mexico where the wanderwords insert themselves most frequently, especially in ‘Mexico’s Children’ and ‘In Athens Once’. Rather than simply providing local colour, as we might expect, the Spanish wanderwords in these two essays are almost without exception bound up with familial relations and sexual desire, the beyond-the-border of the Rodriguezian imaginary. ‘Vete, pero no me olvides’ is a piece of graffiti near the border in Tijuana that haunts ‘Mexico’s Children’; the ‘mad mother’, who is Mexico, gives her children permission to leave, but not to forget her. The essay begins with a time when Mexican farm workers in California could ‘commute between the past and the future’, would send back money ‘to the past’ every weekend, and would try to earn enough to be able to return to Mexico eventually and for good (Days, 48). But this is not how it works out: ‘Mexico’s Children’ ends at a time and in a village where most people have left for the United States to live there permanently, only to return for the occasional festival. When the party is over, ‘the tabernacle of memory is dismantled, distributed among the villagers in their vans, and carried out of Mexico’ (48; 79).

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At the heart of the essay sits this ‘tabernacle of memory’, this holy shrine that encloses the body of Christ and the pull of Mexico, the guilt of having left. Yet Rodriguez’s confrontation with the many ways by which Mexico calls him back results in guilt’s demise: fear of Mexico, of Spanish and of the past is confronted and overcome. The Spanish wanderwords appearing in this essay explain why: machismo is revered in Mexico, as is mamacita: ‘sexuality is expressed as parenthood. The male, by definition, is father. The husband is always a son’ (56). To mother Mexico, Rodriguez as a gay man will always be a child, just like the braceros, the men without women, who ‘lived in barrios, apart from gringos; many retained Spanish, as if in homage to her. We were still her children. As long as we didn’t marry’ (59). The only way for a man who loves men to be an adult, then, is to dismantle the ideology of the family enshrined in Mexico and to return to America, and to English. In ‘Mexico’s Children’, Spanish wanderwords denote rigid roles – of gender and labour, of race and of place – from which America provides a refuge.29 This theme is continued and developed in the essay that follows it, ‘In Athens Once’. Overtly about Tijuana’s mirroring of San Diego, of La Jolla and ultimately of the United States itself in its brash materialism, ‘In Athens Once’ is festooned with Spanish words that are, unusually for Rodriguez, left untranslated. When read closely and in relation to their English surroundings, the sexual connotations of these words are apparent and yet remain covert, and it is not homo- but heterosexuality that is veiled in Spanish here. Penetration is writ large from the start: Tijuana’s entry into Mexico is via a turnstile, ‘as at a state fair’, so the border dividing the two countries also unites them: a población flotante (floating population) passes back and forth that is ‘uncountable’, ‘fluid shadows’ evoking the image of sperm (Days, 80; 81). Taxi drivers offer the male passenger ‘cualquier cosa’ (anything, as in ‘anything for the weekend, sir?’): the availability of sex for hire is quite clear and quite expected in the narrative context of a visit to Tijuana, but never spelt out in English. La frontera is referred to as ‘el otro lado’ (a phrase known to Americans because would-be emigrants refer to the United States in these words) but also as ‘el otro cachete’ (the other cheek), here facetiously translated as ‘the other buttock’ – although the irony of Rodriguez visiting a borderland between-the-buttocks is discreetly left for the reader to infer (Days, 85). Public spaces and private places of enclosure and bodily flow unite also in Rodriguez’s description of Tijuana’s mall, which functions as a zócalo, the Mexican enclosed town square, where amorous

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teenagers make their paseo. There are ‘caldrons of congealed brown mole’ in a supermarket as big as the Ritz, where the narrator buys, as his only souvenir from Mexico, white ‘Liquid Paper correction fluid’ in bulk ‘because I can’t believe the price’ (104–5). Fluid shadows, prostitution, heterosexual courtship, buttocks, borders, enclosures – in this essay, these are all figured in Spanish, in words that – in Rodriguez’s stated conviction – belong in Mexico, but stray into this English text as souvenirs from the other side. Or perhaps as survivors of the white liquid of correction; after all we, dear readers, do not know what other ‘fluid shadows’ have been whited-out and erased, back home in California. But the sexual connotations do not stop there. Innocent, neutral expressions such as ‘no importa’ (never mind) and ‘muy rápido’ (faster) appear and appear only next to ‘whores’ and to ‘downtown’ (88; 103). ‘A sus órdenes’ gains a sexual inflection when a secretary is put at Rodriguez’s ‘service’, and the American priest who runs the soup kitchen where Rodriguez helps out is the object of erotic adoration by the women who call him ‘padrecito’ (96–7). Spanish here clearly covers a limited but distinct semantic domain, a domain where English, the symbolic language, does not want to go, but that it nevertheless delimits and protects: that of familial intimacy, gender roles and relations, sexuality and spaces where private (in the sense Rodriguez defined it earlier, ‘that which must never be communicated’) and public mingle and consort with each other; the realm of abjection, in other words. ‘In Athens Once’ again: The United States shares with Mexico a two thousand-mile connection – the skin of two heads. Everything that America wants to believe about himself – that he is innocent, that he is colorless, odorless, solitary, self-sufficient – is corrected, weighed upon, glossed by Mexico, the maternity of Mexico, the envy of Mexico, the grievance of Mexico. Mexicans crossing the border are secret agents of matriarchy. Mexicans have slipped America a darker beer, a cuisine of tú. Mexicans have invaded American privacy to babysit or to watch the dying or to wipe lipstick off the cocktail glasses. Mexicans have forced Southwestern Americans to speak Spanish whenever they want their eggs fried or their roses pruned. (72)

And so Tijuana, Rodriguez concludes, is ‘here’, in the United States. La frontera that splits adjoining buttocks in Spanish slang also joins ‘the skin of two heads’ in American English; moreover, American privacy is ‘invaded’, male and female

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spheres mingle, the intimacy of tú is eaten with relish, not spewed out – and Spanish is spoken, even by gringos, even in America. Perhaps then, promiscuity in language and desire is possible, and perhaps there is jouissance in abjection? Not so: for Rodriguez, it would seem, these things can only be represented in Spanish or not at all, in silence, because desire – like grandmother’s message that had to be shielded from the gringo – is ‘Not in the words, but passed through them’. The title of the Tijuana essay derives from a vignette, a memory of Rodriguez being in an outdoor café in Athens, watching a hearse go by while the rushhour traffic carries on regardless. ‘[A]n intersecting narrative line,’ he calls the appearance of the hearse, ‘which, nevertheless, did not make mourners of us, of the café’ (106). Condensed in this scene, and in the title of the essay, are images of city life, of the Mexican zócalo and the Athenian agora, gathering places for both commercial and democratic, perhaps also erotic exchange. The scene with the hearse comes at the end of a meditation on the difference between city and village, where the city stands for separateness and individuality, the village for a melancholy collectivism. But in its self-conscious observation of the hearse as ‘an intersecting narrative line’, the essay does more than make the mundane observation that the city enables a comfortable anonymity and distance from the collective – and potentially invasive, even abject – rite of mourning. It also reflects on how the essay form, which allows for disjointedness and elision, the juxtaposition of like with unlike, enables such distance and comfort: the comfort, or consolation, of literary form. For Rodriguez, the essay is a ‘browner’ form than fiction because he can’t deal with its enclosure. I read a novel and already by page twentyeight of the Arrival of the Stranger, I can just feel the manipulation of the environment by the genre. Whereas what I want is for the world to break through. I want there to be absolute unpredictability. I think the essay is a much better possibility for that. (Cooper, 129–30)

What I have argued above, about the role of Spanish wanderwords in Rodriguez’s English prose, chimes with this view of the essay form as freer and ‘browner’ – meaning more heterogeneous, more mixed – than fiction, but it is also different from that view. As I see it, ‘enclosure’ (by which I mean the act of enclosing) in Rodriguez’s work both allows and prevents ‘the world’ from breaking through. English and literary tradition provide ways of containing,

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womb-like, the potentially riotous forces – of the zócalo, of Spanish, of the breaking-through of the ‘world’, of mourning and loss, of unpredictable desire and mixture and confusion – and of controlling them. Spanish, like the homosexual body, erupts where English and the Puritan mind cannot reach. At the same time, Spanish and erotic desire are harnessed and kept in check by the body of the text (the essay form that argues and states, but also narrates and evades) and by the mind of canonical literary tradition.

The question of Spanish, and Richard Rodriguez The Spanish question is a vexed one in the United States, as we saw in Chapter 1. The Official English campaign and current mass immigration from Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America make for a demographic shift and a cultural challenge to American identity that is in important part fought out in linguistic terms, whereas a century ago religion, miscegenation and eugenic ‘unassimilability’ were the battlegrounds. Rodriguez comments on this English language activism in Brown and shows a slight shift of position in so doing: Nativists who want to declare English the official language of the United States do not understand the omnivorous appetite of the language they wish to protect. Neither do they understand that their protection would harm our tongue. . . . Those Americans who would build a fence around American English to forestall the Trojan burrito would turn American into a frightened tongue, a shrinking little oyster tongue, as French has lately become, priested over by the Ancients of the Académie, who fret so about le weekend. (112)

This is an interesting passage for all kinds of reasons; note, to begin with, the ‘Trojan’ and le weekend and the oyster and the tongue. Rodriguez here recognizes English’s imperial ambitions (its glottophagie, its ‘omnivorous’ capacity to swallow up other languages) as well as its corruption in the hands of outsiders (‘A restaurant in my neighbourhood advertises “Harm on Rye” ’) should they be forced to use it against their will, and finally the futile purism that has failed to keep French safe from English invasion so far. But Rodriguez’s work, although it has been and cannot but be read against the rise of Spanish in American literature as well as life, is richer, more

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complex and aesthetically rewarding than a unifocal reading in terms of his language-polemic allows for. His essays are characterized by openness-yetreticence, confession and elision, reflection and self-reflection, argument and interrogation. Most saliently, they are marked by contradiction. In an interview, the question ‘So where does Richard Rodriguez fit?’ elicits precisely this unequivocal answer: ‘within contradiction’ (H. Torres, 190). Interestingly, according to Genaro Padilla’s history of Mexican American autobiography, My History, Not Yours, this is typical of the tradition: ‘Chicano literary production has had as one of its generative principles the reconciling of vexing contradictions,’ because Chicano autobiographers, in the nineteenth century as now, have to deal with cultural difference and with a history of violence and repression (10). Gustavo Perez-Firmat echoes this when he writes about Hunger of Memory as a ‘profoundly “Mexican” performance, another mascara mexicana . . . according to [Octavio] Paz’s notions of mexicanidad’ (Tongue Ties, 150). Rodriguez’s contradictions, however, are less historical and situational than rhetorical and emotional. As most critics now agree, the arguments he has put forward over the course of 30 years against bilingual education, multiculturalism and affirmative action (and which he continues to defend) do not add up when read against the autobiographical narrative, oblique and fragmented as it is, of the essays. The stridently polemical public voice and the frequently confessed anxiety about effeminacy do not square with the formal persona of the writer, who no se abre (does not open himself up) but veils his thought in a baroque style suffused with literary allusion – and is all but silent on his own homoerotic desire, if not on his homosexuality.30 Furthermore, Rodriguez’s rhetorical insistence on English, on the private/public divide and on being American is frequently contradicted by the ‘insistent remembrance’ of parents, of the dead – known and unknown – and of his childhood-in-Spanish. In ‘An American Writer’, he baldly states ‘I am of Mexico’: the one does not preclude the other, even if his face does not match ‘the ambition I brought to it’ in Mexico either (11).31 Still, to me, it makes more sense to conceive of these contradictions as ostensible only, and it is more productive and more accurate to see them as examples of paradox: both/and. Where contradiction heads for collision and confrontation, paradox – call it queerness – permits of simultaneity and

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creative tension, without requiring resolution or synthesis. We come back to psychoanalysis in this way of thinking: a movement of both/and in paradox is also inherent in the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal, or ‘Verleugnung’ in Freud’s German. ‘Verleugnung’ (much more of a common-and-garden word in German than ‘disavowal’ is in English) can be approximated in translation as self-deception that is both seeing and not-seeing, knowing and yet not acknowledging (‘Peter verleugnete Jesum’) or admitting into consciousness what is too painful to be accommodated there. ‘Verleugnung’ is not the same as, but also not far from, ‘Verdichtung’, usually translated as ‘condensation’ in the technical vocabulary of psychoanalysis, but with the connotation in German (from ‘Dichtung’, literature, and ‘Dichter’, poet or writer) of ‘poeticization’, of ‘making literary’.32 Freud’s German enables us to articulate how Rodriguez’s essays work: disavowal, which in Freudian terms is understood as a splitting of the ego, is represented through poeticization of unassimilable autobiographical material in the essay form, and in a splitting of languages. Where English takes on the poetic, literary function, Spanish stands for the raw material of that which remains unprocessed and unassimilated, and has to be contained – or abjected. The work of Richard Rodriguez thus both does and does not exemplify the American norm of migrant Anglo-assimilation in the twentieth century. It does, in that it represents a story of social mobility and the acquisition of a public voice. It does not, in that it shows Americanization, willed or not, to be inevitable and to carry (or bury) loss within it. As Anne Anlin Cheng explains once more in The Melancholy of Race: ‘we can say that assimilation functions as a protection against the trauma of incommensurability by restaging the drama of incommensurability’ (83). Rodriguez’s oeuvre, as a three- (by now four-) volume narrative and demonstration of assimilation, restages that drama over and over again, in its ritual return to the question of language, of masculinity, of religion, of public and private, and of sexuality. In this drama, America usually plays the part of optimism and individualism, Mexico of death, desire and the past – the past of intimacy as much as history. But Mexico and America are intersecting, not just opposing, narrative lines: tropes of mourning and melancholia, and cameos of friends and relations – which are really literary memorials to the dead – are scattered throughout this story of successful assimilation. A hearse insistently draws up in the midst of rushhour traffic, even if we do not stop for death, or care to contemplate it much.

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What then to conclude about Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish? The acquisition of a second language, according to psychoanalysts Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri, always causes ‘a minor internal revolution’ in the mind and in the psyche that henceforth is inhabited by more than one language (120). Nor is the resulting bilingualism a stable system that can be controlled at will. Instead, an internal dynamic develops where the dominance of one language over another can vary in time, depending on circumstances and conscious or unconscious motivations or desires (101). What Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri observe in the therapeutic context, I have outlined here in a literary one, namely that the second language can come to function as a ‘kind of “safety barrier” against the tumult of private emotions that [are] . . . immediately . . . evoked by the words of his mother tongue’ (2). To put it simply: English is the defence against the pull of tú, the maternal or grandmotherly kiss, the deathly embrace of Mexico. But to say this does not mean anything nearly so simple as that Rodriguez’s adoption of English is a revolt against the mother, or an escape from home. As Kristeva writes in ‘The Love of Another Language’, ‘there is matricide in the abandon of a native tongue’, but ‘this maternal memory, this warm and still speaking cadaver, a body within my body’ still ‘resonates with infrasonic vibrations and data’ (244–5). Moreover, in the Kristevan scheme, any symbolic language is a separation from, perhaps revolt against, the mother – and to that extent all language that makes any sense (that is public) turns us into ‘strangers to ourselves’.33 What matters here is that a second language exacerbates this phenomenon; the other, native language does not disappear but remains en souffrance, literally ‘in suffering’ but also (as in ‘rester en souffrance’) ‘in waiting’, ‘unpaid’, like a debt ‘yet to be discharged’ (Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri, 42). Nor is this mournful, suffering, suspended status of the native language necessarily a negative thing. A psychoanalytical perspective enables us to see, and to theorize, that the alternation of languages, however a-symmetrical, has a psychic function that can benefit the ego. Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri explain that by substituting the language of their childhood with a new language – the conveyor of new thought and affect routes – and by adopting a cultural and emotional context not mortgaged by the archaic conflicts, [analysands] not only rendered a service to resistances and defenses, but they also created

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new passages that provided them, albeit at the cost of deep and painful splittings, with valid and structured introjections on which to organise their adult . . . identity. (71)

In literature, in Rodriguez’s work (and we came across it too in Antin’s and Hoffman’s in Chapter 3) this substitution of languages affords the ‘creation of new passages’ in an aesthetic practice that provides us, his dear readers, with a reconceptualization of migrant literature and the migrant subject, as well as a new way of reading both. Rodriguez, I argued at the beginning of this chapter, exposed fault lines in critical assumptions made of migrant writing. Without resorting to the shield of fiction or to assertions about writers’ imaginative freedom, his work demonstrates that literature opens up spaces for identifications across ‘native’ languages and cultural contexts, in ways that are unexpected and unpredictable. Who can foresee that a Mexican American graduate student will recognize himself in the image of Richard Hoggart’s English scholarship boy, or that the Asian woman who taps Rodriguez on the shoulder in a grocery store will tell him ‘I just want you to know how important your books are to me’? (Cooper, 113). We might well say, why not? but we must also acknowledge that, in the scheme of cultural assumptions, these are unlikely connections and identifications – yet they happen every day and all the time. Without disowning background or class, the mixed (‘brown’) form of the essays and Rodriguez’s use of Spanish wanderwords – the intimate language of family and of restriction that has become (through burial) the tongue of the body and of desire – often enact one thing while arguing another, thus creating an aesthetic tension between the two. This can happen because, as AmatiMehler, Argentieri and Canestri write, ‘occasionally a new language represents a life-saving anchor which allows for “rebirth.” At other times it can be a justification for the mutilation of the internal world of the self ’ (108). Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation and Brown have been read here as doing both: Rich-heard Road-re-guess, in anglicizing his name and his letters, has made sure he is heard far and wide. Yet the loss of a Spanish accent which turned the í of Rodríguez into an American I is perhaps also a sign of mutilation – a mutilation that is only undone, however temporarily, by the insertion into the body politic, the body literary, of Spanish wanderwords.

6

Fusion Writing: Bharati Mukherjee’s Dangerous Languages

There is a reason why the language we inherit at birth is called our mother tongue. It is our mother, forgiving, embracing, naming the world and all its emotions. Though I have lived for the last forty years in cities where English or French is the language of the majority, it’s Bangla that exercises motherly restraint over my provisional, immigrant identity. Mother-Bangla is fixed; I haven’t learned a new word or had a new thought or feeling in Bangla for nearly half a century. I don’t need to . . . as a native speaker, I have automatic membership in the world’s most articulate, most imaginative and most intelligent club. . . . To my inner Bengali I remain constant, as it does for me. (Mukherjee, ‘The Way Back’, 11; emphasis original)

Could this confident opening to Bharati Mukherjee’s essay on what it means to be a bi- or multilingual writer in America be any more different from what we have seen in previous chapters? Language migration here does not seem to be a problem at all: far from being lost, or mourned, or repressed, or forgotten or in need of protection, Bangla, the mother tongue, seems to be a source of perpetual comfort and pride. In Mukherjee’s optic, Bangla preserves the ‘inner Bengali’ and anchors an unstable immigrant identity in the safe waters of a cosmopolitan Bengali diaspora. With this declaration of multilingual faith and this chapter we thus move onto new terrain: that of the migrant who is secure in her bicultural identity and her several languages, no longer perched on a hyphen, like Richard Rodriguez in Chapter 5, but happy to have a foot in each camp and a transnational community in between. Yet there are striking similarities with Rodriguez too: both write about the cultures of the West coast, and in seeing California as their homeland both Mukherjee and Rodriguez also regard it as the fulcrum of a new ‘brown’

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America that faces south and west to Asia and Mexico, rather than eastwards or inwards to the rest of the United States. Both in their different literary ways evince a strong sense of transnationality and of permeable borders; in a to-and-fro movement they examine the Americanization of Mexico and India, but they also assess the Mexico and India that exist within the United States. In so doing, neither has any nostalgia for the patriarchal or heteronormative strictures of their native culture. Both were educated by Irish nuns in English and they often work allusions to the English canon silently, palimpsestically into the texture of their prose. Both are based in San Francisco and celebrate that particular city’s multiculture; Mukherjee uses it as her canvas in Desirable Daughters (2002) and The Tree Bride (2004) which, together with the more familiar Jasmine (1989), are the focus of this chapter. These unexpected similarities between Mukherjee and Rodriguez say something about their geo- and gender-political positioning, and also their formation, as writers resisting the ‘ethnic/immigrant’ label, in the hegemonic Eurocentric tradition of mid- to late twentieth-century American culture. It is because of this that both insist they are ‘American writers’, for fear of being relegated to the second division, the ‘ethnic literature’ shelf. When it comes to their attitudes to, and practice of, their native languages, however, Mukherjee’s opening statement about her attachment to Bangla reveals something very different. Whereas we saw in the previous chapter that, for Richard Rodriguez, ‘the pull of Tú’ needed to be resisted in English, Mukherjee, to the contrary, claims that ‘Bangla . . . exercises motherly restraint over my provisional, immigrant identity’, suggesting a subjectivity rooted in native language that is both stable and trauma-free. Unlike Eva Hoffman, who in Chapter 3 represented her self as lost in translation – riven, but also enraptured by the difference between Polish and English – Mukherjee seems sanguine about the co-habitation of languages in herself and we might expect that she would be unafraid to put them to use in her fiction as well. Fiction, however, is not life-writing, and multilingualism in fiction, as I explained in Chapter 1, submits to a different representational regime than do the letters, memoirs, essays, comic sketches and autobiographies we have reviewed for their heterolingual signification so far. What then is the status of

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Mukherjee’s Bangla in her novels? Does it happily co-habit with English in the same way the author claims they live in her body and her immigrant mind? In a recent article on what she calls ‘the Literature of New Arrival’, Mukherjee notes its difference from ‘traditional – canonical – U.S. immigrant literature’, insofar as the new writing ‘embraces broken narratives and disrupted lives, proliferating plots . . . the language fusion (Spanglish, Chinglish, Hinglish, Banglish). . .’ (‘Immigrant Writing’, 683–84; emphasis added). It is not clear whether she sees her own work as part of this new wave, however, even if the ‘proliferating plots’ and ‘overcrowded casts’ of her characterization of it would apply to Jasmine or The Tree Bride too. Does Mukherjee practise in fiction what she preaches in her essays, or does she use the more tried and trusted strategies of old-school migrant writers such as Antin and Hoffman, Rodriguez, Bok and Van Bruinessen: save Bangla for private use and write in English, maybe with wanderwords, ethnographic or otherwise, and with or without a glossary? On the face of it, these questions are easily answered: Mukherjee’s fiction has no problem with bi- or multilingualism at all because, thematically, the acquisition of English hardly figures, and there is no anxiety about loss or attrition of Bangla or Hindi or any other of her protagonists’ native languages. Bi- or multilingual games, furthermore, seem to be absent altogether, and when words from Bangla, Hindi or French stray into Mukherjee’s English, their otherness to an English-only reader is quickly neutralized by deft translation in the same breath, or the next sentence. Often, Mukherjee’s wanderwords appear to be ethnographic, like Mary Antin’s in Chapter 3. In Desirable Daughters, the narrator/protagonist Tara explains, for example, how ‘Children are taught to call every family friend “auntie” and “uncle,” or, in our language, mashi and mesho for the mother’s side, pishi and pishemashi or kaki and kaku for the father’s side. It’s how a family-based culture sees the world’ (36). Tara here is clearly in the position of a cultural and linguistic insider, who explains to an implied outsider readership ‘how a family-based culture sees the world’, while maintaining a certain (critical?) distance from it herself (‘a familybased culture’, not ‘my’ or ‘our’). Like the static Bangla Mukherjee describes in the opening extract above – and like the traditional mother – it seems that, semantically at least, her wanderwords are confined to home, safely contained in reminiscences about India and the past. Orthographically, the cultural

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difference they are used to convey appears camouflaged by Roman script, to blend harmoniously into the narrator’s literary English – without italics, even, to mark their alien, migrant status. Mukherjee’s wanderwords thus infiltrate English almost unseen, their meanings made transparent in translation or context and their form already made readable – if not intelligible, in Reed Way Dasenbrock’s terms of Chapter 2 – to the cultural outsider. On this superficial reading of Mukherjee’s heterolingual practice, transliterated form follows the function of ethnographic fiction – but can it really be as simple as this? If, as we have seen in previous chapters, the nature of migrant writers’ bi- or multilingualism and the surrounding linguascape together tended to shape their representation of language migration, then what are these in Mukherjee’s case, moving from India to North America, and how do they shape her fiction, if at all? I ask this because, as noted, she does smooth the way for her English-only readers. Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride are full of ‘Indian’ wanderwords which, as an outsider, I cannot identify as Hindi or Bangla, let alone any of India’s many other languages. In a sentence such as ‘“We have a purut thakur who comes over every evening,”’ I have no idea what ‘purut thakur’ means, nor what language it is. But because this is followed by ‘He reads the Gita to them,’ I assume the ‘purut thakur’ is a Hindu holy man of some kind, and so the words are most likely Hindi too (Desirable Daughters, 246). Not that it matters: in Mukherjee’s cosmopolitan narratives, which language consorts with English is immaterial, so long as the sense that India exists inside as well as outside the United States is conveyed effectively. So far, so good an answer to the question of Mukherjee’s heterolinguality. But if this is true, if this is Mukherjee’s strategy in representing cultural and language migration, then why bother with wanderwords in other languages at all? If translation and contextual explanation are the name of this particular multilingual game, then why not just write English, all the way through? Mukherjee herself echoes the question I have been asking throughout this book in relation to the new migrant writers of the twenty-first century: ‘how exactly does the immigrant absolutely renounce her earlier self, her fidelity to family history and language, “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion?”’ (‘Immigrant Writing’, 681). In what follows, we will trace this question through Mukherjee’s oeuvre from beginning to end, to see what happens to Bengali and Hindu cultures if the

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words naming them are so easily absorbed and translated into English. Are they thereby also trans-muted? And no less important: what becomes of English in Mukherjee’s use, where it is not just the American-literary idiom of her choosing, but also has a colonial memory and a twenty-first-century global ambition and reach? If Bangla as mother tongue is the site of stability and security for Mukherjee, then what of her English?

The safety of English In his preface to Letters of Transit, a collection of autobiographical essays by exiled writers now resident in the United States, André Aciman states: ‘Every successful sentence they write reminds them that they’ve probably made it to safety. It is, after all, a source of no small satisfaction to be mistaken for a native speaker’ (12). Slippage in this passage from writing to speaking, and even to ‘passing’ in the native language, suggests that there is safety in English, that the writer who writes in English (‘successfully’, anyway) has found artistic shelter of a kind that does not exist in his or her native country and language.1 This safety is, of course, also that of the United States – champion of freedom of expression and fabled refuge, from the seventeenth century onwards, for the world’s poor and persecuted. It is this narrative, this fable, of America and of English as refuge that Bharati Mukherjee explodes in Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride. In both these novels, violence (call it terrorism) continually threatens to – and then does – cross borders to expose the vulnerability of the nation. Ultimately, the explosive transnational family history of the protagonist of both novels, Tara Chatterjee, flaunts the fictionality of security within national borders and, as we shall see, within national languages too. When Aciman reflects on the plight of writers in exile, he explicitly addresses the linguistic choice they have to make once they have acquired English as a result of migration: Having chosen careers in writing, each uses the written word as a way of fashioning a new home elsewhere, of revisiting, transposing, or perpetuating the old one on paper, writing away the past the way one writes off bad debts, . . . look[ing] for their homeland abroad or, more radical yet, to dispose

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of it abroad. [I]n what language will he express his confused awareness of these intimate paradoxes? (‘Editor’s Foreword’, 10)

All the writers in his book, like almost all in this one, have chosen English as their literary language. Yet for Mukherjee, as I will show in this chapter, English is less of a leap and more of a risk than it is for other migrant American writers. It is less of a leap, because English was India’s colonial language until 1947 and remains one of the country’s official languages today. Furthermore, as one of India’s Brahmin élite, Mukherjee was always exposed to English; she lived in England, with her parents, from the age of 8 until 11 and was schooled at the Anglophone Loreto Convent in Calcutta. But this personal/ political history, not a-typical of her class, makes her use of English more risky too, because it carries, pace Bakhtin, ‘the intentions of others’ with it in a very particular sense: English from India comes with colonial baggage, connoting neither safety nor new starts. Nevertheless, Mukherjee’s unhyphenated American literature seeks to connect the United States to the world by means of English as today’s transnational language par excellence; she does not consider her multilingualism as a problem in writing, because from childhood her Indian linguascape has taken the coexistence of Bangla and English for granted. Bangla – as we saw – roots her, leaving English free to wander. In her work she is thus able to bordercross with confidence, because her English is American, global, colonial and postcolonial all at once. In Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride the ironies such a convergence of migrant and imperial, global and local Englishes brings with it are opened up, if not critiqued. English in the twenty-first century is, after all, not the bordered, singular entity that it was in the sixteenth – it has long since ceased to be what Ilán Stavans refers to as ‘Shakespeare’s tongue’.2 Nor does Mukherjee’s English have much in common with that of contemporaries like Salman Rushdie, whose English, at least at the beginning of his career, was self-consciously postcolonial and critical. As he explained in his well-known essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’: ‘we can’t simply use the language in the way the British did; . . . [it] needs re-making for our own purposes. . . . To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free’ (17). This is not Mukherjee’s project. English has been conquered in many places and by many a writer’s hand, and so-called global English is now often thought of less as a bearer of a particular (island!) culture than as a mere vehicle of

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communication, almost a technology in itself, as Martin Kayman points out: ‘English seems to receive the qualities attributed to the communications technology; the language itself becomes . . . a tool, a simple instrument’ (13). That this isn’t so, I shall explain later in this chapter; for now it is important to note the perceived neutral instrumentality of English. Global English, furthermore, is most often written and spoken as a secondary language, or used as the medium of translation from multiple other source languages, rather than as the mother tongue in which life and self are lived. As Richard Rodriguez observed in the previous chapter, English is omnivorous, impure and unclean and hides, when mistakes are made, a multitude of creative sins (like ‘harm on rye’). Mukherjee’s multilingualism in English Plus is thus no particular blessing, achievement or affliction; what differentiates her from Aciman’s exiles who either write in English-only or whose work ‘in their native Spanish and Russian and Arabic, in Chinese and Burmese, in Tamil and Aramaic . . . few of us will ever have the good fortune to read’ is her simultaneous rootedness in Bangla and that wandering, mobile language, English (Mukherjee, ‘Imagining Homelands’, 73). All this means that America as home does not, for Mukherjee, mean America as refuge, and her English is not the place of safety that it is for Richard Rodriguez, or may be for the exiled writers of André Aciman’s concern. Nor does the use of English per se make her into an American writer: English, after all, is not only one of India’s official languages but also the language of choice of the Indian literary diaspora, and it was the discipline-and-punish language of ‘colonial panopticism’, as Alastair Pennycook puts it (Cultural Politics, 98). Most of all, English is the language of globalization and modern communications technology, both themes – along with gender, colonial history, migration and violence – that Mukherjee has been interested in throughout the five decades of her writing career. For Mukherjee, unlike Rodriguez, there is neither liberation nor hiding in English, and it is not a refuge from an old, nor the passport to a new homeland. Far from it. In Mukherjee’s hands, English connects Calcutta with San Francisco, her Indian childhood with Canadian and American adult selves, and British colonialism with American imperialism. As a simultaneous multilingual, her native knowledge of languages other than English does not engender confusion and division, as it did for Eva Hoffman and other

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immigrant writers who acquired English as a result of immigration.3 Instead, her languages are an endowment from multilingual India for, as one of François Grosjean’s interviewees explains in Life with Two Languages: ‘Being bilingual in India is natural; it is expected, encouraged, approved, applauded. It is part of education’ (22). This multilingual endowment plays a crucial role in the two novels that most directly stage a dialogue between Britain, India and the United States, Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride. Sharing the same protagonist and narrator, the plot of both novels hinges on Tara Chatterjee’s multilingual sensibility, which is attuned to various Indian languages and can distinguish between their class-/caste-marked registers and dialects. Although Chris Dey, who poses as a family member newly arrived from Bengal, convincingly addresses Tara’s son Rabi as ‘old sport’ in a colonially inflected English, and Tara herself as ‘Tara-mashi’ (maternal aunt) in the manner of Bangla social convention, it is his ‘street-Bengali’ – accidentally overheard by Tara – that gives him away as an imposter with evil intent (Desirable Daughters, 34). In Desirable Daughters Tara’s multilingual early warning system raises the alarm, but cannot ultimately prevent Dey, a Bengali Muslim, from seriously wounding her ex-husband in a bomb attack set off by mobile phone. As Tara then traces Dey’s, and her own, family history back to nineteenth-century Mishtigunj in Bengal, she uncovers longstanding transnational connections with other speakers of English, of which no less violent consequences echo in the present. In The Tree Bride the same bomber kills her friend and accomplice in the search for ancestral history, Victoria Khanna-Treadwell. Both she and Dey are implicated in Tara Chatterjee’s colonial past, as Victoria’s grandfather Virgil (Vertie) Treadwell had been a British administrator in the district where Tara’s great-great aunt Tara Lata had plotted Indian independence. Tara Lata is the infamous tree bride of the title, who provides refuge to British renegades (‘white Hindoos’ who have opted out of the British empire and of English) as well as to Indian resistance fighters. One of these is an ancestor of the modern Tara’s nemesis (call him a terrorist?) Abbas Hai, who ‘was born and possibly raised in my family’s house’ in the ancestral village of Mishtigunj (The Tree Bride, 278). Family relations, struggles for independence by women and nations, and global ‘terrorism’ are thus all connected in an intricate web of plotlines that weave macro- and microhistories together.

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If it was not already clear from Mukherjee’s previous work, such as the short stories of The Middleman, or Jasmine (where the eponymous heroine also finds no refuge in New York from the Sikh killer of her husband, Prakash), it is clear now, in these two post-9/11 novels: there is no safety in immigration to the American nation, just as there is none in Mukherjee’s narration, either.4 Geographical and linguistic borders do not hold, and the violence of global communications cannot be contained in metaphor, when a mobile phone can really detonate a bomb. Yet to note such continuity is not to say that Mukherjee’s thematic treatment of English in all its varieties, nor her heterolingual practice of English-with-wanderwords, has been consistent throughout. A closer look at the representation of English in her first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter, as well as in Jasmine in the middle period of her long writing career, will show the development of multilingualism as practice and theme in Mukherjee’s oeuvre to culminate in The Tree Bride. The ability to adapt English to local conditions, to be able to pass, if not as a native speaker, then as an unhyphenated American writer, ‘foreign’ accent muted, is vital for Mukherjee’s writerly ambition, as we have seen. How radical and innovative an aesthetic strategy it is to use ‘Indian’ wanderwords in a novel that is largely set in India remains to be seen, however; as ethnographic markers and in (mimetic) fiction, after all, this is exactly where we would expect them to be.

‘To want English is to want the world’: The Tiger’s Daughter and Jasmine It is all the more interesting then that in Mukherjee’s first novel, set in Bengal and Calcutta (Kolkata) and in a linguascape that encompasses Bengali (Bangla), Hindi and Sanskrit as well as English, it is English that comes under scrutiny. Indeed, English is not just English here but an amalgam of American, Indian and poetic varieties that are mutually intelligible to, but also distinct from, each other. Tara Bannerjee-Cartwright, the protagonist, is a hyphenated American by marriage, on a visit to her family and her younger days, in Calcutta. This Tara, like her namesake in Mukherjee’s later novels, is keenly aware of the differences between Indian and American English. She and her friends

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spoke mainly in English, occasionally changing to Bengali in midsentence, almost always in exclamations, favoring ‘How dare you!’ and ‘What nonsense!’ . . . their conversation [would] alight on imported gadgets, on stereos, transistors, blenders and percolators; each foreign word was treated with a holy reverence. (The Tiger’s Daughter, 41)

Both the exclamations and the gadgets are markers of this particular caste’s speech. ‘How dare you!’ is explained belatedly in Desirable Daughters, where it becomes something of a catchphrase that takes on distinctive class connotations, otherwise invisible in English. Tara’s son Rabi, who doesn’t know Bengali, comments that ‘these sudden rages’ (when Tara exclaims ‘how dare you’) reveal her ‘Brahminical side’ (35). This tells us that she is able to convey her Bengali indignation in English, while preserving its original sense of caste-based outrage. Second, note how in the extract above, the ‘foreign words’, such as ‘stereos, transistors, blenders and percolators’ which, the narrator tells us, are treated with reverence in the conversation, do not look ‘foreign’ on the page: they are not in italics, unlike ‘sahib’, ‘maidan’ or ‘mleccha’, wanderwords assumed to be alien to the implied Anglo reader. Even so, thematically, multilingual awareness extends to English as well: ‘“I want an American Pride and samosas.” “What’s that?” “It’s a tall, fuzzy drink. Pink at the bottom.” “Fizzy?” asked Tara’ (The Tiger’s Daughter, 85). ‘Fuzzy’ is actually quite a good adjective to describe a fizzy drink, but Tara’s question is, of course, a surreptitious correction from the vantage point of her – presumed superior – American English. The friends, in turn, ask her to ‘Teach us more phrases, please. The words they are using right now in America’; presumably, those words will give them access to a modernity their own Indian English doesn’t provide for (59). Her friends’ greed for the new, cool, American expressions is balanced by Tara’s linguistic nostalgia in The Tiger’s Daughter – interestingly not for Bengali (which she still speaks with her family) but for a native Indian English: ‘“My God! You are a real fusspot.” It was the word “fusspot” that calmed Tara. What a curious tie language was! She had forgotten so many Indian-English words she had once used with her friends’ (107). Those words, that language of her youth is now displaced by American English, its Indianness edited out and its accent removed. Whereas The Tiger’s Daughter thus self-consciously registers the heterogeneity of English in its Indian and American incarnations, Jasmine,

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Mukherjee’s best-known and most successful novel, seems to have a blind spot about such cultural difference. In this scene the eponymous heroine, an illegal immigrant newly arrived in the United States, makes her first public appearance: We drove into a mall in Clearwater for the test. Time to try out my American talk and walk. Lillian called me ‘Jazzy’. In one of the department stores I saw my first revolving door. How could something be always open and at the same time always closed? She had me try out my first escalator. How could something be always moving and always still? At the bottom of the escalator she said, ‘They pick up dark people like you who’re afraid to get on or off.’ I shut my eyes and stepped forward and kept my eyes closed all the way to the top. I waited for the hairy arm of the law to haul me in. Instead, Lillian said, ‘You pass, Jazzy.’ She gave me two dollars. ‘Now, how about buying me a Dairy Queen?’ (Jasmine, 119)

This, ostensibly, is about passing for American by adapting, and adopting, speech and body language. But the passage has next to nothing to say about Jasmine’s ability to speak American English; instead, it is Lillian Gordon’s naming her ‘Jazzy’ that enables her to pass. Race, likewise, is mentioned but elided at the same time: passing here is not about looks or sounds but about the confident claiming of space. Indeed, this scene is really about how to move in America, with the revolving door an allegory for the paradox of American immigration: always open (Jasmine immigrates illegally, with forged documents) and always shut (to widowed dark-skinned women without visible means of support, like her). As a nation of migrants, of geographical and social mobility, America is like the escalator ‘always moving and always still’. Passing as American by adapting to American English, however, is here, at best, understated. Then again, English itself – in whatever form or accent – signifies mobility in this novel. Much has been made of the importance of English earlier on, when Jasmine – then still Jyoti – selects her future husband specifically for his command of it: ‘I couldn’t marry a man who didn’t speak English, or at least who didn’t want to speak English. To want English was to want more than you had been given at birth, it was to want the world’ (61). English equals modernity for Jasmine, as it did for Mary Antin. And Prakash, the ‘modern man’ who wants a modern wife willing to break away from patriarchal Hindu tradition, duly (though posthumously) provides her with English so that she,

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like Tara Lata in The Tree Bride and Desirable Daughters, can escape her fate as a widow in India and make her transit to modernity and to the United States, however convoluted and traumatic that journey turns out to be. Colonial history is cannily invoked in Jasmine’s voicing of her desire for English. Ironically and without knowing it, she echoes in her demand for English as ‘the world’ the Bengali bourgeoisie of the early nineteenth century, who wanted English and a Western education to claim their share of the spoils of British colonialism. Well before Macaulay’s (in)famous 1833 Minute on Education, the Hindu College was founded by Bengalis in 1816, to teach English language and literature for their own advancement, and quite apart from the British need to foster a home-grown administrative class. As Alastair Pennycook makes clear in The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, the presence of English in India was not a matter of wholesale imposition, if only because – as the irony of white supremacy would have it – many colonial administrators did not believe the masses could be entrusted with it (The Cultural Politics, 75–6). Instead, it was much more a consequence of demand, not for ‘the world’ in Jasmine’s sense, but certainly for advancement and connection with the rest of the British Empire – which by the later nineteenth century amounted to much the same thing.5 If we fast-forward to Mukherjee’s situation as an immigrant writer first in Canada and then in the United States, it becomes clear that it is like that of Jasmine, and like that of her nineteenth-century Bengali forebears: English is wanted, demanded even, neither imposed nor acquired simply as a result of migration to North America. This makes Mukherjee’s relation to, and practice of, English very different from that of other migrant writers in this book, such as Eva Hoffman, or Edward Bok, or Mary Antin, or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, or even those of the second generation, like Richard Rodriguez. English, for Mukherjee, is not just the literary language of her colonial education, but is also taken for granted as the mark of caste privilege that makes for a comfortable sense of belonging in Calcutta, alongside – but not in place of – Hindi and Bangla.6 Furthermore, Indian writing in English has a much longer tradition than just that of the Indian and diaspora writers we read today, like Salman Rushdie or Vikram Seth, Anita Roy or Jhumpa Lahiri. Vinay Dharwadker counts Mukherjee as one in a line of Indian writers stretching back to 1794, who were educated at English-medium missionary schools

