Translation of Cultures [1 ed.] 9789042029286, 9789042025967

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Translation of Cultures

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

106 ASNEL Papers 13

Series Editors Gordon Collier (Giessen)

†Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

ASNEL Papers appear under the auspices of the Gesellschaft für die Neuen Englischsprachigen Literaturen e.V. (GNEL) Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (ASNEL) Frank Schulze—Engler, President (English Department, J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main) Formatting, layout and final editing: Gordon Collier

Translation of Cultures ASNEL Papers 13

Edited by Petra Rüdiger and Konrad Gross

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover painting: Petra Rüdiger, “FlowerFullColours” Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2596-7 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Translation of Cultures: — An Introduction PETRA RÜDIGER AND KONRAD GROSS

ix

TRANSLATABILITY

AND UNTRANSLATABILITY OF CULTURES

Translation, Adaptation, and Intertextuality in African Drama: — Wole Soyinka, Zulu Sofola, Ola Rotimi OMOTAYO OLORUNTOBA–OJU

3

Open Boundaries: — Encountering Ezekiel and Ramanujan JOSEPH SWANN

21

‘Nordism’: — The Translation of ‘Orientalism’ into a Canadian Concept PETRA RÜDIGER

35

Translation of Romanian Culture in Kenneth Radu’s Fiction MONICA BOTTEZ

47

‘There are no jokes in paradise’: — Humour as a Politics of Representation in Recent Texts and Films from the British Migratory Contact-Zone EVA KNOPP

59

Postcolonial Literatures on a Global Market: — Packaging the ‘Mysterious East’ for Western Consumption URSULA KLUWICK

75

TRAVEL

AND

TRANSLATION

IN THE

CONTACT ZONE

Transporting Ceylon: — Robert Knox (1681) and the Temptations of Translation TOBIAS DÖRING

95

Transcribing Colonial Australia: — Strategies of Translation in the Work of Rosa Campbell Praed and Daisy Bates JOANNA COLLINS

TRANSLATION

OF THE

113

TRANSCULTURAL SELF

Swarming with Ghosts and Tūrehus: — Indigenous Language and Concepts in Contemporary Māori Writing MICHAELA MOURA–KOÇOǦLU

133

Of Serpents and Swastikas: — Transcultural Interrogations in Two Poems by Indian Women Writers of the Diaspora CHRISTINE VOGT–WILLIAM

149

Scottish Territories and Canadian Identity: — Regional Aspects in the Literature of Alistair MacLeod KIRSTEN SANDROCK

169

“But who is that on the other side of you?” — Translation, Materiality, and the Question of the Other in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day AGNESE FIDECARO

183

Deconstructing the Canadian Mosaic: — Heaven by George F.Walker SABINE SCHLÜTER

199

POSTCOLONIAL MULTILINGUALISM Functional Equivalence Revisited: — Adequacy and Conflict in the Tok Pisin Bible Translation TIMO LOTHMANN

215

The History and Future of Bilingual Education: — Immersion Teaching in Germany and its Canadian Origins CHRISTINE MÖLLER

235

Transperipheral Translations? — Native North America / Scottish Gaelic Connections SILKE STROH

255

Translation Shifts in African Women’s Writing: — The Example of Nigeria TAIWO OLORUNTOBA–OJU

273

Translation, Multilingualism, and Linguistic Hybridity: — A Study of The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda MARIE CHANTALE MOFIN NOUSSI

291

Notes on Contributors

303

Translation of Cultures An Introduction P ETRA R ÜDIGER

P

AND

K ONRAD G ROSS

in modern history, our globalized present is characterized by a constant interaction of, and exposure to, different peoples, regions, ways of life, traditions, languages, and cultures. Cross-boundary communication today comes in various shapes: as mutual exchange, open dialogue, enforced process, misunderstanding, or even violent conflict. In this situation, ‘translation’ has become an inevitable requirement in order to ease the flow of disinterested and unbiassed cultural communication. This volume presents a selection of papers read at the 28th annual conference of A S N E L (Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English) at Christian-Albrecht-Universität Kiel, Germany, from May 4 to 7, 2005. The various angles from which the general topic “Translation of Cultures” was approached are reflected in the four parts of this publication. Naturally, translation refers to the rendering of texts from one language into another and the shift between languages under precolonial (retelling /transcreation), colonial (domesticating), and postcolonial (multilingual trafficking) conditions. It is also concerned with the (in-)adequacy of the Western translation concept of equivalence, the problem of the (un-)translatability of cultures, and new postcolonial approaches (representation through translation). Translation here is used as a wider term covering the interaction of cultures, the transfer of cultural experience, the concern with cultural borders, the articulation of liminal experience, and intercultural understanding. The essays in the opening section, “Translatability and Untranslatability of Cultures,” probe the possibilities of, and limits to, cultural translations. O M O T A Y O O L O R U N T O B A – O J U ’s essay on the reworking of classical European ERHAPS MORE THAN IN ANY OTHER PERIOD

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plays by Nigerian dramatists replaces the terms ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation’ with the term ‘transdaptation’. Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Zulu Sofola are shown to challenge the hegemonic position of ‘invader texts’ by creating new plays which are thematically and aesthetically steeped in indigenous contexts, thus translating “indigenous African ritual, landscape, language and culture into English.” J O S E P H S W A N N ’s reading of the poetry of the Indian writers Nissim Ezekiel and A.K. Ramanujan examines the fluid boundaries of Indian, Jewish, and Western culture. Postulating religion as a cultural phenomenon, he focuses on a small group of religious poems within the world of each poet and asks how they express their authors’ cultural traditions. At the same time, he reflects on the history of Western thought informing this inquiry, and how this is affected by the encounter with Indian writing. The interface of translation, he argues, is a primary topos of cultural identity. P E T R A R Ü D I G E R translates Edward Said’s concept of ‘orientalism’ into the context of a former settler colony, Canada. Shifting her focus to the Canadian North, she finds a similar ideological process at work which she labels ‘Nordism’: i.e. traditional representations of the Canadian North, first by Europeans and later by southern Canadians, for the sake of exerting colonial control. Textual constructions of the North as feminized space and even femme fatale used to legitimate subjugation have in recent decades come under attack; particularly scrutinized are women writers who, like Marian Engel in Bear, have been deconstructing Nordism and reconstructing the North as a refuge from colonial and patriarchal order. In M O N I C A B O T T E Z ’s interpretation of Kenneth Radu’s The Devil Is Clever, translation assumes two meanings: the transplantation of the author’s mother’s culture from Romania to Canada and the narrator’s translation of his mother’s Canadian experiences in the form of a memoir. Radu wants to give voice to a formerly silenced ethnic group and writes against anglo- and francophone stereotypes of his ancestors. However, although his image of Romanian culture at times seems to verge on exoticism, he is able to keep some critical distance by exploring the evolution of his mother’s hybrid identity. E V A K N O P P looks at transcultural transgressions visible in humorous and comic representations of mainstream and minority cultures in novels and films from the British multicultural contact zone. Tapping a specifically British comic tradition, minority writers and film makers with their humorous translation of cultural collisions question the dominant discourse of white Britishness, expose incongruities in cultural /racial stereotypes, and aim at replacing cultural binarisms with transcultural messages. U R S U L A K L U W I C K ’s essay deals with the marketing strategies of publishing houses which deliberately play down the critical

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Introduction

xi

content of postcolonial novels by often designing exoticist book covers, thus luring consumers with stereotypical images of a mystic and mysterious East. Taking Graham Huggan’s concept of exoticism as her starting-point, Kluwick argues that the aesthetic appeal of the exotic fosters the notion of the homogenous character of very diverse postcolonial cultures which are thus presented as unthreatening. The essays in the second section, “Travel and Translation in the Contact Zone,” take us back into colonial history. T O B I A S D Ö R I N G discusses Robert Knox’s An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681) as a hybrid text mixing geography, anthropology, and captivity narrative which mirrors the author’s attempt to re-translate himself into an Englishman on his return to England after an absence of twenty years. Contradictions in the perception of the other result from Knox’s double role as an intimate insider and a determined outsider whose self-fashioning as a good Christian cannot fully hide his fascination by Ceylonese culture. J O A N N A C O L L I N S analyzes the failure of the translation of Australian realities in Rosa Campbell Praed’s autobiographical and fictional work and Daisy Bates’ ethnographical writings. Their texts view their subjects, the land and the Aborigines, through their colonial lenses and are guided by the concepts of terra nullius, strangeness of the other, a superior Western culture, and the rightfulness of the colonial project. Neither writer is able to step across cultural borders and translate/ approach the other from within. The contributions in the third section focus on “Translation of a Transcultural Self.” M I C H A E L A M O U R A – K O Ç O G L U ’s reading of contemporary Maori writing takes its cue from Wolfgang Welch’s concept of transcultural identities emerging in a modern, globalized world with coexisting and interacting divergent cultures. The formation of a transcultural Maori identity as shown in Keri Hulme’s and Kelly Ana Morey’s fiction becomes visible in the consciously idiosyncratic handling of traditional Maori concepts and the Maori language which demonstrates the writers’ intention of negotiating and reinterpreting an identity free from essentialist cultural separatism. C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M traces the function of traditional symbols from Indian culture in diasporic poems by the poets Ramabai Espinal and Sujata Bhatt. Lifted from their original cultural contexts, the symbols of the serpent (Espinal, Bhatt) and the svastika (Bhatt) are recontextualized in diasporic lifesituations where their border-crossing potential (ethnic, national, religious) contributes to the genesis of a new ‘womanvoice’ or female self. For K I R S T E N S A N D R O C K , the regionalism of Alistair MacLeod’s fiction on Nova Scotia can be embedded in the universal. Going beyond Northrop Frye’s dis-

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tinction of identity (regional culture) and unity (national politics), she shows how the mnemonic region of MacLeod’s fictional characters – descendants of the victims of the Highland Clearances in eighteenth-century Scotland – is not a site of an exclusive collective consciousness, but enables them to develop feelings of a transcultural solidarity with disadvantaged peoples from many other ethnic groups. A G N E S E F I D E C A R O calls Anitai Desai’s Clear Light of Day a “translational novel” which screens the traumatic impact of the 1947 partition of India on the fragile selves of the novel’s female protagonists within a web of intertextual references to Western literature, in particular T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, whose response to a European crisis is ironically undermined by the novelist’s use of multicultural references. For S A B I N E S C H L Ü T E R , George F. Walker’s play Heaven focuses on the failure of intercultural communication against the background of the Canadian concept of the cultural moasic and the country’s official multicultural policy. The rift between Jew and Christian, black and white, upper-class characters and outcasts is not even healed in heaven, to where the characters are taken, where the faultlines in Canadian society have not ceased to exist, and where, therefore, no multicultural paradise has been created. The play remains highly critical of the wide-spread postcolonial celebration of hybridity and a transcultural self. The fourth section, on “Postcolonial Multilingualism,” starts with T I M O L O T H M A N N ’s essay on the 1989 translation of the Bible into Tok Pisin, the most widely spoken language of Papua New Guinea. The interdenominational Buk Baibel is a translational venture which was carried out within, not outside, the country, gives priority to meaning over form, and is – as the lexical choice of translated names or of Christian concepts demonstrates – oriented to the culture of the target audience. To a certain degree, the result is an indigenized work hiding its status of imported book. C H R I S T I N E M Ö L L E R ’s report on immersion teaching in Germany commences with an historical survey of bilingual education which demonstrates that in Antiquity and in many postcolonial societies polyglottism used to be, or is, the rule and that European monolingualism is of fairly recent origin, resulting from the rise of nationstates. In contrast to language-proficiency targets of the European Union, attitudes of European citizens have remained essentially monolingual (exceptions permitted), while Canada has known French immersion teaching since the mid-1960s as a response to la Révolution tranquille in Quebec and the linguistic dualism of the country. Möller outlines methods and achievements of the Kiel immersion project, launched at the beginning of the 1990s, which tapped into the Canadian experience for a transfer to various school levels.

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Introduction

xiii

However, Möller is not blind to problems of the practicability of foreignlanguage immersion classes for schools with children from several nonmajority language backgrounds. S I L K E S T R O H explores a discursive tradition of drawing parallels between First Nations people and Scottish Gaels dating back to the eighteenth century. While anglophone mainstream voices assigned these two marginalized groups to the stage of barbarism within the universalizing Enlightenment theory of the development of mankind from primitivism to civilization, critical voices from the eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Gaelic diaspora in Canada by no means developed a transperipheral solidarity with native North American cultures, as they aligned themselves with the colonial ideology of imperial Britain. The break-up of the British Empire, the concomitant loss of credibility of the colonial ethos since the 1950s, and Scottish nationalism have fostered a Gaelic transperipheral awareness which, however, has not been able to enter into an unbiassed dialogue with First Nations perspectives. T A I W O O L O R U N T A B A - O J U analyzes the triple burden of Nigerian women writers, who face the difficulty of translating African experience from their mother tongue Yoruba or Igbo into English, of capturing the authenticity of that experience in a different language, and of coping with the gendered orientation of oral forms such as proverbs from the source culture. The essay shows the different gendering strategies involved in the translation of proverbs in male- and female-authored texts. The use of proverbs is also one of the hybridizing strategies mentioned in M A R I E C H A N T A L E M O F I N N O U S S I ’s examination of Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000). Mda’s attempt at the africanization or Xhosa-ification of English by way of glossing, the adoption of untranslated words, relexification, and proverbs reflect the post-apartheid language situation with the recognition of eleven official languages in South Africa. The African linguistic invasion of English territory is not only directed against the dominance of English and the former discrimination of indigenous languages, but is also seen as fostering an enriching cohabitation and serving as a significant step on the road towards reconciliation. The editors regret that a few speakers had already made commitments for the publication of their papers elsewhere: Laura Moss’s “Translating into Print,” on the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliations Commission; Stephen Scobie’s “Paris / Québec,” on the translation of contemporary Quebecois poems about the city of Paris; Thengani H. Ngwenya’s “Symbolic Self-Translation in Bloke Modisane’s Autobiography”; Russell McDougall’s “Henry Ling Roth and the Aborigines of Tasmania”; and Geoffrey Davis on “Egon Erwin Kisch and the White Australia Policy.”

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We are grateful to the following institutions and people for the financial or logistical support they extended to the conference: the British Council, Christian Albrecht University, C I T T I Großmarkt, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien, Gesellschaft für die Neuen Englischsprachigen Literaturen, H S H -Nordbank Kiel, and Werkstatt-Café Kiel. Virginia Richter (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich), Peter Marsden (Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University, Aachen), and Silke Stroh (Johann Wolfgang Goethe Unversity, Frankfurt) deserve special praise for organizing the plenary panel at the end of the conference. A very rewarding experience was working together with a highly efficient and committed organizing team: Cornelia Buddensiek, Nicole Eschenburg, Ingrid Glienke, Annika Maass, Christa Meyer, Wiebke Noah, Ann Spangenberg, and Yvonne Studtfeld. PETRA RÜDIGER KONRAD GROSS

T RANSLATABILITY AND

U NTRANSLATABILITY OF C ULTURES

Translation, Adaptation, and Intertexuality in African Drama — Wole Soyinka, Zulu Sofola, Ola Rotimi O MOTAYO O LORUNTOBA –O JU

I.

Introduction

A

D A P T A T I O N S ’ O F C L A S S I C A L and Western dramatic texts by Nigeria playwrights are at least three translation removes from the originating texts. The texts are encountered by the playwrights in their English translations rather than in Greek, Latin or French, hence already one remove from their originating language and culture. Further translation of the texts through adaptation into the multilingual and multicultural setting of the playwrights creates an additional remove, both on the level of language, since the English used in the adaptations is not the English of the original English translation, and on the levels of theme and setting. The playwrights themselves do not attempt or claim fidelity to the original texts; however, their departure from the original in the course of translation or adaptation may be seen in the light of postcolonial ‘abrogation’, for which a broader definition is proposed in this essay. Adaptation within this configuration becomes a debt that the playwrights owe to their own experiential legacies. Their translation efforts often reflect this burden. The texts are transformed not only in consequence of the colonial and multicultural backgrounds of these playwrights but also as a result of conscious ideological resistance to cultural imposition. This essay proposes that the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘translation’ may not always be adequate to explain the resulting, cross-cultural, texts. The texts are therefore better analyzed in terms of their intertexuality. Dramatic texts by Wole Soyinka, Zulu Sofola, and Ola Rotimi, three renowned Nigerian playwrights, are examined in the light of this contention.

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II . Translation and Cross-Cultural ‘Cooperation’ It is well established that translation functions not just as a translingual vector of meaning but also uniquely as a vector of cultural specificity. For it is only through translation efforts, processes, and types, however defined, that elements of one culture become available to an Other, along with those specificities that ultimately constitute the identity of the culture and its mark of difference from the Other. Translation thus signals a functional complementarity within classical definition. It effects a transcultural symbiosis simply by spreading awareness of the other culture and facilitating interlingual and cross-cultural accommodation. But this description of translation as facilitator of cross-cultural cooperation represents only one level of appreciation. On another level, translation inherently provokes what may be described as cultural insurgency, fuelling the flame of resistance to invading or occupying cultural forces. In other words, translation also provokes a protectionist tendency within the native culture, due to either an ideological or an aesthetic sensitivity, or both. As significantly elaborated by Lawrence Venuti, translation processes can at once be instrumental to cultural cohesion and crosscultural coherence, while also activating cultural animosity.1 These interconnecting ideas of ‘cooperation’ and ‘resistance’ within translation find relative correspondence in the postcolonial trope of ‘hybridity’. The ‘hybridization’ processes signal resistance to cultural annihilation on the part of receptor cultures and lead ultimately to the transformation of colonial symbols into something remarkably different. Within this concept of postcoloniality, hybridity as continuously theorized in one form or the other over the last four decades is not simply a marker of heterogeneity and accommodation but also one of resistance and rejection. Significantly, Homi Bhabha’s perspective on hybridity had been anticipated in the terms ‘abrogation’ – “denial of the privilege of ‘English’ as often a metropolitan power over the means of communication,” and ‘appropriation’ – “capturing and remoulding the language to new usage” – as defined by Bill Ashroft et al; these authors themselves had been anticipated in the works of earlier theorists of languageuse in African literature.2 1

Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998): 68. 2 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989): 38. The earlier theorists include Chinua Achebe, Obi Wali, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose works in the preceding decades are further referred to below.

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African translation and adaptation of classic texts can be located within these contexts. While the terms ‘abrogation’ and ‘appropriation’ had gained currency with regard to discrete cultural and linguistic items which occur in African works as part of the process of indigenizing colonial languages, we propose in this essay that the terms are particularly germane to the understanding of the approach of African playwrights to the adaptation or translation of literary works of Western ‘origin’. The perspective here is broadened beyond the abrogation of linguistic privilege or appropriation of usage, to accommodate the abrogation of textual privilege and the claims of literary orthodoxy. The classical view of adaptation, as the re-rendering of an ‘original’ work that constitutes a ‘standard whole’ with a given origin, becomes inadequate to describe African literary ‘adaptations’, when we consider the full dramatic, sociological, and cultural import of the emerging texts. The term ‘translation’ is equally suspect. As noted earlier and as we attempt to demonstrate below, what may be more appropriate is to discuss the works in terms of their intertextuality rather than solely as adaptations or translations of apparent original sources. Texts to which the term ‘adaptation’ is classically applied in the African context include Sophocles’ Oedipus, the French farce Pierre Pathelin, and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera or Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper. The respective adaptation /translation of these texts (or, more properly, their apparent adaptation/ translation) by Ola Rotimi, Zulu Sofola, and Wole Soyinka provides an interesting illustration of the trope of abrogation/ appropriation within African drama. It can be demonstrated that the adaptation /translation occurs in the mode of resistance to cultural subjection by ‘invading’ texts, leading to a virtual abrogation of the presumed textual and cultural origins or sources of the texts. Soyinka, Sofola, and Rotimi are Nigerian playwrights of international stature and their works are often cited as models of African dramaturgy in its multiple and multifaceted realizations. Each of the playwrights had worked with numerous interconnected genres of art and drama, including tragedy and ritual, comedy and adaptations. Their works therefore provide a pedestal for examining various textual and aesthetic phenomena within the African context and within the context of adaptation/ translation. A conflation of the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘translation’ (‘transdaptation’ may be a convenient coinage) is often inevitable within this context, but this need not lead to terminological indeterminacy or confusion. While the term ‘translation’ is classically applied to intra- or interlingual verbal signals – for example, in the work of Roman Jakobson – it has also been progressively

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used in its figurative sense which allows for cross-generic application.3 Both adaptation and translation imply a movement from source to target text on various levels. It is possible theoretically to distinguish between translation, on the one hand (as a re-rendering of specific statements or sundry verbal elements), and adaptation, on the other (as a re-rendering of specific texts in a different medium, setting, culture or context). However, this distinction breaks down within the context of adaptation. Entire chunks of so-called adaptation are often translations of source dialogues, or ‘hypothetical’ source dialogues which derive presumably from the action or theme of source texts. A consideration of the manner in which source titles are rendered in apparent adaptations provides a clear illustration of this inevitable conflation. Often there is a process of indigenized rendering of the sort applied to globalized names such as Kaiser–Caesar–Kesari; Yohanna–John–Johannu; Mikhail– Michael–Minkailu, and so on. Trying to distinguish whether these indigenized renderings are adaptations or translations is a daunting task even for the linguist. The situation is more complicated with the re-rendering of titles that are not necessarily names: for example, The Beggar’s Opera, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), and Opera Wonyosi, among others. Since a title stands in summation for the entire text, it is therefore not just a verbal sign but a sign of the text, and symbol of the genre. Determining whether the numerous titles subsequent to Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, for example, are adaptations or translations is, again, a daunting task. Moreover, many situations and dialogues from apparent original sources are both translated and adapted, so that in many instances we are reminded of the necessary conflation of the two concepts. I myself find particularly interesting the ‘translation’ of onomatopoeic items. For example, the mimicked bleating (sound of a goat or sheep) in the French farce Pierre Pathelin gives rise to several different expressions, such that it would appear that in France goats say Bé e, according to the original; in English, Baah, and in Yoruba, an African language, Mèé.4

3

This elasticity was emphasized recently when Umberto Eco traced the term to the Peircean concept of “interpretation,” which Eco himself re-analyzed as “translation.” See Eco, Experiences in Translation (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2001): 69. 4 The English translation is as given by David Solomon, “The Mad Scene from the Farce of Pierre Pathelin,” http://www.dwsmp3.com/indexlafolia.html (5 February 2005). Interestingly, in Zulu Sofola’s The Wizard of Law, Ramoni Alao renders the goat’s bleating as: Gbé e. It is difficult to understand why this is so since the play is set in Nigeria’s Ibadan, which is the contemporary heartland of Yorubaland, and where goat’s bleating is traditionally rendered as Mèé. (Zulu Sofola was a mid-western Nigerian married to a Yoruba man, so it could be suggested, on a lighter note, that the language of their goats got mixed up some-

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Translation has been theorized into types precisely to deal with the sort of problem raised. Thus, translation could be ‘bound’ or ‘free’, ‘literal’, ‘partial’, ‘full’, ‘restricted’, ‘total’ and so on,5 and the resultant equivalents are analyzed on the basis of such classifications. The terms used to distinguish adaptation types are instructively similar – they are also terms such as ‘literal translation’, ‘transposition’, ‘transformation’, and so on.6 The fact that the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘translation’ are sometimes in free variation in the research literature, albeit with such secondary classifications as ‘adaptation as translation’, only helps to solidify the view that it may be difficult if not impossible to distinguish the two in very many contexts. Within African literature, adaptations or apparent adaptations are, in effect, translations. The language of the source texts is invariably different from that of the target texts in as many as three removes from, for example, Greek to English to Yoruba and to African English. The adaptations involve translation, and every translation is an adaptation within this context. Recent theoretical perspectives on adaptation tend to move from a ‘centrebased’ model that sees adaptations as having a direct relationship to a standard ‘original’. The relationship is by description (one of inferiority), whereby the different ‘versions’’ are a mere ‘reflection’ of the original, and they are traditionally assessed in terms of their degree of ‘reflection’ or ‘distortion’ of that original. The adapted ‘centre’ thus functions, in the satirical terminology of Anthony Easthope, as the “source of life” for the various adaptations of the ‘original’.7 In contrast to this comparative model, a case is made, and persuasively so, for adaptations to be regarded as independent texts rather than as a mere outgrowth or appendage of some original source text. This perspective is justified not only by drawing attention to the doubtful history or homogeneity of source texts (the “thousand sources of culture” leading to the Barthesian proclamation of the death of the author),8 but also by placing emphasis on independent features and textual character of the works being analyzed. Theoretical perspectives in translation are of a similar persuasion. Rather than

where along the line!) However, what is really interesting from the point of view of the present essay is the conflation of the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘translation’ in the item Gbé e. 5 See J.C. Catford, A Linguistic Theory of Translation (London: Oxford U P , 1965): 20– 25. 6 See Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2002): 54–57. 7 Anthony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991): 23. 8 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968) in Barthes, Image–Music–Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977): 53.

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being a mere robotic search for matching verbal or semiotic units or ‘equivalence’ for source texts within target texts, translation reveals an active and purposeful intelligence pursuing a set aim that is often independent of, and sometimes at variance with, that of the so-called original source. In short, in translations there is often revealed “the history and the socio-political milieu” that surrounds the translator and shapes his /her intervention.9 Within the specific context of Africa, adaptation (when regarded as such) is often a tool, not for the sustenance of the cultural or textual ‘standard’ of an original source, but for the abrogation of the hegemonic claims of the source. As noted, adaptation or translation becomes a debt that African playwrights owe to their experiential legacies. A key element of this legacy is the troubled socio-political terrain of Africa, which is usually phrased as economic underdevelopment of the continent, and as continued subjugation of the continent socio-politically and culturally to imperialist interests. On the cultural front, theorists of African literature have expressed both aesthetic and ideological concerns, often in inseparable terms. The aesthetic concern is whether the English language or other colonial languages can actually “carry the weight of [the] African experience,”10 or convey the nuances of its cultural expressions; the ideological concern is that the continued use of foreign languages leads to the underdevelopment of indigenous languages and literatures, and ultimately to continued economic and cultural impoverishment of the African polity.11 This twin concern exercises enormous influence on the creative sensitivity of African playwrights who create new texts that resist the cultural hegemony of assumed originals. Cultural hegemony works not only by means of language-use but through other artefacts of culture. Within our context, these include the staple of Aeschylus–Sophocles–Euripedes–Shakespear–Marlowe–Jonson, and myriad other foreign literary texts rammed into (and displacing) the African cultural land-

9 Román Álvarez & María Carmen–África Vidal, “Introduction” to Translation, Power, Subversion, ed. Álvarez & Vidal (Clevedon & Philadelphia P A : Multilingual Matters, 1996): 5. 10 Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975): 62. 11 Unlike Achebe, Obi Wali believed that the use of English constitutes an aesthetic “dead end” for African literature, while Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o provides an additional ideological opposition to the use of English, insisting that “An African should write in a language that will allow him to communicate with peasants and workers in Africa – in other words he should write in an African language.” See Ngũgĩ, “On Writing in Gikuyu,” Research in African Literatures 16 (1985): 153; Obi Wali, “The Dead End of African Literature,” Transition 3.10 (1963): 13–15.

