Rachael Gilmour

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This essay examines the notion of “translational writing” – literary texts which bear the traces of multiple languages, foregrounding and dramatizing the processes of translation of which they are both product and representation – through detailed examination of two recent novels set in London: Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). Both novels are narrated by their female protagonists, whose movement between linguistic planes defines a distinctively feminized, translingual identity. Each works to destabilize the assumed relationship between language and national belonging, in part by recasting London as a space of translation: a city of immigrants defined by its polyglossia, and a node in a deterritorialized transnational linguistic order. Yet, while both novels explore the possibilities, risks, and limitations of a life lived between languages, they also demonstrate that translational literature, like translation theory, offers no consensus on the practice of translation. Their divergent conclusions – about the relationship between languages, about the nature and purposes of translation, about the connections between language and truth – reveal much about the complexities of translational writing.

Punning in Punglish, Sounding ‘Poreign’: Daljit Nagra and the Politics of Language

This essay explores Daljit Nagras poetry – Look We Have Coming To Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sultans Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!! (2011) – in the context of contemporary British language politics. It argues that Nagras approach to language – combining heteroglot, multivoiced experimentalism with an etymological attention to the historical constructedness of language – offers a riposte to monolingual ideologies, which also resituates English as a product and residue of colonial history. While Nagras poems sometimes come close to regarding the histories enfolded within English as a linguistic and poetic impasse, they continue to invest in the notion of resistance and individual agency in language; and specifically, they revel in poetic dramatization of the accommodations and convivialities of everyday multilingual language practice.

Doing voices: Reading language as craft in black British poetry

This article offers a detailed exploration and comparative reading of two poems published roughly 20 years apart: John Agard’s “Listen Mr Oxford Don” (1985), and Daljit Nagra’s “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch-22 for ‘Black’ Writers…” (2007). The former poem is well-known, being regarded by a range of scholars as the acme of (and often, shorthand for) self-reflexively dialogic black British voice poetry, as it emerged in the 1980s, that plays off the friction between writing and speech. The latter is a complex and satirical take on poetic convention and canonicity — including the legacies of 1980s black British poetry — that exploits a tension between written poetic convention and artifice on the one hand, and the idea of the voiced poem as conveying “presence” or “authenticity” on the other. Both poems direct us towards a structuring paradox in which the embodied immediacy of human voice is mediated through the graphic conventions of written poetry. Reading these poems together, the essay considers on the one hand, how ideas about poetic form, language, and voice emerge out of particular historical junctures; and on the other, how such attentiveness to context can help us to develop techniques of a postcolonial “close reading”, eschewing totalizing formulae or summative evaluations of linguistic dissidence.

Learning Zulu and bearing witness

It feels appropriate to make a confession at the outset of this round table response: I write it here in London while eying my own copy of Sibusiso Nyembezi’s Learn Zulu, alongside Complete Zulu (books and CDs). In other words, I find myself implicated in Mark Sanders’ many scenes of learning and failing to learn Zulu, just as Sanders himself is implicated in his engagements with the Zulu language and literary texts he encounters in this revealing book. Among many other questions it asks, are: what does it mean to try to learn “a language” at a remove from its everyday use by speakers, abstracted from the lifeworlds of which it is part? And what is it, then, that one is learning? Sanders, setting about “learning Zulu again,” confronts not only past versions of himself – as a child in the 1970s, a “Zulu Boy” in the chorus-line of a school production of Ipi Tombi; as an undergraduate student in the 1990s, “learning Xhosa” in the language laboratory at UCT – but also his relationship to a 150-year history of white learners of Zulu in South Africa: British missionaries, colonial officials, the “white Zulu” Johnny Clegg, the Jarvis boy in Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, Judge van der Merwe, who presided over Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. Sanders’ learning Zulu is both a facing of, and an effort to move past, the raced histories of language in South Africa, and of his position as both “victim” and “beneficiary” of “the sins of the fathers,” “who wrought a system in which learning Zulu was made difficult for me (let that be a metonym for much else).”1 Thus Sanders shuttles between subtle and penetrating critique of regimes, pedagogies, and representations of language; the inescapably dialogic, interpersonal, and personal experiences of language learning; and, underpinning both, the often agonized historical and psychic dramas they play out of guilt, identification, loss, and longing. In building its conception of language politics out of the unflinchingly personal, it reminds me of Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, as well as much more recently, Rey Chow’s Not Like A Native Speaker. Yet while Derrida and Chow focus on the figure of the speaker in colonial and postcolonial languaging, Sanders’ concern is decidedly with the learner, with language pedagogies and scenes of tutelage, and this emphasis gives the book its distinctive shape. Sanders, whose own “learning Zulu” initiates and marks the center of this book, wants to be a good student of “the language,” which he also feels as a kind of confession, and a plea to be forgiven: ngicela uxolo, I beg forgiveness.

Reading/Writing Multilingualism: language, literature and creativity in the multilingual classroom

Abstract This article examines the relationship between the discipline of ‘English Literature’ and the contemporary multilingual classroom. It argues that, although our field has often been cast as a kind of corrective to the ‘problem’ of language diversity by helping to teach language norms, literature can – and should – be made a preeminent space for students to reflect on their own experiences of language diversity, and to translate this into self‐reflexive critical tools to think about language in literature. As an example of this kind of practice in action, the article discusses the experience and outcomes of a project in the English Literature department at Queen Mary University of London, Reading/Writing Multilingualism, which involved year 10 and 12 students from two local secondary schools who have English as an additional language.