Negotiating Linguistic Plurality: Translation and Multilingualism in Canada and Beyond 9780228009559

Citation preview

negotiating linguistic plurality

Negotiating Linguistic Plurality Translation and Multilingualism in Canada and Beyond

Edited by María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISB N 978-0-2280-0913-9 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-2280-0955-9 (eP df) ISB N 978-0-2280-0956-6 (eP UB) Legal deposit first quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Negotiating linguistic plurality : translation and multilingualism in Canada and beyond / edited by María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar. Names: Guzmán, María Constanza, editor. | Tahir Gürçag˘lar, S¸ehnaz, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210335033 | Canadiana (ebook) 2021033505X | isbn 9780228009139 (cloth) | isbn 9780228009559 (ePd f ) | isbn 9780228009566 (eP UB) Subjects: l csh: Translating and interpreting. | lcsh: Translating and interpreting—Canada. | l csh : Multilingualism. | lcsh: Multilingualism Canada. | l csh : Language policy. Classification: lcc p306 .n44 2022 | ddc 418/.02—dc23 This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Introduction 3 María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar 1 Translation as Epistemic Leverage over Multilingual Romani Borders 12 Deborah Folaron 2 The Matrix of Multilingual Memory: Binjamin Wilkomirski, Rigoberta Menchú, and the Power of Abject Atrocity 45 Susan Ingram 3 Translating the Multilingual: Reflections on French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India 66 Sanjukta Banerjee 4 Translation Frequencies: Tuning In or Out in Multilingual Settings 87 Joshua M. Price 5 Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals: Negotiating Multilingualism in Print Culture 107 María Constanza Guzmán

vi

Contents

6 Multilingualism Management in Canada through the Prism of Translation Policies 129 María Sierra Córdoba Serrano 7 The Hidden Symbol: The Institutional Discourse of Linguistic Duality in Canada and the Evolving Spirit of the Official Languages Act 161 Martin Cyr Hicks 8 Languages in Concert: Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land 184 Mark Fettes Contributors Index

205

209

negotiating linguistic plurality

Introduction María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar

Negotiating Linguistic Plurality: Translation and Multilingualism in Canada and Beyond sought, from the start, to bring together a multiplicity of experiences with language while problematizing the notion of multilingualism as the de facto condition of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even though cultural and linguistic plurality are commonly seen as marks of our time, mobilized in the late twentieth century, in particular, as linked to discourses of citizenship and cosmopolitanism emerging in the context of economic globalization, it is well established, specifically when referring to the dyad monolingualism-multilingualism, that it was precisely monolingualism, rather than the multilingual experience, that emerged relatively recently in history. Several authors have emphasized the constructedness of monolingualism as a notion. David Gramling and Yasemin Yildiz, for instance, foreground the complexity of speaking of multilingualism in linear and teleological fashion, explaining that monolingualism was “invented” in Europe and became configured between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. They discuss ways in which those monolingual imaginings of the nation and the multilingual experience are in constant tension. Discussing the tension at a notional level, Gramling states, for instance, that “monolingualism and multilingualism both derive historically from the pragmatic and rationalist axiom of ‘lingualism’ – namely that the meaning-making world is organized by way of a countable roster of propositionally and functionally exhaustive entities called languages.”1 Yildiz, for her part, speaks of monolingualism not as a reality but as a paradigm, and posits the “post-monolingual condition” as a “field of

4

María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar

tension in which the monolingual paradigm continues to assert itself and multilingual practices persist or reemerge.”2 She offers the term as a way to “bring into sharper focus the back-and-forth movement between these two tendencies that characterizes contemporary linguistic constellations.” In Negotiating Linguistic Plurality we follow this line of thinking, with an interest both in various approaches and in the historicity of notions and frameworks through which linguistic plurality is articulated. Catching a glimpse of individual subjects’ experience of language and linguistic plurality is equally, if not more, complex, in part precisely because of the social constructedness of the notion of linguistic singularity and the multiple ways it becomes embedded in notions of identity. An analogous tension to the collective one occurs on an individual plane, as several authors have persuasively argued. In The Monolingualism of the Other, for example, Jacques Derrida speaks of the double-edged sword of one’s relationship with (a) language, the pleasure and suffering inscribed in that relationship.3 By staging his argument as a “performative contradiction” and stating in a language that that selfsame language is not “one’s,” he brings to the fore the anguish that crosses language-human relations in their richness and complexity. Quoting Abdelkebir Khatibi, Derrida embraces the search for the meaning, or rather, the experience of (a) language even from within an understanding that “there is no such thing as the language”; “there is no such thing as absolute monolingualism.”4 This tension is at the heart of Negotiating Linguistic Plurality: Translation and Multilingualism in Canada and Beyond. Rather than assuming – on either or both the individual and/or the collective level – monolingualism as a basis and multilingualism as the realization of its opposite, and instead of taking the perspective of policy and models as a matrix on the basis of which scholarship on multilingualism is geared to “manage diversity,” we assume linguistic plurality as a continuing condition of human lived experience. With the idea of “negotiating linguistic plurality” in this volume we sought to deploy multiple experiences in/of language in our contemporary societies while remaining true to the un-answerability of what the language constitutes or what its definite limits and possibilities are. Translation is at the crux of the landscape of linguistic plurality laid out here – it turned out to be in this volume’s conceptual core and central to the majority of the chapters. This is chiefly because language and translation are seen, today, as a central theme of the

Introduction

5

new century. Gramling even posits our time as the “linguacene,” given the centrality of large-scale, “translingually mediated discourse” in the way we are altering “the planet in intensities and scalar trajectories unimaginable in the mid-twentieth century.”5 We have focused on the interplay between linguistic plurality and translation to underscore ways in which the frameworks and terms of the discussions about multilingualism, on one side, and translation, on the other, can be mutually questioned and informed. Within a critique of reified discourses of multilingualism emerging with the promise of globalization, it is imperative to also bring to the fore and problematize ideas about translation that emerged as part of that promise. As Brian Lennon argues in In Babel’s Shadow, “translation is newly urgent and newly controversial today, in an era of reviving narratives of incommensurability on a global scale.”6 Discussing the link between translation and multilingualism, Rita Kothari notes that this relationship is often treated as “too obvious to merit a comment,” while, as she demonstrates, in the case of India, it is fraught and complicated by the nation’s history. Kothari asks: “what are the particularities of this relationship? Is translation a testimony to the difference between languages, or constitutive of one? When Urdu and Hindi are first separated through a set of historically constructed circumstances, and then engaged through translation, what meaning does translation acquire in the context?”7 She goes on to question translation’s meaning: “What does it mean to translate languages in contiguity compared with those in distant lands, and how do the familiar and the foreign play out in a society where both diversity and commonness compete to challenge the existing epistemologies of the nation? On the more conceptual plane, how do we know what comes first – a language or its translation?”8 Kothari’s questioning foregrounds translation’s centrality for any discussion of multilingualism while it also shows how difficult it is to establish conceptual boundaries. She grounds this difficulty mainly – if not exclusively – in the question of context; translation is thus viewed as an experience of the social world, beyond texts and narratives and as part of social experience. This resonates with contemporary readings of translation as an ecological practice, such as Cronin’s “posthumanist ecology of translation” as one that seeks to “situate value elsewhere” – other than the text, the author, the individual – and in the world, keeping in mind a sense of place and of relatedness.9

6

María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar

Thematically, the relationship between translation and linguistic plurality in this volume is explored mainly with a focus on the lived, social, and institutional aspects of linguistic plurality, including language policy and planning, language and transformative justice, minority and minoritized languages, translation zones and plurilingual territories, and language heritage, rights, and nation-building. Rather than clear-cut definitions and demarcations, we have turned our attention to small bits of experience and minoritized practices, given that they have been less documented and also that they help reveal gaps and blind spots within large narratives about language. In focusing on “negotiations around linguistic plurality” we have also been interested in ways in which language and discourse about language are mobilized as strategies toward specific ends – including, though not exclusively, nationalistic ones. This volume is by no means the only collection of essays on multilingualism from a comparative, global perspective.10 The sketches of multilingual experience we feature cover particular conceptual and praxical areas. As far as praxis, we see linguistic plurality negotiated in institutional contexts and also in writing, in public space, and in the streets. Conceptually, the chapters in this volume view these experiences through various lenses. One such lens is language policy: a few of the chapters take on a critical view of language policies and foreground the distances and, at times, even dissonances between policy and language practices on the ground. Our collection does, however, wish to emphasize attempts and experiences of failure to “manage,” “contain,” or fully make sense of, from a policy perspective, what happens on the ground. We sought to do so by bringing together both a variety of contexts/traditions and a combination of perspectives which, while not disregarding questions of policy, keep in sight and are oriented toward lived experiences of multilingualism. We hope the volume, thus structured and placing an emphasis on translation, offers a novel transnational and comparative perspective, and that we are able to foreground the interplay between the individual and the collective. As in Kothari’s exploration, place and context are at the core of this book. On the one hand, by virtue of bringing together various disciplines, this volume activates different conceptual contexts and worlds of knowledge. On the other, as the pieces deal with various regions, languages, and territories, the geopolitical contexts vary. The common thread has been the investigation of the relationship between multilingualism and translation. The volume initially focuses on international

Introduction

7

contexts, dealt with in the pieces by Deborah Folaron, Susan Ingram, Sanjukta Banerjee, Joshua Price, and María Constanza Guzmán; the Canadian context is the focus of the latter part of the volume, with the pieces by María Sierra Córdoba Serrano, Martin Hicks, and Mark Fettes. In all, the scope of the discussion(s) displays an experience of thinking about language that is, in itself, both situated and multiple. By situated we mean context-bound, not necessarily in the sense of being grounded in a fixed place, but as part of specific human experiences and relations. Linguistic plurality is thus seen as negotiated in and through these relations, whether they be intellectual, aesthetic, epistemic, institutional, political, and/or intimate. The critique of multilingualism as a notion in Negotiating Linguistic Plurality assumes that there is a plurality of languages that survive and even thrive beyond borders and traditional institutional structures thanks to strategies devised by communities of speakers. A case in point, as taken up in Folaron’s opening chapter, is Romani. Minoritized and marginalized in a permanently migrant existence over many centuries, Romani-speaking communities speak various dialects of their language, which has not been internationally standardized. This has led to a situation where knowledge on Romani culture is often relayed to outside communities via non-Romani sources. Contemporary Romani activism, aided by a postcolonial context and the development of various institutional forms of support, such as the European Union, has turned this situation around and mobilized ways of reconstructing Romani knowledge from within. According to Folaron, translation and the ethical values it evokes lie at the heart of inter-Romani communication, as well as communication between the Roma and “others.” She maintains that translation, as both concept and practice, can be an “epistemic lens” leading towards the restoration of social justice. While Folaron offers a panorama of the translational dynamics of the Roma as a “multilingual nation without a territory” today, Banerjee’s essay critically explores historical accounts of multilingualism in India as they surface in the translational practices of French travellers in the eighteenth century. Banerjee argues that these accounts were informed by a notion of languages as countable and divisible, underpinned by a cartographic view of language and culture, on the one hand, and the belief in the oneness of language, in this case Sanskrit, on the other. Their representation of multilingualism overrode the linguistic landscape on the ground in India, which was marked by fuzzy borders

8

María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar

and multiple belongings voiced by local translators. French travellers glossed over heterogeneity and made the unfamiliar familiar by prioritizing similarity over difference. Guzmán turns to Latin America and the Caribbean and explores the translational actions of periodical editors, some of whom set out to disrupt nation-focused discourses privileging language homogeneity over multilingualism and hybridity. Through her study of three twentieth-century Caribbean-based cultural magazines, Guzmán demonstrates the varied position of translation (or lack thereof) in periodicals, and its use and links to larger ideological and discursive agendas. According to Guzmán, among her three objects of study, it is Revista Casa de las Américas that, featuring translations from English, French, Creole, and Portuguese, brings to the fore the constitutive linguistic multiplicity of the region and posits translation as an emancipatory tool in reconfiguring the intellectual dynamics of the Caribbean cultural sphere. Also focusing on the Americas, Price approaches totalizing and simplifying language-oriented views of the Anglo-American world through the concept of attunement. He proposes “translational attunement” as a methodology to tease out processes of selective cognition in multilingual environments, while also offering a framework for reflecting on the phenomenology of translation. Price offers ethnographic descriptions of various settings – relayed from a psychogeographical and personal perspective – where he explores how subjects in multilingual spaces choose to tune in to and out of certain messages in daily interactions. Price’s position is that to open oneself to the multiplicity of languages, one needs to actively tune in to others. Viewing it as a form of differential affective attunement, Price argues that translation releases new readings and interpretations among participants in communicative exchanges and invites a consideration of the sensory and affective experience of hearing others in a different language. This ties in closely with this volume’s questioning of translation as mere linguistic transfer and our emphasis on the inextricable links between language, place, and context. The lived experience of language and the affective dimensions of (failed) communication are also taken up by Ingram, who explores two well-known cases that complicate the relationship between language and biography. These are Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 by Binjamin Wilkomirski (1995) and Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia

Introduction

9

(1983). Ingram brings these two works into conversation through a multilingually focused approach that sheds light on the psychoanalytic complexity of language. The two works reveal how alterity is often experienced as a threat and how discourses of child survivors of traumatic and violent experiences surface as retrospectively constructed testimonies of these experiences, while the child witnesses remain largely silent. This, according to Ingram, “can provide us with critical tools to understand the links between speech, betrayal, and violence.” Córdoba Serrano’s chapter opens the Canada-specific section of this volume. Looking at this context “through the prism of translation policies,” she adopts a critical stance towards what she terms the “Canadian model of multilingualism management.” While she draws attention to the need to build stronger links between the fields of translation and language policy, Córdoba Serrano argues that translation policy needs to be made an integral part of a modernized Official Languages Act. She demonstrates that when multilingualism is considered a problem, translation is offered as a form of temporary accommodation, as a “stopgap” measure, until individuals learn the majority language. Drawing on an analysis of the use of translation and interpreting services and the treatment of bilingualism by the judicial system, Córdoba Serrano maintains that a move towards acknowledging translation as part of access and “language human rights” is required to be able to respond to the demographic and linguistic shifts in Canada. Also focusing on questions of policy in his chapter, Martin Hicks offers an overview of the historical evolution and shifts of Canada’s language policies vis-à-vis English and French. In Hicks’s view, the Canadian government, admittedly aloof from the rich multilinguality of Canadian society, has pursued policies that once departed from institutional bilingualism but have recently led towards linguistic duality. Hicks explores a discursive shift he has identified in government publications and initiatives through a specific focus on the design of the symbol of linguistic duality by the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, which has “transformed the idea of biculturalism from a potentially ethnic concept to an entirely linguistic one.” Hick maintains that “while heritage language groups are more or less easily integrated as threads in Canada’s social fabric, we may need to rethink the relationship between our two official languages and the Indigenous languages they supplanted.”

10

María Constanza Guzmán and S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘lar

The need to adopt an alternative view of language plurality that some of the initial chapters emphasize applies also to the contemporary Canadian context, as Fettes eloquently illustrates as he reflects on the specific situatedness of Indigenous linguistic practices and their connection to land. In the closing chapter Fettes suggests that, to come to terms with the realities of language use and knowledge, we need to “avoid squeezing the languages into the straitjacket of Western assumptions.” He notes that, when speaking of linguistic plurality, one may even speak of various “pluralities”; there is a specificity to Indigenous linguistic plurality in the territory called Canada that is different from that of what we know as the European territory, and various pluralities often pose a challenge against national narratives of language. As Fettes argues, the anchoring of Indigenous languages in their geographical surroundings and their immediate lived experiences creates an intimate connectedness to land that requires an epistemological perspective that not only transcends the conventional view of language as a nationally and culturally discrete unit but also acknowledges voices beyond those of humans. For Fettes, this is a question of being open to different kinds of knowing, being ready to embrace an intellectual heritage of a semiotic system that holistically brings together language, culture, and land. This knowledge does not necessarily reflect through a poetic exercise sustained through metaphors, story, and ritual, but needs to be scaffolded by legislation and policy geared to support Indigenous languages. Overall, this volume aims to offer a spectrum of current approaches and debates in the study of linguistic plurality, regarding both the ways in which it unfolds and is transacted in general, and specifically how it is negotiated via translation. It is our hope that both the individual contributions in their specificity, and their composition and the thematic, conceptual, and methodological relationships among them, will inform contemporary debates in various fields of knowledge and illuminate the multiplicity of language experiences in Canada and in our world at large. no t e s The editors and contributors wish to acknowledge the support of York University, and in particular of Glendon College’s research unit, Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact (crlcc ), in the initiatives leading up to this book.

Introduction

11

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Gramling 2016, 93. Yildiz 2012, 5. Derrida 1998, 2. Ibid., 7. Gramling 2016, 215. Lennon 2010, 55. Kothari 2018, 2. Ibid., 3. Cronin 2016, 239. Cronin posits “ecology” as a possible path to answer the question: “Is there a way of attaching value to what translators do that does not involve the sacrifice of a sense of collective responsibility?” 10 See e.g. Lane Mercier et al. 2018, which includes perspectives from various continents and places emphasis on cultural and linguistic diversity “management” (315).

r e f e r e n ce s Cronin, Michael. 2016. “A New Ecology of Translation? Collaboration and Resilience.” In Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age, edited by Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning, 233–44. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. The Monolingualism of the Other: or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press. Gramling, David. 2016. The Invention of Monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Kothari, Rita. 2018. “Introduction: When We Are ‘Multilingual,’ Do We Translate?” In A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamic in India, edited by Rita Kothari, 1–22. Oxford, uk : Oxford University Press. Lane Mercier, Gillian, Denise Merkle, and Jane Koustas. 2018. Minority Languages, National Languages, and Official Language Policies. Montreal, qc , and Kingston, on : McGill-Queen’s University Press. Lennon, Brian. 2010. In Babel’s Shadow. Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

1

Translation as Epistemic Leverage over Multilingual Romani Borders Deborah Folaron

in t ro du c t i on “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” says an oft-repeated English translation of an expression attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. An epistemological journey debuts in much the same way: a reflexive quest to understand how we know what we know, intertwined with the intellectual curiosity of potentially encountering other positions of knowledge and the courage to face prospects that compel one to critically examine, question, and revisit the foundations upon which one’s own knowledge has been constructed. A single, first step traverses the familiar boundaries of the self. The brain’s cognitive awareness of self is sparked initially through consciousness, setting a pattern of knowing what we know. As cognitive neuroscientist Dehaene reminds us, human consciousness activates the moment a single mental representation among many “wins the competition” for access to the global neuronal workspace and is selected as information for internal global sharing and decision-making. Perception then triggers the capacity to report this information through language and a capacity to reflect on the self, which assesses whether or not what one knows is reliable or trustworthy.1 As human beings we seem primed to bootstrap ourselves into spaces beyond the borders of the self through a translational mechanism, one grounded in a notion of translation in its broadest and most inclusive, even non-linguistic, sense. A translational

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

13

epistemic might be conceptualized as one of a process of continual motion, of being and becoming, one whose epistemic vitality transforms and (re)validates the epistemic core through newly accessed stimuli, information, and knowledge. Ultimately its language of expression can be one of plurality, inviting questions on how knowledge is mediated through multiple languages and on how we can effectively disentangle translation from multilingual processing. In her introduction to A Multilingual Nation – Translation and Language Dynamic in India (2018), Kothari insightfully asks: “When we are ‘multilingual,’ do we translate?” In their observations on Kannada, a classical language in India that has borrowed considerably from Sanskrit, Chippali and Sarukkai2 pursue this question further – “What comes first? Languages, or the notion of translation?” – arguing that a translational motion is already present in any notion of language. Venuti, drawing on Derrida, calls attention to the parallel forces further exerted on language by social and cultural agents, with monolingualism one of the potential consequences: Language use, despite biological metaphors embedded in expressions like “native language” and “mother tongue,” is not natural in its origins, but cultural; not only is it acquired from immersion and education in a culture but that acquisition so infiltrates individual uses as to make them fundamentally … collective … [I]n more specifically social terms: a language is imposed by the exigencies of a social situation that is structured hierarchically … and … the “other” that is a cultural institution or political authority may involve the imposition of a monolingualism, an academic or colonial discourse, that seeks to homogenize and limit language use. By the same token, the monolingualism imposed by the other may endow the specificity of individual use with a collective force and hence a transindividual and possibly universal exemplarity.3

p hi l o s o p h ic a l c o n s id e r ati ons on knowi ng Beyond the bounds of the strictly neurological and cognitive, questions on how we know what we know and their relation to language have historically been discussed and debated on the terrain of philosophy. Even while addressing common inquiries into

14

Deborah Folaron

such concepts as “truth,” “justice,” “reason,” “justified belief,” “knowledge,” and “objectivity,” the epistemological traditions of this terrain exhibit significant diversity. Many of these traditions in the West have revolved conceptually around individual agency. However, comparable grosso modo to the way human language materializes, coalesces, and expands through social interactions and relations, so are human epistemic situations shaped by social practices and relationships, which in turn guide and are guided by the social impact of language. Of interest, then, is the growing emphasis on social agency, articulated in the more recently denominated “social epistemology.” Goldman and Blanchard observe that this field considers not only the epistemic quality of group attitudes and individual attitudes on the basis of social evidence, but also the epistemic consequences that emerge from the adoption of institutional arrangements and systemic relations. From the perspective of social moral epistemology, they underscore the relevance of Fricker’s two categories of epistemic injustice – that is, “where a social group is unfairly deprived of knowledge due to lack of access to education and other epistemic resources”: (1) testimonial injustice (“when a speaker is given less credibility due to a hearer’s prejudices about a social group to which the speaker belongs”) and (2) hermeneutical injustice (“when a socially powerless group lacks conceptual resources to make sense of certain social experiences”).4 Fuller (2016), following a more constructivist social epistemology, stresses the implications of considering systemic knowledge that is consolidated and justified in organized social constructions such as academic institutions, e.g. through practices of teaching and research. Moreover, according to Fuller, epistemic agents are proactive and make knowledge to act in the world. An individual “is pulled in different directions due to social forces, mak[ing] decisions on actions to take in response to the social forces and the consequences of those actions.”5 As such, epistemic responsibility does not rest solely on the individual, but on an entire epistemic community, with the epistemic agent considered not as an island unto itself, but as a participant in knowledge production, with emphasis on social character over individual agency.6 Individual acts, to whatever extent this implies, are relational and socially mediated, for “the individual does not form concepts (of epistemic value) or their use in a social vacuum.”7 For many traditionally marginalized, minoritized, and disenfranchised social groups and communities, profound critical questions

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

15

pertaining to the production of knowledge have slowly and systematically been emerging. These groups urge the “others” that constitute the mainstream or hegemonic status quo to rethink their positions of perception and to engage more closely and ethically with their “objects of inquiry.” This enterprise requires a repositioning of all sides, a tacit, if not explicit, agreement to embark on an epistemological journey together, with the goal of abating the proliferation of unjustifiable knowledge and eradicating epistemic injustice. For some, the journey is arduous in the face of hundreds of years of history-making that have muted their voices and representation as the modern world transitioned to embrace participatory democratic institutions without their participation. In their stead have circulated a plethora of construed stereotypes and misleading representations, uncritically accepted and popularly supported even in the absence of any tangible contact with members of the social group being described. When legitimate conditions for reliable and justifiable knowledge are absent, what measures “validate” the knowledge about any given social group – particularly when its members have traditionally had little or no access to the prevalent means of knowledge production in society? How to reverse the entrenched beliefs that “outsiders” have towards whole communities? How to epistemologically account for the inevitable diversity of a social group too readily portrayed as homogenous? Kechi ka na way ehta (Dr John George Hansen), an Omushkegowuk Cree, reflects on this challenge when considering the diversity of Indigenous knowledge: When discussing Indigenous philosophy, it is important to put the concept on a wide, Indigenous basis. This has several reasons. One of them is that, although we as Indigenous peoples each have a distinct culture, we all share the common experience of having been impacted by European colonialism; we have undergone the colonization of our languages, our culture, our spirituality and our justice systems. Although Indigenous philosophy, ways of knowing and being, were historically crushed through colonialism and all colonized people share that experience, we are now in a process of restoring our traditions.8 Facts bear out this heterogeneity. As per the Canadian 2016 census, there are over 600 recognized Indigenous First Nations groups with distinctive cultures and languages in modern Canada

16

Deborah Folaron

alone. These diverse groups collectively mobilize through the shared common experience of social rupture. By acknowledging that the privileges enjoyed today are on territories unceded by Indigenous peoples, settlers and immigrants recognize a moral responsibility to acknowledge history and a legacy of colonialism that deliberately displaced and purged Indigenous inhabitants from these lands. It is a concrete, albeit small, first step on the social epistemological journey leading to restorative justice. The following pages aim to show how these critical, epistemic questions can be considered through the prism of multilingualism and translation in the Romani context.

t he ro m a n i jo u r n e y – a li ttle background Mainstream perceptions about Romani peoples (commonly referred to in English as “Gypsies”), both romanticized as free-spirited nomads and vilified as criminals and freeloaders, are deeply engrained in the popular imagination, worldwide. On what basis have these beliefs been formed? To what extent are they “true” in the face of historical realities? Why have these groups been repeatedly marginalized? The occasional seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bilingual Romani word lists reflect the curiosity with which non-Romani academics viewed the “mysterious” language spoken by these “unidentifiable” social groups. Indeed, any research involving Romani communities entails confronting many layers of historical complexity. Recent historical linguistic evidence places Romani origins initially in India, probably around 1,000 ce . A Romani “identity” seems to have first coalesced among early groups that had settled in Byzantine Anatolia and in the Balkans from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Families, kumpaniyas (groups), and communities subsequently travelled and migrated for diverse reasons, eventually arriving and residing in over fifty modern nation-states worldwide. Upon entering European territory (around the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries), these groups, some more nomadic than others, were generally viewed with suspicion, and over time they were systematically subjected to policies and legislation that sought to assimilate or eradicate them (see Hancock 1987). Different groups underwent different experiences, depending on their territories of residence and their degree of contact with the respective non-Romani cultures. For example, Romani peoples in Spain faced different historical circumstances from those in Russia or Bulgaria or Romania. From this perspective, Romani identity, collectively

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

17

speaking, has not emerged from an exact, shared pool of linguistic, cultural, social, political, and historical references able to be harnessed in ways typically associated with territorial “nation-building.” Notwithstanding this, we do know from Romani research that the sixty to eighty Romani language dialects spoken (with varying degrees of literacy) all share a common core of approximately 800 original lexical roots (e.g. Indian, Persian, Kurdish, Armenian, Greek), and that a common experience of discrimination, persecution, and minoritized outsider status is shared as well. Historically, individual groups that have self-identified as Romani peoples (by many different ethnonyms) have developed survival strategies with regard to the diverse nonRomani (Gadže) “majority societies” that have sought to assimilate, malign, or remove them. These strategies have included preserving the language (dialects) by not sharing it readily with outsiders. In sum and when viewed collectively – that is to say, as a composite of Romani cultures that emerged from within the diverse national cultures and histories of so many nation-states – Romani identity is heterogeneous and transnational. It is multilingual, multicultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic, all loosely comprised within the category. In step with some of the actions for decolonization that took place during the mid-to-latter half of the twentieth century, Romani aspirations and initiatives began to draw on various concepts of nation-building – but without the geographical, territorial perimeters this endeavour usually implies. An educated Romani elite, along with some non-Romani allies, drew inspiration from post-colonial and civil rights movements and later a developing European Union, all of which subsequently dovetailed with emergent worldwide trends of globalization and technology. These undertakings – which continue to this day, and are supported by a wide range of technologies – include Romani language revitalization, decolonization strategies, initiatives to deconstruct the knowledge produced on Romani peoples by non-Romani institutions and policies, and the cultivation of a Romani identity through shared projects in the arts, social inclusion missions, and education. Creating a modern transnational, non-territorial Romani identity is not without its challenges. Groups and their respective histories are heterogeneous and diverse, with the notion of a “collective identity” over national borders not integral to Romani history and tradition at large. Only relatively recently, historically speaking, has self-knowledge of one’s own individual Romani history in relation

18

Deborah Folaron

to a collective one begun to be investigated, understood, and actively promoted. Furthermore, as a minority in every country, no dialect of the Romani language has ever enjoyed majority nation-state status. All educated Roma, therefore, are literate in non-Romani languages of the states in which they live. Vibrant debates thus ensue as to what constitutes “Romani-ness” and the extent to which any one group can represent the interests of other groups. Yet it is clear that in the face of growing populism and nationalisms in their respective countries of residence, Romani solidarity strives to prevail at some level in order for Romani identity to survive. On European territory, and in the context of the eu , the debates on Romani social inclusion have included entitlement to language rights (e.g. the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages [ecrml ]), eliciting questions of whether or not Romani peoples qualify as a historical, national minority group or as immigrants. In sum, Romani solidarity and activist movements struggle not only to react to persistent perceptions that non-Romani others have constructed about Romani peoples and to the policies construed to “deal” with them as a perceived “problem”; they are now pro-active in debating the ways they themselves can participate, guide, and lead in the production of knowledge about their own communities, in their own voices.

c o n c e p t ua l iz in g t rans lati on as e p is t e m ic leverage Over the past decade, the literature in Romani studies and writing on Romani issues has proliferated, extensively, by Romani and non-Romani scholars and activists alike. While language has been an important focus of this writing, translation has been much less so. Despite mentions of translation and notes of translated works, discussions on the diverse translational dynamics and practices of translation (and interpreting) within a Romani context, including in the context of translation studies, are still in a relatively nascent phase. The broader contours of this overall research project have been to observe and outline some of the translational dynamics of the Romani “multilingual nation without a territory.” As the solidarity movement for Romani rights develops and expands, it inevitably deals with the challenges of languages not shared across the borders of nation-states. Because Romani language dialects have no nation-state backing and have not developed equally or uniformly

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

19

in the many and specialized areas of contemporary life (for instance, education, administration, professional domains), the default languages in situations other than family and community affairs are non-Romani ones, with English increasingly serving as a lingua franca. Romani parents also may encourage their children to learn the languages of the state or an international “world” language for the value associated with them for earning a future livelihood. These factors do not impede those who do not know a Romani dialect from learning one as a reflection of their Romani identity. All of these phenomena reflect similarities with other minority language scenarios. However, with no umbilical cord to a territory in common where the Romani language has been “natively” used, and since literate Romani adults whose first language is Romani are bilingual or multilingual, the situation is clearly unique. From the outset, the relation of native language to a territory or nation-state, if one’s purpose is to conceptualize translation activity within the more conventional, or even postcolonial, translation research paradigms, is a priori problematic. From a translation studies-oriented position, the working premise of a non-homogeneous collective notion of Romani identity (if indeed it materializes or is definable as such) can only be understood through an epistemic lens of “translation,” both in conceptual terms and in practical terms. The Romani language itself is amenable to this perspective. Since its very origins, its dialects have been in constant contact with other languages,9 with instances of linguistic adoptions in speech well documented. Indeed, the pragmatic act of translating any Romani dialect into or from any non-Romani language entails knowing something about the specific contact language(s) the dialect has evolved with, mingled with, and borrowed from over time. Without a stabilized, standardized, or codified Romani language accepted for use by all groups internationally, inter-Romani communication implies some form of translation between non-Romani languages and other Romani dialects. In its most global sense, the community at large (throughout Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, etc.) functions in constant translation from within. These translational dynamics are also cultural and social. The Romani self interacts translationally not only with other kinds of Romani cultures but with the non-Romani worlds in which many are fully immersed. A vital tool for survival has been to understand the non-Romani “other.” The asymmetry of this translational relationship, however,

20

Deborah Folaron

is evident. What the “other” knows about Romani culture has often been contingent on non-Romani knowledge produced by popular, literary, and even academic sources. From within a centuries-old minoritized position, contemporary Romani activism attempts to re-construct this knowledge, leveraging classical Western methods of knowledge acquisition along with the oral traditions and histories of experiential “lived” knowledge. It is a critical step in positioning the collectivity through what de Sousa Santos has phrased the “epistemology of the South,” that is, when those who have been “excluded, silenced, marginalised” and “systematically suffered the injustices, dominations and oppressions caused by colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy” mobilize to “‘occupy’ the term ‘epistemology’ in order to resignify it.”10 The linguistic and cultural local ‹– –› global motions underpinning translational communication constitute a natural ally for resignifying the episteme and shifting some of these dynamics of power in other directions. The proposition that translation might be leveraged as an epistemic resource to in some way restore justice not only takes into account the translational dynamics that have historically intervened in the multilingual Romani context; it also acknowledges new potential in the ethical and social value of translation. Prior to exploring this potentiality, however, it is worth recognizing that the merits of this acknowledgment are attributable to the suppleness of the concept itself, whose perimeters contract and expand according to diverse contexts. As the growing corpus of translation literature indicates, translation is not understood universally in the same way; nor does it have the same history in every language and region of the world. With the integration of technologies, it takes on an even broader scope of activities, including adaptation for localization, transcreation, and audio-visual translation. Likewise, concepts such as the “translation zone,” in reference to areas of intense interaction across languages in multilingual empires, nations, border spaces, and within cities,11 encompass myriad translational practices. Moreover, any and every act of translating is “embedded in various contextual issues, such as unequal power relations, colonisation, cultural development, multilingualism, oral tradition, illiteracy, religious meanings, the connection between language and nation, globalisation, etc.”12 Indeed, “translation knowledge” straddles two domains: as knowledge that is “embrained and embodied, on, about, or of translation” and as knowledge “transmitted by or circulating

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

21

transnationally through translation.”13 With the global spread of digital technologies, translation knowledge and translation activities have been further transformed and extended to include informal and formal online networks of collaboration, volunteer translation initiatives, localization projects for language revitalization, and identity politics, as well as prolific use of automatic (machine) translation. Significantly, these technologies have inspired and enhanced global communication internationally among local communities as never before. For the Romani collectivity, they evoke a plurality of ways of “knowing” the Romani experience in the world, through the overlapping lenses of multiple languages and cultures.

in t e rc u lt u r a l trans lati on The Romani collective experience, expressed across a spectrum of many different languages, dialects, cultures, and nation-states, is not only one of a plurality of ways of knowing “Romani-ness.” It is also one of a shared common struggle waged against historical misrepresentation and discrimination. This shared struggle, articulated by way of similar or aligned social and political goals, intersects many nation-states, interrogating dominant, majority society and non-Romani social, political, and cultural institutions in their multiple forms. Altogether, they seem to exemplify what de Sousa Santos refers to as “intercultural translation,” a fundamental pillar of his proposed “epistemologies of the South”: In order to bring together different knowledges without compromising their specificity, we need intercultural translation. [It] consists in searching for isomorphic concerns and underlying assumptions among cultures, identifying differences and similarities, and developing, whenever appropriate, new hybrid forms of cultural understanding and intercommunication that may be useful in favouring interactions and strengthening alliances among social movements … [It] questions both the reified dichotomies among alternative knowledges (e.g., Indigenous knowledge versus scientific knowledge) and the unequal abstract status of different knowledges (e.g., Indigenous knowledge as a valid claim of identity versus scientific knowledge as the only claim of truth). In sum, the work of translation enables us to cope with diversity and conflict.14

22

Deborah Folaron

The combined theoretical, methodological, and conceptual acts of reconstructing knowledge that is encompassed by “epistemologies of the South” implies, among other things, decolonizing the knowledge of both the colonizer and the colonized, and internalizing the co-creation of knowledge through processes of knowing-with rather than knowing about.15 As expressed by Tuhiwai Smith, decolonization, “once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government,” is now “recognized as a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power.”16 Reconciling two “epistemic worlds” during a process of decolonization can be difficult, as cogently expressed by the Anishinaabekwe researcher Madeline Whetung (of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) when she considers the confluence of her research project and the protocols of university ethics boards: My experience reading the ethics protocol made me feel as though it was impossible to embody both at once: I was either colonizing researcher or Indigenous community member: the subject of research. More than this, the university operates from a knowledge-supremacy position where it dis-embeds knowledge that is rooted outside of the academy to bring it into the academy by validating some aspects of it as “research.” It felt like two separate things. These divisions make it feel as though it is difficult to maintain our ethical responsibilities throughout an entire project because it occurs in so many different pieces and it results in a dislocation from self, a reinforcing of colonial dispossession.17 De Sousa Santos’s purpose, however, is to seek a “polylectal” epistemological diversity, one that is not lodged in identitarian essentialisms nor constrained solely to overcoming hierarchical dichotomies and oppositions.18 It is, rather, one that translates into an “ecology of knowledges” prioritizing “the copresence of different ways of knowing”; by studying the affinities, divergences, complementarities, and contradictions among them, their effectiveness in the struggles of resistance against oppression is maximized.19 Intercultural translation thus explicitly recognizes differences. Through processes of defamiliarization and refamiliarization vis-à-vis one’s own standpoint, competitive and cooperative relationships with other standpoints are evaluated and potential convergences maximized on the basis of

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

23

concrete objectives and consequences.20 These convergences contain potentialities of sharing and of consensus. As an example of intercultural translation, he identifies the introducing of Indigenous Quechuan and Aymaran Andean concepts (sumac kawsay and pachamama respectively) into the modern political constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. In this case, translation transpired not only between oral, ancestral knowledge and written, Eurocentric knowledge, but also by the intercultural act of acknowledging and fitting a notion of ethno-cultural nation within a modern nation-state’s unifying constitutional mechanisms, whereby the constitution can “preside over plurinational and intercultural conviviality.”21 Likewise, he recognizes as intercultural translator the figure of Mahatma Gandhi, guided as Gandhi was both by the political needs of a struggle against oppression and by his openness to contributions from different cultures: “rather than considering one culture static and adopting the other, [he] made all of them dynamic and borrowed what he considered good from all of them in light of his political purposes and needs, always with the purpose of enriching the overarching ideas of nonviolence, noncooperation, humanity, equality of religions, and reasons.”22 The concept of “polylectal” epistemological diversity is useful for envisioning the broader Romani collectivity as a distinctly composed epistemic community, but also for understanding the forms and directions currently undertaken to define and produce knowledge collectively. One important mode is linguistic. The common core of lexical items that comprises all the diverse dialects of Romani acts as one point of convergence, consonance, and resonance. Indeed, it is one of the elements that inspired the linguist Courthiade to develop his polylectal script (in lieu of an alphabet) for a more “universal” approach to writing the Romani language in accordance with the phonetics of each different dialect.23 Even while in practice the script was not embraced globally, other more viable pragmatic alternatives such as regional standardization initiatives and the use of English as a bridge language did result. Conceptualizing inter-Romani similarities and differences has taken on various other forms too, and led to different practical decisions. For instance, the “Charter on the Rights of the Roma,” adopted by the European Roma and Travellers Forum (ertf ) in 2009, calls attention to Romani diversity at the same time that it highlights shared language roots and origins (Romanes, the term used within

24

Deborah Folaron

Romani communities to designate any of the Romani language dialects spoken) and a common cultural heritage (Romanipe, the Romani way of being and knowing), two kinds of convergence able to politically galvanize unity from diversity. Notably, it foregrounds a shared Romani identity independent of citizenship in diverse countries and advocates the right to a “self-determined designation, identity, and community.”24 Self-ascription in terms of a collectivity or community is another example. As KlímováAlexander notes, the word “‘Roma’ is a political term … used as an umbrella name for all members of an … extremely ethnographically diverse Romani community.”25 Despite its effectiveness politically, the identifier “Roma” does not imply global consensus among all groups.26 Yet, in the face of external oppressive structures and internal contrariety historically,27 the organizing of diverse Romani peoples nationally, regionally, and internationally through politicization of this term28 has inched the social struggle forward and rechannelled the inappropriate use of other misnomers (e.g. Gypsy, Gitan, Zingaro, Zigeuner, etc.). In sum, the inherent polylectal diversity of Romani peoples worldwide is in the process of conjugating itself into a pro-active social movement. The formation of an epistemic community along the lines of shared values, a rationale for social action, and knowledge production that can potentially lead to policy actions and institutional changes29 is even more discernible in recent Romani initiatives. One example resonating with the experience of other minoritized researchers wanting to produce knowledge useful for their communities is the inclusion of Romani experiential knowledge within the structural fittings of academic institutional frameworks – particularly in situations where “scientific objectivity” is faced off against subjective experience. As Romani scholar Mirga-Kruszelnicka observes, one’s ethnicity should be regarded as “added value in research,” one that does not assume any undermining of quality academic scholarship: Heated debates on the status of Romani scholars, or more broadly, the relationship between ethnicity and academic performance, have recently been taking place. In this debate about the status of Romani scholars, too often ethnic background has been juxtaposed with academic merit, as if these … were mutually exclusive. Rather, these should be treated as complementary qualities.30

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

25

These tensions and debates propel a commitment to action by Romani researchers from within Romani communities seeking to reverse the trend between centuries-old non-Romani producers of knowledge about Romani communities.31 As Ryder attests, “a core area of dispute has focused on the relationship between the researcher and the researched,”32 evidenced by the positions taken in discussions on the Romani Studies Program at Central European University, the European Academic Network on Romani Studies (eanrs ), the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (eriac ), the Gypsy Lore Society, and others (Ryder 2018). A systemic instrument in this social construction of knowledge in parallel with academic institutions is the production of scholarly publications. In this domain as well, the pro-active stance of some Romani venues is clearly stated in their editorial missions. For example, the editors of Lincom Europa’s new Roma series (2010–present) attribute its foundation to the need to counteract some of the “new forms of scientific antigypsyism” and issues of “Roma intellectual property”; they propose that the platform serve young Romani researchers and writers, in the English, Russian, and Romani languages. Likewise, the editorial board of the new openaccess Critical Romani Studies journal (Central European University 2018–) attributes its origins to “a need to center Romani voices in the production of scholarship about Roma.” They state their conviction – in solidarity with similarly suppressed groups – that “scholarship on Romani and other populations that fails to incorporate the voice of the ‘target population’ [is] unethical, abusive, offensive, and methodologically flawed.” In this instance, English is the target common language. Arguably, its epistemic orientation continues along the lines of a classical knowledge-producing academic platform, that is, as an international, peer-reviewed journal in the English language. However, its explicit call to “solicit papers from critically-minded young Romani scholars who have historically experienced significant barriers in engaging with academic knowledge production,” and its emphasis on an activist scholarship for change, set parameters in place for an ethics that is rooted in “intercultural translation.”

in t e rc u lt u r e a n d trans lati on That any one person or group could acquire fluency in all the dialects of the Romani language and all the non-Romani languages used by Romani communities worldwide is of course an impossibility. By

26

Deborah Folaron

default, other linguistic solutions for communication are sought, for instance, through a more widespread regional dialect, a non-Romani (majority or minority) language, or a world language. These situations vary significantly. Members of Romani communities in the Balkan countries, particularly in the former Yugoslavia, routinely communicate by shifting between several Slavic languages and local Romani dialects. Perhaps less habitual, but nonetheless comparable, are the types of linguistic maneuvering that occur in other situations of encounter, for example in the multilingual spaces of pilgrimage (Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer) and of worship (Pentecostal churches; see Thurfjell and Marsh 2014), or the polyglot immigrant places of Romani community centres within cosmopolitan cities. In these types of settings, interlocutors, communicators, interpreters, and translators assume and anticipate that the potential for misunderstanding due to inter-dialectal and interlingual differences is likely elevated. As such, they seek out familiar or similar lexical roots and linguistic knowledge of other languages in order to mitigate the communication obstacles that emerge while speaking, reading, or writing. These familiar instances raise an intriguing question: at which points does a multilingual mind actually slip in and out of “translation mode” and perform a bona fide “translation”? While this is perhaps not “translation” strictly speaking, it is clear that translational processes are being activated. Juxtaposed with the transient and fluid linguistic contours of these kinds of encounters among Romani peoples are the more conventional translation situations associated with the intransient geographical borders of nation-states within which they live. In the case of the latter, the language(s) of the state configure translation directional flows, whether in conformity with government mandates, institutional legislation, political projects, or social imperatives. Ultimately, pragmatic translational realities ground concrete linguistic decisions. When unencumbered by firmly institutionalized grammar and writing protocols, language communication can display many of the creative and circuitous routes of the translational human mind.33 The act of translation, on the other hand, foregrounds an assumption of two or more discrete linguistic repertoires, anchoring the translingual processes and flows. A reason and will to communicate activates potentiality, with linguistic options serving to enable and widen the spectrum of possibilities for participation in a communication act. For example, within the inter-Romani context, three Romani women living in Germanophone countries would

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

27

possibly only get to know one another in the German language if one Romni woman is natively fluent in Romanian and the Kalderaš Romanes dialect, another is natively fluent in Polish and the Polska Roma Romanes dialect, and the third is natively fluent in Macedonian and the Arlije Romanes dialect. The complex, interconnected inter-relatedness of Romani dialects and cultures, layered further by their interconnections with nonRomani languages and cultures, could possibly extend to situations of what Pym calls “interculture.” That is to say, “a cultural place where people combine elements of more than one primary culture in order to carry out cross-cultural communication,”34 synonymous with the intercultural space comprising the “overlap or intersection of cultures” within which translators operate: “translators mostly work in the intersections woven between two or more cultures.”35 For Pym, cross-cultural communication can take many forms, of which translation stricto sensu is but one, albeit one that benefits and adds value to a communication event in specific ways. He stresses that interculture is a strictly operative notion, defining itself hierarchically in the overlap of cultures in terms of “primary-ness” and “secondness”: “as soon as the line between cultures become[s] non-operative [and] there is no functional barrier to overcome, interculturality may lose its derivative status and become indistinguishable from general cultural practice.”36 Theoretically, then, Pym’s notion of a space of interculturality would first seem to be guided and configured by movement, by the fluid motions of reorganizing and reordering of communicative needs in an active or ongoing interlingual, intercultural situation. Ultimately, some communicative imperative would prevail, and alternatives to translation are not a priori excluded; in some situations of communication, the interacting agents can understand one another through other types of linguistic activity such as a polyglot pidgin or a lingua franca.37 Translation, as one of many types of existing social relations, potentially brings its value to the fore through a model of cooperation,38 one that reconciles two goals: to increase understanding, and to decrease potential misunderstanding. By predicting the possibilities for misunderstandings in advance, and identifying, tackling, and reducing them with respect to the aims and probable outcomes of the communication event, the translating agent can decrease potential misunderstanding.39 From this model derive the principles for a translator ethics, principles that highlight certain translator responsibilities, among them: to

28

Deborah Folaron

ethically decide if translation is needed; to take ownership of the probable effects of translation decisions; and to cultivate a trustworthiness in accordance with an intercultural view of cooperation for cross-cultural relationships.40 These principles could be framed as decision-making questions for the interculturally positioned translator. Is it really necessary to translate? What effects can be anticipated from the translation decisions? How do they contribute cooperatively to communication? Will the transaction costs override the benefits? Are long-term, cross-cultural cooperative relationships encouraged? As underscored by Pym, the trust attributed to translators valorizes cooperation by reducing the complexities and risks of communication so that all potentially benefit beyond immediate short-term transactional needs. While it is clear that Pym refers primarily to the professional translation context, it is not unreasonable to envision that the interculturally positioned translator principles of ethics could be operative in certain Romani contexts. One situation to illustrate the point concerns the Canadian processing of refugee claims submitted by Romani families from Hungary between 2008 and 2012.41 During this period, and despite a rise in anti-Roma racism and violence in Hungary documented by human rights organizations,42 the Canadian Harper government deliberately carried out campaigns (including billboards posted in Hungary) to dissuade Romani individuals and families from applying for refugee status in Canada. Within Canada, targeted media coverage on the “bogus” nature of Romani claims was systematic as well. In 2012, the proposal of Bill C-31 (“Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act”) and the creation of a list of designated “safe countries of origin” by Jason Kenney, then Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, further restricted Romani access by placing Hungary on the “safe list.” For those claimants who were able to arrive in Canada, lawyers, interpreters, and translators were needed to prepare – in limited, rapid turnaround time – all the documentation required for submission to the Immigration and Refugee Board (irb ). Among other things, the Basis of Claim form and all supporting evidence to substantiate the claim was (and is) to be submitted in one of Canada’s official languages (English or French). The irb traditionally requests the interpreters and translators it needs from a pool of irb -certified independent contractors. It soon became clear that the actors involved in the endeavour to process these refugee claims

