Writing Beyond Language: The Case of Yousif M. Qasmiyeh

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 seminar focuses on the case of one of such contexts, namely the site of perpetual migration that refugee camps are, to examine how the pressure of postmonolingual imperatives shapes the work of multilingual Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. Informed by the author’s experience growing up in Baddawi refugee camp, his poetry articulates a complex web of linguistic dynamics to balance out the tension between postmonolingual notions of language and the multilanguaging practices of the refugee camp. The contrast between these two elements appears especially relevant in light of the fact that the writer, now based in Oxford, has chosen English as the main language of his poetry and an English publisher for the production and circulation of his works, thereby turning his texts into a literary and linguistic space where the Global North meets the Global South. What does the encounter entail for the poet’s language(s)? How does the monolingualised space of English literature mediate the multilingualism of the refugee camp? What can it mean for the poet to write “beyond language”, as he describes it? This seminar explores some of the literary and linguistic features that shape the multilingual encounter between North and South in Qasmiyeh’s poetry.