Translanguaging art – Questioning boundaries in Monika Szydłowska’s Do you miss your country?

Abstract

Abstract Using the concept of translanguaging art that combines language(s) with other means of artistic expression, I discuss an artist’s book published in 2015 by Monika Szydłowska, who is a Polish-born visual artist living in the UK. Szydłowska’s book Do you miss your country? is a visual diary in which, using media traditionally associated with a travel journal (pencil and watercolours), the artist captures her experience of migration. The book depicts the everyday life of a young migrant woman from Poland, in the first years of her life in Scotland. The visual and textual narrative pinpoints the intricacies of the process of othering and identity building. I consider what the translanguaging art reveals about the process of identity creation in linguistically and culturally diverse communities and show how, through her choice of multi(trans)lingualism as a mode of writing and the form of a pocket-size sketchbook filled with watercolour drawings and speech bubbles, Szydłowska problematises the popular image of the migrant. I also discuss her engagement with the tradition of migrant writing and travel writing and her subtle subverting of these genres. I demonstrate how, by combining languages with visual means of expression choosing the form of a comic and the watercolour – a gendered and nationally loaded medium – she negotiates her identity and destabilises power relations historically operating within the migratory discourse. My conclusion suggests that her use of translanguaging enabled the artist to indicate the transformative and emancipatory potential of migration seen as the empowering rather than disempowering process for migrants and locals alike.