Listening to the Grandmother Tongue "Writers on Other-Languaged Grandparents and Transcultural Identity"

Abstract

In Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature, Irene Gilsenan Nordin et al. make an important and still often unrecognized point: “imaginative literature offers a powerful means of exploring transcultural experience and grappling with the challenges it poses to individuals and societies alike” (x). Arguably, writers who explore transcultural experience through reflective memoir offer particularly valuable takes on the challenges it poses.¹ Writers who approach it third-hand, as the grandchildren of displaced people, offer an additionally distinctive perspective. They present a memory-world that is often more elusive and less easily “readable” than that of first- or second-generation migrant memoirs.