Interpreting “Translanguages” in Transnational Women’s Literature: Socially Situated Perspectives and Feminist Close-Readings

Abstract

This article explores the potentialities of “translanguages” as a lens for interpreting transnational women authors whose writing navigates multiple languages. By “translanguages”, we refer to the generation of a collage that results either from the writer’s alternation of various languages within the same work or from their concoction of a language of their own that reappropriates the contents and expressions of various source languages. We will illustrate our tenets by exploring case studies from Assia Djebar and Maxime Garcia Diaz. By resorting to feminist close-reading methodology, we intend to interrogate the possibilities of interpretation (and their limits) from a socially situated position. This, in turn, involves our approach to how the authors’ multiple languages interact and operate upon one another to create meaning and, last but not least, our analysis of the extent to which the transnational and translingual position of these authors shapes our own situated interpretations of the texts as readers.

1. Introduction

This article intends to conduct an exploration of transnational women’s literature focusing on the intervention upon language that results from the movement from one place to another and, more precisely, from one language to another. We have referred to this as “translanguages of solidarity” elsewhere (Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa 2019), and we are now revisiting the concept of translanguaging in the context of an MSCA Doctoral Network project, EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective. By “bringing together gender and transnational perspectives within an interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural studies” (https://www.euterpeproject.eu, accessed on 22 June 2025), this project intends to rethink European cultural production by attending to the constructions of spaces and identities generated by transnational ‘swomen writers. Two of its endeavors are to select a corpus of case studies from transnational women authors and to advance research on concepts connected with these writers’ border-crossing experiences and their positionality as they are, using Azade Seyhan’s words (Seyhan 2001), “writing outside the nation”.1

Transnational women writers are self-identified women writers whose identities do not fit neatly into one nation. Although this category is open to contestation, it includes writers who have physically crossed a national border, second-generation migrant writers, writers with more than one national identity, writers excluded from the nation (perhaps due to persecution), writers residing under colonialism, writers in exile, and writers deprived of a homeland.

The necessity of the EUTERPE project stems from phenomena in our contemporary era, defined by a reconceptualization of the nation state and national identity in an era of globalization, “characterised by migratory flows, hybridization among cultures and new concepts of citizenship and identity” (Federici and Fortunati 2019, pp. 47–48). Within Europe, refugee crises, migration, interculturalism, and multiculturalism are contributing to the reshaping of Europe. Europe finds itself at a contradiction as it is a fluid and historically situated concept that can be defined geographically, politically, and culturally, and yet, it insists on its borders more than ever, most visibly in the treatment of refugees and the discourse surrounding “Fortress Europe.”

Significant contributions to literary criticism such as Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation (Lukic et al. 2019) have explored the particular relevance of gender to this genre. Transnational writers and subjects are displaced and elude fixed identity categories, troubling the notion of national belonging, presenting an issue when focusing solely on national discourses and literary canons. A focus on transnational women’s writing also allows us to explore how women’s lives, experiences and literary works are shaped and received through a gendered lens, bringing topics to the fore such as embodiment and transnational feminist solidarity.

Moving from one country to another often involves dealing with at least two languages and accommodating one’s identity to a new linguistic environment and the new culture it conveys. A constellation of terms relevant to such experience open before us as researchers involved in the project: translation, multilingualism, mother tongue, and translingualism or translanguaging, among others. In brief, we understand translation as the process of conveying information from a source named language or semiotic mode to a target named language or semiotic mode for an intended audience. A mother tongue is generally understood as the language in which one was raised or spoke first before learning other languages (this is, of course, complicated by questions of familiarity, comfort, national belonging, and many other considerations). Translingualism is the act of moving between languages, covering those “authors who have written important works in more than one language, the ambilinguals, and those who have written in only a single language but one other than their native one, the monolingual translinguals” (Kellman 2000, p. 11). Translanguaging is a distinct concept that “refers to using one’s idiolect, that is, one’s linguistic repertoire, without regard for socially and politically defined language labels or boundaries” (Otheguy et al. 2015, p. 297). We will return to these terms throughout the article and expand on them when needed.

Since we are also dealing with literatures as cultural forms, such terms become further complicated when intersected by others that, in the opinion of the EUTERPE team, must also be dealt with when approaching transnational literatures such as transculturality, situatedness, border, belonging, and affect or vulnerabilities, among others.

It is the goal of this contribution to approach translanguaging in the writings of two of our case studies, by Assia Djebar and Maxime Garcia Diaz, from a feminist perspective. Our understanding of “translanguaging” builds upon the aforementioned concept of “translanguages of solidarity” as propounded by Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa (2019). This concept is distinct from other uses of “translanguage” and “translingualism” (Kellman 2000, 2003) as it is rooted in feminist perspectives of situatedness and social responsibility. We also build upon, and differ from, notions of translanguaging that derive from pedagogy and sociolinguistics.

As we engage with approaches to translingualism and translanguaging, we ultimately approach our analysis through the disciplines of literary studies and gender studies, rather than linguistics or pedagogy. The “linguistic and semiotic repertoires” (Mazak 2017, p. 5; Li and García 2022, p. 314) of our respective authors ultimately manifest in our engagement with their literary output. In this sense, our feminist close-reading methodology (Lukic and Sánchez-Espinosa 2011) treats translanguaging as a performative, creative and social practice. A feminist close-reading considers the contexts of literary production, the text as a political and aesthetic artefact, and the process of reception. A literary analysis of translanguaging places two performances in dialogue: that of the author who performs translanguaging through their work and that of the researcher who receives and interprets the work. In this respect, although we analyze literary texts, we also recognize translanguaging as a “process of meaning-making” (Mazak 2017, p. 6) and we fully endorse the claim by sociolinguists such as García and Otheguy (2020) that

[T]ranslanguaging goes beyond understanding language as simply what we have traditionally called the ‘linguistic’—either named languages or what are seen to be their components—lexicon, morphology, phonology, syntax. Translanguaging (…) incorporates an understanding of how different modes, including our bodies, our gestures, our lives etc., add to the semiotic meaning-making repertoire that is involved in the act of communication (…) (It) goes beyond the linguistic system itself to incorporate doing language.

(pp. 24–26)

Within our article, ‘translanguages’ exists not only as a verb (translanguaging) but also as a noun referring to the aforementioned repertoire of the translingual writer. This repertoire is an individual “translanguage” (a noun) that is realised in the creation of a text and the subsequent interaction between the text and reader.

This means that we intend to investigate how the authors’ various languages interact and operate upon one another to create new meaning. This can appear as “artistic manipulation” of one language interacting with the other, including a “translation” of the colonizing language into the colonized (Cheref 2010). Ultimately, we aim to consider how the transnational and translingual position of these authors, along with the specific deployment of their linguistic repertoires, shapes our situated interpretations of their texts as readers and therefore our feminist close-reading.

2. From Transnational to Translingual

The role played by language in transnational writing is one of the research questions in Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation (2019), a seminal contribution by Jasmina Lukic, Sibelan Forrester and Borbála Faragó2 that paved the way for EUTERPE. In the introduction to the volume, Lukic, Forrester and Faragó reflect on the relations between the “transnational” and the “translational”:

Translation is one of the oldest literary practices. Literary texts demand particular approaches to translation, which is sometimes the practice that turns a text into literature. There is the obvious need to get something into another language, and many of the articles in this collection look not only at migrant or exiled authors who follow the linguistic vectors of the geographical movements in their own lives and writing careers, but also at the relationship of languages and their relative cultural power, reflected in the world status of their literatures. Self-translation can emerge as a way not only to enact the transnational journey, but also to address these differences in power and status.

