Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (review)

Steven Kellman's Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft is a useful collection of essays for those interested in translingualism—defined by Kellman as authors "who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one" (2003, ix). According to Kellman, "by expressing themselves in multiple verbal systems, [translingual writers] flaunt their freedom from the constraints of the culture into which they happen to be born" (ix). Translingualism as a subject is certainly worthy of theorization and study, and by presenting a variety of past and present authors who could be considered "translingual" Kellman advances this topic.

However, the definition of translingualism presented here is very broad and the collection as a whole therefore remains rather diffuse and unfocused. Problematically, Kellman never distinguishes translingualism from bilingualism, multilingualism, or ambilingualism ("writers fluent and accomplished in more than one language" [2003, xiii]). As critics such as Lydia Liu and Ruth Spack have emphasized recently, the term "translingualism" is employed to describe writers who cross-culturally appropriate, criticize, and reinvent a language. Spack argues in America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860-1900 (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) that translingualism involves not only a language choice but also "the transformation of [writers'] linguistic and cultural identities, for their worldview was now being mediated through a new language" (112). A translingual author, then, crosses over into a new linguistical identity. Yet in her essay in Kellman's book, Esmeralda Santiago describes herself as being "in limbo between Spanish and English" (131), and to call this "translingualism" seems to undercut both Santiago's dilemma and the potentially radical power and position of the "true" translingual; in the essay Kellman selects, Santiago emphasizes the discomfort of being in the void between discursive systems—a discomfort that she might seek to preserve. An author such as Gloria Anzaldúa, on the other hand, in her famous essay "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" (reprinted here), will emphasize the radicalism of her use of many languages, even simultaneously. She may refuse, then, to cross over into a new linguistic identity and instead preserve the power of her multiple linguistic locations. Overall, this collection would have been more useful if it had maintained a tighter focus on the subject of translingualism and presented a clearer distinction between translingualism and other related linguistic phenomena.

Furthermore, the essays here are mostly reprints and scholars versed in multilingualism or multiculturalism may already be familiar with many of the essays and writers in the collection (Anzaldúa, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, etc.). Nonetheless some of these essays do present interesting linguistic dilemmas. The section on Africa, for example, starts with an essay which could be considered "anti-translingual"—Ngùgì Wa Thiong'o's "Imperialism of Language," which argues that English should not become a world language and that "we must avoid the destruction that English has wrought on other languages and cultures in its march to the position it now occupies in the world" (2003, 179). More complex is the short piece by Gabriel Okara—a Nigerian writer who writes in English yet attempts to explore and articulate African ideas and folklore in this language. Okara argues that "living languages grow like living things, and English is far from a dead language. . . . Why shouldn't there be a Nigerian or West African English which we can use to express our own ideas, thinking and philosophy in our own way?" (187). André Brink—a South African author—writes novels in both English and Afrikaans and is the only writer to have won the CNA Prize (South Africa's most prestigious literary honor) in each language. Brink argues compellingly that by writing in English and Afrikaans he creates a "dual exploration, a bifocal vision, of a single experience—that of living in (South) Africa" (208). Even when writing solely in English, this radical translingual vision is preserved: "The...