Losing Multilingual Literature

I first taught Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) in Turkey, in 2010. I had hoped my university students there would find in Díaz’s kinetic and insurgent code-mixing a vindication of their own multilingual practices, in an educational environment that still conceived of elite discourse as always already belonging in and to English—but always someone else’s English, and not their own. In class, my late-teenage Turkish-Arabic-English (-and-now-Dominican) co-readers fell instantly in love with Díaz’s sentences, like “A culo que jalaba más que una junta de buey,” whose single English word was the gaunt and indefinite article “a” launching an otherwise capacious catcall. Díaz’s kind of liberty-taking with the still rather stodgily monolingual genre of the transnational novel reminded many of my students of their own translingual syntax, in admixtures of Kurdish, Turkish, English, German, and other languages, while it reminded others among them of Ottoman courtly poetry, which often consisted of strophes with not one historically Turkish word among the Arabic and Persian poetic loan lexicon despite an underlying Turkish syntactic structure.

The Pulitzer-worthy brilliance of Oscar Wao’s literary multilingualism had, to my mind, been its disorienting metapragmatics around code-switching itself: how it pulled the rug out from under readers’ anticipatory notions about the reasonable limits of their own interpretive responsibilities (or some would say “competence”) while reading a centrifugal, multi-voiced literary text. In Wao, any given unfamiliar word or phrase one encountered could just as easily be assumed to be of Star Trek, X-Men, or Wagnerian provenance as it could be assumed to be Dominican or Pan-Latin@Spanish, or New Jersey youth vernacular. The ethnic ascription Melnibonian for instance—used to describe a “handsome [read: white]” boy in a Dominican classroom in Wao—stemmed from the fantasy writing of Michael Moorcock, and not from any legibly politicized mapping of cultural politics in the twenty-first-century Americas. It was through this splicing, dodging, and articulating of various categories of translingual citation—of Melnibonians among Domos among Puertorocks—that Díaz’s code-switching repertoire in Wao regained for the transnational novel the kind of poetic wonder proper to it, a wonder beyond the functionalist reaches of social romanticism.

But what my students in Turkey found more compelling, even, was how Díaz dealt—indeed multilingually—with the affective predicament of living daily amid Western discursive exportations and the kitsch, disauthenticating consequences of the same for their own lives and life stories in modern Turkey. One Arabic-speaking, pious, Muslim young woman in my class, raised near the Syrian border, titled her final seminar paper “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq,” citing the preface to Díaz’s novel. In the Brazilian literary theorist Roberto Schwarz’s historiographic tradition of “put[ting] our misplaced ideas back where they belong, without ignoring the realities which have caused them to get misplaced,” this one young reader of Díaz took delight and refuge in the pugilistic autoethnographic style with which Díaz explained the ground truths of global American militarism to twenty-first-century US Americans who continue to build their own life stories through a vested disinterest in knowing anything about it.

In Wao the narrator, who calls himself the Watcher, often glosses items from the Dictionary of Dominican Things in footnotes, for instance:

The pejorative pariguayo […] is a corruption of the English neologism Party Watcher. The word came into common usage during the first US Occupation of the DR, which ran from 1916 to 1924. (You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids, they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.)

In this way, the implied Anglophone monolingualism of Wao’s readership is found guilty (by association) of world-historical oblivion, not just failure to learn languages. One partiality begets another, says Wao.

None of this parenthetical footnoting...