Language, Diaspora, Home: Identity and Women’s Linguistic Space-Making [1 ed.] 1032328770, 9781032328775

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Language, Diaspora, Home

This book explores language maintenance and development in the linguistic lives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants as they navigate migration and diaspora, highlighting the role of women in acting as custodians and gate-keepers of family languages towards creating a sense of home. The volume features an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on work from narrative, storytelling, literary studies, and linguistic anthropology, as well as interviews with multiple generations of immigrant families, to reflect on the ways these families foster a sense of home and maintain connections to their homelands through language. Robinson showcases the voices of a diverse range of families to examine the choices women in immigrant families make between the use of family languages, dominant community languages, or a mix of the two. The volume enhances our understanding of the ways in which immigrants navigate the linguistic landscapes of home and community amid migration and diaspora. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and gender, and language and migration. Heather Robinson is professor of English at York College/City University of New York. She is the lead co-author of Translingual Identities and Transnational Realities in the U.S. College Classroom (Routledge, 2020) as well as various journal articles and book chapters that have appeared in such varied venues such as Women’s Writing, American Speech, Administrative Theory and Praxis, and Creole Composition: Academic Writing and Rhetoric in the Anglophone Caribbean (2019).

Routledge Studies in Linguistic Anthropology

Narratives of Conflict, Belonging, and the State Discourse and Social Life in Post-War Ireland Brigittine M. French Difference and Repetition in Language Shift to a Creole The Expression of Emotions Maïa Ponsonnet Narrating Migration Intimacies of Exclusion in Northern Italy Sabina Perrino The Ambiguity of English as a Lingua Franca Politics of Language and Race in South Africa Stephanie Rudwick Discourses of Student Success Language, Class, and Social Personae in Italian Secondary Schools Andrea R. Leone-Pizzighella Indigenous Multilingualism at Warruwi Cultivating Linguistic Diversity in an Australian Community Ruth Singer Language, Diaspora, Home Identity and Women’s Linguistic Space-Making Heather Robinson For more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Linguistic-Anthropology/book-series/RSLA

Language, Diaspora, Home Identity and Women’s Linguistic Space-Making Heather Robinson

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Heather Robinson The right of Heather Robinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-32877-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-32878-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-31713-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For Alison

Contents

Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction: Language, Diaspora, Home

1

2 Basement Methodologies: Methods and Motivations

22

3 Language in Motion: Mothers, Children, and Linguistic Circulation

37

4 “Mending that Wound”: Creating Linguistic Futures in a Diasporic Space

50

5 Listen to Your Mother: Home, Migration, and Language

63

6 “Particularized Worlds”: Translingual Writing as Borderland Space

76

7 “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”: Disidentification and Memory in the Poetry of Esther Phillips

91

8 A flat White and a Banh Mi: Third Spaces, Gender, and Language in the Suburban City

108

9 Island Homes

126

10 Conclusion

139

Index 145

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a very strange experience. This project was not supposed to take this form, was perhaps not even going to be a book. And yet here we are, and there are many people to thank who have participated in the process of its creation. Di Su and John Drobnicki, York College librarians extraordinaire, my interlibrary loan heroes, especially during those long months where everyone was working from home and books at circulating libraries were not circulating. Thank goodness for you and OCLC, or I would be very much poorer from paying publishers for individual articles and chapters. Melissa Dinsman, my colleague, writing partner, and friend. Phebe Kirkham and Patricia Milanes, my colleagues, friends, and co-writing companions on Zoom every Tuesday for two years. Shereen Inayatulla and Kelly Baker Josephs, colleagues current and former, for more Zoom co-writing and for listening to the plan. Nela Navarro, for her encouragement and enthusiasm, and for believing in this project before it was clear to me what exactly it was and what it would do. Linda Grasso, for sending me the first call for papers out of which this volume grew, and for her love and care over many years. Jonathan Hall, colleague, friend, and supportive department chair. It will work out fine. My sister, Alison Sternberg. We kept each other company over Zoom workouts and Signal chats in the long months of the lockdowns and are still keeping each other company. Oscar and Dave, too, who always welcome me so beautifully when I visit Warwick. Yes, Oscar, you can have my old phone when I get a new one. Giovanna, Samantha, Alice, Artie, and Glenda, for participating in the interviews for Chapter 4 and sharing their family language stories and for providing a safe landing pad. Dad, for his enthusiasm and his story too.

Acknowledgements  ix Mirtha, Ame, Angelica, Eliana, Luz, and Corinne, for participating in the interviews for Chapter 3, for so generously talking with me about their language stories. Corinne, for the connection with these wonderful women, and Mirtha, for welcoming me so generously into her life. Ileana Leon and Dominique Townsend, for that excellent interlude creating our CCCC 2022 presentation. Julie Straight, for another CCCC collaboration and an unexpected friendship. Elysse Preposi and Harry Dixon at Routledge, for guiding me through the process of proposal and manuscript and all the other pieces, and Karen Adler for pointing me in their direction when I thought I might have a book. Michelle, who I found and who found me, and who read the bits and pieces and then the whole thing, and who always listens even when I am at my most boring, and who makes me laugh. And Caroline and Harriet. You’re good company. And the students of York College, CUNY, whose language stories over the 15 years that I’ve been on faculty there have intrigued and inspired me, and helped me understand the concept and context for this book. Thanks for sharing. Support for parts of this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

1 Introduction Language, Diaspora, Home

This book is about coming and going, leaving, and returning; it is about maintaining ties to places that we left behind and creating new homes and new ways of being in the places where we have arrived. It is about how language ties us to places, and how people loosen those ties, and it is about how women navigate these various linguistic ties as they are bound up with mobility and with feelings of home. It was written against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, when movements around the world— and movements on a much smaller scale—were stopped or restricted in order to “flatten the curve.” What that meant, for this project, is that the research and writing took place largely in a basement in New Jersey in the United States, and so a project that was once imagined as situated ethnography became, conceptually and methodologically, rather different. Instead, the volume that I present here offers an interdisciplinary excursion through the intersections of migration and diaspora, and concepts of home, using the lens of language—language acquisition, policies, ideologies, and maintenance—to consider what we find in these spaces. And it offers a look at the role women play in these sites of linguistic development. The geographical scope of the book is broad, taking us between Sydney, New York, Barbados, Colombia, Singapore, Florida, Guyana, and Jamaica, and connects to still more sites in its consideration of the making of homes via language. It takes as its foundational philosophy the tension between the conception of diaspora that understands the phenomenon as “the direct result of migration,” and a more expansive notion of diaspora as a phenomenon that exceeds any causal link to travel, movement, or displacement (Campt & Thomas, 2008, p. 2). In the metropolitan centres of the world, immigrants and their communities, especially those who have been racially, ethnically, and linguistically minoritized, have identified or have been identified as diasporic: they make and maintain connections to real or mythic homelands far from the places where they currently live. Language is a crucial component in the construction of both diaspora and home: as Canagarajah and Silberstein write, DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-1

2 Introduction “language lies at the center of imagined and contested pasts and futures, mediating desire and identity” (2012, p. 2). Diaspora and home are both sites where past and future come together and are negotiated; they are sites where people navigate their desires and their identities, connecting the imagined possibilities of both diaspora and home with the possibilities afforded by the “outside” world. Diaspora and home themselves are inherently connected, and it is the work of this book to consider linguistic home-making among diasporic people, to explore and embrace the comforts and discomforts that inhere in being in multiple linguistic, spatial, and emotional places at once. This book explores how people, mostly women, navigate what Chandra Talpande Mohanty and Biddy Martin refer to as an irreconcilable tension between the search for a secure place from which to speak, within which to act, and the awareness of the price at which secure places are bought, the awareness of the exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on which they are predicated. (Mohanty & Martin, 2003, p. 101) Vijay Mishra has described diasporas as referring “to people who do not feel comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities as indicated on their passports” (Mishra, 2005, p. 1).1 I follow Mishra in considering diasporas to be made of people, rather than movements: people whose personal and community circumstances place them in multiple places at once. My conception of diaspora aligns with the definition of the terms “transnational” and “transnationalism” offered by Levitt and Jaworsky (2007): Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton (1994, p. 6) initially defined transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.” More recent scholarship understands transnational migration as taking place within fluid social spaces that are constantly reworked through migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Pries, 2005; Smith, 2005). These arenas are multi-layered and multi-sited, including not just the home and host countries but other sites around the world that connect migrants to their conationals and coreligionists. (p. 131) The fundamental difference between these two terms—diaspora and transnationalism—is the centrality of the concept of “home” in diaspora, though, as I will show, this concept is a complicated one. Indeed, my contention here is that to create home, the people who make up the

Introduction  3 world’s various diasporas—especially the second, third, and fourth generations of these groups—must embrace the discomfort of which Mishra writes, while finding ways to belong that do not rely on connections to some distant homeland. Even so, they may feel those connections being imposed upon them by family or by national linguistic ideologies, such as the United States’ “raciolinguistic” taxonomies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), which force a connection to “elsewhere” for people who do not fit into the model of the “idealised native speaker,” from which “ethnic and linguistic minorities are automatically excluded” (Leung et al., 1997, p. 546). As many authors indicate, the development of new models of linguistic belonging is crucial for the enfranchisement of the millions of people globally who live somewhere other than the “mythic” homeland. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s observation, quoted previously, about the tension between finding places of safety and places of visibility for migrants—and particularly migrant women—and the costs of finding these places in terms of desire and identity, provides something of a through-line for this book. Where can security be found? At what cost? The answers to these questions have even more acute consequences for women, who are not necessarily “safe” in public spaces, as though they may be visible in the “wrong” ways. And yet being in private means they become invisible, and with invisibility can come being forgotten or being held in contempt for nonparticipation in the “productive“ work of a society (see, for example, Robinson [2021] and references therein for a discussion of the costs of doing “reproductive” work for women). Exploring how women find places and spaces of safety and visibility has been the focus of several scholars, including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Biddy Martin, and Gayatri Gopinath; I build on the work of these scholars here, keeping in mind Robert J. C. Young’s observation that the politics of invisibility involves not actual invisibility, but a refusal of those in power to see who or what is there … Within academia, this task begins with the politics of knowledge, with articulating the unauthorized knowledges, and histories, of those whose knowledge is not allowed to count. (2012, p. 24) For our purposes here, these unauthorized knowledges are those of immigrant and diasporic women, especially those of home-making and heritage languages that are marginalized within the dominant languages of their wider communities, and broadened, by the end of the book, to others who also occupy positions of marginality within metropolitan, masculinized public spaces.

4 Introduction In the next sections of this introduction, I work through the terms “diaspora/diasporic” and “home,” offering working definitions that will inform the rest of this volume. The next section begins this work with an exploration of “being diasporic.” The term “diaspora” has somewhat faded from view in recent scholarship, in favour of discussions about migration. However, my work re-engages the term because diaspora highlights communities and people, and requires a place for discussions of “home.” Being Diasporic, Being Home I start my consideration of diaspora and being diasporic with Stuart C. Hall’s now-canonical definition of diaspora identity, with “diaspora” functioning more as a metaphor than referring to the literal meaning of the term.2 Hall’s definition, whose origin he situates in the “New World,” and whose usage he applies to “Afro-Caribbean people,” is as follows: diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea … The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (Hall, 1990, p. 235) Diaspora, as Hall’s framing indicates, is historically intertwined with the idea of a homeland, a country or place of origin. Furthermore, indexing to a homeland creates, as Rosa and Trivedi show, “presumptions of authenticity” (2017, p. 330). Not only does writing about diaspora imply the existence of some homeland that has been left behind—indeed, the term “diaspora,” in contrast to the term “migration,” is built on the idea of ongoing connection to an ancestral home and to a sense of community among those who have been displaced, by force or by choice or a combination of the two. But local homes, homes in the “new homeland,” often take on great importance in diasporic communities as sites of resistance to the pressures of the dominant cultures, languages, and discourse—but they also can be sites of oppression and exclusion for family members who don’t fit in with the linguistic and cultural expectations of those who are the “keepers” of these things in the household. Indeed, as Canagarajah and Silberstein write,

Introduction  5 Diaspora has to be treated as a ‘community’ that embodies difference, not similarity. This does not mean that there is no affinity or solidarity among people with a common heritage. But this sense of ‘community’ too has to be achieved situationally through language. (2012, p. 82) The goal of this book is to interrogate these assumptions and again, following Rosa and Trivedi, “to denaturalize notions of homeland” (2017, p. 330). I seek here to get in the middle of the binaries that diasporic thinking can create, according to Juan Flores’ terms: a dichotomy that includes only “continuity and tradition or … change and disjuncture” (2008, p. 17). Amid these binaries, “diasporic populations tend to either idealise or demonise their country of origin” in homogenizing ways that overlook the complexity of experiences in diasporas and homelands alike (Kramsch, 2006, p. 116). But what does it mean to be at home? To be far from home? To go home? Home, especially for people who are immigrants or the children of immigrants, is complicated. The term “home” is often associated with a place that has been left behind (Fortier, 2002). Brah (2005) describes the complicated imagining of home that impacts diasporic people: On the one hand, “home” is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense, it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of “origin.” On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of a locality. Its sounds and smells, its heat and dust, balmy summer evenings, or the excitement of the first snowfall, shivering winter evenings, sombre grey skies in the middle of the day … all this, as mediated by the historically specific everyday of social relations. (p. 192) Not only is home a geographical place; the feeling of “being home” is an enormous component of what this term has come to mean in our communities. Chandra Mohanty writes that ‘being home’ refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; ‘not being home’ is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. (2003, p. 90) What I find important about this observation from Mohanty, which was written in conversation with Biddy Martin, is that we cannot make home,

6 Introduction or understand home, by turning away from the contradictions and the difficulties that inhere in the imagining and the experiences of the places that we are asked to call home and that we choose to call home, especially in the fact that these are often separate places, and these askings and choosings may change dramatically over the course of a lifetime. Looking at home diasporically teaches us that we can only make homes by making space for difference and for change—or what we are calling home will eventually break or will reveal itself as “unhomely” (Bui, 2014) in the ways that count for us. Furthermore, Ann-Marie Fortier writes that “home is not simply a sense of place, but that it is also a material space, a lived space, inhabited by people who work to keep the roof over their heads, or to keep their family warm, safe and sane” (2002, p. 130). Home is created, according to Fortier, around “homing desires” (Brah, 2005), which Fortier describes as “desires to feel at home achieved by physically or symbolically (re)constituting spaces which provide some kind of ontological security in the context of migration” (Fortier, 2002, p. 115). Language, of course, can be a source of this “ontological security,” and telling stories can be how the process of “(re)constituting spaces” can be enacted. Exclusion or exile from the family home, whether voluntary or forced, happens when family and/or home narratives offer no role and no character in which children can see themselves, sometimes leading, as in Fortier’s essay, to departure and a search for a new home, though we see something different in Gayatri Gopinath’s work about the women who try to remake home to better fit their identities (Gopinath, 2005). Linguistically, a movement away from home is often constituted by movement towards a language that is not identified as a home language; homing desires, conversely, may be those inscribed in the reclamation of “home” languages. For diasporic people, making a home in the new places often relies on holding onto aspects of this distant, mythic home, creating counternarratives to the sometimes negative stories that are told about immigrant cultures and families by those who affiliate themselves with the dominant culture, and finding ways to be at home in this new space while negotiating engagement with the dominant culture and language. Space, though, is not a backdrop against which events and language happen. Rather, “language practices are activities that produce time and space” (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015, p. 33); we constantly create and recreate spaces that work for us between canonical home and canonical public. This idea goes to the heart of what I seek to do in this book: I am exploring language practices that create homes and other safe spaces especially when the linguistic homeland is inaccessible. Malea Powell’s analysis of the relationship between storytelling and space-making offers support for the claim that I pursue throughout this book, that through our language stories, we can make homes that embrace

Introduction  7 heritage languages and dominant languages when those are not the same thing. Powell writes, “Stories take place. Stories practice place into space. Stories produce habitable spaces” (2012, p. 391). Another way of saying this is to say that the stories that we tell make it possible for us to live in particular places, at particular times, even as we live with the haunt of the other places and the other times to which we are bound. Powell explains: By “space,” I mean a place that has been practiced into being through the acts of storied making, where the past is brought into conscious conversation with the present and where—through those practices of making—a future can be imagined. Spaces, then, are made recursively through specific, material practices rooted in specific land bases, through the cultural practices linked to that place, and through the accompanying theoretical practices that arise from that place—like imagining community “away” from but related to that space. (2012, p. 388) Spaces are made through practices which are linked to “specific land bases.” While it is well-known that language—its movements and its boundaries—is not “about” land but is rather about people, the languages of immigrant communities are nonetheless imaginatively associated with specific land bases which are often very far away from where the communities are located on the globe. If the people move, then the language also moves and changes, sometimes being nurtured and cultivated, and sometimes being let go or altered beyond recognition. But language also helps communities to accomplish the last piece of Powell’s description: “imagining community ‘away’ from but related to the space that was created by the language users in another place.” A shared language makes creating a shared community more possible, and so makes the sharing of stories more possible: when the linguistic homeland is unreachable, these shared stories sustain languages and families and make them part of a past as well as a present and future. In these spaces, as Malea Powell suggests, “the past is brought into conscious conversation with the present and where—through those practices of making—a future can be imagined” (Powell, 2012, p. 388). Thus home, too, in Powell’s conception, can be “made” through “acts of storied making.” These “acts of storied making” are particularly important for those who lie outside official narratives of home: those whose stories disrupt colonial narratives of forward motion, of expansion and prosperity. Johny Pitts describes his photographic practice for his show “Home is not a Place” as one of trying to “celebrate” the ephemeral spaces of Black home-making in Britain, to “capture them while they’re still here” (Pitts, 2022a). Pitts’ photography is about depicting home in Black Britain’s

8 Introduction terms—looking at the coast as a site of immigration, colonization, and figuring out how it plays into Black British identities. Language, Diaspora, Home builds on Pitts’ observation that for many members of marginalized groups, “your home is where your community is, rather than in stones and mortar” (Pitts, 2022b). This conception of community and home is a direct product of the processes of colonization and of the concomitant erasure of Black people as part of the British historical narrative. Diaspora, he says, is more of a feeling than an edifice. Pitts’ commentary on his photography captures one of the central goals of this volume: to tell stories, via participating in conversation and reading creative works, of and with people whose narratives are often excluded from the traditional and normative narratives of nation states, whose lives are not represented by the edifices of the nation, but whose stories offer counter-narratives that run alongside and against the hegemonic linguistic narratives of language and migrations, where the goal is assimilation into a dominant language community, and/or it is the valorization—almost fetishization—of heritage languages. Language, Women, and Mothers As I will claim throughout this book, women are central not only to the construction of families and family language identities; they also play a central role in the maintenance of heritage languages. Moreover, as Family Language Policy research shows, language itself is central to the construction of families (e.g., King & Lanza, 2019). However, much family language policy research has not explored the role of women and, specifically, mothers in the development and maintenance of multilinguality within families; indeed, Selleck (2022) writes that “FLP research has yet to fully address how ‘language and gender ideologies intersect’ (Piller & Gerber, 2021, p. 12)” (p. 3). Selleck (2022) continues: “by taking an active role in their children’s socialisation, mothers become crucial to language maintenance or shift within the family (Kayam & Hirsh, 2012; Nakamura, 2016; Tuominen, 1999), playing a ‘more active role than fathers in their management strategies’ (Bezcioglu-Goktolga & Yagmur, 2018, p. 55)” (Selleck, 2022, p. 4). One significant exception to the lack of attention to mothers’—as opposed to parents’—roles in multilingual language acquisition and family language policy is the work of Toshie Okita, whose research into the acquisition of Japanese alongside English in families with a Japanese mother and an English father living in the United Kingdom describes the central role that the mothers in her study played in the “success” of the children learning and maintaining Japanese (Okita, 2002). Okita describes this work as the “invisible work” of raising children bilingually and focuses on its emotionally demanding nature (e.g., Okita, 2002, pp. 4–5).

Introduction  9 These emotional demands might be particularly isolating for mothers whose own linguistic and cultural backgrounds might already isolate them from the dominant languages and cultures into which they have migrated. A reluctance to centre mothers in discussion of family language policy is understandable: historically, discussions of “mother tongues” essentialize the role of women in fostering national language ideologies, and thus mean that to focus on mothers’ roles in family language development and maintenance potentially furthers and reinforces monolingualist family language ideologies. Indeed, mothering and motherhood themselves have often been fetishized (cf. Rich, 2021 [1986]), and this fetishization has a direct instantiation in traditional discussions of language acquisition, particularly in the guise of the construction of the “mother tongue.” This fetishization poses a conundrum for this volume, in which I wish to acknowledge the central role that women play in home-making, and, specifically, linguistic home-making. However, the propagation of a naturalized, essentialized connection between mothers and grandmothers and language is not at all the goal of this project; rather I wish to explore the choices that women make—and decline to make—when it comes to developing and maintaining family languages, including making dominant languages into new family languages in the aftermath of migration. Yasemin Yildiz explains the fetishization of the connection between “mother” and “language” as follows: the manufactured proximity between “mother” and “language” stages the fantasy behind the modern notion of the mother tongue—namely that the mother tongue emanates from the mother’s body. This notion indicates that, within the monolingual paradigm, “mother tongue” is more than a metaphor. Instead, it constitutes a condensed narrative about origin and identity. (Yildiz, 2012, p. 12) However, as Yildiz goes on to explain, second- and later-generation immigrants, by the very fact of their lived experiences and their language practices, break this one-to-one connection between “real” mother and “mother tongue” by disconnecting ethnicity and language through their existence and visibility … In fact, the unsettling disjuncture between “language” and “ethnicity” that such speakers expose is often warded off by denying nativity to them while claiming it for others on the basis of perceived congruence between the categories … these language patterns mark the aftermath of migration. (Yildiz, 2012, p. 170; emphasis in original)

10 Introduction Thus, while I consider homes and being “at home” in this book, I do not focus on “home” languages or “mother tongues” as such. Often, the idea of the home language is used not just to describe languages that are spoken in the home but also to establish a dichotomy between languages that are required to stay at home and those that are permitted—and required—in public spaces: the term “home language” implies a language that is spoken at home but which should not or cannot be spoken outside the home. Such languages, by this logic, become unspeakable. Moreover, it assumes a bright line dividing the languages of home and the languages of public spaces: the term “home language” makes the essentializing assumption, often imposed on immigrants, that heritage languages and languages of the “home” country are the only ones that are used in domestic spaces. Many studies have already shown that this is not the case: no language and no home is a linguistic island (e.g., Becker, 2014; Becker & Coggshall, 2009; Chik, Forrest, & Siciliano, 2018; García 1997). This volume thus considers how the boundaries between “home” languages and public languages are negotiated. The participants whose family language policies and practices I discuss in this volume explore exactly this “aftermath” of migration in their own storytelling about language, as do the language stories from the imaginative works that I explore here. All research sites—interviews, and literary / critical textual analysis—take up and complicate this narrative of how women, particularly but not exclusively mothers and grandmothers, sometimes strengthen and sometimes break the narrative that connects origin and identity via “mother tongue.” Indeed, one of the goals of this volume is to challenge the idea that a family’s mother tongue is and must be unique, in other words that there is a single, authentic language for speakers that must be tied to their ethnicity, family origins, or linguistic inheritances (Leung et al., 1997). This volume shows that women are constantly making overt and explicit decisions about how language plays out in and through their families, and these decisions are under constant negotiation from within their families (cf. also Selleck, 2022; Bui, Turner, & Filipi, 2022) as well as constant pressure from the linguistic ideologies of the communities in which they are living and participating. Indeed, as Tovares and Kamwangamalu (2017) write, a family’s linguistic ideologies are in constant tension, which comes out through family language practices and policies (see also Showstack & Colcher, 2019; Curdt-Christiansen, 2016). Tovares and Kamwangamalu write, “despite the loyalty they might have for their home language, working-class or unemployed immigrants have a strategic incentive to assimilate the language of their new home to be able to compete for middle-class jobs (Laitin 1992, p. 59)” (2017, p. 218). These authors continue, arguing that “unless migrant communities, large and small, view their heritage language as a core value (Smolicz, 1984), the

Introduction  11 ethnolinguistic size of the group and institutional support by the host country may not be enough to stop the shift from the community language to the mainstream language, especially for the younger generations of migrants” (2017, p. 218). This volume, then, shows how migrants—primarily but not exclusively women—in various contexts negotiate this tension even as it extends into the third and fourth generations: within their families, within their communities, and even within their nation-states. Throughout the discussion in this book, I push against the essentialism of mothering and mother tongues on the one hand, and against the abstract theorizing about language in migration on the other. I locate, within the exchange of family language dynamics, the “third space” which can then extrapolate outwards in a ripple effect that gets consumed by culture and therefore erases its origins in the minutiae of family language decisions, choices, and moments. ***** Home and Diaspora, Story, and Space Diaspora and home are, as I have discussed previously, irretrievably intertwined. As Jasbir Jain writes, The diaspora “writes” home to fulfil its many psychological, emotional, and historical needs; it also feels free to comment on the political or religious happenings that push the nation into orthodoxies, fundamentalism, and closed spaces. There are other reasons: it writes home to be “visible” in the host culture, not as a waif but as a person with a meaningful, valuable past. It also writes to establish a two-way connectivity and constantly chisel at a past which it claims. And then, that part of the diaspora which “writes” home, does it also for the future. (2017, p. 20) Storytelling shapes and reflects our language practices, and our practices of making homes. But to think about storytelling, we also must think about who is telling the stories, and who is transmitting, maintaining, and shaping language in our communities. Celia Falicov writes that, “women have tended to be the carriers of cultural lore and family stories” (2005, p. 400). Similarly, Edwidge Danticat observes that “women tell stories to their children both to frighten and delight them” (p. 233, quoted in Stone. 2005, p. 382). Discussions of language within families often combine fear of stasis, of either loss of family languages or of “failure” to fit in linguistically with the dominant surrounding community, with delight at the preservation of cultures and languages that feel special, that should be nurtured and cared

12 Introduction for. But whether governed by fear or delight, the language that someone speaks changes the stories that they can tell, and taking away ancestral languages, those languages linked to “specific land bases” (Powell, 2012, p. 388), can be a particularly brutal way of cutting off access to cultural heritage. M. NourBese Philip, for instance, writes of the linguistic violence of the plantations on which Africans were enslaved in the islands of the Caribbean. She describes how the denial by British colonists of African language and speech to the Africans in the West Indies resulted in denying those enslaved Africans the power of making sense of raw experience. It was only when the language that they were allowed to use adapted sufficiently that they were able to express the experiences of being an African transported to the Caribbean under bondage and under English. Philip writes that “In the vortex of New World slavery, the African forged new and different words, developed strategies to impress her experience on the language. The formal standard language was subverted, turned upside down, inside out, and even sometimes erased” (2007, p. 491). This story is still being told and retold throughout the colonized world, and in Language, Diaspora, Home, I take up the telling of this story in the writing of three poets with Caribbean roots. In the chapters that follow in this book, I discuss interviews, poetry, and scholarship, all of which concern language, migration, and home, in order to show how people create spaces for linguistic ways of being that resist, or offer counter-narratives to, dominant language ideologies and practices. The discussion in some of the chapters directly explores family language policy among multiple generations of women within “singular” extended families. Others explore how, as Malea Powell puts it, language is the means by which “stories practice place into space,” (2012, p. 391), making geographic places into spaces where people’s emotional lives thrive. One of the theoretical frameworks that I use to help understand this process is that of the third space, in the terms offered by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). I find trying to capture Bhabha’s definition of “third space” a rather slippery undertaking: Bhabha writes about the creation of third spaces and what the spaces themselves do—that is, the effect of third spaces—rather than what third spaces are and where they lie. Adrian Holliday, in conversation with Vivien X. Zhou and Nick Pilcher, on the other hand says that “the third space is a moment—a place—in which we can stand back and see things in a different way. It’s a space of investigation” (Holliday in Zhou & Pilcher, 2019, p. 3). It is something that we are seeking to attain or, in Holliday’s terms, to “acquire,” and it may take a lifetime of work to acquire it: “But it’s got to be something that everybody does, so there are moments in everybody’s life when they find the deCentredness, and they can see what’s going on around them, perhaps even for seconds” (Zhou & Pilcher, 2019, p. 3), rather than somewhere that exists the same

Introduction  13 for everyone. Importantly, this third space comes with its discomforts— like diaspora—because it is a space that is constituted by pushing back against dominant paradigms. At the same time, it is only this third space that makes the dominant paradigms visible, as Bhabha explains: “if hybridity is important, it’s not only because it permits the recovery of the two original moments from which a third moment emerges; hybridity is moreover for me the ‘third-space’ that makes the emergence of other positions possible. This third-space disrupts the stories/histories that constitute and establish new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which escape common sense” (Bhabha & Rutherford, 2006, p. 99, translation mine).3 Furthermore, Robert J.C. Young interprets this take on hybridity thus: “[hybridity] has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant cultural power” (1994, p. 23). And as much as Bhabha’s theorization of hybridity has been critiqued and contested, the concept of the third space has become a useful and important one in socio- and applied linguistics (e.g., Flores & García, 2013; Higgins, 2017) as a concept that carves out a space between dominant language spaces and “home” language spaces, where the languages associated with both of these can mix. However, whereas Bhabha’s location of third space was a metaphorical or conceptual one, the conception of third space that I use here is a literal one; building on Ray Oldenburg’s (1989) discussion of “the third space” and Edward Soja’s (1996) conception of thirdspace from urban planning and geography, in this book I consider third spaces as specific sites where we can see “the ways that material spaces intersect with imagined and representational spaces to produce a collective experience of spatiality, including spaces of privilege and exclusion” (Higgins, 2017, p. 103; italics in original). This conception of third space focuses on people’s experiences and activities in spaces that are neither fully public nor fully private but contain elements of both. Higgins continues, Space … refers to the ever-changing nexus of activities that happen in any place. A dynamic view of space allows us to examine how migrants, transnationals, and other highly mobile populations experience space, and how they use their language resources in their practiced places. (Higgins, 2017, p. 103) Space in this volume, then, is both literal and metaphorical, and I move between these two conceptions throughout the chapters of the book. Especially in the latter chapters of the book, I explore how language practices of diasporic people, and particularly women, create third spaces that invite translingual language practices that allow the full linguistic repertoires of transnational people and immigrants in ways that the language ideologies,

14 Introduction policies, and practices in the private, family spaces that I explore in the earlier chapters do not. Several of this book’s chapters explore specific places, roles in identity formation among migrant communities through writing by people who live there. The perspectives on many of these places that I offer here differ from those that are most frequently seen in literature and theory: for instance, I explore the Caribbean islands from the perspective of a poet, Esther Phillips, who, unlike so many writers from the Caribbean, remained in the region rather than moving to one of the world’s metropolitan colonial centres. Because this volume was written in a moment of global stillness, too, the narrative of this book considers not only the movement of diasporas but also the sites where diasporic people stop moving, hence the focus on home-making alongside the focus on movement and fluidity. But even though we might consider home spaces to be sites that show less mobility, mixing, shifting, and changing than public ones, I suggest that homes are indeed sites where people negotiate their identities, linguistic and otherwise, as much as if not more than in the public sphere, where the boundaries and links between different linguistic identities may in fact be clearer than at home. The language work that is done at home thus has a profound impact on our languages as they flow in our public lives. As Jasbir Jain writes, “the language that carries memories belongs to domesticity—‘domestic words from long ago, at far-off time and places …’ (Espinet, 2004, p. 83)” (2017, p. 28). I therefore explore the negotiations, conflicts, and frictions that arise as family members figure out the boundaries between their languages, and what those boundaries mean for their relationships with each other and with where they live. I consider how linguistic affiliation is performed these spaces and, crucially, the language stories that we tell at home help us continue to “rub along” (Watson, 2009, p. 126). In the final three chapters of the book, my discussion steps outside “home” into third places, somewhere between private and public, to consider how speakers and writers construct these interstitial sites, where linguistic identities can be hybridized and dynamic, breaking down binaries of “home” language and “dominant” language and the roles they play in identity formation (see the discussion of Luke & Luke, 1999 in de Fina & Tseng, 2017, p. 387). In these chapters, we see poets engaging in “a questioning of history, of perceptions of reality as seen by one side and [which] seeks to present the other, not merely as a response but as an understanding of one’s own position. It is a questioning as well as a remaking” (Jain, 2017, p. 3). I move in the next section of this introduction to a mapping of the chapters of this book. The book is divided into three methodological parts, which I explore in detail in Chapter 2. But all of the chapters are tied together by the key terms of the volume—language, diaspora, and home— and by a focus on women’s roles in threading these three things together.

Introduction  15 Map of the Book In Chapter 2, “Basement Methodologies: Methods and Motivations,” I introduce and elaborate upon the core methodologies of the book—storytelling and listening—as modes of ethical research that make the researcher responsible to, rather than just reporting on, the participants in their research process. I work through the methods and motivations of each of the three sections of the book, in turn exploring my ethnographic practice, my orientation to literary analysis, and my combination of autoethnography and critical analysis of extant ethnography, scholarship, and commentary to thread together the volume’s entire narrative and explore the implications of the immobilities required by the COVID-19 pandemic on my language research practices. This chapter explains how the methods used throughout these pages are a direct product of trying to understand language circulation without the ability to do traditional, embedded ethnography, as I had originally planned to do when I started the project out of which this book grew. In Chapter 3, “Language in Motion: Mothers, Children, and Linguistic Circulation,” I show how women’s linguistic decisions shape how language circulates in homes and families. Exploring the linguistic lives of four women from the same New York–Puerto Rican family via phone and video interviews, I consider how the linguistic boundaries between home and “public” are made and maintained by these women’s uses of and relationships with Spanish, showing how this language circulates across and among three generations of this family. Women are often the gatekeepers of language within a family, keepers of the heritage language alongside pushing their children and grandchildren to adopt more prestigious linguistic practices than their own generation’s. However, speaking with four women from multiple generations of the same family, we see how the role of linguistic “gate-keeper” can change dramatically among women within the same family, and how Spanish can shift from being a community language to a family, or even personal, language. I consider the circulation of Spanish in this chapter as part of the affective economy of diaspora, where a language’s value extends beyond use and into feeling. “’Mending that Wound’: Creating Linguistic Futures in a Diasporic Space,” the fourth chapter of this volume, is also an interview-based chapter. Here, I talk with three women from an Italian-Australian family about how the Italian language was laid down and picked up again as a family language. My main interlocutors’ grandfather emigrated from Italy to Australia in the first decade of the 20th century as a boy, before the large post–World War II wave of Italian immigration that gave Sydney its Italian enclaves and rich immersion in many Italian cultural and culinary traditions. Goffredo and his children and grandchildren integrated fully into

16 Introduction mainstream Sydney life and left the Italian language behind. I discuss the consequences of the linguistic choices made by the first immigrant generation for the third and fourth generations. My interlocutors and I discuss the work of reclaiming Italian as the language of a family that is fully integrated into the “Aussie” society of Sydney, work that the women of the third generation have undertaken for their mother, their daughters, and themselves. Chapter 5, “Listen to Your Mother: Home, Migration, and Language,” explores how language flows—and does not flow—between grandmothers, mothers, and sons, using poetry published by Asian-Australian poets. Using theories of family language policy, diaspora, and home-making, this chapter explores ways in which immigrant families create linguistic homes in new homelands. These poems show the impact of the maternal linguistic choices on the language use of younger generations, and how language creates homes, even if they turn out to be rather complicated for their younger inhabitants. Finally, it explores how, even as nostalgia can frame the relationships between home and heritage languages, new elective affinities create strong ties between the children of immigrants and the cities where they now make their homes. The volume’s sixth chapter, “‘Particularized Worlds’: Translingual Writing as Borderland Space,” marks a shift in the focus of Language, Diaspora, Home. In it and the following two chapters, I move from a focus on family language practices and policies in various diasporic spaces to an exploration of how speakers and writers create space for their own language in linguistic environments that bring with them complicated relationships with belonging and home-making. “Particularized Worlds” explores how the “translingual” poetry of two authors of West Indian heritage, living and writing in the United States, connects diaspora and language by creating a borderland space between languages in which they explore questions of authenticity and belonging. The use of English vernaculars in the poetry of Staceyann Chin and Rajiv Mohabir, I suggest, offers an exploration of what it means to be from somewhere, and not from somewhere, and how to live in between homes and homelands. Their work brings into focus the possibilities of third linguistic spaces, where performance, rather than linguistic “authenticity,” shapes and reshapes linguistic identity. In Chapter 7, I explore the poetry and public writing of Esther Phillips, the poet laureate of Barbados (2018–present). Phillips, unlike many Barbadian writers, has spent most of her life on the island, and her poetry writes that life, connecting her experiences with the landscape and nature of Barbados, and exploring the role of memory in writing a future that moves beyond the residues of colonialism while accounting for their continued influence in everyday life on the island. However, unlike

Introduction  17 Kamau Brathwaite and many other writers from the Caribbean, Phillips has not overtly taken an overtly political position about the linguistic residues of British colonization: Phillips’ poetry and essays are usually rendered in what reads as standardized English, though some of her poems do incorporate the forms of a creolized vernacular English. In this chapter, I explore the complicated linguistic and emotional terrain that Phillips maps out in her writing, linking her sometime-linguistic conservatism with her vision for a Bajan future. In this exploration, I theorize Phillips’ work as establishing an alternative—albeit a complicated one— to the “exilic trajectories” (Gopinath, 2005) that Caribbean writers often explore and live themselves. Chapter 8, “A Flat White and a Banh Mi: Third Spaces, Gender, and Language in the Suburban City” offers a reading of the language practices in small shops and cafés in Sydney. In doing so, it rereads Pennycook and Otsuji’s Metrolingualism, shining a light on the gendered uses of language that Pennycook and Otsuji’s fieldwork reveals, and exploring the division between urban and suburban that is so salient in Sydney. This chapter deepens their analysis of the “rubbing along” (Watson, 2009, p. 16) that takes place between linguistic groups in huge cities like Sydney and Tokyo, their primary research sites. In Chapter 8, I posit small shops and cafés as third spaces that offer sites of safety and community for Sydneysiders who can be marginalized or invisibilized in the city’s larger publics. In Chapter 9, “Island Homes,” I write about the experience of being locked out of Australia and then, finally, going home. Australia’s borders were effectively closed to citizens for two years as the centrepiece of Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a strategy fundamentally connected to Australia’s identity as an “island nation.” I explore the implications of the border closures and enforced immobility of pandemic infection control measures on Australia’s relationships with the migrant and diasporic populations that have shaped the nation-state’s largest cities for the last century. I close this chapter by adding to this history my own family’s story of going “home” after a five-and-a-half year absence. Chapter 10, the conclusion to Language, Diaspora, Home, ties up the threads that run through the volume, exploring the contributions of the book in light of the themes that I have laid out in this introduction. It analyzes how stories and things function in similar ways, acting as tendrils of connection between families and diasporic groups when the movement of the people themselves is made complicated or impossible for reasons of money, distance, border policy, or a lack of time. The chapter concludes by drawing out the central themes of the book and placing the other chapters in the contexts of these themes.