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and engaged in a dynamic of ‘critique, counter-critique, and self-reflexive critique that became central to Indian-English literary culture’ (11). The ‘right to critique both places’ that Gayatri Spivak claims in her essay ‘Postmarked Calcutta’ has not only been long earned but also long practised (83).7 Dharwadker and Spivak illuminate why a writer like Bharati Mukherjee can see English as hers – possessed and possessing – rather than as some derivative or stolen tongue, or one that is to be resisted or transformed. Mukherjee’s aim is certainly to critique both places, but these places are not India and the British empire so much as India and the United States. Such ambition, and the confidence it implies, is the opposite of the ‘old’ immigrant’s rather more humble stance, and aligns her once more with the ‘Literature of New Arrival’ she identifies in a younger generation of migrant writers. If our question remains whether such ambition and confidence, in part derived from multilingualism, carry over into aesthetic practice – or continue to thicken the plot of transnational connection at a thematic level only, then a brief sidestep into Mukherjee’s own migration history may be informative. Biographically speaking, Mukherjee’s status as an ‘old’ or a new immigrant is somewhat ambiguous. Having first come to the United States in 1962 to join the Iowa Creative Writers’ Workshop, she was a lone migrant who preceded the new generation of South Asians who were allowed entry as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965. In the formative years of writing The Tiger’s Daughter, therefore, she was very much exposed to the mid-century American linguascape and the ‘old’ dispensation of American culture in English-only. After marrying the Canadian writer Clark Blaise, she lived in Canada for some years before settling in the United States and becoming an American citizen. This unusual trajectory meant that Mukherjee was already a successful writer when she chose to relocate from Canada to the United States and be naturalized. It may be one reason why Mukherjee’s immigrant – whether in fiction, essays or interviews – has nothing of the supplicant, who has no choice but to assimilate to American ways and who may well mourn the loss of native language and culture. Her notion of (im)migration is much closer to Ania Spyra’s definition of cosmopolitanism as ‘active belonging’, defined by feminist theorist Chandra Mohanty as ‘not . . . a comfortable, stable, inherited, and familiar space but instead an imaginative, politically charged space in

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which the familiarity and sense of affection and commitment [lies] in shared collective analysis of social injustice, as well as vision of radical transformation’ (Spyra, 6). Certainly Jasmine’s, and Mukherjee’s own, cosmopolitanism is not of the rootless, élite, at-home-in-the-world kind that preserves a sublime detachment from local and cultural commitment and has, for that reason, been the subject of scholarly debate in recent years.8 Jasmine’s position is neither glamorous nor safe and exemplifies, as Ania Spyra also notes, the dilemma that cosmopolitanism for women ‘[u]nderstood as volitional and responsible belonging to many places in the world’ is all too often only possible ‘if women remain enclosed within patriarchal discourse’ (20). Jasmine’s success in large part depends on men and it depends on her ability to reflect back to ‘old’ Americans what they want to see in her. This is as true of the farmers in Elsa County, Iowa as it is of New York’s cosmopolitan, intellectual circles: Taylor’s friends in New York used to look at me and say ‘you’re Iranian, right?’ If I said no, then, ‘Pakistani, Afghan, or Punjabi?’ They were strikingly accurate about most things, and always out to improve themselves. Even though I was just an au pair, professors would ask if I would help them with Sanskrit or Arabic, Devanagari or Gurumki script. I can read Urdu, not Arabic. I can’t read Sanskrit. They had things they wanted me to translate, paintings they wanted me to decipher. They were very democratic that way. (Mukherjee, Jasmine, 29)

Strikingly, this passage locates Jasmine’s oriental exoticism, which is also her surplus value, in the ability to read, or not to read, ‘foreign’ script. Her knowledge of another language that cannot even be ‘deciphered’, let alone understood, by native-born Americans renders her powerful in her alien-ness. But acerbic as that final comment (‘They were very democratic that way’) is, Mukherjee never lets the reader settle into a familiar understanding of postcolonial or migrant literature as ‘writing back’ to expose the tragic plight of the migrant or the racism and ethnocentrism of the West. In the passage above, the issue is not that the New York liberals underestimate Jasmine’s sophistication, as you would expect in a postcolonial novel, but that they overestimate it. In exposing this form of tolerant but ignorant overcompensation, she – a wily narrator if ever there was one – teaches us readers something about the

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diversity of ‘Asian’ languages, scripts and ancient cultures while deriding the idea that such awareness amounts to any kind of significant ‘knowledge’ at the same time. Hybridity best describes this repeated narrative move of unsettling Western readers’ expectations; on my reading, Jasmine’s wry irony and subtle critique of what ‘we’ think ‘we’ know about India conform to Homi Bhabha’s specific sense of this term rather than the vulgarized meaning of cultural fusion of some kind. Here is how he explains it: colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition. (114)

Cultural difference, in this schema, is neither absolute nor predictable, and it comes back to ‘terrorise’ colonial authority ‘with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery’ (115). Hybridity then, to keep its edge, is not the bland blending of cultures in some new synthesis, but denotes the undermining and destabilizing of our understanding of such difference.9 Rather than ‘we are not so different after all’, or ‘you have no idea’, Jasmine’s narrative voice says ‘I know your culture, but you don’t know mine, so I can tell you about my world in terms that you can understand but never verify.’ Extrapolated to linguistic difference, this becomes: ‘I know your language, but you don’t know mine, so when I use wanderwords transcribed into Roman script and accompanied by translation into English, you can understand what they say but you cannot be sure what they really mean.’ Hybridity, as ‘a problematic of colonial representation’, like heterolinguality for the English-only reader, is a tease, a tease designed to unsettle knowledges and expectations and reverse relations of authority and mastery. Mukherjee said in an interview with The Times of India in 1989: ‘My aim is to expose Americans to the energetic voices of new settlers in this country,’ again aligning herself with the new immigration (Dhawan, 11). Her ambition ‘to expose Americans to’ is indicative of her desire to hybridize and transform American culture: it is to teach ‘them’ something new and unsettling about the rest of the world, and particularly of the rest of the world that is in their

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midst. In this role of mediator between America and its new newcomers she highlights the unpredictable alliances as well as creative tensions that result from migration, but like the middleman of her eponymous short story, who unwittingly becomes an arms trader, there is always the potential for violence too. The prize-winning collection of 1988 in which this story appeared, The Middleman and Other Stories, already announced Mukherjee’s interest in the theme of global migration and the potent mixture of violence and harmony in inter-ethnic relations. Characters from a variety of countries with violent histories (an Iraqi Jew, a Trinidadian woman of Indian descent, a refugee from Afghanistan, a Vietnam veteran) are involved in recognizably Mukherjeerian scenarios of political violence reaching across the globe, gender-based oppression, cross-cultural romances and unpredictable alliances with nativeborn Americans.10 As we have seen in our analysis of The Tiger’s Daughter and Jasmine, since a variegated, self-reflexive, class- and history-conscious English is the mediating language transmitting this explosive message, Mukherjee’s fiction is able to reach beyond borders to become part of a new global literature. This is true especially of the later novels, which engage with British colonialism as much as they do with globalization and the terrorism that has haunted the United States since 9/11.11 In her self-conscious English and in her ethnographic, yet subversive use of wanderwords, Mukherjee has now moved beyond the ambition to transform America and American literature to write fictions of globalization, for a global readership. Once this is recognized, it becomes possible to see that Mukherjee’s endorsement of the American melting pot – once so problematic in her critical reception – was never simply celebrating assimilation to America, let alone Anglo-conformity.12 Instead, as Sharmani Gabriel makes clear, ‘Mukherjee posits the melting pot as a space of conflict and potential tension,’ in which the operative word is ‘fusion’, one of those semantic wonders in which opposite meanings are expressed in one word: ‘melting together’ and ‘explosion which releases energy’. Like Doris Sommer’s bilingual aesthetics and Bonnie Honig’s notion of democracy as friction in Chapter 2, the concept of ‘fusion’ enables us to read Mukherjee’s work as an exploration of cultural hybridity that shows its potential for critical intervention as well as for creativity.

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Fusion is a keyword for Mukherjee’s fiction also because it provides the kind of scientific metaphor that she is always interested in and frequently uses. As with many of Mukherjee’s metaphors, this one too can be taken quite literally: the explosiveness that is contained in fusion refers not only to global communications systems, but also to the global connections that migrating bodies make, whether in cross-cultural romances or in the perpetuation of intra-national ethnic strife. As mentioned earlier, in Desirable Daughters the protagonist’s ex-husband, who has made his fortune in new telecoms technology, is seriously wounded by a cell phone-activated bomb. John K. Hoppe describes how technology is often at the heart of ‘this ceaseless, flexible dialogue between cultures’ in Mukherjee’s work, but also how the balance of the costs and benefits of technology is volatile and ambiguous – as is that of immi­grants and their languages, as we shall see shortly (138). Mukherjee’s fiction is land-mined with rape, pillage, murder and bombings, from The Tiger’s Daughter right through to The Tree Bride, and not even the most genteel of middle-class neighbourhoods – whether in Calcutta, San Francisco or New York – is safe from such violence. Jennifer Drake summarizes this duality once more: ‘Mukherjee’s stories do not simply promote American multiculture or celebrate assimilation; rather, [the fiction] represents the real pleasures and violences of cultural exchange’ (61). It is not at all easy to see how these pleasures and violences compare, with regard to the immigrant’s fate: the pursuit of happiness – like all desire – remains a chase that is not only never concluded but also always unstable, always unsafe. Unlike some of the American migrant narratives we have encountered so far, which employ the plot of ‘making it’, or at least of ‘accommodating to it’, Mukherjee’s scripts allow for no such satisfying conclusion. Drake again: ‘In Mukherjee’s America, “home” says “freedom,” “home” says “war zone.” “Home” is no consolation, no place to rest. There are too many Americas and Indias for that’ (65).

The violence of connection – and the violation of translation Too many Americas, and too many Indias: in Mukherjee’s work that does not just mean East and West coast, the Punjab and Bengal, Bombay and Calcutta,

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Flushing and Jackson Heights and Silicon Valley, but also the Americas and Indias of history, of the mind – and of multilingualism. The America of the mind is familiar, but the India of the mind less so, to Mukherjee’s largely nonIndian audience. Craig Tapping writes of Mukherjee’s relation to India, when she was still living in Canada, and quotes from her introduction to the short story collection Darkness (1985): Indianness is now a metaphor, a particular way of partially comprehending the world. Though the characters in these stories are, or were, ‘Indian’, I see most of these as stories of broken identities and discarded languages, and the will to bond oneself to a new community against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal. (44–5; emphasis added)

The India of the mind of the Indian diasporic subject, here, is a place where identity was still whole and languages were many, before they had to be ‘discarded’ as no longer of use in the new world. A multilingual identity is broken when languages are lost or shed, and so the move from Indian multilingual memory to North American monolingualism returns us, at last, to the question whether English can be a place of safety, and whether Mukherjee’s other languages are indeed ‘discarded’ and no longer of use in her American or global fiction. Or perhaps there are too many Englishes too? With Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride, Mukherjee’s fiction moves back to India, or rather, back to Bengal and Calcutta and back to Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit, the territory of The Tiger’s Daughter. The Tara we already encountered as the protagonist of this first novel is an earlier incarnation of the Tara Bhattacharjee-Chatterjee who narrates Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride, and who draws on her native language to unmask the imposter/bomber when she overhears him speaking in ‘street Bengali’. But where The Tiger’s Daughter self-consciously registered the heterogeneity of English in its Indian and American incarnations, Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride, while appearing to take English for granted as the homogeneous language of global communication, in fact return to even earlier ground: the colonial English that laid the foundation for English as a global language. Americanization of English as the lingua franca of commerce and tech­nology veils this colonial legacy. What Alastair Pennycook calls ‘the discourse of English as an International Language’ assumes that global English is ‘natural, neutral, and beneficial’, stripped of colonial connotations and merely ‘a result of inevitable

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global forces’ (The Cultural Politics, 9). English ‘is considered beneficial because a rather blandly optimistic view of international communication assumes that this occurs on a cooperative and equitable footing’, Pennycook observes (The Cultural Politics, 9). His analysis of the cultural politics of global English proceeds to reveal the natural/neutral/beneficial view as a language ideology that masks relations of power which have persisted since the colonial era and are exacerbated by the discourse of global English itself. Pennycook once more: Given the dominant position of English in the world and its connections both to inequitable economic systems and to the dominance of certain forms of culture and knowledge, there are inevitable questions to be asked here concerning language and inequality. (The Cultural Politics, 35)

Mukherjee does not often ask those questions explicitly, yet Pennycook’s point about the power of global English originating in British colonialism is well taken in her fiction. A passage in The Tree Bride, giving the views on language of Virgil Treadwell, a British colonial administrator in India, illustrates this: English-speaking peoples: There’s a jab there. Welsh and Irish and Australians and Americans are all fundamentally English. There’s a huge difference between speaking it and actually being it. Jamaicans, Trinidadians, and the bloody Bengalis mimic a decent English . . . if only to use our language against us. (199–200)

Bhabha’s mimicry and mockery of colonial English are clearly inscribed in that last phrase, but Treadwell’s views on English, we must remember, are filtered through the narrative voice of Tara Bhattacharjee. As a would-be historical novelist, she herself here mimics the colonial discourse of English: ‘fundamentally’ belonging to whites, she subversively appropriates it in order to critique its cultural politics. In the twenty-first-century frame narrative of The Tree Bride, English is the language of CHATTY, Tara’s ex-husband’s electronics empire, which links the world’s multiracial ‘digerati’ together in one vast web of money and power, leaving the rest behind.13 CHATTY, of course, is itself a multilingual pun playing on the common Bengali name of Chatterjee, the English ‘to chat’ and to be ‘chatty’, with hints of ‘shatter’ and ‘scatter’ somewhere in between. English thus connects, but it also divides,

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and it is this fusion (that word again) at the heart of global English that Mukherjee exposes in the history of family connection and violence that forms the plot of Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride, which we turn to next. Tara Chatterjee’s comfortable existence in San Francisco, in English, is only in appearance safe and sheltered by money and class privilege. It is violently disrupted by the arrival from Bengal of a criminal who poses as a member of her family. Not her ex-husband, the global communications mogul, but Tara herself turns out to be his target, for Chris Dey (aka Abbas Sattar Hai aka Abdul Rehman/Anthony Thomas/ Diego D’Souza/Sunil Ghose/Harilal Guha/Wahid Ali Ahmad) is out to destroy her life as a modern, divorced woman who thinks herself liberated from the strictures of patriarchy. Multilingual like herself, only more so, Hai is ‘[a]dept in many languages including English, Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi’, which enable him to shape- and identity-shift at will (Desirable Daughters, 220). There is no safety in the multilingualism that facilitates his border-crossing impersonation, but there is even less in English-only. The man’s caste-marked Bengali, hitherto masked by perfect, slightly antiquated, Indian-inflected English and intimate knowledge of the Chatterjee family, betrays him. His uncamouflaged speech is picked up by Tara’s multilingually attuned ethnic radar and sets in train the investigation (by a Sikh policeman from San Francisco’s ‘ethnic squad’, moreover) that reveals him to be a member of a Bengali criminal gang. In this key scene, as in the exchange between the young Richard Rodriguez and his grandmother in the previous chapter, the Bengali bomber’s speech is narrated, but its content withheld from the reader; in Meir Sternberg’s terms (see Chapter 2) this is another instance of ‘explicit attribution’: He switched suddenly to Bengali. He spoke in a rapid, streetsmart Bengali I associated with the children who hustle shoppers for small favors in the densely packed area of lanes around New Market. . . . Rockey-bosha chokra, they’re called, verandah-sitting boys, wiseasses, insult comics, low-rent rappers, we’d say. . . . In their world it was always open season on pretty girls, on fat women, on rich men, on foreigners and minorities. (Desirable Daughters, 119–20; emphasis original)

The Bangla Tara shares with the imposter, which only she can decipher, warrants for once the phrase ‘code-switch’ in this context of what might be described as ‘linguistic intelligence-gathering’. But the translation ‘verandah-sitting boys’

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for Rockey-bosha chokra does nothing for our understanding of the threat this man represents. Although the American elaboration of ‘wiseasses . . . low-rent rappers, we’d say’ helps to convey the (class and caste-based) disdain Tara has for this man, it prepares neither her nor us for his violence. It is the presence of Bangla italicized, as if for alien-ness and emphasis both, that presents the early warning. Whereas Mukherjee usually confines Bengali and Hindi wanderwords to their home setting, that is, India and the past, Rockey-bosha chokra, transliterated and translated, functions as an ethnic marker for a certain kind of youth now in America, whereas other wanderwords – those denoting Indian clothing, social and familial roles or food – are benign ethnographic markers of the remembered home culture, rather than live and threatening presences. Mukherjee has argued in an interview that ‘just as the word “pizza” has come into the American language now . . . we bring with us our foods, our languages and . . . if it is natural for this character to be code-switching, then that’s part of American vocabulary’, but this is not always what she practises (Martos-Hueso and Ramírez, 128). Not only does she often translate even simple words, such as those naming food, but her narrators, as we have seen, function explicitly as mediators and translators.14 Another such example occurs in the prologue to Desirable Daughters, set in Bengal, when Tara explains: ‘The Hindu Bengalis . . . were a minority in their desh, their homeland’ where ‘In my mother-language we call the powerful middle class “bhadra-lok,” the gentlefolk, the “civilized” folk, for whom the English fashioned the pejorative term “babu,” with its hint of fawning insincerity and slavishly acquired Western attitudes’ (6–7; emphasis original).15 Far from treating ‘bhadra-lok’ and ‘babu’ like ‘pizza’ and writing them as part of the American vocabulary, Mukherjee finds it necessary to give three types of translation here: the simple, one-to-one correspondence of ‘desh’ = ‘homeland’; the more searching, dual translation of ‘gentlefolk, “civilized” folk’ that suggests an approximate rather than an exact rendering of the meaning of ‘bhadra-lok’; and the final, complex description of the history and racist connotations of ‘babu’. In the old adage ‘traduttore tradittore’ the translator is always also a traitor or a violator, and it is worth noting here that in Mukherjee’s otherwise conventional use of wanderwords followed by translation, violation the other way (‘the English fashioned the pejorative term . . .’) is made visible for those who would see it.

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In the main California-based narrative, wanderwords are used in the usual way, denoting Indian experience. They are not always italicized or translated; in ‘My mother used to enter in her little laundry book every shirt, sari, and pair of underwear sent out with the dhobi,’ ‘sari’ is indeed an already English word while ‘dhobi’ is clearly the odd word out. Its meaning, however, can be easily inferred from the context of the sentence and the setting: memories of life in Calcutta (71). The only time a whole non-English sentence appears is when the narrator of Desirable Daughters recites lines from a prayer, which come in a letter from her mother: ‘Om-kali kali kalike papaharini/ dharmathamokshade devi narayani namo-stute,’ which certainly does look unwieldy on the page to an unsuspecting reader. The phrase is translated (I assume) a few lines down, as ‘Goddess Kali, the Destroyer of Time, the Dissipator of Darkness, the Scourge of Sinfulness, I too beg you to free me from earthly terrors and longings’ (292). The length and nature of this ‘Indian’ incursion into English suggests that linguistic and cultural difference is greatest, and most necessary to represent, in spirituality: whereas English is the material of economics and technology, of global communication and of literature, for metaphysics only Bangla will do. Even then, the narrator explains almost apologetically that ‘the Bengali sentences I recognized as part of a prayer chanted during Kali Puja’, as if to make it clear that she, too, is now culturally removed from the mantra even as she adopts it for her own purposes; the middlewoman role demands such distance. That the language is Bangla is given in the text, but that the phrase is translated is a presumption on my part; not knowing Bengali, I have no way of identifying what the English invocation of Kali translates. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Gayatri Spivak characterizes this phenomenon as the ‘violation’ of translation. The teaching of ‘third world literature’, Spivak writes: when the teacher or critic often has no sense of the original languages, or of the subject-constitution of the social and gendered agents in question (and when therefore the students cannot sense this as a loss) participates more in the logic of translation-as-violation than in the ideal of translation as freedom-in-troping. (164; emphasis added)16

Important here is the phrase in parentheses, which highlights that what is translated is occluded, the difference between languages and the cultures

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they carry is made invisible unless the teacher/critic has access to the original. Spivak calls lack of such knowledge a form of ‘sanctioned ignorance’ that the West arrogates onto itself, whereby students’ or readers’ actual epistemological loss – of cultural difference – is figured as a gain: of intelligibility (see also Chapter 2). Naturally, when reading (or teaching) Mukherjee’s work, the question must arise whether we are complicit in sanctioning such ignorance, but the conclusion that we do is not inevitable. As a reader and critic of Mukherjee’s fiction who is ignorant of the languages of India apart from English, I nevertheless glean from it a strong sense of cultural and linguistic difference that exposes and makes me aware of my ignorance – as much as it also accommodates it. The notion of hybridity outlined above, where Jasmine’s narrative voice was characterized by the proposition ‘I know your language, but you don’t know mine,’ offers intelligibility and satirizes ignorance.17 In using ‘foreign’ wanderwords and in making the process and the violation of translation visible, Mukherjee acts as a middlewoman who facilitates readerrelations across linguistic and cultural borders – rather than engaging in the kind of Bhanglish ‘language fusion’ she admired in the new immigrant writing at the beginning of this chapter. However, she trades in arms as well, and those arms are not confined to Bengali and Hindi words; the sheer surfeit of narrative detail that makes Mukherjee’s fiction so dazzling is inspired by migrant incursion of cultural difference. Multiple plot lines, vast casts of characters hailing from anywhere across the globe and sudden acts of violence are features Mukherjee herself has likened to Mughal miniature paintings of the seventeenth century, with their ‘crazy foreshortening of vanishing point, . . . insistence that everything happens simultaneously, . . . crowded with narratives, sub-narratives, sometimes metanarratives, so taut with passion and at the same time crisp with irony’ (Chen and Goudie, 7). In the same interview, she also mentions the Puranic tales she grew up with, like ‘every Hindu child’, for the ‘cosmology that my characters and I inhabit’ (12). Finally, when asked about the role of violence in her fiction and ‘why it seems surprisingly positive in its effects’, Mukherjee refers to the Hindu ideal of non-attachment: To allow oneself to be utterly destroyed by the violence done to her [Jasmine] and done by her would be to fall victim to maya. . . . The difficult feat for

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the Hindu American writer is to dramatize the benignity of non-attachment without making characters appear uncaring or grimly stoic. (Chen and Goudie, 86)

The word ‘maya’, untranslated, is effective here in conveying an unfamiliar understanding of Hindu metaphysics, more unfamiliar, and thus more productive in epistemological terms, than the phrase ‘the Hindu ideal of non-attachment’. Even if many of Mukherjee’s Indian sources remain obscure to the ignorant Western reader, the fusion of Hinduism with Americanism that her fiction attempts does not quite make for a smooth surface.18 Instead, it keeps them both in a creative tension that is innovative and challenging – and it is challenging precisely because it does not sanction, but rather highlights Western ignorance. For Mukherjee as a multilingual migrant writer, the dynamic between English, Bangla and her other languages looks fairly conventional in that their difference is mediated (although, as we have just seen, not quite muted) in translation. Multilingualism is not represented in the equivalent juxtaposition of several literary languages, or in the disruption of one by the other or in the conjoining of both in a new hybrid, as we have seen and will see other writers do in other chapters. Neither is English itself represented as oppressive or traumatic, as it was for Eva Hoffman or will be in the next chapter for Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, for example, and it is not idealized as the literary language par excellence, as in Richard Rodriguez’s work. Instead, the presence of wanderwords in their alien appearance invites reflection on cultural difference and the shortcomings of translation, which is complemented by thematic attention to the ideology of colonial English. The Tree Bride, in particular, makes it clear that a rational and taken-for-granted ‘natural, neutral, and beneficial’ English does have a colonial history, as ever of violence as well as literary tradition, which we would do well to remember. This we shall turn to next, by way of conclusion.

The safety of reading? Once again Alastair Pennycook reminds us that both English studies and the discourse of global English were forged in colonial education and language

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policy. He cites the Rev. James George’s prediction of English’s future in 1867: Other languages will remain, but will remain only as the obscure Patois of the world, while English will become the grand medium for all the business of government, for commerce, for law, for science, for literature, for philosophy, and divinity. Thus it will really be a universal language for the great material and spiritual interests of mankind. (qtd. in English, 133)

David Crystal, writing over a century later, illustrates how that ideology lives on in contemporary exaltations of English as a global language: English is used as an official or semi-official language in over 60 countries. . . . It is either dominant or well established in all six continents. It is the main language of books, newspapers, airports and air-traffic control, international business and academic conferences, science, technology, medicine, diplomacy, sports, international competitions, pop music, and advertising. . . . Of all the information in the world’s electronic retrieval systems, 80% is stored in English. (qtd. in Pennycook, English, 134)19

In the colonial narrative that Tara Chatterjee weaves in The Tree Bride from documents given to her by Victoria Khanna-Treadwell, rediscovered by herself on return to her ancestral desh of Mishtigunj, the ideological development of global English from colonial discourse is laid bare. In the framing narrative, Tara and Victoria (termed ‘semblables, soeurs’ in the text) speak the ‘glocal’ English that bears traces of their migrations and histories: ‘Her accent is as mangled as mine, clipped and clear, a bit English and Scottish, American and Canadian’ (The Tree Bride, 9).20 Meanwhile, in the framed story, the discourse of English plays a major part in colonial struggle. Vertie Treadwell, the British administrator in Bengal, echoes the Rev. George almost verbatim when he dismisses the native language of the Bengalis under his command as ‘vile patois’ (198). His counterpart John Mist, the English founder of Mishtigunj, however, stops speaking English altogether after a series of colonial exploits leave him disgusted with the British empire. Earlier, his deliberate silenceas-resistance to the British endows the mutiny on the Malabar Queen, which brought him to India, with literal meaning, while alluding to the first battle of Indian Independence, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, at the same time.21 Nigel Coughlin and other ‘white Hindoos’ in Bengal who, as the colonial expression

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has it, have ‘gone native’, likewise reject English along with the colonial enterprise and serve as exemplars of hybrid subjects for whom language is not neutral, but deeply political because implicated in colonial power relations. As Krishna Sen writes, ‘Mishtigunj turns out to be no pre-lapsarian idyll, but a cosmopolitan environment’ hybridized and alienated by British imperialism; in The Tree Bride’s ‘American fable of identity. . . . Mishtigunj is the centre and America the margin’ (65). All are killed by the British to set an example to natives and settlers alike. It is left to us, readers, to unravel the connection between the plight of the ‘white Hindoos’ in India and the brown AngloAmerican Chatterjees in San Francisco. What links them is that Tara becomes as much the object of disciplinary procedure at the hands of the Bengali bomber as John Mist and Nigel Coughlin were in the hands of the British: like them, she is punished in intra-ethnic strife by those who regard her as their own: Indian Muslims from Bengal. The intricate plot that Tara uncovers in the tree bride’s history under colonialism connects her heroic revolutionary ancestor, Tara Lata the tree bride, with Abbas Sattar Hai or Chris Dey – the imposter who maims her ex-husband in Desirable Daughters and kills her best friend, Victoria Khanna Treadwell, in The Tree Bride. It is a small but significant detail, if we take the context of post-9/11 border paranoia into account, that the Bengali bomber has entered the United States ‘via Mexico’. Sneja Gunew has written that ‘the rise of communications technologies and the rule of American transnational corporations (TNCs) . . . have disseminated a renewed dominance of a particular version of English over other European languages and cultures’ (732). In writing about the role of TNCs, Gunew adds an important factor in the spread and power of English as a global language: this particular version of English sounds and looks American, and appears to have shed its English–English legacy. As we have seen, however, is it not therefore neutral, purely instrumental or divested of its imperial burdens.22 English wields power precisely in its supposedly unmarked, technical, neutral, stripped-of . . . forms. And ‘globalization itself ’, Gunew observes, ‘may be defined as the manner in which one is rendered an object/abject in the face of the forces of globalized capital, communications systems, and TNCs’ (732). It is this notion of English and of globalization that I think Mukherjee takes as her subject, and her target, in Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride. Tara’s position as one of the winners, the subjects, is gradually turned into

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its opposite as she discovers, through her multilingualism and her researches in colonial history, that as a divorced and deracinated woman she is also an object/abject in the globalization game. In these two novels Mukherjee fuses the two kinds of globalization theory that Frederick Buell has identified. The first of these focuses on the global penetration of transnational capital (say, CHATTY) and is seen as a homogenizing force by theorists like Emmanuel Wallerstein and Frederic Jameson, while the second (represented by Roland Robertson and Arjun Appadurai) centres on the possibilities created, through migration and diaspora-formation, of ‘an uncertain creative kind of hybridity’ (Buell, 550). Buell highlights with foresight (he is writing in 1998) that ‘these same processes may produce increased fundamentalism, ethnic conflict and globalized terrorism’ (550). In Mukherjee’s novelistic translation of these two strands, the life of the wife of a communications millionaire of Hindu-Indian descent in Silicon Valley is intricately intertwined with that of a Muslim activist and gang member from the same region in Bengal. Ostensibly at opposite ends of the power spectrum of globalization, they are historically connected, and that connection blows up at the press of a cell phone button. Helpful in both Gunew’s and Buell’s astute critiques of globalization theory is that they see globalization not as product (a new economic order) nor as process (of new kinds of transnational interactions) but as discourse. The term ‘globalization’ itself is thus analysed for the discursive, or ideological, functions that it performs and this requires, in Buell’s view, ‘fine-grained analyses of the interactions between the new wave of global reorganization and existing national traditions and institutions (which, of course are . . . themselves the fruit of older waves of global-local interactions)’ (582). Those ‘older waves’ are, of course, colonialism and imperialism; in my reading of Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride Mukherjee is seen to perform just such a ‘fine-grained analysis’ of how the global and the local, British and American empires, and the transnational and national interact, by means of English, to creative and explosive effect. Because the bomber is a Muslim, parallels with 9/11 and global Islamic terrorism are implied, if not provoked through this imaginative rendering of what Tara at some point calls, with heavy irony, ‘the joys of globalization’. Yet it is important to recognize that for Mukherjee such violence is well-nigh

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inevitable and it is, moreover, not the product of a clash of cultures (as Samuel Huntington would have it) but – precisely – of the connectedness of people across the globe.23 That connectedness, enabled by global English, can be interpreted in creative as well as in destructive ways, and it is fortuitous that Mukherjee has explained in an interview how she herself sees the positive side of globalization. Interviewed by Bill Moyers for PBS on the subject of terrorism, Mukherjee was asked to comment on the epigraph to Desirable Daughters: ‘No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone’s path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone, and find my way’. She responded: This was a very important. . . . Sanskrit verse that I’d discovered by way of Octavio Paz, being translated by an American translator and literary critic, Elliott Weinberger. And the book of Octavio Paz poems, in which this occurs, was given to me by a Bolivian graduate student at the University of California Berkeley. That, to me, is globalization. (Moyers)

Like the terrorist in The Tree Bride, the Sanskrit verse thus enters the United States ‘via Mexico’ (Paz) and circulates, communicates and becomes part of Western literature via Spanish and into English. Camouflaged wanderwords, this example would suggest, have their uses not just as surreptitious challengers of Western ignorance but – in translation – also as contributors to something like a global culture. Globalization in this instance then is a community of transnational, intercultural, migrant and native readers and their many languages; Mukherjee here asserts what Tara in Desirable Daughters characterizes as ‘the heady kinship with the world that I feel through my reading’ (79).24 Bangla, as we saw at the very beginning of this chapter, is for Mukherjee the mother tongue that roots identity, while English, because of its many guises, is forked: it divides as much as it also has the capacity to connect. This is why translation into English – indispensable as it is for the formation of a global culture and a global literature – can also be treacherous in that it appears to sanction ignorance of other languages and cultures, and to merely further Anglo-American cultural imperialism. Like the ‘Literature of New Arrival’ Mukherjee identified at the beginning of this chapter, her later fiction returns to ‘the history of the homeland the immigrant author has left’ and

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certainly the ‘energy’ that she says characterizes their work is evident in her own too (‘Immigrant Writing’, 691; 695). Unlike writers such as Junot Díaz, however, Mukherjee’s heterolinguality is not one of language fusion, but of wanderwords-in-camouflage (call them battle fatigues) whose alien-ness is tempered by their transliteration into Roman script and whose primarily ethnographic signification-in-translation belongs firmly in the twentieth, rather than in the twenty-first century. However, this apparently conventional aesthetic practice has the power to unsettle us readers, as it introduces outsiders to the kinds of radical cultural differences and unexpected alliances that critique and de-centre the American way, while also confronting us with our own ignorance. Bangla, and Mukherjee’s other languages, remain central to all this as their spectral, transcribed presence serves to remind us that reading in English-only would be an impoverishment, that Bangla remains the mother tongue, ‘naming the world and all its emotions’ (Mukherjee, ‘The Way Back’, 11). How very differently attachment to the mother tongue can be represented in migrant writing when that tongue is forbidden and silenced is the subject of the next chapter, when in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée the mother’s exile echoes in the almost-absence of Korean too.

7

‘Words Cast to Weather’: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Words cast by each other to weather avowed indisputably, to time. If it should impress, make fossil trace of word, residue of word, stand as a ruin stands, simply, as mark having relinquished itself to time to distance (Cha, Dictée, 177)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée opens and closes with black pages on the inside cover, both of which have a photograph superimposed. It begins, even before the title page, with a picture of ancient stones, ruins, and ends with a faded photo of nine women, presumably Korean, in traditional dress. Both are ‘fossil traces’, of human lives, of civilizations now lost to memory but present, still, in their materiality, ‘simply, as mark’. The poem cited above comes from the penultimate printed page of Dictée, the part Stella Oh attributes to the tenth muse, but that is also themed by the Chinese number Chung Wai, ‘Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles’ (173). I take the poem both as an epigraph to this chapter on a multilingual text that doesn’t yield its weathered meanings easily, if at all, and as an epitaph for Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, murdered a few days after Dictée was published in 1982. To read Dictée in such knowledge is to read inscription on a gravestone, ruin, fossil trace, residue, relinquished to the vagaries of interpretation in another time and place. This then is a tribute, in the spirit of what Gustavo Perez-Firmat, pace Santayana, terms ‘imitative sympathy’: the fact and the violence of Cha’s untimely death shape my reading of the work and lend it a

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tragic quality, paradoxically both of promise unfulfilled and of definitive, final statement (Tongue Ties, 20). From the outset I treat ‘words cast to each other by weather’ as a Leitmotiv, a heuristic device to decipher the multilingual nature of Dictée, so radically different in its density and experimentation from all the other migrant texts discussed so far. What Geoffrey Hartman has written about the poetics of trauma applies to Cha’s writing, but also to our reading of it, in a particularly apposite way: literary words . . . bear the wound or are scarred by it . . . style means distressing the word, disturbing its sound-shape and semantic stability, marking it individually, even if the result is not only a remarkably rich verbal texture, but also not always resolvable ambiguity or plurisignificance. (‘Trauma within the Limits’, 260)

Trauma, by its very nature, is an absent cause of, in Hartman’s words again, an ‘affect that has an enduring, if chronic, psychic resonance’, as we shall see (264). Such affect cannot be rendered whole, but requires the distressed word and disturbed sound Hartman reads, symptomatically, as trauma’s style. Like the gravestone, fossil, ruin, Dictée stands as remains: artefact and organism, a whole made of fragments, framed by death, infused with a history of colonization and silencing, exile, yearning and mourning. Dictée is not a text, but more than a text, made up of images, poems, passages of life-writing, history, biography, essay and translation exercises. Juliana Spahr calls it a collage, which is fitting because of its analogy with visual art, its juxtaposition of like with unlike materials, and significant sutures (128). Divided into short sections, themselves grouped by the names of the Muses into nine chapters preceded and postscripted by programmatic and poetic language exercises, and mostly written in French and English, Dictée flaunts its diverse cultural source materials. These range from Korean history to Catholicism and the lives of the saints, to avant-garde writing and French film theory. Because of its diverse, unclassifiable, yet integral nature I shall refer to it as a book – however unsophisticated that sounds – a material and visual object, more than a text, more like a work of art. Although my focus here will be, necessarily, on the multilingual nature of Cha’s text, it is worth noting from the beginning that its multilingualism

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in an extended sense consists not only in the alternation of English and French passages with Latin phrases and Chinese ideograms. Yet another other language in Dictée is the visual: photography, film stills, facsimiles of manuscripts and calligraphy, with the latter two marking the transition from, or the combination of, written and visual languages. The frontispiece depicting Korean Han-gul script (further discussed below), while communicating a ‘secret’ message to readers who know Korean and its troubled history under Chinese and Japanese rule, also functions as a visual image in its own right, parallel and equivalent to the photograph of Korean women that appears inside the back cover of Dictée. Through its representation of script, the frontispiece is linked with the Chinese calligraphy and with facsimiles of Cha’s handwriting in the manuscript of Dictée, and with the enigmatic letters, typed and handwritten, to the enigmatic ‘Laura Claxton’. Furthermore, as Mayumi Takada and Sue Kim have shown in their readings of Dictée through the lens of Cha’s visual work as a film-maker and -theorist, the formal organization of the text and its thematization, in the later sections, of the cinematic viewing apparatus ‘implies that a reader’s interaction with words is synonymous with the viewer’s interaction with a film’ (Takada, 37).1 Takada and Kim’s analyses are illuminating because they place the book on a continuum with the rest of Cha’s artistic oeuvre, consisting of film, video, performance, works on paper and ‘mail art’. Reading Dictée in conjunction with the catalogue to an exhibition of Cha’s visual work, The Dream of the Audience, we can thus see how its themes of exile, language, presence and absence, silence, correspondence and imprints or marks are mirrored in visual works such as Exilée (film, 1980) Mouth to Mouth (video, 1975) Re Dis Appearing (video, 1977) Markings (work on paper, 1977) Mot Caché (rubber stamp, 1978) Aveugle Voix (performance, 1975) and Audience Distant Relative (mail art, 1977).2 Dictée then comes into view as an artist’s book, one of several Cha produced, but one (along with her edited collection of essays on film theory, Apparatus (1980)) that she chose to have published – and thus distributed – rather than exhibited in an art gallery. And the mysterious and misdirected letters to ‘Laura Claxton’ in the ‘Thalia: Comedy’ section, which are so resistant to interpretation and integration into Dictée, can now be seen as part of Cha’s larger interest in the notion of correspondence (often spelt en français ‘correspondance’) which is manifest in her work as a visual artist as well.

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Dictée: reading in circles ‘Correspondence’ links the letters to ‘Laura Claxton’ with a passage in the ‘Clio: Epic Poetry’ section, addressed to the mother: From one mouth to another, from one reading to the next the words are realized in their full meaning. The wind. The dawn or dusk the clay earth and traveling birds south bound birds are mouth pieces wear the ghost veil for the seed of message. Correspondence. To scatter the words. (Dictée, 48)

Mouth to mouth, ‘words cast to each other by weather’, correspondence and letters are a scattering of words to the elements. For, as L. Hyung Yi Kang observes about the ‘Laura Claxton’ letters, Cha’s interest in correspondence is not motivated by the connection it enables, but by the just missing of correspondence: the letters do not have a response and ‘one of them is an explanatory note about not being able to locate the  addressee’ (92). The words that are ‘realized in their full meaning’ then are going from mouth to mouth, reading to reading, but not as intended, or rather, the intention is to scatter. To realize full meaning is to ‘make real’ full meaning and ‘to be aware of ’ full meaning: it is for the author to exploit, fully, the multiplicity of meanings and to release their multiplication when the addressee is not reached, ‘from one reading to the next’. Cha’s method, fully realized in Dictée, is to invite a reading, a meaningmaking, in circles, as noted above. Juliana Spahr describes this as a decolo­ nization of reading: ‘Cha wants readers who, as they read, as they mouth the words, transform’ (125). Reading here is meaning-making, not meaningdiscovering nor a deciphering of poetic language as code, code that is frequently ‘switched’, moreover.3 To read in circles is to refuse linearity; insofar as Dictée offers narrative at all, it certainly is not the story of development derived from the Bildungsroman that characterizes so much migrant writing, as we have seen in the life-writing of Edward Bok, Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, and Richard Rodriguez, and as Rebecca L. Walkowitz notes (530–31; pace Eric Hayot). Neither is it the linearity of an in any way resolved history, as is evident from Cha’s critique of historiography in the ‘Clio: History’ section on the revolutionary Yu Guan Soon: This document is transmitted through, by the same means, the same channel without distinction the content is delivered in the same style: the  word.

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The image. To appeal to the masses to congeal the information to make bland, mundane, no longer able to transcend their own conspirator method. . . . Neutralized to achieve the no-response, to make absorb, to submit to the uni-directional correspondance. (Dictée, 33)

This passage describes exactly what Dictée itself is not: not designed for popular appeal, not bland, not mundane, not neutral, not unidirectional but demanding, through its very complexity of form and its frequent obstructions in the channel of words, active reading, participation and interpretation. ‘History, the old wound,’ the following lines argue, must be named so as not to be repeated, and must be written so as not to be forgotten, but written in fragments and circles, so as not to be easily digestible in well-worn words and lines: ‘To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion’ (Dictée, 33). The latter plea is, of course, also a manifesto for avant-garde writing, linking up with that strain of modernism virulently opposed to mass culture and engaged in the project of revitalizing language, ‘making it new’ in Ezra Pound’s words.4 More than any of the other writers discussed so far, Cha’s work really engages with the materiality of language and with the poetic potential of languages-in-contact, as well as with the graphic dimension of words and scripts, and the visual impact of mute or silenced blank spaces. In her reading of the way film theory informs ‘Erato: Love Poetry’ furthermore, Takada shows how Cha’s writing mimics, in its effect on the reader, the ‘boundarilessness’ of film viewing. As Freud first described it in ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’, this is the ability of the viewer to occupy multiple subject positions at once, to shift identifications not at will but unconsciously. Cha writes: It is you who know to hear it in the music so late in the night. Then it becomes you, the man, her companion, the live-in student accompanying her to school how many times as a young girl. It is you who hears his music for her while she sleeps. It is you sitting behind him looking at the moon the clouds the lake shimmering. You are she, she speaks you, you speak her, she cannot speak. (Dictée, 106)

The reader becomes, in Takada’s words, ‘fluid . . . no longer bound to the camera’s movements and moves about as in a filmic space, as in a dream, both observer and agent’ (43).5 The passage in Dictée continues: ‘They do not touch. It is not like that. The touching made so easy the space filled full with touch.

