Negation and Contamination: De-limiting Language in a Refugee Camp

Romantic notions of homogeneity, purity and boundedness continue to play an active role in shaping contemporary views of language, as argued by Yasemin Yildiz in her study on the postmonolingual condition. Their influence is such that it affects even contexts where multilanguaging practices, as defined by Leketi Makalela, are the norm. This paper focuses on the case of one of such contexts, namely the site of perpetual migration that refugee camps are, to examine how literary representations of multilanguaging take form under the pressure of postmonolingual imperatives. It takes a cue from Riikka Ala-Risku’s insight on the key link between literary multilingualism and metalanguage to investigate the work of the Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and his definition of the “dialect” of the camp through negative constructions. Informed by the author’s experience growing up in Baddawi refugee camp, his poetry articulates a complex web of linguistic dynamics through subtraction. Thus, it illuminates the role played by negation in balancing out the tension between postmonolingual and multilanguaging paradigms in the literary representation of language practices that take place in a refugee camp. How does the postmonolingual condition come to bear on such a highly multilanguaging context? How does the representation of multilanguaging practices escape a postmonolingual lens? What role do negative constructions play in the narrative of the language of the camp? This paper proposes a reading of Qasmiyeh’s poetry, based on the study of negation by Matti Miestamo, to argue that, while expressing the difficulty of overcoming postmonolingual biases in the face of multilanguaging practices, negative constructions are also pivotal in: 1) questioning preconceived notions of what language is and how it works, 2) carving out the space for a clear-cut definition of language beyond the persisting constraints of traditional postmonolingual perspectives, and 3) paradoxically reversing the negative narrative of the camp.