impure lines. multilingualism, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism in contemporary women’s poetry -...

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Impure Lines. Multilingualism,

Hybridity, and Cosmopolitanism in

Contemporary Women’s Poetry

MARINA CAMBONI

Mental geographies at the turn of the century are greatly changed, for not only dowe live in a globalized world, but we are also all too aware of the crisis that unites usin the cosmopolitanism of perpetual risk (Beck 2005: ch. 2), risk which affects the realand ideological role played by national and international borders. Moreover, epochalchanges and general insecurity have generated in some individuals and communitiesa psychological desire for fundamental and permanent values, “a secular version ofeternity” in E. J. Hobsbawm’s words (2000: 28). Challenging this search for eternity, thewomen whose poetry I have been reading in the past fifteen years have established theirground on that impermanent place where things change and gendered social, cultural,and political orders are redefined. The space of “all transformative impermanence(and impertinence),” Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls it in her Blue Studios (2006:239). In addition, many of these poets either are, or have become, more and moremultilingual and cosmopolitan. They testify to the fact that we live in a world wherea significant portion of the population is at least partially bi- or multilingual. Moreover,lingering colonial engagements and migrations, travel and mass communication makemultilingualism an ever-expanding phenomenon. In this context, cosmopolitanism asa word and as a concept has lost the aristocratic, idealized, philosophically universalistmeaning of the enlightenment to become a “cosmopolitanism of reality” (Beck 2005:31), which is not simply one, for it admits many versions, born of distinct experiencesof displacement and of “travel,” in the sense James Clifford gives this term.

34 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007. doi:10.1093/cww/vpm013c© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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This is a time, I believe, that should see a distinct move towards a cosmopolitanand multilingual critical perspective in a new journal devoted to criticism and towomen’s writing. With the second feminist wave, women have become increasinglywary of institutionalized languages, genres, and ideologies. Thus it is not surprisingthat a new crop of writers have considered that the very words they weave into theirtexts ground their resistance to nationalist, patriarchal, classist, and racist ideologies.From the cultural point of view, cosmopolitan multilingual criticism would not onlyaddress differences among its readers across nations, cultures and languages, butwould also investigate: (1) the social, ideological and economic values of nationallanguages and of language varieties in relation to one another and to the politics ofpower; (2) the personal and emotional attachments each speaker/writer establisheswith individual languages or dialects; (3) the semiotic processes that govern linguisticand cultural translations within and among cultures. In its reading of literary texts,multilingual criticism would focus on the way writers respond to, criticize, orrenovate each language’s lexical and structural systems, as well as its monolingualdiscursive and power practices, from a gendered perspective and in tune with acosmopolitan world view.

I see at least two important reasons for adopting such a critical attitude. First of all,my own experience has proven that critics can direct writers’ attention to their ownmultilingual and multicultural experiences and their expressive potential. As for thesecond reason, this is related to the extended anxiety generated by the hegemonicpower of English as a lingua franca with a “language-killing potential” (Edwards 1) in aglobal language market, leading “to language monopolies, just like in the worldeconomy” (Kettemann 33). For critics who use English as a first or national language,and even more for those who use it as a second language, critical cosmopolitanmultilingualism would imply an enhanced awareness of the ways a language speaks us.

Conscious of the hegemonic power of her English language, poet Rachel BlauDuPlessis recognizes that “to be an anglophone offers a political privilege to thosewho are its native speakers,” and she appreciates her status as a United States citizenin this critical time as “a very painful and self-conscious fact” (“‘Lexicon’s Mixage’”55). Yet it is exactly this awareness that nourishes her other languages, “because insingle language, the poem/could not be complete” “since it craves” “multi-lingualism”(“‘Lexicon’s Mixage’” 58, cited from Drafts 39–57, Pledge 187). In one of her Drafts,“Draft 36: Cento” (Drafts 1–38, Toll), she consolidates her search for a linguistic koine.“Cento” is a text in which islands of words and expressions in Yiddish (“in mitnderinnenn”), Russian (“Samovity slova”), Hebrew (“shma”), together with the manyItalian words and quotations from the French translation of her “Draft 5: Gap,” bringto the fore the many languages of a woman who declares herself “nomad” (Drafts1–38, Toll, 90).

