1To meddle with English is to be in the flux that abounds, the large surf of one’s clouded contemporaneity. It is a process of social and mental excavation explored to a point of extremity. One that reaches for the irritated, excitable uncertainties of our embodied spoken lives by working with, taking apart, seeing through the imposed complicities of linguistic networks and cultural scaffolds (Bergvall, Meddle English 18).
- 1 I use the term trilogy to characterize the relationship between these three books following paratex (...)
2French-Norwegian artist Caroline Bergvall (b. 1962) delineates her poetic project as a disruption of English in “Middling English,” the opening poem-essay of a trilogy consisting of three books of poetry, Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), and Alisoun Sings (2019)1. All three books have varied themes and forms, ranging from rewritings of traditional poetic forms, conceptual intermedial pieces, and even prose poems, dealing with women’s conditions, economic crises, or the migration of bodies and languages. What they all have in common is Bergvall’s poetic method of “meddling with English,” which, as she summarizes in the paratext of Alisoun, implies working with medieval and contemporary languages and sources.
3Her “meddling” is achieved through the “excavation” of sediments of language (Middle English 17-18). As she explains earlier in the poem-essay, she sees languages as disparate geological ensembles; as a consequence, languages, in their materiality, retain the memory of the other languages they have met (6). As we see with her example of the runic letter <þ> thorn, the matter of these sediments of language appears in the sensorial dimension of words, their visual aspects, sonic qualities, or even the texture they evoke when they are read: in this instance, a foreign Nordic glyph of the familiar voiceless fricative /θ̴/ in English (6-7). Her poetic method materializes these sediments to activate that latent memory of language, in order to alter it. In the three books, she crafts a heterolingual language in Rainier Grutman’s sense of the word, as it appears as an aesthetic composite of diachronic and synchronic variations of English (59-60). For instance, in “Fried Tale (London Zoo)”, the phrase “ymage of a seknd leg” (Meddle English 40), blends Middle English spellings and contemporary or futuristic abbreviations, making it difficult to situate her language in time. Her heterolingual aesthetic is one of temporal in-betweenness, where readers also (re)discover sediments of Old English, Middle English, invented future Englishes, contemporary dialectical variations of English, Old Norse, Old Icelandic, and Latin, as well as traces of languages historically related to English, such as French and Norwegian.
- 2 In conversation with Susan Rudy, Bergvall explains that she is interested in “active, social manife (...)
4What English do those sediments meddle with exactly? Bergvall’s attention to the “implied complicities of linguistic networks,” or to what she calls elsewhere in the poem-essay “the naturalized edges and bounds of language use and rules” (Meddle English 16-17) suggest her wariness towards standardized, legitimized English2. Admittedly, standard languages have no empirical reality, and rather reflect social and political ideals on the purity of language (Lippi-Green 57-61). Such ideals are related to monolingual paradigms and fantasies, i.e. either the desire to constitute one singular, pure language, especially in the context of the nation, or to have languages as separate, discrete entities that may co-exist but do not influence one another (Yildiz, Dowling). These linguistic conceptions are rooted in the exclusion of anything or anyone appearing as other, strange, or foreign. Bergvall references and opposes such conceptions when, in her poem-essay, she mentions monolingual linguistic recommendations in the UK, or questions the authority of English as a (neo-)colonial language, or an economic lingua franca (12). In that sense, she questions what constitutes a dominant or dominating language such as English, and its underlying potentially racist, classist, sexist, and LGBTQ+phobic bias.
5For Bergvall, consequently, working with the materiality of language does not simply mean to focus on its physical qualities, but also on the historicities and social relations it carries. In “Middling English,” she evokes how the letter <h> has become something akin to a “shibboleth in the way it reflects class, literacy, political regionalism” (11). Her heterolingual poetics, by contrast, “irritates” the “edges of language” that the monolingual paradigm produces (Meddle English, 17-18). By remaining in an in-between of temporal layers of languages, she re-materializes or invents forgotten, glossed-over relations between languages in the past, to make us imagine what they did and what they still do to each other. The result of such heterolingual practice, as Myriam Suchet points out in her redefinition of the term, is to stage the foreignness, or strangeness of languages (19)—better still, in Bergvall’s case the staging is a poetic re-activating of the strangeness/foreignness latent in English. In that regard, her medieval circulations are particularly significant, insofar as, for instance, she identifies Chaucer’s 14th century as a moment in which English was a “mash-up on the rise,” a mixture of several languages becoming Middle English (Meddle English 13). If Chaucer’s poetry has often been seen as helping to stabilize English (Owens 149-50), Bergvall rather insists on its flexibility and its constitutive otherness. Such medieval transformations of the language are reminiscent of the contemporary, globalized period: by referencing the medieval period, she suggests multilingualism is not a recent phenomenon, and counters the legitimacy of a monolingual standard and its exclusionary dynamic. In addition, going back to poetic sources that are part of multilingual tendencies, Bergvall highlights the role aesthetic practices can play in diversifying and imagining language(s). Therefore, when she explains that she “mines” English for sediments (Meddle English 17), through a pun with the French “miner,” she undermines the so-called standard English of her contemporaneity, thereby conferring critical force on her heterolingual poetics.
