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Conversations with Golgappa and Italicized Foreign Words

Writer's picture: eucalyptusliteucalyptuslit
By: Rishi Janakiraman, Staff Editor

I love golgappa. But here’s the thing: as soon as I say that, I know I have to explain it. I can’t just leave it there, hanging, because I know that most readers will need more. So here I am, filling in the blanks—golgappa are these crisp little shells you fill with spiced potatoes, chickpeas, and tangy tamarind water that hits your mouth all at once. And I love them; they’re messy, addictive, and they have flavors that don’t translate neatly into English. But why do I have to translate it at all? Why can’t I just say, I love golgappa, and leave it at that?


It’s a small thing, but it says a lot. The choice to explain—to make that extra effort to italicize, or provide a side note—feels like I’m holding up my culture as an exhibit, pointing to what might seem strange or “foreign” for the reader’s benefit. This act of explaining, even with just a few extra words, is a kind of performance. It’s a way of asking, Are you following? Does this make sense to you? It assumes a certain reader—one who doesn’t know the taste of tamarind or the crispness of a puri shell, one who’s looking in from the outside. And in that assumption, I find myself adapting, translating my world, not because it needs translation but because I’ve been taught that the reader is a stranger to it.


In poetry, italics are often the slant in our speech, the way we lean into emphasis, or, sometimes, the way we lean out—toward what we assume is unfamiliar, foreign, or untranslatable. A poet writing about their cultural heritage, in English, might italicize words for food, for family, for pieces of their identity that don’t “fit” in English. Naan, Amma, masala, golgappa. This choice to italicize foreign words or foods is often less about the language itself and more about the reader: it’s a way of saying, look here, notice this—this part is different. The foreign word is made strange, made noticeable, as if to announce to a presumed white reader: Here is something from my world, but it’s not for you, not exactly. Or, more accurately, Here is something you need help to see.


Italics in this sense don’t just tilt words—they frame them. They highlight what is, for the assumed white reader, an object of curiosity. For the poet, italics can become a tool of performance, a form of “translation” that isn’t for clarity but for emphasis. Because italics, at their core, are signals of difference. They create borders on the page, reinforcing that some words “belong” to the text in one way, while others are set apart, peripheral, as if fenced by the slant itself. This is the complexity of italics for poets of color or poets writing from outside the presumed center. It’s a way of navigating an invisible, unspoken contract: you—the reader—might not understand this. And that’s the point. Yet, in meeting that expectation, italics still do the work of framing “foreignness” as other, directing the reader’s attention toward the “difference” while implicitly positioning them on the outside.


To italicize is to code-switch on the page, a visual form of linguistic “turning.” Here, the words stand apart, sometimes in isolation, hinting that they carry a special weight or a private history that English can’t quite hold. But the irony is that italics can also be a compromise, a decision to make “foreignness” legible in the terms expected by a white readership. This act of italicization is a constant negotiation with the idea of the white gaze—and I think Toni Morrison said it best: “it’s the little white man that sits on your shoulder and checks out everything you do or say. You sort of knock him off and you’re free." It’s the assumption that the reader, looking into this poem, will find the cultural elements unfamiliar, exotic, even mystifying. So, italics make them “accessible.” Italics say, I know you’re watching.


Take Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of the borderlands—a space between cultures, a blend, a mixing that is neither fully one nor fully the other. When poets italicize, they negotiate that border, leaning in or pulling away, making decisions about how much to “translate” or how much to protect. Anzaldúa’s “language of the border,” resists the domination of one over another. Italics for poets with multicultural backgrounds often become a tool that grapples with this border space, a small marker that signifies resistance by choosing what to render “legible” and what to hold back.


But italics don’t just accommodate this space—they confine it. When we italicize golgappa or naan or masala, we are marking it as something not quite of this linguistic world. In doing so, we unintentionally uphold an invisible hierarchy that says, “English is the baseline; everything else is an add-on.” The italics become a subtle form of othering within the text, signaling that these words are to be read with a different eye, as foreign objects momentarily grafted onto the “real” body of English. I consider language to be some kind of amalgam with different voices, dialects, and sociolects constantly interacting within any discourse. Yet italics in poetry often work against this idea, preserving the “foreign” voice as a single, alienated presence, rather than as part of the natural heteroglossic flow.


Italics, then, carry a double-edged risk. They offer the poet a way of naming, claiming, and emphasizing their language, their heritage, but they also offer the reader an easy way to compartmentalize, to see “difference” as manageable, as contained. The italicized word risks becoming a gesture, a form of “authenticity” performed on the page for a reader who may never fully understand the world it belongs to. And in the poetry of diaspora, of cultural complexity, the decision to italicize or not becomes a charged choice: to italicize may feel like surrendering to a gaze that demands translation, while to leave words unitalicized might feel like an act of defiance, a refusal to explain.


The decision to italicize is often a compromise. It’s an acknowledgement that to be read widely, to be read at all, may mean adjusting to expectations that aren’t your own. Italics become a shorthand, a way of flagging “difference” while letting the rest of the poem flow. But this compromise isn’t neutral. When “foreign” authors italicize their native foods, their cultural terms, their worlds, they’re not just highlighting words. They’re guiding the reader’s gaze, directing it toward what’s “other.” And in doing so, they’re performing a kind of cultural labor, a work of translation that isn’t for their own community but for the reader who expects it, who needs it. Italics, then, are not merely a stylistic choice—they’re a kind of stage direction, a cue for the reader to notice, to observe, to regard the poet’s world as both present and apart, as real and yet somehow distant.


Because it’s never just about style. It’s about the decision to make yourself understood—and the price of doing so.



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