Education, travel, and the freedom and desire to learn more than one languagehave contributed to the multilingualism of this American poet. But it is mostly writerscoming from non-hegemonic countries, from minority groups or from diasporiccommunities, and who were often forced to learn, or to be educated in, a second or

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third hegemonic language, who express the intricacies and the power politics of theirworlds in their multilingual texts. No one has better articulated the cosmopolitanconsciousness born out of colonization, exile, migration, diaspora, and war than EtelAdnan, the Lebanese-born writer, who studied philosophy in France and the UnitedStates and now lives part of the year in each of these countries. In a key essay withthe telling title, “To Write in a Foreign Language,” she asserts that though each of herlanguages grows like a plant from the land she is inhabiting, as a poet she is both“deeply rooted in language” and transcends language (2007: 7, 8). Her language as anexiled/migrant/traveling poet in today’s globalized world is then, to use EdouardGlissant’s words, “un langage d’un langage” (1996: 46), resulting from the interactionof languages, each rooted in a place and yet transcending individual places/languages.

Words Migrate

“Words migrate between seeds, also crossing torrents /. . ./ when they cross bordersthey’re in exile already,” Toni Maraini writes, (61). Like human beings, words crossborders, migrate as matter of factly as the dispersal of seeds. Their movement cannotbe contained or barred. Again, just like human beings, words, for Virginia Woolf range“hither and thither, . . . falling in love, . . . mating together” (205, ellipses in original),moved by inner drives and/or outer forces. Words mostly mate and generate within asingle national language, but they are apt do so also across languages, across, or evenon, linguistic borders, resisting confines.

Woolf and Maraini envision an incarnated language, imbricating the individual andher words. Furthermore, Woolf’s metaphor makes it clear that there exists a strongcultural association between the exchange of language and sexual intercourse. Whenwords relate across languages in a text or in speech, this is called code-switching orshifting by linguists, hybridization or creolization by cultural historians or by writers.Given this intertwining of language, sexuality, and the female body, it is not surprisingthat, just like the female body, language has been the place of taboo, appropriation,and conflict (Volosinov), and the object of centralized regulation. In this context,multilingualism, together with language experimentation, has been represented insexual terms by DuPlessis, who in one of her Drafts states “I stick non-English/bits inhere and there—/neither affectation nor imitation/(Waste Land, etc.); just simplyfoxing” (“‘Lexicon’s Mixage’” 55 cited from Drafts 39–57, Pledge 210). Foxing, shefurther explains, is a way of dirtying a language, of making it impure, to ruin its virginalcleanness. The poets that have chosen to write across individual languages are veryoften the ones who also try to de-range lexicons, grammars, syntaxes, textualitiesand genres, moulding individual poems out of a will to “constitute the new continentsto be discovered” (Adnan “There”).

Setting myself at the crossroads where poetry meets travel and migration, andwhere languages interact and interweave, I shall try to articulate here a criticism thatcannot be monolingual. For even the language of criticism needs to be recast, with



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appropriate words and expressions coming from different languages when they areneeded. More specifically, I want to elaborate upon the sources, breadth, andimportance of multilingualism in contemporary women’s poetry. I hope this will alsooffer some insights into different contemporary cosmopolitanisms.

