Articles

Hugo Hamilton's Language War

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Abstract

In his two language memoirs, The Speckled People and The Sailor in the Wardrobe, Hugo Hamilton recounts growing up in Dublin in a household in which Irish and German were the only two tongues permitted. His mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and his father was an Irish nationalist who punished his children if he caught them speaking English. Hamilton’s parents encouraged him to be different, but he recounts the difficulties of standing out in a society in which his trilingualism made him feel uncomfortably unique. Throughout his childhood, he was forced into a triangulation among Irish, German, and English. Hamilton’s father insisted that to speak English was to betray Ireland, though most of its citizens did not speak Irish. Like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Hamilton aspires to free himself of the nets of language and nationality. Ultimately, though writing in English, he aspires to a condition beyond any language, to citizenship in a global republic of art.

 

Keywords: language memoir, translingual, Irish, German, English

How to Cite:

Kellman, S., (2019) “Hugo Hamilton's Language War”, Critical Multilingualism Studies 7(1), 51–63.