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scape through the agency of educational and literary orthodoxies that are replicated in the colonial empire. Accordingly, to revise Western literary texts in the light of the African socio-political and cultural experience was, and is still, seen as a pressing duty by committed African writers.

III . Soyinka, Sofola, Rotimi:

Levels of Abrogation and Intertextuality The playwrights Soyinka, Sofola and Rotimi, then, create new African texts which foreground the African socio-political situation and tend to abrogate the hegemonic claims of the assumed originals. A survey of the thematic concerns of the texts by them under consideration illustrates this point. In the sections that follow, it will be seen that abrogation of ‘original’ Western texts in the works of these playwrights occurs largely on the levels of theme, literary orthodoxy, language, and dramaturgy. Wole Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi is an unredeeming satire of the postcolonial African society, particularly the bloodthirsty dictatorship of the period (being the period of ‘presidents for life’ Idi Amin, Nguema, Bokassa, whose ignoble role in the African society of the period has become legendary). As observed by Stephen Hinton in his brief summary of Opera Wonyosi in relation to The Beggar’s Opera / Die Dreigroschenoper, Soyinka “wrote his Opera Wonyosi as a satire on a handful of African tyrants and the numerous vices he saw present in Nigeria and the Central African Republic at the time.”12 Indeed, Soyinka himself notes in his preface to the published edition that the play satirizes the “crimes committed by a power-drunk soldiery against a cowed and defenceless people – resulting in a further mutual brutalization down the scale of power.”13 The brutality of dictatorship permeates every segment of the drama. The play presents the people’s resort to literal and metaphorical beggary and the stench of corruption which could be perceived from miles away. The various dialogues and songs in the play are dramatic mechanisms by which the playwright foregrounds this sordidness across various strata of society. The “Song of the Ruling Passion,” for example, is about “this bloody nation,” where “corruption is the oil that greases /

12 Stephen Hinton, “The Premiere and After,” in Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, ed. Hinton (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1980): 73. 13 Opera Wonyosi, “Foreword,” np. A recent (2005) U S Intelligence Report predicts that the country will break up in fifteen years over ethnic bickering. For analysis of this, see Peter Odili, “Perspectives on U S Intelligence Report on Nigeria”: http://www.vanguardngr .com/articles/2002/politics/june05/06062005/p106062005.html (5 June 2005).

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The national wheel.” Among other satirized episodes: “question papers succumb to leakage,” and “the dumbest suzie obtains first class,” since “sex transcends all class.”14 Also, ethnic jingoism with religious bigotry is rife; human beings get sacrificed in mysterious money rituals. The latter is a well-established cultic phenomenon and a theme that is almost exclusively African. Soyinka’s satire expresses the matter grimly: If the Money Ritual demands your wife Why hesitate, its only a life Think of all the parties that you can give [. . . ]15

Similar strife is the subject-matter of Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame. The playwright attempts here to depict the ethnic bigotry that threatened (and still threatens) to devastate the Nigerian polity. The play came at the time of the Nigerian civil war (1967–70), which was caused by ethnic bickering. Rotimi tries to demonstrate that ‘the gods are not to blame’ for the country’s woes. Odewale, the tragic hero in the play, in a moment of cathartic selfrealization, admits that his is the tragedy of “a man moved easily to the defence of his tribe against others.”16 Accordingly, Rotimi closes the play on the note of an age-long African gnomic declaration: When The wood-insect Gathers sticks On its own head it Carries Them.17

In Sofola’s The Wizard of Law, the growing materialism and corruption of contemporary African society is presented in farcical form amidst numerous absurd episodes of theft and corruption. Here, Ramoni Alao the lawyer sinks so low as to steal clothing materials (“lesi, damasi and sanyan olomigolu”18) from a marketer. Ironically, the reason for this irreligiousness is so that he and his wife can turn out resplendently for a religious occasion:

14 15 16 17 18

Soyinka, Opera Wonyosi (1977; London: Rex Collins, 1986): 57–58. Soyinka, Opera Wonyosi, 58. Rotimi, The Gods Are Not to Blame (Ibadan: Oxford U P , 1971): 65. Rotimi, The Gods Are Not to Blame, 68. Sofola, The Wizard of Law (London, Ibadan & Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1975) 3.

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I will use my brain to get the money for our lace. My wife will be big like cash-madam. We shall walk to the praying ground this Ileya like the Oba himself.19

We will return presently to the language in which this theme is conveyed. However, it can immediately be observed from the brief summaries above that these three plays do not necessarily come off as ‘adaptations’ respectively of John Gay’s/ Bertolt Brecht’s The Beggar’s Opera and Die Dreigroschenoper, Sophocles’ Oedipus, and the French farce Pierre Pathelin. Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame is particularly significant in this regard, as it conveys a thematic purport that is diametrically opposed to the Classical text, Oedipus, in which fate is inescapable and the gods inviolable. This theme, the mainstay of Classical tragedy, is, in effect, abrogated in the so-called adaptation. Abrogation of textual hegemony of ‘original’ texts in African ‘adaptations’ occurs not only in such substitutions with African social and political history and culture as shown above, but also on the level of literary orthodoxy. We refer here to the absence in the African texts of any official announcement of relationship or indebtedness to the Western source material. According to Dudley Andrew, aesthetic representations are invariably adaptations, being “interpretations of a person, place, event and so forth,” but the term ‘adaptation’ is reserved specifically for those works that establish the adaptive relationship by “announcing themselves as versions of some standard whole.”20 This element of annunciation is conspicuous in, for example, Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper, which was, and still is, subtitled “nach The Beggar’s Opera von John Gay.” Although Brecht himself was said to have “surreptitiously written a new piece” different from Gay’s opera, and his interpretation was called an “art of vandalism” relative to original sources,21 he did attend to the demand of orthodoxy by announcing a relationship with The Beggar’s Opera. There is no such annunciation in the Soyinka, Sofola, and Rotimi published texts under consideration. The sense of abrogation is complete with the titles of the African texts, which, particularly in the case of Rotimi’s The Gods and Sofola’s Wizard of Law, bear no relationship of verbal correspondence to the so called original texts (Oedipus and Pierre Pathelin respectively). This is almost equivalent to burning the flag of invading or occupying cultural forces. Soyinka himself wrote an elaborate preface to Opera Wonyosi in which there is no mention of either John Gay or Bertolt Brecht. The term “opera” in the 19 20 21

Sofola, The Wizard of Law 19. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1984): 97. Hinton, “The Premiere and After,” 14–15.

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title is often re-analyzed locally as ope - ra - wonyosi (‘the dunce buys wonyosi’). At best, the flag of the original text is held at half-mast here. It is arguable that the Brechtian attention to adaptive detail may have been spurred by closeness in time to the original piece and also by rigid property rights (the equivalent of contemporary copyright), while the ‘lax’ attitude of the African playwrights may have been encouraged by distance in time and space from the original texts. However, it is equally arguable that the playwrights simply did not regard those Classical plays as sole sources in terms of narrative and dramaturgy, and therefore felt justified to abrogate such claims. Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripedes, which, even in the title, announces its relationship to the original The Bacchae (and which follows this original closely), is a complete contrast. This suggests a conscious abrogation in the case of the Gay / Brecht text. Whether the abrogation referred to here is conscious or not, it does underscore the status of the texts under consideration as original African texts whose theme, setting, language, and dramatic aesthetic are describable in terms of the African aesthetic matrix. Thus, unlike Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper, which is set in London (at “a fair in Soho” just like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera), Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi is set in the Central African Republic of the 1970s. Sofola’s Wizard of Law and Rotimi’s The Gods are also set, respectively, in the Ibadan and Oyo areas of Nigeria. As noted, the plays’ titles bear little resemblance to the presumed originals, while the characters take their names from the African cultural setting and socio-political landscape. Soyinka employs a few names that are recognized from Gay / Brecht (“Macheath,” “Polly,” “Jake,” “Brown,” “Lucy”), but all others are drawn from African culture. Also, the D.J. at the beginning of the play tells the audience that they can call the play whatever they like, including “Opera Wayo” or even “the beggar’s opera.” This is an echo of John Gay’s title, but he goes on to situate begging socio-culturally: “that is what the whole nation is doing – begging for a slice of the action.”22 The concession must certainly be made that evidence of textual continuities or parallels between the Classical / Western texts and their apparent adaptations do exist in the texts, a point to which we will return. However, the abrogation and hybridization noted above are precisely what give the adaptation its new character. The new texts challenge the hegemonic presumptions of primacy or originary status (of sole sources) that inform the classical definition of adaptations. The textual ‘paral22

Soyinka, Opera Wonyosi, 1.

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lels’ are therefore best appraised on the level of intertextuality rather than as adaptation of the originals. In neither Rotimi’s The Gods or Sofola’s Wizard of Law does a single name resemble that of any character in Oedipus or Pierre Pathelin. The names can therefore not be described as translations of names in the original in the sense of a ‘verbal correspondence’. In Africa, names are not just names but anthropological statements. A name is often a ‘sentence’ and sometimes a ‘paragraph’, with meaning rooted in the cultural and social significance surrounding the birth of the child. Similarly, in African dramaturgy names have meanings. They therefore serve intratextual, narrative/ dramatic functions by prefiguring the behavioural attribute or the social, cultural or dramatic roles of characters. In Rotimi’s The Gods, the characters whose dramatic roles are comparable to Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias respectively are: Odewale Aderopo Baba Fakunle

(‘Hunter returns home’) (‘Crown / King replacement’) (‘Father, divination/wisdom fills the house’)

Unlike in the so-called originals, the respective roles of these characters, as warrior/ returnee; heir or potentate and seer, are already prefigured in these names. In Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi, characters are named after real-life African personages of the early 1970s (particularly “Emperor Boky” after ‘President-for-life’ Jean–Beden Bokassa) and after important fictive characters like: Anikura Prof Bamigbapo Alatako

(‘kingpin of rogues’) (‘prof carrier of bags’: i.e. servile, subservient) (‘rival, opposer, prosecutor’)

Other nicknames prefigure their character and role in the play. Sofola equally employs, for her farce, names that have the potential to generate laughter because of certain ethnic, religious, and socio-cultural associations within the African environment. These occurrences clearly constitute levels of intertextuality by which to appraise African ‘adaptations’ and probe deeper into the aesthetic roots of the relevant texts. Simultaneously, the analysis would accommodate any sources that may have been brought in to serve the purpose of the texts and the playwrights. Intertextuality in this context follows both the elastic Kristevan notion and the more restrictive postmodernist emphasis on generic intertexts. In the former, intertextuality is an inherent attribute of a text, any text, and

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every text has that propensity to activate echoes of other texts ad infinitum. In the latter, there is emphasis on specific literary echoes of established pre-texts. In this instance, the new text, as a ‘sign’, is “an index [...] of other signs” and cannot be appreciated or “understood in isolation.”23 Within this context, the adapted text constitutes just one level of intertextuality on which all verbal, structural, historical, and literary echoes are to be identified. This returns us to the ‘concession’ noted earlier. Story, plot, and sequence constitute important elements of dramaturgy and levels of intertextuality where a source dramatic text can gain recognition, prominence, and sometimes primacy, depending on how closely the adaptation appears to follow the plot of the source text. Thus the Gay / Brecht plot is present in Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi, just as evidence of the Sophocles and Pierre Pathelin stories respectively will be found in Rotimi’s The Gods and Sofola’s Wizard of Law. However, within our argument, story, plot, and sequence only constitute levels of intertextuality, rather than absolute and invariable evidence of an original source. Often, we are reminded that at the root of much comparative analysis in adaptation is the “assumption that the adaptive roots of an adaptation constitute the major part of its identity.”24 In relation to African texts, such an assumption is not only fallacious but is also hegemonic in orientation. The issue of contending or multiple sources is familiar in translation and adaptation studies and it is particularly important here. A story in which a debtor feigns illness rather than face up to a creditor, as it occurs in The Wizard of Law, is nothing but a universal nuance of trickery which has long been employed by indigenous dramatists and storytellers who never had access to Pierre Pathelin. This story is, indeed, common fare in African tales that feature the tortoise as archetypal trickster; the occurrence of a similar story in two texts is not necessarily always evidence of adaptation. Furthermore, a relationship with an antecedent text, a generic intertext, is irrelevant unless it is orchestrated by literary or dramatic means – for example, through an explicit indication of the relationship (absent in the African texts), or through specific verbal or semiotic cues designed deliberately to echo antecedent texts or times. These are equally absent or not prominent in the African texts. An adaptation may also rely on the intrinsic knowledge that audiences have of antecedent texts, but here again we draw a virtual zero within the African con-

23

Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1995): 39. 24 Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, 19 (emphasis mine).

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text. Soyinka observed, albeit in pursuance of a different argument and within an unrelated context, that the audience that greeted Opera Wonyosi with enthusiasm was . . . a wide spectrum – across all class divisions, from the ‘lace’ madams to Oduduwa Hall kitchen hands; from the Military Governor to the victim (or victim acquaintance) of his soldiers’ code of anti-civilian conduct; from the university don to the park attendant.25

With such a “wide spectrum,” knowledge of Classical or Western antecedents of the texts cannot be taken for granted. Since the playwrights have not provided such clues, either, Classical/ Western literary / generic intertexts pale into insignificance. We merely make some note of them in academic treatises. Conversely, the sources of the plays and levels of intertextuality that audiences relate to readily are those rooted in the socio-political history and the cultural reality of the African community which then constitute the important intertexts as well as the parallel sources for the plays. A related and important level of intertextuality is the author him- or herself. The writing history of an author is invaluable in constructing intertextuality in relation to his or her writing concerns, dramaturgical bent or stylistic predilection. Intra-authorial intertexts are numerous in the adapted texts on the thematic level of exposition and language. The theme of the bestiality of power is recurrent in the plays of Wole Soyinka (e.g., Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, and A Play of Giants – in which latter work the African dictators including Emperor Boky actually converge). Theme is a motivating factor in the construction of a text. Indeed, as Jakobson is concerned, there is no meaning independent of a theme. The theme of dictatorship and corruption, the various travails consequent on colonial intervention, and the various vices – such themes are a constant feature of African writing and often constitute its organizing principle. Intertextuality and text-sourcing occur on this level as well. Rotimi’s writing career was devoted to an exploration of the interplay between myth, ritual, and history, and their relative contribution to tragedy. His mytho-historical tragedies include Kurunmi and Ogbonramwen Nogbaisi. His The Gods Are Not to Blame, which also relates intertextually to Sophocles’ Oedipus, is therefore not an isolated generic output by the playwright. Intra-authorial echoes also occur on the level of plot and characterization. A conspicuous example is the character Jeru in Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi 25

Soyinka, Opera Wonyosi, “Foreword,” np.

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(1977). This trickster Christian charlatan has seen life in at least two earlier plays by Soyinka, The Trials of Brother Jero (1968) and Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973). Jeru’s habit in this reincarnation is unchanged, in terms of costume, language or behaviour. The ‘bar beach’ in which Macheath is to face a firing squad in Opera Wonyosi had featured prominently in Jero’s Metamorphosis, where Jero and his fellow charlatans have their churches dwelling. The “bar beach show” is already advertised as a “popular expression for the new fashion of public executions in Lagos, capital of Nigeria.”26 In fact, most of Soyinka’s important plays had been written between 1960 (A Dance of the Forest) and 1975 (Death and the King’s Horseman) and necessarily constitute a tremendous source input to Opera Wonyosi on various levels of narrative and dramaturgy. The so-called adaptations considered in this essay are equally suffused with representation of African ritual, culture, and language. Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame is particularly representative of this triad. The play traverses the Yoruba ritual landscape, which may be analogous to, but is definitely different from, the Greek mythical realm populated by the Olympians. The Yoruba metaphysical world-view and notion of fate are far more anthropomorphic and consequently more accommodating of humanity. It is to Ifa, Yoruba god of divination, that the characters in Rotimi’s play call to prognosticate the future of the newly-born Odewale. And it is to the Yoruba pantheon rather than the Greek that Odewale later appeals to for assistance in bringing the tragic culprit to book: I swear by this sacred arm of Ogun, that I shall straightway bring him to the agony of slow death. First he shall be exposed to the eyes of the world [...] [Solemnly.] May the gods of our fathers – Obatala, Orunmila, Sango, Soponna, Esu-Elegbara, Agemo, Ogun – stand by me.27

Again, these are not translations from any ‘original’ text of alien origin. They are, rather, translations into English of the indigenous African ritual landscape, language, and culture. Interestingly, Dapo Adelugba used the term “Yorubanglish” to denote the search by Rotimi, Sofola, and Aidoo for an African language by which to domesticate the English medium in their writ-

26 27

Soyinka, “Jero’s Metamorphosis,” in The Jero Plays (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973): 48. Rotimi, The Gods Are Not to Blame, 23 (emphasis mine).

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ings.28 Any ‘original’ language stands abrogated within the sequence. The centrality of the Yoruba (African) linguistic code to the drama is exemplified in the drama itself when Odewale asks Aderopo: Are you not a Yorubaman? Must proverbs have to be interpreted for you to understand?29

The moral is that the various dialogues are translations from the indigenous African linguistic and semiotic code, which tends to exclude or ‘other’ those not familiar with the codes. Various processes of hybridization or indigenization which have been highlighted in the literature (including relexification, code-switching, and code-mixing, word-borrowing, use of untranslated words, and literalization of idioms) are evident in the foregoing extracts and the texts in general. Thus, even when translation is considered specifically in terms of rendering a statement or text from one language to the other, we find very little correspondence between the apparent original texts and the so-called adaptations. A comparison of Solomon’s (2005) translation of statements in Pierre Pathelin and ‘corresponding’ statements in Sofola’s The Wizard of Law shows a further glimpse of such absence of correspondence. In the following sequence, the draper/cloth-seller had been successfully fooled by husband and wife in the respective plays: G U I L L E M E T T E : We fooled him good and proper and what about my acting eh?!

(“The Mad Scene from the Farce of Pierre Pathelin” ) RAMONI: RAMONI:

We put it to him very heavy didn’t we? We confused him very well and heavy, eh? Alao the Wizard of Law did it again, eh eh? He got a hot pepper soup, didn’t he?30

Such “dynamic equivalence” is about the closest one gets to a possible correspondence between the two texts at the level of dialogue or specific utterances. Even so, the difference is glaring. The quoted statement is actually uttered by Guillemette, the wife, in Pierre Pathelin, but by Ramoni, the husband in Wizard of Law. Also, the lines “We put it to him very heavy didn’t we?” and “He got a hot pepper soup” are obviously drawn from local idiom.

28

Dapo Adelugba, “Wale Ogunyemi, Zulu Sofola and Ola Rotimi: Three Dramatists in Search of a Language,” in Theatre in Africa, ed. Oyin Ogunba & Abiola Irele (Ibadan: Ibadan U P , 1978): 217. 29 Rotimi, The Gods Are Not to Blame, 18. 30 The Wizard of Law, 15.

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The translation, if translation it is, is simultaneously an adaptation and an interpretation to suit the local environment. Glossing or cushioning is required to make the meaning of the local idiom recoverable. This is achieved only with the insertion of “We confused him very well and heavy, eh?” in the sequence. Within the purview of this essay, an abrogation occurs on various levels in the plays by Soyinka, Sofola, and Rotimi which tends to demolish the hegemonic claims of the original texts that they have apparently adapted. The abrogation occurs on the level of literary orthodoxy, since the texts do not announce themselves as adaptations in the first place, or declare any affiliation to those sources. Abrogation also occurs on the level of setting, theme, and language, all of which are almost wholly related to African ritual and the cultural and socio-political landscape, as part of the experiential burden of the African writer. A new text, new language, and new culture are born. Within traditional approaches to ‘adaptations’ and translations (which places an ‘original’ at a radial centre and analyses new texts only comparatively in relation to this ‘centre’), crucial aspects of the plays’ aesthetic which should normally command analytical attention are lost. On the other hand, the strategies of abrogation, appropriation, and transformation employed by the African playwrights enable us to restore analytical order by focusing our attention determinedly on aspects of intertextuality in the texts. A relationship to source texts cannot be completely denied; however, the focus on the new texts along the dimensions of intertextuality allows us to accommodate both that relationship and other relevant textual phenomena. It allows us to give, to each respective source of the ‘adaptation,’ its proper due.

WORKS CITED Adelugba, Dapo. “Wale Ogunyemi, Zulu Sofola and Ola Rotimi: Three Dramatists in Search of a Language,” in Theatre in Africa, ed. Oyin Ogunba & Abiola Irele (Ibadan: Ibadan U P , 1978): 201–20. Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975): 55–62. Álvarez, Román, & M. Carmen–África Vidal, ed. Translation, Power, Subversion. (Clevedon & Philadelphia P A : Multilingual Matters, 1996). Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1984). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989). Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1995). Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” (1968), in Barthes, Image–Music–Text, tr. Stephen Heath (NewYork: Hill & Wang, 1977): 142–48.

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Brecht, Bertolt. The Threepenny Opera, tr. & ed. Ralph Manheim & John Willett (Die Dreigroschenoper 1928; tr. London: Methuen, 1979). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2002). Catford J.C. A Linguistic Theory of Translation (London: Oxford U P , 1965). Easthope, Anthony. Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991). Eco, Umberto. Experiences in Translation (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2001). Hinton, Stephen. “‘Matters of Intellectual Property’: The Sources and Genesis of Die Dreigroschenoper,” in Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, ed. Hinton (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1980): 9–49. ——. “The Premiere and After,” in Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, ed. Hinton (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1980): 50–74. Jakobson, Roman. “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 2: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971): 260–66. Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo. “On Writing in Gikuyu,” Research in African Literatures 16 (1985): 151–56. Odili, Peter. ”Perspectives on U S Intelligence Report on Nigeria,” http://www.vanguardngr .com/articles/2002/politics/june05/06062005/p106062005.html (5 June 2005). Osundare, Niyi. “Caliban’s Curse: The English Language and Nigeria’s Underdevelopment,” Ufahamu 11.2 (1981): 96–107. Rotimi, Ola. The Gods Are Not to Blame (Ibadan: Oxford U P , 1971). ——. Kurunmi (Ibadan: Ibadan U P , 1971). ——. Our Husband has gone Mad Again (London: Oxford U P , 1977). Sofola, Zulu. Wedlock of the Gods (London, Ibadan & Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1972). ——. The Wizard of Law (London, Ibadan & Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1975). Solomon, David. “The Mad Scene from the Farce of Pierre Pathelin,” http://www.dwsmp3 .com/indexlafolia.html (5 February 2005). Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays, tr. Robert Fagles, intro. Ronald Knox (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000). Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975). ——. The Jero Plays (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). ——. Opera Wonyosi (1977; London: Rex Collins, 1986). Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards and Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998). Wali, Obi. “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 3.10 (1963): 13–15.

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Open Boundaries — Encountering Nissim Ezekiel and A.K. Ramanujan J OSEPH S WANN

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E Z E K I E L was one of the founding fathers of modern Indian writing in English. Born in 1924 in Mumbai (then Bombay) into a Bene-Israel family – a branch of the centuries-old Jewish presence in western India – he was active not only as a poet but also as an editor and publisher, as well as being an untiring supporter of younger Indian writers. For the Western (or European) reader, the striking thing about his poetry is its familiarity. The first of the “Egoist’s Prayers,” for example, published in 1976, echoes the “Holy Sonnets” of John Donne:1 ISSIM

Kick me around a bit more, O Lord. I see at last there’s no other way for me to learn your simplest truths.2

The words are addressed to a personal God, and they stem from a personal need. The morality is the individual imperative of Judaeo-Christianity. These are, after all, “Egoist’s Prayers,” spoken by a definably historical self, and they are spoken to a “Lord” who reflects the absolute godhead of JudaeoChristian tradition. The relation is between an irreducible self and a tran1 “Batter my heart, three-personed God”; John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): 314. I am grateful to Jochen Petzold for this observation. 2 Nissim Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 1952–1988 (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1989): 212.

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scendent being, the ultimate knowing subject, on whom man can rely to understand his needs and ways. All this is familiar to Christian and postChristian alike, but there is another, particularly attractive, element that is not so close to home: the irony of the supplication. It is present in all seven of these prayers: The price of wisdom is too high, but folly is expensive too. Strike a bargain with me, Lord, I’m not a man of ample means.3

Is this ironic humour perhaps more Indian? Has the process of translation out of a Judaic culture long implanted within a Hindu one resulted in a symbiosis recognizable in Ezekiel’s English writing? Wisdom and folly are classic OldTestament motifs, but the idea of the bargain is straight from the market place – not just of India, but of India, too. The last of Ezekiel’s prayers is the most poignant of all: Confiscate my passport, Lord, I don’t want to go abroad. Let me find my song where I belong.4

The individual moral perspective is again clear, the poet’s God being called upon to limit and chasten him. But so is the need for rootedness within a specific cultural complex. This is not a rejection of other cultures, but a statement of the indispensable requirement for the creative person of a definable starting-point. An Indian Jewish starting-point cannot be monolithic or simple; the very diversity of the theological basis – on the one hand an immanent, on the other a transcendent deity – indicates this. The fact remains, however, that for Ezekiel, as for every individual – and above all for every cultural migrant – there is a distinction between the sense of belonging within a certain cultural (or multicultural) context and the “abroad,” the other, for which a passport is required. And the passport must be both current and personal. Definability and belonging suggest a wholeness of aspiration, and the concepts of the “Egoist’s Prayers” radiate such a wholeness. The same aspiration is present in the title sequence from Ezekiel’s 1976 volume, Hymns in 3 4

Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 213. Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 213.