For the sake of clarity, and without assuming completeness, I shall call attention tofour major varieties of multilingual poetry and highlight the issues they raise, which Ibelieve are relevant to an understanding of different women’s pleas in today’s world.To each variety I have assigned a distinctive name to better pinpoint its dominatingcharacteristic. I shall call them: nepantla or multicentric; exo or of the outsider; del’irriducibilite or of the suffering visible body; and nomadic “otherhow.” Each varietyentails its own complexity. However, I would like to point out that there are at leasttwo elements that cross over these varieties to form a common core. One is thepoets’ resistance to systemic order and constrictions (social, cultural, national,linguistic) wherever they are located. The second is their advocacy of plurality andcomplexity. This culminates in their rejection of the hierarchic “either/or”oppositional logic, where everything is either inside or outside, belonging or notbelonging, central or peripheral. They build in their poetry polycentric worlds, eachcenter a location in a network of localities, either dispersed or concentrated in space,organized in smaller or larger systems. Each location/world is the site of multiplerelations, individually or collectively networked (see Camboni “Networking Women”10–15). For each variety, I have selected at least one representative poet. These areGloria Anzaldua, Toni Maraini, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Anne Blonstein.

Nepantla or, Multicentric Cosmopolitanism

To militant, ideological, monolingual nationalists, foreign languages, that is thelanguages of bilingual minorities and/or immigrants, represent a threat. Foreign wordswere the nightmare of autarchic, fascist Italy, determined to keep its language pure.And they have been, and are, the nightmare of the French, who have always beenzealous in “protecting their purity even among themselves” (Edwards 105). Thoughthe British and the Americans have not been as protective of their language, in theUSA for instance, there are organizations like US English, Inc. urging theestablishment of English at all levels as the only language of the nation; they believe inits unifying force as a common language and in its assimilating and empowering rolefor immigrants. The monolingual state this organization projects, while ideologicallyreproducing relations of domination and oppression, is as far from present-day realityas it could be. For though English, the dominating language, is spoken by the majorityof the US citizens, it lives side by side with Spanish, the second most spoken, and withthe many other languages of the country.

It is her awareness of being part of this multilingual and multicultural but alsopatriarchal, classist, and racist country, that prompted Gloria Anzaldua to move in theopposite direction from US English, Inc. In her influential Borderlands/La frontera, she



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shaped a hybrid ethnic identity and claimed for herself both the minority variety of herChicano Spanish and the English she was educated in, together with other varietiesand dialects of Spanish origin spoken along the border between Mexico and Texas. Forthis borderland, however, over time she built two different frames of reference: a lo-cal/national one and, at the turn of the twentieth century, a cosmopolitan one. Originallyshe represented this space in negative terms. In it political, economic, and linguistic hier-archies were in full play. And emblematically, when switching from English, she italicizedher Spanish and Chicano expressions, thus graphically rendering the matrix-embeddedlanguage power structure (Myers-Scotton), with hegemonic English discourse retainingits dominant status. As a space in-between, like Homi Bhabha’s interstitial spaces(4), her “frontera” reproduced the hierarchies existing in America, thus projectinga static image of the power relations she meant to overthrow with her writing.

But in her later works, Anzaldua moved from this locally based multilingualism to acosmopolitan one. And it is in this wider context that she renames her “frontera” withthe Nahuatl word “nepantla,” meaning “tierra entre medio” (“(Un)natural Bridges”1), or more precisely, “the overlapping space between different perception and beliefsystems,” where one becomes aware of the “changeability of racial, gender, sexual,and other categories” (2002: 541). With the essays gathered in This Bridge We CallHome, she tells us, she intended to move from victimhood “to a more extended levelof agency,” capable of questioning “what we are doing to each other, to those indistant countries, and to the earth’s environment” (“(Un)natural Bridges” 2).

In her latest vision, her borderland has ceased to be a line that, like the borderbetween English and Spanish, divides and unites to become a place with its own rightto exist, a land that stretches until it touches the margins of other centers.Coherently, in her most recent writing, languages do not switch or shift but flow oneinto the other with no italics to emphasize Spanish, native, or Chicano expressions.They simply all belong in an undivided polylingual language that she creates, thustransforming “nepantla” into a cosmopolitan space that is the space where self andother, the local and the world, meet and frontiers recede. “Todas somos nos/otras”(“(Un)natural Bridges” 3), her word-pun, condenses her thought and tells of howmuch the I–You, Self–Other relation in a cosmopolitan context can foster change andpersonal empowerment, beyond the national frame theorized by Ricoeur.

