I Write therefore I Am (Not). Reclaiming Negative Identities in Multilingual Literature

The Romantic notion of correspondence among linguistic, cultural and national identity haunts contemporary awareness of the multilingual character of individuals and nations. Therefore, post-Romantic authors writing in/with more than one language are confronted with the dilemma of self-definition: which culture can a multilingual author claim as theirs, if cultures are deemed to be monolingual entities? Similarly, nations are confronted with the dilemma of literary appropriation: which multilingual works can they ascribe to the national canon, if the canon only allows for one language? These issues present authors and nations with the threat of an identity crisis. Although it is by no means the only possible response, denying any ultimate linguistic or national literary affiliation seems to be a common choice among multilingual writers who could, in fact, claim many. Which sociolinguistic factors prompt such a paradoxical answer? How does refusing linguistic and/or national belonging serve the assertion of authorial identity in the face of linguistic dispersion? Is there a relation between authors’ approaches to the issue and those of national literary systems? This paper presents an overview of multilingual writers from different backgrounds whose metalanguage constructs the authorial persona by describing what it is not, with a focus on Jhumpa Lahiri and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. The two authors share a threefold engagement with language as writers, translators and scholars, which is reflected in the metalinguistic dimension of their work, while their otherwise varied backgrounds illuminate different aspects of the relationship between polyglotism and literary self-definition by negation.