Afternoon Talk (2): 'Languages and Place' (E8), Saturday 14th November 2020, 12-1pm
Our host for this event is Jane Commane from Nine Arches Press
We understand the world around us and the places we are in through the languages we use to describe them. Languages bring us together and set up apart. When there is conflict and confrontation, I take hope from how we can (word)play and interleave our tongues’ (L. Kiew). This afternoon event brings together poets who explore place through the way in which they use foreign language in their poems, conjuring Hong Kong and Benghal, Malaysia and Sudan. The poets explore the types of vocabulary they have used and the decisions they make as writers as to how much the reader needs to know. Jennifer Wong’s latest collection, Letters Home explores the complexities of history, migration and translation. Jessica Mookherjee’s second collection Tigress mixes myth, magic and migration, exploring the often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood. Sue Wallace Shaddad’s A City Waking Up, explores Khartoum, Sudan through family visits over forty years with poems inspired by the colours, heat, food, people, customs and Arabic language. L. Kiew’s poems in The Unquiet are woven with words from Malay. Her writing ‘is simultaneously compressed and bristling with detail, in poems alive to the slips and possibilities inherent in the transcultural experience’ (Hannah Lowe).
