I Write therefore I Am (Not): Reclaiming Negative Identities in Multilingual Literature

Abstract

The Romantic notion of correspondence among linguistic and national identity haunts contemporary awareness of the multilingual character of individuals and nations, as pointed out by Yasemin Yildiz in her study on the postmonolingual condition. Therefore, post-Romantic authors writing in/with more than one language face the challenge of positioning themselves in relation to purportedly monolingual cultural spaces, often living and working in the state of asymptotic self-translation described by Mary Besemeres. Resisting any ultimate linguistic and sometimes national literary affiliation seems to be a common choice among multilingual writers who could, in fact, claim many – it is the case of authors as diverse as Andrew Riemer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sabira Ståhlberg, Rody Gorman, and Kathleen Saint-Onge, among others. Which sociolinguistic factors prompt such a paradoxical answer? How does refusing linguistic and/or national belonging serve the assertion of authorial identity in the face of linguistic dispersion? Is there a relation between authors’ approaches to the issue and the criteria of literary appropriation embraced by national literary systems? This paper takes a cue from Riikka Ala-Risku’s insight on the key link between literary multilingualism and its metalinguistic dimension to examine the case of Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and the ways in which his metalanguage constructs linguistic identity by illustrating what it is not. Informed by the author’s experience of language(s) in Baddawi refugee camp, his poetry articulates a linguistically complex identity through subtraction, illuminating the relationship between polyglotism and self-definition by negation, while questioning received notions of how languages shape identities.

Presenters

Giulia Travaglini
Sapienza University of Rome

Details

Presentation Type

Colloquium

Theme

Literary Humanities

KEYWORDS

Literature, Multilingualism, Identity