(Lukic et al. 2019, p. 5)

Their pertinent remarks about the “cultural power” of languages and the need for writers to position themselves with strategies such as “self-translation” are further explored in another contribution in the same volume by Eleonora Federici and Vita Fortunati: “Theorizing Women’s Transnational Literatures: Shaping New Female Identities in Europe through Writing and Translation” (2019). Here, Federici and Fortunati delve into the complex intersections between transnational literature, comparative literature, and translation studies and make three very relevant observations: first, that the transnational paradigm means a positive challenge to the obsolete frames from which literatures were often pigeon-holed as national tokens (Spanish literature, Italian literature, etc.) transforming literary cultures and ultimately enriching them; second, that in the current global age of large migratory movements in Europe, translation has become a tool to reach wider reading audiences and offer readers the added values of migrant writers’ productions in their dealing with issues such as identity, nationality, ethnicity, gender, or language itself; and, third, that self-translation has also become the instrument for these often plurilingual writers to control their representation of such important issues in various languages. Moreover, as Federici and Fortunati state, to live in between two languages and use them to communicate means to “switch, shift, alternate not just vocabulary and syntax but consciousness and feelings” (De Courtivron in Federici and Fortunati 2019, p. 67). The words by Sylvia Molloy come to mind when she expresses that “Ser bilingüe es hablar sabiendo que lo que se dice está siempre siendo dicho en otro lado, en muchos lados” (Molloy 2016, p. 68).3

This connection between language and identity is explored by Homi K. Bhabha, whose notion of “Third Space” remains influential today (Bhabha [1994] 2004). Concerned with the postcolonial context, Bhabha’s work seeks to theorize an undoing of the colonial binary that enforces identity categories and places subjects into the dichotomy of colonized and colonizer. His work emphasizes hybridity, ambivalence, and liminality that troubles traditional boundaries and hierarchies, rejecting these “essentialist identities” of imagined communities in favor of a “plural modern space” (Bhabha [1994] 2004, p. 213). For Bhabha, the “Third Space” is a place of encounter between cultures, which makes “the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process” and “quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force” (p. 54). This ambivalence has implications for both identity and language as the Third Space “constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (p. 55). Bhabha recognizes “the importance of the hybrid moment of political change” wherein “the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One […] nor the Other […] but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both” (p. 41). This “Third Space” is one that facilitates an encounter between two cultures, an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications [which] opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (p. 5). It goes, therefore, beyond a dynamics of opposition to “a space of translation […] where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics” (p. 37).

Bhabha emphasizes “negotiation rather than negation” as it is the “negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle” (p. 37). Bhabha’s concept of “Third Space” finds a complement in the process of transculturation, described by Carlos García-Bedoya Maguiña as “una interacción multidireccional y dinámica entre culturas” (García-Bedoya Maguiña 2021, p. 469).4 Rather than a hierarchy or opposition between two cultures, this process is “una transición entre dos culturas, ambas activas, ambas contribuyentes con sendos aportes”5 (Malinowski in García-Bedoya Maguiña 2021, p. 471), echoing the multi-directional interaction of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), which is mutually constitutive and transformative. Although Bhabha’s theories of hybridity and “Third Space” emerge in his analyses of postcolonial contexts, there are clear resonances when discussing transnational writers, who also negotiate multiple cultures and contexts, living between cultures and reconceptualizing their own identities in their interactions with them.

Li’s notion of a “translanguaging space” also encapsulates the performative and political power of translanguages:

The act of translanguaging then is transformative in nature; it creates a social space for the multilingual language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity into one coordinated and meaningful performance, and making it into a lived experience. I call this space ‘translanguaging space,’ a space for the act of translanguaging as well as a space created through translanguaging.

(Li 2011 in Mazak 2017, p. 4)

It is also in this light that the contribution by Sonia Fernández Hoyos and Adelina Sánchez-Espinosa, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquidity and Transnational Women’s Literature: Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar as Case Studies,” investigates the concept of liquidity in the works of Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar. As they maintain, the uncertainty and flux of a global world characterized by the constant transience of bodies crossing borders could easily be understood from Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity metaphor. As they state (Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa 2019, p. 95), “Fluidity, constant change and mobility demand a new approach toward literary criticism (also understood as cultural in its widest sense). It implies writing outside the nation (Seyhan 2001), which, therefore, demands a reading beyond (or “à côté de, i.e., “alongside”) the nation”. Such a liminal position places the writer in the liquid realms of ambiguity and mestizaje. The transnational writer becomes, at the end of the day, the mestiza in Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands “continually [walking] out of one culture and into another” because she is not only “in all cultures at the same time” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 77) but also in all languages: “Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to?” (1987, p. 78). Hence, the “new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. […] She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode-nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” (ibid., p. 79).

However, the politics of multilingualism is not inherently progressive, and Espen Grønlie points to Ezra Pound’s “reactionary multilingualism” wherein his use of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Yiddish merely reflects his own views on race and anti-Semitism (Grønlie in Taylor-Batty and Dembeck 2023, p. 13). In contrast to this racial appropriation, Anzaldua explores how inhabiting the “borderlands” (both mentally and physically) leads not only to code-switching between dominant languages but also to the creation of new languages. These new languages arise from the interactions between multiple cultures, relating to community and identity formations, along with new ways of living and looking. By embracing plural identities, Anzaldúa’s “mestiza feminism” is not trapped by one language or history, as she ponders: “Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 79). Breaking down the boundaries between languages and inhabiting the “in between” therefore allows for new ways of living and imagining the future.

Elizabeth Robinson identifies the connections between translanguaging and feminist praxis as she notes that both traditions prioritize “non-dominant voices, experiences and languages as important practices to shift and challenge these dominant forces” of the colonial, racial, and gendered power relations that govern language use (Robinson 2019, p. 55). By situating writers and our own interpretations through feminist close-readings (Lukic and Sánchez-Espinosa 2011), we can explore the potentialities of translanguage and its specific appeal to postcolonial, migrant, and transnational writers. The standardization of languages is tied to power structures of race, class and gender, and colonialism has asserted the dominance of European languages in particular. Translanguaging allows for a proliferation of creativity in the expression of difference and plurality, challenging the hegemony and homogenization rooted in legacies of imperialism and the modern-day operations of capitalism. It may also be interpreted as a type of activism (or, indeed, artivism) as writers perform a feminist solidarity and forge transnational alliances through their work in their respective contexts. Like Anzaldua’s metaphorical figure of the mestiza, there is a potential to carve out new paths that go beyond imposed and inherited traditions. In the words of Abril-Gonzalez, writing in the tradition of Anzaldúa’s border arte, “within the thresholds of dominant and strict separation of ideas/we resist the borders and boundaries/we reclaim the tensions stemming from oppressive relationships with power” (Abril-Gonzalez 2024, p. 365).

