Today I’m chatting with debut author Priyanka Taslim about her debut novel The Love Match, but more importantly we’re talking about untranslated language in English stories. So many people who grew up in an English speaking country also grew up in a multilingual household, so it’s natural that our writing would become multilingual writing as well. Though so often when we’re writing stories, there’s pushback in maintaining those languages untranslated in text. Creating a monolithic language in our literature is so unlike the world we actually live in, so pushing back is not only more realistic but can also be so important to readers. Everyone please welcome Priyanka Taslim!

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The Love Match by Priyanka Taslim

Zahra and Harun know they aren't a good match even though their parents are convinced otherwise, so together they devise a plot to slowly sabotage their parents plan, leaving Zahra able to be a good daughter while simultaneously catching real feelings for the dishwasher at work, Nayim. But Zahra soon realizes that life and boys are more complicated than she thought.

💕 YA Romance 🎨 Contemporary Fiction 🍃 Easy Reading 🌎 South Asian Rep

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• Genre: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult

Interview with Priyanka Taslim

Amanda: Hi Priyanka! Thank you so much for joining us to talk about multilingual writing, but specifically, maintaining untranslated language in English books. Before we get started, can you tell me about yourself and The Love Match?

Priyanka Taslim: Thank you so much for having me! I am an author and educator from New Jersey. The Love Match is a young adult romantic comedy set in my hometown, which has a vibrant Bangladeshi diaspora community—one of the largest in the United States. It follows an 18 year old girl, Zahra Khan, during the summer after high school graduation. While the rest of her friends are making plans for the future, Zahra feels stuck, having deferred her acceptance to her dream school to work full time and help her family.

When her mom decides to arrange a marriage between her and the teenage son of a wealthy local family, Zahra and the boy—Harun—scheme to fake date and sabotage their relationship to convince their families not to meddle in their affairs, but Zahra’s budding crush on a coworker newly arrived from Bangladesh whom her mother would never approve of throws a real wrench in her plans for her fake relationship!

Amanda: The Love Match has a lot of multilingual writing throughout the novel. Can you tell me why it was important to you to include Bengali in your story?

Priyanka: I never saw much media with South Asian protagonists until very recently. It’s a different story in my parents’ natoks, or the Bengali serial dramas that they like to watch, but the lives of the characters living in West Bengal and Bangladesh were also not like mine. Eventually, when I did start to find South Asian characters in western media, they were either more deeply removed from their culture than my personal experience—as a Bangladeshi American who grew up in “Little Bangladesh” in Paterson, New Jersey—or they spoke Hindi or were Indian.

Thus, when I started writing The Love Match, I actually used a lot of Hindi romanizations because I thought, “Perhaps this is how they’d be spelled correctly even if a Bengali might pronounce them differently” and also “this is what’s more likely to be familiar to western readers so I don’t alienate them.”

Ultimately, I just realized the book is so Bangladeshi. It’s set in Paterson, has a mostly Bangladeshi cast (including the love triangle), and talks about Bangladeshi food and customs. I realized it would be a disservice to the characters to sanitize them of their language just to make things easier for western readers, especially since Bangladesh is the reason for the celebration of International Mother Language Day.

When Bangladesh was called East Pakistan, West Pakistan’s government (now just Pakistan) forbade Bangla from being the official language and tried to wipe out any uniquely Bengali culture from Bangladesh, ultimately leading to a genocide and war that are briefly mentioned in The Love Match. Since my family lived through this time, it felt cowardly to refuse to honor the language they fought to protect.

Amanda: What was it like for you to honor the language in your storytelling? Did you run into any obstacles, hardships, or anything unexpected in doing so? 