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

29

were not all operating with the same objectives in mind. At least two of the professional lawyers who had been hired to work on behalf of the claimants were ultimately disciplined or disbarred for improper conduct and for having failed, among other things, to have claimant documents translated as required by law. The negligence had resulted not only in lengthy bureaucratic limbo but also in deportations. Equally serious were complaints of the anti-Roma bias and ignorance of Romani culture exhibited by some native Hungarian interpreters and translators, resulting not only in breach of trust but also in misrepresented claims. The combined actions of all these parties effectively denied Romani refugees the natural justice they had initially been promised.43 The mobilization of non-governmental and non-profit organizations was intense but nearly bereft of resources. Pro-bono or low-cost providers of legal services (including at the Toronto-based Roma Community Centre [rcc ]) joined other non-Romani and Romani advocacy organizations (e.g. RomanipeMontreal and Canadian Romani Alliance-Vancouver) to assist and search for volunteer translators and interpreters fluent in one or more Romani dialects and/or in Hungarian. In this effort, a sharing of Romani linguistic, cultural experience shifted the dynamic of the intercultural communication from “secondness” to “primary-ness,” encouraging cross-cultural cooperative relationships among translation and interpreting, as well as legal, service providers. All these actors aligned themselves collaboratively in order to collectively counter the mishandling of the Romani refugee claims, which ultimately resulted in some renewal of trust with claimants seeking assistance, guidance, and justice. An important outcome was the approval of a formal, legal request by the former executive director of the rcc to establish the World Romani Dialects Interpretation Bureau, an entity whose mission is to contract interpreters of various Romani dialects in order to respond to diverse Romani community needs in the city of Toronto.44

t r a n s l at io n as e p istemi c leverage ov e r m u lt il in g ual borders The dynamics underpinning these conceptual bases of interculture and intercultural translation, when considered in light of social epistemological agency, are insightful for understanding, or “knowing” from a different perspective, the current Romani movement. When

30

Deborah Folaron

an ethnic social group and its communal history are circumscribed within multilingual boundaries and are written multilingually into historical archives worldwide, translation processes acquire an important decolonizing dimension. Faced with historical documentation and literature in multiple languages and scripts, Romani peoples wishing to know about one another or to construct their history comprehensively as a collectivity rely on the pragmatic options open to them for inter-Romani communication – that is to say, by translating into and from various languages and by using a global language such as English. The means by which to bridge the multiple languages and dialects transforms the act of translation or implementation of a pivot language into an act of social epistemological agency. This section looks briefly at three Romani contexts that epitomize this agency, as it orchestrates and guides the collective struggle to “occupy” Romani epistemology in order to “resignify” it through intercultural translation and contemporary practices of translation.

roma rc h iv e : d ig ita l a rc hi ve of the roma The RomArchive, sponsored in part by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and hosted by eriac , is a multilingual digital platform that was officially launched in Berlin in January of 2019. Its precisely stated aim exemplifies the implementation of a heterogeneous approach to overturning historically hegemonic structures of power that have marginalized or silenced Romani voices. It is worth citing in its entirety. While “hegemonic” archives have almost exclusively portrayed Roma in stereotypical ways, RomArchive focuses on their self-representation: New narratives will emerge, reflecting the heterogeneity of diverse national and cultural identities of Roma. The wealth of Romani artistic and cultural production – tightly interwoven with that of Europe as a whole, centuries old, lively and varied to this very day – will become visible and publicly accessible. This way, the project seeks to counter persistent stereotypes and deep-seated prejudices. RomArchive is thus addressed not only to Europe’s largest minority, but also to Europe’s social majorities. Roma shape the archive in all positions of responsibility – as curators, artists, scholars, and members of the project’s advisory

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

31

board. The curators determine the contents of the archive and select and gather works of art for the archive sections on dance, film, literature, music, theatre and drama, visual arts, and Flamenco, material on the politics of photography, first-person testimonies related to the persecution of the Roma under the Nazi regime, and scholarly material on the civil rights movement. The participants in the project – within the various working groups there are around 150 actors from 15 countries across Europe and beyond – form a worldwide network of artists, scientists and activists, most of whom come from a Roma community. (RomArchive 2019) The RomArchive assumes both heterogeneous differences and a shared historical identity by default. This identity is one that also seeks to “accommodate [a] dual [Romani] heritage: Asian (Indian) and European.”45 By adopting a virtual, digital, web-based medium as a platform, RomArchive facilitates international communication through the affordances offered by contemporary technologies. The plurilingual transnational, indeed transcontinental, community of Romani peoples collaborate with one another through their differences and similarities. Communicating online not only favours interactions; it also strengthens alliances within a broader social movement (see also Folaron 2011). This social movement critiques and challenges the asymmetries of status quo knowledge production and proposes alternative knowledge-making activities capable of speaking to both Romani and non-Romani audiences. The RomArchive currently translates between English, German, and Romanes. Its advisory board is cognizant of the value of multilingual translation when stating that “for international accessibility, the archive will be set up in several languages,” with “translations [envisaged] into additional languages, depend[ing] on funding by the countries in which they are predominantly spoken” (RomArchive 2019).

m u lt il in g ua l ro m a ni li terature Works of literature constitute an important component of knowledge production, one that has been challenging to demarcate in the Romani context until now. Romani literary writing and production, a relatively young enterprise still emerging from a predominantly oral tradition, is plurilingual by default. Any knowledge of and

32

Deborah Folaron

exposure to this literature and its history are often guided by the languages in which one is fluent. This fact raises the question of the extent to which Romani communities themselves know about their own writers and collective literary production. As the Bulgarian researcher Zahova remarks, until the 1980s the Romani writers Filomena Franz (Germany) and Ceija Stojka (Austria) “were not aware of the existence of each other’s works, despite the fact that both were published in German in two neighbouring countries.”46 Arguably, translation can play a critical and necessary role in bringing together such a diverse corpus of literary works published in many different languages so that Romani communities not only acquire knowledge of their peers but also engage in dialogue with one another through literature across their own linguistic and cultural traditions. The Roads of the Roma (1998), edited by Hancock, Dowd, and –Djuric´ , is likely the first compilation of Romani writers whose poetic work was translated from Romani and several European languages into English. Excerpts with brief historical or literary contextualization are also found in French (issues of Études Tsiganes and Missive’s Dossier Littérature: La littérature des Rroms, Sintés et Kalés [2002] edited by Courthiade and Gamonet), German (Die Literatur der Roma und Sinti [2002] by –Djuric´ ), Romani/Romanian (the pedagogical series I Rromani Chib Thaj Literatùra / Limba s¸i literatura Rromani [2005] by Sara˘u), and English (Romani Writing. Literacy. Literature and Identity Politics [2014] by Toninato), among others. From a translation studies perspective, a translational framework grounded in such linguistic and cultural heterogeneity invites interesting questions. When and what works have been translated? Are any language pairs, directions, or clusters in translation more frequent? Indeed, multiple combinations within three general spheres are possible: Romani ‹– –› Romani; Non-Romani ‹– –› Non-Romani; and Non-Romani ‹– –› Romani, with “non-Romani” signifying potentially all languages of the nation-states where Romani peoples live, and “Romani” the entire spectrum of dialects of the Romani language.47 To what extent are international representation and knowledge of Romani writing contingent on the languages chosen for translation? What motivates these choices? Who or what determines the criteria for defining a “Romani writer”? In literary writing forms, the very diverse ways of knowing and experiencing Romani-ness of Romani peoples around the world are expressed in terms of their similarities and differences not

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

33

only through individual subjectivity but also through the prism of the historical circumstances of every writer’s social, political, and geographical context. These factors are addressed in multilingual Zahova’s History of Romani Literature (2014), ostensibly the most comprehensive and global work in English to date. She categorizes written works (including translations) published by authors who are of Romani origin and target Romani audiences, within a historical periodization framework of four main phases: 1 early 1900s–interwar period, including the Soviet state-wide project; 2 1960s–1990s, emergence of Romani-authored works in many European countries; 3 1980s–1990s, including the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union and emerging eu Romani initiatives; 4 End of 1990s–present time, the internationalization of Romani literature and other trans-national and trans-regional developments.48 Zahova judiciously distinguishes the literary production trends between East and West. “The social, political, and cultural differences existing between the countries of Eastern and Western Europe are … revealed in the situation of the Roma communities, the policies towards them, and … the development of Romani literature.”49 In other words, the degree to which Romani writers were even able to publish was contingent on the extent of their social inclusion in different countries and their conformity with the official policies of the state. Moreover, while some were published only in state languages as part of a national canon of literature (“ethno-national” paradigm), others were published in Romani to encourage development of ethnic or national communities (“post-imperial” paradigm) (2014, 43) and/or political and social integration, as for instance in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (2014, 25) and the Soviet regime (2014, 13), respectively.50 From a translation studies perspective, the value of Zahova’s work is manifest, as its details provide a provisional sketch of an international Romani history of literary translation. During phase one, translation languages include English, Bulgarian, Russian, and Sanskrit into Romani, and Romani into Russian, for such genres as the Bible, evangelical periodicals, social and political propaganda,

34

Deborah Folaron

classical literary works, poetry, dictionaries, and the Indian epic Ramayana. During phase two, an even wider range of languages is covered: Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Italian, Slovenian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czech, Serbian, and Romani. Although there is evidence of translated drama, short stories, tales, songs, and grammar/spelling books, the most widespread genre in translation is poetry. Some, such as the Romani poetess Bronislawa Wajs (Papusza), are widely translated, in this case from Romani/ Polish into German, English, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Italian. During phase three, Swedish, Spanish, French, and Romani are observed, mostly for the Bible and children’s stories. Several new Romani writers emerge: for example, Mateo Maximoff (in French), Veijo Baltzar (in Finnish), Katarina Taikon (in Swedish), Philomena Franz and Ceija Stojka (in German), and Ronald Lee (in English); all are subsequently translated into several languages. These three phases are unique in that Romani literary production was contained within the nation-state borders of the published authors, with no signs of this production internationalizing or of Romani authors and reading audiences interacting across borders, despite the emerging international Romani movement.51 It is only during phase four, and coinciding with the widespread adoption of technologies and the internet, that internationalization and translation languages increased, kindling a myriad of organizations, competitions, writers’ associations, websites, literary awards, cultural festivals, and published collections and translations of works by Romani authors from diverse countries.

ro m a n i h is to r ic a l archi ves a n d o r a l h is to ry testi moni es Lastly, history and historiography comprise branches of knowledge critical for understanding and explaining events of the past and for sharing collective memory. In the Romani context, the “important role … played by common memory … can serve as a homogenizing factor, to the extent in which unity is needed in the contemporary world to achieve the goals of the group(s).”52 One such memory concerns the Romani genocide of the Holocaust: “the narrative of the Roma Holocaust victims may perform well as a factor that unites different groups of Roma by providing them with a cultural frame in which [to] develop their communicative memory.”53 The relatively

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

35

recent movement to remember and commemorate the victims of this genocide, known as the Porrajmos or Samudaripen, is deeply rooted in the traumatic experiences and painful testimonies of elderly Romani survivors and their families all across Europe. Indeed, “By allowing the Roma history, including genocide and slavery, not to be known,” states Romani youth activist Savic´,54 “we [allow] discrimination against the Roma to continue today.” As explained in historical terms by Kapralski, The genocide of the Roma during the Second World War was a result of a complicated process in which old anti-Roma measures and policies merged with Nazi regulations based on racist ideology.55 Having been socially discriminated against, the postwar Roma communities did not have access to means of production and reproduction of historical knowledge, nor was there a space for their experience in the public memories of European societies … One can … speak of two mechanisms which together have contributed to the silence about the Roma Genocide. On the one hand, the non-Romani world has not been able (and willing) to recognize the Roma suffering as a part of the Holocaust discourse. On the other hand, Roma themselves have not been able or willing to bring their fate to public consciousness.56 As such, the shaping and formalization of this historical memory is both intra-Romani and Romani/non-Romani, ostensibly a joint decolonizing effort that seeks not only to articulate a shared Romani history among diverse Romani peoples throughout the world but also to insert this collective Romani memory into existing hegemonic national histories and the overall global memory of the Holocaust. Inevitably, historical accounts and documentation (including of the genocide and Holocaust), as well as oral history testimonies, are written in multiple languages, not one of which is Romani. The necessary act of translating thus transforms into an exceptional act of witnessing, one whose ethics sustain a cooperative plurilingual relationship of communication within a goal of bringing transformative historical events to visibility and to their rightful place in the narration of a people’s collective history. Two examples of this combined translation-witnessing approach to history are salient. In one instance, Romanian archives have proven to be a

36

Deborah Folaron

major source of consultation for research and circulation of information on the five-hundred-year period of Romani enslavement in Moldavia and Wallachia.57 In another instance, information on the extermination of around 3,000 Romani persons on 2 August 1944 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (“Gypsy Camp”) have led to annual commemoration ceremonies around the world, encapsulated by Roma Genocide Remembrance Day every August 2nd, when translations of oral testimonies by survivors are shared. Acts of both witnessing and translating involve negotiating and leveraging of trust, whereby several epistemic operations come into play. Fundamentally and above all, belief in the words articulated by another (whether languages are the same or different) transpires through a cooperative model of communication where one is willing to believe in the trustworthiness of the other. In the context of testimony, “knowledge is detached from proof and evidence and is associated instead with trust, belief and authority, without … losing its status as knowledge”; that is, testimonial knowledge occurs through a cooperative interplay between the testifier who assumes authority, epistemic guarantee, and responsibility for what is said, and the addressees who trust in this authority and acquire new “first-hand” knowledge.58 [A] contingent relationship emerges that is … solely due to the fact that there is an asymmetry in information, as someone else possesses knowledge that we ourselves do not possess. Because we do not have direct access to facts which others tell us … we are particularly dependent on the good will of others and their voluntary willingness to cooperate. Epistemic dependence creates an interpersonal and at the same time exceedingly fragile relationship: epistemic trust is therefore the trust of a person who is indissolubly dependent not only on the knowledge [but also on] the good will of another.59 From the perspective of the general non-Romani population, and since the time Romani peoples first migrated into European territory several hundred years ago, their epistemological trustworthiness as a whole has not been believed in or deemed credible. Internal to the social group, collectively speaking, traditions of orality, polylectal forms of knowing individual group histories, and a plurality of languages have all conspired to maintain borders that are only

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

37

now beginning to be traversed. The pillars of knowledge erected by non-Romani social epistemological structures are giving way to Romani-guided ones that decolonize both intra-Romani and non-Romani forms of thinking and knowing. Indeed, the historical archives of individual nation-states in multiple languages contain documents on the statistics, legislation, and decrees that have dictated various parameters of Romani life on national territories over time. The specific gathering, selecting, analyzing, interpreting, defining, and categorizing of different types of information have been beholden to the deeply rooted traditions and conventions (linguistic and cultural) of institutionalized academies of research. How these histories are interpreted and understood by Romani peoples investigating their collective history today relies on multiple language fluency and on translation, both of which play a critical role in archival research, publication of results, and divulgation of knowledge. This history is supplemented by the integration of Romani oral-based and experiential knowledge. These pro-active Romani initiatives create preconditions of trust, belief, and authority of Romani sources in the quest for a more equitable epistemic symmetry between all participating creators and brokers of knowledge. As cogently stated by Krämer and Weigel,60 “Knowledge requires cooperation … Humans are epistemically not independent but rather interdependent beings,” with “epistemic dependence … a constituent element of the human epistemological situation.”61 The trust placed on translators and on their practices of translation – as mediating and intermediate agential influences – thus acquires an important ethical dimension when Romani communities who have not heretofore known their own history come into this knowledge through acts of translation.

c o n c l u d in g words The thousand-year Romani journey from India to Europe, from East to West, is as epistemological as it is physical. The reflexive quest to understand how we know what we know – for both non-Romani and Romani communities worldwide – is continually intertwined with intellectual curiosity and the potential for encounter with other positions of knowledge that invite a critical examination, questioning, and revisiting of the foundations upon which our own knowledge has been constructed and perpetuated. Linguistic and cultural similarities and differences will always characterize Romani peoples. Translation can

38

Deborah Folaron

serve as an epistemic lens by which to continue to strive for transformative justice – or, as some social epistemologists might say, to lessen the harmful effects of injustices already suffered. Epistemological positionings configured through translation, however it is defined, necessarily pass through channels of trust and ethics, embodied in the figure of the translator. Confronted with a linguistic and cultural constellation of multilingual networks and voices, Romani and non-Romani actors and translators alike are able to cooperatively communicate by aligning social and political goals in processes of knowing with rather than exclusively knowing about, thereby allowing heterogenous Romani expression, literature, and history to give birth to a new iteration – a unique epistemic community in modernity through translation. no t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Dehaene et al. 2017, 488–90; see Dehaene 2014. Chippali and Sarukkai 2018, 310. Venuti 2003, 238–9. Goldman and Blanchard 2018. Remedios and Dusek 2018, 36. Reider 2016, ix. Ibid., 173. Kechi ka na way ehta 2014, 30. Matras 2002. de Sousa Santos 2016, 18–20. Simon 2013. Gambier 2018, 23. D’hulst and Gambier 2018, 7. de Sousa Santos 2016, 22. de Sousa Santos 2018, 14–15. Tuhiwai Smith 2012, 101. Whetung and Wakefield 2019, 148. de Sousa Santos 2018, 11. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 218, 233. Ibid., 235–6. Ibid., 244–5. Courthiade 2011, 4. Quoted in Folaron 2018.

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

39

Klímová-Alexander 2005, 13. See Diricchardi-Muzga 2014. Hancock 2010a, 25. Klímova-Alexander 2005. Meyer 2015, 862–3. Mirga-Kruszelnicka 2015, 43. Beck and Ivasiuc 2018; Bhabha, Mirga, and Matache 2017; Bogdan et al. 2018. Ryder 2018, loc 2109. See Heltai 2019 for translanguaging in Romani. Pym 2014, 144. Pym 2012, 9. Pym 2002. Pym 2012, 137. Ibid., 136–59. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 165–72. Beaudoin, Danch, and Rehaag 2015. Subert 2019. Pelley 2018; Brosnahan 2016. Folaron 2016. Hancock 2010b, 277. 2014, 52. Folaron 2019. Zahova 2014, 5–6. Ibid., 44. See also Marushiakova and Popov 2017. Zahova 2014, 55. Kapralski 2015, 46. Ibid., 47-48. Savic´ 2015, 222. Kapralski 2015, 41. Ibid., 44. See Petcut n.d. Krämer 247–8. Ibid., 250–1. Krämer and Weigel 2017, xiii. Krämer 2017, 247

40

Deborah Folaron

r e f e r e nce s Beaudoin, Julianna, Jennifer Danch, and Sean Rehaag. 2015. “No Refuge: Hungarian Romani Refugee Claimants in Canada.” Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series. Paper No. 94. https://digitalcommons. osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1090&context=olsrps. Beck, Sam, and Ana Ivasiuc, eds. 2018. Roma Activism – Reimagining Power and Knowledge. (Romani Studies, Vol. 1). New York: berghahn books. Bhabha, Jacqueline, Andrzej Mirga, and Margareta Matache, eds. 2017. Realizing Roma Rights. Philadelphia, pa : University of Pennsylvania Press. Bogdan, Maria, Jekatyerina Dunajeva, Tímea Junghaus, Angéla Kóczé, Iulius Rostas, Márton Rövid, and Marek Szilvasi, eds. 2018. Critical Romani Studies 1, no. 1. https://crs.ceu.edu/index.php/crs. Bogdán, Mária, Jekatyerina Dunajeva, Tímea Junghaus, Angéla Kóczé, Márton Rövid, Iulius Rostas, Andrew Ryder, Marek Szilvási, and Marius Taba, eds. 2015. Roma Rights 2: Nothing about Us without Us? Roma Participation in Policy Making and Knowledge Production. Budapest: European Roma Rights Centre. http://www.errc.org/romarights-journal/roma-rights-2-2015-nothing-about-us-without-usroma-participation-in-policy-making-and-knowledge-production. Brosnahan, Maureen. 2016. “Deported Roma Refugee Family Receives Permission to Return to Canada.” cbc News, 8 February. https://www. cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/roma-refugee-canada-return-1.3437968. Central European University. 2018–. Critical Romani Studies. https://crs. ceu.edu/index.php/crs. Chippali, Madhava, and Sundar Sarukkai. 2018. “Conceptual Priority of Translation over Language.” In A Multilingual Nation – Translation and Language Dynamic in India, edited by Rita Kothari, 309–24. Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press. Courthiade, Marcel. 2011. “La Langue Rromani (Tsigane): Évolution, Standardisation, Unification, Réforme.” http://marcel-online.carlod.fr/ wp-content/uploads/1989-FR-FodorHagege.pdf. D’hulst, Lieven, and Yves Gambier. 2018. “General Introduction.” In A History of Modern Translation Knowledge, edited by Lieven D’hulst and Yves Gambier, 1–14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Dehaene, Stanislas. 2014. Consciousness and the Brain – Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Viking. Dehaene, Stanislas, Hakwan Lau, and Sid Kouider. 2017. “What Is Consciousness, and Could Machines Have It?” Science 358, no. 6362 (27 October): 486–92. doi: 10.1126/science.aan8871.

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

41

Diricchardi-Muzga, Rinaldo, ed. 2014. “To Be or Not to Be”: Sinti, Gypsy, and Romani. Crisis of Sinti Ethnic Identity. Ljubljana: cip Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica. European Roma and Travellers Forum (ertf ). 2010. Charter on the Rights of the Roma. 18 June. Strasbourg, France: ertf . https://www. ertf.org/index.php/documents/charter-on-the-rights-of-the-roma; http://a.cs.coe.int/team20/cahrom/5th%20CAHROM%20plenary%20 meeting/Item%206.%20ERTF%20Charter%20on%20the%20 Rights%20of%20Roma.pdf. European Roma Rights Centre (errc ). Roma Rights Journal. http://www. errc.org/what-we-do/advocacy-research/roma-rights-journal. Folaron, Deborah. 2011. Translation Romani. http://www.translationromani.net/en. – 2016. “Interpreting Romani – A Canadian Overview: Active Interpreters of Romani in Canada, Ronald Lee, Nazik Deniz and Dafina Savic´ Explain the Ins and Outs of Interpretation for a Little Known Community.” Circuit 132. http://www.circuitmagazine.org/dossier-132/ interpreting-romani-a-canadian-overview. – 2018. “Challenging the Borders of Nation: Language and Translational Language Policy in the Plurilingual Romani Context.” In Minority Languages, National Languages, and Official Language Policies, edited by Gillian Lane-Mercier, Denise Merkle, and Jane M. Koustas, 279–314. Montreal, qc , and Kingston, on : McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2019. “Bute Droma – Many Roads: Romani Resilience and Translation in Contact with the World.” In At Translation’s Edge, edited by Nataša ˘ urovic˘ová, Patrice Petro, and Lorena Terando, 98–122. New D Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press. Fuller, Steve. 2016. “A Sense of Epistemic Agency Fit for Social Epistemology.” In Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency – Decentralizing Epistemic Agency, edited by Patrick J. Reider, 21–39. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Gambier, Yves. 2018. “Concepts of Translation.” In A History of Modern Translation Knowledge, edited by Lieven D’hulst and Yves Gambier, 19–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Goldman, Alvin, and Thomas Blanchard. 2018. “Social Epistemology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/epistemology-social/. Hancock, Ian. 1987. The Pariah Syndrome – An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. Ann Arbor, mi : Karoma Publishers.

42

Deborah Folaron

– 2010a. “Mind the Doors! The Contribution of Linguistics.” In All Change! Romani Studies through Romani Eyes, edited by Damian Le Bas and Thomas Acton, 5–25. Hertfordshire, uk : University of Hertfordshire Press. – 2010b. “Our Need for Internal Diplomatic Skills.” In Danger! Educated Gypsy. Selected Essays, edited by Dileep Karanth, 273–9. Hertfordshire, uk: University of Hertfordshire Press. Heltai, János Imre. 2019. “Translanguaging instead of Standardisation: Writing Romani at School.” In Applied Linguistics Review 11, no. 3: 1–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2018-0087. Kapralski, Sławomir. 2015. “Roma Holocaust: The End of Silence.” In Education for Remembrance of the Roma Genocide: Scholarship, Commemoration and the Role of Youth, edited by Anna MirgaKruszelnicka, Esteban Acuña C, and Piotr Trojan´ski, 41–55. Cracow, Poland: Roma Genocide Remembrance Initiative 2014 of ternYpe International Roma Youth Network. Kechi ka na way ehta [Dr John George Hansen]. 2014. “Indigenous Philosophy.” In Walking with Indigenous Philosophy – Justice and Addiction Recovery, 2nd ed., edited by John G. Hansen, Teresa A. Booker, and John E. Charlton, 30–50. Vernon, bc : JCharlton Publishing. Klímová-Alexander, Ilona. 2005. “Introducing Global Romani Activism.” The Romani Voice in World Politics – The United Nations and NonState Actors, 13–34. Aldershot, uk : Ashgate. Kothari, Rita, ed. 2018. A Multilingual Nation – Translation and Language Dynamic in India. Oxford, uk : Oxford University Press. Kramer, Sybille, and Sigrid Weigel, eds. 2017. Testimony / Bearing Witness – Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Marushiakova, Elena, and Vesselin Popov. 2017. “Politics of Multilingualism in Roma Education in Early Soviet Union and Its Current Projects.” Social Inclusion 5, no. 4: 48–59. Matras, Yaron. 2002. Romani – A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, Morgan. 2015. “Epistemic Communities and Collaborative Research.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 7, 862–6. Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Anna. 2015. “Romani Studies and Emerging Romani Scholarship.” In Roma Rights 2 2015: Nothing about Us without Us? Roma Participation in Policy Making and Knowledge Production,

Translation over Multilingual Romani Borders

43

edited by Mária Bogdán, Jekatyerina Dunajeva, Tímea Junghaus, Angéla Kóczé, Márton Rövid, Iulius Rostas, Andrew Ryder, Marek Szilvási, and Marius Taba, 39–46. Budapest: European Roma Rights Centre. http:// www.errc.org/uploads/upload_en/file/roma-rights-2-2015-nothingabout-us-without-us.pdf. Pelley, Lauren. 2018. “70% of Roma Refugee Claims Now Positive in Ontario, after Years of Low Success Rates.” cbc News, 7 February. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/roma-refugee-claims-1. 4520851. Petcut, Petre. n.d. “Roma History: Wallachia and Moldavia.” Council of Europe Project Education of Roma Children in Europe. https:// rm.coe.int/wallachia-and-moldavia-factsheets-on-romani-history/ 16808b19be. Pym, Anthony. 2002. “Intercultures and the Interface with Nationalist Culture.” http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/intercultures/intnation.pdf. – 2012. On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation between Cultures. A version of Pour une éthique du traducteur. Translated by Heike Walker, and revised and updated by Anthony Pym. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. – 2014. Exploring Translation Theories, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Reider, Patrick J. 2016. “Introduction: What Is Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency?” In Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency – Decentralizing Epistemic Agency, edited by Patrick J. Reider, vii–xvi. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Remedios, Francis X, and Val Dusek. 2018. Knowing Humanity in the Social World – The Path of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. RomArchive. RomArchive Digital Archive of the Roma. https://www. romarchive.eu/en/. Ryder, Andrew. 2018. “Paradigm Shift and Romani Studies. Research ‘on’ or ‘for’ and ‘with’ the Roma.” In Roma Activism – Reimagining Power and Knowledge (Romani Studies, No. 1), edited by Sam Beck and Ana Ivasiuc, 91–110. New York: berghahn books. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2016. “Epistemologies of the South and the future.” From the European South: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities 1: 17–29. http://www.boaventuradesous asantos.pt/media/Epistemologies%20of%20the%20south%20and%20 the%20future_Poscolonialitalia_2016.pdf. – 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire – The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham, nc : Duke University Press.

44

Deborah Folaron

Savic´, Dafina. 2015. “The Danger of Forgetting and the Duty of Remembering.” In Education for Remembrance of the Roma Genocide: Scholarship, Commemoration and the Role of Youth, edited by Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Esteban Acuña C, and Piotr Trojan´ski, 221–6. Cracow, Poland: Roma Genocide Remembrance Initiative 2014 of ternYpe International Roma Youth Network. Simon, Sherry. 2013. “Translation Zone.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 4, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc Van Doorslaer, 181–5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/hts.4.tra16. Subert, Maria. 2019. “Motives and Legacies behind 2008–2009 Hungarian Roma Murders and Apologies.” Contemporary Justice Review – Issues in Criminal, Social, and Restorative Justice 22, no. 1: 3–22. doi: 10.1080/10282580.2019.1576127. Thurfjell, David, and Adrian Marsh, eds. 2014. Romani Pentecostalism – Gypsies and Charismatic Christianity. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang Research. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies – Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. London: Zed Books. Venuti, Lawrence. 2003. “Translating Derrida on Translation: Relevance and Disciplinary Resistance.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2: 237–62. Whetung, Madeline, and Sarah Wakefield. 2019. “Colonial Conventions. Institutionalized Research Relationships and Decolonizing Research Ethics.” In Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education – Mapping the Long View, edited by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, 146–58. New York: Routledge. Zahova, Sofiya. 2014. History of Romani Literature. Sofia: Paradigma.

2

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory: Binjamin Wilkomirski, Rigoberta Menchú, and the Power of Abject Atrocity Susan Ingram

When Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s visually arresting memoir of “how as a young child in Riga he fled from the Nazis, survived two concentration camps, and after first spending a period in orphanages in Kraków, came to Switzerland,”1 appeared in 1995, it was an immediate success and was translated into nine languages including English (by Carol Brown Janeway as Fragments, Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948). Something about the story struck the Israeli-born Swiss writer Daniel Ganzfried as unlikely, and after digging into Wilkomirski’s background, Ganzfried found evidence to support his suspicions: “According to certificates in the archives of Biel (Kanton Bern), Binjamin Wilkomirski / Brano Dössekker was born Bruno Grosjean in Biel on 12 February 1941, and placed with his future adoptive parents, the Dössekkers, on 13 October 1945, and finally adopted by them legally on 4 October 1957.”2 He had therefore “spent the war years in Switzerland and started school in 1947, a year before [he claimed to have] arrived in the country.”3 When this revelation was published in a Swiss weekly magazine and followed up with fraud charges, an international furor ensued. As Stefan Maechler relates in the foreword of Der Fall Wilkomirski (The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth), he was “engaged by the literary agency of Liepman ag in Zurich, which had assigned the rights to Fragments to publishers around the world, and asked to investigate, as a historian, the book’s claims of authenticity.”4 The report Maechler delivered concluded that “[t]here

46

Susan Ingram

is not the least doubt that Binjamin Wilkomirski is identical with Bruno Grosjean, and that the story he wrote in Fragments and has told elsewhere took place solely within the world of his thoughts and emotions.”5 Nevertheless, that did not mean “we are dealing with a coldly calculating man systematically executing a fraud,”6 as Ganzfried had accused Wilkomirski of. Unlike the other cases of fabricated identity that began emerging around that time and have since become so commonplace as to generate headlines such as “Yet Another Writer Has Admitted Faking Her Holocaust Memoir,”7 Wilkomirski continues to insist staunchly on the veracity of his early memories even in the face of evidence to the contrary. By refusing to undergo the dna testing that would conclusively place him in Switzerland, Wilkomirski has encouraged focus on the question Elena Lappin posed in her ground-breaking 1999 Granta article on the Wilkomirski case, “The Man with Two Heads”: namely, whether it matters whether Fragments is fact or fiction.8 Given that we find ourselves at a particularly tense political conjuncture characterized by the blatant disregard of fact, rampant antisemitism, and the rise of authoritarian populism (#potus , #maga ), understanding the factors that continue to encourage such stances takes on a certain urgency. Even in the case of straightforward hoaxes,9 what is “worrisome,” as Adam Kirsch has noted, is “not simply the mendacity of their authors, but the credulity of the reading public that embraces them.”10 In accounting for the readers who accepted Wilkomirski’s memoir at face value, showered it with literary accolades, and then felt betrayed by the revelation of its reputed mendacity,11 we also need to think through the political implications of the ongoing power generated by personal horror. My aim here is to demonstrate how a multilingual approach that takes fantasy seriously and understands language in all of its linguistic and psychoanalytic complexity can provide us with critical tools to understand the links between speech, betrayal, and violence and how they lend themselves to identificatory satisfaction. The reading that follows proceeds in three steps. First, I show how Wilkomirski’s story functions as a hermeneutic meditation on the sometimes debilitating role of language and family figures in the creation of the self, a stunningly difficult personal odyssey into the Symbolic that offers a clinical demonstration of language’s role in psychic development. Such a reading takes its cues from Michael Bernard-Donais’s summary of Lappin’s insights:

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

47

If Elena Lappin is right, and Bruno Doesseker was forcibly separated from his mother and had experiences that he still cannot name and which have had a hold on his imagination since then, we should not be surprised that he testifies to those experiences through the language of the most significant horror of the twentieth century, whose effect on individuals and on a culture is unspeakable and altogether unknowable and which may well take the place of and (mis)name the events to which he does not have access. As Lappin has said, “Wilkomirski often refers to his memories as being film-like. They are, I believe, more than that: they are, I believe, derived from films … I cannot believe that Fragments is anything other than fiction. And yet … anguish like his seemed impossible to fabricate.”12 In order to show how far-reaching Lappin’s insights are, I bring Wilkormirski’s memoir into conversation with another controversial memoir accused of mendacity, whose author’s insistence on the truth of the substance of her memories split scholars: namely, Rigoberta Menchú’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nació la concienca (1983 – I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 1984). While this comparison has not gone unrecognized in the debates over the issue of “truth-telling” in autobiographical writing, and especially testimonial writing,13 my reading brings the underlying psychic and social structures the two share into relief by triangulating them with one of the ultimate works of transmedial convergence culture, the Matrix franchise.14 What this final step targets is the power of their horror and the appeal of atrocity fiction.

Something that immediately strikes the linguistically attuned reader of Fragments is the text’s main refrain of incomprehension. Wilkomirski represents himself as confronted with one incomprehensible situation after another: “Her Yiddish had a funny sound; I didn’t understand what she was talking about” (12); “Lots of yelling and calling at one another in a language I didn’t know” (14);

48

Susan Ingram

“‘These children all French’ was all I understood” (15); “The way she spoke was strange, I could barely understand her … When she came back, she was talking at me fast, and all upset. I didn’t understand a word, but I could tell that she was very cross, that I must have done something wrong, and that the thing ‘was not so simple,’ that they ‘hadn’t been expecting’ me, that there was ‘no spot’ for me” (20 – not bad for someone who didn’t understand a word); “He began yelling something again that I didn’t understand, and I saw his arm swing back, then hit right in the middle of the windowpane” (30); “I didn’t understand what she was saying. What did ‘dahle’ mean? I still have no idea today. She pronounced it with a very long, broad aah. And what did ‘mother’ mean? I couldn’t remember” (46); “I didn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t understand the remaining children, either; they spoke languages I didn’t know” (106); “I can’t make out what they’re saying in the group, but the voices get louder and more excited as we pass the fence, go through the gate and out into the open country” (111). These problems in comprehension become particularly acute once the childhood “I” arrives in Switzerland. He doesn’t know what an orange is (121), or a chestnut (136), or how one is supposed to go about eating them. He doesn’t understand what a Folk Fair is (134); “I didn’t know what a ‘ski lift’ meant” (141). Such strategic representation effectively distances the narrator from his Swiss surroundings, while at the same time undermining their logic: “I didn’t know what a monster was, but I both understood what it must mean – and didn’t understand at all … Why should it be forbidden to eat what was edible, that nobody was guarding as theirs, and that tasted so good?” (23). When he learns what is presumably Swiss German in school, the situation does not improve: “School was full of talk … People talked about things and learned

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

49

things that simply didn’t exist. Mostly, I couldn’t understand a thing. I could understand most of the words quite quickly, but when I put them together, they made no sense, no shape that I could project. So I dozed along in class, mostly baffled by what was going on around me” (127). Even when people speak languages he understands, he does not understand them: “Lots of people talked to me but I didn’t understand what they said – I didn’t want to understand anything. They would only lie to me, like the gray uniforms who took me from the railway station before” (120). For Wilkomirski understanding does not happen through verbal communication: “Jankl didn’t say much. He knew I didn’t understand much of his strange dialect anyway. So most of the time he taught me silently, just by the way he moved his hands” (73). What is Wilkomirski’s problem with language? As he sees it, it is that he does not have one that is his and his alone. Fragments famously begins: “I have no mother tongue, nor a father tongue either” (3). The narrator thus introduces himself as an orphan of a particular kind, a linguistic orphan: “the languages I learned later on were never mine, at bottom. They were only imitations of other people’s speech” (4). This desire for a language of one’s very own, which goes against Derrida’s “ethical injunction to transcend proprietary thinking vis-à-vis language(s),”15 is rooted, as Lappin suggests, in his early loss of the parental figures from whom one is supposed to learn one’s native language (“And what did ‘mother’ mean? I couldn’t remember” [46]); his language is as surrogate as the flow of parental figures who repeatedly pop up in the text. The types of adult characters encountered in Fragments generally fall revealingly into Manichean categories. The vaguely anonymous apparitions of men and women reappearing in the text come in two types: those like Frau Grosz, the unknown woman who knows his name, the woman with the bread the guard tells him is his mother, the rabbi in Krakow, and the man squished by the truck, “maybe my father,” are kindly, distant, and disappear, while those like the farm wife, the “strange lady” (119–21) who adopts him, and all of the camp guards are unpredictable, aggressive, violent, and tend to blur into indistinguishable uniformity: “There she stands, legs apart, sturdy, hands on her hips. The teacher’s a warden – our block warden. She’s just in disguise, she’s taken off her uniform. Now she’s wearing a red sweater, she’s trying to trick me” (130). Between these two groups are the two characters of whom the narrator is most fond: his elder

50

Susan Ingram

brother, Mordecai, Motti for short, and his camp friend and protector, Jankl. These two form a composite figure; should the reader miss the parallel, it is stated explicitly in chapter 9, the one devoted to Jankl, that “[h]e reminded me of Motti” (73). However, it is unlikely that a reader could overlook the similarities. The passage about Motti reads: “Motti didn’t hit me, he never hit me, he didn’t even say anything bad, he just explained calmly what had happened. Then he showed me how you repair an airplane. When the farmer’s wife was away from the house, Motti took over from her as the guardian of us younger ones. This was always a wonderful time. Motti always took special care of me. To me, he wasn’t a child anymore. He was strong, the protector who never got angry or yelled. He could comfort too, and he meant warmth and safety” (28). Jankl, for his part, is described as “already big – maybe twelve. To me, he was already a grown-up. He was always there when I needed him. He protected me, he gave me advice, he taught me a lot, he alerted me to dangers. He showed me patiently how to tie a knot, and why this mattered” (73). And just in case the reader is left puzzled as to how to understand these similarities (or does not have the linguistic competence to appreciate the closeness between Mordecai’s nickname and the German term of endearment for a mother, “Mutti”), the childhood “I” cries out upon discovering his foster parents’ furnace: “Mama, Motti, Jankl, what do I do?” (126). If we now turn the same linguistically attuned lens on I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, we again find ourselves in the company of a reflective yet unwilling narrator, who is uncomfortable with and has reason to mistrust language. Just as Wilkomirski declares that he is “not a poet or a writer, I can only try to use words to draw as exactly as possible what happened, what I saw” (4), Menchú feels compelled in introducing herself to note: “I must say before I start that I never went to school, and so I find speaking Spanish very difficult. I didn’t have the chance to move outside my own world and only learned Spanish three years ago” (1). Her knowledge of Spanish is one of the claims that David Stoll challenged in his accusatory Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans because it obscures the fact that Menchú’s initial acquisition of the language would have been “in a convent school during parts of some of the years in which her family worked on the fincas (coastal plantations).”16 As Leigh Gilmore notes, “By focusing on this particular omission (he considers her vague on the

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

51

point), Stoll means to undermine the veracity of Menchú’s narration of events on the fincas and also to promote the omission of reference to her schooling into a general view of her mendacity. Yet the translator’s note in the first edition of I, Rigoberta Menchú announces with no qualification that Menchú learned Spanish from nuns, a point Menchú does not dispute.”17 Indeed, it is made clear in the introduction of I, Rigoberta Menchú that “1992 Nobel Peace PrizeWinner Rigoberta Menchú learned Spanish to use as a ‘weapon’18 to combat her oppression and that of other Quiche Indians,”19 something Sandra Schumm theorizes as a “borrowing” of language: “When Menchú ‘borrowed’ another language, she broadened her perspective and changed herself, while her book beneficially altered the views of others.”20 At stake in this representation is the problematic relation of alterity that Guatemala’s Indigenous populations have to Spanish. David Damrosch points out that Menchú is by no means the only contemporary Mayan to engage in this type of “self-reinforcing cultural differentiation”: She is not alone in doing this. John Hawkins has argued in his book Inverse Images: The Meaning of Culture, Ethnicity and Family in Postcolonial Guatemala that contemporary Mayan and ladino Guatemalans tend to see themselves as members of two separate cultures, each defined programmatically as the inversion of the other – with the dominant ladinos typically taking possession of the more desired trait in every opposition. In Hawkins’s view, this is not two cultures at all but a single, interdependent cultural system, in which ladinos “are” literate, Spanishspeaking, Westernized city dwellers, and Mayans “are” illiterate, non-Spanish-speaking, non-Westernized country dwellers. Each group clings to these self-images, which continue to seem like the underlying truth even though many ladinos are in fact rural farmers and some Indians are educated city dwellers. Menchú’s account shows many instances of this kind of self-reinforcing cultural differentiation. Though she lived for several years in Guatemala City, she never felt at home there – and never felt she should feel at home there: “The city for me was a monster, something alien, different. ‘Those houses, those people,’ I thought, ‘this is the world of the ladinos.’ For me it was the world of the ladinos. We were different.” (32)21

52

Susan Ingram

Striking for our purposes is that Menchú’s “self-reinforcing cultural differentiation” involves the same type of incomprehension we found in Wilkomirski, if not to a similarly overwhelming extent: “When the owner began to speak, he spoke in Spanish. My mother understood a little Spanish and afterwards she told us he was talking about the elections. But we didn’t even understand what our parents told us – that the ladinos had a government” (25); “We didn’t even know what the name on the paper was” (26); “I could see the gestures the men were making to my father but I didn’t know what they were saying” (30); “We couldn’t understand each other and we needed help … I remember only being able to communicate with the others through signs” (39); “We can only understand the people from our own ethnic group, because we can’t speak Spanish and we can’t speak the other language” (40); “I didn’t know enough Spanish to protest or say what I thought” (93). Rather than incomprehension, what dominates Menchú’s text, as Doris Summer drew attention to well before Stoll’s attack on it, is its purposeful withholding of information (Summer 1991, 32), which serves to link speech, betrayal, and violence in the same manner that Wilkomirski does: Menchú grounds her trustworthiness precisely in her status as a subject committed to honoring a code of truth premised not in full disclosure but in the capacity to keep a secret. As Menchú describes it, the capacity to tell the truth is predicated on following cultural protocols related to secrecy and speech. Tied to this intertwining of speech and secrecy is the very close memory for Menchú of the extraction of secrets through torture. For her, speech is a nuanced arena of political and cultural sensitivities in which agency can be negotiated and for which one can be punished.22

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

53

As we have seen, that is only true of speech that takes place in Spanish, not her native K’iche’.23 Indeed, a key difference between Wilkomirski and Menchú is the latter’s strong connection to both her mother tongue and her parents. Motivating her consciousness-raising was the desire to have her “eloquent account of her childhood in Guatemala and the horrific events surrounding the civil war that claimed the lives of her parents and a beloved brother” (Damrosch 2003, xi) brought to international attention. Just as Wilkomirski “wrote these fragments of memory with the hope that perhaps other people in the same situation would find the necessary support and strength to cry out their own traumatic childhood memories, so that they too could learn that there really are people today who will take them seriously, and who want to listen and to understand” (155), “Menchú’s text offers an explicitly politicized ‘I’ who calls for the politicization of a ‘we’ that includes both indigenous peoples and multiple and diverse readerships galvanized as witnesses in ‘the international community.’”24 To that effect, both emphasize their youthful vulnerability, intuiting “Jacqueline Rose’s (1984) claim that childhood is a screen onto which adults project fantasies about innocence and coherence that help them manage anxieties about the ambiguities of sexuality and language.”25 As David Stoll points out bitterly, “[t]he first-person nature of the story provided an immediacy and credibility that no other narrative style would have achieved.”26 That immediacy and credibility were also enabled by a similar multilingual positionality, which makes the juxtaposition of Wilkomirski’s case with Menchú’s particularly instructive. Menchú tells her story to anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-Dubray in Paris in Spanish, the language of her people’s ladino and Guatemalan oppressors; Wilkomirski writes down the memories he rediscovers upon the prompting of his girlfriend, Verena Pillar, and his friend, Jewish psychologist Elitsur Bernstein, in German, the mother tongue he refuses to acknowledge. However, neither would have achieved international attention had their life stories not been translated into English. Both controversies were therefore fundamentally multilingual in their constitution because of the particular authority of English as a lingua franca. Noteworthy for the generation of controversy is the relation of English and atrocity. As Alan Rosen makes clear in Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English, English is a much more complicated phenomenon than the

54

Susan Ingram

“global English” label reveals, and one whose history in relation to the Holocaust has often gone ignored. In carefully tracing the emergence of English as a lingua franca in the aftermath of World War II, Rosen demonstrates in how far “the status of English in relation to the events of the Holocaust stands in striking contrast … to the position of English from a global perspective.”27 English’s special status is inseparable from its political and economic dominance. It is, as Domna Stanton specifies, not just a global language but “an imperial tongue,”28 or as Rosen paraphrases, “a means to rule rather than be ruled [and a]s such, it widens the gap between the have and havenots.”29 That gap in turn invites translation, as stories that circulate only in even Spanish and German, let alone Yiddish or K’iche’, fall on the “have-not” side of the divide and are incapable of generating global interest. Rosen’s study also describes the role of the Holocaust in conferring neutrality on English and therefore “the possibility of writing in an amnesiac language.”30 Here we see another key point of intersection of the two cases: namely that, as Stefan Maechler has argued, drawing on Halbwachs’s pioneering studies, “social conditions are essential for each individual’s memory” and while traumatic memories “cannot be recovered verbally, are not communicable, and thus lie outside the social realm … this [can] make … them especially sensitive to social influences.”31 As Susanna Radstone reminds us, “at least since the 1980s, the confessional order has been countermanded by an injunction, not to self-scrutiny and self-implication, but to bear witness, rather, to the sufferings of others,”32 to which Karyn Ball adds the rise of academic feminism in “institutionaliz[ing] a moral inducement to give and to hear testimony” while at the same time “assum[ing] a disciplinary power to constitute the testifying individual as an obedient subject offering up his or her ‘authentic’ firsthand knowledge.”33 So Menchú and Wilkomirski were both in their own ways formed and radicalized by global tendencies while at the same time helping to shape those tendencies in the same way that English became a global lingua franca by being shaped by the Holocaust – shaping that occurred, it is worth drawing attention to, as part of the same “post-end of history” moment. Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans came out in 1999, the same year as Lappin’s “Man with Two Heads,” while the English translation of Maechler’s study appeared 2001, the same year as The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, Arias’s edited collection.

