Multilingual Shoplifters, Impossible Death(s), and the Love for Mistranslations

“Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.”¹

Since when do we adapt our words, occasionally camouflage our thoughts, censor our anger, keep the doors of our mouth shut, and peel off the skins of our layered existence?

Since when do we—friends, sisters, queer lovers, granddaughters of deviant women—speak with stones and nails in our mouth, challenging dominant (institutional) languages, contaminating the modern and colonial narratives in written expression?

Since when do we, polyglot persons, who move across multiple territories, are failing to navigate through meaning, affect and social consciousness? At the same time, we sense how liberating is to thrive our language(s) across boundaries like plants we keep watering over the dry, heatwave summer. Our language marks our traces, our language unpacks cardboard boxes and drags the suitcases from place to place. My own language(s) are consistently broken, elliptic, forced, and unforeseen. My blended language is contaminated by and indebted to many different languages: hegemonic or peripheral, imposed or gained, faint or silenced, recognizable or hidden languages.

“Like a thief I would deny the words, deny they ever
existed, were spoken, or could be spoken,
like a thief I’d bury them and remember where.”²

Imagination one: when I am writing, speaking or singing I am a shoplifter who steals from the language stores of my home-town at the Mediterranean, and a looter hiding in foreign language stores of old Central Europe. I am a shoplifter who wears a chameleon pocket costume, uses her hands as quick as lightning and lifts beautiful words from the forbidden depot of colonial languages. Unapologetic I am betraying the syntax, tinkering the grammar, I am carrying errors under my skin.

MULTILINGUALITY is embodied knowledge, it is a state of mind and a place with many different senses on the flesh of my tongue. MULTILINGUALITY entails polyvalent memories and is an everyday practice of survival—in particularly for people with diasporic and migrant experiences. In the first place MULTILINGUALITY is an enrichment of our thinking and feeling—moreover, it is a practice of multidirectional documentation. It is also a dirty emancipation from dominant (colonial) languages that impose hierarchic exclusions, and serve national phantasies of purism. MULTILINGUALITY is political situatedness and critical awareness of individual and collective borders, and borderlands.³

When you move between languages you constantly lose, you fail to recall, you suppress, and you leave aside because of immediate necessity, and the specific (im)material conditions. Thinking, feeling, articulating and writing between languages is like having a death drive. You kill specific meanings, you sacrifice beloved expressions, unconsciously you eliminate grammar, syntax and reasonable orders. Although it is impossible to die – your instinct is feeding the future repetition. When I move between different languages, I sense the rapacity of an undernourished carnivorous animal seeking for food; I am earning imperfect writing and the joy of killing, adding on the risk of misplacement and mis_interpretation. Mister Interpretation, you think you know too much. Miss Interpretation your speculative mind decides whether life is an unfished film or not. When I move between different languages, the inventive animal transfers words between worlds, it gains interest and calories of every lexicon. This narrative creature has three tongues for mastication, a cryptolect stomach that absorbs memory, and a sub-stomach for thoughts repression.

I am chewing my native language and other languages in a dirty, undisciplined and messy way: I use standard modern Greek mixed with Anglo-American jargon and ottoman words. kitap ~ ~ ~ bakal ~ ~ ~ divan. I use academic Greek contaminated with rural Peloponnese dialect, as inherited by my communist mother. I recall rural Greek with idioms of the Vlachs⁴ (or aromanian) language, as spoken by my grandma in North Thessaly. ~ ~ ~ thamaseskou amari / admiring the sea ~ ~ ~

Nonetheless, I love standard Greek as contaminated by the queer cant καλιαρντά / kaliardá.⁵ Besides, I disseminate my hidden desires in broken English and every so often I steal from the American slang, appropriating wordings from movies and songs. In German-speaking countries I use standard German informed by migrant and diasporic knowledges. It is the momentum, timing, and context that encourages or forbids my language. When I move between different languages, I am rehearsing various roles and different temporalities. Migrant tongue has the potential to roam diagonally through contradictory experiences, dissenting time and space logics, and intriguing the field of perception. Migrant tongue exposes its own taste of language, it can cut across disciplinary thinking and fixed territories of representation.

