The power of the transnational native tongue in exile: Belgian refugees during the First World War, their exile press and their fragmented identity

In a dynamic view, culture is both transnational and translational (Bhabha 1994, 247). This approach, which points to ‘the increasing importance of developing transnational cultural studies explicitly from the perspective of translation and displacement’ (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 29) aims at understanding cultures primarily as a blurring of boundaries and a focus on intercultural differences that break away from the enclosed mental worlds of nation-specific traditions (Tymoczko 2005). Scholar of forced migration Laura Rubio Díaz-Leal uses the term de-territorialization to refer to ‘the ways in which displaced people feel they belong to various communities despite the fact that they do not share a common territory with all the other members’ (2004, 13-14). This fragmented translation of a refugee identity was indeed visible from the daily lives of the different Belgian refugee communities during the First World War and was represented by the several geographically bound operations of a hugely varied Belgian exile press. With sizeable exile communities in the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, and respective exile press operations collaborating or borrowing from one another, any notion of a Belgian press in exile, based in any of those three nations, transcends geographical constraints. Therefore, the history of the Belgian refugees in Britain during the First World War is posited in its context of transnational displacement and translation – and by extension code switching and replication. Code switching takes place when information communicated in one language is characterized by infrequent additional use of another language, usually isolated words, phrases or short sentences. Replication is when one newspaper replicates information from another source, it quotes, borrows and references the secondary source. The chapter uses the Belgian press in Britain as a key to extending findings that are nation- or refugee community-specific into the transnational history of wartime Belgian press. A context emerges on how the refugee communities in exile were catered for by their exile newspapers, most notably along specific ideological and linguistic divides. How the power of the native tongue marked the sojourn in exile, a truly multilingual and transnational temporary diaspora can be seen through an analysis of the publishing context of Belgian exile newspapers such as the francophone L’Indépendance Belge (Independent Belgium) and La Métropole d’Anvers (The Metropolis of Antwerp), and the Dutch De Stem Uit België (The Voice From Belgium).