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

55

Another key cultural text that was influential in shaping this historical moment and that brings into relief the constellation identified here is the Wachowskis’ Matrix: the original appeared in 1999, while the two sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions followed fast on its heels in 2003, spawning one of the highestgrossing media franchises of all time. When approached at the level of their imaginaries, several striking parallels emerge between the original Matrix and the tales told by Wilkomirski and Menchú. First of all, in terms of narrative structure, The Matrix partakes in an interweaving back and forth between two different time-frames: that of a future-present – the bleak, spaceship world of the machines, and that of a constructed past – a dangerous, totalitarian world where even a seemingly harmless homeless man sleeping in a subway corridor can at any moment morph into a deadly clone-like sentient assassin as relentlessly hell-bent on destroying the little band of freedom fighters among whose ranks is the naïve hero as the equally nasty Nazi guards and finca overseers are in their treatment of Jewish prisoners and peasant workers, respectively, and the children among them in particular. The troubled relation between these two temporal realms of violence is rooted in linguistic incomprehension. Just as the young Binjamin and Rigoberta experience violence delivered in a context of linguistic incomprehension, the freedom fighters are out to crack the computer language of a program that has deceived humankind into believing in the “reality” of their experience when in fact they are mired in the future, serving as battery fuel for the machines. The naïve heroes also share dual identities that are reflected in differing forms of address. Just as the computer hacker-hero of The Matrix, the one to crack the code, insists his name is Neo and is addressed so by his friends on the spaceship, while the machine assassin, Mr Smith, persists in calling him Mr Anderson, the name under which he worked as an anonymous employee of a computer company, Menchú is referred to as “this girl” (91) and “that girl” (92) by the woman she works for in Guatemala City and not by her own name. In Wilkomirski’s case, it is interestingly the people most responsible for him starting to identify as Binjamin that still call him Bruno: his second wife, Verena – “In one of the documentary films made about her husband, she says: ‘I call him Bruno. “Binjamin” has something diminutive about it, you know, like being the youngest son, and I don’t want to see him in that way. In spite of all the suffering, life has moved on, even his life’” – and his

56

Susan Ingram

therapist, Elitsur Bernstein: “This brought us to – ‘Bruno,’ he said with a quick smile, ‘I always call him Bruno. It drives him crazy, but I can’t change it – I met him as Bruno, so I can’t suddenly start calling him Binjamin. I am talking to you as a friend of Bruno, not of Binjamin.’”34 Then there is the lack of parents. Like Binjamin and Rigoberta, and as his name suggests, Neo is portrayed as an orphan with an older protector-friend, who educates him in the ways of the totalitarian world before falling victim to it. In Menchú’s case, the fact that those protector-friends are her parents, whose brutal killings turn her into an orphan, lends her story special poignancy, as does the fact that her father also was an orphan. However, unlike Binjamin, Rigoberta and Neo have not been abandoned and are not completely on their own. Neo has a dynamic love interest / partner who can fly combat helicopters, he is guided through the matrix’s labyrinth via a cellphone, and he receives sympathetic encouragement from an omniscient, cookie-baking oracle to “know [him]self.” The movie makes clear that Neo could not outwit the sentient programs on his own, but he never has to. He always gets by with at least a little help from his friends, the kind of friends that helped Menchú escape from Guatemala and ensured that her story received international recognition. What the characters of Binjamin, Rigoberta, and Neo all struggle with is the problem of creating an “I” when that “I” is interpellated by others as abject, especially when those others are in a supposed “care-giving” capacity.35 As Kristeva reminds us, “[t]he abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I,”36 which helps explain why Wilkomirski’s and Menchú’s narratives were only generated through the efforts of helpers who served as midwives in the birth of their life stories by encouraging them that the stories were indeed worthy of telling.37 Kristeva also helps us to understand the fascination of the abject as an object of identification: “Anti-Semitism, for which there thus exists an object as phantasmatic and ambivalent as the Jew, is a kind of … sociological thrill, flush with history, that believers and nonbelievers alike seek in order to experience abjection” (Kristeva 1982, 180, italics in original). This is especially prone to happen at times of social fluidity, that is: “only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me.’ Not at all another with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me,

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

57

and through such possession causes me to be. A possession previous to my advent: a being-there of the symbolic that a father might or might not embody.”38 She helpfully clarifies: Obviously, I am only like someone else: mimetic logic of the advent of the ego, objects, and signs. But when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience jouissance – then “I” is heterogeneous. Discomfort, unease, dizziness stemming from an ambiguity that, through the violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out of which signs and objects arise. Thus braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing.39 This space, in psychoanalytic parlance, is the Symbolic, the register of the generation and communication of meaning, which is also capable of generating, among those destabilized by its pre-symbolic semiotic undercurrents, rage against it and attempts “to substitute another Law for the constraining and frustrating symbolic one, a law that would be absolute, full, and reassuring” (Kristeva 1982, 178). Stories about a problematic or seemingly failed entry into the Symbolic are thus likely to foster identification and fascination, particularly for those “deeply troubled by authority” (Salecl 2000). It is thus not surprising that feminist academics evince these tendencies, something that in “Social Bonds and Psychical Order” Karyn Ball seeks to understand by drawing on the work of Susanna Radstone and her analysis of “the prospective staging of such fantasies in the testimonial context”:40 While she reaffirms the distinction between perpetrators and victims, Radstone argues that testimony’s audience may cross that line on an imaginative level, thus affecting what she calls a “grey zone” between good and evil. The grey zone is a site of fantasized identifications with victims and perpetrators that symbolize the prospects of omnipotence and coherent control that are lacking on a psychosocial level and must be disavowed on a moral one. In her view, such identifications may serve to override “an absence of internalised personal authority” while structuring and thereby compensating for amorphous structures of surveillance and control in contemporary society.41

58

Susan Ingram

Ball’s deep self-probing underscores the need for even, or especially, well-meaning academics to be as aware as possible of their fantasized identifications and relation to this zone. She also helps us understand the attraction of those stories at particular historical moments and why it is that “what is most unspeakable are not the crimes themselves or the pain that they caused, but rather the shameful fascination with transgression that compels us to dwell on them.”42 As Ball somewhat disbelievingly specifies, “[s]uch transgression is unspeakable because it violates deeply held bourgeois social codes; it ‘cannot’ be spoken because to speak it is to imagine it and to imagine it is … to share it?”43 She thus points to a key aspect of this phenomenon: that such speaking and imaginative sharing occur at moments when “deeply held” bourgeois social codes are no longer so deeply held or widely shared. Renate Salecl, writing three years earlier, also pointed out in answer to her rhetorical question of “Was not recovered memory therapy born precisely at the time when we had many dilemmas in regard to the status of authorities in contemporary society?” that: The last decade has been marked by the decrease of the power of traditional authorities (father, state presidents, church leaders, etc.) and the emergence of the figures which appear as the obscene underside of traditional authorities – cult leaders, sexual abusers, etc. As has often been noted in psychoanalytic theory, the father as the symbolic bearer of the law became the popular imaginary [sic] replaced by the father of the primal horde, a man who has access to jouissance which is for other men inaccessible.44 This failure of what one might call a “good enough” father, which is indicative of the weakening of the patriarchal social order, has far-ranging consequences, especially given the magnification of these structures by the affordances of digital networks. The way the false/recovered memory debates of the 1990s have morphed into our current culture of fake news and “truthiness” underscores the urgency of recognizing and tackling their appeal. What both point to is an ongoing expectation that one will find a Symbolic that one can occupy comfortably and competently, a tendency that, as we have seen, atrocity stories encourage, with the preference being to avoid the discomfort of the abject and take

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

59

refuge in “a full, tangible, reassuring, and happy substance … embodied in the Family, the Nation, the Race, and the Body.”45 However, as Yildiz underscores in her work on multilinguality in Germanophone culture, “Nativity does not necessarily give rise to familiarity, mastery, and access to one’s language.”46 On the contrary, as this reading underscores, it is to profoundly misunderstand the nature of language to believe that one ever can completely access it. The burden placed on the Symbolic can be seen in the “rigorous fact-checking and verification” that both Menchú and Wilkomirski were subjected to on account of their claims “to have been eyewitness observers of major and disputed passages of twentieth-century history.”47 Such fact-checking takes place in the Symbolic, not just in major languages such as English, German, and Spanish but also in legally oriented discourse. Peskin, for example, treats his “investigation of fraud against Menchú and Wilkomirski … as in a courtroom, with the explicit understanding that those who bring the indictment should carry the burden of proof, and that their case should be made with balance and fairness.”48 Sadly for Peskin and all those who have tried to maintain such standards since Donald Trump unleashed an onslaught of deliberate disinformation under the @potus Twitter handle, such an approach brackets out the workings of the Imaginary and the irrational fantasies that disrupt rational discourse. Jonathan Lear reaches a similar conclusion in noting that what Eskin’s examination of Wilkomirski “shows in bold relief is how the culture was ready to fall in love with this myth. The person called Binjamin ignored the facts, but then so did almost everybody else.”49 Kristeva’s reading of Celine’s antisemitism helps us understand why. In revealing how his “style shows that such a dual enchantment between the ‘not yet one’ and the ‘not quite another’ can be written,”50 she finds it “impossible not to hear [in Celine’s pamphlets] the liberating truth of such a call to rhythm and joy, beyond the crippling constraints of a society ruled by monotheistic symbolism and its political and legal repercussions.”51 “And yet,” she continues, “both the enchantment of the style and libertarian spontaneity bear within themselves their own limit; at the very moment that they seek to escape the oppression of the thinking, ethical, or legislative Unity, they prove to be tied to the deadliest of fantasies. The negated and frightened desire for the One as well as for the Other produces a symptom of destroying hatred directed toward both.”52 In other words, unconsciously experiencing the rational, legal order of the Symbolic as overly

60

Susan Ingram

oppressive, while at the same time desiring to occupy a comfortable berth in it but finding oneself relegated figuratively to the back of the bus, can lead to the unleashing of violent, destructive emotions. In “Anne Frank Abroad: The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature,” Katherine Wilson poses a most pertinent question: “If the global circulation of testimony now signals the emergence of a particular subset – or unsightly underbelly – of world literature, how might identifying a ‘world literature of atrocity’ change the way we encounter these works?”53 What the multilingual reading of the cases triangulated here calls for is the kind of comparative perspective suggested by Shaun Randol in responding to “the rise of foreign ‘Anne Franks,’ specifically in Cambodia.”54 Randol walked away from one of these readings “touched but troubled,” wondering, “What expectations are we to have toward Ratner’s text? Are we supposed to compare Banyan to a standard testimonial text like Frank’s Diary? Is there another text more appropriate for comparison? Are we to see Ratner as a Cambodian Anne Frank? Would Ratner feel comfortable with this relationship?”55 Randol has no doubts about the author’s bravery not just in facing the Khmer Rouge as a sevenyear-old but also in writing about it later in life. However, he cannot help but wonder about her readers and how they will approach her story. As the controversies that entangled them demonstrate, that is also the concern about Menchú’s and Wilkomirski’s works. Whether or not one wants to count them as world literature, they are decidedly atrocity literature whose appeal is psychically on par with The Matrix, and, as Stefan Maechler understood about Wilkomirski, what matters about such stories is what they have to tell us about the nature of violence that children experience before they are in a position to either understand or communicate it: The genesis of his stories is bound up with traumatic experience which – at least until he read this report – we may assume had scarcely found their way into his autobiographical knowledge. The experiences from his early years have the dimensions of a cumulative trauma that eludes all understanding and yet is all the more determinative since it occurred during the phase when the child was developing an ability to speak, to think symbolically, and, finally, to shape experiences into stories. Fragments is the attempt of the adult Bruno Grosjean to assemble elements taken from humanity’s remembrance of the Shoah in order to find a

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

61

means of expressing experiences that were not verbally retrievable either when they occurred or later, and which for that very reason cried out for a narrative that would give them meaning.56 Because “we” continue to prove only too willing to disregard facts and fall in love with myths about figures such as Wilkomirski and Menchú, it is important to revisit such cases and understand them with an eye to their underlying linguistic and psychoanalytic dynamics. As has been demonstrated here, not only do these cases reveal important truths about child survivors, but they also confront us with the seductive appeal of atrocity that is triggered when alterity is experienced as a threat. What this serves to establish is that the fundamental underlying problem, and therefore also a potential solution, lies in understanding and being able to situate and accept one’s own incomplete and imperfect relationship first to language, something that multilinguality brings to the fore, and then to others, as the two are intricately bound. not e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Maechler 2001, vii. Lappin 1999. Salecl 2000. Maechler 2001, vii. Ibid., 268. Quoted in Maechler 2001, 269. Kirsch 2014. Lappin 1999. Katsoulis 2013. Kirsch 2014. Eskin 2003. Bernard-Donals 2003, 209. Peskin 2000; Eakin 2001; Gabriel 2003; Walford 2006. Jenkins 2006. Derrida 1998, 42. Gilmore 2003, 704. Ibid., 704. Burgos-Debray in Menchú 1984, xii. Schumm 1995, 211. Ibid., 211.

62

Susan Ingram

21 Damrosch 2003, xii. 22 Gilmore 2003, 705. 23 Quiché is the Spanish spelling of the name of the Maya people Menchú belongs to (it means “many trees” while the Nahuatl translation, Cuauhteˉmallaˉn, “Place of the Many Trees [People],” is the origin of the word Guatemala), just as Popol Vuh, which means “the book of events,” is the Spanish spelling of the sixteenth-century document that has proven to be one of the most significant surviving Mesoamerican literary primary sources of knowledge about Maya societal traditions, beliefs, and mythological accounts. 24 Gilmore 2003, 705. 25 Ibid., 698. 26 Stoll 2001, 392. 27 Rosen 2005, 13. 28 Cited in ibid., 15. 29 Ibid., 15. 30 Ibid., 189–90, italics added. 31 Maechler 2001, 270. 32 Radstone 2001, 60. 33 Ball 2003, 31. 34 Lappin 1999. 35 In her latest work, Gilmore’s focus is explicitly “the public representation of women” who offer testimony (2), which limits the notion of reality to he said / she said accounts of “what really happened” and brackets considerations of the psychoanalytic real out of her analysis. 36 Kristeva 1982, 1. 37 Dominick LaCapra would want us to notice that this need for a companion supports Eric Santner’s observation in Stranded Objects that “[i]t was Freud’s thought that the absence of the appropriate affect – anxiety – is what leads to traumatization rather than loss per se. This affect can, however, be recuperated only in the presence of an empathic witness. In the case of the child playing fort/da … it is the parent/observer, and in that of the trauma victim, the empathic analyst” (Santner 1993, 25, cited in LaCapra 1996, 214–15). 38 Kristeva 1982, 10. 39 Ibid., 10, italics in original. 40 Ball 2003, 33. 41 Ibid., 33. 42 Ibid., 37. 43 Ibid., 37.

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

63

Salecl 2000, italics in original. Kristeva 1982, 178. Yildiz 2012, 199. Eakin 2001, 117. Peskin 2000, 40. A comparable case can be found in Jeffrey Roth’s discussion of the legal framework and ensuing controversy generated by Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, which was written before Stephen Daldry’s successful 2008 adaptation (Roth 2004). Lear 2002. Kristeva 1982, 179, italics in original. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 179–80. Wilson n.d. Randol 2013. Ibid. Maechler 2001, 269.

r e f e r e n ce s Arias, Arturo, ed. 2001. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ball, Karyn. 2003. “Unspeakable Differences, Obscene Pleasures: The Holocaust as an Object of Desire.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 19: 20–49. Bernard-Donals, Michael. 2003. “Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy.” In Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust, edited by Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, 196–220. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Damrosch, David. 2003. “The 2003 acla Presidential Address: The Road of Excess: Comparative Literature at a Double Crossroads.” Comparative Literature 55, no. 3 (Summer): viii–xv. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press. Eakin, Paul John. 2001. “Breaking Rules: The Consequences of SelfNarration.” Biography 24 (Winter): 113–27. Eskin, Blake. 2003. A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski. New York: W.W. Norton. Gabriel, Yiannis. 2003. “Seduced by the Text: The Desire to be Deceived in Story, Memoir and Drama Stream 4: Theatrics of Capitalism.” cms 3

64

Susan Ingram

(blog). https://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/ proceedings/theatrics/gabriel.pdf. Gilmore, Leigh. 2003. “Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self-Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma.” Signs 28, no. 2 (Winter): 695–718. – 2016. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Katsoulis, Melissa. 2013. Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes. London: Constable & Robinson. Kirsch, Adam. 2014. “Yet Another Writer Has Admitted Faking Her Holocaust Memoir.” New Republic, 17 May. https://newrepublic.com/ article/117764/misha-defonseca-pays-22-million-history-fakeholocaust-memoir. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 1996. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, 1st ed. Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press. Lappin, Elena. 1999. “The Man with Two Heads.” Granta, 4 June. https:// granta.com/the-man-with-two-heads/. Lear, Jonathan. 2002. “The Man Who Never Was.” New York Times, 24 February. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/books/the-manwho-never-was.html. Maechler, Stefan. 2001. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Schocken Books. Menchú, Rigoberta. 1984. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Edited and introduced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Translated by Ann Wright. London and New York: Verso. – 1983. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nació la concienca. Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara, S.A. Peskin, Harvey. 2000. “Memory and Media: ‘Cases’ of Rigoberta Menchú and Binjamin Wilkomirski.” Society (November/December): 39–46. Radstone, Susanna. 2001. “Social Bonds and Psychical Order: Testimonies.” Cultural Values 5, no. 2 (January): 59–78. Randol, Shaun. 2013. “pen 2013: Bravery and Atrocity.” World Literature Today, 30 April. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/ current-events/pen2013-bravery-and-atrocity. Rosen, Alan. 2005. Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

The Matrix of Multilingual Memory

65

Roth, Jeffrey I. 2004. “Reading and Misreading The Reader.” Law and Literature 16, no. 2: 163–77. Salecl, Renate. 2000. “Why One Would Pretend to Be a Victim of the Holocaust.” Other Voices: The (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism 2, no. 1 (February). http://www.othervoices.org/2.1/salecl/wilkomirski.html. Santner, Eric L. 1993. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press. Schumm, Sandra J. 1995. “‘Borrowed’ Language in Carme Riera’s ‘Cuestion de Amor Propio.’” Anales de La Literatura Española Contemporánea 20, no. 1/2: 199–214. Stoll, David. 2001. “The Battle of Rigoberta.” In The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, edited by Arturo Arias, 392–410. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. – 2008. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, Expanded Edition. Boulder, co : Westview. Summer, Doris. 1991. “Rigoberta’s Secrets.” Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3: 32–50. Walford, Lynn. 2006. “Truth, Lies, and Politics in the Debate over Testimonial Writing: The Cases of Rigoberta Menchú; and Binjamin Wilkomirski.” The Comparatist 30 (May): 113–21. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. 1995. Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939– 1948. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. – 1996. Fragments from a Childhood, 1939–1945. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. London: Picador. Wilson, Katherine. 2013. “Anne Frank Abroad: The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature.” World Literature Today 87, no. 3 (May/June): 28–33. doi: 10.7588/worllitetoda.87.3.0028. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

3

Translating the Multilingual: Reflections on French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India Sanjukta Banerjee

in t ro du c t i on Among the challenges posed to India’s cultural pluralism since the eighteenth century, two in particular concern this study. The first one came with the colonial perception of Indian culture that put in place competing models of religious and cultural traditions and largely ignored the complex reciprocal processes of interaction among cultures and communities in the region.1 The second came from the proponents of Hindu nationalism with its ahistorical and aggressive credo of Hindutva during the colonial and postcolonial periods.2 One of the critical sites of India’s cultural plurality in practice has been language, and it is here that both these challenges have been at their most palpable. If it is the politics of language that has emerged as central to Hinduism’s global aspirations in postcolonial India,3 it was the construction of languages as bounded (and bounding) entities and integral to social identification that marked orientalist imaginations of the world.4 This does not suggest that the region’s syncretic tradition was uninterrupted or unchallenged until colonial rule, nor that language hierarchy, either as a notion or in practice, is a purely Western import. There is nevertheless a need to recognize that if language now seems to act more as a separative force than a cohesive one, the reason is the consciousness of language as a direct expression of community identity5 – which owes its origin to the “classificatory passion”6 of European colonialism.

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

67

The mapping and classification of India’s languages in the colonial era finds an important, if not always overt, presence in the eighteenth-century French travel accounts of the region. This study examines a few such accounts, and argues that the travellers’ descriptions of India as a multilingual space can be read as “translations”7 that are fundamentally dependent on an assumption of sameness of languages across cultures, one which renders them representable in the idiom and epistemology of the traveller. Translation in this chapter is to be understood both as interlingual communication involving the rendering of a specific text into a target language, and in the sense of the textualization of culture that travel writing engages in. This latter translation in this study is enmeshed with views of language and often involves translation in the narrower sense when the travel writer translates excerpts from texts of the source culture to include in an account. Both were enabled by a totalizing vision of language that allowed for language relations and individual and community identities to be constructed in terms of an ideology of origins and derivations. Mainstream scholarly research on India’s encounter with the West has treated early-colonial India largely as an Anglophone space. But, as Bernard Cohn notes, “until the late part of the eighteenth century, the British in India had done little to study systematically the wide variety of languages spoken in India.”8 It was in fact the German and Danish missionaries, as well as the English East India Company’s French and Dutch rivals, who had produced grammars and dictionaries of the region’s languages. This study subscribes to the view of early-colonial India that posits a triangular relationship between Britain,9 France, and India in the second half of the eighteenth century, during which a network of Europeans dominated by Frenchmen was in operation.10 Although the French presence in the subcontinent became increasingly peripheral in that same period,11 India’s role in French cultural production transcended the uncertainties of power relations.12 While the British in late-eighteenth-century India pursued language and ethnological studies to modernize the bureaucracy, the French study of the country’s languages and people was torn between commercial and intellectual agendas, the latter spurred in part by a growing Enlightenment interest in the subcontinent as the “cradle of civilization.” But often politics determined the nature of the traveller’s language experience in India. The French focus

68

Sanjukta Banerjee

on Tamil had in part to do with the fact that it was the majority language in Pondicherry, their main trading post in India. Besides, their subordinate colonial status made them subject to restrictions imposed on their movement within India by the British. In general, however, European travel accounts were marked by considerable cultural permeability: during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accounts in French and other continental European languages were frequently translated into English and helped establish many of the commonplaces in Anglophone accounts of India.13 French, Spanish, Italian, and German travel books were translated rapidly into English and/or reviewed in British periodicals – a process that was reciprocated in Europe and America.14 While acknowledging that the French attitude to language discussed here should not be taken to represent a homogenous national voice during the eighteenth century, I want to stress that the dominant European epistemology of the late eighteenth century – organized through methods of “scientific” observation and cataloguing – governed the French understanding of multilingual India. Here the empirical and the mythical were entangled. The perception of language in terms of error, excess, chaos was part of the general view of perfectibility of culture through the recovery of a lost “essence.”

f r a m in g l a n guage The cultural translation that travel writing engages in has been examined from the intersections of translation and ethnography. The history of ethnography in travel can be explored as the history of the emergence of a basic set of analytical categories15 – including language and religion – the presence of which to a greater or lesser degree marked travel writing from the Middle Ages until the last century. The now well-established theoretical approaches that analyze travellers as translators are those that help establish links between the eras of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European travel and the production of “systematic” knowledge about the world. This translation that both travel writing and ethnography perform involves bringing coherence to the cultural practices of others, and insofar as neither of the practices typically deals with an already existing source text, the construction and translation of a cultural discourse seem to constitute a single act, “claim[ing] at once to ‘show’ others to the domestic audience and to speak the others’ words in the lan-

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

69

guage of that audience.”16 In both cases, the assertion of authority tends to rest on a claim of fluency in the native’s language, which is seldom documented in the account. Notwithstanding the variety of orientalist situations across cultural and historical sites and the internal complexities and instabilities of each orientalism,17 much of the European discourse of India was framed by a common set of devices. A case in point is the notion of languages stemming from a single source. Rooted in Christianity, this view of primordial monolingualism18 was later put to the service of goals in Europe, correlating the concept of standardized language to that of nation. While earlier missionaries had tried to incorporate ancient Asian cultures and religions into biblical scenarios, deist philosophers and intellectuals19 such as Voltaire and Holwell sought to use Asian texts as “older and better Old Testaments.”20 This “new” orientalism wanted to denigrate the Bible and was therefore less beholden to the Judeo-Christian worldview. It was particularly interested in Asia’s non-Abrahamic religions, especially those with sacred scriptures that were possibly the world’s oldest texts. For Voltaire, arguably the most influential intellectual presence in late-eighteenth-century French discourses of India, the main quest was for the vestiges of a pure uncluttered universal monotheism. This attention informed the perceptions of the travellers in question, so that India’s languages and texts functioned to shape not only knowledge of the subcontinent, but also Europe’s own linguistic, and religious and national, identity. The essence of India’s religiosity was sought to be located in Sanskrit, a language that stood in opposition to the unreliable vernaculars of the region in the European imagination. This comparison had an ethnological dimension – the construction of a genealogical tree of languages as a means to access the genealogy of nations.21 Thus, in French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat’s22 account of the religion of India, which the country’s fragmented linguistic landscape and the unreliable translations of its ancient religious texts seem illequipped to make accessible,23 the emphasis is on the commonness and predictability of human relation to language: “The errors of all nations are caused by forgetting their natural language. Once it falls out of use, the commentators render it unintelligible … In their commentaries on the original sacred books, the Brahmins of each region have slipped in absurd, preposterous fables presuming they would be enjoyable to those to whom they were told. Hence the difference

70

Sanjukta Banerjee

of opinion on the birth, actions, nomenclature of their Gods.”24 The underlying message seems to be that language and thinking are separate processes – language is “a grammatical clothing lightly thrown over a semantic body.”25 Prioritizing the “original” over the translation and similarity over difference, plurality is seen to lead inevitably to degraded versions. It is clear from Sonnerat’s account that the Hindu textual sources he draws on are primarily the Tamil versions of the Puraˉ nas, a community of mythopoetic texts whose survival and propagation has depended on a tradition of commentary alongside translation, transcreation, and performance in the vernacular languages. Like other regions of India, the south produced its versions of classical Indian myths as responses to specific needs.26 In the subordination of myth to logos in the account, the vernacular language is opposed to Sanskrit in an interior-exterior duality between “prestige” and vernacular language, which, as we will see, is a notion unsustainable in the Indian case. It is important to consider how science figures in this attitude to language. Sonnerat, a naturalist, distanced himself from those European intellectuals whose reliance on style and rhetorical devices, he argued, only concealed falsehood.27 This rather common claim to authenticity found in European travel accounts of the time has particular significance in this case. The Enlightenment goal of identifying universal “truths” of all of humanity here intersects with the logic of empiricism. But in the late eighteenth century these two shared ground in that both were interested in inferences and interpretations conducive to general theories. Even in the face of numerous exceptions, cultural expressions were processed through the logic of the underlying universal. Here the local, its geography and history, got noticed only to be cancelled out or relegated to a secondary position.

c o u n t in g e xcess It is well known that much of the colonial enterprise of classifying, mapping, and naming the languages in India, associated with the British, was undertaken for administrative purposes. But if this “qualitatively new knowledge”28 served “instrumental functions for capitalist, military, and administrative expansion … the methods to produce this knowledge were not specific to India.”29 It was the methodologies authorized by the scientific standards of the day against which the accuracy and authenticity of new knowledge

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

71

about India were tested.30 The emerging attitude in Europe that deemed languages to be discrete, standardizable entities was part of this “scientific” Enlightenment tradition, which often intersected with the traveller’s quest for the curious. At the same time, colonial administrators, orientalists, and naturalists conversant with this technique of knowledge construction and accumulation held on to the religious impulse of the earlier Catholic orientalism. In general, notions of linguistic irregularity and religious falsehoods were made part of the discourse that sought to posit a unidirectional, static relationship between Sanskrit and vernacular languages, the latter as derived from the former. One of the principal means of ordering India’s linguistic plurality in European travel accounts was enumeration. Allied with the “scientific” cataloguing characteristic of post-Renaissance episteme, the enumerative helped to establish a typology of languages, and emphasized the characteristics of languages the travellers came into contact with. For example, in his Recherches historiques et geographiques sur l’Inde (1786), French theologian AnquetilDuperron31 lists the languages of the country in a manner typical of other European travellers: “Travelling down the peninsula, one comes across the Jargon of Balasore, corrupted from Bengali … then Telugu – it is the Indian language that is closest to Sanskrit. Its area extends from Ganjam on the Orissa coast to 8–10 coss32 north of Tamil-speaking Pulicat … The coast of the Pescherie has a particular jargon, a corrupt Tamil that resurfaces west of Cape Comorin.”33 This attempt to organize plurality echoes the “aesthetic of the marvelous,” which with its “dual emphases on variety and otherness” constructed a “marvelous topography”34 of the Indian space. This feature and function of travel writing, which Pramod Nayar terms the “scientific marvelous,”35 negotiated the unfamiliar through enumerations, categorizations, and rational explanations.36 “This not only reduced the Other into something knowable, it also enabled the traveler to retain his epistemological/cultural integrity in the face of the Other’s excesses.”37 Nayar’s discussion is concerned with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British explorations of India. But it is useful for reading the above description of India’s languages, where the demystification of difference follows a pattern similar to the one he elaborates.38 Beginning with a mapping of languages onto regions to portray the former as distinct and separable,39 the attempt at ordering becomes interspersed with comments about the negative

72

Sanjukta Banerjee

excess of multilingualism: Anquetil’s enumeration of the languages of the land is overwhelmed by instances of language-mixing he comes across, leading him to conclude that “to communicate with the people of India, one needs to know not only the … languages and their alphabets, but also the local jargons and dialects – a prospect that is … terrifying.”40 This excess seems readable only as a “lack,” in Anquetil’s references to the “corrupt” local languages and “jargon(s)” – the latter signifying “deformed,” “incomprehensible,” “made up of disparate elements,” akin to “Babelism.”41 Here linguistic difference slides into the realm of geography, and principles of visual observation guide the general approach to verbal description and epistemology.42 The understanding of language as a direct expression of community identity – generally absent in pre-modern India – gradually developed with colonial efforts to map the languages of the subcontinent, engendering a radically new view of the relation of the speaker to their speech. It was also de rigueur in the prominent eighteenth-century French accounts of India to describe the vernacular languages as bounded by regions, as it was to point out that all the languages no doubt sprang from Sanskrit43 – the more a vernacular obscured this link, the greater its state of corruption. As already suggested, this attitude is not unrelated to the absence of clear distinctions between broad categories of knowledge in the orientalist discourses of India in the eighteenth century.44 A clearer link can be established here between geography and language, since not only was geographical discourse inseparable from those of languages, the latter were studied in cartographic terms.45 Tracing the connections between cartography and its formative role in eighteenth-century European colonial knowledge, Matthew Edney notes that before the eighteenth century, a distinction was made between geo-graphy (earth description) and choro-graphy (region description), the former entailing the study of the world as a whole and of mapmaking, the latter describing a particular region and its inhabitants without reference to the rest of world.46 This distinction gradually dissolved, and in a new approach to classify the subject of observation, Enlightenment geographers started distinguishing instead between physical and human features of landscape, reflecting the “Cartesian dualism between mind and matter and the contemporary idea that the natural world is a stage for human action.”47 Colonial-era observations of landscape were based on a

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

73

broad understanding of what features of landscape should be studied: examples of this could be seen in long lists of itemized “heads of enquiry”48 encompassing data ranging from geology and commerce to history, language, and religion. It was the map’s “graticule”49 that allowed all data to be represented in the same manner – the assumption being that translation between European and Indian systems of knowledge on a subject could be achieved by reducing them to a common measure. Therefore, underpinning any translation between languages occasioned by travel between Europe and India, there was an intralingual translation between branches of knowledge represented in such data.

m u lt il in g uali sm: p l u r a l iz at io n o f m onoli nguali s m The French traveller’s attempt at mapping and listing India’s languages while traversing regional boundaries was driven by a comparative method, and the assumption that language, as a universal, is put to the same use across communities and cultures. Cohering with the notion of “unity of language,”50 this view of multilingualism – which has come to inform secular ideologies of modern nation-states – could be seen as a translation between two modes of social and cultural signification. Naoki Sakai observes that the notion of unity of language is an “historical a priori.”51 It is “a regulative idea”52 that lets us tell one language from another and organizes knowledge, but is not empirically verifiable. Crucially, since the unity of one language is already accompanied by the unity of another, the notion “is possible only in the element of ‘many in one.’”53 This notion of oneness is manifest in Sonnerat’s account, when he reads the specificity of Tamil through a European lens. “The living languages of India have sufficient affinity with [Sanskrit] that one might consider them its offspring, but corrupted by mixing with jargon.”54 But if the local translators of Hindu texts altered them by inserting fables well-known in the country where they wrote, such a situation was not unique to India, he adds. Haven’t the Catholics and the Protestants, instead of reading the scriptures in Hebrew and Greek, become increasingly attached to interpretations that divide them?55 Here the traveller’s home is displaced onto the foreign. The narrative of corrupt versions, manifest in the face of the Other’s excess, speaks in fact of its own place of enunciation.

74

Sanjukta Banerjee

The history of French, a language described as “incorruptible” around the time that Sonnerat and Anquetil wrote their accounts, is intimately linked with a strong tradition of purism. Although plurilingual practices and the use of non-standard languages have always been present in France, the period between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries saw “a progressive shift from local languages and dialects to French,”56 effected through numerous legislations. Such a process, Georges Lüdi observes, can involve the eventual internalization of the dominant ideology by speakers, engendering feelings of pride in “speaking the ‘legitimate’ language or … insecurity and guilt if they think this is not the case.”57 In the pursuit of linguistic homogeneity, standard languages are accorded “retrospective historicity,”58 a constructed past that sets them apart from less prestigious varieties. The French tradition of purism was dependent on a codified language legitimized through an elaboration of bon usage (proper usage), or “ideology of the standard.”59 Bon usage, an evolving set of norms,60 paradoxically confirms the experience of mauvais usage (improper usage). The omnipresence of patois61 in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been widely attested. The traveller’s comparison of the French and Indian contexts is therefore a “pluralization of monolingualism”62 based on the idea of “plurality of languages in one humanity.”63 It is an epistemic principle determining what is to be considered proper language, and a strategic principle insofar as it tells us what we must seek as proper language. The enactment of the idea involves processes that could be described as “translations” of “radical difference of discontinuity”64 – at odds with measurable representation – into “measured difference.”65 In the context of this study, these can be understood to convert forms of unfamiliar knowledge into familiar but lesser objects, which begins with an acknowledgment that a universal language has been lost and the multiplication of languages on a territory inevitably results in confusion, incomprehension, and fragmentation. How is the notion of “oneness” of language imposed on a multilingual tradition where conspicuous traits of an overarching prestige language were not sought in local versions of classics, or people speaking “languages of Place” did not identify themselves as constituting groups united through language and place?66 The French rendering of the Bhaˉgavata Puraˉna67 titled Bagavadam,68 translated by Maridas Pillai (alternately Maridas Poullé) and edited by

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

75

traveller and naturalist Foucher d’Obsonville, helps reflect on the question. Pillai, a Tamil Pandit of the Catholic faith and chief translator/interpreter for the French in Pondicherry, based the translation not on Sanskrit but on an abridged Tamil version.69 In his introduction to the translation, d’Obsonville, who does not name himself or the translator, refers to Pillai as the Indian interpreter of whose assistance he had availed himself for the translation. But being a Christian, Pillai may have misunderstood aspects of the canonical text.70 D’Obsonville feels justified in stripping the translation of unrecognizable terms and supposed synonyms, and restoring it to its original simplicity, since there is a general belief among the sages of India in a single, supreme god.71 If his interventions have resulted in abrupt transitions and digressions, the custom of interrupting the narrative to instruct, especially in a “dialogic” text, is after all part of the Homeric tradition practised through antiquity.72 D’Obsonville, like Sonnerat, looked for a Sanskrit original that might reveal a universal, monotheistic history of humankind73 in a literary tradition which defied any stable demarcation between Sanskrit and the vernaculars, or between the oral and the written. This quest involved a dual process: the insertion of Sanskrit into a universal history of the world through a translation of the Sanskrit-vernacular relation into terms understandable to the eighteenth-century European reader, and the necessary dehistoricization of India’s multilingual tradition. Here translation, in the broader sense, becomes constitutive of language: prioritizing equivalence over equality, it accords language its unity and its limit before a text is engaged with. Pillai’s story brings us back to ideas formative of modern understanding of language as entities conforming to geographical borders. Anthony Lodge argues that in France (and Britain), institutional pressure to conform to prescribed linguistic usage has been strong for so long that standard language is deemed to be the only authentic form, and all deviations are considered failed attempts to express oneself properly.74 This ideology of error and perfectibility75 was ubiquitous in missionary and colonial explorations of language in India. In Sonnerat’s account, it is subsumed under the trope of “lack” when he describes Tamil, the Indian vernacular he was most familiar with, as the “most deficient”76 of India’s languages. Minute changes in sound alter the meanings of entire sentences, leading to incomprehension.77 Here Tamil is synecdochal of an Indian whole – it

76

Sanjukta Banerjee

is within the “conceptual symmetry”78 between France and India that linguistic difference seems accommodable. The confusion that characterizes Tamil is part of the general disarray of languages, a condition the traveller attributes to the absence of cultivation of science, alluding most likely to the benefits of standardization. The same gods become unrecognizable in the local translations of Indian mythology.79 Linguistic diversity does not threaten universality.

in c l u d in g t h e temporal This “global” (rather than worldly, signifying a distinction from “universal reason”)80 view of the environment tends to cancel out the temporal dimension of language. The privileging of the spatial demands the suppression of the differing historicities of language and translation within and across cultures.81 If the assumption at work in the travel accounts is that the vernacular languages of India are derived from Sanskrit, the word “Sanskrit,” meaning “perfected” or “artificial,” suggests a different possibility: that the vernaculars preceded a purified Sanskrit,82 the latter’s power lying in its “nonintelligibility and unavailability.”83 This is not to be taken as suggesting the primeval language of the native, but rather that a unidirectional relationship between Sanskrit and the vernacular languages across regions is one that can only be established retrospectively. An equally relevant point to consider would be the processes of “cross-fertilization”84 between Sanskrit and the vernaculars recorded in India, in the course of which local and Sanskritic language traditions absorbed the sensibilities of each other.85 This mutual exchange underwent a transformation around the middle of the second millennium, when vernaculars such as Tamil became more assertive and came to replace Sanskrit as the language of literature while absorbing the latter’s conventions and ideologies.86 Examples of this can be found in the retellings of the Pura¯nas, which came to incorporate local stories into Sanskrit categories. The language relations that d’Obsonville and his contemporaries encountered need to be seen in light of this mostly deliberate87 “process of change by which the universalistic orders, formations, and practices of the preceding millennium were supplemented and gradually replaced by localized forms.”88 This emphasis on the temporal dimension of language and the related historicity of the local is meant to foreground linguistic heterogeneity occasioned by language use rather than to posit the

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

77

local in essential terms. Annie Montaut observes that “[o]ne of the most frequent observations in Indian sociolinguistics and language shift studies is the extraordinary resilience of language maintenance in diasporic situations all over India.”89 The choice of language is determined by the type of socio-economic exchange, each being the main one in a given context. Therefore, the scenario of a single language use for all communication does not exist in India. Rather than as equal mastery of two or more languages, multilingualism here is to be understood as a “verbal repertoire”90 made up of various segments that are not in competition.91 Perhaps one way to reflect on this is through the notion of the “denizen,” as opposed to the “citizen,” elaborated by Michael Cronin.92 The distinction examines the nexus of language and mobility in accounts of contemporary travel, but it is applicable to historical texts that put in place the methods and tropes for dealing with difference, which have hardened into explicit dogmas. A denizen is someone who not only dwells in a place but can also “move through and knowingly inhabit [it].”93 This movement involves, I want to stress, accommodating change: Maridas Pillai belonged to the group of local “go-betweens”94 in Pondicherry on whose linguistic mediation the French were heavily dependent. Pondicherry has long been a multilingual city with its own “linguistic ecology”95 – shaped by trade and colonialism – within the Tamilspeaking regions of South India. Like many other colonial centres in India, it was also a segmented city. A competent go-between here was not only multilingual, but equally able to mediate in different registers of knowledge and authority. Pillai’s linguistic mobility between India and Europe was made possible because of being embedded in the language(s) of place in the present.96 Here the issue of caste must have inflected the nature of this relation, although information about Pillai’s background is scant. But we know that his ancestors belonged to the elite non-Brahmin Vellalar caste. In the course of the colonial era, the community came to be associated with Tamil scholarship. This facet of Pillai’s identity perhaps also explains why he would be looking to translate from Tamil rather than Sanskrit. At the same time, Tamil as a vernacular has long drawn on its authority as classical language with a literary tradition arguably older than that of Sanskrit. So the notion of vernacular-classical opposition is especially problematic in its case. In the story of Pillai’s translation of the Bhaˉgavata Puraˉna, language therefore emerges as a relational

78

Sanjukta Banerjee

and dynamic practice, and translation as a “telling in turn”97 that enfolds its own previous iterations but is not limited by them. The issue here is not that the linguistic and literary traditions across India manifest certain unifying features, but that these have emerged from varied types and degrees of interdependence among larger and smaller languages. Indeed, among the elements common to literatures of the region is a strong presence of stories from the Sanskrit epics and the Puraˉnas. This literature has endured precisely because it has not depended on the Sanskrit-Buddhist complex alone for its sustenance. By the late eighteenth century, it had dynamic folk and Perso-Arabic elements, a facet mostly left out of the texts mentioned thus far. But not all the records left by French travellers fit that mold. That the choice of language was primarily related to types of socio-economic exchange has been attested by SwissFrench Antoine Polier, who lived in India between 1757 and 1788. Polier’s record is distinct not only because of his much longer stay in India, but also because much of it comes from a compilation of his correspondence in Persian, the I’jaz-i Arsalani,98 written when staying in Awadh and Delhi. Addressed to his Indian contacts ranging from the emperor and nobles to traders and artisans, the letters help locate him in the socio-cultural milieu of the region. It is in fact telling but also expected that a text chronicling the quotidian, rather than an account addressed to the European reader, captures the linguistic sensibilities of the community he was embedded in. By all accounts, in the fashion of a denizen, Polier came to inhabit those sensibilities. A trader, a collector, and an informer for both the English Company and the Indian rulers, Polier is best described as an expert in self-fashioning. He studied Sanskrit and sought out copies of ancient Indian texts to pass on to his English patrons, but his everyday life in Lucknow resembled that of a Mughal aristocrat. He knew some Persian and the letters seem to have been guided by him. But they are the work of his munshis,99 the most important among whom was Kishan Sahai, a Hindu from Bihar. Alam and Alavi note that the format of the letters is modelled on the IndoPersian epistolary style common in eighteenth-century India, while the vocabulary varies “depending on the contents of the letters and corresponding to the [munshi’s] appreciation of received diction.”100 Crucially, they reflect the prevalent culture of the Imperial court in the Delhi-Awadh region,101 emphasizing vocation, rather than language, religion, or region, as the primary identifier of people.

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

79

c o n c l u s i on The comparative method at work in the traveller’s apprehension of India’s languages involved identifying Sanskrit and Latin (and Greek) as cognates. This would move Anquetil-Duperron to translate the Upanishads into Latin with explanations in Greek. But unlike Latin, which imposed its identity on the lands that it ruled, “there was no self-generated descriptor for either the political or the cultural sphere that Sanskrit created and inhabited.”102 Both languages transcended the local, but their paths diverged quite early – the space and power of Sanskrit was never demarcated in a universal, stable fashion. An incommensurability should also be noted between vernacular formations in France and India. No doubt both were spurred by “new visions of vernacular political space.”103 But in early-colonial India, vernaculars were still languages of Place, not facts of the genetic makeup of its people. The French accounts discussed in this paper seek to translate India into terms that sought to group languages by “blood links” to organic roots, and imagined boundaries between them “according to the genetic (vertical) criteria of linguistic affiliation.”104 Studies of India’s multilingualism have, however, shown that language maintenance is proportionate to the selective use of language under shifting social roles105 of individuals and communities. In such a situation, links of genetic affiliation can be superseded by contact between neighbouring languages,106 so that notions of fixed linguistic identity are challenged by multiple belongings. The instances of interwoven languages along the coastal regions that Anquetil-Duperron grapples with, the unsettled borders of Tamil that Sonnerat disparages, and the intrusion of Tamil into Pillai’s French translation of a Sanskrit “original” that d’Obsonville seeks to remedy, suggest that the complexity of language relation in translation encounters can remain constant at different scales of enquiry.107 Polier’s story exemplifies an engagement with multilingualism in which linguistic identity is not a priori, and linguistic consciousness, based in practice, emerges through a shifting, uneven process. In all the examples, a different kind of vertical attention is called for – a journey into the particulars of place in space and time. The perception of multilingualism that posits the existence of discrete languages is on the other hand a “pluralization of monolingualism” associated with expectations of normative linguistic

80

Sanjukta Banerjee

behaviour. As I have argued, it is centrally dependent on the notion of languages as commensurable entities. In the texts I have cited, this ubiquitous notion often comes undone in the travellers’ own descriptions of people’s use of language. not e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

Roy 2005, 2. Ibid., 2. Basu 2016, 12. Ibid., 12. Montaut 2005, 81. Ibid., 87. All translations of French accounts included here are mine. Cohn 1996, 33. A discussion of the British element in that relationship is beyond the scope of this chapter. Alam and Alavi 2001, 18. Following the British victory over France in the Seven Years’ War culminating in the Treaty of Paris (1763). Marsh 2009, 2. Teltscher 1995, 3. Leask 2002, 11. It is worth noting that the second half of the eighteenth century saw the publication of a large body of French writings on India, including 135 travel accounts between 1757 and 1815, references to which abound in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British periodicals. Rubiés 2002, 251. Sturge 2007, 1–2. Lowe 1991, 5. Calvet 1998, 18. The kind of religion that was sought to be created required an authoritative scripture. Two such invented texts were Holwell’s Shastah – supposed translations from a mysterious ancient Hindu text titled Chartah Bhade Shastah – and the Ezour-vedam – purportedly the translation, by a Brahmin, of a Sanskrit commentary on the Vedas. Today we know that the Ezour-vedam was authored by one or several French Jesuits in India. App 2010, 3. See Trautmann 2006. Travelled in India between 1774 and 1781.

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

81

Sonnerat 1782, vol. 1, 8–9. Ibid., vol. 1, 5. Guldin 2016, 15. Gupta and Valpey 2013, 11. Sonnerat 1782, vol. 1, xv. Ludden 1993, 252. Ibid., 252 (emphasis added). Ibid. Travelled in India between 1755 and 1762. A measure of length in India, varying between two and four kilometres approximately. Anquetil-Duperron 1786, x–xi (emphases original). Nayar 2005, 214. Nayar draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of the marvelous in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, il : University of Chicago Press, 1992). Nayar 2005, 216. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 217. Here I draw on Nayar’s elaboration of the three “moments” in the rhetoric of India in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English travel accounts. Anquetil-Duperron indeed suggests that the reader should use a map to understand his description. Anquetil-Duperron 1786, xii. “Jargon,” in Le nouveau petit Robert de la langue, 2007. Edney 1997, 54. Those such as Voltaire who did not subscribe to a monogenetic view of language did however believe in the salutary effect of fixing language through standardization, at least for French. Interestingly, in the Indian context, the colonial obsession with standardization has evolved into institutionalization of clear-cut linguistic identities in the post-colonial era. This has meant the substitution of functional linguistic heterogeneity by a dynamics of competition (Montaut 2005, 98). Edney 1997, 42–3. Ibid. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44. Edney gives the example of Colin MacKenzie’s survey of Mysore (1800–07). Edney 1997, 18.

