Traversing Monolingualism

The protagonist and first-person narrator in Yoko Tawada’s 2002 story “Bioskoop der Nacht” [Bioscope of the Night] is a Japanese woman living in Germany who is constantly asked in which language she dreams. Because her German interlocutors reproach her for not being able to give a clear answer, she is pleased when a Dutch psychoanalyst, whom she meets at a party, helps her identify her dream language—as Afrikaans. This language, to which she has no obvious prior connection, leads her to travel to South Africa in order to learn “to translate her dreams.” The playful, finely ironic manner in which this story responds to and undermines demands for clear-cut linguistic identifications along expected national, ethnic, and racial lines is part of the immense appeal of Tawada’s writing. It is also one reason why she offers such an intriguing vantage point for exploring multilingual literature today.

Behind the question of the dream language, with which Tawada’s narrator is repeatedly confronted, lies the assumption that each individual ought to have a single, authentic, deeply rooted language. Someone living with multiple languages constitutes a conundrum to this conception. Although a relatively recent idea dating back to the emergence of the modern nation-state, this monolingual paradigm has held sway for the last two centuries in many realms. Indeed, European and European–inflected literature itself has been dominated by the idea that writing solely in the mother tongue is the natural and unquestionable norm. As a result, the significant multilingual dimensions of so many canonical twentieth-century authors—from Kafka and Joyce to Nabokov and Beckett—have been treated as exceptional. It is only in the last two decades that this perspective has appeared to change with the greater visibility of multilingualism in many spheres: whether in everyday life, politics, Hollywood films, or on the Internet. The list of acclaimed and popular authors who write in a so-called non-native language (Edwige Danticat, Ha Jin, Wladimir Kaminer), in multiple languages (Nancy Huston, Ariel Dorfman), or who mix different languages in their texts (Junot Díaz, Jonas Hassen Khemiri) is likewise growing, yet the tension between a still dominant monolingual paradigm and re-emergent multilingual practices that I have elsewhere termed the “postmonolingual condition” continues in ever–new guises. What applied linguists call “glossodiversity”—the idea of languages as entirely interchangeable—sets languages next to each other without disturbing or transforming any of them. Whether on the multilingual welcome signs of banks, in multilingual software packages, or in some literary texts, multiple languages can exist side-by-side in this new world order, yet without necessarily leading to new perceptions of language(s) and new conceptions of the world.

In the work of Tawada, a critically postmonolingual author, by contrast, an Afrikaans “dream language” can lead her protagonist not just to a new place but also to new insights about Japanese implication in apartheid. Like the protagonist in her “Bioskoop” story, Tawada (b. 1960) could be described as a Japanese woman living in Germany. Having moved to Hamburg in 1982, where she eventually studied German literature, she has long written in both Japanese and German, a relatively rare bilingual combination. Since the mid-1980s, this practice has resulted in the publication of over twenty books in each of her literary languages and led to prestigious prizes in both countries. Tawada does not, however, reproduce the same texts in both languages and does not generally translate herself. In fact, she has long preferred different genres in her different languages: poems and novels in Japanese, shorter prose and plays in German. In these varied texts she frequently thematizes travel and strange bodily transformations, while marrying myth and the mundane in at times surreal ways. What sets Tawada’s writing further apart is the fact that her adventurous bilingual poetics—deliberately switching back and forth between writing in Japanese and writing in German—is not a means of establishing any kind of identity, however hybrid, but rather...