18 Introduction Notes 1 Though “hyphenated” identities are complicated too, as Bolatagici writes: “But the hyphen does little to reveal the complexities of mixed race identity. Instead, it simplifies and reduces the individual to the sum of their parts and the hyphen stands to represent a juncture; a chasm that cannot be united” (2004, p. 75). 2 The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of “diaspora” is as follows: “The body of Jews living outside the land of Israel; the countries and places inhabited by these, regarded collectively; the dispersion of the Jewish people beyond the land of Israel,” with the first written instance being found in 1694. However, the term has been used in its extended meaning since just 50 years after this first recorded usage; this extended definition is as follows, and connects much more closely with Hall’s “metaphorical” definition: “Any group of people who have spread or become dispersed beyond their traditional homeland or point of origin; the dispersion or spread of a group of people in this way” (Oxford English Dictionary, “diaspora.” October 16, 2022). 3 The original French, which is itself a translation for the journal Multitudes: “Mais, selon moi, si l’hybridité est importante, ce n’est pas qu'elle permettrait de retrouver deux moments originels à partir desquels un troisième moment émergerait; l’hybridité est plutôt pour moi le qui rend possible l’emergence d’autres position. Ce tiers-espace vient perturber les histoires qui le constituent et établit de nouvelles structures d’autorité, de nouvelles initiatives politiques, qui échappent au sens commun.” (Bhabha & Rutherford, 2006, p. 99).

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Introduction  21 Rosa, J., & Trivedi, S. (2017). Diaspora and language. In A.S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 330–346). New York: Routledge. Selleck, C. (2022). The gendered migrant experience: A study of family language policy (FLP) amongst mothers and daughters in the Somali community, Bristol. Current Issues in Language Planning, 1–20. Showstack, R., & Colcher, D. (2019). Language ideologies, family language policy, and a changing societal context in Kansas. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 12(2), 455–483. Smith, M.P. (2005). Transnational urbanism revisited. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31, 235–244. Smolicz, J.J. (1984). Minority languages and the core values of culture: Changing policies and ethnic response in Australia. Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development, 5(1), 23–41. Soja, E.W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell. Tovares, A.V., & Kamwangamalu, N.M. (2017). Migration trajectories: Implications for language proficiencies and identities. In A.S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 207–227). New York: Routledge. Tuominen, A. (1999). Who decides the home language? A look at multilingual families. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 140(1), 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1999.140.59 Watson, S. (2009). Brief encounters of an unpredictable kind: Everyday multiculturalism in two London street markets. In A. Wise & S. Velayutham (Eds.), Everyday multiculturalism (pp. 125–139). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Yildiz, Y. (2012). Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press. Young, R.J.C. (1994). Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race. London and New York: Routledge. Young, R.J.C. (2012). Postcolonial remains. New Literary History, 43(1), 19–42. Zhou, V.X., & Pilcher, N. (2019). Revisiting the “third space” in language and intercultural studies. Language and Intercultural Communication, 19(1), 1–8.

2 Basement Methodologies Methods and Motivations

Introduction: Methodologies and Motivations In this chapter, I work through the methodologies of Language, Diaspora, Home, discussing my motivations and the ethos behind the interdisciplinary research that I present here. I also offer a detailed discussion of the three main methods of the book: (1) interview-based ethnography, (2) literary analysis of poetry that either uses global English vernaculars and code-meshing, and which engages with the linguistic and cultural complications of diaspora, and (3) critical rereading of existing ethnography, scholarship, and commentary to fill in the lacunae that I see in those other authors’ analyses or to synthesize the insights from others’ work to theorize my own. Throughout this discussion, I maintain a focus on the circumstances under which I conducted most of this research: the global pandemic beginning in 2020 which, as I explore in detail in Chapter 9, created a state of vastly restricted mobility for over two years, followed by deeply conditional mobility governed by virus-testing protocols and mandatory quarantines for another several months. These conditions meant that traditional methods of ethnography, such as participant observation as a member of the community on which the research was based, were largely unavailable because of the global immobilities that we endured, and which were reflected in travel bans imposed by institutions, especially institutions like mine, which are governed by state-level edicts. The multiple methods of this project, then, are a direct response to these immobilities. The pandemic exposed many extant vulnerabilities in our societal systems and caused a great deal of suffering. But one of the unexpected latent consequences of the pandemic was the way it brought our urgent need for storytelling into sharp focus, especially in our increased consumption of fiction, television, and film during the months of sheltering in place (see, for example, Squires, 2021; Boursier et al., 2021). While pandemics themselves are very difficult to tell stories about (see, for example, Belling, 2009

DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-2

Basement Methodologies  23 for discussion of this phenomenon), stories can divert and distract us from the sameness of the days that many of us had to learn to cope with (e.g., Dinsman & Robinson, forthcoming; Smith, 2020). This interest in storytelling and stories as a way to escape from the sameness of the everyday, to think about something other than the four walls of my house and the streets of my small town, to revisit the cities—New York and Sydney— around which my life has been built and which were off-limits, shaped this volume. It was written in the basement and the bedrooms of my house during a sabbatical in which I had planned to do fieldwork in a K–12 school in Sydney for six months, but during which, instead, I supervised over three months of online school for two young children. The poetry that I read, the other theoretical ethnographic work that I pored over, and the interviews I conducted offered a way to connect to the world that I lived in beyond those pandemic strictures. The kind of analysis-from-a-distance that I present in this volume has been considered problematic by other writers. Jacqueline Jones Royster, in her essay “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” describes how she considers such research to be not just problematic but a source of anger: “I tend to be enraged at what Tillie Olsen has called the ‘trespass vision,’ a vision that comes from intellect and imagination (1972, p. 62, citing Brontë, 1995), but typically not from lived experience, and sometimes not from the serious study of the subject matter” (Royster, 1996, p. 34). This kind of concern is regularly expressed by anthropologists, too: that the only way to do “proper” ethnography is for the researcher to embed themselves in a particular context, so that their research becomes part of their lived experience, too (“Ethnography” (n.d.)). But in the pandemic, only Olsen’s “trespass vision” remained. And, indeed, her framing of “trespass vision” is an apt one: Olsen was writing about the restricted circumstances of women’s writing lives, building off Charlotte Brontë’s own negative description of her “facilities for observation [and] knowledge of the world” when compared with those that available to other writers, men, who were free to move about in ways that women were not (Brontë, 1995, 1849, quoted in Olsen, 1972, p. 15). But “trespass vision” was the only vision available in these months during which so many women were bound to home because of children and their online classes, bound to home because of travel restrictions or work-from-home requirements. What I have tried to offer here, then, to counter the source of Royster’s rage at “trespass vision,” is “the serious study of the subject matter.” But at the same time, doesn’t a resistance to “trespass vision” suggest that we can’t learn from others’ stories, others’ research, that only first-person experience counts? Indeed, the issue of trespassing has become a fraught one in ethnography: as Anna de Fina writes,

24  Basement Methodologies In the work of early anthropologists, the possibility of observing human behaviour was directly related to “being there” and therefore the multiple ways in which the researcher made her presence felt were not a focus of attention. In the decades following, lack of attention to the interaction of the research with the object of research came more and more under fire, as scholars pointed to the many ways in which the identity of the interviewer and the context of the event can shape the data collected and highlighted the need to put subjectivity and reflexivity on the map. (de Fina, 2021) My focus in this chapter, then, is on considering how my own positionality necessitated an improvised methodology based on what I could do at any particular moment during those pandemic years, and a consideration of the implications of those methods for the project. The goal of this volume is also one of “assembl[ing] women’s perspectives” (Anderson et al., 1987, p. 106). While vast amounts of writing have been produced about diaspora and home, and the intersections between diaspora, home, and language, there has been less focus specifically on women’s participation inhabiting, creating, and maintaining these intersections. Anderson et al. (1987) describe the importance of women’s perspectives thus: women’s experiences and realities have been systematically different from men's in crucial ways and therefore needed to be studied to fill large gaps in knowledge. This reconstitution of knowledge was essential because of a basic discontinuity: women's perspectives were not absent simply as a result of oversight but had been suppressed, trivialized, ignored, or reduced to the status of gossip and folk wisdom by dominant research traditions institutionalized in academic settings and in scientific disciplines. (p. 106) Thus, the methods that I work with here are designed to center women’s experiences, using forms of research where women’s stories of the places and spaces that they make through language are the focus. This meant, for me, using several different approaches to understand women’s language and home-making practices in diasporic spaces. While ethnographic and specifically oral history approaches focus on the interview as a centerpiece of research, limiting research methodologies to interview can still keep us from understanding women’s consciousness, “their sphere of greatest freedom” (Anderson et al., 1987, p. 107). Asking people direct questions about their experiences does not allow us to understand everything: as Anna de Fina explains, “there are certain things that people don’t want to

Basement Methodologies  25 talk about and so they will give really minimal answers and if the interviewer doesn’t know how to navigate that then the interviews will not be very illuminating” (de Fina, 2021). Rather, as de Fina (2021) continues, a deep understanding of the context is crucial in being able, as a researcher, to ask the right questions in interviews, but also to fill in the gaps that direct ethnography leaves. Thus, this volume not only contains explorations of language, diaspora, and home via interview techniques but also focuses on the contexts of linguistic home-making by reading texts that explore a wide range of perspectives on linguistic home-making practices in diasporic spaces. Listening as Methodology The methodology that ties the chapters of this book together is listening, if we think of a methodology as a framing analysis of the ways in which research is conducted. Ethnography and rereading poetry, ethnography, and theory are exercises in listening as much as they are exercises in interpretation and analysis. For, as Malea Powell reminds us in her essay “Stories Take Place: A Performance in One Act,” a story, after it is told, becomes the listener’s: “Take this story. It’s yours now. Do with it what you will” (2012, p. 389 and following; italics in original). Similarly, Ellen Cushman, in her writing about the storytelling cultures and practices of the Cherokee Nation, as shown in the materials of their digital archive, discusses the role of the listener in Native American rhetorical and storytelling practices, making clear the importance of Powell’s storytellers’ refrain. Cushman writes, Listeners’ roles in storytelling cannot be underestimated because listeners are asked to pick up, hold on to, teach others, and pass along what they are told … the work of storytelling in this digital archive asks participants to actively take up the knowledge, to continue the telling of it, and to position themselves in relationship to the era, the place, and the elder telling the story. (2013, p. 129) Story, in this way, becomes available as a connection between the past— other people’s pasts—and the futures that the listener imagines and participates in. I use the term “listening” both as literal practice and as metaphor for the close readings that I offer throughout the book. Listening is an embodied practice that is required for communication: careful listening, making sure that the speaker knows that they are heard, is an important aspect of ethnography. Listening goes beyond communication between individuals, and because my purposes in listening go beyond individual comprehension and

26  Basement Methodologies into understanding how language builds community, I turn to listening practices that have been theorized as “community listening.” Community listening—as opposed to rhetorical or academic listening (e.g., Ratcliffe, 1999, 2005; Stenberg, 2011)—is a connective, memory-embracing methodology. Jenn Fishman and Lauren Rosenberg describe community listening as “a literacy practice that involves deep, direct engagement with individuals and groups working to address urgent issues in everyday life, issues anchored by long histories and complicated by competing interpretations as well as clashing modes of expression” (2018, p. 1). Furthermore, by framing it as a literacy practice, Fishman and Rosenberg connect community listening directly to the consumption as well as to the production of text. When we listen well, we can begin to tell stories that draw together threads from past and present: in a community listening orientation, the researcher is both listener and storyteller, implicated in the knowledge that listening makes audible. The practice of community listening draws attention to the fact that while hearing can sometimes be passive, listening cannot: listening, unlike hearing, demands a response from the listener. The stillness of the pandemic meant that I had time to draw together stories I have heard over my 15 years of listening to and reading the work of students and writers from the world’s diasporas; their stories, taken together, helped me to make sense of what I was listening to, and to respond to them by creating rich contexts out of which to ask further questions. These rich contexts, as Anna de Fina explains, are crucial in doing effective research into people’s life narratives; without a rich understanding of the context, any attempt to engage participants in an interview context will founder (de Fina, 2021). The case is the same for reading poetry and reading extant ethnography: a context built out of broad and deep listening allows the reader to “listen” to what is in these texts, even for things that are not highlighted by the writers themselves. I have argued elsewhere (Robinson, Hall, & Navarro, 2020) that it is important to shift responsibility for making meaning away from the speaker—especially when the speaker is racially or linguistically minoritized—and onto the listener. But to do this effectively, the listener must be open to making meaning based on the ways of knowing that they can glean from what they are listening to, rather than imposing their own paradigms of understanding. So when Annie Laurie Nichols writes that “it becomes vital, then, to consider not only why we listen, but how we do so” (Nichols in Cushman et al., 2019, p. 8), she is specifically describing what generative listening as a white, WEIRD1 (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) researcher entails. Being active in her listening, and listening from an embodied positionality, means “Instead of being as passive as possible, I should be as present as possible” (Nichols in Cushman et al., 2019, p. 8). It means creating and building out from a relationship with her interlocutor rather than trying to be invisible and passive in the ethnographic

Basement Methodologies  27 relationship. This is the positioning that I work to adopt throughout this volume: listening within a relationship with my interlocutors, either in interviews or in reading published poetry. Community listening must necessarily happen in the intimate spaces of our societies, into which listeners must be invited, and when the role of listener changes among those gathered. This has been the case for my interviews, where, via video chat, I see into people’s houses, and they see into mine: because I interviewed women, and because I interviewed people on the other side of the world who were, because of the pandemic, in their homes like me, there are children around, and other people to hear or to greet. The written texts that I analyze also invite readers into the linguistic and cultural worlds that the writers create. Romeo García writes, “Community listening reminds us that while everyone is marked by gender and race, lived experience matters and informs both the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of how we listen” (2018, p. 13). These spaces, these places, these other people are part of the lived experience that are so crucial to my project here. Traditional ethnography also typically marks participants as gendered and raced; these attributes are often key variables in the research. In the traditional model, the researcher is objective; they remain unmarked, hegemonic, and outside the research site, and it is up to the individual ethnographer to manage the complications that come with this positioning (see, for example, Villenas, 1996). But community listening assumes that the listener is part of the community, with the responsibility that comes with that. It assumes that learning comes from standing in what the listener already knows and building out from that. The stories I tell in this volume are built mutually as a conversation rather than as reportage, as a reader response made available by the authors who published their works and interlocutors who told me their stories. But the reader response is not the one called for by the New Critics, who, in John Guillory’s terms, “presented literature itself … as a world apart from the world to which most of their students were destined to return” (Guillory, 1995, p. 247). Rather, I see the written works that I explore in this book as very much a part of the world in which not only the writers but their readers live, and which offers a way to understand the worlds that they create. What I create in this volume, thus, is a methodology where women’s role in the language practices of migrant families is centered and, even when women are not the focus of my scholarship, my analytic framework is one where understanding gender and its intersections with race and ethnicity, with language, and diaspora remains central (cf. Campt & Thomas, 2008, p. 7). For, as Myra Jehlen writes, “as a critical category gender is an additional lens, or a way of lifting the curtain to an unseen recess of the self and of society. Simply put, the perspective of gender enhances the critical senses” (1995, p. 271). *****

28  Basement Methodologies This volume is divided, methodologically, into three sections. The first section, Chapters 3 and 4, takes an explicitly ethnographic approach to research, interviewing women about their family language policies and practices and the ways in which they keep maintain their family “language inheritances” (Leung et al., 1997, p. 545; Rampton, 1990). The second section, comprised of Chapters 5, 6, and 7, switches to reading the poetry of authors who explore the linguistic impacts of diaspora and migration in their words. The third section, Chapters 8 and 9, is made up of more traditional critical review essays, in which I reread research by other scholars to bring out the narratives about gender, diaspora, and conceptions of home that I see infusing these works. In the next parts of this chapter, I work through my methods and motivations for composing each of these sections in these ways. Linguistic Ethnography at a Distance Chapters 3 and 4 of Language, Diaspora, and Home take their research practices from linguistic ethnography, in a somewhat pared down version because of the conditions of immobility under which I conducted my interviews and my research into the context of these two conversation-based chapters. The methods of these two chapters are most akin to the methods of oral history, and the interview and narrative interpretation and production that operate within this field (e.g., Anderson et al., 1987; Sheftel & Zembrzycki, 2019), as well as the kinds of linguistic ethnography that Anna de Fina has described in her various publications. These ethnographic chapters pick up stories that I have long been paying attention to: that of the migrant communities of New York City, and Queens in particular, and that of the longstanding Italian communities in Sydney, Australia. The approaches that I take in these chapters offer a variation on the kind of “participatory research” that Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) describe in Metrolingualism, their wide-ranging ethnographic study of city-based language practices among migrants in Tokyo and Sydney. They describe their participatory research practices in detail, focusing on their goal to “become part of their participants’ worlds” so that they could hear their participants’ stories: The stories recounted by our participants gave us insights into their life trajectories, their histories, their deeply-held views and passions. Such stories, however apocryphal and changed, however much in need of being spoken and enacted, are also the stories of the double-edged world of multilingual Sydney. As researchers, we have to learn how to put our participants at ease so they will tell us these stories, how to listen to

Basement Methodologies  29 their stories (and not interrupt with ‘research questions’) and how to interpret and appreciate these stories for all they tell us about language, lives and the city. (2015, p. 112) For Pennycook and Otsuji, there are no verifiable “truths” about their research sites to be found outside the stories that they can gather by listening to people talking about language. These stories create specific worlds, where researchers can see participants constructing a narrative in which they negotiate the various pressures that go into the formation of their linguistic identities and, in the case of the interviewees in this volume, those of their families too (see, for example, Baynham, 2003; Bucholtz, 1999; De Fina, 2003; de Fina & King, 2011; Georgakopoulou, 2007; Schiffrin, 1996, for elaboration on these points). As de Fina and King write, stories are particularly productive sites of analysis for the study of immigrant perceptions and experiences as they reflect and build on shared ideologies and all kinds of shared presuppositions, while also (re)shaping understandings through compliance with or resistance to mainstream values and discourses (De Fina & King, 2011, p. 166). But in order to do this kind of work, building rapport between interviewer and participants is of vital importance, as is an understanding of the contexts out of which participants’ stories are emerging (see de Fina 2021 for further discussion). Coupled with the methodological focus on listening that I have threaded throughout this volume is a concern with ethical citation and attribution. I try to practice ethical citation in each of the three sections, following the tenets articulated by Savannah Shange in her article Citation as Ceremony. Shange asks: “When our interlocutors appear in the text, do they arrive only for the purpose of illustration? Beyond a catchy chapter title, are we honoring the words of those whose stories put lines on our CV and food in our refrigerators?” (2022, p. 194). Shange continues with the important observation that “Careful, ethical ethnography cites our research participants as thought and theory partners in the effort to speak back to the silences and violences of extant social science” (Shange, 2022, p. 194). I use this approach in the explicitly ethnographic chapters of this book, but also extend it throughout all this volume’s chapters, using quotation and rereading methodologies in order to honor my interlocutors in the same ways throughout the book. I have written the two ethnographic chapters of this book as stories, incorporating my interlocutors’ words into my sentences rather than including them in the block quotations that are common in linguistic ethnography. This decision was a deliberate one, as it made a better narrative for my interlocutors to read about themselves. I cite them, then, as I cite the scholars with whose published words I frame their

30  Basement Methodologies narrative. And I choose to use poetry and already-published writing and research in order to honor the labour that these writers have already expended. Listening to Poetry, and the Politics of Citation My orientation to literary analysis combines close reading with an understanding of the linguistic and social contexts in which the poets write, focusing on the linguistic/poetic techniques of using sound and reference to linguistic forms as part of the poetry. This methodology offers a rich research site for explorations of linguistic identity because the life stories, the snapshots of moments that it encapsulates, are explicitly mediated, whereas ethnographic narratives can appear to be unmediated by the narrative intentions of the interviewee. Using poetry in this study thus builds on the “good” ethnographic practice for which Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008) advocate, which considers how tellers of stories want to be understood. This orientation is likewise crucial to reading, but it does not define the limit of literary analysis. Just as with interviews, where the participant does not define the limits of analysis of their words though they may set forth a framework, writers of poetry offer strong suggestions of how they want to be understood. Using poetry in this project allows me to center the tenet of not seeking an exoticized performance of otherness from my interlocutors, since so much research on language and migration inadvertently others and exoticizes speakers of languages other than English, not acknowledging that speakers of other languages in migrant and diasporic communities are often fully fluent, proficient, and often “native” speakers of English or another of the world’s imperial, colonial languages (see also Yildiz, 2012; Robinson, Hall, & Navarro, 2020, pp. 122–4). A consideration of the ethics of conducting oral history has led me to use the published works of writers from marginalized communities rather than to seek to interview them. Sheftel and Zembrzycki, following Jennifer Scanlon, ask “Why should people in vulnerable positions participate in a project which did nothing to improve their actual lives?” (Scanlon, 1993, cited in Sheftel & Zembrzycki, 2019, pp. 353–4). This question was what pushed me to seek narrative of diasporic people’s linguistic lives in published works, rather than in further interviews, alongside the problems of access which pandemic immobilities created. The poets whose work I explore in this section of Language, Diaspora, Home capture the sounds and syntax of migration and diaspora, and the feelings, too. And using poetry comes with the benefit of citation. Citation, in academia, is an acknowledgement of labour, a strategy to create a more equal power dynamic. For a book such as this, the benefits of the research mostly accrue to me. Having a family’s story told, having it be out in the world is also worth

Basement Methodologies  31 something, as my interlocutors tell me. But for the chapters that occur in the middle of this book, I prefer the give-and-take of literary analysis, the power of the writer matching the power of the researcher. Sara Ahmed describes citation as “a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies” (2013). The bodies around which the academic world gets reproduced tend to be the same old bodies; for example, several studies have shown that the research of Black women is under-cited in their fields in comparison to their levels of scholarly productivity (e.g., Smith & Garrett-Scott, 2021; Smith et al., 2021). Smith and Garrett-Scott (2021) explain the core importance of citation thus: “Citations determine whether we are perceived as academic subjects or objects. … Citation—the process of crediting ideas and inspiration to their source— is not only the measure of ‘success’ in the academy; it is also the mark of subjectivity” (2021, pp. 20–21). This is the ethos of my using poetry rather than interview for a substantial portion of the discussion of diasporic home-making language practices in this book: I wanted to name the authors as producers of intellectual work, to build off their own assertions of subjectivity, to take only the time that they have already given, and to make their work, rather than the embodiment, of writers of colour, my objects of inquiry. Thus, I engage citation as what Savannah Shange calls “a practice of relation” (2022, p. 195, emphasis in original) in order to make connections between my own experiences and entanglements, those of my interlocutors in the interviews, and the stories that the poets in this volume tell. The subjectivities of the poets whose work I include here was important as I decided whose poetry to work with—and their subjectivities, their identities, are part of their poetry and their official narratives as poets. I also chose their work because they employ vernacular Englishes in at least some of their works. Creative writers who use vernacular Englishes, according to Nero and Ahmad (2014), often do so to “capture the identities, sensibilities, and experiences of their characters and the ecology of the space they inhabit in the stories” (Nero & Ahmad, 2014, p. 14). But it is important to engage with these vernaculars as we would a performance: the vernaculars in the poetry may or may not be the poet’s “authentic” language, but rather demonstrate the subtle, complex, and constant negotiation between authenticity and fabrication” (Nero & Ahmad, 2014, p. 25) that many plurilingual writers from the world’s colonized spaces often engage in. Some multilingual writing, Anjali Pandey writes, tends towards the ornamental, using what she terms “shallow multilingualism,” which switches out lexical items while maintaining English syntactic structures and maintaining ease of access to the author’s intended meaning even as multilingual elements are incorporated (Pandey, 2016, p. 83). This results, Pandey argues, in a “peripheralized” or “exhibitionistic” multilingualism (Pandey,

32  Basement Methodologies 2016, pp. 83–4 and passim) rather than a use of literary multilingualism that gets at the complex linguistic identity formations of many migrant and diasporic people. The texts that I work with in this volume, with their use of code-switching and code-meshing/code-mixing between languages and varieties of English, however, serve the latter function. As Carla Jonsson writes, C[ode] S[witching] and C[ode]M[ixing] are used to resist, challenge and transform power relations and domination … Most importantly however, CS and CM allows for the reflection, construction and reconstruction of a hybrid/third space identity, which is fluid and always in transition. (Jonsson, 2005, p. 254, quoted in Sebba, 2011, p. 4) This observation about these literary-linguistic techniques is what makes vernacular writing an important source for this volume, since people who use diasporic language practices, as narrated in interviews and other spoken contexts, and indeed those writing about diasporic language practices even if they use standardized forms of English, also use reference to these practices to describe how such hybrid/third-space and fluid identities are constructed in migrant and diasporic contexts. In the chapters that use vernacular poetry and poetry about diasporic language practices, then, I offer an analysis more aligned with linguistic anthropology than with the sociolinguistic approaches explored in sources such as Pandey (2016) and Sebba, Mahootian, and Jonsson (2012). By this, I mean that rather than analyzing the specific techniques of incorporating linguistic variation into these texts, I read for the purpose of analyzing these linguistic-literary choices and make connections between these linguistic choices and the experiences of cultural and linguistic difference that the authors depict in their poetry. Though reading is “an isolated, individualistic expression,” as Kamau Brathwaite describes it, reading poetry written in vernaculars gets us closer to the oral tradition, which “makes demands not only on the poet but also on the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the poet makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him” (Brathwaite, 1993, p. 273). The readings of poetry offered in this volume are an attempt to build community, to listen carefully, even when physical distance is enforced. (Re)reading Research Finally, this book uses the more traditional academic method of critical analysis of extant studies of language, migration and diaspora, which I think of in this context as the rereading of research and analytic stories that have already been told. The final two chapters of this volume offer readings of the work of established academic authors, reframed around the

Basement Methodologies  33 central questions of this book: how do the people of the world’s diasporas make homes, and how does language play into these practices? One of my main rereading research sites, Pennycook and Otsuji’s Metrolingualism was where I started this research project, as I thought about Sydney’s multilinguality and wondered about the multilingual identities and languaging practices of its denizens. My rereading practices, especially in Chapter 8, draw specifically on the techniques of literary criticism, using gender as my critical term in order, in Myra Jehlen’s terms, “to pose new questions and thus discover new levels of interpretation” (1995, p. 265). Furthermore, reading through the framework of gender illuminates gaps in Pennycook and Otsuji’s deep and rich work that are “not obviously involved with sexual identity” at all, to again use Jehlen’s framing (1995, p. 271). Similarly, in Chapter 9, I reread journalism about the COVID-19 pandemic as well as academic writing about pandemics and Australia’s “health security” measures through the critical lens of the “island,” with its accompanying implications for movement and isolation. The final methodological positioning that I employ in this volume is that of evocative autoethnography, which Suresh Canagarajah describes as incorporating “richly detailed narratives” that recall “hidden feelings, forgotten motivations, and suppressed emotions” (Canagarajah, 2012, p. 261, following Ellis & Bochner, 2006). I use my own experiences as frameworks for the rereadings in these chapters, bringing to bear my knowledge of Sydney and Australia, and the experience of being away from these places for an extended period time, all the while being “from” there. My analysis in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 in particular relies on this situatedness. Conclusion In this chapter I have described the hybrid methodology of this volume, which informs methods that themselves were adopted and/or created in response to pandemic immobility: I had to find ways to continue to research, and to write, when the fieldwork I had so carefully planned could not happen. The methods that I have put together here, though, reflect some of the major debates in linguistic anthropology and linguistic ethnography, which engage questions about what real, valuable research looks like and how it can work so as not to pretend objectivity and not to exploit its participants. The methods that I used were often like looking for crumbs in the forest—finding ways that I could put together a path through my ideas about language and home together while looking at what I could find, from my limited viewpoint. The research I present in this volume thus makes no claim to objectivity but rather offers an exploration of various subjectivities, including my own, as I read theory and analysis, narrative and poetry, from my own position in the world.

34  Basement Methodologies Note 1 Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

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36  Basement Methodologies Schiffrin, D. (1996). Narrative as self portrait: Sociolinguistic constructions of identity. Language in Society, 25, 167–203. Sebba, M. (2011). Researching and theorizing multilingual texts. In M. Sebba S. Mahootian, & C. Jonsson (Eds.), Language mixing and code-switching in writing: Approaches to mixed-language written discourse (pp. 1–26). New York: Routledge. Sebba, M., Mahootian, S., & Jonsson, C. (Eds.). (2012). Language mixing and code-switching in writing: Approaches to mixed-language written discourse. New York: Routledge. Shange, S. (2022). Citation as ceremony: #SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the practice of reparative enunciation. Cultural Anthropology, 37(2), 191–198. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.2.03 Sheftel, A., & Zembrzycki, S. (2019). Who’s afraid of oral history? Fifty years of debates and anxiety about ethics. The Oral History Review, 43(2), 338–366. https://doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohw071 Smith, C.A., & Garrett-Scott, D. (2021). “We are not named”: Black women and the politics of citation in anthropology. Feminist Anthropology, 2, 18–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12038 Smith, C.A., Williams, E.L., Wadud, I.A., Pirtle, W.N.L., & The Cite Black Women Collective. (2021). Cite Black Women: A critical praxis (A Statement). Feminist Anthropology, 2, 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040 Smith, Z. (2020). Intimations: Six essays (pp. 19–28). London: Penguin. Squires, C. (2021). Book sales have soared since the pandemic—But the industry must adapt to engage with new readers. The Conversation, October 14. https:// theconversation.com/book-sales-have-soared-since-the-pandemic-butthe-industry-must-adapt-to-engage-with-new-readers-169583. http://hdl.handle. net/1893/33516 Stenberg, S. (2011). Cultivating listening: Teaching from a restored logos. In C. Glenn & K. Ratcliffe (Eds.), Silence and listening as rhetorical acts (pp. 250– 263). Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: SIU Press. Villenas, S. (1996). The colonizer/colonized Chicana ethnographer: Identity, marginalization, and co-optation in the field. Harvard Educational Review, 66(4), 711–732. Yildiz, Y. (2012). Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

3 Language in Motion Mothers, Children, and Linguistic Circulation

Language anchors people to their families while connecting them to global diasporas. In this chapter, I use interview-based storytelling to explore how a multigenerational family, whose elders moved from Puerto Rico to New York City in the mid-20th century, maintain affiliations with the city and the island as they move across the globe. I build on the observation that women—mothers, grandmothers, and daughters—are the custodians of language in many families, facilitating and blocking transmission from one generation to the next. In writing about a series of interviews that I conducted with four women, part of the New York-Puerto Rican diaspora, I explore the different ways in which they each keep the Spanish language circulating in their lives and those of their children, and the relationships that the women describe themselves having with Spanish—relationships that may or may not translate into language transmission within families. Second and third generations, especially in well-established cultural groups like Puerto Ricans in New York City, are making linguistic choices about language maintenance that, rather than responding to urgent language acquisition and maintenance needs that arise from migration, are much more forged by their desires to shape linguistic identity and mobility in global communities. The women who I interviewed for this chapter are fully enfranchised in English, the language of the dominant community in New York City, and they have made conscious decisions about the role of both Spanish and English in their lives and those of their children. The four women with whom I spoke for this study are all members of the same extended family. Their ages range from 42 to 86, and they all are bilingual English and Spanish speakers. I met this family through an old school friend, who, in conversation about this project, told me about her friend who she met while living in Singapore. The connection thus extends from Sydney to Singapore and then to New York, 50 miles away from where I was conducting research in my New Jersey basement. My original connection was with the participant who I call Ava in this chapter (all names are pseudonyms), but my primary conversational relationship DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-3

38  Language in Motion became the one with Ava’s mother Maricela, with whom I spoke, via WhatsApp, several times, and who read this chapter and with whom I check in from time to time, even though it is almost two years since we originally spoke. All interviews were conducted over digital means—video chat or over the phone. I took detailed notes during all conversations; video chats via a web-based provider were recorded, but my attempts to record the phone calls failed. I nonetheless checked my detailed notes with Maricela and my other participants, who verified or amended details as necessary. In this way, though my methods veered significantly away from canonical ethnographic practice and participant observation, I maintained the reflexivity so crucial to non-exploitative ethnographic encounters and community listening (cf. Villenas, 1996; Nichols in Cushman et al., 2019). While for all participants English is a dominant language, Spanish plays an important part in each of their language identities. Furthermore, it plays a role in all their identities as mothers to their children, though this role does not always play out in terms of having transmitted Spanish as a primary language to their children. The oldest member of this group of women, Isabela, found English “too dominant” a force in the world of raising her children in New York in the 1970s, and so she did not speak Spanish with them, even as she maintained it as an important language in her own life. Her niece, Maricela, who has lived a thoroughly international life, moving with her Dominican mining engineer husband to different sites across the Northern Hemisphere, has maintained Spanish as both a family and a professional language, and Maricela’s daughter Ava and her niece Eleanora have both kept Spanish circulating as they raise their own daughters, though in different ways. In our conversations, I saw that for Maricela and Ava, and to an extent Isabela, Spanish was not tied to ethnic identity but to identity within the family, but for Eleanora, language was very much tied with ethnic identity, but that ethnic identity was reinforced by building strong cultural affiliations with Puerto Rico and her relatives there. In thinking about the stories of these four women, a key motif centers around the intersections between language and identity, both on the individual and the family level. Okita (2002) writes that it is well known that the family provides an important context for the generation and transmission of ethnic identity, and that language is an important source of ethnic identity … ethnic identity is likely to be shaped during the process of language use and acquisition. (p. 232) However, while this chapter discusses linguistic transmission and maintenance practices that had their primary impact on the children of this family, my focus on language use and maintenance is on how these choices and

Language in Motion  39 practices have affected these four women, as mothers and as themselves. I ask, in this chapter, how women feel about language, in a context where they are the ones who are expected to do the work of language maintenance. We see, in the conversations that I present here, that an emotional connection with a particular language is not always enough of a motivation for transmission, but, importantly, a lack of transmission in a family does not mean that a language is not valued: it is just not seen as useful enough to warrant the work of maintenance, which, as Eleanora’s story confirms, requires specific strategies and, as Okita (2022) shows, can have familial costs. Keeping language circulating does not necessarily depend on a particular linguistic community beyond family, though that can help (cf. King, Fogle, & Logan-Terry, 2008). The stories in this chapter also show what happens when the second and third generations keep moving beyond their original “destination.” Isabela, Maricela, Ava, and Eleanora are what we might call “diasporic cosmopolitan”—connected with cosmopolitan cities and with diasporic connections to the Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, New York and in Puerto Rico. The term “diasporic cosmopolitan,” introduced by Nina Glick-Schiller (2015), suggests a worldliness linked to specific, emotional connections with historical homelands and/or communities; it gestures towards migratory pasts and anchors in particular places, alongside a forward-looking engagement with and interest in diversity as a sustaining force of life. The diasporic cosmopolitanism of these four women comes through, I suggest, in the ways that Spanish circulates in their lives, as well as the ways in which these four women move about the world. In keeping Spanish circulating in their lives, these women create a sense of home and maintain deep emotional relationships with Spanish, which they have acted on throughout their lives in various ways. Tadgh Ó hIfearnáin explains, We are yet to understand why people who were brought up with the same family language background, in the same location, attending the same schools and with similar extended social networks, can have very diverse profiles with regard to language proficiency in both the minoritised and dominant languages and even have opposing attitudes and practices within their linguistic repertoires. (2013, p. 3) This chapter, then, contributes to developing such an understanding by considering the circumstances around each of these women’s personal linguistic choices and their language policies for their children, and by thinking about the ways in which family languages circulate—and change as their speakers keep moving.

