Language
Cannibalinguistics
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Language-learning and people-eating in Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre.
Europe disenchanted
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A broad cast of characters who almost all speak to a solitary woe. This is Europe?
Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag
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On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch. « My own language, made camp. »
The pulverization of memory
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Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.
« When I was silent… » — Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
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Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. It is a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch.
Of human children & language children
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The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
Two palindromes
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→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
A sangre fría
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Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.
The Archipelago Conversations, an excerpt — Interview with Édouard Glissant
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An excerpt from The Archipelago Conversations with the late French Carribean philosopher and poet. « The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles. »
Glossomania-mania
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On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.