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The entire screen. To make the sequences move. In close up. To fabricate the response. So soon. Too (Dictée, 106–08). Then there is a blank page, followed by ‘immediate. To make fully evident the object. The touch. Making void the reticence of space the inner residence of space’ (106–08). Reflection, in the double sense of filmic light- and self-reflection, is at issue here in the subtle shift from ‘reticence’ to ‘inner residence’ of space. And as I see it, the resistance to linear narrative is transcribed into a resistance to the ‘flow’ of cinematic images too: ‘to make the sequences move’ is ‘too soon, too immediate’. Instead, there is a need for pause, represented in the blank page that forces a halt to proceedings and inhibits ‘touching made so easy’: the screen must be emptied, and the reticence/residence of the screen space made ‘void’ and thus visible in its emptiness, its illusory nature. But this is difficult stuff: what seems to happen in the course of a page is a move from multiple identifications to none at all; although the viewer is fluid she or he is not allowed to get carried away on the stream of consciousness engendered by the flow of images, or words, on the screen or page. Sue Kim, in a strongly argued analysis of Cha’s contribution to film theory, ‘Commentaire’, explains how for Cha and the critics included in her edited collection Apparatus, ‘Filmic apparatuses and processes, which are ideologically neutral and can be broken down, and examined, and manipulated in different ways, are seen as inherently serving apparatuses of power’ (161). Kim critiques this stance as formalist and identifies in her essay many of the features of Dictée (principally those associated with French film theory) that date the book to the arid high theory of the early 1980s, with its insistence that the apparatus (the means of production, so to speak) be exposed in any artistic endeavour as a political gesture. But for Kim, as for me, Dictée, despite this datedness, does not fall foul of the political overreach embedded in the idea that formal experimentation in itself equals radicalism, an overreach that characterized so much of 1980s theory, as she argues that [T]he particular innovation of [Dictée] comes from its coupling of the formal strategies, which always self-reflexively insist upon scepticism of signification, with the particular histories and contexts dealt with in the novel. In that sense, it responds not only to aesthetic realism or ideologies that depend on easy predication and identification, but also to postmodern and modernist aesthetics. (163)

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Though Kim is strangely off-base in designating Dictée as a novel, her conclusion – much more importantly – positions Cha’s text not within but against postmodern and modernist aesthetics, because of Cha’s insistence on the importance and the materiality of Korean history. With that observation, we are back to ‘Clio: History’, and to a key section of Dictée: To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology. . . . Not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this experience, for this outcome, that does not cease to continue. (32)

This oft-quoted passage notably insists on the ‘flesh and bone’ of historical experience – and its Korean particularity – that for Cha, as an immigrant to the United States of the second wave, ‘does not cease to continue’. Those familiar with trauma theory are familiar with this phenomenon too. What Greg Forten writes in a different context fits here perfectly: ‘the trauma of the historical events affects those who do not live through them with the same force as those who do. It proposes that to inherit a history is to have transmitted to one a disturbance that never stops disturbing’ (277). In other words, it ‘does not cease to continue’. As we shall see in the next section, this identification of Cha’s first-person voice with the first generation of Korean immigrants’ sense of trauma and exile, not settlement, in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, testifies further to Dictée’s project as a ‘fossil trace’ of memory, but one that, in the poem cited at the beginning of this chapter, is ‘avowed indisputably, to time’. An excursus into Korean history is therefore necessary because it has everything to do with the near-absence of Korean in Dictée. On the face of it, Cha’s interest in the history of the homeland, which Bharati Mukherjee saw as characteristic of the new immigration in the previous chapter, might be taken for a roots-type search for origin. We would be much mistaken to read Dictée in this light, however, because Cha’s excavation of Korean history uncovers only route upon route of displacement and exile, never reaching any kind of homeland at all. Such exile is mainly figured through the missing mother, and then – but by implication only – through the missing mother tongue as well.

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Dictée and the question of history Sue Kim’s conclusion, quoted above, that the political significance of Dictée lies in the combination of radically disjunctive form with an insistence on the particularity and concreteness of Korean historical experience elegantly resolves the split in Cha criticism between those who read Dictée as an avant-garde text and those who would claim it for migrant literature. The critical exchange that took place between Priscilla Wald and scholars of Asian American literature, like Elaine Kim and Shelley Sunn Wong in 1990, highlights Dictée’s multicultural doublespeak.6 With its classical references, its feminist themes, avant-garde writing, use of French film theory and of French as well as English, the text flatters the (what counts in the West as) welleducated reader, and with its thematization of subjectivity and the difficulty of signification it invites, furthermore, theoreticist readings. At the same time, its signs of Korean-ness (the photograph of Han-gul script, the folksong, the passages on the mother and on Korean history) are legible in their historical and contemporary ramifications only to those well-educated enough to know that language and that history, a knowledge that is still relegated to the realm of the ‘ethnic’ and thus marginalized in the terms of Western academic power relations. When it comes to Koreans, those power relations rule outside academe too. Both in Writing Self Writing Nation and in a later essay, ‘Myth, Memory, and Desire’, Elaine Kim draws attention to the political signification of the phrase ‘the L.A. riots’ after the Rodney King beatings in 1992, for example. Although victimized in these cataclysmic events, Korean Americans ‘found themselves being inscribed widely in print and visual media not only as inarticulate aliens but also as racist, grasping ghetto merchants with thoughts of no one and nothing except themselves and their property’, Kim writes (‘Myth, Memory, and Desire’, 86). Ronald Takaki explains further how and why the ‘riots’ are remembered by Korean Americans as sa-i-ku or sa-i-gu (29 April), an attack against themselves in which they were made the scapegoats for America’s race problem (Strangers, 493). Sa-i-gu then became, in a way, the obverse of another significant date in Korean American memory: the sa-il-ku (19 April) of 1960, when a ‘student-led uprising toppled the U.S.installed government of Syngman Rhee’ in South Korea, as Elaine H. Kim

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reminds us (Kim, ‘Poised’, 20). According to Kim, the events of sa-i-ku (29 April 1992) through their resonance with this earlier event in living memory bound Korean Americans together and renewed Dictée’s importance as a text ‘about Korean and Korean American nationalism’ (‘Preface’, x). What made sa-i-gu particularly traumatic was that it evoked memories of repeated violence against Koreans, both in the United States and in the history of the nation. Dictée refers, in particular, to the period of Japanese annexation of Korea, from 1910 to 1945, when Koreans were forbidden to speak their own language on pain of death and were forced to take Japanese names. Many, such as Cha’s forebears, were exiled to Manchuria, where Cha’s mother was born and worked as a teacher. Suppression of the native language reached there too: ‘The teachers speak in Japanese to each other. You are Korean. All the teachers are Korean’ (Dictée, 49). As Lisa Lowe also observes, this narration of the mother’s sojourn in Manchuria and the imposition of Japanese upon Korean subjects there directly address the title of Dictée and its theme of imposed speech and correct writing: ‘They force their speech upon you and direct your speech only to them’ (Dictée, 50). As the Americanizing campaigners of the early twentieth century, discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, also knew, ‘schooling is an integral part of the state apparatus’, in Lowe’s words, and she adds that ‘in the case of Japanese rule in Korea it functioned as a primary locus for socializing, and “dictating” subjects in the colonial language, culture, and hierarchy’ (Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, 45). In an earlier passage in ‘Clio: History’, the narrator represents the era preceding the mother’s exile through the iconic figure of Yu Guan Soon, who was killed in 1920 for her resistance to the Japanese. At times the narrator slips from her third-person biographical narration into identification with Yu Guan Soon’s perspective: ‘our country, even with 5,000 years of history, has lost it to the Japanese’ (Dictée, 28; emphasis added). Like Jeanne D’ Arc and Sainte Thérèse, who will appear later in Dictée, and like the mother and the Muses, Yu Guan Soon is a resister (Cha would have made of this ‘re sister’) not just opposed to Japanese rule but to male rule as well: ‘There is already a nationally organized movement, who do not accept her seriousness, her place as a young woman. . . . She is not discouraged’ (30). Yu Guang Soon takes part in the uprising against the Japanese on 1 March of 1919, another landmark date in Korean history, ‘familiar to virtually everyone in North and

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South Korea, but  . . . completely unknown in the West’, Elaine Kim writes (‘Poised’, 10). This Western ignorance of Korean history, which makes this almost a secret history, is highlighted by Kim as much as by Lisa Lowe in Writing Self Writing Nation, in keeping with Cha’s insistence on the necessity of rescuing history from oblivion in Dictée. Documents are inserted into ‘Clio: History’, in the form of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports and a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt ‘from the Koreans of Hawaii’ in 1905, asking the United States to intervene in the imminent annexation of Korea by Japan. The letter remains unanswered – another example of ‘missed correspondence’. The  section ends with a photograph of three figures, presumably Koreans, standing in a field with their arms outstretched, about to be shot by a firing squad, presumably Japanese.7 The historical narrative, halting and disjunctive as it is, is resumed in ‘Melpomene: Tragedy’ with a letter dated 19 April, the anniversary of sa-il-ku 1960, only: ‘Nothing has changed, we are at a standstill. I speak in another tongue now, a second tongue a foreign tongue. All this time we have been away. But nothing has changed. A stand still’ (80). The standstill is the impasse of the Cold War which has divided North from South Korea, declared a demilitarized zone along the border and separated families and generations. The standstill, also, is the echo of a 1962 student demonstration with another demonstration 18 years later: ‘The police the soldiers anonymous they duplicate themselves, multiply in number invincible they execute their role’ (84). But although nothing has changed (‘You are your post you are your vow in nomine patris’) there is a shift: ‘you work your post you are your nation defending your country from subversive infiltration from your own countrymen’ (86). The return to Korea is not a homecoming, and at the end of ‘Melpomene’ the Muse is invoked ‘to exorcize from this mouth the name the words the memory of severance through this act by this very act to utter once, Her once, Her to utter at once, She without the separate act of uttering’, as if articulation alone could undo the severance from the motherland and the separation of mother from daughter (89). Striking about Dictée’s re-construction of Korean history is the narrator’s investment in the nationalist fervour of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations, which she makes her own.8 As Priscilla Wald observes, ‘Cha’s transnational imagery marks the tenacity rather than dissolution of national

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frontiers and the rocky terrain of unequal power relations they delimit’ (215). Unlike Bharati Mukherjee’s, Cha’s transnationalism is figured and mourned as a disabling exile; the notion of partition haunts Dictée. In her detailed and thoughtful reading of the text as a ‘ritual’, which ‘ends at the border between child and mother, figured as a paper screen’, Josephine Nock-Hee Park shows just how many versions of boundaries and borders there are in Dictée. The list includes glass, screen, veil, shade, shield, shelter, mist and filter, all barring access to that which is desired. Read as a quest for the mother, ‘the text takes on this goal fully cognizant of the impossibility of attaining it’, Park observes (238). However flimsy the border may be, its crossing or dissolution is forever deferred, as both reunion of mother and child and reunification of North and South Korea remain within the realm of desire, beyond the bounds of the book. In Strangers from a Different Shore Ronald Takaki draws on living memory to write a history of Korean Americans. He makes a clear distinction between those Koreans who came to the United States as refugees from Japanese rule at the beginning of the twentieth century and those who came from the 1960s onwards. The first generation, according to one of his informants, ‘thought of themselves as exiles, not as immigrants,’ whereas ‘the new immigrants have been coming as settlers, yimin, and have been bringing their families to America’ (Strangers, 285; 437). Perhaps Dictée’s first person’s identification with her parents’ plight and Korean nationalism originates in Cha’s own history of migrating with her family to Hawaii in 1962, when she was 11 years old, and then to San Francisco in 1964, just before the 1965 Immigration Act opened the borders to immigration from Asia. Positioned in between Takaki’s two generations, the Cha family’s migration to America was but the latest in a series of displacements (Korea-Manchuria-Korea-Hawaii-California) lived in exile from a united and independent motherland. Elaine Kim explains how she, like Cha, grew up with her parents’ pride in Korean culture and their desire to maintain it in America, ‘part of a secret life we lived, always in America but never of it. It was important to me to think of what was “ours,” though ignored and refused in the dominant culture, as deliberately kept secrets’ (‘Poised’, 5). Lawrence R. Rinder adds to this that ‘Confucianism . . . serves as a model for Cha’s recurring invocation of filial connection,’ which may give us further insight into Cha’s predicament, though it is probably wise to bear David

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Palumbo-Liu’s cautionary remarks in mind about the orientalist obfuscations that the mention of ‘Confucianism’ in American political discourse tends to bring with it (Palumbo-Liu, 194–203 passim) (18).9 Clear is that Dictée assumes this filial connection, that it runs along the maternal line and that it is associated with the duty to make a secret history public, but not in such a way as to make it easily digestible – because it isn’t. Dictée’s preoccupation with speech  – its historical (im)possibility, its necessity, its production, its regulation – thus derives from this specific historical burden. A caveat is necessary here too, however, because ‘speaking out’ and ‘finding a voice’ are critical clichés of feminism and multiculturalism that are all too often left unexamined, as Deborah M. Mix has written. In an inversion of the usual valorizations of speech and silence, she cautions that ‘it is crucial to recognize the ways silence can signify resistance and the ways speaking can be used in the service of dominance and subjugation’, and she refers to Dictée’s use of blank pages, untranslated multilingual passages and broken-up syntax to illustrate this point (Mix, 204). I shall examine Cha’s thematization of speech in greater detail below, but believe it is also necessary to look at the more general issue of the representation of speech production and -regulation, which is something of a cultural stereotype when it comes to East Asian American speech. The narrator in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, for example, allows himself to be nicknamed ‘Yerrow Pelir’ in the painful awareness that his pronunciation of ‘l’ and ‘r’ is not up to American English scratch. As with all stereotypes, there is some truth to the notion that it is difficult for native speakers of Korean, Mandarin, Japanese and other languages to learn the English phonetic system that is so different from their own. Because Native Speaker takes the production and regulation of speech as its major marker of ethnicity, a brief detour to its representation of Korean-Americanness by comparison with Cha’s poetics and politics of voice is in order.

Mouth to mouth: the poetics of speech production Dictée and Native Speaker approach their similar themes in very different ways. Whereas Cha chisels her words out of stone, resisting fluency in any language and breaking up grammar as well as narrative, Lee tells a harrowing

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story of a child’s death and the dissolution and subsequent restoration of its parents’ relationship in a beautifully stylized American English interrupted by the occasional Korean wanderword. If Dictée’s voice can be read to represent Takaki’s first exiled generation of Koreans in the United States, Lee’s narrator appears to be typical of the second, born in America, the son of a Korean grocer, married to an American woman of Scottish descent.10 Yet, strikingly, both explore the production and regulation of speech as a marker of migrant identity, albeit in contrasting ways. To some extent this is due to generic difference between the texts: by contrast with Dictée’s experimentalism Native Speaker is recognizably a novel and works with the institutional – we might say ideological – features of the form that Lisa Lowe identifies, such as integrative narrative and ‘the unification of the citizen with the “imagined community” of the nation’, which it also critiques (Immigrant Acts, 98). Native Speaker begins with the dissolution of a marriage largely due, we are told at the beginning, to the narrator Henry Park’s alien-ness and secretiveness; the list of character flaws his wife gives him includes several orientalist stereotypes such as ‘illegal alien’, ‘emotional alien’, ‘Yellow Peril: neo-American’, ‘stranger’, ‘follower’, ‘traitor’ and ‘spy’ (5). These designations are, of course, a mixture of old and new insults to Asian immigrants; the ‘neo-American’ is hated for her success, the ‘illegal alien’ despised for his illegitimacy and presumed difference, visible and cultural. The familiar double bind of discrimination against Asian Americans is expressed by Fukuko Kobayashi as ‘the mainstream’s image of them either as “unassimilable” or an over-assimilated “model minority”’ (66). Only later in this linear narrative, interrupted by flashbacks, does it become clear that the child’s death has caused a crisis in the Parks’ marriage, which is eventually overcome. Both the alienation between Henry Park and his wife Lelia and their reconciliation are in part figured through Lelia’s work as a speech therapist: The children she saw had all kinds of articulation problems, some because of physiological defects like cleft palates or tied tongues. Others had had laryngectomies, or else defective hearing, or learning disabilities, or for an unknown reason had begun speaking much later than was normal. And then others – the ones I always paid close attention to – came to her because they had entered the first grade speaking a home language other

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than English. . . . All day she helped these children manipulate their tongues and their lips and their exhaling breath, guiding them through the difficult language. (2)

The work of second-language acquisition, but also assimilation to American ways and structures of feeling, is condensed in the notion of correct pronunciation of English and the fact of having another language is regarded as a handicap analogous to physiological defects or learning disabilities. Lee thus literalizes and critiques the metaphor of finding a voice: to be projected, let alone heard, the voice cannot simply be ‘found’ but has to be produced and the physiological apparatus regimented to conform to American rules. Cha literalizes as well and perhaps more so. In ‘Urania: Astronomy’, she reproduces anatomical drawings of the speech-production apparatus (larynx, air passages and lungs) juxtaposed with a poem on the facing page that collapses literal and metaphorical meanings of finding a voice: Stop. Start. Starts. Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise. Broken speech. One to one. At a time. Cracked tongue. Broken tongue. Pidgeon. Semblance of speech. (Dictée, 75)

The word ‘pidgeon’ is a mis-spelling of another type of degraded speech, pidgin, but also works to call to mind a pigeon’s fussy movement of the head and neck, and its call that is pigeon-speak but only ‘semblance of speech’.11 Both ‘pidgeons’ have colonial overtones and exist somewhere between mere noise and communication, as signification pure and simple, unfit for more sophisticated ends. In Native Speaker, speech and silence are contrasted throughout as markers of American-ness and Korean-ness, respectively, embodied in Lelia and Henry Park, and in their occupations: his as a detective/spy engaged in uncovering secrets that require his silence, and hers as a speech therapist and aspiring poet, dependent on voice. As Elda Tsou has pointed out in her reading of the novel as allegory, ‘The motif of espionage is an obvious signal of potential double meanings, and it is complicated by the additional conceit of the ethnic spy,’ to which I would add: and that of the ‘ethnic voice’ (576). Their differences are worked through and in the end resolved through their

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joint work with children, with the narrator acting as the ‘Speech Monster’ in what is ‘really a form of day care, ESL-style’ in inner city schools where the couple act out the drama of learning to speak ‘properly’, but without believing in it. Instead, they subvert their mission and it is Lelia, the Anglo-American ‘pale white woman horsing with the language’ who becomes the learner, even as she acts the teacher: ‘She wants them to know that there is nothing to fear . . . to show them it’s fine to mess it all up.’ When she calls out the children’s names at the end of the novel, ‘taking care of every last pitch and accent, . . . . I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are’ (349).12 Daniel Kim summarizes the novel’s linguistic agenda accordingly as ‘aim[ing] to expand the conventional American understanding of who gets to count as a native speaker and thus a native son’ (245). In this way, Native Speaker achieves the integration and the reconciliation of Park, former ‘traitor and spy’, with the nation that Lisa Lowe writes about, although this is a nation with a crucial difference: Lee figures the United States as multilingual. Native Speaker is a much more complex novel than the speech-narrative I have extracted here suggests; in its interweaving of a family drama with American politics and the problematic of bicultural desire, his writing is as reminiscent of Philip Roth as of Richard Wright or Ellison’s Invisible Man, with which Native Speaker has most often been compared.13 But the point I am making here is that Lee’s representation of Korean-ness is strikingly similar to Cha’s, in that they both focus on language as embodied, with all that connotes: the difficulties of speech production, but also cultural habits and histories, and memories inherited from their parents’ generation. These memories live on in a native language that can no longer be shared except with that traumatized generation which has largely been silenced, and become excessively careful with words, as Park and his father are, in America. In Native Speaker it is John Kwang, the local politician whose staff Park joins as an undercover agent, who voices Korean history to a largely Korean American audience: If you are listening to me now and you are Korean, and you pridefully own your own store, your yah-cheh-ga-geh that you have built up from nothing, know these facts. . . . Remember, or now know, how Koreans were cast as the dogs of Asia, remember the way our children could not speak their own

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language in school, remember how they called each other by the Japanese names forced upon them, remember the public executions of patriots and the shadowy murders of collaborators, remember our feelings of disgrace and penury and shame, remember most of all the struggle to survive with one’s identity still strong and alive (152–53).

Kwang’s speech recites ‘the same’ Korean history Cha draws on in Dictée, but his highly rhetorical eloquence could hardly be more different from Cha’s broken-up, halting, traumatized speech. Also it is ironic that Kwang addresses his audience in English, speaking of ‘our feelings’ and ‘our children’, but noting that those children could not speak ‘their own’ language in school in Korea, just as they cannot in America either. Park’s father, now the retired owner of three yah-cheh-ga-gehs in New York City, is frequently taunted for the way he speaks, and Park himself has been treated by speech therapists in his younger days, ‘saved from the wild’ as he puts it, ironically (232). Daniel Kim notes the further irony that ‘there is a radical disjuncture between the language being described’, like the father’s broken, halting speech and the narrator’s elegant and precise English. ‘His is the language that remains when every last trace of the immigrant tongue has been scraped away,’ writes Kim, as if it were necessary to prove, after all, that native speech is only produced by a vocal apparatus ‘cleansed of any defect or imperfection’ (252). Park is aware, however, that one culture’s normality is another’s difficulty or shortcoming: Native speakers may not fully know this, but English is a scabrous mouthful. In Korean, there are no separate vowels for L and R, the sound is singular and without a baroque Spanish trill or roll. There is no B and V for us, no P and F. . . . I always hear myself displacing the two languages, conflating them – maybe conflagrating them – for there’s so much rubbing and friction, a fire always threatens to blow up between the tongues. Friction, affliction. (233–34)

The racist cliché about ‘l’ and ‘r’ in East Asian languages is quietly reworked in those last two words to contrast a Korean perspective on language difference (friction) with an American-English one (affliction); the transposition of ‘r’ in ‘friction’ to ‘l’ in ‘affliction’ exposes how the discourse of ‘defect’, coming from monolingual ignorance, serves the dominant order especially well when it is internalized by those whose first language is not English.

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Nevertheless, Korean has a presence in America in Native Speaker. The way the novel represents the regimentation of American speech can be read as a critique – not just of monolingualism, but of Americanization per se to some extent. This is an instance where the speech theme gives a different slant to Lee’s use of Korean wanderwords, which are otherwise fairly seamlessly integrated into the novel’s American English, their meanings either translated or clarified in the narrative context. Like Mukherjee’s, most Korean words and expressions are used for greetings, honorifics, indications of class or rank and food, but unlike Mukherjee’s they are narratively situated in the speech of second-generation American citizens. The key wanderword is ‘ggeh’, the money club that serves a community through a mixture of savings, investments and the giving of micro-credit to those members who ask for it and are deemed deserving. Within the political plot of Native Speaker the new ggeh devised by John Kwang develops into a resource for a multiethnic community that is otherwise excluded from the financial ‘services’ and institutions of American capitalism, and Kwang’s demise is largely due to the ggeh’s success, exploited and defrauded by one of his workers. As a Korean concept the ggeh thus stands as an enlightened alternative to capital and highlights the latter’s discriminatory, exclusionary features in the land of opportunity. Lee’s novel, however is, by comparison with Dictée, rather muted in its linguistic and political critique. To cite Lisa Lowe once more on the novel as a cultural institution: ‘[it] regulates formations of citizenship and the nation, genders the domains of “public” and “private” activities, prescribes the spatialization of race relations, and, most of all, determines possible contours and terrains for the narration of “history”’ (Immigrant Acts, 98). All this is true of Native Speaker, even if it does revise, as we have seen, dominant definitions of citizenship and nation through multilingualism. In this novel of the contemporary United States, Korean ‘history’ has a place as precisely that: history, the past, memory. And it is a memory that – as we saw in John Kwang’s speech – has to be remembered where it is no longer lived, because it is no longer lived, but in the process of being overcome. This stands in stark contrast to the mourning of history in Dictée, where the memory of a broken and split homeland is lived and relived in a broken tongue, split between second and third languages – and speech-less in Korean.

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Dictée’s multilingualism and the absence of Korea(n) Cha’s English, French, Latin and Chinese ‘words cast by each other to weather’ are not Doris Sommer’s joyful, playful bilingual games, but more akin to Gustavo Perez-Firmat’s melancholy muse (see Chapter 2). If there is gaming, it is a game of life and death, war and history and the difficulty of articulation, producing the ‘particular and unconventional aesthetic effects’ and the ‘respect for the displaced and culturally overloaded artists’ who write bilingually – multilingually, in Cha’s case – that Sommer writes about, ‘even when one language feels more precarious than another’ (‘Introduction’ to Bilingual Games, 2). Korean is the language that feels ‘more precarious’ in Dictée, precarious and precious, but it is worth noting that where Sommer assumes playfulness, even if with a critical edge at times, Cha’s aesthetic practice comes from necessity more than choice. Ultimately, it comes from trauma’s inarticulate and stumbling articulacy; ‘the eloquent stutterance called poetry’ that Geoffrey Hartman writes about in an essay on trauma and poetry literally characterizes Dictée (‘Trauma within the Limits’, 264). From its very inception in the title, Dictée tries to wrest creative possibility from the violence and imposition of language, of the linguistic order, which is, in the Lacanian sense that Cha was familiar with, also a patriarchal order, one that is resisted and countered here with the marked absent presence of the mother tongue. The second image in the book, the frontispiece verso of the title page, shows a picture of inscriptions on an indeterminate background, reading in Elaine H. Kim’s translation from the Korean: Mother I miss you I am hungry I want to go home to my native place14

Placed at the beginning of the book, but outside the textual boundaries of Dictée, these are the only wanderwords in Korean script Cha uses, and it is significant that their provenance is Japan, not Korea. Dictée tells in part, as we saw above, the history of the mother, Huo Hyung Soon, exiled in Manchuria during Japan’s long occupation of Korea (1910–45). It is now thought that the inscription was carved into a tunnel built by Korean labourers and designed to provide safe exit for the Japanese emperor during World War II. Although

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its exact genesis has been disputed, the location of the inscription in Japan bears witness to colonial oppression at the same time as the words, in their yearning for the mother, project Korea as the motherland and affirm Korean as the mother tongue.15 Dictée is thus, among many other things, a book of displacement and desire, and just as the mother is exiled and yearned for in the narrator’s recuperation of her history, so also is Korean, the mother tongue, exiled to the book’s outer limits but inscribed in a secret but permanent mark of resistance to those who would obliterate it. Korean is the language the mother is forbidden to speak in exile, yet continues to practise, if only to herself: Still, you speak the tongue the mandatory language like the others. It is not your own. Even if it is not you know you must. You are Bi-lingual. You are Tri-lingual. The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge. It is being home. Being who you are. (45–6)

Like Bharati Mukherjee’s Bangla, the mother tongue roots and stabilizes identity, constitutes subjectivity – but only ‘in the dark’. Unlike Mukherjee’s Bangla, Korean is the forbidden language that can only be used in secret, not just as narrated but also in the narrating discourse. The striking thing about Dictée, so striking because invisible and so invisible as to be un-remarked upon, is that it keeps Korean to itself ‘in the dark, in secret’ as well. Although language – as imposition, as ritual, as embodied, as authoritative (religious, nationalist, historiographical) – is examined from all angles, the native language is only ever referred to at one remove, in what is represented but not as a means of representation itself. Korean script (Han-gul) never appears except in that insurgent frontispiece easily passed over by the unobservant reader, or those ignorant of Han-gul. Insurgent because the frontispiece, as critics who know Korean have observed, performs the same function in Dictée as the original inscription did in the historically oppressive setting of Japan during World War II: it speaks from Korean silencing and invisibility to, if not liberation, then certainly presence and self-assertion, through and ‘to time to distance’.16 Furthermore, in the text of Dictée only two Korean wanderwords appear, shortly after the passage about the mother tongue quoted above: To speak makes you sad. Yearning. To utter each word is a privilege you risk by death. Not only for you but for all. All of you who are one, who by law

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tongue tied forbidden of tongue. You carry at the center the mark of the red above and the mark of blue below, heaven and earth, tai-geuk and t’ai chi. . . . You carry the mark in your chest, in your MAH-UHM, in your MAH-UHM, in your spirit-heart. (46; emphasis added)

‘Tai-geuk’ is the Korean term for yin and yang, in Chinese ‘taiji’, represented as red and blue, respectively.17 ‘Mah-uhm’ is translated (by Elaine Kim) as ‘spirit heart’ and followed by a rendering in English of Bong Sun Hwa, a Korean folk song.18 The only Korean words that wander into the English of Dictée therefore belong, as Mukherjee’s mantra to Kali did, to the semantic domain of a distinctly non-Western conception of self and world, akin to the 10 principles of Confucianism written in Chinese and English on pages 154 and 173, respectively, a realm beyond history and politics. Korean then, unlike the native languages of other writers who have produced bilingual texts (such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Gustavo Perez-Firmat and Susana Chávez-Silverman), is not a public, literary or print language in Dictée. Nor is it rendered in the way that Chang-rae Lee does in Native Speaker, as speech that can be represented in transcription and/or translation to signify cultural difference, as in Lee’s treatment of Henry Park’s father’s speech, which appears artificial and highly formal when mediated through English. What this almost-absence of Korean means in Dictée is harder to interpret. In ‘Poised on the In-Between’, Elaine Kim explains what it would have meant for a Korean American woman like Cha in the 1960s to become a ‘real’ Korean: she would have had to learn from another woman ‘to speak “feminine” Korean in a soft, lilting voice’, study Korean history and accept its patriarchal bent, and behave like a true Korean female, conforming to ‘ideals of feminine modesty, frugality, chastity, fidelity, and maternal sacrifice’ (‘Poised’, 6). These are not ideals easily compatible with Western feminism, and the almost-absence of Korean in Dictée might thus be explained with reference to Cha’s consistent critique of patriarchy in the text. This interpretation, however, is far less convincing than the idea that the Korean language, far from being tainted by patriarchy, is banished from the text and so conspicuously absent in sight and sound as a sign for the mother’s absence, for the impossibility of return to the homeland and the maternal language.

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Of course, the daughter/narrator of Dictée does return to Korea, but the experience is precisely not one of homecoming: You return and you are not one of them, they treat you with indifference. All the time you understand what they are saying. But the papers give you away. . . . They ask you identity. They comment upon your inability or ability to speak. . . . They say you look other than you say. As if you didn’t know who you were. You say who you are but you begin to doubt . . . when did you leave the country why did you leave this country why are you returning to the country. (56–7)

The play of words, ‘you identity’ instead of the possessive ‘your identity’, puts identity in question and the contrast between ‘they say’/’you say’ and ‘who you were’/‘who you are’ reinforces the doubt. And the border patrol’s questions at the end of this passage (with their repetition, in turn, of ‘the country’/‘this country’/‘the country’ where it is unclear which country is meant) merge with the narrator’s own uncertainty about who she is or was and why she has left or is coming ‘back’ to Korea – or the United States. The question of home thus remains a question, as is the ‘ability or inability to speak’. Shirley Geok Lin-Lim suggests in ‘The Im/Possibility of Writing in Two Languages’ that where there is an impasse between language and silence – as there is so often in Dictée – this might alert us to ‘the presence of another language in a monolingual English-language text purporting to represent a multilingual life’ (44). I read Dictée, precisely because of the almost-absence of Korean, as a work that is haunted by the mother tongue as a private domain of selfhood and nourishment, not lost but projected, in many ways as an obscure objet du désir, forever deferred and, because deferred, overlaid with second, acquired and/or imposed languages: English, French, Chinese. Unlike these, Korean is primary: the equation of mother tongue and mother’s milk, familiar from the French écriture féminine, is literalized in Cha’s use of the word ‘utter’ as verb, as adjective, and even as a neo-noun. Its phonetic rhyme, in American English, with ‘udder’ enhances this lexical overlap and semantic consensuality:19 Begins imperceptibly, near-perceptible. (Just once. Just one time and it will take.) She takes. She takes the pause. Slowly. From the thick. The thickness. From weighted motion upwards. Slowed. To deliberation even when it

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passed upward through her mouth again. The delivery. She takes it. Slow. The invoking. All the time now. All the time there is. Always. And all times. The pause. Uttering. Hers now. Hers bare. The utter. (5)

Breastfeeding and the formation of speech are here drawn together in one act of imbibing language-as-mother’s-milk: ‘the utter’ as breast and utterance and as ultimate articulation of the bond between mother and child, language and body. However, the bond that enables articulation – speech – is cast as desire, as jouissance in dreamspace and dreamtime, ‘Always. And all times. . . . The utter,’ rather than remembered or relived.20 As Lisa Lowe observes in ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, ‘the relationship of the subject to the figure of the mother is never naturalized as an unmediated identification . . . the writing thematizes union, but through a reformulated notion of reunion that is displaced by departure, distance, and return’ (62). Like the mother tongue that escapes representation and is marked for its absence in Dictée, so also is the mother yearned for in her permanent absence. Both are, ultimately, fantasies of union and self-identity kept out of the bounds of the text, and therefore safe and inviolable. Writing is added to the conflation of breast milk and speech later on, in ‘Urania: Astronomy’, which begins with a meditation on the giving of blood, the needle absorbing and ejecting blood like a pen does ink: ‘Stain begins to absorb the material spilled on.

. . . When possible ever possible to puncture to scratch to imprint. Expel. Ne te cache pas. Révèle toi. Sang. Encre. Of its body’s extention of its containment’ (65). This associative chain/stain of hiding and revealing, blood and ink is extended further in ‘Elitere: Lyric Poetry’ with ‘The memory stain attaches itself and darkens on the pale formless sheet, a hole increasing its size larger and larger until it assimilates the boundaries and becomes itself formless. All memory. Occupies the entire’ (131). The play on puncture, in turn, harks back to early passages on punctuation (‘She would take on their punctuation. She waits to service this. Theirs. Punctuation.’)

and points forward to ‘Incision’ later on (4; 79). A reading in circles reveals echoes and repetitions that consistently relate the female body (breast blood milk) with speech halting or halted, but also with

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memory and inscription uncontainable, ‘until it assimilates the boundaries . . . and occupies the entire’. French and English thus serve to write over Korean, but palimpsestically only, because the mother tongue remains a present absence behind the screen of French and English imposition. And that present absence remains, for when those two languages are put in dialogue we find another instantiation of just-missed correspondence that may well, in Shirley Geok LinLim’s terms, signal the ghost of another, underlying, maternal language. The dictée in French on the opening page is followed by an English dictation exercise, which is an imperfect translation of the French, but it is not only that. Both are exercises in the correct transformation of speech into writing and both are rendered, to the letter, with the instructions for correct punctuation written out. There is, as several critics have noted, no perfect correspondence between the French and the English ‘versions’ of this dictée, largely because ‘Il y a quelqu’une’ has no gendered equivalent in English: ‘someone’ can be male or female, but ‘quelqu’une’ is unequivocally a woman or a girl. ‘From afar’, conversely, is incorrectly transcribed ‘From a far’ as if ‘far’ itself were a noun, or as if another noun were missing, such as ‘country’. ‘[A]t least to say the least of it possible’ is awkward, and does not correspond with ‘dire le moins possible’, because it does not ‘say as little as possible’, and so on. This opening page is important for Cha’s language politics because both English and French are shown to be second languages, imposed not imbibed, and learnt through mimicry (‘She mimicks the speaking. . . . Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words’) and the regimentation of language exercises (‘Ecrivez en francais’ [sic]; ‘Translate into French’) (3; 8; 14). Importantly the female of French ‘quelqu’une’ does not exist in English, yet is central to the text of Dictée: the ‘elle’ who ‘venait de loin’ is both mother and daughter, exile and immigrant, whose speech is inhibited, impaired or forbidden, but who manages to say/write but one thing, imperfectly in French and English both: ‘Il y a quelqu’une. Loin. There is someone. From a far’. Translation fails here, because in the French the person is far away, whereas in English she may be near, having come from afar, or she may be seen ‘from a far’. I take the title of Dictée, furthermore, not just to refer to these opening dictation exercises or other forms of regimented speech like recitation of the catechism and, much later, the pledge of allegiance (‘Will and will only espouse this land this sky this time this people’) but to the subject/object of this book, that is la dictée: ‘she who is dictated’, ‘she who is dictated to’, she who is, therefore, written (57). She who is written is the mother; she who

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is writing is the daughter, diseuse, Sibyl, who facetiously puts Sappho’s name to her own epigraph ‘May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.’ Words, in other words, that can withstand weather; words like those carved in stone by the Korean labourers in Japan during World War II.

Cha’s multilingual aesthetics – and trauma ‘How does traumatic knowledge become transmissible – how can it extend into personal and cultural memory?’ It seems to me that Geoffrey Hartman’s question is also Cha’s in Dictée (‘On Traumatic Knowledge’, 552). She answers it in her poetic practice of multilingualism, which explores themes of exile, speech, maternal legacy and history and works the associations – personal, historical, theoretical, linguistic – between them. Cha’s multilingual consciousness thus provides, as it were, the means of research into these themes, evident in the multiple ways she plays upon the meanings of words, their sounds and their images. ‘Play’ is, as noted earlier, perhaps not the right term to describe this experimentation and exploration, since it is trauma (historical, national, parental) that activates this writing-in-circles. It proceeds as a series of advances and retreats, an ‘aller/ retour’ in the words of one of the poems, which ‘does not cease to continue’ and never reaches the point of ‘arrivée’. In The Babel of the Unconscious Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri explain how playing around with languages that is ‘autopedagogic in the process of learning the mother tongue in infancy, can be autotherapeutic or therapeutic during the course of patients’ mental processes and in the development of the cure’, when words that are phonetically or orthographically similar ‘change meaning when they pass from one language to another’ (273). In my reading of it, Cha’s language experimentation resembles less the autopedagogic of the language learner than the autotherapeutic of the multilingual subject. As she explained in her ‘Artist’s Statement’ of the early 1980s: Since having been forced to learn foreign languages more ‘consciously’ at a later age, there has existed a different perception and orientation toward

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language. Certain areas that continue to hold interest for me are: grammatical structures of a language, syntax. How words and meanings are constructed in the language system itself, by function or usage, and how transformation is brought about through manipulation, processes such as changing the syntax, isolation, removing from context, repetition, and reduction to minimal units.

This gives us a fairly precise description of what goes on in Dictée; such manipulation transforms Cha’s English, and it moves across English and French, so that the part of the poem ALLER/RETOUR, which begins with ‘Qu’est ce qu’on a vu’, ends with the ungrammatical English ‘This view what one has viewed’, rather reminiscent of Pietro di Donato’s literal translations from Italian in Chapter 2.21 A little later in the same poem, the ‘Veil’ becomes ‘Voile. Voile de marieé. Voile de religieuse Shade shelter shield shadow’ and so forth, setting off a chain/stain of association around the notion of partition (ultimately signifying the partition of Korea through the De-Militarized Zone) or screen, in turn connecting to earlier and later references to the screen in film theory.22 Play by lexical and semantic association is an example of what Doris Sommer describes in Bilingual Aesthetics: ‘Even if I can say the same thing or idea [veil/voile] in more than one language, switching from one to another performs points of entry or exclusion, and it sets off different soundslike associations or etymological echoes’ (xviii). Linguistic play in Dictée is never just for fun or interest: the veil that turns into shelter and shield gains connotations of protection and then defence, that would otherwise be hidden from view, and the protective cover of the bridal veil and the nun’s veil becomes, by extension, double-edged as oppressive and imprisoning as well. This kind of small but significant semantic shift, of course, is poetry; it is how language works poetically rather than logically or communicatively, and it is ubiquitous were we to pay sufficient thoughtful attention to it. Cha’s multilingual consciousness creates surplus value in its ability to break open convention, revive dead metaphors, reduce redundancy and reveal hidden or new meanings. This method is at times most reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s: ‘Narrative shifts, discovers variation. Each observance prisoner of yet another observance, the illusion of variation hidden in yet another odor yet another shrouding, disguised, superimposed upon. Upon the nakedness’ (Dictée, 145). These could be Stein’s words, for – as she observed in The Autobiography of

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Alice B. Toklas – her explorations of the vagaries of English syntax, punctuation and semantics were informed and facilitated by writing in France, surrounded by French.23 Cha goes further in working across English and French, revealing their closeness: ‘In another tongue. Same word. Slight mutation of the same. Undefinable. Shift. Shift slightly. Into a different sound. The difference. How it discloses the air’ (157). Critical analysis of Dictée that pays due attention to such poetic research is not a matter of mere formalism, either on my part or on Cha’s. Her multilingual, avant-garde writing may well be more effective in getting her political message across than a more conventional form of life-writing in English-only would. Her experience, above, of having been ‘forced to learn foreign languages’ is dramatized and embodied in the halting and ‘unnatural’ use of her English and French. Cha not only makes the lack of corresponde/ance between languages, and between representation and experience, visible but presents an alternative aesthetic practice as well: one that does not erase difference but highlights it, creates textual difficulty to represent unpalatable history and fills absence and loss with silence and misarticulation, mis-communication. As L. Hyung Yi Kang notes, Cha designates English and French as alien in Dictée, even though they are the dominant languages in the text (84). Joo and Lux are more specific than this in writing that ‘turning to French’ serves ‘to elude the forces of Japanese colonialism in Korea, turning to English to resist French Catholic domination’ (2). Certainly, as Kang notes, the use of English ‘is not accompanied by pride as it would according to the dominant U.S. logic of assimilation’ (Kang, 84). More radical still, Cha undermines the communicative function of language in favour of ‘the desire for some adequate representation of the subjective enunciation’ (77). Correspondence, or communication, that just misses is the point of the work of art that is Dictée, and all the misses that critics have identified fit into this overarching design of misdirection: the opening non-quotation from Sappho; the non-existent muse Elitere instead of Euterpe; failures and inequalities of translation; and the whole complex of mistakes and inventions that Lisa Lowe has characterized as Cha’s ‘aesthetic of infidelity’.24 Poetic exploration, or perhaps exploitation of language’s polysemy is at the heart of this subversion, as a final example will demonstrate. In ‘What of the Partition?’ Josephine Nock-Hee Park gives a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem about exile, ‘Le Cygne’, against Cha’s use of it in ‘Urania:

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Astronomy’. Park traces not just the non-correspondences between French and English in Cha’s poem, but also the shift from ‘cygnes’ to ‘signes’ within the French: ‘Cygnes. Paroles souvenus. Déja dit./Vient de dire. Va dire.’ and from the first line ‘J’écoutais les cygnes’ to ‘J‘écoutais les signes’ on the next page, which ‘silences the poem’ (Dictée, 66–8; Park, 224).25 In her detailed and thoughtful reading, ‘the whole of the text demonstrates that speaking itself is the most difficult aspect of the exilic condition’ (Park, 223). Park also notes the mis-spelling ‘pidgeon’ I analysed earlier, in the speech apparatus passage that follows the Baudelaire-inspired French-English poem on facing pages, but she does not remark upon the appearance of yet more and other birds: Broken speech. One to one. At a time. Cracked tongue. Broken tongue. Pidgeon. Semblance of speech. Swallows. Inhales. Stutter. Starts. Stops before starts. About to. Then stops. Exhale swallowed to a sudden arrest. (Dictée, 75)

Park is undoubtedly right in concluding that, in this poem and in Dictée as a whole, ‘Broken English reveals the fact of emigration,’ but this is not all it does (225). Through a play upon Baudelaire’s swans, via a play upon English pidgin, to a play upon the double meaning of ‘swallows’ Cha connects exile with colonialism and with stunted speech and a choked-up voice apparatus. At the same time, remember that ‘birds are mouth pieces wear the ghost veil for the seed of message’, which I cited at the beginning of this chapter – these birds are homing pigeons, perhaps. Associated with soaring flight, the swallows of lyric poetry are contrasted with Cha’s aesthetic which is the lyric’s opposite: that of stutters, starts, stops and the swallowing of speech that results, moreover, in ‘a sudden arrest’. And where ‘arrêt’ in French would be a natural word to use for ‘stop’, in English the legal sense of ‘arrest’ is inescapable and again plays upon the connection in Dictée between the disciplining and patrolling of language, of bodies and of national borders. Thus, even if we hear French ‘arrêt’ in Cha’s English ‘arrest’, which might be designated interference or interplay between the two languages, the ‘arrest’ still works to make us stop and reflect on the regimentation of language, at home and abroad.

