Multilingualism, Redux

In connecting linguistic expression to aesthetic non-neutrality, Yu draws on a tradition of monolingualist discontents to critique the limits of Australian cosmopolitanism. Australia’s monolingual mindset demands that writers make themselves available to the hegemonic English reader, necessitating translation or explanation. Despite a literary market that grows increasingly aware of, and as Sarah Brouillette would argue, has developed an appetite for post-colonial narratives, English remains the language of literary expression (16). This reflects not only the stance of the state apparatus that consolidates English as a national language through the official register, but also the cultural stance that consolidates English as the singular national language (apparent in the imperative to ‘speak English!’ or ‘we speak English here’). Of course, this is deeply ironic, given the late arrival of English to the continent and its plurality of Indigenous languages, and even in the very limited timespan of Australia’s colonial history, remain irreflective of its plurilingual realities.

Furthermore, parallel to the hierarchy of aesthetics, the asymmetrical English linguistic capital in monolingualist Australia facilitates cultural capital, relying on one’s ability to speak normative ‘proper’ English. Non-Western accents and ‘imperfect’ syntax are denigrated as flawed and ‘ugly’, posited in opposition to the cultivated Anglo register. Terminally Poetic is loaded with references to the forces of linguistic and aesthetic assimilation within the literary industry, with Yu being hounded by intrusive editors that seek to fix his writing to a ‘high standard’, demanding ‘beauty / of language’ (43), but ‘excludes and extrudes us baddies’ (20). In ‘The editor’s response’, Yu exposes how this abstract aesthetic ‘high standard’ is entrenched in forms of cultural, economic, and linguistic capital: it is ‘so high only a few top writers can ever aspire to’, and explicitly political as it relies on ‘decency propriety and an unshakable sense of social responsibility / and of course rationalism economic and always beauty / of language and of characters and of everything else along canonical lines’ (43). Access to this realm of aesthetics requires capital exchange: it is necessary to pay for the privilege of attempting to emulate the Western canon. You must ‘purchase a few back issues’, ‘learn to write like them / your masters / by taking out a subscription / plus a 10% / gst’ (43). By demonstrating how this sense of beauty in language is reliant upon such asymmetrical access to capital, Yu asserts that aesthetics, particularly when it comes to language, is anything but neutral.

Whilst I suggest that Yu’s multilingual counter-aesthetic challenges the monolingualist paradigm, as aforementioned, I do not seek to present multilingual expression as counter-hegemonic in itself. Pandey argues that multilingual deployments are not inherently radical, especially where linguistic commodity fetishism is concerned. This prompts evaluations of multilingual expression: does it affirm the linguistic capital of Anglocentric monolingualist hegemony, in which other languages are exotic signifiers of cosmopolitan capital, or does it challenge the normativity of monolingual mindsets? She highlights the predominant market interest in ‘shallow’ multilingual expression, peppered into literary text as an exotic ‘flavour’, and deployed for Orientalist aesthetic pleasure. In this paradigm, non-English expression, marked by its alterity, is the object of a celebratory, cosmopolitan consumption, which in being ingested, cultivates a worldliness about the reader. ‘Shallow’ multilingualism, as Pandey suggests, is marked by guiding and brief forays into linguistic alterity, reminiscent more of a linguistic safari than an attempt to challenge English’s linguistic hegemony. erminally Poetic adds that such a market’s interest in linguistic alterity only extends to ‘brethrens of your commonwealth who speak your lingo / with an imitation accent that you feel comfortable with’ (74). Here, multilingual expression is only acceptable under desirable cases, made comprehensible and safe for a hegemonic audience.

Reflecting on Pandey’s critiques of multilingual exhibitionism, I raise Yu’s work as an exemplar of ‘deep’ multilingual deployment: he enmeshes English and Mandarin linguistic structures to gesture towards the violence of monolingualism. He is upfront in his challenge to monolingualist readers, stripping away the prestige and centrality of English through nonsense-sounding cross-cultural metaphors, and using un-glossed Chinese characters with its logographic writing system detached from shared etymological roots to alienate the monolingualist reader. This is exemplified, perhaps simplistically, in the line ‘now you can jaw!’, which with some very elementary Mandarin knowledge, phonetically gestures towards the less nonsensical 做 (zuò), meaning to do, make, compose, create (152). Yu provides no guidance, leaving the line opaque for interpretation. Yu simulates a reversal of linguistic hierarchies by refusing to gloss, demanding that the monolingualist audience conforms to his expression, unexplained in footnotes and treated as if it were common knowledge. This challenging and unapologetic multilingual expression more appropriately reflects Australia’s obscured plurilingualism.

