I AM A LETTER ‘I’: TRANSFORMATIONS OF IDENTITY, CULTURE

AND GENRE IN SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING

MARGARET ANNE CLARKE

The following analysis is based on a selection of works in English,

Spanish and German from a corpus of student-authored texts written for

a literary competition1 held over a period of three years in the School of

Languages and Area Studies, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom.

The School offers both TESOL and modern European language provision

within a wide range of single and combined honours and applied language

degree programmes to a highly cosmopolitan student cohort consisting in

equal measure of learners from the United Kingdom, Europe and the Far

East.

The project was underpinned by the premise that the students’

ability to communicate in a second language would be enhanced through

the development of innate imaginative and creative competences: giving

learners what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has termed ‘permission to

speak’ by posing them the challenge of creating meaning-making texts,

short narratives, poems and other genres entailing individuation and

personal writing. Whereas the formal teaching of second language writing

may, in some cases, be structured around the initiation of students into

the established genres of formal composition and their appropriate

registers, in this instance, once the basic parameters of word limits and

judges’ criteria had been set, what actually constituted creative

composition was left as far as possible to the students’ judgement. Thus

the students were free to construct an autonomous speaking position in

1
The full corpus of works authored by the students are accessible on
http://www.port.ac.uk/creativewriting
ways they may not have felt able to do in more formal essay type

assignments.

The project was realized within the context of a profound phase of

transition involving the revision of certain key assumptions which have

traditionally underpinned the formal class-based teaching of modern

foreign languages. Degree programmes and majors structured around the

study of national languages and literatures necessarily entail also the

assumption of national, cultural and linguistic differentialism, or what

Pieterse terms ‘the social proclivity to boundary fetishism, essentializing

boundaries (Pieterse, 2004: 4). This in turn has contributed to the

conception of language learning as a cognate, self-contained subject,

defined by, and confined to, the parameters of the particular nation state

where the languages studied originally evolved, and their respective

canons of national literature.

Yet central to the development of a nation-state is the concept of

the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) which unites the diverse

elements of that community and provides it with a transcendent identity,

of which one of the principal components is a common and unified

language. Language, in this context, is bounded by geographical territory,

and within a relationship that holds language, territory and the identity of

the individual citizen to be isomorphic with one another. Thus language is

held to be, and taught as from the earliest stages, as a monoglossic

entity. According to Bakhtin, this is in fact the primary historical stage of a

language, defined by its closure and resistance to derivation from , and

exchange with, other languages; identifying a language presupposes a

boundary, or opposition to other languages in wider socio-linguistic fields

(Irvine and Gal, 2000: 76).

This means that several dichotomies are at work in the teaching of

modern languages. The most fundamental of these is the situated position

of the language learner, whose identity is often assumed to belong to one

culture and one nation only. The learning of another language, in this

context, is the acquisition of something called the L2, or ‘target language’

of another, entirely separate culture, which in turn remains confined to

the boundaries of its own nation-state. There is a possibility, then, that

many practices of language teaching may conform to the dictates of

‘centripetal’ forces, which work according to the assumption that language

learners are themselves monoglossic entities, and that the language they

are learning is unitary and homogenous in character. This position not

only leads to what Irvine and Gal term ‘the deculturing of linguistic

phenomena’ (2000: 78); language learning, in this context, also becomes

either the neutral conduit for the transmission of a specific cultural and

literary tradition in a state of opposition to the external heterogeneity of

other nation-states and cultures. It may also become a fundamentally

transactional process: that is, the accumulation of sufficient linguistic and

grammatical items which will enable the students to acquire sufficient

speech patterns and conversational gambits to ensure at least partial

acceptance by native speakers of the student’s target language. In this

context, culture also becomes fetishised as content, something the

students learn about, and native speakers and representatives of that

culture equally fetishised as the other.

 As an authentic representation of the language learner and her real

experience of culture and language, this educational schema leaves a

great deal to be desired. To begin with, the students are being educated

within a context of the acceleration of contacts and interchange across

national, cultural and linguistic boundaries, a result in part of the

phenomenon of ‘globalization’: the increasing integration of economies

and societies on a world-wide scale. While both the nature and the effects

of globalization have been hotly debated over the past two decades, it is,

nonetheless, widely agreed that the intensification of migration and

contacts across boundaries have greatly deepened and intensified the

complexity of cultural identities.