3. The Concept of Translanguage Within Its Conceptual Constellations

Before we proceed further, it is important to distinguish between multilingualism, translingualism, and translanguaging as each of these terms carries the weight of scholarly tradition. These theoretical genealogies have shaped and influenced our use of these terms, although we are consciously moving in another theoretical direction as a result of our own disciplinary spaces, as we will demonstrate. Taylor-Batty and Dembeck observe that we “generally associate ‘multilingualism’ with text-oriented approaches and ‘translingualism’ with production-oriented approaches” (Taylor-Batty and Dembeck 2023, p. 10). As they explain, “scholarship starting out from the perspective of authorship is inclined to focus on lived experience, while text-centred approaches are more open to ‘aesthetic’ questions; ‘translingualism’ research often ties itself to speaker-centred research in linguistics, whereas ‘multilingualism’ research is more interested in individual texts’ (aesthetic) singularity or even exceptionality” (p. 11). A divide in scholarly tradition emerges, therefore, depending on both the object of study (speech practices, lived experience, literary texts) and the discipline (primarily literary studies or linguistics). Further distinctions exist when scholars treat translingualism as “unbounded” language use in linguistics or two or more “bounded” languages in literary studies (p. 12). In his seminal The Translingual Imagination (2000), Steven G. Kellman, for instance, defines “literary translingualism” as “the phenomenon of authors who write in more than one language or at least in a language other than their primary one” (p. 2). Translingualism can open many other approaches since the term may refer not only to the ordered transition from one language to another but also to the writers’ alternation of various languages within the same work.

On the other hand, “trans” as a prefix implies a dissident recognition of categories that are there but must be transgressed. It implies porous boundaries, mobility from one language to another, along with situated, multiple, plural positions. It conveys resistances and dissidences, an aspect that, although further theorized by Natalie Edwards two decades later (see below), can already be found in the emphasis Kellman places on the subversive potential of translingualism. His comments on Oscar Wilde’s use of French as a form of rebellion, for instance, are very illuminating:

When Oscar Wilde wrote one of his most scandalous works, Salomé, he compounded the effrontery by writing it in French, the official language of Décadence. “My idea of writing the play was simply this,” said Wilde to an interviewer; “I have one instrument that I know that I can command, and that is the English Language. There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it”… Wilde chose French for this one occasion because in part he hoped to disconcert the British. “Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare,” he explained, in French, the language of his artistic rebellion and nationalistic ressentiment.

(Ellmann in Kellman 2000, pp. 51–52)6

Kellman also comments on how “[S]ome translingual texts expose the accents that their authors never quite discard. [There are] calques… instances in which the author is thinking in one language but employing the locutions of another” (2000, p. 36).7 This observation serves as a bridge to the related concept that we are activating in this article, that of translanguaging. Deriving from pedagogy and sociolinguistics, this term refers to “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al. 2015, p. 283). This approach treats “a named language as a social construct” (p. 283) as “named language categories have been ultimately constructed throughout history for social purposes that bear a well-known and well-documented connection to the imposition of political power” (p. 298).

Translanguaging scholars see the need to move beyond the idea of code-switching between two different systems as they argue that bilingual or multilingual speakers do not mentally and conceptually divide their language use in such a rigid way. Instead, as Suresh Canagarajah (2011) notices, they “shuttle between languages” (p. 401) and thus “codemeshing” could be a more fitting term to refer to the one single integrated system (p. 403). We must be aware of the “dynamic, hybrid, and transnational linguistic repertoires of multilingual speakers” (Tian and Link 2019, p. 1) as “multilingual language users select linguistic features from their single repertoire strategically and creatively to mediate social and cognitive activities” (ibid.).

Both translingualism and translanguaging point to the inherent diversity and plurality of Europe and represents a challenge to Eurocentrism as Europe cannot be self-contained, never a fixed entity. For our purposes in this article, translanguaging is particularly inspiring since it places emphasis on the dynamic meaning-making, the gradual concoction of a language of the writer’s own, a translanguage, which reappropriates the contents and expressions of various source languages. This is in line with Natalie Edwards’s (2020) tenets in her Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women. Translingual Selves. Edwards maintains that “the category of the “translingual” has not been adequately theorized since Kellman’s initial proposal” (p. 18) in the literary field and that reading multilingual texts through translanguaging can greatly enhance our understanding of literature and our theorization of the trans in translingual:

Translanguaging enables us to probe how and why authors incorporate multiple languages in their literary writing, how they transform languages to invent new linguistic formations and how they create new formulations of subjectivity within their self-narrative.

(ibid.)

These new formations have, in Edwards’s view, a strong dissident potential since “[blurring the borders] between where one language ends and another begins” (ibid.) makes translanguaging transactions the arena for “side-stepping resistance to linguistic boundaries” (ibid.). Furthermore, translanguaging can help these women writers resist and disrupt not only rigid literary norms but also the cultural hierarchies that sustain them:

Reading through translanguaging, then, fundamentally questions hierarchies between languages and the power accorded to some of them. In the context of a highly centralized, colonial language, such a reading practice is all the more necessary.

(ibid.)

A number of research questions span before us at this brainstorming moment just before we embark on the analysis of our case studies: How does the creation of a new repertoire language (the “translanguage”) modify the inherited patrimoine? What are the potentialities of denaturalising the language one inhabits to create a literary voice? How can translanguaging strategies help the writer’s affective rapport to languages? How can translanguaging help escape the writer’s ventriloquist tendency to speak for the silent subaltern other? Can the process of translanguaging and/or the resulting translanguage operate as a form of artivism? What is the effect of the defamiliarization that arises from the incorporation of the digital and transmedia in translanguage? These questions will guide our inquiry as we proceed with the analysis of our two transnational women authors, Assia Djebar and Maxime Garcia Diaz, and the significance of their respective translanguages.

Our two case studies provide different models of linguistic and literary expression, highlighting two transnational women authors from differing cultural contexts, linguistic backgrounds, and, indeed, time periods, all of which inevitably influence their literary output and performance of feminist solidarity within their texts. These differences will underline the appropriateness and replicability of our methodology, which aims to place feminist close-reading in dialogue with translanguaging, demonstrating the connections between these two practices.

4. The Case of Assia Djebar: A “Feminist Translanguage of Solidarity”

The present case study on Djebar takes its point of departure from a previous contribution from one of the authors, Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, together with Sonia Fernández Hoyos (Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa 2019), which applied Zygmunt Bauman’s liquidity paradigm to Djebar’s oeuvre. One of its findings was that Djebar’s language could be referred to as a “feminist translanguage of solidarity” (p. 102), a term that explains Djebar’s holding on to the solidity of feminist solidarity with Algerian women in order to counteract the liquidity of her own exile. Fernández and Sánchez’s essay concluded on a positive note, offering hope in the paradigms of transnational writing. This new contribution extends on the concept of translanguaging from where the previous one left it.

Algerian writer Assia Djebar, pen name of Fatema Zohra Imalayen, is an interesting case study for the present article since she situated herself in a third space towards three languages: French, Arabic, and Berber. She also navigated the clash between her own privileged situation and those of the underprivileged Algerian women she describes in her novels. Djebar spent her life travelling in and out of Algeria, the country where she was born, and was educated in some of the most prestigious schools, moving later on in life to France where she was the first Algerian to be admitted to École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, one of the elite institutions in France. Her literary career made her a model representation of Francophonie as attested by her becoming the first Maghrebian member of the Académie Française and winning some of the most prestigious French literary prizes. Her whole life was, therefore, a negotiation of the transnational in-betweenness of Arabic, her mother tongue, and French, the imposed language of the colonizers of her native country that actually became the object of her study, teaching, and writing.