40  Language in Motion In the next section, I retell these stories that emerged during our conversations, seeking commonalities in these four women’s experiences while trying to understand the points of divergence, and noting the individualized motivations for the language practices and family language policies that they described. The narratives that I write subsequently are language snapshots rather than fully developed depictions of these four women’s linguistic lives, following the approach to storytelling in interviews discussed by de Fina (2021) and explained in detail in the previous chapter. I analyze my participants’ stories about their relationships with language to learn about how language flows in families and communities, and the decisions that people make as linguistic agents, and not just as “automatic” users of language. Women of the Second and Third Generation: Spanish in Circulation Isabela

Isabela moved as a child with her parents from Puerto Rico to New York in the 1950s, moving to a Puerto Rican enclave in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Isabela and her brother grew up speaking Spanish with each other and their parents, and learnt English through school and community. She identifies as being bilingual in Spanish and English; her proficiency in both languages meant that she became a bilingual educator in the New York public school system in the 1970s. Though she had trained to be a Spanish teacher, the New York fiscal crisis of 1975 meant that demand for Spanish teachers was low, but there was a job available as a bilingual educator after she graduated from Brooklyn College, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in 1974. Isabela described her love for Spanish many times during our conversation: she loves the literature and the poetry of the language. But Isabela locates the origin of her own love for Spanish not in her own family but in her church. Her pastor was a professor of Spanish at Brooklyn College, and made sure, she remembers, to introduce Spanish poetry into the church. Isabela attributes her ability to read and write in Spanish, as well as speaking, to church and her pastor; he is the reason she studied Spanish literature at Brooklyn College for her undergraduate degree. Isabela’s linguistic situation in some ways is opposite to the creation of translingual spaces that Wei Li discusses, where bilinguals’/multilinguals’ languages are mixed together and used alternatingly everywhere, either metalinguistically or in linguistic practice (Li, 2018, p. 14): she keeps her languages more or less separated in separate domains. This comes, perhaps, from the kind of “linguistic purism” ideology that we see discussed in Showstack and Colcher (2019). The use of Spanish in church gives it a prestige that it may not necessarily have had in the wider community at the time all this

Language in Motion  41 was happening, in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City. Connecting Spanish to education, literature, and her church seems to be have been a way for Isabela to keep Spanish in circulation in her life and to remain emotionally attached to the Puerto Rican diaspora while on a prestige trajectory in New York City (see Georgiou, 2019 for discussion of the tension between emotional attachments to diaspora and being integrated into the middle class in an immigrant city, especially Georgiou’s exploration of the “elite cosmopolitan” identity [p. 68]). However, this prestige trajectory, perhaps necessarily, was not compatible with maintaining Spanish as a family language. Isabela said to me, “my children and grandchildren are angry that I did not pass the language on to them; it’s still a sore point.” Isabela expresses regret for not maintaining Spanish within her family in New York but says that “English was just too dominant” when her children were at school, so that it just made more sense to “function entirely” in that language. This loss of Spanish, though, is fairly typical for second-generation Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. As Celia Zentella explains, for Nuyoricans, speaking Spanish is not an integral part of identity as a Puerto Rican New Yorker, even if it is seen, from the island, as a vital part of being Puerto Rican (Zentella, 1997). According to Negrón (2018), citing Duany (2002) and Zentella (1997), historically, being a member of the New York Puerto Rican community often meant “giving up” Spanish; New York Puerto Rican identity has a cultural as much or more than a linguistic one (Duany, 2002). Furthermore, Isabela’s experience of being racio-ethnically profiled as Puerto Rican offers a suggestion as to why setting aside the markers of “foreignness” for her family might have felt worthwhile as she raised her children: for example, during one incident in the 1970s, another parent at the school where Isabela worked as a student teacher and which her children attended declared Isabela’s Spanish not good enough, even for helping a student who was failing Spanish class. The mother rejected Isabela’s offer to help her daughter because the Spanish that she spoke was Puerto Rican and not Castilian. Nearly 50 years later, says Isabela, “it still hurts.” But despite “losing” Spanish, Isabela’s family nonetheless very much identifies with their Puerto Rican heritage and maintains it through food and culture, even if it is detached from the language. This is still one model of being Puerto Rican in New York, as Negrón (2018) explains. But the three younger women show other models of how Spanish can be kept in circulation as a family language. Maricela

The person who introduced me to Isabela was Maricela, who is Isabela’s niece. Maricela’s parents moved from Puerto Rico to New York in the 1950s, when Maricela was a young child. Maricela’s mother fostered

42  Language in Motion Spanish in the family, making sure her children could speak it, and Maricela’s children were born in Queens and grew up in Brooklyn speaking Spanish with their parents and grandparents. Maricela moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for university, studying at Carnegie-Mellon University. It was at Carnegie-Mellon that Maricela met her husband and where they began their history together with the international mining community. Maricela calls this community of Dominican mining engineers and their families “my mining family,” and she lived among them in Colombia, the U.S. state of Utah, Canada, and Shenzhen, China. She now divides her time between Park Slope, Brooklyn, the centre of the New York Puerto Rican community, and Puerto Plata, a global expatriate community on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. Maricela’s children are bilingual. Her daughter lives now in Singapore with her husband and two daughters after many years in London; her son lives in California. Both are fluent English and Spanish speakers, though her son, Maricela says, speaks mostly Mexican Spanish because of his work in biotechnology which took him frequently to Mexico from his home base in California. For Maricela, Spanish is “the language of the heart, not academic.” She maintains this orientation to Spanish by using it in her everyday family life; however, she also pursued a masters in bilingual education at the City University of New York so, similarly to Isabela, making Spanish part of her work outside the home. It may have been this dual approach to Spanish, incorporating into both her family and professional life, that has helped Maricela keep Spanish in circulation in her family: both Maricela and her daughter Ava, whose story I retell subsequently, see Spanish as a language of intimacy and love, and for Maricela, it has been an important part of her life outside her home too. Maricela is a globally mobile person, making homes all over the world and maintaining transnational affiliations on several continents. Eventually, being nearer to her aging mother brought her back to Park Slope, but she also lives for half of each year in the Dominican Republic, surrounded by others with similar transnational connections. Maricela and both of her children show a “transnational habitus” (Nedelcu, 2012), in which people live an everyday cosmopolitan life, maintaining social and familial connections across continents and time zones. Maricela, her daughter Ava, and Maricela’s son are all “on the move,” and the transnational habitus that we see in Maricela’s family suggests an interesting relationship between mobility and the concept of language community. That is, once a family’s relationship to a language becomes almost entirely about family, rather than being a language that helps them circulate in a local community, the idea and need for of a supporting language community wanes. As we see subsequently, however, a language community makes transmitting a language from parents to child much easier because the children have somewhere to

Language in Motion  43 speak the language other than at home. Maricela’s family has been part of a transnational community for decades, due to the mobility required of them by the work of Maricela’s husband, the mining engineer. Because of this, community has not been a significant source of cultural or linguistic support in ways that we usually understand these, especially since Maricela has worked to maintain both English and Spanish with her children as they have moved from country to country, working on both languages at home when they were not the language of the broader community. That is, in Colombia, not only did Maricela make sure to speak in English to her children to make sure they maintained that language, but she also encouraged them not to speak the local variety of Spanish but rather to maintain their Caribbean variety, the language of their home. Maricela’s attitude towards the Spanish language in this context reflects the centrality of her transnational affiliations as well as her emotional connection with Spanish as a family language: language does not belong to a territory, but to its speakers. She says, “If speakers of a global language want to understand each other, they will.” She gives an example of a time when she was translation between staff and parents at a school in Brooklyn. The Spanish-speaking parents said that they could not understand her “Caribbean” Spanish. She replied to the parents, “you would understand just fine if I was offering you a million dollars.” The parents laughed, and the conversation proceeded. Maricela’s relationship with Spanish as being primarily a family, rather than a community language, is something that she shares with her daughter, Ava, whose story I turn to next. Ava

Ava was born in New York: she was raised in Brooklyn and lived, during her childhood, in Colombia, Utah, and Canada. She moved to London as an adult and currently lives in Singapore with her husband and schoolaged daughters, planning to move back to London at some point. Ava’s family is English-dominant, and her children go to local school in Singapore, where they are learning Mandarin alongside English, which is the primary language of instruction. The girls have also picked up Singlish, the local English vernacular. Ava and her husband encourage their daughters’ learning Mandarin, though it is not a language in use at home; Singlish, however, is discouraged in favour of other varieties of English, particularly the British-inflected English that their father speaks. Ava speaks Spanish with her parents and to a degree with her older daughter; her younger daughter understands but does not speak the language. Ava calls her mother her “teacher of language,” whether it was English (in Colombia and Francophone Canada) or Spanish (in New York

44  Language in Motion and Utah); she describes Spanish as the language of mothering. This orientation to the language keeps it circulating in her family: she speaks Spanish with her daughters, especially as the language of secret maternal communication when they are out, to be discreet. Her elder daughter understands; the younger one says she does not, but her older sister helps her get the message. Ava talks about her aunt as being so much more affiliated with Spanish than Ava is: her aunt and cousin moved back to Puerto Rico and work actively to maintain Spanish in all facets of their lives. Ava’s connection to Spanish seems, by contrast, to be disconnected from a Puerto Rican/Dominican identity: while, like her mother, she identifies as a speaker of “Caribbean Spanish,” her use of Spanish is disconnected from Puerto Rican culture and from Puerto Rico and the New York Puerto Rican community and is instead anchored in her family, both nuclear and extended. Ava and her daughters’ language practices are clearly shaped by living in Singapore, a place where multilinguality is fostered to varying degrees (see, for example, Curdt-Christiansen, 2016). As much or more of a diasporic cosmopolitan city as New York, Singapore is a place where many people make homes and are not “at home” at the same time, as their inhabitants look back to other linguistic or physical homelands even after several generations. The affiliation with Spanish that Ava maintains is an emotional one, and the emotions keep the language circulating even when it is not a particularly “useful” language, except in intimate conversations. And that seems to be enough. Ava’s cousin Eleanora, on the other hand, has maintained Spanish as a family language by fostering—indeed, aggressively pursuing—Spanish-speaking education and community for her daughter. We turn to her story now. Eleanora

Eleanora was born in Brooklyn and lived in Puerto Rico from ages 4 to 18, spending summers in New York with her grandmother, who is also Ava’s grandmother: Eleanora and Ava are cousins. Eleanora describes herself as having been shy about speaking English during those years, rather than the Spanish in which she felt more comfortable expressing herself, but when she moved back to New York at age 18, she says, the English “just came back.” When Eleanora’s daughter, now in her 20s, was born, Eleanora was adamant that her daughter would know Spanish and know Puerto Rico, and she took on the work of making sure that happened. Accordingly, she sent her daughter to a bilingual school near where they lived in Florida and to Puerto Rico every summer to live with her grandmother’s family. In our conversation, Eleanora expresses her pride in the work that she did with

Language in Motion  45 her daughter to make sure that she spoke Spanish and English alongside each other and that she was connected to Puerto Rico. Eleanora’s daughter’s father is Colombian-Italian-American, with a Colombian-American mother and Italian-American father. He does not carry strong affiliations with Spanish himself; Eleanora thus decided that she would be the one to make sure her daughter spoke Spanish. Eleanora too maintains connections to Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York: she moves back and forth between New York, Florida, and Puerto Rico. Believing that Spanish needs to be spoken in a community, Eleanora built community for her daughter by taking her to Puerto Rico for summers and having her live there for several years, and then by having her attend a bilingual Spanish–English school in Florida during the school year. Eleanora’s relationship with Spanish is not necessarily an emotional one in the same way as Isabela’s, Maricela’s, and Ava’s: Eleanora tells me that she loves language in general but that Spanish does not necessarily occupy the unique place in her heart that it does for the other women whose stories I have retold here. It seems that keeping Spanish circulating in wide, community-based use, rather than having it as a private language, changes a speaker’s emotional affiliation with it and changes the reasons they might have for maintaining it. This observation was, incidentally, confirmed by a former student of mine, Ileana, also from New York, also bilingual in Spanish and English. When Ileana read this chapter, she remarked on the different experience and affiliation she has with Spanish, a language that she speaks every day and in most facets of her life. Ileana checked with her cousin, who agreed that Spanish is “just a language,” something for use, rather than something that forms a core part of her emotional identity. Working Language in Cosmopolitan Diasporic Lives The four women who shared their language stories with me offer a snapshot of the New York Puerto Rican community as it has grown beyond the city. These stories show trajectories through and out of the community that reinforce the idea of diaspora, all of which resonate into the future, and whose relationships with the mythic homeland range from strong and part of present reality, to distant and tenuous at best. Eleanora, we might say, has taken steps to claim Puerto Rican identity and social and cultural capital. The other participants’ cultural capital comes from different places: for Maricela and Ava, from a sort of generalized sense of multilinguality and multiculturality—diasporic cosmopolitanism—which is associated with global mobility and connections with historic homelands and communities, and for Isabela, from the prestige of speaking Spanish as a way into a rich literature and culture.

46  Language in Motion As we saw in the introduction, the term “diaspora” implies something of an “imaginary homeland” (Rushdie, 1992): a home that is not necessarily the site of an individual’s departure, but rather the source of cultural connections. Diaspora is particularly important as a source of support for individuals and groups who are othered in their “destination” homes: it gives a sense of belonging to those who are often positioned as perpetual outsiders. For the members of the family whose stories I retell here, their relationship with Spanish could be taken to show changing relationships with diaspora and with home, shifting towards a more global sensibility in which transnational mobility is a key factor in people’s experience. Thus, in this analysis I intersect diaspora with cosmopolitanism, an orientation to the world which not only creates and maintains links with past homelands, but which also seeks out new connections, living lives that span many geographic locations, that are not bound by either the diasporic homeland or the original “destination,” in this case New York. I suggest that it is the loosening of these diasporic ties that moves people into a cosmopolitan experience. Georgiou (2019) writes that “cosmopolitanism has become increasingly ordinary and incorporated in diasporic imaginaries: a way of living (a practice) and seeing (an ethics) in an intensely interconnected and culturally entangled world” (p. 63). So, it is both a connection to “imaginary homelands” and a connection to the broader world. Language can be the nexus, the lynchpin between these two orientations. As Glick-Schiller (2015) explains, diasporic cosmopolitanism is not an ideal but a range of pathways of connection among people who have had similar experiences of displacement that lead to experiential and affective solidarity (Georgiou, 2019, p. 65). Linguistic circulation and different ways of making Spanish circulate all play important roles in the lives of these four women. Spanish, for Isabela, Maricela, Ava, and Eleanora, signals a way to hold onto the past and bring it into the present. Ava’s strategies for sustaining Spanish as a family language for her daughters and the future generations of the family, though, are less clear. Isabela’s own description of not speaking Spanish with her children because she was “not thinking ahead” is relevant to Ava’s story. While Ava speaks Spanish to her daughters, Spanish is not a family language, and there is little community support in Singapore for minority languages in general and Spanish in particular (see Curdt-Christiansen, 2016, for a detailed exploration of this point). Eleanora, by contrast, approached her daughter’s acquisition of Spanish deliberately, with a plan for schooling and an investment in significant time spent in Puerto Rico throughout her daughter’s childhood. These different paths reflect the different times in which Isabela and Eleanora were raising their children and the difference in community attitudes towards multilingualism: whereas assimilation in the 1960s and 1970s often entailed speaking English only,

Language in Motion  47 this attitude has become increasingly marginal since the 1990s. Now, instead, raising bilingual children is often seen as a hallmark of good parenting (e.g., King & Fogle, 2006). For Ava and Maricela, we might say that keeping Spanish in circulation as a family language has been a powerful way in which these women have created their home spaces as they live globally. While over the years their children’s connections to Spanish as an everyday language becomes more diffuse, their connections to Spanish as a family language—and thus as something that ties them all together— remains strong. These stories show how women keep language circulating within their families. The ways in which they direct the flow of language is shaped by different pressures, particularly emotion and opportunity. But it is not necessarily everyday communication that makes language flow. Indeed, in diasporic families like this one, with more than one language in circulation, it seems that if choosing a language is only about communicating with particular family members, then that language is unlikely to continue to circulate through the second and third generations. But if the language is connected with developing and maintaining ethnic affiliations, cultural affiliations, or emotional affiliations, then it will flow, even as these affiliations can be developed without language. Several the responses from Isabela, Maricela, and Ava suggest that Spanish is something of a reified object of emotions as well as being a means of communication. Thinking and feeling about a language is separate from using it to communicate within a community or maintaining it throughout the generations of a family. So, when I consider how language circulates, I think about language in the same way as someone looking at the circulation of images, symbols, and ideas might look at the objects of their study (e.g., Dingo, 2018; Lotier, 2018): as objects that circulate, to which emotions stick, as elements that are the center of an ”affective economy” (Ahmed, 2004). Language circulates if it does something outside the family unit or if it does something distinct within the family unit; it is something that is interesting, something that has cultural value, circulates, even if it is not overtly useful. Something that has no use, but has emotional or cultural value will circulate if it isn’t needed but if it is desired. In the four snapshots that I offer in this chapter, Spanish is the language that circulates within an affective economy of language, which sometimes, but not always, translates into multigenerational language maintenance. Isabela, Maricela, Ava, and Eleanora’s stories provide snapshots of the ways in which the circulation of Spanish has changed within the New York City Puerto Rican community and the ways in which the identity of this community might be changing as the feelings that attach to Spanish change over time. For these women, Spanish is not “needed,” but it has cultural and emotional value, and so they keep it moving. Sometimes family linguistic identity and individual linguistic identity are in conflict, or

48  Language in Motion sometimes they are aligned, and sometimes one develops and adapts from the other. In the stories that these four women tell of their linguistic lives, we see how Spanish circulates in their lives and how it is passed or not passed along. Finally, the stories of these four women and their families suggest how, for people from the New York Puerto Rican community, the ordinals of first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants are not particularly sensible. As Duany (2002) writes, being Puerto Rican means living a fully transnational life: the terminology of “immigrant” does not really make sense because of the flows of language and people between the United States and the island. What the story of these four women shows is that there is no one story of being Puerto Rican in and from New York, and, furthermore, there are many ways that women engage with and pass on language in their families. Isabela, Maricela, Ava, and Eleanora show how diasporic practices are enacted through languages and the ways in which people hold on to these linguistic “homelands” while moving through the world. The ways in which these women keep Spanish circulating shed light on the ways in which linguistic homes are constructed, and how family ties to one original immigrant language can seed a cosmopolitan, diasporic relationship with language more generally. It gives a glimpse of what it takes to keep language circulating: emotional investment, but also the ability to move; the chance to leave, and the chance to go back home again. References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Curdt-Christiansen, X.L. (2016). Conflicting language ideologies and contradictory language practices in Singaporean multilingual families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7), 694–709. Cushman, E., Jackson, R., Nichols, A. L., Rivard, C., Moulder, A., Murdock, C., Grant, D.M., & Adams, H.B. (2019). Decolonizing projects: Creating pluriversal possibilities in rhetoric. Rhetoric Review, 38(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.108 0/07350198.2019.1549402 de Fina, A. (2021). IAS lecture by Anna de Fina on ethnographic interviewing. Bilingualism Matters YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 99aO1Mxhe2w Dingo, R. (2018). Re-evaluating girls’ empowerment: Towards a transnational feminist literacy. In L.E. Gries & C.G. Brooke (Eds.), Circulation, writing and rhetoric (pp. 135–151). Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado/Utah State University Press. Duany, J. (2002). The Puerto Rican nation on the move: Identities on the island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Georgiou, M. (2019). Diaspora and the plurality of its cosmopolitan imaginaries. In J. Retis & R. Tsagarousianou (Eds.), The handbook of diasporas, media, and culture (pp. 63–76). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Language in Motion  49 Glick Schiller, N. (2015). Diasporic cosmopolitanism: Migrants, sociabilities and city making. In N. Glick Schiller & A. Irving (Eds.), Whose cosmopolitanism?: Critical perspectives, relationalities and discontents (pp. 103–120). New York; Oxford: Berghahn. King, K., & Fogle, L. (2006). Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents’ perspectives on family language policy for additive bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6), 695–712. King, K.A., Fogle, L., & Logan-Terry, A. (2008). Family language policy. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 907–922. Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039 Lotier, K.M. (2018). What circulation feels like. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, 26. https://www.enculturation.net/what-circulationfeels-like Nedelcu, M. (2012). Migrants’ new transnational habitus: Rethinking migration through a cosmopolitan lens in the digital age. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(9), 1339–1356. Negrón, R. (2018). Ethnic identification and New York City’s intra-Latina/o hierarchy. Latino Studies, 16(2), 185–212. Óhifearnáin, T. (2013). Family language policy, first language Irish speaker attitudes and community-based response to language shift. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(4), 348–365. Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families (Vol. 12). John Benjamins Publishing. Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary homelands: Essays and criticism 1981–1991. London: Penguin. Showstack, R., & Colcher, D. (2019). Language ideologies, family language policy, and a changing societal context in Kansas. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 12(2), 455–483. Villenas, S. (1996). The colonizer/colonized Chicana ethnographer: Identity, marginalization, and co-optation in the field. Harvard Educational Review, 66(4), 711–732. Zentella, A.C. (1997). Growing up bilingual. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 “Mending that Wound” Creating Linguistic Futures in a Diasporic Space

The first part of this chapter’s title comes from an article in The Guardian about the reintroduction of the California condor to northern California. The article quotes a member of the Yurok tribe, Tiana Williams-Claussen, who said that when she sees a condor in the sky again, “it’s just mending that wound that was carried by my elders, is carried by me and that, at least in part, is not going to be carried by my children” (Cistone, 2021). Like with the condor, many people feel that the loss of ancestral, family languages in the process of migration and assimilation is a wound that is carried by later generations of family members; the process of ancestral language revival within a family is a mending of that wound. Not every person, not every family, feels the loss of ancestral languages as a family wound: some people see family languages as relics of a past that is best left behind. But the story I will tell in this chapter is the story of a family that, three generations after the loss of Italian in Sydney, Australia, is mending the wound via bilingual immersion schooling for the youngest generation of the family. The family whose story I focus on in this chapter starts in Sydney in the first decade of the 20th century: in 1908–1910, the three Marini1 brothers immigrated from northern Italy to Sydney to establish a business importing and installing Italian marble. The works created by the Marini brothers still stand in the city today in buildings where the marble was warehoused and cut, and in the sites where it was installed in the city’s public and private buildings. The first generation of Marini immigrants, the brothers, promptly started the process of integration and assimilation into early 20th century Sydney; for the youngest of the brothers at least, this integration was accompanied by the loss of Italian as a language for his children and grandchildren. The story that I tell in this chapter thus starts with “the fragility or the drying up of our own families’ roots” (Hobsbawm, 1992, p. 173) that comes with migration and assimilation into a big city, before turning to the role that language plays in the loss and subsequent process of rebuilding of a family’s cultural identity. The decisions that families DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-4

“Mending that Wound”  51 make about language can be reversed and, just as cities like Sydney provide the scene of assimilation and loss of a heritage language, they can also provide the cultural and linguistic resources to nourish and reclaim the family’s linguistic roots, though in a somewhat new form. Because, while the Marini family’s Italian linguistic heritage was set down by the first generation, the youngest Marini brother’s daughter, Agnes, started the process of picking it up again with a trip to the University of Perugia in the 1950s and a lifetime of reaffiliation with Italian culture and life, centred on Italian traditions of conviviality and on seeking the revival of Italian as a family language. I frame my discussion, in part, by using Vijay Mishra’s conception of the “diasporic imaginary,” a term with which he works in the context of the “old diasporas,” diasporas that took place before mobility between “home” and “homeland” was one of the defining features of migration (Mishra, 2005). Mishra’s “diasporic imaginary” refers to the reconstruction of a homeland by communities that rarely, if ever, return: a homeland recreated in the decades- or centuries-old landing place. Thus, I consider the importance of language in the creation of the diasporic imaginary and the articulation and satisfaction of what Avtar Brah refers to as a “homing desire” (2005, p. 209), which stands in place of connection with and return to an actual “homeland” in the lives of many diasporic people. Homing desire comes into play, I suggest, when the borders between nations and homes are experienced as very real and functionally impermeable, rather than metaphorical, as Brah suggests they are for later diasporic groups: when people emigrate from Europe to an island in the South Pacific, the impracticalities and expense of frequent home-going become central to the diasporic experience. Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey, writing of immigrant English language learners, state that For many learners, the target language community is not only a reconstruction of past communities and historically constituted relationships, but also a community of the imagination, a desired community that offers possibilities for an enhanced range of identity options in the future. An imagined community assumes an imagined identity, and a learner’s investment in the target language can be understood within this context. (2011, p. 415) Furthermore, language plays an important role in ethnic identity development, as Toshie Okita points out: “ethnic identity is likely to be shaped during the process of language use and acquisition” (2002, p. 232). Among the Marini descendants, we see a desire for “not only a reconstruction of past communities and historically constituted relationships, but also a

52  “Mending that Wound” community of the imagination, a desired community that offers possibilities for an enhanced range of identity options in the future” (Norton & Toohey, 2011, p. 415). Sometimes, the picking up of language is part of a strategy of making sense of ethnicity, of connecting ethnicities that have been erased, because of migrations or because of the changing over time of how an ethnic community gets included in dominant whiteness, with the present and future. In this chapter, then, I explore a space between ethnicity and diaspora, and look at how the picking up of family language threads creates places of belonging that offer a countervailing force to the assimilatory urges of previous generations, whether or not these assimilations into dominant cultures have succeeded. For families and people who have been subsumed in dominant whiteness as the boundaries of whiteness have changed over time (e.g., Ignatiev, 2012), I suggest there is a drive to become distinct, to shore up a linguistic identity to match a vestigial ethnic or cultural identity, one which, because it is a diasporic identity, must be reimagined and recreated. A name like Marini, surrounded by names like Smith and Hughes and Robinson, is strange and “other” and must be made to make sense by being placed into a narrative of diaspora, homeland, and belonging. Brian Castro, in “Writing Asia,” writes, “Language marks the spot where the self loses its prison bars–where the border crossing takes place, traversing the spaces of others … We gain by losing ourselves” (1996). The third- and fourth-generation Marinis are indeed using language to cross borders and traverse the space of others—and to claim the “otherness” that is theirs. Learning and using other languages also destabilizes who and what others think we are: it creates a private life space that is not subject to categories that are imposed by dominant, hegemonic linguistic and cultural discourses. And so, language can create a space, a community, that is at once cosmopolitan, diasporic, and very local. As we see in the next section, all these vectors are vital parts of the redevelopment of the Marini’s linguistic and cultural identities. To learn the Marini story, I spoke with several members of the family over video conference to learn the details of their stories about learning and being Italian. I was familiar with the story before initiating this research project: the interlocutor who I call Gianna Marini is my mother’s spouse, and I have known the Marinis for over a decade. Thus, the stories that I represent here are refinements of those that I have been hearing from Gianna and her older sister Sara for a long time. Our conversations over the years have shown me clearly how language revival and maintenance within families are women’s business. I spoke with Gianna, Sara, Sara’s daughter Amelia; Gianna’s daughter Anna-Maria and my mother were also present during our conversations. I also asked follow-up questions in separate video chats in order to hear more details about the stories and to

“Mending that Wound”  53 check my understanding of them. When this chapter was drafted, I sent it to Gianna, Sara, and my mother to ask them for their response to the way I have told their story; I incorporated their responses into subsequent drafts. Marinis in Australia: Reclaiming Italian as a Family Language While Australia saw a surge of migration from Italy and Greece in the years after the Second World War, Italians and other Europeans were immigrating earlier.2 In these earlier years, the three Marini brothers immigrated to Sydney, the eldest in 1908. He brought his two brothers in 1910. This chapter focuses on the descendants of the youngest brother, Goffredo, who came to Australia as a 12-year-old boy. In the 1920s, Goffredo married an Anglo-Celtic woman who, like the other women in this book, was in charge of language in the domestic space, and so Italian was spoken in the factory but not at home, as Goffredo’s granddaughter, Gianna, tells it. Goffredo and his wife had two children, a son who worked with his father in the marble factory and so learnt some Italian, and a daughter, Agnes, who spoke only English. This division between daughter and father, between English and Italian, is the beginning point of this story. Agnes has worked throughout her life to restore this past and has passed down a love for Italy and the Italian language to her daughters.3 Agnes’s work of restoration began in earnest when she enrolled at the University of Perugia as a young woman in the 1950s to attend Italian classes for foreigners and to be in Italy. This trip shaped the rest of Agnes’s life and that of her family, particularly in its function as a gesture to recover the language that gave them their last name. The rest of this story is about how the family balances their lives as fully integrated, middle class, white Sydneysiders while maintaining and developing connections to Italy. These steps centre around the reacquisition of the Italian language. As I speak to Agnes’ daughters, Sara and Gianna, they describe how Agnes fostered the connection with Italian. Sara describes two particular strategies that her mother pursued in the process of reclaiming Italian as a family language. The first tapped into traditions of conviviality that were shared between Sara’s parents, two ethnic cultures in 1960s Sydney—Italian and Anglo-Irish. The second strategy focused on Agnes’s daughters’ education, on having Italian be included in the language curriculum at their high school in the northern suburbs of Sydney. The “convivial” strategy was centered upon welcoming a Franciscan friar, Father John, known by the family as Padre Giovanni, into the family home in the 1960s and 1970s. Padre Giovanni’s charge was to teach Agnes and her husband Peter Italian. These Italian lessons took place, in Sara’s memory, over the shared consumption of significant amounts of whiskey. Sara and Gianna both

54  “Mending that Wound” recall that, while the Italian lessons were not particularly successful in teaching their parents Italian, Padre Giovanni made an enduring impression on the family and fostered a strong connection with Italy and Italian culture. As well as bringing a sort of Italian conviviality into the house, Padre Giovanni also brought many trinkets associated with Italy and the Franciscan order to the house; these items are now fondly remembered and held by both Gianna and Sara, and some have stayed with Agnes, now in her late 80s, not only as artifacts of the family history but as artifacts of Italian language and culture. The second strategy Sara describes is her mother’s campaign, with another parent, to have Italian included in Sara’s high school foreign languages curriculum. This effort failed, and Sara took away from that experience a deep feeling of the inadequacy of intervening in the family’s linguistic trajectory at the high-school stage, remembering her own experiences of being unable to retain any of the French that she learnt as a teenager in high school foreign language classes. When Sara became a parent in the 1990s, she wanted Amelia, her daughter, to learn a language from an early age. Italian was the obvious choice. However, there was no place for Sara’s daughter, Amelia, in the Italian immersion preschool program that they had identified at International Grammar School (IGS) in Sydney, which offers a bilingual immersion curriculum from preschool through to the end of high school. And so, Amelia instead went to a Montessori preschool offering Japanese, while she remained on the waiting list to start school at IGS in the Italian stream. Amelia loved learning Japanese, so her parents included Japanese as an option, alongside Italian, for Amelia’s enrollment in kindergarten at IGS. In Sara’s telling of these events and choices, we see language affiliation and investment shifting, too, in response to local circumstances. The specificity of the desire to learn Italian to build on family heritage changed, and has changed in Sara’s narrative into acting on the importance of early language immersion, in contrast to her own unsatisfactory education in French from the age of 12. Learning Italian remained important, but learning Japanese became an acceptable alternative in terms of her intentions for Amelia’s language acquisition, because of Amelia’s pleasure at learning that language. In other words, bilingual immersion was more important than Italian immersion. This story shows the competing investments that shape the linguistic futures of “old” immigrant families, as opposed to the urgency of language-education choices when language learning is more closely tied to the experience of immigration: bilingual language exposure and learning becomes as important as building on family language cultures.4 As it turns out, though, Amelia was admitted into the Italian stream at IGS and began to learn Italian there. Amelia reports that when she left the school at 18, she felt that she was bilingual in Italian and English.