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Darkness, in which he chastizes himself, less ironically now, for hypocrisy and self-deception: He has seen the signs but not been faithful to them. Where is the fixed star of his seeking? It multiplies like a candle in the eyes of a drunkard. He looks at the nakedness of truth in the spirit of a Peeping Tom. Changing his name would be no help. He is the man full of his name.5

The signs are unambiguous, the star that should guide the poet is fixed, the truth is naked. But he is weak and vacillating, in the grip of abstractions on which he can only look as a voyeur. That is the problem with the abstractions of a transcendental morality, as many of us have painfully learned. The most significant statement of the poem, however, is left for the final line, where name and self are telescoped. “He is the man / full of his name” suggests a completeness of identity, a perfect reciprocity between being and sign or name. The name takes on an ontological dimension, filling ‘reality’ with what it signifies, and reality is the presence to itself of that unbroken meaning . In the next poem, Ezekiel writes: A life is a symbolic pattern. He’s this life. He’s the interpretation.6

Here, he assumes more clearly the role of the interpreter, the active creator of meaning; and the meaning created becomes identical with the poet’s historical persona. There is a new movement here. The poet sees his life initially as a pattern symbolic of the inadequacies he has catalogued in the body of the poem. But then this distant, abstract view draws in and concretizes – he is, he says, both pattern and interpretation, both sign and meaning. Conversely, both

5 6

Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 218. Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 219.

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sign and meaning are coterminous with the poet’s unique existence: “He’s this life” (emphasis mine). Sign and meaning have reached a limit where they cease to function as distinct conceptual levels, and the “I” darkens into unknowability. The classic distinctions of Western epistemology are, in Ezekiel’s hands, not static but dynamic categories, and he pursues them to the point of breakdown, the end of language, where the only statement possible is “I am as I am.” This reflects a key moment in the Jewish scriptures, when the transcendent God of Israel reveals himself to Moses in his name, Yahweh: “I am what I am” (or “I will be what I will be”). In its refusal of all definition, the name itself is dynamic; but transcendence has its origins in abstraction,7 and any world-view focused on transcendence can easily take on the rigidities of a static, abstract system. We see this happening in most secular as well as religious ideologies. Ezekiel’s rejection of such systems is explicit: The Enemy is God as the Unchanging One. All forms of God and the God in all forms.8

The poet lists various manifestations of this deity – “The absentee landlord, / the official of all officials. // The oppressor who worships God / and the oppressed who worship God” – all of whom he sees as “victims of the Enemy”; and he concludes: “They stay stable. They stay still. / Their hands continue to keep down the young.”9 The poet’s philosophical critique assumes socio-cultural contours, for it is inevitable that the system grounded in abstraction should wither and destroy the society that gave birth to it if it loses the inherent dynamism of its knowing process. 7 More specifically, the concept of transcendence is rooted in our ability, and consequent need, to organize our experience in ascending orders of meaning, until we arrive at, or project, an ‘ultimate’ level: a ‘meaning of meaning’ beyond experience. This process is based in turn on the perception of similarities in experience (this thing is like that → it’s a plant → it’s a rose → it’s attractive, beautiful etc), which is the root of metaphor (a person, in this or that respect, we say, is ‘like a rose’). However, this thing is always this thing, not that. It remains unlike all others, our love is not a red, red rose; and it is when the moment of reversal or breaking in the process of analogy is forgotten, that the system it generates will petrify into an absolute. Conversely, the dynamism of the system depends on the implicit awareness of its limitations: the retention within it of the ability to break. 8 Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 222. 9 Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 223.

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Increasingly, therefore, Ezekiel’s perspective recognizes the limitations of wholeness and the clear unities of abstract thought. The twelfth of his “Hymns in Darkness” is a tribute to darkness as “a kind of perfection,” with “secrets / which light does not know.”10 This is both a statement about the incompleteness of life as we experience it and about the ultimate darkness of all knowing. Again the poet approaches the end of language, where concepts such as light and darkness destabilize and exchange roles. The act of knowing ceases to reflect the clear possession of meaning and becomes an immediate encounter with an ineffable and particular unknown. There is a close analogue to this in the writings of the Western mystics – for instance, Meister Eckhart or the Middle English Cloud of Unknowing. Nissim Ezekiel’s active exploration of his own tradition takes him to its boundaries where the transcendentalist perspective breaks and a space opens towards other constructs. This space, I would argue, is the key site of cultural translation. Where Ezekiel ends is, in a sense, where Ramanujan begins. A.K. Ramanujan was born in 1929 into a Brahmin family in Mysore, southern India. His working life was spent in Chicago as a professor of linguistics, and many of his poems set in America are examples of effective cultural translation. Whatever their thematic variety, their underlying perspective – and frequently also their motifs – remain rooted in the Hindu tradition. It is within this tradition that he also wrote his “Prayers to Lord Murugan,” on which I shall now focus. A footnote tells us that Murugan was the “ancient Dravidian god of fertility, joy, youth, beauty, war and love.”11 In the third of Ramanujan’s “Prayers,” the god is invoked in the following terms: Lord of green growing things, give us a hand in our fight with the fruit fly. Tell us, will the red flower ever come to the branches of the blueprint city?12

10 11 12

Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 223. A.K. Ramanujan, Selected Poems (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1976): 51. Ramanujan, Selected Poems, 52.

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The contrast with Ezekiel is immediate. The addressee here is not a transcendent personal God, but the lord of “green / growing things” – distinctly thisworldly phenomena. And the poem stays within that strictly defined horizon. Its concern is not with individual morality viewed against the backdrop of an absolute, but with the needs of the community, which are modest, concrete, and vital: the fight against crop pests in field and orchard, and against choking sterility in the city. The power of the poem lies in its fragmentary images. Far from developing a single interpretable line of meaning, the language sparks off a shower of associations that move in many directions at once. One such movement lies in the colours, green, red, and blue, which combine the concepts of growth, beauty, and fruitfulness as the city’s rightful heritage, but undermine that notion by embedding the ‘blue’ in the ambiguous concept of “blueprint.” For, as a blueprint, the city is planned and rational, the project of a brave new world still on the drawing-board, whole and indivisible as the unattainable blue sky. As a blueprint it is potential rather than real; but its potentiality is both life-giving and destructive. As the fruit of abstraction, it is threatening; but inasmuch as its branches may bear “the red flower,” it is fruitful. And there is a further dimension present in this complex image, for Ramanujan knows that the tree joining heaven and earth – its roots containing heaven, its branches earth – is a Hindu symbol of life in its inverted wholeness. All is immanent, circular, and self-referential here. There is interpretable meaning, but it constantly slips through one’s fingers, the associations flowing back and forth through the poem in a dynamic that both contains and is the poem’s meaning. The process itself is imaged in the figure of the unspoken tree whose branches enclose all the movements and meanings of the poem. The tree signifies and the tree is: signifying, it draws together the poem’s meanings, and functions as a metaphor of life; being, it draws apart from them and fragments into its own elements, a red flower, branches, fruit. This fragmentation is metonymic.13 And in the Hindu world-view it is the metonymic, touching immediately to the ineffable, that crucially embodies life. 13 The relevance for linguistic theory of the distinction between metaphor and metonymy was proposed by Roman Jakobson in 1956. Cf. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language (1956; The Hague: Mouton, 1971): 90–96. The critical use of the term ‘metonymy’ has been disputed by, among others, Harold Bloom. Cf. Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (1979; London & New York: Continuum, 2004): 9, but the distinction is now generally accepted in the sense used here. Ramanujan himself observed in a conversation with the present writer at the 1989 Commonwealth Literature Conference, that “Western poetry is on the whole metaphorical, Indian poetry metonymical.”

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Ramanujan’s aesthetic draws on the tradition of Hindu philosophy, for which being is not the presence to itself of an ascertainable meaning – as it became in post-Socratic Western thought – but the force of the other in all its singularity, encountered in a moment that precedes abstraction. The key text here is the Tat twam asi (‘Thou art that’) of the Chandogya Upanishad,14 of which K.M. Sen observes that it “provides the core of most Hindu religious thought.”15 The words are a statement of identity between self and other in a relation of immediate juxtaposition – simply being there, sharing a space as parts of a perceived whole, members of a single set.16 It is this primary moment of relatedness that infuses Ramanujan’s poetry and marks the point where Nissim Ezekiel’s ends. To the mainstream Western tradition, this moment is frequently equated with darkness and negativity; but to the Hindu tradition – and also to an alternative Western movement that can be traced from the preSocratics through the Middle Ages to postmodernism17 – that very negativity is the source of light. As Ezekiel said, “darkness […is] a kind of perfection, / while every light / distorts the truth.”18 Ramanujan’s “Prayers,” like Ezekiel’s, translate into modern English an aesthetic that infuses a whole culture. But they do more than translate, they explore and enact that culture. And because these poems touch to the nerve of their own tradition – and indeed of the contemporary Western tradition – they open out into a space rich with possibilities of meeting. Both Ezekiel and Ramanujan show that cultural translation is performed within one’s own culture, by taking it to its limit. If we look on culture in the broadest sense as language, we can say that the limiting case is the site of both maximum linguistic authenticity and maximum openness. For it is here that another cultural language can be understood, not only in its similarities to one’s own starting-point, but also and above all in its differences; it is in this unique context that structures arising in different world-views can be recognized as significantly complementary. Returning to our examples: in Ezekiel’s 14

The Upanishads, tr. & intro. Juan Mascaró (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965): 117–18. K.M. Sen, Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961): 19, 133–43. 16 This, for Jakobson, is the essence of metonymy. Identity with the other could be described as the primary relation generated in this context; it contrasts radically with the secondary relation, the abstract awareness that both self and other are ‘beings’ present to themselves, that dominated post-Socratic western thought up to the mid-twentieth century. 17 The fundamental approach of Eastern cultures led a subversive existence in the West from the time of Heraclitus, surfacing finally in the Scotist and Nominalist schools of the later Middle Ages and gradually infiltrating the intellectual revolutions of Protestant individualism and science that have in our own day generated postmodernism. 18 Ezekiel, Collected Poems, 223. 15

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case this is the point where Judaeo-Western culture breaks on its own internal tensions and the quest for meaning becomes an encounter with an absent unknown. In Ramanujan’s case, knowledge is defined from the beginning as an encounter with irreducible otherness, where to know is at the same time not to know, and to be is the ‘toward-ness’ of pure relation. There is an end-point where the two approaches meet, and this end-point was always – albeit in characteristically different ways – latent within them. This not to say that cultural translation is confined to that limiting moment, but that it is borne by the dynamic leading up to it.19 Because it is a dynamic, the study of a culture’s history is crucial, and Ramanujan added another dimension to this history – as well as to the concept of translation20 – with his English versions of medieval Kannada21 mystical and religious poems in Speaking of Śiva. These vacanas – sayings or prayers – were, we are told, at the same time protest poems against the rigidities of Brahminism. They stem from the popular movement of Viraśaivism, or devotion to Śiva, and Ramanujan says of their authors: In these Viraśaiva saint-poets, experience spoke in a mother tongue. Pan-Indian Sanskrit gave way to colloquial Kannada. […] The poets were not bards or pundits in a court but men and women speaking to men and women. They were of every class, caste and trade; some were outcasts, some illiterate.22

Basavanna, a minister at court in early-twelfth-century Kalyana, founded a community of Viraśaivas, a group “with egalitarian ideals disregarding caste, class and sex […] challenging orthodoxy, rejecting social convention and reli-

19

However, it is only a culture explored rigorously, both creatively and academically, that will yield such possibilities of authenticity, and that can only occur in the absence of fear and threat. Otherwise cultures, like families and individuals, close up, reject the supposedly alien and fight. Western cultures in particular – but also other transcendentalist cultures, like Islam – with their dominant model of meaning as possession and being as presence, tend to generate static concepts of self and other and invoke scenarios of cultural clash. As if a culture were something hard and fast, definable in any other terms than the dynamic. 20 Ramanujan sees his translations of the vacanas as “a re-enactment in English, the transposition of a structure in one texture onto another.” At the same time he insists on faithfulness to the original: “In the act of translating, ‘the Spirit killeth and the Letter giveth life’. Any direct attack on the ‘spirit of the work’ is foredoomed to fuzziness. Only the literal text, the word made flesh, can take us to the word behind the words”; Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 13. 21 A Dravidian language of southern India. 22 Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, 12.

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gious ritual.”23 Basavanna’s revaluation of experience speaks in the following poem: Milk is left over from the calves. Water is left over from the fishes, flowers from the bees. How can I worship you, O Śiva, with such offal? But it’s not for me to despise left-overs, so take what comes, lord of the meeting rivers.24

Far from accepting the prescriptions of Brahminism, the poet resorts to the remnants of nature once its own needs – exemplified in the sustaining medium of calves, fishes, and bees – have been met, and with what is left he worships his god. There is a departure from system here, a rejection of hierarchical values in favour of the peripheral and random – of what happens to be there but no longer falls under any precept of purpose. Once again we are close to the metonymic. When the poet finally enjoins: “so take what comes // lord of the meeting rivers,” he establishes Śiva as the god of these broken things. The irony of the disclaimer “it’s not for me / to despise left-overs,” echoing the dry humour of Ezekiel’s egoist, highlights the humanism of his perspective: God and man alike are bound into an experiential world where what is discarded from order is essential to the definition of order – and where, by logical extension, non-being is essential to the definition of being. Two centuries before Basavanna, the sadhu Dasimayya, a weaver by trade, wrote the following vacana: When to the hungerless figure, you serve waters of no thirst, whisper the sense-less word in the heart, and call without a name,

23 24

Speaking of Śiva, 63. Speaking of Śiva, 90.

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who is it that echoes O! in answer, O Ramanatha, is it you or is it me?25

The paradoxes of the opening strophe express the negative potentiality of language:26 its inability, except in reaching to the silence of self-contradiction, to express the irreducible particularity of any single phenomenon or experience. Words can only say what something is like or not like – the basis of metaphor – not what it is in its inmost individuality. Am I hungry? Does the water quench my thirst? Or are these simply figures of speech that only touch my specific experience when they are broken – when you, the ineffable other, call to me beyond nameable meaning?27 Then language is reduced to an echoing O, and I do not know if it is you or I that utters it; for I am you – Tat twam asi. Like many works of the mystics in all cultures – the Old Testament “Song of Songs,” the Sufi poems of thirteenth-century Islam, the works of the sixteenth-century Spanish friar John of the Cross – this is not only a religious text but also a poignant love poem. In Ramanujan’s version, Dasimayya’s text enacts a moment of achieved translation in every sense of the word: personal, linguistic, and historical. Personal in the perceived identity of the speaker with Ramanatha as the other; linguistic and historical in the transition from medieval Kannada to modern English. The twelfth-century ascetic Mahadevi, wandering “wild and godintoxicated,” as Ramanujan puts it,28 in search of her Lord Śiva, expresses the moment immediately before such achievement: You are the forest you are all the great trees in the forest 25

Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, 107. It is an index of the translatability of cultures that the English poet John Keats, speaking of a fellow Romantic poet, could advocate what he called the “negative capability” that is “content with half knowledge.” Cf. letter of 21 December 1817 to his brother George, in Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Heinemann, 1966): 40–41. Taking into account the difference in context, this approximates the acceptance of silence that is a keynote of the Hindu view of language. 27 For the linguistic implications of this reading, cf. footnote 37. 28 Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, 113. 26

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you are bird and beast playing in and out of all the trees O lord white as jasmine filling and filled by all why don’t you show me your face?29

Like the “Prayer to Lord Murugan,” this is a thoroughly metonymic poem. Where the speaker looks for a whole she finds only parts, where she looks for identity she finds only negativity. The union she seeks with her Lord is granted only in knowledge of the phenomena of this world, in an order of ever greater fragmentation: first the forest, then the trees, then the creatures playing among the trees. Indeed, the identity she seeks lies in this fragmentation, for Śiva, as the destroyer, is the god of ever-smaller things. But the poem also indicates why this is so. The identity of the addressee is constantly negated. In whatever terms I define you, you are not what I call you, for the terms in which I define you again need definition, and all they can ever point to is the next order down of terms or signs. The forest is its trees, the trees are what plays among them, and so on. Language – as we also know in the West – is a per se endless system pointing to nothing beyond itself.30 To Mahadevi, the nothingness inherent in each act of pointing fills all being; indeed, being is inseparable from this nothingness.31 It becomes a sort of absolute, and in this sense it is “filled by all” experience, because nothingness and negativity cannot of their nature be further defined. For Mahadevi, this absolute dominates human knowing.

29

Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, 122. Each sign breaking only and ever on another sign, but in that breaking releasing (potentially at least) the energy of aesthetic experience. Josef Simon, for example, argues that meaning no longer possesses “ontic priority over the ‘arbitrary’ sign,” for it resides only in the sign. Cf. Simon, “Sprache als Zeichen betrachtet,” in Sprache denken, ed. Jürgen Trabant (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995): 99. The concept of sign as immanently linguistic has “transformed the relationship to ‘being’, the ‘fundamental relation’ becoming no longer that of thinking to being but of thinking to ‘name’ ” (Simon, “Sprache als Zeichen,” 105; my tr.). This perfectly reflects the Nominalist tradition of medieval Europe (cf. note 17). Simon does not, however, develop the aesthetic implications of his thesis. 31 This should be strictly distinguished from the nihilistic concept of nothingness that informs Western philosophy and (especially religious) culture. 30

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The twelfth-century master Allama Prabhu was active in Kalyana alongside Basavanna and Mahadevi. Like the text from Dasimayya quoted above, his poetry focuses on the state of achieved union: Looking for your light, I went out it was like the sudden dawn of a million million suns, a ganglion of lightnings for my wonder. O Lord of Caves, if you are light, there can be no metaphor.32

The name “Lord of Caves” derives, we are told, from the “experience of the secret underground, the cave-temple”33 that Allama is said to have had as a young man. Grieving for the death of his beloved, he entered this place of darkness in a vision and was there given a linga, the stone symbol of Śiva, by an entranced yogi. From that moment on he was possessed by the Lord of Caves.34 Against this background the poem celebrates the moment of divine enlightenment in the paradoxical imagery of darkness and light. Śiva is the lord of darkness, in whose presence the devotee’s own light of understanding and self-identity ‘goes out’. The poet seeks to grasp the ineffable experience in metaphors of superabundant energy, “the sudden dawn / of a million million suns, // a ganglion of lightnings,” only to deny the possibility of metaphor altogether: “if you are light, / there can be no metaphor.” This programmatic statement is both an act of poetry and about poetry, realizing as well as thematizing the dynamic running through all of these vacanas. If you, the Lord of Caves, are light, metaphor is impossible, because metaphor, the trope of the effable, relies on light, and in this “sudden dawn” the epiphany of light is darkness. A new naming is called for, but the only naming possible is a denial of naming, a denial of the possibility of transfer from a known to an unknown situation – and such transfer is the function of

32 33 34

Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, 168. Speaking of Śiva, 144. Cf. Speaking of Śiva, 144.

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metaphor.35 On the way to its act of denial, Allama’s text uses metaphors – dawn, sun, ganglion, lightning – because there is no alternative, no other way than metaphor to articulate even negative meaning. But at the same time the text affirms the end of metaphor; and the end of metaphor is, in this sense, the end of language, brought about by the sheer indescribability of the encounter with the Lord Śiva. At the end of language, as at its beginning, the speaker stands face to face with the other, experienced in all its force – and in this sense uniquely known – but for this very reason unnameable except by its proper name, Lord of Caves, Lord white as jasmine, Ramanatha.36 Read in this way, Allama’s statement touches to the root of the distinction between Indian and Western cultures and their translatability. It opens out towards the same boundary and shares the same thirst for the unknown as Ramanujan’s and Ezekiel’s “Prayers.” Like these modern texts, the medieval vacanas are, in their English versions, examples of effective cultural translation – which means that, like them, they are also more. For implicit in all three sequences of poems examined here is a model that sets translation at the centre of the linguistic process, in the encounter with limits negotiated in every intense linguistic act. These texts tell us that it is in breaking on the unknown that a culture, like its individual agents, fulfils its primary need for identity – that a culture is most itself in the moment of translation.

WORKS CITED Bloom, Harold, ed. Deconstruction and Criticism (1979; London & New York: Continuum, 2004). Donne, John. The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Ezekiel, Nissim. Collected Poems 1952–1988 (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1989). Jakobson, Roman, & Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language (1956; The Hague: Mouton, 1971).

35

The Greek metapherein, from which the term ‘metaphor’ is derived, means simply ‘to transfer’, lit. ‘to carry across’. 36 Metaphor relies on the difference between proper and improper naming. It postulates a level of stability essential to the use of language in everyday life, and is, in this sense, the trope of meaning and light. Looked at from a static point of view, it is synonymous with language as such. But language is not static, and at the beginning as at the end of the linguistic process stands a moment not of meaning but of encounter with the not-yet named (or the unnamed), about which metaphor must remain silent. The trope proper to this moment is metonymy. Viewed statically, metonymy is merely a sub-category of metaphor (cf. Bloom, “Breaking of Form,” 9), but within the dynamic of language it indicates the moment before (and after) naming.

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Keats, John. Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Heinemann, 1966). Ramanujan, A.K. Selected Poems (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1976). ——. Speaking of Śiva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Sen, K.M. Hinduism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). Simon, Josef. “Sprache als Zeichen betrachtet,” in Sprache denken, ed. Jürgen Trabant (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995): 90–111. The Upanishads, tr. & intro. Juan Mascaró (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

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‘Nordism’ — The Translation of ‘Orientalism’ into a Canadian Concept P ETRA R ÜDIGER

I.

Introduction

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an important means of supporting dominant ideologies; it is also an important means of challenging these ideologies. Feminist and post-colonial movements not only criticize mainstream ideas of history and culture; they also question objectivity in canonical representations. Ania Loomba states accordingly: ITERATURE IS NOT ONLY

Anti-colonial or feminist struggles emphasised culture as a site of conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed. The decentring of the human subject was important to them because such a subject had been dominantly theorised by European imperialist discourses as male and white.1

In subverting dominant representations of history and culture, postcolonial and feminist texts are close to the practice of deconstruction. Their critique implies a theory of change that can be regarded as a highly constructive political enterprise. The method applied emphasizes the need to “re/read” the mainstream text; it is based on a strategy that “displaces sign-systems and enacts an active transaction between past and future.”2

1

Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1998):

40–41. 2

Eva Darias–Beautell, Contemporary Theories and Canadian Fiction (Lewiston N Y : Edwin Mellen, 2000): 129.

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In Canada, the re/writing of hegemonic representations has become an extremely effective project for the country’s literature. Here, the place about which the subaltern speaks is to be understood in truly geographical terms. It is the Canadian North. The Canadian North has become the site for challenging and subverting dominant ideas of history and culture and the implications ascribed to these. In particular, female authors from southern Canada have begun to question the inherited images that were influential in the creation of the Canadian nation. In their texts, they criticize the equation of women with colonized land and show how the decolonization of women goes hand in hand with a different perception of what ‘North’ can mean. Since Edward Said’s analysis of the set of beliefs known as ‘orientalism’3 has become a central critique within studies that question hegemonic representations of geography, it seems promising to apply his theory also to the analysis of counter-narratives of the Canadian North. Owing to the fact that Said in his work very successfully contributes to the process of revealing mainstream representations of history and culture as essentially masculinist and colonialist, the present essay will endeavour to show how helpful his theory can be in analyzing fictional texts that attempt to subvert common representations of woman and land. I draw on Said’s views in suggesting a quintessentially Canadian approach to the revision of Canada’s literature of the North. I will therefore first take a close look at Said’s Orientalism, deducing from that study those assumptions that are also important for the dominant discourses of the Canadian North. This will enable me to develop a theory which, in analogy to Said’s terminology, may be called ‘nordism’.4 I shall then go on to apply this theory to the analysis of Marian Engel’s novel Bear (1976) before offering some general conclusions.

II . Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ In Orientalism, Edward Said analyzes the ways in which the Orient came to be known as Europe’s Other during the long history of colonization. He emphasizes the inaccuracies of a wide range of beliefs and questions essentialist assumptions about that region. For Said, the Orient is a constructed

3 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; London: Penguin, 1995). 4 See also Petra Wittke–Rüdiger, Literarische Kartographien des kanadischen Nordens (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005).

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reality that was created by and in relation to its Western counterparts, in particular France and Britain. In literature, Western representations of the Orient produced an image that legitimized the arrogant behaviour of Europe’s colonial elite. As Danielle Sered states, “The Orient […] is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien […] to the West”; whereas the Orient signifies a system of representations, orientalism is “a manner of regularized (or orientalized) writing, vision and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases [which] ostensibly suited the Orient.”5 In other words, orientalism is the image of the Orient as handed down in academic studies about that region. In Orientalism, Said puts into question the underlying set of beliefs that forms the basis of textual representations of the Middle East and North Africa. In the introduction to his work, he argues that the creation of the Orient as Europe’s Other has contributed to the development of a dichotomous positioning of Europe vis-à-vis the Middle East; on the one hand, this has helped European culture to manifest itself as a contrasting idea and experience of the Orient: on the other, it has preserved and intensified European hegemonic ambitions. Orientalism is thus not an innocent academic discipline, but a Western style of ruling and possessing the Orient. Said is not saying that the textual representations of this geocultural region is a pack of European lies; rather, such representations constitute political visions of a reality whose bipolar structures have produced and ultimately continued the confrontation of the known with the unknown. He points out that “the supposedly apolitical scholarly works are involved in ‘interests’ and geopolitical power relations, and hence any texts are undetectable from power relations of political, cultural, intellectual, and moral domains.”6 Thinking in dichotomies has been essential for the Europeans’ understanding of themselves. The dialectic of self and other, civilization and wilderness, masculinity and femininity, West and East, Occident and Orient have strongly influenced colonial discourses. The Orient is thus more than a geographical entity; it is “an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it ‘reality’.”7

5

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html (accessed 25 September 2005). http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/k/x/kxs334/academic/theory/said_orientalism.html (accessed 25 September 2005). 7 http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/k/x/kxs334/academic/theory/said_orientalism.html (accessed 25 September 2005). 6

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III . ‘Nordism’ The Canadian North is also more than a geopolitical entity. It is a highly constructed reality that became the centre of the multifaceted discourses of the North. Regardless of geographical, historical, political, and socio-cultural differences, the Canadian North – just like the Orient – is commonly portrayed as Europe’s other. Constructed by and in relation to the Europeans who explored it, the North came to be known as the contrasting image and idea of the colonial elite. Representations of this region in exploration literature and academic studies have added to a process of stereotyping that legitimated the existence of colonial practices. In particular the travel journals of the early explorers contributed to the development of a ‘nordist’ tradition. By writing about the Canadian North, European explorers claimed it for their own. “The [North] became the studied, the seen, the observed, the object.”8 This critique of textual representation as a form of power is prominent in Said’s work as well. The supposedly apolitical reports of the ‘documentary’ tradition are also texts that cannot be separated from power relations and questions of prestige. Just as orientalism is more than mere ideas or assumptions about a certain region, ‘nordism’ is a mode of discourse that is also complex and multifaceted. ‘Nordism’ functions as a foil against which the Canadian North has been perceived and controlled and which at the same time justified colonial policies: “knowledge about [the North] was part of [...] maintaining power over [it].”9 Every encounter with the Canadian North was likewise an entry into the complex world of texts and discourses. Disguised as ‘documents’, the reports of European explorers were influential in the creation of a myth that was soon to become the southern-Canadian way of perceiving the North. For me, ‘nordism’ thus does not mean a neutral discipline; it is, rather, a southernCanadian mode of perception, appropriation, and exploitation, the product of a dynamic of power and cultural dominance. From the very beginning, the narrative tradition expressing this dynamic has less to do with realistic geographical encounters with a non-textual reality than with the ‘second-order’ written representations of the North in documentary texts. Sherrill Grace can thus writes: “what we know as North is the

8 9

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html (accessed 25 September 2005). Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism, 45.