I like nepantla, this single word with a full sound that neither has an equivalent inEnglish, Italian, or Spanish, nor nourishes the meaning/image of a border within itself.And I have adopted it to define the type of cosmopolitanism that, though rooted in aspecific geographic location, conceives margins as new centers engaging inmulticentric exchanges. As a final consideration, I must add that the changes inAnzaldua’s writing confront us with the literary, linguistic, and stylistic relevance of acosmopolitan frame of reference. Should we, then, introduce cosmopolitanism as aheuristic category in our critical work?



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Exo or, the No-place/No-where

If Anzaldua roots her cosmopolitanism in a specific location, Toni Maraini representsthe place she speaks from as exo (1987: 214). Exo is the non-place a woman has beenmade to occupy in a male-governed, war-ridden world. It is the place where she hasbeen kept out of cultural sight, made invisible. With Ursula K. LeGuin we could saythat it is the place of the dispossessed, which is not even marginal, for it does notparticipate in the center–margin opposition of all self-centerd and confined states andcivilizations. But in the utmost cultural absence, freedom can begin, Maraini tells us,and perpetual mental traveling. Exo, then, stands for the critical distance the enquiringmind establishes from political, cultural, national, and linguistic allegiances. As suchMaraini’s cosmopolitanism comes close to that of the “outsider” imagined by Woolfin Three Guineas. For what Woolf stressed was not so much the self-centeredcosmopolitanism of the British modernist intellectual criticized by Adrienne Rich inher influential “Notes Towards a Politics of Location,” as the freedom of the mind toenquire further, to question a woman’s position in the world in which she lives. AndWoolf’s inquiry started with her own Great Britain.

Born in Japan during World War II, brought up in Italy, educated in London andNew York, married to a Moroccan painter, Maraini was one of the major activists ofthe modernist movement in Morocco in the early 1970s. In her poetry, the fourlanguages she has used in her life and travels—Italian, English, French, andArabic—intertwine and intermingle, building a dreamy, surreal world. Arabic brings inwomen coming down the streets of North African towns. French and Englishalternate with Italian, though French seems more suited for wordplay, puns,alliterations, and anaphoras (see her Poema d’Oriente and Le porte del vento). But it isthe continuity and discontinuity of Maraini’s poetry with twentieth-centurymodernism, especially herdebt to Gertrude Stein, that emphasizes how relevant experimenting with multiplelanguages can be for the enquiring mind. Through her languages, this poet, influencedby Sufi and Oriental mysticism, brings to the fore the underside of Western,Middle-Eastern, and Eastern worlds. For Maraini reveals how much the colonial andpostcolonial dream of a peaceful oriental penetration by Eastern and Middle-Easternphilosophies and artefacts that nourished western modernity has turned into anightmare of migrating persons and whole groups fleeing ethnic and religioussectarianisms, violence, famine, and war. It is this nightmare, this cosmopolitan worldcrisis that sees East and West, North and South equally implicated, if with differentpower roles, and that calls for a new critical agency and linguistic agentivity in theoutsider woman. Taking sides with North African women, Maraini reminds us thatdispossession of women has not ceased. In fact we can say that it has increased, evenif not in the same ways, in different parts of the world. This single circumstancerequires women’s continued resistance to re-emerging patriarchies and, most of all, itdemands a new, and relational, agency different to the one feminists imagined andbuilt thirty years ago, one that is now as capable of criticizing the power privileges



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women and feminists may have shared as of building relations rather than separations.Contemporary criticism should contribute to the construction of this critical agencyand linguistic agentivity. For western women, it would mean increasing the desire toreally listen to and understand the languages, discourses, and points of view of otherwomen in the world, to engage in an intercultural dialogue beyond the local sphereand local allegiances, renouncing even feminism when it becomes another hegemonicand oppressive discourse.

