'Тел Me in Your Motherтел': Dinara Rasuleva’s Translingual Poetics

• In Event: Transnational and Translingual Poetics

Abstract

Dinara Rasuleva is a translingual Tatar poet and activist based in Berlin. In her writing, Rasuleva “tangles herself in four languages” (Russian, Tatar, German, and English) and allows her poetry to overflow national and linguistic borders. Most recently, the poet has been working to revive her “lost” Tatar language through her abstract poetic experiments. This paper analyzes code-switching in Rasuleva’s work as a decolonial feminist practice that enables the poet to convey her mosaic identity and negotiate established linguistic norms. Poetic form driven by musicality and fluidity of meaning accommodates the poet’s evolving linguistic repertoire and reveals the capacity of languages to interact and transform one another. At the same time, Rasuleva’s poetry does not perform harmonious multilingualism but creates space for tension, confusion, and untranslatability.

Author

• Alexandra Tkacheva, U of Michigan