6For Bergvall’s meddling is not just a matter of exploring the medieval, but also of thinking her “clouded contemporaneity” (Meddle English 18), and therefore all its complexities and injustices. She also turns to the future, not only imagining what it may look like, but also how it may reflect back on the contemporary era. By gearing the materiality of her heterolingualism in all temporal directions, Bergvall’s poetics, I argue, demonstrates that English is always already a stranger to itself, reframing relationships between languages and the world that they create. Yet, these heterolingual temporal distortions do not always yield bright visions of the world: the future Bergvall imagines can be just as dystopian as ideal (Bergvall and Rudy). What is it then that Bergvall’s heterolingual poetics critiques? How does its temporal in-betweenness activate its critical potential? What alternative imaginaries to monolingual paradigms does it yield? Are those imaginaries developed exclusively for the future or for other moments in time? Reading through the trilogy and focusing on the poems exemplifying the circulations between the Middle Ages, the contemporary era, and the future, I will offer close analysis of Bergvall’s heterolingualism and of the voices that speak it. Identifying the temporal strategies undergirding the materiality of her language will enable me to pinpoint the objects of Bergvall’s critiques and their relation to language(s). Throughout the entire trilogy, I argue, the more we go on, the more a utopian momentum builds up in the heterolingual imaginaries she gives us to read.
- 3 Although less medieval in appearance, the other pieces in the book—photomontages of Bergvall’s arch (...)
- 4 Bergvall drew from “The Summoner and Pardoner’s Tale,” “The Knight’s Tale,” and “The Friar’s Tale” (...)
- 5 Notably Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban and Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, and the movie The (...)
7In the first volume of the trilogy, Meddle English, the “Shorter Chaucer Tales” sequence best represents Bergvall’s circulations with the medieval period.3 The poems are inspired by and sometimes quote from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, both in its form (especially narratives) and its language.4 From them, Bergvall notably retains the original tales’ way of exploring the complexities of Chaucer’s contemporariness, as well as its strong satirical and humorous tone. In her own tales, Bergvall’s heterolingual language bridges the gap between medieval issues and those of her time, from religious tensions, violence against women, to economic issues. “Fried Tale (London Zoo)” takes up the latter, consisting in a both hilarious and horrific satire of neoliberal economic practices. Written in a blend of Old and Middle English, contemporary dialectical variations, several varieties of English slang, text-message abbreviations, and borrowings from science-fiction novels,5 the poem is infused with an archaic and futuristic atmosphere. In this language, filled with stinging puns, a narrator introduces two ruthless stockbrokers, Smith and Smith. As they go to the pub, one Smith recounts his latest venture, the ruin of one Ninja, who also becomes known to us as a “no job no income no assets” (39). In economic jargon, the phrase refers to toxic subprime loans (Owens 149), suggesting the scene might be taking place just before the 2008 financial crisis. Yet the language of the poem suggests otherwise, as we see for instance in the description of the Smiths entering the pub: “Entr the publik hostelrye 4 well-deservd drynk aftr the bauchery” (39). The utterance remains in a temporal in-between: the use of “4” is indebted to text-message abbreviations placing us in the early 21st century, while “hostelrye” is a Middle English word, and “publik,” although somewhat Saxon in its spelling, sounds futuristic in the poem, as it is associated with a series of neologisms with a similar ending, for instance “stuporifik” (38). In that context, the noun “bauchery” appears as a neologism specific to this strange futurity, combining the English “debauch” or “debauchery,” borrowed from the Middle French “débauche,” and the Anglo-Norman “butchery.” Bergvall’s sounding of the poem participates in the temporal confusion as it activates the materiality of language in a new way: in a reading, Bergvall effectively links “hostelrye” and “bauchery” by making both words rhyme with the sound /rai/ (Fried Tale). In that version of the poem, if “bauchery” is indeed a neologism of that strange future, it is also geared towards the past. The language is undoubtedly anachronistic for 2008, as it appears as a montage of heterogeneous times (Didi-Huberman 17), stitching together pasts, presents, and imagined futures. Anachronisms potentiate English through comical puns and thus make it more apt to satirize the Smiths and their inhuman practices. Indeed, we learn later that the “bauchery” consists in one Smith ruining Ninja, who gets dismembered every time a financial operation takes place (40-41): his financial ruin leads to his physical destruction, superimposing a dystopian quality on the tale. This anachronistic heterolingualism is also spoken by the Smiths, and in that sense is an avatar of the expanding anglophone economic lingua franca Bergvall mentions in “Middling English” (11-12). If, ironically, this rich language undoes fantasies of monolingualism, how are we to understand it and what it represents when spoken by the Smiths who are the very object of the satire?
