Multilingual Poetry and the Stakes in Cultural Translation: Rhina A. Espaillat, Touria Nakkouch & Denise Morgan

This article aims to explore how three multilingual poets conceive of poetic practices that challenge the monolingual paradigm. While these poets hit hard at the univocality of the linguistic paradigm in the English poetic tradition, the author argues, they become, in the words of Zoe Skoulding, “a means of resisting the weight of racist and colonial histories that inflect the English language and its contemporary presence in the world” (2021). The Dominican -American perspective of Rhina P. Espaillat, the Afro-British perspective of Denis Morgan and the Arab Moroccan perspective of Touria Nakkouch set the three widely apart. However, all three engage in poetry writing as a dynamic process of negotiation of meaning between two languages. Through code-switching (Espaillat), parodying of literary tropes (Nakkouch), or through body language (Morgan) they assume critical positions against “globalist” languages on account of their imperialism, (Euro)centrism and hegemony. The significance of this study lies in the turn the author takes in moving Moroccan multilingual poetry from its classical mould and integrating it within a global poetic conversation. By the same means, the author forces Moroccan multilingualism out of the comfort zone of Postcolonial Studies and allows it to soar in the heights of World Poetry. The approach in this study is comparativist, as it alternates Close Reading of texts with Distant Reading. Setting the three poets in dialogue with a hegemonic English supports the idea of pluri-vocality as being at the heart of a Multilingual project of creating multicultural spaces and fostering a global language justice.