Where we come from – a short history of (M)othertongues
Who are we?
Are we the place we were born, the language we first learned to speak, the culture of our nations?
Since its beginning, (M)othertongues has stood for gray spaces, for in-betweenness, for looking behind the conventional binaries of identity. We are more than a few words on a visa application, more than what people see at first glance and what our family histories say about us.
(M)othertongues started in a very Bennington way – with a class, and a reading, and invested students disagreeing with said reading. Soon, a choice was made. The class didn’t feel represented by this anthology of translator’s essays “Bilingual Lives”, which is a kind of landmark translation book. So the class decided to put together their own collection, facilitated by their professor, Marguerite Feitlowitz. First, a tutorial, then a club … since the first issue of Fall 2019, (M)othertongues has changed a lot, explored new directions, and continues to constantly “translate” itself up to this day.
Do you want to delve deeper into our old issues and discover art from our vast archives? Here is a small selection of past works, prose, poetry, visual art, and film to get you started—these are some Editor’s Highlights, only a taste of all the stunning works we have gathered. Take some time on your own to browse past work if you are enjoying this.
I don’t know what to say — dance
What can language express – and what can it not express? This series of films tackles the question of translation in a very unique way, through dance. One person talks in their mother tongue, another dances to their words, the sounds, the feelings. The experience this creates is fascinating, and definitely a must-watch for me.
2020 Spring
〰️
2020 Spring 〰️
An Elegy for My Mother’s Tongue — prose
This beautiful work concentrates on the feeling of loss and belonging, and how both interact with language. After losing their grandfather, the narrator ponders on his mother tongue, Malayalam, and tries to understand how grief influences and works through their languages. A narrative piece that truly struck me.
2020 Fall
〰️
2020 Fall 〰️
The other kind — poetry
This poem addresses the kind of double image a lot of international students find themselves presented with when first entering the US. “My existence was juxtaposed by America’s inability to balance between love and hate for the unfamiliar”, the author explains. Here, international students are often forced to adapt, at the expense of their own personality, history, and cultural identity.
2021 Spring
The Democracy Diary: A Journey into Jalib — poetry and and translation
In this piece, the author translates a poem by Jalib, and explains his process to us. Not only are we introduced to a beautiful poem on democracy and resistance, we are also able to trace the steps the translator took, and we learn to understand why this work of art is so important to him and in what context it was created.
2021 Fall
Tashkent — Visual Art
These drawings were created in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a city of importance to the family history of the artist. Born into a Korean family, the artist's family survived the Population Transfer in the Soviet Union in 1930, Tashkent was where they stayed afterward. The artist’s strokes are filled with this important part of their family’s history, giving the drawings of everyday life in Tashkent their beauty.
2022 Spring
〰️
2022 Spring 〰️
Tongue/Tied — poetry
This poem was inspired by the photograph of a young boy undergoing tongue surgery and the visible pain he was going through. The author writes about a similar pain that comes with assimilating to English, preferring it over your mother tongue in order to achieve validation in the US. The raw emotion and brutality of this piece is truly baffling.
2023 Spring
Cruzando El Puente — prose
This piece of prose, written partly in English and partly in Spanish, highlights the author’s experience with border control at the US-Mexico border. Although they are a US citizen, they have immigrant family members. They manage to show the vulnerability of immigrant children when faced with law enforcement in a really compelling way.