8Indeed, as Bergvall notes in the poem-essay, what matters with this type of world language is “the kind of world it perpetuates” (12): there lies the nuances in Bergvall’s distribution of her heterolingualism. In the poem, the world the Smiths perpetuate is commented upon by another person in the pub, the Keynesian economist, John Galbraith. In what appears as a more standard English, Galbraith explains why financial bubbles and financial crises recur unavoidably. These economic cycles are endlessly repeated because of a form of amnesia: we forget past economic cycles and crises, convinced this time around the next bubble will not burst into dire financial consequences. Amnesia is performed by the Smiths’ heterolingualism; more specifically, the anachronisms of their heterolingualism is an ironic embodiment of the Smiths’ amnesia. Through its anachronisms, this language materializes the memory of the past, and given we are in repeating cycles, the memory of a future that has yet to actually happen, but which is already present in the past. However, according to Galbraith, the Smiths have forgotten about it all, as is implied by one of the Smiths’ remarks as he revels in recounting his economic prowess:
wot luckered demolition wot goldn floodings
wot bestest crusading wot moostest profiteered!
Xclaff loudly, wot regionl blakouts,
wot farmakonikl funs, all in a days work. (38-39)
9The language here also combines archaic forms of English (“profiteered” or “moost”), contemporary dialectical variations of English (“wot” seemingly imitating a Cockney accent), and futuristic forms (“Xclaff,” or “farmakonikl”). Together they evoke excess through the assemblage of religious images of destruction supposedly followed by re-creation (“floodings” and “crusading”) with a language of financial surfeit with the double superlatives (“bestest” and “moostest”). Thus, Smith declares his belief, or at least his desire, that his financial enterprises will create the world anew. For him, however, the condition for re-creation appears to be amnesia, in the form of “regionl blakouts,” with “blakouts” referencing both the obliteration of a place, and a moment of amnesia, especially after a moment of (alcoholic) “bauchery.” Moreover, the adjective “regionl” points to areas that tend to be minoritized or othered, especially by financial centers—what these financial operations also minoritize are the languages of these areas and their inhabitants.
- 6 Here and elsewhere in the poem, Bergvall seems to reference the Nasdat language Burgess invented fo (...)
10In the poem, amnesia occurs because the Smiths appropriate the language of those they ruin without situating them: linguistic ruin piles onto financial ruin. As Richard Owens suggests, the poem manifests the appropriation of black vernaculars, for instance with the materialization of the /r/ sound in the respelling of “laugh” into “larf” (150). Not only is this true for racial minorities, but also for class minorities. The Smiths call each other “brothers” in a litany that performs linguistic appropriation: “my brothers, my brothers deere, sworne bretheren […] o my brovas” (41). Parroting A Clockwork’s Orange’s protagonist Alex DeLarge’s address to his fellow criminals (25),6 the Smiths perform the dystopian character of their camaraderie and their practices. The dystopianness of their language is rooted in linguistic appropriation: it moves from archaic forms that denote authority and power over language, to “brova” which is reminiscent of both Californian business school slang and the Cockney-accented “bruv” or “bruvva.” The back and forth between language of the past and language of the present re-affirms the cyclical nature of the Smiths’ violence, while demonstrating the mechanism of appropriation by suggesting the Cockney origin of “brova.” Ironically enough, it is not a so-called English standard that seems to be the object of Bergvall’s satire, but rather a certain type of multilingualism, in the form of economic lingua franca, that pilfers minoritized languages. This multilingual mechanism is founded on a form of monolingual fantasy insofar as the Smiths’ amnesia prevents them from identifying their language as multilingual. Furthermore, it makes them exclude those who speak the languages they pilfer, such as Ninja, who are othered and minoritized for speaking a language of which they have been robbed.