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product of […] writing, [of] representations. The real north (or norths) is not […] the issue.”10 What becomes clear here is that the major construction of nordistic discourse is the North itself. From its earliest depiction, the conquered land of Canada’s North, regardless of its climatic and geographical extremes, emerged from exploration journals as a highly feminized space, synonymous with the colonized female body; the discourse of the North was imbued with notions of power and dominance, superiority and control: The feminization of colonized landscapes can illustrate the positionality inherent in viewing/reading landscapes […]. The association of […] women with colonized land legitimated perceptions of both women and land as objects of colonization. Imperialist literature often incorporated sexual imagery to create and sustain the heroic stature of male colonizers who conquered and penetrated dangerous, unknown continents, often characterized by the fertility of both indigenous vegetation and women. The construction of a “sexual space” paralleled the construction of space to be colonized, and the desire for colonial control was often expressed in terms of sexual control.11

To uncover the deep-rooted nature of received notions of woman and land in colonial practices, one has to begin a process of ‘unlearning’. Whereas Said’s main aim is to ‘unlearn’ the dominant mode of orientalism, a number of southern-Canadian writers – in particular women – have begun to contest canonical representations of the North in an attempt to subvert these notions. In their novels, they have created images of the North that can best be described as ‘post-nordistic’. These are works that question the assumptions that have formed the basis of nordistic discourse. This involves rejecting stereotypes, generalizations, and prejudices; it also requires a shift in perspective, with the emphasis no longer on absolute truths but on a deliberately engaged subjectivity. One site of change and resistance is gender. Since the development of a ‘post-nordistic’ literature has its roots in the intertwining of postcolonial and geofeminist movements, the following analysis of Marian Engel’s novel Bear is aimed at indicating what happens to nordistic literature when it is a woman who is doing the writing.

10 Sherrill E. Grace, Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2001): 21. 11 Alison Blunt & Gillian Rose, “Introduction” to Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Blunt & Rose (New York & London: Routledge, 1994): 10.

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‘Post-Nordism’ in Marian Engel’s Novel Bear

In Bear, Marian Engel takes her heroine Lou beyond the bounds of the human and lets her protagonist become a unity with the Northern Other. This is a novel that makes use of the nordistic exploitation of dichotomies but does so only to highlight their limitations. We have the nordistic patterns of regional opposition and the same symbolic implications. The structural core is also identical: there is the same journey from South to North and back to South again, and we have the canonical associations of baseland and hinterland. The twist, however, appears with the bear. Aritha van Herk writes appreciatively of Engel’s donnée: A woman and a bear: a bear and a woman. Alone at last. Bear broke through what was, until its publication, a hegemonic male / female dichotomy. That female characters in Canadian novels sought a completion to or understanding of themselves in relation to men was given. That a heroine might come to an understanding of herself without the generic presence of man was barely a consideration. And when Marian Engel suggested that a bear and a woman alone were enough for any number of epiphanies, the motif of the woman who comes to terms with herself and her life was forever altered.12

Bear shows the integration of a fragmented and alienated personality, and it is through contact with the Northern world that refuge from the patriarchal and colonial order is found. It is not without reason that Engel has chosen a setting that is strongly connected with the colonial period of Canadian history. When the island on which the story takes place was settled, the first Colonel built a house in that Northern wilderness that can be seen as an absurd example of “colonial pretentiousness.”13 As Elspeth Cameron writes, The artificiality of this imposed and imported order strikes Lou. English in its ‘gentility’, this 19th century culture is singularly inappropriate to a landscape as rough and strong as Canada’s.14

This is probably why Engel has chosen to ‘enrich’ the library of the first Colonel by letting random notes about bears flutter from between the pages of respectable nineteenth-century books when Lou is about to catalogue them.

12

Aritha van Herk, “Afterword,” in Engel, Bear, 143. Marian Engel, Bear (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976): 36. 14 Elspeth Cameron, “Midsummer Madness: Marian Engel’s Bear,” Journal of Canadian Fiction 21 (1977–78): 84. 13

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These notes “remind Lou of pre-history, of a past in which man and nature were one, where magical transformations gave hope and vitality to life.”15 By revealing the artificiality of nineteenth-century colonialism through this juxtaposition with what was there before, Engel has founds a way to criticize nordistic discourse. In dis/covering what was in the Canadian North before its ‘exploration’, Engel even ridicules the received notions of the exploration journals to a certain extent: By getting underneath the veneer of 19th century gentility to the vital landscape, and by realizing her own authenticity as a person beneath the controlled responses which are socially imposed, Lou ‘unhides’ what has been there all along.16

This is true not only for the land itself but also for the woman. Lou rejects her sexual colonization by ‘making love’ to a creature that was surely not on the agenda for what was considered an appropriate sexual partner for women. When Lou begins her wilderness sojourn, she is alienated. But as she proceeds in a northerly direction, she reacts strongly to her natural surroundings. In this novel, then, the North is more than a physical background; it is a crucial element in the heroine’s progress. The closer Lou gets to the island, the more she has the feeling of having changed. Almost immediately she begins to feel free and develops a sense of being reborn.17 This joyful approach to the Northern landscape finds a sharp contrast in the welcoming words of the store-keeper Homer, who had not expected to see a woman come up there, into the male North, strong and free.18 By using (blind) Homer as the personification of what nordistic discourse was all about, Engel subverts this narrative tradition. In particular Lou’s second encounter with Homer illustrates how far Lou has left patriarchal assumptions behind. She will never lie back for sex without desire again; she has abandoned her passivity and can approach Homer on her own terms now. But Engel subverts not only the sexual colonization of women; she also exposes Homer and his mental predecessors as liars when it comes to how the land is experienced. Where famous men have failed, woman now does not fear to tread. Woman not only succeeds in finding her way around in the powerful world of the Northern wilderness; she even manages to find her true

15 16 17 18

Cameron, “Midsummer Madness,” 85. “Midsummer Madness,” 88. Engel, Bear, 18–19. Bear, 27.

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self, out there in the New North. It is the bear, again, that is responsible for this ‘post-nordistic’ account of the North. Not only does the bear act as Lou’s lover; he is also “the great mother who creates Lou’s new self.”19 The bear’s tongue unites these two roles: As a lover, he affords Lou lust and sensual pleasure; as the great mother, he licks her into her new shape. “By choosing the bear as a lover, [however], Engel […] rejects the simplicity of human sexual opposition, and instead enters the animal presence of sexuality inside the human.”20 By rejecting the sexual dichotomy of woman and man, Engel also rejects the stock binaries of nordistic narratives. The North is no longer a place for males alone. It is, rather, a place that welcomes women. The traditional pattern is thus no longer tenable and the solution is that of unity. Where woman was considered an outsider, she now becomes one with the land she was excluded from. Engel’s ‘post-nordistic’ narrative subverts nordistic discourse by rejecting the patterns of separation that were inherent in colonial practices. But Engel not only stresses the need to unify woman and land in physical terms; she also highlights the need to let a woman become one with her own self. Again it is through the bear that this unity is accomplished. Aritha van Herk writes: The bear has walked not only into her life and into her house, but into her head, and there enacts the transformation that permits Lou to love herself. [...] by making love to her […] in the library, that is, in the glass-enclosed upper regions of the intellect, he introduces to her the idea that she is entitled to desire.21

Lou sheds her old self and knows that the compromises and feelings of guilt belong to her past life. It is no surprise, therefore, that she cannot react fully to the maleness of the bear unless Lou is able to speak “I N H [ E R ] O W N 22 V O I C E .” Again the idea of unity is crucial to this development. Having discovered the authentic voice of the Northern landscape – “its own orgasms of summer weather”23 – Lou wants to become a bear herself. “But when she tries to get the bear to mate with her as if she were a female bear, the bear gives her a rebuking swipe with his paw and tears half the skin off her

19

Donald S. Hair, “Marian Engel,” in Profiles in Canadian Literature 6, ed. Jeffrey M. Heath (Toronto & Reading: Dundurn, 1986): 84. 20 Van Herk, “Afterword,” 144. 21 Van Herk, “Afterword,” 146. 22 Engel, Bear, 91. 23 Bear, 117.

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back.”24 This moment is less a moment of violent separation than one of rebirth and renewal. The physical union with the bear does not have to take place in order to accomplish the mental and emotional entity of Engel’s heroine. The bear thus serves as a sort of midwife to Lou’s transformation. Lou finally leaves the island with an integrated and whole personality. The North in Bear assumes – is translated into – a ‘post-nordistic’ aspect. Although Lou is not allowed to become the North in the physical sense of the word, psychological union does take place. In contrast to all those European explorers who were united with the Arctic landscape only in death, Engel’s heroine is given birth to. The moment of bloody separation symbolizes a magical transformation; it indicates that a psychological metamorphosis has taken place and Lou has become whole. She is no longer the fragmented woman she was when she began her wilderness sojourn. After having found her means of self-expression – the power to speak in her true voice – she achieves complete integration. She has “dare[d] to read what is inside [her] head [and is thus able to] unearth [her] body.”25 What dies here, then, is merely Lou’s alienated and fragmented self. Death thus becomes a metaphor for a new beginning and a satisfactory life full of completion. Aritha van Herk once said in an interview that death is a metaphor for North.26 In Bear it truly is: the colonialist approach to the country has to die in order for new conceptions of that region to emerge. The ideological equation of woman and land which for centuries was a means of colonizing both is here turned on its head. The land is no longer a passive earth-mother awaiting discovery by a male explorer, just as the woman is no longer an object that can be colonized in a sexual sense. Engel has shown that the analogy between the sexual and the colonial-political appropriation of a passively experienced reality is no longer tenable in the light of a new notion of the North. The return to prehistory symbolizes a solution for Engel’s heroine that offers her the hope of a new beginning. The return to her home base is thus also a necessity. Lou could not go on living on the island in Georgian Bay. She has to return to where she came from in order to live up to her true identity. The bear, in its transcendent appearance, will remain with her as a

24

Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995): 107. 25 Van Herk, “Afterword,” 147. 26 Petra Wittke, “No Lies this Time: An Interview with Aritha van Herk,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 38.2 (2000): 135–46.

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her guardian spirit; he will always remind her of what she has learned during that summer.

V . Conclusion Ths article has shown that Edward Said’s critique of academic studies of the Orient offers a useful approach to textual representations of colonized regions. In particular, binary oppositions are exposed as hierarchies in which the colonialistic pole is always superior. Said’s critique of the received paradigms of absolute truth can be applied to the mode of discourse that I have labelled ‘nordism’. Here, a similar set of beliefs was influential in the creation of a narrative tradition that came to be regarded as the only true approach to Canada’s North. Just as Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the basis of orientalism, I criticize the construction of the nontextual reality that came to be known as Canada’s North. In an attempt to subvert the received notions of this region, Marian Engel – among others – has written a novel that applies a ‘post-nordistic’ approach to the Canadian North. As has become clear, her reading of the land differs radically from canonical representations of it. In accordance with her rejection of the nordistic narrative tradition, Engel also overcomes the colonization of women in her novel. She frees land and woman from misrepresentations that have informed both discourses, nordistic and patriarchal. Engel’s solution is that of unity. It is the creation of a scenario in which the land is no longer colonized in terms of gender. It is no longer a female place, but a place that offers place for women as well. While famous explorers merged with the Northern landscape only in death, Engel’s heroine becomes one with the North in beginning a new life (as her name ‘Lou’ = lieu suggests, finding her ‘place’). It is this reversal of the narrative tradition that can be seen as what Robert Kroetsch calls the creation of “a new literary genre.”27 As Aron Senkpiel states, “it is tradition, not landscape, that must be rewritten, reformed.”28 It is the era of ‘post-nordism’ that has changed the literary landscapes of Northern Canada.

27

Robert Kroetsch, on the cover of John Moss, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1994). 28 Aron Senkpiel, “Places of Spirit, Spirits of Place: The Northern Contemplations of Rudy Wiebe, Aritha van Herk, and John Moss,” in Echoing Silence: Essays on Arctic Narrative, ed. Gerald Lynch (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 1997): 123.

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WORKS CITED Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Blunt, Alison, & Gillian Rose, ed. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York & London: Routledge, 1994). Cameron, Elspeth. “Midsummer Madness: Marian Engel’s Bear,” Journal of Canadian Fiction 21 (1977–78): 83–94. Darias–Beautell, Eva. Contemporary Theories and Canadian Fiction (Lewiston N Y & Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen, 2000). Engel, Marian. Bear (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976). Grace, Sherrill E. Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill– Queens U P , 2001). Hair, Donald S. “Marian Engel,” in Profiles in Canadian Literature 6, ed. Jeffrey M. Heath (Toronto & Reading, Dundurn, 1986): 81–87. http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html (25 September 2005) http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/k/x/kxs334/academic/theory/said_oreintalism.html (25 September 2005) Loomba, Ania. Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). Moss, John. Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1994). Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; London: Penguin, 1995). Senkpiel, Aron. “Places of Spirit, Spirits of Place: The Northern Contemplations of Rudy Wiebe, Aritha van Herk, and John Moss,” in Echoing Silence: Essays on Arctic Narrative, ed. Gerald Lynch (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 1997): 123–35. Van Herk, Aritha. “Afterword,” in Engel, Bear, 143–47. Wittke, Petra. “No Lies this Time: An Interview with Aritha van Herk,” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 38.2 (2000). 135–146. Wittke–Rüdiger, Petra. Literarische Kartographien des kanadischen Nordens (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005).

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Translation of Romanian Culture in Kenneth Radu’s Fiction M ONICA B OTTEZ

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to discuss the translation of Romanian culture that Kenneth Radu‘s selected fiction (one long narrative and one short story) represents in both meanings of the word: first, ‘to translate’ = to bear, remove or change from one place to another, which will refer to the process of immigrants’ carrying over and transplanting their native country’s culture in their new, adoptive country; second, ‘to translate’ = to turn into one’s own or another language, the process by which the Canadian author gives expression in English to his mother’s experience in Canada, translating her stories, and commenting on them. I shall use the term ‘culture’ as defined by Adam Kuper, in a broad sense referring to everything manmade: HIS ESSAY SETS OUT

Culture is essentially a matter of ideas and values, a collective cast of mind. The ideas and values, the cosmology, morality and aesthetics are expressed in symbols, and so culture could be described as a symbolic system. [. . . ] A thorough-going philosophical relativism is often adduced from the observation that not only customs, but also values are culturally variable. It seems to follow that there are no generally valid standards by which cultural principles and practices can be judged.1

The long narrative The Devil Is Clever is the saga of the Corcheses, an immigrant family belonging to the first wave of Romanian immigration coming to Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century. If, in 1902, 152 Romanians were admitted to Canada, their numbers had increased over ten times by 1

Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2000): 227.

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1913.2 These figures demonstrate both the efficiency of the Canadian govern-

ment’s propaganda in its wish to settle the western prairies and the dissatisfaction of the immigrant peasants with their economic and social condition in their native country. This economically motivated first wave of immigration was halted by World War I and then by discriminatory changes in the legislation referring to Central and Eastern Europeans in 1930 (109).3 Kenneth Radu subtitles his narrative A Memoir of My Romanian Mother, which led to its being classified as biography under its I S B N code number. The author structures his account into four parts framed by a Prologue and an Epilogue. The Prologue introduces the reader to the dramatic moment in Annie Corches’ life when, at the age of fifteen, the orphan protagonist makes her escape from the dreadful life on her uncle’s farm in Dysart to the home of her beloved sister Tenka in Regina. It is a moment that the narrative will reach again at the end of Part I I I . Part I turns back in time and recounts the story of Annie’s parents’ immigration in 1909 from Romania to Dysart, the prairie village the displaced Romanians set up in Saskatchewan. In spite of losing her mother and getting a stern step-mother at the age of barely one year, Annie had a happy childhood on her father Samson’s farm, until the latter died, too, of cancer in 1920. Parts I I and I I I give an account of the orphan’s inability to adjust to a new foster home with a family of strangers in Montana, and her return to Dysart to live on her paternal uncle’s farm. There her aunt Sophie cruelly exploites her as unpaid domestic help and treats her brutally, submitting her to terrible verbal and even physical violence. Thus she not only reduces Annie to a life of drudgery, shattering her self-confidence, but also contributes to her physical deformity: a crooked eye that never recovers perfect vision. The reader closes the book with the narrator’s voice in his ears, a son haunted by his mother’s stories, but also a patient researcher of the past, the past of his mother’s family but, in the context of Canada’s past, her family’s adoptive country.4 2 Kenneth Radu, The Devil Is Clever: A Memoir of My Romanian Mother (Toronto: HarperFlamingo Canadian, 2004): 43. The second wave of Romanian immigration to Canada extended from 1946 to 1989, when Romania was under Communist rule. These immigrants, most of them intellectuals, were seekers of political asylum, fleeing political oppression at home. The third wave was again economically motivated and started in 1990, when the Communist regime was overhrown. The Romanian diaspora in Canada now numbers some 200,000 people. 3 Radu, The Devil Is Clever: A Memoir of My Romanian Mother (Toronto: HarperFlamingo Canadian, 2004): 109. Further page references are in the main text. 4 The reader learns from the author’s Acknowledgements that he consulted the National

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The narrator presents his mother’s evolution with great psychological insight, which is imparted to the reader through well-informed and searching commentary. The formative values of her ethnic, historically marked background are projected against a universal scheme. Thus the Romanian woman’s love of family and nurturing, as expressed in her excellent cooking and domestic expertise, and her creativity, as expressed in such manual work as tapestry or crocheting, are projected against the archetypal quest for the Promised Land, the peasant’s love of land or woman’s love of, and closeness to, nature, manifested in Annie’s passion for gardening and her “green fingers.” The motivation of the Corcheses’ voluntary displacement was economic, the Old Country that they left behind being one of great social oppression caused by a feudal type of agriculture where the landowners levied heavy taxes on the peasants, who were legally bound to the estate (107). The immigrants pursue the archetypal dream of a new beginning in the Promised Land, where economic success would bring about a more prosperous and dignified living. Annie’s father is a pawn in the implementation of the official project of settling the prairie and changing it into an agricultural area on the European model. What Samson Corches needs is hard work and minimal investment to indicate sincerity of purpose and stability. The old nightmare of economic deprivation and unjust treatment has been left far behind, and has been replaced by a dream where apparently only individual performance matters: “The government allowed three years for the transformation of once held Cree territory into a European farm. Neither boyars nor slaughtering soldiers would prevent the new life” (46). The narrator’s words discreetly allude to Old World forms of dispossession and imperial persecution. Throughout the book, the narrator paints a rich picture of the Romanian culture the immigrants carried over the ocean with them, a culture translated: i.e. transported and transferred, to the new land. But Kenneth Radu is not a typical ‘ethnic writer’, narrating about a ‘subject’ whose fate is determined by her ethnicity. Yet, when he deals with the official project of settling the western prairies with immigrants, he does comment on the central, dominant ‘imperial’ position from which the edge of

Archives in Ottawa, the Saskatchewan Archives in Regina, the Saskatchewan Genealogical Society Library, the Prairie History Room in the Regina Public Library, the Canadian Pacific Railway Archives, the Commercial Weather Services Division of Environment Canada. For more extensive cultural information he talked to people of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Dysart, Sask, and the Dysart Heritage Society. For a better knowledge of his mother’s personal history, he talked to cousins, a sister and a brother, who gave him more information, documents and pictures.

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society is discarded as culturally inferior and morally intolerable. Radu quotes minister of the interior Clifford Sifton’s definition of the kind of immigrants he was encouraging: healthy animals, “born to the soil” (39), with the sole purpose of making it fertile. Sifton’s definition is followed by the much more offensive and contemptuous words that appeared in the Calgary Herald of 18 January 1899, describing immigrants coming from countries other than Britain as “a mass of human ignorance, filth and immorality” (40). While admitting that illiteracy was probably higher than among the lower-class British immigrants, the narrator strongly protests against the accusation of filth. He underlines Rahila’s personal and house-cleaning habits, concluding firmly: “cleanliness was not exclusively a Puritan preoccupation. The Romanians, dare I say, were as clean as the English” (40). As regards the charge of immorality, the narrator accuses the newspaperman of perverse fantasies and stereotypes, pronouncing the charge irrelevant and even laughable. Referring to those families abiding by laws of matrimony sanctioned by their church (the Romanian Orthodox Church), the author considers that the editorialist’s description could only have originated in “a psychotic dream or a bizarre notion of Balkan sexuality” (41). Yet Radu only elegantly qualifies the furious xenophobes, so scornful of the ‘primitive’ immigrants, as Canadian sophisticates of English and French extraction (39). Then the narrator quotes the animal image the anglophile Stephen Leacock uses when he describes the immigrants as “ethnological freaks,” “mere herds of the proletariat of Europe” (41), and, on the francophone side, he inserts the words of Henri Bourassa, an icon of extreme French Canadian nationalism, who complained in a parliamentary speech that it is “the providential condition of our partly French and partly English country to make it a land of refuge for the scum of all nations” (42). Radu underscores how much such discourse can hurt, how insulting such venomous words are, even to the descendants of the immigrants of those times. The writer’s ideological position is clearly adversarial to this type of oppressive national discourse: he appeals for freedom from national stereotypes and from oppression by a nationalist orthodoxy of any sort. Among the defining aspects of cultural identity the Romanians in Dysart have brought with them, the narrator enumerates religious faith, music, and dancing. Annie’s spiritual universe is at first dominated by the immanence of good and evil in the world, by the religious faith of the community in which she was born. The author presents religious faith, frequently bordering on superstition, as defining for the spirituality of the Romanian immigrants. The first

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few Romanian immigrants arrived in Saskatchewan in the 1890s, but by 1902 they had already erected the first Romanian Orthodox church in Canada (in the whole of North America, actually). It is a fact which, the narrator underlines, “testifies to the central importance of the church to the Romanian sense of identity” (43). The narrative records Annie’s memories of the religious service in the church overcrowded with people, full of the smell of incense, and vibrant with the prayers sung by the priest and echoed by the congregation. The reader gets a minute description of the altar and its iconostasis, then of the icons brought across the ocean by each family as one of their most cherished possessions. Her half-brother’s christening and her father’s burial are also scenes deeply imprinted on Annie’s memory. God and the devil are constant presences in Annie’s childish psyche, and the narrator rightfully regards this duality as specific to the Romanian peasant’s mind-set. He recounts a creation myth, numerous legends (one that the reader is likely to remember is the one about how the bee got the stripes on its belly for remaining faithful to God, 59), and quite a number of proverbs alerting the hearer to the unlikely places where the Devil may lurk. Annie’s childhood imagination is haunted by Maistra, the beautiful magical bird of Romanian folktales that the sculptor Brancusi immortalized in bronze. After repeatedly praying in vain to God to restore her father’s health or reunite her with her siblings, Annie loses her absolute faith, and when her brother John dies she performs the ritual gesture of lighting a candle in his name more out of habit or faint hope than out of genuine belief. The narrator reveals intellectual and critical distance when he comments that a dark strain of Old-World fatalism compromised his mother’s understanding of life: she believed that happiness could only be a momentary respite from sorrow, a belief the author traces to the Romanian peasant, who granted the devil more prominence than religion allowed (242). Annie finally stopped regarding God as omnipotent and caring, giving the Devil’s influence as much credence as she did God’s, and the narrator’s affirmation that Annie never acquired “the courage of atheism” seems to praise this attitude, which he probably endorses (225). Folk music, dancing, and the art of tapestry-making are also manifestations of the artistic imagination that makes up Romanian ethnic identity as warmly and vividly evoked by the narrator through his mother’s memories. Music constitutes an integral part of the Romanian peasants’ spirituality, which they use to express their innermost feelings or unformulated moods. Thus, after his wife’s death Samson sings to himself while walking the newly ploughed prairie field. It is a scene that subtly betrays the hybridization

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of the memoir with fiction, as Annie was about a year old at the time and could not have told her son anything about it. But Radu imagines his grandfather singing Mioritsa (The Ewe Lamb), the quintessential Romanian shepherd’s ballad, embodying his fatalistic sense of life and death and “his apprehension of spiritual power” (50). Samson also sang and played the tilinca5 on public occasions, at communal gatherings. The narrator records Annie’s memory of her father at such a time – “there was music in his soul” – and adds his own comment that, for the Romanian peasant, music was (and, we can confidently say, still is) “a language to express what would otherwise have remained forever silenced” (54). Radu impressively renders the vibrant sensitivity of the Romanian soul to music when he mentions how later Annie would also sing to herself while working, out of a need to externalize unformulated feelings. For Radu, Romanian folk dances, particularly the hora, symbolize community and harmony, continuity as the operating principle of life, the linked circle of the dancers suggesting the pattern of beginnings and endings continually merging with each other (72–73). The hora dancing scene recalled through six-year-old Annie’s eyes at her half-brother’s christening party carries an air of authentic expression of joy and celebration. Then the narrator also comments on ethnic dancing in contemporary Canada: Many ethnic folk dances have since become self-conscious, precious or embarrassing or all three. Various cultural groups don their national or regional costumes and dance at one special occasion or another, the quaintness of the exercise proportional to its cultural irrelevance. (71)

The author is not referring here to show-business (Ukrainian or Irish or Cossack dancers in national costume showing their astounding mastery to paying audiences in a theatre), but to spontaneous dancing at social gatherings in contemporary Canada, which are not “village dances” as in Annie’s prairie birth-place. One has to make a special effort to dance like one’s ancestors, the unnaturalness of the endeavor emphasized by the unfamiliarity of the steps. The ethnic dance loses its cultural significance if performed outside its place of origin. No longer spontaneous or expressive, the ethnic dance suffers from deracination. Uprooted, it wilts and does not recover from transplant shock. (72)

5

Tilinca: a shepherd’s pipe similar to the recorder, essentially a wooden tube with no holes for fingering (The Devil Is Clever, 52).