“Mending that Wound”  55 Gianna, Sara’s younger sister, was very intentional about enrolling her own daughter, Anna-Maria, in the Italian program at IGS. Gianna feels the absence of Italian language in her family as a loss and describes her sadness when she contrasts her own family’s relationship with Italian as compared to the Marini cousins who have maintained Italian as a family language. In what Gianna describes as a concerted effort to address the loss of Italian as her family language, Anna-Maria has been in the Italian immersion program since she was 3, starting in their two-day per week preschool program. Now, as a teenager, Anna-Maria feels that she is developing a bilingual Italian-Australian identity and will be bilingual when she finishes school. The bilingual language immersion program at school pairs daily language instruction with significant cultural immersion programs and activities for students, from preschool to school completion. However, according to Gianna, these cultural immersion programs and activities tend to point directly back to Italy rather than to the vibrant Italian-speaking communities in Sydney, and despite the geographical proximity of IGS to Sydney’s traditional Italian centres, Leichhardt and Haberfield. Anna-Maria’s parents have also been very pleased to participate in the Italian cultural activities that are offered for families associated with the school and have missed that aspect of their daughter’s schooling during the restrictions imposed because of the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic. This community has been particularly important for Gianna, since she feels that she is largely a visitor to and observer of Sydney’s Italian community rather than a member of that community. IGS’s indexing of Italian culture back to Italy has been an avenue through which Gianna can express her love for Italy, as well as creating a connection to the community built around the Italian language program at IGS, even if it is parallel to, rather than integrated into, Sydney’s version of being Italian. As Moloney (2009) shows, students at IGS develop significant cultural affiliations with the communities—and nation states—who speak the languages that they learn at school. Certainly, Anna-Maria, when in Year 6, told her parents that she judges the quality of her education in the Italian language from year to year through her feeling of how successful the teacher is in integrating language instruction with cultural immersion, expressing significant dissatisfaction with teachers who she feels did not do as well as others on this front. Anna-Maria, at this point in her education at IGS, feels that she is on track to becoming bilingual due to her Italian education at IGS and feels well-immersed in Italian culture; similarly, Amelia reports that she felt bilingual when she finished high school. However, Amelia also feels that the fact of her Anglo-Saxon ethnic and cultural heritage, and the fact that her family is not connected with the Italian community in Sydney, makes it hard to maintain Italian: she points out that the languages taught at IGS are not Sydney’s community languages

56  “Mending that Wound” but rather languages that orient the school and its students towards a global cosmopolitanism. In this sense, the indexing of language acquisition back to Italy, rather than to local communities, makes it harder for former students to maintain their language without specific strategies to do so (see Ó hIfearnáin, 2013, for further discussion of this point in the context of Irish). Thus, I see the bilingual immersion program at IGS adopting a model of what we might call elite cosmopolitanism, focused on global mobility, rather than vernacular cosmopolitanism, which would seek out the cosmopolitan closer to home (Georgiou, 2019; Glick-Schiller 2014). The school thus places itself in the context of Mishra’s diasporas of the border, marked by mobility and a personal relationship with the “homeland,” rather than the old diasporas, those in which Brah’s homing desire is more salient than a direct connection with and return to the homeland, and in which the diasporic home is reformed and rebuilt in the place of settlement. The Marini sisters’ and granddaughters’ experience reclaiming Italian is shaped by the possibilities that Sydney offers. For instance, Sara sees a clear connection between the linguistic possibilities of Sydney and the availability of the bilingual immersion curriculum at IGS: the fact of being in a multilingual space provides a strong motivation for students, and the linguistic offerings at IGS are shaped by Sydney’s role as a global city. Homing Desire Language feeds and assuages homing desires in the Marini family: reclaiming Italian as a family language is an avenue to connecting more deeply with Italian culture, offering a feeling of being Italian, or, more formally, of solidifying a sense of Italian diasporic identity. I note here that I am making a purposeful distinction between diasporic and ethnic identity. According to Khachig Tölölyan, what distinguishes diaspora from ethnicity is that diaspora entails a structured gesturing back to the homeland and activism on behalf of the global diasporic community, whereas ethnicity denotes an engagement primarily with a local, “hostland” community that is defined by historical cultural, religious, and/or geographic affiliations (Tölölyan, 1996, p. 30). Like diaspora, though, ethnicity marks a point of differentiation from dominant white cultures in places like Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom; however, while diasporic communities maintain strong imaginative and activist ties to a global community of those with shared origins and a strong affiliation with the originary homeland, ethnic communities are locally oriented (see Christou & Mavroudi, 2016; Mavroudi, 2020; Tölölyan, 1996; Werbner, 2002). The diasporan community is marked by a “re-turn” to the homeland without physical return (Tölölyan, 1996, pp. 16–18). Crucially, though, we need to incorporate the settler colonial perspective in Tölölyan’s continuum

“Mending that Wound”  57 between diasporic and ethnic, because while Tölölyan constructs ethnicity as something not particularly involved with the politics of the “homeland” but rather focused on the local/hostland national identity (i.e. the American in Italian-American), settler colonial white communities often display strong desires to be able to claim to be “from somewhere” because they cannot and should not claim indigeneity, and also because being a colonial has always been lesser than being from the homeland. Thus, laying diasporan claims (rather than ethnic claims) has been a source of prestige and a foundation for identity work in a settler colony like Australia. I have calculated my blood quantum of Irishness, for instance, and that’s what we were all doing in the 1980s. Furthermore, Sydney is what Avtar Brah calls “diaspora space,” which she defines as the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, or belonging and otherness, of “us” and “them,” are contested. My argument is that diaspora space as a conceptual category is inhabited not only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of diaspora) includes the entanglement, the intertwining of the genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’ (Brah, 2005, p. 209). The multiplicity of diaspora space, and its inclusion of indigenous and migrant peoples as co-constructors of diaspora space, is crucial for our understanding of settler colonial/immigrant cities like Sydney, because it challenges the othering forces of hegemonic ethno-racial dominance, even if it does not break them down. As Brah describes it, hyphenated/hybrid identities prevail in diaspora space; she explains that through processes of decentering, these new political and cultural formations continually challenge the minoritising and peripheralising impulses of the cultures of dominance. Indeed, it is in this sense that Catherine Hall (1992) makes the important claim that Englishness is just another ethnicity. (Brah, 2005, p. 210) By insisting on Italian-Australian-ness, families like the Marinis decenter Anglo-Celtic Australians as authentic Australians, even as Amelia, Agnes’s granddaughter, claims her “Anglo-Saxon” identity as more salient in her life than the Italian identity her family has cultivated. The third generation of the Marinis, the sisters Gianna and Sara, who were my main interlocutors as I listened to the Marini story, are invested in making their Italian meaningful in the context of “mainstream” Sydney. Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, of ethnic and racial identities in Australia,

58  “Mending that Wound” in the Australian context whiteness confers certain privileges to those whose skin colour represents sameness. Irish, English and Scottish postwar migrants to Australia are differently positioned in relation to British imperialism than, say, Italian, Greek, and Vietnamese migrants, and different conceptions of home, place and belonging are therefore produced. (2003, p. 29) The privilege of whiteness sits in tension with a desire for differentiation. The Marinis, in the last decades, have occupied this place of whiteness, being readable as Irish/English/Scottish. But their conceptions of home, place, and belonging are shaped by their proximity to Italianness. Vijay Mishra writes, in his discussion of the diasporic imaginary, about people’s “libidinal investments in nations (as denizens or as outsiders)” (Mishra, 2005, p. 19). I want to pick up on the idea of these libidinal investments in considering what Italy and the Italian language do for the third and fourth generations of the Marini family. As we saw previously, having their daughters learn Italian in a school setting offered a connection to Italy for Sara and Gianna, but in talking in particular to Gianna, it is more than that. Anna-Maria’s immersion in Italian language and culture via her schooling offers Gianna a sense of forward motion, of finally making progress in the family’s efforts to recover Italian and to reclaim Italy. These investments of time, money, and emotion provide the opportunity to strengthen the family’s connection to the past while defining its future. Importantly, too, it offers a sense of differentiation from Anglo-Celtic whiteness, a reclamation of an ethnic past which has been erased, in terms of the family’s integration into mainstream Sydney society, over the generations but which has always been part of the family’s narrative. As Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji discuss in Metrolingualism, immigrant communities in Sydney stand in contrast to and in differentiation from the “Aussies,” who are identified with an Anglo-Celtic history in the city (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015, Chapter 5). Even indigenous Australians are often differentiated from these “Aussies” in a problematic disassociation of Australianness from the island’s original inhabitants.5 Australia, the nation, has a complex and problematic relationship with indigeneity, and one of the responses to recognizing the land rights and histories of Australia’s indigenous people has been a recognition among some middle-class white people that they cannot fully claim to be “from” Australia. But people need to be from somewhere. Hence, it seems that Australians who trace “old” diasporic connections will claim them just as much as immigrants from newer diasporas in order to feel a sense of belonging. Australia’s problematic relationship with indigeneity requires a countervaling disapora: one of the libinidal investments in nations that we see at play in the Marinis’ story is the quest for a sense of belonging to

“Mending that Wound”  59 Italy, that imaginary homeland. Avtar Brah’s concept of homing desire is again important here: it captures the reality of diasporic communities who are imaginatively affiliated with homelands and who maintain cultural ties by importing them into the new diasporic space, rather than by living in mobility between homeland and settlement. Brah writes, the concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins, while taking account of a homing desire. The homing desire, however, is not the same as the desire for a “homeland”. Contrary to general belief, not all diasporas sustain an ideology of return. Moreover, the multi-placedness of home in the diasporic imaginary does not mean that diasporian subjectivity is “rootless”. (2005, p. 197) We see this tension between home and homeland in the Marini story. The family is invested in its affiliation with Italy and lays claim to that affiliation through this immigration story and enacting their desire to claim a home in Italy. They sustain an ideology of return only as sojourners, and yet lay claim to Italy as theirs. The fact that the regional specificity of the Marinis has been lost in family lore about being Italian also ties strongly to the idea of the diasporic imaginary: a version of home that is an imaginary homeland, that crucially builds off what is accessible at home, in Sydney. The Italian that AnnaMaria and Amelia are learning/learnt at IGS is not the ancestral language: standard Italian only really dates from the 1950s. Italy, when the Marini brothers left, existed more or less only on paper: what is now “Italian” in Sydney comes from a different place (Cardona 2019 [1976], pp. 3–4). This point is important: there is no going back home, as Salman Rushdie writes in “Imaginary Homelands”: the thing itself, the homeland of the past “that was lost” cannot be precisely reclaimed (Rushdie, 1992, p. 10). Thus, the Marinis’ homing desires drive a process that never needs to arrive. Getting somewhere is the point, though the “where” can change over a lifetime. Learning Italian, I suggest, is primary in creating this mobility: there is a drive to become distinct, to shore up a linguistic identity to match a “vestigial” ethnic or cultural identity, one which, because it is a diasporic identity, must be reimagined, recreated. And particularly because in recent years middle-class, progressive white Australians have become more aware of and emphatic about indigenous Australians’ claims to land and the genocidal history of the Australian nation-state, drawing a contrast between the settlers and the indigenous Australians has felt imperative. Settler colonials are always from somewhere else, in contrast to being indigenous. The investment in where we are from can be felt as much by those who are identified as settler colonials as those who are identified as migrants.

60  “Mending that Wound” Throughout this chapter, I have looked at the interweaving of language and whiteness and the reclamation of white cultural and ethnic identities through language. I suggested that letting go of Italian in the first, pre– World War II generation of the Marini family was the cost of the family being granted whiteness. Seeking whiteness and thus integration into mainstream Australian culture would have probably felt necessary in an immigration scheme which was explicitly labelled as the White Australia Policy, which excluded from citizenship the Chinese Australians who had been emigrating to Australia since at least the mid-19th century and which was buoyed up by the racist, colonial, genocidal English fantasy of “terra nullius” that attempted to erase indigenous Australians’ millenia of attachment to the land and which created the assisted passage scheme for thousands of Italian and Greek people in the years after World War II, when the stream of more westerly European immigrants dried up but the fruit still needed to be picked. The work of the Marini women, the central characters of this chapter, became necessary because of the choice made by parents from the immigrant generation to lay the language down as a family language. The daughters and granddaughters of that immigrant, Goffredo Marini, reclaimed Italian as their inheritance and did the emotional work of passing it on. It is love that kept Italian moving in this family: love for Italy and Italian culture, but also love for Agnes, Goffredo’s daughter, because Italian—speaking Italian, being Italian—was so important to her. And now love for their daughters has made Gianna and Sara, Goffredo’s granddaughters, invest so much in their children’s educations, built around participation in this Italian immersion program, which they see as a route back to Italy while staying anchored in the Sydney of the 21st century. Notes 1 All names are pseudonyms. 2 See Di Giovanni (2020) for a detailed account of the history of Italians in Australia and Sydney. 3 I note here that Agnes has four children, two sons and two daughters. By their sisters’ account, the two brothers do not feel the loss of Italian in the same way or, indeed, at all. 4 For discussion of the middle-class tendency, seen most abundantly in monolingual families, to have children become bilingual, and the attitude that equates bilingual parenting as “good” parenting, see King and Fogle (2006). 5 For example, an article in SkyNews: the headline is “New community-run school combines Indigenous culture with Aussie curriculum” (SkyNews, 2021).

References Brah, A. (2005). Cartographies of diaspora. New York: Routledge. Cardona, G.R. (2019). Standard Italian (Vol. 1). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

“Mending that Wound”  61 Castro, B. (1996). Writing Asia. Australian Humanities Review, 1(4). http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/1996/04/01/writing-asia/ Christou, A., & Mavroudi, E. (2016). Dismantling diasporas: Rethinking the geographies of diasporic identity, connection and development. London & New York: Routledge. Cistone, S. (2021). “Endangered condors return to northern California skies after nearly a century.” The Guardian. Retrieved March 27, 2021, from https://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/26/california-condor-reintroducedyurok-tribe Di Giovanni, M. (2020). Italian language maintenance in Sydney: New perspectives for the fourth generation? PhD diss., University of Technology, Sydney. Retrieved from https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/142528/2/02whole.pdf Georgiou, M. (2019). Diaspora and the plurality of its cosmopolitan imaginaries. In J. Retis & R. Tsagarousianou (Eds.), The handbook of diasporas, media, and culture (pp. 63–76). John Wiley & Sons. Hall, C. (1992). White male and middle-class: Explorations in feminism and history. New York: Routledge. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1992). Nations and nationalism since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ignatiev, N. (2012). How the Irish became white. New York: Routledge. King, K., & Fogle, L. (2006). Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents’ perspectives on family language policy for additive bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6), 695–712. Mavroudi, E. (2020). Feeling Greek, speaking Greek? National identity and language negotiation amongst the Greek diaspora in Australia. Geoforum, 116, 130–139. Mishra, V. (2005). The diasporic imaginary and the Indian diaspora. Talk at VUW. Retrieved from https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/42566/1/ india%20diasporapdf.pdf Moloney, R. (2009). Forty per cent French: Intercultural competence and identity in an Australian language classroom. Intercultural Education, 20(1), 71–81. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2003). I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society. In S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A.-M. Fortier, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration (pp. 23–40). London: Berg. Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change. Language Teaching, 44(4), 412–446. Óhifearnáin, T. (2013). Family language policy, first language Irish speaker attitudes and community-based response to language shift. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(4), 348–365. Pennycook, A., & Otsuji, E. (2015). Metrolingualism: Language in the city. London and New York: Routledge. Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families (Vol. 12). John Benjamins Publishing. Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary homelands: Essays and criticism 1981–1991. London: Penguin.

62  “Mending that Wound” Schiller, N.G. (2014). Diasporic cosmopolitanism: Migrants, sociabilities and city making. In N. G. Schiller & A. Irving (Eds.), Whose cosmopolitanism?: Critical perspectives, relationalities and discontents (pp. 103–120). Berghahn Books. SkyNews. (2021). New community school combines Indigenous culture with Aussie Curriculum. Skynews.com.au, April 21, 2021. Retrieved from https://www. skynews.com.au/details/_6249529240001 Tölölyan, K. (1996). Rethinking diaspora(s): Stateless power in the transnational moment. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 5(1), 3–36. Werbner, P. (2002). The place which is diaspora: Citizenship, religion and gender in the making of chaordic transnationalism. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28(1), 119–133.

5 Listen to Your Mother Home, Migration, and Language

A language with 700 speakers in the world is surviving in New York City. One hundred of the speakers of Seke, a language spoken in five villages in the Nepalese Himalayas, live in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, more than half of these speakers in two apartment buildings in Flatbush, Brooklyn. In a New York Times article from 2020, Nawang Gurung, one of the Seke speakers and city residents, explains the role that living in the city plays in preserving the language: “‘Back home, it takes two days by horse-ride and long hours of walking to reach a village,’ he said. ‘Over here, it just takes two stops on the subway’” (de Freytas-­Tamura, 2020). The proximity in which the Seke speakers of New York live, he explains, means that the language has more of a chance to thrive. But this survival must be accompanied by a determination, on the part of its speakers, to speak Seke and to provide the cultural and community contexts in which it makes sense to speak it. And so, de Freytas-Tamura writes, The apartment building in Flatbush where a number of Seke speakers now live is a microcosm of life back home and a bastion of the language. … Inside their apartments, it looks as though their former homes had been transported virtually undisturbed from thousands of miles away. (de Freytas-Tamura, 2020) However, while Seke is being preserved in New York City, the broader Nepalese diaspora is creating its own language, de Freytas-Tamura writes: Ramaluk, which is a hybrid of English, Nepali, Hindi, and Seke, is spoken more than Seke as Seke speakers leave Nepal, or at least leave the villages where Seke is spoken. So the language of “home” is not actually spoken at “home” very much any more. What does “home” mean, linguistically and socially? How do migration and diasporic movement trouble the relationship between home and language; in which ways does language maintain the isolation of home from the wider context, and how does it break that isolation down? The DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-5

64  Listen to Your Mother linguistic rhythms of immigrant homes, if they emphasize heritage languages, might chafe for second and third generation members of immigrant families, whose home is the “new” place; on the other hand, they might provide a sanctuary, offering a space of intimacy and comfortable difference in a world that pushes to homogenize its inhabitants. Georgis (2006) describes the different relationships with home experienced by second-generation immigrants in Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For as follows: living in multiple realities and learning to negotiate contradictions is not unfamiliar territory to most second-generation immigrants. There is the old world of their parents, where love of the originary home is an illness, invoked by nostalgic memory that is cordoned off from the realities of the hostile environment and their everyday strategies of survival. And then there is “the rough public terrain,” (2005, p. 37) the world in which they were abandoned and for which their parents were unable to prepare them and instead “regaled [them] with how life used to be ‘back home’ (Brand, 2005, p. 38).” (p. 18) Thinking more specifically how the concept of home works in people’s lives, Ann-Marie Fortier, too, writes that “home remains widely conceived as an imagined, isolated space that is rarely connected to wider social contexts” (2002, p. 120). Linguistically, this observation is particularly true, to the point that so-called home languages are differentiated from languages that are spoken in the wider community, and often, when people identify speaking a home language other than English, they are excluded from counts of English speakers. However, this kind of binary between home and what Fortier refers to as “wider social contexts” is a false one. While homes are heritage language spaces, where languages are preserved and passed between generations, they can also be spaces where dominant language use is encouraged or even enforced. They are sites of confrontation from which local dialects and ethnolects emerge and where linguistic identities are formed, sometimes in opposition or resistance to heritage languages and cultures, and sometimes in concert with them, where multilingual speakers develop pluralistic, hybrid, or translingual identities as they navigate the spaces between languages. Because even though homes are separate, by necessity and design, the borders between private and public in cities are porous, especially for immigrant and racialized women. Sofia Villenas writes that “for women of color, there has never been such a thing as a private sphere ‘except that which they protect in an otherwise hostile environment’” (Hurtado, 1996, p. 18, cited in Villenas, 2001, p. 21). Villenas elaborates on this point in the context of her work with Latina

Listen to Your Mother  65 mothers, who carefully and deliberately create their own spaces as home— el hogar—despite and because of their hostile surroundings in the town in which they live. Villenas writes, “Because racism has configured these women’s home lives in a way that breaks down the public/private sphere distinction, an understanding of women’s claim to the home has required a race-based perspective” (Villenas, 2001, p. 21). Language might also be a way that these immigrant women seek to make the boundaries between the private and the public as strong as possible, even outside the home: to create community in the face of a hostile dominant environment. In this chapter, I focus on domestic spaces because of the central role that women have in the passing on, or cutting off, of intergenerational language flows in homes. Falicov (2005) writes of the crucial role that women play in the maintenance of culture within families, calling them “the carriers of cultural lore and family stories” (p. 400). How these stories are told, and what language(s) are used to tell them, is a vital part of the stories themselves. Gaiutra Bahadur writes of her experience of the cultural and ancestral disconnection that comes with denying access to languages of diasporic home. When this access is denied, she writes, you also take away access to the stories that my forbears created, in the cadences that they created them. Educate me in a language lacking the rhythms of home, and I am likely to speak as a segmented self, to sound surgically snipped and etherized in the official world. (Bahadur, 2016, p. 6) But, on the other hand, these ancestral languages remain complicated for the women who pass them on or who use them to articulate their own ideas and identities. Michelle Cahill, an Australian poet, writes that “Within cultural spaces language has the power to bind women’s material and emotional realities to aesthetic and seemingly apolitical philosophical paradigms, shaped predominantly by men” (Aitken, Boey, & Cahill, 2013, p. 24). That is, language is not only a means—currently and historically— of expression for women, but also a means of restricting and restraining them, limiting what they can say and where they can say it. It is in this landscape that women nonetheless find themselves being largely responsible for language maintenance in the family (e.g., Winter & Pauwels, 2005). And so we might say that at home, in the domestic space, women, particularly mothers and grandmothers, both reinforce and undermine these patriarchal paradigms with their intimate involvements in the language and education of children. For language, then, we might say that home is an “in-between” space for diasporic families. Diasporic movements create a situation where people “are scattered and regrouped into new points of becoming” (Braziel &

66  Listen to Your Mother Mannur, 2003, p. 3). People whose lives are built on the fact of diaspora must contend with a continual looking-back to an imagined, historical, and/or reconstructed past or “home,” as well as trying to make new homes where their families have landed. It is in these in-between spaces, between past, present, and future, between ancestral homes and languages and those of the present and future, that the work of this chapter takes place. But what does an in-between space or place look like for language? This is a question that I explore here, and which I revisit in later chapters. Language, of course, plays a crucial role in constructing both the diasporic/national and domestic kind of home: as the Seke story shows, languages are associated, geographically and emotionally, with diasporic homes and connections with those homes are maintained through language use, especially in domestic spaces. Exploring language in homes helps us to understand the limitations of current interest in and adoption of what Christopher Jenks calls “trans- constructs,” as they pertain to language (2020, p. 312). These constructs offer a particular perspective on and methodology for embracing the full linguistic repertoires of individuals, communities, and nations as resources to challenge monolingual ideologies and language policies as enacted at the state and school levels, among others. Jenks (2020) writes that “the home is an ideal site for understanding trans- constructs as the management of linguistic boundaries is a mundane, yet critically important, activity for multilingual families” (p. 313). As the previous chapters of this book have shown, it is in these boundaries that families navigate the maintenance of linguistic and cultural inheritances in the context of present and future linguistic and cultural affiliations. In other words, the decisions that multilingual and/or immigrant families make about family languages show what they consider to be important and valuable, particularly for their children. Sofia Villenas’s study of Latina women and their construction of home in North Carolina suggests it is only by the preservation of these linguistic boundaries in the face of racism and other forms of discrimination that family “narratives of dignity” (Villenas, 2001, p. 3) can be constructed and maintained. Linguistic choices made by previous generations, too, can always be reconsidered, as Canagarajah (2008) writes: “the family has to negotiate its linguistic responsibilities with other social and economic pressures. The family is porous, open to influences and interests from other broader social forces and institutions” (pp. 171–2). Many of these influences come from the new nation state where migrants are making their homes, and particularly the pressures that the dominant language(s) in those nation states exert. Curdt-Christiansen (2016) describes these influences and pressures emanating from the nation-state’s cultural and language policies to the detriment of community and family languages in comparison to the dominant national languages. Family language policy is very much influenced

Listen to Your Mother  67 by giving “priority to social prestige, educational empowerment, and socioeconomic gains” (Curdt-Christiansen, 2016, p. 2). We see this in Curdt-Christiansen’s study, where, in one family, the family language Malay is dispreferred as the language for communication among children and their parents’ generation of English. The preference for dominant over family languages in such situations is well known. For example, Chik, Forrest, and Siciliano (2018) show that among the third generation of immigrant families, only 30 percent identify themselves as fluent speakers of their families’ languages. Canagarajah and Silberstein (2012) write, “diaspora has to be treated as a ‘community’ that embodies difference, not similarity. But this sense of ‘community’ too has to be achieved situationally through language” (p. 82). And, as Wei Li (2011) suggests, multilingual spaces are created interactionally: that is, interactions create community rather than preceding them or existing independently of them. This does not mean that there is no affinity or solidarity among people with a common heritage—people contend with these differences in public, and they are provisionally kept at bay at home, but each of these spaces exerts pressure on the others. While immigrant cities are considered to be multilingual, with English superimposed on everything, both of these studies show how multilinguality and translinguality (at least in Canagarajah’s sense of “shuttling” between languages and employing a wide linguistic repertoire [Canagarajah, 2006, p. 589]) make functioning in the new homelands possible. Indeed, home can exert a great deal of pressure for language to not be transformed or ruptured, but, as we see among the Seke speakers, to remain as a place for preservation and statis. (Re)Claiming Linguistic Homes Language forms a crucial part of the “back-stage” of social life forms; linguistic identity development for all children, and particularly those who are members of linguistic diasporas, is a central part of the more general identity development of these children and is anchored in family interactions (Falicov, 2005). And, of course, these interactions happen at home. Mothers and grandmothers in particular drive language acquisition, either in terms of the maintenance of heritage languages or the letting go of them. We see both forces—maintenance and abandonment—at play in Andy Quan’s poem, “Quiet and Odd.” The poem describes several boys whose names mark them as being part of the East Asian diaspora into an Anglophone environment: Darren Lee, Adrian Lee, Bennett Ho, Jacob Chiu, Dominic Kong, and Joseph Fong. These boys, the “quiet and odd” boys of the poem’s title, speak their heritage languages with their mothers and grandmothers at home. But they are caught in the tension between home and outside, between English and their “home” languages, and this tension

68  Listen to Your Mother silences them outside the home: their language is tied up in a borderland space, and they can neither speak with their families nor with the other boys: We reckoned their tongues got caught on the way out of their mouths like jackets on doorknobs as they rushed outside, their mothers calling them back to do their homework, mind their grandmothers, though even they’d pretend they couldn’t hear or understand whatever language shouted after them. (2013, p. 203) The voices of the mothers and grandmothers in these lines tug on the boys, “calling them / back,” calling them to “mind their grandmothers,” even as the boys pretend to neither hear nor understand the languages in which they are called. Is the boys’ silence a performance for the outside world and the other boys who are watching them? In that outside world, they have no language, and inside their homes, the languages that are “shouted after them” are their mothers’ and grandmothers’ languages, not theirs. The tension between home and outside has rendered these boys, in Quan’s telling, languageless, and the pull of the outside world on them is such they perhaps must turn their backs on their maternal languages in order to move in the outside world. These boys are set in contrast to the boys with whom the speaker affiliates himself; the speaker and his friends who … couldn’t speak our ancestral language. Nor could our mothers! Tell them they’ve lost their heritage. What’s the use anyway of those clattery loud towers of nine tones, building blocks flung at you in too-bright colours? (2013, p. 203) In these lines, the boys follow their mothers in their “loss” of their ancestral languages: the boys are subject to a choice that their mothers have made. Nonetheless, while the boys with whom Quan’s speaker affiliates himself are defiant about “losing their ancestral language,” the speaker also characterizes himself and his friends as loud and jarring: “nails on chalk / boards, fire alarm drills.” The choices for these boys are silence or cacophonous noisiness. The maternal line, for both groups of boys, shapes the family’s linguistic futures, either letting go of or hanging onto the “ancestral language” and passing that choice on to their sons: the sons in both cases are subject to

Listen to Your Mother  69 their mothers’ and grandmothers’ linguistic decisions but seem to have no agency themselves, except in keeping silence. For Quan’s speaker and the speaker’s friends, belonging in the outside world means leaving ancestral languages in the past, at home; furthermore, the maintenance of ancestral languages means silencing the third generation, relegating home to a feminized linguistic space that is disconnected from the outside world. The pictures that Quan draws of these boys raise the question of what happens to them after they grow up. Do they turn back to the “clattery towers of nine tones,” reconstructing or maintaining their “ancestral languages”? Do they continue to pretend to not hear or understand these languages shouted after them, or, like the sons of Chapter 4, the Italian-Australian family, are they outside the matrilineal tradition of matrilineal language maintenance? Do they not really care? One version of the linguistic grandmother is the grandmother in Andy Quan’s poem: the speaker of a foreign language, to be minded but also to be denied. These grandmothers speak and maintain diasporic languages, home languages, languages in domestic spaces, which do not make it out into “wider social contexts” but which they nonetheless teach to their children and grandchildren. Then, on the other side, are the grandmothers who gave up heritage languages. Grandmothers, as the first-generation immigrants, often let go of their own ancestral, heritage, diasporic languages, realigning their children with hegemonic languages over the ones that they seem to view as belonging to a past that must be let go in order for the children and grandchildren to attain the social acceptance and prosperity that is often the purported purpose of immigration. Their homes thus become spaces where their own languages do not live. In Omar Musa’s poem “Gran/ Nenek,” just as with Isabela’s children in Chapter 3, we see the grief that such decisions about language can cause two generations later. Musa foreshadows his own linguistic trauma in the title of the poem, with Gran the first word in the pair with Nenek, the Malay word for grandmother: The title itself is a rupture: the form of the title suggests that Nenek is the translation of Gran because the speaker must translate into his grandmother’s language. His lack of knowledge of Malay is a source of grief and anger: I weep and weep in secret rage and rage at my murmuring phrasebook incompetence my illiterate smiles (Musa, 2013, p. 167) These lines occur in the poem after the speaker has described the experience of moving around his grandmother’s “collage of streets she traversed

70  Listen to Your Mother these years”—words which evoke Nenek’s home (as she is named in this section of the poem). Musa’s speaker’s return to the diasporic homeland— the homeland that raciolinguistically marked (Flores & Rosa, 2015) immigrants are forced to maintain—drives him to tears and to rage, specifically because of his inability to speak his grandmother’s language: he is turned into a tourist by his “phrasebook incompetence.” This is an effect of the assimilation that is often seen as a necessary accompaniment to diaspora (see discussion of Showstack & Colcher, 2019 and Tovares & Kamwangamalu, 2017 in the introduction for discussion of this point); what Musa does here is demonstrate the pain that resonates in subsequent generations after immigration. And the pain is carried by the loss of language. Making Linguistic Homes In his set of poems “Thanks for the poems, Pauline Hanson,”1 Paul Dawson’s speaker claims home as a member of an immigrant community in Sydney by describing the repetitive homeward motion that his journey between the city centre and the suburb, Hurstville, which is his destination, rather than home being claimed by uses of dominant languages, or by birth or race or ethnicity. Hurstville / we disembark / my feet on automatic pilot Twenty years of stepping onto the platform, Of going home (2013, p. 112) This claim of country and home functions as an act of counter-narrative (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004), offering an alternative practice of home-­ making to birth and language which resists white supremacist narratives of who can be “at home” in settler colonial places like Sydney. Dawson makes this counter-narrative explicit at the start of the poem, where we meet the speaker on the train to Hurstville, one of Sydney’s “immigrant suburbs.” On the train, the speaker witnesses a confrontation between a youth, reading in Korean on the train, and a skinhead, who harasses the reader by commenting on his reading material and the language in which it is written: Why are you reading that book? Why don’t you read it in English? (Dawson, 2013, p. 111) As the speaker contemplates this act of racialized harassment on the train, they align themselves with the youth reading in Korean and not the skinhead. As Dawson creates this alignment, I suggest, he makes a claim about how homes are made: not by assimilation into dominant languages and

Listen to Your Mother  71 cultures, but rather in the repetitions of the action of going home, of claiming home via movement. We see, in this poem, home in a very literal sense acting as Fortier suggests, combining “forces of movement and attachment” (Fortier, 2002, p. 130). Home is not necessarily static and familiar but is rather created by repeated actions, of movements towards and away from this homing site. The speaker’s “homing desire” is clear in Paul Dawson’s poem, emerging as it does when the speaker gets off the train to go home, his “feet on automatic pilot,” even in the context of this vicarious experience of alienation. The repetition of movement, of going home from the station in Hurstville, creates the claim to home; repetition solidifies belonging, connection by physical action unseen by the aggressor but which Dawson claims as just as powerful as the linguistic allegiance that the skinhead demands. These repeated movements towards home happen linguistically as well as physically. Some families reclaim heritage languages via their children (for example, see Chapter 3), and some children reclaim heritage languages themselves, when the heritage language is not a language of the home. Fortier continues, “homing desires do not occur in the movement toward an endlessly deferred space but they also emerge within the very spaces of inhabitance called home” (Fortier, 2002, p. 130). Vuong Pham’s poem “Mother,” written from the perspective of a speaker whose family arrived in Australia as refugees from Saigon during the Vietnam War, describes the linguistic and educational sacrifices made by the speaker’s mother in order to see her children “set up”—at home—in Australia: … I tell her: ‘Mother, this week I taught my students Wordsworth saw thousands of daffodils and thought of you.’ She smiles and I’m taken back to a halcyon-time in childhood when she stitched floral pyjamas, tablecloths, bedsheets together using a sewing machine for less than $5 an hour to afford rice, pork, Asian vegetables and help pay for my tuition so I could learn to spell ‘persistent’ correctly— Praying that I might speak an unbroken English tongue and never be confined... (Pham, 2013, p. 197) The mother’s choices have made possible her son’s affiliation with the English of Wordsworth, not only to read it, but to teach it: he is at home in the English canon. The speaker’s nostalgia comes through not for a lost home

72  Listen to Your Mother in Vietnam, and via this a lost language, but rather for the “halcyon-time” of his childhood in Australia, when he nonetheless watched his mother working to pay for his tuition—suggesting a private school—so that he could attain this particular “unbroken English tongue” and thus “never be confined.” The idea of never being confined by language echoes Andy Quan’s “quiet and odd” boys whose tongues got caught on the doorknobs. The halcyon time referred to in this poem also gestures to nostalgia that ignores the Vietnam War—halcyon meaning a time of “peace, happiness, prosperity or success” (OED)—and it must also ignore the piecework, the lack of prosperity, that his mother’s hourly rate implies. Svetlana Boym offers a perspective on immigrants’ stories that is important here, highlighting the nostalgia that can inhere in these stories: Immigrants’ stories are the best narratives of nostalgia—not only because they suffer through nostalgia, but also because they challenge it. These stories are often framed as projections for the nostalgia of others who speak from a much safer place. Immigrants understand the limitations of nostalgia and the tenderness of what I call diasporic intimacy, which cherishes non-native, elective affinities. (Boym, 2007, p. 16) In “Mother,” nostalgia for a homeland has been replaced by a doubled nostalgia for childhood, in both mother and son; during the son’s childhood the goal of the mother is for her child to never be “confined” by language in Australia the way that his mother was but he also shows “diasporic intimacy,” a “non-native, elective affinity” with Wordsworth’s poems. Once again, the son’s linguistic future is shaped by his mother’s choices, and the son in “Mother” accepts this future willingly: it becomes part of who he is as much as the stories of Saigon that his mother tells. In Paul Dawson’s poem, the “elective affinity” between the speaker and the diasporic home is traced through the back and forth of footsteps taking him home from Sydney day after day. But just because the mothers and children in these poems do not feel pain for languages and homes left behind, it does not mean that pain will not be felt. As the poems in this chapter and the stories in Chapters 3 and 4 suggest, it can take two generations for the pain to come out, and it is in the relationships described in poetry between grandmothers and grandchildren in this chapter that diaspora is felt as loss. Conclusion Making linguistic homes is an iterative, multigenerational process. The linguistic engagement with the facts of diaspora can change in a family, or in

Listen to Your Mother  73 a lifetime. Mothers and grandmothers operate as linguistic gate-keepers in their role as makers and maintainers of domestic spaces, but their linguistic choices also have consequences for how their children and grandchildren can feel at home in their families’ diasporic destinations. We see four ways of being “at home” here—some in which “home” and “at home” are integrated, some which are in conflict, and some which are, of course, in between. In all the works that I’ve discussed here, the family members making the choices about which languages their children—all sons and grandsons—will speak are women. The sons and grandsons, except for Omar Musa’s speaker in “Gran/Nenek,” accept these choices and live with their consequences woven into their own stories without overtly challenging them. The only explicit challenge comes in Musa’s poem, with the speaker who is frustrated, when returning to the ancestral homeland, that the language of that place is not his, that his grandmother set it down for the generations after hers when she left Malaysia. It is notable, in the context of the rest of the chapters of this book, with their focus on women’s language choices, that the work of addressing language loss in the creation of migrant homes is taken up by four poets who identify as men, and the stories that they tell are those of how to live in the present when linguistic choices have been made for them. For the speakers in the poems that I discuss in this chapter, there is no in-between space between English or “home language”— home is either where they are now or somewhere that they can never be. Note 1 Pauline Hanson is the name of a right-wing Australian politician who has been active in that country’s federal politics since the 1990s. Her signature positions involve anti-immigrant, anti-indigenous, and white-supremacist policies and statements.

References Aitken, A., Boey, K.C. & Cahill, M. (2013). Three perspectives (Introduction). In A. Aitken, K.C. Boey, & M. Cahill (Eds.), Contemporary Asian Australian poets (pp. 15–30). Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann. Bahadur, G. (2016). Coolie woman: An Odyssey of indenture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bamberg, M., & Andrews, M. (Eds.). (2004). Considering counter-narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense (Vol. 4). John Benjamins Publishing. Boym, S. (2007). Nostalgia and its discontents. The Hedgehog Review, 9(2), 7–19. Brand, D. (2005). What we all long for. Toronto: A.A. Knopf, Canada. Braziel, J.E., & Mannur, A. (Eds.) (2003). Theorizing diaspora: A reader. Wiley-Blackwell. Canagarajah, A.S. (2006). Towards a pedagogy of shuttling between languages: Learning from multilingual writers. College English, 68(6), 589–604.

74  Listen to Your Mother Canagarajah, A.S. (2008). Language shift and the family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12, 143–176. Canagarajah, A.S., & Silberstein, S. (2012) Diaspora identities and language. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 11, 81–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/15 348458.2012.667296 Chik, A., Forrest, J., & Siciliano, F. (2018). Language diversity in Sydney: At home and in public. In A. Chik, P. Benson, & R. Moloney (Eds.), Multilingual Sydney (pp. 26–39). New York: Routledge. Curdt-Christiansen, X.L. (2016). Conflicting language ideologies and contradictory language practices in Singaporean bilingual families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7), 694–709. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434 632.2015.1127926. Retrieved from http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/52365/ Dawson, P. (2013). Thanks for the poems, Pauline Hanson. In A. Aitken, K.C. Boey, & M. Cahill (Eds.), Contemporary Asian Australian poets (pp. 111–112). Waratah: Puncher & Wattmann. De Freytas-Tamura, K. (2020). Carefully nourishing a dying language. New York Times, January 8, A19(L). New York State Newspapers. Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A610740341/SPJ.SP01?u=cuny_ york&sid=SPJ.SP01&xid=1ece1e0d. Falicov, C.J. (2005). Emotional transnationalism and family identities. Family Process, 44, 399–406. Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. Fortier, A.M. (2002). Making home: Queer migrations and motions of attachment. In S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A.-M. Fortier, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of home and migration (pp. 115–135). Berg. Georgis, D.S. (2006). Cultures of explusion: Memory, longing and the queer space of diaspora. New Dawn, Journal of Black Canadian Studies, 1(1). Hurtado, A. (1996). The color of privilege: Three blasphemies on race and feminism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jenks, C. (2020). Family language policy, translingualism, and linguistic boundaries. World Englishes, 39(2), 312–320. Musa, O. (2013). Gran/Nenek. In A. Aitken, K.C. Boey, & M. Cahill (Eds.), Contemporary Asian Australian poets (pp. 166–167). Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann. Pham, V. (2013). Mother. In A. Aitken, K.C. Boey, & M. Cahill (Eds.), Contemporary Asian Australian poets (pp. 196–197). Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann. Quan, A. (2013). Quiet and odd. In A. Aitken, K.C. Boey, & M. Cahill (Eds.), Contemporary Asian Australian poets (pp. 202–203). Puncher & Wattmann. Showstack, R., & Colcher, D. (2019). Language ideologies, family language policy, and a changing societal context in Kansas. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 12(2), 455–483. Tovares, A.V., & Kamwangamalu, N.M. (2017). Migration trajectories: Implications for language proficiencies and identities. In A.S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 207–227). New York: Routledge.

Listen to Your Mother  75 Villenas, S. (2001). Latina mothers and small-town racisms: Creating narratives of dignity and moral education in North Carolina. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 32(1), 3–28. Wei, L. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5), 1222–1235. Winter, J., & Pauwels, A. (2005). Gender in the construction and transmission of ethnolinguistic identities and language maintenance in immigrant Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 25(1), 153–168.