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Whereas Chang-rae Lee uses the trope of speech – whether it is the father’s broken ‘Konglish’ or the speech therapy that Lelia dispenses, or also Henry Park’s own consciously perfected speech – as a figure for the immigrant’s legitimate claim to Americanness, Cha uses it to stand in for language as a whole: its difficulty, its impossibility even, in the face of that historico-personal trauma. In Native Speaker, Daniel Kim argues, ‘the essence of. . . . Korean-ness is not so much a matter of accent, idiom, or syntax; it is, rather, a matter of feeling, a matter of melancholy’, and this goes for Dictée too (254). But the disjuncture Kim finds between the narrated accented Korean American voice and the narrating perfect American English one highlights a subject/object divide that comes with the territory of the novel, in which language migration is represented (in direct or reported speech) while English-only rules in the representing narrative voice. Put simply, Lee thematizes language migration whereas Cha enacts it, and this may well have to do with the difference between narrative discourse and ‘the eloquent stutterance called poetry’, to cite Geoffrey Hartman once more (‘Trauma’, 264). In other words, it has to do with form. But it also has to do with what is being worked through in Native Speaker as regards traumatic history, and the traumatic knowledge that is being broached or approached in Dictée: in Lee’s narrative, history is in the process of being overcome, whereas in Cha’s poetry it can barely be spoken – and is therefore broken. There is more, always more, that can be said about this. For psychoanalyst Anne Anlin Cheng, the fact that Dictée insists ‘that language is occupation, and it is coercive’ means that ‘the reader is not allowed to sentimentalize a prior, “original, native” voice’ (Cheng, 162). If all language is mimicry and mimicry inevitably turns into regimentation-through-interpellation, her argument runs, then there is no safe place for the native language to escape such dictation. It will be clear from my reading of Dictée that I disagree with Cheng and see native Korean as the cherished mother’s tongue that is  – while not ‘sentimentalized’ – certainly placed at the heart (‘MAH-UHM’, the spirit-heart) of Dictée. And Korean is at the heart of Dictée precisely by having been evacuated and placed beyond the bounds of the text to the stonecarved inscription on the frontispiece. Conspicuous absence from the text of Dictée exempts the mother tongue from the dictation and mistranslation, the imposition and interdiction that have indelibly stained/chained French and English, Latin and Chinese – the forced foreign languages learnt later.

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To draw to a close and gather up the fragments Cha has shored against her ruins: her traumatic knowledge, which is also that of Korea and of her parents and grandparents, enters literature and cultural memory by means of a multilingual writing-in-circles. In the collection Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age Heinz Ickstadt reflects on ‘an aesthetics of disruption, distortion, or silence, for instance’ that can create a kind of anti-aesthetic to unite didactic, political and artistic functions of ethnic writing without falling into the either/or dichotomy of form versus content, or mainstream (read white) versus multicultural (Ickstadt, 267). Surprisingly, her name is not mentioned in the entire volume, but of course he could have been writing about Cha. Her achievement is precisely that she has dissolved, with Dictée, a long-standing divide between avant-garde and migrant literature. As I suggested in Chapter 2, the difficulty entailed in reading bi- or multilingual texts (when you do not know all the relevant languages) is akin to the difficulty encountered in avant-garde writing. Such difficulty, however, is a plus, not a problem, when it comes to migrant writing because, as Reed Way Dasenbrock has written, ‘A full or even adequate understanding of another culture is never to be gained by translating it entirely into one’s own terms’ (‘Intelligibility and Meaningfulness’, 17). Doris Sommer echoes this view but adds to it that ‘A renewed taste for technique is probably a better exercise for developing multicultural respect than the remedy [translation] that multiplies never quite separate or equal value ratings’ (Bilingual Aesthetics, 65). As we move on to an analysis of a more fully fledged bi- or multilingual literature in the next chapter, this argument against or – as I prefer to interpret it – beyond translation will be developed further, but for now it suffices to note that Cha, as we have seen, was acutely aware of how translation misfires, how some languages are more equal than others and how technique is never just poetic form but should also fit political function. Dictée is a meditation on gender, exile, migration and nation, and an exploration of languages visual, physical, regimented and religious. The memory of a broken and split homeland, furthermore, is lived and relived in a broken tongue, split between second (Chinese) and third (English) and fourth (French) languages – but speech-less in Korean. For the cherished, sought-for and fought-for, yearned-for mother tongue is an all-but-absent presence in Dictée, appearing only in the words of a folk song and in a faded

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photograph as a sign carved in stone – one of those ‘fossil traces of word’, ‘residue of word’, ‘relinquished to time to distance’. In relation to trauma and literature, Geoffrey Hartman writes about a shared concern for the absences or intermittences in speech . . . for the ‘ghosting’ of the subject; for the connection of voice with identity (the ‘appeal’ in cryptonymy, punning and specular names); for interpretation as a feast not a fast, and for literature as a testimonial act that transmits knowledge in a form that is not scientific and does not coincide with either a totally realistic (as if that were possible) or analytic form of representation. (‘On Traumatic Knowledge’, 552)

Dictée, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, after the knowledge of Cha’s violent death, makes for traumatic reading. Interpretation of it is ‘a feast, not a fast’, but the knowledge transmitted is, no doubt, traumatic too. Cha unsettles, Dictée unsettles. A visual artist poet immigrant exile daughter speaks for the female generations, with difficulty, difficulty made visible, audible, on the page. A multilingual text that is a work of writing art does not translate and makes life hard for a reader schooled in the ‘dictation’ of the West. In her visual work (performance and video) Cha’s aim was to represent, or conjure up, what she called ‘the dream of the audience’: to create a fit so perfect between subject and object of view that the two would merge and feel as one. Multilingual works like Dictée risk finding no audience, and Cha’s dream of an audience was realized only posthumously. Still, her ‘Words cast to each other by weather, simply, as mark,’ do ‘stand as a ruin stands, relinquished to time to distance’, stripped down to their naked power of signification. With our investigation of Cha’s experimental, multilingual prose and poetry in Dictée we have, in effect, already made the transition from reading wanderwords in English texts to reading bi- or multilingual writing for their heterolingual aesthetics. In the next and final chapter this exploration culminates in the development of a bi- and multilingual poetics, as we turn our attention to Latin@ poetry and prose in Spanish and English.

8

Escribir y Leer, Bilingually: Spanish/English and Spanglish American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

‘American literature’, writes Werner Sollors in his introduction to The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, ‘is not only a literature of immigration and assimilation. Many works . . . reveal how multilingual American literature is part of a transnational world’ (‘Introduction’ to The Multilingual Anthology, 7). Because this is particularly true of Hispanic American literature I shall, in this final chapter, be reading bilingual English/Spanish poetry that both stakes its claim to belonging in the United States and jumps across its national borders. Here, in the much-changed linguascape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, words wander across and between languages to set up home in born-in-the-USA literature that affirms its connections to points east and south, making it truly a literature of the Americas once again.1 In the contemporary United States Spanish reaches out and back to Cuba, to Mexico, to Puerto Rico, to the Caribbean and to most of middle and Latin America, as well as belonging of old in the Southern border states. Its transnationalism means, as Gloria Anzaldúa has made clear in Borderlands/La Frontera, that Spanish is not a singular entity but a plurality of idioms and vocabularies that have adapted to local conditions in the United States. As we might expect, this holds for Latin America too, as the linguist John Lipski observes: ‘although many regional languages were spoken in 15th  century Spain . . . only Castilian made its way to the Americas’, yet ‘in truth Latin American Spanish is the product not only of its first settlers but of the totality of the population, immigrants and natives alike’ (‘The Role of the City’, n.p.). It is as justified to speak of a variety of Spanishes in recent bilingual American writing as it was possible to distinguish various Englishes in the oeuvre of Bharati Mukherjee, as we saw in Chapter 6. To Hispanists, of course,

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none of this is new and I approach this – their – terrain therefore hesitantly, as an amateur equipped with strong interest but weak Spanish, and no Latin@ Studies expertise to speak of.2 Nevertheless, if this book is to move beyond a theory of heterolinguality towards a poetics of bi- and multilingualism in literature, then it is necessary at this stage to venture from consideration of wanderwords onto analysis of a properly bilingual mode of writing that is current and vibrant and living in the United States, while addressing audiences abroad as well. Two questions present themselves immediately: What does it mean to speak of a ‘properly bilingual’ literature, and how do you read it with only basic knowledge of one of the languages involved? Both will be answered a little later in this chapter, when it will become clear – if it isn’t already – that translation alone is not the answer. First, however, we should explore the various Spanishes that live on American soil and thrive in its bilingual poetry, to get a better idea of the complexity and variety of games bilingual poets play, and how serious they often are.

Spanishes Spanish in American texts is not self-identical and does not always serve the same function in bilingual poetry. That of Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, for example, tries to bridge the troubled waters between the United States and Cuba, whereas Tino Villanueva’s Spanish asserts its primacy at home in southern Texas – yet both write bilingually. Second, class, like region, makes a difference to Spanish as it does to English; Anzaldúa writes about this too, when she lists among the many languages of the border in ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’ not only standard Mexican Spanish but also North Mexican Spanish dialect, Chicano Spanish (with regional variations), Tex-Mex and Pachuco or caló (Borderlands/ La Frontera, 55). Nor is the existence of several Spanishes in one place only a border phenomenon. In her language memoir Something to Declare Julia Alvarez describes the different registers of Spanish she heard at home and at school in the Dominican Republic: There was the castellano of Padre Joaquín from Spain, whose lisp we all loved to imitate. Then the educated español my parents’ families spoke, aunts and uncles who were always correcting us children, for we spent most of the day with the maids and so had picked up their ‘bad Spanish’. Campesinas, they

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spoke a lilting, animated campuno, ss swallowed. . . . This campuno was my true mother tongue, not the Spanish of Calderón de la Barca or Cervantes or even Neruda. (21–2)

Both class and region relate varieties of Spanish to Spain’s imperial past; the coveted ‘lisp’ in the priest’s speech denotes his prestige pronunciation of ‘z’ and ‘c’ as ‘th’, which distinguishes the Spanish of Spain that is still referred to as ‘Castellano’ (Castilian) in Latin America from its colonial offspring. Rosario Ferré writes about this Spanish and how it has been at war with English since Queen Elisabeth sank the Spanish Armada in 1588.

or desde que la reina Isabel derrotó a la Armada Invencible en el 1588.

in the title poem of Language Duel Duelo del Lenguaje (3). Ferré puts English and Spanish side by side, at war, but also in dialogue with each other throughout this collection of poems, whereas Alvarez writes in English and leaves her Spanish mostly in the Dominican Republic, the land of memory for her, as an immigrant to the United States. Her memoir as border declaration, however, states ‘how much of my verbal rhythm, my word choices, my attention to the sound of my prose comes from my native language as spoken by la familia’ (126). Spanish thus inflects Alvarez’s English, echoing the childhood division of labour between campuno and castellano, official and servant, writing and speech, but it is not part of a bilingual narrative discourse, as it is in the work of her compatriot Junot Díaz for example. Something else again happens in the manipulation of different registers and varieties of Spanish in Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas, where a Chicana Spanish is moulded to the cadences and sounds of porteño (Buenos Aires) speech. Both will be discussed in greater detail in the Conclusion to this book. So many writers and poets, so many bilingual practices, it seems, and there are still more: Ilán Stavans recovers his native Mexican Spanish in order to master Spanglish, a ‘new American language’ he discovers on the streets of Nueva York. Stavans explains how, when he was an aspiring writer, in love with English à la Richard Rodriguez, but

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with primitive skills in Shakespeare’s tongue. . . . Spanish was the language of the past for me, English the language of my future. It was only when I was already comfortable in both Spanish and English . . . that I suddenly detected the possibilities of Spanglish. (Spanglish, 6)

Like many second-language learners, Stavans can read English long before speaking it well, and only with the confidence of fluency come the freedom and delight to play around with it. Stavans eventually produces a dictionary of Spanglish with an introductory essay explaining its transnational reach and creativity, as well as its dynamism: ‘the lingo on the streets’, he writes, ‘will never be imprisoned’, which makes Spanglish a perpetual source of shape-shifting creativity – but also a moving target, impossible to pin down (Spanglish, 55). This creates a difficulty for the writer who would use it, and indeed, Stavans remains quite hesitant about the possibilities of Spanglish as a written language. Not so Susana Chávez-Silverman, whose Spanglish does not seek to transcribe the language of the streets so much as develop a transnational literary language of and for the Americas.3 Silverman does what Anzaldúa explored and advocated before her: she writes a wild tongue that is neither Shakespeare’s nor that of Cervantes, but a mishmash (which, as Stavans explains, ‘is a Hebrew term that means fusion’) que ‘no es solamente hablado sino quebrado’ (Spanglish, 4; 5). A mishmash that is spoken only when it is broken defies not only the rules of separate-but-equal languages, of misnamed ‘code’-switching, and of class/register decorum, but also of a bilingualism that is ‘balanced’ and does not brook ‘interference’.4 When written, the mishmash that is Spanglish furthermore advances a new American literary language that encourages, or even demands bilingual reading, which cannot be a bad thing in a country where monolingual literacy has not yet caught up with multicultural life. American Spanish is thus national and transnational, indigenous and immigrant; it lives in exile and it travels abroad, but it also touches and transforms and entwines itself with American English – not just in passing, but continuously – to produce a bilingual body of work such as American literature has not seen for a long time, and perhaps never in quite this form and quantity.5 How Spanglish will fare in the long tradition of multilingual American literature is still an open question, but the interplay between Spanish and English that changes either or both is certainly part of many creative writers’ bilingual strategy today. Sandra Cisneros has spoken in an interview, for example, about the aesthetic effect of translating literally, a

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strategy that echoes Pietro di Donato’s narrative practice and Meir Sternberg’s category of ‘verbal transposition’, as we saw in Chapter 2. Cisneros explains: ‘how you can say something in English so that you know the person is saying it in Spanish. . . . All the expresiones in Spanish when translated make English wonderful’ (Cisneros, 289). Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña, echoing postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie (see Chapter 6) sharpens such interplay between Spanish and English to give it a critical edge: I am very interested in subverting English structure, infecting English with Spanish, and in finding new possibilities of expression within the English language that English-speaking people don’t have. I find myself in kinship with non-white English-speaking writers from India and the West Indies, Native Americans, and Chicanos. (Gómez-Peña, 157)

Junot Díaz takes this idea of stretching English beyond existing bounds of possibility even further, when he speaks in an interview of wanting to ‘push English to the edge of disintegration, but still be, for the large part, entirely coherent’ (14). Translating literally, ‘infecting’ English with Spanish structure and pushing it to the limit then are aesthetic practices that are bilingual in nature, even though we might not immediately recognize them as such. For the here and now, however, we are concerned with more obviously bilingual writing than Cisneros’ or Gomez-Peña’s; whereas in the previous chapters the key question was what happens to migrant authors’ other, usually native, language(s) when they write in English, in this one I ask what it means to write, and to read, bi- or multilingually.

‘English is broken here’: in search of bi- or multilingual writing Multilingualism and bilingualism are terms prone to confusion when used to characterize the linguistic make-up of texts. Most of the work considered so far in this book was written in English with occasional words or phrases from Italian and Italian American, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Bangla, Hindi, French and Korean wandering in at significant moments and to various effects, but in this chapter the ‘other’ language – Spanish – holds its own with English. Given the growth of Spanish in the United States (see Chapter 1) and the variety of Spanishes spoken in the Americas generally, bilingual

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literature by US-based writers in Spanish/English and, to a lesser extent, in Spanglish, is flourishing. But, as the work of publishers such as Arte Publico and Bilingual Review Press shows, it takes many different forms. Sometimes it means texts are published in their original combination of English and Spanish, or in their original Spanglish. At other times the works themselves are monolingual but appear in bilingual editions, where the original Spanish text appears in English translation on the opposite page, cara a cara and face to face, we might say, but not in dialogue with each other.6 We see the same confusion in the use of the phrase ‘multilingual writing’ when it characterizes the linguistic nature of single works as well as that of editions or collections of texts. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature is an example of this phenomenon. Here, editors Werner Sollors and Marc Shell place the multilingual writing of Francis Daniel Pastorius’ Beehive of 1696 at the beginning and Tino Villanueva’s Convocación de Palabras, which has English wanderwords in italics throughout, at the end of their selection. Pastorius’ writing in seven languages and Villanueva’s in two, however, in fact frame a collection of monolingual texts in languages ranging from Arabic to Yiddish. There is only one example of an interlanguage à la Spanglish or Yankee Dutch (Kurt Stein’s ‘Die Schoenste Lengevitch’ in Germerican) and only one text – a circular in Spanish and English versions – that approaches, but doesn’t quite deserve, the qualification ‘bilingual’.7 Pastorius’ and Villanueva’s combinations of languages within the same text are thus exceptions to a monolingual rule; ‘multilingual’ applies to Sollors’ and Shell’s anthology as a whole, and to America’s literature over the centuries, but not to any individual texts bar Pastorius’ Beehive.8 The reason Marc Shell gives for this in his Afterword is that the anthology seeks to prove that ‘American citizens have published successfully in the United States in scores of languages and have produced more than 125.000 imprints in languages other than English’ (687). That point is certainly proven, but it leaves the question how we might define and read a bi- or multilingual literature properly speaking and proprement dit unanswered. In light of the previous discussion, it seems to me that a minimal definition would require bi- or multilingual literature to combine, put in dialogue or even fuse two or more languages with each other in a single text, rather than simply juxtaposing them by way of mutual translation or parallel signification. A text in what Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien has memorably termed ‘weird English’, meaning English infused with another language, thus does not qualify as bi- or

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multilingual, nor does the circular in Spanish and English in The Multilingual Anthology, because the versions do not talk to each other and so there is no added value in reading both; the latter is crucial.9 Texts that work with the dynamic between two or more languages would be equivalent to what Debra A. Castillo calls ‘aggressively bilingual works’, or what Martha J. Cutter refers to as the practice of ‘radical’ bilingualism. This designation is echoed by Lourdes Torres in the case of work that ‘can only be read by a bilingual audience’ (190; 86). Cutter writes that ‘[w]hereas a bilingual text would only use one language at a time, a radically bilingual text maintains a constant movement between different languages or even between different layers of the same language’ (24). Again, the terminology is confusing: in Cutter’s formulation, a bilingual text ‘uses only one language at a time’, but this begs the question of what counts as ‘a time’: a paragraph, a page, a sentence, a phrase? Moving ‘between different layers of the same language’, furthermore, resembles Bakhtin’s heteroglossia rather than what we commonly understand by bilingualism, while ‘one language at a time’ is reminiscent of Juan Bruce Novoa’s understanding of bilingualism as ‘moving from one language code to another, [whereas] “interlingualism” implies the constant tension of the two at once’ (qtd. in Martin, 407). None of this really helps: if, on the one hand, every utterance that mixes registers is ‘radically bilingual’, then that definition casts the net too wide and does not have any usefully distinguishing function at all. If, on the other, we adopt Bruce-Novoa’s ‘interlingualism’, then it is pulled in too tightly, leaving no room for languages in a single text to remain distinct while talking to each other. It might be better therefore to adopt Torres’ strategy, which approaches the business of definition from the other end, as it were, and judges the bilingual nature of a text by its (un-) translatability. Writing about Susana ChávezSilverman’s Killer Crónicas, Torres observes that it ‘cannot be translated into either Spanish or English without losing the essence of the intercultural message’ (L. Torres, 90). This is only the flipside of my observation above, that there has to be added value in reading both languages: meaning resides in the way they resonate with each other, and signify on each other, furthermore. Echoing Doris Sommer (see Chapter 2) Torres says elsewhere that ‘[n]ot translating foreign words is a political act’, because it draws the reader into a bicultural practice of signification that does not posit English as normative or sovereign.10 The epithet ‘radical’, as we shall see, aptly describes the aesthetic and cognitive challenge that bilingual texts can pose when translation (whatever

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is lost or gained in it, in Cutter’s paradigm) is not enough for, or even inimical to, bi- or multilingual signification. It is my contention in what follows that bior multilingual writing, which makes no concessions to English-only readers, indeed radically questions American literature-as-Anglophone, whether it has become so by definition or domination, and is therefore a political act. It is in the opposition, alternation, fusion or dialogue between English and other languages in the same text, on the same page, in the same sentence, within the same word and on an equal footing that the bi- or multilingual nature of American literature is most daringly demonstrated and its aesthetic, as well as political and transnational, potential explored and asserted. If we now return to Sollors’ and Shell’s anthology, then we see, according to this definition, Francis Daniel Pastorius writing a transnational, multilingual America in the Beehive through his use of seven languages. Even he does so only in a very particular, limited sense, however, because his languages do not really engage with each other. By the same token Tino Villanueva’s Convocación de Palabras in Spanish, with English words highlighted in italics, thematizes bilingualism but at first glance does not – strictly speaking and proprement dit – appear to enact it, as English is the poet’s object, but not his equal subject language. This is entirely appropriate in a poem that posits Spanish as native, English as acquired, as we shall see; it is only when we read the English translation on facing pages, in which the strangeness of English wanderwords in Convocación is effaced, that the poem reveals its bilingual/ bicultural aesthetic after all. In translation, English’s original alien appearance in a Spanish lexical environment is absorbed into a seamless whole, so that Tenaz oficio el de crearme en mi propria imagen cada vez con cada una al pronunciarla: postprandial subsequently becomes: A constant effort creating myself in my own image each time I pronounced one of them: postprandial subsequently

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which does not make much sense, since the problematic of pronouncing alien words in one’s own self-image disappears in translation (Villanueva and Hoggard, 682–3). The word ‘oficio’ moreover, so evocative in this context of trying to pronounce English (the United States unofficial ‘official’ language, after all) is lost, as is the repetition of ‘cada’ that highlights the effort involved in such learning. The issue is thus not one of the quality of this particular translation, but rather of its (f)act in undermining the poem’s meaning. It is worth examining both Villanueva’s and Pastorius’ multi- and bilingual practice in more detail to see just how the appearance of two or more languages in the same work produces aesthetic and political effects that are not just lost, but also actively destroyed in translation. Because the latter erases linguistic, as well as semantic difference, it makes palabras palatable, where they are not meant to be so. Pastorius’ Beehive is a miscellany of wisdom-of-the-ages in Latin, Greek, English, German, French, Italian and Low-Dutch that borrows from several European literary traditions. Its multilingualism makes the text transnational (any well-educated European of the seventeenth century would have been able to read most or all of these languages) but, curiously, not national or even protonational in this canonical context: Pastorius addresses the Beehive to his sons in Pennsylvania, who ‘probably will never attain to the Understanding of said Languages’, because English is ‘my said two sons [sic] Country-language’ (29).11 Pastorius recognizes that English itself is ‘not the ancient Britan-tongue. . . . But a Mingle-mangle of Latin, Dutch & French’, and so, to make his text accessible to his American-colonial sons, he typically translates from the Greek, Latin, German, Low-Dutch, French and Italian into English, or he quotes passages with similar meanings in several languages, including English (30). Thus the first line of a short poem about how bees can suck honey and spiders extract venom from the same rose is given in Greek: ‘ρόδόν μελίσσαις μέν γλυκή στάξει μέλι’. This then morphs into the Latin ‘Rosa quidem Apibus Mel Dulce stillat,’ to become ‘From that Rose, whence the Bees their sweetest honey pluck,’ only to end up as ‘Besser bringt man Honigseim/Immengleich vom fernen heim’ (21). However, this series of translations, or parallel passages, that seems to convey the same moral in the same imagery, actually resembles a game of Chinese whispers in the transit from Greek to German: by the time the German version is reached, the rose has disappeared. Not only that, but the idea that the same flower can harbour poison and/or honey is replaced with the notion that honey

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is better brought back from a place far away, because – as becomes evident in the next lines – ‘[a]ls dass man nach art der Spinnen/Selbst was giftigs solt ersinnen’ (poison is all too easily made, as spiders do, within oneself). Since German was Pastorius’ first language, we can assume that he was quite aware of the slippage of moral meaning enacted in this serial translation. Whether his sons or his general audience were aware of it is another matter, because only multilingual readers would spot Pastorius’ sleight of hand. And of course, the parable of the rose, the bees and the spiders is an allegory for Pastorius’ own dilemma as a writer: how will his sons, how will any monolingual reader of the Beehive gain wisdom or suck poison from his multilingual rose? What can guarantee a harvest of goodness, if not mastery of all the languages he employs? The idea in the German version that honey is better fetched from elsewhere, while poison is made (up) in one’s own mind, explains Pastorius’ strategy for the education of his sons: it is an inducement to the English-only reader to seek sustenance in other cultures and in other languages.12 Centuries before Eliot and Pound, Pastorius thus advocates a searching for the best that has been thought and said across borders, and writes about his cross-cultural and multilingual borrowing ‘that in this Book all is mine, & nothing is mine; Omne meum nihil meum . . . that nothing can be said, but what has been said already, Nihil dicitur, quod non dictum prius’ (19). Furthermore, he ends this meditation on the ethics of multilingual plagiarism with ‘[Here many books Quint-essensed you see,/give thanks to God, who thus enabled me]’ (19). This Readers’ Digest-like practice of distilling the (Western) world’s wisdom for the elevation of an American colonial readership that would know English, and possibly German, but was unlikely to master all of the languages secreted away in the Beehive’s honeycombs, styles its author as a multilingual enabler/translator, rather than a creator/poet in a proto-modernist vein. Both live ‘on borrowed words’, but where Pastorius’ multilingualism is designed to delight and instruct through the repetition of eternal and universal truths, high modernist poetic practice sought to dazzle and puzzle with a multilingual erudition that was rapidly going out of style, and posed more questions than its readers could find answers to.13 Marjorie Perloff says of Pound’s many languages in the Cantos that ‘there is never any doubt but that the voice that orchestrates these ingenious variations is a well-versed and expert English

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speaker’, whose puns and jokes are meant to be ‘measurable against a norm’, that of correct English (‘Language in Migration’, 730). Tino Villanueva sees the big difference between Chicano poets such as himself and poets like Eliot and Pound (or writers like Pastorius) in the fact that the bilingualism of Chicanos is more existential, while Eliot’s and Pound’s is more referential, second-hand, one might say, and bookish in its acquisition. Missing in their bilingualism (multilingualism in some instances) is the immediate context of, and their everyday relationship to, the cultures implied in the languages they quote. (‘Brief History’, 709)

His poem Convocación de Palabras, by contrast, articulates in Spanish what it is like to master and absorb English, as a ‘bookish’ but also as a living language, with all its vagaries and idiosyncrasies, its changing cultural connotations and its (unwitting) incorporation of words originating in other languages (like the French ‘faux pas’, or Yiddish ‘kibitzer’). The poem begins in 1960, when the poet was young, and ‘Yo no era mío todavía’ (I was not fully myself [my own] yet) because he could not fully understand the English that entered the home by way of the newspaper and TV. Berating himself for his inadequacy, the poetic voice declares: Está sera tu fe: Infraction Bedlam Ambiguous

because, with imperfect English, he is condemned to ambiguity and chaos, his speech an ‘infraction’ of established order. As the poem develops, the English wanderwords move first to more culturally acceptable terrain (they become ‘affable’ ‘assiduous’) but then, as confidence grows, also to the insurgent and critical semantic field: ‘egregious’, ‘priggish’, ‘suffragette’. In the end English is, after much effort, writeable like ‘traces of living blood/on the constant (unchangeable) paper’: huellas de sangre vivida sobre el papel constante: exhume querimonious kibitzer.

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Learning a living English means, furthermore, to be able to raise the dead (and the bookish) by creating a new word from old words (like ‘querimonious’, from querulous  sanctimonious) and to put one’s own name to writing, to become a poet. ‘Y por encima,’ above all, it means la palabra Libertad

Freedom is being able to write a Spanish poem and manipulate English within it, just as Whitman did when he punctuated his poem ‘A Broadway Pageant’ with the word ‘Libertad’. Freedom to (use both languages) and freedom from (the bedlam of misunderstanding) liberates the voice of a poet growing up in a country where English is dominant, yet Spanish is older and native and very much alive (Convocación, 682). Villanueva’s political argument is lost along with the aesthetic effect of his wanderwords, however, in the English translation. Convocation of Words cannot do justice to the canny inversion the original poem enacts by having Spanish as the dominant language with English as the interloper, because the alienness of the – newly discovered and savoured – English wanderwords of the original are, although still italicized, no longer strangers in this translated environment. The only strange word that appears here is ‘libertad’ at the end, which in its foreign appearance thus inverts the original poem’s exposure of English as the alien presence on Spanish territory. What Marc Shell in this same volume calls ‘glottophagie’, a consuming, swallowing or eating of another language in order to absorb it into one’s own, is not in Villanueva’s poem a violent consumption that destroys the other language, but an incorporation of it into a bilingual poetic practice. While Villanueva makes an ironic comment, through his use of words like ‘suffragette’ and ‘kibitzer’, on how English absorbs other languages continually in this way, the original convocación is a meeting, not a merging, of words and languages. In translation, however, it becomes its own opposite: a gathering of English-only words where ‘libertad’ is an intruding stranger, the odd one out rather than the triumphal cry of having gained a strange tongue that makes the poet free, because bilingual. The confusion that the designation ‘multilingual’ or ‘bilingual’ can create when talking about American literature in more than one language then is not easily resolved even when we restrict our corpus to single texts. ‘Bi- or multilingual’ characterizes a range of aesthetic practices in which languages

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are combined and have varying degrees of interaction with each other, and even when untranslated, not all bi- or multilingualism is the same: it can be ‘bookish’ or ‘existential’. What Josiane Hamers and Michel Blanc have observed with regard to speech – that it is possible to be bilingual and biliterate but to remain monocultural – is true of writing too, and Tino Villanueva’s distinction between himself as a bicultural Chicano poet and Eliot and Pound’s ‘bookish’ multilingualism echoes this insight (Hamers and Blanc, 11). Another difference between ‘bookish’ bi- or multilingualism and Villanueva’s biculturalism consists in the productive (speaking and writing) versus receptive (listening and reading) command of two or more languages. Although Villanueva, like Anzaldúa, is not a migrant writer, he resembles Pérez-Firmat and a host of other contemporary Hispanic poets and novelists in that they all work in English and Spanish with the knowledge of tongue, ear, eye and pen. In the aesthetics of their bilingual practice, all four dimensions of inhabiting, and being inhabited by, two (or more) languages are present: orality, aurality, literacy and script. A writer like Susana Chávez-Silverman plays around with the dynamics between these dimensions too (e.g., when she writes orally/ aurally later, in the Conclusion). Given the complexity and variety of bi- or multilingual textuality then, it may again be more useful to think of a spectrum of possibilities rather than to try and characterize any particular aesthetic practice as either ‘radical’ or ‘aggressive’ or simply bi- or multilingual, according to the degree of accessibility to monolingual readers, provided by translation. Translation (literal or contextual) after all is but one aspect of bi- or multilingual practice; productive use of languages other than English is another, bi- or monoculturalism yet a third and finally the degree of mixture between languages (Bruce-Novoa’s ‘interlingualism’) is also important in determining the linguistic make-up of literary texts. Ideally, we might then locate a particular bi- or multilingual work anywhere on a multidimensional spectrum, according to the degree of translation (readerly accessibility), degree of language mixture (writerly daring), degree of bookishness (intertextuality, referentiality) and the degree of bi- or multiculturalism (ethnic signification) it exhibits. It is impossible to concretize such a spectrum in a table or a graphic representation, and in any case aesthetic practices do not lend themselves easily to being boxed up and tied with definitional strings in this way. Still, these four dimensions can give us some sense of the various factors involved in the language ‘choices’

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(if choices they are) writers make, whether or not their bi- or multilingualism is the result of migration. We can ask where a particular bilingual practice stands on the long continuum that stretches between English-only and Spanish-only; whether English and Spanish are treated as separate, and as equal or not, or whether they are mixed up so that Stavans’ mishmash and Pastorius’ minglemangle become the mishmangle of Spanglish. We can try and divine whether a bi- or multilingual text partakes of two or more living languages and cultures, or borrows from and refers to another literary tradition ‘bookishly’, so as to enhance its own. Does the use of multiple languages constitute a bid for universalism, as in Pastorius’ case, or represent a desire for a language to transcend all others, as in Steven Kellman’s translingualism (see Chapter 2)? Or does it, conversely, signify a conversation or conflict between or convergence of languages and cultural perspectives? Answers to these questions depend on how we choose to read bi- or multilingual writing, and this is what we shall turn next.

How to read bi- or multilingually The title poem of Rosario Ferré’s Language Duel Duelo del Lenguaje is an example of languages in conflict. Ferré keeps Spanish and English rigidly separate, but she also gives them equal status. What are called, on the title page, Ferré’s English ‘translations’ of her Spanish poems work on their own terms, in their own right and can stand on their own poetic feet. Because this is so, the order of appearance of ‘original’ Spanish and ‘translation’ English is often reversed, as, for example, in the title poem(s) ‘Language Duel’/‘Duelo del lenguaje’: English and Spanish have been at war/El inglés y el español han estado en guerra since Queen Elizabeth sank/desde que la reina Isabel the Spanish Armada in 1588./derrotó a la Armada Invencible en el 1588. Language carries with it/Las lenguas llevan a bordo all their fire and power./todo su fuego y poderío. It’s still feuding in Florida,/Todavía están guerreando en la Florida, Puerto Rico,/en Puerto Rico, and California./y en California.

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In fact I swear/De hecho, yo les juro that as I talk to you/que mientras discuto en español in English about my right to speak/sobre mi derecho a hablar inglés, in Spanish,/ I can hear the guns boom/escucho rugir los cañones and see the canon balls roar/y veo las bombas over my head./ salir volando sobre mi cabeza. (2–3)

The underlined differences between Spanish and English ‘versions’ of the ‘same’ poem speak to the way Ferré writes with different voices (inglés/Spanish) in each, to different audiences with different queens and versions of history (Elizabeth/Isabel; la Armada Invencible!), and with different ideologies of language: English capitalized, singular and sovereign, the Spanishes plural (las lenguas) and aware of how they got to the Americas (a bordo, on board ship). If there is translation involved in these two poems, surely it works – and fails – either way: neither the monolingual English nor the solamente español reader would get the whole picture here, one that considers both sides of the struggle between two imperial languages on American soil. Ferré’s poem, or poems, are thus about el derecho a hablar/the right to speak both languages in and of the United States, and by also writing in them Ferré’s duel/o declares bilingualism the winner. What looks like two monolingual poems then, or one translated one, turns out to be a bilingual poetic practice, whose significance arises from the poet’s juxtaposition of languages and its signification, its action, from the reader’s effort to make them talk to each other. At the other extreme of the mixture-dimension we might place a poem such as Francisco Santana’s ‘Anoche’ from the collection Tristealegría, por ejemplo the lines: La overweight chavalona Took three spaces para bailar a gusto. ... Y la cutie que every other dance iba a arregular sus looks; andaba haciendo unos moves pa’ revivir hasta los muertos, if you know what I mean. (50)

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Santana here alternates between Spanish and English lines, switches languages in mid-sentence, combines English adjective with Spanish noun and vice versa, and creates new Spanglish words like ‘moves’ which looks English, but scans and sounds better when pronounced as duosyllabic (‘mo-ves’) Spanish. Nothing is translated here; either ‘you know what I mean’ or you don’t, and even if that meaning for some readers can be occluded without resorting to the dictionary, translation cannot ever convey the sense, the dance, the mo-ves of this poem between and across two bodies and two languages which become one, and make a third. Eva Mendieta-Lombardo and Zaida A. Citron observe that this kind of language-switch and -mix in bilingual poetry is the most intimate type; ‘usually labelled “intrasentential code-switching,” this [is] the one that characterises stable bilingual communities’ they write (69). In such, what they call, ‘realistic’ bilingual practice, prominent in contemporary Nuyorican and Chicano/a poetry, poets write to their own culture and people in their own voice. But this can also mean that so-called code switches are not experienced as such at all by bilingual readers, just as they often aren’t by speakers, either. While it is possible in linguistic terms to analyse when a language switch occurs, it depends on the reader/listener’s familiarity with the languages involved whether such a switch is heard or seen as in any way significant. For those not in the know, bilingual poetry of this kind ‘induces the reader into an active interaction with a culturally intimate world of signification’, Mendieta and Citron conclude (570). This formulation may serve us as a basic definition of a bi- or multilingual reading practice too: a reader who actively engages with bi- or multilingual writing, enters – as Reed Way Dasenbrock already explained in Chapter 2 – into a culturally intimate world, to which she or he would otherwise have no access. Surely, this is a readerly gain, even if such engagement – in the terms of Doris Sommer’s thesis that bilingual writing can wilfully be designed to exclude cultural outsiders – may be seen as forced entry. Writers cannot dictate, and much less control, who might want to read their work and how. If readers who are not bilingual and bicultural are willing to make the effort to break in, armed with their grammars and their dictionaries and their senses attuned to bilingual sights and sounds, they enter at their own risk. And because they are cultural and linguistic outsiders, their access can only ever be limited, anyway: ‘the will to understand the Other’ does not need to be, as Sommer has it, ‘the

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ultimate violence’, but can precisely be the will to confront, and to accept, difference (‘Resistant Texts’, 543). Breaking and entering is the extreme scenario; there are less violent, intermediate options for bilingual reading as well. Because receptive learning of another language (i.e. reading and comprehension) is usually easier and happens sooner than gaining the productive (speaking and writing) command of it, the audience for Spanish/ English writing in the United States reaches beyond Spanish/English bilinguals per se to English speakers with a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, through contact, study, interest or a combination of all three. Take, for example, the poem ‘Son-sequence’ from Gustavo Pérez-Firmat’s collection Bilingual Blues as an exercise in reading: Call these poems a son-sequence: Son as plural being. Son as rumba beat. Son as progeny. Son, fueron, serán. Son, danzón, guaracha. Son, his father’s son. Is he? (23)

Simple in form, in its use of Spanish and English and in its repetitive sound, the poem nevertheless achieves multiple resonances in its play on the meanings of ‘son’ in English and Spanish, and exploits the fact that what looks like a homonym on the page sounds different in each language. Son as child, son as sound, son as the third-person plural of ser in the present tense, son as songand-dance: these meanings wander and merge and eventually converge in the last line. Here it becomes clear that the poem is ‘about’ the anxiety a father feels about his son’s past and future (fueron/serán), in particular, in relation to language and culture (rumba, guaracha, the sound/son of Spanish). In the context of ‘Summer Nights’, a poem that appears two pages before it, ‘Sonsequence’ gains further significance. ‘Summer Nights’ asks what will happen to Hispanic children who grow up in North Carolina: ‘Who will they be?/ It’s not so easy Rosa,/everything has consequences’ (Bilingual Blues, 20). The consequence for children who grow up in North Carolina is, most likely, that they grow up in English and may never know that the Spanish ‘son’ sounds different from an English one – that maybe an English son is not his father’s son

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at all. Continuity, in the son-sequence of generations, as in the consequence of language change through migration, cannot be guaranteed. There is little in ‘Son-sequence’ that a dictionary and grammar can’t fix in terms of literal understanding, but the poem is much richer for being read with an eye, and an ear, for difference, a difference that translation effaces. In her analysis of ‘Turning the Times Tables’, also in Bilingual Blues, Annabel Cox explains Pérez-Firmat’s critique of language as ‘code’: ‘Language, the poem seems desperate to declare, is more than just a single series of signs that when placed in combination always result in a stable or predictable outcome . . . [language] has powers of expression beyond literal meaning’, and this effect is multiplied when two or more languages come into play (76). As if to confirm this, in another poem, ‘Provocaciones’, the poet answers Heberto Padillo’s rhetorical question of how one can possibly live in two languages, with a laconic ‘why not?’: ‘¿cómo no seguir vivendo con dos/lenguas casas nostalgías tentaciones melancolías?’ After all, ‘hacer de dos grandes ojos una sola mirada’: we create a single image with two eyes, and it is the combination of languages that makes for a better view and clearer vision (Bilingual Blues, 55).

‘You (don’t) know what you’re missing’: the paradox of bi- and multilingual reading A stanza from Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella’ in Borderlands/La Frontera illustrates, finally, a bilingual poetic practice that, like Pérez-Firmat’s, is accessible to a reader with only rudimentary Spanish, but also manages to convey just how much such a reader is missing. Despite her protestations in the Preface that ‘we Chicanos no longer feel we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture – to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos’, Anzaldúa uses a range of strategies in Borderlands/La Frontera to ensure that a variety of readers with more and with less Spanish (or English) can enter into the spirit of her poetry, even if they cannot always follow the letter. There are monolingual poems in Spanish and in English, and sometimes the latter are translations by the poet herself. Most of the poems are bilingual, with a glossary at the end of the volume to accommodate the English-only reader.

