Working with an old friend and colleague, Zimbabwean poet and intellectual ganyamatopé dzapasi tawona sitholé, David Gramling just recently published an exploration of their concept of “hard translanguaging”, which troubles the easy notion that all forms of bilingualism are liberatory and critical.
Here’s the first paragraph of the piece from the Wiley Handbook of Translanguaging, but feel free to email David for the full PDF!
Hekani, warrior! We two authors of this essay greet you. We greet one another as well in this way, routinely and earnestly, though we did not always do so. Hekani—a Shona greeting meant to express triumph, satisfaction, and surprise—needed to be taught and repeated to David slowly for years, before he picked it up and began using it to greet others, including tawona, in a mutualizing way. For someone who writes books about mono/multilingualism, it was surprisingly hard for David at first to get into the groove of such “hard translanguaging,” a term we will elaborate on in this essay.
“Mutualizing” is tawona’s concept for these often long and arduous, sometimes disappointing, but necessary call-and-response utterance processes that insist on changing the sedimented norms and discourse habits that, for a range of reasons, very much do not wish to be changed. As such, tawona understands mutualizing work, across status-divergent languages, as conditioning the very possibility of justice within translanguaging and monolanguaging settings alike. For tawona, it is proper to translanguage in the spirit of the ancestors who have held onto mufaro/joy despite adversity and violation (see Pyle 2019, see Zhang and Yanti 2018)—and, as well, in the spirit of the Welsh anti-colonial history through which the concept of trawsieithu first arose for us to use (Williams 1994).
Mutualizing in translanguaging practice is different from, say, “compromising” in that it is driven by an enduring stamina that can lead toward true structural change in relations, rather than merely toward the next pragmatically negotiable transaction or individualistic-entrepreneurial intercultural triumph that confirms preexisting identities. tawona and David’s simple greeting has come to signal deeper implicit commitments to become subject to each other’s ancestries and experiences in irreversible ways, to enter into a system of responsibility with one another.