11The temporal in-betweenness of Bergvall’s heterolingualism enables her to explore the constitution of languages of domination as one of appropriation, which, although multilingual, remains exclusionary. Her satire of these financial systems and their othering and minoritizing tendencies is made all the more effective by the genericness of the characters that speak the language. The genericness, and perhaps even the amnesia, of the characters, is embodied by their shared name, Smith. Following Bergvall’s economic punning, they are stock characters whose voicing of that language reflects their amnesia, or at least the appearance of amnesia. They practice a language that thinks them and satirizes them in its ludicrous excesses. Ultimately, their language of domination is undermined by Bergvall’s heterolingual practice, othering the Smiths as well.
- 7 The report written by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani at the Centre for Research Architecture is (...)
12The second volume of the trilogy, Drift, continues Bergvall’s exploration of medieval and contemporary circulations, and othering languages of domination. In this book, she focuses on the motif of the sea voyage to tackle issues of migration. She goes further back in time by offering a re-writing of the 8th-century anonymous poem “The Seafarer” and The Vinland Saga (13th century), as well as poems inspired by the Håvamål in the Elder Poetic Edda (13th century), all of which recount stories of strenuous migrations. These are mirrored by a section piecing together a report and testimonies from survivors7 on a humanitarian scandal, the case of the “Left-to-Die boat” in 2011: 72 migrants left Libya on a small zodiac unfit for the voyage, hoping to reach Lampedusa. Quickly, the migrants ran out of fuel and were unable to get their bearings on the sea, while seeing ships and aircrafts from various European nations or international coalitions (e.g. NATO) circling them without providing help. Ultimately, they drifted for 15 days, and landed back in Libya, only 16 having survived. The “Report” section brings out the present political dimension of Bergvall’s poetry more forcibly. This does not attenuate Bergvall’s attention to the materiality of language and aesthetic but rather stages a conversation between different types of migrations: it also questions what language(s) one may use to write (on) those various migrations. Another section called “Log” thus provides readers with reflections on Bergvall’s elaboration of her poetic language in relation with sea voyaging and migrating through different eras. She insists on her exploration of runic letters in Old English, symbols of the past foreignness of contemporary English, and their irritating potential. In Drift, through the interaction between these sections that weave together various experiences of migrations in time, the tone and language move from satirical to elegiac, both lamenting and criticizing conservative or nationalist discourses on what has been called a migration crisis.
13In the “Seafarer” section, Bergvall translates, or rather rewrites, medieval poems into the contemporary period, at least partly. In “Song 6,” the poetic voice struggling at sea expresses their despair at being lost and drifting endlessly:
clasping at my crackling scin noman to steer
the failing structure Im a hostage of the waves
floating in my coffin I have lost all my papers all
I had with me Oneman gone that’s all theyll say. (Drift 48)
14The “papers” may be interpreted as identity papers and immigration papers that are demanded when one is crossing borders to justify one’s presence in a country. In the poem, the lack of papers metonymically points to contemporary migration and refugee crises as well as the rejection of others based on the lack of said papers. This rejection is more precisely that of a form of otherness, of foreignness, as undergirded by a monolingual, exclusionary framework. Against this, in her rewriting of the “Seafarer,” Bergvall does not appropriate the languages of refugees or migrants such as those in “Report,” but rather probes the past of the English language to reveal its latent foreignness, and estrange it. Consequently, her language is not one that would be a seamless contemporary English: she intermingles it with Old English and Old Norse. In the passage above, “scin”—easily recognizable as the contemporary English “skin”—is an Old English spelling of the word, which actually comes from the Old Norse “skinn.” Thus, Bergvall underlines the innate foreignness of English, which is itself the result of migrations, implying English is indeed not monolingual. What is more, in Old English, “scín” can also mean “ghost,” suggesting that this foreign, migrating poetic voice from the past keeps haunting, or perhaps should keep haunting, the present.
15At the same time, in the sense of ghost, “scín” may refer to deceiving appearances, pointing to the ambiguity of trying to find the roots of a language, even though the aim is to prove its innate foreignness. Bergvall therefore approaches her heterolingual practice as a way to play with what in “Middling English” she called “the altogether confusing and inventive arche-logic of etymologies” (6). Somewhat humorously, Bergvall’s spelling showcases the double Greek meaning of arkhe, both commencement and commandment—what constitutes the arkhe signals a unique and absolute beginning of a history (Derrida 11). In that sense, etymological inquiries could result in looking for a singular origin of a language downplaying the meeting of languages to insist on what is the basis of a monolingual standard. Bergvall, nonetheless, is inspired by the “confusing and inventive” dimension of etymological research to subvert such monolingual bias in her poetry. Her poetic methodology, as well as her language in “Seafarer,” activates this subversion, as she explains in the “Log” included in Drift: “I pretend to a possible one-to-one sound-to-sound assimilations [sic], indulge in false friends and fake slippages, flatten out etymologies and historic developments” (44). Already, the poetic gesture causing etymological crises carries through with the haunting /f/ alliteration: the temporal in-betweenness of her heterolingual practice is also an in-betweenness, or instability of origins and meanings.