All this said, it is also true that Djebar was willing to risk some of these privileges when it came to supporting actions for the cause of Algerian independence, such as the 1956 strike, which actually got her expelled from the École Normale8 and gave her the occasion to write her first two novels—La Soif (1957) and Les Impatients (1958)—both in French and published in Paris by Julliard, the prestigious publishing house.9 Djebar’s writing mostly in French has led some Djebarian scholars such as Natalia Edwards to classify her as multilingual and hence discard her from her analysis of translingual self-writing (Edwards 2020, p. 23)10. Other scholars (Murdoch 1993; Rothendler 2016; Boussoualim 2018) focus on Djebar’s translanguaging and transcultural strategic practices and her in-betweenness. Djebar was always conscious of this ambiguity and of her own position before it and often expressed herself in that respect in her interviews and in her writings. Well-known instances are her statements in a 1985 interview with Margarite Le Clezio, “Ecrire dans la langue adverse”, on her feelings about writing in a foreign language, where she mentions, “At home I write in a foreign tongue…in the tongue which I call the adverse tongue… the first exile occurs in a tongue which is opposite to me” (Murdoch 1993, p. 92), a comment on her famous words in L’Amour, la fantasia (1985):

French is my ‘stepmother’ tongue. Which is my long-lost mother-tongue, that left me standing and disappeared? … Mother-tongue, cither idealized or unloved, neglected and left to fairground barkers and jailers! … Burdened by my inherited taboos, I discover I have no memory of Arab love-songs. Is it because I was cut off from this impassioned speech that I find the French I use so flat and unprofitable? […] Writing the enemy’s language is more than just a matter of scribbling down a muttered monologue under your very nose; to use this alphabet involves placing your elbow some distance in front of you to form a bulwark—however, in this twisted position, the writing is washed back to you.

(Djebar 1993b, pp. 214–15)11

Calling the French language her “stepmother tongue” (“langue marâtre”) and “the enemy’s language” signifies her intentional alienation from this language, her “placing her elbow some distance in front” while also forming “a bulwark”, looking for safe grounds for her writing in that very space. Indeed, her relationship with French is a love–hate one and, as Brigitte Weltman-Aron puts it, “[the] ‘adverse language’ is never simply that” but gives Djebar “alternative tools for her writing” (Weltman-Aron 2015, p. 56). In an interview conducted by Mildred Mortimer in 1988, Mortimer asks, “me semble que votre tâche est difficile. En tant que romanciere et historienne, comment combiner cette écriture en langue française avec le récit oral arabe?” (Mortimer 1988, p. 201), to which Djebar answers:

Si le premier volet est de ramener le passé à travers l’écriture en français, le deuxième est d’écouter les femmes qui évoquent le passé par la voix, par la langue maternelle. Ensuite, il faut ramener cette évocation à travers la langue maternelle vers la langue paternelle. Car le français est aussi pour moi la langue paternelle. La langue de l’ennemi d’hier est devenue pour moi la langue du père du fait que mon père était instituteur dans une école française ; or dans cette langue il y a la mort, par les témoignages de la conquête que je ramène. Mais il y a aussi le mouvement, la libération du corps de la femme car, pour moi, fillette allant a l’école française, c’est ainsi que je peux éviter le harem.

(p. 201)12

However, these words are complemented by Djebar’s statements in L’Amour: “Writing in a foreign language has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins. Writing does not silence the voice but awakens it” (Djebar 1993b, p. 204). Djebar intentionally places herself on a liminality that actually proves to be very productive to her aims. In so doing she evinces that, contrary to Audre Lorde’s (1984) famous feminist dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, in the frames of postcoloniality, one can also resort to making use of what Josefina Ludmer (1984) termed as “Las tretas del débil” (translated as “tricks of the weak” in Ludmer 1991), i.e., putting the postcolonial tools to subversive decolonial uses from one’s colonial subaltern position. As Fernández and Sánchez point out:

As an exiled writer, Djebar can use the indeterminacy of her third space to take possession of the weapons of the oppressor and put them to good use. The French language can become the vehicle to compensate for the aphasia of her Algerian sisters if conveniently Arabicized.

(p. 102)

Indeed, Djebar activates that third space via an imaginative intervention on the colonizing language, French, which also resonates with bell hooks’ rereading of Adrienne Rich’s words: “this is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you”, in hooks’s (1994, p. 167) Teaching to Transgress. Certainly, by recycling elements of the oppressors’ language, Djebar, like other transnational writers such as Gloria Anzaldua or Lélia González, attains a disruption of the colonial legacies that are providing the space for her writing.

Critics have referred to this intervention upon French in many ways: as “reshaping” (Murdoch 1993, p. 17), modulating it into a “disruptive language” (Ghaussy 1994, p. 460), artistically translating it into the mother tongue (Cheref 2010, p. 90), or generating a radical palimpsest that some describe as bilingual (Donadey 2000, p. 29) and others as multilingual (Lievois 2013). In our opinion, however, the linguistic intervention can be best understood if analyzed as translanguaging since it implies “codemeshing” (Canagarajah 2011, p. 403), i.e., not only the mutual activation of the languages upon each other but also the interactions of two cultures in their transness. Malika Boussoualim has also written on the relationship between translingualism and transculturality, using Djebar’s La Femme sans sépulture as an illustration of her approach. She follows Canagarajah’s tenets (Canagarajah 2013) in saying that while the multilingual approach conceives the relationship between languages “in an additive manner (i.e., combination of separate languages)”, the translingual approach focuses on the contacts and influences of languages upon each other, on their productive synergies. Translingual practices, according to Canagarajah, exert linguistic transformations as they involve “exchanges and negotiations” between cultures (Boussoualim 2018, p. 111). Boussoualim concludes that Djebar’s translingual practices are a fitting representation of Wolfgang Welsch’s conception of transculturality as a relationality between cultures that, rather than being based on “social homogenization” “intercultural delimitation” or “exclusion and conflict” (Boussoualim 2018, p. 112), which makes cultural communication impossible, is set upon “entanglement, intermixing and commonness”, promotes “exchange and interaction”, and supports “coexistence rather than combat” (Boussoualim 2018, p. 112).

As discussed in Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa (2019, p. 102), Djebar’s and the Berber women’s experiences interpellate one another, conforming a disruptive new repertoire, a translanguage. Ultimately, what matters is the finding of a representational strategy to communicate the experiences and voices of Algerian women with the linguistic instruments she has. As Alexandra Magearu (2021, p. 296) puts it, Djebar reconfigures her own voice by listening to those other voices and creating a space for subaltern aurality, a sort of oral ethnography that encompasses fragments of speech and archival traces, hence breaking the dichotomy between oral and written discourse. Indeed, in novels such as L’Amour, la fantasia (1985, Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade, 1993), Ombre Sultane (1987, A Sister to Scheherezade, 1993), or La Femme sans sépulture (The Woman without Sepulchre, Djebar 2002), French is fertilized into such translanguage crossing many boundaries: the boundaries of three languages, French, Arabic, and Berber; the boundaries of their cultural traditions; and the media boundaries. Djebar’s translanguaging entails the imaginative translation of the Berber oral story-telling tradition into her written discourse. It is an effort “to capture the voices of women speaking in the Algerian vernaculars: darija and the various Berber dialects. In her eyes, translation is required whether the language of writing is French or formal Arabic (fusha)” (Dobie 2016, p. 132). In an interview with Maryse Leon in 1979, Leon asks, “Being a novelist, how did you become a filmmaker?” and Djebar answers,

Let’s say I moved from written literature to oral literature in order to find a solution for the problem of not writing in the mother tongue of the collectivity. After ten years of purely literary activities, I gradually detected a popular language. At first, I thought it was a national language, but then I realized, instinctively and unconsciously, that it was a women’s language I was interested in. When I tried to transpose popular Arabic, which felt like a very rich language to me, to French, which is very rational and intellectual, there was a loss. And then there was the timbre of the voices which stuck in my mind and which gets inevitably lost in writing… We live in a culture where expression stifles a lot of things.