The consequences of globalization have also been defined by Homi

Bhabha as fundamentally dual in nature: a double process entailing the

homogenisation of culture across national borders and, at the same time,

the formation of new cultural hybridities, or broader concepts of human

interaction which are essentially hybrid forms. Globalization also entails a

trend towards human integration, unfolding across many different fields

(Pieterse, 2004: 24), of which the diaspora of Central European and Far

Eastern students to the U.K. for study, travel and employment purposes is

but one example.

One consequence of these myriad processes is to render the

‘typical’ profile of the modern languages student at post-secondary level

extremely problematic; quite apart from the mixed nationalities which

make up an increasingly diverse student cohort, language learners may

also be individuals who have lived abroad for short to long periods,

returning with bicultural and multicultural experience; they may be

children of first or second generation immigrants, or with parents of mixed

nationalities who have already acquired some oral competence in their

target language; or professional people and mature students who have

worked in cross-cultural milieus.

All of this has implications for the way we conceptualize and teach

language. If we accept that language, as a ‘social semiotic’ is central to

the way that cultural reality is shaped and represented by human beings,

then we also have to acknowledge that language itself must be as

heterogeneous and heteroglossic as the new forms of cultural reality

themselves. Heteroglossia is defined by Bakhtin as a complex synthesis of

world views and languages that is always dialogised: that is, each

language is viewed from the perspective of other languages. The inherent

property of any language, then, is one of constant mutation and

transformation, another outcome of hybridization (Zappen, 2000: 4).

Bakhtin terms this dynamic state of flux and interchange as dialogised

heteroglossia: ‘within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, a

mixing of various “languages” co-existing within the boundaries of a

…single national language’ Bakhtin, 1981: 358 – 59).

Within these plurilingual and multilingual contexts, then, languages

cannot be solely confined to discrete boundaries within the consciousness

of speaking subjects, nor can they be a homogenized and monolithic

entity representing the ‘official’ language of one nation state. There has

therefore been a call by intercultural practitioners and theorists to

transcend the national and monolingual focus of foreign and second

language by not only fostering multilingual or plurilingual awareness of

‘the whole ecology of languages’ (Risager, 2005: 187), but effecting also a
reunion of the traditional schism between language and culture. The

concept of languaculture has come to the fore, first developed by Michael

Agar, it is the cultural knowledge inherent in language, in a state of

continual evolution within the personal and life histories of language users

themselves, and carried by them through different cultural contexts and

different speech communities, refracting, adapting and integrating along

the way (Risager, 2005: 192). All second language learners possess,

whether they realize it or not, a high degree of plurilingual competence,

and a store of interlanguage which enables them to translate and

interpret, to switch their semiotic codes according to their positions in

different social and cultural contexts, negotiating and renegotiating their

hybrid identities. According to Christopher Brumfit:

Every element in our cultural experience, however complex, can be

drawn into our linguistic repertoire to produce allusions of immense

complexity and depth…the range of associations which may be

acquired by any specific symbol available to us is immense… it is

important to emphasize the variety of our linguistic and cultural

associations, because there is a strong tendency to see both

language and culture as relatively solid and unegotiable, and the

relations between them as fixed.

(Brumfit, 2001: 9 – 10).

Transforming identities and languages

The focus, therefore, is no longer on the learning by students

about a separate language and culture located on the other side of a

national frontier, but on the heteroglossic third space emerging within the

consciousness of the language learners themselves. Language learners are

addressed, not as ‘deficient monoglossic enunciators’ but as ‘potentially

heteroglossic narrators’ (Kramsch, 1997) who engage in ‘critical cross-

cultural literacies’. The conscious and explicit study and use of a second

language by the learner is also an initiation into the practices of a speech

community which is, and always has been positioned at multiple

boundaries between societies, cultures and languages. Seen from this

perspective, the language learner, when composing in another language,

is actively participating in her chosen speech community, and actively

contributing to the transformation of language within that community.