16The sonic quality of this explanation haunts the poems of “Seafarer” retrospectively, for instance in “Song 7,” in which the poetic voice expresses their anxiety while seafaring and migrating:
Thats why never one so proud and bold what
goes seafaring without mægaworry ohman
of being broken into code Ferð to feran far to fare
Ferð to fera feor to fo further heonan further
hereone go forth Farout to the four winds to the
outlands Trip it journey wayfaring outvoyage to
geseek others plucked from this eard this earp
this harp ok the bearded geese Blow wind blow,
anon am I. (49)
17The feeling of anxiety comes through with the heterolingual term “mægaworry,” compacted with the medieval rune <æ> and what sounds like a more contemporary, colloquial expression of excess with the prefix “mega.” The combination suggests shared experiences may be found in the circulation between medieval and contemporary periods. The circulation is materialized in what seems to be at first sight a sonically harmonious etymological timeline through which one would go forward, as we might deduce from the meanings of “fare” and “further,” as well as the repetition of “to.” As one would go forward in space, one also goes forward in time—the medieval runic letters progressively give way to words that sound more and more familiar. However, the timeline is less linear than it appears, as it reverts back to its beginning and the words change, as if to signal the instability of language and of its history: as Vincent Broqua shows, Bergvall’s etymological approach makes language drift (in the sense of dériver in French) using homophonic derivations and translations of words (58-59). For him this is particularly manifest in “Log” with lexicographical poems that list words drifting, showcasing Bergvall’s poetic research in action as we read, leading us back to the poetics of “Seafarer” (59). For that specific word, we find a short entry:
ferd to feran
repeat from my first version
add
freran = freeform = free form (161)
- 8 It does appear at the end of “Song 4,” which describes birds and ships in the sky: “Ships with thei (...)
18The drift of the words in the timeline does not appear in “Log,” as it does in “Seafarer” and in the end, the words “free form” did not make their way into this poem8. Yet, the principle is active in the poem, free forming words and a timeline that is not actually a line, but a drift, liberating language(s) from the “arche-logic of etymologies.” Ultimately, the materiality of Bergvall’s heterolingualism in this drifty timeline shows there is not one origin, but always several, that re-appear with recurring histories of migration.
- 9 Drift was first conceived as performance work as she describes in “Log” (128), although it eventual (...)
19The proliferation of origins, and thus of meanings, is reflected in the faking, or rather complexification, of the etymological journey undertaken in these lines. As Áine McMurtry emphasizes, the first word of the etymological timeline, “Ferð,” may mean “journey”, but more importantly it also designates the idea of “heart” or “spirit” in Old Norse (825-826). Opening the etymological timeline with such a word signals the importance of affective responses both to actual sea voyage and migration, and to voyaging through languages. For McMurtry, the potential for affective responses is manifest in Bergvall’s poetic approach to sounds (819), here with the alliteration in /f/ that gives rhythm to the presumed etymological timeline. Bergvall’s intense performances of Drift play on our affective responses to the sonic quality of language. In a 20139 performance of this specific poem and supposed etymological lines, she combines the words in a different order, re-enacting etymological and temporal drifting, which appears to be contingent to the occasion (Performance, n.p.). Such an idea is also made visible by the fog of words designed by Thomas Köppel which floats on a screen behind Bergvall. Furthermore, her performance is accompanied by the percussion work of Ingar Zach, the rapidity of which contrasts with Bergvall’s elongated diction of the “Feran” suite. The contrast between the two creates a haunting effect, in which words estrange and haunt each other. Both in performance and on the page, she thus affects the foreignness of English, and makes us rethink our reactions to other foreignnesses that come through migrations. Bergvall’s affective heterolingual aesthetics is for McMurtry a form of minor literature, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, i.e. a way to rethink forms of inclusiveness of otherness (823, 825-826). Such a process makes it possible in turn to imagine different futures, outside of monolingual bias, as is suggested by the last word of the etymological timeline, further, which both ends and begins a new timeline.