82 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75

76

Sanjukta Banerjee

Sakai 2009, 73. Ibid., 73. Ibid. Ibid., 75 (my emphasis). Sonnerat 1782, vol. 1, 225. Ibid., vol. 2, 20. Lüdi 2012, 207–8. One might note that while French was touted as the universal language of Europe by the late 1700s, around the same time at least six million French people did not know the national language, and only half of that number spoke it. See Calvet 1998, 47–8. Lüdi 2012, 209. Lodge 1993, 8. Ibid., 178. See ibid. for its evolving definition in France. The Encyclopédie describes it as “a corrupt manner of speaking used in more or less all our province.” The definition adds that “The [French] language is spoken only in the capital.” Quoted in Lodge 1993, 193. Here I draw on Pennycook 2010, 132. Sakai 2009, 73. Ibid., 86. Ibid. Pollock 2006, 510. Hindu sacred text, one of the eighteen Puraˉnas. Published in Europe in 1788. A conclusion based on links demonstrated in the work between Tamil and Sanskrit names. See the edition of this translation titled Bagavadam ou Bhaˉgavata Puraˉna (2004), edited and introduced by J.B. Prashant More with a preface by Pierre Filliozat, establishing this link. Poullé and d’Obsonville 1788, x. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., xi. See Le Blanc 2009, 15–36, for an account of the reception of Pillai’s translation in Europe. Lodge 1993, 5. See Das 2017, 846–83, for a discussion of how print technologies between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries helped crystalize missionary and colonial ideologies of perfectibility and error of Indian languages. These ideologies have influenced the perception of language and literature in India since the nineteenth century. Sonnerat 1782, vol. 1, 229.

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

83

77 Ibid., vol. 1, 240. 78 Islam 1996. 79 Sonnerat 1782, 240. Elsewhere, Sonnerat justifies this extrapolation by citing British orientalist Alexander Dow’s description of Bengal, which he considers applicable to the Tamil-speaking region (vol. 1, 195–6). 80 My perspective is based on Béji’s notion of “culture mondiale” (1997, 47), translatable as “worldly culture” and not “global culture,” the latter allied with notions of civilization, homogeneity, standardization. See Mignolo 2000 for a discussion of this point in relation to how macro-narratives, products of local histories of a few countries, constructed colonial difference. 81 It is well known now that the Sanskrit word anuva¯d, which acquired the meaning of “‘translation’ as transfer” to describe the “new practice of translation imported by the colonial powers” (Guldin 2014, 44), earlier meant “to speak or repeat after” and is primarily a temporal metaphor. 82 As Pollock points out, the etymology of Sanskrit also suggests that it is not tied to any particular community. 83 Doniger 2009, 18–19. 84 Ibid., 19. 85 Ibid, 19. 86 Ibid. 87 Pollock 2006, 504. 88 Pollock 1998, 41. 89 Montaut 2005, 94, citing P.B. Pandit, Language in a Plural Society (New Delhi: Dev Raj Chanana Memorial Publication, 1977). As Montaut indicates, “diasporic situation” here refers to communities all over India “living in a different linguistic environment” from their own. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Cronin 2010, 338. 93 Ibid., 338. 94 See for example Raj 2009, 105–50. 95 See discussion in Agmon 2011. Agmon draws on the term “language ecology” from Einar Haugan, The Ecology of Language: Essays (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 1972). 96 In addition, Pillai’s Catholic identity would not mean severance of ties with his Hindu family history. As Agmon notes as well, the French Jesuits in South India followed a policy of “accommodation” toward the converts. They had to engage with Hindu forms in order to acquire religious authority among the converts whose culture was marked by those forms (66–7).

84

Sanjukta Banerjee

97 Merrill 2009, 5. 98 Alam and Alavi 2001. 99 Secretary/teacher/translator. Having munshis draft letters was common practice for Mughal nobles and officials. Polier followed this convention. 100 Alam and Alavi 2001, 16–17. 101 Ibid., 60. 102 Pollock 2006, 571. 103 Ibid., 573 104 Montaut 2005, 87. 105 Ibid., 95, citing R.N. Srivastava, Studies in Language and Linguistics (Delhi: Kalinga Publications, 1994). 106 Montaut 2005, 92. 107 Cronin 2012, 67.

r e f e r e nce s Agmon, Danna. 2011. “An Uneasy Alliance: Traders, Missionaries, and Tamil Intermediaries in Eighteenth-Century French India.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Alam, Muzaffar, and Seema Alavi. 2001. A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I’jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters, 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe. 1786. Recherches historiques et geographiques sur l’Inde. Berlin: Pierre Bourdeaux. App, Urs. 2010. The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia, pa : University of Pennsylvania Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 141–64. Berkeley, ca : University of California. Basu, Manisha. 2016. The Rhetoric of Hindu India: Language and Urban Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calvet, Louis Jean. 1998. Language Wars and Linguistic Politics. Translated by Michel Petheram. Oxford, uk : Oxford University Press on Demand. Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press. Cronin, Michael. 2010. “Knowing One’s Place: Travel, Difference and Translation.” Translation Studies 3, no. 3: 334–48. – 2012. The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection.

French Accounts of Eighteenth-Century India

85

Winchester, uk : Zero Books. Doniger, Wendy. 2009. “An Alternative Historiography for Hinduism.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 2, no. 1 (March): 17–26. Edney, Matthew H. 1997. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago, il : The University of Chicago Press, 1997. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago, il : University of Chicago Press. Guldin, Rainer. 2016. Translation as Metaphor. Milton Park, uk : Routledge. Leask, Nigel. 2002. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: From an Antique Land. Oxford, uk , and New York: Oxford University Press. Le Blanc, Claudine. 2009. “Les premiers passeurs de Bhâgavata Purâna.” In Passeurs d’idées religieuses entre l’Inde et l’Europe, edited by Christine Pflieger-Maillard and Ysé Tardan-Masquelier, 15–36. Strasbourg, France: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. Lowe, Lisa. 1991. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, ny , and London: Cornell University Press. Lodge, R. Anthony. 1993. French: From Dialect to Standard. London: Routledge. Ludden, David. 1993. “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge.” In Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, 250–78. Philadelphia, pa : University of Pennsylvania Press. Lüdi, Georges. 2012. “Traces of Monolingual and Plurilingual Ideologies in the History of Language Policies in France.” In Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History, edited by Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl, and Olivier Moliner, 205–30. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, pa : John Benjamins. Marsh, Kate. 2009. India in the French Imagination: Peripheral Voices, 1754–1815. London: Pickering & Chatto. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press. Montaut, Annie. 2005. “Colonial Language Classification, Post-colonial Language Movements and the Grassroot Multilingualism Ethos in India.” In Living Together Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics, edited by Munshirul Hasan and Asim Roy, 75–106. New Delhi:

86

Sanjukta Banerjee

Oxford University Press. Nayar, Pramod K. 2005. “Marvelous Excesses: English Travel Writing and India 1608–1727.” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (April): 213–38. Pennycook, Alastair. 2010. Language as a Local Practice. Milton Park, uk : Routledge. Pollock, Sheldon. 1998. “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500.” Daedalus 127, no. 3: 41–74. – 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, ca : University of California Press. Poullé, Maridas, and Foucher d’Obsonville. 1788. Bagavadam, ou, doctrine divine: ouvrage indien, canonique: sur l’être suprême, les dieux, les géans, les hommes, les diverses parties de l’Univers, etc. Paris: Tilliard. Raj, Kapil. 2009. “Mapping Knowledge: Go-Betweens in Calcutta, 1770–1820.” In The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, edited by Simon Schaffer, 105–50. Sagamore Beach, ma : Science History Publications. Roy, Asim. 2005. “Introduction.” In Living Together Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics, edited by Munshirul Hasan and Asim Roy, 1–25. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. 2002. “Travel Writing and Ethnography.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 242–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sakai, Naoki. 2009. “How Do We Count a Language? Translation and Discontinuity.” Translation Studies 2, no. 1: 71–88. Sonnerat, Pierre. 1782. Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine. 2 vols. Paris: Froulé. Sturge, Kate. 2007. Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum. Manchester, uk : St. Jerome Publishing. Teltscher, Kate. 1995. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Trautmann, Thomas. 1997. Aryans and British India. Berkeley, ca : University of California Press.

4

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In or Out in Multilingual Settings Joshua M. Price

Knowledge, feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye once observed, has everything to do with attention (Frye 1983, 121).1 This is particularly clear amidst the clamour of multilingual settings, where you can best understand that which you lend your ear to. “Translating” or interpreting2 in multilingual settings is a matter of wilfully “tuning in” as if to a radio frequency, or as one tunes in to a conversation. The metaphor of attunement, of translation-as-tuning-in, allows us to address practical as well as theoretical questions of translation in everyday settings. Among the issues are epistemologies of ignorance: “how a person can be right there and see and hear, and yet not know” (Frye 1983, 120; also see Sullivan and Tuana 2007). Translation-as-tuning-in provides a framework to chart how people are selective in what they comprehend or assimilate when they are in multilingual spaces. It also indicates the need for a methodology to study the lived phenomenology of translation, the sensory and affective experience of apprehending another’s speech. A series of first-person ethnographic descriptions drawn from everyday life illustrates how people dial in for clarity or surrender to the apparent opacity of potential communication. The examples will be drawn from walking the streets – of Montreal, Ciudad Juárez, and New York (see also Simon 2016). Building on the concept of “affective attunement” and the Situationists’ notion of psychogeography, a theoretical argument will be mounted on the experiences of people tuning in or tuning out in multilingual

88

Joshua M. Price

situations in these cities (Massumi 2015; Stern 1985; Khatib 1958; Debord 1989 [1958]). Let’s start with a walk in an urban landscape. You are striding (or rolling in a wheelchair, or swinging forward on crutches); the soundwaves bounce off the walls; heat rises from the asphalt; people size you up, usually subtly, sometimes openly, as they pass you on the sidewalk. In street phenomenology, the anchor is the lived body through which so much culturally rich sensory material is channelled. Some aspects of street-level embodiment are dehumanizing: street harassment of women, people hailed into racial/racist schema (Martínez 2000; Ellison 1952, 11; Fanon 2008 [1952], 89). You may be ignored, given a wide berth, called names, treated as a ghost or as a sexual object. Other parts are affirming: someone gives you a neighbourly smile, a sober nod of acknowledgment, or rushes forward to assist you when you trip on a pothole. You go into a shop. Do the shop staff follow you around to make sure you don’t steal anything? Do they ignore you, even when you want service? Or do they cater to you, and bend over backwards to accommodate you? People read each other visually, of course, but there is also an important auditory-linguistic dimension to people’s reactions. You hear Arabic, Spanish, French, Tagalog, Chinese, English, and different people respond differently to the languages they hear. One can close oneself off to this multiplicity or open oneself to it. Author Junot Díaz describes the approach he takes when confronted with linguistic plurality, which “I hear everywhere I go in Paris, and everywhere I go in New York, and everywhere I go in the Caribbean, which is the approach that the world is present on almost every street.” Díaz sees his writing as an attempt to grapple with this condition, “to address what I think is the condition of a person in the world. It’s not … that they live again in a vast sea of monolinguists. But they are adrift with a thousand tongues. That’s normal” (Díaz 2009). Díaz opens himself to that multiplicity. Not everyone does. On the macro-level, English exercises hegemony in North America. Part of the hegemony is to cloak the “thousand tongues,” or how the world is present on every street. Even as people pass frequently between linguistic borders, nation-state borders have become more militarized, and the dominant culture veils and disregards the more marginalized languages and their speakers, or stigmatizes them.

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

89

d if f e r e n t ia l attunement a n d u r ba n wanderi ng Even for those who open ourselves to that linguistic plurality, we each respond differently to the signs and signals around us. Brian Massumi refers to “differential attunement.” We’re all in on the event together, but we’re in it together differently. We each come with a different set of tendencies, habits and action potentials ... “Attunement” refers to the direct capture of attention and energies by the event. “Differential” refers to the fact that we each are taken into the event from a different angle, and move out of it following our own singular trajectories, riding the waves in our own inimitable way. (Massumi 2015, 115) For the notion of affective attunement, Massumi draws on the work of child psychologist Daniel Stern, who described how mothers and children come to share affective states. Parents and their children may find themselves in sync based on mutually recognized behaviour, even while they may each channel or express themselves differently in that moment (Stern 1985, 146). The parent and child play peek-a-boo, or drum on different surfaces together, or share surprise and delight. Stern called this way of synchronizing “affective attunement.” Affective attunement for Stern is the “performance of behaviors that express the quality of feeling of a shared affect state without imitating the exact behavioral expression of the inner state” (142). Stern’s observations of parents and children can be adapted to study affective attunement amidst the chaos and kinesthesis of street life, with its transience, noise, and movement. The Situationists add a vocabulary and a methodology for studying how attunement occurs in real time, and in transitory city spaces (Debord 1989 [1958]). The Situationists were a French avant-garde art and politics movement of the second half of the twentieth century that has influenced generations of activists, artists, radical urban planners, and anarchists. Situationist Guy Debord charged his colleagues to study psychogeography, “the laws and precise effects of a consciously or unconsciously elaborated geographical environment acting directly on affective behavior” (50). Psychogeography designates an approach to charting how urban space is perceived and experienced from the standpoint of a pedestrian:

90

Joshua M. Price

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of the distinct, self-contained character of administrative districts, and above all of the dominating actions of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. (50) “Ecology,” in the expanded sense of the Situationists, includes not just the natural environment but also spoken languages and other semiotic systems. Languages, placed within an ecology, evolve amidst ever-changing material conditions, including urban design and architectural forms (see Basile 2016; Pennycook 2017).3 Ecosystems in this sense are complex, and may be balanced or unbalanced, and are subject to an array of external forces just as all ecologies are. At any given point, some neighbourhood ecologies or microclimates are emerging, while others are in embryonic form, and still others may be threatened with extinction. Some elements of an ecology may be parasitic on others, even predatory – think of gentrification, or colonization – just as some languages are parasitic on others, while other elements may live in symbiosis. Languages are affected by non-linguistic cultural and sociological forces. Language ecologies are not necessarily confined to a space or place, such as a neighbourhood, a region, or a nation-state, nor to a particular people, though they may be. Languages themselves “are not spatially arranged isomorphs,” but rather “sites constituted through diversity and pluralism,” as Rita Kothari has commented of India (2018, 117). The material, cultural, and social conditions in which a language lives shape the conditions for how it travels, crosses borders, or spans communities – or does not. For the Situationists, the practice of drifting across a landscape, what they called the “dérive,” is a method or a means of acquiring data about an ecology or set of ecologies. The dérive is a technique “of transient passage through varied ambiances. The dérive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects.” The dérive involves wandering, “letting go,” in order to chart the energies, tensions, and eddies of the urban landscape. As one drifts along, one consciously takes stock of the ambiances. “Cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” (Debord 1989 [1958], 50). Meandering along, one discovers a city’s currents, its spaces of relative freedom, as well

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

91

as its spaces of confinement, barriers, and restrictions. “The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations to social morphology” (50). One can use a dérive to chart the “centers of attention” and the spaces that are rendered marginal or barely legible (50). The dérive thus involves performing a special, technical kind of conscious itinerancy to learn, and to challenge, the layout of a city as a populated place. This roving or roaming amounts not merely to a means of acquiring information; it is also a subversive practice. One can use a dérive to experiment with rewriting a map. Narrating past dérives points to the different ways we attune to and respond to multilingual spaces. How do people understand the same spaces in incommensurate ways? How do they attune to others, or fail to?

Montreal, summer 2018. Nina is a Peruvian-American friend from high school who moved to Canada for university and stayed. She is already in line at Romado’s Portuguese Chicken House when I arrive. It’s always a little hard to eat there for us. To begin with, you go to Romado’s for their Portuguese-style rotisserie chicken, as its name suggests. But we like their salmon, so we have to be extraclear about what we want. Before we enter Romado’s, Nina stops me and tells me that on her previous visits, staff behind the counter had not acknowledged her, and when she insisted on ordering anyway they had pretended not to understand her or her “accent.” Even when she spoke loudly and slowly, enunciating every syl-la-ble, they acted frustrated and uncomprehending whether she spoke French or English, and demanded that she repeat her order over and over. They treated her as if she were incomparably stupid. That gets old fast. Nina tells me she is in no mood to deal with their shit today. Thus forewarned, I follow her in to the line. As we get to the front, she physically lays her hands on my waist and guides me, the big white guy, in front of her, the (relatively) diminutive Latina, so I face the counter, with my back to her, and she leans forward on her tippy-toes and tells me her order in my ear in English, while standing behind me. I protest at first. I don’t want to order for her. But her hands are firm and she holds me in place. As I move forward to order, I feel like we’re giving in to their arrogance. Today I want to force them to deal with her,

92

Joshua M. Price

but it must be tiring for Nina, this low-grade onslaught on her soul, when all she wants is their fish. So I order, no problem. I get the food from the guys behind the counter, pay, and we get out of there. Later, enjoying the grilled salmon on our little picnic blanket at Jeanne-Mance Park, Nina elaborates. “I’m too brown,” she says ruefully, but not without a certain pride. And on top of that a woman: a brown woman with an accent. “They can’t let it slide.” They display aggressive ignorance towards her (Frye 1983; Shannon and Sullivan 2007; Lugones 2003, 18; Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). At Romado’s, at least sometimes, a tall, white, Anglo-American guy can expect readier uptake even in Francophone Quebec than a Latinx who speaks French and English (and Portuguese). In Nina’s experience, staff willfully pretend she is hard to understand. Without taking stock of the racialized politics of how the staff tuned me in and tuned her out, one cannot explain the situation with any nuance. In Romado’s, Nina and I were situated differently and experienced events differently. But we were attuned to one another. One might object to this interpretation of events. How do you know, the skeptical reader might ask, they were racist? Why do you rely on her assumption? A lot of racist behaviour is implicit and ambiguous – only occasionally is racism explicit and unambiguous. Reading racism thus usually requires interpretation, a skill acquired through hard-won familiarity in navigating a racist society. Otherwise, racist behaviour can be explained away as a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation. In this case, it is based on observation: Nina observed the employees’ comportment toward her, confirmed by the differential treatment I experienced, and drew an inductive conclusion: racist. Nina interprets their actions based on how they seem to calibrate their way of listening or speaking depending on who they see before them. I orient myself, or open myself to her account. I pay attention. Put in the terms of this argument, I attune myself to Nina’s meanings. I do so because I know her to be a person of sober judgment, seasoned by experience. Trusting her judgment is a consequence of knowing her well and has come to be one element of my tie to her (just as I have friends whose judgment I definitely don’t altogether trust, and that’s part of being friends with them). Indeed, attuning myself to her is to perform, in the sense of acting on or reinforcing, my tie to her, and its mutuality. It could be argued that the staff are brusque to everyone; or that they were just having a rough day. One could also argue that Nina

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

93

is paranoid, or merely jumping to conclusions. But that would mean denying the relevance of history – the entire span from microhistories to macro-histories: one’s own history as a racialized subject in a place such as Montreal to the grand sweep of colonial domination, modernity, and structural racism. Neither of us comes to this moment tabula rasa. We have both lived lives in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Each of us in our own way has come to be conscious of some of the ways in which structural racism manifests itself interactionally. And I am still learning. Another friend in Quebec alerted us to linguistic racism and accent discrimination years before. Daniel grew up speaking French in the Côte d’Ivoire but when he got to Montreal after earning his doctorate in comparative literature, people (white people) often acted as if he did not speak proper French. Daniel read this as racist xenophobia. The racism has a nationalist cast and expresses itself on the linguistic plane, including in everyday interaction. For a Francophone to fail to understand Daniel’s French, or an Anglophone to fail to understand his English, is to fail – really refuse – to attune oneself. By the same token, for me to fail to attune myself to Nina’s reading would be to suspend a facet of the relationship built on trust, confidence, and empathy. I attune myself to her, we both attune ourselves to Daniel, the reader does or does not buy in to the analysis above – a chain of attunements, people willing or disposed to open themselves to the rhythms of the other’s thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. The chain breaks when there is a failure to attune oneself. This does not mean that one uncritically accepts everything another says – attunement implies critical engagement, an attempt to understand deeply and critically what another says, what they mean, or how they are interpreting the world around them. It is through chains of attunement that one builds up a social body, because substantive social coordination depends on attunement. We respond to each other reciprocally, and in this way we form and sustain social units. It is this kind of coordination that Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela credit with the building of social networks (1992, 193–4). Alas, the inverse is also true. A failure to attune oneself to others is what makes for social cleavages. This can happen at an individual level, such as when we shun a person, or, less dramatically, when we simply do not try to understand. The divide can also occur at the collective level, when a group is treated with hostility, or with

94

Joshua M. Price

callous indifference. To those overdetermined as nonsensical, or – more darkly – as dangerous, one is in effect refusing to build a social tie. The gaps in understanding can simply be neutral (I do not know you, and I have no reason to think well or poorly of you), but in many cases, a posture against attuning oneself can be motivated by nationalist ideology, old-fashioned racism, sexism, fear or distrust of foreigners or those perceived to be foreign, and can manifest itself as, for example, interactive accent discrimination. If chains of people attuning themselves to one another are a precondition for networks of solidarity, and if withholding trust prevents those links from forming, one more step completes the practical syllogism. As a political posture, I try to attune myself to women and people of colour as a way to build solidarity. In other words, for me conferring trust is not confined to individual webs of friendship and personal connection. Such a posture does not mean I naively or ingenuously believe everything I am told; I do not check my head at the door. Rather, this vector of attunement implies a disposition or predisposition to take stock and consider the stories women and people of colour tell about the world and their experiences of it. This disposition makes attunement part of an anti-racist and feminist stance. Nina and I continue our walk along the street in Montreal. It’s Erev Pesach, right before Passover starts. In Mile End, we enter a kosher supermarket to buy matzo meal and matzah. The place is abuzz with last-minute shopping. At checkout, I noticed that one fellow in front of us is complaining to the worker who is packing his bags. He’d like two boxes, not one. The worker just rolls his eyes, says he won’t, and continues to pack as before. The man remonstrates in English, “I just spent eighty bucks in here; why don’t you just give me two boxes like I asked?” Nina doesn’t hear this. Later, as we are walking on the street, a Francophone woman is talking to the father of a young girl who is passing her on the street. I blink out of the conversation, in part because my French is so poor, but also because the scene does not intrigue me. Nina laughs and tells me what the woman said about the young girl. Policing gender roles, the mediation of cultural difference, the micro-interaction of consumption, class, and resistance. Mapping how people tune in to each other, or do not, provides evidence of social solidarity or social segmentation along the lines of gender, class, age, or other axes of difference. Mapping attunement is one way into mapping

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

95

how social solidarity is a building block for society, as well as how social conflict manifests itself. In certain cases, publicly declaring one’s vector of attunement can have a consciously political cast. Wearing a t-shirt that says “I believe women,” in the context of a campaign to end sexual harassment and sexual assault, is a public declaration of a disposition to attune to women who have testified to sexual harassment or assault. Chanting “Black Lives Matter” at a demonstration is a way of claiming attunement to Black people stopped by the police. By looking at attunement, we can see how acts of solidarity as well as social divides unfold in real time and in real space. That is, the networks of attunement are subject to, and inform, the ecology of a place as a living, dynamic social context, nested within larger societal networks. The analysis in this case started with street-level footing, as Erving Goffman once put it (1979), though this level is often trivialized or overlooked as merely anecdotal (also see Simon 2006; 2011; 2016).

El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. In 2000, I collaborated with historian Julia Schiavone Camacho in charting the psychogeographic space of the US-Mexican border and the role of language, race, gender, and border enforcement in marking this shadowy, liminal zone. At the time, Julia was teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso, on the US side of the border. El Paso is a medium-sized city. Many of her students commuted from the sprawling megalopolis Ciudad Juárez on the Mexican side. In fact, the two cities were, and are, integrated in all sorts of ways, though they are cut by an international border fence and the Rio Grande. Besides doing her doctoral work on the border, Julia had spent months preparing for our dérives by reading oral histories compiled by her predecessors, oral historians of generations past, who documented the lives of people who crossed the border daily throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Julia pointed out to me that people interviewed for the oral histories did not, in the main, use phrases such as “crossing over” or “cruzar la frontera.” Instead, the United States was “over there,” as some put it: people passed through a contiguous geopolitical space without necessarily marking the border in their speech. Colonization imposed a border as one draws a map or a blueprint, an abstract

96

Joshua M. Price

schema from an imagined bird’s-eye view, but one with real consequences, such as dividing families and communities, including Indigenous communities and Indigenous land. Without minimizing the violence of the border, then, I note that the borderlands is lived in a way irreducible to that aerial view. Here in the borderlands, often people did not draw a national boundary in their speech nor describe one in their phenomenological experience of going back and forth between Mexico and the United States. In order to delve more into the politics of language and space, Julia and I conducted a series of dérives at the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez border between the United States and Mexico. Our political and intellectual inspiration was Abdelhafid Khatib, a Situationist who had conducted two dérives of the marketplace of Les Halles in Paris in 1958. Khatib went out at night to conduct his dérives and published his findings as “Notes on a Psychogeography of Les Halles” (1958; also see Yoon 2013). Khatib does not explicitly describe how he crossed the space, nor does he describe or overtly incorporate the voices of the people who worked in or travelled through this neighbourhood. He does not give an account of how he observed others or how others observed him. Until the end of his essay. And then the reader is brought up short. We learn in an “Afterword” that police arrested Khatib twice during his nocturnal dérives, since he was violating the curfew Paris imposed on North Africans, and he spent two nights in jail. In effect, Khatib turned the dérive into a decolonial tool by showing how authorities maintained a tight colonial grip on Paris itself. Khatib’s account forces us to acknowledge that the experience of a dérive is racially inflected, as the Paris police and the French state enforced discriminatory policies. Khatib documented how the curfew restrictions racialized space. Khatib’s essay illustrates that social location and how you are marked or identified matters in how you move, where you move, with what safety or danger, and that, in turn, has consequences for what you see and perceive, especially for people racialized as non-white. Navigating the worlds of white supremacy, as a white, cisgender-male subject, while engaging in a dérive with a Chicana colleague, I sensed shifts in how we were each perceived as we crossed spaces. Our dérive points to the fragmentation of memory and identity.

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

97

Julia and I began our project by walking from El Paso, Texas, to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico several times during the day, across one of the international bridges that span the Rio Grande. Mid-morning, we conducted dérives of downtown El Paso, and then again after eight p.m. Finally, we ventured out several times to El Paso and across the border to Juárez at two, three, four in the morning. It was pitch black out. I had brought with me from New York a push scooter that I gave to Julia for her birthday, and she was becoming proficient. Occasionally, Julia would speed up and slalom along the dark roads and boulevards, ponytails flying in the wind. As we walked the deserted streets of El Paso, we would occasionally see a tired worker journeying home. Julia would call out in Spanish and scoot over. The person usually seemed to be a bit surprised by Julia’s bright tone at such a desolate hour and place. But they usually warmed quickly to the conversation. We would interview them on where they were going and where they were coming from, flowing back and forth fluidly between Spanish and English. Julia and I debriefed after every interaction and then at the end of the night. El Paso seemed to shut down for the most part after 6 p.m. The stores were closed, people must have gone inside (if they had a home to go to), leaving the streets largely empty and dark. Even the rows of shotgun shacks did not seem to have lights on. Recalling the experience twenty years later, Julia reflects with me on the difference between street life in Mexico and the United States, and how that contrast may have been experienced by generations of her family: I remembered my nana [grandmother] being happier in Mexico where public spaces were livelier into the night, where people tended to sit on their porches. The barrio in Tucson must have reminded her of her home in Mexico which I feel she always missed. (Schiavone Camacho, oral communication, 2019) Indeed, the differences in public space between El Paso, Texas, and just across the border in Ciudad Juárez could not have been clearer. In Juárez, life was bustling at 3 a.m., 4 a.m. In the main strip that ran from one of the border bridges, one could get paletas of sweet mango, green mango, avocado, raspberry, and coconut. Taquerias bustled with business, ranchera music issuing out as sonic advertisements that they were open, drawing us in, even as crowds spilled out onto the streets. Some people standing in the streets craned their

98

Joshua M. Price

necks and leaned forward to eat their tacos al pastor, in the universal posture of biting into street food while keeping one’s body far enough away to avoid the dripping juices. Nearer the border, but still on the Juárez side, we encountered a white woman squatting in the gutter. She told us in English that she was waiting for someone, but then she would break off mid-phrase, or repeat over and over the name of the person she was looking for. I found her a little unnerving. We walked on. Towards the centre of Juárez, Julia recalls, “we chatted with an elderly lady in a plaza.” It was now nearly four in the morning. The woman was sitting on a park bench, surrounded by feeding pigeons. In elegant Spanish, she told us of a film festival that was playing in town. She met her friends at odd hours in the plaza, and sometimes they walked together. “I do not remember if she said something about how lonely it is at night on the US side,” Julia comments, “or if I was drawing these connections.” We met a solemn, austere Central American man, nattily dressed in pressed jeans and a white t-shirt, who was waiting for a coyote to chaperone him across. For him more than anyone else we talked to, the other side seemed to be the most tantalizing even as it was also idealized and distant. His formality and sobriety made for a discordant note with the carousing, busy life all around us, a young couple laughingly enjoying an assignation, commuters walking to work, or street barkers peddling their wares. Some of the man’s Spanish expressions I did not understand, especially when he referred to an illness he had suffered recently, and the herbs a curandera had given him to cure the problem. Is my mind playing tricks on me? Memory, nostalgia, and desire mix together. I remember Juárez as lively, safe for old ladies and entire families eating a late dinner: vibrant street life provided an open zone for all. As I moved back and forth between the United States and Mexico, I began to conclude that the biggest shift from Juárez to El Paso was going from a public space of sociality and interaction – in all its painful, agonizing, and pleasurable colourations – to the solitude of private property and the death of public space in El Paso. Yet this is partial. I know that this was a period of intense femicide: women disappeared and found later, in the desert, sometimes stripped, sometimes wearing other women’s clothing, unsolved murders and sex crimes in addition to the dozens, even hundreds of cases

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

99

of women murdered by husbands, boyfriends, or other intimates. The social conditions – the armed gangs, the cartels, the ruthless exploitation of workers in the border maquiladoras, as well as the legions of women forced by economic circumstances to travel at night or in the early morning to work, or across the border – contributed to make Ciudad Juárez unsafe for women. The border insecurity was a result of economic and social organization, in other words. These accounts of what the border represents are important to gather and understand, and to fill in the picture of what the border means for women in Mexico. It would have been too easy for me to come away with a reductive, monolithic understanding of the meaning of the border for people who live in the borderlands. Without the company and feedback of Julia and other Mexican women and women of colour, I might have missed the perils of the borderland for women, especially women racialized as non-white. Acknowledging the structures of gender violence entails wrestling with the difficulties of translating the language women use when they face disparate forms of danger as they move across public and private spaces. As the number of femicides has spun increasingly out of control in the succeeding decades, they have been joined by mounting thousands, and by now tens of thousands, of men and gender-non-conforming people who have gone missing – desaparecidos, in that most fearsome of participles that Latin America has given us – or simply murdered and put out on display. What is that particular strip of Juárez like today? I return to this below. On one of the dérives, we set out on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso (utep ). I followed Julia over to the main research library. The campus library was one of the most bizarrely situated buildings I have ever been in. With its imposingly high walls and turrets, it evoked a nineteenth-century penitentiary. The library reminded me of New York’s Attica prison. I couldn’t stop gaping at it. Ultimately, however, it was not the building’s architecture I found so spellbinding and so appalling; it was the perspective one gained from the utep Library. Peering out from the third-floor reading room through a small arrow slit, I could spy straight down and see the border fence. Someone had fitted dozens and dozens of needle-like nails all around the windows in the library, doubtless to

100

Joshua M. Price

ward off pigeons or other birds, but I had an experience of looking out of Fortress America, in the form of this neo-Gothic early-twentyfirst-century castle. The perspective was the outcome of, and also engendered, a sense of being besieged. As I looked down, I could see that the border fence was topped with concertina wire. Evenly spaced border patrol suv s traintracked the fence into the horizon in both directions, each suv with men in the signature olive-green shirts of the Border Patrol surveying the Rio Grande with binoculars. The river, that mighty symbol of the border, ran just beyond the fence, with several bridges spanning it from the Mexican side. Weakened by the heat, the pitiless sunlight and the substantial water drained off for agricultural irrigation upstream, and tamed into a canal within the city limits of El Paso–Juárez, the Rio Grande dribbled sadly along. And then the vast sprawl of Ciudad Juárez unfolded with its pink adobe hue, mottled with the concrete solidity of its metallic industrial core, and dotted with the blues and yellows of painted houses. Beyond that, I could see the sandy-coloured expanse of Chihuahua. Viewed from my perch inside the library, I could not get over that sight, that expanse. I have never forgotten it. A citadel mentality is the opposite of attuning oneself to another’s message. Twenty years later, I am haunted by a memory of a militarized border that is now even more militarized. The border has been reinforced, backed by more machinery of state violence and state surveillance, shored up by astounding public displays of populist white supremacy in the United States, even as it also faces stiff contestation and protest on both sides of the border. After conducting these border dérives in 2000, I felt as if the US side of the border was marked most of all by the death of public space. However, as of 2020, the US side of the border region has become much more sinister and terrifying. In the American popular imagination, the US border has become identified with disappearing migrant people coming over the border into the labyrinths of federal custody, separating families, or simply turning them back to places of manifest danger. “The Border” is impressed ever more forcefully onto people’s lives. The language of separation, epitomized in the notion of a border wall, demonstrates the horror that the border visits on people’s lives. The violence of the border has probably never been more marked.

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

101

at t u n e ment People attune to each other in a variety of ways. As we saw above, Brian Massumi adds a political analysis of how people can be mutually absorbed in an activity: in large public events such as a political demonstration, for example, different actors are “differently absorbed, coming at it asymmetrically, from different angles, living a different complexion of affecting–being affected, transitioning through the encounter to different outcomes, perhaps structured into different roles” (2015, 95). Each person reacts in their own embodied way to each other and to external circumstances.Yet they are attuned. Attunement is not always salubrious or celebratory. I can snub you on the street, and let you know. Or, as you walk toward me on the street, you can try to intimidate me wordlessly so I step off the sidewalk and let you pass. We are attuned, although in a negative, hostile key. Attunement can take on an even deeper, existential sense. Attunement for Zadie Smith involves a moment of aesthetic and even spiritual defencelessness. To get us to that point, Kierkegaard hopes to “attune” us, systematically discarding all the usual defenses we put up in the face of the absurd ... But if you want to effect a breach in that stolid edifice the human personality I think it helps to cultivate this Kierkegaardian sense of defenselessness. (2012) Defencelessness points to a state of uncertainty, of disorientation. Attuning oneself deeply to someone new requires a cultivated openness to significant cognitive shifts, to re-reading communication, the world, and other people’s inhabitation of the world, in radically new ways. Attunement is an active state. Cultivating this defenselessness means letting go of the desire that everything be transparent and clear. Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently “absurd” phenomena – like the category of the “new” in art – that we become more open to them. Put simply: you need to lower your defenses. (Smith 2012)

102

Joshua M. Price

This kind of attunement leaves one teetering on the edge of bewilderment. My thesaurus links bewilderment to being bamboozled or conned. That does not sound right, since bamboozled implies being misled or fooled. Bewildered does not; it is to be bemused or perplexed. Nevertheless, for my particular use it is helpful to wonder if I am being tricked, because then I adopt a critical attitude; I worry that someone is trying to take advantage of me, or that I am being misled by some social institution or ideology. I am on guard against being hoodwinked. In the more neutral sense, I am bewildered because I am temporarily or partially freeing myself from some previous understanding, though I have yet to land on some other terra firma. Part of the hesitation is that I may never find it. The particular form of attunement I am arguing for strikes a balance between lowering defenses and staying on guard against being bamboozled. It requires a circumspect reading of the politics of language use in a given situation.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2007. I have come to the college graduation of a friend. Her father’s family is Italian American and her mother’s family is Mexican. We have just eaten a torta de tres leches and I sprawl out in my chair, dawdling at the kitchen table after a rich meal. I chat amicably in Spanish with my friend and her mother. Since I am new here, I am watchful, yet my friend and her mother do everything to make me feel comfortable. An aunt from the Italian-American side is sitting with us, impatiently fingering a plastic cup. “Speak English!” she says. My friend’s mother ignores her and keeps chatting with me in Spanish, not even pausing, not even glancing at her sister-in-law, who is seated immediately to her left. I silently admire the mother’s calm, good-humoured resolve. Do I notice a mischievous grin curl at the corner of her mouth? “Speak English,” the sister-in-law says again, and my friend’s mother chats on in Spanish, and I respond in kind. Then I am cast forward in time. We are seated around a large table in Vancouver, Spanish speakers from across Latin America, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. “Speak English,” says the man, an Anglo-Canadian, the only non-Spanish speaker among the dozen assembled. White men, English speakers, speakers of a majority language or hegemonic dialect, are more accustomed to being the centre, to interrupting others, to deciding not to attune ourselves to others if it takes too much work.

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

103

That command, “Speak English!,” was, in this context, to demand that something be made simple. It was to evade the challenge of stereophonic complexity and to deny oneself the chance to zero in on others’ frequencies. It was to seek the superficially easy, the monocultural. It was to refuse the challenge of opacity implied by a vibrant, multilingual ambiance (Glissant 1989, 189–94). It was to wall oneself off from other possibilities, other Americas, with all the possible rabbit holes one may go down. Against the backdrop of cultural domination, the demand to speak English aligns with the call for a monolingual nation. Some people are more accustomed to attuning themselves in challenging situations, and to appreciating, even loving, multilingual environments, or at least being more patient with opacity. Power dynamics make it so that women, people from minority languages, and other people who are otherwise socially marginal are often cast in the role of listener. I remember a Deaf friend who would suffer through long dinners with hearing people speaking to each other in conventional ways – without sign language. We would only occasionally stop and write him notes, ask him questions, or otherwise engage him. While he listened, he would study us, our movements and gestures. At times, I would watch him watch us. He was attuning himself to us, following us, taking part in a communication that we, irresponsibly, were not making particularly easy for him. Attunement for some is a vocation, and for some it is a survival skill; skill at attunement is in part learned behaviour, and in part disposition. When English-speakers bank on others attuning themselves, their impulse sometimes emerges from a sense of entitlement, and a history of being the subject of others’ attunement.

c o n c l u s i on In my twenties, living in Chicago and then New York, I remember listening to Spanish-speakers once I had learned enough Spanish to follow the gist of a conversation. It was as if I had been granted a superpower. I had acquired x-ray vision: I could see through walls into rooms that had previously been closed to me. What had been a wall of opaque sounds could be dissolved into its component elements. I could participate in the exchanges I saw on the other side of the wall. (Of course, there was a sociality to developing this particular superpower: I had “acquired” this ability by being taught Spanish by Spanish speakers.)

104

Joshua M. Price

For me, the x-ray vision had to be intentional, and to a certain extent it still has to be. It requires that I focus my attention, and if I don’t concentrate, if I don’t try to penetrate meanings, then I am still surrounded by barriers of jumbled sounds. I have to attune myself to the meanings. Conceiving of translation as tuning in is in part a pragmatic solution to the problem of understanding another’s language in a living context. Tuning in involves deriving meaning from complex sensory data – sounds, gesticulations, bodily movement. If one is placed too far away from the moment one desires to translate (literally or figuratively), the sound is fuzzy, blurry, unclear, or one misses it entirely. How one dials in, or whether one does, is an analytical question, but it is also an ideological, aesthetic, and political one. The politics of English hegemony, at least in North America, often take the form of a sharp nativist distinction between, on the one hand, an imagined transparency and solidarity among English speakers – an ethnonationalist conceptualization of internal homogeneity – and on the other hand, an othering of non-English speakers, where an opaque wall is imagined to separate English speakers from non-English speakers. The distinction has been racialized. The examples above illustrate the racial and gender stakes of tuning in or tuning out. In a similar spirit, Rita Felski has argued for a “suspicious” reading: [N]ot just an intellectual exercise, but a distinctive disposition or sensibility that is infused with a mélange of affective and attitudinal components. Experimenting with other modes of reading and reasoning will require us not only to think differently but also, perhaps, to feel differently. (Felski 2011, 575) If the theoretical problem is when, why, and under what conditions a person translates, the practical problem is how to describe how one tunes in. The Situationists supply us with a tool from the avant-garde movement, the dérive, as a means to chart the psychogeography of transient spaces. By conceiving of translation as differential affective attunement we acknowledge how nuanced communication is, how each person participating in a communicative exchange reads or hears a word or phrase differently, how each listener literally incorporates the word differently – draws the expression into their bodies. Translation-as-tuning-in gives us a metaphor to take up the botched communication, rebuffs, snubs, missed signals, and the like.

Translation Frequencies: Tuning In and Out

105

Put in positive terms, differential attunement gives us a rich framework to describe how people focus in on a person or a moment, and activate their interpretive apparatus to draw out meanings. This approach to multilinguality is attentive to place and the space of encounter, open to analysis of ambiance, attitudes of anger, excitement, repulsion, fear. From that base in micro-interaction, we build a detailed sense of the social fabric, while noting its idiosyncrasies and vicissitudes. These detailed, thick descriptions of ever-evolving ecologies can give us a better sense of how social blocs form and dissolve, and how entire neighbourhoods, communities, and societies are built, stably or unstably, through everyday interaction in multilingual settings. no t e s 1 For their conversation and comments on earlier versions, I wish to thank Elena Basile, Julia Schiavone Camacho, S¸ehnaz Tahir Gürçag˘ lar, and María Constanza Guzmán. 2 I will use “translating” and “interpreting” interchangeably. 3 I thank Elena Basile for introducing me to the literature on ecologies of language.

r e f e r e n ce s Basile, Elena. 2016. “Languaging and Emergent Scapes of the Intelligible: Thinking through an Experiment in Affective Mapping.” Tusaaji: A Translation Review 5, no. 5: 82–98. Debord, Guy. 1989 [1958]. “Theory of the Dérive.” Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958). In Situationist International Anthology, translated by Ken Knabb, 50–5. Berkeley, ca : Bureau of Public Secrets. No copyright. Díaz, Junot / Booksmag. 2009. “Junot Díaz s’exprime sur le spanglish.” Posted 10 February 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUzDl6c Q66w, 3:03. Ellison, Ralph. 1995 [1952]. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage. Fanon, Frantz. 2008 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. London: Pluto Press. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, ny : Crossing Press. Felski, Rita. 2011. “Context Stinks.” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn): 573–91.

106

Joshua M. Price

Glissant, Édouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, va : University of Virginia Press. Goffman, Erving. 1979. “Footing.” Semiotica 25, no. 1: 1–30. https://doi. org/10.1515/semi.1979.25.1-2.1. Khatib, Abdelhafid. 1958. “Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles.” Translated by Paul Hammond. Internationale Situationniste no. 2 (December 1958). http://www.cddc. vt.edu/sionline/si/leshalles.html. Kothari, Rita. 2018. “Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India: Acts of Naming and Translating.” In A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamic in India, edited by Rita Kothari, 116–32. Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press. Martínez, Jacqueline. 2000. Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis. Lanham, md : Rowman & Littlefield. Massumi, Brian. 2015. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1992. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boulder, co: Shambhala. Pennycook, Alastair. 2017. “Translanguaging and Semiotic Assemblages.” International Journal of Multilingualism 14, no. 3: 269–82. Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger, eds. 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press. Simon, Sherry. 2006. Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal, qc : McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2011. Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. New York: Routledge. – 2016. Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life. Montreal, qc: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Smith, Zadie. 2012. “Some Notes on Attunement: A Voyage around Joni Mitchell.” New Yorker, 17 December. Stern, Daniel. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana. 2007. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: suny Press. Yoon Soyoung. 2013. “Cinema against the Permanent Curfew of Geometry: Guy Debord’s Sur Le Passage de Quelques Personnes à Travers Une Assez Courte Unité de Temps (1959).” Grey Room 52: 38–61. doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00115.