This also implies the confrontation with what Peter Abbs (1998: 117)

terms the essential historicity of the self, manifested in discourse which, in

the process of traversing another linguistic and cultural contexts, must

necessarily itself evolve, develop and transform. The construction of a new

linguistic artefact by students in their second language also detaches the

students from their usual frames of reference and forces them to confront

directly the formal features of speech and writing. As the poem below,

written by a Far Eastern Masters student in Translation Studies illustrates,

this process also sensitises the students to what cognitive scientists term

‘content space’: that is, the constellation of beliefs which the learner must

rework and renegotiate through writing, and also rhetorical space: the

conceptualisation of their experience in new linguistic forms.

“I am a letter ‘I’
I am a letter I, I, I,
Always asking why, why, why.

Why can’t I fly?

(Because you don’t have wings to fly.)
Why can’t I cry?
(Because you don’t have tears to cry.)
Why can’t I dye?
 (Because you don’t have hairs to dye.)

Anyway, I still want to try, try, try.

____________________________
Since I was young I’ve got a dream:
Serving people to have a sip of cream.
But how can I fulfil this without hearing them scream?
Well, let me continue to dream, dream, dream.
__________________________

In the dream I met Mr. Peter.

He is, no doubt, my sincere teacher.
(What you need is a pool of water)
‘Why?’ I wondered and asked Peter.
(You can fulfil your dream by diving into a pool of
water)
Guess what? Less than a minute later,
I became a great waiter!

Siu Ping Lam

MA Translation Studies

The poem illustrates the concept of language seen by the learner as

a fluid and negotiable system to be performed. It is also an apprenticeship

in the development of Bakhtin’s ‘ second voice’, the double-edged

discourse which Bakhtin attributes to the author. The working within a

language, while at the same time regarding it with a certain irony, and

maintaining a distance from the language in order to perform the linguistic

acrobatics illustrated above, is also the actualisation of consciousness, and

is, for the author, a process of cultural reflection on her complex and

potentially disorientating position between languages and cultures. The

author, when exposing herself to the discontinuities, fragments and

synchronic networks she traverses, may also reflect critically on her

transforming identity, and the crystallizing of that identity into new

constellations. The student structures a humorous reflection on her own

identity as an enquiring subject in a stage of flux between contexts and

cultures, using such devices as phonological variation: ‘I am a letter I, I,

I/Always asking why, why, why’; syntactic form: ‘Why can’t I fly?

(because you don’t have wings to fly)’ and semantic categories: in the

dream I met Mr Peter/He is, no doubt, my sincere teacher’. This ‘open

country’, the between-place or borderland where the expansions of the

authors’ selves and consciousness and their second language meet is

defined by Bhabha as the ‘third space’, described as ‘unrepresentable in

itself’, a place where ‘the meaning and symbols of culture have no

primordial fixity or unity’ and where ‘the same signs can be appropriated,

translated, re-historicized and red anew’ (Bhabha, 1994: 37 – 38). To use

language, then, is to change language itself, and to fuse the diverse

meaning systems of language through the process of composition is to

change the constellations, patterns and networks of the learner’s own

identity. It is from this point that the students may make their

‘presencing’ felt in another linguistic or cultural environment.

Rapprochements between languages and cultures

Moreover, the act of writing in a second language may also cause

the student to reflect, to step out of the maelstrom of their emerging or

expanding selves, or beyond their situated position altogether. Through

imaginative use of the second language, the learners are permitted to

reposition themselves in different spaces or different chronological eras,

including canons and social structures from which they might formerly

have assumed themselves to be excluded. The construction of a poem or

the narrative is the process through which the students are permitted to

articulate national or cultural conflicts, and to effect rapprochements. Thus

the act of second language writing becomes what Bhabha (1994:4) terms
‘the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue which prevents

“primordial polarities”’ or the ‘intersticial passsage’ between fixed

identifications’ (Bhabha, 1994: 4). This sense, evident in many of the

students’ submissions, of going beyond chronological time, situated

identities, or geographical spaces, also points up assumed conflicts or

frontiers in society established by history. Revisions take place, as

illustrated in this native British student’s imaginative reconstruction of the

plight of a German soldier in the trenches in World War I.

