Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by Yasemin Yildiz (review)

The “postmonolingual” that titles Yildiz’s book is—like the postcolonial—a temporal and psychological state in which the persistence of the monolingual is affirmed and attempts to overcome it are spawned, rather than any announcement of its recent or imminent death. Beyond the Mother Tongue is not, as Yildiz stresses, “a study of multilingualism per se” (4), but a timely look at “linguascapes” of resistance to or uneasy co-existence with the monolingual. The contexts under investigation extend from Kafka’s Prague to post-Holocaust and postmigrant Germany; those writers situated postmonolingually are shown to use this location to re-think relationships to family, to trauma, to the other, and to the gendered self. One of the key theoretical premises of Yildiz’s argument is her rejection of the concept of language appropriation—the claiming of a language as one’s own—in favour of language depropriation, the notion that language escapes ownership by everybody, native speakers and non-native speakers alike. Although German is the site of Yildiz’s exploration because of the contribution made by that language to the establishment of the monolingual paradigm, she emphasises that her discussion is of relevance to other contexts.

Beyond the Mother Tongue begins its journey in Prague with Kafka, for whom German functions as an interfamilial marker of difference, simultaneously creating a division between Kafka and the (biological and national) mother while also allowing the writer to keep her at bay. Kafka’s “high modernist aesthetics of negativity develop from th[e] impossible situation” (34) of writing—as a Jew and within a multilingual context—in a native language that nonetheless resists ownership. Yildiz then moves on to post-Holocaust Germany, and considers Adorno’s fascination with Fremdwörter—words of foreign derivation—as “a site at which social relations become legible” (81). She traces an evolution in Adorno’s thought from a Marxist reading of unassimilated foreign elements in the mother tongue as expressions of language users’ alienation from the material world, to the significance of Fremdwörter as “foreign” elements in the German language in the wake of the Shoah, and hence as uncanny reminders thereof.

Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada’s work “experiments with bilingually derived ways of loosening [the] strictures” (111) of monolingualism, of gender as it is inscribed in language, and of forms of identity based on nation and race. Tawada’s restless journey through languages is an avoidance of the monolingual poles of Japanese and German and an attempt to “maintain the critical edge and imaginative space opened up by contingency” (142). Yildiz’s discussion of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s collection of prose texts Mutterzunge and other works presents a refreshing reading of the literary translation that is the dominant stylistic feature in Özdamar’s writing, arguing that it is a means of coming to terms with traumatic experience—here the political violence perpetrated against young leftists in Turkey in the 1970s. Yildiz argues that the literal translation of Turkish idioms, lexis, and syntax into German permits repetition at a distance, and hence enables the working-through necessary for overcoming trauma. German serves a therapeutic purpose as Turkish has become less inhabitable. Gino Chiellino has made a similar argument for German as an unburdened therapeutic space for linguistic migrants in his discussion of Franco Biondi’s Die Unversöhnlichen (Am Ufer der Fremde, Stuttgart 1995, 380–395). In Biondi’s novel, however, it is metaphor that takes stylistic—and therapeutic—center stage as biographical and linguistic past and present collide.

The final focus of Yildiz’s discussion is enfant terrible Feridun Zaimoğlu and the “synthetic vernacular” (Yildiz is citing Matthew Hart here, 173) of Kanaksprak, his collection of twenty-four first-person monologues attributed to young male Turkish-Germans. Although Yildiz does not reference Translation Studies scholar Lawrence Venuti in this chapter, the mélange of language that Zaimoğlu has brought into being is reminiscent of the foreignizing translation that Venuti advocates: “not a transparent...