6 “Particularized Worlds” Translingual Writing as Borderland Space

In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “To survive the Borderlands, you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 194). Taking up this idea of the crossroads and of living sin fronteras as a survival strategy as Anzaldúa presents it, in this chapter I consider what it is to inhabit linguistic borderlands and what the consequences of moving about in that borderland space are for writer and reader alike. I focus on the ways in which translingual writing—writing that crosses linguistic boundaries by linking together forms and structures from different languages and English vernaculars into the same linguistic and literary spaces—asks readers to contend with the losses inherent in mobility and then what is gained by embracing this loss. Recently, translingual writing has rightly been celebrated as showcasing the linguistic resources of writers from linguistically minoritized communities, but, I suggest, it also stands as an elegy for the loss that living in the borderlands—cultural, linguistic, and geographic—requires of the members of these communities, and similarly of members of diasporic and immigrant communities around the world.1 Translingual writing, such as the work of the authors whose poetry I explore in this chapter, offers us another type of insight into the tension between embracing mobility and seeking homeplaces that we saw playing out through language in the previous chapters. Translingual writing brings sound into poetry and so brings the voices, the accents, and the vernaculars of its writers, its speakers, or its characters into text. A focus on sound and on mobility, as unconnected as they may seem, are, I suggest, both essential to the project of broadening our perspectives on who and what we think of as linguistic belonging. A focus on sound in writing helps resist the homogenizing pressures of standardized English, which erases difference while purporting to equalize its users. This linguistic homogenization, this erasure of sound, reflects the homogenizing forces to which immigrants are often subjected, and obscures the losses that transnational and diasporic communities endure as they move around the globe and as their lives continue to be affected by past movements. DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-6

“Particularized Worlds”  77 Translingual writing, by contrast, incorporates and makes these losses visible, resisting the inexorable assimilatory power of standardized Englishes and expanding what we consider to be the language of a nation. In it, writers perform their full linguistic repertoire, including languages with which they feel both strong and loose affiliations, some of which they perform for their audience, and some of which they withhold, particularly, but not only, through the use of standardized Englishes. Translingual writing is, for the purposes of this chapter, writing that moves between two or more languages or varieties of English, including those that are used alongside the standardized written metropolitan varieties that are usually seen written down in literature. I include examples of translingual writing that is code-meshed rather than code-switched2— where the deliberate linguistic boundaries that speakers and writers of standardized Englishes and other languages often create are blurred and made irrelevant even as the plurality of their language remains clear. I also do not discuss works in so-called “vernacular transcription” (Ashcroft et al., 2002, p. 45), whereby a writer works in a single variety, effectively writing down the spoken vernacular of a particular language community, such as Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Díaz, 2007) and Thomas Wolfe’s “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” (Wolfe, 1935). Instead, I focus on translingual writing that is a conscious performance of living and writing between languages. In this chapter I discuss the work of two contemporary poets, Rajiv Mohabir and Staceyann Chin, who are queer writers of color living in the United States and who maintain—and write about—strong transnational affiliations with the Caribbean (Guyana and Jamaica, respectively), as well as, in the case of Mohabir, India and England. Their translingual writing asks their readers to contend with what it means to live in an always-­ pluralized linguistic space, metaphorically and literally: both writers write extensively about New York City and other literal borderlands of the United States. They thus locate their language in the linguistic crossroads of the Americas, particularly when they write their linguistic affiliations with the Caribbean. Chin’s and Mohabir’s writing shows how linguistic marginality is, for many, a condition of being and living in America and speaking and writing in English. I choose the work of these poets because of the explicit ways in which they engage with the sound of language—language as it might come out of the mouth of their speakers and characters—even beyond what poets usually do. In this attention to sound, I suggest they offer a view of “particularized worlds,” to take Toni Morrison’s term from her Nobel lecture. A “particularized world,” Morrison suggests, stands against histories “[dis] connected from experience” and from lives without context; it is created only through language (Morrison, 1993). The variation in language that

78  “Particularized Worlds” Mohabir and Chin incorporate into their writing helps the reader to explore these particularized worlds not just through imagery and content but through language itself, in the ways that the reader must work to understand, to listen to the poetry as they read it, to use it to build contexts around the experiences that the sounds of the language in these poems makes real. The sounds of translingual writing, I suggest, open the possibility of building community between reader and poet that is not just based on similarity but on a recognition and incorporation of difference, if the reader can set aside their own voice in some cases and/or if they can incorporate the sound of their own voice alongside that of the poet, the poets’ speakers, and their characters, in others. This focus on sound draws upon Kamau Brathwaite’s discussion of the importance of noise, as he calls it, in the creation and performance of “nation language,” the language of the people of the Caribbean, in contradistinction to the imposed and enforced language of the colonizers. As Brathwaite writes in “The History of the Voice,” “the noise that it makes is part of the meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of as noise, shall I say), then you lose part of the meaning. When it is written, you lose the sound or the noise, and therefore you lose part of the meaning” (1993, p. 271). From this perspective, then, writing that does not explicitly call on or recall the sound of the voices of its narrators, its speakers, and its characters, means that the audience loses part of its meaning. Indeed, Brathwaite continues, reading is an “an isolated, individualistic expression,” standing in contrast with the possibilities of communitybuilding that builds on oral poetic traditions. Orality, he argues, “makes demands not only on the poet but also on the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the poet makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him” (1993, p. 273). Translingual, codemeshed writing can blur the border between reading and orality, bringing sound and, indeed, noise into written language. Translingual writing for minoritized writers is a fraught practice: it might be seen as the writers’ only authentic mode of expression, and thus suggest that standardized national languages do not belong to these writers. Authenticity, as Jacqueline Jones Royster writes, can be a trap for racially and linguistically minoritized writers, because only the languages and varieties that seem consistent with and natural to the particular racial or ethnic minority to which the writer is assigned by the reader will be considered authentic (1996, pp. 36–7). Susan Sniader Lanser writes that “the sign of narrative authority is language without traces of social or culture difference” (1992, p. 125). Even though, in this quotation, Lanser is referring to writing by 19th-century and early 20th-century African American authors, the restriction on the forms of authoritative language that she describes here largely prevails over 100 years later. Because of this,

“Particularized Worlds”  79 marginalized writers sometimes feel the need to claim their authority by using only standardized English. Translingual writing, though, allows for a different possibility: its focus on the sounds of language creates a borderland space between languages, showing us the intersections between languages and creating a space to dwell in and on all of them. But it requires of the reader an openness to unfamiliarity and change at the level of language itself. Indeed, Stefan Helgesson and Christina Kullberg write that translingual writing is “a linguistic situation governed by mobility, as it constantly moves towards or away from languages … moving between languages makes for a transitional relationship to languages as if they were always temporary” (2018, p. 147). Translingual writing destabilizes linguistic certainty, offering instead a creative space where “correctness” is contested and is negotiated between writer and reader, rather than being a set of rules and expectations imposed by the reader on the writer. The poetry of Rajiv Mohabir and Staceyann Chin offers insights both into identity performance3 and also the performance of poetry and language in resisting the homogenizing forces of standardized English. Translingual performances, rendered through spoken and written language, put pressure on the reader and critic to tolerate their own loss of understanding, of knowledge, of access. These authors create a linguistic world that belongs first and foremost to the members of the linguistic communities who speak these vernaculars, and they create borderland spaces for those outside to inhabit. These borderland spaces offer a view into the migrant, diasporic experience that is often invisible for “sedentary” people, to use Srivastava’s term (2020); Staceyann Chin’s and Rajiv Mohabir’s poetry offers a view into these worlds. These two poets use the language in their poetry in order to enact borderland language of the sort lauded in Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands. Borderland language is the language of migrants, of transnational people who are seeking to live their transnational, transcultural affiliations in their writing, and embracing the loss that such translingual writing exposes. Staceyann Chin is a black Jamaican lesbian performance poet whose poetry often considers the implications of migration for language, culture, and identity, alongside the simultaneous fragility and endurance of transnational connections. Her performance of poetry is built upon and around the fact—and the sound—of her Jamaican accent and the ways in which it, as Kelly Baker Josephs writes, allows her to build community with other Jamaicans and people from the Caribbean as she performs her work (Josephs, 2009). Written down, though, her poetry reads as mostly standardized written English. The language play that Chin’s performances allow often relies on the sounds that do not appear in the printed versions of her poems: instead, it relies on the connection between poetry, poet, and audience, as Brathwaite describes. Chin’s written-down poetry does, however,

80  “Particularized Worlds” incorporate various translingual moments, of which many, though not all, are marked typographically by italics or indentation. We see an example of a translingual moment in the title of “Why I Be Writing You Poems,” and its first line “I be turning your picture,” (Chin, 2019, p. 167), both of which are unmarked typographically, but which use structures that are not part of the grammar of standardized written English, and are often associated with U.S.-based Black Englishes rather than necessarily being recognizable features of Jamaican English. Jamaican English does, however, feature elsewhere in Chin’s poetry, in what Josephs (2009) refers to as “Creole sound bites” (p. 121). We see a “Creole sound bite” in the italicized lines in the following excerpt from Chin’s poem “My Jamaica”: Jamaica has always been harsh hard words of rigid correction connecting with the side of my head   two fingers of water above the rice   turn down the fire when the pot start boiling   and gal-pickney must learn fi wash them under-clothes (Chin, 2019, p. 22) Creole sound bites in Chin’s work, Josephs explains, are “a line or two of patois inserted periodically, particularly when she is repeating dialogue. … these sound bites aid in Chin’s formulation of accurate ‘voice-portraits,’” which are a feature of Chin’s poetry (Josephs, 2009, pp. 161–2).4 Crucially, without Chin’s own voice performing this poetry, the rest of the poem outside the “sound bite” looks like standardized English, and as such, is a canvas onto which the reader can superimpose their own accent. Only the sound bites force an accent when the poem is read on the page, and, equally, they disappear to an extent when the poems are performed by Chin: the “sound bites” are, I suggest, particularly distinct for readers, as well as being, as Josephs describes it, accompaniments and reinforcements of Chin’s “longing for Jamaica” (Josephs, 2009, p. 161). Chin also writes about the linguistic changes that accompany migration: in “Feeling Unfamiliar,” for instance, she writes, “truth is with parts of Black America in my mouth / I am no longer foreign enough” (Chin, 2019, p. 131). In these lines, Chin explicitly describes the sound of how she speaks as indexing her foreignness, but also causing her to mistaken for a Black American. Changes in sound like this are especially critical for a performance poet, whose accent is a central part of the sound of her poetry. And yet the written versions of her poetry, in the ways in which they decouple sound and word, can sometimes be just as translingual in writing as they are in spoken performance: they involve the reader’s own linguistic knowledge, their mental accent, in creating meaning and sound out of the

“Particularized Worlds”  81 poem. Chin’s sound bites help her reader out in this way, helping them to read from either an “other” linguistic perspective, helping them to understand the language and sounds of Chin’s “particularized world,” or allowing the sound of their own voice in as they read her work, and so allowing them to be a part of the linguistic community that she builds with her poetry. Similarly, Rajiv Mohabir’s poetry works through, among other things, the idea of a creole linguistic home in the borderlands of the United States, where creole means an experience which is built on forced linguistic, ethnic, and racial trans-/dis-locations and contacts. These trans-/dis-locations can result in hybridized languages, identities, and spaces but are often accompanied by experiences of feeling inauthentic, displaced, and in profound loss of heritage and home. Mohabir’s poem “Ode to Richmond Hill” begins mid-sentence, with a drunk teenager vomiting on the footpath in front of an old man who yells in Creolese, the English-based creole spoken in Guyana, and who uses Hindi words that the drunk teen and his friends do not understand (Mohabir, 2017, pp. 25–6). The poem continues as the speaker, returning to Richmond Hill after an absence of three years, catalogues memories of an Indo-Caribbean life and family, noting markers of their Indian ancestry and how they have been rendered illegible because of multiple migrations. The speaker (re)discovers Richmond Hill, an area in the New York City borough of Queens which forms the center of a Guyanese enclave, as a possible homeplace that embraces the “aesthetics of loss” that Emmanuel Nelson finds at the center of “Indian diasporic writing in the Caribbean,” brought about by the continual and continuing displacement of people of Indo-Caribbean heritage in the postcolonial world (1992, p. xiii). Mohabir writes in languages that are recognizable as standardized American or British English, Bhojpuri and Guyanese Creolese, as well as incorporating Hawai’ian and London English into other poems. Through these languages, Mohabir reflects his family’s migrations from India to Guyana, then to London, Toronto, and New York. These languages build a network of movement and migrations without necessarily establishing a centre. “Ode to Richmond Hill” shows the linguistic heritage of the speaker and of those who might call Richmond Hill home: a connection with Hindi alongside strong affiliations with standardized written English and a creolized vernacular English. We see these three linguistic links in this part of the opening stanza of the poem: the old Uncle yells, eyes silver with disbelief, Pick up yuh paisa, na man! No worry on this slate day youths dem

82  “Particularized Worlds” speak no Hindi to know paisa means money, a taxi speeds by blaring a chutney remix … (Mohabir, 2017, p. 25) The soundscape that these lines create highlights the diasporic connections of places like Richmond Hill; the sounds that Mohabir calls up here are both verbal, in the accent of the “old Uncle,” and in the sound of the taxi driving past. The “old Uncle”—“uncle” being an honorific for older men in Indian-influenced Englishes—in the first line speaks a code-meshed Hindi and Creolese; this translingual moment, this “Creole sound bite,” is marked using italics. As in Chin’s poetry, sound bites are crucial tools in Mohabir’s translingual writing, in that they allow written language to be heard in ways that orthographies related to standardized language varieties do not; they make the speakers in the text sound right. Like Chin, Mohabir also stretches typographic conventions for the inclusion of vernaculars in text: for instance, while the first instance of Creolese in this stanza is marked with italics, the following text also includes Creolese syntax—“youths dem speak no Hindi”—without italics, and the first instance of “paisa” and its English translation are italicized, but the second instance of the Hindi word is not. These typographical variations may unsettle what English-monolingual readers are accustomed to being told about what is “English” and what is “other”; whereas Chin’s poetry made clear to the reader where they were reading in Jamaican patois, the lack of italics in some of the lines of vernacular in “Ode to Richmond Hill” blurs the boundary between the voice of the speaker in the poem and the reader of the poem, making the vernacular of the speaker into the vernacular of the reader in that moment. These blurred boundaries are further reflected and emphasized by the sound of the “chutney remix” blaring from the passing taxi: chutney is a style of music that is popular among Indo-Caribbean communities in the Caribbean and in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, which fuses traditional Indian rhythms with Caribbean ones (Tanikella, 2009; Gopinath, 2005). But the word “chutney” is itself an Anglicized version of the Hindi “chatni” and entered English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the early 19th century as the British government’s colonization of India was well-established; it refers to a product which is a literally a mixture (OED, 2020). So, in the last line of the previous passage, this mixture, chutney, is remixed. Mohabir’s poetry challenges conceptions of what is “original” and whether originality and authenticity count anyway. “Ode to Richmond Hill” does this through language and sound. While they might be assigned a South Asian identity because of an ancestry tied to India through the indentured migration of hundreds of thousands of Indians to Guyana and the West Indies from the mid 19th to the early 20th century, Hindi is lost

“Particularized Worlds”  83 to the kids in the first stanza of the poem: they are New Yorkers, linked more closely to the Caribbean, whose vernaculars they do understand, and to the United States than to India. And while the speaker in “Ode to Richmond Hill” does know Hindi, so maintaining or recreating this linguistic connection to the Indian diasporic homeland, they still, in this poem, struggle with linguistic authenticity, particularly as it represents the maintenance of Indian identity in the face of multiple mass(ive) migrations. The following passage explores the speaker’s interrogation of the authenticity of Indianness in Richmond Hill. These lines detail the ways in which this Indo-Guyanese community of Richmond Hill simultaneously maintains and, as the poem suggests, corrupts its connections with Indian traditions. In addition, they articulate the tension that migrants carry as they at once hold onto and continue traditions from a long-ago home, even as these traditions gradually change due to local pressures. you are a forgery that will one day burn not on a pyre but in an incinerator, not on a riverbank, but in a crematorium, your prayers in Hindi accented in English alveolars neither devas nor prophets recognize as supplication (Mohabir, 2017, p. 25) In its repetition of words that denote imperfect, inauthentic copying—“replica,” “forgery”—and with its description of how English has made the speaker’s Hindi prayers unrecognizable as “supplication,” these lines describe the loss of authenticity that comes with migration and which manifests itself specifically through language. English has interfered not just with the sounds of Hindi as spoken in Richmond Hill via repositioning speakers’ tongues as they hit the roof of the mouth5; the changes in pronunciation, caused by speaking English, that Mohabir describes here emphasize the impossibility of going back home. While the words might be recognizable in these prayers, these mantras, English’s influence changes what these words can be heard as. But even though the speaker calls the Indianness of Richmond Hill a forgery because of diasporic movement and, specifically, because of exposure to English and Anglos, for this reader at least, the rotis, the mantras, the pujas that are described in the poem immediately before this passage are recognizable as Hindi words and Hindu symbols. To a reader unfamiliar with the Indian diaspora and the large Indo-Caribbean communities in Guyana, Trinidad, and New York City, the speaker’s words may in fact be unrecognizable as describing a

84  “Particularized Worlds” Guyanese community. Recognition depends on the perspective of the reader, but Mohabir’s speaker suggests that it is what changes everything, right up to the way in which individual sounds are pronounced with the tip of the tongue. English, the imperial language, is what has created this accent and destroyed the connection between intention and reception: the prayers are not “recognize[d] as supplication.” The irony of this line is, particularly, that nonwhite immigrants to the metropolitan centers are often denied native speaker status, and yet the fact is that they are—sometimes monolingual—English speakers because of global colonial history. The fact that English is what makes the speaker’s prayers unrecognizable as such inverts the usual tropes of linguistic interference, that an accent is something that is not English, not American, getting in the way of comprehension. Here, English is the strong accent, the interfering factor for comprehension. Mohabir’s poetry poses a question about the ways in which English linguistic affiliations get in the way and answers it by describing how English corrupts the sounds of Hindi. The speaker in this poem emphasizes the dislocation of those who are “doubly diasporic” in that their families have (been) moved around the world twice and have moved to metropolitan centers where their belonging is contested.6 The focus of that network in “Ode to Richmond Hill” is the dislocation from Guyana into the United States, where Indo-Caribbeans are often unrecognizable: they are either included in the general category Caribbean, and so excluded from diasporic Indianness from “mainland” India, or their Caribbean identities are erased as they are assigned to being Indian or Asian in New York (e.g., Warikoo, 2004, p. 371). However, to emphasize that Richmond Hill is a Guyanese and not an Indian community, Mohabir introduces the adjective “coolie” in the following passage, using it to explore how this identity plays in Richmond Hill. a coolie Uncle in a kurta mouths Marley as you walk by you start to sing praise to Queens where you are Chandra’s son or soand-so’s buddy ke pickni (Mohabir, 2017, p. 26) In this passage, translinguality emerges word by word; individual vocabulary items index cultural knowledge. The “coolie Uncle” in the “kurta” mouthing “Marley” indexes India and the Caribbean in the same phrase, connecting them in the mouth of a resident of Richmond Hill. Being “Chandra’s son” reaches into an Indian ancestry, being “so-and-so’s buddy

“Particularized Worlds”  85 ke pickni” reaches into a Caribbean linguistic community, “pickni” being a term for “child” throughout the Anglophone Caribbean. Mohabir traces familial lines here; tracking Queens-based inheritances and heritages, lineages of immigrants. Queens, the most diverse county in the United States, welcomes these layered American identities and recognizes them, offers a home that exists in a context of constant instability and displacement, embracing mobility where, as the poem suggests, other places might reject it. The poem ends with the speaker being embraced in Richmond Hill’s “coolie arms,” a reference to the indentured histories of Indo-Guyanese people in Queens7 and continuing the reclamation of the term “coolie,” once used as a pejorative term for Indian and Chinese people contracted to work on sugar and other plantations in the era immediately after the end of chattel slavery in the Caribbean (e.g., Bahadur, 2016). The voice of Richmond Hill, personified, ends the poem in a whisper in the speaker’s ear noting the speaker’s three-year absence; it speaks in Creolese, imploring the speaker: “dis time na long time.” And with this final Creole sound bite, Mohabir creates a complicated ending to the poem for a reader who is not a speaker of Creolese: reading through the filter of other Englishes, which many readers of Mohabir’s poem may do, the final line is potentially ambiguous for non-Creolese speaker because it is speakable, and, when spoken, sounds very close to many other varieties of English, including standardized English, but one word, the central word “na,” offers two potential meanings for those outside the linguistic community from whence it comes: does it mean “not” or does it mean “no”? That is, does this line mean, “the time was not a long time,” or “this time, don’t stay away for so long”? This ambiguity is unresolvable without translation, but both possible meanings work in the context of the poem, and so perhaps that is the point: after all, Mohabir is not only a speaker of Creolese and metropolitan English (London/New York) but also knows the questions, the requests for translation that speakers of Creolese encounter from nonspeakers. And so, in this line, we see how translingual writing positions monolingual, monovarietal English speakers as outsiders, and as such forces them to either seek help and translation, or to live with ambiguity and experience the loss, in a reflection of the experience that accompanies migration. “Ode to Richmond Hill” works as translingual poetry not only because of Mohabir’s code-meshing use of language but also because it draws connections between several linguistic communities with which Mohabir is affiliated, and which, in other poems, he explores and claims as key contributors to his identity. As a final step in this chapter, I will briefly explore how translingual writing can draw temporary affiliations as well as more permanent ones: as I mentioned previously, translingual writing is performance, rather than the only possible way in which translingual writers can write. In Mohabir’s poem “Mynah,” for instance, the language travels

86  “Particularized Worlds” between standardized written English, Guyanese creole, Hindi, and Hawai’ian, tracking the sounds of the word “mynah” through these languages. The poem is built around repetition of the sounds in “mynah” and traces a shared history of the word—“myna,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, being recorded in English in the early 17th century, borrowed from the Hindi name for that bird, which, as the first stanza of the poem indicates, has “rove[d] the world over” (Mohabir, 2017, p. 51; OED, 2020). Although Mohabir’s speaker calls the mynah homeless, its name connects it to an Indian home, but the sounds take it from India to London to Guyana and then to Hawai’i. Mohabir notes the movement between languages through changes in orthography and typography, even as the sounds are connected: “minor,” “minah,” “Maina,” “kama’āina.” In the movement between these words, all must be pronounced the same, for the rhyme scheme forces a pronunciation of “minor” where the final -r is elided, so making the one word that looks like American English sound different in a standardized American accent. Through this word, Mohabir maps his own global movements alongside and upon the global migrations of his family; the affiliations that he draws with language stretch deep into the Anglophone world’s colonial histories. Conclusion Sometimes borderland spaces are spaces to be inhabited and explored, rather than passed through or avoided all together. Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, of course, explores what it is like to live in the space, and how it is to be in the borderlands space: she ends her poem, “To live in the Borderlands, you,” with an invocation: “you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 195). Translingual writing like Staceyann Chin’s and Rajiv Mohabir’s shows language that functions sin fronteras; it shows how English is a crossroads, echoing the movements of the people who speak it. Mohabir’s and Chin’s poetry explores the space of authenticity and corruption, often settling in the space of corruption and asking the questions so what? What now? If, as in Mohabir’s “Mynah,” we trace our languages’ histories through a series of dilutions and dislocations, then our only way through is in fact to dwell in and embrace those mixes, those changes. I began this chapter with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s entreaty, from a story told in her Nobel lecture, where her speaker asked their interlocutors to show her their “particularized world.” Through her use of this phrase, Morrison explored the possibilities that language affords when it is used to describe experiences and lives whose descriptions have been deemed unimportant or uninteresting in canonical literature. She writes that “The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers” (Morrison, 1993). In

“Particularized Worlds”  87 this sentence, Morrison also offers a description of what translingual writing does that literature written in standardized metropolitan forms cannot, though she does not write about translingual writing per se. So, in this chapter, I have suggested that, through its use of sound and its connection to the lived experience of migration, translingual writing offers a rich medium for the description of lives that have often been rendered invisible in national literatures, which often seem to prefer arrival to movement. Morrison’s characters in her Nobel Prize lecture also speak of how language can be used to preserve one speaker’s dignity while subjugating another’s: the full quotation around these words “particularized world” is the following: “Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world” (Morrison, 1993). In this fuller quotation, Morrison suggests that even telling a “particularized world,” by using language to describe our own experiences rather than to offer generalizations and universalizations, carries a risk of losing face; nonetheless, it is only by getting into the particulars of “the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers and writers” (Morrison, 1993) that language can be vital, forceful, felicitous. Even as language can only ever approximate experience, I suggest in this chapter that translingual writing might get us closer in our approximation, and help readers work through the discomfort of not understanding, to see better the lived experiences of “others.” The code-meshed translingual writing that I discuss here demonstrates powerfully how it is to live in the geographical and cultural borderlands of the United States, embracing constant change and variation in language and being in constant negotiation with an audience or reader. This writing can be seen as an effort to hold onto and make visible writers’ transnational connections and identities in the face of the homogenizing forces which accompany the migration, especially when migrants must learn new languages. Migration often emphasizes forward motion, offering the dream of a better life but eliding the loss that accompanies mobility and the fact that living as an immigrant often means being assigned to, or living in, a space of perpetual leaving-behind as well as moving-towards. In translingual writing, these spaces are made visible and held in tension: translingual writing dwells on the past even as it inscribes possible futures for what count as national languages. In this sense, I offer an alternative to the teleological pressure that often accompanies considerations of linguistic plurality in literature, such as explored by Kellman (2000) in The Translingual Imagination, or by Sollors (1998) in the introduction to Multilingual America; in these texts, the authors focus on multi- or translingual people, who cross over between languages and do not, in each separate text, look back. In this chapter, on the other hand, my focus is on how translingual writing shows a writer’s languages working simultaneously, gesturing towards a visibly pluralized way of engaging the world through language.

88  “Particularized Worlds” Notes 1 In this chapter, I use the terms “minoritized” and “standardized,” rather than the more common “minority” and “standard,” in order to emphasize the socially constructed nature of these conditions. 2 Code-meshing, a term popularized by Young (2009) and Canagarajah (2011), refers to language that merges different varieties, languages, registers, and orthographic conventions within small syntactic units as well as in a text as a whole; code-switched language, on the other hand, refers to language in which the boundaries between varieties and languages occur between syntactic units (sentences, paragraphs), and the lines between these languages and varieties are clearly marked. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, for instance, can be thought of a as a code-switching text, because there are clear delineations between the standardized American English spoken by the narrator and the African American vernaculars spoken by the characters in the book (Hurston, 2018). 3 My use of the term “performance” here builds on the idea of gender performance proposed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (Butler, 2002). For a discussion of performance specifically as it relates to language identity, see the chapter “Transing Identity,” in Robinson, Hall, and Navarro, 2020. 4 Josephs (2009) includes the following footnote: “See Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean, edited by Stewart Brown, Mervyn Morris, and Gordon Rohlehr (Essex.: Longman, 1989) for a discussion of voice-portraits” (footnote 6, p. 168). 5 One of Hindi’s most recognizable sounds is the retroflex, where the back of the tip of the tongue hits the alveolar ridge when pronouncing many of that language’s sounds. English does not use this retroflex tongue position, instead using a tip-up position. Indeed, the positioning of the tongue tip in making some of language’s most common sounds—t, d, s, z, r, l—creates one of the most distinctive features of an accent. 6 See Mona Domosh’s “Postcolonialism in the American City,” where she discusses the ways in which writing about New York has emphasized its foreignness (Domosh, 2004). See also Natasha Warikoo’s work on the identities of Indo-Caribbean immigrants in New York City (Warikoo, 2004). 7 Much of Mohabir’s work investigates the legacies of indenture on cultural production in the Indian diaspora, including his “Coolitude Project” (Mohabir, 2021).

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“Particularized Worlds”  89 Brathwaite, E.K. (1993). The history of the voice. In Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Butler, J. (2002). Gender trouble (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, A.S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 401–417. Chin, S. (2019). Crossfire: A litany for survival. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. “chutney, n.” OED Online. (2020, 29 June). Oxford University Press. Retrieved July 28, 2020, from https://www-oed-com Díaz, J. (2007). The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books. Domosh, M. (2004). Postcolonialism in the American city. Urban Geography, 25(8), 742–754. Gopinath, G. (2005). Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures., Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Helgesson, S., & Kullberg, C. (2018). Translingual events: World literature and the making of language. Journal of World Literature, 3(2), 136–152. Hurston, Z.N. (2018). Their eyes were watching God. Virago Press. Josephs, K.B. (2009). Dissonant desires: Staceyann Chin and the queer politics of a Jamaican accent. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 42(2), 153–170. Kellman, S. (2000). The translingual imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lanser, S.S. (1992). Fictions of authority: Women writers and narrative voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mohabir, R. (2017). The Cowherd’s son. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press. Mohabir, R. (2021). Coolitude project. Rajiv Mohabir. Retrieved from http:// www.rajivmohabir.com/coolitude-project. Morrison, T. (1993). Nobel lecture. NobelPrize.org, Nobel Media, December 7. Retrieved July 19, 2020, from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/ morrison/lecture “myna, n.” OED Online. (2020, June). Oxford University Press. Retrieved July 30, 2020, from https://www-oed-com Nelson, E.S. (1992). Reworlding: The literature of the Indian diaspora. New York: Greenwood Press. Robinson, H., Hall, J., & Navarro, N. (2020). Translingual identities and transnational realities in the U.S. college classroom. New York: Routledge. Royster, J.J. (1996). When the first voice you hear is not your own. CCC, 47(1), 29–40. Sollors, W. (1998). Introduction: After the culture wars; or, from “English only” to “English plus”. In W. Sollors (Ed.), Multilingual America: Transnationalism, ethnicity, and the languages of American literature (pp. 1–16). New York: NYU Press. Srivastava, V.K. (2020). Anatomy of stigma: Understanding COVID-19. Social Change, 50(3), 385–398. Tanikella, T. (2009). Voices from home and abroad New York City’s Indo-Caribbean media. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12, 167–185.

90  “Particularized Worlds” Warikoo, N. (2004). Cosmopolitan ethnicity: Second-generation Indo-Caribbean identities. In P. Kasinitz, J. H. Mollenkopf, & M. C. Waters (Eds.), Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the new second generation (pp. 361–391). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Wolfe, T. (1935). Only the dead know Brooklyn. The New Yorker, June 1935. Retrieved July 17, 2020, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1935/06/15/ only-the-dead-know-brooklyn Young, V.A. (2009). “Nah, we straight”: An argument against code switching. JAC, 29(1–2), 49–76.

7 “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” Disidentification and Memory in the Poetry of Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips is a singular writer in the context of Caribbean poetry, and she is a singular figure in the context of this book. She is a Caribbean poet who left Barbados, as so many Caribbean writers do; however, after a brief sojourn in the United States, she returned home and stayed, building her career and her life on the island. Now, she is a poet embedded in the heart of Barbadian national and literary identity: poet laureate, editor of BIM journal, friend and companion of George Lamming, and a poet who is committed to “page-based poetry” (Lee, n.d.) as opposed to spoken-word or performance poetry for her own works. In this exploration of Phillips’ work, I continue my consideration of what it is to make home, and specifically to stay home, particularly in a region like the Caribbean which is shaped by diaspora, both historical, forced by plantation slavery and indenture, and current, forced by economic and cultural pressures. In Phillips’ commitment to living in the Caribbean, she sits in contrast to many Caribbean writers who have lived abroad for much if not all of their careers, and in contrast to the other writers whose work I explore in this book and for whom mobility is a driving force behind their poetry. Phillips and her work, on the other hand, are not only steeped in Caribbean history but also in how these histories shape everyday life in the Caribbean. These histories include linguistic histories, which include the development of creoles out of the enforced contact between African, indigenous, and metropolitan languages that take place under settler colonialism and plantation-based systems of slavery and the legacies of living in a British colony. In some ways, we could consider Esther Phillips to be an example of an anti-diasporic poet, whose object in her writing is to explore the experience of staying put. But just like those writers who I discussed in the previous two chapters, who are contending with the idea of a distant home, Phillips is contending with a past that is remembered, with certain memories suppressed and certain others brought forward to create a narrative that includes the present and future. She is also rewriting, or reframing, the stories of the Caribbean that have been circulating among writers from the DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-7

92  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” Caribbean diaspora who have resettled in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and Africa, among other places. She writes back, as it were, not just to the empire that brought the Drax family to Barbados, and which enriched and continues to enrich all of their descendants, but also to other Barbadian and other Caribbean writers. For Phillips does something radical for a Caribbean writer, especially those of her generation, by staying home and trying to tell a story of Barbados from inside, without the critical as well as physical distance offered by the oceans between the Caribbean and the metropolitan centers where so many writers of her generation settled. And it is for this reason that I include the works of Esther Phillips in this discussion of mobility, diaspora, and home: Phillips writes in a context built out of diaspora, but rather than continuing to move, she decided to stay. Her work with language, I suggest, reflects this decision to live in situ with the past and so shares qualities with the work of Chinua Achebe, who contends with the linguistic violence of colonization by claiming English as his own language, one that he uses and reshapes to tell African stories. For, while English has been imposed and enforced upon the people of Barbados, Esther Phillips uses it to create a literature that belongs to that place. Phillips’ work comprises an attempt to create a new vision of a Bajan literary home that incorporates the colonial histories and linguistic legacies that Caribbean writers must contend with, on Bajan terms. In this way, Phillips enacts the same kind of reclamation of the home space that I explore throughout this book; her work with memory and the creation and recreation of Barbadian histories and home recalls Jasbir Jain’s description of the work of diasporic writers: Diasporic writers have used memory and history to understand not only the nature of the “self” but also the nature of the “other”. They have worked with a cultural past and woven it with the history of their ancestors, have explored the construction of the “self” in a political world and experimented with the aesthetics of writing, negotiating not only their migratory experience but also their cultural pluralities. (Jain, 2017, p. 27) Phillips’ engagement with the politics of home-making, and specifically of writing home in a context that has historically denied that she and other Black Barbadians have a central space in the histories of the island, thus picks up the thread of this book in which I explore how marginalized people assert their visibility in a landscape that wants them invisible. The theoretical framework that I use to analyze how Phillips positions herself within and against the colonial histories and traditions is José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” (Muñoz, 1999), an

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  93 orientation that at once resists colonial legacies while at the same time using and redefining them for the colonized, marginalized subject’s own purposes. I suggest that Phillips’ subjectivity, as it comes through her poetry, is a disidentificatory one in that she is, in Muñoz’s terms, “working on and against” dominant ideologies to “transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance” (Munoz, 1999, pp. 11–12). This description of disidentification is apt for Phillips’ work. As poet laureate of Barbados, Phillips’ poetry, especially her 2021 volume Witness in Stone, retells the legacies of colonization through an exploration of everyday sites and experiences. Similarly, her recent public writing tells the story of Barbados becoming a republic in later 2021, contextualizing that event within the living histories of the island and the remnants of the time of colonization and plantation slavery that still mark the landscape of Barbados, both physically and psychologically. As Muñoz explains, disidentification does not entail a wholesale rejection of dominant ideologies, but rather an embrace of them for purposes that might contradict the effects of these dominant ideologies and the authors and architects of them. I see Phillips’ use of formal, standardized, written Englishes as an example of her disidentificatory practices since, I suggest, we must always imagine these Englishes as being written in a Barbadian voice and pronounced with a Barbadian accent. Because, as I have written elsewhere (e.g., Robinson, 2019; Robinson, Hall, & Navarro, 2020), while standardized Englishes always have the effect of delocalizing language and creating space for the reader’s own voice and own context, when they are read aloud and made into oral languages, they always bear the sounds of the local varieties. In the next sections, I explore in more detail what this disidentificatory positioning means for Phillips’ poetry, considering how Phillips how navigates language, standardized and vernacular (Ahmad & Nero, 2012) in her works. Esther Phillips and “Nation Language” Esther Phillips’ poetry mostly lives in standardized English—but not always. A careful reading of Phillips’ poetry shows that no single reading of Phillips’ relationship with “nation language” (Brathwaite, 1993) and standardized English is possible. Nation language is, in Brathwaite’s definition, “the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors” (Brathwaite, 1993, p. 260). While Brathwaite focused on using and representing

94  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” “nation language” in his works, so rendering the sound of Caribbean Englishes in writing, Phillips uses nation language sparingly, mostly writing in standardized English. But, on reading through Phillips’ oeuvre, and reading it in the context of her popular and activist writing, Phillips’ positioning is not an assimilatory one: she does not identify with—or see herself in—the dominant ideologies of colonization and the writings of the colonial centre. Nor does she occupy the kind of archipelagic/utopian positionality that Brathwaite and other Caribbean writers-in-exile stake out, seeking, as Ashcroft (2016), following Bloch (1986) and Otto (2005), puts it, a “Heimat,” “the home we have all sensed but never known” (Ashcroft, 2016, p. 89). Phillips, rather, finds home in Barbados and creates a futurity there that incorporates the island’s pasts and is grounded in a life whose place is in the present. She has what poets who live abroad do not—a present based on the island and in the islands. Thus, though we can say perhaps that her poetry does not have the same critical distance that writers in exile have, as Evelyn O’Callaghan describes, Phillips creates a Barbadian linguistic center in her work which offers a different, valuable world view. Indeed, Phillips’ most effective poems are those where Barbados is clearly central in her world view. There has been a shift in the ways that Phillips has asserted this Barbadian center in her poetry over time. In her 2003 poem, “Just Riffing,” we see an association between being able to speak the rhythms of Bajan English and being outside the island. The speaker in “Just Riffing” is outside the Caribbean, thinking back to the sounds of that place. In the first stanza, the speaker expresses a fear of “losing [their] true rhythm” as they live and work outside Barbados, and instead being colonized by the meters that characterize Anglo-American poetry. Sometimes I get frighten’ that I losing my true rhythm: like if I standing still outside my heart, hearing it beating in iambic metre, unrhymed trimetre. (Phillips, 2021c, p. 73) These lines, written in an “eye dialect” (Tidwell, 1942, p. 174), are meant to represent the sounds of Bajan speech, gesture to “nation language,” and recollect Brathwaite’s assertion that “the hurricane does not roar in [iambic] pentameter” (Brathwaite, 1993, p. 265). Here, the speaker fears that they are losing their “true” rhythm as they live and work outside Barbados, and instead having the rhythms of other poetic traditions imposed

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  95 upon them. In later lines in the poem, Phillips also contrasts the language of Barbadian musicians, which flows “strong and smooth,” with the formal structures of poetry. On the other hand, in this poem, the positioning of the speaker outside Barbados creates space for Bajan to be heard, to be hearable as such: in this poem, it takes being outside to hear the difference. Phillips’ positioning with respect to standardized English hews to the positioning described by Chinua Achebe in his essay “English and the African Writer.” Achebe writes: I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings. (Achebe, 1965, p. 30) Like Achebe, Phillips’ poetry demonstrates a belief that English can “carry the weight” of her Barbadian experience. But her use of mostly standardized English orthographies and syntaxes—structures which delocalize written language—alongside her attested commitment to “page-based poetry” complicates this analysis. Perhaps, we could say, Phillips’ poetry shows us a new English, a Barbadian English when there is no point of comparison, no “other,” because she is writing in Barbados, for Barbadians. From this perspective, I might argue that Phillips does not need to write in vernacular, in nation language, because she and her poetry come from Barbados and she reads it in Barbados and so sounds Barbadian. Phillips uses nation language strategically, sparingly, in her later works. Her weightiest poems, the poems that critique British colonization and the enslavers of her ancestors, are always rendered in standardized English, and the more playful, less serious poetry is rendered in nation language. Phillips, in her disidentificatory positioning, uses standardized English without identifying with standardized English, as the analysis of “We Island People” in the next section explains. Phillips’ work with Englishes, standardized and vernacular, shows us why the disidentification framework is important: she works from the premise that it is possible to be critical of the structures that colonization has imposed but to not reject them entirely. What does seem clear, though, is that in earlier poems the use of nation language, or the Bajan vernacular, was a strategy to give voice to those who were rendered voiceless under systems of slavery and colonization. On the other hand, in her later works Phillips uses the Bajan vernacular as a site of play, of joy (see also 2021b for Phillips’ joy at hearing old Bajan sayings on the radio), of groundedness in the present of the island.

