T  M Languages of Refuge: In Defiance of Monolingualism .   B. VENKAT MANI is Evjue-Bascom Profes- sor in the Humanities and the Senior Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wiscon- sin, Madison, where he teaches German and world literatures. He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims (U of Iowa P, 2007) and Recoding World Literature (Fordham UP, 2017), winner of the Ger- man Studies Association’s DAAD Book Prize and the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Sca- glione Prize, and the editor, most recently, of Wiley Blackwell’s Companion to World Literature (2020) and German Quarterly’s forum “World Literature: Against Isolationist Readings” (2021). He is working on a monograph on refugees and the global novel. For A. Z., my Pashto teacher ! ﻣ ﮍ ﮪ ﻣ ﺎ ﺷ ﻲ(Marh ma shay!; “May you not die!”). In my very first week of learning Pashto a few years ago, I was startled when my Pashto teacher wrote this phrase on the blackboard in Pashto and roman scripts, followed by an English translation. Used as a greeting in Pashto, the expression could be taken as a stand-in for “may you have a long life,” but it is much stronger. The starkness and economy of the words deploys the grammatical imperative mood to convey that one may avoid death. The phrase was curiously absent from the text- book, Pashto: An Elementary Textbook, which had the more sanitized ﺳ ﺘ ﮍ ﻱ ﻣ ﺎ ﺷ ﻲ(staray ma shay), meaning may you not be tired, along with the Arabic ﺳ ﻼ ﻡ ﻋ ﻠ ﻴ ﮑ ﻢ(salam aleikum), peace upon you (Inomkhojayev 85). “It is used on both sides of the border,” explained my Pashto teacher. He was from Southern Waziristan, the area of Pakistan on “his side” of the Durand Line, the international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan referred to in the United States as the “Af-Pak Border.” Later in the semester he told us that on 11 September 2001, he was eleven years old when he heard of the attack on the Twin Towers on the radio. Because of his village’s proximity to the Af-Pak Border, to escape death and destruction caused by the United States–led “war on terror” and drone attacks, residents of Waziristan were forced to move away to bigger cities—from the clos- est, Peshawar, to the farthest, Karachi—to find work and somehow begin new lives. Internally displaced Pakistanis ended up living along- side Afghan refugees cascading from the other side of the border. The communities of Pashto speakers in Pakistan and Afghanistan shared ©  The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America PMLA . (), doi:./S   ·  ] https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000803 Published online by Cambridge University Press