Beyond the Mother Tongue

Yasemin Yildiz's Beyond the Mother Tongue offers a usefully provocative take on a growing “movement” in language studies away from a monolingual framework for conceptualizing language, language relations, and language users and toward conceptions of multilingualism that do not simply offer pluralized versions of monolingualism—sets of discrete languages and their users. While the book focuses primarily on canonical and “minority” writers associated with the literary/aesthetic realm—Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu—and more particularly with engagements with “German,” Yildiz's analyses move fluidly to encompass a far broader range of language practices, and will be of interest to readers (like myself) relatively unfamiliar with the specific texts Yildiz discusses. This is both necessary and appropriate given her argument that monolingualism is not simply a statement about the limited linguistic repertoire of populations but, rather, a “key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as of imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (2).While firmly at odds with the tenets of the ideology of monolingualism (helpfully described in her opening chapter), Yildiz also resists the temptation to merely celebrate a plurality of languages. Instead, she insists that we understand contemporary language practices and politics, at least in the West, as a response to an overriding monolingual framework, that is, as postmonolingual rather than evidence of a “plurilingual” ethos or the multilingual practices and beliefs obtaining elsewhere and/or in other eras. Yildiz's historicizing of contemporary forms of multilingualism demonstrates these to be “refracted through the monolingual paradigm” (3–4), hence we need to read such instances and efforts at multilingualism against the backdrop of that paradigm, to “work through” rather than attempt to merely sidestep notions of the “mother tongue,” for example, in order to move beyond such concepts (13–14).Yildiz's location of monolingual and postmonolingual writing in ongoing tension, and her careful elucidation of the language environment, politics, and practices out of which specific writings have emerged, enable her to help us see resistance to monolingualism even in writing that would appear on its surface to be simply monolingual, and, as well, to demonstrate that writings which appear to be highly multilingual may in fact evince monolingualist conceptions. So, for example, in light of Paul Celan's multilingual practice, and his location outside the language he claimed as his own, his endorsement of German as his mother tongue can be understood to resist the monolingualism he preached insofar as he was not the authorized speaker of that language (18). Conversely, the conceptual artwork Wordsearch, while displaying an enormous variety of languages and scripts marking it as in one sense “multilingual,” fits within a monolingual framework by identifying the contributing individuals in terms of one language only.Following her opening chapter introducing the history and significance of monolingualism as a cultural paradigm, subsequent chapters examine and evaluate the strategies by which specific writers have broken with monolingualist tenets. Chapter 1 examines Kafka's wrestling with both German—the language he spoke and wrote—and Yiddish, a language he encountered in Yiddish theater particularly and wrote about in ways that changed his relationship with German. Chapter 2 considers the “internal multilingualism” of Adorno's use of “foreign”-derived words in his otherwise “German” writings, especially in the context of Adorno's writings on “Words from Abroad” (1959), his considerations of Fremdwörter as “the Jews of language,” and the early twentieth-century movement against use of such words by language purists. Adorno, Yildiz argues, puts “native” and “foreign” words into dialectical interplay to engage in what she terms a “critically postmonolingual form.”Chapters 3–5 are each devoted to three contemporary writers and the alternative strategies they take for breaking with monolingualism within the context of increased global migrations and communications: Yoko Tawada, Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu (respectively). Yildiz shows that switches in Tawada's writing between Japanese and German produce a defamiliarization of and detachment from both languages and a rejection of any proffered “inclusion” into a monolingual paradigm. Engaging bilingualism not through borrowings but the production of two linguistically separate oeuvres, Tawada's writing, Yildiz argues, destabilizes what it means to be either a “Japanese” or “German” (writer) by writing in both, thereby undermining claims to mother tongue exclusivity. In a sharp critique of monolingualism, Tawada uses bilingual writing to address monolinguals, as in her bilingual play Till, in which almost all the characters are