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Once I looked into her blue eyes, asked, Have you ever had an orgasm? She kept quiet for a long time. Finally she looked into my brown eyes, told me how Papagrande would flip the skirt of her nightgown over her head and in the dark take out his palo, his stick, and do lo que hacen todos los hombres while she laid back and prayed he would finish quickly. (Borderlands/La Frontera, 110)

In these lines about her grandparents’ sexual relations, constructed as violent (palo/his dick/stick) and without pleasure, the silence and taboo surrounding sexuality is voiced, à la Richard Rodriguez, in Spanish, the language of secrets; the taboo language is thus also the language of taboo. This Spanish is itself shrouded in circumlocutions, and functions almost as a metalanguage that articulates not what cannot be spoken but the fact that it cannot be spoken: ‘lo que hacen todos los hombres’, (that which all men do) and in the next stanza ‘Mujeres no hablan de cosas cochinas’ (women do not speak of filthy things) and ‘watching her sons y los de la otra’ (and those of the other woman). The English surrounding these Spanish phrases, however, makes it quite clear what ‘all men do’ and what it is that ‘women do not talk about’, so that the use of Spanish here culturalizes both the abuse and the taboo surrounding it. Since one of the distinct functions of language-switching in writing is quotation of speech, the poem distinguishes, in italicizing the Spanish words, not just between English and Spanish, but also between speech and writing. We might therefore say that in this poem Spanish poses, and English discloses the secret of sexuality: what is lost to the Anglo reader in ‘coded’ reported speech is gained not in direct translation, but in interpretation of the interplay between the two languages. ‘Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella’ is by no means typical of how Anzaldúa writes bilingually in Borderlands/La Frontera and I use it here simply to demonstrate a common practice in bilingual writing, when a language switch is marked in italics. English context then provides explanation of any Spanish meanings for those who would otherwise miss them. Because Anzaldúa uses a range of bilingual aesthetic strategies, she shows in the collection as a whole, as Holly Martin puts it, ‘how code-switching is not so much a change from one language to the other as it is a continuous discourse, drawing upon the

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resources of both languages’ (406). Implicit in Martin’s felicitous phrase, and following on from Mendieta and Citron’s insights above, is the question what exactly counts as a ‘switch,’ and for whom. Looked at closely, the very concept of ‘code’ switching assumes a monolingual norm, whereas bilingual readers and, even more so, speakers of Spanglish might not even recognize any change from English into Spanish. This, in large part, is Anzaldúa’s point: her variegated bilingual practice is readable for the very ‘Anglos, Mexicanos, and Latinos’ that she says she does not want to translate for in her Preface. They can alternately dip in and out of various parts of the text, or they can learn to swim. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is probably the best-known bilingual text in contemporary ethnic writing, and that fact testifies to the success of her varied approach. Bilingual, bicultural meanings here are generated by the poet/theorist’s design and the reader’s willingness to swim across borders. This is not just a question of language, but also of form, for it is in the combination of bilingual border theory and poetic practice that the message of Borderlands/ La Frontera is conveyed: less ‘if you know what I mean’ than ‘make of it what you can’. This invitation to a sink-or-swim-or-paddle reading practice has a political meaning for Anzaldúa, as it did for Torres earlier in this chapter and for Doris Sommer in Chapter 2. Western art, she writes in ‘Tlilli, Tlapalli/ The Path of Red and Black Ink’, ‘is dedicated to the validation of itself. Its task is to move humans by means of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling. Western art is always whole and always “in power.” It is individual (not communal)’ (Borderlands/La Frontera, 68). Mastery is not where it’s at in Borderlands/La Frontera, either for the poet/theorist or the reader. Instead, we are invited to make connections between languages and ideas, between theory and practice, without ever quite being ‘in power’ or reaching firm ground. A reader who is fully bilingual across all four dimensions in English and Spanish, familiar with Mexican corrídos, and well versed in Nahuatl and the cultures of the South West is undoubtedly at an advantage here, but even she will have to create her own meanings, just as he will have to do his own interpretative work. It is often assumed that only English-only writing will find an audience in the United States, but the popularity of Borderlands/La Frontera shows that the question of readership for bi- and multilingual writing need not be as vexed as it is made out to be.14 If we shift our focus from a quest for

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complete intelligibility to what Reed Way Dasenbrock in Chapter 2 called ‘meaningfulness’, then we open the way for a different kind of reading, one that does not strive for transparency and wholeness, but realizes the significance of occlusion in linguistic and cultural difference. In his Afterword to The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature Marc Shell addresses this issue when he distinguishes three kinds of readers for the collection: one who knows the original language in which a particular text is written, another who doesn’t know that language and is therefore dependent on its English translation and a third reader who knows all languages. Because this third type of reader doesn’t exist, the ideal for Shell is a reader who ‘knows some other non-English language’ and ‘will realize something of what she is missing’ when faced with a text in a language she or he doesn’t know, because that person will be aware of the original when reading the English translation. On this model, English monolinguals can understand what is said in bi- or multilingual texts through translation, but only those who are already bilingual (in English plus any other language) can read bi- or multilingually, that is, with the awareness – however abstract – that how it is said matters (this, after all, is the literary dimension) and with a sense of what is not said: missing, lost, distorted or destroyed, or also gained or invented or found in translation. So what does it mean for these readers to engage with bilingual Spanish/ English writing? How do they cope not just with evident unintelligibility when their understanding of Spanish doesn’t stretch to colloquialisms or poetic liberties that grammar books and dictionaries can’t explain, but more so with the awareness that they are missing something, without even knowing what that something is? Clearly, such a reader will not be able to do without translation altogether, since she or he needs to have some sense of the semantic field for which heterolinguality is employed, whether this comes in the shape of distinct wanderwords or of a more integral language-mixing, as in Francisco Santana’s poem above. Translation, however, for this reader is not the end but only the beginning of trying to read bi- or multilingually. The second step would be to register that the dictionary doesn’t have certain words or that its definition doesn’t fit the context (as in ‘palo’, above) or that certain forms appear ungrammatical, or to notice visual or possibly aural rhymes (as in ‘hablado sino quebrado’) that suggest aesthetic features above and beyond the purely semantic level. At this point the reader will gain a more concrete

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sense of what she or he is missing and as s/he reads on, this may give some insight into the style or tone of the text, such as that it uses the vernacular, or is riddled with profanities or puns or archaisms, and so on. Even when translation ‘works’ to make the text intelligible, this reader will retain the sense of cultural difference that is inscribed in wanderwords and other kinds of heterolinguality. As Reed Way Dasenbrock observed in Chapter 2, ‘[a] full or even adequate understanding of another culture is never to be gained by translating it entirely into one’s own terms. It is different and that difference must be respected’ (‘Intelligibility and Meaningfulness’, 15). The paradox of reading bi- or multilingually without adequate knowledge of all the languages involved is not that you don’t know what you are missing (as a monolingual reader reliant on translation would) but that you do, and this is the point. Support for a method of reading that does not rely on translation solely, but moves beyond it, comes from linguists concerned with the (un-) translatability of emotions and culture-specific values across languages as well. As we saw in Chapter 2, Anna Wierzbicka writes of languages as containing ‘cultural scripts’ that do not necessarily entail particular behaviours or attitudes but ‘shared understandings’ of how such behaviours or attitudes are valorized in a particular culture and speech community (580). She gives the example of ‘privacy’: whether or not a particular English speaker values privacy, the concept of privacy exists and is understood in English, but might not be part of the cultural script of another language. ‘Privacy’ would then be difficult or near-impossible to translate, because the concept would be alien to that culture. When such concepts as privacy are not analysed as part of a cultural script (which ‘describes cultural norms and values from within rather than from the outside’) Wierzbicka notes, the result is ‘the unwitting absolutization of the assumptions embedded in the English language’, due to English’s global reach (584; 594). Linguistic imperialism thus becomes conceptual, and even emotional imperialism.15 María Lugones gives a lovely example of how ‘privacy’ functions in cultural difference at the end of her essay ‘Hablando cara a cara/ Speaking Face to Face’: Siempre hay tiempo para los amigos.    I’ll see you next Tuesday    At 5:15. Vente y tomamos un café y charlamos

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Mientras plancho la ropa. I’ll call you Monday evening to let you know for sure that I am coming. Ay mujer, te ves triste, ¿te sientes bien? Me duele mucha la cabeza y Estoy un poco sola y cansada. Dura la vida, ¿no? Hi, how are you? Fine, and you? Fine, thank you. (53–4)16

I have deliberately relegated the translation of the Spanish to a note here, because to insert it in brackets would ruin that aspect of the signification which is enacted simply in the arrangement and appearance of the words on the page: the Spanish is visibly longer, more discursive, has more tag questions and no exact time specification. If read as a bilingual dialogue, privacy is inscribed in the more contained and precise English responses to Spanish overtures, but similarly if we regard the above as a juxtaposition of approaches to friendship in English and Spanish, the contrast between them in terms of personal space and the sharing or protecting of it is clear. What Lugones explores in this essay concerning cross-cultural face-to-face encounters can equally well be applied to bilingual writing: En qué voz with which voice, anclada en qué lugar anchored in which place, para qué y por qué why and to what purpose, do I trust myself to you . . . o acaso juego un juego de cat and mouse just for your entertainment . . . o por el mio? I ask these questions out loud because they demand to be asked. Asking them in this way demands recognition and places the burden (?) of answering them actively on your and not just my shoulders. (50)

We return here to the question posed at the beginning of this book: in what linguistic voice should the bi- or multilingual writer write? Why trust a monolingual reader with that other voice, to what purpose? What risks are being run in bilingual games, and for whose benefit? The latter, Lugones implies, may lie more in the kinds of questions being posed than in any specific answers being given; the point is that bi- and multilingual writing throws up challenges to intelligibility and interpretation for which reader and writer share responsibility. The writer who does not trust his or her own other voice,

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or does not trust that it will be heard, and therefore translates, as Lugones does here, denies the reader an opportunity to engage with it, whereas the reader who does not put the work in to hear/read that other voice declines the writer’s invitation to be understood on his or her own terms. Bi- or multilingual writing demands attention and effort on the part of the reader and works on multiple levels beyond the semantic: it has dimensions of sight and sound, rhythm and rhyme (or the absence thereof), text and intertext – as we saw above and in previous chapters. Most of all, bi- and multilingual writing works with the alienness, the opacity of other languages as its material. Reading it, you have to open your ears and your eyes to the poetic, the aesthetic that results from a cross-fertilization of languages pregnant, embarazada, with meaning because unmoored from their lugar, and unable to stay in their places. As Doris Sommer writes in Bilingual Aesthetics: Words are not proper and don’t stay put . . . they wander into adjacent language fields, get lost in translation, pick up tics from foreign interference, and so can’t quite mean what they say. Teaching bilinguals about deconstruction is almost redundant. (‘Big dill!’ Pnin might have said). (xix)

If Sommer is right and ‘words can’t quite mean what they say’ anyway, then it becomes possible to theorize bi- or multilingual reading and writing in a new way, not as the mastery of two or more linguistic ‘codes’ to mix up or switch between, but as productive and receptive literary acts or performances, in which even ‘foreign interference’ and ‘embarrassing mistakes’ (which are bound to be made in reading or writing several languages) are significant. ‘Always,’ in Sommer’s words, ‘they mark communication with a cut or a tear that comes close to producing an aesthetic effect,’ which is a big deal indeed, as we shall see in the Conclusion (xii).

Conclusion: Really Reading Junot Díaz and Susana Chávez-Silverman

In ‘The Traffic of Meaning’, Mary Louise Pratt writes that [t]he multilingual person is not someone who translates constantly from one language or one cultural system into another, though translation is something multilingual subjects are able to do if needed. To be multilingual is above all to live in more than one language, to be one for whom translation is unnecessary. The image for multilingualism is not translation . . . but desdoblamiento (‘doubling’), a multiplying of the self. (35)

As if in answer to Isabelle de Courtivron’s question at the beginning of this book, ‘Being bilingual, what does it mean?’, Pratt here explains the difference between a translation-based paradigm and the bi- or multilingual approach to migrant writing developed over the previous chapters, that goes with the flow of signification across and between languages. To read bilingually is to read-indifference, keeping languages on parallel tracks, as it were, but remaining alert to the points where they cross or converge, for that is where the sparks may fly and aesthetic effects be produced. Ending this book, which has taken us through a century of American migrant writing and a plethora of histories and theories from various disciplinary perspectives, thus requires a final demonstration of desdoblamiento in play. Below, I shall read some passages from Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by way of an adventure in bi- and multilingual reading with only basic Spanish.1 No doubt I will, to use Marc Shell’s words from the previous chapter again, ‘realize something of what . . . is missing’, but the question is how I will know what that something is (‘Afterword’, 687). What will be lost, and gained, in reading bilingually with only a basic knowledge of Spanish, when Silverman’s Spanglish requires more than that? How necessary is it to research Díaz’s Dominican Spanish slang, of which I know very little or, for that matter,

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his many references to popular sci fi culture, of which I know less? How and where will one language and set of cultural references spark off another, and will it be possible to explain my bilingual understanding in English?

Ancladas en otros lugares: Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas Me han pedido que (me) explique acquí. I mean, que ehplique mi lengua, my use of language. My odd, transcultural ortografía. My idioma, ‘tis of thee. Bueno, mi lengua . . . is a hybrid? Nah! Demasiado PoMo, trendy, too Latino Studies (even if it’s true). Been there, done that. A verrrrr, mi lengua . . . es un palimpsesto? Sí, eso está mejor. It’s a sedimentation of . . . hmm. (xix)

Susana Chávez-Silverman begins her bilingual crónica, or memoir, of living in English and Spanish simultaneously and creatively by reflecting on the nature of this undertaking, for ‘the very structure of memory, particularly of a transnational subject, is multilingual: memories are written in many languages and accents’, as Ania Spyra reminds us (‘Language, Geography, Globalization’, 203). In Killer Crónicas Silverman joins scholarship to life, speech to writing, and – like the poets of the previous chapter and Junot Díaz later – the United States to the Hispanic world: the Mexico that is her mother’s land, the Madrid of her childhood and the Buenos Aires of a year-long visit to research Argentine women’s poetry, and to write. It is worthwhile analysing this passage in some detail, to see just how Chávez-Silverman’s prose uniquely fuses, through its bilingualism, these worlds into one seamless whole that is fully readable only for English–Spanish bilinguals, but can be followed also by those who read Spanish only haltingly, with dictionary and grammar at the ready. The introductory phrase ‘Me han pedido que (me) ehplique acquí’ (they have asked me to explain (myself)) anticipates the unspoken demand that bilingual writing account for itself, that it legitimize ‘mi lengua, my use of language’. ‘Que ehplique,’ after all, is an unorthodox and impure phonetic spelling of the Spanish ‘que explique’ as Argentinians or, more accurately, the porteños of Buenos Aires pronounce it. It is not immediately recognizable even to those familiar with standard Spanish, in which ‘comerse las eses’ (to swallow your s-es) is considered a mark of degraded speech. The elaboration of ‘mi lengua’ into ‘my use of language’ is therefore appropriate: Chávez-Silverman

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does not write standard Spanish mixed in with standard English but mixes it all up: the sound of Buenos Aires speech with colloquial interjections like ‘Nah!’, jargonic abbreviations like ‘PoMo’ and the exaggerated Spanish tonality of ‘A verrrrr’ (let’s see) ending the paragraph daringly with ‘hmm’ – a pause for thought. None of the regular rules apply here, least of all those demanding English-only in an American text. For the line ‘my idioma, ‘tis of thee’ is the central one in this programmatic opening statement, playing as it does on the verse every American schoolchild knows, ‘My country ’tis of thee/Sweet land of liberty/Of thee I sing,’ and subverting (some would say ‘perverting’) it in the process. Spanish, Chávez-Silverman shows here, is as much a language of ‘the Unaited Esteits’ (as Ilán Stavans spells them in his book, Spanglish) as English is, and the mixture of the two that is her idioma is as much a fully functioning and transnational language as it is also a particular, personal idiom.2 Most accurately, perhaps, ChávezSilverman’s idioma in Killer Crónicas can be classed as an idiolect, a language ‘characterized by numerous associative links with the experiences accumulated in the memory of the speaking [here: writing] individual’, as Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri put it (224). Hence the need to ‘ehplicar’ the Argentine connection, the ‘odd, oral, transcultural ortografía’ (‘I can’t not write it as I hear it,’ she says later on the same page) and also the rejection, which is at the same time an acknowledgement, of the influence of postmodernism and Latin@ Studies on this work. The latter are linked by academic association through and to the word ‘hybrid’, and dismissed as too modish in favour of ‘palimpsesto’, a punning palimpsest itself, of course, in that the Spanish term overwrites the English within it. ‘Palimpsesto’ is judged to be better (‘Sí, eso está major’) than ‘hybrid’, but still not adequate, because it is difficult to explain where all the diverse elements of this language come from. Palabras de otros lugares (words from other places) appear in this text; the narrator explains, for example, that the frequent use of ‘chévere’ (fabulous, or cool) is something she picked up from Puerto Rican friends, ‘Al punto de que my students aquí en Califas (who have no clue what foreign Hispanopaís I hail from pero saben que I lived recently en Buenos Aires) think that chévere es una palabra argentina!’(which is why my students here in Califas who have no clue what foreign Hispanic country I come from but who know I recently lived in BA think that ‘chévere’ is an Argentine word! (xx)). ‘A sedimentation of . . . hmm’ is a final stab at definition, a thought never completed, except

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again by implication and association, when Chávez-Silverman relates her interest in orality and her ear for phonetics to a habit inherited from her father: ‘Ever daddy’s girl, supongo, ehtudiante de la tradición oral,’ which explains the funny ortografía (I suppose, student of the oral tradition (xix)). But this is not all. As Paul Allatson writes in the Foreword to Killer Crónicas, the mix of languages that Chávez-Silverman employs and creates in written form does ‘not simply reflect an aesthetic choice; [it] also signal[s] a highly political gesture in the U.S. context’ (xii). Allatson places Silverman’s work in the tradition of politicized Chicana writing begun by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa in the 1980s, but also notes that she goes further than her predecessors in wielding a wild tongue, and refusing to ‘succumb to monolingual and hegemonic cultural pressures to translate or explain’(xii). Killer Crónicas, as a transnational and multilingual text, has a cultural and geographical reach that takes in Mexico, Spain, South Africa, Argentina and the United States which gives it, as Allatson remarks, ‘a potentially huge reading audience’; as well as varieties of Spanish, English and Spanglish, it also includes a few phrases of Afrikaans and Dutch (xii). He explains furthermore that the crónica is a popular genre of autobiographical writing in Latin America, ‘a combination of personal confession, everyday observation, and a memorializing drive’ (ix). In Chávez-Silverman’s hands it becomes something close to an autobiographical essay in epistolary form, for most of the crónicas are addressed to friends and acquaintances, and are conversational in tone, como weblog, or e-mail. New modes of cultural production thus inform Chávez-Silverman’s work as they do (the reception of) that of Díaz; web-writing and literary prose are no longer separate spheres, but are beginning to overlap more and more and pathbreak new avenues for bi- and multilingual writing. Cecilia Montes-Alcalá concludes from her study of bilingual blogging that while code-switching has often carried a stigma in oral production, such stigma does not seem to obtain in informal written expression, especially in such a democratic forum as the internet. . . . The answer to why they do it seems straightforward: because they can. In fact, code-switching emerges as a valid strategy to communicate in writing. (169)

Other than in blogging, however, in e-mail and for Chávez-Silverman, the intersubjective, epistolary aspect is important, as it establishes the implicit dialogue of correspondence: ‘Es sencillo: I can’t write sin sentir el latido

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del corazón (or at least el tecleo de manos on a keyboard), las pulsaciones cerebrales – verbales – de un interlocutor’ (I simply can’t write without feeling the heartbeat (or at least the strumming of fingers on keyboard), the cerebral – verbal – pulsations/keystrokes of an interlocutor (xxi)). As a result, there is an immediacy and an intimacy to these crónicas that can make them difficult to grasp fully; some read like Truus van Bruinessen’s letters (see Chapter 4), in which networks of family and friends are referred to as a matter of course, without explanation. Yet because Killer Crónicas, unlike van Bruinessen’s archive, is addressed to a public readership, the cultural and sometimes personal references that remain opaque to me may, as well as being an epistolary feature, also signal what I am missing as an outsider to this transnational Hispanic culture, and to Latin@ studies. And by signalling what I am missing, such references also hint at what I, reader/outsider, have the opportunity, through careful reading and follow-up, to gain. Crónica IX, ‘Estragos Acuáticos Crónica,’ for example, sketches an intellectual milieu stretching between Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Montevideo, through a group of poets who are both rivals and friends. No doubt the reader who is familiar with Latin American poetry can tell who is who and may find references to or echoes from their work in this Crónica that, so far, have remained a closed book for me. All the same, I find it rewarding to read and re-read, because I discover new layers in it with every attempt at analysis. At first glance, ‘Estragos Aquáticos Crónica’ looked to me to be a fairly anecdotal account, such as one might give in a letter or an e-mail, of recent events: a report of dramatic weather conditions in Buenos Aires and travails in getting a plumber to do the necessary repairs is followed by a story of a recent visit to Chile and an encounter with obnoxious male Chilean poets. On closer examination, however, this crónica appears to have hidden depths, depths that are only revealed in the interplay of English and Spanish. It opens with a humorous description of rainstorms (‘tormentas terribles’, terrible storms) in Buenos Aires that cause a flood in Chávez-Silverman’s apartment. She has just returned from Santiago, Chile, where she has attended several poetry readings and met Marina Arrate and Verónica Zondek, ‘amiga de Silvia Guerra and el Luis Bravo en Montevideo’, Uruguayan poets (61). Remarkably, Silverman’s first editions of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry have survived the flooding undamaged, although a psychiatrist friend who lives nearby ‘lost all her Lacan books’(58). This brief reflection on the (to my Anglo eyes) ‘torment’ of

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possible water damage to books, which are the tools of her trade and markers of her identity as a Pizarnik-scholar after all, then frames a report on the recent visit to Chile. This is a narrative of both how poetry connects people across the Americas and how cultural difference, marked by dissonant styles of speech and argument, also divides them. The biblical image of the flood in Buenos Aires gives way to that of a dog fight in Santiago, as the narrator discusses the Latino (italics used advisedly) cultural scene with the Chilean Roberto Vitale, and is forced to take the Chicana side against what she sees as his macho-Chileno stance. The prelude to this fight has been told in a previous episode, where the narrator attended a poetry reading by the Chilean poet Rodrigo Lara, which she judged to be ‘Practica un type of poetry que podríamos llamar “Bukowskian,” I guess. You know: maomeno, I fucked this chick, went to bed drunk, didn’t know where I was (or who she was) cuando me dehperté. That sort of thing’ (Practically the kind of poetry we could call ‘Bukowskian’. . . . More or less, . . . when I woke up (60)). This gender gap between the narrator and male poets of the Bukowskian persuasion opens up further when, a few days later, ‘Habíamos ido con Wilson to this poetry reading en “La Perrera.” Yes, te le juro, al antiguo Pound, donde antes llevaban a los strays caught by the dogcatchers to eventually be killed’ (We went with Wilson to this poetry reading in ‘The kennel.’ Yes, I swear, the old (dog-) Pound, where the dogcatchers used to bring their strays to eventually be killed (61)). In this description of the poetry venue, the phrase ‘al antiguo Pound’ is the interlingual pun that enables a debate about poetry, gender and cultural difference to be staged in the language of a dog fight: pound as kennel, and Pound as an illustrious poet of the masculinist modernist aesthetic. The fight that ensues between the narrator and Vitale, described as ‘super machista y misógino’ (super macho and misogynistic) by a friend who also tells her that Vitale has ‘un retrato de Pinochet in his house’, (a portrait of Pinochet) firms up the associative connection between Vitale’s and Pound’s politics (64; 65). ‘El tema de la película “Doggie Love”’ (the theme of the film ‘Doggie Love’) furthermore sparks off a debate that is partly about the Mexican film Amores Perros, partly about poetry, but mostly about gender, or rather, about cultural differences between Chávez-Silverman as a Chicana identifying with the Mexicanness of Amores Perros and the ‘intellectual’ critique mounted by Vitale, et al., cast in gendered terms (62).3 When the narrator is reluctant to answer

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the question ‘¿qué significa ser poeta en Chile ahora?’ (what does it mean to be a poet in Chile today?) because she is an outsider and no expert on Chilean poetry, Vitale’s baiting of her concludes in ‘Ah . . . conque la CHICANA no quiere opinar sobre teatro . . . sobre literatura, sobre cine ¿eh?’ (Ah, . . . so the CHICANA doesn’t want to give her opinion on theatre, literature, cinema, eh? (64)). The Chicana is thus humiliated, silenced and put down, but of course in this Crónica she takes her revenge. Through a critique, on and between the lines, of right-wing, male poetry across continents, in Spanish and in English, she writes palimpsestically about crypto-fascist estragos acuáticos, flood damage of another kind. This example illustrates not only the political charge of Silverman’s bilingual writing and transnational, hemispheric Latin@ affiliation, but also how Killer Crónicas is ‘bookish’, though not in the Poundian sense identified by Tino Villanueva in the previous chapter. Instead, she continually uses literature and cinema as a point of entry into a new culture, only to then examine and interrogate the preconceptions a view of the world through the lens of cultural representation generates. This happens, for example, in ‘“El Chino” Crónica,’ which is ostensibly about the search for authentic tango in Buenos Aires. First, the narrative voice envisages the sardonic smile of her friend who was present at the time, to whom this epistle is addressed (‘Necessito, entonces, recrear tu presencia, tu sardónica rísa’ (I need, therefore, to recreate your presence, your sardonic grin)) so that he can act as the imaginary interlocutor (‘I need your voice, Pablo’) on whom she can test her observations (15). Then, she gives her astonished commentary on Argentine Spanish: ‘ante estos bizarre giros linguísticos argentinos: rubro (categoría), avatares (twists of fate, ups and downs), contenedor (este es el que MAS me MATA, only here – made in Argentina y basado en el psicoanálisis, obvio – podría shamarse una “supportive relationship” a CONTAINER)’ (In the face of these bizarre argentine expressions: rubro, avatares, contenedor (this one cracks me up/ kills me: made in Argentina and obviously based on psychoanalysis, they call a supportive relationship a container (16)).4 This search for the authentic (always a hopeless prospect, as any scholar of postmodernism knows) thus begins with a meditation on the cultural difference embedded in words, words like ‘obvio’ (obviously) that are often transcribed with lengthened vowels and great emphasis: ‘OOOObvio,’ which she sees as a typically porteño expression.

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It ends, predictably, with that most typical of urban travel experiences: frustration and disillusionment, because the ‘reaaaaalmente autéeentico’ tango club promised by the taxi driver turns out to be just another tourist trap, with no dance floor and no dancing, so that the gap between hope and reality, language and experience opens up to full tragicomic effect. ‘“El Chino” Crónica’ is truly an essay in futility: the futility of the search for cultural authenticity, but also the futility of the demand to give up that search. When lost in the ‘grimmer and grimmer’ neighbourhood where the tango club is supposed to be, she tries hard to find the world of Argentine literature on the streets of Buenos Aires: ‘yo iba recibiendo los definite vibes de un Buenos Aires cada vez más alicaído, más tristón, más abandoned-warehouse and threatening, graffitti-scrawled muros. Más Borges, I told myself firmly. Más compadrito. En fin, I told the equally disconcerted Pablo, más tanguero’ (I was beginning to get definite vibes of a Buenos Aires that each time became more depressed and depressing. . . . More and more Borgesian . . . more of a place where the old guys hang out . . . more of a tango scene (17)).5 Borges has to be called to mind for the narrator to ‘recognise’ the tango atmosphere of Buenos Aires, because tourist tango itself cannot evoke it, just as ‘contenedor’ above gained authentic Buenos Aires meaning only through Silverman’s association of it with Villa Freud and Argentine psychoanalysis.6 Having come to Buenos Aires through poetry (Pizarnik’s and that of others) she thus shows how a bookish cultural insider is reduced to a mere visitor, an outsider among other gullible outsiders in the search for authentic tango. She makes clear how our knowledge of other cultures from books and films precedes us and betrays us when faced with the real thing; part of what makes Killer Crónicas so fascinating is the dialogue it stages between bookishness, everyday living and the bilingual awareness that, in Sylvia Molloy’s words, ‘there is always an other way of saying it’, in another place, in another time, in another language (293). The title of the collection itself reflects this bookish bilingual awareness, in that it can be roughly paraphrased as an ‘Argentine diary’ because of its reference to Esteban Echeverría’s novella El Matadero, or The Killer, a highlight of nineteenth-century Argentine literature and a protest against the Rosas dictatorship. In addition, the ‘killer’ in Killer Crónicas is that of the American ‘killer joke’ (as in ‘que MAS me MATA’, above) and I only get this reference

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and this joke because Chávez-Silverman explains, at the end of the volume, that she is in the habit of asking her students to open up ‘Killer, por favor’ at the beginning of a class on El Matadero, by way of probing their bilingual facility (143). Both aspects, the political and the humorous use of languages in close contact, align Chávez-Silverman’s writing with Doris Sommer’s programme for a bilingual aesthetics that is playful and critical, democratic and transnational (see Chapters 2 and 8). Other than Dirk Nieland’s comic and transitional Yankee Dutch (see Chapter 4), Chávez-Silverman’s Spanglish has a wide geographical and representational reach that can act as a bridge between North and South America, the comic and the political, and Angl@s and Latin@s who are interested in each other’s cultures and prepared to work at reading bilingually.7 To do so is to ‘dive into este mi texto intersticial. Go on, lánzate. Lance yourself,’ (dive into this interstitial text of mine) as Chávez-Silverman invites us to in the prefatory ‘Glossary Crónica.’ At the beginning of this book I asked whether a fully bi- or multilingual American literature is possible, and whether some literary forms are more suited to multilingual signification than others. I also wondered what it takes for us to be able to read bi- and multilingual migrant writing in a way that would do justice to its critical and political as well as poetic and aesthetic potential. Those questions can now be answered, as it is evident that a bi- and multilingual American literature is beginning to be written (again) by writers like Chávez-Silverman and the poets of the previous chapter. Anatoliy Kharkhurin’s empirical research in multilingualism and creativity shows that ‘cross-linguistic associations expand a pool of poetic images’ precisely as Doris Sommer surmised and the work of all the bi- and multilingual writers discussed in preceding chapters bears out (174). Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, furthermore, answers to Jahan Ramazani’s call for ‘a complex and nuanced picture of cross-national and cross-civilizational fusion and friction’, and my reading of this novel below and of Killer Crónicas exemplifies the transnational and bilingual poetics that such representations deserve (355). That the poetic signifying power of multilingual migrant writing is not confined to poetry, furthermore, Díaz’s fiction and Chávez-Silverman’s autobiographical prose both abundantly illustrate. It works with the fusion and friction of languages and cultures in contact, but also with the migrant’s

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affliction of belonging to two linguacultures at once, which Chang-rae Lee identified in Chapter 7. This brings with it not only ‘the right to critique both places’ (in Gayatri Spivak’s words of Chapter 6), but also the burden of traumatic memory of each. This is memorably exemplified in ChávezSilverman’s ‘Route 66 Crónica’ about 9/11, which insists on the necessity of writing (‘el deseo de la palabra. . . . Ek moet skryf ’ (the desire for the word. . . . I have to write) in the face of catastrophe, and yet tries to keep political pers­ pective too as it insists on the very different meaning the eleventh of September has for the Southern part of the American continent (53).8 Written in Los Angeles in September 2001, it asks: ¿Qué se puede escribir ahora, in the wake of the blast del 11 de septiembre, esa fecho already etched into my consciencia as the anniversary of Pinochet’s golpe contra Allende and democracy en Chile? Y . . . (pausa porteña) no. Al contrario, hay que escribir. Besides, I am beginning to discover, desde que estoy de regreso, here, in my (?) Califaztlán: I can write anywhere. (What can be written now, in the wake of the blast of 9/11, this fact already etched into my consciousness as the anniversary of Pinochet’s coup against Allende and democracy in Chile. And. . . . (Buenos Aires-type pause) no. On the contrary: I must write. Besides, I am beginning to discover, now that I am back here in my (?) own Califaztlán: I can write anywhere). (52)

In reflecting bilingually on writing and politics, this passage brings everything together that is distinctive, important and innovative in Killer Crónicas: the awareness of seismic political events in North and South America on 11 September, the question whether writing is possible at all in the wake of such trauma and the issue of the location of writing and language. ‘Califaztlán’ joins Califas with the Chicana homeland, just as the Spanglish of this passage connects North and South America, politics and representation, Califas and Chile. The ‘sedimentation’ of the oral into the written, sound into sight furthermore, that characterizes Chávez-Silverman’s prose, is also a sedimentation of the political into the aesthetic and el Norte America into the South. With Killer Crónicas, a text of Los Angeles and Buenos Aires, L.A. and B.A. equally, igualmente, wanderwords reach their lugares at last. Junot Díaz also writes about 9/11, and similarly invokes traumatic memory by rupturing his English narrative with Spanish wanderwords, but in a very different way, as my final foray into the wilds of bilingual American literature will demonstrate.

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Really reading Junot Díaz, or Oscar Wao’s wild tongue They say it came first from Africa, . . . that it was the death bane of the Tainos, . . . that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or . . . fukú – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral . . . ; despite ‘discovering’ the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. (1)

These opening lines of Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, American National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize winner of 2008, are a beginning full of beginnings: the beginning of slavery and the New World, of genocide and conquest, of Oscar Wao’s biography. It is also the beginning of endings: the end of the Taino at the hands of Columbus’ men, of Columbus himself, disgraced and crazy as he lay dying. And it is the end of Oscar Wao, whose chronicle this is but whose death (‘at the end’) is foretold here. It spells the end of the Twin-Towering Manhattan skyline that Oscar and his never-tobe-girlfriend stare at, several pages later, from the Jersey shore, in a time before Ground Zero was Ground Zero and homeland insecurity hadn’t been invented yet. Pregnant with portent, this beginning is bold and gruesome but also beautiful, even as it rewrites the history of the Western hemisphere in three doom-laden sentences. These are sentences for Europe’s crimes: its corruption of Africa and America, ground zero indeed, or terra nullius as the Europeans conceived of it, which was also paradise – Columbus writing in Castilian, in his letter of the first voyage, that Española is a marvel, more beautiful than Tenerife and ‘filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the sky’ (33). Like olden-day skyscrapers, perhaps, these trees are, like golden-days Manhattan before 9/11, or like the ‘wordscrapers’ Oscar and his n-t-b-girlfriend create as he courts her, unaware that she is his never-to-be.

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Española, of course, is Hispaniola is Haiti of tragic history, but it is also the Dominican Republic, where Oscar Wao and his author hail from. Before Columbus ‘“discovers”’ it on the first page of the novel as one of the Antilles (or, later, the ‘Untilles’), ‘these islands’ have already been explored by Derek Walcott in the epigraphic poem that precedes the Admiral’s appearance. The voice of the poem reports to have ‘had a sound colonial education’ but also a long memory of resistance to it, so that he ‘saw/when these slums of empire were paradise’ (n.p.).9 The Caribbean as Utopia and dystopia then, no-place or thisplace.10 ‘Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation’ the poem famously ends, and Díaz’s narrative voice takes off and over from there, echoing Walcott’s unabashed and wanton repetition of the n-word, in a singular island voice that has ‘Dutch, nigger, and English in me,’ and contains multitudes. Together with a quote from Fantastic Four about the import, or lack of, of ‘brief, nameless lives’ in the scheme of larger things, Walcott’s naming of the mélange that is Caribbean identity, post-Caliban’s colonial education, is perfect as an introduction to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel has sci-fi, Spanish, Elvish and English in it as well as a host of other languages and literatures too numerous to mention, and too heterogeneous to identify. Or so you would think; the annotated guide to Oscar Wao online makes it much easier, but more about that later. In this opening passage we don’t see so much of the novel’s multilingual texture yet, ‘(dique)’ being the only interjected wanderword together with the creole, made-up, ‘fukú’, and its invented Latinate species name ‘fukú americanus’, uncapitalized. But in the pages that follow, we readers are directly addressed as ‘you’, and challenged by the narrator to keep up with Oscar’s story which is told at breakneck speed, in what appears to be an oral discourse, consisting in part of islandic youth in-speak peppered with popular cultural references to genre fiction, of American hip-hop expressions and varieties of Spanish slang derived from the speech of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Haitian and South American Americans. This narrator’s voice is extremely complex, the more so because it combines high and low, standard and slang locutions and intertextual references, as well as creating new ones in the process. ‘Dique,’ however, is instructive on the first page of a Dominican American novel: look it up in the dictionary and you find it means ‘dike’ in English, which can make some sense in the context of Columbus’ landing and the question of what or who could possibly have held back the tide of European ‘exploration’, but in

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the sentence where it occurs, amid ‘hearing divine voices’, it makes no sense at all. Look further therefore, and find that the online Urban Dictionary gives ‘Dominican slang for “supposedly” or “so they say”’(from ‘se dice que’ or – more likely – ‘on dit que’, I assume) and that sounds right here. While ‘fukú’ is a Díaz invention of obvious American English-gone-global derivation, the modest (in brackets) presence of ‘dique’, if my theory that it comes from the French ‘on dit que’ is correct, introduces from the beginning a word of Haitian creole heritage into Dominican American writing. This is significant, since much of the novel’s representation of Dominican racial politics revolves around the ‘taint’ of blackness that is conspicuously displaced onto Haitians, and used as a race-and-class slur. In the familiar hierarchy of skin tone that is often called the pigmentocracy of the region (the darker-skinned, the lowerclass and poorer you must be) Haitians occupy the bottom rung; Lola teases her mother in a restaurant in the Zona Colonial, where the waiters look down on them as outsiders, by saying ‘they probably think you’re Haitian’, to which the retort is ‘la única haitiana acquí eres tú, mi amor’ (the only Haitian here is you, darling (276)). What taints and taunts people also ‘taints’ language: ‘Dominicans are reluctant to admit any influence,’ the linguist John Lipski observes, ‘[but] popular Dominican Spanish contains demonstrable Haitian traces’ (‘The Role of the City’, n.p.). Fear of contamination of standard languages by their colonially produced creoles and fear of miscegenation have historically gone hand in hand, and current US anxieties that hegemonic English is threatened by the Spanish invasion of new (im)migrants are a direct legacy of such nineteenth-century fetishization of purity. Díaz’s insertion of ‘dique’ into his English sentence therefore does not simply signal caution to the reader, warning her and him of the speculative, hearsay nature of the story they are about to read; for that purpose, he could have used ‘(so they say)’. More significantly and much more interestingly, it introduces language-mixing, creolization, as a fundamental feature of his literary discourse and one that English-only readers have to come to terms with if they really want to read him. This takes work, the kind of work that migrants have to do, as they learn to inhabit a language that isn’t native to them. Mary Antin turned the tables on her native-born American readership earlier in this book in the same way, by using lots of wanderwords and leaving them untranslated in the text, then appending a glossary to assist us in learning her languages; Díaz’s debut Drown had a

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glossary too.11 In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao wild tongues, however, are no longer tamed but unleashed on the reader, who has to do the best she or he can with Wao’s ‘todologos’, a hybrid neologism for the mix of languages, registers and popular culture references encountered in the novel.12 Díaz himself has said about the difficulty of learning English as an immigrant child that ‘there’s English acquisition and then there’s English acquisition, that there is this almost endless array of vernaculars that you have to pick up’, which are not just sociolects or accents but also the vernaculars of sports, or TV, or popular music, or ‘comic books, fantasy, and science fiction [which] are like a very vibrant, alive, and very American language’ (‘In Darkness We Meet’, 14). Interestingly in Díaz’s narrative discourse, the American vernacular of comics, sci-fi and fantasy holds equal status with the literary English alluded to in the novel’s title (Oscar Wao = Oscar Wilde) and the use of Spanish words, phrases and even whole sentences. These bring what Lori Ween has called a ‘Latin feel’ to the proceedings that does not, however, become ‘an essentializing notion that allows the market to categorize and define a type of writing’ (129). Rather, it does the opposite: in combination, conjugation and cohabitation these languages become an idiolect, or as Díaz puts it, in that same interview, ‘your own goddam idiom. You just create this entire language, and in some ways it holds you together’ (‘In Darkness We Meet’, 14). The quality, indeed the ‘feel’, of Díaz’s language is so original and obtrusive as to remind of Toni Morrison’s dictum in ‘Unspeakable Things, Unspoken’ that ‘the most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction, the one most fraught, is its language – its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked and unmasking language’ (11). Morrison is very much an absent presence in Díaz’s novel, an important ghost in the machine of ‘creating a language that can hold us together’, and here she draws particular attention to the political nature of certain kinds of culturally and/or racially marked registers which, by their ‘taintedness’, can stage a revolution in poetic language. Which is a revolution in thought as well; it shakes up hierarchies and forces you to look at words and worlds in a different way. Take, for example, the many words for racial differentiation that appear in Oscar Wao’s Spanish. Where US English only has ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘mulatto’ or ‘high yaller’, Díaz uses ‘bemba’ and ‘jabao’ and ‘trigueña’ and ‘moreno’ and

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‘negro’ and ‘blanquita’ and ‘prieta’ and ‘chabine’, which denote a whole range of shades and other racial features that are untranslatable in single words. To be understood they would have to be described and contextualized at some length; to be meaningful, they speak perfectly well for themselves as they are, for, according to a Vološinovian conception of the ideological burdens languages carry, these words import that colour hierarchy into the English text.13 With it, they evoke the long and troubled history of race-mixing in the Caribbean, so different in law (and therefore language?) though not in practice, from that of the United States.14 Díaz’s use of them is knowing and deeply political, as the language that differentiates in this way (unlike the blackand-white thinking of English) also ‘holds together’ the Latin@s of the region and establishes transnational connections between them. This is vital, because migrants bring not only their languages with them but also their brutal and painful histories of dictatorship and violence, of exploitation and conquest and rape and slavery.15 In its insistence on the continuity of transnational migrant cultures and the importation of traumas that it entails, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a tale of the making of (‘new’) Americans, but one that blows all the cherished myths of identity, from dream to self-invention to new beginning to bootstrap mobility, to smithereens. And it does this through its language, its ‘unpoliced, seditious, inventive, disruptive. . .’ etcetera multilingual signification that connects everything with anything and everybody with another, regardless of creed, colour or previous condition of servitude. This makes for a heterogeneous, multilingual, cross-register style that will have you take note and make notes on virtually every page; really reading Junot Díaz is work. This burden of work is considerably lightened by the comprehensive annotated guide to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ‘Kim’ has posted on the web, but it is not lifted; as ever, translation is not enough.16 In the terms of Reed Way Dasenbrock’s theory of reading multicultural literature, knowing what ‘jojote’ means in English, or that ‘Galactus is a fictional character that appears in comic books’ certainly informs my reading in terms of intelligibility, but it does not make it that much more meaningful. Meaningful is that, although I cannot recall its translation, I have not forgotten the word ‘jojote’, nor its derogatory power or the context in which it occurs, which prompted me to look it up in the first place. And this – retention of the ‘foreign-to-me’ word, its

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look, its sound, its feel in the mouth as I nearly choke trying to pronounce it as an English speaker – is surely the point of Díaz’s multicultural and multilingual, omnivorous writing. Really reading means to move beyond translation and to let the wanderwords do their own thing. To give another, very straightforward example: that ‘Darkseid’ on page 5 refers to ‘a fictional character that appears in comic books published by DC Comics’ may be useful to know, but it does not advance my reading much in poetic terms. Only when reading creatively and associatively, with eyes and ears (not just laptops) open, does Darkseid come to rhyme with the dark side of the history of the Americas that Díaz is excavating here, as Chávez-Silverman did in ‘Route 66 Crónica’ earlier, in his examination of the Trujillo dictatorship and other forces of terror, be they Nazi or Stasi, Papa Doc or Baby Doc, TonTon Macoutes or SIM.17 Díaz’s writing shows up particularly well how the poetics of wanderwords and other kinds of heterolinguality that I have developed in previous chapters works to enhance our reading. His work exemplifies transnational migrant culture in the very fabric of its bi- and multilingualism; it mixes up high and low cultures and registers, the King James Bible and sci-fi, orality and literacy; absorbs American and postcolonial literatures; writes Spanish and Spanglish, English and Elvish; and connects New Jersey with the Dominican Republic.18 Díaz’s literary discourse is living proof that, in Alastair Pennycook’s words of the beginning of this book, ‘languages are not mere media but . . . stand at the very core of major cultural and political questions’ (‘Lessons’, 217). It diversifies the American linguascape of the twenty-first century, to make it multilingual again and return it, critically, to its heterogeneous beginnings. As Díaz himself puts it: I’m part of the mainstream ‘American’ literary tradition. I’m part of the Latino literary tradition. I’m part of the African Diaspora literary tradition as well as the Dominican literary tradition. But there’s also the oral tradition and the rhythmic tradition of the music I grew up with which deeply influences how I write a sentence and how my work sounds. (Cespedes, 904)

This is what the future holds for twenty-first-century ‘American’ literature: fusion writing that is, in Doris Sommer’s words, constantly marked by ‘a cut or a tear’ as languages rub up against each other and explode – or make new meanings (Bilingual Aesthetics, xix).

