Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023
Hybrid Languages and Multicultural Writing in Literature
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis
The Chaos and Code-Switch of Being Seen: On Hybrid Languages and Multicultural Writing in Literature
Some books speak at you, crisp and clear and polished like an undergrad trying too hard in a seminar. Other books interrupt you. They hijack your brain mid-scroll, jam their syntax between your thoughts and say something like: this isn’t a story, this is a collision. This is what it sounds like when people live between languages, between places, between selves, and no, it’s not going to be “smooth.”
You don’t read these books. You experience them like migraines, or strobe lights, or that moment at 3AM when you accidentally start remembering every cringey thing you've ever said at a family wedding. I’m talking about writers like Ocean Vuong, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Junot Díaz (before he became complicated), Ilya Kaminsky, Myriam Gurba, Rawi Hage, Xiaolu Guo, and yes—Salman Rushdie, in his overwrought, maximalist way. Writers who don’t clean up their languages for you. Who leave in the mess, the mother-tongue slippage, the awkward silences between hyphenated identities.
Because if you’ve ever grown up switching between languages, or cultures, or the white-people voice you use at job interviews and the one your grandmother understands—you know the linguistic gymnastics required just to be comprehensible. You know what it means to shape-shift, to twist your thoughts into something digestible. And you know the exact kind of exhaustion that comes from constantly being expected to translate your whole self.
That’s where hybrid literature lives: in the emotional fallout of never fully belonging to one linguistic continent. It's a genre-less genre, a vibe more than a form. Sometimes it reads like poetry doing karaoke in a basement full of ghosts. Sometimes it’s just plain weird. But it’s always alive with tension.
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Let’s talk about language, but not in that grad-student-on-too-much-coffee way where everything is about “postcolonial discourse” and nobody’s allowed to say “this book made me feel like I was being punched in the throat—in a good way.” Hybrid language in literature isn’t a technique, it’s a condition. It's not some craft decision like whether to write in third-person omniscient or limited. It’s a thing that happens when you're trying to write your mother’s voice, your own sexual panic, your migration story, and your TikTok brain all into one paragraph and you don’t know what language will let you do it.
Think of Sandra Cisneros switching between English and Spanish like it’s no big deal—except it is a big deal. Because every choice to leave something untranslated is a power move. It’s a dare. It says: I’m not going to explain myself to you. Figure it out. Or don’t.
Or take Zadie Smith. Her characters aren’t just multicultural—they’re hyper-verbal, code-switching, class-hopping Londoners who sound like four different timelines of the British Empire stacked on top of each other and set on fire. You get Cockney slang next to Proust references, Jamaican patois clashing with hyper-articulate ennui. It’s dizzying. It’s manic. It’s completely true.
Then there’s Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Sympathizer isn’t just a spy novel—it’s a literal translation nightmare. A Vietnamese narrator writing in English about a French-colonized Vietnam while impersonating an American soldier. You can feel the layers grinding against each other, like tectonic plates of identity. Even his punctuation feels paranoid. Ellipses, dashes, intrusive footnotes. The whole thing’s constantly under surveillance—linguistically, politically, existentially.
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What I love—what wrecks me—is how this kind of writing admits its own instability. These are books that say: “Yes, I contradict myself. Yes, I’m fragmented. No, I’m not going to smooth it out for your reading pleasure.” It’s punk. It’s diasporic. It’s anti-colonial in form, not just content. Because let's be honest: English isn’t neutral. Never was. And writing in English, especially about non-English experiences, is a kind of betrayal—unless you fracture it, hybridize it, haunt it.
Hybrid literature makes English wear different clothes. Sometimes it makes it drunk. Sometimes it sends it back to its colonizing ancestors and says, “look what you made me do.” Which is why these books often feel like performance art. They’re kinetic. You hear the clashing of tongues in your brain. You get whiplash.
And the point isn’t just bilingual aesthetics. It’s about power. About whose voice gets centered, whose language gets seen as “correct,” and whose history gets buried under italics and glossaries. That’s why leaving things untranslated isn’t just a stylistic choice—it’s a refusal. It’s saying: this part of the story isn’t for you.
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There’s a loneliness to it, though. Not in the tragic, violin-music kind of way. More in the sense of standing at a party where everyone understands the joke but you—and you’re the one who wrote it. That’s what it’s like to write cross-cultural literature in English. You're always aware of what’s being lost. Of how even your most intimate metaphors might not land because someone didn’t grow up with your mother’s food, or your religion’s humor, or your country's ghosts.
Hybridity means writing about things that don’t translate, and then trying to make them mean something anyway. It’s why these books often feel haunted—not by spirits, but by versions of themselves that could’ve existed in another language, another country, another self. There’s always a shadow-text, hovering just behind the one you’re reading.
I think that’s why people respond so emotionally to books like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s not just the beauty of the sentences (though, sure, they’re beautiful, in a sad-boy-poet kind of way). It’s the tension. Every sentence is like a tightrope between cultures, between shame and lyricism, between “am I allowed to say this?” and “if I don’t, who will?”
And honestly, isn’t that what most people are doing now—trying to figure out how to talk across identities, generations, memes, trauma? Hybrid literature didn’t just show up for fun. It’s a response to the fact that the world itself is broken into a million overlapping dialects—digital, cultural, emotional—and if your art’s not at least a little bit janky and scrambled, it might not be real.
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Also, let’s be clear: this isn’t a trend. This isn’t like autofiction or dark academia or whatever genre the BookTok gods are into this week. Hybrid, cross-cultural writing has always existed. Think of Caribbean writers like Jean Rhys or Derek Walcott. Think of African-American spirituals, spoken-word poetry, Indigenous oral traditions. The difference now is that readers are finally hungry for that chaos. They’re tired of the polished, MFA-stamped narrative arc. They want voice. Fracture. Risk.
Which is great—but also terrifying. Because there’s a pressure now to turn identity into content. To monetize your trauma. To write your hybrid self into something that feels “authentic” but also marketable. And sometimes, I wonder if hybrid writers are being asked to perform a kind of legible exoticism—just enough “otherness” to be edgy, but not enough to alienate the white readers holding the purse strings.
There’s no clean way out of that contradiction. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the power of hybrid language in literature is that it doesn’t resolve. It holds tension. It stays uncomfortable. It makes space for multiple truths at once—like how you can miss a country you hated, or speak a language that once oppressed you, or love a culture that keeps misunderstanding you.
So yeah. Hybrid literature is messy. It’s hard to teach. It’s harder to review. And it doesn’t always “work” in a conventional sense. But when it hits? When it breaks through the static and shows you what it feels like to be split open and still try to sing?
There’s nothing else like it.