Late into Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize-winning debut play English, a character professes an actual hatred of the English language. Given she’s been furiously studying it for years, with considerable grit and defiance, her animosity towards it seems almost perverse. But this profound ambivalence around the learning of language, particularly the learning of English, is fundamental to Toossi’s play; it deepens and problematises what is essentially a humanist comedy of manners.
Colombian writer and translator Ingrid Rojas Contreras said that “when you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss”. Toossi understands and articulates this loss with great sensitivity and insight, as her five characters grapple with the liminality of the bilingual self, straddled between oppositional worldviews. English avoids the geopolitical to its detriment, but it interrogates its central themes with energy and rigour.