20Bergvall’s re-emerging of the foreignness of the past through etymological crises is indeed an emerging of the foreignness of the future as she explains in her “Log” (153-154). The confounding of the foreignness of the future and the past comes through the lines: “geseek others plucked from this eard this earp / this harp.” The verb “geseek” uses the Germanic prefix ge- which marks a conjugation in the past, while the verb “seek” itself implies looking for something either for now or the foreseeable future. The otherness that is sought after is also that of migration, which is suggested by the Old English “eard,” in which one may recognize the contemporary English “earth.” In Old English, the term designates many spaces—from one’s country to one’s house. Through the combining of the past and the present in “eard”, all these scales are conflated, implying that migrating should be met by hospitality and by listening to these “others” who had to leave their original “eard.” For one can also make out “heard” in “eard,” which becomes fully-fledged with the image of the “harp” thereafter—the others we should also listen for to imagine another future are the foreigners referenced in the music of the heterolingual poems.
- 10 It may also be a reference to the anonymity of the original writer of the medieval poem, “The Seafa (...)
21This future is however never actually described in the poems of Drift, nor is it imagined in the heterolingual texture of the poems as was the case in “Fried Tale.” Rather, the future remains potential or a becoming, as McMurtry suggests as well (827): perhaps this is because the voice(s) that sing the poems remain unidentifiable, leaving the future radically open. Indeed, each of the songs composing “Seafarer” ends with the following refrain: “Blow wind blow anon am I.” The term “anon” is certainly a reference to anonymity—that of the many migrants that have been “plucked from this eard,” and so of the poetic voice itself.10 “Anon” can also be read here as a temporal marker of the future, suggesting these others will be heard in the future. In an older usage of the term in Middle English, “anon” also means “at once” or “immediately,” which underscores the urgency to bring this potential future into the present, to truly perform the inclusion of otherness. The speaker’s self-designating as anonymous and plural shows the necessity of this subversive temporal journey in language in order to make us reconsider our relationships to our own languages as foreign, and so to imagine other futures that always need to be reconstructed towards less exclusion.
- 11 Alisoun Sings has a previous version, a chapbook entitled Alyson Singes published in 2008, around t (...)
22While in Drift, the poetic voice remains at least in part “anon,” one voice is forcefully embodied throughout the whole of Alisoun Sings: that of yet another Chaucerian figure, the Wife of Bath, Alyson or Alisoun.11 Bergvall takes up the original character’s strong-willed logorrhea-like speech and extends it through an entire book of prose poems composed in a similar heterolingual texture, that enable Alisoun to give her opinion on all sorts of topics about the state of the world. Bergvall taps into the Wife of Bath’s speech and language, as well as her proto-feminist views—in Chaucer’s tale, she advocates for women’s empowerment, and also questions the legitimacy of the class system. She appeared as a character somewhat ahead of her time, which is reflected in Bergvall’s spelling of her name. Indeed, although Alisoun is undeniably a figure from medieval times, one hears in her name that she might only really appear in the future, which is materialized at the end of the book, where her name is spelt “Alisoon” (120). Not only does Bergvall activate the futurity of the medieval Alisoun in her present, but she also suggests that she still remains a figure that can re-appear in the future. This temporal instability, and its implications for what Alisoun has to say, is performed by her very language, which she describes in this way: “’tis a rich scrambljumbl of heavily bitching tongues, folded like shells in tymologick tension, so is ma usage a happy combimess, simpel” (4). The messy combination that is her language is a synthesis of the anachronistic language of “The Shorter Chaucer Tales” and the etymological and temporal crises of Drift. There, she materializes both medieval times, for instance with the spelling “simpel” for “simple,” and presentness or futurity with the phonetic rendering of “my” into “ma,” or the neologism “scrambljumbl.”
- 12 See, for instance, Evans and Johnson.
23Her tongue is indeed characterized by temporal in-betweenness, which gives it its biting, critical tone, which is also comical. The use of the adjective “bitching” to humorously describe her heterolingual tongue re-activates the proto-feminist dimension of the Wife of Bath and the later feminist readings of her paradoxical embodying of misogynistic stereotypes on women as unruly, loud, excessive, and nagging.12 The polysemy of “bitching” in Alisoun’s casual speech confers greatness to her complaining, or even more than complaining, her critiquing of the world. The texture of her diachronic heterolingualism directs her “bitching” into all temporal directions, as she delineates her views in a later poem:
I used to have a mo pragmatik view on this whats for certeyn, but I like to think I move with the time. As agenders change and the oceans rise and the citees sprawl, marriage needs be large! […] let folke of alle gendres creeds coloures and sexes, esp. those what know best what it feels like to be owned and belittled by isolated servitudes or preachers rules letem meet & mete in strengthened unions. And create new transactions. (17)
24Alisoun enumerates those that are minoritized by patriarchal, heteronormative, racist systems of oppressions, through a feminist twist, with the adding of the letter <e>, both reminiscent of medieval spellings of English, and of French endings for the feminine, suggesting her point is true in the past and the present. The materiality of her heterolingualism in that sense already counters the oppressive logics of those systems: they are indeed rooted in the rigidity of standard languages following monolingual bias that identify otherness, including gendered and sexual, as foreign (Baer 5, 7). Alisoun’s language, by contrast, is one of plasticity and proliferation, inclusive in its materiality and what it calls for. In a very humorous, if not sassy, tone not unlike that of the original Wife of Bath, she calls for the oppressed to “meet & mete.” “Mete” in Old English does mean “meet”, suggesting Alisoun is also calling for a gathering of the oppressed not just through space but also through time. Yet, to a contemporary reader, a pun with “mate” may be detected, implying a form both of camaraderie between the oppressed, but also of sexual connivance: these “new transactions,” are also the new sexualities needed to imagine unions, or build a world that still remains to be invented through forms of radical inclusiveness.