Even when Yu does gloss his text, he satirises the function of footnoting, explicitly patronising the reader and drawing attention to the asymmetry of linguistic dynamics.

*No, I can’t…
(Sorry the poet feels bad about having to explain too much to the
five-year-old western reader who has so little knowledge of chinese.)
(‘the-five-year’ is a reference to Martin Ami’s comment on Wild 
Swans by Jung Chang as a book that makes him ‘feel like a
five-year-old’. Wild Swans, Flamingo, 1991) (152)

Here, Yu rejects the role of cultural interlocutor, treating the literary market’s monolingualist demands as one would treat spoilt children; his juxtaposition of the ‘five-year-old’ and the literary citation highlights how monolingualist literary industries demand that other languages be translated for them. Should literary authorities, affirmed by the powerful institutions behind them, not have a greater ability to understand Chinese than a five-year-old? Through his opaque expression that refuses to translate for the reader, Hiddleston describes the effects of such techniques as elucidating the ‘contingency of [her] own language and counters dangerously reductive and exclusive notions of cultural identity’ (15).

To further challenge linguistic aesthetics, Yu uses intentionally ‘bad’ monolingual writing, developed through his performance of non-normative and ‘ugly’ English. I use ‘ugly’ in reference to his style to highlight that the common prescriptivism in grammar and pronunciation is ultimately aesthetic rather than corrective for clarity; ‘proper’ English is pleasing whilst deviant ‘englishes’ are undesirable and ugly. Claire Gallien suggests that monolingual expression can be deeply generative. She describes the possibilities of using english in non-normative ways, in which broken English can be reconstituted into ‘“breaking [in]” to open up critical and creative spaces to develop new and challenging soundscapes in texts’ (72). Yu exemplifies this in the poem ‘Bad writing’, where the first five lines of anaphora establish and emphasise a mood of bitterness:

you reject me because i write badly
you reject me because i write ugly
you reject me because i write unintelligibly
you reject me because i write ungrammatically even ungraciously
you reject me because you are scared shit of my bad writing (20)

His ungrammatical expression, rather than simply countering linguistic propriety through deviancy, demonstrates his command of poetic device and wordplay, which accentuates his political critique. The varying endings of the first four lines all rhyme due to the adverbial suffix, excepting ‘ugly’. To ‘write ugly’ may not be normative English, but its rhythmic impact in the pleasing rhyme and trochee in ‘badly’ and ‘ugly’ illustrates a generative alternate aesthetics that diverge from normative expression.

Where normative English dominates, Yu’s ugly writing highlights the possibility at the margins. As Yasmin Yildiz describes in her critique of national monolingualisms, multilingual subjects have a hyperawareness of the ‘contingent relationship between sound and meaning, signifier and signified’ that allows for new possibilities in expression (117). Yu’s own poetry describes this as ‘your English that is easy to fuck with but hard to use’, referring to possibility in experimentation (20). In other words, despite the multilingual predisposition to complex layers of signification, he is still marked as foreign and unskilled with his ‘bad chinglish’ (20). In ‘breaking’ English and revelling in the generative potential of ‘broken’ english, Yu thus demonstrates that to write badly is to be freed from the restraints of normative English, allowing for a radical broadening of poetic expression.

It is not non-normative language itself that is unacceptable or incapable of meeting literary standards, but the cultural outsider that sits lower on the aesthetic hierarchy that it signifies. As a racially-marked poet, Yu’s expression itself necessitates editing, or governance, to suit the narratives of the cosmopolitanist audience. The repetition in the anaphora ‘you reject me because i write’ emphasises that it is the act of the ‘other’ writing that is the problem, the slightly offset characters in the fourth line further demonstrating an unpleasant misalignment.¹ This is further supported by Yu’s prolific writing, spanning original English language, multilingual, and Chinese prose and verse, as well as his extensive work in translation. Where, as Yu emphasises, the literary industry is insistent on a perfectionist mode of production that necessitates constant revision to stringent and asymmetrical standards, Yu’s radical poetics is fuelled by his outright disregard for such demands for normative aesthetic beauty. The reader is ‘scared shit’ of his writing and the fragile limitations of normative language; Yu’s misaligned line refuses to ‘get in line’, interrogating linguistic and aesthetic hegemony by writing ‘ungraciously’ through his confident ugliness. Yu de-centres the hegemony of proper English, suggesting that the instinct to govern expression confirms and validates Anglocentric hegemony over Australian image and form. Yu’s assured non-conformity with prestigious image and form poses a challenge to the dominance of Anglocentric cultural institutions.