5

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals: Negotiating Multilingualism in Print Culture María Constanza Guzmán There is a geography of imagination which imposes on the Caribbean artist a unique location in space and time. George Lamming What is multilingualism? It is not only the ability to speak several languages, which is often not the case in our region where we sometimes cannot even speak our oppressed mother tongue. Multilingualism is the passionate desire to accept and understand our neighbor’s language and to confront the massive leveling force of language continuously imposed by the West with a multiplicity of languages and their mutual comprehension. Édouard Glissant

Linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity are in tension with, and often overdetermined by, fixed national and regional cartographies. In the Americas, spaces of language heterogeneity have been obscured through various means, including hegemonic nation-centred discourses informed by geopolitical borders that condition national languages and frame nations and communities. Territorial markers inform identity discourses that privilege linguistic homogeneity, resulting in a national consciousness that is often at odds with the identitarian possibilities emerging from lived linguistic and cultural experience on the ground. As sites of intellectual conversations, periodicals provide a unique vantage point from which to study the circulation of ideas multilingually, transnationally, and transculturally. Throughout the

108

María Constanza Guzmán

twentieth century, “periodicals played a fundamental role in key cultural and political debates that are now part of the historical archive. They also offer rich and productive ground for the study of translation, as a concept and as a practice, within the larger interdisciplinary spectrum of intellectual history.”1 Periodicals are rich in structural elements and abundant in information. Also, as Tahir Gürçag˘lar notes, they shed light on their audiences, as they are often intended to be read during a certain period, address a well-defined readership, emphasize contemporary material thus creating a sense of immediacy, and build a dialogue with their readers.2 Moreover, periodicals are sites to trace specific “epistemological economies,” as Claudia de Lima Costa argues, for they are part of the “material apparatus that oversees the travels of theories and organizes their translation, publication, and circulation,” and can be counted among “the institutionalities controlling the circulation of texts in the symbolic networks.”3 This chapter emerged from a project centred on tracing twentiethcentury intellectual history in Latin America and the Caribbean via translation.4 It is based on archival research – a comprehensive survey of all translated materials in each of the periodicals – charting which texts from what languages and locations each periodical translated, how these texts were framed, and how they relate to other contents and to editorial decisions. These include the thematic patterns of translation praxis, the intersections between the translated narratives and other narratives, and the presence and role of translation vis-à-vis the editorial policies and visions – stated and unstated – of the periodicals and of the larger intellectual projects within which they are inscribed. Looking at the translation praxis and at the discursive compositions that are constructed through translation, the central questions of the project have been: What are the vectors of exchange that realize themselves in these periodicals? What is the directionality of the translated exchanges? How does translation perpetuate colonial intellectual and epistemic legacies? How does it subvert, resist, decolonize the spaces inscribed by these legacies? What are the images of Latin America and the Caribbean that emerge from these periodicals? I discuss these questions as they relate to cultural and editorial projects in the Caribbean as spaces where multilingualism and linguistic hybridity are negotiated and transacted.5 I look at the Caribbean

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

109

itself, and at its periodicals, as spaces of translation where stated and unstated language policies are enacted. These spaces, in turn, at times perpetuate while at other times disrupting official histories and colonial legacies via the negotiation of linguistic heterogeneity. In examining specific editorial projects from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean, I have looked at the periodicals Bim, Tropiques, and Casa de las Américas, and compared their different editorial visions and approaches to discuss the implications of diverse strategies of transacting linguistic diversity via translation and editorial praxis in the Caribbean. While not overlooking the cultural and historic complexity and heterogeneity of the region, I focus specifically on the implications of diverse uses of translation for transacting multilingualism. To the extent that these strategies are deployed against the background of larger discursive formations, they help bring to the surface tensions, continuities, and discontinuities between official, national, and regional discourses about language and more organic narrative practices. This study has unfolded on the basis of an interdisciplinary framework, which includes mainly contemporary translation and literary studies, and Latin American cultural theory. Firstly, the approach to the topic has been largely archival, both methodologically – i.e., it involves examining archival materials – and epistemologically, in that it approaches translation as part of the Latin American archive and its relation with narrative and cultural history.6 It is premised on the observation that translation, as a practice and as a notion that is part of Latin American and Caribbean intellectual history, has been relatively unexamined; thus, investigating the intersection between translation and the history of ideas in the Americas is a way of addressing “subjugated knowledges,”7 in the process toward a genealogy of translation in its relation to intellectual history in the Americas. The analysis is inspired by the work of Uruguayan scholar Ángel Rama, particularly by the notions he posits for narrative analysis in La transculturación narrativa en América Latina. It is also informed by the so-called decolonial turn. As Aníbal Quijano points out, “after the colonization of America and the expansion of European colonialism to the rest of the world, the subsequent constitution of Europe as a new id-entity needed the elaboration of a Eurocentric perspective of knowledge”:8

110

María Constanza Guzmán

The incorporation of such diverse and heterogeneous cultural histories into a single world dominated by Europe signified a cultural and intellectual intersubjective configuration equivalent to the articulation of all forms of labor control around capital … Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony.9 This is the legacy that Ángel Rama traces in La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City], as he unveils the filial connection between colonial discourse and intellectual production. When it comes to translation, if and when translation is a way of privileging Western frameworks and voices from the (euro)centre (to use Quijano’s term), translation praxis is consistent with the Eurocentric logic of the coloniality of knowledge. As much as it has been a vector of Western and Eurocentric thinking, translation has also been a necessary condition for internationalist emancipatory movements. As Brent Hayes Edwards notes in his study of Black internationalism and the diaspora in the Black Atlantic, such study “can be seen only in translation”: It is not possible to take up the question of “diaspora” without taking account of the fact that the great majority of peoples of African descent do not speak or write in English. I have outlined some of the reasons that it makes sense to situate this question in particular through the dialogues and encounters facilitated in the French metropole between the world wars; if, as I argue, that space is privileged and richly varied, it is by no means the exclusive prism of linguistic exchange. The larger point is that one can approach such a project only by attending to the ways that discourses of internationalism travel, the ways they are translated, disseminated, reformulated, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference.10 When studying twentieth-century intellectual history it becomes evident that cultural production in the Americas, and specifically in the Caribbean, has traces of colonial dynamics, migration flows, and the interplay between the local and the transnational. “Print languages” (Anderson 2016) also bear traces of the hierarchies

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

111

emerging from Caribbean history. This is one of the reasons that led this project to periodicals that saw themselves as having a regional scope. In one way or another, they were (or have been) committed to a sense of intellectual autonomy and self-determination, while aspiring not to restrict themselves to the national but to contribute to a larger cultural field. As such, they display productive tensions emerging from their contextual specificities. While positioning themselves as Latin American or Caribbean intellectual fora, one can thus ask, are these periodicals responding to a unidirectional logic that perpetuates intellectual (colonial) unidirectionality?11 Or, conversely, are they able to establish a transcultural interaction of cultural production aimed to achieve a complex, bi/multi-directional cultural organicity, a poiesis of the Americas, leading to transcultural forms of intellectual exchange and vernacular ways of knowing?

t r a n s l at io n ( in ) t he cari bbean The Caribbean is the most multilingual space in the hemisphere12 and translation is a central aspect of intellectual life in the Caribbean. However, as Buzelin and others remark, translation’s importance is often overlooked in studies about the region: “Whether it is the promotion of creative works or the circulation of knowledge, the development of a pan-Caribbean cultural identity is to a large extent dependent on a practice that is often excluded from theoretical debates: translation.”13 Moreover, critics – such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat – have affirmed that translation goes beyond cultural production, and that it is in fact at the heart of the complex condition of Caribbean identity. As regards hegemonic cultural forms, the intellectual borders in the Caribbean are established by linguistic ones, based on an image of the region that is mapped upon colonial cartographies and, as such, reproduces them. As Edouard Glissant describes it, the Caribbean, once an archipelago “constantly linked by a system of communication, from the continent to the islands of the north, from the islands to the continent in the south,” was “balkanized” by colonization and the “arrogant imperialism of monolingualism accompanied the spread of Western culture.”14 From the eighteenth century, with the development of print, improved trans-Atlantic communications, “and the fact that the various Americas shared languages with their respective metropoles,” there was “a relatively easy transmission”

112

María Constanza Guzmán

of the doctrines being produced in Western Europe.15 Following the mappings thus traced, the Caribbean intellectual field, and language in it, unfolds via vectors of exchange that are historically predetermined. To this day, “when it comes to the circulation of literature, and more particularly of its own home-grown literary culture, the Caribbean presents a complex web of (neo)colonial heritage and relative publishing independence” (Saint-Loubert 2017, 48). Rather than participating in an experience of the Americas, the colonially sedimented Caribbean fragmentation generates over and over again an interlocutor that, whether real and imagined, is based in the eurocentre. Hereby lies the dialectic of translation: an emancipatory praxis inscribed by the colonial relation. Referring to the Caribbean cultural field in the twentieth century, in his book El Caribe Literario the Cuban critic Emilio Jorge Rodríguez discusses the importance of literary periodicals in the Caribbean around the 1930s and 1940s. He notes that, specifically in the English-speaking Caribbean, periodicals represented a novel phenomenon and a shift in the hierarchies among literatures and writers.16 A new era began in which they, and particularly the so-called “little magazines,” would serve as substitutes for Caribbeanborn publishing houses – up to then scarce or non-existent.17 As Rodríguez notes, these periodicals would then become one of the few central sites for literary activity and circulation, bring to the readers a considerable number of Caribbean authors that were formerly unknown, and promote bibliographic information and analysis. As such, they were also a locus for a Caribbean worldview.18 As fora and spaces for community formation, periodicals in the region also created the condition of possibility for a liberation that was at once linguistic, thematic, aesthetic, and epistemic. They offered a space able to constitute new alliances and create from the Caribbean. As George Lamming stated, speaking of the condition of the Caribbean intellectual and her-his relation to the colonial legacy, these spaces for literary and cultural conversation were emancipatory as they led to an unconscious bond between these writers of a later generation who come from different territories: Jamaica, Haiti, Bahamas, Trinidad. The overlap of themes is a natural consequence. Whatever the period, history becomes a contemporary character ... Sometimes it is not clear whether class or pigment

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

113

is the more decisive signal in the formation of personal and group allegiances. But it is in the very flexible and varying range of language, the subtle or even explicit manipulation of speech rhythms, that much new writing commands a particular attention. If the metropole directed what is standard and required by the cultural establishments, it is at the periphery of colony and neo-colony that the imagination resists, destabilises and transforms the status of the word in action. This is [the] mark of cultural sovereignty [my emphasis]: the free definition and articulation of the collective self, whatever the rigour of external constraints.

t r a n s l at io n in

tropiques

Part of the collective project led by Martinican intellectual Aimé Césaire, the literary journal Tropiques was founded and published in Fort-de-France between 1941 and 1945 – Martinique was under Vichy rule at the time. Out of the intellectual energy surrounding World War II and a desire to foreground Martinican identity, collaborators Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Roussi (Césaire), and other Martinican intellectuals including René Ménil and Aristide Maugée founded Tropiques. Its philosophic and aesthetic project was openly political, linked to a project of cultural self-affirmation, and, although short-lived, Tropiques exerted considerable influence. Considered a “legendary journal of avant-garde philosophy, criticism, poetry, and ethnology, history, and politics,” it was, according to Wilder, “less interested in criticizing modern universality from the standpoint of Black particularity than in refiguring the relationship between universality and particularity by fashioning an original Antillean modernism that was simultaneously rooted and cosmopolitan.”19 Within the Caribbean, Tropiques is considered a pioneer of periodicals valorizing Caribbean culture and intellectual production. As Munro notes, to this day it is a testimony of the energy of a committed generation.20 Tropiques was published exclusively in French and included mostly essays and poetry. Paradoxically, despite its explicit intent to be a project of the Caribbean, specifically of and for an AfroCaribbean cultural space, and its drive to decentre the intellectual nucleus from the European metropole, Tropiques’s references are mostly European – most of the epigraphs were by European poets and

114

María Constanza Guzmán

intellectuals (e.g., Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Debussy), and the actual contents reveal a conversation that takes place mainly with the eurocentre. Although the editorial project is a Caribbean one, as well as being nationally and identitarily self-affirming, it was built via the colonial language – as is the case for most Latin American and Caribbean periodicals. In its deixis there is a marked use of a “we” that addresses a European “you.” The “we” seems to denote sometimes Martinique, sometimes a collective and internationalist Negritude project. Tropiques was able to map a territory that went beyond its national borders, in which there was an imagined Caribbean. The presence of translation in Tropiques is consistent with this practice. Translation was used to frame the periodical’s own political positions. For example, in one of its first issues, on Afro-Caribbean literature, an essay by Césaire is followed by a translation of an essay by author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson, “La Creation du Monde” (trans. Roux Delimal). However, contents from the Anglophone or Hispanophone Caribbean are virtually absent. One issue included a section devoted to Cuban literature, and featured a translation from the Spanish of a text by the Cuban author and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, published next to a text by Alejo Carpentier (originally in French). Beyond this gesture toward a pan-Caribbean dialogue, the desire for an international conversation was a transatlantic one, enacted vis-à-vis the cultural production of France.21 The enunciation of Tropiques is addressed, not to the Caribbean or to the rest of the Americas, but to the eurocentre. However, the recognition of the centrality of language was palpable. Through the various issues of Tropiques we can see the question of vernacular language gradually come to the fore. There is the presence of Martinican creole, presented as a constituting part of an identitarian complexity that the journal seeks to engage. The presence is framed for a foreign audience, as it were. It is presented for discussion and explained, glossed, translated, so to speak. Finally, there are hints in Tropiques of a transcultural transatlantic relationship, as can be seen in essays discussing the arts in France and the Caribbean at once (e.g., an article about André Breton and Wilfredo Lam). As a general rule, the periodical’s enunciation and its drive for a dialogue is not addressed to the Caribbean, nor to the Americas, but to the European – and Europe-based – interlocutor.22

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

t r a n s l at io n i n

115

bim

The Caribbean periodical Bim, a “little magazine,” was founded in 1942 by the Barbadian writer, editor, and artist Frank Collymore (1893–1980) – also known as the “Barbadian Man of the Arts.” Its main goal was to promote the literary production of the English-speaking Caribbean. Published twice a year, Bim has been one of the central and most influential regional fora among Anglophone Caribbean writers. As Lamming wrote in his introduction to one of the 1955 issues, describing the role of Bim in the intellectual conversations of its time: There are not many West Indian writers today who did not use Bim as a kind of platform, the surest, if not the only avenue, by which they might reach a literate and sensitive reading public, and almost all of the West Indians who are now writers in a more professional sense and whose work has compelled the attention of readers and writers in other countries, were introduced, so to speak, by Bim.23 One important feature of Bim revolved around the connections it developed, thanks to its editor Collymore, to promote Caribbean letters abroad. Specifically, it was closely linked to the influential bbc radio programme Caribbean Voices, which served as an important vehicle for Caribbean writers to become known oversees. “Particularly in the years when the Irishman Henry Swanzy was program producer (1946–1954), Caribbean Voices actively encouraged the writing of fiction that was expressive of West Indian realities and that utilized West Indian cultural forms.”24 When it comes to translating practice in Bim, we see that the presence of translation in its issues was minimal. During its first two years of existence, no translations were published. Despite this monolingual quality, its pages featured a great diversity of Caribbean voices, as it included authors from Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana, and St Lucia. Issue no. 12 was the first one including texts from the French Caribbean. These were published in the French originals and introduced by an essay by André Midas that was translated from the French.25 In 1953 Bim included a second issue on the Francophone Caribbean, devoted to Haiti and Martinique; that time the poems

116

María Constanza Guzmán

were published in English translation. In all of the journal’s issues until 1969, the only other translations were a few essays originally published in Europe dealing with Caribbean literature and its European reception (e.g., “The Contribution of the West Indies to Poetry” by Janheinz Jahn).26 In general terms, the presence of translation in the first three decades of Bim was minimal. Regarding the journal’s awareness vis-à-vis questions of language, in its editorial vision it is clear that Bim’s project of Caribbean self-affirmation involved the question of language and a recognition and legitimation of the vernacular. It did so mostly by explaining and glossing: Collymore devoted years to compiling a glossary of Barbadian creole. The glossary began with an initial list of expressions in 1953, to which entries and sections were added each year. It eventually became a central feature of Bim and ended up being published in book form.27 Consistent with its vision, the image of the Caribbean that emerges in Bim is specifically the Anglophone Caribbean experience. What is different from Tropiques is that, at least until the 1970s, Bim’s vision is at once plural and centripetal, in the sense that the cultural affirmation is done from within and for internal consumption, as it were. The scarcity of translations and the total absence of texts from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is also consistent with the Anglo-Caribbean-centric vision. Bim’s own, explicit, and conscious mission, which it fulfills almost without contradiction, was mobilizing an emerging Anglo-Caribbean literature – hence the importance of measuring reception in Europe, by tracking prizes or the presence of Anglo-Caribbean authors in international anthologies. The “we” of Bim includes a dynamic and changing intellectual collective body whose matrix emerges in the Caribbean and radiates from within, rather than addressing itself to a European metropole.28 Nevertheless, it remains framed by the linguistic fragmentation of the Caribbean responding to the colonial regional mapping.

t ran s l at io n in

r e v i s ta c a s a d e l a s a m é r i c a s

Founded in 1959, Casa de las Américas is an important cultural institution of the Cuban revolution, a nucleus of cultural production and the origin of numerous and varied pan-American cultural initiatives. Revista Casa de las Américas, a monthly associated with the eponymous institution, was founded in 1960, shortly after the

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

117

creation of the institution Casa, and is still in existence. Along with other initiatives of the cultural institution, Revista Casa became a central Latin American forum, gathering and exalting the energies and ideas of Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals. Casa as an intellectual project was overtly political: its first director, Haydée Santamaría, was part of Fidel Castro’s insurgent forces in the Sierra Maestra and, like all other revolutionaries, would continue the revolutionary project in the newly structured social and cultural institution. After Santamaría, since 1965 (issue 30) and until the end of the twentieth century, Revista Casa was directed by renown Cuban intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar – author of the influential essay “Caliban.”29 Casa the institution and Revista Casa were, from their inception, Latin Americanist projects, and endeavoured to offer a counterpoint to the dominant narratives of culture in Latin American intellectual discourse. Casa de las Américas celebrated the liberation struggles of the Third World … and the tradition of Latin American antiimperialism epitomized by Martí. It awarded literary prizes in the categories of the novel, poetry, the essay and the short story, which were then published and distributed throughout Latin America. Attractively illustrated, Casa de las Américas responded to the long-standing dream of the avant-garde to close the gap between life and art and to foster intellectual commitment to the cause of emancipation … It represented a new cultural geography, one whose center had drastically shifted from Europe.30 For Revista Casa, in terms of volume, translation was the exception rather than the rule. However, despite the fact that they were significantly less frequent than non-translated materials, translated texts played a central role in the development of Revista Casa, its debates, and its pan-American scope and area of influence. True to its Latin American scope, the journal has consistently published texts mostly by Latin American and Caribbean writers and intellectuals, most of which were originally written in Spanish but also included translations. On average, we can find translated material in one out of every two issues, and often in a smaller number vis-à-vis the rest of the contents. Between 1960 and 2000 Revista Casa featured translations from more than fifteen languages. The majority of texts were translated from French, English, and Portuguese.

118

María Constanza Guzmán

In Revista Casa we find a significant density of translations of texts by United States authors, almost without exception civil-rights activists and political radicals and authors committed to social justice – from Martin Luther King to Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. However, the great majority of translations from English are of texts written by authors from Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean. This is also true for translations from French and Creole, which are to a large extent by authors from the Americas. Translations from Portuguese are largely from texts by Brazilian authors. There is a higher density of translation in special issues devoted to regions where languages other than Spanish were prevalent. For example, in 1970 an entire issue was devoted to the First Pan-African Cultural Festival which had taken place in 1969 in Algiers, and in 1975 an issue is devoted to the Anglophone Caribbean. These and other special issues were composed almost exclusively of translations. Conspicuous in its near-absence is translation from Russian and the entire Soviet bloc. Despite the political relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union until the end of the eighties – and especially through what the Cuban intellectual Ambrosio Fornet called the quinquenio gris, the presence of Soviet-era texts, and of translations from Russian and from the languages of Eastern Europe, is almost insignificant compared to French, English, Portuguese, and even Italian. This suggests that, while organically connected with the political field, the cultural field – if Revista Casa is any index – had its own workings and a measure of autonomy. Regarding planning, there is no evidence of a statement about a policy for translation as part of general editorial practice. For example, in regard to crediting translators, at first translators weren’t identified, nor was the language of origin of the translated texts; within five years of publication, the presence of translations and translators in Revista Casa became more overt and visible. A significant feature of translation practice in Revista Casa is the fact that the presence of translation in the journal is not limited to the translation of articles, poems, or other stand-alone pieces; the book reviews section, a significant portion of the journal, includes reviews of translations. Moreover, the editorial section at the end of the journal (entitled “Al pie de la letra” – literally “verbatim”), where the editorial voice can be felt at its strongest and one of the sections for which Revista Casa became well-known, integrated fragments of translated texts in practically every issue. These were mostly excerpts

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

119

of international newspaper articles (e.g., there were several from Le Monde Diplomatique), often about topics related to Cuba, Cubans abroad, and Cuban cultural policy, as well as of Latin American cultural production (e.g., several pieces documented the internationalization of the so-called Latin American Boom in the seventies). The editorial “voice” positioned itself vis-à-vis the views represented in the excerpt cited: it would either expose the differences between its views and Revista Casa’s, or endorse them, in which case translation served to legitimize or support the view of Revista Casa. The Caribbean has featured prominently throughout Casa’s over sixty years of existence. What is characteristic about Casa is its focus on creating an image of Latin America that took itself as the centre – not the eurocentre. Moreover, contrary to other Spanishcentric Latin American projects, Casa saw the Caribbean as part of the common territory of the Americas. Translation from both English and French, and from Creole, favours the translation of intellectual communities that are mostly of the Americas and commonly viewed as peripheral. Since early on in the sixties, Revista Casa devoted entire issues to the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, each featuring translations of numerous well-known and emerging authors. The translations in the monthly granted a great deal of attention to language, specifically to the linguistic hybridity of the Caribbean – which was marked, rather than erased, in the translations. In addition to the publication of works by authors from the Caribbean and of issues devoted to the region in Revista Casa, the institution Casa de las Américas also published book-length translations into Spanish of works by Caribbean authors in various genres and awarded prizes to authors from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. As Ileana Sanz notes, Casa’s publishing house’s (fondo editorial) first book-length Spanish translation of an anglophone Caribbean work was The Hills Were Joyful Together by Jamaican author Roger Mais (translated as Las montañas jubilosas and published in 1978), and Casa may have published the first Spanish-language anthologies of Anglophone Caribbean and Francophone Caribbean authors ever published in the Americas. In 1979, a dedicated research centre was created, the Centro de Estudios del Caribe, which has a multilingual periodical called Anales del Caribe. The important role played by Casa de las Américas for plurilingual exchange in the Caribbean region is well-established and its

120

María Constanza Guzmán

initiatives have been recognized and enjoyed prestige for decades.31 Describing the role of Casa, and of Cuba at large, in translating authors from the Caribbean, Ileana Sanz mentions the centrality of translation – and of translators and interpreters – in publications and in regular events, and an editorial policy which has for decades taken translation seriously. She asserts that these translations opened up a literary reality of the Caribbean not just for Cubans but to a Spanishspeaking Latin American readerships, and notes that among the contributions of Cuba and for Cuba of the translations of Caribbean authors sponsored and featured by Casa was that of bringing visibility to the “Caribbeanness” of Cuban culture and literature. This was premised on the belief in the existence of a Caribbean literary corpus that transcends its multilingual expression. Sanz notes that these translations served to counter regional cultural fragmentation and led to an understanding of a Caribbean corpus that is differentiated from the European one and has a shared ground beyond the region’s linguistic heterogeneity (89, my translation). The Caribbean played a central role in the symbolic construction of Casa from its beginnings. The “we” of Casa is that of an inclusive and multilingual Caribbean, of a pan-Caribbean vision with communities sharing common historical features and which are also part of a larger Latin American community. Casa’s strategy has been dual: the projection of a Caribbean for Cuba and for the region itself, displaying heterogeneity – as can be seen in the multilingual journal Anales del Caribe – and a Caribbean projection toward Latin America, with a role of cultural dissemination and also emphasizing heterogeneity, using Spanish as a vehicular language and translation – in Revista Casa, for example – to feature Caribbean authors and get them to be known throughout the continent while displaying linguistic difference and heterogeneity, thereby questioning the hegemony of Spanish. Both in its pages and within the overall institution, the Caribbean in its heterogeneity is most clearly present in Casa de las Américas.

t r a n s l at io n in t h e constructi on o f t h e c a r ib b e a n i magi nary Doing archival work is a daunting and humbling endeavour. Most important, as contemporary cultural critics admit, the aspiration to comprehend the totality of the cultural phenomenon – such as

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

121

aiming to cover the entirety of “the great unread” that remains outside of the Western canon, as Moretti reminds us32 – is both an illusion and a misguided goal. Moreover, the archive – with its selective quality, its omissions, and its silences – is always incomplete and fragmentary. Thus, while a comprehensive account of translation in Caribbean periodicals may be an impossible undertaking, the observation of translated materials in Tropiques, Bim, and Casa de las Américas – and, importantly, the comparative nature of the exercise – illuminates several aspects of intellectual vectors of exchange in the Caribbean. It also opens up numerous questions. The three periodicals engaged in transnational conversations that had a regional resonance. As Pascale Casanova notes, “national literary space must not be confused with national territory.”33 However, the literary space in the Caribbean is revealing of multiple, diverse, and extremely complex mappings. While translation was part of the transnational conversation intrinsic to Caribbean intellectual life, it was by no means the only way in which the transnational conversation was made possible. Translation was, however, the only way such a conversation could be pan-Caribbean. Seeing translation as one of the narrative practices constituting the composition of each of these periodicals, we see both its specificity and the commonalities it has with other elements in the larger discursive formation. In most of the cases observed we see affinities between translation and the ideological underpinnings of the larger intellectual project. Moreover, as they give indication of their themes, their agents, and their readerships, looking at translation in these periodicals allows for a reading that does not focus mainly on names and figures (that is, on what has been considered critically salient), but sheds light on modes of circulation. These three periodicals, each in its own way, participate in constructing an image of the Caribbean. The image that emerges, for the most part, in the case of Bim and of Tropiques, is not that of a multilingual Caribbean; rather, it is an image of a Caribbean mapped on the colonial matrix, to the extent that it relies heavily on either the metropole as a central interlocutor – in the case of Tropiques – or the cartography of linguistic separation and fragmentation – which appears to prevail in the case of Bim. Conversely, the case of Revista Casa provides a counterpoint, as in its various narrative practices, including translation, it embraces the region’s linguistic multiplicity. As such, translation in Casa is an enactment – rather than the

122

María Constanza Guzmán

flattening or the erasure – of linguistic multiplicity. The Caribbean that emerges in Casa de las Américas is a plurilingual and multivoiced one. In creating the space for this multiplicity to emerge, it is a space that offers dynamic cartographies and defies colonial mappings. Casa is exceptional as a translation space, and this can be seen not only as it relates to the Caribbean but in relation to the Americas at large. The translations of Revista Casa challenge traditional directionalities of colonial intellectual legacies and aim to produce other, non-hegemonic mappings. The image of the Americas that has emerged through the years from Casa’s periodical and from the institution at large is one of a heterogeneous, multilingual territory that partakes in a plural intellectual imagination.34 In Casa we can see a constellation that brings to the forefront the languages of the Americas and gives space to plural, vernacular voices. Its narrative and translation praxis move toward a broader decolonial project. “Revista Casa establishes an intellectual counterpoint to dominant cultural practices, and creates, poïeticly, transculturally, positing new intellectual territorialities, strengthening and energizing the body of the Americas, and creating the conditions of possibility to imagine the Americas otherwise.”35 Beyond the practice of each periodical and looking at translation at large, we see that this praxis can only be understood in relation to the larger intellectual visions in which it is inscribed. As it relates to the colonially inflected linguistic reality of the Americas, translation responds to negotiations that take place at the level of the relation between language and the political body. Translation can either block or enable instances of languaging – understood as an experience of resistance – and other counterhegemonic writerly practices. The materials selected for translation in an editorial project are often in line with the larger narrative and discursive composition – and this fact may be more or less conscious, more or less problematized. Either way, these instances of twentieth-century intellectual history, as traced in its periodicals, demonstrate that, through translation, editorial projects can create the possibility for emancipatory, autopoietic practices via language, and, as such, they open up the space for ontological reconfigurations.

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

123

no t e s 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

Guzmán 2019, 169. Tahir Gürçag˘lar 2019, 175–6. De Lima Costa 2014, 134. This chapter is based on a long-standing project on translation and intellectual history in Latin America and the Caribbean. An earlier version of this chapter, focusing on the Caribbean, appeared in Spanish in the translation journal Mutatis mutandis, under the title “El Caribe se traduce: la traducción como praxis descolonial en las revistas Tropiques, Bim y Casa de las Américas”; part of what is covered is also featured in a chapter in my recent book Mapping Spaces of Translation in Latin American Print Culture (Routledge 2020). As Anne Malena points out in discussing translation in the “French” Caribbean during the centuries of colonial rule, “A translation perspective cast upon the region permits a multifaceted socio-political exploration of its history but it is not without its methodological and research challenges” (480). Among other challenges, the historical archive is difficult to access; this is a less-studied region when it comes to investigating translation practices; and it is important to “unveil” evidence of “translation previously occluded by colonial history” (490). This view of narrative practice as related to the Latin American archive is informed by Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Foucault talks about “subjugated knowledges” as “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy” (1980, 82). Quijano 2000, 534. Ibid., 540. Edwards 2003, 7. This topic, of the intellectual legacy of the letrado (or man of letters) as a colonial one, is addressed in depth in Rama’s The Lettered City. For a concise and eloquent social history of linguistic plurality and poetics in the Caribbean – with an emphasis on the Anglophone experience – see Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice. I thank Joshua M. Price for this reference. Buzelin 2005, 80. Glissant 1999, 248–9. Anderson 2016, 51.

124

María Constanza Guzmán

16 This assertion does not imply that there was no history of print translation before the twentieth century – see e.g. Malena for translation practices in the “French” Caribbean, providing evidence of the presence of translation as part of colonial and post-colonial cultural practices. 17 This was a widely discussed problem; as Glissant put it, “we are aware of the dramatic need for literacy and the circulation of books in our countries” (1999, 249). 18 Rodríguez 2011, 118, my translation. 19 Wilder 2015, 23. 20 Munro 2005, 1163. Tropiques is a referent for Caribbean studies and numerous scholars have written on Cesáire and on this periodical. For this chapter I will focus specifically on translation and the questions mentioned earlier as framing my project. 21 Essays were featured that commented on French and Caribbean letters together (e.g., ref. André Breton, André Masson, and Wilfredo Lam). 22 Contemporary scholars have offered critiques of the Negritude movement from a post-colonial perspective, especially given its relationship with France; they suggest it is important to study this movement and its products from a historicizing perspective to be able to recognize its limits and tensions vis-à-vis the metropole but also recognizing its importance and gains as a movement from a specific time and context (see Wilder 2015; Pagni 2012). 23 After Collymore, other intellectuals served as editors of Bim, including A.N. Forde, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John Wickham, E.L. Cozier, and more recently Esther Phillips and Curwen Best. Its publication was suspended in the nineties but the journal was relaunched in 2007 with the subtitle “Arts for the 21st Century.” See http://www.jrank.org/literature/ pages/3356/Bim.html. The younger Caribbean journal Savacou produced a special issue (7/8, 1973) as a seventieth-birthday tribute to Collymore, including reprints from back issues of Bim as well as new writing by its contributors. 24 Simpson 2014, 3. As Simpson notes, what is known as the “rise” of the Anglophone Caribbean novel in the years immediately following the Second World War and through the 1950s and 1960s actually emerged directly from a development of short fiction writing among West Indians in the 1940s and 1950s during the years the bbc ’s Caribbean Voices program was on the air; to her, this provides evidence that writers were engaged in discovering and fine-tuning an oral aesthetic, and, furthermore, that this aesthetic was integral to expressing anti-colonial and nationalist sentiments, which critics argue is a main characteristic of novels of the

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

25 26 27

28

125

1950s and 1960s. Simpson mentions small local publishing ventures such as the All Jamaica Library (1904–09) and “little magazines” such as Bim, and also Trinidad (1929–30) and The Beacon (1931–33, 1939) in Trinidad; Kyk-over-al (from 1945) in Guyana; and Focus (1943, 1948, 1956, 1983) in Jamaica. She notes, however, that publishing avenues “were few and far between,” and that Caribbean Voices had a “symbiotic relationship with the ‘little magazines’” of the region. “The intellectual mood of the time indicated that a home-grown literature that spoke of and from West Indian peoples, rather than about them from foreign perspectives, would help create a freer society” and support views “more equitable social and political systems” (1–3). A note included stated that it was translated for the bbc . Translated from the German in collaboration with Paul Vesey. Philip Nanton affirms that Collymore was “unwilling or unable to shift to the creolisation of written English in his own work, yet fascinated by the language around him. Consciously or unconsciously, he chooses not to use Barbadian or regional English, neither was he initially willing to encourage its use creatively through publication” (2004, 170). At the same time, he was “surrounded by other versions of English that, in the context of Barbados, were clearly different and constantly changing. Other writers were willing to respond to the language around them while he was not prepared to do it. This response to the local language placed him ‘on the threshold’: ‘He betrays his ambivalence to the creolisation of English by choosing, ultimately, to study the local language rather than to use it or indeed to encourage its use.’ He records it as an amateur lexicographer, publishing Notes for a Glossary of Words and Phrases of Barbadian.” Regarding the Anglophone Caribbean, it is worth comparing the experience of Bim with that of a more recent journal, The Caribbean Writer, edited by the Caribbean Research Institute at the University of the Virgin Islands. Founded in 1987 and having Bim as a sort of precursor, its editorial board includes distinguished figures of Caribbean letters – e.g., Derek Walcott, Edwidge Danticat, Kamau Brathwaite. The Caribbean Writer is also focused on the artistic expression of the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly poetry and short fiction. One of its distinguishing features is the fact that it emphasizes the variety and richness of the various creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean in their singularity and heterogeneity. Interestingly, it has a considerable presence of Caribbean authors in the diaspora, even US Latino authors (e.g., Julia Alvarez). Given its emphasis on language, it grants importance to language hybridity, code-switching, and the translingual character of the Caribbean aesthetic condition. The

126

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

María Constanza Guzmán

translators are visible and invited to share their reflections on their own process. That being said, there is almost no presence of the Francophone or the Hispanophone Caribbean – only one issue, in 1991, was devoted to young Cuban authors, whose texts were published in translation. The image of the Caribbean that emerges from The Caribbean Writer is more strongly aligned with the north – i.e., the US intellectual field and the Caribbean diaspora. Just like in Bim, the Francophone and Hispanophone presence is practically non-existent. At present the director of Revista Casa is Jorge Fornet. Franco 2002, 45. See for example Ileana Sanz and Nancy Morejón y Lourdes Arencibia. Moretti 2000, 55. Casanova 2004, 206. This conclusion coincides with the one resulting from the comparison with Cuadernos de marcha. Guzmán 2015, 28.

r e f e r e nce s Álvarez, Sonia, et al., eds. 2014. Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas. Durham, nc : Duke University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2016. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd ed. London: Verso. Arencibia, Lourdes, Nancy Morejón, and Ileana Sanz. 2014. “Foro: Cuba traduce el Caribe.” Tusaaji: A Translation Review 3, no. 3: 88–100. Brathwaite, Kamau. 1984. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon Books. Buzelin, Hélène. 2005. “A Socio-historical Perspective on French Translations of West Indian Fiction Author(s).” Journal of West Indian Literature 13, no. 1/2: 80–118. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press. Collymore, Frank A. 1970. Notes for a Glossary of Words and Phrases of Barbadian Dialect. Wildey, Barbados: Barbados National Trust. Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2003. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press.

Translating (in) Caribbean Periodicals

127

Franco, Jean. 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. Glissant, Édouard. 1999. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, 3rd ed. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, va : University Press of Virginia. Guzmán, María Constanza. 2015. “Translation and Territorial Imaginaries: Vectors of Exchange in the Cuban Casa de las Américas and the Uruguayan Cuadernos de Marcha.” ttr vol. XXVIII, no. 1 and 2 (special issue Territories, Histories, Memories, edited by A. Echeverri and G. Bastin): 91–108. – 2017. “El Caribe se traduce: la traducción como praxis descolonial en las revistas Tropiques, Bim y Casa de las Américas.” Mutatis Mutandis 10, no.1: 167–81. – 2019. “Introduction.” Translation and Interpreting Studies (tis ) 14, no. 2 (special issue Translation and/in Periodical Publications): 169–73. Lamming, George. 2000. Speech for the event Mitos en el Caribe, Centro de Estudios del Caribe, Casa de las Américas, August, published online in Anales del Caribe. http://www.casa.cult.cu/publicaciones/ analescaribe/2003/2003lamming.htm. Lima Costa, Claudia de. 2014. “Feminist Theories, Transnational Translations, and Cultural Mediations.” In Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas, edited by Sonia Álvarez et al., 133–48. Durham, nc : Duke University Press. Malena, Anne. 2018. “Politics of Translation in the ‘French’ Caribbean.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, edited by Fruela Fernández and Jonathan Evans, 480–93. New York: Routledge. Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, no. 1: 54–68. Munro, Martin. 2005. “Tropiques.” In France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, edited by Christina Johnson and Bill Marshall, 1163. Oxford, uk , and Santa Barbara, ca : abc-clio . Nanton, Philip. 2004. “Frank A. Collymore: A Man of the Threshold.” Kunapipi 26, no. 1: 161–72. Pagni, Andrea. 2002. “Negrofilia y negritud en perspectiva cubana: Una lectura de ‘Lettre des Antilles’ de Alejo Carpentier.” Tusaaji: A Translation Review 1: 1–10. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 1989. The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

128

María Constanza Guzmán

Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3: 533–80. Rama, Ángel. 1985. La transculturación narrativa en América Latina, 2nd ed. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno. – 2002. La ciudad letrada, 2nd ed. Hanover, nh : Ediciones del Norte. Rodríguez, Emilio Jorge. 2011. El Caribe literario. Trazados de convivencia. Havana: Ed. Arte y Literatura. Saint-Loubert, Laëtitia. 2017. “Publishing against the Tide: Isla Negra Editores, an Example of Pan-Caribbean transL/National Solidarity.” Mutatis Mutandis 10, no. 1: 46–69. Simpson, Hyacinth M. 2014. “The bbc ’s Caribbean Voices and the Making of an Oral Aesthetic in the West Indian Short Story.” Journal of the Short Story in English 57: 81–96. Tahir Gürçag˘lar, S¸ehnaz. 2019. “Periodical Codes and Translation: An Analysis of Varlık in 1933–1946.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 14, no. 2: 174–97. Wilder, Gary. 2015. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, nc : Duke University Press.

6

Multilingualism Management in Canada through the Prism of Translation Policies María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

The study of translation policies has carved out a central place within the sociology of translation in recent years. This does not mean that translation studies (ts ) scholars had not previously called attention to the links between translation and language policy (for instance, see Diaz Fouces 1998, Toury 1998, Lambert 2004, Brisset 2009, and Grin 2010). However, these contributions were isolated initiatives that did not attract any collective attention to the topic until more recently (González Núñez 2016; González Núñez and Meylaerts 2017; and Córdoba Serrano and Diaz Fouces 2018, among others). This chapter can be situated within this emerging interest and aims to shed new light on multilingualism management in Canada precisely through the prism of translation policies. I claim that the study of translation policies can bring to light processes of social inclusion and exclusion that celebratory official discourses on diversity in Canada may tend to mask, which, in turn, can offer a more nuanced evaluation of different models of multilingualism management in Canada. Moreover, unlike most social research on language and linguistic diversity in Canada, which has centred on the official languages (Cardinal and Léger 2018, 28), the case study presented in this chapter will consider not only official languages, but also non-official languages, including Indigenous languages – an emerging research area that has received less attention to date.

130

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

1. mo d e l s o f m u lt il in g uali sm management a n d t r a n s l ati on Before we turn our attention to the case study at hand, we must examine some of the most common models in multilingualism management, and, in particular, the role of translation policies within multilingualism management, to then situate the case study within those main models. In order to do so, I propose to situate translation policies within the general framework of public policies, as I have argued elsewhere (Córdoba Serrano and Diaz Fouces 2018). Generally speaking, public policies “represent responses (more or less explicit, more or less complete) in terms of decision-making and public intervention to a given ‘problem’ by an entity endowed with public power” (Córdoba Serrano and Diaz Fouces 2018, 6). The “problem,” however, needs to be recognized and “selected” from many other social “issues” and make it to the public agenda (Hlavac et al. 2018). Once an “issue” is selected and elevated to the status of “problem” – that is, “when propitious circumstances called policy windows open and when policy entrepreneurs, the actors who take advantage of the policy windows, place the idea on the decision-making agenda” (63)1 – the way in which the problem is posited and defined shapes the different responses in the form of public policies. When looking at the political management of different language groups of individuals, the way the “issue” or “problem” (in this case, multilingualism) is conceptualized – whether as a problem2 or as a right – leads to different models of multilingualism management in which translation and translation policies are also conceptualized very differently (Córdoba Serrano and Diaz Fouces 2018). When multilingualism is considered a problem, translation is seen as a form of temporary, ad-hoc accommodation that will cease when individuals learn the majority language(s). The right to translation is not a right in and of itself, but rather the means to access other fundamental human rights3 (access to justice, to education, to healthcare, etc.). On the other hand, when multilingualism is seen in a positive light and using one’s language in public life is a right that groups or individuals can claim without the need to justify a lack of mastery of the dominant language(s), translation is also an institutionalized right. In these cases, the right to translation is generally based on identityrelated arguments, especially individual autonomy and dignity

Multilingualism Management in Canada

131

(De Shutter 2017). The autonomy argument is based on the idea that “if the state denies language rights and seeks instead to assimilate minority speakers into a majority language, one does not have equal access to a set of choices” (21). The other identity-related interest is dignity: “A language is a source of collective and personal self-respect and dignity” (22). In short, “the identity case supports translation rights as a means of enabling people to continue to have access to their context of choice and as a condition of their equal dignity” (26). These two apparently opposing models can, however, coexist within the same demolinguistic context, depending on the groups to whom the policies cater: the first model is generally applied to translation policies concerning allochthonous groups – that is, groups who come from the outside, such as refugees, temporary guest workers, illegal immigrants, and permanent immigrants. The second model is generally applied to translation policies related to autochthonous groups to whom language rights have been granted. To fully see the applicability but also the limitations of a model, we must examine its social and historical manifestations; we now turn to the case of Canada to do precisely that.

2. m a n ag in g m u lt il in guali s m i n canada 2.1 Demolinguistic Reality: Some Statistics According to unesco 4 (2009), Canada ranked seventy-ninth in the world in terms of linguistic diversity. Though this ranking appears to be quite low, it is important to contextualize it by mentioning that among oecd countries, only Belgium, Israel, Norway, Latvia, and Italy ranked higher. According to demolinguistic data from the 2016 Census from Statistics Canada (2017c), 21.1% of Canada’s population (or 7,166,705 individuals) have a mother tongue5 other than the official languages of Canada,6 and 0.6% of this percentage corresponds to Indigenous languages. It is important to acknowledge that this is the Canada-wide statistic, and there are provinces with higher percentages: 27.6% of the population of British Columbia and 26.7% of the population of Ontario have a mother tongue other than English or French. In 2016, the majority of people with a non-official mother tongue lived in one of the six largest census metropolitan areas (cmas ): Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton,

132

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

or Vancouver; Toronto had the highest percentage of population whose mother tongue was not English or French (42.8%), followed by Vancouver (41.8%).7 These data on mother tongue can be combined with other language-related data from the 2016 census (the latest census available at the time of writing), especially data about language spoken most often at home and knowledge of the official languages,8 to offer a more complete picture of the stakes of multilingualism management in Canada from a purely demolinguistic point of view. With regards to language spoken at home, in 2016 (Statistics Canada 2017c), 11.5% of Canada’s population reported speaking a language other than English or French most often at home (0.39% were Indigenous languages). As for knowledge of the official languages, 1.9% of Canada’s population reported not being able to conduct a conversation in either English or French. This figure is 2.5% for Ontario, 3.3% for British Colombia, and 5.7% for Nunavut. The figures are higher in cities such as Toronto (4.4%) and Vancouver (5.6%). The question from which these data are collected (i.e. “Can this person speak English or French well enough to conduct a conversation?”9) can, however, be problematic and misleading. First of all, how is “well enough” defined, and second, “well enough” for what? To buy milk, or to understand a judge when convicted? According to the 2016 Census of Population Long-Form Guide, “well enough” refers to “a person who can carry on a conversation of some length on various topics in one or both of [the official languages],” which helps to clarify, but may not elicit very useful information in terms of language barriers and access to public services in high-risk situations (such as courts or hospitals), in which conversational English or French may not be sufficient. The guide also explains that Questions 7 to 910 are used “to estimate the need for services in English and French, and to better understand the current status and the evolution of Canada’s various language groups” (Statistics Canada 2017a). As a point of comparison, the US Census’s American Community Survey (acs ) includes a question in which individuals are asked “How well does this person speak English?” with four Likert-scale response options (“very well,” “well,” “not well,” and “not at all”).11 A person is considered a Limited English Proficient (lep ) individual

Multilingualism Management in Canada

133

if she or he answers less than “very well.” In 2015, the acs revealed that 8.6% of the American population was considered Limited English Proficient. Federal programs use data from this Englishspeaking-ability question for three purposes: (1) “to decide which localities are required to produce voting materials in minority languages,” (2) “to determine the number of school-age English-language learners in each state,” and (3) “to determine which governmental programs should provide assistance to those who have limited ability to communicate in English” (US Census Bureau 2019b). Since 1976, Australia has also been collecting information through its census on residents’ use of languages other than English (abbreviated as “lote ”) using four gradings: “I speak English very well / well / not well / not at all” (Hlavac et al. 2018, 65). As Hlavac et al. explain, “[t]he inclusion of this question was in part motivated by the desire of demographers and policy-makers to elicit in approximate terms the projected need for T&I services amongst the general lote-speaking population.” In conclusion, had the question and possible answers in the Canadian census been framed like in the US or Australia, the results might have been quite different. The collection of this information also seems to serve a very different purpose in Canada than in the US and Australia. For the moment, let’s keep in mind that whether or not a question like the one at hand is included in the census, how the question is framed, and how the answers are used (i.e. for what purpose) may in fact be indicative of the public importance given to the issue of multilingualism management. It may also explain the different responses in terms of public policies. As García Beyaert (2015, 148) points out, “perhaps Canadian society has not fully acknowledged the public dimension of language rights and cross-linguistic communication barriers for minorities other than the official language minorities,” a question that we delve into later. 2.2 Different Policy Responses to Multilingualism Management According to End-User In Canada, according to strictly quantitative demolinguistic data, individuals with a non-official mother tongue outnumber people whose mother tongue is French (21.1% vs 20.6%, according to the 2016 Census, with 77.1% of the latter living in Quebec; Statistics

134

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

Canada 2017c), and one could argue that policy choices should reflect those data. However, we all know that policy choices go well beyond demolinguistic data. As Cardinal has clearly stated and as we shall soon see here, “[b]eyond demolinguistic data, multilingualism management models are also anchored in a given state tradition and language regime” (Cardinal and Sonntag 2015; Cardinal and Léger 2018, 30), both of “which can help explain how and why certain policies choices are made and why others are avoided” (Cardinal and Léger 2018, 20). With this in mind, in the next sections I will examine, primarily through the prism of translation, different state responses to language diversity in Canada in the form of public policies, as well as the effects and consequences of these policy choices. I will focus on the justice sector, which is the most regulated sector in terms of translation policies, especially when dealing with non-official languages. More specifically, I will concentrate on judicial proceedings, which are, in turn, one of the most regulated areas within the justice sector in terms of translation policies. The first section focuses on translation policies as they pertain to the official languages; the second, on translation policies related to Indigenous languages; and the third, on translation policies related to non-official allochthonous languages. I will move between different levels of government (federal and provincial), depending on the issue at stake. By offering a sort of kaleidoscope of translation policies in Canada in a specific sector (justice) and domain (court system), I aim to bring to light the main stakes and contradictions involved in managing multilingualism within an officially bilingual framework.

3. ju d ic ia l b il in g ua l is m and the ri ght to t ran s l at io n : t h e c as e o f offi ci al languages While the origins of official bilingualism in Canada date back to the Constitution Act of 1867, the Official Languages Act (ola ), adopted by the federal government in 1969, is considered the main landmark for official bilingualism in Canada. The Act granted equal official status to English and French and was adopted following the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, appointed in 1963 by the government of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, as a response

Multilingualism Management in Canada

135

to “neo-nationalism in Quebec and renewed mobilizations from French-speaking populations in other provinces” (Cardinal and Léger 2018, 25). The Commission was tasked with “inquir[ing] into and report[ing] upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and ... recommend[ing] what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada and the measures that should be taken to safeguard that contribution” (Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Appendix 1, 103). In 1982, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in the Constitution and included a specific section on language rights (section 16). Not only did the Constitution make bilingualism official for federal purposes, but it also imposed certain language-related obligations on the provinces, particularly regarding access to primary and secondary education in an official minority language (Cardinal and Léger 2018, 26). In 1988, a new Official Languages Act was adopted. This new Act clarified the provisions of the 1969 Act, introduced a focus on enhancing the vitality of official language minority communities in Canada, confirmed language-of-work rights for workers in federal institutions, and aligned the ola with the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Laurendeau 1988). It took multiple court challenges, however, “to translate into practice the rights and commitments laid out in the Charter and the new ola” (Cardinal and Léger 2018, 26). Several action plans and roadmaps have been created since 1988, and almost half a century later, a modernization of the ola is well underway. In fact, in 2018, the Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages was tasked with conducting national consultations and reporting on Canadians’ views on modernizing the Official Languages Act. The groups consulted were young Canadians, official language minority communities, people who have witnessed the evolution of the Act, justice sector experts, and representatives of federal institutions (Standing Senate Committee 2019b). The result of these consultations was a final report submitted on 30 June 2019 that contains specific recommendations to modernize the Act. One area of focus of these recommendations is precisely judicial bilingualism.12 Judicial bilingualism is not new to Canada. The

136

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

provisions in the 1988 Act related to judicial bilingualism date back to the 1867 Constitution, section 133 of which states that “either [the English or the French Language] may be used by any Person or in any Pleading or Process in or issuing from any Court of Canada established under this Act, and in or from all or any of the Courts of Quebec” (Constitution Act 1867, s. 133). The 1969 ola , the Charter, the 1988 ola , and case law clarified and expanded on these rights. For criminal law, more specifically, language-related matters have been legislated by the Criminal Code since 1978. Sections 530, 530.01, and 530.1 guarantee all accused persons the right to a criminal trial in the language of their choice. The accused must be informed of this right and may obtain the translation of information or an indictment in the other official language. While, in theory, some of these provisions only apply to federal courts, the reality is that the complexity of the Canadian legal system is such that a separation between federal and provincial or territorial levels is, generally speaking, unfeasible; the Canadian system is based on two legal traditions (common law and civil law), separates jurisdictions between different levels of government, and relies on a wide range of stakeholders. Some aspects of the system depend on the federal government (such as the appointment of certain judges), while some areas of law (such as criminal law) are legislated by the federal government but administered by the provinces and territories (Standing Senate Committee 2019a, 13). Therefore, provinces and territories, for instance, are also required to guarantee the right to a criminal trial in the official language of choice. In principle, all these above-mentioned policy instruments concerning the right to use English and French in court seem to suggest a conceptualization of language and translation as a right that falls perfectly within the second model (language and translation as a right) described in section 2. However, I will focus on two issues concerning judicial bilingualism brought up in the debates and consultations to modernize the ola , as these issues challenge the ideotypical version of the model in which language rights would generate translation rights and those translation rights “would be limited to languages of identity” (De Shutter 2018, 29). In fact, the issues in question show how language rights sometimes end up competing with translation rights, creating a sterile dichotomy that can’t but compromise the principle of equality on which official bilingualism is predicated.