25In that sense, as poet and critic Toby Altman suggests in his review of the book, Alisoun’s plea is somewhat utopian, looking for an ideal, or at least a better, future (n.p). Alisoun’s poems do not constitute a traditional utopia in that she does not describe an ideal world—rather she calls for a better world, tracing glimpses of what it could be in a utopian momentum. Such an élan towards the future is discernible in Alisoun’s critique of the present through the past, a dynamic that can be related to José Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity. According to him, queer futurity is better understood as a utopian mode, which consists in critiquing the present by tracking unconscious queer traces in the past (traces of a “no-longer-conscious”). Such traces constitute a potential to imagine better futures, that are then enacted as possible in the present (as a form of “not-yet-here”) (21-22): queer futurity in that sense is imbued with hope and is profoundly relational. In the afore-mentioned poem, Alisoun performs that very hope through her heterolingual description of enlarging cities. The word she uses, “citees,” contains both the contemporary English “city” and the French “cité,” and conflates the spatial aspect of urban centers and its political and social dimensions. The spelling and the dialogue with the French may make us think the word has a feminine ending (as in “citée”), without being exclusively feminine, as is suggested by the absence of the acute accent. These heterolingual puns show that political imaginaries cannot be developed without including all genders. The word “citee” is actually a Middle English word to designate the city: in between these temporal layers of language, one may deduce that to truly enlarge urban and political space, it is necessary to look into the past and its language, where traces of inclusion, in its very materiality, may already be contained as suggestions for the future. Thus, the largeness of the heterolingual citee, as it becomes apparent at the end of the book, is also that of the future (“What is somebody morphed/to the sign of a larger future, collectivised without/sacrifice, feminised without fear, all shades and/gradations freely be lit and animated” 115).
- 13 On the issues of anachronisms and historicism in queer historical methodologies, see in particular (...)
26The recovering of traces from the past as potential for this larger future, and so for the present, needs citation, as when in these enlarging “citees” we also hear the French “citées” (“quoted”). Citation implies a need to recognize situated practices and forms of knowledge in one’s discourse, including in Bergvall’s poetic methodology. In that sense, Alisoun’s “bitching tongues” is also akin to the assemblage of various voices, or as Bergvall puts it in the Preface of the book “a voice-cluster” (viii), which comprises a number of feminist writers such as Emma Goldman or Hélène Cixous, also known for their biting writings. Bergvall’s loose citational mode is made manifest in poems by references to other writers, but also by the use of extended notes at the end of the book. It reflects a need for the diversification of scholarship, by including diverse voices. This need for citation, especially of other voices, echoes Alisoun’s imperative for the readers at the end of the book: “Hystoricize!” (113, 115), in which one may hear a twisting of Fredric Jameson’s famous “Always historicize!” With what reads like a medieval spelling, she replaces the masculine “his” of “history” by an allusion to femininity—the Greek “hystera,” meaning womb, or uterus, which has also given its name to the infamous female disease, “hysteria.” Bergvall calls non-dominant voices, here women’s voices, to participate in the elaboration of knowledge, possibly alluding to feminist and queer historical methodologies. By re-appropriating hysteria, she also legitimizes non-conventional modes of historical discourse and language. Bergvall’s aim here is perhaps not quite to propose a definite historical method, but to investigate alternative historical modes through poetic means. As her very word for it suggests, such a mode is steeped in her heterolingual aesthetic of temporal in-betweeness, the anachronisms of which do not preclude a form of situatedness.13 Indeed, the texture of the language evolves with the eras she evokes to manifest her utopian momentum.
