This chapter thinks about ways that language is lived interstitially – between registers, accents, national histories, and personal travels – as something that (embarrassingly) always spills out or crops up when one is least ready for it to do so, revealing or mis-revealing a particular linguistic genealogy. Looking closely at Québécois poet Michèle Lalonde’s iconic 1967 poem-manifesto Speak White, and various recorded performances of this poem by speakers offering distinctive manners of accenting or pronouncing the bilingual (English–French) relations and agonisms enacted in the poem, this chapter further reflects autoethnographically or autocritically at ways the author’s own transnational and hybrid relation to these languages further helps to complicate national and international narratives. At once personal and political, historical, and critical, the chapter reflects on ways that language performatively offers an affective archive of one’s embodied and ancestral trajectories, and fails ever quite to account for how we experience the migrations and misalignments of our everyday.

An increase in the numbers of people migrating to Ireland in the 1990s spurred a parallel interest in literary representations of a new multicultural Ireland. Until very recently, such representations have been predominantly authored by white Irish writers. In this chapter, I instead focus on fiction and poetry produced in the last decade by migrant writers of colour in Ireland. The perspective afforded in this work is not simply an add-on to the already existing body of literary work about ‘multicultural Ireland’. Rather, it is, among other things, a corrective to the centring of the dominant white ‘native’ point of view on the ‘migrant other’. In the last decade, and particularly in the last few years, migrant writers of colour are breaking through into the literary and cultural mainstream with work that centres migrant of colour consciousness and, particularly in the case of young emerging artists, that experiments with form, genre, and medium in ways that circumvent established literary norms and circuits of exchange.