Multilingual Editing: Hybridity, Non-Normativity and Resistance

Picture the scene

A then-young, future editor happily plays in a park with their caregiver, both recent arrivals from a distant political-economic system in the midst of collapse. The word “Canada” in cursive proudly extends across their brand-new sweatshirt. “Speak English,” a nearby voice shouts. And so, a lifelong deconstruction of language, of difference and of power begins.

Roles reverse as the child caregives for adults in an unfamiliar land and worlds coalesce as the now-adult and (multiple-time) immigrant-editor-translator-teacher settles somewhere along the liminalities of languages, regional dialects, nations and cultures. Life through a multilingual lens is a gift, a challenge and all the nuances in between.

Fast forward to present day

Language choices are never neutral, developing through historical processes, politics, media, literature, film, music and art. Weekly, I collaborate with newly arrived English language learners on the idea that prescriptive English (our editorial standard written English) began in the violent settler-colonial context of the British/US empires. It is not the hybrid Toronto-English that has so heavily influenced my adulthood — evolving daily on Mississauga, Anishinaabe, Haudenasaunee and Wendat lands; influenced by the waves of post-colonial English-speaking diasporas from Jamaica, from Trinidad and Tobago, from Grenada, from Guyana; and melding with Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Arabic, Somali, Spanish and Portuguese. That the rigid English found in learner textbooks is not the intertwined Northern Ontario-English of my youth, influenced by Cree, Anishinaabemowin and French. That the inflexible English of the classroom is not the interwoven Ukrainian-Polish-English of my childhood. And that out of violence, out of necessity, we can create something beautiful with our Englishes.

Above all, I share with the hope that students in my classes question English. That they continue on the journey of learning that global varieties of English, hybrid languages, regional dialects and slang evolve through Indigenous languages, waves of immigration and migration, subversion of and resistance to British/US/Canadian-English language dominance. And are further deconstructed through disability justice, plain language, conscious language, reclaimed slurs — and, at times, editing.

Despite a lifelong relationship of unease with English, the version that I have learned to hesitantly coexist with, as an editor, is disabled, is plain, is conscious, is radical, is subversive, is representative, is decolonial, is liberatory, is translingual, is foreignized, is cannibalized. It celebrates hybridity, code switching, code meshing, cultural frame shifting, regionalisms, word play, informality and slang. It is gender neutral and expansive, pronoun rich, non-normative and beyond binaries. It appreciates the poetics of accessibility. It celebrates survival from manufactured margins and so-called differences. It rejects dehumanizing rhetoric, dog whistles, euphemisms, stereotypes, tropes, microaggressions and slurs. It fiercely crips and reclaims. It interrogates passive voice and biased media framing. It unlearns grammar and style. It avoids italics, hyphens and possessives. It deconstructs tone. It tears down hierarchies. And it rearranges and reimagines all that no longer serves. 

Still, I periodically imagine another life in which English, uninvited, never became the language I hear in my dreams. Where it didn’t become the dominant language in my life. In those split seconds when my facade of near-fluid English slips — with a short “o”  here and a harsh “h” there — all of a sudden, I’m small again, standing, eyes closed, by a grey concrete slab of a building shouting, Я не хочу їхату до Канади.

Now, let’s rewrite the first scene

Piece by piece, I reimagine another type of linguistic world. One that is “person-centred” and “prioritizes care over correctness” — and one that, through non-linear crip time, learns from the past without the illusionary haze of nostalgia, exists in the present with all its horrors and provides hope in an uncertain future. And I strive for an eventual, collectively edited version of English that celebrates our entire selves, cultures, and multi-generational memories, traumas and dreams.  An English that collaboratively shares our stories in our own voices — with accents, experimental pronunciations, hesitations, imperfections, creative grammar constructions, lack of expected verb tenses, approximated transliterations and flexible sentence structures. An English that accommodates our names. An English that is curious. An English that steps back when it lacks what only another tongue can fully convey. And an English that never asserts its dominance over the caregivers of would-be editors who just want to play in a park on a Sunday afternoon. 

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