Multilingual Poetries, NAFTA, and 9/11

Literature and nationalism go way back. Benedict Anderson locates the beginnings of nationalism in print culture, in the development of the idea that there is a community of people who all know the same language. He puts it, beautifully, like this:

What the eye is to the lover—that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with—language—whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue—is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.

Anderson locates the rise of the imaginary community of nationalism as dependent upon the development of print-languages, and as it creates unified fields of exchange (so people realize through the development of print-capitalism that they are part of a linguistic community), it fixes language (so readers in the twenty first century can read writing from the seventeenth century) and differentiates them from those who speak a different language. In The World Republic of Letters (2007), Pascale Casanova adds to Anderson a nuance. Casanova reads linguistic variance as being a sort of anti-nationalist form, a way that writers refuse pasts and futures and their fellowships. So the world republic of letters that Casanova describes is one where there is a nationalist literary tradition, one where “national writers turn their back on the wider world and devote themselves to literary conservatism.” And then at the same time, and in opposition, there is a literature written in resistance to this national tradition. This literature deliberately avoids the standard language practices of the nation, often by using vernaculars, idiolects, dialects, or colloquialisms and often by including other languages. Dante, for instance, is a classic example here as while he is in exile, he turns from Latin to write in “Italian.” Joyce is another example here. And Casanova’s study is full of additional examples: the English romantics and many of the modernists.

Casanova does not spend much time on contemporary US poetries, which is too bad because there develops in the US in the 1990s an unusual amount of poetry that is written in but includes other languages. They are works that are unevenly bilingual, works that presume that readers will have a fluency in English but not necessarily in the other languages. They use English syntaxes and tend to include words or phrases in other languages. Sometimes, although less often, a sentence will be in another language. It is even rarer to see an entire paragraph. These works are also published in English language presses and distributed through English language networks. Their ancillary material, such as their jacket copy and their copyright page, is in English. They are clearly influenced by the bilingualism that shows up in Nuyorican and US/Mexico border literatures of the 1970s, but they are not the same. Often, these works are more concerned with what it means to write in English in this time than with representing, whether in realism and/or in a political concern with linguistic freedoms, the language patterns of immigrant identities. There are a large number of example works published in the 1990s. I like to think of M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Softly Breaks as a useful beginning to this cluster of works, even as it was published in 1988. Among the many writers that I would include in this decade formation are Francisco X. Alarcón, Myung Mi Kim, James Thomas Stevens, Robert Sullivan, Anne Tardos, Haunani-Kay Trask, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka, all of whom published works in the 1990s that trouble English.

That this poetry arises, perhaps re-arises is the better term, in the 1990s in the world of English language literature, should not surprise. There were a number of reasons why writers in English in that decade might find writing in Standard English vexing or at least worthy of attention. Globalization at the time was morphing into something even more complicated. While the story of globalization has many possible beginnings (and if the word is presumed to just mean trade, it has...