Is There Comfort in Language? A Look at the Polyglot Poetics of Julia Alvarez and Zeina Hashem Beck

Abstract

Is There Comfort in Language? A Look at the Polyglot Poetics of Julia Alvarez and Zeina Hashem Beck Doris Hambuch According to Sarah Dowling, translingual poetics refers to “poetry that is self-consciously situated between languages and that attends to the complex processes of domination and refusal that can be observed and interpreted from the discursive context of each” (5). This article studies the translingual poetics of two contemporary women and argues that the texts of the younger, Lebanese poet, Zeina Hashem Beck, are more explicit in their representations of respective processes of domination than those of the older, Dominican-American poet, Julia Alvarez. Both Hashem Beck and Alvarez can be considered Anglophone writers, but neither grew up with English as a first language. Neither fits entirely within Dowling’s frame of settler monolingualism and neoliberal multiculturalism, yet certain elements of these contexts are relevant for the following readings. Employing the concept of comfort, the resulting comparative analysis understands the varying representations of languages other than English through discussions of creative inspiration and forms of delivery. It observes that the contrast with a non-European language enforces the challenges polyglot poetry poses for the current global language and for what Yasemin Yildiz terms the “monolingual paradigm” (2–3). “Bilingual verse in English renders the flipside of the global hegemony of English visible and audible” (253), Laura O’Connor writes at the beginning of her comparative study of poetry by Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez and Irish author Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Building on O’Connor’s argument, my comparative study of the former with the Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck adds a non-Western angle to the discourse at hand. O’Connor’s focus is on a common choice of form and vocabulary that allows both poets in her study, Alvarez and Ní Chuilleanáin, to reveal the intricacies of the monolingual paradigm that “marginalize the (m)other tongue” (269). An analysis of Hashem Beck’s poems demonstrates how this technique works [End Page 274] when the “other tongue” is further removed through a different script and its affiliation with the so-called “Orient.” I further argue that younger generations, including poets such as Hashem Beck, can take this strategy further, to marginalize the dominant language in selected texts. The comfort language, if one is willing to consider the other tongue as such, thus receives greater prominence and power. At the outset of Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture (2018), Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz claim that “monolingual paradigms are inadequate in a world dominated by globalization and migration” (1). Likewise, in the introduction to Multilingual Literature as World Literature (2021), Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang write that their anthology “argues not only, with Spivak and Mufti, against the dominance of English, but also against a dominant concept of monolingualism that has further served to limit and skew the scope of world literature” (3). Relying on Edward Said’s “Traveling Theory,” Hiddleston and Ouyang advocate a “worldly” kind of text and critic as they reject hierarchies among cultures (2). Creative multilingualism that necessarily escapes affiliation with a single culture seems best suited to lay bare and contest the power structures at stake. This can happen even in polyphonic texts written in a single language, as Michelle Hartman argues in her study of the anticolonial framework of Lebanese novels in French. In the preface to her book, Hartman refers to the poet Nadia Tuéni, who claims to write “Arabic in French” (x), in an attempt to expose the political power of languages. Aptly captured in the title of a poetry collection by Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand, No Language Is Neutral (1990), this connection between language and power has been the subject of ongoing debates among sociolinguists and poets for several decades. Since Pierre Bourdieu’s pathbreaking research in the 1970s, linguists, most recently Claire Kramsch, for example, have emphasized the symbolic power of language (Kramsch ix). In a comprehensive textbook, Kramsch points to the effect that digitalization has had on language dynamics because of its impact on distribution: “The symbolic universe that language learners are entering today requires them to have a much greater awareness of the...