96  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” The playfulness of Phillips’ use of nation language can be seen in her 2009 poem “Transition Radio,” reprinted in her 2014 volume Leaving Atlantis. This poem shows Phillips using deliberate code-­switching and deliberate voicing to make her point. “Transition Radio” starts with an admonition to the speaker’s “love” who is angry that someone has broken into his house and stolen his German radio. The speaker tells “G,” the owner of the radio, Don’t get vex, love; is you who praise Caliban fuh tiefin words from European. (Phillips, 2009, p. 17) The use of nation language in these opening lines first aligns the speaker with Barbados, with the local, with Caliban, a main character of Shakespeare’s The Tempest who is generally read as a representative of the colonized, enslaved Caribbean. Indeed, these three lines are a gesture to George Lamming’s work in his book of essays The Pleasures of Exile, where he writes back to the Caliban story (Lamming, 1960).1 But, as the poem progresses, we see rereading and a reanalysis of Caliban, in which Phillips turns the enslaved Caliban, who is potentially left behind after Prospero returns to Milan, into a thief, someone who takes the language, rather than having it imposed upon him. The language that Caliban has “tief,” in Phillips’ telling, is “learned,” connecting Caliban and this symbol of the Caribbean to the rest of the world but particularly to the colonial centre and the BBC, which had enacted the colonial project for years. And yet here Caliban embraces it, seeks it out, makes it his own. Indeed, stealing the language, in this version, is both deliberate and arduous: it is something that he wanted, that he thought had value. all dat learned discourse on global upheaval de BBC world news, de latest Book Reviews— (Phillips, 2009, p. 17) According to “Transition Radio,” what is now in Caliban’s possession is “learned discourse” and the voice of the empire itself, “de BBC world news.” Caliban has taken the discourse to which he was denied access by the colonizers. Notably, too, Phillips positions “G” as the agent of the colonizers here—he was the one who owned the radio and is angry about it being stolen and, he imagines, sold for just a few dollars. Furthermore, the speaker shows that “G” believes that Caliban will not appreciate the

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  97 value of what comes out of the radio. But, instead, Phillips’ speaker sides with Caliban and supports the theft: he is, the speaker indicates, doing what he needs to do to take up a new position, a free position, with respect to global discourses. Caliban just expanding his options. Is cultural emancipation, love, is culture in transition. (Phillips, 2009, p. 17) This poem is an affectionate one, spoken in the voice of a lover. But this is also neither an identification with the colonial world that comes out of the radio or with Caliban, who Brathwaite and others identify with the “alter/ native” world of the Caribbean (and his mother, the precolonial Sycorax; Brathwaite, 1992). “Getting free,” for Phillips, means leaving people to do what they want with the colonial residues, to “expand” new “options,” to force a change in the culture. “Transition Radio” is an unusually self-conscious poem for Phillips, whose poetry tends more towards the naturalistic and the domestic than to the literary; it not only engages with Caribbeanist narratives of Caliban but does so in nation language, perhaps an indication of Phillips building joy into the tireless work of “cultural emancipation” which she has undertaken as a Bajan poet and as poet laureate of Barbados. Phillips uses other poetic strategies to build this joy in too. One of Phillips’ primary projects, especially in her 2021 volume, is using nature imagery to reclaim the sites of colonization and plantation which still shape the Barbadian landscape and structure Barbadian memory. Phillips uses nation language in one poem in her 2021 anthology. This poem, “Woman Tongue Tree,” describes the seasons of a common tree on Barbados—a tree that is in fact an introduced species—which she nonetheless anthropomorphizes into one of Barbados’s people, writing the tree as a woman living in that place, being a part of the community, sharing in the news and the stories of the people there: Some days she get real sombre, and talk ‘bout time and patience and cycles and seasons; how humans got a lot to learn. At other times is like she get a joke, and when she start to shake wid laugh, percussion sweet fuh days! (Phillips, 2021c, p. 43)

98  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” This poem is about endurance, about the cycles of time, but the voicing of the poem in nation language makes it a particularly Barbadian time and Barbadian endurance—a tree introduced onto the island from across the world—but which has emerged, for Phillips, as a symbol of endurance and change in this place, of pleasure and joy, of “time and patience / and cycles and seasons.” And so, perhaps, “Woman Tongue Tree” shows the practice of disidentification in a different way than the previous poems: a use of nation language to create a local sensibility, all the while connecting the islands that Phillips inhabits in her poetry and public writing with the rest of the world, showing how this tree from far away has become part of the place, the voice of the place, where it lives now. Memory and Making Home The poems that I discussed previously show the interplay of language and the making and claiming of home. In this section, I spend time with another of Phillips’ poems from 2021, “We Island People” (Phillips, 2021c, pp. 75–77). This poem creates a particular positioning of living on an island, abstracting away from the particulars of Barbadian life and histories into an island identity that was a site of exploration for many of Phillips’ countrypeople, including Brathwaite and George Lamming. However, rather than exploring the connectedness of the Caribbean archipelago, or the links between the archipelago and the colonial metropoli, Phillips presents the island as a refuge, a place from which to reject standards set by those overseas, across the water. The first three lines of the poem point to the landscape of Barbados, characterizing the ocean as “shutting in” the islands’ inhabitants. We who have few caves hills mountains, in which to hide shut in by sea and ocean. (Phillips, 2021c, p. 77) But shutting in in this context is not the same as making the island “insular,” a positioning that many in island studies have pushed against (Pugh, 2013, Stratford et al., 2011; see also Chapter 9 of this volume); rather, the shutting in creates a space of safety, a place to create an identity, as the following lines show: And so we circle inward, become our own caves; relish the darkness, unmask,

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  99 slough off the outward skin; feel the damp air cool the burn of public gaze … (Phillips, 2021c, p. 75) Phillips’ reclaiming of “the darkness” is a gesture that speaks to the enforced “enlightenment” of colonization, of anti-Black feelings that have afflicted people across the Caribbean. The insulation that she experiences on her island allows its inhabitants to “unmask”—to stop performing for an outside—white, colonizer—observer/audience and live on their own terms. This poem offers a different kind of perspective on the language of Barbados than we saw in the poems I discussed earlier, speaking to the challenges of asserting a linguistic identity in the wake of linguistic colonization, a colonization where indigenous and African languages were largely obliterated and the remaining creoles stigmatized: … while our tongues are quick to shape the syllables of foreign nations, the song of the heart will always find its roots, its rhythms, the syncopation of its truest joys and sorrows here in these caves, hills and mountains, these streams and rivers, seas and oceans (Phillips, 2021c, p. 77) In this passage, Phillips expresses ambivalence about using the colonizer’s language and about the origins of those languages as coming from outside the island. But her language and the language of Barbadians will always for her be anchored in that place, that island, and so can express home even if the origins of the language lie in “foreign nations.” It is in this passage that we see Phillips’ most explicit expression of her Achebean perspective on using English: that while the basis of the English that she uses is “foreign,” its use in Barbados, the ways in which the speakers of English in Barbados have made it a language that expresses the island’s “rhythms, the syncopation / of its truest joys and sorrows” means that it is a language that is equal to expressing Barbadian experience. At this point, it is a language built for endurance and that can convey the survival of its Black Barbadian

100  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” speakers. Nation language for Phillips is one of her tools as a poet, one of the Englishes at her disposal alongside standardized written English; both, when written, have to be able to stand up well into the future. For Phillips, in her writing, is interested in posterity. Phillips is committed to being a “page-based” poet, which she places in opposition to the “sound and fury” of performance and spoken-word poetry, as we see in the following passage, taken from an interview with fellow poet John Robert Lee: I have made my peace with the idea of spoken word/performance poetry mainly by deciding that it is simply different from page-based poetry, and does not/cannot have the same demands placed on it. I believe that page-based poetry requires every last one of the skills you have mentioned [the essential attention that should be given to shaping form with care, to logical setting out of thoughts and ideas]; all skills to which I adhere and for which I have the greatest regard. This, I believe, is the literature that will last and have greater impact long after the sound and fury have blown over. (Lee, n.d.) The last sentence of this quotation speaks to one of Phillips’ goals in her poetry: to create works that endure. And the way that she sees to make her Barbadian poetry and language endure is by writing it down to be read rather than by performing it. Phillips’ positioning of her own poetry offers a challenge to what has emerged as a central orthodoxy of Caribbean letters: that the anticolonial stance is and must be one of positioning spoken language as the primary discourse of the region, because of the ways that written language erases the local positioning of language and assimilates it to standardized, colonizer Englishes. As Kelly Baker Josephs writes, Kamau Brathwaite and Edouard Glissant, two major theorists of Caribbean discourses, place spoken language at the center of Caribbean writing: “Glissant observes that the written word is especially diminishing to Caribbean speech, which is ‘always excited, it ignores silence, softness, sentiment … For Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is Discourse’” (Josephs, 2003, p. 123). In History of the Voice, Brathwaite makes a similar statement: “the noise that [nation language] makes is part of the meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of as noise, shall I say) then you lose part of the meaning. When it is written, you lose the sound or the noise, and therefore you lose part of the meaning” (1993, p. 17). Phillips, on the other hand, eschews the “sound and the fury” of spoken-word poetry. Rather, she places her poetry, Barbadian poetry, in the same medium, the same context as English and American poetry—white

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  101 poetry—that has been taught to colonial children as conveying universal truths in universal language. I suggest that Phillips has chosen these terms of engagement because she wants to erase any difference between her poetry, created out of and written about Barbados, and the poetry of expatriate Caribbean authors and of white British and American authors. In doing so, though, she risks the trap that Audre Lorde writes of: “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 2015). But, indeed, this dismantling is not Phillips’ goal. Rather, as her writing and speech about Drax Hall and reparations for the people of Barbados shows, she wants to claim the master’s house and live in the memories of that place, rather than trying to remove it from the landscape (see, for example, Phillips’ essay “Pay Up, Mr. Drax,” in Barbados Today [Phillips, 2021a]). Through this lens, we can see a connection between Phillips’ activist work, in writing and interviews concerning reparations for Barbados, and campaigning for the opening up and returning of Drax Hall to the descendants of the Barbadians who built it, and her use of standardized Englishes and insistence on page-based poetry: the language, the places, belong to Barbados, even if they were imposed upon the people who remain there after the colonizers have left. This kind of positioning is exemplary of Muñoz’s disidentification: a reorientation of dominant ideologies, rather than a wholesale rejection and destruction of them. Thus, the interest in posterity that Phillips expresses in the interview with John Robert Lee (Lee, n.d.) can be seen as being connected to Phillips’ work on retelling and recentering Caribbean histories: Phillips wants to tell the story of the present and to move forward. To do so, she is rewriting the histories of Barbados with the Black Bajan experience at the center of this narrative, to create a sense of “home” in her poetry. Doing this, as the descendent of enslaved people on the island, is an act of resistance, similar to that which Gayatri Gopinath describes queer diasporic literature undertaking. Gopinath writes, “Rather than simply doing away with home and its fictions of (sexual, racial, communal) purity and belonging, queer diasporic literature instead engages in a radical reworking of multiple home spaces” (2005, p. 165). I suggest that Phillips’ work, in Gopinath’s terms, “refigure[s] … the space of home,” not, as in the texts in Gopinath’s study, “through the articulation of queer desire,” but rather through the articulation of a poetry that centers Barbadian experiences, Barbadian histories, and Barbadian landscapes. Phillips’ re/writing “home” from a Black Barbadian perspective resonates with the importance—and elusiveness—of the concept of home for enslaved people, for whom homes could only be made in secret or under the supervision (and with the permission) of the enslavers. Thus, claiming a home in a space shaped by slavery is an act of resistance, and living in that home that was once not yours is a particular power move (see also Villeñas [2001], in which the author explores the

102  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” importance of creating a “moral” family home—“el hogar”—among disenfranchised immigrant Latina mothers in a North Carolina industrial town). We see this resistance in Phillips’ poetry about Waterman Straws, the Drax Estate, and other sites of Barbados’ history of colonization and plantation slavery. This orientation towards home and reclamation means building on the realities in which we exist, rather than seeking and creating alternative ones. Home, for Phillips, is not something looked at and critiqued from a distant site “outside,” but rather something that is dismantled and rebuilt from within. We see this dismantling and rebuilding increasingly over the course of Phillips’ work, where her positionality shifts from one where she views Barbadian experiences from outside, seemingly writing for someone who is not from there, to one where her Barbadian experience at the center, and the stories that her poems tell are steeped in the life of the island. Esther Phillips and Memory

Especially in her later work, Phillips’ poetry and public writing focuses on working through memory, or the residual impact of Barbados’ particular colonial histories, on the Barbadians of African descent who have stayed on the island. She creates a continuity from these historical facts that have been difficult, by her telling, for many Black Barbadians to talk about and remember, and the future of the island that she puts forward in her work. She writes, Memory, then, is this amazing faculty we use in order to reach back into the past. Memory is not only the repository of our life experiences, but also contains the arsenal we need for our present and future survival; it is through our memory that we reach for resources that helped us out in difficult times. Memory is the touchstone by which we are able to test what should be avoided and discarded, and what is tried and proven to be worthwhile, or possibly enduring. (Phillips, 2021b) In another Barbados Today column from 2021, Phillips explored the silences about the past that she experiences from those living in Barbados. She writes, “I wonder … about the silence” that she hears not only from the former enslavers but also from the Black people whose ancestors were enslaved (Phillips, 2021a). She elaborates in the silence from the latter, suggesting that it stems from fear of retaliation from those who owned the plantations or supported the system, and from shame “because of the debased treatment they were forced to endure under the system of slavery,” having been made to believe that they were responsible for their own

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  103 debasement. Phillips ends with the observation that “what is unspoken is no less true or real, and may in fact gather greater force from being made to simmer under cover for centuries” (Phillips, 2021a). Phillips has taken it as her charge to bring the truth out and to reckon with this past in her poetry and public writing. We see this reckoning taking place in the final poem that I will explore in this chapter, a piece entitled “Barbados” (Phillips, 2012). Unlike in “We Island People” and many of her other poems where she contemplates her home, in “Barbados” Phillips does not refer to the landscape or the nature of the island. Rather, this poem is a consideration of history, of dealing with memory. Phillips begins this poem with a future orientation, writing: At last the heart makes its way past sadness and regret Grows at ease with shadows that move like humble servants about the room Sweeping up words where they had fallen as dust motes These lines indicate the difficulty of managing the past and an acknowledgment of the pain of colonization and a history of slavery that still lingers in the landscape and in the discourses of the island. However, in her image of the “shadows that move like humble servants about the room” Phillips is creating an image that reflects what would have been a common sight in the houses of Barbados’s slave-owning class during the colonial period. Is she asking people living in Barbados to accustom themselves to living like the owners, rather than the workers? Is she asking them to imagine the past as something that can help them manage their lives and their memories, something that is already a part of the household and should be acknowledged?2 The poem then turns to a specific engagement with the problem of histories written by others, rather than the Black Barbadians who remain on the island after the colonizers have left: she writes of the words, still lying about the island, which are Unconnected From anything we meant to say In these lines Phillips addresses the legacy of the colonizer’s history, and how Barbadians might live with it; here, she creates a distance between the words that are left and the histories that Barbadians would tell. The next lines describe limiting the pain of colonizer history and the memories shaped by enslavement; she writes of “brushing the edge off memory / turning it face downward.” The memory and the pain remains in place, and responding to it is necessarily complicated. In particular, the line

104  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” “turning it face downwards” indicates these complications through its ambiguity. Is memory turned face downwards like a mediaeval outcast, buried prone at the edge of the graveyard? Or is it turned face downward to keep it open to the place where the reader left it, like a book, in case it’s needed again? Phillips leaves these questions unanswered. One of Phillips’ most important contributions is her insistence on never comparing Barbados with anywhere else: it is the center, for her; even as England is “the poisoned head of the stream” (“Stairs,” Phillips 2021c, pp. 30–31). Even as she travels to England, records her poetry in England, publishes her work out of England, Barbados is the centre. And it is from this centre that Phillips enacts her practice of “remaking home from within,” which Gayatri Gopinath describes as an act often performed by women in diaspora. Gopinath explains that for “queer racialized migrant subjects,” “staying put” becomes a way of remaining within the oppressive structures of the home–as domestic space, racialized community space, and national space–while imaginatively working to dislodge its heteronormative logic. (Gopinath, 2005, p. 15) Phillips, in her work, does not dislodge the Caribbean’s “heteronormative logic,” which as Evelyn O’Callaghan writes, can be so problematic and destructive for women in the islands: “It is writers who have left … that dare to treat of such issues [attitudes to LGBTQI++ people, patriarchal oppression of women, etcetera] in their work” (2011, p. 140). These oppressions are underlying in Phillips’ work, and they are not what she directly engages with. However, Phillips does offer an epistemology of “staying put,” articulating what it means to remain or to be left behind because of the lack of desire—and power—to leave, an unwillingness to accept the losses that expatriation brings. In doing so, Phillips’ project is aligned with the project Gopinath describes in this quotation, because she is “dislodging” the exilic logic of Caribbean literature: that the Caribbean can only be seen and understood from the outside. She is also dislodging the colonial logics of Caribbean literature, where the focal point is the metropolitan centre and the Caribbean is often viewed at a distance. Instead, Phillips’ frame of reference is Caribbean, is Bajan. “Barbados,” recorded in 2012, foreshadows Phillips’ focus in her 2021 poetry and public writing on how memory interacts with the present in Barbados and asks the colonizers to engage with their role in shaping how Barbadians live: this poem was recorded by a British arts organization, the Southbank Centre, and is accessible on their website. In the vision offered by this poem, memory is everywhere, but it can also be set down, made to

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  105 hurt less. Edouard Glissant articulates a duty for Caribbean writers to show the relevance of the past to the presence (Glissant, 1999), and this is what Phillips does within her poetry and beyond: her public writing from 2021 is explicitly activist in its centering the people of Barbados in an examination of the island’s past, rather than allowing the histories of the island to continue to be told from the outside, even by expatriate Barbadians. Instead, Phillips claims a right to the histories of the island. Conclusion Michelle Cliff, in “Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot,” discusses Prospero’s two slaves, Caliban and Ariel, and how they have both functioned as symbols of the colonization of the Caribbean region and the Caribbean people (Cliff, 1991). Caliban has often been used to represent the “base” Caribbean—native and savage—whose fate, at the end of The Tempest, is unclear: Caliban may have been left to reclaim the island from Prospero, thus freed in fact if not in word, but may also have been taken, still enslaved, to Milan to continue to serve Prospero, whose virtues Shakespeare has Caliban begin to recognize late in the play. Ariel, on the other hand, is explicitly freed by Prospero at the end of the play because of his good service; however, unlike with Caliban, whose internal motivations are laid bare by Shakespeare, we have no idea of Ariel’s internal life and see him just as a symbol, an avatar of Prospero’s intellectualism and magic. These two enslaved creatures in the play have been seen in opposition to each other, but, as Cliff writes, according to Roberto Fernández Retamar, There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity; both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of air, although a child, is the intellectual. (1989, p. 16) Whereas Kamau Brathwaite’s project is to reclaim the Caribbean for Caliban and his mother Sycorax, we might say that Phillips’ project is to reclaim Ariel for the Caribbean, Ariel the magical, powerful “intellectual” who, after being freed by Prospero, disappears but remains a part of our understanding of the island, in the air and the land and the sea. There is no question that Ariel is freed, as there is with Caliban. And so Phillips’ project, I suggest, is to bring the Caribbean intellectual home, to make a case that argues that in fact Ariel stayed in the islands, shaping the futures of their inhabitants alongside Caliban, or perhaps even instead of him. What we see in Phillips’ poetry is also an attempt to merge Caliban and Ariel, as Retamar suggests we can and ought: there is no opposition between the

106  “Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!” airy Ariel and the earth-bound Caliban, but rather that they are both parts of the same story, the same system. Therefore, I see Phillips as writing back to many of the other Caribbean poets of her generation, and in particular to Kamau Brathwaite, who placed the story of Caliban and Sycorax at the heart of his reading of the Caribbean, and who placed nation language at the heart of his understanding of the discourse of the region. She writes back, too, to George Lamming, who, in his old age, returned to Barbados but who Phillips caricatures in “Transition Radio” as a representative of the old guard, as a man who did not trust Caliban to know what to do with what the world—via the Grundig radio—had to offer. Esther Phillips writes Barbadian poetry from Barbados, in Bajan standardized English and Bajan nation language, and so shows us the meaning of Gayatri Gopinath’s phrase, “remaking home from within,” in a context that has been shaped by arrivals and departures like no other place, for the last 400 years. Notes 1 The volume in which “Transition Radio” appears is a collection written to and for George Lamming about his return to the Caribbean after decades abroad. 2 Thanks to Michelle Brazier for asking me the pointed questions that helped me work better with this passage.

References Achebe, C. (1965). English and the African writer. Transition, 18, 27–30. Ahmad, D., & Nero, S. J. (2012). Productive paradoxes: Vernacular use in the teaching of composition and literature. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 12(1), 69–95. Ashcroft, B. (2016). Archipelago of dreams: Utopianism in Caribbean literature. Textual Practice, 30(1), 89–112. Bloch, E. (1986). The principle of hope, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brathwaite, E.K. (1993). The history of the voice. In Roots (pp. 259–304). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Brathwaite, K. (1992). Caliban’s guarden. Wasafiri, 8(16), 2–6. Cliff, M. (1991). Caliban’s daughter: The tempest and the teapot. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 12(2), 36–51. Glissant, E. (1999). Caribbean discourse, trans. J.M. Dash. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia. Gopinath, G. (2005). Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jain, J. (2017). The diaspora writes home: Subcontinental narratives. Jaipur/Singapore: Rawat/Springer.

“Talk ‘bout Battle fuh Language!”  107 Josephs, K.B. (2003). Versions of X/Self: Kamau Brathwaite’s Caribbean discourse. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 1(1), 1–15. Lamming, G. (1960 [1992]). The pleasures of exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lee, J.R. (n.d.) Esther Phillips: Vast interiors. Interview with Esther Phillips. ArtsEtc. Retrieved from http://www.artsetcbarbados.com/aestudios/esther-phillipsvast-interiors Lorde, A. (2015[1984]). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In Sister outsider: essays and speeches (pp. 110–114). Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Muñoz, J.E. (1999). Disidentifications. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Callaghan, E. (2011). Caribbean migrations: Negotiating borders. In F. Smith (Ed.), Sex and the citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (pp. 125–135). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Otto, M. (2005). The other side of the mirror: Utopian and heterotopian space in Kamau Brathwaite’s Dream Stories. Utopian Studies, 16(1), 27–44. Phillips, E. (2009). Witness in stone. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Phillips, E. (2012). Barbados. Southbank centre’s poetry Parnassus. Southbank Centre, July 25, 2012. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ DEJX_LxmZM Phillips, E. (2021a). Pay up, Mr. Drax (Part 1). Barbados Today, July 27, 2021. https://barbadostoday.bb/2021/07/27/btcolumn-pay-up-mr-drax-part-1/ Phillips, E. (2021b). Memory as survival. Barbados Today, September 8, 2021. https://barbadostoday.bb/2021/09/08/btcolumn-memory-as-survival/ Phillips, E. (2021c). Witness in stone. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Pugh, J. (2013). Island movements: Thinking with the archipelago. Island Studies Journal, 8(1), 9–24. Retamar, R.F. (1989). Caliban and other essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, H., Hall, J., & Navarro, N. (2020). Translingual identities and transnational realities in the U.S. college classroom. London and New York: Routledge. Robinson, H.M. (2019). Post-colonial composition: Appropriation and abrogation in the composition classroom. In B. Jaquette, R. Oenbring, & V. Milson-White (Eds.), Creole composition: Academic writing and rhetoric in the anglophone Caribbean (pp. 320–342). Parlor Press. Stratford, E., Baldachino, G., McMahon, E., Farbotko, C., & Harwood, A. (2011). Envisioning the archipelago. Island Studies Journal, 6(2), 113–130. Tidwell, J.N. (1942). Mark Twain’s representation of negro speech. American Speech, 17(3), 174–176. Villeñas, S. (2001). Latina mothers and small-town racisms: Creating narratives of dignity and moral education in North Carolina. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 32(1), 3–28.

8 A Flat White and a Banh Mi Third Spaces, Gender, and Language in the Suburban City

Introduction: Linguistic Space-Making The previous chapters of Language, Diaspora, Home have all taken as their central focus the language practices of people who are making homes in diasporic settings. These chapters use people’s accounts of how language has shaped places of belonging in their own lives, and the lives of those around them, gathered either via interview or by the reading of the poetry of diasporic writers. Chapter 8 shifts the focus of this volume away from home as a private, domestic space, and from the language practices of individuals in the context of their families, to language practices observed in more public places by researchers other than myself. A Flat White and a Banh Mi explores how the language practices of proprietors and customers in small spaces—small shops and cafés—in suburbs of the city of Sydney create places that sit between public and private, home and work, and what the implications of the languaging that we see in these places are for the study of women’s linguistic space-making practices that are the subject of this volume. Sydney is a suburban city. Unlike cities like New York, Paris, and London, where the boundaries between the business life and the residential life of the city are blurry, Sydney offers a central business district, known as the CBD, which is bounded by water to the north and west and by parks and major arterial roads to the east and south. Most Sydneysiders live beyond these boundaries, in suburbs that stretch out to the Blue Mountains in the west and to still more waterways in the north, east, and south. Thus, discussions of the “urban” in Sydney need take something of a different form to those that apply to the metropolitan cities of the northern hemisphere as well as the great cities of India, Africa, and Asia, since the urban experience of Sydney is a predominantly suburban one. This chapter thus offers an exploration of Sydney as a suburban city and considers two institutions that define the suburbs: small, local shops, and cafés. These venues,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-8

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  109 I suggest, offer interstitial third places (Oldenburg, 1989), which also function as third spaces (Bhabha, 1994; Bhabha & Rutherford, 2006; Soja, 1996), sitting between the public of work and the private of home. In this chapter, I explore how these sites function as third places and as linguistic third spaces, showing how the languaging practices of the owners and patrons of these sites create these functions. This discussion thus continues Language, Diaspora, Home’s consideration of linguistic home-making practices, extending the idea of home-making into spaces that operate between public and private. This chapter, as well as continuing with the storytelling methodologies that I discussed in Chapter 2, uses a methodology of rereading such as we see in Badwan (2021), particularly in Chapter 9 of that book. Here, after offering the theoretical underpinnings of the chapter and connecting the discussion here with that in earlier chapters, I reread ethnographic research conducted by Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), Jones et al. (2015), Wise (2010), and Rubino (2018) through the lens of women’s linguistic construction of third places and third spaces, working to understand what this shift in orientation changes in the analysis of their ethnographic encounters. These authors explore how diversity comes together in the city through their discussion of small shops in various ethnic suburbs of Sydney. Indeed, local shops are well-researched sites of cultural and linguistic contact in Sydney. For instance, Wise (2010) writes, in her discussion of social and cultural tensions in the changing suburban landscape of Sydney’s Ashfield, a suburb that has seen multiple immigrant groups settle there over the last century, that “the social field of small shops is different [to that of supermarkets], as these are traditionally places where interaction and a little exchange are commonplace” (p. 926). Antonia Rubino, following Clyne (2005), describes so-called “ethnic suburbs” and the “ethnic establishments” that they host as “gravitation points” (Clyne, 2005, p. 103), places for members of the ethnic group with whom they are identified to go, but “which also have increasingly appealed to a wider variety of visitors, which include the changing local residents and visitors … either for commercial or social reasons” (Rubino, 2018, p. 182). In small shops, the commercial and the social are closely tied together. Many of the shops that sociologists explore are specifically immigrant or ethnic spaces: spaces where languages and cultures come into contact and “rub along” (Watson, 2009). For a suburban city like Sydney, exploration of social and linguistic relations that emerge in these small shops is a particularly important piece of understanding how the city works, since such small shops appear in every suburb, and as such are simultaneously sites of stability—the shops endure—and change, as the people who run and who frequent the shops change with the arrival of suburban inhabitants from different cultural backgrounds.

110  A Flat White and a Banh Mi This chapter also explores Sydney’s suburban cafés and their cultures as sites of sociality and commerce that function in a similar space to local small shops. As Emma Felton’s, and Peter Walters and Alex Broom’s studies of café culture in Australia show (Felton, 2019; Walters & Broom, 2013), not only are small coffee shops ubiquitous in the Australian suburban landscape, but they also offer an in-between space for their patrons: a place that is neither home nor work, but which has elements of both. For my purposes, too, cafés, particularly what Felton calls “third wave” or “specialty” cafés, are an important site of inquiry because these spaces are not marked as immigrant or ethnic spaces as the small shops often are, even as they are often run by immigrants and their families. Rather, I suggest, they code as “Australian” spaces, as Felton’s discussion of the export of the Australian specialty café suggests (Felton, 2019, pp. 67–8),1 and so offer a site that is adjacent to, but crucially distinct from the small shops that have garnered so much sociolinguistic attention. Shops and cafés operate differently in terms to “the right to the city”: that is, who can share these spaces and who is excluded from them (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015, p. 101), and these differences are important in understandings how both shops and cafés function as third places and third spaces in the human and social geographies of the city. Because, too, of the understanding of shopping as a gendered activity, these two spaces are gendered differently, a distinction that is important in furthering the understanding I am working towards in this volume of how women’s agency, and women’s linguistic space-making works in various diasporic sites. Finally, this chapter makes the case that looking at suburbs as such, rather than engulfing them into the broad definition of the city, is important if we are to understand how linguistic and social contact function in suburban cities like Sydney. This contact is enabled by the prevalence of these third spaces—local places that have regular customers—in the suburbs (as opposed to the CBD), in small, in-between spaces rather than the big public of, for instance, the Sydney Produce Market or the train, to which Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) give a great deal of attention. Places such as cafés and small shops thrive in the suburban city because of the latter’s denser housing and “a pre-automobile legacy of retail strips within easy walking distance of homes and workplaces, mean[ing] that people who live in these areas have a natural advantage over those who, through preference or necessity, live in the suburbs” (Walters & Broom, 2013, p. 193). The walkability of the suburbs in Sydney, and other suburban cities like Canberra and Melbourne, is essential for the support of these third spaces: even if travel between suburbs takes longer, getting around a suburb, and importantly getting to the local shops, a feature of all these older suburbs in these cities, is a matter of walking rather than driving. Before

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  111 moving onto a more detailed discussion of how small shops and cafés function socially and linguistically, I move to introduce the framing terms for this chapter: third places and third spaces. Third Places and Third Spaces The term “third place” was coined by Ray Oldenburg to describe places other than the home (the first place) and work (the second place) which the Industrial Revolution separated and made very distant from each other, both physically and socially (Oldenburg, 1989). Home and work, as I have explored in this volume, “are relatively small worlds and both constrain individuals to play the social roles those settings require” (Oldenburg, 2013, p. 8). Unlike home and the workplace, though, third places are social spaces which are neither completely public nor completely private, and which foster connections between people who would otherwise be unlikely to be in contact with one another. Oldenburg writes that a third place is “one in which people from a diversity of backgrounds combine to expand one another’s understanding of the world and, out of the bonds formed there, community takes root” and a place in which “conversation is the main activity” (2013, p. 9). As such, according to Oldenburg (2013), and Walters and Broom (2013, in the same volume) cafés fit the definition of a “third place,” being, as Walters and Broom (2013) put it, “places that provide a link between the public and the private or domestic realms (Lofland, 1998) or, in other words, between work and home” (p. 186). I add small, local shops to this category: the local shops, and the interactions we see within them in Rubino (2018), Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), and Wise (2010), show local shops functioning as third places because they are places where people come together to build and maintain community connections. We see these connections through the social and linguistic expectations that these researchers describe among owners and patrons; we also see that these sites are something more than public because the connections between patrons and owners are more than transactional, more than transitory, but are not as intimate as the connections that we might see in the “first place,” home. In Language, Diaspora, Home, I have been interested in how language circulates in homes, and how that language can often contrast with what circulates in public. In this chapter, I consider how language circulates in third places such as local shops and cafés, and thus how these places operate as third spaces (following Bhabha, 1994 as well as Oldenburg, 1989), and also third spaces (following Soja, 1996). Michel de Certeau theorizes places as “the result of physical configurations and institutional orders,” whereas, according to Higgins, space is constituted by people’s activities in a physical place (Higgins, 2017, p. 103). The term “third space” in postcolonial theory refers to the space between colonizer and colonized, or, as

112  A Flat White and a Banh Mi Bhabha puts it, “self” and “other”: it is both a point of contact and the rejection of the self/other, colonized/colonizer binary, spaces where hybridity comes into being (Wolf, 2000, para. 38). According to Bhabha, then, the third space “carries the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 38). Flores and García use this framing of the term to develop their idea of the linguistic third spaces, in which speakers “defy ethnolinguistic identities defined by a nation state/colonial paradigm” (2014, p. 246) by “participating in fluid language practices” within a particular space. Lanza’s more elaborated definition of space is relevant here, particularly as it functions with respect to language: “Space is conceived as dynamic and continually negotiated among various social actors with different discursive power, material constraints, and spatial practices” (2021, p. 765). Thirdspace, then, as Higgins (2017) describes it, “refers to people’s experiences in spaces, which includes both their physical and imagined understandings of space” (p. 103). How language practices work in the two places that I am focusing on in this chapter, though, differs greatly, so it is to these differences that I will turn now. I first describe shops and cafés as third places, as physical sites that are places where people go. I then consider these third places as third spaces, as I explore how the ethnographers of these places describe people’s uses of and activities in them, and how their proprietors use language to turn them into third spaces. The final section of this chapter offers a reading of shops and cafés as gendered third places and third spaces, particularly looking at how women create third spaces in them through their language practices. Shops Sydney’s suburbs, especially those in the so-called inner ring and middle ring, are built on a recursive theme: a set of local shops around which lie a collection of high-to-middle-density residences. Travelling south or southwest on one of the train lines that radiate out of the city, the landscape gradually changes from old industrial, with brick warehouses, to tightly packed terraces and, increasingly, high-rise apartment buildings, to single family homes. Travelling north, the change between industrial and high-­ density housing is interrupted by a trip across the Harbour Bridge and a ride through the North Sydney business district before, again, the high-to-­ medium-density housing starts, interspersed with clumps of glittering highrises at St. Leonards, Artarmon, and Chatswood. From many of the stations along these train lines, we see a pattern recurring: a set of local shops arranged near the entrances to the station. For the suburbs not served by the train, but rather by the blue buses that connect the parts of the city that the trains do not, the pattern still repeats: the bus routes pass through sets of shops, then streets of flats and houses, then another set of shops, and so on.

