In-between Tongues: On Bringing Together Multilingual Voices

Being a multilingual speaker who writes predominantly in English, I keep asking myself, Why English? I started writing English to escape the vulnerability of my own mother tongue. The foreignness of a second language offers a cocoon where I could tell my stories without the fear of being known, especially by my family. The cost: loneliness. It didn’t take me long to realize how English poses its violences against BIPOC writers, how my English could always be perceived as “different,” and how our voices are either racialized or tokenized. How can I be most myself, and encounter others at their most authentic, across linguistic barriers? How can we return language to its diverse, multi-terraneous landscape?

Reading bilingual work by Eduardo C. Corral, Zeina Hashem Beck, and Safia Elhillo gave me hope. Beck once mentioned the power of “third meaning/dimension” when different languages converge in a poem. In her lecture notes, Elhillo advocates for “poetry of the third space,” where an intentional inclusion of other languages in an English poem creates a “gesture of closeness” and a rightful “sort of opacity.” I became convinced that the poetic space for me to be seen in English doesn’t have to negate any other parts of myself, or seek to be understood. What needs fostering is the possibility to just be—to bring our linguistic fragmentation and multiple heritages into whatever meshed form does justice to our liminal existence.

The poems in this issue aspire to seed such possibilities. From historical turbulence to personal struggles of growing up in different languages, from traces of violence embedded in intimate moments to critical reflection on timeworn tales and practices, these poems ask me, and hopefully us, to pause, protest, and celebrate. Twelve poems, twelve languages—Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Yoruba, ASLwrite—twelve lenses to defamiliarize ourselves from what’s expected in an English poem, dismantle the tokenization of other languages on the colonial terrain of English, and re-center the voices, lived experiences, and histories of those straddling across linguistic boundaries. I hope reading this issue feels like looking at a kaleidoscope, each “shake” to a new poem fills us with wonder and faith about what our own arrangement of the different pieces of our identities could look like.

I want to emphasize how this collection reflects only a fraction of the ongoing collective wave to multilingualize English. What has stayed with me most, as an Editorial Fellow, is the honor of receiving over three hundred submissions for a call I once thought would draw only a few. I’m humbled by those courageous experiments and emboldened to let my bilingual voice take up more space. This issue is my effort to offer a “gesture of closeness” to the multilingual community: Write. Scream. Let our forked tongues be heard. Together.