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Without being specific, the narrator probably has in mind what one of the characters from his short story “Baba” refers to as “organized dancing, singing, and national crafts on Exhibition,”6 all got up by a cultural committee in a multicultural Canada that values ethnicity, but also likes it on display. Food, family, and feasting associated with hospitality is another major component of Romanian cultural identity and the values the memoir represents. How much the narrator relishes this traditional food and particularly his mother’s expertise at preparing it can be seen from the recipes he prefixes to each of the four Parts, and traditional courses associated with celebrating Christmas and Easter are granted ample space in the narrative. Yet again, we sense some critical distance derived from a nutritionist’s perspective in Radu’s comments (63), which signifies that what was for his mother an everyday practice was discontinued after he left his parents’ house. But food can be the manifestation of difference, and in his presentation of mamaliga (corn-meal mush) the narrator enlarges upon food as a sign of social class and rank. The author makes plain the social contempt felt for a class that was practically regarded as “beasts of burden,” as is transparent in the psychological make-up of Olivia Manning’s heroine in her Balkan Trilogy – her disgust for both Romanian peasants and mamaliga, their basic food, originates, according to Radu, in British arrogance and paternalism (65). The narrative also foregrounds the patriarchal codes and the gendered space on the Romanian farm of Annie’s childhood in its historical specificity. One detail particularly struck the child as unbearably humiliating – the way some wives went and washed their husbands’ hands after a meal, a sight that filled her with revulsion and made her vow to be more emancipated in her own married life. Child-abuse and exploitation are also depicted as historically specific to the times, not particularly to Romanians. Aunt Sophie’s cruelty and violence towards Annie appear in the light of a manifestation of pure evil, not as ethnically determined. The narrator repeatedly underscores the fact that his mother’s unhappiness was not caused by the ethnic displacement brought about by her parents’ immigration – since she was raised in a Romanian community that had translated (i.e. carried over) their culture and transplanted it in their new country – but by her own specific family circumstances. The author represents Annie’s sense of her situation as that of an exile (240), a feeling caused by her expulsion from her father’s house after his 6

Radu, A Private Performance (Montreal: Véhicule, 1990): 70.

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death and her subsequent migration from one home to another. Moving to the house from the kind couple in Montana, then to her aunt Sophie’s, then to her sister Tenka’s, then to her brother Nick’s – tending to other people’s needs and caring for their children – induced in Annie a sense that she belonged nowhere. She dwelt in “the perilous territory of not belonging”7 – really perilous, because this condition resulted in her bouts of severe depression: Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: Its essential sadness can never be surmounted […]. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever.8

In Annie’s case, the native place is her father’s prairie farm in Dysart, inextricably associated with the Romanian culture that her father stands for in her mind and soul, shaping the most profound and endurable layer of her later hybrid identity. It is in the case of Annie’s brother John that the early displacement and uprootedness lead to a permanent and restless sense of homelessness and of not belonging anywhere, with final tragic consequences: he becomes a filthy, stinking hobo, who, after meeting with a train accident that damages his brain, dies of consumption in a sanatorium at the age of twenty-four. Although the author tells the reader that his mother never considered her parents anything but Romanians, he never mentions her sense of her own identity: Romanian, Canadian, Romanian-Canadian? The subtitle of his book testifies to Radu’s recognition of his ancestry and to the tribute he implicitly pays to their courage and hard work. He never tells us how his parents, farmers who were hard put to survive the Depression, managed to make their life a success story – we only get fragmentary glimpses of their migration to eastern cities, of coming to own their own house. But underlying these omissions there is a meta-story of acculturation, the narrative not being concerned with the ethnic aspect of the subject. The short story “Baba” centres precisely on this aspect, offering a four– generation chronicle of a Romanian immigrant family. The Baba9 of the title is an octogenarian who has spent over fifty years in her host country. The

7

Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P ,

2000): 177 8 9

Said, Reflections on Exile, 173. Baba is the Romanian for old woman, sometimes with a slight deprecatory overtone.

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story uses her daughter Vera as a focalizer. Vera is a woman in her fifties, rather vain about her looks, and the mother of a married daughter with two children. Vera embodies what Homi Bhabha designates as the mimicry phase: she organizes her life after fashionable ideas from up-to-date Canadian magazines. The presence of her mother makes Vera feel youthful and fashionable and New-World, as she and her friends become repeatedly conscious of the opposition Canada/ Europe or New World / Old World. The old woman is marginalized by being sequestered in one room, which looks like a museum to Vera and gets on her nerves. Very much like Annie Corches, Baba expresses her energy and creativity in cooking, gardening, and crocheting doilies. Although she knows it to be true, Vera would never admit that she is ashamed of her mother’s otherness. The next generation, Baba’s granddaughter, does not feel embarrassed by the old woman’s foreignness; she is only slightly impatient when it makes her grandmother dysfunctional, as when she will not get on an escalator but start crossing herself. The evolution of religious feeling illustrates gradual integration and assimilation: the old women is devoutly religious, Vera does go to church, but her religion is more tentative and more like superstition, a fear of not blaspheming. Her husband, who is of the same ethnic background but a third-generation Canadian, has become an atheist, and her daughter has married Unitarian and therefore has relinquished the Old-Country denomination. Vera has a degree from the University of Toronto and many English friends; her main principle is thus condemnation of excess, and she values discretion in displays of difference – she could not bear the thought of being freakish. In multicultural Canada, she offers to be on cultural committees that organize dancing, singing, and national crafts exhibitions, but only on the premises of the church, and she subscribes to the ethnic paper from Cleveland. All these activities make her “proud of her national involvement,” but she does everything in “a quiet sort of way, nothing excessive,” rather toning things down.10 In Vera’s cooking practices there is a complete discontinuity from the old woman’s ways, as she is keen on learning to make non-traditional food. The most illustrative part of this saga of assimilation recounts what has happened to the ethnic language. Baba only speaks Romanian and has never learned any English in about half a century in Canada. Her daughter Vera knows Romanian well enough to translate anything for her mother, including 10

Radu, A Private Performance, 70.

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Anthony Quinn’s The 25th Hour, a film about a Romanian village during World War I I . Yet she sometimes uses linguistic approximations such as hola for hora. Derrida tells us that displaced persons, exiles or expatriates, deportees or nomads or just rootless persons, feel nostalgic about their mother tongue; it is for them their ultimate country and ultimate home, even if in the new country it has become “the language of the other,” a language which has been disowned.11 We might say that Baba has practically always refused to leave her Old Country mentally, and her last wish, which her daughter denies, is to go to see Romania again. Vera, on the other hand, never feels nostalgic either about the language or the country she has never seen. Baba’s granddaughter Carolyn knows just the basics of the language, enough to get herself across to the old woman in the house or when shopping. Finally, the great-grandchildren have no Romanian whatsoever, simply using her bedside tale-telling as a pleasant incantation for going to sleep. Kenneth Radu, particularly in The Devil is Clever, positions himself as a Canadian who wants to explore his ancestral ethnic heritage, giving voice to a formerly silenced ethnic subjectivity. Hence language, and translation from one language into another, plays a foremost part in his memoir. Although the personal experience Radu recounts is that of his mother, who is used as focalizer through most of his account (derived from Annie’s habit of telling her children stories about her life), the discourse belongs to the narrator, who also annotates the events narrated with his own psychological analysis of the protagonist, corroborated by his personal experience as a son in the family Annie Corches started at the time the memoir ends. For the initial stories to be told and for the final narrative to take shape, a lot of translating activity had to be performed. Concerning the proportion of the mother’s and the son’s translating jobs, we can only make conjectures, since the ethnic subject, as already indicated, is played down in the narrative. Annie was born on Canadian soil but we are told that up to the age of fifteen, when she left her uncle Simeon’s farm, she spoke only Romanian at home and learned English at school. The narrator comments that, though broken at first, her English improved with elementary education. As she married a Romanian husband, Annie must have continued to speak her ethnic language at home. The narrator does, however, specify that “Annie spoke

11 Jacques Derrida, Despre ospitalitate: De vorbã cu Anne Dufourmantelle, tr. Mihai Ungureanu (Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre: De l’hospitalité; Iasi: Polirom, 1999): 91.

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more Romanian than English except to her youngest son” (24). So we can deduce that she did much of the translation of the stories that she kept telling her children, using them as a sort of intuitive therapy for herself and for pedagogical purposes for the children (16, 93, 131). The narrator never tells the reader how much Romanian he has himself, but we can surmise that he has a good knowledge of the language, as he gives a lot of Romanian equivalents for the cultural practices, customs or objects that he describes and for the recipes of the Romanian traditional food that precede each of the four parts of the narrative. Making use of Mick Short’s concepts,12 we can say that the narrator’s voice renders his mother’s experience in the third person, using mostly Narrator’s Representation of Action, Representation of Speech, Representation of Speech Acts, Indirect Speech, and only relatively seldom Free Indirect Speech / Thought (45, 58–59) and Direct Speech (190) or Free Direct Speech / Thought (101–102). This type of discourse generally conflates the narrator’s and the protagonist’s voices, so it is hard to attribute the very few cultural or linguistic mistranslations to one of them.13 A possible explanation would be the time that elapses between the mother’s stories and the son’s decision to commit them to paper. We do not know when or why he took that decision, but he shaped them into a narrative which is not only a biography but at the same time an affectionate, yet never sentimental, memorial. On the personal level, Radu’s memoir is the moving story of a deprived orphan, psychologically and physically crippled by unmotivated cruelty, who nevertheless finally manages to build a family of her own and thus, in the end, turn her life into a success story, even if that part of Annie’s life is only hinted at in the narrative. Kenneth Radu positions himself as a Canadian who wants to explore his ethnic heritage, giving a voice to a formerly silenced ethnic group. At the end

12

Mick Short, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (London & New York: Longman, 1995): 288–325. These are narratological categories initially elaborated and refined by Geoffrey Leech (with Mick Short) in Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (London: Longman, 1981). 13 The most conspicuous cultural inadvertence would be mentioning that Annie’s foster mother prepared coliva for breakfast, after having correctly described this food as the ritual cake that is given out at burial or memorial services. Coliva might be eaten for breakfast only if already prepared for a funeral or memorial service for a member of the family or of the community, as this ritual food involves laborious preparation. One instance of linguistic inadvertence would be the use of the form prost – a masculine noun / adjective– to report the insults that aunt Sophie heaped on Annie, as in Romanian nouns / adjectives are gendermarked.

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of the narrative we learn that Annie encouraged her son to write her story. We can assume that it is a gesture that would give her a sense of empowerment, of overcoming the silence in which she used to take refuge strategically for most of her life, or – to use Smaro Kamboureli’s words – a sense of her subverting the silence often imposed on the ethnic subject either by the state apparatus or by an internalized inferiority complex.14 Even if Romanian culture seems somewhat exoticized, on the collective level the book is a vivid, unforgettable ‘heritage’ piece, very much like the Dysart Byzantine Church, which is now a ‘heritage site’ in a contemporary Canada where multiculturalism has turned the literary representation of ethnicity15 into a cultural asset of vital importance for mutual enrichment.

WORKS CITED Derrida, Jacques. Despre ospitalitate: De vorbã cu Anne Dufourmantelle, tr. Mihai Ungureanu (Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre: De l’hospitalité, 1997; Iasi: Polirom, 1999). Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies. Diasporic Literature in English Canada (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 2000). Kuper, Adam. Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 2000). Leech, Geoffrey N., with Michael H. Short. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (London: Longman, 1981). Radu, Kenneth. The Devil Is Clever: A Memoir of My Romanian Mother (Toronto: HarperFlamingo Canada, 2004). ——. A Private Performance (Montreal: Véhicule, 1990). Said, Edward W. Reflection on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000). Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (London & New York: Longman, 1995).

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14

Smaro Kamboureli, Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 2000): 17. 15 It is, however, significant for the general appeal of the book that, if many writings with ethnic subjects are given support by the Canada Council within the frame of multiculturalism programmes, Kenneth. Radu’s memoir benefited from no such subsidy.

“There are no jokes in paradise”1 — Humour as a Politics of Representation in Recent Texts and Films from the British Migratory Contact Zone E VA K NOPP

Laughter takes part in, and is part of social history. And it is not just any part, but a particular significant one – an indicator of tensions and contradictions, which helps to illuminate social situations and can be made to function like a litmus test in assessing the state of a given society.2

J

O K I N G A B O U T T H E E T H N I C , cultural or religious peculiarities of subcultures within a given society constitutes no novelty as a cultural practice around the globe, British society being no exception to this. On the contrary, the notion of an English – later British – national identity has always been inextricably associated with a sense of humour that excluded other cultures:

From the incipient stages of an English nation state under the Tudors, we find English writers defining their national and cultural identity amongst other things also in terms of a particular sense of humour and a particular significance and quality of laughter.3

1 James F. English, Comic Transactions. Literature, Humor and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1994): 9. 2 Manfred Pfister, “Introduction: A History of English Laughter?” in A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond, ed. Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): vii. 3 Manfred Pfister, “Introduction: A History of English Laughter?” vii.

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Yet the downright boom of comic depictions of both British minority and mainstream culture in recent years sees this notion of a particularly British sense of humour being tested. In cultural practice by young British artists from minority backgrounds, laughter, as Meera Syal remarks, is “no longer a weapon to keep out the foreigners; the foreigners, the odd balls, the women, the Irish, they [are] reclaiming it, grabbing it and turning it back onto its makers.”4 I would like to argue that the function of such humorous representations goes beyond simply increasing the entertainment factor and popularity of these texts and films. Humour in its various guises provides a platform for the negotiation and transgression of cultural identities and may thus function as a way of explicitly fighting dominant, mainly white5 discourses of ‘Britishness’. At the same time, the comic transgression of cultural stereotypes from all parts of British society relieves young writers and artists from the burden of a mere positive representation of the ‘otherness’ of immigrant cultures. The first part of this esay presents a theoretical framework that investigates current notions of humour and their applicability to theoretical concepts of the cultural contact zone in Britain. These considerations form the basis for the second part of the essay: a textual analysis of functions of humour in recent, well-known texts and films by young British authors from minority backgrounds. Examples will be taken predominantly from Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) and Meera Syal’s first novel Anita and Me (1996). I will also draw on Hanif Kureishi’s slightly earlier novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Ayub Khan–Din’s film East is East (1999).

Taking Humour Seriously: Humour as a Politics of Representation of the Cultural Contact Zone in Britain Even though the comedy in texts and films such as those just mentioned has been hugely marketed, Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein point out that “cultural criticism […] has remained virtually silent to the multifarious connections between laughter and the postcolonial.”6 Their recently published compilation

4

Meera Syal, “Last Laugh,” in Cultural Breakthrough: Defining Moments. Essays, ed. Voluntary Service Overseas (London: V S O , 2003): 22; onlinehttp://www.vso.org.uk/Images /culturalbreakthrough_essays_tcm8-2848.pdf 5 The use of the term ‘white’ here and hereafter is to be seen as a label for traditional and mainstream notions of a British national identity constructed on the basis of out-grouping non-Western British citizens. That this is a generalization that, luckily, not all white British citizens would agree to goes without saying. 6 Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction” to Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, ed. Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005): 2.

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of essays on the subject can be regarded as one of the first comprehensive studies to focus on humour as a strategically employed textual device in postcolonial cultural practice. According to their line of argument, this gap in postcolonial studies can be partly attributed to a “misconceptualisation of the nature of laughter.”7 The conviction that humorous instances cannot convey serious issues and the concomitant reduction of comic textual representations to their entertainment factor are prejudices humour theorists have struggled against for quite some time. Consequently, postcolonial theorists might have refrained from theoretical engagement with humour, considering it to be an inappropriate vessel to transport the serious and often disturbing issues of colonial and postcolonial experience or other forms of racial and cultural discrimination. Further impediments to conceptualizing postcolonial forms of humour might have been the predominantly Marxist “ideological positions that have historically eschewed humor as an unwanted diversion of energies needed for revolution.”8 Nonetheless, this essay will try to show how fruitful critical analysis of the various uses of humour in transcultural British fiction can be. My main motivation for engaging in this topic comes from the overabundance and popularity of comic depictions of mainstream and immigrant communities in Britain in recent years. This is a tendency across generic borders, ranging from T V comedy (e.g., Goodness Gracious Me, The Kumars at No. 429) through film (e.g., East is East, Bend It Like Beckham10) and theatre (e.g., East is East11) to literature (e.g., The Buddha of Suburbia, Anita and Me, White Teeth). It seems as if the politics of representation of the contact zone have changed: Writings by authors from among first-generation immigrants to Britain from the 1960s onwards were primarily concerned with creating a collective identity among the immigrant communities by verbalizing their suffering from cultural and racial prejudice while at the same time

7

Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction,” 2. John Lowe, “Monkeykings and Mojo,” M E L U S 21.4 (1996): 107. 9 Goodness Gracious Me, dir. Nick Wood, writ. Sanjeev Bhaskar et.al. (London: B B C 2, 1998–2000). The Kumars at No. 42, dir. Lissa Evans & Dominic Brigstocke, writ. Sanjeev Bhaskar et al. (London: B B C 2, 2001–2004). 10 East Is East, dir. Damian O’Donnell, writ. Ayub Khan–Din (U K 1999). Bend It Like Beckham, dir. Gurinder Chandha, writ. Gurinder Chandha, Paul Mayeda Berges & Guljit Bindra (U K 2002). 11 East is East first featured as a play at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1997, before coming out as film in 1999; see Ajub Khan–Din, The Royal Court presents East is East, rev. ed. Nick Hern (London: The Royal Court Theatre, 1997). 8

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promoting black12 emancipation. Whereas this first phase of writing from the contact zone sometimes strategically employed essentialist notions of cultural and ethnic identity, Stuart Hall pointedly observes that “you can no longer conduct black politics through the strategy of a simple set of reversals, putting in the place of the bad old essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject.”13 In recent years, new forms of representation have come into play that de-essentialize ethnic and cultural identities and instead proclaim an “identity which has to be thought through difference.”14 In fact, despite the recent increase in religious fundamentalism and racial conflict, most British citizens from minority backgrounds claim for themselves a multiple identity, such as Asian British or black British.15 Consequently, many young British artists from minority backgrounds do not want to be reduced to one cultural or ethnic identity and they do not see themselves obliged to the burden of a mere positive representation of ‘their’ minority background. Their transcultural productions often lack political correctness when portraying both majority and minority cultures and thus transgress cultural boundaries by employing humour and comedy. That laughter and comedy can have great political potential is undisputed. Yet, in some ways parallel to the above-mentioned developments in postcolonial British writing, earlier theories of humour have recently been criticized for taking a rather one-dimensional perspective on humour’s sociopolitical impact. Two ground-breaking book-length essays on humour from

12

The term ‘black’ or ‘black British’ originated in the black-emancipation movement in Britain in the 1960s where it was used to denote the Afro-Caribbean immigrants from the ‘Windrush’ generation. It is now, however, a disputed but nevertheless frequently used label for immigrants and subcultures of non-Western origin. In this essay, the term is applied in this sense. For further discussion, see Tariq Modood, “British Asian Identities: Something Old, Something Borrowed, Something New,” in British Cultural Studies, ed. David Morely & Kevin Robins (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001): 67–78, Helge Nowak, “Black British Literature – Unity or Diversity?” in Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. Barbara Korte & Klaus Peter Müller (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998): 71– 87, and Mark Stein, “The Black British Bildungsroman and the Transformation of Britain: Connectedness across Difference,” in Unity in Diversity Revisited? 89–105. 13 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities: Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1991) repr. (excerpt) in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed Las Back & John Solomons (New York: Routledge, 2000): 154. 14 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities: Old and New Ethnicities,” 148. 15 Tariq Modood, “British Asian Identities: Something Old, Something Borrowed, Something New,” 74.

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the beginning of the twentieth century by Henri Bergson16 and Sigmund Freud17 are still widely recognized, yet present rather narrow understandings of humour and reduce its impact to a single social function. Bergson, whose essay on comic literature has been regarded as one of the first reflections on humour in modern literary theory, claims that humour’s sole purpose in literature is corrective in nature. The socially superior character bonds with the audience and derides the social incompetence of the socially inferior character. Sigmund Freud, by contrast, relates the practice of joking to his theory of the unconscious and argues that, like dream-work, joke-work is a way of releasing unconscious and repressed desires and tensions. Its sole function can thus be regarded as one of society’s civilizing tools. Even a concept as widely accepted and acclaimed as Bakhtin’s carnival grotesque18 has been criticized for its one-sidedness in ignoring the fact that humour does not always have a subverting and liberating function, but that it is also a tool of degradation, outgrouping, and the reinstatementof oppressive social norms: Its appearance on sites which are permitted by culture which is operating these hierarchies as norms leads us to see carnival’s long-term effects as constraining rather than liberating. This is, first, because carnival may deflect and exhaust energies that might otherwise be employed directly to oppose hierarchical dominance; secondly, and more subtly, because carnival, in inverting symbolic hierarchies, also reinscribes them.19

Recent theories of humour, however, tend to emphasize the more multidimensional character of laughter. They are thus applicable to a wider range of comic transactions and take into account the fact that instances of humour, including its cultural representation in literature, may serve various social and political ends, depending on the historical and cultural context they are embedded in:

16

Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, tr. Claudesley Brereton & Fred Rothwell (Le rire: Essai sur la signification du rire, 1900, tr. London: Macmillan, 1911). 17 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, tr. & ed. James Strachey (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unterbewussten; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1940; tr. London: Routledge & Paul, 1960). 18 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1968). 19 Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Hemel Hempsted: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993): 126.

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In one society, the predominant form of laughter can be that which aims from the site of the ideological or power centre at what is to be the marginalised or excluded altogether, in another, the most significant form of laughter can arise from the margins challenging and subverting the established authorities.20

Despite this indispensable multi-dimensionality of the many divergent humour theories currently circulating,21 there is one notion of humour that connects them across their differences and is therefore highly applicable to the context of the cultural contact zone. It regards laughter as the reaction to something incongruous or incompatible that transgresses the social norms and conventions of a given society. One can only join into this laughter if one is aware of these conventions: “Laughter […] presupposes shared worlds, shared codes, and shared values.”22 Consequently, comic transactions are a means to construct and play with in- and out-grouping mechanisms and can therefore be regarded as powerful tools in the construction of collective identities in modern pluralistic societies. “Laughter is always caught up in the kinds of distinctions between centre and margins every society employs to establish and stabilise its identity.”23 One might go even further and argue that comic breaches of norms and conventions raise awareness of the existence of the dominant discourses of identity at work in a given society and may thus function as a site of playful but nevertheless effective negotiation of cultural stereotypes. In this way, humour simultaneously transgresses and reinforces discourses of identity. It “makes us laugh not merely with our allies but with our enemies […] Indeed a very important feature of the work performed through comic exchange is that even while the transaction intensifies certain lines of difference and antagonism it selectively obscures other such lines.”24 Consequently, humour may function as a powerful tool in the representation of modern postcolonial Britain. Not only do promises of “hilarious and moving comedy […] when two cultures collide”25 promote the popularity of texts from the contact zone, but humour’s in- and out-grouping power can also function as a means of questioning and subverting dominant discourses

20

Manfred Pfister, “Introduction: A History of English Laughter?” vi. For a recent bibliography of current theories of humour and their interconnections with postcolonial theory, see Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction,” 19–23. 22 Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction,” 13. 23 Manfred Pfister, “Introduction: A History of English Laughter?” vi. 24 James F. English, Comic Transactions, 14. 25 This quotation is taken from the dust-jacket of Ajub Khan–Din, East is East: A Screenplay (New York: Hyperion, 1999). 21

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of white Britishness. Humour may be used to out-group and ridicule what is at the heart of white British identity, just as it has been employed to out-group the margins of British society. In appropriating the so highly esteemed British sense of humour, writers from minority backgrounds, in a sense, beat them at their own game. Still, “it would be simplistic […] to reduce the laughter in postcolonial texts to an act of ‘laughing back’ at the coloniser.”26 Instead of just reversing the perspective and maintaining cultural binaries, comic transactions have the potential to go even further and break up the ‘old logic of identity’ altogether. The boundaries between who is laughing, who is being laughed at, and who is laughing along are never clear-cut and may change from one moment to the next. Humorous instances that transgress the established discourses of identity and play with racial and cultural stereotypes are a useful device for negotiating the transcultural make-up of British identities by simultaneously subverting and reaffirming participation in ethnic-minority and mainstream discourses, thus promoting notions of cultural hybridity and transculturality.

Mocking, Laughing, and Sneering in “Happy Multicultural Land”27 The most apparent positive effect that the current hyping of funny postcolonial British texts has had is increased awareness of and interest in the multicultural British situation among mainstream audiences. While literature and other cultural productions by first-generation immigrants to Britain only reached a small number of people within the white population – most of them were not directed particularly at such an audience, either – the recent boom in black British and Asian British comic fiction and film makes a mainstream audience aware “that being British isn’t what it used to be.”28 Here already, the two-edgedness of comedy shows: even if the above-mentioned positive effects go undisputed, the risk of a quick sell-out of cultural and ethnic diversity for popularity’s sake remains. Writers from minority backgrounds as well as postcolonial critics have raised concerns about the trend towards a commodification of cultural specificity: “This whole Asians Are Groovy thing amuses me but I don’t trust it. None of us want to be remembered merely as

26

Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction,” 12. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000): 465. 28 Hanif Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (London: Faber & Faber, 2002): 55. 27

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this year’s flavour, to be discarded when the next cute ethnic phase comes along.”29 Besides these marketing effects of comedy, the humorous instances in the texts examined demonstrate various comic effects on different textual levels. In her debut novel White Teeth, the British-Afro-Caribbean writer Zadie Smith shows herself to be a master of appropriating a supposedly very British sense of humour and thereby subverting traditional discourses of Britishness. She endows several of her immigrant characters with a wittiness and linguistic creativity in their comic utterances that outdoes the much plainer idiom of many of the white British characters. Right at the beginning of the novel, when the white middle-class Archie Jones attempts to commit suicide on the premises of a kosher Muslim butchery, the owner, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, prevents him from doing so by pointing out that they “are not licensed for suicides around here. This place is halal. Kosher, understand? If you’re going to die round here, my friend, I’m afraid you have to be thoroughly bled first.”30 One of the novel’s female protagonists, the Bangladeshi Alsana Iqbal, is renowned for her sharp tongue. Her sarcastic observations of the hypocrisies surrounding her everyday life in the London suburb of Willesden display a very witty and inventive appropriation of English. Not only does she ridicule her much older husband Samad Iqbal when she accuses him of mimicking British pompousness– “ And who does he think he is? Mr Churchill-gee?” Laughed Alsana scornfully. “Original whitecliffsofdover piesanmash jellyeels royalvariety britishbulldog, heh?”31

– she also directs her linguistic sarcasm at the British national conservative Enoch Powell, “E-knock someoneorother […] Rivers of Blood silly-billy nonsense,”32 or her lesbian niece Neena, whom she preferably calls “Nieceof-Shame”33 or “Miss Clever Lesbian.”34 Smith’s choice of narrative perspective can be understood along similar lines. She appropriates characteristics of a particularly English comic tradition when introducing her readers to an omniscient narrator whose preference for 29 30 31 32 33 34

Meera Syal, Last Laugh, 24. Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 7. Smith, White Teeth, 241. White Teeth, 62–63. Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 63. Smith, White Teeth, 346.