De l’irriducibilite, or of the Visible, Suffering Body

The expression de l’irriducibilite conveys a third type of polylingual cosmopolitanism,one born out of resistance to the overimpositions of imperialism and colonial power,out of exile and forced linguistic acculturation. It finds its location in the visible,suffering but resisting female body, and in an interior feeling of blockage and division.The artistic text is in this case both an incarnation of the body’s historical andlinguistic imprinting and a semiotic act of visible and audible testimony that requires,to be completed, the contextual presence of a multiethnic and multilingual audience,sharing its ethical and political stance. I shall here concentrate on what I consider aparadigmatic work, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. But I would also like to callattention to the colonial and postcolonial continuities—in this case the effects ofFrench colonization—that are manifest in the Arabic and Indo-Chinese diasporas, andin particular the many, though different, similarities that connect Cha’s work to that ofEtel Adnan and Assia Djebar. I borrow the expression de l’irriducibilite from the latter,an Algerian novelist and feminist critic (Djebar 2), who uses it to name her refusal tobe made invisible and silent both within her own culture and in the postcolonialmetropolis. But it is Adnan’s words that I find particularly suited to introduce Cha’sDictee. “Am I my body, and/or my soul,” she asks, to immediately consider, “But whenI carry pain whenever I’m awake and wherever I go, the question becomes serious.An acute awareness of oneself is not always a blessing” (“Further on”).

This suffering body is the body we almost see when reading Dictee. Born in SouthKorea, educated in a Catholic private school in San Francisco, an art and comparativeliterature major at Berkeley, Cha was to become a representative oflate-twentieth-century Conceptual Art before a sudden and violent death put an endto her promising career. In Dictee she conflates French and English to make the word“language” stand both for the organ that inhabits the mouth, almost physically cut offby and through imposed linguistic silence, and the discourse of power that silences all“Others” (Friedman 2003). As an expatriate/emigrant/exile, Cha, like the heroine ofher poem, the “Diseuse,” builds for herself a critical agency and linguistic agentivity asspeaker and storyteller. The “Diseuse” is the woman who stumbles from a silencehidden by echoed languages to “The delivery,” to the “Uttering. . . . The utter” (1995:5, ellipsis in original). In the French “dictee” that opens the poem, commas and fullstops are not so much sentence markers as framing visual devices exhibiting words asdiscourse stills, blocking its flow, as if they were language images suddenly emerging



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out of the blackness, out of the interior silencing and annihilation that Eva Hoffmannhas poignantly portrayed in her Lost in Translation. French and English, together withJapanese and Chinese, in Dictee stand for the cultural monolingualism and hegemonicdiscourses Cha’s epic altogether resists.

In the book, the image of white letters on a black background, coming before eventhe title page, further directs our attention to calligraphic language, to the page as ablank space and to the visual codes that are a great part of Cha’s Dictee. Reproducingthe message of desire for home and his mother written by a Korean miner forced towork in a Japanese cave, those graphic signs, visually condense the nostalgia thatmoves the “Diseuse” in her quest. Thus, interweaving visual and linguistic semioticcodes and five different languages, Cha’s epic offers itself as a cosmopolitan culturalmodel of resistance to imperial/colonial silencing and separation of self from self inthe colonized space, and to the separation of daughter from mother in a patriarchalworld. Integrating political, ethical, and aesthetic discourses, she weaves togetherdifferent literary genres just as she integrates visual and graphic languages coherentwith our highly visualized world, as an alternative solution to the violence thatsuffering and discrimination can generate.

Cha’s work—like much emerging work—can stimulate contemporary women’scriticism to pay greater attention to exploring the emotional and affective resonanceof various artistic codes as well as different languages and their respective powers.

