Abstract
In a webinar discussion with writer Amara Lakhous and graphic novelist Takoua Ben Mohamed hosted by Giulia Riccò and her colleagues at the University of Michigan, the question of language ownership came up. 1 Both Amara Lakhous and Takoua Ben Mohamed talked about “owning” the languages they speak. Amara Lakhous also described his language practice as linguistic polygamy, a concept I have turned over in my mind many times since first hearing it. During the Q&A portion of the presentation, I asked what happens to the tradition and history of literatures and languages in the case of migrants and economic and political refugees, who practice linguistic polygamy and by extension, literary polygamy as they learn languages and literatures in the countries where they end up living. Although the question did not elicit a direct answer, Lakhous did mention and question the geographical nature of borders that “held” histories and languages at one time and, I would add, the attempts of nation states to promote them as monolingual and monocultural entities capable of imposing hegemony through linguistic and cultural power, that is, we might say, until the arrival of the language polygamists.
The term “linguistic polygamy” acquires its power from its flippant irreverence, as well as its inherent lack of any sort of historical-emotional commitment or loyalty of the kind that nation states elicit from their citizens; instead, it expresses the kind of linguistic effort of “world making” which Mary Louise Pratt defines in her 2022 monograph Planetary Longings as “the actions, practices, and creations by which people create meaningful realities and stories for themselves from what is around them, even as they contend with hostile circumstances.” (Pratt 8) As she explains, world making is particularly prevalent from the nineteen nineties on, when migrations of every stripe have led to shifting definitions of citizenship, meeting mobility head on. Pratt’s discussion on the role of citizenship in the migrant’s process of worldmaking is particularly pertinent to a country like Italy where, indeed, the migrant’s struggle to acquire citizenship is so incredibly labyrinthine, with caveats, procrastinations, and demoralizing political debate, that even for those who were born in Italy of migrant parents, citizenship has become a planetary longing: a quest, for the seeker of both physical and psychological respite in a place that can, at the very least, legally, and safely, be called home. The discussions around the laws regulating the acquisition of citizenship through “blood” i.e., ius sanguinis, granted in cases where at least one parent is Italian, or the increasingly fraught ius soli, which in theory would confer citizenship on those who are born in Italy of migrant parents holding legal residence, but only after their 18th birthday, have become glaring examples of “azzeccagarbuglismo” or the legal quibbling that never actually intends to solve anything. The law of ius soli, which has been open to any number of interpretations and maneuverings by the various political parties over the past few decades, has met with steep opposition recently by the Giorgia Meloni government, which proposes a possible “ius scholae” for those who have attended Italian schools for at least ten years, in opposition to proposals from the left that would limit the number of years to five. To date, no solutions are in sight, although the debates ebb and flow, much like the ongoing debate over the status of DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals) students in the United States. These students are primarily Hispanic, indeed, Mexican, with the combined numbers from Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala significant as well, although they may also be Brazilian or South Korean. 2 They go by the aspirational term of “Dreamers”: those who, it is imagined, never let go of their dream to become citizens of the United States but are currently denied that status if they were not born on US soil. Here in the United States, as in Italy, the debate has taken on a life of its own, with no solution on the horizon, and an actual worsening of the prospect of citizenship, while hostile governments continually “kick the can down the road” for another administration to deal with. Nevertheless, the migrants are present, and they enter the education system, something that DACA has facilitated.