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garrulous and digressive comments is highly reminiscent of the narrator of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,35 the latter often being regarded as the prototypical comic novel in English. With the help of digressions, this narrator allies herself with the reader in order to out-group a given character or group of characters so as to deride them. While her mockery of Archie’s suicide attempt is rather benevolent – she mock-didactically points out that “suicide can’t be put on a list of Things to do in between cleaning the grill pan and levelling the sofa leg with a brick”36 – a much harsher satire is applied when exposing the double-standards of the Muslim fundamentalist group K E V I N , ‘Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation’, a Moslem fundamentalist group with an obvious “acronym problem,”37 as the narrator points out to us drily. Smith thus does not abide by political correctness and has her narrator mock the peculiarities both of white British mainstream society and of minority cultures. That humour has immense power as a social in- and out-grouping mechanism is demonstrated well in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me. Every time the Kumar’s house fills with Indian friends and relatives, the formidable armada of Meena’s, the protagonist’s, Indian aunties joins in a gossipy chorus about the strange customs of the English: Mama shot her posse a knowing look and explained that all this garden frippery, gnomes, wells and the like, was an English thing. ‘They have to mark their territory…’ It was on the tip of her tongue to add ‘…like dogs’, but the Aunties recognised their cue and launched into their own collected proverbs on English behaviour. ‘They treat their dogs like children, no, better than their children […] ‘They don’t like bathing, and when they do, they sit in their own dirty water instead of showering…’ ‘The way they wash up, they never rinse the soap off the dishes…’38

This catalogue of prejudices and stereotypes is conspicuously reminiscent of the preconceptions applied to immigrants and minority groups by mainstream society. By reversing the direction of laughter and derision, the aunties construct among themselves a positive image of their Indian identity. Only the twelve-year-old Meena, who feels torn between her Indian and English Midlands identity, observes that the aunties’ laughter about the “peculiar going on

35 Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 36 Smith, White Teeth, 11. 37 White Teeth, 295. 38 Meera Syal, Anita and Me (London: Flamingo, 1996): 33.

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of the ‘gores’” is “tinged with something like revenge.”39 As the only Indian girl in the village, she is devoid of the cultural background of the rest of her peer-group and has experienced the out-grouping force of laughter: “Only the big girls laughed in this way, malicious cackles which hinted at exclusivity and the forbidden.”40 Yet instances like the above may function as more than the simple reversal of perspectives and a means of ‘laughing back’. “Parodying the stereotype itself serves to negate the alleged accuracy of the stereotype.”41 In Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, the protagonist’s Muslim Pakistani father, Haroon Amir, called ‘Harry’ for most of his life, suddenly decides to act like a Buddhist guru in the suburbs of 1970s London. Through the eyes of his son Karim, the reader becomes aware of the absurdity of the whole performance: “He’d spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he was putting it back in spadeloads.”42 It is not so much his father’s performance that creates “bubbles of laughter”43 in Karim’s nose as the sincerity with which the suburban middle-class bourgeoisie is fascinated by Haroon’s exoticism and lets itself be led on. For Karim, coming from a mixed Pakistani-English background, mimicking the stereotype sometimes seems the only possibility on his way to an acting career. When his director, Shadwell, makes him imitate an Indian accent in his part as The Jungle Book’s Mowgli in order to be more authentic and to disguise his suburban middle-class background, the only way for Karim to avoid a feeling of racist degradation is to “sen[d] up the accent and ma[ke] the audience laugh by suddenly relapsing into cockney at odd times.”44 On the one hand, as Frederick M. Holmes45 suggests, this can be considered as an act of carnivalesque subversion of his director’s power over him; on the other, jokingly breaching the illusion of the stereotypical Indian in the role of Mowgli may actually serve to disclose the artificiality of his supposedly authentic Indianness.

39

Syal, Anita and Me, 34. Anita and Me, 17. 41 Lois Leveen, “Only When I Laugh: Textual Dynamics of Ethnic Humor,” M E L U S 21.4 (1996): 47. 42 Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990): 21. 43 Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, 35. 44 The Buddha of Suburbia,158. 45 Frederick M. Holmes, “Comedy, the Carnivalesque, and the Depiction of English Society in Hanif Kuresihi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim,” English Studies in Canada 28.4 (2002): 645–66. 40

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The comic play with stereotypes makes up by far the greater amount of instances of humour in these novels. The simplified and seemingly fixed concepts of ‘otherness’ and ‘Britishness’ on the part of the white majority serve as a prolific source of laughter in all comic texts. Mr. Ormerod, the keeper of the village’s only shop in Tollington, Meena’s hometown in Anita and Me, epitomizes imperialist views on ‘Britishness’ and the rest of the world. When he tells the Kumars about his church-charity’s development projects in Rhodesia – “they asked for a plough but we thought a few tins and preserves would tide them over for a bit” – he automatically associates the Kumar’s otherness with the otherness of the people in Rhodesia: “You could see it in his face, he had made the connection. Africa was abroad, we were from abroad, how could we refuse to come along and embrace Jesus for the sake of our cousins?”46 His patronizing imperialist arrogance and rather outdated notions of development aid are further ridiculed in a later part of the novel: ‘I mean, Mrs. Lacey, it’s not just giving them stuff, is it? It’s about giving them culture as well, civilisation. A good, true way of living, like what we have. It’s all very well just saying hee-yaar, get on with it but they’ll just tek us for mugs. They’ll want fans next, radios, cookers. I mean, we ain’t a charity, are we?’ Mrs Lacey nodded her head and then said, ‘I thought we was a charity.’ ‘Well, you know what I mean,’ replied Mr Ormerod testily, giving her some change and turning to us with a welcoming smile, completely devoid of irony.47

The fact that these lines come out of the mouth of a rather uneducated man from a remote village in the Midlands provokes mild, benevolent bemusement at his narrow-mindedness. This is in stark contrast to the satire with which the white middle-class Joyce Chalfen is portrayed in Smith’s White Teeth. Her condescending self-righteous exoticist interest in the “brown strangers,”48 the Afro-Caribbean-British Irie Jones and the Bangladeshi Millat Iqbal, is met with sharp satire when she enquires about her son’s new friends’ origins: ‘Well, […] you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?’ ‘Willesden,’ said Irie and Millat simultaneously. ‘Yes, yes, of course, but where originally?’

46 47 48

Meera Syal, Anita and Me, 21. Syal, Anita and Me, 172. Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 326.

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‘Oh,’ said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent. ‘You are meaning where from am I originally.’ Joyce looked confused. ‘Yes, originally.’ ‘Whitechapel,’ said Millat, pulling out a fag. ‘Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.’49

Instances like this show the absurdity of notions of an authentic cultural or ethnic origin and identity in a society that has always experienced migration. Even “the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, née Chalfenovsky).”50 Yet these essentialist notions of cultural and ethnic identity are just as much existent in the consciousnesses of the ‘othered’ margins of society. Samad Iqbal suffers enormously from what he feels to be the corruption and soiling of his Muslim Bangladeshi culture by his Western way of life. It is highly ironic that Samad should have to acknowledge that his desperate attempts to rescue his sons from this sense of corruption by Western civilization have been futile. It turns out that Magid’s upbringing in Bangladesh has made him a ‘mimic man’ who aims to be even “more like the English,”51 while Millat, the twin who stays in London, suffers from similar cultural tensions to those experienced by his father. He seeks refuge and identification in the Muslim fundamentalist group K E V I N , but the religious catharsis he attempts cannot extinguish the characteristics that have been shaped by his Western upbringing. It seems rather ridiculous that he manages to wean himself from his favourite pastimes of drinking, smoking marihuana, and promiscuous relationships with women, while he cannot free himself from his obsession with Western Hollywood gangster films.52 How difficult it is, particularly for children from mixed cultural backgrounds, to define cultural identity in the cultural conflict zone is humorously played out as a running gag in Khan–Din’s East is East. Here, the seven children of the Khan family, their father George Khan a Pakistani, their mother Ella an Englishwoman, get into an argument about how to define what they are. The daughter Meenah and her brother Tariq feel insulted when called ‘Paki’. Saleem, the intellectual artist, would prefer to be called ‘AngloIndian’, while Meenah proposes the term ‘Eurasian’. When Tariq claims to be ‘English’, Maneer points out to him that “no one round here thinks we’re 49 50 51 52

Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 319. Smith, White Teeth, 328. White Teeth, 288, italics in original. Cf. White Teeth, 444–47.

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English. We’re the Pakis who run the chippy.”53 How futile and absurd a straight definition of their cultural identity actually is becomes clear when the youngest of the seven announces the arrival of the Pakistani family that two of the Khan’s sons are forced by their father to marry into with the words: “Mam, quick the Pakis are here!”54 In a number of instances, humour is actually seen to “perform a conciliatory function,”55 serving as a means of handling cultural differences that otherwise might be a source of intercultural misunderstanding and conflict. When the topic of arranged marriages comes up in White Teeth in a conversation between the British Archie and the Bangladeshi Samad, Archie’s reaction “Where I come from […] a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her;” is met by Samad’s sarcastic remark: “Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean […] that it is a good idea.”56 In East is East, a confrontation looms between George Khan and his English wife Ella concerning George’s first wife in Pakistan. When he mentions the possibility of her coming over to Britain, because of political upheavals in Pakistan, Ella reacts with absolute disapproval and threatens to leave George taking their children with them. Only George’s joking remark about the Muslim custom of polygamy – “Why big problem, first wife always treat second wife like sister”57 – can prevent the conflict from getting out of hand. Yet, besides these advantageous functions of humour and laughter in the above-quoted texts, one should not indulge in single-minded celebration of laughter’s positive potential in transcultural productions. As a number of essays in Reichl and Stein’s collection demonstrate, there are some dangers that the application of humour and comedy faces in the postcolonial context. Humour might be conciliatory in intercultural conflicts, but is such a ‘defusing’58 of conflict really always of advantage? In some instances, joking away cultural differences may evade the examination and discussion of conflict. Applied to the above-mentioned conflict in East is East, the intercultural difficulties between George Khan and the rest of his family eventually cannot 53

Ajub Khan–Din, East is East, 34–35. East is East, 104. 55 Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein, “Introduction,” 12. 56 Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 98. 57 Ajub Khan–Din, East is East, 14. 58 See Ulrike Erichsen, “Smiling in the Face of Adversity: How to Use Humour to Defuse Cultural Conflict,” in Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, ed. Susanne Reichl & Mark Stein (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 27–41. 54

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be joked away any longer and lead to a major conflict, so that the family ties might eventually not withstand these tensions. In addition to this, the comic play with cultural and racial stereotypes will always be a risky game. It eventually always remains a question of positionality and of ‘getting the joke’, whether a comic depiction will be understood as a transgression and negotiation of community discourses. It makes an immense difference whether it is a Hanif Kureishi or a Zadie Smith, or an Arab character in one of their fictions who jokes about the peculiarities of Muslim customs or whether it is a member of a British nationalist party doing so. At other times, the textual or medial representation of stereotypes may not be ironic enough to be understood as a transgression, thereby reinforcing prejudices and essentialist versions of cultural and ethnic identity. In addition to this, humorous depictions of the supposedly ‘Happy Multicultural Land’59 of Britain should not lead to a cheap sell-out of cultural and ethnic characteristics, as was pointed out above. Perhaps this can be avoided by regarding laughter and comedy not a prerequisite of transcultural fiction but, rather, as one of many perspectives that serves the transgression of borders, for “life isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee.”60 Nevertheless, as has been shown, humour is a powerful tool for the representation of transcultural identities in the British cultural contact-zone, because it is a means of transgressing and resisting dominant discourses of Britishness. Text and films by young British artists from minority backgrounds humorously present the simplified stereotypes still persistent in a white British mainstream culture as narrow-minded and out-dated. However, humour is not only employed to fight back and thus to maintain the binarism of ‘Britishness’ and ‘otherness’. It points to the inappropriateness of essentialist versions of cultural identity and acts as an exceptionally fitting mode for the representation of the transcultural make-up of many British identities, identifying incongruities in stereotypes without sidelining them entirely. However, the ambiguity of the positionalities in humorous approaches should not end in a mere skirting of existing problems, nor should humour be regarded as merely an economic factor in the marketing departments of publishers or film producers. After all, “jokes occur because society is structured in contradiction; there are no jokes in paradise, or in the telos of the good society.”61

59

Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 465. Meera Syal, Anita and Me, 150; see also the title of her second novel: Life Isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee (London: Black Swan, 2000). 61 James English, Comic Transactions: 9. 60

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WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1968). Bend It Like Beckham, dir. Gurinder Chandha, writ. Gurinder Chandha, Paul Mayeda Berges & Guljit Bindra (U K 2002). Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, tr. Claudesley Brereton & Fred Rothwell (Le rire: Essai sur la signification du rire, 1900, tr. London: Macmillan, 1911). East Is East, dir. Damian O’Donnell, writ. Ayub Khan–Din (U K 1999). English, James F. Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1994). Erichsen, Ulrike. “Smiling in the Face of Adversity: How to Use Humour to Defuse Cultural Conflict,” in Cheeky Fictions, ed. Reichl & Stein, 27–41. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, tr. & ed. James Strachey (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unterbewussten, 1940; tr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). Goodness Gracious Me, dir. Nick Wood, writ. Sanjeev Bhaskar et al. (London: B B C 2, 1998–2000). Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities: Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1991) repr. (excerpt) in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back & John Solomon (New York: Routledge, 2000): 144–53. Holmes, Frederick M. “Comedy, the Carnivalesque, and the Depiction of English Society in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim,” English Studies in Canada 28.4 (2002): 645–66. Khan–Din, Ajub. The Royal Court presents “East is East”, rev. ed. Nick Hern (London: The Royal Court Theatre, 1997). ——. East is East: A Screenplay (New York: Hyperion, 1999). Korte, Barbara, & Klaus Peter Müller, ed. Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998). The Kumars at No. 42, dir. Lissa Evans & Dominic Brigstocke, writ. Sanjeev Bhaskar et.al. (London: B B C 2, 2001–2004). Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). ——. Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, (London: Faber & Faber: 2002). Leveen, Lois. “Only When I Laugh: Textual Dynamics of Ethnic Humor,” M E L U S 21.4 (1996): 29–55. Lowe, John. “Monkeykings and Mojo,” M E L U S 21.4 (1996): 103–26. Modood, Tariq. “British Asian Identities: Something Old, Something Borrowed, Something New,” in British Cultural Studies, ed. David Morely & Kevin Robins (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001): 67–78. Nowak, Helge. “Black British Literature – Unity or Diversity?” in Unity in Diversity Revisited? ed. Korte & Müller, 71–87. Pfister, Manfred. “Introduction: A History of English Laughter?” in A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond, ed. Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): i–x. Purdie, Susan. Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Hemel Hempsted: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).

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Reichl, Susanne, & Mark Stein, ed. Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). ——. “Introduction” to Cheeky Fictions, ed. Reichl & Stein, 1–23. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Syal, Meera. Anita and Me (London: Flamingo, 1996). ——. “Last Laugh,” in Cultural Breakthrough. Defining Moments. Essays, ed. Voluntary Service Overseas (London: V S O , 2003): 22–24; online http://www.vso.org.uk/Images /culturalbreackthrough_essays_tcm8-2849.pdf ——. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (London: Black Swan, 2000). Stein, Mark. “The Black British Bildungsroman and the Transformation of Britain: Connectedness across Difference,” in Unity in Diversity Revisited? ed. Korte & Müller, 89– 105. Sterne, Lawrence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).

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Postcolonial Literatures on a Global Market — Packaging the ‘Mysterious East’ for Western Consumption U RSULA K LUWICK

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U G A R A N D S P I C E , and all things nice; that’s what little girls are made of.” When browsing through the shelves of bookshops, the covers of postcolonial books seem to hum a similar tune. “‘Sugar and spice, and all things nice’ – this is what we are made of,” books from the ‘mysterious East’ seem to whisper, “this is what you will get if you buy us,” their covers seem to suggest. Open the books and the whispering stops. No sugar, no spice. As the seductive whispers of the covers cease and the books’ true voices take over, we find that many of them are sugared and spiced no more heavily than books from the West. Why, then, the masquerade of “sugar and spice”? Why are postcolonial literatures made to flaunt their association with the ‘mysterious East’ by their publishers? Stepping outside bookshops and meandering down the streets one might find a partial answer. The feet of British women this summer were attired with Indian-style slippers, made of imitation silk and complete with golden embroidery and sequins; during the Edinburgh festival, the streets were lined with body tattoo artists, ready to adorn your body with exotic designs; and in June, Austrian branches of the furnishing house I K E A celebrated ‘Indian weeks’ with a promotion of Indian-style cuisine, artefacts and design. The phenomenon which Stanley Fish has called “boutique multiculturalism” is alive and thriving,1 and the publishing industry seems not to be exempt from its appeal.

1

Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or, Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 378 and passim.

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This essay explores the implications of this situation on the marketing of postcolonial books. More precisely, it examines the interrelation between the commodification of postcolonial literatures and the exotic with particular emphasis on its effect on the packaging of postcolonial literatures for the global literary market. Hence what will be stressed is the physical aspects of books, focussing on their concrete nature as vehicles for more abstract literary content. The thematic implications of the books discussed here will be disregarded, since I want to look at precisely how postcolonial literatures are marketed through their design, without consideration of their content. Thus books will be understood here less as ‘literature’ than as actual commodities on the literary market, and their authors (responsible for their content) will take a back seat to their marketing editors and publishers. Some initial remarks on exoticism will set the scene for my discussion of exoticist signals in the promotion of postcolonial literatures. I will focus on exoticism as a phenomenon of aesthetic perception and representation, arguing that it tends to rely on readily recognizable markers for its effect. My theoretical basis will be supplemented with a discussion of Gérard Genette’s concept of paratextuality, which I will employ to argue for the influential role the physical features of books might play in the pre-reading phase of reception, focusing particularly on the initial contact between book and reader. I will exemplify my theory of the hitherto largely neglected potential of the paratext by the ensuing analysis of the covers of five postcolonial novels and suggest that the plethora of exoticist markers on display affects readers in their initial classification and evaluation of texts. Graham Huggan defines exoticism as a “particular mode of aesthetic perception,” and this is a view I want to adopt for this essay.2 By describing exoticism as a form of “perception,” Huggan highlights the role of the beholder, and this category is crucial for my analysis of exoticist signals in postcolonial paratexts, which naturally rely on a perceiving and interpreting presence. The reference to the “aesthetic” is similarly important for my argument in the following, since I will focus almost exclusively on aesthetic signals on book covers, signals which seem innocent precisely because they are ‘merely’ aesthetic. As a perceptual framework for the approach to Eastern cultural products, exoticism is pervasive, especially where the popular imagination is concerned – indeed, Huggan defines “the postcolonial exotic” as “integral, rather than

2

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge,

2001): 13 (emphasis in the original).

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peripheral, to the postcolonial field of cultural production.”3 This is also what my introductory observations on boutique multiculturalism imply, since they suggest that, in its commodified version, the East is liable to being virtually equated with the exotic. The popularity of exoticism as a “mode of mass consumption,”4 however, effectively disguises its highly contradictory nature as a cultural phenomenon, highlighted in critical discussions on exoticist discourse which recognize that exoticism fulfils two diametrically opposed purposes at once: it simultaneously domesticates and distances that which it constructs as ‘the other’.5 While it designates Eastern objects and subjects as strange and foreign, it simultaneously renders them recognizable in their very otherness by assigning them the familiar label of the exotic, hence emerging as a strategy which allows the East to be safely contained while preserving its mystic allure. As Said argues, this allure is related to “a kind of second-order knowledge” about the Orient:6 i.e. to the circulation of myths of the East which result in what V.G. Kiernan has called “Europe’s collective day-dream of the Orient.”7 The orientalist myth that the East is mysterious, a site of mysticism and adventure, is, of course, exactly what turns exoticism into such a popular marketing strategy. In order to keep the myth of the mysterious Orient intact, therefore, exoticism as a “mode of mass consumption” seeks to bar people from all but a fairly imprecise popular and commodified knowledge of the East while simultaneously using its allure to provide them with exotic goods. One of the most widely employed strategies to which publishers resort here seems to be the incorporation of readily recognizable exoticist markers as part of the marketing process: as a marketing strategy, exoticism resorts to signals which appeal to “a kind of second-order knowledge” which, though not presupposing any familiarity with the East, allows artefacts to be recognized, classified, and consumed as exotic. Since the image of the mysterious East attracts readers and is profitable, the exotic aspects of postcolonial books tend to be stressed, exaggerated, or even invented by the marketing departments of publishing companies; the recourse to the discourse of exoticism in the commodification of postcolonial literature is often quite independent of the actual content of the books. While this strategy runs counter to the agenda behind

3 4 5 6 7

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 121. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 13. See, for instance, Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 13, and Peter Mason, Infelicities, 154. Edward Said, Orientalism, 52. Quoted in Said, Orientalism, 52.

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much postcolonial literature, however, books by postcolonial writers also profit from their association with the exotic, which appears to raise their saleability. Yet this is a self-perpetuating process: the demand for exotic artefacts is really an effect of the continued emphasis on the desirability of the exotic by marketing departments in the first place; hence the circulation of exotic stereotypes on the market creates a certain image to which postcolonial cultural products have to conform in order to be perceived as valuable and as authentic. The market constructs its own categories, which commodities are made to fit by artificial streamlining: in order to partake of the market value of mysterious otherness, postcolonial cultural products are promoted as exotic. As far as mere financial profit is concerned, this strategy is probably successful. Yet, on quite another level, I would argue that the enforced association of postcolonial books with exoticism at the marketing stage partly defeats the purpose of subversive postcolonial writing, since it entails the presentation of books as exotic commodities – an image against which their content (and writers) often rebel.8 Let me now turn to Genette’s concept of paratextuality. According to Genette, the paratext of a book is everything that accompanies and surrounds a text in material (the peritext) or discursive (the epitext) form.9 Hence the notion of paratextuality encompasses all aspects that turn a text into a book, transforming it into an object consumable by the public, and it includes elements as diverse as a book’s title or author’s name and interviews or reviews. Genette characterizes paratextual features as zones “not only of transition but also of transaction”10 which allow authorial agents – author, for instance, or publisher – to influence readers and direct their approaches to particular books.11 Reception, he acknowledges, can be guided and even manipulated by paratextual means:12 authors might suggest what they regard as suitable readings in forewords, reviewers might highlight specific aspects of a text, and writers might elucidate particular references in interviews.

8 Huggan writes illuminatingly about the complicity of postcolonial studies with global market forces (see, for instance, The Postcolonial Exotic, 28), but he disregards the circular character of this process. 9 See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Tresholds of Interpretation, Literature, Culture, Theory 20, tr. Jane E. Lewin, intro. Richard Macksey (Seuils, 1987; tr. Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997): 1–2, 4–5, and 344. 10 See Genette, Paratexts, 2 (italics in the original). 11 See Paratexts, 2. 12 See Paratexts, 2.

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While some paratextual elements have received attention in the context of postcolonial studies,13 the dust jacket or book cover has so far been largely neglected. Genette himself discusses both of them (albeit with reference to literature in general, not to postcolonial literature in particular) as far as the author’s name and the book’s title, both of which are usually placed on the cover, are concerned. He does not, however, seem to regard the dust jacket as a fruitful object of research in itself, and emphasizes that dust jackets are “constitutively ephemeral, almost inviting the reader to get rid of them after they have fulfilled their function as poster and possibly as protection.”14 While it is, of course, true that dust jackets are detachable from books, this does not render them negligible, as Genette fallaciously seems to conclude; after all, they often carry the same information as the covers of subsequent paperback editions: author’s name, title and, most important for me in this essay, illustrations. Genette ignores cover illustrations almost entirely; to be precise, he is even rather dismissive of them,15 which is surprising, since he himself concedes that the cover or dust jacket often forms the zone of first contact between reader and book. Yet if we agree with this assumption (and it seems hard to do otherwise), then we also need to acknowledge that dust jackets and covers fulfil an important role in the initial appraisal of a book by its prospective reader, and that if the importance of this role has so far been neglected by criticism, it has simultaneously been recognized and fully appreciated by the publishing industry, which has proceeded to utilize the function of the cover as a contact zone for marketing purposes. Indeed, the cover forms an ideal vehicle for the marketing of a book, since it provides the publisher with an opportunity to literally package the book as a desirable consumer item. The role of a book’s cover or dust jacket is to attract the reader, present

13 Wendy Waring, for instance, has argued that the use of glossaries allows conclusions regarding what she refers to as “the market reader” to be constructed for a specific book (Waring, “Is This Your Book? Wrapping Postcolonial Fiction for the Global Market,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 22.3–4 [1995]: 462). On the implications of the inclusion of glossaries in black British literature, see also Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Studies in English Literary and Cultural History 7; Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002): 94–96. 14 Gérard Genette, Paratexts, 27. There could, however, be a cultural restriction at work here on Genette’s part, inasmuch as French books that are not primarily issued as laminated paperbacks with full-colour cover designs (Gallimard, Seuil and so forth) are traditionally ‘under-designed’ or un-illustrated, in the expectation that bibliophiles will detach the cover (or gummed-on dust jacket) and apply their own bindings. That is to say, French ‘intellectual’ publishers still obey the adage that ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’. 15 See Genette, Paratexts, 28.

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the book as a desirable commodity, and, ultimately, persuade the reader to buy it. I would suggest that in order to achieve this goal, book covers send out a plethora of signals that can either be classified immediately because of their familiarity or are so obscure that they become attractive by their sheer mysteriousness. In the case of postcolonial literatures, publishers tend to choose the first of these two options, and the familiar framework to which many of the signals on postcolonial book covers refer back is exoticism. This is not an innocent choice, of course, and the second function of covers renders this strategy highly problematic: covers prepare readers for the reading of particular books; they suggest to readers specific ideas about the kind of book they are holding in their hands, and as such they can create expectations that influence the ensuing reading process, in extreme cases to an extent that might be difficult to withstand. Through the choice of exoticism as the framework to which postcolonial book covers frequently appeal, readers are led to expect exotic literature upon opening paratextually exoticized books, which are hence forced, by their publishers, into the discourse of exoticism already at the pre-reading stage. In her book Cultures in the Contact Zone, Susanne Reichl draws attention to the manner in which what Graham Huggan describes as “emblematic images and designs” in the service of “iconic representation”16 of postcolonial cultures can “precondition a reader’s expectations.”17 In her discussion of ethnic markers on book covers, Reichl primarily focuses on semiotic references which encourage the reader either to form an idea of a writer’s ethnicity or to expect a book to be inscribed in a specific ethnic context – in the case of the books she discusses, this is the context of black British experience. While I share Reichl’s conviction of the preconditioning quality of ethnic paratextual markers and while I want to adopt her argument in this respect, my main concern here is slightly different. Rather than demonstrate the existence of ethnic signals on book covers, what I want to highlight with the help of a few book cover designs is how the ethnicity of both writer and book, so to speak, is marketed with recourse to the category of the exotic. Before embarking on the analysis of book covers, however, it seems necessary to pause in order to introduce an important clarification of the perspective from which the ensuing discussion will be conducted. My point of view in the following will be emphatically Western insofar as I will consider how the cultural signals displayed on book covers become exotic signals once the

16 17

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 53. Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone, 64.