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Wanderwords and other heterolingual aesthetic practices come into their own, as I have shown, when we allow their wayward significations into our reading to breathe new life into familiar migrant writing, such as Hunger of Memory or Lost in Translation or The Promised Land. Close attention to wanderwords can also expose the otherwise well-disguised migrant routes of a canonical cultural production like DeLillo’s Underworld, while analysis of heterolingual diction enriches our understanding of Dictée’s difficulty no less than Díaz’s bilingual and popular-cultural troping. To read multilingually, in other words, is to reanimate the dead letter of writing in English and revitalize its living connection with other languages. Nor is this effect confined to American literature, or to writing in English only. At the beginning of this book I thought chiefly about the ‘wonder and the wandering of words and meanings in the lingual contact zone of English-with-other-languages’, but now, by its end, it is clear that no such limitation need exist: Why not Arabic-with-other-languages, or French, or Russian, or even Mandarin or Japanese? In the future, more and more bi- and multilingual readers and writers will contribute to a multiculture that is not just transnational, but global and – most likely – voiced, imaged and written on the internet. This future is already with us, and in the beginning of it is the wanderword.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Meir Sternberg uses ‘heterolingual’ in ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’ (222); K. Alfons Knauth writes of ‘conflictive multilingualism’ that is ‘conditioned by direct and durable colingual contacts between neighboring countries or between different cultural groups within a country mainly on the basis of immigration or exile’ (3.9). 2 The mention of Quintilian’s verba peregrina and the advice that such barbarolexis, or barbaric vocabulary, be kept to a minimum also comes from Knauth (2.1). 3 Brom Weber made a similar point in 1975: ‘all American literature has been written or recounted by members of ethnic groups’, and is therefore ‘inescapably ethnic in origin’ (3; 16). 4 Nor is she always able to do so; she has said in interview ‘I wasn’t aware that the House on Mango Street was so influenced by Spanish until I finished’ (qtd. in Contreras). 5 As K. Alfons Knauth has made clear, in a tradition dating back to the Classics ‘the principle of literary imitatio produced a special kind of intertextual bi-or multilingualism’ which has generated a rich critical apparatus that is still being expanded (2.4). I will return to this issue in Chapter 8. 6 For a history of the Official English movement and preceding attempts at language restriction in the United States, see Ricento, ‘A Brief History.’ For a history of US language policy, see Urciuoli, and for a discussion of the impact of language policy on minority languages, see Romaine. 7 Marc Shell underscores this when he observes that ‘[t]he contrast between emphasizing cultural diversity and deemphasizing language difference arises from the traditional American pretense that culture is not largely linguistic or, rather, that culture ought to be English’ (‘Babel in America’, 14). 8 Gilman writes about a different context, that of soit-disant Jewish writing in the new Germany, but he applies his statement to ‘the Yiddish-speaking Jews of North America’ as well (21).

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9 See the MLA language map for numbers and geographical distribution of current speakers of languages other than English: http://arcgis.mla.org/mla/ default.aspx. 10 See François Grosjean, Bilingual Lives and Steven Kellman, The Translingual Imagination. 11 See also my review of The Translingual Imagination (Lauret, ‘Review’). 12 After Babel echoes the title of George Steiner’s famous book on multilingualism and translation, which celebrated language diversity in a manner deeply at odds with the Chomskyan linguistics of his time and the imperial monolingualism of his adopted country, England. In an unmistakable echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on linguistic relativity, Steiner writes, rather wonderfully: ‘Each language maps the world differently. . . . Each tongue – and there are no “small” or lesser languages – construes a set of possible worlds and geographies of remembrance’ (xiv). 13 See also Roger Williams on indigenous American languages in colonial times. The anthology Castillo edited with Ivy Schweitzer, The Literatures of Colonial America, corrects this Anglo bias and places the literature of New England among those of New Spain, New France and pre-Columbian Native America. It is a great shame that neither the anthology nor Performing America provide extracts of the original texts, but only translations, so that for the reader the effect of English-only is preserved. 14 See Dasenbrock, ‘Intelligibility and Meaningfulness’ (1987), ‘Do We Write the Text We Read?’ (1991) and ‘Why Read Multicultural Literature?’ (1999). 15 Rosenwald gives the example of a passage in Ashkenazic Hebrew in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America that students who do not know Hebrew cannot possibly understand. They have to be told what the passage says, because ‘[r]eading other languages doesn’t get easier unless readers actually go out and learn them; what readers are confronting is not difficulty, but impossibility’ (Multilingual America, 6). 16 This not-so-rhetorical question has been of concern to educational institutions and organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, who have pointed to the cognitive, social, cultural and – yes – also security gains that bi- and multilingualism bring in their train. Translation has been given much attention in recent years by the MLA in the United States, with the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the United Kingdom following suit and setting research priorities in ‘translating cultures’ and ‘foreign language learning’. Both in the United States and in the United

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Kingdom this new interest in translation follows – not a moment too soon – the closure of many modern language programmes, which has brought with it a serious erosion of both countries’ skills base. These closures have not just happened as a result of ‘cutbacks’, as one MLA statement has it. The abolition of many modern languages degree programmes and, in the United Kingdom, of compulsory ‘foreign’ language education in secondary schools, is itself indicative of a much more widespread Western cultural and Anglo-linguistic complacency that was challenged by 9/11 and subsequent seismic shifts in the geopolitical landscape and is only now, belatedly and slowly, being addressed. See MLA, ‘Learning Another Language,’ and the British Academy position paper ‘Language Matters.’ 17 A bi- or multilingual reading, furthermore, can draw on the linguistic unconscious in interesting and often humorous ways. A trivial but telling example of such a reading by contrast with translation is my response to the regulatory health warning on tobacco products. In Spain this says ‘Fumar puede ser causa de una muerte lenta y dolorosa,’ which is much less threatening and stark than the English ‘Smoking causes a slow and painful death.’ For one, I don’t know Spanish very well and so none of it is particularly familiar; Spanish words are still relatively new and exotic to me, which softens the effect. Second, ‘Fumar puede ser causa de una muerte’ is less definitive than ‘Smoking causes death.’ Third, and more importantly, a multilingual reading is aware of the look and sound of the words, and the ways in which they resonate with other languages I know. ‘Lenta’ is close to ‘lente’ in Dutch, meaning the hopeful season of spring, and also reminds me of the Italian ‘lento’ which intrigued me in my music books as a child, so both have quite positive connotations. ‘Dolorosa’ furthermore is not painful in my linguistic imagination but pathetic in the true sense: full of pathos, sorrow, as in the Mater Dolorosa for whom I am named. Then again, ‘dolorosa’ also has ‘rosa’ in it, fragrant with silky-soft petals. A Spanish ‘muerte lenta y dolorosa’ is thus not nearly as terrifying as dying from smoking in English. 18 See, for example, the work of Pas on American literature in Polish, PerezFirmat, Sommer and other Latin@ critics on the literature of the Americas in Spanish, Ǿverland on Norwegian, Conolly-Smith on German, Yin on Chinese. 19 See, for example, Gardaphé, Konzett, Lee, Park, Perez-Firmat, Sinke, Zaborowska. 20 Since then the call for transnational American studies has been echoed by many other scholars, notably Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 address to the American Studies Association, and Emory Elliott, who echoed Fisher Fishkin’s

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Notes call for multilingual scholarship in 2007. Elliott urged his readers ‘to listen and really hear all voices and make greater efforts to engage with colleagues around the world, not only to share our knowledge of the United States but to learn other ways of perceiving, thinking, and behaving in the world’ (‘Diversity in the United States and abroad’, 17; emphasis added). For Elliott, as for Fisher Fishkin, this multilingual agenda is imperative in a divided, uncertain and terrorized world that suffers as much from Western intervention (soft-cultural as well as hard-military) as it does from forces on the ground seeking to counter them by any means necessary. This is not to say anything so simple as that bi- or multilingual scholarship will bring world peace overnight, but it is to acknowledge that English-only is not conducive, on the whole, to finding ‘different ways of perceiving, thinking, and behaving in the world’. It can be no great coincidence that scholars most interested in cultural difference and those most aware of the role of language in structuring it tend to be bi- or multilingual themselves. Working in Anglo environments, they feel the pressure and, it must be said, wield the power of English, and one way of dealing with the friction that results is to put it to work and write about it.

21 The Act stipulated that no more than a 2 per cent equivalent of the number of people of a particular national origin already living in the United States according to 1920 Census figures would be allowed entry per year. In practice, this quota system heavily favoured those of Irish, German and British origin; according to Desmond King, these countries accounted for ‘about 70 percent of the annual quota of approximately 158.000’ (60). 22 See Gabaccia, Immigration and American diversity. 23 James R. Barrett writes of the Red Scare of 1919 as ‘a kind of enforced Americanization’, which immigrants with radical sympathies had to accept on pain of incarceration or deportation (1019). 24 Joshua Miller reports in Accented America that in 1919, 38 workers were fired for ‘a refusal to learn English in the school provided’ and notes that the word ‘refusal’ clearly ‘implies wilful disobedience rather than incapacity’ (58). 25 In their summary of Americanization historiography Otis L. Graham and Elizabeth Koed put it thus: ‘Liberal Americanizers tended to promote a minimalist core, a blend of skills [such as English], behavior [such as punctuality and hygiene] and values [such as democracy and egalitarianism]’ while allowing for immigrant ‘gifts’ such as cuisine, folklore and religion. The ‘100%-ers’ by contrast demanded in addition ‘thrift and sobriety . . . respect for the capitalist system . . . perhaps conversion to Christianity [and] certainly the repudiation of radical/terrorist political doctrines’ (44).

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26 It is no accident that the concept of ‘the American creed’ itself entered common parlance in 1917, when William Tyler Page first articulated and submitted it to the US House of Representatives, significantly personalized as ‘an American’s creed’. Page’s declaration closed with the words ‘I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.’ It can be found online at >http://www.ushistory.org/documents/creed.htm. Its context was, of course, the patriotic fervour of World War I, but Progressivism with its reformist zeal, modernity and the social schisms it brought about, and last not least, Theodore Roosevelt’s 100 per cent Americanism also played their part. 27 See for the historiography of the movement up to 1948 Hartmann; for a view from 1970 Carlson; late twentieth-century perspectives: Graham and Koed; Gerstle; Gabaccia, ‘Liberty, Coercion and the Making of Immigrant Historians.’ For Americanizers’ own, contemporaneous ideas of the movement, see Aronovici; Bogardus; Boughman; Committee for Americanism; Gibbs; Shiels; Stauffer. 28 The Task Force had been charged by President George W. Bush to prepare a policy document for the Department of Homeland Security ‘to help legal immigrants embrace the common core of American civic culture, learn our common language, and fully become Americans’ (US Dept. of Homeland Security, iv). 29 Among the many scholars who have recounted this story of the Ford Americanization ritual are Currell, and Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity (89). 30 For a detailed assessment of ‘foreign’ language instruction during the first half of the twentieth century and the role of ethnic shame in it, see Zimmerman (1402). 31 For insightful further contextualization of the English-Only movement, see Crawford, At War with Diversity. 32 This short history of the US linguascape in the twentieth century implicitly connects its development to that of Appadurai’s techno-, media- finance- and ethnoscapes as well. For example, as the ‘foreign language press’ is curtailed around World War I, media-and linguascapes change, and as labour markets fluctuate due to immigration restriction, Depression and war, the ethnoscape is affected. Internationalization and global migration affect the movements of people and capital, hence ethno-and financescapes, while the internet and global communications technology make the twenty-first-century technoscape look very different from that of even 20 years ago. See Appadurai and Rantanen for further explication of the various scapes.

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33 See, for example, the website of the Workmen’s Circle which provides courses in Yiddish, http://www.meetup.com/Workmens-Circle-Yiddish-Group/ and the Native American documentary We are still here for the revival of Ojibway, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnPKzZzSClM. 34 Stephen Bender has termed such policing of linguistic behaviour ‘language vigilantism’. On contemporary nativism, see Juan Perea, Immigrants Out!, especially Tatalovich. Further examination of the twentieth-century linguascape can be found in James Crawford’s anthology, Language Loyalties. See specifically articles by Atkins; Castro; Fishman; Higham; Huddleston; Leibowicz; McCormick; Montaner; Nunberg; Roosevelt; Snow; Transviña. On the rift between generations as a result of language attrition, see Fillmore. As regards the pressure to write in English, Brian Lennon makes a big play of English-only marketability in In Babel’s Shadow.

Chapter 2 1 Anatoliy Kharkhurin adds to this rather too sweepingly that ‘historically, the overwhelming part of the population in the United States speaks only one language, English, and has little incentive to acquire any foreign language’ (xii) while the rest (migrants) had to acquire English and likewise had no incentive to learn yet another language once they had mastered it. Although this view of ‘history’ is, really, confined to the twentieth century, Kharkhurin’s conclusion that the United States ‘presents a clear pattern of monolingual/bilingual dichotomy, rather than a more variegated picture of multilingualism as one would find in Europe (with the exception of the U.K.)’ is nonetheless right. 2 For the four dimensions, see Edwards, Multilingualism, 56; Grosjean, Life with Two Languages, 232; Hamers and Blanc, Bilinguality and Bilingualism, 6. 3 From a narrow definition of bilingualism as perfect, to a notion of balance, the scale then slides all the way down to the ability ‘to produce complete, meaningful utterances in the other language’ in Einar Haugen’s oft-cited phrase (quoted in Grosjean, Life, 232). This minimal definition brings us back to the idea that anyone whose first language is not Spanish or French and who can say a formula like ‘una cerveza, por favor’, or insert a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ into their sentences, is bilingual – not a satisfactory position for our purposes. 4 See for an accessible overview of the scholarship on cognitive processing in bilinguals Cook.

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5 Kharkhurin acknowledges the advantages of early language acquisition and the ‘critical period hypothesis’, which holds that any second-language learning is more effective before puberty, before ‘lateralization [of the brain] is complete’ (29). Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri in The Babel of the Unconscious (x) use ‘polylingualism’ for simultaneous and ‘polyglottism’ for successive bilingualism, but I follow here the more common practice in linguistics. 6 On the one hand many linguists agree, as do happy bilinguals, that the more languages you know the easier it is to learn still more; on the other hand, dominance of one language over another and gradual attrition of the first language if it is not in everyday use (as is often the case with migrants of second and third generations) are common experiences for bilinguals. 7 Part 2 of Lost in Translation is titled ‘Exile’. 8 Kharkhurin reports that recent research indeed shows impairment of the bilingual’s cognition when confronted with verbal tasks, but a markedly enhanced performance on non-verbal ones (22). He further mentions greater ‘flexibility in thinking and superiority in concept formation’ (24). 9 See Wei, ‘Dimensions of Bilingualism’, 24–5; Fishman, ‘Whorfianism’, 574; Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics, 4; Kharkhurin. Other linguists adopt a more equivocal stance. Grosjean, for example, remains neutral on the question of cognitive advantage, while Edwards opts for the cautious formulation that ‘bilingualism can represent another dimension of one’s capacities, and in that sense a repertoire expansion’ – hardly a startling claim for the superiority of the bilingual mind (Life, 226, Edwards, 70–1). Neuroscientific research has not advanced as much as we would like to think sometimes, although thanks to MRI brain imaging the ‘topography’ of language functions in the brain has been considerably modified in recent years. Our deeper questions about ‘how language works in the brain’ need to be far more specific for empirical research in neuroscience to be able to answer them. This is not to say that it has nothing to offer us, however; at the very least, neuroscience gives insight into the physiological basis of various language disorders, such as impaired speech (aphasia), loss of the ability to read (alexia) and, if the right hemisphere is damaged, impairment of ‘affective prosody’ (intonation, inflection) and ‘in general, any non-literal meaning’, according to Michel Paradis (399). Research into the effects of brain damage and dementia for a person’s language capacity (speech, reading, aural comprehension and writing) has produced some startling results that enable us, at least, to disarm some common misconceptions about bilingualism. For example, the finding that in most (though not all)

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cases of left hemisphere brain damage in bilingual subjects both languages are affected, to a similar degree across the four functions, and that both languages are restored to the same degree on recovery, tells us that ‘the mother tongue’ has no different status in brain functioning from that of languages acquired later in life (Green, 418). Conversely, the regression to childhood that often occurs in people with dementia may entail a re-activation of the native tongue, which – as we saw with Rakhmiel Peltz’s research in Chapter 1 – has remained dormant but intact, even if it hasn’t been used for many years. 10 I allude here to Roland Barthes’ famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which argued that none of the meaning of the literary text ultimately can be said to derive from the author’s life or intentions, but only from the reader’s active engagement with words on the page. 11 See, for example, Besemeres, ‘Anglos Abroad’ and ‘Different Languages, Different Emotions’; Pavlenko, ‘In the World of Tradition I Was Unimagined’ and ‘Language Learning Memoirs as Gendered Genre’. See for language memoirs also Morrow, ‘Language and Identity’; Ramsdell, ‘Language and Identity Politics’; and Kramsch, ‘The Multilingual Experience’. Pavlenko notes a gender difference in the genre and finds that women life-writers ‘see language learning as a reinvention of self through friendship and as connectedness with others’, whereas ‘male memoirs privilege individual achievements’ (‘Language Learning Memoirs’, 229; 231; emphasis original). 12 This game works in English too, although differently, for ‘mouth organ’: is the mouth an organ? Or is an organ [the musical instrument] some species of giant mouth? 13 This seems surprising, given psychoanalysis’ interest in language, and in light of the fact that so many influential psychoanalysts of the twentieth century were bior multilingual émigrés themselves. Then again, maybe that is the reason: taking bi- or multilingualism for granted, migrant analysts might have been especially attentive to the strangeness of all language, including or perhaps especially the ‘native’, and less likely to see an analysand’s several languages as a problem. 14 This was true of Freud’s own migration to England too. Cathy Caruth writes about a letter Freud wrote to his son, with the prospect of exile and death in England. She does not quote the original, but just notes that ‘the last four words – “to die in freedom” – are not, like the rest of the sentence, written in German but in English’. Caruth comments that ‘the impact of this, not fully conscious address, may be not only a valid, but indeed a necessary departure’ for trauma theory (192). But we can see Freud’s use of wanderwords in the face of death and exile – and not least freedom – also as a point of departure for a theory

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of language migration to which psychoanalysis is integral. Trauma theory in relation to multilingualism is discussed further in Chapter 7. 15 As far as I have been able to ascertain, the expression (although not the practice) ‘the sleeping dictionary’ has its origin in British colonialism, when the phrase was used to describe relations, linguistic and sexual, between male colonial administrators and native women. A 2003 film of that title by Guy Jenkin presents just such a scenario, in which the young male British protagonist learns the native language and mores from his Sarawak lover. For the few scholarly discussions of the phenomenon, see Kerr and Weatherston.

Chapter 3 1 See, for example, Kellman, The Translingual Imagination, 73–84; Zaborowska, How We Found America; Casteel, ‘Eva Hoffman’s Double Emigration’; and Fjellestad, ‘The Insertion of the Self ’. 2 See Buelens, ‘The New Man’, 91; Zaborowska, How We Found America, 226. 3 Lejeune, The Autobiographical Pact, 22–3; Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 9. 4 Sollors, ‘Introduction’ to The Promised Land; McGinity, ‘The Real Mary Antin’. See also Domna C. Stanton, ‘Autogynography’ where Stanton discusses the relation between fiction and autobiography in detail. 5 Hoffman says as much in an autobiographical essay: ‘within the framework of postmodern theory we have come to value . . . uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity’ (‘The New Nomads’, 44). 6 The Immigration Act is also known as the Johnson-Reed Act and incorporated the National Origins and Asian Exclusion Acts. 7 Maria Karafilis pithily remarks that Antin in The Promised Land came up with ‘her own type of Dillingham Commission’ by naming the teacher who recognized her talent ‘Miss Dillingham’. 8 Daniels, Coming to America, 280. 9 See Israel Zangwill’s play, The Melting Pot at Project Gutenberg. 10 See Higham, ‘The Problem of Assimilation’. 11 At this time, writes Higham, the ‘ethnicization’ of immigrants takes place: before they can assimilate to America, they first assimilate to each other. They are perceived, and then come to perceive themselves, as distinctive because of their shared ethnic otherness or national origin (Italians, Germans, Jews) rather than because of their particular regional (Sicily, Westphalia) or religious (Hasidic

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Jews, Dutch Reformed Protestants) origins by which they would have defined themselves previously. 12 Most recently, Jay Parini and Adam Rovner have characterized Antin’s work as simply celebrating assimilation. See Parini, ‘The American Mythos’, 58–9; Rovner, ‘So Easily Assimilated’, 319. 13 As Antin shows, however, not all immigrant girls were sent to school – her sister Frieda was put to work in the textile industry, for example. For an insightful analysis of how Antin sees the connection between her own and Frieda’s work, see Babak Elahi, ‘The Heavy Garments of the Past’. 14 For an analysis of the predicament of child migrants which draws on Hoffman’s and Antin’s memoirs, see Nedim Karakayali, ‘Duality and Diversity in the Lives of Immigrant Children’. 15 For more on this, see Karafilis, ‘The Jewish Ghetto and the Americanization of Space’. 16 Betty Bergland observes something similar when she says that Antin as autobiographer ‘is represented most concretely as a child, in both the narrative and the visual texts’ (the photographs Antin included to illustrate scenes from her life) so that she ‘becomes frozen as an adolescent’ (‘Rereading Photographs’, 75; 55). 17 I take the term ‘Yinglish’, meaning a mixture of Yiddish and English, from Loeffler, ‘Neither the King’s English.’ 18 For other language memoirs, see, for example, Kaplan, French Lessons, and for studies of the genre Besemeres, ‘Anglos Abroad’, and Pavlenko, ‘Language Learning Memoirs’. Brian Lennon has since contested the genre in In Babel’s Shadow. 19 As I understand it, the closest approximation in any of my languages would be the German ‘Sehnsucht’. 20 It is interesting that Eva’s two favourite English words, ‘enigmatic’ and ‘insolent’, in a way rhyme with ‘teşknota’ and ‘polot’, because what makes Eva enigmatic is her longing for the old world, whereas her old Polish panache is interpreted as insolence in the new. 21 ‘Strangers to ourselves’ is a direct reference to Julia Kristeva’s book of the same title, a psychoanalytic take on the ‘othering’ that subjectivity-in-language brings about. 22 Several critics have remarked that Hoffman gives Canada a particularly bad press in Lost in Translation, because it is the initial site of linguistic and cultural trauma. Canada is figured as the Sahara from the very beginning, and ‘Vancouver is the place where she first suffers the humiliations and

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disorientations of immigrant life’, writes Sarah Phillips Casteel, for example. See her ‘Eva Hoffman’s Double Emigration’ (291) and Fanetti, ‘Translating Self ’. For the purposes of my argument, however, there is no difference in the linguistic isolation that Eva experiences in Canada and the United States. 23 This is the same either/or division Todorov proposes, and for a similar reason: the ideological and cultural split between Eastern Europe and the West during the Cold War does not permit of translation. Unlike Hoffman, however, Todorov does not lose or mourn his Bulgarian, nor is it displaced or re-placed: it exists, still fully fledged, in another cultural, ideological, geographical space: literally in Bulgaria, but also – as he speculates – in another part of his brain. 24 Claire Kramsch writes in this connection about Hoffman’s self-consciousness and the text’s self-reflexivity: ‘her Polish self [that] watches herself . . . a self that is highly conscious of her art’ (6). 25 In a close analysis of another passage from Lost in Translation, Claire Kramsch notes how Hoffman’s narrator’s ‘Polish self watches herself do and think all of these things’ in the awareness that all English (all second language) is artifice and mimicry, badly performed. See Kramsch, ‘The Multilingual Experience’. 26 In an uncanny – and likely unconscious – echo of this passage, Doris Sommer writes: ‘It is one thing to read an inscrutable face and conclude that attempting to understand it would be a violation; it is another (but certainly related) thing to hear the terms of a respectful distance being set in a foreign accent’ (‘Resistant Texts’, 546). 27 It took some time for this message to filter through to historiography and the social sciences, however. Evidently it was still necessary in 2011 for sociologist Helma Lutz to argue that language migration is of vital importance to the study of immigrant identity. Using Hoffman’s memoir, Lutz asked ‘whether language acquisition is just an instrumental process in which one learns to function in a new country or actually results in a deformation of the self. Does the acquisition of different cultural codes necessarily entail subjugation, or can it also be experienced as a creative space in the process of identity reconstruction?’ (348–9). 28 For Antin’s Transcendentalism, see Butler, ‘Both Joined and Separate.’ 29 Originally Antin had wanted to publish The Promised Land as a novel, with her alter ego, Esther ‘Altman’, in the leading role, but her defence of immigration demanded the autobiographical form. 30 Salz derives this impression from her study of Antin’s letters, from which a very different persona emerges. See also Keren McGinity, ‘The Real Mary Antin’, likewise based on examination of Antin’s correspondence.

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31 Antin was 18 at this time, though masquerading as 16, and she married the non-Jewish, considerably older geology professor Amadeus Grabau less than a year later (Salz, ‘The Letters’, 71). 32 As Werner Sollors documents in his ‘Introduction’, Antin was a prodigious correspondent with the great and good of her time, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks and Mary Austin, and counted Emma and Josephine Lazarus among her friends. (Sollors, ‘Introduction to The Promised Land’, xli.) 33 In the fashion of Antin’s time it was called ‘neurasthenia’, a notoriously vague diagnosis often made of high-achieving women. Like her contemporary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Antin was prescribed a rest cure during which she was not allowed to read and write, for fear of overstimulation. (Salz, ‘The Letters’, 76). 34 See for an analysis of these aspects Jolie A. Sheffer, ‘Recollecting, Repeating, and Walking Through’. 35 The last sentence of de Man’s article is ‘Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause’ (de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, 930). 36 Doris Sommer calls this phenomenon, in a different context, ‘the evaporation effect produced by the initial violence of writing’ (‘Resistant Texts’, 542). 37 It is tempting to speculate that writing in English – as she, like Hoffman, had to in order to reach her intended readership – may have had something to do with it as well; after all, she started out as a writer in Yiddish with From Plotzk to Boston, which she translated herself into English for publication. AmatiMehler et al. lend some credence to this idea when they write about ‘the type of personality that, regardless of specific inborn neurophysiological “talents,” seems to have a predisposition . . . for learning languages’. Those characterized as ‘imitative’ personalities are ‘capable of prodigious feats of learning, as rapid as they are superficial; but behind a façade of fascination and efficiency, they hide the fragility and poverty of their structure’, the psychoanalysts write. This is particularly interesting in light of Antin’s breakdowns and virtual career-collapse in the years after The Promised Land was published. The ‘imitative personality’ thesis would seem to contradict the earlier view that a second language can lead to new introjections that make a reorganized adult female identity possible, but this would be to forget that, as psychoanalysis understands it, such introjections are made ‘at the cost of deep and painful splittings’ as Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri also state (141–2).

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38 For a more nuanced view of this change in the American linguascape, see Jonathan Zimmerman, ‘Ethnics against Ethnicity’, which offers a very interesting analysis of immigrants’ own agency in bringing about this change. 39 Justine Pas, for example, writes movingly of having learnt Yiddish in recent years at university (Pas, ‘Finding Home in Babel’, 179).

Chapter 4 1 The Americanization of Edward Bok is still in print and it is also available as a full-length e-book. 2 Although it cannot be categorized as ‘American literature’, van Bruinessen’s archive is so unique and her Canadian immigration so similar to what it would have been across the border (indeed she does move to Grand Rapids for a spell, as if to just another Dutch migrant town) that I include it here all the same. 3 I have explained elsewhere that Bok’s autobiography is not an immigrant autobiography at all but an Americanization tract. See Lauret, ‘When Is an Immigrant’s Autobiography not an Immigrant Autobiography?’ 4 Arnold Mulder claimed in 1944 that this becoming ‘bilingual in reverse order’ was typical of rural American-born immigrant children too. ‘Properly speaking, they were people without a native tongue,’ he wrote; ‘[t]hey did their thinking in Dutch (or Swedish or Bohemian, in other communities) and had to translate into unfamiliar English’ (199). 5 Krabbendam likewise observes that Franklin’s Autobiography was a model for Bok’s own (71). 6 Krabbendam reports that Bok made the journey to promote Leven-WorstelenZegepraal (To Live, to Struggle, To Triumph), the Dutch translation of his autobiography, but that reception of the book in the Netherlands was not all that favourable. Most of his intended readership did not even know who Edward Bok was, and ‘Autobiography was generally considered proof of unhealthy feelings of self-importance’, in other words: it was considered unseemly and un-Dutch. The Americanization of Edward Bok therefore consisted, as far as his Dutch readership was concerned, as much in the performance of the boastful autobiographical act itself as in Bok’s career and success (Krabbendam, 167). 7 Abraham Kuyper, Calvinist Dutch prime minister and leader of the Antirevolutionary Party, remarked on a visit to Michigan in 1911 that evidently only

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the ‘lower classes’ had retained the Dutch language, and had done so in a form that was not ‘civilized’ (Edelman, 18). 8 ‘Monkiederij’ is mistranslated in the appended ‘Vocabulary’ as ‘gezeur’ (kvetching) and ‘monkie’ as ‘geknoei’ (making a mess). 9 See Amati-Mehler, Argentieri and Canestri, 33–4. 10 ‘eddekeesje is goed, maar toe muts is te veel’ (education is good, but too much is overdoing it) (Nieland, 7). For Dutch immigrants’ educational ambitions, see Henry S. Lucas (ed.), Dutch Immigrant Memoirs (404). 11 See Grosjean, Life, 147–8. Linguistics as a discipline grew up with early anthropology, race taxonomies and eugenics. The taint of ‘mixed languages’ – especially creoles and pidgins – derives from their historical association with miscegenation: a mixing of ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ languages yields a degraded, ‘mongrel’ offspring. This connotation of miscegenated impurity to an extent informs contemporary derogatory attitudes to languages like Spanglish, too. 12 In this respect, Penelope Gardner-Chloros’ argument that ‘inter-morpheme switching’ (such as ‘gewurried’ earlier) ‘would be unthinkable in writing’ is unwarranted: Nieland uses it habitually (Gardner-Chloros, 84). 13 H. L. Mencken, The American Language, Appendix II, section 8 ‘Dutch’. 14 In this respect it is different from today’s pre-eminent American interlanguage, Spanglish, which Ilán Stavans compares to Ebonics and Yiddish, which have many varieties and share the characteristics of them being internal languages. Stavans also highlights how difficult it is to capture an oral language like Spanglish in writing, because its ever-changing nature makes it a moving target. In a broader interlingual perspective, therefore, Nieland’s achievement is considerable (Stavans, Spanglish, 47; 252). 15 Dutch religious immigrants had been settling around the Great Lakes from the early nineteenth century onwards on the American side, and did so in Canada after World War II. 16 Yet another, intermediate audience is implied in the typed version of a handwritten account (the ‘Zeebrief ’ or ‘Sea-letter’) that van Bruinessen circulated among a broader circle of friends and relations, in which she narrates her voyage across the Atlantic and the family’s arrival in Montreal. For such widening of audience as a convention of the epistolary genre, see Gerber, ‘Epistolary Ethics’. 17 The genre is defined as such by Aneta Pavlenko, ‘Language Learning Memoirs’. See also Chapters 2 and 3. 18 van Bruinessen wrote On the Move when she was in her 70s, and at the time of my writing, she is still alive. Although not deposited in the National Archives

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of Canada, there are other letters covering the 40-year gap, which have been kept by the family. Personal communication with Frank van Bruinessen, 15 November 2010. 19 Alistair Thomson, May 2006, personal communication cited by permission of the author. 20 Certainly van Bruinessen’s writing also provides fascinating material for social history, particularly on gender. A long letter addressed exclusively ‘to the female members of the family’, for example, details van Bruinessen’s first experience of a Canadian maternity hospital, where she vividly describes how much more medicalized and public childbirth there is, compared with the low-tech intimacy of home births in Holland. (van Bruinessen, Letter, 15 March 1951, MS. 1r). 21 Journal, 10 November 1949, MS. 1r. 22 Journal, 18 December 1949, MS. 3r. 23 van Bruinessen cites statistics about the size and population of Canada by comparison with the Netherlands’ overcrowded cities, ever-encroaching on the countryside, for example (Journal, 8 December 1949, MS. 3v). 24 Anne van Arragon Hutten characterizes her own book as the ‘collective autobiography’ of a generation of Dutch Canadians. 25 Letter 3 (to parents) 1 September 1950. MS. 26 Of course, in the Reformed, Calvinist faith it is perfectly possible and legitimate to ‘go forth and multiply’ in the capitalist as well as in the reproductive sense, and indeed van Bruinessen compares herself in her journal, when she has just given birth to her third son within 5 years, to ’n gierigaard die steeds maar meer F wil’ (a miser who wants more and more $) (Journal, 11 December 1949, MS. 1v). Still, mere greed and materialism are not acceptable, and ostentatious display of wealth is taboo. 27 This link between the church and maintenance of the native language was equally strong in Dutch communities in the United States, as historian Suzanne Sinke shows: ‘All studies of Dutch language use in the United States noted the close relationship between Dutch language retention and Calvinist religious activity’ (‘Gender in Language’, 127). 28 The freedom and equality that the Dutch felt English afforded them is worth commenting upon, as van Bruinessen also does in her letters. She is surprised that her husband Peter addresses his employers by their first names, for example, and Sinke’s research shows that the relative informality of English, especially with regard to class, but also to gender markers, was welcomed by the Dutch. Having only one form of direct address (‘you’, as opposed to the Dutch distinction between ‘jij’ and ‘U’) cut out a whole area of potential social

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awkwardness, and the single English definite article is grammatically simple, because gender-neutral, as are most English nouns (‘Gender in Language’, 128). See for the notion of freedom in English also Sinke, ‘I Don’t Do Windows’. 29 Letter, 25 August 1950, MS. 1r. 30 Letter, 2 December 1951, MS. 2r. 31 Letter, 13 November 1950, MS. 1r. 32 According to neuropsychologist Douwe Draaisma, most people’s strongest memories in old age are of the years around age 20. He thus writes of a ‘reminiscence bump’ in autobiographical memory about events in early adulthood, and what I would call a ‘reminiscence slump’ as regards life between 40 and 60 (197–9). 33 The tone of this distinctive narrative style is reminiscent of Cissy van Marxveld, a popular author of ‘fiction for older girls’. Her Joop Ter Heul series was a staple of adolescent girls’ reading in the Netherlands in the post-war period. 34 Alice Kaplan describes her grandmother’s similarly alternate use of Yiddish for conversation and Hebrew for matters that touch on the religious in French Lessons (13). 35 This was the ‘zeebrief ’ (sea letter) announced in an earlier letter: ‘nu hoop ik maar op de plaats van bestemming een reisoverzicht te kunnen maken’ (I really hope I can at least write a report of the journey once we have reached our destination) (Letter, 11 April 1950, MS. 5r). In another letter, van Bruinessen worries that she will be seen as too self-important and vain because of her writing, and justifies her effort in time-honoured terms: ‘t is wel van belang that iedereen weet wat een emigrant te wachten staat’ (it’s important that everyone knows what emigrants can expect in this country) (Letter, 10 October 1950, MS. 1r). 36 Letter, 11 May 1952, MS. 1r. 37 Letter, 25 August 1950, MS. 1r. 38 Letter, 20 May 1951, MS. 1v. 39 Kathleen DeHaan writes in this context of immigrant letters as constituting the ‘performance of a diasporic identity’. 40 They were downwardly mobile at times and lived in a trailer park for a while, for example.

Chapter 5 1 (Mexican) is in brackets because Rodriguez has identified himself variously and pointedly as ‘An American Writer’ (early in his career, in the essay of that name)

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and as ‘someone who is related to Mexico’ (in a recent interview with Alex Park) as well as a host of other epithets (‘a dark-skinned Mexican American and a mestizo’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Jewish’); it always depends who is asking, and when. See Park, ‘Interview with Richard Rodriguez’; Susan Lerner, ‘An interview with Richard Rodriguez’; and Julie Polter, ‘Extended Interview with Richard Rodriguez’. 2 Frederick Luis Aldama, who also discusses this passage, relates it to the ‘ethnoqueer’ dynamic between conquistador and indio: ‘he is both active and penetrating conquistador and the passive indio’, but the latter’s ‘subordination . . . quickly turns into resistance as Rodriguez actively locates himself within a history of an indio subjectivity that can penetrate back’ (585). 3 Laura Fine reads this passage too, and concludes that it is about Rodriguez’s ‘confused ethnic identity’, a strangely literal reading in the light of her overall argument in this essay, that Rodriguez represents himself in this collection in the autobiographical persona of ‘an inept outsider’, who is learning lessons in Mexico that turn his preconceptions upside down (127; 133). 4 In this revision Kristeva defends herself against the charge that, in analysing abjection in the work of the anti-Semite Louis Ferdinand Céline, she was exonerating him, ‘(as if to try to understand necessarily meant to pardon [him])’ (261). 5 While initially many critics took Rodriguez’s bait and accused him of rootsbetrayal – see, for example, Tomás Rivera’s ‘colonized mind’ article, ‘Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis’, Ramón Saldívar’s ‘Review’, Genaro M. Padilla, My History, and Rosaura Sánchez, ‘Mapping’, it seems that since the early 1990s Rodriguez’s work has continually been ‘re-considered’. For a summary of the critical debate from a movement point of view, see Delgado, ‘Richard Rodriguez and the Culture Wars’; from that of the defenders, Randy A. Rodriguez, ‘Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered’. Henry Staten, ‘Ethnic Authenticity, Class and Autobiography’ offers a good balance. 6 Even in Hunger of Memory, which has drawn most of the critical fire, Rodriguez never disavows his descent, nor is he ashamed of his Mexican parents. Instead, he is candid about the fact that learning English was in part designed to hurt them. He describes the shame engendered by their poor command of English, and by a public education system that has no respect for Spanish nor for Mexicans. The Irish nuns at his Catholic school make it their business to persuade Rodriguez’s parents to speak English to their children in the home, and thus effectively to banish Spanish from their lives, private as well as public, altogether.