(Leon and Martineau Hennebelle [1981] 2021)

Translanguaging is Djebar’s solution for the lack of translation. The strictness of French cannot accommodate the richness of popular Arabic and she resorts to moving from written to oral literature. That way, French is deprived of its oppressive colonizing power and, to use Djebar’s term, transposed into a new language that could be termed as indicated above, as a “feminist translanguage of solidarity” because it functions as a feminist activist, or artivist, strategy, as “the accomplice of [Djebar’s] resistance on behalf of, or, rather, alongside her Algerian sisters” (Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa 2019, p. 102). As the quote above states, this is the solution for “not writing in the mother tongue of the collectivity”. After all Djebar famously expressed herself both in Femmes d’Alger dans leur Appartement (1980) and in Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995) about the need to exercise respectful solidarity by not speaking “for” or “on” other women. In Femmes d’Alger, we read:

Don’t claim to “speak for” or, worse, to “speak on,” barely speaking next to, and if possible very close to: these are the first of the solidarities to be taken on by the very few Arabic women who obtain or acquire freedom of movement, and body and mind. And don’t forget that those who are incarcerated, no matter what their age or class, may have imprisoned bodies, but have souls that move more freely than ever before.

(Djebar 1992, p. 2)

This is the position she expresses also in Le Blanc de l’Algérie, fifteen years later, when she states,

[Some] speak of Algeria, describe it, and question it […] Others know, or ask themselves […] Yet Others write “on” Algeria, on her fertile misfortune, on her reappeared monsters. I, on the other hand, I have simply found myself, among these pages with a few friends. Me, I decided to bring myself closer to them, to the border.

(Gueydan-Turek 2011, p. 85)13

Djebar’s gives voice to the subaltern sisters by situating herself “près de”. Her closing up to them takes place at the border. The paradoxical in and simultaneously out condition of this space allows Djebar to attain her ultimate intention to write her solidarity “next to” rather than “for” her sisters. Our qualification of this as “feminist artivism” is pertinent since, indeed, the translingual transgression of the officiality of the written language by the intrusion of orality serves as a bridge between Djebar and the Algerian sisters she represents in her novels. Azade Seyhan explains that Djebar, like many other transnational writers outside the nation, needs to narrate herself, translate herself into the pages. She partakes of a tradition of transnational autobiographical voices that “bear witness to personal and collective histories threatened by forgetting and erasure”:

By acting as interlocutors, these (auto)biographical voices moderate a delicate and critical exchange between self ’s experience and representation of trauma and the emphatic identification with the trauma of others who are voiceless by force or circumstance (or due to the absence of any sympathetic interlocutors).

(Seyhan 2003, pp. 160–61)

As Edward John Still puts it: “It is […] through the representation of women […] who are thus presented as non-autobiographical figures, that Djebar’s novels find a literary expression for Algerian women’s challenges and sufferings, past and contemporary, in which her identity holds a stake” (Still 2019, p. 176).

It is not casual, therefore, that Djebar should so often choose the figure of Scheherezade to represent the power of the story-teller, that alter-ego woman who can exert political transformation through her manipulation of language. As highlighted by Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa (2019, p. 107) the Scheherezade alter ego places Djebar on a league of feminist transnational Arabic writers such as Fatima Mernissi, Nawal al Saadawi, or Leila Sebar, who have vindicated the protagonist of Arabian Nights to deconstruct orientalist sensual odalisque clichés and resorted to this emblematic heroine to represent themselves as resisting sisters to the less privileged subaltern women in their motherlands.14 Close-reading A Sister to Scheherazade (1993; Ombre sultane, 1987) can be pertinent as an illustration here. The novel deals with the relationship between two women: Isma, the “liberated” exiled woman, and Hajila, the Algerian woman, second wife to her ex-husband. Though first- and second-person narrative voices are used at times, the narrator is mostly Isma, who uses second-person narration to address Hajila and narrate her actions:

Here am I speaking to you again, Hajila. As if, in truth, I were causing you to exist. A phantom whom my voice has brought to life. A phantom-sister?” […] My concern now is with the imminent drama. Our two lives merge: the body of the man becomes the party walls separating our lairs, which house a common secret.

(Djebar 1993a, p. 82)

Although it may appear at first that Isma is voicing Hajila’s silence and has, therefore, the agency the latter lacks, the relationship between the two women is not so simple. Isma and Hajila need each other in order to fight the violence of the husband, just like Scheherezade and her sister cannot survive without their mutual collaboration. Scheherezade’s seductive story-telling can only attain the liberation of both Dinazarde and many other imprison sisters because of the constant prompting from Dinazarde. It is most telling that Djebar should finish her novel alluding to the effects of sisterly solidarity:

Eyes are opened, hearing sharpened by anticipation or encouraged by sisterly solidarity, rediscovering the warmth and the unspoilt, intuitive vision of childhood. The second wife stands on the threshold, devouring the space and now the first one can put on the veil, or go into hiding […] At the end of the long night, the odalisque is in flight.

(Djebar 1993a, p. 156)

The first wife is standing “on the threshold” of the second wife’s place but she is careful not to trespass that space. The more powerful sister, Djebar’s Scheherezade alter-ego, is bringing herself closely “next to” the less powerful Dinazardes. It is this respectful solidarity that can finally attain the transformation and set the odalisque in flight “at the end of the long night”.

Two further aspects are important to consider as regards translanguaging in Djebar’s work: the temporal and the transmedia interventions. On the former, Rachel Rothendler contributes an interesting approach by describing Djebar’s language as “a temporal, physical, and imagined space (Rothendler 2016, p. 296). Rothendler highlights that in L’amour, la fantasia, Djebar intertwines her own story and the life stories of women who experienced the Algerian War of Independence or its traumatic aftermath.

By this strategy, the writer does not only demonstrate that those stories are part of her own experience, but she also devises a totally new chronotope: “Appropriating the voices of colonizer and colonized across time, Djebar creates a chronotope, a kind of temporal landscape in which French, the language of the colonizer, becomes her own to the extent that she inhabits it” (ibid.). Rothendler adds that this intervention conveys the struggle to create meaningful spaces that could be best defined as “imagined linguistic spaces […] that cannot be encompassed by any one language” (pp. 298–99).

Certainly, this new temporality, this alternative chronotope can account for Djebar’s transmedial decolonial artivism, the last point we wish to explore in this section. We could well conclude that Djebar’s translanguaging, which, as we have seen above, encompasses writing, orality, music, and women’s embodiment, is a transmedial creation that also incorporates visuality. After all, she was not only a writer but also a film-maker and her visual discourse is just another one of her languages that cannot be understood in isolation, but must be understood in its transmedial interaction with verbal and musical languages. An illustrative case can be her documentary film La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua (The Nubah of the Women of Mount Chenoua, 1977). Nubah (Nouba in Arabic) is a vestige of the musical traditions of Al Andalus found in the Maghreb countries, which Djebar uses as the structure to her docufiction with a protagonist, Lila, again an obvious alter ego of Djebar herself, returning to her native village on the Chenoua mountain. On being interviewed by Monique Martineau (Leon and Martineau Hennebelle [1981] 2021) about her choice of this musical form, Djebar explains her reasons for choosing Bela Bartok’s music as soundtrack of the film and states that

[The nouba form] stems from my relationship with popular culture. The latter offered me models, in this case a construction model. These noubas have been around as collective culture for four centuries. I also played with the word nouba, which means: a story told by everyone, in rotation.