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books are circulated on a Western market. Ironically, the Eastern editions of postcolonial books are, frequently, not strikingly different from Western editions, if at all. I would assume, therefore, that for postcolonial readers the markers which I am going to discuss as exoticist fulfil a function of cultural identification and that in such contexts they remain devoid of the ‘stigma’ of exoticism.18 Thus exoticism – or, rather, the kind of aesthetic exoticization which I will discuss below – seems to lie, as far as these markers are concerned, partly in the eye of the beholder, and can, in the case of the following book covers, be seen as a partial effect of the context of a Western market. Consider the dust jacket of Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s novel The Last Song of Dusk.19 Clearly, this cover design is blatantly exoticist. It contains a plethora of exoticist markers which seek to label the novel as part of a specific culture, which for Western consumers has become attractive through extensive commodification. The ostentatiously beautiful woman with long black hair and emphatically oriental eyes, clad in a sari, her golden jewellery, the panther, the peacock feathers, the oriental-style decoration which frames the cover, and the entire general design, with its cheerful mixture of rich colours – among them, notably, cinnamon yellow – all of these highlight the book’s affiliation with an exotic culture.20 Added to this is the short phrase of appraisal from the Sunday Times, which labels the novel “a magical piece of storytelling.” As we will see presently, the reference to storytelling seems to be a favourite trope in the paratextual packaging of postcolonial literatures. I would suggest that this is due to the prominence which both the Arabian Nights and the ‘oriental tale’ as such hold in Western concepts of the East. In her book on orientalist poetics, Emily Haddad discusses the extraordinary popularity the Arabian Nights achieved within years of its publication and the

18

Roger Benjamin comes to a similar conclusion when he discusses the strong interest Eastern collectors of art show towards orientalist European paintings. See Benjamin, “PostColonial Taste: Non-Western Markets for Orientalist Art,” in Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, ed. Roger Benjamin (Victoria: The Art Gallery of New South Wales; London: Thames & Hudson, 1997): 32–40, esp. 33 and 34. 19 See Siddarth Dhanvant Shanghvi, The Last Song of Dusk (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), Fig. 1 below. 20 Mary Anne Stevens stresses the importance of striking colours in orientalist painting, noting that “for a number of Orientalist painters, exoticism and Orientalism were synonymous with brilliant, explosive colours.” Stevens, “Western Art and its Encounter with the Islamic World, 1798–1914,” in The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse. European Painters in North Africa and the Near East, ed. Mary Anne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984): 20.

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seminal impact it had on Western orientalism.21 Following Frances Mannsåker, she connects this impact with the fact that the publication of the Arabian Nights preceded expeditions to and scholarship of the Orient, a circumstance which granted it a special role in the construction of the Western image of the East, allowing it to enter an almost metonymic relationship with the Orient in the Western imagination.22 Indeed, it seems that even today the Arabian Nights has not abandoned its hold on the Western mind and that it still informs popular notions of the Orient as a mystic home to mysterious and adventurous stories. Publishers turn this circumstance to their advantage by seeking to place postcolonial books in the tradition of oriental storytelling à la Arabian Nights. At first sight very different, but actually quite similar to the dust jacket of The Last Song of Dusk is the cover of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.23 A cursory glance might only take in prominently coloured letters against a white background. If at first, however, the cover seems far from exoticist, a closer look reveals a number of exoticist markers within the apparently neutrally coloured letters which form the title. One can identify, among other things, a little piece of green cloth with oriental decoration in the green ‘I’, a drawing of red chillies against a red background in the ‘C’, little cubes that look like the ingredients of a chutney in the ‘K’, a peacock feather – again – in the ‘L’, an oriental figure woven into a purple piece of cloth in the ‘A’, and a glimpse of a tattoo of an orientally rendered dragon or some other exotic beast in the ‘N’. To term these details ‘exoticist’ might mean overshooting the mark here, since they can also be read as mere cultural markers. As indicated above, the perception of something as exotic depends to a significant extent on the stance of the observer. Yet the manner in which exotic artefacts (the two pieces of cloth, the drawing, the tattoo), hence issues of representation, are highlighted on the cover of Brick Lane calls to mind exoticism as the predominant mode of representation of the Orient in the past and perhaps even today. In this context, the detail from the tattoo is particularly interesting, since it touches on the commodification of the very body of the oriental subject. Add to that the potential knowledge about the ethnic community inhabiting the real Brick Lane in London, and the cover lends itself to exoticizing readings.24 Exoticist 21 See Emily A. Haddad, Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in NineteenthCentury English and French Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002): 4–6. 22 Emily A. Haddad, Orientalist Poetics, 4. 23 See Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003; London: Black Swan, 2004), Fig. 2 below. 24 I am, of course, aware of the ironic fact that, by focusing exclusively on specific paratextual markers and interpreting them as culture-specific, my own reading of postcolonial

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notions and stereotypes can, moreover, also be detected in the foregrounding of the “sensuality” of the novel in a passage from the Daily Telegraph reproduced on the back cover. The description of the novel as sensual is in tune with one of the most persistent and traditional orientalist clichés – the notion that the Orient is a site of sensuality and sexual licentiousness and that the oriental subject is sexually potent and active. The impact of this view is emphasized by Edward Said, who claims that much orientalist discourse implies “that what is really left to the Arab after all is said and done is an undifferentiated sexual drive.”25 In a similar vein, Lisa Lowe highlights the interconnection between the exotic and the (feminine) erotic, claiming that both evoke situations of “desire” which are “structurally similar. Both depend on a structure that locates an Other – as woman, as oriental scene – as inaccessible, different, beyond.”26 Against this background, far from being accidental, the numerous references to sensuality on the covers of postcolonial books acquire a special significance, since they seem to perpetuate the associative connection between the exotic and the erotic: among the five exoticized books I have chosen for my peritextual analysis here, three are described in terms of sensuality by their commentators on the back covers, their paratexts thus revealing that postcolonial literature is still frequently regarded through the lens of extremely conservative orientalist clichés. One of these books is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake.27 A decidedly non-exotic book, it is nevertheless packaged in terms of the exotic, thus serving as an excellent example of how authorial intention is ignored and how postcolonial books are marketed as exotic regardless of their content. Since decisions concerning the packaging of a book lie within the responsibility of the publisher, and while writers have little or no say in the choice of cover designs for their books, the manner in which a book is presented can be significantly at odds with its actual agenda, of which Lahiri’s book is a prime example. The cover illustration of The Namesake highlights the nature of exoticism as an aesthetic category: the book is presented as ostentatiously aesthetic, not least through the clever combination of understatement (note how the creamy background dominates the front cover, which displays little apart

book covers becomes emphatically exoticizing – occasionally, perhaps, rather narrowmindedly so. Despite this double bind, however, such a reading seems necessary in order to highlight the manner in which cultural markers can encourage particular readings and, hence, precondition interpretation. 25 Edward Said, Orientalism, 311. 26 Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains, 2. 27 See Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (London: Flamingo, 2003), Fig. 3 below.

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from the author’s name, the title, and the stem of the flower) and lusciousness (note the lavish use of the colour gold). This emphatic foregrounding of the aesthetic is revealing, since, as emphasized by Graham Huggan, it is precisely the role of exoticism as an aesthetic category that potentially deprives exoticized objects of their subversive impact.28 Exoticism pleases aesthetically and glosses over subversiveness. In this sense, one might be tempted to read the cover of Lahiri’s novel as the publishers’ attempt to captivate readers by intimations of elegance and beauty rather than to alert them to the pressing issues of culture, affiliation, and identity which this novel raises in such a sensitive manner.29 On the cover of her novel, Jhumpa Lahiri is both praised for the “sensuality” of her prose and for her abilities as “a dazzling storyteller.”30 Both of these stereotypes re-appear in the praise for Bahiyyih Nakhjavani’s novel The Saddlebag, as reprinted on the back cover of that novel.31 The novel is described as “a tantalising tale,” while Nakhjavani is compared to “early Salman Rushdie.” Most significant for my purposes, however, is the passage from the Tablet review: “Nakhjavani throws into her tale such a mixture of humour, exotic sensuousness and lofty omniscience that I was left spellbound like Scheherezade’s sultan.” A plethora of exoticist markers is on display here: Oriental “sensuousness,” again, a reference to magic in the description of the reader’s reaction as “spellbound,” and another allusion to storytelling and to the Arabian Nights in the comparison with “Scheherezade’s sultan.” Even the word “exotic” itself makes an appearance. The exoticization continues on the front cover, which displays what appears to be a detail from an oriental painting, unfortunately, however, not identified. This demonstrates yet another exoticizing strategy. Through being packaged as oriental art, the book is made to proclaim an association with such art, thereby inviting its own reception in terms of authenticity, since its make-up facilitates approaches to the text in terms of ethnographic realism. In combination with the magical-realist mode in which the book is written, the peritext of the novel corroborates the old

28

See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 24, as quoted above. Such an impression is strengthened also by the conspicuously frequent repetition of the words “elegant” and “elegance,” which are used to describe Lahiri’s style on both front and back cover. The description of the novel’s content, by contrast, is relegated to the inside of the cover. 30 See Amy Tan on the front cover of Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake. 31 See Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, The Saddlebag (2000; London: Bloomsbury, 2001): Fig. 4 below. 29

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orientalist stereotype that the Orient is a location where anything can happen and where magical occurrences are the norm. The fact that The Saddlebag is quite exotic also in content and that The Namesake is not, but that their covers nevertheless contain similar exotic markers, shows that postcolonial literature is presented as homogeneous in the marketing process, and once more reveals that the manner in which postcolonial books are packaged is largely independent of their actual content. Readily available exotic clichés can obviously be more profitable than consideration of a book’s content, and categorization by geographical or cultural origin is evidently not deemed problematic by publishers. To conclude my discussion of postcolonial paratextuality, I want to consider one example of two diametrically opposed methods of packaging one and the same text. My example is Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, and in order to clarify the context of the various manners in which it has been presented paratextually, it is necessary to give a very brief plot summary. Anil’s Ghost is set at the time of the Sri Lankan civil war, and it deals with the way in which people are affected by the experience of living in a country at war with itself. Its protagonists form a group of traumatized characters who are engaged in a human-rights mission and retreat to a deserted villa in order to escape government surveillance, as well as to come to terms with their own war experiences. As they nurse their personal wounds and make tentative attempts at renewed social interaction, issues of identity, belonging, and humanity become central. Thus Anil’s Ghost is concerned with universal themes, and although it also depicts the specific atmosphere of Sri Lanka during the civil war, it is very much a novel about war and humanity as such. The cover illustration of the first British edition of Anil’s Ghost does credit to this fact. The cover design is de-ethnicized, the more so as readers unfamiliar with Michael Ondaatje might categorize his name as Dutch. In contrast to the exoticist covers we have looked at so far, the cover of this edition is grey.32 The barred window suggests imprisonment, and this reflects the concerns of the novel in a threefold way: dissenters are literally caught and imprisoned during the war; the population of the country is imprisoned literally and metaphorically – neither can they move about freely nor do they possess freedom of thought and speech; and the protagonists, finally, are imprisoned metaphorically, since their traumatization has robbed them of the ability to express their emotions.

32

See Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), Fig. 5 below.

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The effect of this content-sensitive cover design is that the universal appeal of the novel is preserved, and the absence of exotic markers prevents it from automatic conflation with the exotic. The cover illustrations of other editions are less concerned about the actual content of the novel, and foreground, instead, the ethnic aspects of the book by prominently displaying the faces of slightly non-Western-looking women.33 Such cover designs disregard the themes of war and humanity so central to the novel, reducing its subversive potential in its first contact with readers by marketing the book as an ethnic or even exotic product. And a look at another paratextual element, the blurb text, reveals that even in the Bloomsbury edition exoticism is alive and thriving. The description of Anil’s Ghost here is as follows: The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka […] a country formerly known as Ceylon, that is steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition – and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war34

Again, exoticist stereotypes are activated by the suggestion that Sri Lanka (or Ceylon?) is ancient – “steeped” in history – rather than modern, and exists in some remote mythological time until it is forced to awaken from its exoticist slumber into the modern – Western – age by the horrors of war. What I have outlined here is a process of cultural translation. For the benefit of Western consumption, postcolonial books are translated into the familiar – and unthreatening – category of the exotic. As a result, prospective readers are encouraged by the books’ exoticized covers to approach such literature in terms of exotic cliché; rather than being discouraged from entertaining stereotypes, readers are practically invited to apply their stereotypical ideas to postcolonial texts. Hence the book covers and the messages they transport create exoticist reader expectations which subsequently need to be actively dismantled by the actual texts (if, indeed, they are written in a manner detrimental to exoticist stereotypes). In addition, such expectations can also prompt readers to interpret otherwise innocent textual elements as exotic and incorporate them into a framework of exoticism, subsequently becoming the basis of the reading process. Hence exotic book covers can both raise readers’ sensitivity to the presence of the exotic in texts and induce them to overemphasize this element of postcolonial books in their interpretation. 33 See the covers of the Vintage (New York, 2001) and Picador (London, 2001) editions of Anil’s Ghost, Figs. 6 and 7 below, respectively. 34 See the front-cover blurb of Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).

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While postcolonial books, owing to the popularity of exotic goods, might indeed profit from their paratextual association with exoticism as far as saleability is concerned, their conflation with the exotic encourages the continuing circulation of exoticist stereotypes about the East. What is particularly disturbing in this respect is the striking similarity between modern postcolonial book covers and the covers of books from colonial times, demonstrating the continuing popularity of colonial stereotypes. An early edition of Kipling’s Kim,35 for instance, displays an elaborately engraved elephant’s head, its tusks adorned with lotus flowers, golden against a dark blue background. We have seen exotic animals on two of the covers discussed here, and we have also seen a lotus flower on the cover of The Namesake. The similarity between these cover designs thus suggests that the manner in which the ‘mysterious East’ is packaged has not seen any major changes within the past hundred years. Exoticism does not seem significantly less thriving now than it did then, rendering the powerful marketing potential of the exotic almost inevitable. In his discussion of the postcolonial exotic, Huggan highlights the ironic quality with which writers induce exotic clichés. This irony, however, is something for which one looks in vain on the covers of postcolonial books. The exotic is not conjured up, here, in order to be subverted and deconstructed, but for poorly disguised marketing purposes. Yet if the attractiveness of exoticism as a marketing tool enhances the saleability of postcolonial literatures it does so at a relatively high prize. The price postcolonial books have to pay is their own complicity in precisely the kinds of stereotypes that postcolonial writers often seek to deconstruct. The price is also that, by packaging postcolonial books in exoticist terms and as items for global consumption, publishers invite their reduction to exotic objects representative of exotic cultures. The texts of such books often reveal the exoticist expectations that are raised through their own paratextual design as exoticist traps – but the texts are another story.

WORKS CITED Ali, Monica. Brick Lane (2003; London: Black Swan, 2004). Benjamin, Roger. “Post-Colonial Taste: Non-Western Markets for Orientalist Art,” in Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, ed. Roger Benjamin (Victoria: The Art Gallery of New South Wales; London, Victoria: Thames & Hudson, 1997): 32–40.

35

See Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1901).

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Fish, Stanley. “Boutique Multiculturalism, or, Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 378–95. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Tresholds of Interpretation, tr. Jane E. Lewin, intro. Richard Macksey (Seuils, 1987; tr. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). Haddad, Emily A. Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Kipling, Rudyard. Kim (London: Macmillan & Co., 1908). Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake (London: Flamingo, 2003). Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1991). Mason, Peter. Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1998) Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, The Saddlebag (2000; London: Bloomsbury, 2001). Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). ——. Anil’s Ghost (2000; London: Picador, 2001). ——. Anil’s Ghost (2000; New York: Vintage, 2001). Reichl, Susanne. Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature, Studies in English Literary and Cultural History 7 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (1978; New York: Vintage, 1994). Shanghvi, Siddarth Dhanvant. The Last Song of Dusk (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004). Stevens, Mary Anne. “Western Art and its Encounter with the Islamic World, 1798–1914,” in The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse. European Painters in North Africa and the Near East, ed. Mary Anne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984): 15–23. Waring, Wendy. “Is This Your Book? Wrapping Postcolonial Fiction for the Global Market,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 22.3–4 (1995): 455–65.

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F I G U R E 1: Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, The Last Song of Dusk (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004).

F I G U R E 2: Monica Ali, Brick Lane (London: Black Swan, 2004).

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F I G U R E 3: Jumpha Lahiri, The Namesake (London: Flamingo, 2003).

F I G U R E 4: Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, The Saddlebag (London: Bloomsbury, 2001).

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F I G U R E 5:

Michael Ondaatje, Anil‘s Ghost (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).

F I G U R E 6:

Michael Ondaatje, Anil‘s Ghost (New York: Vintage, 2001).

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F I G U R E 7: Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (London: Picador, 2000).

F I G U R E 8: Part of the front cover of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (London: Macmillan, 1908).

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AND T RANSLATION IN THE C ONTACT Z ONE

Transporting Ceylon — Robert Knox (1681) and the Temptations of Translation T OBIAS D ÖRING

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J A N U A R Y 1 6 8 1 , a group of eight distinguished gentlemen convened for a meeting in London. They were members of the Royal Society for Improving of Natural Knowledge and, since this was their first meeting in the new year, they opened it by swearing in Sir Christopher Wren as president. The further points on their agenda, according to the minutes of secretary Dr Hooke, were the following. First, a “letter by Mr Boyle was read, containing an account of a strange hurricane at Hanau”; then, a letter by Mr Pascall was read, giving an account of an earthquake at Chedsey; and third, a letter by “Mons. Leibnitz [sic]” was read, “containing several ingenious conjectures about the use of an universal language and character; as also of an universal algebra, and the great benefit thereof; and that by the help thereof he had been able to perform very many considerable things.”1 This meeting, then, seems to mark the moment when Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s project to construct a universal language came to the attention of English scientists and academics, a project which Leibniz first outlined in his 1678 Lingua Generalis.2 Here, he proposed to divide and subdivide the whole field of encyclopaedic knowledge into basic units of elementary ideas and then to represent each of these with either a letter or a numeral. More elaborate ideas would thus be signified by a sequence of letters and numerals, the longer the more complex, but each unambiguously and transparently denoting all the elementary units from which it systematically derived. According to N 12

1 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: A. Millar, 1757), vol. 4: 63–64. 2 Cf. Umberto Eco, Die Suche nach der vollkommenen Sprache, tr. Burkhart Kroeber (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994): 276–77.

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Umberto Eco, Leibniz was not trying to re-create the kind of ‘natural’, Adamic language in which signifiers and signifieds necessarily cohere; but he was certainly hoping to define a system of elementary notions organized as an alphabet of thought, not of sound, thus devising a grammar for the truthful and precise communication of ideas, without having to take the laborious and often dangerous detour through the labyrinth of any single language. To invoke Leibniz’s Lingua Generalis in the present context means to invoke the promise and problem of a ‘translation-less’ world, a universe of knowledge operating through the exchange of signs free from the constraints of realization in any natural language, hence liberated from the necessity and messiness of cultural translation – a promise not only of unrestrained philosophical communication but also of global reconciliation. To be sure, this “general language” was not designed to do away with hurricanes and earthquakes, but hopefully to prevent other terrible catastrophes. Leibniz pursued his philosophic interests, for which we remember him today, strictly on the side; his main professional concern and activity lay in the field of court politics and international diplomacy, where his central hope was to re-unite the Christian churches, after some 150 years of bloody hatred and division.3 We might therefore generalize from the case that, in this kind of enlightened perspective, linguistic difference is seen as denoting, if not actually determining, political division. To translate between different languages is thought to be a necessary evil, an stopgap measure until the problem has been solved. In a “world republic of letters,” to cite the title of Pascale Casanova’s recent study (2004) about world literature and globalization, the free flow of ideas and knowledge should not be burdened any longer by translation. For all the critical effort of translation studies and their remarkable achievements, especially in the field of postcolonial theories, to establish the value of transcultural perspectives,4 this ‘enlightened’ notion of translation is still suprisingly resilient in contemporary discourses. As far as popular domains are concerned, this notion dominates representations of linguistic diversity and translational politics, such as Sydney Pollack’s 2005 feature film The Interpreter, set in the context of postcolonial Africa and the U N , which

3

Cf. Eco, Die Suche nach der vollkommenen Sprache, 278. For example, Tejawini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: U of California P , 1992), Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader (London & New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2004), and Postcolonial Translation Theory, ed. Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). 4

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despite its title eventually erases the process of translation from its plot. As far as current academic domains are concerned, English has taken on the status not just of a lingua franca but, to all effects, also of a lingua generalis, so that frequent assumptions about its cultural neutrality override any awareness of the need and labour to translate. It is this notion of transparency that I would therefore like to question in this essay and to which I return at the end. At this point, however, let me return to the Royal Society and their meeting in January 1681. The fourth point on their agenda was not a letter or report, but a natural object, whose chief interest lay not in any promise of linguistic universalism, but in its material presence rendering translation superfluous: Mr Hook shewed a piece of a talipat leaf, which one Mr Knox, who had been nineteen years and a half captive in Ceylon, had brought with him from thence. It was about seven feet long and nine feet wide at one end, shaped like a woman’s fan, closing and opening like that. The whole leaf was said to be a circle of twenty feet diameter.5

This leaf, from a special palm tree (Corypha umbraculifera) found in India and Ceylon, appears to have been the first of its kind ever brought to England (though it came a little too late to be included in the curious list of “rarities” belonging to the Royal Society, published later the same year6). What was so attractive to its present owner, Dr Hooke, that he presented it so proudly to this learned gathering could have been the fact that this very leaf was contiguous with the reality it stood for, the reality of Ceylon whence it had found its way to London: an actual part of this exotic island’s foreign nature, the leaf was a material synecdoche of otherness brought home. And yet, as the minutes of the Royal Society suggest, the talipot immediately underwent a process of textualization and, indeed, translation. The passage quoted subjects this piece of foreign nature to a specific cultural rhetoric that describes and domesticates it through the use of homely terms. This is a rhetoric of measuring – its enormous size and diameter are given in English feet – as well as a rhetoric of comparison: its shape and function are explained with reference to a “woman’s fan,” the simile thus transferring this material part of a South Asian world firmly into the social world of English

5

Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, vol. 4: 64. 6 Cf. Donald W. Ferguson, Captain Robert Knox. Contributions towards a Biography (Colombo & Croydon, 1896–97), one hundred copies printed for private circulation. [BL 10825iII]

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Restoration culture. Such moves are neither uncommon nor surprising; they belong to the familiar and familiarizing strategies by which European travellers have long approached and framed their strange encounters.7

F I G U R E 1: “The manner of their sheltering themselves

from the Raine by the Tolipat leafe” 7

Cf. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge 1992); David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1993).

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But in this particular case, the matter is more complex because the roles of traveller and writer do not quite coincide and, what is more, because the actual journey here concerned involved long years of captivity. The “one Mr Knox,” who brought this famous leaf to England, had set out from London in 1658 as a regular traveller and trader – but he returned from Ceylon, more than two decades later, as an adventurer and escapee and long-held hostage. It is this irregularity that makes his case and text so interesting that I would like to take this seventeeth-century figure of a cultural go-between as an example to discuss some fundamental issues in the translation of cultures. Robert Knox was seventeen years old when he entered into the service of the English East India Company and sailed for the Bay of Bengal on the Ann. The ship was under the command of his own father, Robert Knox Senior, and her voyage proved ill-fated. Trading turned out to be more difficult than anticipated and, even worse, in November 1659 the Ann was caught in a mighty storm, got shipwrecked, and was forced to stay for months at Kottiar, on the coast of Ceylon, for repairs. Ceylon had recently been captured by the Dutch from Portuguese authorities, yet the new colonial power barely controlled the coastal regions. The whole interior of this fabled island, highly lucrative for spice and other oriental goods, was the dominion of a local authority, the powerful king of Kandy. It seems that Captain Knox seriously underestimated the policy and cunning of this ruler. After months of misfortunes, the shipwrecked English voyagers were at first “treated by the countrey people with noe small courtesy,” as we read in a subsequent report;8 they daily received food and other gifts without having to give anything in return – so that they may be excused for lowering their guard and pleasing themselves with the notion that they were genuinely welcome to the Sinhalese. They were to pay, however, with their liberty. Eventually, the King sent an official delegation, ostensibly to greet the English, but in reality to capture them and add as many of them as he could to his considerable collection of Europeans in his palace. Here, cut off from all means of transport or escape, the Englishmen were separated and allocated different ways of living in the purview of the royal household, where their new roles seemed to slide uncertainly between the position of foreign court advisor and of hostage. Knox Senior, in fact, did not live to negotiate this plight – he died within a year, consumed by shame, grief or disease, mourned over by his faithful son, who dug a grave with his own hands in a corner of a

8

S.D. Saparamadu, “Introduction” to Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681, 1958; Dehiwala, Sri Lanka: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1981): 7– 56.