monolingual in either Japanese or German and confront one another without, however, mixing or producing a hybrid form or dialogue. In other writings, Yildiz demonstrates, Tawada shows the ways in which a foreign language offers freedom and creativity not available in one's ostensible “mother” tongue. Yildiz's analysis further shows the overlaps between gender, language, and civic/ethnic identity in, for example, Japanese women's desire for “foreign” language study and fetishizing of Western men as means to escape restrictions imposed on them in Japan, and in monolingualism's problematic associations of one's “first” language with the “mother.”Chapter 4, focused on Emine Sevgi Özdamar's writing, shows how Özdamaru uses literal translation from another language (Turkish) to produce a form of multilingualism that “is both visible and invisible in the text” (144) insofar as her text Mutterzunge, while ostensibly in “German,” carries with it the traces of the language translated (e.g., the term Mutterzunge vs. what is perceived as the “idiomatic” Muttersprache). Özdamar's writing thus points to the tension between a multilingual practice (of literal translation) and a monolingual paradigm. For unlike a translator's use of literal translation, Özdamar's writing does not simply translate an (original) Turkish text but is written and exists only “in” a German recognizable as using (literal) translation of Turkish linguistic forms, producing a strangeness to both the German text and its Turkish “source” as simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Yildiz reads Özdamar's use of this strategy as the writer's “means of working through traumatic (trans)national histories” (146) rather than as a means of affirming Turkish culture, enriching German culture, or engaging in intercultural dialogue or aesthetic experimentation, as other critics have suggested. Yildiz accomplishes this reading through placing Özdamar's writing in the context of not only German/Turkish relations but also the Turkish state's own efforts at language purism in developing an official form of “Turkish” (an invented tradition) as part of nation-building, efforts that effectively cut off cultural memory through evisceration of written archives. Yildiz further contextualizes Özdamar's intervention in terms of political repression in Turkey that itself leads to a “loss” of language, versus the conventional identification of such loss with migration. Conversely, German, for some of Özdamar's characters, offers a desirable alternative idiom to what has become the official idiom of their “mother” tongue (167).Chapter 5 explores postmonolingual strategies among “second-generation immigrants,” a.k.a “postmigrants,” focusing on the Turkish–German writer Feridun Zaimoglu's 1995 book Kanak Sprak, which offers a synthetic vernacular that, Yildiz argues, represents “a new transnational code that is both rooted and not rooted, that affirms and challenges the link between language and ethnicity” (173). More specifically, Yildiz shows how Kanak Sprak, rather than identifying Turkish as the natural language of its characters, presents their inventive use of German as a form of masculine self-fashioning, as in the deformation of Kanake (a racial slur) and Sprache to the title's Kanak Sprak. The book's speakers provocatively challenge the legitimacy of the meanings ordinarily ascribed to the Kanake slur, stereotypical views of Turkish–German young men, and the German language itself, Yildiz argues, by reclaiming them. Further, Yildiz shows, the text embodies a code-switching—here not between languages but between registers, rendering code-switching an intralingual phenomenon and producing a text simultaneously more and less monolingual—as Yildiz puts it, “monolingualism ... with a multilingual affect” (179). Thus, unlike postcolonial efforts to appropriate an imposed language, postmigrants' strategies aim at claiming a language withheld from them (181).Beyond the Mother Tongue will be of most immediate professional academic interest to what monolingual convention dictates be referred to as “German literature” specialists. However, the growing number of scholars interested in past and contemporary politics of language relations and forms of writing countering the ideology of monolingualism will find Yildiz's argument, insights, and detailed analyses useful. These broaden our understanding of the micro-politics of specific language practices, revealing the ways in which those practices that might appear to be aligned with the dominant monolingual framework may subtly counter and undermine its tenets, how ostensibly “multilingual” practices may reinforce that framework, and the challenges we all face in engaging such practices in our own reading and writing

Argument (complex analysis · Ethos · First language · German · Ideology · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · History · Law · Linguistic Education and Pedagogy · Philosophy