Multilingualism Management in Canada

137

3.1 Translation of Legal Decisions: The Unequal Value of the Original and Translated Versions of Federal Court Decisions According to section 20 of the ola , “decisions, orders and judgments [issued by any federal court] must be made available simultaneously in both official languages” where “(a) the decision, order or judgment determines a question of law of general public interest or importance; or (b) the proceedings leading to its issuance were conducted in whole or in part in both official languages.” Other decisions, orders, and judgments “shall be issued in the first instance in one of the official languages and thereafter, at the earliest possible time, in the other official language.” Federal courts – with the exception of the Supreme Court,13 which systematically complies with these provisions – respond differently to these language requirements (Senate Standing Committee 2019a); court decisions may not be systematically published, the translation may be published months after the original decision, or decisions and their translations may be published simultaneously, but without revision by jurilinguists and with the latter labelled “unrevised.” One of the main reasons behind these inconsistencies in compliance is the fact that the English and French versions of federal court decisions are not equally authoritative; in other words, the translations of federal court decisions are not considered be equal in value to the original. The ola does not explicitly state the equal value of both versions, which, combined with the practice of using labels such as “unrevised” for translations of decisions and other similar practices, leads to the widespread interpretation14 that translated versions are not authoritative. Some of the individuals who participated in the national consultations to modernize the ola rightly asked: “What is the use of translating a judgment if the two versions do not hold equal value and authority? How can we speak of equality if one of the languages is disadvantaged when it comes to choosing the version of a judicial decision? ... In reality, there is inequality” (Beaudoin 2018). This lack of explicit recognition of the translated version – more often than not the French text – as authoritative contrasts with bilingual legislation, which explicitly states that “both language versions are equally authoritative.”15 However, it is important to mention that most federal legislation is not translated, but co-drafted,16 which indirectly confirms a negative conceptualization of translation.

138

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

For a country such as Canada, in which, with the exception of Quebec, the French language mainly exists because of translation and in translation – in the legal domain, the existence of common law en français and civil law in English evidences this statement – this negative conceptualization of a translation as inferior to the original cannot but affect the language rights of the French-speaking minority. When less value is assigned to a translation, fewer resources are likely to be invested in it and the resulting quality is likely to be worse, thus reinforcing the perception of the translation as inferior to the original and, inevitably, negatively impacting access to justice in both official languages. In other words, the denial of true translation rights – not only formal rights based on the mere existence of a translated version, but also substantive rights – may lead to a denial of language rights and an invalidation of the language-asright model as a whole. In such cases, translation is in reality seen as a form of accommodation. As McLaren (2014, 45) puts it: Comment justifier, dans un système juridique qui prône l’égalité de statut de deux langues officielles comme valeur constitutionnelle, que l’une ou l’autre de ses communautés linguistiques officielles n’ait pas accès dans sa langue à une version fiable d’une partie si fondamentale du droit? … [l]’égalité réelle implique que les versions linguistiques des décisions judiciaires doivent être de qualité et de statut égal. La solution employée actuellement à l’égard des décisions des certains tribunaux revient à traiter la traduction comme s’il y avait une langue officielle principale, la langue de rédaction des jugements, et une obligation d’accommodement en ce qui concerne l’emploi de l’autre langue officielle, la langue dans laquelle ces décisions sont traduites.17 (emphasis added) This is an issue, however, that a modernized loa could have changed, as reflected in the report on the views of the justice sector experts submitted by the Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages; one of the report’s recommendations was to recognize legal decisions in English and French as equally authoritative and of equal value in the Act (Standing Senate Committee 2019a, vi). The recommendation is not included in the final report, however, and a vague justification is provided: “Currently, judges make their decisions in

Multilingualism Management in Canada

139

only one language and there is no obligation to co-draft decisions. It might therefore be difficult at this stage to recognize both versions of federal court decisions as equally authoritative and of equal value in the Act. In the meantime, however, it is possible for the federal government to take steps to move the Act towards this ideal” (Standing Senate Committee 2019b, 70). Once again, we see a lack of acknowledgment of the direct link between language rights and translation rights and how this can affect equal access to justice in the official languages. 3.2 The Right to Interpreting as a Non-Language Right This conceptualization of translation as accommodation within the language-as-right model does not seem to be exclusive to the translation of federal court decisions. In fact, another issue, also within the realm of judicial bilingualism, that has attracted considerable attention in the recent consultations on the modernization of the ola is the appointment of bilingual judges at the Supreme Court of Canada. The main argument in favour of mandatory “functional bilingualism” is that federal courts are already obliged by section 16 of the ola and section 530(1) of the Canadian Criminal Code to ensure that all trials held under their jurisdiction be presided over by a judge who understands the minority official language of the proceedings without the mediation of an interpreter; currently, the Supreme Court is an exception to this rule. The underlying assumption of supporting mandatory bilingualism is that true equal access in both official languages is not possible through language interpretation; in other words, the presence of an interpreter is considered an indirect form of access to justice, a form of accommodation that can only be justified in criminal proceedings when it is the only option (i.e. when the end-users do not understand either official language). The right to an interpreter in criminal proceedings is not considered by Canadian doctrine or case law a language right in and of itself, but a procedural right (Jiménez Salcedo 2018, 131). As Jiménez Salcedo shows, this differentiation was gradually enshrined in case law, especially following the R v Beaulac18 decision (1999). The absence or presence of an interpreter came to mark the difference between linguistic rights (when the end users are speakers of official languages) and procedural rights (when the end-users speak non-official

140

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

languages), and between direct access to justice for the former and indirect access for the latter (Jiménez Salcedo 2014; 2018). In that vein, recommendation 20 of the final report submitted by the Standing Senate Committee in 2019 to modernize the ola asks that the Official Languages Act and any necessary federal legislation be amended to require that, at the time of their appointment, judges of the Supreme Court of Canada have enough understanding of English and French to be able to read the written submissions of the parties and understand oral arguments without the assistance of translation or interpretation services (Standing Senate Committee 2019b, 46, emphasis mine). To the best of my knowledge, not a single empirical study has been conducted to compare the effectiveness of a “functionally bilingual” judge versus a well-trained language professional in judicial proceedings in order to analyze and compare the impact of these two choices on equal access to justice in both official languages. Empirical studies may indeed reveal unexpected conclusions and challenge some of the recommendations made in the final report. In conclusion, the two issues discussed in this section show how, in a country in which language rights have been granted to two language minorities and in which translation is an integral piece of language policy, language rights do not necessarily generate translation rights. I have also tried to show the potential consequences this can have for equal access to justice in both official languages. Even within a language-as-right model, translation (understood in the broad sense) can still be seen in certain spheres – the judicial sphere is an interesting case in point – as a form of accommodation instead of an integral piece of language rights. The question is to what extent true equality can be achieved between different autochthonous19 language communities in Canada if linguistic rights do not lead to true translation rights. With that in mind, I’ll turn to the case of the Indigenous languages.

4 . j u d ic ia l b il in g uali sm and in d ig e n o u s l anguages The United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages. On 21 June 2019 (declared National Indigenous Peoples Day by the Government of Canada), fifty years after the first

Multilingualism Management in Canada

141

ola, and after three readings in the House of Commons, the Indigenous Languages Act (ila )20 received royal assent. As the communiqué from Heritage Canada explains, “the legislation was developed to support the meaningful implementation of Calls to Action 13, 14, and 15 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (Canadian Heritage 2019). In the Preamble to the Act, the Government of Canada acknowledges that “a history of discriminatory government policies and practices, in respect of, among other things, assimilation, forced relocation, the Sixties Scoop and residential schools, were detrimental to Indigenous languages and contributed significantly to the erosion of those languages.” The language of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, released in December 2015, clearly resonates in the summary and purposes set out in the ila . One of the most important elements of the Act is the official acknowledgment by the Government of Canada that “the rights of Indigenous peoples recognized and affirmed by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 include rights related to Indigenous languages” (emphasis added). The Act insists on the vital role of the Government of Canada in the protection of Indigenous languages and in coordinating its efforts with “provincial or territorial governments, Indigenous governments or other Indigenous governing bodies, Indigenous organizations or other entities – including by entering into agreements or arrangements with them for purposes such as providing Indigenous language programs and services in relation to education, health and the administration of justice” (s. 8). While the Act is an important first step towards the recognition of language rights for Indigenous languages, Lemieux (2019), among others, highlights that the Bill and, more recently, the Act itself “ne dit rien sur un droit à l’éducation dans une langue autochtone; il ne dit rien sur le droit à un procès dans une langue autochtone; il ne dit pas grand-chose sur l’offre de services publics dans une langue autochtone.”21 Indeed, section 10.1 provides that a federal institution or its agent or mandatary “may22 provide access to services in an Indigenous language, if the institution or its agent or mandatary has the capacity to do so and there is sufficient demand for access to those services in that language” (s.  10.1, emphasis added), which means that, in

142

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

practice, access to public services in an Indigenous language may not become a reality. Furthermore, the final version of the ila barely contains any explicit provisions for translation or interpretation (Goyette 2019; Lemieux 2019). Section 11 of the ila states that a “federal institution may cause (a) any document under its control to be translated into an Indigenous language; or (b) interpretation services to be provided to facilitate the use of an Indigenous language in the course of the federal institution’s activities” (emphasis added). Interestingly, the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages, which was established in the ila, is given one power that the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages is not in the ola , which is the power to potentially support an Indigenous government or governing body’s efforts to “establish certification standards for translators and interpreters” (s. 25). Incorporating this area of jurisdiction into the ocil ’s duties is exceptional, especially in an act where translation- and interpretation-related provisions are minimal. Putting aside this exception, at the federal level, the only sphere in which systematic translation-related measures are being taken – measures that, in fact, predate the ila – is parliamentary proceedings. A 2018 report by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs included a recommendation to recognize the use of Indigenous languages in proceedings of the House of Commons and committees, and stated that this recognition should also be accompanied by the right to simultaneous interpretation out of Indigenous languages; in the past, Indigenous mp s were not prevented from using their languages, but there was no guarantee that they would be heard by other mp s who do not speak those languages. The recommendation was approved, and since January 2019, the Translation Bureau of Canada has provided interpretation out of Indigenous languages for six mp s in the House of Commons (Déry 2019). The importance of this special status given to Indigenous languages in relation to other non-official languages in the House of Commons is not to be underestimated, since the House of Commons is seen as “the most symbolic and important place in Canada, where democracy happens,” as stated by mp Robert Falcon-Ouellette (cited by Beattie 2018). While the covid crisis has led to an increase in requests for translation and interpretation services in Indigenous languages (Pelletier and Shannon 2021), the right to translation has not been fully and

Multilingualism Management in Canada

143

systematically extended to other spheres. For instance, in judicial proceedings (the focus of this chapter), court interpretation in Indigenous languages is provided free of charge by the state only in criminal proceedings (including any matter related to the Youth Criminal Justice Act). In this regard, it is worth remembering that, even though criminal law falls within federal jurisdiction, most criminal proceedings take place in provincially administered courts. That is why I will turn to Quebec now, as Quebec is in fact the province with the highest proportion of people who reported an Indigenous mother tongue in Canada in 2016. Specifically, 47,030 people in Quebec reported having an Indigenous mother tongue in the 2016 Census, which represents 22% of all individuals across Canada who reported an Indigenous mother tongue. Moreover, 42,595 of those individuals spoke their Indigenous mother tongue at home, which means that the mother-tongue retention rate in Quebec is in fact very high, greater than 90% (Statistics Canada 2017c). Directive A-6 from the Ministry of Justice of Quebec (Services d’interprètes et paiement des frais) states: “En matière criminelle et pénale fédérale ou provinciale pour toutes les cours, les services d’interprétation sont fournis à la partie ou au témoin qui ne comprend pas la langue employée lors de l’audience. Ces frais ne peuvent être réclamés aux parties et ils sont à la charge du ministère de la Justice” (Ministère de la justice du Québec 2007, 1).23 This applies to both Indigenous languages and other non-official languages. There are, however, exceptions concerning Indigenous languages; the Cree and Inuit covered by the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement and the Naskapi covered by the Northeastern Quebec Agreement have language rights in court cases in both criminal and civil proceedings in the regions covered by the agreements: “Lorsque l’une des parties est bénéficiaire de la Convention de la Baie-James et du Nord québécois ou de la Convention du Nord-Est québécois, le ministère de la Justice assume les frais d’interprétations requis pour faciliter l’interrogatoire d’un témoin et lorsque la cause a lieu, dans le cas d’un Cri ou d’un Inuit, dans les districts judiciaires d’Abitibi ou de Roberval, ou, dans le cas d’un Naskapi, dans le district judiciaire de Mingan (article 305, alinéa 2 C.p.c.)”24 (Ministère de la justice du Québec 2007, 2). Directive A-6 also introduces a slight distinction between services for Indigenous language speakers and those for allophone endusers:25 whereas for allophones, interpreting services are targeted

144

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

toward those who do not understand the language used in court,26 in the case of Indigenous languages, they are intended for use by “those speakers who do not understand or are not familiar enough with the language used in Quebec courts” (emphasis added).27 This addition may be interpreted as a small step further towards recognizing translation rights for reasons other than lack of mastery of the official languages. In other words, this subtle difference, along with the aforementioned exceptions concerning certain areas covered by land claim settlements, may suggest in practice a slightly different status for Indigenous languages at the Quebec provincial level as compared with other non-official languages. Although translation rights for Indigenous languages are guaranteed in criminal proceedings,28 in practice, we don’t know how many interpreting requests related to Indigenous languages are in fact served by the Government of Quebec. When asked about the number of trials that had been cancelled due to the unavailability of interpreters working with Indigenous languages, the Ministry of Justice of Quebec (correspondence, October 2017) responded that they didn’t have this information. In 2018, in response to another request for any reports or documentation about its efforts to find a solution to the lack of qualified interpreters of Indigenous languages, the Ministry of Justice of Quebec (correspondence, February 2018) provided the same response and noted that “il n’y a pas de comité mandaté pour se pencher sur la question du manque d’interprètes autochtones.”29 Moreover, beyond criminal proceedings and beyond certain special areas protected by agreements, translation rights for Indigenous languages remain limited, highly conditioned upon available resources, and mostly symbolic. Additionally, violations of Indigenous language rights, unlike in the case of the official languages, cannot be pursued in court, according to the Indigenous Languages Act. In other words, Indigenous languages and their management are now considered a public “problem” that requires institutional attention, and some policies have been formulated and resources allocated, which is not likely to change, particularly given recent “focusing events” (i.e. Joyce Echaquan’s death, and the recent discovery of 215 Indigenous children buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School). The question is whether this initial attention will translate into more concrete actions or a more official form of recognition of the Indigenous languages. Another question

Multilingualism Management in Canada

145

is whether recognizing the special status of Indigenous languages could pave the way to the recognition of the special status of other non-official language groups, to which I will turn now my attention.30

5 . j u d ic ia l b ili nguali s m a n d a l l o c h t h o n o us 31 languages “Linguistic diversity is on the rise in Canada,” says the opening sentence of the report that summarizes the highlights of the 2016 Census (Statistics Canada 2017b). As was mentioned earlier, from a purely demolinguistic point of view, the number of individuals who reported an allochthonous mother tongue in the 2016 Census surpassed the number of individuals who reported an autochthonous mother tongue other than English in Canada. Moreover, the number of people who reported an allochthonous mother tongue rose from 6,838,715 in 2011 to 7,749,115 in 2016 (Statistics Canada 2017b), an increase of 910,400 people or 13.3%. Linguistic diversity is far from being evenly distributed across Canada, however, and the demolinguistic reality and the need for translation and interpretation in public services in Toronto, for instance, can’t be compared with those of Dolbeau-Mistassini, Quebec, where 99% of the population reported French as their mother tongue. Canada also prides itself on its institutionalized multiculturalism. In 1971, the federal government declared itself multicultural by policy, the first declaration of its kind in the world. It wasn’t until 1988, however, that the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was finally passed. The key objectives,32 announced in October 1971 and elaborated upon over the years (Leman 1999, n.p.), were: “(1) To assist cultural groups to retain and foster their identity; (2) to assist cultural groups to overcome barriers to their full participation in Canadian society; (3) to promote creative exchanges among all Canadian cultural groups; (4) to assist immigrants in acquiring at least one of the official languages.” Since language barriers can certainly prevent “cultural groups”33 from fully participating in Canadian society,34 the second objective in particular would suggest support for the right to translation. In practice, however, as Cardinal and Léger (2018, 30) state, “[O]n the whole, the federal language policy provides minimal guidance for the recognition and accommodation of linguistic diversity,” and there is certainly no policy framework for the provision of translation and interpreting services concerning allochthonous languages.

146

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

Several authors have in fact argued that the Canadian policy of multiculturalism was merely a way to placate the allophone population following the declaration of official languages in 1969 (García Beyaert 2016). By examining the debates and deliberations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Haque (2012) shows how language gradually came to be regarded as a fundamental cultural element for the two so-called founding races, but private and peripheral – sometimes folkloric, I would add – for other ethnic groups. This is, in fact, an underlying assumption that the debates and consultations on the modernization of the ola and the subsequent recommendations continue to reinforce even today. Court interpreting is, to date, the only guaranteed accommodation for non-official allochthonous languages to which federal institutions have shown tangible commitment in terms of the provision of translation and interpreting services and the establishment of a policy framework (García Beyaert 2016). For criminal proceedings, the provisions of section 14 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms establish that individuals who are hearing-impaired or do not understand or speak the language being spoken in court have the right to be assisted by an interpreter, and that this right applies regardless of the language involved. In Ontario, the province with the highest number of people reporting an allochthonous language as their mother tongue, but which is also expected to comply with statutory provisions relating to official bilingualism in the legal system,35 the Ministry of the Attorney General’s Court Services Division provides court interpretation services in over eighty spoken languages, American Sign Language, and Langue des signes du Québec (Ministry of the Attorney General 2021). Interpreting and translation services are provided free of charge in any language required “in criminal and child protection matters.” They are also provided “in any language [in addition to French], in civil, family and small claims court matters, if the litigant qualifies for the Court Services Division fee waiver” (Ministry of the Attorney General 2021, emphasis added), an eligibility criterion that is related to the litigant’s gross annual household income.36 The demand for court interpreting in non-official languages in Ontario is high37 and some positive steps have been made towards professionalizing court interpreting, more often than not as a result

Multilingualism Management in Canada

147

of “focusing events” (Kingdon 1995). For instance, in November 2007, former defendant Avtar Sidhu and others, with the support of Justice Casey Hill and lawyer Anthony Moustacalis, initiated a class action suit against the Ministry of the Attorney General of the Province of Ontario for inadequate court interpretation services due to “incompetent government-appointed court interpreters” that “have led to miscarriages of justice and even wrongful convictions” (Blatchford 2008, cited by García Beyaert 2016, 144). In response to this, among other things, new court interpreting accreditation exams were designed in Ontario for the twenty-five highest-in-demand languages. However, these higher standards have not been accompanied by higher rates of pay,38 making it difficult to attract and/or retain qualified professionals. The challenge of retaining well-qualified professionals is even more acute for the Immigration and Refugee Board (irb ), an administrative tribunal responsible for making decisions on immigrants’ and refugees’ claims to entitlement to refugee status. The irb provides interpretation for any party who does not understand or speak either of the two official languages used in irb proceedings and pays freelance interpreters $27 an hour (irb 2019). It is also important to highlight that the educational qualifications required – secondary school diploma or equivalent (i.e. no formal education in translation or interpreting) – are also commensurate with this rate, which in turn may seriously affect access to a fair hearing. In conclusion, as we saw in the previous section on judicial bilingualism, when it comes to the use of official languages in courts, the presence of an interpreter is to be avoided whenever possible so that the accused can be heard and understood without mediation; however, when the end users are not speakers of official languages, relying on an intermediary with no relevant training would appear to be acceptable. As García Beyaert (2016, 152) claims, “while compromises between the ideal and the possible are clearly necessary, the risk that interim, stopgap solutions present is that, even when much better solutions are possible, it is all too easy for agencies and institutions to become invested in mediocre and inadequate policies and procedures.” I would add that it is also too easy to end up with no policy framework, or with ad-hoc or non-professional practices that can compromise fundamental human rights.

148

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

6 . c o n c l u si on A detailed examination of the right to translation (translation understood in a broad sense) in judicial proceedings as it pertains to different groups of end-users in Canadian society – some of whom are holders of language rights and some of whom are not – reveals the stakes and challenges of managing multilingualism in an officially bilingual country. This chapter has shown that even when the end users of translation policies are speakers of official languages, the Canadian model deviates from the ideotypical language-as-right model, in which language rights usually give rise to translation rights. The case study examined shows that even when translation policies cater to official minorities, translation can still be considered a form of accommodation. In a country in which the two official languages have such different demographic weights and in which around 70% of the population speaks only English, translation is a central piece of language policy: it is not only a consequence of language policy, but the main conduit for its implementation. And yet, while it is frequently hinted at, translation does not have a central place in the current Official Languages Act. In this regard, the existence of an explicit and comprehensive translation policy in Canada – a policy that would, among other things, address the role of bodies such as the Translation Bureau and issues related to the professionalization of language professionals – would solve many of the issues and concerns brought up in the consultations on the modernization of the ola . Such a policy, however, may not come about any time soon if the link between translation and social justice is not fully acknowledged. A modernized Official Languages Act should also be able to respond to demographic and other changes in Canadian society. And yet, issues related to non-official languages have been either almost entirely overlooked in the recent consultations on the modernization of the Official Languages Act, or they have been discussed separately, as in the case of Indigenous languages. Compartmentalizing language-related debates according to the end users may in fact preclude the development of productive debates about who and what needs to be included in translation policies. A more inclusive relational approach to linguistic diversity management in Canada would also elicit the questions that Johanne Poirier

Multilingualism Management in Canada

149

asked in the roundtable “The Challenges of Coexistence: Language Policy in Canada” held at McGill in February 2019: is bilingualism, after all, an obstacle to (linguistic) diversity? Are linguistic rights a zero-sum game? A critical examination of this question may require a certain openness to challenging Canada’s narrative on linguistic duality, deeply rooted in the state traditions of political compromise between the “two founding races” and federalism (Cardinal and Léger 2018). It would also require collaboration between the different levels of government – federal, provincial, and also municipal – each of which respond differently (and sometimes conflictingly) to linguistic diversity within an official framework of linguistic duality.39 As this critical examination may not appear on the institutional agenda for some time, it may be important, in the meantime, to move away from a model of multilingualism management that is primarily predicated on identity and culture-based arguments to a broader framework based on the idea of access and human language rights, a minimum threshold of sorts that, once defined, would apply to any language group. This would mean that while autochthonous minorities, including Indigenous peoples, could enjoy language rights beyond this minimum threshold, the state would also guarantee accommodations for allochthonous groups in well-defined “high-risk” situations (i.e. situations in which fundamental human rights could be compromised, such as access to a fair trial, access to healthcare, or access to education). A policy framework for the provision of translation and interpreting services in these high-risk situations would also need to deal with the professionalization of language professionals, which, as seen in this article, is a key element that is not always properly addressed. The application of sanctions for non-compliance would also be fundamental to a successful implementation of such a framework.40 An illustrative example of this approach is the United States, where failure to provide T&I services to Limited English Proficiency individuals is considered a form of discrimination and a breach of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Canadian model of multilingualism management could also take a page from the Australian model, which does not pay much attention to whether translation and interpreting for allochthonous groups is a form of accommodation or a (language) right, but rather sees it as an aspect that affects

150

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

the effective provision of public services (Hlavac et al. 2018), which self-evidently affects all language groups. If framed in this way, perhaps the questions asked by Poirier would be less threatening, and the issue of multilingualism management could earn a place on the institutional agenda at all levels of government. not e s 1 Hlavac et al. use the Multiple Streams Framework, developed by Kingdon (1995), to explain how a translation policy comes to be. 2 This time, “problem” is used in its negative sense. 3 Skutnabb-Kangas (2006, 273) makes the distinction between language rights and language human rights: “language/linguistic rights (lr s), understood as a wide spectrum of rights related to the use and learning of languages … differ from linguistic human rights (lhr s)” in that the latter “are those (and only those) lr s that, first, are necessary to fulfill people’s basic needs and for them to live a dignified life, and, second, that therefore are so basic, so fundamental, that no state (or individual or group) is supposed to violate them.” For instance, as Martínez-Gómez (2018, 153) explains, “the right to be informed of the criminal charges against oneself in an understandable language is considered a lhr , whereas the right to a judge and witnesses who speak (or sign) one’s language is a lr that cannot necessarily be expected.” 4 The linguistic diversity index used by unesco is based on Greenberg’s diversity index and reflects the probability that in a given country any two people selected at random would have different mother tongues. The highest possible value, 1, indicates total diversity (i.e. no two people have the same mother tongue), whereas the lowest possible value, 0, indicates no diversity at all (i.e. everyone has the same mother tongue) (unesco 2009, 375). 5 “Mother tongue” refers to the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual at the time of the census (Statistics Canada 2017c). 6 Individuals who reported English and/or French and a non-official mother tongue have been excluded from this count. They represent an additional 1.8% of the population (ibid.). 7 Interestingly, the census agglomeration of Winkler, Manitoba, surpassed Toronto, with 45% of the population having a mother tongue that was not one of the official languages.

Multilingualism Management in Canada

151

8 Refers to the ability of the individual to conduct a conversation in English only, in French only, in both English and French, or in neither English nor French at the time of the census (ibid.). 9 This is Question 7 of the 2016 census questionnaire. 10 Question 7 refers to the ability of a person to speak English or French well enough to conduct a conversation. Question 8 refers to the language a person speaks most often at home. Question 8 b) refers to any other languages a person speaks on a regular basis at home, and Question 9, to the language that a person first learned at home in childhood and still understands. 11 Language use, English-speaking ability, and data on limited Englishspeaking households are currently collected in the American Community Survey (acs ). In the past, various questions on language use were asked in the censuses from 1890 to 1970. The question discussed here was asked in the census in 1980, 1990, and 2000 and is the same question asked in the American Community Survey. 12 The Senate Committee’s recommendations focus on four themes: leadership and cooperation, compliance, enforcement principles, and judicial bilingualism (Standing Senate Committee 2019b, 74). 13 See McLaren (2014) for a detailed account of the translation model used at the Supreme Court. 14 See ibid. for a detailed account of different interpretations of section 20 of the ola and specific practices based on these interpretations. 15 “Any journal, record, Act of Parliament, instrument, document, rule, order, regulation, treaty, convention, agreement, notice, advertisement or other matter referred to in this Part that is made, enacted, printed, published or tabled in both official languages shall be made, enacted, printed, published or tabled simultaneously in both languages, and both language versions are equally authoritative” (Part II, section 13, Official Languages Act 1988). 16 Co-drafting refers to “[a] method of drafting federal statutes that takes into account Canadian bijuralism and legislative bilingualism, whereby the English and French versions are drafted jointly by two law clerks, a francophone generally trained in civil law and an anglophone generally trained in common law. Both language versions are equally authoritative. This practice has been in effect since 1978 at the federal level” (Standing Senate Committee 2019a, iv). 17 “In a legal system that vaunts the equal status of two official languages as a constitutional principle, how can we justify the fact that one of its

152

18

19

20 21

22 23

24

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

official language communities does not have access in its own language to a reliable version of such a fundamental part of the law? ... Real equality means that both language versions of judgments are equal in quality and status. The current solution used by some courts for their decisions is to approach translation as though there were one primary official language (the language in which the judgment is written) and a duty to accommodate the use of the other official language (the language into which these judgments are translated)” (my translation, emphasis added). According to R v Beaulac, the right to choose the official language of judicial proceedings is not a procedural guarantee, a form of accommodation in an institutionalized monolingual court, but a binding right for public powers, which must provide the necessary material and human resources to allow bilingual courts to be instituted (Jiménez Salcedo 2018, 135). I am using “autochthonous” as an umbrella term (Grin 1995) to include not only those who are commonly called “Indigenous,” but also those minorities that are often called “homeland minorities” or “national minorities,” i.e. minorities who may not be indigenous to the land, but who have been historically settled in that land for a period long enough to view that land as their historical homeland. The longer title of the Act is “An Act respecting Indigenous languages”; however, the shorter accepted title will be used in this chapter. The Act itself “says nothing about the right to education in an Indigenous language; it says nothing about the right to a trial in an Indigenous language; it says little about the provision of public services in an Indigenous language” (my translation). It is important to note the recurrent use of the word “may” in the ila (compared with the more imperative “shall” used throughout the ola ). “For criminal and penal matters in all federal and provincial courts, interpretation services are provided to any party or witness who does not understand the language used in the hearing. The parties cannot be made to pay the cost of these services; rather, the Ministère de la Justice must bear the cost” (my translation). “The Ministère de la Justice assumes the costs of interpretation services needed to facilitate the examination of a witness when one of the parties is a beneficiary of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement or the Northeastern Quebec Agreement, and when the proceedings take place in the judicial districts of Abitibi or Roberval in the case of a Cree or Inuit beneficiary, or in the judicial district of Mingan in the case of a Naskapi

Multilingualism Management in Canada

25 26 27

28

29 30

31 32

153

beneficiary (C.C.P. article 305, paragraph 2)” (Ministère de la justice du Québec 2007, 2, my translation). Term used in the Quebec context to refer to speakers of languages other than English, French, or Indigenous languages. “Aux parties et aux témoins qui ne comprennent pas la langue employée devant les cours de justice du Québec” (Directive A-6). “Aux parties et aux témoins autochtones qui ne comprennent pas ou ne sont pas suffisamment familier avec la langue employée devant les cours de justice du Québec tel que prévu à la directive A-6” (Directive A-6, Annexe 2). It is important to remember that the right to interpreting for any language is recognized not only by section 14 of the Canadian Charter, but also by section 36 of Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and that Quebec is the only province to include the right to an interpreter in its human rights legislation. “No committee has been appointed to look into the issue of a lack of Indigenous interpreters” (my translation). This is certainly a “fear” that the conservative camp has. Candice Bergen, Conservative mp for Portage–Lisgar (Radio-Canada 2018), stated the following concerning the right to use Indigenous languages in the House of Commons: “Ce sera plus difficile d’expliquer pourquoi ce service n’est pas offert pour l’espagnol, le mandarin ou le Pendjabi, par exemple, alors qu’ils sont davantage parlés au Canada que les langues autochtones.” Statistics Canada and other sources refer to allochthonous languages as “immigrant languages.” In the Canadian Multiculturalism Act itself, these objectives are “translated” into the following paragraphs of section 3 (1): It is hereby declared to be the policy of the Government of Canada to (a) recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage; (b) recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism is a fundamental characteristic of the Canadian heritage and identity and that it provides an invaluable resource in the shaping of Canada’s future; (c) promote the full and equitable participation of individuals and communities of all origins in the continuing evolution and

154

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

shaping of all aspects of Canadian society and assist them in the elimination of any barrier to that participation; (d) recognize the existence of communities whose members share a common origin and their historic contribution to Canadian society, and enhance their development; (e) ensure that all individuals receive equal treatment and equal protection under the law, while respecting and valuing their diversity; (f) encourage and assist the social, cultural, economic and political institutions of Canada to be both respectful and inclusive of Canada’s multicultural character; (g) promote the understanding and creativity that arise from the interaction between individuals and communities of different origins; (h) foster the recognition and appreciation of the diverse cultures of Canadian society and promote the reflection and the evolving expressions of those cultures; (i) preserve and enhance the use of languages other than English and French, while strengthening the status and use of the official languages of Canada; and (j) advance multiculturalism throughout Canada in harmony with the national commitment to the official languages of Canada. 33 It is important to mention that, technically speaking, at the federal level, the label of “language minority” is only reserved for official language minorities. The other groups are called “cultural” or “ethnocultural groups.” 34 The Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants (lsi ) to Canada identified language barriers as a major concern for settlement. The lsi was conducted jointly by Statistics Canada and Citizenship and Immigration Canada and was designed to study the process by which new immigrants adapt to Canadian society. About 12,000 immigrants aged fifteen and older who arrived in Canada from abroad between October 2000 and September 2001 were interviewed. 35 British Columbia has a slightly higher number of people reporting an allochthonous language as their mother tongue, but has no statutory provisions related to judicial bilingualism other than for criminal proceedings. 36 The fee waiver eligibility criteria are specified here: https://www.attorney general.jus.gov.on.ca/english/courts/feewaiver/index.php#toc001.

Multilingualism Management in Canada

155

37 Ontario courts provide over 150,000 courtroom hours of interpretation annually (Ministry of the Attorney General, “Get a Court Interpreter,” https://www.ontario.ca/page/get-court-interpreter). 38 Freelance court interpreters in Ontario are paid $30 per hour. For each booking, they are guaranteed a three-hour minimum regardless of the length of the interpretation assignment (ibid.). As a point of comparison, freelance conference interpreters working for the Translation Bureau on assignments related to non-official languages negotiate their rates for each assignment and could charge anywhere from $800 to $1,200 a day depending on the difficulty or conditions of the assignment, their level of experience, and their language combination. Once a contract is signed, the interpreters are paid their full day rate, regardless of any reductions to the scheduled workload (Informant, 10 October 2019). 39 For a detailed account of how the municipal level resists and challenges official bilingualism, see Hébert (2016). 40 As shown by Córdoba Serrano (2016), who analyzes translation policies in California, if sanctions for non-compliance do not exist, the provision of translation and interpreting services and their quality can be seriously affected.

r e f e r e n ce s Beaudoin, Louis. 2018. Evidence. 15 October. https://sencanada.ca/en/ content/sen/Committee/421/ollo/54275-e. Beattie, Samantha. 2018. “Speaking Indigenous Languages Finally Welcome in Canada’s House of Commons.” Huffington Post, 30 November. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/11/30/indigenouslanguages-house-of-commons_a_23605664/. Canadian Heritage. 2019. “The Indigenous Languages Act Receives Royal Assent.” Cision, 21 June. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/theindigenous-languages-act-receives-royal-assent-824167442.html. Cardinal, Linda, and Rémi Léger. 2018. “The Politics of Multilingualism in Canada: A Neo-Institutional Approach.” In The Politics of Multilingualism: Europeanisation, Globalisation and Linguistic Governance, edited by Peter A. Kraus and François Grin, 19–37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cardinal, Linda, and Selma Sonntag. 2015. State Traditions and Language Regimes. Montreal, qc , and Kingston, on : McGill-Queen’s University Press. “The Challenges of Coexistence: Language Policy in Canada.” 2019. McGill, 22 February. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj0-XSK3FGA.

156

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

Córdoba Serrano, María Sierra. 2016. “Translation Policies and Community Translation: The U.S., a Case Study.” New Voices 16: 122–63. Córdoba Serrano, María Sierra, and Oscar Diaz Fouces, eds. 2018. “Building a Field: Translation Policies and Minority Languages.” Special issue, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 251 (May): 1–17. De Shutter, Helder. 2017. “Translational Justice: Between Equality and Privation.” In Translation and Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies, edited by Gabriel González Núñez and Reine Meylaerts, 15–30. New York: Routledge. Déry, Stéphane. 2019. Evidence. 18 February. https://sencanada.ca/fr/ content/sen/Committee/421/ollo/54530-f. Diaz Fouces, Oscar. 1998. “Traducció i language planning [Translation and Language Planning].” In Actes del III congrés internacional sobre traducció [third international congress on translation], edited by Pilar Orero, 627–36. Bellaterra: Departament de Traducció, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. García Beyaert. 2016. “Cross-Linguistic Communication and Public Policy: The Institutionalization of Community Interpreting.” Unpublished thesis, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona. González Núñez. 2016. Translating in Linguistically Diverse Societies: Translation Policy in the United Kingdom. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. González Núñez, Gabriel, and Reine Meylaerts, eds. 2017. Translation and Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies. New York: Routledge. Goyette, Savanah. 2019. “Translation and Interpretation Policy in Canada’s Official Languages Act and Indigenous Languages Act: A Comparative Study.” Unpublished paper submitted for fulfilment of the requirements of the course “Glottopolitics and Public Institutions.” Montreal, qc : McGill University. Grin, François. 1995. “Combining Immigrant and Autochthonous Language Rights: A Territorial Approach to Multilingualism.” In Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination, edited by T. Skutnabb-Kangas and R. Phillipson, 31–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. – 2010. “Translation and the Dynamics of Multilingualism.” PowerPoint presentation, Translation Forum, Brussels, 5 March. – 2017. “Translation and Language Policy in the Dynamics of Multilingualism.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 243: 155–81.

Multilingualism Management in Canada

157

Haque, Eve. 2012. Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hébert, Lise. 2016. “A Postbilingual Zone? Language and Translation Policy in Toronto.” Tusaaji: A Translation Review 5, no. 5: 17–27. Hlavac, Jim, Adolfo Gentile, Marc Orlando, Emiliano Zucchi, and Ari Pappas. 2018. “Translation as a Sub-Set of Public and Social Policy and a Consequence of Multiculturalism: The Provision of Translation and Interpreting services in Australia.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 251 (May): 55–88. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. 2019. “Standard Interpretation Service Contractor Clauses and Conditions.” https://irb-cisr.gc.ca/ en/interpreters/Pages/SiscccCtcesi.aspx (accessed 10 October 2019). Jiménez-Salcedo, Juan. 2014. “Politiques linguistiques et interprétation en milieu social au Canada: des droits linguistiques aux droits d’accès aux services publics.” Çédille 4: 131–47. – 2018. “The Asymmetry of Canada’s Language Policy Regarding Access to Justice: A Model for Managing Postmonolingualism.” In Translating and Interpreting Justice in a Postmonolingual Age, edited by Esther Monzó-Nebot and Juan Jiménez Salcedo, 127–40. Wilmington, de : Vernon Press. Kingdon, John W. 1995. Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, 2nd ed. New York: Longman. Lambert, José. 2004. “La traduction dans les sociétés monolingues.” In Übersetzung, translation, traduction, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert, and Paul Fritz, 69–85. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Laurendeau, Paul. 2016. “Official Languages Act (1988).” In The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada. 3 March. https://www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/official-languages-act-1969 (accessed 30 September 2019). Lemieux, René. 2019. “Reconnaissance des langues autochtones au Canada : Un commentaire sur le projet de loi C-91.” Trahir (blog), 31 March. https://trahir.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/lemieux-c-91/. Leman, Marc. 1999. “Canadian Multiculturalism.” Current Issue Review. http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/CIR/936-e.htm#B.%20 Bill%20C-37. Martínez-Gómez, Aída. 2018. “Language, Translation and Interpreting Policies in Prisons: Protecting the Rights of Speakers of Non-Official

158

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

Languages.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 251 (May): 151–72. McLaren, Karine. 2014. La langue des décisions judiciaires au Canada. Chair in Legal Drafting. Laval, qc : Université Laval. https://www. redactionjuridique.chaire.ulaval.ca/sites/redactionjuridique.chaire. ulaval.ca/files/karine_mclaren_concours_de_redaction_juridique.pdf. Ministère de la Justice. 1989 [2007]. Directive A-6. Services d’interprètes et paiement des frais. Québec: Ministère de la Justice (last revised 12 July 2007). – 2017. “Services d’interprétation et/ou traduction en langues autochtones devant les cours de justice.” Correspondence, 19 October. https://www.justice.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/contenu/ documents/Fr__francais_/centredoc/rapports/ministere/acces_ information/decisions-documents/2017/dai_no_75367.pdf. – 2018. “Demande d’accès aux documents.” Correspondence, 9 November. https://www.justice.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/ contenu/documents/Fr__francais_/centredoc/rapports/ministere/acces_ information/decisions-documents/2018/dai_no_76920.pdf. Ministry of the Attorney General. 2021. “Court Interpretation Services in Ontario.” https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/courts/ interpreters/ (accessed 27 July 2021). Pelletier, Paul, and Amanda Shannon. 2021. “The Indigenous Languages Market.” Virtual Conference, ailia , 22 April 2021. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=igMkg2Out6s&t=1134s (accessed 4 August 2021). Radio-Canada. 2018. “Les langues autochtones maintenant bienvenues aux Communes.” 5 December. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/espacesautochtones/1140002/langues-autochtones-traduction-chambrecommunes-ottawa-robert-falcon-ouellette. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. 1967. Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Book 4, Appendix 1. A. Davidson Dunton and André Laurendeau, co-chairmen. Ottawa: Privy Council Office. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 2006. “Language Policy and Linguistic Human Rights.” In Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, edited by Thomas Ricento, 273–91. Hoboken, nj : Wiley-Blackwell. Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages. 2019a. “Modernizing the Official Languages Act: The Views of the Justice Sector.” Ottawa: Senate. https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/421/OLLO/reports/ OLLO_Report_Final_e.pdf.

Multilingualism Management in Canada

159

– 2019b. “Modernizing the Official Languages Act: The Views of the Federal Institutions and Recommendations.” Ottawa: Senate. https:// sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/421/OLLO/reports/Modern OLAFedInst_2019-06-13_E_Final.pdf. Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. 2018. “The Use of Indigenous Languages in Proceedings of the House of Commons and Committees.” Ottawa: House of Commons. https://www.ourcommons. ca/Content/Committee/421/PROC/Reports/RP9993063/procrp66/ procrp66-e.pdf. Statistics Canada. 2017a. “2016 Census of Population Long-form Guide.” https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/statistical-programs/document/3901_ D18_T1_V1 (accessed 4 November 2019). – 2017b. “Census in Brief: Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism in Canadian Homes (Census of Population 2016).” Released 2 August. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98200-x/2016010/98-200-x2016010-eng.cfm. – 2017c. “Language Highlight Tables, 2016 Census.” https://www12. statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/hlt-fst/lang/Table. cfm?Lang=E&T=11&Geo=00&SP=1&view=2&age=1 (accessed 4 November 2019). R. v Beaulac, [1999] 1 scr 768. Supreme Court of Canada. https://scccsc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1700/index.do. Toury, Gideon. 1999. “Culture Planning and Translation.” In Anovar/ anosar: Estudios de traducción e interpretación, edited by Alberto Álvarez Lugrís and Anxo Fernández Ocampo, 13–25. Vigo, Spain: Servicio de Publicacións da Universidade de Vigo. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action.” http://www. trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf (accessed 15 October 2019). unesco. 2009. “Multilingualism, Translation and Intercultural Dialogue.” In Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue: unesco World Report, 14. Paris: unesco . http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0018/001847/184755e.pdf. US Census Bureau. 2019a. “American Community Survey.” https://www. census.gov/programs-surveys/acs (accessed 4 November 2019). – 2019b. “Language Use.” https://www.census.gov/topics/population/ language-use/about.html (accessed 4 November 2019).

160

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

l e gi sl at io n An Act Respecting Indigenous Languages, Statutes of Canada 2019. http:// www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/bill/C-91/royal-assent. Canadian Multiculturalism Act 1988. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/ C-18.7.pdf. Criminal Code 1885. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/. Constitution Act/Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1982. https:// laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html. Constitution Act 1867. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/. Official Languages Act 1988. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/ acts/o-3.01/. Official Languages Act 1969.

7

The Hidden Symbol: The Institutional Discourse of Linguistic Duality in Canada and the Evolving Spirit of the Official Languages Act Martin Cyr Hicks

in t ro du cti on While most of the other contributions to the Canada section of this book focus on its multilingualism or linguistic diversity, this chapter offers an overview of Canada’s language policy and the current institutional discourse that pervades it. Canada is clearly a multilingual country, in that we encounter hundreds of languages spoken among the people living within our borders; but Canada is not officially a multilingual nation – it is officially a bilingual nation. Most Canadians, however, surprisingly fail to understand what official bilingualism truly means, and to recognize the role Canada’s language policy has in how their government constructs their national identity. The dominant public discourse, among scholars and laypeople alike, concerning Canada’s language policy since the Official Languages Act (ola ) was first implemented focuses on the fact that it is limited to federal institutions – the language of government and its services to the people. In other words, most Canadians have the impression that their national languages policy is entirely limited to “institutional bilingualism” and that it has not changed very much since its implementation in 1969. Although institutional bilingualism has always been a central feature of the national language policy, the institutional discourse concerning the ola is significantly different from the dominant public discourse. The institutional discourse is defined here as the discourse

162

Martin Cyr Hicks

“The symbol of linguistic duality.” Canada’s Social Fabric. Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages (2018): http://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/ aboutus/commissioner.

produced and promoted by the government itself. For instance, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages (ocol ), the institution that embodies and upholds the ola, interprets the policy in a way that goes far beyond institutional bilingualism, and produces a great deal of rhetoric about Canada’s “linguistic duality” and how it is ocol’s mandate to preserve it. ocol defines linguistic duality as “the presence of two linguistic majorities cohabiting in the same country, with linguistic minority communities spread across the country.”1 The concept of “linguistic duality” is equally prevalent throughout every government department (the executive branch), the communications of the three major federal political parties (the legislative branch),

The Hidden Symbol

163

and the many decisions of the supreme courts (the judicial branch). Although Canada’s language regime is still mainly concerned with the federal government and its services, the government rhetoric surrounding it goes a significant step further, establishing French-English linguistic duality as a cornerstone of Canadian national identity. All government institutions in Canada today repeatedly refer to linguistic duality as a core Canadian “value.” As such, the institutional discourse is making a bold ideological statement about the Canadian nation. In the early 1990s, ocol even produced an emblem to symbolize the concept and ideology linguistic duality. This symbol (above), which is still used by ocol, is almost completely unknown to the Canadian public. But where does the symbol of linguistic duality, along with the discourse it represents, come from? When did it become dominant in the official, institutional discourse? Why is it not dominant in the popular, public discourse? This chapter’s objective is therefore to expose and explore how the dominant public discourse concerning Canada’s language policy is out of phase with the dominant institutional discourse. “Discourse,” as used here, is defined as a way of using language that promotes an ideological representation of some aspect of the world (Fairclough 2003, 17, 217), in this case the Canadian language regime. Put differently, discourse is an ideologically infused linguistic-semiotic practice that constructs a system of thought and perception of reality. Through discourse analysis,2 the chapter will reveal the ideology prevalent in the language (and imagery) used in key documents relating to Canada’s language policy, the emergence of linguistic duality as a discourse, and the discursive shift linguistic duality represents within Canada’s language regime, at least at the institutional level. This analysis builds on advances made in the field of Language Policy and Language Planning (lplp ), and in particular the seminal work of the Compendium of Language Management in Canada (clmc ).3 The chapter’s main thesis is that the 1988 Official Languages Act – a quasi-constitutional act4 – represents the specific tipping point when the institutional discourse relating to Canadian language policy shifts from institutional bilingualism to linguistic duality. Even though the discourse of linguistic duality is not the dominant public discourse, it represents an ideology that bears upon the way Canadians are governed in their experience of multilingualism, multiculturalism, and national belonging.

