Editor’s note
The other day I was making buckwheat tea and wondered, for no reason, what I’d do if the universe suddenly demanded that I choose between being able to read Ocean Vuong or Park Joon. Before I could weigh the poets against each other, I simply gave up because this imaginary dilemma that I’d given myself had already made me so sad.
What I mean to say is that to me, multilinguality is a blessing that allows me to hold even more space in emotion and beauty and this world. And here, in this inaugural issue of Pollux Journal, we sought to explore all that our experiences with language, or lack thereof, can bring into our lives.
I am tempted to say that we wanted to celebrate multilinguality, but perhaps that is cruel. Sometimes we can’t claim multilinguality in its entirety, but even within the lack of complete fluency, we can hope that the presence of language will provide connection as in May Hathaway’s “My Mother and I Watch The Social Network (2010)” or that our existing connections like those in Devi Sastry’s “The Gentle Joke of Speaking with My Grandmother” will transcend what we can articulate within the confines of language. And as we navigate the relationship between language and colonialism, like we do in Elizabeth M. Castillo’s “Real French” and aneleh’s “crann darach”, we must wonder how multilinguality has taken its space in our lives. Then again, for many of us, multilinguality is simply a part of who we are and how we live. It affords us the vocabulary to capture a greater scope of emotions, like Fatima Malik discusses grief in “Khuda Hafiz”, and appears in Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim’s “Whose Booty?” because the real world, too, is not monotonous in languages and dialects. While we aren’t strictly celebrating multilinguality itself, since we are spending a lot of time interrogating how and why we have each interacted with multilinguality, I would say that in a way, the pieces in this issue are celebrating the sheer scope of how language can appear in our lives. I’m excited to share with you how our Issue 1 contributors chose to celebrate, and for what more we will be able to explore together in our coming issues.
Thank you for your love and support from the moment we launched in November to now and onward.
Best,
Youngseo Lee / Editor-in-chief