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  113 Many of these suburbs have historically been associated with specific ethnic and cultural groups. Redfern has been known as a centre for indigenous Australians, Willoughby is the site of one of Sydney’s Armenian enclaves, Leichhardt and Haberfield have long been known as Italian suburbs, and Ashfield and Chatswood are both centres for Sydney’s Chinese community. As Amanda Wise writes, the ethnic identities of Sydney’s suburbs are in constant flux: in the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, Ashfield was a community of Anglo-Celtic Australians, before being a centre for Greek and Italian immigrants, and its community is now a mix of Anglo, Italian, Indian, and Chinese Australians (Wise, 2010, p. 918). However, movement between suburbs in Sydney is extensive, as Antonia Rubino writes of Leichhardt and Haberfield: “While both initially serviced the Italian community, they have increasingly appealed to a wider variety of visitors, which include the changing local residents and visitors” (Rubino, 2018, p. 182). Sydney’s suburban communities often work in these two ways, offering centres for various ethnic communities as well as bringing visitors from across the city to the small restaurants, shops, and cafés that line the main streets of these suburbs. As ethnic centres, these suburbs, and particularly their “ethnic establishments (e.g., groceries or restaurants)” (Rubino, 2018, p. 180) play an important role in language maintenance in the ways in which they function as “in-group public spaces” for members of the city’s diverse linguistic communities (Clyne, 2005, cited in Rubino, 2018, p. 190). However, while Rubino, following Clyne, refers to these “ethnic establishments” as “in-group public spaces,” I suggest that they, socially and linguistically, function more as third spaces, that is, spaces that are not home but share enough of the characteristics of home to create space for more private language practices. The fact that they are nonetheless not home means that they allow broader access and contact between linguistic and cultural groups than home would. Indeed, the narratives provided by Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) and Wise (2010) show that these local suburban shops are expected to function as third spaces. We see this in two examples from Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), one which shows the linguistic expectations of community members, due to their histories in the suburb being somewhat at odds with the multilingual realities of the shop, and its owner; and the other which shows the owner creating a linguistic third space through her use of multilingual repertoires. Wafiq is the owner of a “mixed goods” shop, selling coffee, nuts, and other goods from across Europe and the Middle East, in one of Sydney’s inner suburbs, Marrickville. In Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), Wafiq, a speaker of English and Lebanese Arabic, explains the linguistic expectations of the long-term residents of the suburb:

114  A Flat White and a Banh Mi One problem for him is that the older Greek population, which used to form a much larger percentage of the suburb, often assumes he speaks Greek. Excerpt 5.2 (W: Wafiq, R: Researcher) W: Because sometimes you know, the Greek comes here and he doesn’t understand, ah:: what they want, about the stuff you know, the products. And I don’t speak Greek! I speak two languages and I don’t understand what they’re talking about! R: And they’re speaking to you in Greek? W: In Greek! And I should you know, as a shop owner, understand them. And some people get upset you know, but it’s not my problem you know, I don’t know. They’re old people … and they’ve been here for 40 years. (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015, p. 91) This mismatch between the linguistic expectations of long-term residents— and long-term customers—is a common theme in ethnographic research about Sydney’s changing suburbs. Just as Wafiq’s customers “don’t realize the shop has changed hands and languages” (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015, p. 91), the older customers who Amanda Wise writes of in her discussion of Ashfield’s small shops also experience the mismatch between their remembered experience of the shops and their present realities as one of physical and emotional “discomfort” (Wise, 2010, p. 930). These discomforts extend from changing linguistic environments to changing physical environments—environments which can feel exclusionary where they once have may felt welcoming. Wise explains that shops in Ashfield, run by and for the newer Chinese inhabitants of the suburb, have replaced earlier Italian or Greek shops, as the ethnic mix of the suburb has changed, and so the spaces which the older inhabitants were used to have also changed and become unfamiliar, both in terms of what they sell and how they are laid out, as well as in the modes of engagement between shop owners and these customers. These customers expect the shops to still function as third spaces for them, as they may have in the past—to function as the community “gravitation points” that Rubino (2018) describes. It seems too, that Wafiq understands and is interested in responding to this desire for small suburban shops to function as third spaces, in his willingness to learn Greek and thus accommodate Marrickville’s older Greek residents; he understands that in these suburban spaces, language is part of the commercial landscape and has decided to respond to his customers’ linguistic discomforts by learning some Greek. The history of the shop as a third space influences the decisions of the current owner, so creating the potential that it can function as a third space in the future as well. The possibilities offered

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  115 by considering third spaces also show how the power dynamics in shops shift between owner and customer, demonstrating the impact of customers on how a small shop works in the community and how the owner can— and perhaps even must—relinquish some control over the space to the members of the community in which it sits. Another shop in Marrickville also features in Pennycook and Otsuji’s discussion. Song’s discount shop is just down the road from Wafiq’s mixed goods store. Pennycook and Otsuji’s discussion of Song’s shop highlights the linguistic negotiation that comes of living and working in Sydney’s suburbs, and it gestures towards a long relationship between the two that is made possible by the long-term existence of the shop in Marrickville. Pennycook and Otsuji describe an exchange between Song and one of her long-time customers, a Greek woman who has apparently been coming to the store for 20 years: Song’s discount store is filled not only with a range of products jumbled together but also with such linguistic items. From her regular interactions with her Greek customer, she has learned a few Greek (‘Greco’) resources such as yassou (hello) (pronounced [ja∫u] by Song). Her friend lists a few other daily terms she has apparently taught Song over the years: kala (good), afharistro (thank you). This type of exchange apparently had been going on for a long time. (2015, p. 92) This quotation from Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) shows Song’s shop functioning as a third space through the language practices that Song invites there. The interaction described above is warm, showing how “at home” this customer feels in Song’s shop and how Song has made space for that feeling via her receptivity to learning Greek. This receptivity has kept this customer coming back to the shop for 20 years. We do not have much of a physical description of Song’s shop in Marrickville, but her long-term connection with the Greek customer suggests that the physical space created a space for the connection that Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) described to emerge and that, unlike the shops Wise (2010) describes in Ashfield, the spatial habitus of the shop was “welcoming” and “comfortable” to her Greek customer. This exchange suggests that Song was as open and observant of the spatial expectations of many different immigrant groups as she was in her willingness to incorporate Greek into her linguistic repertoires. Indeed, as Higgins (2017) writes, “[the owner, Song’s] spatial repertoires change according to her customers, their language backgrounds, and the activities they are involved in at her shop” (p. 107). These shifting repertoires, I suggest, make the shop into a third space, which is both more

116  A Flat White and a Banh Mi home-like in the continuities of relationships and the language uses that Song maintains, and public, in that it is mercantile space where language serves transactional purposes. In spaces like Song’s, the lines between languages and also between private and public spaces get the most blurred, where home language and dominant language become categories without as much meaning, where linguistic negotiation happens and third spaces are languaged into existence. The linguistic third spaces that Song and Wafiq are in the process of creating in their shops means that language in these spaces goes beyond the fully transactional exchanges that Wise (2010) describes: building a third space requires intentional action and re-action on the part of the owners of the spaces and may not be necessary for commercial success. They are actively cultivating that third space by changing their own personal behavior (their language in that space) to accommodate and enlarge the “kind” of space it is. Not all small shops are third spaces. For instance, in the noodle shop that I visited in July 2022 in Enmore, a suburb adjacent to Marrickville in Sydney, the language we used to order and to pay was strictly transactional, with only the menu and the cash register offering a shared linguistic space between the non-Vietnamese-speaking customers and the people who worked there. It is the actions and interactions of the shop owner and the customers, and the resultant deliberate creation of a spatial language repertoire, as Higgins (2017) argues, that create linguistic third spaces. We see linguistic third spaces emerging when shop owners deliberately create spaces of linguistic fluidity and mixing, which means that the owners themselves must themselves be willing to inhabit these spaces in their own language practices. In practice, creating a linguistic third space means using language in a way that dismantles strict divisions between languages and the need to perform linguistic expertise—that is, creating these spaces means being open to learning and to being taught, which is sometimes an uneasy position to hold. The benefits of creating these third spaces for the shop owners and customers in the shops described in Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) mean that language becomes a resource for shared understanding rather than being a marker of belonging or exclusion. Alongside these small shops—often literally as well as figuratively—suburban Sydney is host to another site that often becomes a kind of third space: the suburban café. Cafés, like local shops, are ubiquitous in Sydney and in the Australian cities of the east coast. Like local shops, too, they can function as meeting places for community members, but they can also be aesthetically or culturally exclusive and thus form possible, but not inevitable, third spaces. In the next section, I explore the conditions under which suburban cafés might become third spaces for members of their communities—and the conditions which might prevent them from becoming so.

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  117 Cafés Cafés throughout Sydney, whether they are one of the independent, “third wave” (Felton, 2019) cafés that dot the inner- and middle-ring suburbs, or shopping mall or chain cafés, create space for private conversations in public, and offer somewhat limited transactional repertoires no matter where they are. That is, as Felton (2019) explains, Australia’s cafés offer a menu of coffees and food that vary little, no matter where they are to be found. The spaces, too, while they may differ in the details, function in largely the same ways: orders are taken and paid for at the counter, customers find themselves a seat, and the coffee and food are brought to the table. The common nature of the menu and of the Australian cafés’ spatial and transactional experiences mean, I suggest, that cafés are often a space of comfort because of their predictability and because of the ways in which they encourage people to sit and converse, often for long periods of time: transactions take place away from where people sit, and staff visit tables to deliver or clear away dishes and to chat. Unlike the local shops that I describe in the previous section, the transactional language of the cafés is English, and the somewhat standardized design of the space smooths out the kinds of spatial discomforts that Wise (2010) describes. Thus, suburban cafés offer, I suggest, an “Aussie” experience (see Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), and Wise (2010) for discussion of the uses of this term) that creates a linguistic and cultural third space for many of their users. In the following paragraphs I go into more detail about how this kind of café offers the experience of the third space socially and linguistically, as well as exploring the limitations of this analysis. Cafés across Sydney are interesting because of their consistency and their ubiquity. Just as the local-shops-surrounded-by-residences pattern prevails throughout Sydney’s suburbs, so does the inclusion of often several cafés in each suburb’s shopping strip. Even the smallest collection of local shops will likely sport at least one sit-down café, as well as one or two other shops that offer takeaway espresso-based drinks. As Felton relates, the ubiquity of such cafés stems from the mid-20th century, when American soldiers were stationed in Sydney in World War II, and the Italian and Greek immigrants who arrived in Sydney in the postwar years cemented the introduction of a coffee culture to a predominantly Anglo, tea-drinking city after the war (Felton, 2019, Chapter 4). The food that the cafés offer— bircher muesli, avocado toast, the full Aussie breakfast, the ubiquitous banh mi—owes much to the many waves of immigrants who have settled in the city. Sydney’s suburban cafés function as third places and third spaces because they are both public and familiar and because of the ways in which people use these spaces for meeting and conversation but also to experience

118  A Flat White and a Banh Mi companionable solitude. However, they perform their function as third places/spaces differently than the shops that I discussed in the earlier section. First, they do not function as language hubs for members of the diverse linguistic communities who live in Sydney, and as such do not perform the role in language maintenance that Clyne (2005) and Rubino (2018) discuss: owners of cafés do not establish linguistic third spaces in the ways that shop owners such as Song and Wafiq do in Pennycook and Otsuji (2015). Rather, I suggest, it is their limited public language repertoires, shaped by the standardized coffee and food menus, and their offering of venues for somewhat private conversation in whatever shared languages or discourses the patrons include in their own repertoires that make them into hubs in the linguistic city. Indeed, while the languages spoken behind the counters are often not English, and the people working at the cafés may well be immigrants or sojourners in Sydney (including the international students whom the Australian tertiary sector has courted assiduously for over 30 years for their ability to pay full tuition fees), the transactional language is English and is spoken together by patrons and workers within a shared limited linguistic repertoire which often incorporates various shorthand terms, creating a shared café discourse around the city. Unlike in shops, too, the way the café space functions often curtails opportunities for a chat across the counter, expectations surrounding which caused a great deal of distress and discomfort in the intercultural encounters related by Wise (2010), because the coffee line has to keep moving. What will happen in a café, though, is that owners or workers will come out from behind the counter and visit tables, when they are delivering food or cleaning up the dishes. Such encounters happened with us and the people working the café in Ultimo where we went when we first landed in Sydney. The language behind the counter was a mix of Southeast Asian languages, in this café up Ultimo Road from Sydney’s Chinatown, across the road from the business school of University of Technology, Sydney, and down the road from Central Station. Food would be delivered upstairs to the tiny indoor balcony where patrons sat; it was in this space that patrons asked questions of the staff and chatted a bit. This café, sitting at the edge of where the city of Sydney starts to become the suburbs where people live, nonetheless follows the same linguistic and behavioural structures that we see in the cafés further out from the CBD. Particularly, and perhaps because it is a franchise of a Sydney coffee roaster, the linguistic repertoire of this café is that of the suburban cafés, but the refrigerated case full of food—sandwiches and pastries, sausage rolls and pies—next to where customers order, facilitates ordering for the tourists who might visit and not know the language repertoire of Sydney cafés. That is, it is possible to order by pointing here, and to see your sandwich or pastry taken from the case and put in the panini press to be warmed up. The pointability of

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  119 the food in the case recalls the observation, made by Emma Felton, of the “certain ‘cultural know-how’” (2019, p. 16) that is required to navigate Australian cafés. She writes, as in any consuming space, cultural capital, that is, specific knowledge and skills, are required to navigate through the transaction process. Such social hierarchies cut across other divisions such as gender and class. … Yet, despite this, the relatively low cost of obtaining entry into the café through the purchase of a drink gives it greater accessibility than many other consumer places. (Felton, 2019, p. 37) The linguistic repertoires of cafés in the Australian suburbs are a mélange of the many immigrant languages of Australia’s major cities. For many people these linguistic repertoires have been naturalized: the flat white and the banh mi of the title of this chapter, for instance, are ubiquitous in the Sydney of 2022 for both take-away and sit-down consumption. The linguistic repertoires that customers must navigate change over time as the linguistic and cultural mix of the cities change: for instance, as I grew up in Sydney, while the East and Southeast Asian influence on the food that we eat gradually grew in popularity alongside the well-established presence of Greek, Lebanese, and Italian influences, food from Mexico and Central America was rare. Now, though, a chipotle pulled pork sandwich might sit alongside a roasted vegetable salad with halloumi, za’atar, and labneh on a café menu. However, not all Australians feel comfort with the linguistic changes that they must incorporate as they move between Sydney’s independent cafés, which make up 95 percent of Australia’s cafés, according to Felton (2019). Chain cafés, which often appear in shopping malls, thus fill an important niche in the coffee scene in the suburbs, as Walters and Broom (2013) explain: “The shopping mall café serves a dual purpose—beyond its self-evident function of providing a place where shoppers can sit down, eat, and drink, it also provides a focus for the appearance of activity that is less obviously the performance of pure consumption than the rest of the mall. The mall café can be incorporated into the narrative myth that the mall somehow acts as a community hub, that it is as natural as a neighborhood (Dovey, 2008)” (p. 195). The food offered is less challenging, too— one very common chain in Sydney sells large sweet and savoury muffins and other baked goods, connecting to the offerings that patrons might have chosen from at a tea shop before the spread of Australia’s coffee culture outside the ethnic suburbs of the major cities. Jones et al. (2015) write about how chain or corporate cafés in a British context can be more welcoming spaces than independent cafés:

120  A Flat White and a Banh Mi In the context of corporate café spaces the setting itself never disappears and there is a contradictory sense of these cafés being at once highly managed environments and having a relaxed informality. It is this paradox that appears to create a social confidence about being in them. The routine practices—how it works and what is on offer in franchised café spaces—are part of this confidence. This etiquette, of “knowing what to do” does have to be learned (and we have rather comic field notes of when we forgot/got confused with café systems) … this familiarity with etiquette and café practice generates confidence in visiting and being in such spaces precisely because they are easy to know and invite in no particular crowd. (Jones et al. 2015, p. 653) Though this fieldwork took place in the United Kingdom, Jones et al.’s analysis seems to hold in the Australian context as well. Corporate cafés take the attraction of the limited linguistic repertoires of the café even further, in requiring not only limited language and cultural resources to place an order and take up space, but also being consistent across the city. Felton writes about the social inclusion such chain cafés allow for: “Paradoxically, despite the socially progressive associations of third-wave cafés, with their focus on ethical practices and agricultural sustainability, studies have shown that minority groups tend to feel more at home in chain cafés.” She suggests that the “standardization and homogeneity of their layout and their predictable menus and aesthetics” make it easier for patrons from a wider range of backgrounds to feel at home in this type of café (Felton, 2019, p. 37, citing Jones et al., 2015, p. 657). So, even as I have argued in the preceding paragraphs, it is precisely the predictability of linguistic and consuming repertoires that make cafés into third spaces and into spaces that transcend particular cultural boundaries in Australia. Jones et al.’s (2015) research suggests that it is the even more predictable environment of the chain café, or even more anonymous and predictable, the café embedded in the shopping mall, that attracts people from more cultural backgrounds. These cafés may well provide what Felton describes as among the safest places for city-dwellers to encounter the unfamiliar, but for people who have been labelled as being too different, of not belonging, as Felton writes, “while the café supports civil encounters, this does not necessarily translate to tolerance or understanding of difference” (Felton, 2019, p. 36). The spatial language practices of small shops and cafés create third spaces for patrons in two different ways. In the small shops that I discussed, when shop owners deliberately broaden their own linguistic repertoires to embrace the languages of their patrons, they create linguistic third spaces where the fluidity of movement within a spatial language repertoire (Higgins, 2017) challenges the boundaries between “home” languages and

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  121 dominant languages and sets up convivial spaces. Cafés, on the other hand, set up convivial linguistic third spaces via the embrace of a limited but shared linguistic repertoire from site to site. Indeed, even as the sites themselves are completely independent of each other, the discourses in which they participate are interconnected, and so this predictability, this sharedness, creates a network of third spaces across the suburbs. However, these third spaces may not always be totally inclusive because of the “cultural know-how” required to navigate them. In the final section of this chapter, I discuss how gender intersects with access to these places and spaces. Creating space for women in public places is not automatic and yet is of crucial importance to our cities’ linguistic and social landscapes. Language, Gender, and Third Spaces In the introduction to their special issue of the journal Frontiers, Maureen Flanagan and Gianella Valiulus write that the city is a gendered space and place where women must struggle to destroy the barriers that have been erected to keep them invisible, to claim their bodies and their bodies’ needs as integral parts of the city, and to assert their rightful visibility as urban citizens. (2011, p. xiii) Since the Second World War, women have been socialized into the suburbs and the home, resulting in a dichotomy that sees the city as the province of men and the masculine, and the suburbs gendered feminine. Roger Silverstone writes, the suburban home has been built around an ideology and a reality of women’s domestication, oppressed by the insistent demands of the household, denied access to the varied spaces and times, the iteration of public and private that marks the male suburban experience, and which creates, for them, the crucial distinctions between work and leisure, weekday and weekend. In particular, postwar suburbanization was buttressed by a concerted effort by public policy and media images to resocialize women into the home, and into the bosom of the nuclear bourgeois family (Spigel, 1992). (Silverstone, 1997, p. 7) These two observations are at the core of why the suburban third spaces that I have discussed in this chapter are important sites, particularly for women, but also for the migrants who are often excluded from the CBD because of invisible linguistic barriers that enforce an English-only

122  A Flat White and a Banh Mi sociality in the city’s sites of power (government, finance, law, etc.): they are places where women can be both visible and be left alone, to owe nobody conversation or a smile, but be able to be out in public and safe. Judith Garber also describes, within this right to be left alone, a right to find and connect with others with whom we identify: she writes that “if people can control how they are paid attention to—say, if they are among similar and sympathetic people—then this is normally preferable to being left totally alone” (Garber, 2000, p. 31). In other words, the right to the city is the right to both be heard and not heard, to build weak but enduring affiliations, rather than having to be at the center of others’ linguistic and emotional needs. For women—just as for those who speak non-hegemonic languages—third spaces must offer a space to be different but not other. Christina Higgins writes that “spaces should be seen as sites where power relations and inequities are made visible, but also where they can be transformed” (Higgins, 2017, pp. 103–4). This observation is crucial to our understanding of how the spatial linguistic repertoires that I have explored previously connect with the experiences of women in various spaces. The linguistic power relations that suburban shops and cafés reveal give us insight into how third spaces have the potential to transform, or at least destabilize, the binary expectations of how women should create and use, and should be seen using, these spaces. For, as Fullagar et al. explain, “women’s right to access spaces in the city, where they might enjoy some of the community and sociality of third places, are constrained by public-private dichotomies that reinforce masculine entitlement to public place” (Fullagar et al., 2019, p. 32). They also reinforce the entitlement of the English speaker to public space and relegate migrant languages to home. The third spaces that I explore here are hybrid spaces, the proprietors succeeding when they create space for multilingual repertoires and behaviours that simultaneously push at gender binaries. As we saw previously, the language practices of multilingual people both shape and are shaped by the spaces in which they enact these practices (see also Higgins, 2017, p. 103). But gender also plays a part. Pennycook and Otsuji remark on the role of gender in the linguistic urban conviviality that is their focus, writing, “[w]hen we look at language affiliations, work and social relations, we also need to see the ways in which these are bound up with the class and gendered lines along which social organization also occurs” (2015, p. 107). However, despite this trenchant observation, their analysis goes beyond the observation only when they quote one of their participants who worked at the Sydney Produce Market—one of Pennycook and Otsuji’s most significant research sites—who describes the market as a “male space,” where the atmosphere was like that of a men’s club: a gendered sociality that actively excludes women. In the Produce Market, the language uses that Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) write about are

A Flat White and a Banh Mi  123 primarily transactional—about buying and selling—and there is not as much of the conviviality, in its sense of living together, as they show in the other, smaller shops which are more integrated into the suburban landscape of Sydney. This dichotomy is tied up with the gendering of the spaces as much as it is tied up with the suburban versus urban locations of these places. However, the language work of two other of their participants also suggests how gender participates in linguistic space-making in the city: Song, the owner of the Marrickville shop who I discussed previously, and Mariko-san, the owner of a grocery store in the “Japanese alley” in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood. Pennycook and Otsuji’s discussion of Song and Mariko-san’s suburban shops suggests that they are gendered sites: they show Song and Mariko-san, as women, building the connection between community and language into their conception from the get-go. For instance, Mariko-san, the owner of the grocery store in Chatswood’s Japanese alley, participates in the creation of a “village and community feel” throughout the suburb beyond the alley. For her, as Pennycook and Otsuji write, “Establishing ongoing social relationships … is more important than transactional encounters. Such relations should not be like one-off transactions after purchasing (‘お店行っ て買ったら終わり はいぽん じ ゃなくて’)” (2015, p. 195). We see similar ongoing social relationships in Song’s exchange with her Greek customer. The active embrace of the wider linguistic community in these small shops, I suggest, creates places of safety for the customer in ways that women’s third spaces create safety for them. The necessity of safety alongside comfort is not widely discussed in the mainstream third place/third space literature, but it emerges as a crucially important factor in whether a place functions as a third place for women (e.g., Fullagar et al., 2019). Local shops and cafés, with their affiliation with daylight hours, make for important third spaces for women and other minoritized people alike, in the ways in which it is socially acceptable and safer for them to be out alone. Furthermore, Walters and Broom (2013) argue that cafés are sites in which the changing masculinities of Australian cities can be seen: they write that “inner city third spaces are supporting and embracing types of identity work, forms of ‘manliness’ and gender work, that move against the imagined ‘Australian way’” (2013, p. 200). Thus, while Emma Felton suggests that cafés are not gendered spaces (Felton, 2018), from the linguistic and social practices that people adopt in these spaces, they offer a challenge to the general tendency for non-home spaces to be gendered masculine. The ways in which people behave in third spaces creates the gendered meanings of those spaces—and so, the ways in which Song and Mariko-san use language to build cross-linguistic community is something we can read as being just as gendered as the language practices at the Produce Market, which create the “large male club” atmosphere there

124  A Flat White and a Banh Mi (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015, p. 107). Furthermore, the ways in which people of all genders use the space of the café, including the linguistic repertoires of those spaces, genders those spaces as alternatives to more stereotypical male spaces like pubs—and thus allows for more expansive gender schemas (Bem, 1981) to play out in these spaces. So, rather than adopting Felton’s analysis that cafés are gender-neutral spaces and that shopping is a province of women, I suggest that the ways in which the two spaces function as third places, and their potential to be spaces of community, create places for difference to be visible but not threatened. This is the line connecting gender and language that I want to draw: third spaces offer room for more fluid performances of both gender and linguistic identity. In the Produce Market, the men who work there stick together in their linguistic groups, whereas in the smaller, suburban places, the centrality of encountering diversity in the way the owners set these spaces up means that they are safe for women and gender nonconforming people and for translinguistic repertoires that are not transactional but are, rather, social. They offer space for a broader range of gender performances than other third spaces, in part because of their affiliations with daylight hours and the centrality of conversation alongside a limited transactional linguistic repertoire in their linguistic landscapes. As I have shown previously, third spaces are extraordinarily important spaces in the landscape of a suburban city like Sydney because they offer places of safety for people who have been marginalized in the broader publics of the city. Furthermore, these third spaces are often created by the linguistic practices that take place with them: just like in the preceding chapters of this book, language use both creates and expands the feeling of home. Note 1 See Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) and Wise (2010) on the designation “Aussie,” which is connected with, but not limited to, Anglo-Celtic Australians.

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A Flat White and a Banh Mi  125 Felton, E. (2018). Filtered: The café and contemporary urban experience. In 14th ISA World Congress of Sociology: Power, Justice & Violence, 2018-07-15–201807-21. (Unpublished) https://eprints.qut.edu.au/122634/ Felton, E. (2019). Filtered: Coffee, The café and the 21st century. London and New York: Routledge. Flanagan, M.A., & Valiulis, M.G. (2011). Gender and the city: The awful being of invisibility. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 32(1), xiii–xx. Fullagar, S., O’Brien, W., & Lloyd, K. (2019). Feminist perspectives on third places. In J. Dolley & C. Bosman (Eds.), Rethinking third places. Edward Elgar Publishing. Higgins, C. (2017). Space, place, and language. In A.S. Canagarajah (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 102–116). London and New York: Routledge. Garber, J.A. (2000). “Not named or identified”: Politics and the search for anonymity in the city. In K.B. Miranne & A.H. Young (Eds.), Gendering the city: Women, boundaries and visions of urban life (pp. 19–40). Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jones, H., Neal, S., Mohan, G., Connell, K., Cochrane, A., & Bennett, K. (2015). Urban multiculture and everyday encounters in semi-public, franchised café spaces. The Sociological Review, 63(3), 644–661. Lofland, L.H. (1998). The public realm: Exploring the city’s quintessential social territory. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Oldenburg, R. (2013). The café as a third space. In A. Tjora & G. Scambler (Eds.), Café Society (pp. 7–21). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Oldenburg, R. (1989). The great good place: Cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. New York: Paragon House. Pennycook, A., & Otsuji, E. (2015). Metrolingualism: Language in the city. London and New York: Routledge. Rubino, A. (2018). Multilingualism in the Sydney landscape: The Italian impact. In Multilingual Sydney (pp. 180–192). London and New York: Routledge. Silverstone, R. (1997). Introduction. In Silverstone, R. (Ed.), Visions of suburbia (pp. 1–12). London: Routledge. Spigel, L. (1992). Make room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America. Chicago, IL Chicago University Press. Soja, E.W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell. Walters, P., & Broom, A. (2013). The city, the café, and the public realm in Australia. In A. Tjora & G. Scambler (Eds.), Café society (pp. 185–205). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wise, A. (2010). Sensuous multiculturalism: Emotional landscapes of inter-ethnic living in Australian suburbia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(6), 917–937. Wolf, M. (2000). The Third Space in postcolonial representation. In S. Simon & P. St-Pierre (Eds.), Changing the terms: Translating in the postcolonial era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Retrieved from http://books.openedition.org/uop/2003

9 Island Homes

In this final chapter of Language, Diaspora, Home, I explore the context of the 2020–22 COVID-19 pandemic in relation to 20th-century pandemics, especially the 1918–19 Spanish influenza epidemic, and to contemplate (or theorize) what our current global health crisis and accompanying “health security” (Weir, 2014) impact how we think about home and about being at home. It is an effort to record the climate in which I have written this book, describing the home, Australia, that I was shut out from for over two years: being unable to go home is what has driven this entire book, and the availability of the choice to go home—or not—shapes the language stories that I tell and retell here. This is a different kind of chapter from those that have preceded it: it considers diaspora and home deeply, but it is not about language. It serves as something of a companion chapter to Chapter 2, the methodologies chapter of this volume, in that it plumbs the depths of the circumstances that gave rise to this volume and is an attempt to find the language to process this inconceivable experience: of being denied a home by the government that is supposed to protect its citizens. As such, this chapter functions as an attestation, a bearing of witness, to some of the impacts of the pandemic. The title is a gesture to the song Island Home, written and first performed by the Warumpi Band and made into something of an unofficial Australian national anthem by Christine Anu. In the version I know, jangly from its 1990s production, it is Anu who sings of displacement from her island home, as she lives in the city. For me, it has also been a personal anthem as I have lived for nearly 25 years in the suburbs of New York City, longing for my island home that is “waiting for me” (Murray & Burrarwanga, 1986). In her book Cartographies of Diaspora, Avtar Brah writes that, by the late 20th century, borders had become metaphorical because diasporic peoples are not looking to return to a homeland but were, rather, building their identities around mobility. She writes,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-9

Island Homes  127 borders are arbitrary constructions. Hence, in a sense, they are always metaphors. But, far from being mere abstractions of a concrete reality, metaphors are part of the discursive materiality of power relations. Metaphors can serve as powerful inscriptions of the effects of political borders. (2005, p. 198) For people living in diasporic spaces, she goes on, the metaphor of the border often functions as powerfully as the physical delineation of territory, although it requires paperwork and money to cross, rather than presenting physical restrictions on movement as hard borders might. However, the pandemic made borders anything but metaphorical: it provided the fuel that has made the reassertion of the bounded nation state more possible in terms of who is allowed to go where. As we know from past pandemics, the virus that caused the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic will not go away, but the pandemic is slowly ending, morphing into something endemic—manageable, more or less. But the global cessation of movement as a result of this particular pandemic is different from past pandemics, because the world in which it occurred is different: more interconnected, more reliant on movement to sustain its communities. In many ways, the SARS-COV2 pandemic threw us back into the ways that global mobility worked in what we may have thought to be the distant past: more local, more targeted, with longer periods of stillness and stoppage between journeys. This pandemic turned new diasporas, diasporas of the border (Mishra, 2005), into old diasporas, where movement was more or less permanent and old homes had to be translated into new ones because there was no going back (see, for example, Nirrapil and Ali’s [2021] story of the Indian diaspora during COVID-19). Seas became more like moats than highways (MacGregor, 2013) for the governments of nation-states. For diasporic, expatriate, immigrant people, during the pandemic months, our old homes indeed became “imaginary homelands” (Rushdie, 1992); our work was, nevertheless, to maintain our connections with, and do things for, the people in them when we could not be there with them. For Australians like me, going home was out of the question. From March 2020 to March 2022, Australia’s borders were closed. Australian citizens who wished to return had to contend with inflated airfares and a hotel quarantine system capped at just a few thousand places per week; the incoming passenger numbers were cut as one of the first steps to contain COVID outbreaks in Australia. Australians who wished to leave had to apply for an exemption from the strict border rules and to agree to leave for more than three months; anecdotally, it seems few exceptions were granted even when relatives overseas were ill or dying. Resident

128  Island Homes Australians, almost alone in the world, lived lives that were similar to the lives they lived prior to the pandemic throughout much of 2020 and 2021 until it all fell apart in June 2021. Then their freedom to move was taken away too by their government’s response to the virus. Sydney’s lockdown ended after 106 days, and the front page of The Washington Post marked the end of that stretch on October 12, 2021, with photos of my hometown that made me cry. Island Imaginary The locking down of Australia as an island nation provides an uncomfortable but important lens through which to consider the impacts of border closures and the cessation or limiting of global movement in the COVID-19 pandemic, because the lockdown was so complete and excluded—or trapped—citizens and noncitizens alike. It also resonates with Australia’s history in ways that trouble the Australian nation’s self-construal as the lucky country, an outpost in the middle of the Pacific that offers a “fair go” to all (see, for example, Gough, 2006). Australia’s “COVID-zero” approach that endured for much of 2020 and 2021 enabled the reassertion of Australia’s national imaginary as an island nation, disconnected or protected from the surrounding seas and the rest of the world, depending on your perspective. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, the key management strategy for the virus was to stop people moving, both locally and internationally. And thus, those who could not stop moving, like the essential workers who had to keep going to work, or like the migrant workers in India who were sent home from the cities (e.g., Pal & Siddiqui, 2020), or the refugees and asylum seekers for whom a novel virus was less dangerous than the homes they were leaving, became those who were not only at the most risk for exposure but who were also seen as the riskiest. As Adey et al. write, “the diseased body and the mobile body appear almost as one, and certainly COVID-19 has raised awareness of the dangerous proximities of mobile bodies that have only amplified entrenched suspicions and racialisations of mobile labour, asylum seekers and refugees” (Adey et al., 2021, p. 3). Vinay Kumar Srivastava puts it even more acutely: Instead of sympathetically understanding the predicament of people and the conditions that have caused it, whenever the crisis remains unmitigated we look for a cause outside our domain. The underlying idea is the belief that, “we were normal and un-diseased” till outsiders barged in and spread this deadly infection. The disease is viewed as located extraneously. (Srivastava, 2020, p. 389)

Island Homes  129 He sums the situation up thus: “the ‘sedentary’ become ‘disease-nascent’; the ‘migrants,’ the mobile, become ‘disease-saturated’” (Srivastava, 2020, p. 390). Certainly, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, this was the narrative in the United States. Because testing was barely available, we did not know where COVID-19 was or where it might go next. As time went on and the disease spread everywhere in the nation, to all U.S. cultures, all U.S. residents, we were all disease-saturated, either in the present or in the past or, quite realistically, in the future. Furthermore, active measures were taken in the press to disabuse the U.S.-based population of the idea that we could locate the threat in one particular outside place.1 News reports in April 2020 explained that the dominant strand on the east coast in the first half of 2020 was from Europe, not from China, trying to break the association between place and virus; the U.S. president at the time sought to continue to externalize the threat and strengthen the link between China and COVID-19, but his lack of credibility meant that his efforts were not widely successful and were largely viewed as an effort to deflect attention from his own responsibility for the catastrophic mismanagement of the U.S. government’s pandemic response. The statistics were clear: in the United States, as opposed to other parts of the world, the threat was here, and it was us. The United States, in the grips of a chaotic and incompetent federal government pandemic response and widely varying state-level responses, never did even begin to manage the virus until a widespread vaccination program was established in early 2021, and even then, vaccine uptake was not uniform across the country; thus “progress” on managing COVID-19 suffered many setbacks. Australia’s efforts to locate the virus as external to the nation, on the other hand, were much more successful, both metaphorically and literally: even in its mid-2021 COVID crisis, the case numbers in Australia were nowhere near the peak infection rates of other countries.2 But one consequence of prioritizing health security over citizens’ right of return has been tens of thousands of Australians who cannot “go home,” victims of Australia’s history of externalizing threats to a region outside the island. Indeed, Australia has a long history of equating national security specifically with “health security” (e.g., Bashford, 1998, 2003, 2007). This history seems to have helped to encourage Australians in Australia to accept the sacrifices that this equation required during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, such sacrifices were built into Australia’s approach to controlling the spread of the virus. In a press release on March 25, 2020, a day after the national borders were officially closed, the Australian foreign minister stated that [a]s many travellers are doing, it may be necessary for some Australians to stay where they are overseas, and as far as practicable remain safe and comfortable, including by following the directions of local