The title given to this interview is, tellingly, “J’ai recherché un langage musical”, emphasizing the transmediality of her project. The passage above evinces, again, that what matters about the conception of her film as a traditional musical form, a “nouba”, is that it allows her to represent the unheard voices of Algerian women. Anna Litovskikh et al. add that

Nubah is used in the film not just as a metaphor but as a narrative structuring principle: every woman’s voice will be heard when it is her turn. Djebar and Bartók do similar things: they listen to and record humble voices in “almost silent” Algeria. The fiction in the film relies on a documentary—interviews with women and archival footage. And the script is based on this. Ethnography and magical realism coexist here: the author ensures that the stories of the women she is listening to take their rightful place in Algerian history.

(Litovskikh et al. 2023, p. 6)

In their opinion, the most interesting aspect about the use of this musical form is its horizontality, wherein no part of the performance takes protagonism over the other and “every voice counts”. And so does every silence, for that matter, since, as they state, in Djebar’s films, “the silence (of Djebar and Algerian women) becomes a statement” (ibid.) and “Silence as a means of representing Algerian women is a consequence of both gender politics and colonial history. Lila’s intention to listen to these women’s nubah is a political gesture” (ibid., p. 8).

Ultimately, trying to express the voices and the silences contained in her nouba-documentary and the resulting translanguage (whether by Lila, the narrator in the film; by Hajila, the one in Sister; or by any of the other Scheherazades in her novels, or by Djebar herself), becomes Djebar’s artivist feminist intervention.

Although influenced by the Arabic of her mother tongue, and the Berber of her ancestry, Djebar’s translanguaging manifests in her use of just one language, French, as her Scheherezades enact their “next to” feminist solidarity with their subaltern sisters. Our next case study, Garcia Diaz, alternates between named languages, often within the same poem. Furthermore, as she writes from her post-digital twenty-first century context, Garcia Diaz’s relationship to intermediality influences her writing in an immediate way that is in contrast to the twenty-year span between Djebar’s cinematic excursions of the 1970s and the experimental form of her novels in the 1990s. These variances in translanguaging demonstrate Canagarajah’s claims that “communication transcends individual languages […] [It] transcends words and involves diverse semiotic resources and ecological affordances” (Mazak 2017, p. 3).

5. The Case of Maxime Garcia Diaz: A Feminist Translanguage for the Digital Age

Maxime Garcia Diaz is a Dutch–Uruguayan poet known for her slam poetry and her multilingual poetry collection Het is warm in de hivemind (2021). Primarily writing poems that blend both Dutch and English (albeit while incorporating other languages), her relationship with English is not oppositional, nor does it mirror the postcolonial positioning of Djebar. On the contrary, the language was a source of comfort for her during her adolescence and often the linguistic medium through which she expressed herself creatively, serving as an escapist comfort language outside of the Dutch language that surrounded her. She attributes this phenomenon, in part, to the influence of her Uruguayan father (she did not speak Spanish until later in life). As she participated in poetry slam competitions and wrote for publication, she pivoted towards Dutch due to the pragmatics of the Dutch poetry scene, allowing her to participate in competitions and access state funding. Her perspective on English is therefore nuanced as she also displays an awareness of a trend towards the anglicization of Dutch culture and the global anglophone dominance, highlighting the value of writing in the local language (Heesakkers 2022). The third space (Bhabha [1994] 2004) of her translanguage allows an encounter between these two languages, among others, which facilitates artistic creation and linguistic interactions without any imposed hierarchy.

Garcia Diaz is therefore not opposing one specific language, but rather the monolingualism of the poetry form and literary output in general, a challenge to “the constraints imposed by monolingual publishing norms that prevent certain types of multilingual literature from ever seeing the light of day” (Taylor-Batty and Dembeck 2023, p. 8) as she seeks to expand the limits of what constitutes a Dutch-language poetry collection. Whilst it is still necessary to acknowledge the unequal power relations between the English language and other languages globally, Garcia Diaz’s approach recalls the process of “transculturation” that is a multi-directional and dynamic interaction between cultures, with each culture actively making their own contributions (García-Bedoya Maguiña 2021, pp. 469, 471). Rather than a hierarchical imposition of one culture upon another, this multi-directional interaction echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), whereby the interaction is mutually constitutive and transformative. Garcia Diaz’s translanguaging creates a third space that reflects a dynamic hybridity, reshaping both languages in a transcultural encounter that promotes plural identities in the context of neoliberal homogenization that promotes monolingualism.

The majority of poems in Garcia Diaz’s debut collection, Het is Warm in de Hivemind, incorporate both English and Dutch, as is immediately evident upon opening the volume to see the book’s division into three sections, namely, “origin stories,” “baby-faced simulacrum,” and “no wave,” while most of her poems’ titles are also in English. “Superhumanmoon” utilizes English in the form of a barrage of fictional news reports, ominously conveying a rapid, but plausible, technological development, from the launch of “the laser interferometer space antenna” (Garcia Diaz 2022, p. 14) to “moving from extreme life extension to immortality” (ibid., p. 15). Dutch, meanwhile, primarily conveys the story of Garcia Diaz’s “floor wolkenweldt, document van een millennium” (ibid., p. 15)15, whose life mirrors these technological developments. References to “floor wolkenveldt & haar medicated brain/haar vrienden zijn mid-21st century teens” (ibid., p. 15)16 also illustrate that media buzzwords and medical terminology have percolated into Dutch expressions. In avoiding a rigid separation between the two languages, Garcia Diaz demonstrates how they interact to achieve her aesthetic aims in “a model of multilingualism whereby individuals are seen to draw on their communicative repertoires in fluid and dynamic ways without being restricted by the boundaries between named languages” (Taylor-Batty and Dembeck 2023, p. 12). As a translingual poet who moves between multiple languages, all writing is an act of self-translation, recalling Walkowitz’s notion of “born translated” that troubles the boundaries between “author and translator, original and derivation, native and foreign” (Walkowitz 2015, p. 31).

Her poem “Artificielle” is the only one in the collection that incorporates French. The poem is found in the “baby-faced simulacrum” section of the book, bringing to mind Baudrillard’s own discussion of Disneyland (the French word “artificielle” also, perhaps coincidentally, triggers a quasi-homophonic association with “artificial hell”). Garcia Diaz’s choice of language therefore echoes the themes of her poem as she draws associations between Marie Antoinette, modern celebrity culture, theme parks, the spectacle, and discussions of body image. Opening with “je mange des pêches dans ma chambre […] je veux connaître sifflement de la lame/de la guillotine” (Garcia Diaz 2022, p. 27)17, the speaker appears to be a costumed performer in a theme park, dressing herself as a princess for a mock execution. The multiple languages interact, accumulating a series of images of the performer, with her “queen’s headband in cotton and black lace/haar pruik, die niet bestond, die ik verzon/moi, Imagineer” (ibid., p. 29), emphasizing a shared illusion over reality.18 Information about Marie Antoinette, in her “black mourning/ensemble […] its tattered/blackness aroused considerable sympathy, and she was forbidden/to wear it to her execution” (ibid., p. 33) further blurs the line between simulation and historical fact. These images of performativity and spectacle provide a critique of a misogynistic visual regime of restrictive norms and performativity, reinforced by morbid tabloid speculation on a young Lindsay Lohan’s partying habits, with a “pre-prepared obituary/on hand ready to go at a moment’s notice” (ibid., p. 36) despite her not yet being “of legal drinking age” (ibid., p. 33), echoing the impending execution of the French queen. Garcia Diaz blends languages, voices, and time periods to emphasize the allure of the spectacle and the harmful consequences of a punitive beauty culture where “inside every skinny legend/is a decapitated queen” (ibid., p. 29).