Die Gedanken eines Soldaten

Meine Brust platzt. Ich kann nicht atmen. Mein Kopf hämmert nur so. Ich

wil aufschreien aber das wage ich nicht. Ich brauche Zeit zum

Nachdenken. Was ist geschehen? Wo sind meine Kameraden? Wo ist

Tommy? Ich werde wahsinning. Ich bin am Ende. Reiß dich zusammen!

Du lebst noch. Denk doch mal! Ich erinnere mich an den Pfiff. Der

Feldwebel hat uns angeschrien. Wir sind die Maschinengewehr sofort

gehört. Klaus ist gleich gefallen. Krüger wurde zerfetzt. Ich bin gelaufen.

Man konnte das Cordit riechen. Ich bin blind gelaufen. Man hat Männer

schreien gehört. Man hat dauernd das Maschinengewehr gehört. Es hat

eine Lücke im Stacheldraht gegeben. Ich bin dadurch gelaufen. Ich habe

nach links gesehen – niemand. Ich habe nach rechts gesehen – niemand.

Ich war allein. Ich konnte die Gesichter der britischen Soldaten sehen.

Dann ein blendendes Aufblitzen und ich bin gefallen.

Das war vor zehn Minuten. Jetzt bin ich hier in einem gewaltigen

Granattrichter. Ichschaudere. Ich habe schereckliche Angst. Ich sehe mich

um. Es gibt Leichen. Sie leigen mit dem Gesicht nach unten im Schlamm.
Es gibt Stücke von Leichen – Arme, Beine. Bei meinen Füßen gibt es einen

Kopf – der Helm noch daran. Hier ist es die reine Hölle. Ich bin allein. Ich

übergebe mich. Ich kann Tommy spechen hören. Ich bin in der Nähe von

den britischen Schützengräben. Sie plaudern und lachen. Der Angriff muss

keinen Erfolg gehabt haben. Was soll ich tun? Ich kann mich nicht

bewegen. Ich habe keine Wahl. Hier mus ich bleiben und auf die

Dunkelheit warten. Vielleicht werde ich in der Dunkelheit durch das

Niemandsland wegkriechen können. Es sind noch einige Stunden bis zur

Dunkelheit.

Sei geduldig! Mit etwas Glück kannst du überleben. Was kann ich

anders tun als warten? Warten und denken. Ich denke an den

Kriegsausbruch. Wir waren alle so begeistert. Wirwaren stolz darauf, die

deutsche Uniform zu tragen, für die Freiheit zu kämpfen und das

Vaterland zu schützen. Wir waren so idealistich! Wir waren so scarf

darauf, in den Krieg zu ziehen. Wir haben niemals an die Wirklichkeit

gedacht Das war eine andere Welt, eine andere Zeit, ein anderes Leben.

Jetzt bin ich hier. Hier ist die Wirklichkeit. Die Leichen, das Blut, der

Schlamm, die Scheiße, der Krach, die Angst und ich. Hier ist mein Leben,

in diesem Granattrichter, von Leichen umgeben. Meine Kamaraden sagen,

dass sie füchten, hier zu sterben. Ich fürchte hier in dieser Hölle zu leben.

Ich versuche an meine Familie zu denken: meine Frau, meine Kinder,

meine Mutter. Was machen sie in diesem Augenblick? Vielleicht denken sie

an mich. Ich bete zu Got, das ich… Es gibt einen seltsamen Nebel, einen

beißenden Geruch…
Im April 1915 verwendete die dutsche Armee zum ersten mal/ Senfgas in

Ypres.

The thoughts of a soldier.

My chest is bursting. I cannot breathe. My head is pounding. I want to

scream but I dare not. I need time to think. What happened? Where are

my comrades? Where is Tommy?2 I am going insane. I am done for. Pull

yourself together. You are still alive. Think!

I remember the whistle. The sergeant-major had shouted at us. We

climbed the ladders. We climbed out of our trenches. One could instantly

hear the machine gun. Klaus fell straight off. Krueger was ripped to

pieces.

I ran. One could smell the cordite. I ran blind. One could hear the men

scream. The incessant sound of the machine gun. There was a gap in the

barbed wire. I ran through it. I looked left – no one. I looked right – no

one. I was alone. I could see the faces of the British soldiers. Then a

blinding flash and I fell.