130  Island Homes authorities. Given the unprecedented scale of the global interruption to travel, the options outlined [above] will not return all Australians travellers home. (Payne, 2020; emphasis mine) This approach created a rolling crisis of 40,000 Australians abroad who could not get home, but nonetheless, in June 2021, in a paragraph hidden deep in a budget report, the Australian federal government offered an assumption that the borders would remain closed until mid-2022. This response and this assumption stood in stark contrast to most other nations in the world, including those that had successfully kept the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths low through the use of border restrictions and extended and highly restrictive quarantine arrangements for those who did manage to enter the country. Australian journalists and commentators had much to say about Australia’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly as compared to other approaches taken around the world. Richard Glover, radio host and columnist, wrote an opinion piece for the U.S. newspaper The Washington Post in which he itemized the reasons for Australia’s success (Glover, 2021). The last point in his list is an imperative: “Be an island.” From a U.S. perspective, this can only reasonably be read as facetious, and yet the imperative gets at the heart of the strategy that the Australian government embraced for managing the SARS-COV2 pandemic, and which the Australian people have also largely embraced. The island imaginary of the nation state builds on the geographical coincidence that has protected Australia from the full devastation of the pandemic. Being an island—but not just any island, a large island, an island nation surrounded by other island and archipelagic nations—had meant that the approach of the virus could be anticipated and contained at the national borders, which are also the borders of Australia’s two islands. Glover’s imperative, be an island, is one of the formative imperatives for the building of the Australian nation state: an imagining of the country as bounded, unified, isolated. Island Australia, Suvendrini Perera writes, is an idealized, uniform, secure, and whole nation state: “the trinity of cultural homogeneity, territorial wholeness, and uncontested sovereignty that constitutes the nation-state in its ideal form is mapped onto the features of island-Australia” (2009, p. 40). In many places, one of the main pandemic containment strategies that we were encouraged to adopt (in the United States) or which were mandated with extensive rules (in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada, for examples) was to turn our household units into islands: those who could not be islands were at more risk. But Australia did so on a national scale. For Australia to occupy the island space as a nation in the COVID-19 pandemic—ignoring the realities of island interconnections across the

Island Homes  131 world—harked back to other times at which Australia has claimed an island status out of fear of the rest of the world. It acted in the same way during the 1918–19 pandemic and in other smaller pandemics in the 20th century in a more targeted way (e.g., Stephenson & Jamieson, 2009). Perera (2009) writes of Australia’s long-standing habit of using islandness to symbolize its identity and policy: “the Australian nationalist imaginary is predicated on the construct of the island-continent, that is, of a singularity understood as whole and self-contained, a monadic landmass at once severed from its surroundings and protected against them by encircling oceans” (2009, p. 18). Furthermore, she notes the Australian tendency to look towards the “outback”3 for the construction of a national identity, rather than seeing Australia as an island connected to other islands and continents, its defining characteristic the “encircling ocean.” Perera writes that in the Australian national imaginary, “the ocean, the beach, and the coastline signify death and dissolution. As the historical scene of invasion, they invoke fears of other invasions” (2009, p. 34). Similarly, Catherine McGregor describes Australia as “an island nation without an oceanic consciousness”; she writes, further, that Australia’s “culture militates against flexible use of the sea as highway rather than as a moat” (McGregor, 2013). But a nation is its people as well as its geography. As Pete Hay writes, living in or on an island nation does not have to mean being disconnected from the wider world, though their islands’ geography necessarily means that they are separated from it: Islanders are not isolated in the sense of being denied connection to the wider world. But they are isolated in the sense that the encircling sea constitutes an emphatic perceptual boundary; a clearly evident delimiter that is experienced as an edge of primary significance. (Hay, 2013, p. 216) In this way, island-ness pushes against Brah’s conception of the metaphorical nature of borders: the “encircling ocean” forms a border that is physically, and often psychologically, real. However, depending on the disposition of those who govern the island, it can remain a metaphor, rather than a hard line, even in all its wateriness. Both Perera and Hay discuss the ways in which island life relies on interconnections with other islands and people in their regions, and Paul Battersby contends that, before Australia’s federation in 1901, “the waters separating Australia from the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago were a vast lake across which roamed adventurers, migrants, guest workers and tourists from Europe and Asia” (Battersby, 2004, p. 14). In this context, then, Richard Glover’s imperative to “be an island” in the way that the Australia he describes is an island

132  Island Homes emerges as a choice, but not the only choice available to Australia: being an island can also mean embracing connectedness and movement as a defining state or, indeed, as an imperative. Indeed, Pete Hay writes that the assumed dichotomy between an island identity constructed in response to the perception of an emphatic border and islands as contained spaces and resistant to change is a false one. Islands are sites of change and island identities are, reflexively, not immutably fixed; they are always in process of becoming something else. (Hay, 2006, p. 224) During the COVID-19 pandemic, borders were no longer metaphorical. Diasporas of the border, built on the assumption and expectation of mobility, were stuck. Australia had, at least temporarily, broken the kind of diasporic pact that sustains global cities like Sydney and New York, which thrive because of their flows, their connections, to people and places outside the borders, across the seas: the people who make up the island nation disappeared from the imaginary. And so, I suggest, the success of Australia’s early COVID response does not necessarily translate from national geography into individual lives: Australians are not, after all, islands.4 The early 2021 stance of the Australian government, to keep Australia in a state of “suspended animation” (Open Society Common Purpose Taskforce, 2021, p. 8)5 while the world moved on around it, marked Australia as an anomalous island and Australians as anomalous islanders. For Australian residents with diasporic connections, then, the pandemic recreated some of the experience of distance that may have been experienced by immigrants a century ago, produced by Australia’s position on the globe. For participants in these “old diasporas” (Mishra, 2005), movement to Australia was movement along a one-way path; for those who they left, the goodbye was probably for life. For people of the old diasporas, staying in touch with the homeland meant “transplanting” icons of home to the new land and finding the old represented or reflected in the new (2005, p. 22). But, by contrast, as Mishra argues, more recent diasporas “maintained the primal sanctity of the homeland intact” (2005, p. 22), and national borders were, as Avtar Brah puts it, largely “metaphorical” (Mishra, 2005, p. 198). These sometimes-metaphorical borders accord with Hay’s conception of island imaginaries: the movements of people make them metaphorical; isolation need not be insular. And thinking of Australia as a “territorialised landscape,” as Castro (1998) calls it, rather than as the people who make up the nation, got Australia to the place where it resembled nothing so much as a fortress in 2020–21: there was no “real” Australian but the resident Australian. The island nation brooked no opposition: you are either in, or you are foreign. If the diasporic imaginary

Island Homes  133 is built upon connections to others—other spaces, other times, other languages—then the island imaginary that Australia constructed during COVID-19 looked outwards only to see threat. But as Gillian Beer writes, “the island persists, and it persists because of, not despite, all that traffic of people” (Beer, 1989, p. 21, cited in Hay, 2013, p. 229). The pandemic in Australia exposed the contradictions in Australia’s constructions of its national identity. The nationalism and isolation of Australia was exposed, standing in stark contrast to its cosmopolitan, global cities and its economy indexed to overseas markets and currencies, even as the vitality of the nation has been built upon the movement of people to and from its shores. In April 2020, at the beginning of the 2020–21 coronavirus pandemic, Arundhati Roy wrote, Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could … Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. (Roy, 2020) Roy’s image of the portal, the gateway, is powerful here: it does indeed feel that the pandemic has caused a break between past and future. But it seems to me that nations and individuals both have to be willing to step through the gateway, to use what we have learned in the pandemic, and thus keep our focus on maintaining and rebuilding a world made of the diasporic futures that so many individuals have so carefully nurtured. ***** The first thing you see as you fly into Sydney from the Pacific is the sandstone cliffs that rise out of the South Pacific. And then you see the city—at once familiar and strange as you emerge from that half-day over the ocean, as you arrive into the Sydney dawn. The city is a city, recognizable whether you have come from Vancouver, from Tokyo, from Seoul or Dallas or Los Angeles, with its requisite skyscrapers and shining glass skyline. And it is recognizable as itself: the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House fill your eyes as though you are looking at a postcard, but these are your eyes, and this is the window of the plane, and you must really be there because these two iconic structures are below you after all of those hours over the ocean. Sydney is a known space, a bucket list item and more, for many people in the Northern Hemisphere. It is a place where their cousins, their aunt, or their daughter-in-law moved to or came from, once upon a time. It is at once distant and accessible, exotic and familiar. Thanks to its colonial

134  Island Homes history and current existence as part of the American and British empires (see AUKUS, see the E3 visa, UK working holiday visa), there are flows between Sydney and the United Kingdom, Sydney and the United States, tendrils retracing the expansion of empire. These are tendrils through which language also flows, linguistic tendrils that make Australia accessible to the rest of the Anglophone world. But Sydney is also foreign: an Asian city with strong ties to the region in which it sits geographically, a mid- and eastern Mediterranean city where people from Greece and Italy and Armenia and Lebanon have made homes, and a city with a deep and continuing indigenous history, that is now on the signs as you move from suburb to suburb. This is Gadigal land. This is Cameraigal land. It is a watery city, a city that is connected to the harbour and the ocean. While in Manhattan and New York it is sometimes easy to forget that the city sits on islands, as you battle highways and buildings to get to the two rivers that surround Manhattan, or traffic and crowds as you try to make your way to the city beaches, Sydney is built around the oceanic waterways, even as it has buried the streams that sustained the first European settlers and the Aboriginal communities that lived in that place for thousands of years before 1788, when everything changed. My father arrived in Sydney on a DC Super-Constellation in 1956, on the Southern Cross route as a 12-year-old. He travelled for three days from his home outside a wintry Birmingham, and he flew overnight, two days later, from Perth to Sydney in the Southern Hemisphere summer. His winter clothes, he recalls, were rather hot in the warm evening when he arrived in Perth. Many Australian families have these multigenerational stories of arrival: flying into Sydney over the land or sailing in on a great ocean-going passenger ship. In the introduction to Mirror Sydney, Vanessa Berry writes, My mother recounted her shock on glimpsing Sydney for the first time, from the deck of a passenger ship in 1949, seeing the bare-looking, lowrise city she was told would be her new home. (2017, pp. 4–5) My father, when he arrived in Sydney, did not see the city. He recalls an airport that was “very different to what it is now, a wooden shed housed customs and immigration and you queued on the tarmac” (Robinson, 2021). After Customs, he and his parents were met by the representative of the British Motor Corporation, who had brought the family to Australia so my grandfather could work in the new BMC factory in Zetland. Dad was driven not into Sydney itself, with its aspirations to cosmopolitan life via its four towering department stores in a boxy city that was under major construction (Berry, 2017),6 but out into the suburbs, to a rented house in Earlwood before the family moved to their home in Bexley.

Island Homes  135 In July 2022, my family and I flew home for the first time in five and a half years. It was supposed to be three, but the pandemic had different plans for us. We were flying from Vancouver. Before we left for this trip, my children only really knew about “Australia.” The last time they were there, they were two and five years old. Before we left for this trip, I tried to talk about Sydney with them, about New South Wales. After the visit, they understood, a little, that Sydney is different to Canberra; that Australia is a big place. Mostly, though, what they know is that it is far away, that it is where I’m from, that it may or may not be the source of many of my peculiarities, including, but not limited to, my bad American accent. ***** The flight felt the same—the longest night, then the glow of dawn finally arriving. And then the coast. This time we came in somewhere over Queensland, so no cliffs yet. But then we swung out to sea, and there they were. The children were interested in seeing the land in the general sense, but they didn’t realize what they were seeing. Why would they? They were not home. But I was. It was not as twinkly as a summer landing. That winter, Sydney was saturated with rain, with La Niña swirling in the Pacific and drenching them day after day. My mother watched the radar, timing walking the dog with breaks in the approaching clouds. We came in OK. The Customs officer at the border didn’t know what he was seeing with my wife’s residency paperwork, but the immigration officer did. You’re fine, she said. And so we were in. But we had already received the text from my mum: three positive rapid antigen tests at my mother’s house that morning, probably just as we landed. The big homecoming at the airport, the running children and the long hugs, were not going to happen. So we bundled into a taxi—we forgot the car seat in the airport—and went to a hotel in the middle of the city: Ultimo Road, Haymarket. We got organized, and then we went to the Market City food court, and I ate laksa. I’ve been wanting laksa for months, and there it was, offered by four places. So our arrival, just like our absence, was shaped by COVID-19. And each return and departure is shaped by the question of how the island’s borders will show up in our future lives. The ways in which the distance, and the cost of leaving and returning to the other parts of the world where our lives have taken place for so long, continue to change, shaping and reshaping our connections to the multiple homes that we have created. And on that trip to Sydney in July 2022, I began to pick up the threads of memory, threads of a life I had laid down 20 years before. But this life, as it stretches into the future, has to be different. Because, as all of the chapters in this book show, there is no going back; there is only building forward into the spaces that stretch before us.

136  Island Homes Notes 1 Despite the fact that the U.S. president at the time insisted on calling COVID-19 by racist names. His rhetoric created a wave of anti-Asian violence that continues in the United States in mid-2023. 2 The fact that Australia was even in a COVID-19 crisis in mid-2021, when highly effective vaccines had been available since December 2020, was a source of immense anger and frustration to many of the Australians stuck outside its borders: the vaccine distribution program of the Australian federal government had come to be known as the “stroll-out” for the complacent attitude towards Australia’s health security that the Morrison government exhibited. See Tranter (2021) for an expatriate Australian’s moving account of watching the crisis unfold from abroad. 3 Perera attributes this idea to Ian Mudie’s 1940 poem “Underground,” in which he writes, “It is the outback and not the ocean that grips the mind of Australians.” 4 The statistic that 30 percent of Australians were born overseas, and 46 percent have at least one parent born overseas (ABS, 2013, 2021), was cited often during the pandemic, precisely to push back against the idea that all Australians were in Australia and that Australians would not feel their loss of mobility and connection with the outside world too acutely. 5 Full quotation: “In short, our recommended strategy is for Australia to move from zero COVID, which traps us in suspended animation, to ‘securely reopened and effectively vaccinated’ which would allow us to ‘live with COVID’ in a way that minimises both direct and indirect harm.” (2021, p. 8). 6 You can see the city from this time in the image here: https://found-film.co.uk/ photo/2019/04/26/sydney-from-the-air-c-1959/

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Island Homes  137 Berry, V. (2017). Mirror Sydney: An atlas of reflections. Sydney: Giramondo. Brah, A. (2005). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. New York: Routledge. Castro, B. (1998). Dangerous dancing: Autobiography and disinheritance. Australian Humanities Review, 12. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/1998/12/01/ dangerous-dancing-autobiography-and-disinheritance/ Glover, R. (2021). 10 reasons for Australia’s COVID-19 success story. Washington Post, March 15. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/15/10reasons-australias-covid-19-success-story/ Gough, D. (2006). Australians value a “fair go” highest. The Age, November 16. https://www.theage.com.au/national/australians-value-a-fair-go-highest20061112-ge3juk.html Hay, P. (2006). A phenomenology of islands. Island Studies Journal, 1(1), 19–42. Hay, P. (2013). What the sea portends: A reconsideration of contested island tropes. Island Studies Journal, 8(2), 209–232. McGregor, C. (2013). Girt by sea: Australia’s Navy and national identity. The Drum, October 13. Retrieved May 26, 2021, from https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2013-10-14/mcgregor-australias-oceanic-conscience/5019396 Mishra, V. (2005). The diasporic imaginary and the Indian diaspora. Talk at VUW. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/42566/1/india%20diaspo rapdf.pdf Mudie, I. (1956 [1940]). Underground. In J. Wright (Ed.), A book of Australian verse (pp. 139–140). Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Murray, N., & Burrarwanga, G. (1986). My island home. Recorded by C. Anu. Stylin’ Up [Album]. Parole Records. Nirrapil, F., & Ali, A. (2021). “Living in two realities”: Indian diaspora reckons with crisis abroad. Washington Post, May 2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ health/2021/05/01/india-diaspora-covid-response/ Open Society Common Purpose Taskforce. (2021). A roadmap to reopening. Sydney Policy Lab and the Culture Strategy at the University of Sydney. University of Sydney. Pal, A., & Siddiqui, D. (2020, April 21). The long road home: India’s migrant workers fall through the cracks of the coronavirus crisis, Reuters. https://www. reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-india-migrants/ Payne, M. (2020, March 25). Australians abroad during COVID-19. Media Release, Office of the Foreign Minister. https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/ marise-payne/media-release/australians-abroad-during-covid-19 Perera, S. (2009). Australia and the insular imagination: Beaches, borders, boats, and bodies. Springer. Robinson, J.W. (2021, November 1). Email to Heather Robinson and Alison Sternberg. Roy, A. (2020, April 3). The pandemic is a portal. The Financial Times. https:// www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca. Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary homelands. In S. Rushdie (Ed.), Imaginary homelands: Essays and criticism 1981–1991. Random House. Srivastava, V.K. (2020). Anatomy of stigma: Understanding COVID-19. Social Change, 50(3), 385–398.

138  Island Homes Stephenson, N., & Jamieson, M. (2009). Securitising health: Australian newspaper coverage of pandemic influenza. Sociology of Health and Illness, 31(4), 525– 539. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01162.x Stevenson, P. (2017). Language and migration in a multilingual metropolis: Berlin lives. Springer. Tranter, K. (2021, August 7). There are no happy lockdowns but every lockdown is unhappy in its own way. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2021/aug/08/there-are-no-happy-lockdowns-but-every-lockdown-isunhappy-in-its-own-way Weir, L. (2014). Inventing global health security, 1994–2005. In S. Rushton & J. Youde (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Global Health Security (pp. 18– 31). New York: Routledge.

10 Conclusion

If you walk down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, in the heart of the New York Jamaican community, you might see four-foot-tall, two-foot-wide brown cardboard or blue plastic barrels standing on the footpath, waiting to be purchased, filled, and then sent to the Caribbean by private shipping companies. Shipping barrels to the West Indies is cheap, costing about US$80 from New York in 2022. Customs clearance in Jamaica is cheap too: $6,500 Jamaican, about US$50. If you are an immigrant like me, used to sending and receiving gifts via the postal service, buying other things that you need where you live if you can and waiting until you go home to stock up on the stuff that you can’t find, you might not know that this is what these objects are and how emblematic of a Caribbean immigrant experience they are. The barrels might tell a story of stuff standing in for the love of a family left at home, waiting to migrate themselves when the papers come through, or they might tell a story of those who maintain a home “at home” for when their family members, working and saving in the New York, can come back. For me, too, they also tell the story of a family close enough to ship a barrel without it costing more to ship than the contents are worth, or of it taking months to arrive as it covers half of the earth on its journey. And they tell a story of movement of stuff as a proxy for the bodies who are responsible for the stuff, who can’t move. And so, they connect with the story of the immobility of globally connected bodies in the pandemic with which I started this book. The barrel is a stand-in; the barrel is a symbol of the love of relatives who nonetheless cannot be there themselves, and as such it is a powerful symbol of immigration when the immigrants themselves cannot move. The image of the barrel, for me, is emblematic of a diasporic experience where connection between the originary homeland and the diasporic landing place is that of Mishra’s “diasporas of the border” (2005). In the diasporas of the border, the mobility of people and things is taken for granted; borders are porous and readily crossable, and a life is lived in two or more places. A hyphenated identity, as Mishra would have it, is DOI: 10.4324/9781003317135-10

140 Conclusion the central part of the deal, as is the ready traffic of stuff between “home” and “elsewhere.” Part of this volume works with the idea of the people who live these “diasporas of the border,” where movement is built into the model of immigration that they live. But Language, Diaspora, Home also discussed another kind of diaspora; indeed, I would say it dwells on it: the kind of diaspora where the homeland is not real but must be constructed and reconstructed in the imagination and with the bits and pieces that migrants collect over the course of a life. Identities are no less hyphenated, but the connections are sustained in bits and pieces by imagination more than mobility. For if you are an immigrant like me, there are no barrels. Sending everyday things back home, or having them posted to me, is not worth the money or the time: rather, rebuilding home where I am takes many trips back and forth, and odd discoveries of things—or simulacra of things—as reminders of where I am from. My desk’s current adornments, for instance, feature a cockatoo pen holder and matching pen, bought at a shop in the mall about ten minutes away from my house in New Jersey, and a coaster, with an echidna on it in the style of Ken Done, purchased as a souvenir shop at Circular Quay on my wife’s first trip to Australia in 2008. Even though Australia and Australians are now much more part of the New York City landscape than was the case when I came to the United States in the late 1990s, finding a trapping of home where I live right now still gives me a bit of a thrill, and finding something that purports to be Australian but is not the kind of Australian that I know is disappointing. Bad flat whites. Crooked Harbour Bridges. Gigantic koalas. Not surprising, though: there’s not enough space in New York to really be Australian. It is hard to remember when I felt like Australia was close enough to come and go from, though the frequency of my visits in the early part of my sojourn in the United States suggests that it did feel like that at some point. The distance and the cost of taking a family of four back and forth has become more and more daunting, as has the deep sadness that I feel every time I leave my island home. We were getting ready to go again in 2020, after three years, and then we were stuck, immobilized in the United States. Sydney had never felt so far away. And then, one day, walking in my town in April 2020, I heard the screech of a cockatoo. Those screeches confused me: the world had just shut down, the town was almost still, and then I heard that familiar sound in the wrong place, on the wrong continent. Later that year, too, there was a cockatoo pen holder in a shop at the Bridgewater mall, a few miles down the highway from my New Jersey town. It reminded me of the domesticated pet cockatoo screeching into the air town in New Jersey: right thing, wrong place. Those two cockatoos—the one down the road, the one now on my desk, accompany the sounds of the Australians over the phone and video chat, and in the news, in my head, all the time.

Conclusion  141 Who in New Jersey wants a cockatoo for their pens, other than me and maybe the family whose cocky’s screeches fill the air of Bound Brook? These domesticated cockatoos, fake and real, are a far cry from the flocks of cockies that fill the gum trees and the fig trees of Sydney at dusk, screaming as the sun goes down, but in some ways make a lot more sense in the New Jersey landscape than those raucous wild birds ever would. It will take a while to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on us, individually and collectively. Scholars of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic have noted that, despite the enormity of the experience of living through the pandemic, there is very little writing about the pandemic written by those who survived it. Catherine Belling describes the comparative dearth of writing about the influenza pandemic, especially as compared to the abundance of writing about World War I, at whose tail end the pandemic occurred. She writes, the silence that surrounds the 1918 pandemic may not only have been due to selective memory’s normal erasure. There may also have been a refusal or inability to describe a trauma that might still have haunted its survivors. Perhaps the flu overwhelmed language in ways that war did not. (2009, p. 57) So, while we are starting to weave this first pandemic of the 21st century into our narratives, we do not yet know quite how to make sense of it: now, in early 2023, we are getting “back to normal,” and sometimes it seems that the world wants to deny the fact that it has changed everything. In Chapter 9, I quoted an essay written by Arundhati Roy (April 2020), when the pandemic was just beginning. In it, she writes, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” We are still trying to figure out what Roy’s portal looks like and where it takes us to. But immigrants are used to living with “breaks with the past,” managing memory and imagination and mixing the two. So perhaps the experiences of migration and diaspora that I explore in this book can help us walk through this portal, with the baggage that we can carry in our hands and in a plane’s luggage hold, sending some things forward in a barrel to be unpacked when we have time and space, and reconstructing a past with a view to a different future. In some ways, this book is another barrel—a barrel of the paraphernalia collected during the three years of a global pandemic, a barrel full of stories of making homes against the backdrop of immobility, mobility, and migration, of marginalization and belonging. *****

142 Conclusion Language marks movement, and it marks fixity, and it can carve out a space in between these end points. Language, Diaspora, Home offers a series of depictions of how language moves, when it can move, and who directs that movement, insofar as it can be directed at all. As we have seen throughout this book, language is often a matrilineal inheritance: not just the words and structures themselves, but also the feelings that come with language, of attachment or a need to leave a language behind. We saw, in Andy Quan’s poem “Quiet and Odd,” that women took on responsibility for the work of language maintenance, calling out to their sons and grandsons in languages that those boys pretended not to understand, but also for language loss, with the mothers of the boys with whom the speaker affiliates himself declaring their “ancestral languages” things best left in the past. In Quan’s poem, as in the stories I tell throughout this book, mothers shape linguistic futures, as well as being the custodians of linguistic pasts. But it is up to their children and grandchildren to decide whether to pick up the linguistic threads that their parents either lay before them or place out of reach. The stories that I tell in this book similarly show the power that women hold in shaping the linguistic futures of the spaces which they inhabit, private, public, and in-between. Through their labours and life-long investments, they can come back into connection with a family’s or a community’s diasporic past, even if the threads of ancestral languages were laid down long ago. These stories should also remind us of the incredible labor and investment—usually, as Okita (2002) shows, the labour of women, usually rendered invisible—that goes into maintaining heritage languages. The stories of Language, Diaspora, Home show the many ways that linguistic and cultural maintenance can be made to stick, to be passed on, but also the love and care and money that provides the energy that gives family and community members the chance to keep the language going from one generation to the next, and which creates linguistic third spaces in the hegemonic linguistic contexts of the world’s diasporic places. Immigrants and the children of immigrants, as we see throughout this book, are not only linked with their diasporic homes through language, but they also create and strengthen these links themselves, through their own actions, creating homes in the “new” homelands that integrate linguistic homelands of the past rather than feeling a need to keep them separate. In doing so, they offer challenges to conceptions of who is and can be “at home” in white-majority immigrant destinations like Australia and the United States. Love, too—love of family, of children, of heritage, and of language—is one of the central themes of the book. In Chapter 3, “Language in Motion,” I argue what keeps Spanish circulating in the family of the women

Conclusion  143 whose language practices I discuss is their strong emotional connections to that language. Similarly, in Chapter 4, the drive to reacquire Italian for the Marini family in Sydney, set down a century ago, is driven by the love of a family matriarch as well as a desire to re-narrate the family’s immigrant history by rebuilding connections with the diasporic homeland through reclaiming Italian as a family language. In these chapters, too, the idea of home is made complicated by the fraught relationship with indigeneity, settler colonialism, and race that is seen in Australia and the United States. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, I analyse of poetry to explore linguistic home-making practices in three distinct sites: Australia’s big cities Sydney and, to a lesser extent, Melbourne, New York City’s Caribbean enclaves, and Barbados. These poets’ representations of language and its flows allow us to explore the interstitial spaces that so many immigrants or descendants of immigrants occupy. In these spaces, language and identity belong neither to the “origin” nor the “destination,” but to a space in between that is constantly under construction, fighting for recognition if not acceptance. These three chapters offer a response to the challenge that Ashcroft et al. (2002) offered in The Empire Writes Back, to show how language can be made to “’bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience” (Ashcrofte, 2002, p. 38), or, as Raja Rao puts it, “to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own” (Rao, 1938, p. vii). As these three chapters show, this process is a complex, sometimes contradictory one that challenges speakers’ conception of their own ethnic, cultural, and linguistic authenticity. Sometimes, too, the tension between diasporic and current homeland and the linguistic practices that create home in each of these places cannot be resolved; these three chapters explore the identity formation practices which travel alongside the linguistic home-making ones that are the focus of this volume as a whole. Finally, the last two chapters explore a more explicit type of linguistic place- and space-making, coupled with an exploration of construction and maintenance of geographic and physical borders. In Chapter 8, I consider how language practices and the creation of limited and stable linguistic repertoires in small physical spaces can create places of safety for those who are often marginalized in the broader publics of a large metropolis. Whereas Chapter 8 focuses on creating inclusive spaces, Chapter 9 explores the creation of exclusive spaces on the national level and the implications of national border policy in times of health security policies which deeply impact the very foundations of the idea and practice of diaspora and the maintenance of diasporic flows of people. These effects are felt both nationally and individually; the national effects are well-­ discussed, but the individual ones are still being teased out, narrated, and re-narrated.

144 Conclusion In the introduction to this volume, I wrote that diaspora and home are both sites where past and future come together and are negotiated; they are sites where people navigate their desires and their identities, connecting the imagined possibilities of both diaspora and home with the possibilities afforded by the “outside” world. (p. 2) Language, Diaspora, Home is an effort to navigate these sites, these spaces, and all of the complicated emotions and linguistic practices that come with these efforts at navigation. It is an attempt to write a feminist account of diaspora that centers women and families and the agency of those who are often marginalized in our narratives of migration and settlement, because they do not occupy the public spaces where research is readily conducted. It is an exploration of the claim of the title of Johny Pitts’ 2022 book, Home Is Not a Place. This volume shows some of just how much more home is than being simply where we are and where we live.

References Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2002). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. New York: Routledge. Belling, C. (2009). Overwhelming the medium: Fiction and the trauma of pandemic influenza in 1918. Literature and Medicine, 28(1), 55–81. Mishra, V. (2005). The diasporic imaginary and the Indian diaspora. Talk at Victoria University Wellington, 2005. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/ id/eprint/42566/1/india%20diasporapdf.pdf Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families (Vol. 12). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Pitts, J., & Robinson, R. (2022). Home is not a place. Glasgow: Harper Collins UK. Rao, R. (1938). Kanthapura. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks. Roy, A. (2020, April 2). The pandemic is a portal. The Financial Times.

Index

Ahmed, Sara 31, 47 Anzaldúa, Gloria 76, 76, 86 Australia, Australian 15–17, 28, 33, 50, 53, 55–60, 65, 69, 71–73, 110, 113, 116–120, 123, 126–131, 140–143 authenticity 16, 31, 78, 82, 83, 86, 143

community listening 26–27, 38 cosmopolitan 39, 42, 44, 45–46, 48, 56, 133 COVID-19 1, 15, 17, 33, 55, 141 Curdt-Christiansen, Xiao Lan 10, 44, 46, 66–67 Cushman, Ellen 25

Barbadian 91, 92–95, 97–106 Barbados 91–99, 101–106 Bhabha, Homi K. 12, 13, 109, 111–112 bilingual, bilingualism 37, 40, 42, 44–45, 47, 50, 54–55 border, borders 17, 51, 52, 56, 126–132, 135, 139–140, 143 borderland, borderlands 16, 68, 76–77, 79, 86 Brah, Avtar 5, 6, 51, 56–57, 59, 126, 131–132 Brathwaite, Kamau 17, 32, 78–79

Dawson, Paul 70–72 de Fina, Anna 23–26, 28, 29, 40 diaspora/diasporas/diasporic 22, 24, 26, 30, 32, 38–39, 45, 51–52, 56–59, 63, 65–66, 69–70, 76, 79, 81–84, 91–92, 101, 104, 108, 110, 126–127, 132, 139, 140, 142 diaspora space 58–59 diasporic imaginary 46, 51, 58–59, 132–133

Café 108–113, 116, 117–124 Caliban 96–97, 105, 106 Canagarajah, Suresh 1, 4, 33, 66–67, 88 Caribbean 12, 17, 43–44, 139, 143 Chin, Staceyann 77, 79, 86 circulate, circulation 15, 111 Cliff, Michelle 105 colonial/colonization/colonizer 7–8, 12, 30, 31, 56–59, 70, 78, 82, 86, 111, 112, 133 community 2, 4, 5, 7–8, 26, 32, 42–43, 45, 47, 51, 55–56, 65, 67, 83–84, 111, 113–115, 119, 122–123, 142 community language/s 15, 43, 51, 77, 81

English 12, 16, 17, 30, 31–32, 41–46, 53, 64, 67, 71, 76–77, 79–86, 92–93, 95, 99–101, 106, 117–118, 121–122 ethnography, ethnographic 38, 112, 114 family, family home, family language 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 37–39, 41–44, 46–48, 65–67, 72, 81, 102, 134, 139, 142–143 family language policy 8–9, 10, 12, 28, 40 Felton, Emma 110, 117, 119–120, 123, 124 feminist, feminism 144 Flores, Nelson 2, 13, 69, 112, 144 Fortier, Anne-Marie 5–6, 64, 70–71

146 Index García, Ofélia 10, 13, 112 gender, gendered 8, 27, 33, 110, 112, 119, 121–124 Georgiou, Myria 14, 41, 46, 56 global 14, 22, 37, 42–43, 45–47, 56, 84, 86, 97, 126–127, 128, 132–133 Gopinath, Gayatri 82, 101, 104, 106 grandmother, grandmothers 9–10, 16, 37, 44, 65, 67–69, 72 Hay, Pete 131–132 health security 33, 126, 129, 143 Higgins, Christina 13, 111–112, 115–116, 120, 122 history/histories 3, 5, 14, 26, 30, 77, 84–86, 91, 98, 101–103, 105, 129, 134 homeland, homelands 4, 5, 6–7, 16, 31, 39, 57, 59, 72–73, 83, 113, 127, 139–140, 142–143 identity 2, 3, 4, 9–10, 14, 16, 17, 24, 30, 32, 37–38, 41, 44–45, 47, 50, 51–52, 55–57, 59, 67, 79, 82–85, 88n3, 91, 98–99, 123–124, 131, 132–133, 139, 143 island imaginary 128, 130, 132 imaginary homeland 46, 59, 127 immigrant, immigrants, immigration 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 29, 41, 48, 50, 51, 54, 57–58, 60, 64–67, 69, 70, 72, 76, 84–85, 87, 103, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117–119, 127, 132, 139, 140, 141–142 indigenous 57–60, 91, 99, 113, 134, 143 island 10, 12, 14, 51, 58, 91, 92–93, 98–99, 103, 105, 140 Italy, Italian 113, 114, 117, 119 Jain, Jasbir 11, 14, 92 Josephs, Kelly Baker 79, 80, 100 language practices 9–11, 13, 16–17, 27–28, 31–32, 40, 44, 108, 112–113, 115–116, 120, 122–123, 140, 143 listening 15, 25–27, 29–30, 38, 89 Lotier, Kristofer 47

methodology 14–15, 84, 109 migrants, migration 1–3, 4, 6, 8–9, 10–11, 12, 14, 27–28, 32, 37, 39, 50–51, 53, 27, 63, 66, 73, 29, 80–81, 82–83, 85, 87, 102, 104, 121–122, 128–129, 131, 140–141 Mishra, Vijay 2, 51, 56, 58, 127, 132, 139 Mohabir, Rajiv 78, 79, 81–87 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 2–3, 5 Morrison, Toni 77, 86–87 mother, mothers 8–11, 37–39, 41, 43–44, 52–54, 65, 67, 68, 71–72, 134–135, 142 Muñoz, José Esteban 92–93, 101 Musa, Omar 69–70 narrative 5, 6–8, 9–10, 12, 14, 26, 28–30, 33, 40, 52, 54, 58, 66, 70, 72, 91, 97, 101, 113, 119, 129, 141, 144 nation language 78, 87, 91, 93–98, 100, 104, 106, 112, 127–128, 129–133 nation 3, 8, 9, 11, 17, 51, 55, 57–58, 59, 66, 76, 78 New York 15, 23, 63, 77, 81, 83–84, 108, 126, 132, 134, 139, 140, 143 Nostalgia 16, 71–72 Ohifearnain, Tadgh 39, 56 Okita, Toshie 8, 38, 51, 142 Oldenburg, Ray 13, 109, 111 Otsuji, Emi 6, 17, 28–29, 58, 109–110, 111, 113–118, 122–124 Pandemic 1, 15, 17, 22, 26, 27, 139, 141 Pennycook, Alistair 6, 17, 28–29, 58, 109–110, 111, 113–118, 122–124 Perera, Suvendrini 130–131 Pham, Vuong 71 Phillips, Esther 14, 16–17 Pitts, Johny 7–8, 144 Place 2–3, 5–6, 12–13, 14, 25, 27, 52, 57–58, 59, 64, 67, 72, 76, 81, 94, 98, 101, 129, 139, 142–143 Powell, Malea 6–7, 12, 15 Private 3, 13–14, 23, 45, 52, 64–65, 108–109, 113, 118, 121–123 Public 3, 6, 10, 13, 14–15, 64–65, 67, 108–109, 110–111, 113, 116–119, 121–122, 124

Index  147 Quan, Andy 67–69, 142 Roy, Arundhati 133, 141 Royster, Jacqueline Jones 23, 78 Rosa, Jonathan 3, 4, 5, 69 Rubino, Antonia 109, 111, 113–114, 118 Rushdie, Salman 46, 59, 127 Singapore 42, 43–44, 46 Soja, Edward 13, 109, 111 sound/s 5, 30, 32, 65, 93–94, 95, 100, 140 space/spaces 2–3, 6–7, 10–17, 24–25, 27, 31–32, 40, 47, 52–53, 56–57, 58–59, 64–67, 69, 71–72, 76, 79, 81, 86, 87, 92–93, 95, 98, 101, 104, 130, 132–133 Srivastava, V.K. 79, 128–129 standardized English 17, 32, 76–82, 86–87, 93–95, 100–101, 106 story, stories 6, 13, 14, 22–23, 25–32, 47, 52, 65, 72, 91–92, 126, 139, 142–143

storytelling 11, 22–23, 24, 25, 37, 40, 109 Sycorax 97, 105–106 Sydney 15–16, 28, 33, 51–51, 53–60, 70, 72, 128, 132, 133–135, 140–141 third space, third-space, thirdspace 11, 12–14, 16, 32, 142 Tölöyan, Kachig 56 translingual 13, 40, 64 transnational, transnationalism 2, 13, 42–43, 46, 48, 76–77, 79, 87 Tseng, Amelia 14 Villenas, Sofia 27, 38, 64–65, 66, 101 Virus 22, 127–128, 129–130 women 2–3, 6, 8–11, 23–24, 27, 31, 37–40, 47–48, 53, 64–65, 66, 73, 104, 108, 109, 121–124, 142, 144 Yildiz, Yasemin 9, 30 Zentella, Ana Celia 41