A few words about DACA are in order. DACA is a status for which undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States before the age of 16 and have lived in the US since June 15, 2007 may apply. It confers work eligibility and considers the DACA recipient to be “lawfully present” in the US for the purposes of other immigration applications. 169,590 current DACA recipients reside in the State of California. They make up the vast majority of the overall 594,120 documented Dreamers in the entire United States; and if you consider the number of people who are DACA eligible in California, which is 1,160,000, you realize that among the 40.2% or 15.8 million people who identified as Hispanic in the 2021 census, the DACA-eligible population (those eligible to file the paperwork for DACA status) is significant at 8.6%. If you compare this number to other states, such as Montana, with only 80 DACA recipients, or Alaska, with 70, or even New York, with 24,580, you immediately realize that Hispanics overall are now the biggest ethnic group in the state (the white population declined to 35% in the 2021 census), with many of them fitting the profile that Pratt has described of those who are “world-makers” with extremely precarious citizenship and residency status. Looking again at the data for the State of California, the DACA-eligible population numbers 1,160,000, meaning that roughly half are actual DACA recipients, or Dreamers, visible and documented through the status for which they petitioned. 3 This means that on any college campus in the State of California, most of which have been designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions, DACA students are among our many Latinx students, and we might in fact speculate that the percentages of Hispanic students who are DACA are extremely high, since they have already had to document their status through the university application process. Most Latinx students have complicated stories of mobilities across borders, since either they themselves are DACA students, or they come from families with undocumented relatives whose immigration status affects their lives. Someone always has a DACA story to tell, which you hear if you speak Spanish, since the stories beyond the statistics, the personal stories, are told in Spanish. Some stories will never be told in English, like the one I recently heard from my housekeeper, who told me that she needs to go to El Salvador for her nephew’s graduation from medical school because her sister, who is undocumented, cannot attend her own son’s graduation. So many of these stories involve education, one of the main forms of mobility, and a mobility that will bring the inclusion DACA students desire.
The value of narrative pedagogies as language teaching and language learning strategy has grown in recent years as documented in multiple studies (Peters 2021). The ability to tell the main stories about your life in a new language motivates the language learner. Yet if students tell their most personal stories in a heritage, family language that is not referenced in the learning environment, opportunities for connection through communities are lost, and so is motivation, for people are motivated to talk about themselves, to understand how the language they are studying fits into the world they are making. In the United States, the teaching of languages, literatures, and cultures still follows the trajectory outlined by Claire Kramsch in her 2009 monograph The Multilingual Subject: What Language Learners Say about Their Experience and Why It Matters. 4 Kramsch discusses the teaching methods adopted at elite institutions, where students came from educational backgrounds that could rely heavily on a shared set of language learning practices that enabled methods she likens to professors “opening up” the heads of students from traditional, elite backgrounds and “pouring” in comprehensible input with a high probability that the input would be processed uniformly by all, with the outcome being that of having prepared students to order a cappuccino, see the leaning tower of Pisa or the Colosseum, and shop. But that doesn’t work anymore, not in big, state-run institutions, anyway, like the one where I work, where migrants, immigrants, and the undocumented no longer hide, but seek to discover and promote their genealogies, reclaiming inclusion. Through interviews and surveys of today’s students who recount their language learning experiences and the disconnection they felt between themselves, their lives, and the languages being taught, Kramsch offers personal data and reflections on language learning as the expression and construction of the self, in line with Pratt’s world-making hypothesis, particularly where migration is a dominant element of a student’s story and day to day reality as belonging is sought.
University campuses, then, both virtual and physical, are transnational settings where national languages, literatures, and cultures are taught, often to students who speak one or two heritage languages plus English. What, we must ask ourselves, do national histories, national language histories and national literary histories mean to migrant cultures and migrant users of language, and multiple languages, who may suffer from language insecurity in all the languages they speak and know, or in which they may possess partial competencies? When authors such as Amara Lakhous and Takoua Ben Mohamed say they feel free to own the languages they speak, and I would add, at whatever stage of competency they may speak them, they are also expressing their right to become speakers of those languages and to possess and claim them to the same degree as do those with whom they share the same geo-cultural space. And, as Lakhous expressed, they feel a commitment to them as an expressive means, but it is a commitment they feel to all the other languages they speak, spoke, or will ever speak, as well, hence the activity of the linguistic polygamist as he had defined his relationship with multiple languages along the variables of time and place.