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7 This very widespread notion of migrant subjectivity (on the part of immigrants themselves as well as natives, I hasten to add) is really an updated – and entirely unacknowledged – version of ‘Blut und Boden’. 8 Garcia’s is an intricate argument that I cannot do full justice here; it deserves to be read in full. See Garcia, ‘The Inauthentic Ethnic’ (136). 9 This essay is probably the most succinct summary of all his controversial opinions. 10 In interviews, he has often described himself as melancholy: ‘I am a morose homosexual. I’m melancholy. The idea of being gay, like a little sparkler, never occurs to me’ (London). Of course he is also facetious in opposing melancholia to ‘gay’ness. 11 His argument is not the familiar one that affirmative action diminishes the achievement of those who benefit from it, but that it doesn’t reach the right people: those disadvantaged by class (rather than race or ethnicity per se). 12 Gustavo Perez-Firmat also uses Eakin’s terminology of ‘expository’ and ‘narrative’ voices in Tongue Ties (147). 13 Perhaps it is indicative of Rodriguez’s need to find a predecessor far from home that he did not see, or did not recognize, Arturo Islas as such. Islas, best known as the author of the Chicano classic The Rain God, was professor of English at Stanford at the time Rodriguez was a student there, and taught a class on lifewriting that combined the study of autobiography with practice of it (The Rain God cover notes). 14 Afeminado is one of many Spanish words for ‘homosexual’; English ‘effeminate’ is coded in the same way. 15 His own identification with Richard Hoggart’s scholarship boy would be an example of such use of personal experience for public ends. 16 Lea Ramsdell writes of the passage in Hunger of Memory where young Richard finds his parents at home speaking Spanish, but changing to English (‘those gringo sounds . . . [p]ushed me away’) as he enters, that ‘he does not hide the grief that he feels over the loss of intimacy’ as a result of the family’s switch to English (169). 17 See, for example, Park, ‘Interview’ and Polter, ‘An Extended Interview,’ where he also uses other Spanish phrases as part of his own discourse, such as ‘somos de los negros’ and ‘de los pobre [sic]’. 18 Padilla and Sánchez both draw attention to the fact that there has been, and remains, a vibrant public sphere in Spanish in the South West. The latter criticizes Rodriguez for his ‘ignorance’ of that fact, which may or may not be

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justified, but in any case misreads Rodriguez. By designating Spanish his private language he doesn’t necessarily deny it its public role, rather he equates the public sphere he wants to have access to with English because of his need to ‘leave the house’ and be free to speak in a language other than that of home. See Padilla, My History (4); Sánchez, ‘Mapping the Spanish Language’ (119). 19 In an interview with Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz Rodriguez proclaims: ‘I intend a prose that is brown and intends to confuse or to bewilder, even amuse by pulling hard on the foreskin of words (for the reader’s pleasure and my own)’. ‘The foreskin of words’ diverges, rather, from Rodriguez’s usual coyness, which in itself makes this playful statement worth citing. It also shows, however, how different the talking Rodriguez persona is from the cerebral one we encounter in the writing (Ibarrola-Armendariz, 95). 20 Angelika Soldan and Elizabeth Zavaletta read Rodriguez’s whole oeuvre as a ‘queering of identity’, but in my view his thought is too bound by binary divisions in Hunger of Memory to qualify as ‘queer’. A queer reading becomes possible with Days of Obligation (although, as Jeffrey Decker notes, this book also is structured on a pattern of oppositions) and is almost mandatory in Brown (Soldan and Zavaletta, 313–19 passim; Decker, 128). 21 See Rodriguez, ‘Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered,’ for the argument that Richard Rodriguez’s work was always already ‘queer’. Although in my view not always convincing, because based on assertion rather than textual analysis, Randy Rodriguez’s proposal was groundbreaking and generated a flood of new scholarship, particularly on the intersections of sexuality, masculinity and race in Richard Rodriguez’s work. See, for example, Eduardo De Gregorio, ‘Language and Male Identity Construction’; Spencer A. Herrera, ‘Performing the Chicano (Homo) Erotic’; José E. Limón, ‘Editor’s Note on Richard Rodriguez’; Yaakov Perry, ‘Metaphors We Write By’; Richard T. Rodriguez, ‘Imagine a Brown Queer’; Sandra Soto, ‘From One Yellow House to “Late Victorians”’. 22 As Yaakov Perry observes, ‘Rodriguez’s particular emplotment of desire is hardly ever addressed by his critics as an issue relevant to . . . bilingual education’ and all the other controversies he has been engaged in (156). 23 Lim’s essay is the only one I have come across (bar Gustavo Perez-Firmat’s in Tongue Ties) that is explicitly devoted to Rodriguez’s bilingualism. Leaving queer out of account, Lim argues that Latin is Rodriguez’s ‘third language’, which ‘captures Rodriguez’s ideal of a universal language’, and is akin to Homi Bhabha’s ‘third space’ in the logic of Brown’s mestizaje argument. Because Latin is a dead language confined to script and liturgy, I am not convinced by Lim’s

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argument (based on Rodriguez’s statement in an interview with Sedore) that Latin allows for participation ‘in any society in any country in the world’ (524). 24 In an interview with Tim Sedore, Rodriguez comments on this scene, names the ‘gringo’ friend and explains that his grandmother ‘was telling me that I had no business playing with him’ (Sedore, 445). Henry Staten – in an otherwise wonderful article – spectacularly misreads this passage in my view when he observes that it is indicative of ‘the purest Romantic theory of language, criticized by V. N. Vološinov’ because he takes Rodriguez to intimate that ‘the deepest, most authentic meaning pertains not to the material embodiment of language but to the spirit’. I read it in exactly the opposite way, with Vološinov, to mean that it is the sound of Spanish and the shared understanding of it – regardless of particular words used – that enables both this communication between Richard and his grandmother and the exclusion of the ‘gringo’ friend (Staten, 111). 25 See also Cooper (110). 26 Contrast Rodriguez’s defence of the macho as patriarchal figure, for example, with Ilán Stavans’s critique in ‘The Latin Phallus’, where repressed homosexuality is part of the definition: ‘Hispanic men are machos, dominating figures, rulers, conquistadors – and also, closeted homosexuals’ (230). 27 Of course, Hispanic homophobia has its counterpart in the Anglo-Protestant United States, but I note it here because, given the critiques of homophobia in Chicano/a writing, absence of it in Rodriguez is particularly striking. See, for example, Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera; Stavans, ‘The Latin Phallus’; Cantú, ‘“A Place Called Home.”’ 28 Ilán Stavans shows how Rodriguez shares this embarrassment with many other Hispanic men, and cites Octavio Paz’s view on self-disclosure as ‘“the shameful art of abrirse”’ (‘The Latin Phallus’, 129). 29 Maybe this is what Randy Rodriguez had in mind when equating English and America with ‘queer’. Tomás Almaguer adds another insight to this when he explains that, in the Mexican cultural system, there is no equivalent to the modern ‘gay’ man, which again sheds a Hispanic-cultural (rather than a resistant/individual) light on Rodriguez’s refusal of the ‘gay’ label (Almaguer, 257). 30 He complains in an interview that ‘very few reviews mention the fact of my homosexuality in discussing Brown [whereas] [f]or me it is a crucial aspect of my book’. I do not find this so surprising in light of Rodriguez’s sexual reticence when writing; moreover, typically and confusingly, in the same interview he

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describes Brown as ‘animated by a sense of sexual sin’, which begs all kinds of other questions about Rodriguez’s view of sexuality, and of his writing about it in Brown (Arias, 281). 31 In Brown he relates how the class/race nexus of social hierarchy in Mexico would have prevented him from being recognized there as a serious writer too: ‘the whitest dinner party I ever attended was . . . where a Mexican squire . . . expressed himself surprised, so surprised, to learn that I am a writer. . . . Un escritor. . . . ¿ Un escritor . . .? . . . . “You know, in Mexico, I think we do not have writers who look like you,” he said. He meant dark skin, thick lips, Indian nose, bugger your mother’ (141–2). 32 Doris Sommer makes a similar observation in the context of a discussion of Freud’s ‘Jokes and the Unconscious’, when she writes that ‘Wit would turn out to be the work of art as well as of unconscious mechanisms, and Freud would find even firmer grounds for code-switching between psychoanalysis and poetics, and for calling the witwork Verdichtung’ (Bilingual Aesthetics, 69). 33 As in the title of her most famous book on language, Étrangers à Nous Mêmes or Strangers to Ourselves. Rodriguez echoes this in a way in his interview with Sedore when he says, with regard to the ‘Grandma’ episode quoted earlier, that ‘everybody is bilingual to that extent: everybody has some part of their language that is in conflict with the public language’ (Sedore, 445).

Chapter 6 1 Mukherjee disapprovingly quotes Ha Jin, who seems to echo Aciman’s view: ‘some migrant writers . . . have to make their living outside their mother tongues . . . their survival depends more or less on estrangement from the mother tongue, and their ambition may lie in another language in which they have to figure out how to survive’ (The Migrant Writer, 89–90). She comments that Jin ‘works within traditional, Western narrative conventions; and . . . jettisons the options of writing in the mother tongue or in Chinglish in favour of simple, serviceable English prose that is easily accessible to American readers, whom he targets as his primary audience’ (‘Immigrant Writers’, 683). 2 Ilán Stavans refers to English in this way repeatedly in On Borrowed Words. 3 See for the various kinds of bi- and multilingualism Chapter 2. 4 Mukherjee’s experience of real-life transnational violence informs these narratives. Concerns first voiced in The Sorrow and the Terror, a campaigning

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memoir on the bombing of an Air India flight over Canada in 1987 which killed 329 Canadians of Indian descent, are continually reworked in her fiction. In an interview she has commented that ‘Canadians did not see these lost lives as a loss of Canadian lives and so the Prime Minister in Canada at that time . . . sent a cable of condolences to the Indian Prime Minister . . . saying “So sorry about your people”’ (Martos-Hueso and Ramírez, 136). 5 For the longstanding trade-and intellectual relations between Bengal, Britain and New England, see Krishna Sen, ‘The Bengal Connection: Transnationalising America in The Namesake and The Tree Bride’. 6 In some ways more comfortable, as Mukherjee has frequently pointed out, than the racist environments of Toronto or Montreal, New York or San Francisco. With caste privilege came gender restriction, however: ‘I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wandered. . . . I was constantly guarded’ (Moyers). 7 Interestingly, Dharwadker concludes that this history of Indian writing in English, preceding British colonialism, ‘carved out a permanent aperture inside the discursive formation of Indian-English literature, through which the precolonial, the noncolonial, and the colonial (and, most recently, the postcolonial) have constantly leaked into each other’, so that ‘causally, Indian writing in English cannot be solely or entirely a colonial phenomenon. . . . Indian writing in English is not homogeneously a literature of complicity, collaboration, or mimicry’ (116). 8 As rehearsed fairly early on by Bruce Robbins, for example, in ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanism’. 9 Jopi Nyman describes Mukherjee’s revision of Hawthorne in The Holder of the World (1993) similarly in Bhabha-ian terms as ‘historiographical mimicry’, tacitly allied with mockery: ‘By reading this novel as a form of mimicry and understanding that it functions as a critique of colonial discourse as represented in Western historiography . . . we can see where the relative lightness of Mukherjee’s writing comes from’ (301). Geraldine Stoneham also uses Bhabha’s hybridity but reaches the conclusion that ‘Mukherjee’s vision is based on a metaphor of genetic mutation rather than hybridity’ (92). 10 One of those unpredictable alliances is her own marriage to Clark Blaise, an American-born Canadian. Their joint effort at cross-cultural dialogue was published in 1977 as Days and Nights in Calcutta. As well as a memoir of a

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family visit to Calcutta that elicits differently ambivalent responses from both authors, they also act as cultural middlemen to inform a North American readership about India – or at least about Calcutta. 11 See for a reflection on the very language of post-9/11 ‘terrorism’ Kaplan, ‘Homeland Insecurities’ and ‘Violent Belongings’. 12 The speech she gave on becoming an American citizen, ‘Give Us Your Maximalists’, published on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, earned her the opprobrium of critics in the United States and in India. As Sharmani Patricia Gabriel relays it in her overview of Mukherjee’s reception, US-based critics of Indian descent took her to task for her embrace of the United States and for neglecting ‘the material realities impinging on Third World immigration’ in her work. Some Indian critics, by the same token, objected to Mukherjee’s negative representation of India, and yet others to her appropriation of the American literary tradition. Others again have found Mukherjee not critical enough of British colonialism, or not postcolonial enough in her fictional concerns. Much of this debate has been focused on Jasmine; see, for example, Bhatt, ‘Jasmine: an immigrant’s attempt at assimilation’; Stoneham, ‘ “It’s a Free Country” ’; Grice, ‘ “Who Speaks for Us?” ’; Carter-Sandborn, ‘ “We Murder Who We Were” ’; as well as Gabriel, ‘Between Mosaic and Melting Pot’. 13 J. K. Tina Basi noted in 2005 that 60–80 per cent of the world’s websites are in English. Furthermore, in India, often hailed as the new IT frontier, telephone connectivity was 3 per cent, home computer ownership 1–2 per cent and internet connectivity only half of that again (367–68). 14 Ubaraj Katawal gives the example of ‘matar panir’ in Jasmine: ‘Matar for peas and panir for cheese’ (Katawal, 13). 15 In the novel’s dedication to Mukherjee’s husband, ‘Clark-babu’, the suffix has been reclaimed, ironically, as an affectionate honorific. As for ‘Bhadralok’, interestingly this is a self-designation in Sanghamitra Niyogi’s research on the reception of Mukherjee’s work among immigrants; her American BengaliHindu interviewees in the Bay area described themselves as such and with that word (Niyogi, 247). 16 I owe this reference to Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien who quotes it in Weird English (254). 17 Spivak takes issue with hybridity in the remainder of the paragraph quoted above, probably not coincidentally, and calls it ‘a word serving to obliterate the irreducible hybridity of all language’, which is theoretically correct, but not immediately relevant here (Critique, 164).

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18 In response to Indian critics of Mukherjee’s work, Katawal writes that her characters ‘do not forsake the traditional modes of understanding regarding god, sociality, family, friendship . . . even when they strategically adopt the notions of citizenship, public and private, the rule of law, science and technology’ (3). 19 It is quite shocking to see how a noted linguist like Crystal falls victim to the triumphalism inherent in the ideology of global English in this passage. Elsewhere he has deconstructed some of the more outlandish, though no less widely held, beliefs about English – such as that it is inherently more logical, or beautiful or easier to learn than other languages – stating unequivocally that ‘A language becomes an international language for one chief reason: the political power of its people – especially their military power’ (7). It is worth noting that this book was written at the behest of Mauro E. Mujica, chairman of US English. Walter Mignolo adds a useful rider to the centrality of power relations by pointing out that, although ‘the number of speakers of non-colonial languages largely outweighs the number of speakers of colonial languages’, the issue is not how many people in the world use English but who does so (41). 20 The allusion is to Baudelaire in the dedication to Eliot’s The Waste Land and there are many more such buried references to the Anglo-American literary tradition (its ironic border-and language-crossing hybridity, pace Spivak, made visible here). Desirable Daughters palimpsestically overwrites scenes from The Great Gatsby, while Yeats, Browning and Tennyson are echoed as reminders of a common colonial education in Tara Chatterjee’s correspondence with friends and relatives in India. 21 I take it this is a playful reference on Mukherjee’s part, as the Indian Mutiny did not stretch to Bengal. It was, however, the beginning of direct rule by the British crown. 22 English, in Gunew’s view and mine, has not become what Edward Said described as ‘a technical language almost totally stripped not only of expressive and aesthetic characteristics but also denuded of any critical or self-conscious dimensions’ (qtd. in Gunew, 734) – which is but the flip side of Pennycook’s discourse of EIL as ‘natural, neutral, and beneficial’. 23 This is Huntington’s thesis in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). 24 It is worth noting too that Mukherjee’s repeated reference to Baudelaire, via Eliot, in ‘ma semblable, ma soeur’ is in reference to reading: ‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’ (Eliot, 53).

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Chapter 7 1 See also Sue Kim, ‘Apparatus: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the politics of form’. 2 My translation of the French titles is [She] Exiled, Hidden Word, Blind Voice. Constance Lewallen, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982). 3 See Chapters 2 and 8 for my critique of ‘code-switching’. 4 Josephine Nock-Hee Park notes the connection with Pound when she reads Dictée as invoking ‘the high modernist reinvention of epic’ (226). 5 I have analysed this phenomenon of ‘boundarylessness’ with reference to the work of Gertrud Koch in the context of feminist film theory (with the earliest stage of which, Laura Mulvey’s article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Cha was familiar) in ‘Feminism and Culture: the Movie’. 6 In her preface to Writing Self Writing Nation Elaine H. Kim explained that this collection of essays on Cha’s work was specifically conceived to counter the work of ‘contemporary critics who largely ignored or sidelined Korea and Korean America in their discussions of the book’ (ix). In Shelley Sunn Wong’s final essay of the collection, the target of this criticism becomes clear. Wong cites a paper presented by Priscilla Wald at MLA in 1990 on Cha’s ‘aesthetics of displacement’, in which, for Wong, ‘a theoretical discourse “displaced” the subject(s) of Dictée’ (140). Wald graciously took the criticism on board in her review of Writing Self Writing Nation, where she placed Dictée in a transnational context and conceded the ‘problematic’ nature of her MLA presentation. See Wald, ‘Minefields and Meeting Grounds.’ 7 Hee-Jung Serenity Joo and Christina Lux highlight the suggestion in the text of another ‘public execution scene’ at the very end of Dictée that rhymes or chimes (the passage is about pealing bells) with this image (11). 8 Although, as Elaine Kim notes, Cha is not unique in taking this stance: ‘Long after the Japanese occupation was formally ended in 1945, Korean American writing continued to express the particular anguish of the exile deprived even of the sustaining illusion of a triumphant return “home” after a life of toil in a country where s/he felt hated’ (‘Korean American Writing’, 158). 9 Takaki sounds a similar note of caution when discussing Confucianism in relation to recent Korean immigration in Strangers (441). 10 In her history of Korean American writing, Elaine Kim calls Cha’s generation the 1.5s ‘to denote those who were born in Korea and speak Korean but were educated primarily in the United States’ (‘Korean American Literature’, 174).

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11 The Oxford English dictionary gives ‘pigeon’ as an alternative spelling for ‘pidgin’, and defines pidgin English as ‘jargon chiefly of English words used between Chinese and Europeans’ (emphasis added). I shall return to the pidgeon in relation to the swan that appears in ‘Urania: Astronomy’ below. 12 Tsou writes of the classroom as ‘a utopian space in which nonnative speaking is encouraged’ (584). 13 See, for example, Wu, ‘Native Sons,’ and Kim, ‘Do I, Too, Sing America’. Kun Jong Lee gives a comprehensive list of all the African American writers Lee has been compared with in ‘Towards Interracial Understanding’; Tsou’s reading, focusing on a de Man-ian understanding of allegory, references ‘Ellison’s playful critique of African American hypervisibility’, which rather underestimates that novel’s politics, in my view (Tsou, 585). 14 Translation by Elaine Kim (‘Poised’, 10). Barbara Page’s translation is slightly different; she leaves off the final elaboration ‘to my native place’ (‘Women Writers’, 15). 15 ‘The suggestion seems to be that Korean nationalists in Japan carved the words [after liberation] as if the inscription had been made by a forced [Korean] laborer,’ Elaine Kim explains (‘Poised’, 25). 16 Elaine Kim, Lisa Lowe, L. Hyun Yi Kang and Shelley Sunn Wong all make this point in various ways in the collection Writing Self Writing Nation, which is devoted to Dictée precisely in order to reclaim it, and Cha, for Korean specificity. The aim is to produce ‘a materialist reading . . . sensitive to the issues of colonialism, nationalism, race, ethnicity, gender, and class’, as Elaine Kim puts it in her ‘Preface’ (ix). 17 Possibly the slip from ‘taiji’ to ‘t’ai chi’ is simply due to different transcription, but it may also be a play on words in the original Chinese, from Taoist Ying and Yang to ‘t’ai chi’, the Universe. 18 As explained by Elaine H. Kim in ‘Poised’ (4). Joo and Lux translate ‘mah-uhm’ as ‘mind’ and ‘heart’, and they connect its sound (in American English, at least) to the ‘mom’ who appears at the end of the text (Joo and Lux, 11). 19 For an explanation of ‘consensuality’ as a feature of multilingual semantics, see Chapter 2. 20 The mother–daughter bond I read into the passage above occurs not in the mother’s history recounted in the second Muse-headed section, ‘Calliope: epic poetry’, but precedes it as part of a meditation on the production of speech in a section entitled ‘Diseuse’; the two are thus not overtly linked. 21 ‘What has one seen’ or ‘[that] which one has seen’ (125).

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22 ‘Veil. Bridal veil. Nun’s veil’ (127). 23 ‘One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english’ (Stein, 77–8). Of course, Stein herself was a simultaneous multilingual who therefore, according to my theory, was more predisposed to be (self-) reflective about language. 24 Joo and Lux interestingly add to the non-existent nature of ‘Elitere’ its consonance with the French “elle itère,” meaning “she iterates” or “she repeats,” a reference that recurs throughout the text: the iterating, speaking woman’ (4). See for mismatches and subversions particularly Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original;’ Wong, ‘Unnaming the Same.’ Kun Jong Lee’s ‘Rewriting Hesiod’ is invaluable for an understanding of Cha’s manipulation of her classical sources and for his analysis of Cha’s feminist version of Korean history, which he reads against contemporary historiography and Cha’s mother Hyung Soon’s essays, which have since been published in Korea. 25 ‘Swans. Remembered words. Already said. Just been said. Go (on to) say’. And ‘I heard the swans. I heard the signs’. (Dictée, 66–8; qtd. in Park, 224)

Chapter 8 1 See Susan Castillo, Performing America for a discussion of colonial America’s multilingual literature, briefly discussed in Chapter 2. 2 I largely follow Nicolás Kanellos’ usage here, who uses ‘Hispanic’ as a neutral and general term for Spanish-language literature, in preference to Latino/a or Chicano/a which have specific cultural and political connotations (Kanellos, ‘Introduction’, 8). 3 Paul Allatson refutes this in his introduction to Killer Crónicas, arguing that ‘Susana Chávez-Silverman’s chronicles do not necessarily represent a coming to literary fruition of Spanglish’ because her writing is more aptly characterized by ‘adept code-switching between English and Spanish’ that bespeaks ‘an unequivocal at-homeness in both tongues’. For my purposes here, however, the distinction he makes between such ‘adept code-switches’ and ‘neologistic wordplay in both English and Spanish that may indeed be regarded as a literary form of Spanglish’ is too subtle to be significant (Allatson, x). 4 See Chapter 2 for these terms and my critique of them.

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5 Dirk Nieland’s Yankee Dutch in ‘n Fonnie Bisnis was, as we saw in Chapter 4, after all a transitional phenomenon largely confined to first-generation Dutch immigrants, a spoken language transferred to script for comic effect. Such comic use of migrant interlanguages has historically been typical; a language that was broken may have been spoken, but was not considered fit for serious literary purposes. 6 It is worth noting, however that, as usual, English is more equal than Spanish; the bilingual editions only translate from Spanish into English and not the other way around. This suggests that the project is to encourage monolingual English audiences to read Latin@ writing without quite forcing them to ‘go home or speak the language’. 7 Mark Sebba calls such texts as the Spanish/English circular ‘parallel texts’, because they contain ‘identical content in each language, without any language mixing’ (‘Multilingualism in Written Discourse’, 109). 8 Brian Lennon makes the same observation in In Babel’s Shadow (57). 9 Ch’ien writes: ‘With increasing frequency in literature, readers are encountering barely intelligible and sometimes unrecognizable English created through the blending of one or more languages with English. . . . . This book aims to show that weird English constitutes the new language of literature and that it brings new literary theory into being’ (Weird English, 3–4). 10 Torres approvingly paraphrases Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin here (L. Torres, 82). 11 He adds: ‘For seeing I and my wife are both Germans, I dare not well call it their Mother-) Tongue, which they, if possible, should perfectly learn to Read & Write’ (29). 12 ‘Blockt in de Boeken vry, Nocktans met dit Befluyt dat ghy, gelyck een Bye Wilt Honigh suygen’ (by all means, study the books, but resolve to suck honey from them, like the bee) or ‘Omnia explorantes Bonum tenete’, or as my mother used to say: ‘onderzoek alles en behoud het goede’ (examine everything and retain what is good) (Pastorius, 25). 13 On Borrowed Words is the title of Ilán Stavans’ memoir in which he writes about his multilingualism in Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English, wondering if he could ever become an American writer since ‘as a Jew in a long chain of generations, I was a wandering soul, inhabiting other people’s tongues’ (224). 14 Brian Lennon, for example, attributes even a bi- or multilingual writer’s ‘management’ of languages other than English (by way of containment, tagging (italicizing) and translation of wanderwords) to the ‘structural function of the nationalizing languages of book publishing generally’. Although no doubt the

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institutional and gate-keeping power of publishing is considerable, it is – if anything – declining with the development of e-cultures. There is no reason why bi- or multilingual writing on the web would not find its own audience in the same way that indie music and video have (Lennon, 11). 15 ‘Embarrassment’ is my favourite example of how English (English-English) has created emotions in me I did not experience before, and yes, ‘embarrassment’ spreads and may yet conquer the world. 16 There’s always time for friends. Come over and we’ll have a coffee and chat while I do the ironing. Hey girlfriend, you look sad, are you alright? I have a bad headache and feel a little lonely and tired. Life’s hard, isn’t it? (53–4).

Conclusion 1 I chose to discuss Killer Crónicas for a combination of scholarly and sentimental reasons. Silverman’s use of the e-mail format affords discussion of yet another, and highly contemporary, form of migrant life-writing, and the collection’s setting in Buenos Aires evokes memories of travelling there and learning some porteño Spanish informally as a result. My knowledge of Spanish is based on listening to the speech of my Argentine family in law, on learning standard Spanish formally, at beginner’s level, and on reading by myself with a dictionary and grammar to hand. 2 Sharzhad Mahootian goes so far as to propose a specific bilingual identity deriving from the use of mixed languages. She writes that ‘the overtly marked choice of mixed code [here: Spanglish] . . . serves to separate a subset of bilinguals whose bilinguality is not merely the ability to function in two separate groups with two separate languages’, which ‘signals a bilingual identity separate from their monolingual ones’ (1499). 3 ‘Doggie Love’ is a humorous, literal translation of Amores Perros (dir. Iñarittú, 2000) but it also chimes nicely in the linguistic unconscious with the Paul Anka hit song ‘Puppy Love’ of 1960. 4 Note here also the porteño quasi-phonetic spelling of ‘llamarse’ as ‘shamarse’. 5 The difficulty of translating ‘compadrito’ and ‘tanguero’ defeats me here; the latter is a ‘tango dancer’, the former a ‘buddy’, ‘geezer’ or also ‘wise guy’. 6 Villa Freud is the nickname for an area in the neighbourhood of Palermo in Buenos Aires, which is renowned for the large number of psychoanalysts living and practising there.

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7 Indeed, as John Lipski explains, Spanglish by its very nature is not confined to any one place and does not ‘constitute the lexical repertoire of any known speech community’ but instead draws on the linguistic creativity of many registers and regions (‘Is Spanglish the third language of the South?’). 8 ‘Ek moet skrijf ’ is Afrikaans. 9 The full poem is entitled ‘the Schooner Flight’ and is available online at: http:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177932. 10 Like the first person of Walcott’s poem, Wao’s narrator, Yunior, wants to explain no less than how the U of Utopia – etymologically no-place, but a paradisical good place in Thomas More’s euphonic naming of it as a fictional island in the Atlantic – became the U of the Untilles (259). The U is the U of ‘until we can go to America’ or ‘until the US rescues us’; it is the U of ‘this uncountry’, as Belí calls the Dominican Republic elsewhere, which has morphed into a dystopia, from Columbus’ days onwards, where violence and terror reign (259; 128). 11 Díaz’s latest, This is How You Lose Her, returns to the more conventional, less adventurous format of predominant English with Spanish wanderwords only. That it has no appended glossary may say something either about the changing American linguascape (yes, even in mainstream publishing) or, more modestly, about Díaz’s fan-base, who don’t need it. 12 The otherwise wonderful Annotated Oscar Wao wrongly explains this as ‘Something like philosophers—“todo” is Greek for “all” and “logos” is “words” but more in the context of “ideas” or “reasons”’; in fact, it is a joining of Spanish ‘todo’ (all) with Greek ‘logos’ (‘word’) making literally ‘allword’, but in the context of page 214 (‘local todologos’) indeed ‘philosophers’. I adapt it here for my own purposes to mean ‘all words in all languages’. 13 According to The Annotated Oscar Wao, approximate translations are, respectively: bemba ‘Fat lip; a type of racial characteristic’; jabao ‘light mulatto from the Caribbean’; trigueña ‘between morena and blanca’; moreno, most revealingly: ‘polite term for Dominican negro. There are officially no black Dominicans. Only Haitian residents are called negros’; blanquito ‘white boy’; prieta ‘ a very dark-skinned girl . . . kinky hair, darker than mulata, similar to morena’; chabine ‘mixed race person with light freckled skin, crinkly fairish hair, sometimes with green eyes’. It is also worth noting that in addition to the racial meanings there are connotations of class and social standing (urban/rural) for the male-gendered words as well as those of sexual attractiveness and beauty when applied to women. The compiler repeatedly states her exasperation with trying to translate these terms: ‘I’ve gotten more emails about racial terms than

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anything else in this book’ [Wao] and ‘I’ve gotten so many notes on the different skin colors, and I’m trying really hard to stay out of the racial politics of the DR.’ 14 For these differences in law and policy, see Fredrickson. 15 As Israel Zangwill, author of The Melting Pot, which features a protagonist who suffers from traumatic memory of the Russian pogroms, well knew. 16 ‘Kim’ explains how reading the novel ‘was extremely slow going since I needed my laptop nearby the entire time, with Wikipedia, Google, and Google translate open . . . unless I wanted to miss out on half of the story’. The compiler of the annotated guide doesn’t tell us what the outcome is of having most gaps in understanding filled in with information of the ‘this word means that’ and ‘this figure comes from that scifi text’ variety. Still, the commentary is lengthier than any on The Waste Land, and the many contributors’ comments on The Annotated Oscar Wao suggest that he has quite a following, both within and outside of the United States; fans enthusiastically participate in shining their light on the text’s many occlusions. See ‘Kim’s ‘Introduction’ to the site (http:// www.annotated-oscar-wao.com/). 17 The Dominican secret service under Trujillo, Servicio Inteligencia Militar. 18 Emily Apter is less sanguine about the diversifying potential of American migrant writing in English and her thought-provoking misgivings are worth considering. Of ‘the Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat, who lives in New York and writes in English’, she observes that ‘producing work directly in a nonnative tongue . . . bypass[es] the act of translation, subsuming it as a problematic within a larger project of cultural or self-representation. In this picture “global” signifies not so much the conglomeration of world cultures arrayed side by side in their difference but, rather, a problem-based monocultural aesthetic agenda that elicits transnational engagement’ (3). I think Díaz in turn ‘bypasses’ the pull of a ‘monocultural aesthetic agenda’ by writing much more multilingually than Danticat, who does indeed write predominantly in English with creole wanderwords.

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Websites The Annotated Oscar Wao: notes and translations for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. http://www.annotated-oscar-wao.com/index.html MLA language map http://arcgis.mla.org/mla/default.aspx Urban dictionary http://www.urbandictionary.com/

Index abject/abjection  131, 136–9, 143–4, 147, 176–7 theory of  30, 123–5, 130, 269n. 4 Abou, Sélim  6 Abulhawa, Susan  1, 3 Accented America (Miller)  19 Aciman, André  12, 13, 155–7, 273n. 1 aesthetics  79, 186–7, 204 bi- and multilingual  36, 59–61, 69, 166, 243 Cha’s  204–10, 277n. 6 see also poetics Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (Ickstadt)  209 Afrikaans  238, 282n. 8 AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council)  254n. 16 Aldama, Frederick Luis  269n. 2 Allatson, Paul  238, 279n. 3 Almaguer, Tomás  272n. 29 Alvarez, Julia  212–13 Amati-Mehler, Jacqueline  6, 63–4, 79, 148–9, 204, 259n. 5 American Language, The (Mencken)  92, 108–9, 266n. 13 American literature  10, 156, 166, 214, 251 colonial  16 in English  2, 7, 30, 218 as ‘ethnic’  3, 253n. 3 Hispanic  40, 211, 223, 279n. 2 language migration in  1, 3, 8, 15, 25, 39 in languages other than English  4, 19, 255n. 18 migrant  11, 27 see also migrant literature; migrant writing as monolingual  11 as multilingual  5–8, 211, 214, 218, 243–4 Spanish in  145, 211 see also Latin@ writing as transnational  5, 8, 211

American Spirit, The (Stauffer)  70, 97 American Studies Association  255n. 20 Americanization  55, 70, 152, 168, 197 and Antin  70–3, 80, 88, 93 and Bok  95–100 passim, 265n. 6 campaign  20–5 passim, 29, 53, 71–2, 257n. 29 coercive  4, 19, 25, 49, 75, 256n. 25 discourse of  70, 73–4 historiography of  15, 256n. 25 and Nieland  106 and Rodriguez  147 Americanization of Edward Bok, The (Bok)  95, 265n. 1 absence of Dutch in  38–40, 96, 99 and Americanization campaign  95–7, 101 and immigrant success  29, 98, 104, 121 language migration in  97–100 Annotated Guide to Oscar Wao, the (‘Kim’)  246, 282nn. 12, 13, 283n. 16 Antin, Mary  7, 26, 52, 113 and Americanization  72–3, 75–80 autobiographical persona of  88–9, 262n. 16 letters of  263n. 30, 264n. 31 as mediator  52, 83 migration of  92 multilingualism of  91 split subjectivity of  52, 75 see also The Promised Land Anzaldúa, Gloria  3, 62, 211–14, 238, 272n. 27 ‘Immaculate, Inviolate: Como Ella’  228–30 and ‘linguistic terrorism’  33–8 passim Appadurai, Arjun  20, 177, 257n. 32 Apter, Emily  283n. 18 Argentieri, Simona  6, 63–4, 79, 148–9, 204, 259n. 5 Aronovici, Carol  98

316

Index

Arte Publico  216 Arteaga, Alfred  5 assimilability/unassimilability  72, 77–9, 145 see also eugenics assimilation  15, 26, 59, 71, 194 in The Americanization of Edward Bok  98 Anglo-  147, 166 in Jasmine  275n. 12 linguistic  78, 93 in The Promised Land  69, 72 in Rodriguez  129, 147, 166–7 aural/aurality  6, 14, 38, 66, 223, 231, 259n. 9 in Hoffman  85–6 in Nieland  105–6 autobiographical persona  88, 89, 91, 100, 269n. 3 autobiography  88–9, 261n. 4, 264n. 35, 267n. 24 Antin’s  73 Bok’s  38, 95–101, 265n. 3 Franklin’s  100, 265n. 5 Mexican American  146 theory of  69, 89 see also life-writing; memoir Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein)  205–6 avant-garde writing  66, 182, 185, 188, 209 Babel  14, 58, 65 Babel of the Unconscious, The (AmatiMehler, Argentieri and Canestri)  6, 63–5, 204 Bakhtin, Mikhail  9, 28, 46, 48–50, 227 ‘intentions of others’  9, 121, 156 Bangla (Bengali)  151–62 passim, 168–79, 199, 215 Barrett, James R.  256n. 23 Barthes, Roland  260n. 10 Basi, J. K. Tina  275n. 13 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)  124, 138 Beckett, Samuel  13–14 Beehive, The (Pastorius)  216, 218–20 Bender, Stephen  258n. 34 Bengali (ethnicity)  151, 154, 160, 162, 168–76 passim, 275n. 15

Bengali (language) see Bangla Benjamin, Walter  19, 90 Bergland, Betty  262n. 16 Besemeres, Mary  56–7, 260n. 11, 262n. 18 Bhabha, Homi  165, 169, 271n. 23, 274n. 9 bi- and multilingualism  2, 9–10, 50, 250 advantages of  27, 64 aesthetics of  59–60 American, re-emerging  11, 24 in American literature  9, 16, 19 see also migrant literature; migrant writing ‘bookish’  223 see also intertextuality as common  6, 13 definitions of  36–40, 258n. 3 four dimensions of  37, 223, 230, 259n. 9 of migrant writers  1, 36, 40, 45, 154 negative valorization of  40–1 poetics of  212 see also aesthetics; poetics in speech vs. writing  39, 44 terminological confusion  215–24 passim vs. translation  18, 235 biculturalism  16, 28, 122, 195, 230 Mukherjee’s  135, 151 Nieland’s  102–5 readers’  217, 226 Villanueva’s  223 Bildungs autobiography or novel  68, 130, 184 bilingual aesthetics  36, 61 humour in  273n. 32 linguistic play in  205, 243 politics of  16, 59–60, 166 and translation  209 see also aesthetics; poetics Bilingual Aesthetics (Sommer)  59–63 passim, 234, 243, 250, 259n. 9, 273n. 32 Bilingual Blues (Perez-Firmat)  40, 227–8 bilingual education  41, 126, 127, 129, 146, 271n. 22 Bilingual Games (Sommer)  6, 59, 198 see also linguistic play bilingual poetry  212, 226 bilingual puns  59, 85, 221, 232

Index bilingual reading  16, 224–8, 255n. 17 paradox of  121–2, 228–34 see also readership Bilingual Review Press  216 bilingualism  11, 14, 84 advantages of  41–2 Chavez-Silverman’s  214, 236 and cognition  38, 41–2, 59, 64, 217, 254n. 16, 258n. 4, 259n. 8 definitions of  37–45, 258n. 3, 259n. 9 and emotions  57–8 Ferré’s  225 Hoffman on  91 and identity  39 in literature, critics on  40, 59, 62, 217 official  84 in psychoanalysis  148 Rodriguez on  136–7, 271n. 23 and schizophrenia  51 and subjectivity  97, 124 in van Bruinessen  116–20 Villanueva’s  218, 221 see also bi- and multilingualism; multilingualism Bilinguality and Bilingualism (Hamers and Blanc)  39, 45, 258n. 2 binary division  43–4, 85, 132–7 passim, 271n. 20 Blaise, Clark  163, 274n. 10 Blanc, Michel H. A.  39, 44–5, 223, 258n. 2 Boelhower, Bill  3 Boetcher-Joeres, Ruth-Ellen  133 Bok, Edward  13, 71, 39, 101, 265nn. 1, 3, 6 autobiographical persona of  100 as editor of Ladies Home Journal  97–100 passim see also The Americanization of Edward Bok Border Trilogy, the (McCarthy)  1, 3 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa)  33, 211, 228–30, 272n. 27 border(s)  5–6, 109, 190, 211–13, 220, 276n. 20 in Cha  190, 201, 207 linguistic  3, 15, 43, 110, 212 in Mukherjee  152, 155–6, 170, 173, 176 permeability of  42, 135, 152, 159 in Rodriguez  135, 139, 141–3, 152

317

Boughman, Ruby M.  98 Bratt, James  104 Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The (Díaz)  235, 243–50 annotated guide to  31, 246, 282nn. 12, 13, 283n. 16 Dominican Spanish in  45, 247–9 narrative discourse in  248, 250 opening of  245 race in  247–9 Brinks, Herbert J.  104, 113 British Academy  254–5n. 16 British Empire  158, 162–3, 175, 177 see also colonialism Brown (Rodriguez)  126, 133, 149 language in  135, 139, 145 as queer  136, 271nn. 20, 21 race in  135, 273n. 31 sexuality in  134, 136, 271n. 21, 272n. 26, 272–3n. 30 as trope of mestizaje  133–5, 271n. 23 Bruins, Elton J.  104 Buelens, Gert  68 Buell, Frederick  177 Bulgarian  50–1, 263n. 23 Butler, Sean  72, 263n. 28 Cable, George Washington  17 Cahan, Abraham  1, 53–5 passim Call It English (Wirth-Nesher)  19 Call It Sleep (Henry Roth)  53 Canestri, Jorge  6, 63–4, 79, 148–9, 204, 259n. 5 canon/canonical  13, 145, 219 American  2, 4, 28, 127, 153, 251 Cantonese  8 Carr, John Foster  73 Caruth, Cathy  260n. 14 Casteel, Sarah Phillips  263n. 22 Castillo, Debra A.  217 Castillo, Susan  16, 254n. 13, 279n. 1 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung  30, 97, 162, 174, 190–210 passim on film theory  186 migration of  191, 277n. 6 mother’s exile  189, 277n. 8 multilingual aesthetics of  204–10 visual work of  183 see also Dictée

318

Index

Chávez-Silverman, Susana  13–14, 31, 200, 235–44 passim, 281n. 1 multilingualism of  38–40, 243 politics of  249–50 see also Killer Crónicas Cheng, Anne Anlin  128, 147, 208 Chicanismo  125–30 passim Chicano/a(s)  126, 128, 130, 139, 240–1, 244 literature  146, 221–3, 226, 228, 270n. 13, 272n. 27 Spanish  212–13 Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming  216, 275n. 16, 280n. 9 Chinese  19, 183, 255n. 18 in Dictée  200, 201, 208, 209, 278n. 16 Christ in Concrete (di Donato)  54–5 Christian Reformed Church  109, 112 Cisneros, Sandra  1, 3, 39, 214–15 Citron, Zaida A.  226, 230 Civil Rights Movement  23 code, linguistic  39, 43, 55, 114, 138, 217, 281n. 2 -breaking  61 critique of  42–3, 66, 184, 217, 228–9, 234 ‘we’ code  44–5, 270n. 14 code-mixing  6, 44, 107, 121, 281n. 2 code-switches/code-switching  1–2, 6, 36, 273n. 32 Chávez-Silverman’s  238, 279n. 3, 281n. 1 critique of  42–6, 48, 121, 214, 226–30 Mukherjee’s  170–1 Nieland’s  107–8 cognitive linguistics  41 Cold War, the  21–3, 129, 190 in Todorov and Hoffman  26, 51, 92, 263n. 23 colonial America  104, 109, 219–20 colonial American literature  1, 16, 219, 254n. 13, 279n. 1 colonial education  162, 174, 246, 276n. 20 colonial history  156, 162, 175–7 colonial language(s)  46, 174–5, 247, 276n. 19 Dutch as  104 English as  30, 155–6, 168–9, 172, 274n. 7 Japanese as  189

pidgin and creole  194, 247, 266n. 11 Spanish as  208, 213 see also English; Spanish colonialism  37, 46 British  157, 162, 166, 169, 261n. 15, 274n. 7, 275n. 12 Japanese  206–7 Columbus  245–6, 282n. 10 Conolly-Smith, Peter  105, 255n. 18 Conrad, Joseph  13 consensuality, of languages  65, 201, 278n. 19 Cooper, David  131, 141, 144, 149 Cooper, James Fenimore  17 cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism  30, 151, 154, 163–4, 167 Cox, Annabel  228 Cree  8 creole  11, 17, 246–7, 266n. 11, 283n. 18 critique, cultural and political  20, 172, 177, 272n. 24, 274n. 9, 275n. 12 Antin’s  68, 74, 76 bi- and multilingual writing as  2, 14, 39, 60, 62, 217–19 Bok’s  98 Cha’s  184, 197, 200, 206, 209 Chávez-Silverman’s  14, 238, 241, 244 Díaz’s  243, 248–50 Hoffman’s  68, 87 Lee’s  194, 197 Mukherjee’s  163, 165, 169, 176, 179 Rodriguez’s  130, 135 Critique of Postcolonial Reason, A (Spivak)  172 crónica, definition of  238–9 Crystal, David  175, 276n. 19 cultural difference  3, 5, 19, 33, 51 attitudes to  41, 74, 87, 161 in Chávez-Silverman  240, 241 as embedded in wanderwords  3, 5, 6, 46, 49, 69 Latino  135, 146 in Lee  200 and linguistic difference  35–6, 42, 59 and migration  6–7, 154, 173 in Mukherjee  172–9 passim in Rodriguez  140 study of  94, 231, 256n. 20 and translation  16–18, 52, 174 in van Bruinessen  110

Index Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, The (Pennycook)  157, 162, 169 cultural scripts  57, 64, 232 culture wars, the  87, 127, 269n. 5 Cutter, Martha  17, 217–18 Dabène, Louise  114 Dante Alighieri  49 Danticat, Edwidge  283n. 18 Darkness (Mukherjee)  168 Dasenbrock, Reed Way  17, 61–3, 154, 231, 254n. 14 on reading multicultural texts  36, 209, 226, 249 Days and Nights in Calcutta (Mukherjee and Blaise)  274n. 10 Days of Obligation (Rodriguez)  29, 123–30, 133, 149 abjection in  123–6, 130 Chicanismo in  128 Mexico in  123–5, 130–45 passim queer reading of  271n. 20 Spanish wanderwords in  141–5 de Courtivron, Isabelle  9–10, 12, 95, 235 De la Campa, Román  134–5 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés  1 De Man, Paul  89, 264n. 35, 278n. 13 Decker, Jeffrey Louis  271n. 20 DeHaan, Kathleen  268n. 39 Delgado, Fernando Pedro  127, 269n. 5 DeLillo, Don  1, 24–5, 55 Underworld  46–50, 64, 251 Democracy and the Foreigner (Honig)  59 Derrida, Jacques  14, 37, 45–6, 55 Desirable Daughters (Mukherjee)  30, 152–79 passim globalization in  177–8 intertextuality in  276n. 20 multilingualism in  158, 170 representation of English in  156, 158, 160, 168 violence in  155, 167, 176 Dharwadker, Vinay  162–3, 274n. 7 di Donato, Pietro  24, 54–5, 122, 205, 215 dialogism  50–1 Díaz, Junot  1, 7, 97, 235–6, 243–50 passim bilingual writing of  31, 135, 179, 213, 251, 283n. 18