Priyanka: The majority of Bangladeshis in the diaspora come from a district of Bangladesh called Sylhet, as does my own family. Sylheti is its own dialect of Bengali, but in many ways it is so different from standard Bangla that some people consider it a whole other language—some even call it “impure.” Even though it is the primary dialect of most diaspora Bangladeshis, a lot of fiction about Bangladeshi characters will use standard Bangla, which created another linguistic identity crisis for me. To this day, I get readers, typically in older generations, who say that while they’re proud of me for representing Bangladeshi culture, it’s such a shame that I don’t know standard, formal, “educated” Bangla.

Despite them—and the copyeditor I had, who was not Bangladeshi or Bengali herself yet still queried every single use of Bangla and demanded I translate it, using Google Translate as her source—I thought it was unfair that readers who grew up in the diaspora and most likely were Sylheti didn’t get to see their dialect celebrated on page. It was an emotionally fraught journey, but I found the book becoming more and more ME the more revisions I did, from mostly English to Hindi, to standard Bengali, to Sylheti Bengali, with more and more uses of context clues rather than direct translations.

Some reviewers dislike the book for it. I once even saw a white, European bookseller say she could never recommend it to her shop’s visitors because it put her off so much—and that kind of response does make me sad.

But then I do a school visit, and shy Bengali kids come up to me to say it was so cool to see Sylheti on page, or a kind non-Bengali reader tells me they learned so much through their own research after reading that I have zero regrets. I will keep writing the way I write.

(Especially because, when I was a kid, no one ever took the time to explain “American” things I didn’t understand to me, and I taught my own students to unpack difficult words through context clues all the time while in my ELA classroom.)

Amanda: What do you hope young readers will gain from seeing multilingual writing in your story?

Priyanka: I really think normalizing the linguistic diversity of our world will help kids in particular feel less “other.” I remember seeing articles praising the children of the British royals for learning multiple languages, which is a common experience for white people. It makes them seem so smart and cosmopolitan, and it is a sought-after skill in the job market. But the same is not true for multilingual kids of color. They often have to grow up hearing their parents or even themselves mocked for their accents or any fallacies in their language use.

I ended up with a huge vocabulary from being a voracious reader, which meant that I frequently learned words visually rather than by hearing them pronounced aloud, and I’ve had multiple experiences in life where people relished in correcting my pronunciation. Just today, I saw a viral tweet about a white woman yelling at a taco truck worker to “speak English if you’re in America.”

These sorts of experiences can fill children with a lot of shame about their identities, which leads to shame about getting caught speaking languages other than English. I had a conversation with a friend perhaps a week ago on the topic of how characters in multilingual writing by white authors will often shoehorn phrases from their mother tongue into their speech—a way for the author to remind readers of how exotic they are, perhaps. But I find it difficult to code-switch into speaking Bengali around anyone who isn’t Bengali themselves, something I’ve struggled with when doing readings. I would never pepper in random Bangla into English sentences with a white person… because what would their reaction even be? Safe? Or mocking? Even dangerous?

Perhaps if they can see their language, culture, and ethnic features celebrated, future Bangladeshi American kids can know it’s okay to be exactly what they are, and it might also be an exercise in empathy for other kids, so they grow up to break cycles.

Amanda: There are a million answers to this and none are right or wrong, but why do you think maintaining your native language is so important to diaspora communities?

Priyanka: I think I’m in a position of privilege in that I grew up in a large Bangladeshi diaspora community. It wasn’t something I always liked growing up, in part because of the way people in said community often dealt with xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia, but as I grew older and got some distance from my hometown, I came to appreciate the value of exposure to my parents’ culture. I know that isn’t the experience of many diaspora folks, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, their families think they are better off not speaking their mother tongue, that they’ll be safer and more accepted if they assimilate and speak only English.

Sometimes, regardless of their family’s intentions, language is lost naturally from disuse because they might be the only family that speaks it within their community. Quite a few books by South Asian authors tackle the quandary of being the only South Asian person in mostly white spaces, which then leads to the protagonists feeling like they can’t lay claim to their heritage, that they aren’t enough. I think they are enough, and being unable to speak the language or having other touchstones doesn’t negate their belonging if it’s a belonging they want.