That was ten minutes ago. Now I am here, in a huge blast crater. I am

shuddering. I am terribly afraid. I look around me. There are corpses.

They are lying face down in the mud. There are bits of corpses – arms,

legs. At my feet there is a head – still wearing a helmet. This is sheer hell.

I am alone. I throw up.

I can hear Tommy speak. I am close to the British trenches. They chat

and laugh. The attack can’t have been successful. What shall I do? I

cannot move. I have no choice. This is where I must stay and wait for the

2
German slang for a Brisith soldier. It should be rendered here in the plural.
darkness. Perhaps I can crawl through nomansland under the cover of

darkness. There are still a few hours until darkness.

Be patient. With a bit of luck you can survive.

What else can I do but wait? Wait and ponder. I am thinking of the

outbreak of war. We were all so enthusiastic. We were proud to wear the

German uniform, to fight for freedom and protect the fatherland. We were

so idealistic! We were keen to march to war. We never thought of the

reality. That was a different world, a different time, a different life. Now I

am here. This is reality. The corpses, the blood, the mud, the shit, the

noise, the fear and me. This is my life, in this blast crater, surrounded by

corpses. My comrades tell me they are afraid to die in this place. I am

afraid of living in this hell.

I try to think of my family: my wife, my kids, my mother. What are they

doing at this very moment? Perhaps they are thinking of me. I pray to

God that I… there is a strange haze, a stinging smell…

On April 15th the German army first used mustard gas in Ypres.

Jeff Pedersen
B.A. Hons Applied Languages

Perspectives and symbols in the borderlands

Thus, according to Claire Kramsch (1997), the borderlands between

societies, cultures and languages do not exist exclusively as events in

time or places in geographical space; the borderlands also exist in the

learners’ own minds, positioning them at the intersection of many roles,

places and differing chronologies. Moreover, while the student authors

considered here are of different nationalities, and may identify themselves

as originating from another nation and another speech community, their

language learning is taking, or often has taken place, in the country of its

origin, and while they are undergoing a process of acculturating to their

new environment. Language learning, then also involves reaching out to

an ideal, not of the imitation of an alien ‘native speaker’, but of

participating fully within a number of roles and of contributing to the

students’ chosen speech community (Paulenko and Lantolf: 2000). This

also renders language acquisition, above all else, a question of personal

agency and choice (Paulenko: 1998). Students add to and construct new

subjectivities while they purposefully and intentionally interact with their

new surroundings, and engaging in the long and often painful process of

self-translation’ into another language and another culture (Paulenko and

Lantolf: 2000) while at the same time coming to terms with their status as

‘legitimate but marginal members of a community’ (Cole and Engerstrom

1993:9). The students pass through frontiers and pick out, or select

symbols which enable them to traverse the frontiers: ‘a middle place,

composed of inter-actions and inter-views, the frontier is a sort of void, a

narrative sym-bol of exchanges and encounters.’(Certeau, 1984: 127).

The acquisition and use of language is thus inseparable from the

students’ everyday negotiations with their chosen speech community, its

physical surroundings, its symbols, landmarks and artefacts. A typical

example here is the following meditation produced by a central European

student on the scene at the waterfront of Portsmouth itself, a maritime

island city. The student attempts to create an environment that looks

towards the future with anticipation, from differing perspectives and

differing chronologies, but, in the process, locates this within the common

memory and activity of the native people of the city. Indeed, the
recounting of this experience at the boundary makes the author acutely

aware of the paramount importance of the manipulation of contextual

frames and perspectives – as in the transposition of the student’s

authorial voice to that of a seagull, positioned as author and observer, and

a narrative voice with which to learn, absorb and reflect:

The Ferry
Every day he was there, sitting on his wooden bollard.
Every day he was watching the people who were spilled out of the ferry.
He liked the ferry with its huge smoke pipes. They were painted in red
and blue.
He liked red and blue, red like the sunset, and blue like the sea.
It was a big ferry and every day dozens of cars and hundreds of people
were coming out;
Only some were looking at him sitting on his wooden bollard.
Every day he wondered what the people might be up to.
He supposed they were busy. They all seemed to be very hectic.
He liked to have something to do; and every day there was something.
But every day he took his time on his wooden bollard.
His work could wait for a while; later he would return to it.
It was windy here at the harbour, but he liked to be at the waterfront.
He liked the wind; it made him feel alive.
Every day the wind brought new scents with the arrival of the ferry, new
scents from afar away over the sea.
The wind is good, he thought, watching the hustle and bustle down at the
harbour.
The wind is stirring the air, and fresh air is always very clean.
For him fresh air was like the airiness in spring, when everything is
blossoming after the gloomy frostiness of the winter.
Wind is a good sign, there is always something new with a refreshing
gust.
Like the people on the ferry, he thought, every day there are new people
coming, everyone with a new story to tell.
He liked everything new.
New things are good; they are like footmarks in the sand on the beach,
changing the structure of the present.
He would like to hear their new stories, interested in the smaller and
bigger events on earth, but no-one would ever tell him about them.
In fact, they all seemed to overlook him.
When he was younger, he had tried to get closer and he had asked them
about their tasks, but most of the time they had shooed him away as if he
was an unpleasant thing.
After a while he had given up and decided to watch them silently from his
wooden bollard.
Over time he had made up his mind. And he was happy with it.
He was happy watching them sitting on his wooden bollard.
For him watching the ferry spilling out the people had a bit of familiarity
and yet something new and unknown every day.
As soon as the ferry was empty he left his bollard returning to his children
so that his wife, a grand seagull, could stretch her wings for a while.

Sybille Kubitza
BA (Hons) Combined Modern Languages

The student seeks to build bridge for her displacement by creating

symbols (such as a seagull in this instance) seek to build bridges for their

displacement, reaching out for some unifying vision between her private

self and the public arena of which she does not yet feel quite a part. ‘In

that displacement, the borders between home and world become

confused, and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each

other’ (Bhabha, 1994: 9), ‘in a profound desire for social solidarity’. In

many of the poems produced by the students, the marks and signs left by

the people on the physical environment, such as footprints on the beach

in this particular example, are ‘read’ by the student authors and

incorporated into the space of their texts. The student attempts to ‘read

the world’ and the signs in their sensory experience. Inherent in

language learning, then, is the possibility of transcendence through

synthesis. The potential transcendence of the learner’s situation between

languages and cultures is highlighted in her concrete metaphors which

weave across the incremental rhythms of her prose, emphasising the

rhythms of everyday working life and human activity, juxtaposed against

the life-giving wind which brings hope for the future, and the climax of the

bird flying back to his domestic environment.

Tactics and bricolage in second language writing

Another notable feature of these narratives and poems is the scant

regard they show for generic convention. The purpose of the narrative or
poetic composition is evidently to provide the students with a fixed base, a

site from where they are able to combine heterogeneous elements.

Although the second language learners must necessarily operate within

an established linguistic field, and within the codes, mastered at various

levels, of the vocabulary and syntax of their second language, the

students may still appropriate, or reappropriate, a present relative to a

time and place, within a network of places and relations (Certeau, 1984:

xiii). The learners, then, effect, or create, ‘innumerable and infinitesimal

transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy’. They

insinuate their own viewpoints and modes of usage into the dominant

linguistic order. ‘Unrecognised producers, poets of their own acts, silent

discoverers’, the students’ works trace ‘wandering lines and unexpected

trajectories, obeying their own logic’ (Certeau, 1984: xviii). The learners,

existing often on the margins of language, or the named nation or society

within which the language is located and structured, employ whatever

tactics they can muster within the overarching structure of the language

and its spatial or locational institution. Thus the construction of the

students’ own narrative space is accomplished through a sort of bricolage

of different registers acquired from the different components of their life in

the UK or abroad and other resources poached from media outlets, idiom

picked up other native speakers they have come into contact with, and so

on.

Although the learners remain dependent on the possibilities offered by the

pre-established linguistic system, the transverse tactics the employ do not

obey the law of the place, or of the genre, or other conventions, for they

are not defined or identified by them; odd features from the second
language are interwoven into the pre-established linguistic system, as a

‘way of dwelling’ in the language (Certeau, 1984: 30).

He superimposes them and, by that combination, creates for

himself a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining

order of the place or of the language… he establishes within it a

degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in between, he

draws unexpected results from his situation.

