Editorial Note: Tran Tran was a Finalist for our 2024 Editors-in-Chief position for our 2024 Community Anthologies. We invited our finalists to write a short piece on the topic of their proposed anthology.
I stared at my pen name, flagged as an error in Word. I wrote “Tran Tran writes in the muddle between Vietnamese and English”, the word “muddle” constantly auto-corrected into “middle”. To write in English as a (multilingual) (non-native) English speaker is to face this perpetual pressure of wrongness—red squiggles under our identities and unusual lexical choices.
Yet I refuse to right myself into what I am not. I don’t believe anyone could exist in the exact “middle” between languages. Instead we shuttle, falter, wobble, even stumble, in a linguistic flux. This ever-shifting state manifests poetically as an ongoing negotiation—where words, sounds, and meanings merge and clash, creating a dynamic interplay that resists fixed boundaries.
I believe there are two types of languages: one we were born into, and one we grow into. The first runs in our blood, an ineradicable inheritance. The latter results from a more conscious acquisition—an adopted mode of expression that extends and fills in gaps of the first one. Each language, with its own linguistic intimacies and restrictions, shapes and amplifies different sides in us. It is impossible to enter a language without encountering its socio-cultural and historical shadows, nor to speak at least two languages without them interacting with and influencing each other. This linguistic convergence opens up unique angles for multilingual writers to act from: What creative possibilities in writing—i.e. in form, content, lexicon, and syntax—could capture the complexities of multilinguality? What power dynamics can we challenge through multilingual writing?
For writers from a multilingual background writing in English, we must confront the prestige and tyranny this language reigns over others, deep rooted in the troubling history of Western imperialism and colonization. How can the presence of another language gain equal footing with English in shaping the intention of a poem? What experiments do we need to center the value of non-English words, beyond the usual marginalized practices of italicizing or glossarizing?
I was not aware how much space another language can take up in response to English until I came across Eduardo Corral’s work. A section in his poem ‘From”Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel”’, weaving Spanish and English, shows me what a linguistic act of crossing borders could look like. Corral also uses extensive code-switching in his poems, a literary technique gaining prominence among bilingual writers of color. The poetics of code-switching captures the lived experiences of those who live at the crossroads between languages. I feel seen when reading Corral’s poems, even when I do not understand the Spanish part. Multilingual poems reflect my own living dilemma—to be half understood in either language. Writing in multiple languages involves taking risks—of confusing readers, of not being understood—in order to stand up for more pressing peripheral experiences and their unacknowledged truths.
When I first began composing poetry in English, doubt smeared across the page. Would I ever feel “enough” and “equal” in this second tongue? What does it mean to create and express myself in the language of those who once waged war on my homeland? Questions of linguistic dominance persisted at the back of my mind. It took me a while to slowly respect my connection with English, while also taking up responsibilities to grapple with its colonial roots. How can I build a home for myself, and voices like me, on this linguistic territory?
I drew much inspiration from Zeina Hashem Beck, a Lebanese poet who invented a bilingual form called “the Duet”. Duet poems feature an equal share of English and Arabic existing both separately and in relation to one another. In her interview with harana poetry, Zeina asks, “What third meaning/dimension opens up when you read them [English and Arabic] together?” I find this “third meaning/ dimension” the common space multilingual writers (or at least me!) exist in. We are not simply the colliding points between languages, but the outward ripples that carry their own mix of beauty and pain.
Now imagine what happens when multiple ripples converge—waves of multilingual poetry joining forces to reshape the landscape of language itself. Let’s begin with baby steps of gathering courage to assert our own linguistic heritages and adoption, leaving untranslatable traces across the page.