164

Martin Cyr Hicks

1. t h e b a n d b c o m m is s i on and the 1969 o f f ic ia l l a n g uages act Though not prevalent in the public discourse today, the concept of linguistic duality has a long history. Despite its pluralism, the idea of dividing Canada into two linguistic communities – two founding peoples – can be traced back to the foundation myths of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759), when the British Empire wrested control from the French of what would be known as Canada. We see the same concept in the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions of 1837: the outcome of those failed rebellions led to the Durham Report, a document that speaks of “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state” and the need to assimilate the French-speaking minority nation (1839). Scholars such as John Ralston Saul argue that the idea of linguistic duality is especially prevalent in the Lafontaine-Baldwin partnership5 and its development of responsible government, which was nevertheless done in partial opposition to Durham’s approach (2012).6 Others suggest that linguistic duality is enshrined in Article 133 of Canada’s first constitution, the British North America Act of 1867 (Talbot7 2017). These events and texts contributed to what Hugh MacLennan called the “two solitudes” when describing the state of affairs between French and English Canada in his famous 1945 novel. Although the concept of linguistic duality is certainly anchored in events of earlier centuries, it was only in the 1960s that it would fully emerge as a discourse, as a way of representing the Canadian nation. During the 1960s, a time of national upheaval and nation-building, Canadian politicians and policy-makers felt it was no longer possible to ignore increasing tensions between Canada’s “two solitudes.” With the rise of Quebec nationalism and growing fear of separatism, the Canadian government under Lester B. Pearson launched the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (the B and B Commission, 1963–69). This commission was created to assess what Canadians, both French- and English-speaking, felt about the future of their country. The commission concluded that Canada’s bilingualism and biculturalism should be formally recognized and enshrined by the state and its institution. In other words, Canada should become officially bilingual and its biculturalism should be recognized by giving Quebec special status (1967). The commission, in its reports, was

The Hidden Symbol

165

the first to use and clearly articulate the term “linguistic duality”: “despite the constant increase in numbers of Canadians of other ethnic origins, as a result of immigration, linguistic duality remains the basic characteristic and foundation of the Canadian community” (Canada 1967, 39, emphasis added). The term only appears four times in all six books of the report and is used to refers to something much closer to what the commissioners meant by “biculturalism” than to “bilingualism.” While the federal government of the time, headed by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, accepted the B and B Commission’s suggestion to proclaim Canada officially bilingual, it rejected the commission’s conclusions regarding biculturalism. Rather, Trudeau declared Canada to be a multicultural state in a speech to Parliament (1971).8 To be fair, in its public consultations, the commission found considerable unease outside of Quebec with the concept of biculturalism, which did not reflect cultural pluralism nor recognize cultural contributions made by Canadians who were not of British or French descent. Not many Canadians, including a majority of Québécois, would feel comfortable defending biculturalism today.9 However, at the time, the Québécois took the Trudeau government’s refusal to recognize biculturalism, and by association linguistic duality, as an assault against their identity and their rightful place in the Canadian political project. This helped fuel Québécois nationalism.10 Nevertheless, as a result of the B and B Commission’s recommendations, Trudeau’s government did enact the 1969 ola . This Act first established Canada as an officially bilingual country, and because of the distinction the government had initially made between language and culture, the 1969 Act was limited to institutional bilingualism, leaving aside linguistic duality along with biculturalism. Trudeau’s vision was therefore to promote multiculturalism within a bilingual framework – and bilingualism consisted of individual rather than collective rights.11 Even though the use of both French and English had been recognized in Article 133 of the 1867 Constitution,12 it was only in the 1969 ola that French received official status. As such, this was the formal beginning of Canada’s bilingual language policy. According to Linda Cardinal,13 despite major advances in the Canadian language regime, it nevertheless relies on “a representation of the language rights and official languages as a compromise” (Cardinal 2018). Here, Cardinal suggests that in giving official status to both English and French, the government intended the Québécois

166

Martin Cyr Hicks

to feel recognized and at home in the Canadian political project. It did not work out that way. Rather, the Québécois felt the 1969 ola was an ineffective half-measure. The language of the 1969 ola confirms it was limited to institutional bilingualism. In Language Policy and Language Planning (lplp ), “official languages” is typically defined as limited to the language(s) of government. The 1969 act certainly conforms to this definition. Under the “Declaration of Status of Languages,” the 1969 ola states: “The English and French languages are the official languages of Canada for all purposes of the Parliament and Government of Canada, and possess and enjoy equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all the institutions of the Parliament and Government of Canada” (Section 2, emphasis added). Here is a clear example of institutional bilingualism. Although establishing both French and English as the official languages of Canada was no small feat, it was ultimately unsuccessful at deterring the Québécois from the allure of independence.14 As Canada’s language policy was limited to government operations (that is, institutional bilingualism) and advanced nothing with regard to Canadian identity, most Québécois were unimpressed with it.15 Since its inception, the general (public) perception that Canada’s official languages policy is limited to institutional bilingualism has not significantly changed.16 In other words, most Canadians, including the Québécois, still believe official bilingualism relates only to federal government institutions or individual rights and has very little to do with collective rights or cultural identity. Simply put, Canadians think our country’s language policy has not evolved much since 1969.

2.

a n at i o n a l u n d e r s ta n d i n g

(1977)

In 1977 the Government of Canada published a policy statement titled A National Understanding, an exposé designed to inform the general public about the spirit and intent of Canada’s language policy. What makes this notable is that its publication marks the first time “linguistic duality” emerged as a term in an official government document (the B and B Commission was not actually speaking on behalf of the government; it was reporting to the government). Pierre Elliott Trudeau himself authored the preface17 and the Office of the Privy Council produced the text.

The Hidden Symbol

167

The timing of this publication was deliberate. Throughout the first half of the 1970s, it became clear to the federal government that its partial implementation of the B and B Commission’s recommendations was taken badly by most Québécois, who (to repeat) saw the ola as a half-measure. The ongoing move towards Quebec independence had clearly not shifted, as evidenced by the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976 and that party’s promise to hold a referendum on sovereignty. The Trudeau government, at the behest of the Commissioner of Official Languages (among others), was compelled to change the language policy from institutional bilingualism to something broader in scope and closer to what the B and B Commission had intended. In his preface, Trudeau references the October 1976 Speech from the Throne, in which he clearly indicated the policy would shift from focusing exclusively on the federal government towards helping Canadians “have the best possible chance of understanding their compatriots of the other language” (Trudeau 1976). The speech also promised new official languages programs to achieve this objective. A National Understanding is the follow-up to that speech, and clearly outlines what the revamped Canadian language policy would look like. For the first time, the government formally uses the terms “linguistic duality” and “linguistic communities.” According to the policy statement: [The official language policy] recognizes that linguistic duality is essential if Canada is to be a country where both English- and French-speaking communities can live lives of creativity and fulfillment. It is a policy that originates in the very nature of Canada and is essential to its continued existence as a country. (Canada 1977, 18, emphasis added) Here we see the institutional discourse of linguistic duality in its nascence,18 and this basic definition has not since changed in any significant way. The statement also lays out the principles behind this new policy direction. These principles were eventually enshrined in the 1988 ola (namely in its Parts IV, V, VI, and VII), which will be discussed shortly, and are still referred to as the “spirit of the [Official Languages] Act.”19 Briefly, the first principle confirms that every Canadian has the right to speak any language privately. The

168

Martin Cyr Hicks

second principle states that the “English and French languages are the official languages of Canada and have equality of status” (43). This second principle is particularly interesting because it eliminates the “as to their use in all the institutions of the Parliament and Government of Canada” passage from the 1969 ola . Therefore, in the new policy, equality of status becomes a more general principle that applies to Canadian society and identity as a whole. The third principle states that Canada’s federal government must take positive measures to ensure that official language minorities survive across Canada, but also that “the English and French languages are a fundamental expression of the Canadian heritage” (43). The fourth principle relates to the right to be educated in the official language of one’s choice, and the fifth encourages Canadians to learn both official languages to create a “natural link between the two linguistic communities” (44), although it emphasizes that this is not an obligation. The sixth principle refers to the government’s bilingual service to the public. The seventh deals with equal opportunity for French and English speakers for employment and advancement in the public service. Finally, the eighth principle discusses equal representation of the two official language communities in the public service. In the way it formulated these principles, the government was beginning to shift the discourse of Canada’s language policy from institutional bilingualism towards linguistic duality. The document explicitly states that Canada needs such a shift to keep the country together. Building on Cardinal’s view that Canada’s language policy stems from a compromise between the two solitudes, the discourse of linguistic duality is additionally enmeshed in a nation-building effort, aiming to bring the two solitudes closer together. Here, the two solitudes cease to be a difficult reality Canada must contend with through policies of compromise and become an integral part of the national identity. Despite its stronger emphasis on community and identity, A National Understanding still distinguishes language from culture in ways that are similar to the B and B Commission’s approach. Although it frequently claims language and culture are “intimately related” (20), it suggests we must not mistake its statements regarding official language communities for any assertion about official cultures in Canada. Language here is still very much an expression of culture, but it is not the basis of culture itself. By today’s more anti-essentialist sociolinguistic standards – which hold that language

The Hidden Symbol

169

is not merely an expression of culture, but the very location of culture – this position in A National Understanding is outmoded. In support of Cardinal’s idea that Canada’s language policy is really about compromise, A National Understanding was used as a bargaining chip against the Quebec sovereignty movement. This new policy direction was meant to placate Québécois separatists, adjusting the institutional discourse of the Canadian language policy to bring it closer to their demands. Linguistic duality, as presented in A National Understanding (and as it is still defined today), incorporated the same concepts that were also behind the biculturalism expounded by the B and B Commission and initially abandoned by the government.20

3. t he c h a rt e r o f r ig h t s and freedoms (1982) Despite the articulation of linguistic duality as a discourse in A National Understanding, the 1982 patriation of the Constitution – which contained the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (“the Charter”; Part I of the Constitution) as its centrepiece – was still mostly limited to institutional bilingualism. The political debacle leading up to the patriation of the Constitution (see “the night of the long knives”) is notable, and in the end all provinces signed the Constitution except Quebec, which felt the Charter did not guarantee the powers it needed to be secure within the Canadian federation. The first mention of official languages in the Charter is that “French and English are the official languages of Canada and have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all institutions of the Parliament and of Canada” (Charter, section 16[1], emphasis added). Apparently disregarding the new wording of the 1977 policy statement, the Charter initially refuses to go beyond the scope of institutional bilingualism by replicating the same language used in the 1969 ola . This introductory statement is not infused with the ideology promoting the linguistic duality of Canada – that Canada comprises two linguistic communities. This is especially true when we juxtapose the passage above with subsection 16.1(1), added in 1993, which clearly points to the existence of “linguistic communities” in the province of New Brunswick.21 However, subsection 16(3) of the Charter does state that Parliament or a legislature have the authority to further advance the equality of both official languages’ status. This subsection makes possible the

170

Martin Cyr Hicks

discourse of linguistic duality’s eventual ascendancy. Nevertheless, with the exception of the sections concerning New Brunswick, the prevalent discourse in this part of the Charter still very much pertains to institutional bilingualism, focused on individual rights rather than duality or collective rights. The Charter also extends the language policy beyond the federal government’s institutional bilingualism when it defends the right to be educated in one’s official language of choice (section 23). This is where the Charter follows up on the 1976 Speech from the Throne. But even here, the Charter speaks of the English or French linguistic minority “populations” of the provinces rather than of official language “communities,” as worded in A National Understanding. Although the Charter mostly replicates the language and discourse of the 1969 ola , the political significance of institutional bilingualism must not be completely understated. As Jean Leclerc22 states: “[w]ithout a doubt, the most prestigious status for any language is that of official language, because states or countries that grant it automatically commit to using that language in all of their operations” (Leclerc 2018). In other words, even if the Charter lays out a policy mostly limited to institutional bilingualism and fails to refer to the existence of Canada’s official linguistic communities, it does nevertheless recognize and grant essential rights to both Francophones and Anglophones. Rare are linguistic minorities of the world that have the rights accorded to Francophones in the Canadian Charter. The problem is that, in contrast to the clause relating to New Brunswick, there is absolutely no sense that Canada’s Francophones form a community of any sort. This was intentional. If the government recognized a pan-Canadian Francophone community, it would inevitably be forced to recognize Quebec as its centre (if not its progenitor – with the exception of Acadians). From the perspective of the politicians involved in the patriation of the Constitution, this would have given the province of Quebec too much power, which from their point of view would have threatened the cohesion and integrity of the Canadian federation.

4 . m e e c h l a k e a nd the 1988 o f f ic ia l l a n g uages act In the years following the 1982 Charter, a subsequent government led by Brian Mulroney reopened the constitutional debate with the hope that Quebec would sign the Canadian Constitution. Again, this

The Hidden Symbol

171

chapter will not delve into the intricacies of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord (1987–90) or its follow-up, the Charlottetown Accord (1992). But briefly, the Meech Lake Accord would have amended the Constitution to grant Quebec special status as a distinct society, as well as a veto on constitutional amendments, among other privileges. This accord reformulated conclusions already made by the B and B Commission, which stated that “the two dominant cultures in Canada are embodied in distinct societies … We recognize the main elements of a distinct French-speaking society in Québec” (1967, xxxiii).23 Although a majority of the Canadian political leadership and population supported the Meech Lake Accord, its support was not unanimous and the accord was therefore eventually blocked.24 The follow-up Charlottetown Accord was rejected by popular vote in 1992: even though it also granted Quebec special status, it did not give that province all the concessions Meech Lake offered.25 Many of the problems that have plagued Canadian politics since the early 1990s stem from the Québécois sense that, with the failure of the Meech Lake Accord especially, the rest of Canada refuses to recognize this community as a distinct society (see Taylor 1992).26 The Meech Lake Accord was an initial attempt to firmly institutionalize the discourse of linguistic duality, which was first elaborated (and poorly worded) as “biculturalism” by the B and B Commission, and later as linguistic duality in A National Understanding. The nearly catastrophic effect the failure of the Meech Lake Accord had on Canadian unity is undeniable.27 In the lead-up to the Meech Lake debacle, the federal government also decided it was time to modernize the Official Languages Act. The typical claim is that this was an attempt to make the ola more consistent with values expressed in the Charter, building on new minority language education rights,28 but the 1988 ola is actually part of the same system of thought that inspired the Meech Lake Accord. Designed to amend the 1982 Charter, the Accord may have failed politically, but one of its underlying policies lives on in the 1988 ola . While the discourse of linguistic duality may have been articulated more obviously in A National Understanding, it did not yet have official or legal status when that policy statement was published (1977). In giving linguistic duality legal status, the 1988 ola succeeded where Meech Lake had failed. Discourse analysis is used in this chapter to address the subtle, discursive level at which linguistic duality eventually becomes

172

Martin Cyr Hicks

dominant within the institutions of Canada’s federal government. It is because of this subtlety that most Canadians remain unaware of it. The discursive shift from institutional bilingualism to linguistic duality manifests itself in a single word: communities. Whereas the Charter (again, with the exception of the New Brunswick clause) refers to English and French linguistic “populations” (section 23a), the 1988 ola finally acknowledges “linguistic minority communities” (sections 2b and 41a) and “official language communities” (section 39[1]). The linguistic shift from populations to communities, inconspicuous as it may seem, is where linguistic duality as a discourse and ideological perspective begins to dominate the government rhetoric of Canada’s official language policy. This shift in the 1988 ola also marks a discursive shift from viewing bilingualism as an individual rights issue to considering it a collective one. If Canada has two types of official language minority communities, as the ola clearly stipulates, we can reasonably surmise29 that we have two official language majority communities as well. As the only Anglophone minority community is the Anglo-Quebecers, by simple deduction the Francophone majority community can be none other than Quebec. As it is never explicitly named, Quebec holds the same place in the Canadian language legislation as dark matter does in physics: they are both present by deduction only. Nevertheless, the Québécois are indirectly, yet undeniably, recognized as one of two distinct linguistic majority communities. As such, the central element of the distinct society clause of the Meech Lake Accord was surreptitiously implemented in the ola – a Canadian quasi-constitutional act. The 1988 ola also clearly specifies in sections 2b and 41b that French and English have “equal status” in Canadian society (and the same statement is made more ambiguously in sections 56.1 and 58.1a). As they do not specify that these services are limited to government agencies only, these statements further reinforce the discursive shift from a more limited institutional bilingualism to the broader, bolder concept of linguistic duality. Cardinal, in her work on language policy in Canada (2018), aptly draws a distinction between the legal “principle of personality” and the “principle of territoriality”:30 At the federal level, the development of English and French has been based on the principle of personality since the enactment of the first Official Languages Act in 1969. This law, in the

The Hidden Symbol

173

same vein [as] the new Official Languages Act of 1988, confers the right of Canadians to receive federal services in the official language of their choice. This right is granted to individuals and relates only to public uses. The principle of personality did indeed lead to the establishment of institutional bilingualism as a language policy in Canada, and institutional bilingualism is still in large part what Canadian language policy addresses. However, Cardinal does not seem to recognize the discursive shift present in the 1988 ola – for her, the original ola and the 1988 version do not differ significantly in terms of legal principles. Yet, with the shift from “linguistic populations” to “linguistic communities” in the 1988 ola , the language policy itself also significantly shifts from the principle of personality towards the principle of territoriality, even if the scales are not tipped completely in that direction. As Cardinal herself writes with regard to the New Brunswick clauses in the Charter, the “notion of community equality has particularities that recall the territorial principle” (Cardinal 2018). Following the same logic, the 1988 ola therefore uniquely blends the principle of personality, manifest in institutional bilingualism, and the principle of territoriality, manifest in linguistic duality. Until 1988, the language policy established by the Liberals under Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau distinctly avoided any connection between language and territory. Nor does the 1988 ola overtly make that connection. However, as stated above, the 1988 Act does implicitly claim that Canada has two official language majority communities, one of which can exist in no other place than the territory of Quebec. This is where the discourse of linguistic duality begins to take precedence over that of institutional bilingualism in the official Canadian language policy. As such, the 1988 ola was less an attempt to match the principles of the Charter than it was a successful attempt to align with those of the failed Meech Lake Accord.31 To reiterate the main point of this chapter, regardless of the now-dominant institutional discourse, the public discourse – as seen with Cardinal – still asserts that the ola was inspired by Pierre Trudeau’s vision of official bilingualism, as manifested in its original 1969 version and the Charter. But as the discourse present in the current ola actually aligns with the concessions and principles of the Meech Lake Accord, then the current ola is, in reality, the product of André Laurendeau’s vision of linguistic duality – as developed

174

Martin Cyr Hicks

in the B and B Commission’s reports under the unfortunate and unpopular guise of biculturalism. While biculturalism as a concept was soundly rejected in the late 1960s, the discourse behind it lives on in the concept of linguistic duality and has been institutionalized in the 1988 ola . Although Trudeau did sign the preface to A National Understanding, he was generally opposed to the concept of linguistic duality. Graham Fraser and Kenneth McRoberts quote Trudeau’s famous speech to the Canadian Senate in 1988, in which he argues against the duality expounded in the Meech Lake Accord: “Bilingualism unites people; dualism divides them. Bilingualism means you can speak to the other; duality means you can live in one language and the rest of Canada will live in another language” (quoted in McRoberts 2004, 148, and Fraser 2006, 92). Both Fraser and McRoberts correctly demonstrate that Trudeau (despite having prefaced A National Understanding) was wary of the discourse of linguistic duality, along with many other Canadians. Nevertheless, linguistic duality represents the spirit of the ola in its current form.

5. t h e sy m b o l o f l in g u is ti c duali ty (1991) an d c a n a da’ s l a n g uage poli cy today Victor Goldbloom became the fourth Commissioner of Official Languages in 1991, during the turbulent period between the failures of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords. The federal government, largely through ocol , was trying to highlight the advances made in the 1988 ola , including its new recognition of Canada’s linguistic duality. To help, ocol designed a symbol to represent itself and promote the newly minted vision embodied in the ola . Annual reports and various articles written by Goldbloom and his team reveal what the symbol represents. The symbol is composed of two interlocking squares of similar shape, size, and colour (usually silver). A smaller square of a different colour (usually gold) is at the centre of the symbol, where the two squares intersect. The two larger squares represent the two official language majority communities. The middle square is a point of convergence and appears to represent the nexus of the Canadian Francophone-Anglophone partnership. The symbol is a clear depiction of linguistic duality – two languages (two squares) of equal status (of the same size) – as it is defined in the ola .32 The symbol has also been referred to as “the social fabric of Canada.” A short explanation of what this means usually

The Hidden Symbol

175

accompanies the pin depicting the symbol, a pin which is still offered to guests by ocol representatives today: Canada’s Social Fabric: A fabric is woven of many threads. English- and French-speaking Canadians from myriad cultural backgrounds make up the social fabric we call Canada. The gold fabric in the centre of the pin symbolizes the coming together of our two language communities and the richness of the dialogue between them. Wearing the emblem of the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages shows your commitment to fostering harmony between the English and French fibres of Canada’s social fabric.33 The idea here was to shift the discourse away from Trudeau’s original vision of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework” (imbued with an exclusively individual sense of language rights – the principles of personality and institutional bilingualism) to the more communitarian view of linguistic duality. The symbol depicts two supra linguistic communities (linguistic duality), each composed of a multitude of diverse sub-communities (multiculturalism), which may or may not be defined by language. What is both astonishing and problematic is that few Canadians have ever even seen the ocol symbol, and correspondingly, few understand the discourse or ideological perspective it represents: a well-defined vision of Canada’s national identity, embodied in a quasi-constitutional act. It is almost as though the symbol were hidden from the public, albeit in plain sight. We see this symbol in every ocol publication, including its annual reports, until the arrival of Graham Fraser, the sixth commissioner of official languages (2006–16). Although Fraser was never opposed to the symbol – he in fact dubbed it the “the symbol of linguistic duality” (ocol 2009, 11) – it has been far less prevalent at ocol since 2006. Nevertheless, in almost all of his speeches, reports, and publications, Fraser (who continued to wear the pin on his lapel) espoused the discourse of linguistic duality as much as or more than any of his predecessors.34 This discourse also remains prominent on ocol ’s official website. The website functions as an interface between the general public and the ola , allowing citizens to better understand their linguistic rights. ocol ’s website states that “English and French are fundamental characteristics of the Canadian identity”; “Canada’s two official languages are deeply

176

Martin Cyr Hicks

rooted in our history and are key identifiers of our … identity”; and “[l]inguistic duality and cultural diversity are fundamental and complementary values of Canadian identity. Tolerance and a sense of accommodation are ingrained Canadian values – this is largely thanks to our duality, which has taught us to respect one another.”35 The website reveals ocol ’s unwavering commitment to the values represented by the symbol it originally designed in the early 1990s. As such, ocol is clearly promoting something that goes beyond the language of government (in its references to “history,” “identity,” “cultural diversity,” and “respect”), although the defence of institutional bilingualism is still very much a part of ocol ’s mandate. Today, the discourse of linguistic duality is certainly not limited to ocol . Every federal government ministry and department now defines linguistic duality as a core Canadian value. For example, in its 2018–2023 Action Plan for Official Languages, the Department of Canadian Heritage states that the “government reaffirms the importance of our linguistic duality and bilingualism as the foundation of the social contract that brings us together” (Canada 2018a, 7). Note how duality and bilingualism are treated as separate yet connected concepts in this statement. Even the 2018 federal budget stipulates that “Canada’s linguistic duality, which for 50 years has been enshrined in the Official Languages Act, is an integral part of Canada’s history and identity” (Canada 2018b, 181). In its analyses of its 2011 and 2016 censuses, Statistics Canada states that Canada’s “two official languages … exert a strong pull as languages of convergence and integration into Canadian society” (2011, emphasis added) and the official languages are the “two languages of convergence in the public sphere” (2017, emphasis added). Interpreting the official languages as “languages of convergence” makes the coexistence of linguistic duality, multilingualism, and multiculturalism possible: Canada’s unity in diversity is achieved through its linguistic duality – cultural plurality (including linguistic diversity) is encouraged so long as the outcome of that plurality is integrated into (at least) one of two official language communities. Trudeau’s “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework” has shifted to mean “multiculturalism within the framework of linguistic duality.” To reiterate, strong references to linguistic duality are the norm rather than the exception in the institutional discourse of the government. The discourse of linguistic duality is also prevalent throughout the publications of the Senate Standing Committee on Official Languages (ollo ) as well as

The Hidden Symbol

177

the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages (lang ), both bipartisan government entities. Yet regardless of the government’s efforts to promote linguistic duality as a core national value, the prevailing public discourse is still that Canada’s language policy relates entirely to institutional bilingualism. In ocol ’s 2009 annual report, Graham Fraser stated that “[d]espite public support for bilingualism, Canada has been reluctant to embrace linguistic duality as a key element in its identity” (2009, xi). In contrast to Fraser’s lucid observation, it is troubling to observe how often the Canadian government, basing its perspective on public surveys that reveal the population’s general support for institutional bilingualism, automatically (and erroneously) concludes the public must also be in favour of linguistic duality. The two are not necessarily identical, as this chapter has demonstrated. That said, the two are not mutually exclusive either.

c o n c l u si on There are two discursive currents at play in discussions of Canada’s official language policy, and the dominant public discourse is not in sync with the dominant institutional one – or at least the public discourse has not caught up with the institutional discourse. If the public were made more aware of the discourse and policy of linguistic duality, as well as the hidden symbol that represents it, it is unclear that it would necessarily espouse them. Many Canadians might feel resistant or even hostile to a discourse that appears to have been constructed by the government, seemingly pandering to unrelenting French-Canadian demands. They may perceive this as the centre imposing itself on the periphery – the “Ottawa bubble” perpetually out of touch with the multilingual realities many Canadians deal with on a daily basis. They may even see it as a throwback to our colonial past. Obviously, Canada’s settler colonial heritage is present in the discourse of linguistic duality, but it has come a long way from the ethnically driven discourse of the “two founding peoples.” As is evidenced in the social fabric reference cited above, the two official language communities are interpreted as inclusive and culturally diverse communities. In linguistic duality, we see twenty years later the reification of the B and B Commission’s recommendations. 1977’s A National Understanding and the 1988 ola transformed the idea of

178

Martin Cyr Hicks

biculturalism from a potentially ethnic concept to an entirely linguistic one. This reformulation is perfectly represented in the ocol symbol. Importantly, the “spirit of the Act” – a term that comes up frequently in ocol investigation reports – is one and the same as the spirit of the defunct Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords. Those accords may have failed at the pan-Canadian democratic levels, but their spirit, in the guise of linguistic duality, lives on in Canada’s legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. The Canadian public (including the Québécois) fails to recognize this. Despite often obsessive claims by Canadians that they have no identity, something public figures often reinforce (see Justin Trudeau’s often-cited 2015 comments about Canada being the first post-national state36 – comments he would not repeat thereafter in his role as prime minister), the evidence abundant in government rhetoric actually promotes a strong linguistically based – not ethnically based – binary view of national belonging. Canadians may not share the federal government’s views on their identity but they cannot reasonably claim it does not exist. For better or worse, from the government’s perspective Canadian identity is far more clearly defined than people realize. This is evidenced in Canada’s language policy and depicted in the discourse and symbol of linguistic duality. That said, the federal government will need to explore how the discourse of linguistic duality, a “fundamental characteristic of the Canadian identity,” aligns with the 2019 Indigenous Languages Act. While heritage language groups are more easily integrated as “threads” in Canada’s “social fabric,” we may need to rethink the relationship between the two official language communities and the Indigenous language communities they displaced. Indigenous communities may challenge the legitimacy of official languages as “languages of convergence.” Nevertheless, bringing to light the shifting discourse within Canada’s interpretations of its language policy helps to clarify ongoing debates on bilingualism, multilingualism, and language policy. Precision around terms and concepts is important, especially when the Canadian example is viewed as pertinent in other multilingual contexts around the world.

The Hidden Symbol

179

no t e s

1 2

3

4 5

6

7 8 9

10

11

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages (ocol ). See the ocol website: http://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/. The discourse analysis approach used in this chapter is mainly critical, following the tradition established by Foucault (1969), Barthes (1977), and later by Fairclough (2003). The clmc is a comprehensive web resource on language policy in Canada, edited by Monika Jezak of the University of Ottawa’s Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute (olbi ). The compendium contains over 1,600 pages of invaluable research by leading scholars in the field. When an act is quasi-constitutional, it means that it has the power to override all other laws with the exception of the Constitution. Baldwin and Lafontaine were two Canadian politicians who exchanged ridings in order to ensure a Francophone voice in the Parliament of the United Canada. Saul makes a very strong case that this partnership symbolizes a core foundation of Canadian identity. Although they accepted Durham’s recommendations concerning responsible government, his recommendation concerning the assimilation of the French Canadians was effectively rejected. Robert Talbot is a historian and ocol ’s research manager. This speech is the precursor to and foundation of the 1988 Multiculturalism Act. In Quebec, cultural diversity is fully recognized in its policy of interculturalism. A discursive analysis I conducted in 2012 revealed that Canadian multiculturalism and Québécois interculturalism are in fact exactly the same (see Hicks 2012). It is curious to me that the B and B Commission, along with the public, accepted a distinction between language and culture. Today this would be impossible, as we regard the two as indistinguishable. That said, because language and culture were separated in this way, we can see how many French Canadians of the time felt the government’s refusal to recognize biculturalism was a slight. Had people understood then the extent to which culture and language are intertwined, their interpretation of the government’s policies would surely have been different. Eve Haque published an insightful work on this topic in 2012, in which she investigates the relationship between race and language. In some ways, this chapter takes her argument and turns it on its head.

180

Martin Cyr Hicks

12 French and English are defined as the languages of Parliament in the British North America Act. 13 Professor Cardinal is a leading figure in the study of Canada’s language policy. 14 The October Crisis happened in 1970. René Levesque and the Parti Québécois, a party promoting sovereignty, won the 1976 elections in Quebec. The first referendum on sovereignty was held in 1980. 15 For a more detailed account of how the Québécois perceive Canada’s language and cultural policies, please see Hicks 2004. This negative impression among the Québécois led to two referendums on sovereignty. 16 See Taylor’s Reconciling the Solitudes (1993, 163–73) for more on how the language policy was interpreted generally. See also the ocol annual reports from 1971 to 2018. 17 This is strange, because a little more than a decade later Trudeau opposed the concept of linguistic duality. 18 The French version of the same passage is slightly different, de-emphasizing the reference to “communities.” It is curious that Anglophones have typically been keener than Francophones to give Quebec the concessions it has always wanted on this issue. 19 The phrase “the spirit of the Act” appears in every ocol investigation report. 20 By today’s standards, the Commission might have been called The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Linguistic Duality. 21 Section 16.1(1) of the Charter states: “The English linguistic community and the French linguistic community in New Brunswick have equality of status and equal rights and privileges, including the right to distinct educational institutions and such distinct cultural institutions as are necessary for the preservation and promotion of those communities.” 22 Along with Linda Cardinal, Jean Leclerc is a seminal scholar of language policy in Canada, and another major contributor to the Compendium of Language Management in Canada (clmc ). His historical overview of language policy in Canada is an invaluable resource for scholars. 23 That said, the report immediately follows up by stating that “[o]n the French side there is not only the distinct society in Quebec; elements of an autonomous society are taking shape elsewhere” (1967, xxxiii). Nevertheless, the final conclusion is still that there are two main cultures in Canada. 24 The Meech Lake Accord did not meet the deadline for ratification in the legislature of only two provinces, despite having over 60% of general support (public and political) in those two provinces.

The Hidden Symbol

181

25 The Québécois rejected the Charlottetown Accord because it was not as forceful as the Meech Lake Accord, and the rest of Canada (particularly the western provinces) primarily rejected it because it was fed up with making concessions to Quebec. 26 As over 85% of French Canadians live in Quebec, the Québécois often fail to distinguish between “French Canadian” and “Québécois” – they see “French Canadian” as an outdated term for “Québécois.” So, the denial of the status of distinct society to Quebec is often interpreted as a denial of the distinctiveness of French Canadian society. 27 There is a direct correlation between its failure, the emergence of the Bloc Québécois, and the 1995 referendum on sovereignty – which could have led to the complete break-up of the country. 28 See Fraser (2006). 29 This is the point logicians could more easily attack. Here, my argument is based on what we can reasonably agree on, not on what is incontrovertibly the case. 30 In law, the principle of personality refers to individual rights, whereas the principle of territoriality refers to the collective rights of a people inhabiting a specific territory. 31 And A National Understanding before it. 32 From this point forward, any reference to the ola is a reference to its 1988 (and still current) version. 33 A similar description was elaborated for ocol ’s annual reports (1993–2005) and its journal, Language and Society (1991–99). 34 All of Fraser’s annual reports at ocol clearly refer to linguistic duality as a core national value. 35 See the ocol website: http://www.ocol-clo.gc.ca/en/resources/frequentlyasked-questions. 36 A statement made in a New York Times article in late 2015.

r e f e r e n ce s Canada. 1967–70. Reports of Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (André Laurendeau and Charles Dunton). http://epe. lac-bac.gc.ca/100/200/301/pco-bcp/commissions-ef/dunton1967-1970ef/dunton1967-70-eng.htm. – 1977. A National Understanding. Ottawa: Government of Canada, Ministry of Supply and Services. – 2011. Linguistic Characteristics of Canadians. https://www12.statcan.gc. ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-314-x/98-314-x2011001-eng.cfm.

182

Martin Cyr Hicks

– 2017. Linguistic Integration of Immigrants and Official Language Populations in Canada. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/censusrecensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016017/98-200-x2016017-eng.cfm. – 2018a. 2018–2023 Action Plan for Official Languages. https://www. canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/official-languages-bilingualism/ official-languages-action-plan/2018-2023.html. – 2018b. Federal Budget. https://www.budget.gc.ca/2018/docs/plan/ budget-2018-en.pdf. – 2018c. Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. http://www. officiallanguages.gc.ca/en. Canadian Multiculturalism Act. 1988. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/ acts/C-18.7/page-1.html. Cardinal, Linda. 2018. “Political and Institutional Foundations of Language Management in Canada.” In The Compendium of Language Management in Canada, edited by Monika Jezak. https://www.uottawa. ca/clmc/foundations. Accessed 1 September 2018. The British North America Act. 1867. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1867/3/pdfs/ukpga_18670003_en.pdf. Constitution Act: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 1982. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/fra/Const/page-15.html. Durham, John George Lambton. 1939. “Report on the Affairs of British North America.” Early Canadiana Online. http://eco.canadiana.ca/view/ oocihm.32374/13?r=0&s=1 (accessed 10 August 2018). Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2002 [1969]. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Fraser, Graham. 2006. Sorry, I Don’t Speak French. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Haque, Eve. 2012. Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hicks, Martin Cyr. 2004. “Resistance and Symbiosis: Québec Discourses of Resistance in the Context of Postcolonial Theory.” PhD diss. Montreal, qc : Université de Montréal. – 2012. “The Challenge of Interculturalism: Insights on the BouchardTaylor Commission and Multiculturalism in Québec.” In Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity, edited by Scott H. Boyd and Mary Ann Walter, 75–84. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, uk : Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

The Hidden Symbol

183

Jezak, Monika, ed. 2018. The Compendium of Language Management in Canada. https://www.uottawa.ca/clmc/ (accessed 1 September 2018). Leclerc, Jean. 2018. “Linguistic History of Canada.” In The Compendium of Language Management in Canada, edited by Monika Jezak. https:// www.uottawa.ca/clmc/linguistic-history. Accessed 1 September 2018. McRoberts, Kenneth. 2004. “Struggling against Territory: Language Policy in Canada.” In Language, Nation, and State, edited by Tony Judt and Dennis Lacorne, 133–60. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. MacLennan, Hugh. 2018 [1945]. Two Solitudes. Montreal, qc : McGill-Queen’s University Press. Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. 1992. Annual Report 1991–1992. Ottawa: Government of Canada, Minister of Supply and Services Canada. – 2007. Annual Report 2006–2007. http://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/html/ ar_ra_2006_07_e.php. – 2009. Annual Report 2008–2009. http://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/html/ ar_ra_2008_09_e.php. Official Languages Act: an Act respecting the status and use of the official languages of Canada. 1969. https://www.uottawa.ca/clmc/officiallanguages-act-1969. Official Languages Act: an Act respecting the status and use of the official languages of Canada. 1988. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/ acts/O-3.01/. Saul, John Ralston. 2012. Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine & Robert Baldwin. Toronto: Penguin Canada. Talbot, Robert. 2017. “Linguistic Duality: A Founding Principle of Confederation?” Bulletin 43, no. 2: 6–7. http://www.cha-shc.ca/ download.php?id=2748. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press. – 1993. Reconciling the Solitudes. Montreal, qc : McGill-Queen’s University Press. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. 1968. “Statement on the Introduction of the Official Languages Bill.” https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ primeministers/h4-4066-e.html. – 1971. House of Commons Debates. 28th Parliament, 3rd Session, Volume 8 (8 October 1971): 8545–8, Appendix, 8580–5. – 1976. “Throne Speech.” Quebec City: Université Laval. https://www. poltext.org/sites/poltext.org/files/discours/tcan1976.pdf.

8

Languages in Concert: Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land Mark Fettes

a b r ie f s tat e m e n t o f the problem I still vividly remember the first time I got a sense of the unique place of Indigenous languages in Canada. The year was 1992; I had been living in Ottawa for a few months as a new immigrant. Looking for an interesting language-related topic to write about, I had gone down to the Byward Market to interview Ruth Norton, the director of the newly formed Languages and Literacy Secretariat of the Assembly of First Nations. Hanging on the wall behind her desk was a Government of Canada map displaying a spread of coloured dots – one for every First Nation in the country. The colours denoted different language families: Algonquian, Siouan, Dene, Inuit, and others. A swath of green dots swept across thousands of kilometres of boreal forest. A necklace of blue dots fringed the Arctic coast. A tracery of violet dots followed the tributaries of the vast Mackenzie watershed. An intricate mosaic of colours filled the valleys and islands and coastal inlets of British Columbia. Language and land were visibly dancing together, on a gigantic scale. At the time, the most commonly cited statistic on Indigenous languages was that there were 53 of them in Canada, of which all but three were endangered.1 Yet such global descriptors do little to convey the rich and complex realities of a glorious cornucopia of languages spoken in many varieties and in vastly differing geographical, economic, and cultural contexts. As I gradually learned more about the languages and the places and communities they belong to,

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

185

this misrepresentation came to seem increasingly willful and oppressive. Canadians did not want to know the true linguistic map of the land beneath their feet, just as they didn’t want to know about residential schools or the Indian Act or the numbered treaties with First Nations. Their mental map of Canada barely had space for two languages, let alone 53, or 70, or 190, or 2,000 – figures that reflect different ways of capturing the diversity of Indigenous nations and communities across the country. Today, perhaps, that is starting to change. The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission2 had a far greater impact on public discourse and public institutions than did the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples two decades earlier. Indigenous artists and writers and politicans have a far more prominent role in Canadian cultural life today than they did even a decade ago. School systems in most provinces have committed to doing a better job of teaching about the Indigenous history of Canada, including the hard truths about residential schools. There are grounds for hope. Indigenous linguistic plurality, however, remains challenging for the national narrative to embrace. As predominantly oral, community-based languages, Indigenous languages do not fit comfortably with the preconceptions of Canadians whose first-hand experience is limited to English, French, and other “modern” languages. Their extraordinary syntactical, phonological, and lexical diversity defies simple summation. The impacts of colonialism and disease on their vitality and registers of use are profound. And still more challenging is their connection with the land as an ontological reality. Even people who are acutely conscious of the multilingual nature of Canadian society, and who support the languages’ legal and political recognition as recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, may see this primarily as an issue of minority rights, unconnected to issues of land ownership or stewardship or land-based identity. And yet, as we shall see – and as that map on the wall of Ruth Norton’s office was hinting at – the connections run deep indeed. One of the clearest statements of this link between language and land can be found in the report of a federal Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures, established in 2004 to provide guidance to the Minister of Canadian Heritage on the formation of a national Aboriginal language strategy. (Ruth Norton served as one of the ten Task Force members.) The report, which can still be readily accessed online, asserts the following in its Executive Summary:

186

Mark Fettes

The most important relationship embodied by First Nation, Inuit and Métis languages is with the land. “The land” is more than the physical landscape; it involves the creatures and plants, as well as the people’s historical and spiritual relationship to their territories. First Nation, Inuit and Métis languages show that the people are not separate from the land. They have a responsibility to protect it and to preserve the sacred and traditional knowledge associated with it.3 To many readers, this probably comes across as a statement of cultural belief. I want to suggest that it reflects, instead, an ontological truth. To understand the languages in this way is to grasp, in some fundamental sense, what they are. The rest of this chapter sets out to explain how this can be so. First, however, it may be worth reflecting on the instinctive resistance we may feel to such a claim. There is a deeply embedded preference for decontextualization in much Western discourse, tied to the underlying logic of colonialism: that people, animals and plants, materials, cultural practices, and so on can be described, managed, uprooted, and redistributed according to the needs of the state and the economy without changing their fundamental nature. Nowadays it has become more common to unveil and denounce such assumptions and practices. We may be less aware, however, that this logic has also infiltrated the Western understanding of human rights, in part because the central purpose of “rights talk” is to defend people who have been subject to this kind of dislocation and deracination. The net result, however, is that Indigenous languages are widely understood, both politically and intellectually, as an issue of personal and cultural identity. This is how they are treated, for example, in the Calls to Action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,4 which specifically tie the languages to “Aboriginal rights” (Call 13), “Canadian culture and society” and “Aboriginal cultures” (Call 14), and existing modes of multilingual governance in Canada such as language commissioners (Call 15). The land is not mentioned. I suggest that this approach is inadequate. If we are truly making an effort to move beyond centuries of colonization, we should avoid reinscribing colonial assumptions in our thinking. A good start is to take seriously what Indigenous elders and scholars and artists have been saying for decades. The languages belong to the

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

187

land. Since this is the land we all live on, coming to embrace this as a truth about Canada will have consequences for how we think about Canadian multilingualism. It is none too soon to be asking these questions.

l e arnin g f ro m in d ig e n ous i nternati onali sm As the Task Force quotation above makes clear, the land relationship is not just that of language with territory, as might be assumed within the Western tradition. “Land” in an Indigenous context refers to all kinds of beings living together in a particular place. The Western concepts of “ecosystem,” “habitat,” biome,” food web,” and so on all refer to aspects of the land, but none of them encompasses its full richness. The land is not just a set of living relations but a lively, multifaceted intelligence that thinks and acts in many registers, one of them being human. What this means, as Nishnaabe scholar Leanne Simpson points out in As We Have Always Done (2017), is that Indigenous nations are always already international: My understanding of Nishnaabewin is that our intelligence includes all the thinking that has gone into making the realities we live in and that on a more philosophical scale, internationalism has always been part of our intellectual practices. With our complex ways of relating to the plant nations, animal nations, and the spiritual realm, our existence has always been inherently international regardless of how rooted in place we are. We have always been networked. We have always thought of the bush as a networked series of international relationships.5 An Indigenous language, then, is a language of interspecies diplomacy – a language shaped through ongoing efforts to listen to what the land is saying, in all its many voices, and rephrase some parts of it in human terms. Its genealogy is not that of a solo instrument, but one that is essentially part of an orchestra. And this in turn suggests that reconciliation must entail, not just the valuing and upholding of Indigenous languages as solo instruments – the kind of acknowledgment that follows naturally from Western rights discourse, for instance – but also, and more importantly, the valuing and upholding of the full orchestras of which they are part.

188

Mark Fettes

This is an unfamiliar kind of linguistic pluralism. We have become so accustomed, in Western intellectual traditions, to thinking and writing of language as a uniquely human capacity, that we may have difficulty in imagining it as part of a much greater chorus of voices. Not are the implications easy to fathom. “To foster expertise within Nishnaabe intelligence,” Simpson writes, “we need people engaged with land as curriculum and in our languages for decades, not weeks.”6 And this is not land that has been chopped up and paved over, but land that has retained much of its ecological complexity and integrity, whose intelligence has not been drastically eroded by industrial agriculture, forestry, and mining. Until we take this intelligence seriously, we will not be able to enter into a true, respectful dialogue about the languages themselves. There is no substitute for listening to Indigenous elders, activists, and scholars, as a means of educating ourselves for such a dialogue. But it is helpful, I think, to imagine this process, too, as a polyphonic one. For one thing, the land can speak to us directly, if we go and spend time with it, quieting “the persistent chatter of words within our heads,” reorienting ourselves to the “improvised duet between our animal bodies and the fluid, breathing landscape that they inhabit.”7 “The land is the real teacher,” Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us. “All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gift with open eyes and open heart … But you have to be quiet to hear.”8 These two strands of polyphonic dialogue, the Indigenous and the Earthly, are key. This contribution, however, the one you are reading now, is part of a third strand. It consists of the voices of writers and scholars who have caught something of those other harmonies and attempted to find translations for them into a Western idiom. Like all translation, this is an enterprise doomed to partial failure, and yet a necessary one. It is a kind of preparatory or ancillary work for the building of relationships required by the other strands. It involves a kind of intellectual fence-removal, an opening up of doors and windows, a readying of the house and garden for other, wilder guests.9 In the context of this book, I want to take up this notion of a linguistic pluralism that encompasses but is not limited to human languages. I would like to convince you that this is not a platitude, nor wishful thinking, but a description of reality possessing empirical and theoretical depth. Holding this image in our minds may help us learn to listen in new ways.

