Untranslatable Self: Shenandoah Essayists Offer Truths Beyond/Between/Within/Without Language
by Stevie BillowI’m absolutely honored to be writing this as one of Shenandoah’s Editorial Fellows in Nonfiction. A year ago, I started this fellowship with a strong sense of imposter syndrome. Not only did I have little faith in myself as an editor (certainly not someone qualified to work with a magazine with a reputation like Shenandoah’s!), but I doubted I had the right to curate a selection of personal essays on Language & Identity.
I’m monolingual. My native tongue is the most widespread imperialist language on the planet. I speak with a Northeast white American accent. When I speak, what I say and how I say it is a manifestation of several dimensions of privilege. What authority did I have on the subject of Language & Identity?
Like any human being who communicates, my relationship with language is multitudinous and ever-changing. I hold the privilege of being a native English speaker alongside being a trans nonbinary person who uses they/them pronouns. For this reason, some think of me as a language anarchist, a confusion or mistake—anything other than the words I try to teach them. Every passerby, every government demands linguistic hegemony over my self-expression. I have (re)discovered my paternal family’s ancestral tongue, Rusyn, and am working to (re)learn and (re)define what this endangered language means to me. This is a language that majority governments have long suppressed, contested, banned, and, consequently, is being lost among Rusyns living in the homeland and their diaspora.
I don’t tell you this as evidence of my authority on this subject of Language & Identity. On the contrary, I say this to implore us all to let go of our knee-jerk desire for authority. What has seeking authority ever done for human communication? Control and standardization only serve to dilute language, to compromise authentic emotional meaning and to sever communities. I encourage you, as you read these essays, to resist the urge to translate. More often than not, things are lost, not found, in translation. Let go of the need to know, to understand, and instead recognize and spend time with the gaps in your understanding. Listen deeply to vocabularies of experience you are unfamiliar with. Reading is a conversation between writer and reader. It’s in that sacred, individual communication that creation occurs and meaning is made.
What I have learned this past year is that authority is not nearly as valuable as honesty, humility, and mutual care in the editorial process. These essayists—Anaya Marei, Danielle Shandíín Emerson, Flávia Monteiro, and Alexis M. Wright—speak with unwavering vulnerability on the embodiment, lineage, malleability, and futurities of language. I am endlessly grateful for their trust in me as a shepherd of their words. We need storytellers like them. Just as we need storylisteners like you.
