ARSANIOS, Mirene
The Autobiography of a Language: Essays and Stories

What if one’s mother tongue is but a crushed tower of Babel? From which of its ruined fragments can a literary voice emerge? The Autobiography of a Language neither assembles a life story nor seeks a fashionable hybrid identity. Rather, through traces of languages in motion, the author captures the guilt of being a writer more than a mother’s daughter, the intersections between mourning a father and giving birth to a son. In brilliant prose, Mirene Arsanios formulates a new mother language despite the absence of a mother tongue, one capable of both love and cruelty.

Iman Mersal

Published by Futurepoem, 2022
Literature