27In that sense, it is Alisoun’s citing of archives that enables her to question or reconfigure the inclusion of minorities, especially queer minorities, in linguistic, political, and social imaginaries through poetic discourses. The archives appear as a place where she may find those traces of queerness that constitute the potential for a different future. In the poem “The tale of John Eleanors trial,” she explores a major 14th-century archive of what we now call transgender identity, questioning the use of pronouns. John/Eleanor Rykener was a sex worker who lived as John for a while and then as Eleanor: she was tried for prostitution and presumption of sodomy, but according to Alisoun the problem was less those issues than the confusion as to what pronoun should be used. Her own recounting of the matter is tinged with Middle English: “She gives hir name as Eleanor, a proper queenly name” (11). “Hir” is the Middle English for the contemporary pronoun “her;” yet for contemporary readers, it does not completely evacuate the masculine “his,” as if this heterolingual pronoun performed anew the ambiguity of the past, while asking us to imagine other futures for transgender people. In addition to this undecidability, Alisoun mentions that, in fine, the records in Latin show neutral pronouns are used for Eleanor (12), which might point to a greater flexibility of language and genders: would a modern-day neutral, “it” or “they”, be the right pronoun, though? The poem does not resolve the issue, but remains in this in-between of past and present to invite further reflections.
28Queens and transgender identities appear later with a much more recent past almost more akin to today’s world, in a poem called “C.W.E.E.N.” about the punk fashion designer and icon, Vivienne Westwood:
HERE COMES THE CWEEN. Dame LaWest, a designing quim so FIERcE & CONtrarian. S/he was desd head2heels in a dappr dupr cOMBo o’BLK synth satn robe biodegraded beLO the kNee ycarryng a grandbaby all-teed up “I am not a terrorist” ywrapd all faded GB flag for carDIGn motherfunker still 2 kool for school th’ole muff. (72)
29The title of the poem refers both to the Old English “cwén,” the first meaning of which is “woman,” and to a contemporary portmanteau of “conscious queen,” i.e. a female icon who is trying to make the world a better, more inclusive place. Cween Vivienne Westwood was particularly famous for transgressing patriarchal and heteronormative gendered norms in fashion, and this is reflected in the text with the allusions to Drag imaginaries and vernaculars (the image of the queen, or the term “fierce”) and the unstable pronoun “S/he.” Although there are still traces of Alisoun’s pastness (with “ycarryng and “ywrapd”), the language here sounds decidedly more futuristic through the use of various slangs and the upper-case letters. Westwood’s radical queer inclusion extends to people who are othered and excluded for different reasons, as is suggested by the reference to the famous picture of Westwood carrying an infant wearing her “I am not a terrorist” tee-shirt. This type of otherness is also excluded because of bias reflected in monolingual thinking. The language of this poem, by being more futuristic here, ironically performs Westwood’s radical queer stance of heterolingual inclusion, and therefore makes us imagine another such future. Indeed, punk existence (and queer existence according to Lee Edelman, No Future 24-26) was characterized by “no future.” What the poem suggests with this language, however, is that the absence of future is not a fatality. It is rather the consequence of the dominant system’s way of excluding otherness and preventing it from formulating the possibility of a future in one’s own language. With this poem, Bergvall looks at a fairly recent past that truly paints alternatives through a heterolingual language that makes it possible to express a utopian future of inclusion of otherness.
30By meddling with English, Bergvall investigates and disrupts the dynamics of language thought of as unique and self-sufficient. Through temporal muddling, she questions and even defeats the instrumentalization of language for exclusionary purposes, dealing with themes as varied as economic crises, migratory issues, and the discrimination of gender and sexual minorities. The critiques and questions she formulates in her trilogy are made effective by the texture of her heterolingualism caught in between layers of time to better activate the strangeness, foreignness, and otherness of English, and language in general. This very in-betweenness signals a form of irresolution as to when exactly the language we are reading is situated—although received as Bergvall’s present, it could very well be from several pasts or several futures. Bergvall’s temporal operations, notably anachronisms, tease out the potentialities of her heterolingual aesthetic. On the one hand, it re-activates foreign connections between languages, suggesting cross-fertilization and proliferation born of the encounters between languages. On the other, the richness that abounds in such a poetic materiality is also what potentiates her language to question assumptions on languages, and makes it more suited to imagining inclusive futures. The more the trilogy advances, the more optimistic, or even utopian, this pull to the future becomes: simultaneously, the voices that speak it become more and more pluralized and embodied, to better situate and activate the connections between languages. Yet the utopian momentum that builds up in the trilogy remains in an in-between, refusing to assign straightforward origins or normative descriptions of the future. It encourages an affective mode of listening to the voices and languages of others and an attentiveness to the otherness revealed in ourselves: thus, it makes us imagine other futures that may change our contemporaneity.