319

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The  245–51 Drown  247 on English  34, 36, 245, 248 narrative voice of  246 This Is How You Lose Her  282n. 11 transnational work of  243, 250 see also The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Dictée (Cha)  181–210 passim critique of historiography in  184–5, 278n. 16 feminism of  200–1, 279n. 24 and film theory  182–3, 185–6, 188, 205, 277n. 5 Korean history in  187–92 language politics of  203–4 multilingualism of  182–3, 198–204, 210 poetics of trauma in  182, 187, 198, 204–9 reception of  277n. 6 speech production in  192–7 Dillingham Commission  71 double-voicedness  72, 77, 90, 129, 133, 225 Draaisma, Douwe  268n. 32 Drake, Jennifer  167 Drown (Díaz)  247 Dutch/American biculturalism  102–4 Dutch (ethnicity)  97–8, 100, 105, 265nn. 2, 4, 6, 266nn. 10, 13, 15, 267nn. 24, 28 Dutch (language)  104, 215, 219, 238, 246, 255n. 17, 267n. 27 Bok’s  38, 40, 95–6, 99–101 and English  96, 101–2, 107–8 Nieland’s  40, 43, 280n. 5 van Bruinessen’s  29, 39–40, 96, 114–22 see also Yankee Dutch Dutch migrants/migration  29, 101, 103–4, 112–16, 266nn. 10, 15, 267n. 28 Dutch Reformed Church  103, 262n. 11, 267n. 27 Ebonics  266n. 14 Edwards, John  36–9, 258n. 2, 259n. 9 Eliot, T. S.  1, 4, 86, 220–1, 223, 276n. 20

320

Index

Elliott, Emory  255–6n. 20 Ellison, Ralph  47, 195, 278n. 13 Elvish  246, 250 emotions  28, 77, 83, 112, 119, 146 and native language  13, 45, 48–9, 93, 151, 179 and second language  148, 281n. 15 transcultural  56–7 translatability or untranslatability of  5, 56–8, 232 English acquisition of  10, 29, 78–91 passim, 100, 113–16, 248, 269n. 6 see also second language acquisition and Americanization  22–3, 53, 73–5, 98, 256n. 25 colonial  168–9, 174 enforced  20, 27, 29, 256n. 24, 258n. 1, 264n. 37 as ‘ethnic’ intruder language in US  3, 7, 222 freedom and equality of  75, 79, 114, 141, 267–8n. 28 as global language (see global English) immigrants’  53, 117–18, 207 imperialism of  5, 145, 232 see also colonial language(s); global English in India  156–63, 170–1, 274n. 7 as language of publishing  11, 158, 264n. 37 as literary language of US  2, 7, 12, 248 migrant literature in  11, 28, 36, 117 see also migrant literature; migrant writing as normative in US  8, 33, 92, 260nn. 12, 14 as public language  132–5 as second language  12, 263n. 25, 265n. 4 smoking in  255n. 17 transparency of  1, 17 writers’ attitudes to  24, 30, 40, 53, 128, 162, 270n. 16, 279n. 3, 282–3n. 13 English-Only movement  4–5, 8, 24, 257n. 31 English-Plus  8, 157 epistolary form  118, 238–9, 266n. 16 see also letters

essay (form)  50, 133, 144, 152, 238 Rodriguez’s  128–49 ethnic literature  33, 106 see also ethnic writing; migrant literature; migrant writing ethnic shame  22, 26, 105, 257n. 30 ethnic writing  4, 14, 53, 209, 230 see also ethnic literature; migrant literature; migrant writing eugenics  23, 52, 71–2, 145, 266n. 11 see also assimilability; race feminism/feminist  68, 163, 188, 192, 200, 277n. 5, 279n. 24 see also gender Fender, Stephen  68 Ferenczi, Sándor  48 Ferré, Rosario  213, 224–5 Fine, Laura  133, 269n. 3 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher  255–6n. 20 Fishman, Joshua A.  41, 258n. 34, 259n. 9 Fonnie Bisnis, ’n (Nieland)  29, 95–6, 102–8, 121, 280n. 5 ‘foreign’ accent  175, 195, 208, 236, 248, 263n. 26 Derrida on  55 erasure of  96, 122, 149, 159–60 in migrant speech  12, 25, 80, 107 in migrant writing  40, 50, 55–6, 60, 80, 122 Foreign Dialogues: Memories, Translations, Conversations (Zournazi)  12 foreign language press, the  21, 23, 257n. 32 foreign languages, learning of  204, 206, 208, 254–5n. 16, 257nn. 28, 30, 258n. 1 foreignness, of wanderwords  2, 8, 11–12, 47, 53, 55–6, 173 Forster, Leonard Wilson  35 Forten, Greg  187 Franklin, Benjamin  100, 265n. 5 French  40, 45, 101, 145, 247 as American language  8 Derrida on  55 in Dictée  182–3, 188, 201, 203–9 passim Todorov on  50–1 Freud, Sigmund  128, 147, 185, 260n. 14, 273n. 32

Index From Plotzk to Boston (Antin)  264n. 37 fusion, of languages and cultures  153, 214, 218, 243, 260n. 9 in Mukherjee  165–7, 170, 173–4, 179 Gabaccia, Donna  21, 256n. 22, 257n. 27 Gabriel, Sharmani  166, 275n. 12 Galema, Annemieke  104 Garcia, Michael Nieto  126, 133, 270n. 8 Gardaphé, Fred  24–5, 55, 255n. 19 Gardner-Chloros, Penelope  43–4, 121, 266n. 12 gender  68–9, 91, 260n. 11, 267n. 20 in Antin  73, 87–8 in Cha  203, 209, 278n. 16 in different languages  60, 267–8n. 28, 282n. 13 in Mukherjee  152, 157, 166, 274n. 6 in Rodriguez  135, 142, 143 in Silverman  240 in van Bruinessen  29, 110–12, 113–14, 118, 267n. 20 Genius of Language, The (Lesser)  12 Gerber, David  111–12, 116, 266n. 16 German  60–1, 65, 92–3, 101, 255n. 18, 280n. 11 Freud’s  147, 260n. 14 Pastorius’  219–20 Gerstle, Gary  23, 257n. 27 Giles, Paul  20 Gilman, Sander  5 Glatshteyn, Jacob  17 global English  5, 28, 37, 156–7, 168–78 passim, 276n. 19 globalization  157, 177–8 and communications  159, 167, 172 fiction of  166, 168, 172, 178, 251 and migration  60, 166 and ‘terrorism’  158, 177 theory of  177–8 glottophagie  145, 222 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo  215 Graham, Otis L.  256n. 25, 257n. 27 Greek  25, 93, 219 Grosjean, François  11, 13, 24, 110, 266n. 11 on bilingualism  37, 41, 45, 86, 158 on critique of code-switching  43–4 on linguistic play  102 Gunew, Sneja  176–7, 276n. 22

321

Hamers, Josiane  39, 44–5, 223, 258n. 2 Harper, George G.  105, 107 Hart-Celler Act see Immigration and Nationality Act 1965 Hartman, Geoffrey  182, 198, 210 Hebrew  19, 214–15, 254n. 15, 268n. 34, 280n. 13 Antin’s  52, 75–7, 83, 91 heritage languages  8, 27 heterolingual/heterolinguality  1, 50, 55–6, 65, 212 Antin’s  69–70, 77 Cha’s  251 Díaz’s  250 Hoffman’s  82 as mimetic  3, 4, 55, 159 Mukherjee’s  154, 159, 165, 179 Sternberg’s taxonomy of  54–5 and translation  18–19, 27, 63, 231 see also wanderwords Higham, John  71, 261n. 10 Hindi  159, 162, 168, 215 wanderwords  153–4, 171, 173 Hispanic American literature see American literature; Chicano/a literature; Latin@ literature Hispanic/Hispanics  23, 139, 227, 236, 239, 272nn. 26, 27 Hoffman, Eva  10, 26, 31, 95–6, 125, 157 and Antin  67–70, 76, 91, 92 Exit into History  90 language migration of  29, 81 Lost in Translation  10, 15, 34–5, 67–80 passim, 251 migration of  51, 91–2, 262–3n. 22 and multiculturalism  86–91, 94, 261n. 5 on Polish  40, 70, 82, 84, 90–2 return to Poland and Polish of  90 and second-language acquisition  29, 34, 79, 81–2, 85–6 self-reflectiveness of  88, 93–4, 263n. 24 Shtetl  90 on Yiddish  83 see also Lost in Translation Hoggart, Richard  130, 149, 270n. 15 homophobia  140, 272n. 27 homosexuality  130, 131, 136–7, 146, 270nn. 10, 14, 272nn. 26, 30 Honig, Bonnie  59, 60, 166 Hoppe, John K.  167

322

Index

humour  96, 106, 115–19 passim, 239, 243 bi- and multilingual  29, 44, 51, 61, 255n. 17, 281n. 3 see also bilingual puns; linguistic jokes Nieland’s self-satire  95–6, 103–5, 108–9 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez)  29, 123–40 passim, 251, 271n. 20 class in  129–30, 134 Hispanicisms in  125, 133 polemics of  127–8, 146 reception of  126, 132–3, 271n. 20 Spanish in  132, 134, 138–40, 269n. 6, 270n. 16 splitting of languages in  147–9 title of  125 Hungry Hearts (Yezierska)  53 Hurston, Zora Neale  106 hybridity  165–6, 173 Ibarrola-Armendariz, Aitor  271n. 19 Ickstadt, Heinz  209 ideology  6, 18, 92, 177, 193, 263n. 23 of Americanization  21–2, 72, 84 of languages  19–20, 27, 174–5, 225, 249, 276n. 19 see also English; language ideology of wanderwords  35, 46, 49–51, 58 idiolect  237, 248 Immigrant Acts (Lowe)  193, 195, 197 immigrant letters  29, 95–120 passim, 239, 267n. 18, 268n. 35 see also epistolary form; van Bruinessen immigrant literature see migrant literature; migrant writing immigrant writers see migrant writers immigrant(s) assimilation of (see Americanization; assimilation) children  73, 80, 105, 129, 248, 262n. 14, 265n. 4 ‘ethnicization’ of  261n. 11 generations of  3, 15, 19, 85, 104, 259n. 6, 280n. 5 identity  10, 86, 151–2, 263n. 27, 268n. 39 languages  37, 47, 53–4, 196, 214

life-writing of  117, 120, 265n. 3 see also migrant literature; migrant writing old and new  70–1, 106, 162–3, 191 trauma of  76, 187 immigration  159, 253n. 1, 263n. 29, 265n. 2, 275n. 12, 277n. 9 and acquisition of English  69, 158 Antin’s and Hoffman’s  67 debate  72 Jewish  76 legislation  23, 70–1, 92, 163, 191, 257n. 28 mass  20, 91, 145 narratives/literature of  68, 80, 211 see also migrant writing new  175, 187 and non-English languages  23 ‘pause’  55, 92, 257n. 32 restriction  22–3, 25, 52, 71, 261n. 11 study of  15 see also migration Immigration and Nationality (or HartCeller) Act (1965)  23, 92, 163, 191 Immigration (or Johnson-Reed) Act (1924)  22, 70, 92, 261n. 6 In Babel’s Shadow (Lennon)  16, 258n. 34, 262n. 18, 280–1n. 14 Inferno (Dante)  49 intelligibility/unintelligibility  60–1, 107–8, 159, 173, 232–3, 280n. 9 Dasenbrock on  17, 62, 154, 209, 231, 249 of wanderwords  2, 6, 58 interference, linguistic  29, 108, 121, 207, 214 critique of  42–4, 234 interlanguages  153 Dutch/English  119, 121 Germerican (German/English)  216 Italian/English  44 Konglish (Korean English)  208 Spanglish (Spanish/English)  40, 153, 122, 213–16, 224–44 passim, 266n. 14, 279n. 3, 282n. 7 Yankee Dutch  29, 43, 102–9 passim, 118, 280n. 5 Yinglish (Yiddish English)  78, 262n. 17

Index interlingualism  27, 29, 44, 217, 240, 266n. 14 see also heterolinguality; languages in contact; wanderwords intertextuality  223, 234 DeLillo’s  47 Díaz’s  246 Hoffman’s  67 multilingual  1, 2, 4, 66, 253n. 5 Invisible Man (Ellison)  47, 195 Islas, Arturo  270n. 13 Italian  8, 11, 19, 24–6, 93, 255n. 17 in DeLillo  46–9 in di Donato  24, 54–5, 122 in Pastorius  219 Italian-American (language)  24, 48–9, 55, 215 Jacobson, Matthew Frye  2–3, 7, 15 Jameson, Fredric  177 Japanese  8, 30, 60, 189, 192, 251 Jasmine (Mukherjee)  152, 153, 159–65 cosmopolitanism in  164 English in  161–2 hybridity in  165, 173 Jespersen, Otto  41 Jin, Ha  273n. 1 Johnson-Reed Act see Immigration Act 1924 Joo, Hee-Jung Serenity  206, 277n. 7, 278n. 18, 279n. 24 jouissance  137, 144, 202 Kanellos, Nicolás  279n. 2 Kang, L. Hyung Yi  184, 206, 278n. 16 Kaplan, Alice Yaeger  262n. 18 Kaplan, Amy  275n. 11 Karafilis, Maria  261n. 7 Katawal, Ubaraj  275n. 14, 276n. 18 Kayman, Martin  157 Kellman, Steven  13–14, 78–9, 83, 254n. 10 Kennedy, John F.  19, 23 Kharkhurin, Anatoliy  38, 41, 243, 258n. 1, 259n. 5 Killer Crónicas (Chávez-Silverman)  217, 235 aural/oral quality of  223, 228 e-mail form of  31, 238, 239, 281n. 1 multilingual reading of  217

323

politics of  238, 243–4, 249–50 Spanish and Spanglish in  213–14, 234–7, 243, 279n. 3 ‘Kim’  249, 283n. 16 Kim, Daniel Y.  195–6, 208, 278n. 13 Kim, Elaine H.  188–91, 198, 200, 277nn. 6, 8, 10, 278nn. 14, 15, 16, 18 Kim, Sue  183, 186–8 Kingston, Maxine Hong  62 Knauth, K. Alfons  35, 253n. 1 Kobayashi, Fukuko  193 Koed, Elizabeth  256n. 25, 257n. 27 Konzett, Delia Kaporoso  53 Korean  8, 10, 192–3, 196–7, 215, 277n. 9 in Dictée  30, 183, 188, 197–204, 208 Korean America(n)  277nn. 6, 8, 10 Korean history  182, 187–91, 195–7 Krabbendam, Hans  97, 99, 101, 265nn. 5, 6 Kramsch, Claire  263nn. 24, 25 Kristeva, Julia  30, 125, 130, 148, 262n. 21, 269n. 4 Ladies Home Journal  97, 98, 121 Lahiri, Jhumpa  162 Lakota  8 language attrition  15, 24, 26, 75, 153, 258n. 34, 259n. 6 language diversity  14, 17, 254n. 12 see also multilingual America Language Duel Duelo del Lengaje (Ferré)  224–5 language ideology  19, 20, 27, 72, 84 of global English  169, 174–5, 276n. 19 in Underworld  48 language loss see language attrition language memoir  57, 80, 212, 260n. 11, 262n. 18 language migration  1, 37, 60, 121, 124, 261n. 14 in American literature  8, 10, 15–16, 18 Antin’s  69–70, 89, 95 Bok’s  97 definition of  3, 6 Hoffman’s  69, 71, 84, 93, 95 and identity  58, 63–4, 263n. 27 literary representation of  28–30, 91, 95–6, 154, 208

324

Index

Mukherjee’s  151, 154 Perez-Firmat’s  228 as trope in migrant writing  99 in the United States  15 language policy  22, 27, 41, 174, 253n. 6 language politics  8, 17, 28, 162, 169, 203 language theory see theory of language languages in contact  36, 56, 59, 135, 251 Dutch/English  106, 121 interplay between  96, 136, 207, 214, 229 poetic potential of  14, 31, 36, 43, 185 Spanish/English  130, 135, 227, 243 languages other than English  2–4, 16, 19, 23, 157 attitudes to in US  25, 87 use of in US  223, 254n. 9 Latin  2–5 passim, 47, 183, 198, 208 as international language  219, 271–2n. 23 Latin American Spanish  211 see also Spanish Latin@ Studies  212, 236–43 passim, 249 Latin@(s)  135, 228, 230, 279n. 2 literature  210, 250, 255n. 18, 280n. 9 see also Chicano/a(s); Hispanic(s) Lawtoo, Nidesh  129, 133, 134 Lee, Chang-rae  92–100 passim, 108, 244, 278n. 13 Lee, Kun Jong  278n. 13, 279n. 24 Legacies (Portes and Rumbaut)  15–16 Leibowicz, Joseph  71 Lejeune, Philippe  69 Lennon, Brian  6, 258n. 34, 262n. 18, 280n. 8 Lerner, Susan  127, 269n. 1 Lesser, Wendy  12–13 Letters of Transit (Aciman)  12 Leven-Worstelen-Zegepraal (Bok)  265n. 6 see also The Americanization of Edward Bok lexical gap  57, 102 lexical overlap  19, 108, 115, 201 Life with Two Languages (Grosjean)  11, 158, 258n. 2 life-writing  10, 30, 36, 206, 281n. 1 as form  69, 133, 152, 281n. 1 migrant  57 see also autobiography; letters; memoir Lim, Jeehyun  136, 271n. 23

linguascape  124, 154, 258n. 34, 265n. 38, 282n. 11 American  23–9, 91–7, 163, 211, 250 during Cold War  55, 84 definition of  20 Dutch/American  104–5 Dutch/Canadian  114 Indian  156, 159 Spanish American  23–4, 26, 134 linguistic creativity  35, 39, 49, 59, 6, 243 bi- and multilingual  10, 29, 41–2, 51, 59 of Spanglish  214, 282n. 7 linguistic jokes  63, 85, 221, 242–3, 273n. 32 see also bilingual puns; humour linguistic play  34–5, 43, 59, 61, 137, 169 Antin’s  79–81 Cha’s  201–7 passim of children  61, 65, 66 Hoffman’s  85, 90 Nieland’s  96, 102–5, 108 Perez-Firmat on  40 Spanish/English  224–5, 227 van Bruinessen’s  117–21 passim linguistic purity/purism  2, 42, 56, 102, 247, 266n. 11 Rodriguez on  29, 136, 145–6 linguistic unconscious, the  6, 36, 39, 58–65 passim, 204, 255n. 17, 273n. 32, 281n. 3 in Hoffman  10, 85, 93 in Rodriguez  133, 148 linguistic unintelligibility see intelligibility linguistics  10, 13, 15, 36, 99, 254n. 12, 259n. 5, 266n. 11 see also psycholinguistics; sociolinguistics Lin-Lim, Shirley Geok  201, 203 Lipski, John  211, 247, 282n. 7 Little Book for Immigrants in Boston, A  74 Lives in Translation (de Courtivron)  9 loanwords  1, 101, 138 Lost and Found in Translation (Cutter)  17 Lost in Translation (Hoffman)  92, 95, 251, 259n. 7, 263n. 25 afterthoughts on  90–1 and Antin  67–70, 75–7, 78, 86 and English  10, 34–5, 85–6

Index explanation of title  14, 34, 81 influence of  15, 56–7, 93 as language memoir  57, 101, 111 language migration in  83–7 loss of Polish in  29, 40, 67–9 narrative structure  67–8, 88 wanderwords in  5, 83 see also Hoffman Lowe, Lisa  189, 190, 202, 206, 278n. 16, 279n. 24 Immigrant Acts  193, 195, 197 Lugones, Maria  232–3 Lutz, Helma  263n. 27 Lux, Christina  206, 277n. 7, 278n. 18, 279n. 24 Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1833)  162 McCarthy, Cormac  1, 3 McGinity, Keren  69, 91, 263n. 30 McKay, Sandra  15 Mahootian, Sharzhad  281n. 2 Mandarin  92, 251 Martin, Holly  229–30 mastery (of languages)  37, 74, 108–9, 220 critique of  39, 42–3, 49, 234 matrix language  7, 107, 121, 133 May, Stephen  7 melancholia/melancholy  144 in Dictée  208 in Lost in Translation  70, 88 Perez-Firmat’s  198 in The Promised Land  98 Rodriguez’s  270n. 10 Melancholy of Race, The (Cheng)  147 melting pot, the  22, 77, 166 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill)  71, 283n. 15 Melville, Herman  1, 3 memoir  23–6, 133, 152, 212–13, 236, 274n. 10, 280n. 13 Antin’s  29, 52, 67–80 passim, 91, 262n. 14 Hoffman’s  5, 10, 57, 67–70, 80–91 passim, 262n. 14, 263n. 27 Mukherjee’s  274n. 4 Stavans’  280n. 13 van Bruinessen’s  29, 96, 109–21 passim see also autobiography; language memoir; life-writing

325

memory  45, 63, 81, 116, 213, 236–7, 268n. 32 in Antin  75, 79 bi- or multilingual  11, 92, 168 in Cha  181, 187–8, 191, 197, 203, 209 see also Dictée colonial  155, 246 immigrant  49 in Rodriguez  123, 125, 138, 141–2, 144, 148 see also Hunger of Memory and subjectivity  96–7, 110 traumatic  48, 244, 283n. 15 see also trauma Mencken, H. L.  92, 108–9, 266n. 13 Mendieta-Lombardo, Eva  226, 230 mestizaje  33, 133, 145–6, 271n. 23 Mexican  124, 140–1, 146, 218 culture  230, 240, 272n. 29, 273n. 31 masculinity  139 migrant workers  23, 143 Spanish  30, 212–13 Mexican American  128, 149, 137, 139 autobiography  146 Rodriguez as  123, 127, 132, 268–9n. 1 Michaels, Leonard  12 Middleman, The (Mukherjee)  159, 166 Mignolo, Walter  276n. 19 migrant cultures  7, 15, 19, 30 definition of  2–5 Díaz’s  249–50 Rodriguez’s  123, 127 van Bruinessen’s  112 migrant languages  25, 27, 50, 84 see also bi- and multilingualism; bilingualism; multilingualism migrant literature  28, 38, 42, 149, 164 definition of  2–4 European languages in  25 wanderwords in  5–10 passim, 42, 125 see also American literature; bilingual writing; migrant writing Migrant Writer, The (Jin)  273n. 1 migrant writers  2, 3, 11, 163 bi- or multilingualism of  38, 45, 154 and English  5, 129, 162 exiles  3, 157 and generational difference  25, 40, 68, 85, 127

326

Index

language dilemma of  8, 30, 44, 50–1, 154 and linguistic play  34, 96 refugees  3, 12, 13 use of wanderwords  28, 46, 50, 54 see also heterolinguality see also bilingual writers migrant writing  28–9, 33, 49, 52, 126 bi- and multilingualism in  14, 40, 55, 63, 243 and Bildungsroman  184 canonical  28, 251 critical assumptions about  126–7, 149 definition of  2–4 difficulty of  209 English of  5, 54, 283n. 18 first generation  3, 105, 153–4, 173 language migration in  35, 106, 120 readings of  9, 21, 40, 94, 235 wanderwords in  5–7, 34, 46, 65 migration  30, 33, 113, 177 Antin’s  75 Bok’s  99 Cha’s  191 Dutch  104, 112–14, 117 and gender  110–11 global  6, 60, 166, 257n. 32 history  10, 15, 22 Hoffman’s  51 of language (see language migration) literature of (see migrant literature; migrant writing) Mukherjee’s  163–4 Nieland’s  103 study of  87, 94 van Bruinessen’s  110, 120 see also exile; immigration Miller, Joshua  19 Minh-Ha, Trinh T.  12 miscegenation  134–6, 145, 247, 266n. 11 Mittman, Elizabeth  133 Mix, Deborah M.  192 MLA (Modern Language Association)  18, 20, 24, 254–5n. 16, 277n. 6 Moby Dick (Melville)  1, 3 modernism  14, 184–7 passim, 240 multilingualism in  1, 2, 4, 19, 220 Mohanty, Chandra  163 Molloy, Sylvia  242

Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida)  14, 37, 45–6, 55 monolingual/monolingualism  4–5, 76, 97, 254n. 12 American  23–5, 70, 84–7, 129, 197 American literature  11 in Hoffman  85, 91 imposed  33, 36, 51 as norm  33, 44, 96 readers  10, 17, 83, 118, 214, 220–33 passim, 280n. 6 in Rodriguez  133, 137 Montes-Alcalá, Cecilia  238 Moore, Danièle  114 Moraga, Cherríe  238 Mornings in Jenin (Susan Abulhawa)  1 Morrison, Toni  248 Morrow, Nancy  117 mother tongue  58, 64, 103, 110, 131, 213, 260n. 9, 280n. 11 absence of, in Dictée  201, 203, 209 attachment to  40, 82, 151–2, 157–9 as forbidden  98, 187, 198 rejection of  30, 125, 148, 273n. 1 separation from  64, 75, 84, 93 see also native language mourning  128 in Cha  182, 197 in Hoffman  69, 85 in Rodriguez  144, 145, 147 Moving Stories (Thomson)  111 Moyers, Bill  178, 274n. 6 Mukherjee, Bharati  167, 169, 273nn. 1, 4, 274nn. 6, 9, 276nn. 21, 24 and Bangla  150–3, 199 Darkness  168 Desirable Daughters  152–79 passim Jasmine  159–65 passim and ‘literature of new arrival’  153, 165, 178, 187 as mediator/translator  153–5, 171, 173–4 migration of  163–4 multilingualism of  151–8, 163, 168–9, 174 reception of  275n. 12, 276n. 18 representation of English  155–9, 162–3, 178, 211 representation of multilingualism  158–9, 174, 179

Index Sorrow and the Terror, The  273–4n. 4 Tiger’s Daughter, The  159–60, 163, 166–8 transnationalism in  166, 191, 273n. 4 Tree Bride, The  152–78 passim wanderwords in  153–4, 159, 166, 171, 197 see also Desirable Daughters; Jasmine; The Tree Bride Mulder, Arnold  265n. 4 multicultural literature  5, 17, 61–2, 249, 254n. 14 see also migrant literature; migrant writing multiculturalism  5, 10–11, 62, 70, 223 debate  69, 92 hegemonic  19, 93 Hoffman’s critique of  87, 94 Rodriguez’s critique of  126, 128–9, 146 multilingual aesthetics see aesthetics; poetics multilingual America  8, 15–17, 19, 218 literature  5, 30, 87, 211, 214, 243 Multilingual America (Rosenwald)  17 Multilingual America (Sollors)  8, 15 Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (Sollors and Shell)  4, 16, 211, 216–18, 231 multilingual reading  18, 61, 226, 228–34 passim, 235, 265n. 6 paradox of  232 multilingualism  8, 60, 152, 258n. 1, 280n. 13 in American literature  2, 4, 5, 18–19 see also migrant literature; migrant writing Antin’s  52–3 conflictive  1, 253n. 1 and creativity  41, 243 in Dictée  182, 197–8, 204 in India  102, 154–8 passim, 168, 173 Mukherjee’s  153, 156–7, 159, 174, 177 Pastorius’  219–20 psychoanalysis of  28, 63 and security  170, 254n. 16 in (world) literature  28, 35 see also bi- and multilingualism; bilingualism Multilingualism (Edwards)  258n. 2

327

Nabokov, Vladimir  13 National Archives of Canada  109, 110, 266–7n. 18 National Origins Act (1924)  21 native language  7, 13–15, 78, 90, 125, 213, 260n. 13, 261n. 15, 267n. 27 in Bok  99, 100, 101 in Dictée  189, 199–200, 208 in Hoffman  81, 84, 85, 90, 125 and ‘interference’  42, 54 in Native Speaker  95 in Rodriguez  148 suppressed  25, 196 and taboo words  64 in van Bruinessen  118 see also mother tongue Native languages  8, 27, 254n. 13, 258n. 1 Native Speaker (Lee)  92–100 passim Navaho  8 neuroscience  42, 64, 259n. 9 New Immigrants in the United States (McKay and Wong)  15 New York Times, The  87 New York Times Book Review, The  275n. 12 Nieland, Dirk  95, 121 ’n Fonnie Bisnis (a Funny Business)  95–6, 102–6 use of Yankee Dutch  107–8 Yankee Dutch  108 Niyogi, Sanghamitra  275n. 15 Norwegian  19, 255n. 18 Nyman, Jopi  274n. 9 Oh, Stella  181 Ojibway  27, 258n. 33 Olneck, Michael  22 On Borrowed Words (Stavans)  273n. 2 On the Move (van Bruinessen)  29, 110–21 passim O’Neill, Joseph  1 oral/orality  59, 66, 99, 223, 266n. 14 in Chávez-Silverman  237–8, 244 in Díaz  246, 250 in Nieland  103, 106 orthographic/orthography  204 and cultural difference  1, 14, 19, 154 phonetic  43, 106–8, 236, 281n. 4 An Other Tongue (Arteaga)  5

328

Index

otherness  1, 28, 31, 46–50 cultural  1, 261n. 11 Italian-American  46, 48–9 linguistic  19, 59, 153 Mexican  3 see also cultural difference Padilla, Genaro M.  146, 269n. 5, 270n. 18 Page, Barbara  278n. 14 Page, William Tyler  257n. 26 Palumbo-Liu, David  192 Paradis, Michel  259n. 9 Parini, Jay  262n. 12 Park, Alex  269n. 1, 270n. 17 Park, Josephine Nock-Hee  191, 206–7, 277n. 4 Pas, Justine  265n. 39 passing (in language)  15, 37, 155, 159, 161 in writing  80 Pastorius, Francis Daniel  216, 218–21, 224, 280n. 12 Pavlenko, Aneta  56–8, 260n. 11, 262n. 18, 266n. 17 Pelecanos, George  1 Peltz, Rakhmiel  26–7, 260n. 9 Pennycook, Alastair  7–8, 25, 27, 250, 276n. 22 The Cultural Politics of English  157, 162, 168–9, 174 Performing America (Castillo)  16, 254n. 13, 279n. 1 Perloff, Marjorie  6, 18, 60–1, 63, 220 Perry, Yaakov  271n. 21 Philipp, Adolf  105 phonetic/phonetics  106–7, 192, 201, 204, 238 spelling  102, 103, 105–6, 236, 281n. 4 untranslatability of  18–19 poetics  182, 192, 243, 273n. 32 of bi- and multilingualism  5, 8, 10, 17–19, 31–3, 210–50 passim see also aesthetics; multilingual reading Poet’s Tongues, The (Leonard Forster)  35 Polish  15, 26, 56–7, 93, 215 in American literature  19, 25, 255n. 18 in Hoffman  34, 40, 81–91 passim, 152, 263n. 24 see also Lost in Translation

Portes, Alejandro  15, 17 Portuguese  11, 16 postcolonial/postcolonialism  30, 156, 164, 215, 250, 274n. 7, 275n. 12 postmodernism  237, 241 Pound, Ezra  1, 4, 185, 220–1, 223, 240–1, 277n. 4 Pratt, Mary Louise  8, 235 Promised Land, The (Mary Antin)  70–80 passim and Americanization  70–5 as Bildungs autobiography  68, 184 double voice in  76, 90 on English  53, 70, 75–82 passim, 85–6 language migration in  29, 70 wanderwords in  56, 96, 247 psychoanalysis  63, 147, 241–2, 273n. 32 and language migration  28, 58, 64, 260n. 13, 261n. 14, 264n. 37 see also The Babel of the Unconscious psycholinguistics  28, 42 queer/queering of American identity  135–7 see also Rodriguez Quintilian  2, 4, 101, 253n. 2 race  56, 110, 140, 266n. 11, 270n. 11, 271n. 21 in the Caribbean  249 in the Dominican Republic  247, 282n. 10 in Mexico  142, 273n. 31 in the United States  129, 134–6, 161, 188, 197, 278n. 16 Ramazani, Jahan  243 Ramsdell, Lea  270n. 16 reader/readership (languages of)  231 American-born  77, 247, 273n. 1, 274–5n. 10 Anglo  3, 160, 228 bi- and multilingual  2, 18, 29, 118, 122, 230 see also poetics English-only  25, 47–9, 52, 65, 82, 218–47 passim monolingual  10, 17, 62–3, 220–33 passim

Index nativist  78, 87 transnational  31, 166 Red Scare  21, 256n. 23 Rinder, Lawrence R.  191 Rivera, Tomás  132–3, 269n. 5 Robertson, Roland  177 Rodriguez, Randy A.  136, 269n. 5, 271n. 21, 272n. 29 Rodriguez, Richard  7, 13, 123–49 passim, 151–2, 157, 174, 270n. 13, 271nn. 19, 20 as American writer  128, 268–9n. 1 on bilingualism  30, 38, 135, 271n. 23, 273n. 33 Brown  126, 133–49 passim, 272n. 30 critical reception of  126, 132, 146, 269n. 5, 272n. 24 Days of Obligation  125–6, 130–45 passim, 149, 271n. 20 on English  129, 131, 137, 145–6, 269n. 6 on essay form  133–4, 144, 147 Hunger of Memory  123–40 passim, 146, 149, 251, 269n. 5 masculinity in  130, 139–40, 142, 147, 271n. 21 and Mexico  142–4, 146 as polemicist  127–8, 129–30, 133, 271n. 21 and queer  135–7, 146, 269n. 2, 271n. 20, 272n. 29, 273n. 30 on Spanish  40, 123–49 passim, 270–1n. 18, 272n. 24 see also Brown; Days of Obligation; Hunger of Memory Roosevelt, Theodore  19, 71, 92, 101, 190, 257n. 26, 258n. 34, 264n. 32 Rosenwald, Lawrence  11, 17, 92–3, 254n. 15 Roth, Henry  1, 19, 53–5 passim Roth, Philip  195 Rovner, Adam  262n. 12 Rowlandson, Mary  120 Roy, Anita  162 Rumbaut, Rubén G.  15, 17 Rushdie, Salman  156, 162, 215 Saldívar, Ramón  269n. 5 Salz, Evelyn  89, 263n. 30, 264nn. 31, 33 Sánchez, Rosaura  269n. 5, 270–1n. 18

329

Sanskrit  159, 164, 168, 178 Santana, Francisco  31, 225–6, 231 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis  254n. 12 Saussure, Ferdinand de  46, 81 ‘scientific’ racism  23 Sebba, Mark  35 second language  37, 58–9, 90, 203, 214, 263n. 25 English as  10, 37 as ‘safety barrier’  64, 148 Spanish in United States  8 and split subjectivity  64, 78, 264n. 37 writing in  10, 12, 29 second language acquisition  29, 38–9, 41, 86, 194, 259n. 5 and gender  102, 109, 114, 260n. 11, 267–8n. 28 as loss  82, 85 as a result of migration  64, 111, 117 second-generation immigrants  11, 15, 26, 127, 197 Sedore, Tim  272n. 24, 273n. 33 semantic/semantics  1, 14, 166, 182, 205, 219 bi- and multilingual  56, 153, 206, 278n. 19 and consensuality  201, 278n. 19 heterolingual domain  77, 143, 177, 200, 221 play  29, 205 semilingual/semilingualism  108, 121 Sen, Krishna  176, 274n. 5 Seth, Vikram  162 sexuality  134–5, 141–7 passim, 261n. 15, 271n. 21, 273n. 30 and language  64, 137, 141, 229 in Rodriguez  130–7 passim, 142, 146, 271n. 21 Sheffer, Jolie A.  74 Shell, Marc  4, 16, 216, 222, 231, 235 silence(s) (in signification)  13–14, 51, 229, 241 in Dictée  179, 183, 185, 192, 201, 206–8 and imposed monolingualism  59, 84 in Native Speaker  194–5 in Rodriguez  134, 137, 140–1, 144 in The Tree Bride  175 Simic, Charles  12–13 Simon, Sherry  80

330

Index

Sinke, Suzanne M.  109, 114, 116, 267n. 27, 268n. 28 sleeping dictionary, the  64–5, 261n. 15 Smith, Anne-Marie  130 Smith, Sidonie  68, 88, 261n. 3 sociolinguistic/sociolinguistics  6, 26, 44, 54, 56, 106 Soldan, Angelika  271n. 20 Sollors, Werner  4–6, 8, 16, 43–4, 211 on Antin  52, 69, 73–5, 261n. 4, 264n. 32 Something to Declare (Alvarez)  212 Sommer, Doris  6, 40–1, 138, 226, 243, 263n. 26, 264n. 36 see also Bilingual Aesthetics Song of Myself (Whitman)  1 Sorrow and the Terror, The (Mukherjee and Blaise)  273–4n. 4 Spahr, Juliana  182, 184 Spanglish  43, 211–14, 224, 230, 266nn. 11, 14 Chávez-Silverman’s  214, 235–44, 279n. 3 Spanish, in US  8, 23–6 passim, 33, 39, 214, 227 in American poetry  30, 215–34 passim Argentine  236–7, 241 Castellano  213 Chicano/Chicana  212–13 diversity of  211, 212–15, 218 Dominican  45, 212–13, 235, 246–50 Latin American  211 Mexican  30, 212–13, 269n. 6 as native language of US  14, 218, 222, 237 as transnational  211 Special Sorrows (Jacobson)  2, 15 speech  27, 38, 55, 84, 223, 246 accented  11, 213, 221, 237 bi- and multilingual  6, 11, 38, 223 community  23, 57, 282n. 7 impaired or forbidden  203, 207, 210, 259n. 9 literary representation of  3, 48, 53, 170, 203, 208 production and regulation of  192–7 passim, 202, 278n. 20 transcribed  96, 106–9, 213, 236

vs. writing  11, 39, 65, 80, 101, 229 see also ‘foreign’ accent; orality spelling see orthographic/orthography Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  18, 163, 172–3, 244, 275n. 17, 276n. 20 Spyra, Ania  163–4, 236 Staten, Henry  269n. 5, 272n. 24 Stauffer, Robert E.  70–3, 97 Stavans, Ilán  156, 237, 272nn. 26, 27, 28, 273n. 2, 280n. 13 on Spanglish  213–14, 224, 266n. 14 Stein, Gertrude  205, 279n. 23 Steiner, George  254n. 12 Sternberg, Meir  35, 170, 253n. 1 taxonomy of heterolinguality  54–5 Stoneham, Geraldine  274n. 9, 275n. 12 Strangers in the Land (Higham)  71 Swahili  8 Swierenga, Robert P.  103 Takada, Mayumi  183, 185 Takaki, Ronald  188, 191, 193, 277n. 9 Tapping, Craig  168 Tawada, Yoko  61–3, 65 terrorism  155, 158, 166, 177–8 9/11  159, 166, 176–7, 244–5, 255n. 16, 275n. 11 linguistic  33 theory of language  41–2, 46, 78, 85, 272n. 24 Antin’s  78 Derrida’s  14, 37, 45–6 Hoffman’s  85 Romantic  272n. 24 universal  3, 13–14, 46, 271n. 23 Vološinov’s  6, 28, 36, 46–66 passim, 81 They Who Knock at Our Gates (Antin)  70 This Is How You Lose Her (Díaz)  282n. 11 Thomson, Alistair  111 Tiger’s Daughter, The (Mukherjee)  159–60, 163, 166–8 Todorov, Tzvetan  50–1, 85, 263n. 23 Tongue Ties (Perez-Firmat)  40, 132, 146, 182, 270n. 12, 271n. 23 Torres, Hector  137, 146 Torres, Lourdes  217, 230, 280n. 10 translatability/untranslatability  56–7, 147, 203, 208–9, 282n. 13

Index translation  1, 19, 39, 54, 254nn. 12, 16, 255n. 17, 263n. 23, 283n. 18 critique of  16–18, 33, 212, 219, 226–50 passim and cultural difference  17, 31, 200, 218–19, 228 into English  31, 110, 119, 153, 157, 165, 222, 280n. 6 as erasing cultural difference  62–3, 66, 82, 154, 178 literal (as heterolingual strategy)  27, 55, 102, 118, 125, 205, 281n. 3 lost in  14, 34, 81, 90, 231, 234 as paradigm  17, 36, 235 of the self  57, 85, 90–1, 152 theory of  18–19, 54–5 as violation  138, 167, 171–4 of wanderwords  153–4, 170–1, 178, 280n. 14 translingualism  13–14, 224, 254n. 10, 261n. 1 transnational/transnationalism  176, 211 Tree Bride, The (Mukherjee)  30, 152–78 passim English in  156, 168–9, 174–6 globalization in  176–7, 274n. 5 multilingualism in  158–9, 177 violence in  155, 158, 167 wanderwords in  154, 178 Tsou, Elda  194, 278nn. 12, 13 Underworld (DeLillo)  46–50, 64, 251 Uses of Literacy, The (Hoggart)  130 van Arragon Hutten, Anne  113–14 van Bruinessen, Truus archive of  95–6, 109–12, 239, 265n. 2 bilingualism of  116–20 letters of  29, 95, 110–20, 123, 267n. 20, 268n. 35 migration of  112–16 On the Move  29, 110–21 passim, 266–7n. 18 religious discourse of  113, 116–17 see also On the Move Vander Werf, Dorothy Delano  107 Vegvayzer fun di Fereynigte Shtaaten far dem Idischen Imigrant (Carr)  73

331

Veltman, Peter  107 Venuti, Lawrence  18–19 verba peregrina  2 vernacular  232, 248 African American  106 Yankee Dutch  102–9 Villanueva, Tino  31, 38, 216–23, 241 Vološinov, V. N.  6, 28, 46–51 passim, 56–8, 249, 272n. 24 Walcott, Derek  246, 282n. 10 Wald, Priscilla  188, 190, 277n. 6 Walkowitz, Rebecca L.  184 wanderwords  18, 30, 58–9, 125, 212, 280n. 14 creative reading of  33, 61–5 definition of  2–8, 39 ethnographic  56, 77, 87, 153 as importing difference  25, 46, 50, 69 as multilingual signification  36, 45 poetics of  250–1 psychoanalysis of  65 reading of  27–31 theory of  27, 35, 42–8, 52–8, 212 (un)intelligibility of  60–2, 66 in world literature in English  27–8 see also heterolinguality; verba peregrina Watson, Julia  68, 88 Weber, Brom  253n. 3 Ween, Lori  248 Wei, Li  38, 41, 107, 259n. 9 Whitman, Walt  1, 222 Wierzbicka, Anna  57, 232 Williams, Roger  254n. 13 Wirth-Nesher, Hana  19, 53, 55, 83 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  65 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston)  62 Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia  15 Wong, Shelley Sunn  188, 277n. 6, 278n. 16, 279n. 24 Workmen’s Circle, the  258n. 33 world literature  2, 5, 28 World War I  21, 71, 92, 257n. 26 World War II  22, 27, 109, 112, 129, 198–204 passim world wide web  31, 238, 249, 258n. 33, 275n. 13, 280–1n. 14

332

Index

Wright, Richard  195 Writing Self Writing Nation (Elaine H. Kim and Alarcón eds.)  188, 190, 277n. 6, 278n. 16

Yiddish  12, 19, 25, 53, 73, 91, 253n. 8 Antin’s  70, 75–7, 83, 93, 264n. 37 revival of  8, 26–7, 258n. 33, 265n. 39 Yoruba  8

Yankee Dutch  102–9, 118 Yankee Dutch (Nieland)  108 Yekl (Cahan)  53 Yezierska, Anzia  53–5

Zaborowska, Magdalena  68 Zangwill, Israel  71, 283n. 15 Zavaletta, Elizabeth  271n. 20 Zournazi, Mary  12, 13, 84, 90