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

189

t h e s p e a k in g world Expanding our notions of language entails some related work on our ideas about thinking. I’ve already noted Leanne Simpson’s passing reference to “all the thinking that has gone into making the realities we live in.”10 A little later she spells this idea out a little more, while commenting on a traditional story about the Nishnaabeg’s dealings with the Hoof Clan: The Deer clan, or nation, in this story has power, influence and agency. They have knowledge that is now shared and encoded in the ethics and practices of hunting deer for the Nishnaabeg. There is an assumption on the part of the Nishnaabeg that the deer have language, thought, and spirit – intellect, and that intellect is different than the intellect of the Nishnaabeg because they live in the world in a different manner than the Nishnaabeg, and they therefore generate different meaning.11 Those of us raised in the Western tradition may be prepared to accept that deer think; after all, they are fellow mammals, and the hold of Cartesianism on the Western imagination has faded considerably since the heyday of behaviourism. But deer are not a special case. Everything animate thinks, and as Robin Wall Kimmerer discovered when she began to study her ancestral language, this covers a lot of ground: To whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy? Naturally, plants and animals are animate, but as I learn, I am discovering that the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say, “What is it?” And we answer Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, “Who is that being?” And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is.12

190

Mark Fettes

Things that are animate do not just think, they also speak. Facing outward, the animate being communicates relationally with the other beings around it, projecting (or speaking) its selfhood and receiving various responses back, to which it in turn responds. Indeed, what the animate being encounters is not various other beings isolated from one another, but a community of beings already profoundly immersed in a dance of relationship. Each new arrival faces the challenge of co-ordering its communicative and relational behaviour with this pre-existing dance, in order to fully and fruitfully inhabit its place in the world. And because this co-ordering is not only outer but also inner work, it engenders thinking, the inward-facing aspect of animacy. Thinking is internalized relationship. If this seems abstract, it may be helpful to see the analogies to Lev Vygotsky’s notion of how children develop concepts, along with the acquisition of a language in which those concepts can be expressed.13 Initially the children encounter these concepts in action, as they co-order the actions of adults and older children to shape the world around them. Gradually, they learn to attune their own actions to the cues provided by those more experienced others – often, but not only, through language. This is first and foremost a pragmatic activity, a practice developed through participation in the social world. Yet in order to accomplish this feat, the children simultaneously develop a kind of toolkit for organizing their inner thoughts and feelings that can be put to many uses beyond the immediate context. In Vygotsky’s own words: Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts … All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.14 For Vygotsky, signs and actions acquire meaning in specifically human contexts (“between people”). But for the Nishnaabeg and the Potawotomi, and quite possibly all hunter-gatherer cultures around the world, this dialogue between the “outerness” and the “innerness” of things is universal: all living beings are selves, as Eduardo Kohn puts it.15 On the basis of years spent living with the Runa

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

191

people of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Kohn suggests that a forest may be better understood as a web of living thoughts than as an assemblage of various entities. “Such thinking,” he adds, “need not happen in the time scale we chauvinistically call real time … Biological lineages also think. They, too, over the generations, can grow to learn by experience about the world around them, and as such they, too, demonstrate a ‘scientific intelligence.’”16 Such intelligence is not only multi-species but also multi-layered. It is operative within and between individuals, within and between species, and within and between ecosystems. Kohn describes, as an example, how the tropical forest “captures and amplifies” differences in soil conditions by engaging plants, herbivores, insectivores, and carnivores in a “dense web of living thoughts” that results in distinctive, complex communities developing on poorer soils.17 To the attentive hunter-gatherer, the intelligence entailed in such exquisite and creative responsiveness to the environment is self-evident. Humans are late arrivals to this profoundly thoughtful world; their primary task is to listen, observe, and learn. What is heard and observed is, obviously, not language in the sense of a symbolic system. As Kohn elaborates within the Runa context, the living thoughts of the forest are expressed through other semiotic modes, notably iconicity and indexicality – briefly, the ways that living beings reference and interpret each other through expressive similarity (of sound, appearance, smell, etc.) or through vital connection (as in co-occurence, predation, symbiosis, and so on). These semiotic relations between living beings, Kohn argues, are thoughts, which simultaneously are ecological relations; over time, certain thoughts and webs of thought prove more fruitful than others; as the ecological system develops, its intelligence develops. This does not make it infallible, but it does embody a kind of deep wisdom, the result of centuries or millennia of adaptation to a particular locale.

t h e l e a p in to language Here, then, are the humans, thrown into a world already deep in conversation. How are we to make sense of the relationship between the specifically human languages they develop and the more-thanhuman babble all around them? First, by acknowledging kinship. “Language is a biocultural niche and ecological artifact,” summarizes Chris Sinha: that is, human

192

Mark Fettes

language is a product of the particular and peculiar way that human beings come to inhabit the world, in communion with the web of living thoughts around them.18 Central to this human way of dwelling is what Sinha calls “extended embodiment,” which refers to how we create artifacts and then cultural practices around the artifacts that in turn extend our means of thinking with and about the world. Language is an ecological artifact in this sense, just as baskets and calendars and shelters are. Like these other devices, the symbolic functions unique to human language rely absolutely on their embeddness in the world of human culture in order to be useful and meaningful; and that world of human culture is embedded in turn in the universe of Earthly intelligence. Baskets are used to contain or cover the products of foraging and food preparation; calendars organize the passage of time as marked by the turning of the earth and its orbit around the sun; shelters carve out a small, distinctive habitat within a larger one, drier and more moderate in temperature and more subject to human ordering. Language accomplishes similar goals through semiosis: organizing labour, ordering perceptions, establishing distinctively human frameworks of interpretation – but always, ultimately, in dialogue with the more-than-human world. So, kinship, but also specificity. Kohn writes of the need to “provincialize language,” by which he means that we need to stop thinking of human language as the template for all forms of meaning and representation. This tendency, he argues, is on display in current “posthuman approaches that seek to dissolve the boundaries that have been erected to construe humans as separate from the rest of the world.”19 How Forests Think focuses primarily on coming to a deeper understanding of the thinking world, as we have already seen. Complementary to this is an understanding of the odd properties of symbolic thinking that afford both distance and intimacy with that world; that can set humans apart from their living kin, or implicate them imaginatively, spiritually, and relationally. Some strands of contemporary scholarship highlight the ways in which human language remains deeply embodied. This is Abram’s approach, for instance: If we are not, in truth, immaterial minds merely housed in earthly bodies, but are from the first material, corporeal beings, then it is the sensuous, gestural significance of spoken sounds – their direct bodily resonance – that makes verbal communication possible at

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

193

all. It is this expressive potency – the soulful influence of spoken words upon the sensing body – that supports all the more abstract and conventional meanings that we assign to these words.20 Abram is drawing on the European phenomenological tradition, especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; but he also cites a number of European and American linguists, among them such luminaries as Jespersen, Sapir, and Jacobson, who were deeply interested in non-arbitrary relationships between sound and meaning. In somewhat less poetic but highly influential terms, cognitive linguistics George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have elaborated a philosophy of human rationality founded on embodiment.21 In such works as Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh, they argue that language relies on bodily experiences and perceptions in order to convey any kind of meaning. Abstract reasoning makes just as much use of our embodiment as the most concrete and practical forms of everyday communication. It does this by “mapping” between domains of embodied understanding, as in the common metaphoric understanding of “time as space,” which is cashed out more specifically in concepts such as “life is a journey” or “a career is a climb up a ladder.” All linguistic meaning, they claim, relies in the final analysis on these fundamentally non-linguistic apprehensions of the world. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.22 These “fleshly” aspects of human language are real and undeniable. And yet it seems equally undeniable that much of how language is used in modern society actually distances us imaginatively from our bodies and from the living earth. It seems that these symbolic systems, whatever their Earthly roots, can eventually go their own way; that there is little in them to ensure that we are reminded of our kinship with other beings or our indebtedness to water, air, and soil. The reminders are there if we look for them; that is all. So how is this possible? How can language be, at one and the same time, an ecological artifact and a cultural reality that, at least

194

Mark Fettes

in some circumstances, denies its own ecological embeddedness? The answer lies, as Sinha argues, in the intersubjective nature of discursive meaning.23 Words ultimately mean what their users agree to take them to mean. Indeed, the word “agree” implies too great a degree of conscious agency. Words, like other artifacts, are bound up in cultural conventions that govern their use; individual users have little choice but to go along with those conventions, otherwise they risk not being understood. Thus, as language becomes implicated in ways of life that actually distance individuals from their more-thanhuman kin, from the full exercise of their body, or from awareness of the Earth, the linguistic system evolves to reflect these experiences and perspectives. In its origins, some 70,000 years ago, human language was surely interwoven with human cultures that knew themselves to be part of “a networked series of international relationships.”24 The “biocultural niche” that language evolved to fill was one of highly adaptable, intelligent attunement to complex and changeable environments. What symbolic language offered, Sinha suggests, was flexible construal – basically, the ability not only to see different possibilities in a situation, but to communicate about those possibilities with other group members.25 Symbolic representation enables this to a degree that iconic and indexical representation do not. And this was not, in its origins, a step away from our deeply felt kinship with other living beings, but the opening up of a new kind of relationality that would find its deepest expression in art and ritual and story. How we got from these ancient origins to the present day is, of course, a long and complex history that involves much more than language. Abram, for example, places significant emphasis on the development of formal writing systems, in particular the advent of phonetic writing, which distances thinking from its grounding in dialogical reality.26 Yet, he says, “[m]any other factors could have been chosen” – among them the emergence of agriculture, the development of formal numbering systems, and “the countless technologies spawned by alphabetic civilization itself.”27 What is clear is that the flexibility of symbolic language already carried within it the potential for alienation. Here, uniquely, was a form of communication that could be self-referential; that could establish its own discursive environment while cutting off dialogue with other ways of being. The great mythopoetic systems of Indigenous cultures around the world seem designed to ward off this possibility; to teach, in myriad

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

195

ways, the importance of reciprocity with the more-than-human. But these safeguards are not, as it were, built into language itself – only into the ways language is used. Indigenous languages remain connected to the land only as long as the communities and cultures that bear them continue to renew their ancient dialogue with the web of living thoughts around them.

w is d o m a n d metaphor A Western term for this web of living thoughts is “the wild.” This is a concept only an agricultural, urban, industrial civilization would feel a need for; other cultures might simply call it the land, the earth, world, being. But for us, here and now, the term has its uses, especially for its ability to evoke an Earthly domain of life that transcends human desires, ambitions, and plans. Robert Bringhurst characterizes it well: What are the essential characteristics of the wild? For one thing, it is coextensive with time: simultaneously ancient and brand new, stable and ever-changing. For another, it is the very essence of wealth: rich and varied and extensive and complex and intertwined with itself beyond our wildest dreams. Third, it’s astoundingly beautiful: delicate, fragile, adaptable, strong and immensely intelligent, attentive and responsive. The wild remembers its past and dreams its future and speaks its immediate present. What does it say? It says this, this, this, being here, being here, you, me, us … The wild isn’t something to conquer or subdue; it’s something to try to live up to: a standard better than gold.28 We might say, then, that the question of what it means for a language to be Indigenous is, in significant part, the question of what it means for language to be wild, or to be deeply, intimately entwined with the wild. The question lies at the heart of Bringhurst’s book of oral essays, The Tree of Meaning, inspired in part by his long sojourn with the written record of the Haida mythtellers, a rich and complex body of stories recorded in the original Haida language (uniquely localized to a group of islands west of the British Columbia mainland and north of Vancouver Island) by ethnographer John Swanton in a twelve-month period from 1900 to 1901. While Bringhurst’s

196

Mark Fettes

engagement with those texts is controversial among the Haida, their significance for him is encapsulated in his claim that mythtelling is “the primary way – and maybe the only way – of doing sustained and serious philosophy in an oral culture.”29 Or, we might say, the distilled wisdom of thousands of years of wild language. Are stories fundamental components of human language? Bringhurst argues that they are: A story is to the sentence as a tree is to the twig. And a literature is to the story as the forest is to the tree. Language … is the wood the tree is made of, an engineer might say, but a biologist would notice something else. The wood the tree is made of is created by the tree. Stories make the language they are made of. They make it and keep it alive. You can kill the tree and take the wood, kill the story and take the language, kill the earth and take the ore, kill the river and take the water – but if you really want to understand the wood, the water, the minerals, and the rocks, you have to visit them at home, in the living trees, the rivers, the earth. And if you really want to understand the language, you have to encounter it in the stories by which it was made.30 The point we are concerned with here is that the stories that are developed and told in an oral culture that is intimately familiar with the wild web of living thoughts are different, wildly different, from those characteristic of an agricultural or an urban or an industrial culture. It is not that the latter are totally divorced from the more-than-human world that surrounds and sustains them; rather, that their dialogical involvement with that world tends to be accessible in glimpses rather than in a sustained and complex narrative mythology that forms part of the background of everyday life. The languages of non-Indigenous cultures retain traces of the wild, just as domesticated species do. In this essay, wrestling with the intensively cultivated medium of standard written English, I can perhaps even so convey some meaningful sense of that wildness. But this is done, as it were, against the cultural grain of the language. Any success I may have feels fleeting. This experience of transient insight into the almost-unsayable is nonetheless familiar. It is the experience of encountering a poem that brings into focus something one already knew, but did not know this way. “The labour of poetry,” says Charles Simic, “is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words.”31 Or

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

197

as Bringhurst puts it, “Poetry, like science, is a way of finding out – by trying to state perceptively and clearly – what exists and what is going on … Composing a poem is a way of leaving the self behind and getting involved in something larger.”32 This “something larger” is, ultimately, the wild: the intricate ecology of selves that is implied by and sustains each individual self. As Jan Zwicky points out in Wisdom and Metaphor, the ability of symbolic language to refer to such individual selves – to focus our attention selectively on this piece of the whole – is both invaluable and perilous. “The distinctness of things, ourselves included, is the basic condition of awareness informed by the capacity for language.”33 And yet “the inadequacy of language to comprehend the world” is equally part of our experience – every move to distinguish and define the world’s separate parts undermines our ability to grasp it as a whole.34 Still more problematically, language drifts towards habit. Not only does language push us towards certain routine forms of attention, it encourages us not to notice that it has done so. Thinking that aims at understanding is, in fact, always a form of resistance to linguistic orthodoxy. Not merely to some particular linguistic orthodoxy (though it may be that, too), but to the orthodoxy that is, for all humans, the inevitable perceptualepistemic consequence of learning to refer.35 Think of such orthodoxy as a kind of domestication. Then poetry and metaphor can be seen as ways of retrieving wildness, or perhaps as the way in which the wild still lives in language. For us moderns, poetry and metaphor often appear as frills, ornaments on the utilitarian armature of literal discourse. But perhaps they are, instead, windows onto a essential dimension of the linguistic repertoire of oral cultures that expresses and amplifies their kinship with the land. “Poetry,” says Bringhurst, “is what I start to hear when I concede the world’s ability to manage and understand itself. It is the language of the world: something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention, and something the world will teach us to speak, if we allow the world to do so.”36 For cultures whose worldview is premised on participation in this living world, poetry in this sense is an essential mode of languaged understanding. Poetry, as we know, works largely through image and metaphor. These are aspects of language that are unlikely to be captured by

198

Mark Fettes

standard grammars and dictionaries, or to be found at the heart of a classroom lesson. As Zwicky emphasizes, “we say nonmetaphorically first” – it is the “mortal” life of language, language that “enacts the way it is with things in their distinctness,” that offers itself as the default access route to meaning.37 But a language community that pays close attention to the speaking of the world will have constant recourse to metaphor as “an explicit refusal of the idea that the distinctness of things is their most fundamental characteristic.”38 Metaphor, on this account, is what allows us, as languaged beings, to remain in touch with the self-determining, ineffable wholeness of the wild. This suggests, then, that the body of stories that collectively comprise a mythology stands in a metaphoric relationship to the web of living thoughts that sustains the story tellers. Anthropologist Wade Davis likes to describe Indigenous languages as “old growth forests of the mind,”39 and this metaphor itself seems apt. But the sylvan life of the language is not in the words and grammar alone, nor even in the stories that body the words forth, but in how those stories resonate with “the stories that creatures are”40 or, more comprehensively, the stories of the innumerable beings and their relations that comprise the relevant sustaining ecology of more-than-human selves. In this metaphoric relationship, as in any other, understanding requires familiarity with both domains. Neither the speaker ignorant of the land and its web of relations, nor the land dweller ignorant of the language and its body of myth, is able to attend as well to what land and language have to offer. One needs an ear for both.

l a n g uag e s in concert We live amidst the inequities and struggles fostered by inability to hear and be heard. Linguistic plurality is deeply entwined with these struggles. When we live out our lives in settings dominated by human concerns and human voices, we find it difficult to listen to the land. When one or more of our languages is amplified by the technologies of capitalism and consumerism, we can find it hard even to listen to the quieter voices of intimate human relations, or to the voices of the marginalized and dispossessed. These failures of listening converge in the case of Indigenous languages. What I have offered in this article is a kind of propedeutic, a preparatory course that may help you know what to listen for. I have

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

199

sought, too, to give you a sense that Indigenous languages are a key part of our intellectual heritage, not just as Canadians, but as human beings in a world of living thoughts. What they teach is not simply the particulars of this culture or that place and ecosystem, but a mode of participation in the Earthly conversation that is constantly unfolding all around us. Symbolic language, I have argued, emerged in a world where human beings were already skilled listeners to the web of living thoughts around them. The languages they developed over thousands of years incorporated all kinds of references to that ecology of selves, and the communities in turn embedded the languages in cultural practices that continually renewed those relationships. Poetry and metaphor were central to the linguistic strategies that enabled this to happen. Language and culture and land were intertwined in a single semiotic system in which humans were deeply at home. We can still learn from this heritage. This involves listening to Indigenous elders, activists, and scholars, as I suggested at the outset, and to the voices of the wild. It could also involve listening to Indigenous oral literature in translation, as Bringhurst recommends. The Haida mythtellers featured in Bringhurst’s translations41 offer the intricate and challenging experience of entering an imaginative world of land, sea, and sky where the numinous is constantly present, operating according to its own unwritten rules, sustaining the orderly existence of humans and other Earthly beings. As Bringhurst writes of Gary Snyder, the American poet whose early work was deeply influenced by an earlier translation of Ghandl’s stories: Listening to Ghandl and his colleagues taught Gary once and for all that any healthy and sustainable human culture in North America has to rest, region by region and watershed by watershed, on indigenous foundations. The Haida mythtellers taught him how singular and specific each indigenous culture is, and how each one nevertheless becomes, through its own collaboration with the place where it evolves, universally humane.42 The body of oral Indigenous literature currently accessible through English (or other widespread languages) is limited but growing. It deserves all of the attention and care that good listeners can give. Especially if those listeners are themselves poets or musicians, weavers or carvers, fishers or foresters, they may find ways

200

Mark Fettes

to translate what they hear into what they do. These are stories, remember, whose function is to help sustain human participation in an ecology of selves. We can also learn Indigenous languages themselves. The humility entailed in this, the progress through the stammerings and fumblings of a language learner, can itself be a useful lesson. With it comes the opportunity to build relationships, perhaps a lasting connection with an Elder or knowledge keeper, perhaps an entry into community ceremony or land-based learning. At the same time, bear in mind that resources and time are limited. It is always a question of priorities, and the community’s priorities may not be yours. Because of this, perhaps the central imperative is to provide support – not only morally, but financially and discursively, and with legislation and policy. As we have seen, the reclaiming of the languages and the reclaiming of Indigenous relationships with the land need to go hand in hand. In another article I have explored what this might mean in political terms, arguing for the extension of an Indigenous land-use planning paradigm to encompass the stewardship of the languages as well,43 while in others I have suggested approaching language learning as a process of growing into the world.44 The essential thing is to avoid squeezing the languages into the straitjacket of Western assumptions. We need to learn to meet them on their own terms. Leanne Simpson, writing primarily for an Indigenous audience, observes: We cannot just think, write or imagine our way to a decolonized future. Answers on how to re-build and how to resurge are therefore derived from a web of consensual relationships that is infused with movement (kinetic) through lived experience and embodiment. Intellectual knowledge is not enough on its own. Neither is spiritual knowledge or emotional knowledge. All kinds of knowledge are important and necessary in a communal and emergent balance.45 This chapter has been concerned with intellectual knowledge – a constellation of perspectives that helps illuminate the nature of Indigenous languages and their place in a more-than-human world. Other kinds of knowledge are needed. The next steps are up to you.

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

no t e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Assembly of First Nations 1990. Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015a. Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures 2005, ii. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015b. Simpson 2017, 56. Ibid., 72. Abram 1997, 53. Kimmerer 2015, 222. Bringhurst 2008, 260. Simpson 2017, 56. Ibid., 61 Kimmerer 2015, 55–6. Vygotsky 1978. Ibid., 57. Kohn 2013. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 82–3. Sinha 2017. Kohn 2013, 40. Abram 1997, 79–80. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; 1999. Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 4. Sinha 2017. Simpson 2017, 56. Sinha 2017, 49–70. Abram 1997, 93–102. Ibid., 264. Bringhurst 2008, 268. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 169. Simic 1990, 64. Bringhurst 2008, 144. Zwicky 2003, 17L. Ibid., 34L. Ibid., 46L. Bringhurst 2008, 145. Zwicky 2003, 33L.

201

202 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Mark Fettes

Ibid., 59L. Davis 2003. Bringhurst 2008, 167. Ghandl of the Qayalh Llaanas 2000; Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay 2001. Bringhurst 2007, 334. Fettes 2019, 265–82. Fettes 2012; 2016, 1–16. Simpson 2017, 162.

r e f e r e nce s Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York and Toronto: Vintage. Assembly of First Nations. 1990. Towards Linguistic Justice for First Nations. Ottawa: Assembly of First Nations. Bringhurst, Robert. 2007. Everywhere Being Is Dancing. Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, ns : Gaspereau. – 2008. The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology. Berkeley, ca : Counterpoint. Davis, Wade. 2003. An Interview with Anthropologist Wade Davis. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2003/ may/mali/ davisinterview.html. Fettes, Mark. 2012. “Growing into Language with Hunters, Singers, Tricksters and Other Imaginative Guides.” 19th Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium, 18–20 May 2012, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, bc . http://www.academia.edu/ 28224973/ Growing_into_ Language_Revitalization_through_Land_and_Imagination. – 2016. “Land and the Living Roots of Language: From Rights to Reconciliation.” Tusaaji: A Translation Review 5, no. 5: 1–16. – 2019. “Language, Land, and Stewardship: Indigenous Imperatives and Canadian Policy.” In Language Politics and Policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States, edited by Thomas Ricento, 263–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghandl of the Qayalh Llaanas. 2000. Nine Journeys to the Mythworld. Translated by Robert Bringhurst. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed.

Linguistic Plurality on Indigenous Land

203

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think. Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley, ca , and Los Angeles, ca : University of California Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, il : University of Chicago Press. – 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Simic, Charles. 1990. Wonderful Words, Silent Truth. Essays on Poetry and a Memoir. Ann Arbor, mi : University of Michigan Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sinha, Chris. 2017. Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind. Cultural, Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives in Cognitive Linguistics. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. 2001. Being in Being. Translated by Robert Bringhurst. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures. 2005. Towards a New Beginning: A Foundational Report for a Strategy to Revitalize First Nation, Inuit and Métis Languages and Cultures. Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage. http://www.afn.ca/uploads/files/education2/ towardanewbeginning.pdf. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015a. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. http://nctr.ca/assets/ reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf. – 2015b. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action. http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. Vygotsky, Lev. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press. Zwicky, Jan. 2003. Wisdom and Metaphor. Kentville, ns : Gaspereau.

Contributors

sanjukta banerjee teaches in the School of Translation and the Department of Humanities at York University (Toronto). She holds a PhD in humanities from York University. Her doctoral research examined the nexus of travel writing and translation in eighteenth-century French accounts of India, with a focus on language. Her work on the subject has appeared in Tusaaji: A Translation Review (2018) and in the anthology A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamic in India (Oxford University Press, 2018). maría sierra córdoba serrano is associate professor and former director of the Translation Unit at McGill University (Montreal). Before joining McGill in 2017, she was an associate professor at the miis (Monterey, California). She is interested in sociological approaches to the study of translation. Among other numerous works and translations, she has published Le Québec traduit en Espagne: analyse sociologique de l’exportation d’une culture périphérique (University of Ottawa Press, 2013) and recently co-edited (with O. Diaz Fouces) an issue on translation policies and minority languages for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2018). mark fettes is associate professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver). His work on Indigenous languages dates from the early 1990s, initially as a researcher for the Assembly of First Nations. Beginning with his doctoral work in the late 1990s, much of his scholarship has been guided by questions about how mainstream schools undermine the viability of Indigenous languages and what imaginative, place-based

206

Contributors

approaches to schooling might offer. He has led several sshrc funded community-based research projects exploring the viability of such approaches in British Columbia, while developing new ways of thinking about the connections between land, language, community, and imagination.

debbie folaron is associate professor of translation studies and holder of the 2020–2023 Jean Monnet Chair at Concordia University (Montreal). She is co-founder and former co-editor of Translation Spaces: A Multidisciplinary, Multimedia, and Multilingual Journal of Translation. In 2011, she launched the multilingual site Translation Romani, a site that presents two knowledge domains, translation studies and Romani studies, in relation to one another. Her research focuses on translation theories and practices in the context of contemporary digital society, multilingualism, and less-translated minority languages, with a focus on Romani. Her current project, “Multiple Roles of Translation in Minority Multilingual Romani Contexts (romtra ),” is supported by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. maría constanza guzmán is associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at York University (Toronto), where she teaches in the graduate programs in translation studies and humanities. She has published numerous articles and translations. She is editor-in-chief of Tusaaji: A Translation Review, and recently guest-edited a special issue on Translation and/in Periodical Publications for the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies (tis ) (John Benjamins, 2019). Her books include Gregory Rabassa’s Latin American Literature: A Translator’s Visible Legacy (Bucknell University Press, 2011) and Mapping Spaces of Translation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Print Culture (Routledge, 2021). martin cyr hicks is a senior investigator at the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages (ocol ) and a part-time professor at Carleton University (Ottawa) and Saint Paul University (Ottawa). He was previously a professor in the Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies at Bog˘ aziçi University (Istanbul), and he holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Université de Montréal (2004). His ongoing research focuses on language policy and planning in Canada.

Contributors

207

susan ingram is professor in the Department of Humanities at York University (Toronto), where she coordinates the Graduate Diploma for Comparative Literature. She is the general editor of Intellect Book’s Urban Chic series and the co-author of the volumes on Berlin, Vienna, and Los Angeles. Recent publications include Comparative Literature in Canada: Contemporary Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Publishing in Review (edited with Irene Sywenky; Lexington Books, 2020) and Siting Futurity: The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna (punctum books, 2021). joshua martin price is professor of socio-legal studies and criminology at Ryerson University (Toronto). His writing on translation has been published in Target, Translation Perspectives, ttr , and Mutatis Mutandis. He collaborated in the translation of two books of Latin American philosophy, Heidegger´s Shadow by José Pablo Feinmann (with María Constanza Guzmán) and Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América by Rodolfo Kusch (with María Lugones). His next book is tentatively entitled Translation and Epistemicide. s¸ ehnaz tahir gürçag˘lar teaches translation studies at York University (Toronto) and Bog˘ aziçi University (Istanbul). Her fields of interest are translation history, ideology, retranslation, and periodical studies. She has published on various aspects of translation in Turkish and English. She recently co-edited Perspectives on Retranslation, Ideology, Paratexts, Methods (Routledge, 2019).

Index

accommodation, 9, 31, 76, 77, 130, 138, 139–40, 145–6, 148, 149, 176 activism, 7, 20, 89, 188, 199 affect, 8 Afro-Caribbean literature, 113–14 agency, 14, 29, 30, 52, 189, 194 Algonquian (language family), 184 alterity, 9, 51, 61 Americas, the, 8, 103, 107, 109–12, 115, 118–20, 122, 124 animacy, 189–90 Arabic (language), 78, 88 archive, 34, 108, 109, 121; RomArchive digital archive, 30–1 Arctic, 184 Armenian (language), 17 art(s), 25, 89, 101, 194; artistic and cultural production, 30–1; artisans, 78; artists, 89; avantgarde, 89, 104. See also Situationists Asia, 19, 69 assimilationism, 16–17, 88, 104, 131, 141, 164; assimilationist policies, 17

attunement, 8, 87, 89, 93–5, 101–4, 190, 194; affective, 8, 87, 89, 104; differential, 89, 105; linguistic, 47, 50 Australia, 133 author, 47, 60 Balkans, 16, 26 Barbados, 115 becoming, 13 Bim (magazine), 109, 115–16, 121 border(s), 7, 20, 34, 75, 79; borderlands, 96, 99; linguistic, 7, 29, 36; Mexico–US, 95–100; national, 17, 18, 26, 34, 161 boundaries: conceptual, 5, 192; multilingual, 30, 79; regional, 73 Brazil, 118 Britain, 67–8, 70, 71, 75, 78, 164, 165 British Columbia, 131, 132, 184, 195 Bulgarian (language), 34 Canada, 7, 28, 91, 93; biculturalism, 9, 135; Canadian census, 131–3, 143, 145, 176; Canadian

210

Index

identity, 130, 136, 145, 149, 161, 163, 165, 166, 168, 175–8; Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 145; Canadian society, 9, 133, 145, 148, 168, 172, 176; Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 135, 146, 169–70; Compendium of Language Management in Canada (clmc), 163; demographics, 9, 148; Immigration and Refugee Board (irb), 28, 147; multiculturalism, 145, 1 46, 163, 165, 175, 176, 177; public policy, 130, 134, 145; Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 134, 135, 146, 164 Canada’s languages: bilingualism, 9, 19, 135, 136, 139, 140, 145–7, 161–6, 167, 169, 170, 172–7, 178; demolinguistic context, 131–4, 145; language commissioner, 186; language policy, 9; linguistic duality, 9, 149, 162–77; linguistic duality symbol, 9, 161–3, 165, 174–6, 177; multilingualism, 186, 194; Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages (ocol), 9, 142, 162, 163, 174, 175–8; official languages, 9, 28; Official Languages Act (ola), 9, 134, 135, 140, 148, 161, 163, 164, 167, 170, 171–2, 176. See also Indigenous languages of Canada Caribbean, 8, 88, 107–11, 112, 113–22; Caribbean identity, 111, 113; translation in, 110–22; West Indies, 115

cartography, 7, 72, 107, 111, 121, 122 Casa de las Américas (magazine), 8, 109, 116–20, 121, 122 Césaire, Aimé, 113–14 childhood, 48, 50, 53; child, 9, 45, 50, 60, 89; child survivors, 45, 61; children, 9, 89, 190 Chinese (language), 88 citizenship, 4, 24, 28, 77, 175 city, 20, 26, 77, 89–91, 95, 100; neighbourhood, 90, 96, 105; street, 6, 88, 89, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101; urban culture, 195, 196; urban landscape, 88, 90; urban space, 89 Ciudad Juárez, 87, 95–100 civil law and common law, 136, 138 civil rights, 149; movements, 17, 31 cognition, 12–13, 101, 193; cognitive awareness, 12; mental representation, 12; neuronal workspace, 12; selective cognition, 8. See also consciousness collective, the, 4, 6; collective rights, 165, 166, 170, 172 Collymore, Frank, 115, 116 colonialism, 15, 16, 20, 66, 77, 93, 96, 185, 186; colonial discourse, 13; coloniality, 110; colonial power, 22. See also postcolonial communication, 7, 8, 26–9, 31, 35, 36, 49, 57, 67, 77, 87, 101, 103, 104, 133, 192–4 comparative perspective, 6, 14, 26, 60, 73, 79, 132 conflict, 95 consciousness, 12, 53, 66, 79, 91, 93, 107; public, 35

Index cosmopolitanism, 3, 113 Cree (language), 15 Creole (language), 8, 114, 116, 118, 119 Cuba, 112, 114, 116–20 culture, 7, 10, 47, 58, 59, 67, 68, 90; cultural difference, 94; cultural fragmentation, 120; cultural identity, 186; cultural institutions, 13, 21; cultural plurality, 3, 15, 23, 66; cultural policy, 119; cultural practices, 27, 192, 199; cultural production, 67; cultural sphere, 8; dominant culture, 88, 103; national culture, 17 Czech (language), 34 decision-making, 12, 28, 130; judicial, 137–9 decolonization, 17, 22, 200; decolonial, 122; decolonial tool, 96; decolonial turn, 109; decolonize, 22, 30, 35, 37, 108 Dene (language family), 184 dérive, 90–1, 96, 104; urban wandering, 89–91 diaspora, 77, 110 Díaz, Junot, 88 dictionary, 34, 67, 198; word lists, 16 difference, 8, 70, 71, 77; between languages, 5, 72, 74, 76 discourse, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 59, 68, 69, 71, 72, 110, 117, 197; discourse analysis, 163, 171; official, 9; public, 185 diversity, 14–15, 21, 90, 115, 129, 185

211

ecology, 90, 105, 191, 192, 194, 197–8, 199–200; Earthly, 188, 192, 193, 195, 199; ecological complexity, 188; ecological framework, 90; ecological relations, 90, 191; of knowledges, 22; linguistic, 77, 90; of selves, 197, 199, 200; of translation, 5 editorial practice, 25, 109, 114, 116, 118; editorial policy, 25, 120; editorial project, 108, 109, 122 education, 13, 14, 17, 19 El Paso, 87, 95–100 embodiment, 20, 22, 38, 57, 59, 88, 101, 192, 193, 200 empire, 20 English (language), 23, 25, 30–4, 53–4, 68, 88, 102–4, 118, 119, 132–3, 134, 136, 137–8, 140, 149, 164–8, 169–70, 172, 175, 185, 196, 199 Enlightenment, the, 67, 70, 71, 72 episteme, 20, 71, 74; epistemic community, 23, 24, 38; epistemic injustice, 14–15; epistemic legacy, 108; epistemic lens, 7, 25; epistemic leverage, 29; epistemic liberation, 112; epistemic relations, 7, 22, 36, 37; epistemic responsibility, 14 epistemology, 5, 10, 14, 20, 67, 68, 71, 72, 87, 108, 109; analytical categories, 37; epistemological diversity, 22; social, 14 ethics, 7, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 35, 37, 38, 49, 59, 189

212

Index

ethnicity, 23–4, 51, 52, 135, 146, 165; ethnic community, 30, 33; concept of, 9; ethnic plurality, 17 ethnography, 24, 68, 195; ethnographic description, 8, 87; ethnonym, 17 Eurocentrism, 23, 109, 110, 112, 114, 119 Europe, 3, 10, 16, 19, 30, 33, 35–7, 68–73, 77, 109–10, 112–14, 116, 117, 118, 120; European languages, 32, 68 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ecrml), 18 European Union, 7, 17–18 experience, 4–7, 10, 92, 96, 97, 100, 112, 116, 122, 191, 196, 199; collective, 15, 21; cultural, 29; of discrimination, 17, 93, 94, 96, 141; first-hand, 185; of language, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 197; social, 5, 14, 92; traumatic, 35; violent, 9, 55, 56, 60 familiar, the, 5, 8, 92 family, 16, 19, 28, 35, 46, 50, 51, 59, 96, 98, 100 fiction, 46, 47, 115 fluidity, 26, 27, 56, 97, 107, 188 foreign, the, 5, 73 France, 67, 74, 75, 76, 79, 114 French (language), 68, 74, 132, 133, 134–6, 137–8, 140, 145, 163–6, 168–72, 175 French travellers, 7, 8, 67, 78; French travel writing, 67, 68, 79 Gandhi, Mahatma, 23 gender, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 104; gender violence, 99

genealogy, 69, 109, 187 genocide, 34, 35, 36 geopolitical context, 6, 95, 107 German (language), 26–7, 32, 48, 50, 53, 54, 59 Glissant, Édouard, 111 globalization, 3, 5, 17, 20, 110 global perspective, 6, 19, 20, 21, 24, 33, 35, 54, 67, 76, 184 grammar, 26, 198; books, 34, 67 Greek (language), 17 Guatemala, 51, 53, 56; civil war, 53; Indigenous populations, 51, 53 Haida (language), 195, 196, 199 hegemony, 15, 30, 35, 88, 102, 104, 107, 110, 120, 111, 122 heterogeneity, 8, 15, 30, 32, 57, 107, 109, 120 Hindi (language), 5 Hinduism, 67; Hindu texts, 70, 73, 78 history, 34–7, 38, 54, 56, 59, 68, 70, 73, 74, 75, 93, 108–10, 112–13, 176, 185, 194 Holocaust, the, 34, 35, 46, 53, 54 human rights, 9, 28, 147, 149, 186 Hungarian (language), 29, 34 hybridity, 8, 108, 119 identity, 4, 22, 96, 107, 111, 113; collective, 72; fabricated, 46; identity politics, 21; linguistic, 79; national, 69. See also Canada; Caribbean; culture; Indigenous communities; Roma ideology, 8, 102; bon usage, 74; of error and perfectibility, 75;

Index mauvais usage, 74; nationalist, 94; of standard, 74 imaginary, 16, 58, 59, 104 imperialism, 111 incommensurability, 91; and translation, 5, 79 India, 5, 7, 16, 37, 66–80; culture, 66, 78; early colonial, 67, 79; French discourses of, 67–79; French study of languages, 67, 68, 70–3; French translation, 73, 75, 79; identity, 69, 72, 79; languages, 5, 7, 17, 67–72, 74, 76, 77; local translation, 76, 77; multilingual, 67, 68, 71, 79 Indigenous communities, 16, 22, 51, 53, 96, 178; Aboriginal peoples, 185; Aboriginal rights, 186; First Nations, 184, 185; Indian Act, 185, Indigenous diversity, 185; Indigenous history, 185; Indigenous identity, 185, 186; Indigenous knowledge, 10, 15, 21, 22, 23; Indigenous land, 10, 96, 184–200; Indigenous literature, 196, 199; Indigenous wisdom, 191, 195–8; Nishnaabeg, 187–9, 190; residential schools, 141, 185; stories, 189, 195, 196, 198–200; storytelling, 198; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 185, 186 Indigenous languages, 9, 53; International Year of, 140; plurality of, 184, 185, 188, 198 Indigenous languages of Canada, 9, 15, 10, 129, 131, 132, 134, 140–5, 148, 178, 184–201; Indigenous Languages Act (ila),

213

141, 178; language rights, 184–201; Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages, 142 information, 12, 13, 36, 37, 91 institutions, 14, 15, 17, 25, 102; academic institutions, 14; cultural institutions, 21; institutional context, 7; public institutions, 185 intellectual history, 111; intellectual field, 112, 116; intellectual heritage, 10, 199; intellectual knowledge, 200; intellectual life, 111, 121; intellectual relations, 7, 8, 115, 188; intellectual tradition, 188 intellectual property, 25 intelligence, 187, 188, 191; Earthly, 192; Nishnaabe, 188; scientific, 191 internationalism, 110, 114; Indigenous, 53, 187; Black, 114 interpreting: interpreters, 29, 75; services, 9, 26, 28, 29, 139–40, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149 Inuit (language family), 184, 186 Italian (language), 34, 68, 118 judicial system, 9, 163, 178; interpreting in, 134–48 justice, 14, 29; epistemic, 14–15; restorative, 16, 20; social, 7; systems, 15; transformative, 6, 38 Kannada (language), 13 K’iche’ (language), 53, 54 kinship, 191–4, 197 knowledge, 7, 54, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77, 87; circulation of, 111;

214

Index

ecology of knowledges, 22; fields of, 10; knowledge keeper, 200; production of, 7, 15, 24, 25, 31, 70–3, 110; relation to language, 12–13; scientific, 21, 24, 25; spiritual, 189, 200; systemic, 14; traditional, 186, 189; worlds of, 6 Kurdish (language), 17 Lamming, George, 112, 115 land, 16, 72; language and, 10, 184, 285. See also Indigenous communities language, 18, 49, 55, 59, 66, 72–3, 76, 107, 116; ancestral, 189; and biography, 4, 8; and cognition, 12–13; concept of, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 46, 67, 68, 72, 73, 187, 188, 189; contact, 19; difference among, 5; ecology, 77, 90; excess, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73; experience of, 3, 4, 10, 61; global, 30, 54; heritage language, 9; hierarchy, 66; homogeneity, 8; knowledge of, 10, 19, 32, 50, 51; language heritage, 6; learning, 51, 190; “lingualism,” 3; linguistic diversity, 76, 109, 145, 148, 149, 161, 176; linguistic incomprehension, 47, 48, 49, 52, 55; linguistic landscape, 7; linguistic plurality, 6, 8, 10, 13, 36–7; maintenance, 77, 79; majority, 9, 26, 102, 131; mapping, 67, 70, 71, 73; marginalized, 88; meaning-making, 3, 190, 192, 194, 198; minoritized, 6; minority, 6, 19, 26, 103, 131, 133, 135, 139; and nation, 20; pivot, 30; policy and planning, 6,

9, 109, 129, 140, 145, 148, 149, 200; politics of, 96, 66, 102; relations among, 8, 9; revitalization, 17, 21; rights, 6, 9, 18, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138–41, 143, 144, 149, 175; sign language, 146, 203; standard, 75, 196; standardization, 7, 19, 23, 69, 76; state language(s), 26, 33; unity of, 73–5; use, 10, 13, 77, 79, 80, 99, 102; vehicular, 120; vernacular, 70, 77, 114; vitality, 185; world, 19 languaging, 122 Latin (language), 79 Latin America, 8, 19, 93, 99, 102, 108, 109, 111, 114, 117, 119, 120 legislation, 10, 16, 26, 37, 59, 74, 200 liminal zone, 95 linguacene, 5 lingua franca, 19, 27, 53, 54 linguistics, 77, 193 literacy, 17, 18, 19, 184 literature, 60, 76, 78, 112, 114, 116, 120; world, 60. See also Indigenous communities: Indigenous literature; translation local, 20, 21, 26, 70, 72–4, 76–7, 79, 83; local translators, 8, 73 Macedonian (language), 34 magazine, 8, 45. See also periodicals mapping, 94, 67, 70, 73, 116, 122, 193 marginalized social group, 7, 14, 16, 20, 30, 103, 198 Martinique, 113

Index Matrix, The, 47, 55, 60 memory, 34–5, 45, 52–4, 58, 96, 98, 100; collective, 34; multilingual, 45–61 Menchú, Rigoberta, 8, 45, 47, 50, 51–6, 59, 61; Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, 47; I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 50; Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, 50 method, 20, 73, 79, 90; methodology, 8, 10, 22, 25, 68, 70, 71, 87, 89 metropole: European, 110, 112, 114, 116 Mexico, 96, 97. See also US– Mexico border Middle Ages, the, 68 migration, 16, 36, 100, 110; migrant, 7, 18, 100 minority, 7, 18, 30, 135, 138, 162, 164, 170, 172; rights, 171, 185 monolingualism, 3–4, 13, 69, 73, 79, 88, 103, 111; monolingualism-multilingualism dyad, 3; monolingual paradigm, 4; pluralization of, 73, 74, 79; post-monolingual condition, 3 Montreal, 29, 88, 91–5, 131 mother tongue, 13, 49, 53 multiculturalism, 17, 28, 145, 146, 163, 165, 175, 176, 177 multilingualism, 3–6, 7, 8, 16, 20, 72, 73, 77, 79; Canadian, 9, 185, 186; institutional aspects, 6; management of, 9, 129; multilinguality, 105; multilingual perspective, 46, 60; multilingual positionality, 53; multilingual

215

settings, 8, 29–30, 87, 91, 103, 105 myth, 59, 68, 70, 198; Haida mythtellers, 199; mythology, 76, 196, 198; mythopoetic systems, 70, 194; mythtelling, 196 narrative, 5, 6, 30, 34, 53, 55, 61, 73, 75, 121, 189, 196; national, 8, 10, 185 nation, 3, 5, 18, 20, 26, 24, 59, 69, 103, 162, 163, 164; multilingual, 7; nation-building, 6, 17, 168; nation-state, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 73, 88, 90 nationalism, 6, 18, 66, 69, 94, 135, 164, 165 Negritude movement, 114, 124n22 New Brunswick, 169, 170, 172, 173 New York, 87, 88, 97, 99, 103 North America, 8, 19, 88, 100, 104, 199; Anglo-American, 92 objectivity, 14, 24, 91 orality, 36, 75; oral culture, 195–7; oral history, 20, 34–6, 95; oral literature, 199; oral tradition, 20, 23, 31, 37; predominantly oral languages, 185 orientalism, 69, 71 Ottawa, 131, 184 Paris, 53, 88, 96, 110 performance, 70, 89, 91, 92; performative contradiction, 4 periodicals, 8, 33, 107–9, 111–14, 121. See also magazine periphery, 67, 113, 119 Persian (language), 17, 78

216

Index

phenomenology, 8, 87, 88 philosophy, 13, 15, 69, 193, 196 pidgin, 27 place, 5–8, 26, 27, 35, 56, 74, 77, 79, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 100, 105, 184, 187, 189, 190, 194, 199, 200 poetics, 10 poetry, 32, 34, 113, 116, 117, 197, 198; metaphor, 13, 87, 104 Polish (language), 34 polylectal diversity, 22–4, 36; polylectal script, 23 populism, 18, 46, 100 Portuguese (language), 8, 92, 117, 118 postcolonial, 7, 17, 19, 51, 66. See also colonialism post-humanism, 5, 192 Potawotomi, 189 print languages, 110. See also language; literacy psychoanalysis, 9, 46, 57, 58, 61; the Symbolic, 46, 57, 59 psychogeography, 8, 87, 89, 96, 104 publishing, 45, 108, 112, 119. See also editorial practice

191, 198; relational, 77, 190, 192 religion, 23, 66, 68, 69, 73; Bible, 33–4, 69; Catholic, 71; Christianity, 69, 75; multireligious, 17; non-Abrahamic religions, 69; sacred books, 69 Roma, 7, 12–38; Charter of the Rights of the Roma, 23; Romani culture, 7, 30; Romani diversity, 23–4; Romani history, 17, 30, 32, 33, 38; Romani identity, 18, 21, 32; RomArchive, 30–1 Romani (language), 16–21, 23, 26–7; dialects, 7, 17, 18, 21, 23–6; interlingual differences, 23, 26; inter-Romani communication, 7; non-Romani languages, 19, 25, 26, 32; origins, 23; translation from/into, 31–4 Romani literature, 31–4; History of Romani Literature, 33 Romani studies, 18, 25 Romanian (language), 27, 32 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 185 Russian (language), 25, 33

Quebec, 92, 93, 133, 135, 136, 138, 143–6, 164–7, 169–72, 178

Sanskrit (language), 7, 13, 33, 69–71, 73, 75, 76–9; relation to vernacular, 71, 73, 75 Santamaría, Haydée, 117 semiotics, 191; semiotic system, 10, 57, 90, 199 Serbian (language), 34 Serbo-Croatian (language), 34 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 187, 188, 200 Siouan (language family), 184

racism, 88, 92, 93, 94; racist ideology, 28, 35 reader(s), 46, 47, 50, 60, 75, 78 readership, 53, 120, 121 reason, 14, 76, 193 relation, 51, 53, 55, 58, 69, 71, 72, 77, 79, 91, 102, 114, 122; relatedness, 5, 27, 187, 188, 190,

Index situatedness, 7, 10, 61, 92; social location, 96 Situationists, 87, 89, 90, 96, 104 Slavic (languages), 26 Slovak (language), 34 Slovenian (language), 34 social experience, 5, 14; social identification, 56, 66; social inclusion, 17, 18, 33; social role, 79; social world, 5, 190 solidarity, 18, 25, 94–7, 104. See also justice Sonnerat, Pierre, 69, 70, 73–5, 79 space, 12, 20, 26–7, 57, 67, 71, 79, 87, 89–91, 95, 99–100, 104–5, 107–9, 111–12, 114, 193; public, 6, 97, 98, 100 Spain, 16 Spanish (language), 34, 50–4, 59, 88, 89, 98, 102, 103, 117–20 speech, 9, 46, 49, 52, 53, 72, 87, 95, 96 spirituality, 15, 101, 186, 187, 200 symbolic system, 191–4; symbol, 100, 161–3, 165, 174–6, 177; symbolic language, 194, 197, 199 subjectivity: self, 12, 24, 88, 190, 197–9 Swedish (language), 34 Switzerland, 45, 46, 48 Tagalog (language), 88 Tamil (language), 68, 70, 71, 73, 75–7, 79 technology, 194, 198; digital, 20, 21, 31, 34 territory, 7, 10, 26, 29, 36, 114, 119, 121, 122, 186, 187;

217

plurilingual, 6, 10, 74; plurinational, 23 testimony, 8, 9, 34–6, 95, 113; testimonio, 8 text, 5, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55, 60, 67, 68, 75, 77, 78, 80, 196 thick description, 105 Toronto, 29, 131 transcultural, 111, 114, 122 transience, 26, 89, 90, 104, 196 translation, 4–9, 12–13, 16–20, 26–38, 54, 67, 69, 70, 73, 87, 109, 110, 122, 188, 199; cultural, 68; directionality of, 26; ecology of, 5; Indigenous language and literature, 188, 199; intercultural, 21, 25–7, 29; literary, 108; and multilingualism, 5–6, 10; as notion, 5, 18–19, 67, 73, 75, 76, 87, 104, 108, 109; policy of, 9, 129, 133, 134, 136, 146, 147, 148; praxis of, 108, 110, 122; right to, 9; space of, 109, 122; zone, 6, 20 translational dynamics, 7, 8, 20 translation studies, 19, 32, 33 translator, 27–9, 37, 38, 51, 118, 120, 142; local translator, 8 translinguality, 5, 26 trauma, 9, 35, 53, 54, 60; amnesiac language, 54 travel writing, 67–70, 71, 74, 76, 80 Tropiques (magazine), 109, 113– 14, 116, 121 truth, 14, 47, 51, 52, 58, 59, 61, 70, 186, 187 United States, 93, 95–8, 100, 133; census, 132

218

Index

Urdu (language), 5 Vancouver, 102, 132, 195 violence, 9, 28, 46, 49, 52, 55, 57, 60, 96, 99, 100; gendered, 98, 99 voice, 8, 10, 15, 18, 25, 30, 38, 68, 96, 110, 115, 118, 119, 122, 187, 188, 198, 199 Western thinking, 10, 20, 66, 186– 9, 195, 200; Western discourse, 186, 188 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, 8, 45–7, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 59–61; Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948, 8, 45; The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, 45

world, the, 5, 10, 15, 20, 32, 34–7, 55, 56, 66, 68, 69, 72, 75, 88, 93, 94, 188, 189–93, 195–200; modern, 15 World War II, 35, 45, 54, 57 writing, 6, 23, 26, 31, 47, 54, 58, 60, 88, 113, 115, 188; rewriting, 91; writing systems, 188, 194. See also travel writing Yiddish (language), 47, 54