“Arabic at the dinner table / spearing mint / Spanish leaves her soiled hymns
in the laundry / tries teaching French how to ululate / I laugh at them
both / Arabic stands in my doorway / asks if there is space in my bed
for her hands /                           / afterwards / I fold my tongue & get dressed”⁶

Etel Adnan, a diasporic Arab in exile, has been living, writing and teaching in different countries. She developed awareness and sensitivity to the motivations of understanding, using and resisting her multiple languages Arabic, Greek, Turkish, English, and French. I recall her thoughts on writing (poetry) in a foreign language, her fondness of multilingualism, and the political complication of using different languages, colonial and non-colonial ones. I recall her work also as a reference to the impossible death(s) that translation, as the process of rendering meaning and cultural knowledge from one language to another, is going through. The transfer from one signification to another is a small thanatos. At the same time, you seek the rebirth of a meaning, you desire a relational connection. What you erase or inhibit in one language can be the balsamic plant in another. This is how one can move through boundaries and binaries in life, like stepping from one wound to the other in the limbo of individual and collective desires. Remember how you press lightly on the vase cracks, imagine how to inhabit a crevice in the rocks. Anyhow, we encounter the structural violence of dominant languages, of discipling society, of the politics of death.

Another imagination grounds on the idea of transferring Adnan’s poem “The Book of the Sea” in Greek without using the appropriate binary pronouns. “The Book of the Sea” has not been translated from Arabic into French because of the gender pronouns of the main narrative elements, the Sea and the Sun. In Greek (similar to French) the sun, as a noun, is a masculine word and the sea a feminine word – in Arabic it is the contrary. Adnan explains: “So, the poem is not only not translatable, it is, in a genuine sense, unthinkable in Arabic.”⁷ What is thinkable in grammar and unthinkable in culture could become (un)bearable in poetic terms, or even a painfully pleasurable work. How to displace and disarrange the evermore troubling pronouns of nature, objects and physical phenomena? An attempt to blend the pronouns, but not to exchange them in the opposite binary order, would be to expand them, to pluralize them, or rather to displace them in the context of each sentence.

She the sea, he the sea, they the sea - She the moon, he the moon, they the moon – She the sun, he the sun, they the sun – She the chair, he the chair, they the chair – She the acoustic attenuation, he the magnetic resonance, they the spatial dispersion.

The moving between languages implies the producing of different spaces and temporalities for each of them. The language goes from fluent to fluid, it moves from the time ahead to the events of the past, it inhabits and transforms the present. To let oneself switch perspectives in countless variations. The language is also wandering between the genders. “…wandering from one language to another like being in transit, between masculinity, femininity, and transsexuality.”⁸, writes Preciado connecting his multilingual practice to Derrida’s thoughts in his monolingualism of the other. To paraphrase and pluralize Preciado: when we write about what matters more to us, in languages that do not belong to us the embedded assumptions and the certainties of one’s own single language are not enough. We are dealing with initial fears, we shift our lens(es) and perspectives in the understanding of the world. We find (our own) meaning in the amalgam of the different languages we tend to “possess”, a meaning from within performative contradictions that build new relations. Thus, we move away from a language definition that implies a demarcation of ownership, discipline, and control.

When we engage with our different languages in a profound manner, it feels like inhabiting many shelters at the same time. Each language is a shelter, and the intermingle of the languages reclaims its own shelter too. Thereby, there is a relational process when we shift between shelters and a journey of awareness, as we trace back the materials of which every language house is made of. This tracing can be unsettling and triggering, as we unearth validities and parts of straight-line knowledges. We can find relief in putting aside dominant narratives, embrace disorder, and allow for new narratives to occur. In future perfect I remember that we will no longer adapt our words, camouflage our thoughts, censor our anger, and peel off the skins of our layered existence. Our mouth doors are wide opened, we entered through the threshold, we opened the gates.