While migrants may have no political rights in their country of refuge – and often, country of hostile refuge as Pratt has described the places in the lives of mobile subjects who engage in “world making” –, no one asks if they have cultural or linguistic rights because, very clearly, they do and as they make their worlds, they deploy those rights. Once we share the same space and communicate, orally or in writing, we become part of that linguistic, cultural, and literary place as world makers and creators with them. The language classroom is one of those spaces, so how do we view their location and positionality as students in our language classrooms? Do they have cultural and linguistic rights, and if so, what are they, and how does the University address those rights, and from what perspective? Is the university a site of hospitality, one that is capacious enough to welcome them into the “home” of its story and enable them to make it their story? Enable them to move toward educational goals through mobilities of access that should be transparent in the language classroom?
In the context of our Hispanic Serving Institutions in California, it is hard to welcome students into a monolithic presentation of language, culture, or literature, as there can be nowhere for them to sit down, no place from which to connect, and nothing to which to connect. Lakhous’ notion of linguistic polygamy thoroughly upsets the concept, act, and performance of language as an affirmation of nationality by opening it up to the prospect of many languages and the affirmation of multiple belongings, which don’t necessarily cohere to nation states, but rather to glocal, shifting spaces, all of which can be mine, or yours, or theirs. As professors of language, we can make our classrooms places where students are invited to become language polygamists, to commit to many languages at the same time as they are learning Italian, while remaining connected with the heritage languages they speak. Although we tend to think of Amara Lakhous as someone who writes in Italian, he stresses that he writes in Italian, but also French, or Arabic, some of the languages to which he is committed as language polygamist.
It takes a long time for teaching practices to change, and teaching lags behind research and scholarship. Judging from the journals, series, articles, and book chapters on multilingualism, you would expect to find multilingual teaching practices on the rise, too, and indeed, the number of projects on multilingual teaching is expanding everywhere and it is hard to keep up with all of the conferences, talks, symposia, and experiments. As an example, on Friday, April 7, 2022, the “Giornata di studio dedicata all’intercomprensione tra le lingue non affini” took place, sponsored by the Università di Firenze in partnership with France, Hungary, and Sweden. Intercomprehension as a teaching strategy of languages pertaining to the same language family is a subject I am knowledgeable about as it is the method used for the textbook Juntos: Italian for Speakers of English and Spanish that I co-wrote (Donato, Oliva, Romero & Zappador Guerra 2020). However, this conference moves the use of Intercomprehension to the next level by looking at the bridges that can be drawn across languages of different language families in the language classroom. To be sure, it is a more complex task than working with languages from the same language family, but nonetheless highly significant in its recognition of the need for language learning to take place in a multilingual context where the plurilingual abilities of the students in the course are recognized and engaged. A week prior, on April 1, 2022, a similar conference, “Jornada cientifica sobre intercomprensié i plurilingüisme,” took place in Barcelona, in Catalan. And I co-presented at yet another conference, this one devoted to third language acquisition, “The 12th International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism” (IAM L3), in Zagreb, also in 2022. 5
The rapid rise of these sorts of conferences, of the need and awareness to teach Italian, or any language for that matter, in tandem with others, stems, without a doubt, from the many years of the “migrant crisis” and the increased awareness of the migrants’ right to language learning experiences that mirror and validate their own living and being in language. We note in this regard Tony Capstick’s volume Language and Migration, which offers numerous case studies of migrants and language use and in which he discusses the need to take a critical look at multilingualism and how “Wherever people go, languages go with them,” noting that more people in the world are now multilingual, as opposed to monolingual (Capstick 24). Also pertinent in this respect is Maya Angela Smith’s Senegal Abroad: Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations, and Diasporic Imaginaries, which explores the role of language in the forming of national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities among Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York. 6 As Syrians, Senegalese, Ghanaians, Peruvians, Albanians, and now Ukrainians move through Europe as migrants, we must remember that it is no coincidence that today’s multilingualism as practice and pedagogy has accompanied this movement and the migrants’ own presence, visibility, and communicative practices as listeners and speakers. In closing, let me go back to my title to defend the linguistic and cultural rights of students in the Italian language classroom to find there a gateway to so many languages, and the right and pleasure of becoming language polygamists.