When I have kids, I think they might have an experience similar to those of these authors and their characters. I want to teach them how to speak Bengali for so many reasons. I think language can be a huge part of understanding and belonging. It provides connection because, even though my Bangla is more like Banglish, I could still speak it fluently enough to navigate a visit through Bangladesh (albeit, with my family). I could speak to my relatives there and keep in touch with them. I can talk to my grandmother, who knows no English, on the phone almost every day. These are reasons I’d want to keep that part of me alive in my kids.

But I don’t know that it’s feasible that I, or other Bangladeshi Americans of my generation, would always remain in the spaces that my parents did. The whole concept of the immigrant dream is scraping to provide for your children so they have more—more access, more education, more everything. My parents did that for me, but when I already speak Bengali less fluently than them and can’t read or write in it, when I’m in more “American” spaces than they ever needed to be, I don’t know if it’s possible to maintain.

That’s okay. I still think my future kids and other children will have a claim to their Bangladeshi heritage. If books like The Love Match help them feel closer to it, pique their curiosity, or even just give them insight into how someone else with similar cultural touchstones might live, if it’s even a fragment of a mirror that helps them feel proud of where they came from even as they forge their own paths, I think that’s still valuable.

Amanda: How do you think we can begin to work towards making publishing a safer space to write our stories the way they’re meant to be told, language and all?

Priyanka: I think it’s important to have diversity at every possible level, because without that, there are still dominant cultural gatekeepers who provide barriers for multilingual writers and marginalized authors. Even as the percentage of authors of color inches higher, the number of white publishing staff remains relatively stagnant, meaning an overwhelming majority of agents, editors, publicists, marketing people, and CEOs are white. In my case, I am very lucky to have an agent of color who never polices the way I depict my culture. Similarly, The Love Match had an editor of color, who has been an absolute pleasure to work with. I’ve been fortunate to get that from my publishing team.

Yet even that didn’t protect me at the copyediting stage, as I mentioned above. Even though my editor told me I could ignore whatever didn’t resonate with me in my copyedits, The Love Match was my first published novel and my first experience with them. I felt myself buckle under the weight of negativity from my copyeditor, who asked me to translate every instance of Bangla in the text even when there were context clues, used Google Translate to try to chide my use of my own language, called things out as ridiculous that I’d seen in hundreds of romance novels before mine, and even gave me detailed definitions and example sentences for the few English words I’d used incorrectly when a simple suggestion would have sufficed without leaving me humiliated and patronized (again, I am an English teacher myself, who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English literature).

I will say that my publishing team was compassionate after the fact and apologized profusely for my discomfort while speaking to the copyeditor, but I ended up having to do a second round of copyedits with someone else because of this person.

I’ve heard similar horror stories from other marginalized authors, particularly authors of color. It’s difficult enough to get an agent and a publishing deal without having to confront a racist copyeditor. Then, once you get past most of those other stages, the reality is that the people marketing books often have their own biases. When they have entire lists of books they’re responsible for, if they, like so many agents and editors, “can’t connect” to a book with a protagonist who looks, speaks, and prays differently than them, is that book given a fair shot? Equal opportunities to thrive? Do the same marketing tactics work for it? Does it fall through the cracks because they’re more excited by the books they do relate to?

I’ve been blessed in many ways and have worked with genuinely amazing people. My agent, editor, and publicist were lovely throughout the process of publishing The Love Match. Even so, I think we would see more authors of color getting published and feeling truly respected if there was more diversity at every level of publishing, but to do that, we’d need to make publishing an industry that is feasible for those who aren’t privileged to survive in.

Until that happens, we’ll unfortunately keep seeing authors, agents, editors, and other professionals of color, or otherwise marginalized professionals, unable to withstand the death by a thousand cuts that publishing can feel like.