Garcia Diaz’s traversal of linguistic barriers sees her prioritize an affective response to her poetry over the direct communication of a fixed idea or meaning. Whilst both Dutch and English will be familiar to most Dutch-speaking readers of her poetry, the same cannot be assumed of the sections in French. Despite this obstacle, the sections in Dutch and English follow a clear thread that takes the reader through the poem’s themes, allowing the French words to add associations even if they cannot be fully understood. Another poem in the collection, “w@vvy don’t pretend to be analog when ur digital” contains two words in Greek, a language that the poet herself does not speak. In this way, Garcia Diaz’s poetry resists accessibility and interpretation. However, the poet’s view is that poetry does not have to be fully understood as one can appreciate the sound of a word or its appeal to the imagination (Heesakkers 2022). Similarly, her philosophy is that poetry does not need to have a clear message but can trigger imaginative associations without a single meaning or interpretation (Kok 2019).

The use of punctuation, symbols, and emojis with no fixed meaning similarly resists direct interpretation. “Artificielle” employs cake emojis to divide the poem into sections whilst also evoking further imagery associated with Marie Antoinette. The poem “w@vvy don’t pretend to be analog when ur digital” also decorates its text with at signs, percentage symbols, crosses, and numbers to emulate the language of early-2000s internet forums and social media. Furthermore, “mad girl theory, or: audrey wollen never answered my email :( after Allen Ginsberg” contains an emoji in its title, which could be interpreted as ironic, whilst the poem also includes multiple instances of the symbol for mercury (which has a history in biology of denoting a non-binary organism). Garcia Diaz’s use of emojis and internet references stems from her interest in the digital space and its constructions of girlhood. For Garcia Diaz, these inclusions are part of her experiment with translanguage, reflecting a development in Dutch language and society (Snoekx 2022). As Leonardi notes, “emojis are considered as the lingua franca of the digital age” (Leonardi 2022, p. 22). Similarly, they are “the world’s first truly universal form of communication,” more ubiquitous even than English (Evans in Leonardi 2022, p. 28). Although all language is contextual, the language of emojis lacks standardization by any single authority or association with a particular culture or homeland. Emojis “[lack] codification” (Leonardi 2022, p. 39) and “do not hold the same meaning in different cultures” (ibid., p. 28). Garcia Diaz’s use of emojis, in particular, connects to Abril-Gonzalez’s evocation of “pictorial language to “write” our lives” and conveys translanguaging’s dialogue with intermedial forms of expression (Abril-Gonzalez 2024, p. 358).

Recalling Garcia Diaz’s approach to aesthetics, her innovation in language again results in poetry that creates ambiguity and encouraging a multiplicity of possible meaning. This effect is reminiscent of the words of the transnational writer Sylvia Molloy, another writer who had experience of “living between languages” (Molloy 2016). Molloy recalls the mantra of the writer and translator Valery Larbaud, “en una lista de recomendaciones literarias anotaba Larbaud como mandato para todo escritor: “Donner un air étranger à ce qu’on écrit” (Molloy 2016, p. 69).19 Garcia Diaz’s innovations in poetic language create an ambiguous experience of poetry that is not entirely knowable, yet it is one that seeks to trigger affective and imaginative responses.

Garcia Diaz’s novel approach to language raises an interesting problematic for poetry’s oral tradition, especially considering her background in slam poetry (winning the NK Poetry Slam in 2019). As she recognizes, the punctuation and emojis that dot her poetry cannot be read aloud in a conventional way (Heesakkers 2022), challenging assumed ways of reading and engaging with poetry. Conversely, one poem in the collection is a feminist slam poem that she has performed previously, the aforementioned “mad girl theory, or: audrey wollen never answered my email :( after Allen Ginsberg” (Garcia Diaz 2022). When performing slam poetry, the actual text is only a fragment of the overall aesthetic experience, as the poet must be aware of her tone of voice, volume, facial expressions, and gestures, among other details. A written slam poem therefore serves a similar purpose to a film script, providing a template for interpretation but not a complete piece of art in itself.

The poem’s invocation of Allen Ginsberg also recalls the influence of the American jazz movement on the Beat poets, placing this poem within an intermedial genealogy of musical performance. Here, Garcia Diaz innovates not only in the use of language but also in her use of medium. This poem is multimodal as it incorporates languages from multiple semiotic systems and, despite the bound physicality of the book medium, it is also inherently inextricable from the digital space and therefore transmedial. In the opening line of the poem, an underlined sentence mimics the appearance of a hyperlink, which, in a digital context, would take the user to another webpage. Garcia Diaz explores the limitations of the medium by providing URLs in an appendix at the back of the book, prompting the reader to manually type the web address into their browser in order to access the content. In this instance, the hyperlink adds music, taking the reader to a YouTube video of a song from an animated Barbie film. This addition demands interactivity from the reader, fitting Espen Aarseth’s definition of ergodic literature, that which requires non-trivial effort on the part of the reader (Aarseth 1997). Similarly, Garcia Diaz has artistically repurposed photographs of the women she references, such as Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, with the addition of tears fitting the “sad girl” motif she draws from Audrey Wollen. This transmedial experience points to the inherent intermediality of the book medium itself. Any medium contains its own potential for innovation and connection to other media, in line with WJT Mitchell’s claim that pure media do not exist (Mitchell 2005) or Bolter and Grusin’s (2000) observation that media are always being remade as a result of dialogue between old and new forms.

These additional elements create an immersive experience that affects the reader beyond the capabilities of language. Furthermore, they also contribute to the disruption of conventional reading processes. For example, the reader receives no instructions about when or how to listen to the music; this could conceivably be background music to the poem, or a continuation of its themes, which require separate and careful listening. The use of photos also disrupts the reader’s gaze as it passes over the text, encouraging the reader’s eyes to move back and forth between visual and verbal modalities to create a reading experience that combines both. These transmedial techniques extend reading beyond the book’s medium to the digital space, with its hypertextual connectivity encouraging transcultural encounters and linguistic innovations through a blending of languages and media.

