The Violence of Translingual Identity in Kazim Ali's Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities and Julia Alvarez's The Other Side / El otro lado

Abstract US translingual writers Kazim Ali and Julia Alvarez make the unusual choice of verse to write their autobiographical texts, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (2009) and The Other Side/El otro lado (1995), respectively. The choice of verse forms by these two writers is very much central to how each conceives of translingual identity and its relationship to material and symbolic violence. Autobiographical verse exposes what conventional narrative tends to efface: the discursivity of subjectivity and the violence of translingual selfhood. But the inherent fragmentary quality of poetry, its jagged line and stanza breaks, its resistance to linear narrative or closure, its abrupt caesuras, its lyrical incursions and excursions can make it a particularly effective avenue to express US translingual stories of identity—of linguistic bifurcation, of the permanence of exile, of the threat of violence on the edges of their experiences.