Zain Baweja on writing Gloss — a poem that plays with translations across Urdu and English, among other languages:
What does it mean to write in a hybrid of the two languages? Does it mean to plug English words into Urdu forms? Or to include a smattering of words and phrases from Urdu, thereby “chutneyifying” English?
I am increasingly dissatisfied with the postcolonial notion of “hybrid” identity, by which the poem is a composite of two things at once — native and foreign, colonized and colonizer, Urdu and English. It suggests that languages and poetic traditions are closed systems, each with their sovereign territories, which the writer merely mixes. […] I am trying to write poems in which linguistic flux is itself an entry point, and it becomes unclear what belongs to whom.
Making meaning like this, outside of encoded definitions, can be playful, joyful, revelatory. Sometimes it can seem like nonsense. As automated systems continue to bend the world toward ever more average, standardized, known experiences, it is important to defend and appreciate the purposeful unknown.