The Untranslatable Word: How Diaspora Writers Are Refusing to Explain Themselves

In a packed room above a bookshop in Peckham, south London, the poet Adaeze Okorafor read a piece in which the Igbo word chi appeared four times. She never once stopped to define it. Afterwards, a woman near the front asked, gently, whether she worried some readers would be lost.

"I used to worry," Okorafor said. "Then I realised the worry was never about clarity. It was about permission."

That exchange, on a wet Thursday evening in March, captures a quiet revolution running through the work of Britain's Black African writers. The italicised, footnoted, carefully explained foreign word — that small typographical apology that has shadowed African literature in English for half a century — is being deliberately abandoned.

The tyranny of the glossary

For much of the twentieth century, an African novel published in London came fitted with a kind of instruction manual. Words in Yoruba, Twi, Swahili or Wolof were slanted into italics, marking them as guests in the text. Sometimes a glossary waited at the back, translating a grandmother's blessing into something a reader in Surrey could file away.

The convention was rarely questioned. It was simply how the book reached the shelf. But it carried an assumption, subtle and corrosive: that the natural reader was elsewhere, and that the writer's community was material to be interpreted rather than addressed.

"Every italic is a little bow to an audience that was never you," says the critic Selassie Mensah. "You are curtseying to the reader over the heads of your own people."

Mensah, who teaches contemporary literature at a university in the Midlands, has tracked the shift across roughly forty debut collections and novels published in Britain since 2019. In the majority, she says, non-English words now appear in ordinary roman type, unglossed, unbowed.

Trusting the reader to reach

The change is not merely cosmetic. To strip the italics is to make a claim about who the book belongs to. It says the Igbo reader in Deptford and the Nigerian reader in Lagos are the centre, and everyone else is welcome to lean in.

The novelist Kojo Anane, whose second book is set between Kumasi and east London, describes the decision as a matter of respect running in two directions. "When I write obaatan, I am not going to translate my mother," he told me. "If a reader doesn't know the word, they can do what I did my whole childhood in English classes — sit with the not-knowing, and reach."

There is something almost mischievous in this reversal. The African child in a British school spent decades reaching across a gap to reach words like heath and moor and copse — words for landscapes they had never seen, never once italicised for their benefit. Now the gap is being asked to work the other way.

Not everyone is convinced

The movement has its sceptics, and they are not all outsiders. Some older writers, who fought hard simply to be published, see the unglossed word as a luxury of the securely arrived.

"It is easy to refuse to explain yourself when three of your friends already run imprints," one veteran novelist told me, asking not to be named. "When I started, the choice was italics or invisibility." His point lands. The freedom to withhold explanation is itself a marker of how far the door has opened.

Others worry about a subtler trap — that refusing translation can become its own performance, a signal of authenticity aimed, ironically, at the very literary establishment it claims to ignore. A word left unglossed can be an act of trust, or it can be a flag planted for the prize juries.

Okorafor is alert to this. "The test," she says, "is whether you'd write it the same way if no white person ever read it. If yes, keep it. If you're doing it to be seen refusing — that's just italics wearing a different coat."

What a language carries

What is really being negotiated here is belonging. A diaspora writer holds two vocabularies and is told, endlessly, to choose. The unglossed word is a refusal to choose — a way of saying that the whole self, in all its languages, can sit on one page without a translator standing between the writer and the world.

Back above the Peckham bookshop, after the reading, a teenager approached Okorafor with a battered notebook. She had underlined every Igbo word in the printed handout and, beside each, written what she thought it meant, then what her mother had told her it meant. The two columns rarely matched.

"That," Okorafor said later, "is the whole point. She didn't want a glossary. She wanted a reason to go home and ask."