For Garcia Diaz, the connectivity of the internet is reflected in the collage of voices that compose her texts and the eponymous “hivemind” that gives its name to her collection. The mosaic of found language, sources, and quotations simulate the information overload of the internet (Heesakkers 2022). In “mad girl theory, or: audrey wollen never answered my email :( after Allen Ginsberg”, this panoply of voices situates Garcia Diaz within a genealogy of women artists and critics. Opening with an Audrey Wollen quote, “every time you slice into the canon/girls rush out like ghosts” (Garcia Diaz 2022, p. 64), she draws attention to the patriarchal exclusion and repression that make up the histories of art and literature. In dialogue with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Garcia Diaz’s translanguage allows her to rewrite a canonical narrative and protest poem to center women, reframing the text to address the gendered history of medical abuse, mental healthcare, and women’s agency. Ginsberg’s original narrative acts as a palimpsest through which Garcia Diaz can state, “ik zag de beste meisjes van mijn generatie/vernietigd door verdriet” (ibid.).20 Incorporating diverse women’s voices throughout history into her poem, including Sylvia Plath, Andrea Long Chu, and Audre Lorde, the poem rejects the idea of a purely individual or, indeed, national experience, instead implying the speaker is part of a shared transnational collective experience of misogyny. The third space of her translanguage allows her to denaturalize and deconstruct a patrimoine, a cultural and linguistic inheritance shaped by the same power relations that construct the literary canon. Her evocation of a collective voice is in line with artivism as Garcia Diaz uses her poetry to demonstrate her transnational feminist solidarity.

In demonstrating that her voice and creative output belong to a “tissue of quotations” (Barthes 1977), Garcia Diaz moves beyond the idea of an autonomous individual to the posthuman subject that is contingent, relational, and interdependent. In this view, as in Braidotti’s (1994) nomadic subject, identity is fluid, rejecting notions of fixed, stable, or essential identity that reinforces dichotomies. Braidotti’s nomadic subject is situated and embodied but possesses a critical distance as they are never fully immersed within their society or national context. Similarly, the position of the transnational writer, never entirely at home, places them in a “condition of being re-adjusted or re-situated [and therefore] “grants […] a privileged space in which truths are constructed and deconstructed” (Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa 2019, p. 101). This notion of fluidity pervades Garcia Diaz’s volume, and the motifs of mercury and mermaids recur throughout her poetry, troubling the boundaries of the human subject.

For Sandra Faulkner, poetry is an ideal medium to capture this type of fluid and plural subject as “poetry defies singular definitions and explanations, it mirrors the slipperiness of identity, the difficulty of capturing the shifting nature of who we are and want to be, and resonates more fully with the way identity is created, maintained, and altered through our interacted narratives” (Faulkner in Faulkner 2018, p. 7). Garcia Diaz’s poetry encapsulates this type of embodiment, with poems such as “superhumanmoon” and “Sunshine Cybernetics” featuring bodily transformations and the posthuman body. Two of her posthuman philosophical influences, Donna Haraway and the Xenofeminists, recur throughout the collection. A quote from The Cyborg Manifesto appears in both English and Dutch: “our best machines are made of sunshine” (Garcia Diaz 2022, p. 42) and “onze mooiste machines zijn van zonlicht” (ibid., p. 43), embracing a cyborg figure that both decenters the human and rejects socially imposed categories. A quote from The Xenofeminist Manifesto also adorns the back cover of the collection, “ik wil geen schone handen maar superieure vormen van corruptie” (ibid., n.p.), also rejecting essentialist identity categories and the notion of purity.21 By quoting these critics in both English and Dutch, Garcia Diaz defamiliarizes them, encouraging the reader to reflect on the metaphors used and potentially triggering new and productive interpretations. Her use of translanguage ultimately shapes all elements of her artistic production, connecting her posthuman philosophy, multilingualism, digital subjectivities, multimodality, and transmedial experimentation.

6. Conclusions

We started this article with Federici and Fortunati’s approach to transnational literatures as arising in the context of current migratory flows and cultural hybridization and hence involving reconceptualizations of categories such as identity or citizenship (Federici and Fortunati 2019, p. 48). Linguistic operations play an important role in these transformations and our inquiry has taken us to translingualism as a mode of cultural and political intervention in transnational women’s literature.

Our case studies have illustrated two transnational women authors who write from distinctly different positions and contexts, yet there are various commonalities to be found in their oeuvre and respective creative philosophies. From our feminist close-reading stance that focuses on the partial, multiple, and situated construction of our feminist objectivity (Haraway 1988), we have approached the limits on our reading and interpretations whilst emphasizing gender as a critical concept driving interpretation. Furthermore, we have chosen to read with a transnational and translanguaging lens in line with these aims.

Transnational writers cannot be reduced to a single culture or context, particularly in the case of Djebar, whose life and career spanned France and the United States. Certainly, our reading lacks a similar transnational and translingual positionality to the authors in question. A deep knowledge of Arabic, the Berber traditions, and Algerian idioms and cultural references would, undoubtedly, facilitate one’s reading of Djebar, for example, whilst native English, Dutch, or French speakers will no doubt arrive at Garcia Diaz’s poetry with different preconceptions. Readers and researchers from these various contexts may arrive at entirely different interpretations as a result of their situated positionality and familiarity with those contexts, their cultures, their geographies, and their histories. But our rapport as feminist researchers is equally important when approaching the texts. Ultimately, as researchers, our responses are often rooted in affect, and this is what drives and motivates us. We are writing from different locations (Spain, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Italy, and multiple other countries since the inception of this article) and perspectives, and we can relate to the transnational repositioning of these authors to one degree or another, as our situated knowledges resonate with our own research in topics such as multilingualism, identity, space, and the body.

Maxime Garcia Diaz, as a Dutch–Uruguayan poet and second-generation migrant whose cultural hybridity encourages a fluid approach to literary language, has been garnered with the C. Buddingh’-prijs for the best poetry collection in Dutch despite her stretching the definition of a Dutch-language poetry collection to its limits. Assia Djebar, conversely, had direct experience of colonialism and migration that she reacted against in her work from feminist and decolonial stances, yet her work was so well received in France that she gained entry to the Académie Française. Djebar utilizes a third space of language to explore the dynamics of a colonized space and its relationship to a colonial power. The French tongue is not an imposition to be cast aside but a tool for Djebar to use in her critique of colonialism and patriarchy. Garcia Diaz, meanwhile, combines and creates languages to explore the limits of what constitutes a poem in her Dutch context, embracing a multilingualism that allows languages to interact in a transcultural process, resisting neoliberal capitalism’s erosion of linguistic diversity in favor of English as the dominant lingua franca.

The translanguaging and translanguages of these writers extend beyond linguistic limitations towards other modalities and media, becoming intermedial and even transmedial in the search for innovation. Djebar’s exploration of the musicality of language and her move towards experimental cinema demonstrate a need to find alternative and new forms of expression. Similarly, Garcia Diaz’s work contrasts the orality of poetry with the print medium, combining the analogue and the digital, incorporating hyperlinks, photographs, emojis, and music. Moreover, the intertextuality of each author situates them within a genealogy of writers, philosophers, and activists who have come before, moving beyond the individual towards a transnational feminist collective voice, with both writers embracing polyphony to situate themselves within a collage of voices. Djebar’s “next to” feminist solidarity places her alongside those people subjugated by colonialism and patriarchy while Garcia Diaz’s posthuman feminism destabilizes notions of the autonomous and unitary self to identify a shared experience of misogyny through history and across cultures.

Evidently, whilst the third space of their respective translanguages allows for the subversion of a patrimoine, linked to monolingual hegemony and patriarchal subjugation, situating these writers within a collective feminist voice, it also allows for an innovation of literary language that is appreciated by readers who do not share these same transnational experiences but are sympathetically affected by them. As has been demonstrated in this article, these translanguaging writing techniques are the foundation for the artivism of their respective writers as literature inspires and affects the reader to look and understand the world differently, to raise consciousness in pursuit of equality and material change. The interactions between languages and cultures facilitates creative productivity, demonstrating the subversive potentialities of multilingualism and translanguaging in line with transnational feminist aims.