(Certeau, 1984: 30).

The students thus create sentences or modes of narration that retain a

certain unpredictability within the space ordered by the organising

techniques of linguistic systems. Although they use as their material the

vocabularies of established languages, and although they remain within

the framework of prescribed syntaxes, these ‘traverses’ remain

heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out

the ruses of different interests and desires (Certeau, 1984: 33), shedding

a slightly different light on the use of a language. The students’ peculiar

turns of phrase in the language, ellipses, word-plays, alliterations, and

inversions, are the ‘benchmarks of an apprenticeship within the

established order of language’ (Certeau, 1985: 23).

Morever, this way of utilising and appropriating whatever you can

pick up from the imposed system can be used as a form of resistance, or

even an act of challenging a certain political, social or cultural order: ‘it

creates at least a certain play in that order, a space for manoevers of

unequal forces and for utopian points of reference’ (Certeau, 1984: 18).
 An example of the use of bricolage in second language writing can

be found in the poem below by another British national writing in Spanish.

The poem recounts a personal protest against what was evidently a highly

distressing incident at the hands of a peeping tom. The peculiarly Spanish

feature of double interrogative and exclamation marks to express both

the student’s outrage and to confront her attacker is used to the following

effect:

Lávabos Públicos – ¿Hasta qué punto?

Esperabas afuera hasta que llegé.

Tu asegurabas de que no hubiese nadie más
Como um ladrón, esperando para robar.
Entraste y me robaste.

¡Ladrón! - has invadido mi espaço personal

¿ Quien te has creido?
Me has visto vulnerable
Y te has aprovechado.
¿ Quien te has creido?

¡Ladrón! - Me has robado la intimidad.

Me has quitado la seguridad.
Tus ojos mirones…mirando lo que no debian.
¿ Quien te has dado el derecho?

¡Ladrón! - Tienes la carnet que te da libre aceso.

Tienes el poder y lo has abusado
Seleccionando de reojo a tus víctimas inocentes
Y caí yo en tu trampa cebada.

¡Ladrón! - Sin saberlo has escogido a una mas fuerte.

Yo te he visto - ¡Ladrón!
Y sé lo que haces
Y además…
Yo sé quien eres!
¡ OJO! ¡Ladrón… Voy a por ti.

Public toilets – to what point?

You were waiting outside until I arrived.

You were making sure no-one else was around.
Like a thief, waiting to rob someone.
You came in and you stole from me.
Thief! - You’ve violated my personal space
Who did you think you were kidding?
You’ve seen me vulnerable
And you took advantage.
Who did you think you were kidding?

Thief! - You’ve robbed me of my privacy.

You’ve stolen my confidence.
Your peeping eyes … peeping at what they shouldn’t.
Who gave you the right?

Thief! - You’ve got the key that gives you free access.
You’ve got the power and you abused it.
Eyeing sidelong your innocent victims
And I fell into your nasty little trap.

Thief! - You don’t know it but you’ve picked on someone stronger than
you.
I’ve seen you - Thief!
I know what you’re up to
And what’s more …
I know who you are!
HEY! Thief! … I’m going to get you.

Lesley Hook
BA Hons. Spanish Studies

Conclusion

This article has proposed the possibility of creating and analysing a

potentially large and diverse field in second language writing, not
contradicting, but complementing established and certified modes of
language learning, teaching and practice; and also other forms of second
language writing at all levels, from primary to post-secondary education.
It has also suggested some tentative methodologies drawn from the fields
of creative writing and intercultural studies, by which the imaginative
pieces of students, created largely from their own agencies and using the
linguistic resources that they have at their disposal, can be placed in wider
contexts and within already established disciplinary fields. In a globalized
world characterised by integration of nations and peoples on the one
hand, and diasporas across many cultures, nations and fields with the
hybridities that these create on the other, and through networks and
modes of communication in diverse media, a practice and theory of
second language writing founded on the student’s own agency, creativity,
language use and practice, may play a valuable part in evolving new
forms of language learning practice appropriate for the times, creating
rapprochements, playing their own unique part in the transformation and
growth of languages and cultures, and effecting positive and fruitful
contact between boundaries, frontiers and nations.

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