Nomadic “otherhow”

Cha shares with many writers, and many of the world’s people, the experience ofbeing a forced traveler, individuals who may be suffering from displacement or whofind themselves in a state of nowhere (the Exo, Mariani). Yet there is another kind oftraveler, a privileged Nomad of the kind described in Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects.Braidotti has been justly criticized for the way she employs western philosophy togeneralize and universalize the nomad, in her “situated, postmodern, culturallydifferentiated understanding of the subject in general and the feminist subject inparticular” (1994: 4). Now we have come to understand that what she is describing iswestern women who share with her an experience of travel or transplantation and,most of all, the freedom of mental and physical exploration that has led them to builda cosmopolitan self. The name I have given to this final group melds Braidotti’sconception of the subject, with DuPlessis’ term for a woman’s difference,“otherhow,” (“Otherhow (and permission to continue)”). DuPlessis’ coinage in itsturn echoes How(ever), the title of Kathleen Fraser’s magazine, devoted tocontemporary experimental poetry and innovative criticism. Both DuPlessis andFraser speak Italian fluently and have long-lasting European connections with homesin Italy. Their aim, as DuPlessis writes of herself, is to construe the dilemma ofthemselves as women writers resisting “culture as constituted” (2006: 241). Theyhave chosen poetry as the literary genre through which to explore language as a mine



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whose riches are still to be sounded, an engagement with language to which they feelcommitted if they are to distance themselves from imperialistic or colonizing andpatriarchal discursive and literary habits. For this reason they focus on how poetry canbe made to convey the complexity of life, memory, history, and personal engagementwith the present. For as another poet I include in this group, Anne Blonstein, haswritten to me, they feel an acute responsibility—an ethics—towards the ways inwhich they cultivate and transmit words (letter 8 July 2007).

Blonstein is a British poet transplanted to Basel, Switzerland, and a biologist whospecialized in genetics before devoting herself to poetry. She belongs to a youngergeneration of poets whose work is now starting to attract critical attention (seeCollecott, Camboni ‘“Timeturned images”’). Her words have the concrete, clearquality of perfectly defined objects, while her terse, unusual images are the outcomeof an English language that, mated to the other idioms she lives with—German,French, and Hebrew—shapes the transnational world of a language nomad. In herchapbook from eternity to personal pronoun, quotations from two different Germantranslations of the Torah are the starting point of her dialogue with her Jewishtradition, its translations over the world and its transformations in history. In hermost recent work, Hebrew—like Korean in Cha’s writing—has become the place towhich she ties her English and the other languages she uses in her life throughgraphic/visual and semantic associations. Its letters in her poetry work as a notarikon“letting an alphabet//transfuse a requisite of /starcelled/haemoglobal//exceptors” (!j[0]xrt al, Thou Shalt Not Kill).

If Anzaldua sees a symbiotic relationship between human beings and all forms oflife, Blonstein finds it between humans and language. In this relationship “languageneeds us for its survival and propagation as much as we need language for ours”(letter 26 June 2007). For Blonstein languages, with their varieties and differences,have become the endangered species of our globalized world. Through abuse andmisuse, she writes, “we can suffocate parts of language, again limiting the possibilitiesand potential of our ways of living and continuing (to say nothing of planetarysurvival).” She knows that simplification not only betrays actual experience but, alliedwith power, can become mortal, and invites us critics to inquire further into thepower of languages.

University of Macerata, [email protected]

Works Cited

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—. “To Write in a Foreign Language.” 18 Jul. 2007. <http://www.epoetry.org/issues/issue1/alltext/esadn.htm>.

—. “Further on.” 18 Jul. 2007. <http://www.archipelago.org/vol4-4/adnan.htm>.



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Anzaldua, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. With an Introduction bySonia Salıvar-Hull. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

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DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Otherhow (and permission to continue).” In Dwelling in Pos-sibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry. Ed. Y. Prins and M. Schrieber. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1997. 327–37.

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how2journal.com>.Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Modernism in a Transnational Landscape: Spatial Poetics,

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ature Moderne. Ed. E. Zolla. Napoli: Liguori, 1987. 208–27.—. Poema d’Oriente. Roma: Semar, 2000.—. Le porte del vento. San Cesario (Le): Manni Editori, 2003.Myers-Scotton, Carol. “The Matrix Language Frame Model: Development and Re-

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Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Towards a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: SelectedProse 1979–1985. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. 210–31.

Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Transl. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1992.

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