tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975068782640761502.post7063610780804242905..comments2024-01-03T08:48:10.334+08:00Comments on LOL Literatures in Other Languages: Asma SayedAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08899050113520098038noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8975068782640761502.post-15946416102559446932010-03-31T04:11:55.535+08:002010-03-31T04:11:55.535+08:00I have not read any recent work of Dr.Sayed on mul...I have not read any recent work of Dr.Sayed on multilingual and multicultural writing, but I am probably doing what she suggests as a neo-language that extends one's culture within the Canadian milieu.<br /><br />You might be able to glean this from the recent poems I have written --- in "A Lullaby", I wove the cultural energies of a native/regional language to create a lullaby in English which lends itself to any rhythm of music, thus creating a multi-cultural lullaby rooted in universally recognizable images and poetic figures. (See http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com May 3 post)<br /><br />In the "Haiti Poems", I used creole, French, and Spanish as strands of worldviews braided into the Haitian central image of a catastrophic temblor. (See the group of poems in the same blog, January 30 post).<br /><br />Since I needed to concretize the experience of ballerina's dance in another poem ("A Ballerina on the Window"), I felt it functional to use the terminology of ballet en Francais to lend the poetic utterance with the verve and traditions of the dance.<br /><br />In "Basura Days", I used Spanish, American, and Filipino to encapsulate the pre- and post-colonial nuances of a worldview that finds its central image in "garbage" (as in objectifying the experience via "past baggage" and a gestalt of diverse cultural residues --- the ethnic diaspora).<br /><br />Did these somehow enrich the poetic utterance? As espoused by Dr. Cruz -- and maybe Dr. Sayed in "resistance/culture retention" -- multilingual tools make for the multicultural (and perhaps universal) ambiance if not cosmopolitan orientation of the poems.<br /><br />Is this a challenge to the hegemony of English or "the retention of cultural identity"? If multilingual/multicultural literary tools are handmaidens to these political agenda, multilingual writing would unnecessarily be delimited. I do not subscribe to "retention of cultural identity" via literature. Literature must always enrich itself as a cross-cultural medium. Linguistic jingoism is not, a fortiori, acceptable.<br /><br />What Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot meant to accomplish with the interweaving of poetic utterance in other languages into the core English is the "importation" of cultural slices into the central imagery of their poems to figuratively expand its worldview, a Weltanschauung the poem is leaner without.<br /><br /> -o0o-<br /><br />(I just got back from a Caribbean cruise which somehow reinforced my bias for cosmopolitanism --- I am happiest at a polyglot table where toasting is done in as many languages I can understand and inebriatingly try to speak. I imagine humans were meant to remain in Babel, so they could also blissfully return to silence which is, after all, the language of the soul.)<br /><br />---ALBERT B. CASUGA<br />http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.comALBERT B. CASUGAhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08403297362821170299noreply@blogger.com