How does an immigrant make a home in a foreign tongue? How does an immigrant dispel their foreignness to feel comfortable in the language, a new linguistic homing? Immigrants' encounters with the host society show both a displacement, a distance from the mother tongue, while often simultaneously displaying a project of familiarization with the host language. These encounters entail entering, navigating, and claiming a new linguistic—and therefore cultural—terrain, presenting the wonders of the new and the perplexity of cultural complexity. Nuances, even basic yet historically contingent meanings in the host language, are elusive, creating ground fertile for irony, lightheartedness, and play. In this presentation I will share a corpus of poems in English and a set of bilingual, Greek/English poetic plays that speak to the unstable—and therefore disruptive and creative—encounter with a foreign tongue. Within them, the speaker, an immigrant persona, turns linguistic distance into proximity to rewrite routines of the host society into playful surprises. The poems aspire to linguistic dexterity as they underline the anxiety of the persona's linguistic alterity, coupled with accents, misspellings, malapropisms, and all. Languages intertwine in the bilingual plays to locate instances of intimate resonance in linguistic sites where none appear at first sight.
See, http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/immigrant-poetics
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