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foreign field. The son then stayed in Kandy almost twenty years, before he managed to escape (together with a fellow prisoner) on an adventurous trip through the mountainous jungle to a Dutch fort at the coast, whence he returned to England in 1680. This delayed homecoming, after a period of detention that covered more than half his life, seriously questioned not just the success of the trading voyage, but also the identity of the voyager: as who or what did Robert Knox return? Indeed, this point seems to have been his father’s own concern, conveyed to him with his last words and will. On his deathbed, according to Knox’s own report, he charged me to serve God, and [. . . ] bad me have a care of my Brother and Sister. And lastly, He gave me a special charge to beware of strong Drink, and lewd Company, which as by Experience many had found, would change me into another man, so that I should not be my self.9

To remain himself, or rather – since the printed text separates these two words10 – to retain his self, constitutes the central challenge in the foreign life of this true-born Englishman and Puritan. But, as I would like to suggest, the “strong Drink and lewd Company” that his father warns against merely serve as tropes for the influence of local cultural forces threatening to corrupt and change his self. For, according to one modern commentator, the effect of the ‘captivity’ was to make Knox a full fledged Kandyan villager. On his escape he had become almost indistinguishable from the Sinhalese. He had long hair upto his waist, a beard ‘a span broad’, and taken to the Chingulay habit.11

Against such ways of going native or, as we might call it, against the threat of cultural self-translation, I argue, Knox manages to fulfil his father’s deathbed command only when he turns into an author. Only by turning his adventures into a written English text, after his return to London, while also giving a comprehensive account of the nature and the culture of the place which delayed this homecoming so long, Knox Junior re-translates his self from the experience of estrangement. His famous Historical Relation of Ceylon, pub-

9

Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 300. Cf. Ulla Haselstein, “Giving Her Self: Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and the Problem of Authenticity,” in (Trans)Formations of Cultural Identity in the English-Speaking World, ed. Jochen Achilles & Carmen Birkle (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1998): 125–40. 11 Saparamadu, “Introduction” to Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 34–35. 10

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lished in London in 1681 as the first English book about this island, therefore provides an opportunity for us to trace cross-cultural engagements in early colonial contact zones. The opening paragraph sets his agenda: How this Island lyes with repect upto the Neighbouring Countries, I shall not speak at all, that being to be seen in our ordinary Sea-Cards, which describe those Parts; and but little concerning the Maritime parts of it, now under the Jurisdiction of the Dutch: my design being to relate such things onely that are new and unknown unto these European Nations. It is the Inland Country therefore I chiefly intend to write of, which is yet an hidden Land even to the Dutch themselves that inhabit upon the Island. For I have seen among them a fair large Map of this Place, the best I believe extant, yet very faulty: the ordinary Maps in use among us are much more so. I have procured a new one to be drawn, with as much truth and exactness as I could, and his Judgement will not be deemed altogether inconsiderable, who had for Twenty Years Travelled about the Iland, and knew almost every step of those Parts especially, that most want describing.12

His tone is confident and self-assured. This book claims to give us inside knowledge in the true sense of the term, the kind of knowledge which penetrates more deeply into the interior of Ceylon than the authorities who purport to control it, the Dutch, who remain on the periphery, since even their most recent maps are incomplete and faulty. The present writer, by contrast, sets out to fill blank spaces and reveal what has effectively remained a “hidden Land” – a great promise to which his subsequent report, in all fairness, does live up. Before Knox, no European ever managed to convey so much information about the physical, natural, cultural, and social realities of Ceylon. But the only reason Knox can do so is the fact referred to in the opening paragraph as twenty years of travel “about the Iland,” a curious and telling euphemism for what, in actual fact, were twenty years of captivity. True, after the first years, he did have considerable space to move around the Kandyan kingdom (he earned his living as a trader, and eventually staged his escape under this disguise). Yet the point is that Knox can only set himself up as an authority to describe this kingdom due to his long confinement in it under the authority of its King. So his long experience of humiliation and subjection here translates into an epistemic advantage: the condition for producing inside knowledge. With this book, the captive now captures what used to detain him.

12

Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 93.

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This is also suggested in the wording and the typographical layout of the title page (Fig. 2 overleaf). The main title, printed in large letters, An Historical Relation of the Island C E Y L O N , in the E A S T - I N D I E S , is supplemented by small print in the subtitle: “with an A C C O U N T of the the Detaining in Captivity the Author and divers other Englishmen, now Living there, and of the Author’s Miraculous E S C A P E ,” thus introducing the “Author” in a way that predicates all his authority on his captivity. The point is repeated two lines further down when the author is named, together with the epithet “a Captive there near Twenty Years,” which is to authenticate his text. All this works only in retrospect: “Miraculous E S C A P E ” and “near Twenty Years” are crucial terms to state the termination of imprisonment. But the question still remains: what is the functional relation between the large title and the small subtitle of this book: i.e. between the “Historical Relation” and the account of detainment? The title page connects the two with the simple word “together,” but this little word barely hides the tension that runs through Knox’s entire text, the tension of his self-positioning in conflicting acts of cultural translation. The structure of the text repeats the twofold structure of the title page. The book comes in four parts. Parts I to I I I offer a comprehensive description of the island, systematically proceeding from geography and natural features, via the political organization of the kingdom, to the life, language, beliefs, and customs of inhabitants. After 200 pages, Part I V marks a decisive change of style and subject. Now, the author purposes “to speak of our Captivity in this Island, and during which, in what condition the English have lived there, and the eminent Providence of God in my escape hence”:13 i.e. he turns to the narrative of his own adventures. This is not just a different topic but a different type of discourse, a tale of personal suffering, tribulation, and eventual triumph, all told in the past tense – as opposed to the consistent use of present tense in Parts I to I I I to indicate the way things are in Ceylon. Knox’s book thus combines two kinds of rhetoric, catering also for two sorts of readers. Parts I to I I I , corresponding to the title and containing Ceylonese geographycum-anthropology, employ the tropes of the descriptive and declarative rhetoric of scientific knowledge, including the use of the eternal present, whereas Part I V employs the tropes of personal involvement, ingenuity, and suspense from the rhetoric of adventure tales. Static portrait supplemented by the dynamic narrative of a narrow escape: Knox’s hybrid text thus offers a classic example of the pressure which Edward Said famously analyzed as arising from the 13

Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 288.

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conflict “between a holistic view” (“description, monumental”) and “a narrative of events”: i.e. the pressure between a panoptic vision of otherness and a detailed record of travel and change.14 In the case of Knox, however, despite the sequence offered in the book, the latter is the precondition of the former: the true beginning of his Historical Relation lies in its final part.

Fig. 2: title page, An Historical Relation of Ceylon

14

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985): 239–40.

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In the critical reception of the book, two issues have dominated discussion: (a) the question of factual accuracy, especially debated among historians from modern Ceylon and Sri Lanka,15 where the general consensus seems to be that his account, some contradictions notwithstanding, remains an invaluable source-book compiled from first-hand observation and with genuine sympathy; (b) the question of the contemporary influence of his work – an issue traditionally debated by European critics16 in connection with Daniel Defoe, who owned a copy of it which he made ample use of for works like Captain Singleton and Robinson Crusoe (which came out, one year before Knox died, in 1719). However, in view of the points raised at the outset, I would like to focus on two other issues: the question of authorization, and the temptations of cultural translation. Even though I just suggested that the beginning of Knox’s book lies in its ending, because it is the captive’s escape narrative that underwrites the scholar’s panoptic vision, the real condition of its possibility lies in its preface. This framing device has been added to the text by Dr Hooke, secretary to the Royal Society, whose authority, indeed, frames the entire project. The preface reveals that Hooke played a decisive part not just in seeing the work into publication (it came out eight months after the January meeting and was printed by Richard Chiswell, the official printer of the Royal Society), but also in shaping and editing and, quite possibly, ghost-writing the text in significant parts.17 The extent of what Hooke refers to as his “Solicitations and Endeavours”18 may be gauged when comparing the passage about the talipot leaf in Knox’s text. The description is longer but uses the same rhetorical devices as Hooke’s own minutes of the Royal Society meeting and so suggests the secretary’s helping hand in authoring the scientific text: The leaf being dryed is very strong, and limber and most wonderfully made for mens Convenience to carry along with them; for tho this leaf thus broad when it is open, yet it will fold close like a Ladies Fan, and then it is no bigger than a mans arm. [. . . ] When the Sun is vehement hot they use them to shae themselves from the

15 C.R. Boxer, “Ceylon through Puritan Eyes: Knox in the Kingdom of Candy 1660–79,” History Today 4.10 (1954): 660–67, & K.W. Goonewardene, “Robert Knox: the Interleaved Edition,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 37 (1994): 117–44. 16 Cf. David Fausett, The Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe (Cross / Cultures 18; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1994): 75–95. 17 Donald W. Ferguson, Captain Robert Knox: Contributions towards a Biography (Colombo & Croydon, 1896–97): 27. (One hundred copies printed for private circulation) [BL 10825iII] 18 Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 74.

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heat. Souldiers all carry them; for besides the benefit of keeping them dry in case it rain upon the march, these leaves make their Tents to ly under in the Night. A marvelous Mercy which Almighty God hath bestowed upon this poor and naked People in this Rainy Country! one of these I brought with me into England, and you have it described in the Figure.19

If the line between Hooke’s copy-editing and writing Knox’s text is blurred, the authority and identity of the first-person narrator asserting himself in this passage also becomes questionable. What is indisputable, however, is Knox’s emphasis throughout on practical concerns and pragmatic uses of God’s natural gifts. This clearly corresponds to the view of Ceylon established by Hook’s preface. Here, the author and representative of English science makes clear that The Historical Relation powerfully relates to England’s overseas colonial interests – even though Ceylon, of course, was a place yet outside English colonial power at the time. Still, the book is advertised as a model for precisely this kind of colonial project, producing inside knowledge for the purpose of political administration: ’Tis much to be wondred that we should to this Day want a good History of most our West-Indian Plantations. Ligon has done well for the Barbadoes, and somewhat has been done for the Summer Islands, Virginia, &c. But how far are all these short even of the Knowledge of these and other Places of the West-Indies, which may be obtain’d from divers knowing Planters now Residing in London? And how easie were it to obtain what is Defective from some Ingenious Persons now Resident upon the Places, if some way were found to gratifie them for their Performances? However till such be found, ‘tis to be hoped that the kind Acceutance [sic] only the Publick shall give to this present Work, may excite several of other Ingenuous, and knowing Men to follow this Generous Example of Captain Knox who, though he could bring away nothing almost upon his Back or in his Purse, did yet Transport the whole Kingdom of Conde Uda in his Head, and by Writing and Publishing this Knowledge, has freely given to his Country, and to you Reader in particular.20

The practical concerns Hooke is promoting with Knox’s work are captured in the rhetoric of “transport,” a term whose economy includes the whole spectrum of cultural and material engagements here at play. As an epistemic operation, “transport” stands for the wealth of inside knowledge provided by the subsequent travel text. As a linguistic operation, “transport” is a figure for the discourse of simile and comparison by which the encounter with this

19 20

An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 117. Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 73.

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strange and wondrous island, as we have seen, is mediated home. But as an economic operation, “transport” also, and quite simply, signifies the material profits indicated through the comparison with “our West-Indian Plantations”: i.e. the transport of colonial goods and trade in slaves. “Transporting” Ceylon, therefore, in one phrase combines these various meanings and so helps to translate scientific knowledge into political action. Writing and publishing the Historical Relation of Ceylon thus promises literally, and not just figuratively, to enrich England. To support this reading, we need only look at Knox’s further projects. His expertise was evidently much appreciated and earned him several career opportunities for further voyages, leading to fame and material well-being. He was, for example, directly employed by the Royal Society and sent to the East with the stated mission to transport as many other rare and curious objects to England as he could.21 More important even was his later employment by the East India Company. After the disaster of the Ann, under the command of his father, one might think they would not trust another Knox with any of their ships. But, on the contrary, the Company found in Knox Junior the man they sought to begin plantation on St Helena, in preparation of which he was first sent to Madagascar to buy slaves and other necessary goods. The Company’s instructions to him make quite clear that he was explicitly supposed to exercise his powers of surveillance in every place and to give a full account in writing of everything observed.22 As a matter of fact, this voyage turned out to be another failure, with a curious repetition-as-reversal of Knox’s own earlier fate when his crew mutinied and sailed away with the ship. The crucial point, however, is that he qualified for this whole project only on the basis of his credits from Ceylon, so that the scientific terms of his earlier travelogue were now translated into economic terms. Thus, the earlier transport of Ceylon “in his head” now led him to transport black Madagascan slaves in his ship. However, the power-strategies at work here become questionable when we consider what I called the temptations of translation. Simply put, this means that his “transport” of Ceylon has not left the carrier unaffected. A reading of the final part, Knox’s personal adventure narrative, suggests the strong anxiety of cultural influence under which the narrator and captive must have laboured to maintain his sense of personal integrity, increasingly threatened by the plight, and the promise, of local life in Kandy. Following his father’s dying words, Knox Junior barely manages to remain true to his self by fending off

21 22

Cf. Ferguson, Captain Robert Knox: Contributions Towards a Biography, 30–31. Cf. Ferguson, Captain Robert Knox, 33–35.

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the various powers that try to ‘translate’ him. Right after his father’s death, he tells us, he himself almost died from fever, surviving only because he exercised his cultural techniques as a therapy: “For my custom was after Dinner to take a Book and go into the Fields and sit under a Tree, reading and and meditating until Evening.”23 But the real remedy is provided when, by some providential blessing, he comes into the possession of an English Bible. Immediately upon opening it, he is given solace by the words of Saint Paul to the Jailor: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thine house.”24 Henceforth, this Holy Book is frequently consulted and provides the interpretative pattern for his whole experience – so much so, that his captivity in Kandy figuratively repeats the Babylonian bondage and thus only renews his covenant with God: having always a reviving hope in me, that my God had not forsaken me, but according to his gracious promise to the Jews in the X X X Chapter of Deuteronomy, and the beginning, would turn my Captivity and bring me into the Land of my Fathers.”25

This providential narrative of promise and deliverance, based on the power of the Book, is placed against the constant powers of seduction in the island paradise, which try to win him over. These powers figure in the possibility to take a local wife or, as he puts it, to “intermarry” (Figure 3 overleaf). Knox was not the only English prisoner, and most of his fellow Englishmen eventually did just this: they settled in Kandy, found themselves women or “bed-fellows,” and started families, all in the plausible attempt to make a home away from home. Not so Knox. Throughout he emphasizes how he has always resisted such temptations, be they female company or royal employment. He even offers us a moral fable about “two Lads of his Company” who fell for such favours: they first accepted the King’s preferment and then took local wives – only to be killed before long by some accident, a providential punishment for their loss of selfhood.26 Knox, by contrast, clearly abhors such cultural and physical associations and consciously avoids close contact with the natives and their king. As a good Puritan, he considers the Scriptures’ injunction against taking ‘Wives of Strangers’ and, with a few like-minded Englishmen, founds a colony of bachelors:

23 24 25 26

Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 303. Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 303. Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 333. Cf. Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 315.

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We were all single men; and we agreed very well together, and were helpful to one another. [. . . ] And with a joynt consent it was concluded amongst us, That only single Men and Batchellors should dwell there, and such as would not be conformable to this present agreement, should depart [. . . ]. I thought fit to make such a Covenant, to exclude women from coming in among us, to prevent all strife and dissention, and to make all possible Provision for the keeping up love and quietness among our selves.27

Figure 3: “The Manner of their Eating and Drinking”

27

An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 331.

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Yet it seems to me that this rhetoric of male bonding and masculine fortification against the corrupting forces of feminine seduction shows Knox’s agenda rather than his actual position: i.e. the attitude of self-exclusion may fit these English bachelors’ self-fashioning but hardly their actual practice. The first three parts of Knox’s book, for one thing, could never have been written on this basis, for they provide such a wealth of detail about every aspect of Sinhalese social life, including “their Houses, Diet, Housewifery, Salutation, Apparel” (chapter V I ) as well as “their Lodging, Bedding, Whoredom, Marriages, Children” (chapter V I I ), that they cannot possibly be based on distant observation. Here, the tension between the first three-quarters and the last part of the book returns as the tension between the discourse of an intimate insider, offering us previously hidden knowledge of the country, and the discourse of a determined outsider, offering us the tale of his trial and resistance – a tension, in short, between his role as expert and as escapee. In this uncertain wavering and wandering between the different roles, even the experience of captivity emerges as a multiple figure. Richard Hooke, in his Preface, resorted to the figure to advise all readers to read “the Book it self, and you will find your self taken Captive indeed, but used more kindly by the Author, that he himself was by the Natives.”28 Yet the Author’s anxious gestures of selfpreservation in his book suggest that he must have been more captivated by the island’s culture than he dares admit. Transporting the whole Kingdom in his head, in this sense, must have translated his self. What, then, does Robert Knox’s tale suggest about current exigencies of cultural translation? In her thought-provoking study briefly mentioned at the outset, The World Republic of Letters, the French critic Pascale Casanova looks at our contemporary globalized and transnationalized literary world in terms of the political and economic strategies that underpin it. She argues that this has long been shaped by multilingual and multicapital go-betweens, not often studied or acknowledged but crucial for its functioning: The great, often polyglot, cosmopolitan figures of the world of letters act in effect as foreign exchange brokers, responsible for exporting from one territory to another texts whose literary value they determine by virtue of this very activity.29

This figure of the exchange broker, again, combines the literary with the financial, and the textual with the economic aspect and may thus serve as an

28

An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 75. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2005): 21. 29

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apt reflection also of Knox’s role between Ceylon and England. However much he may have tried to keep to his self, and keep his English Puritan integrity intact, his text provides ample evidence, as we have seen, of how deeply he must have been involved in the cultural trafficking in and from this island, with his transport of the Kandyan kingdom, and how resolutely he has opened up a translational space for English claims to enter. In Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje says of Robert Knox that he “wrote of the island well, learning its traditions,” and adds that, apart from Knox, “few foreigners truly knew where they were.”30 But where exactly was Robert Knox? And who was he, or who did he become, when he had actually gained such knowledge? It seems to me that these are questions which arise from his attempted role-play in the valiant, but ultimately vain, attempt to keep his English self unchanged. This shows the effect and efficacy of cultural translation and complicates the notion of place or identity as stable categories, which Knox himself was trying to promote in the binary structure of his book, while also complicating common notions of transparency in language. The ambiguity that ultimately haunts his project can at once be noted in the fact that the very book he uses to fortify himself against corrupting foreign influence, the English Bible, is itself the product of a translational process, which he is trying to resist. The translation of cultures, then, may begin with binary oppositions but, I argue, eventually works to erode them, as we have seen in An Historical Relation of Ceylon, proceeding to work towards a condition of mutual translatedness. Knox and his work were much championed by the Royal Society – whereas Leibniz’s proposal for a universal algebraic language failed to find favour. One week after, the Society convened again and, as the minutes tell us, On occasion of Mons. Leibnitz’s letter, the president and Sir John Hoskyns discoursed about the universal algebra mentioned by him [...]; but did not conceive, that it could be of so great use, as Mons. Leibnitz seemed to imagine.31

To these practical-minded English gentlemen, such speculation was not of much use; instead, if we follow the logic of Hooke’s preface, they put their stakes on profits and plantations to translate everything into the currency of global markets and material exchange: to them, money seemed to be the more attractive and useful lingua generalis, a lingua œconomica by which our con-

30

Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (1982; Basingstoke: Picador, 1984): 82–83. Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, vol. 4: 65. 31

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temporary world republic of letters, too, has come to operate. For this reason, the figure and function of Robert Knox appears to be so relevant because he shows the precarious processes and acute anxieties by which our globalized world has historically come about. Prefiguring Crusoe, this Englishman and Puritan tried bravely to resist transculturation. But (to adapt Oscar Wilde on seduction) the only way to overcome temptations of translation is indeed to yield.

WORKS CITED Bassnett, Susan, & Harish Trivedi, ed. Postcolonial Translation Theory (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). Birch, Thomas. The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, 4 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1757). Boxer, C.R. “Ceylon through Puritan Eyes: Knox in the Kingdom of Candy, 1660–79,” History Today 4.10 (1954): 660–67. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2005). Eco, Umberto. Die Suche nach der vollkommenen Sprache, tr. Burkhart Kroeber (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994). Fausett, David. The Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe (Cross / Cultures 18; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1994). Ferguson, Donald W. Captain Robert Knox. Contributions towards a Biography (Colombo & Croydon, 1896–97). One hundred copies printed for private circulation [BL 10825iII]. Goonetileke, H.A.I. “Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom, 1660–1679: A Bio-Bibliographical Commentary,” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 1.2 (1975): 81–85. Goonewardene, K.W. “Robert Knox: The Interleaved Edition,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 37 (1994): 117–44. Haselstein, Ulla. “Giving Her Self: Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and the Problem of Authenticity,” in (Trans)Formations of Cultural Identity in the English-Speaking World, ed. Jochen Achilles & Carmen Birkle (Heidelberg: Winter, 1998): 125–40. Knox, Robert. An Historical Relation of Ceylon, intro. S.D. Saparamadu (1681; 1958; Dehiwala, Sri Lanka: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1981). Niranjana, Tejawini. Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: U of California P , 1992). Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family (1982; Basingstoke: Picador, 1984). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Saparamadu, S.D. “Introduction” (1981) to Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 7–56. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1993). Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London & New York: Routledge, 1995). ——. The Translation Studies Reader (London & New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2004).

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Transcribing Colonial Australia — Strategies of Translation in the Work of Rosa Campbell Praed and Daisy Bates J OANNA C OLLINS

I.

Introduction

T

H I S E S S A Y E X P L O R E S ‘ T R A N S L A T I O N ’ in the work of two Australian female writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – the novelist Rosa Campbell Praed and the anthropologist Daisy Bates. While these writers attempted to transcribe the conceptual and physical terrain of Australia in their work, their representations were always already premissed on the idea of Australia as a location of the primitive, and thereby somehow beyond the parameters of signification in English. According to Tejaswini Niranjana,

conventionally translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic, ‘out there;’ knowledge involves representation of this reality, and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.1

As such, colonial translation works to support the epistemologies of the culture whose conceptual apparatus perform the translation. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi argue that “translation has been at the heart of the colonial encounter and has been used in all kinds of ways to establish and perpetuate

1

Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford: U of California P , 1992): 2.

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the superiority of some cultures over other cultures.”2 Translation is at the heart of the colonial encounters depicted in the autobiographical writings of Rosa Campbell Praed and in the anthropology of Daisy Bates. These writers literally and metaphorically, consciously and unconsciously, deploy translation as a tool of colonial power, ultimately realizing Australia as the primordial ‘other’ to the European norm. The colonial context of these writers’ mediations of their realities determined their translational strategies, as both writers posited a cultural superiority which tautologically legitimated their colonial realities. In their thinking, Australian reality remained somehow ‘out there’, to be translated into intelligibility for Europeans. Furthermore, the received idea of Australia for Bates and Campbell Praed was one where reality represented an overwriting or disavowal of a pre-existing Aboriginal reality. This abandonment of a prior language and culture is the basis of these writers’ translations of Australia.

II . Translation in Colonial Australia Translation is never fixed, but constitutes movement, transfer, transposition. The word roots of ‘translation’, translatio in Latin and metapherein in Greek, suggest movement, dislocation, and displacement. Salman Rushdie deciphers translation as ‘bearing across’;3 Willis Barnstone also suggests the meaning ‘transportation’.4 These metaphors of translation, and the idea of translation as a metaphor,5 are particularly apt for the historical beginnings of Australia in convict transportation and immigration. On another level, this etymology of the word ‘translation’ also signifies how the culture, conceptions, and significations of the colonizer will not map unproblematically and transparently onto colonial sites. Instead, disruptions of meaning occur; Australia becomes a place whose land and peoples will not submit to laws of ‘nature’ and society as designated by the British. Following William Dampier’s account of his voyages to the Antipodes in 1688 and 1699, Australia was rendered as disorderly, a place that disrupted attempts to translate it into Western conventions. These earliest accounts of Australia imagined it as a place where natural laws became inverted. Here

2

Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi, Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 2. 3 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 17. 4 Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1993): 8. 5 Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, 16. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 278.

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duck’s bills were attached to mole’s bodies, fish jumped from rock to rock, and rivers flowed uphill. Plants taken to England after Cook’s first voyage did not fit in with Linnaeus’ botanical classifications. Such resistance on the part of Australian flora and fauna to translation into Western laws of nature earned Australia an enduring reputation for being disorderly and topsy-turvy. Paradoxically, the foundation of Australia’s status as a colony specifically depended on its amenability to Imperial law. Under that law, the land space that was named Australia (previously Terra Australis, Australia del Espíritu Santo, Zuidland, New Holland, and Van Diemen’s Land)6 translated into the context of British interest, as terra nullius, literally ‘no man’s land’, a place where indigenous peoples had no territorial possession or rights.7 Thus terra nullius signalled a conceptual emptying that resulted in the land’s being invested with notions beneficial to its colonization. It also enabled the categorization of Australia as a settlement, rather than a conquest, labels which concealed the reality of colonial appropriations. Such a history fits with the idea of Australia as a reality ‘out there’. Between the 1830s and the 1850s, however, economic imperatives to tap its under-used resources compelled a new translation of Australia as edenic paradise. While this promoted emigration, the Westerner became predominantly conscious of Australia as contradictory – lawless, but potentially prosperous; full of natural oddities, yet arcadian. Neither attempt to translate Australia was sufficiently real to enable the colonizers to make sense of the landscape and climate they encountered. Indeed, Australia so fundamentally challenged the epistemological boundaries of Western conceptions of ‘nature’ that its ‘otherness’ became problematic for the colonial project. Australian nature seemed so weird and alienating that it bordered on the supernatural. Peter Morey argues: “If British rule is ‘natural’ anything supernatural which contravenes or transcends nature, consequently calls into question the power and permanence of rule.”8 Thus Australia’s apparent refusal to conform to British epistemologies ensured that it became that which was unknown, something threatening and other to the colonizer or explorer. Australia was a territory whose oddity and apparent untranslatability not only revealed the limits of colonial rationality, but in so doing facilitated a mediation of the environment as supernatural, as unhomely, uncanny. As such, Australia was not a trans6

Richard White, Inventing Australia, Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney, London & Boston M A : George Allen & Unwin, 1981): 2. 7 Alex Castles, An Australian Legal History (Sydney & Melbourne: Law Books, 1982): 20. 8 Peter Morey, Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 28.

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parent reality ‘out there’; rather, it bordered on the untranslatable, approximating Freud’s classification of the uncanny as a product of ‘intellectual uncertainty’, that sense of being where ‘one does not know where one is’.9 The attempted act of translation via Western paradigms of landscape and natural laws had thus rendered Australia as ‘unhomely’ (unheimlich). It became that which was simultaneously familiar and strange, known and unknown. As such, this reality as mediated for many immigrant Australians was dislocating, phantasmatic, ‘unreal’.

III . Rosa Campbell Praed: Writing the Otherness of Australia Born ‘Rosa Murray Prior’ in 1851, Rosa Campbell Praed was the daughter of Anglo-Irish immigrants. She spent her childhood in Queensland, witnessing the northward ‘expansion’ of the frontier of settlement. For her, ‘girlhood’ was intimately associated with Australia, and effectively ended with her marriage and subsequent move to England in 1876. She notes in a draft manuscript for her 1902 autobiography: “[as] the schooner set sail […] the mainland growing more distant, and the island shores fading at last into mist as they receded, the Australian girlhood ended.”10 Upon reaching England, she embarked on a literary career and accordingly began socializing with the London literari, associatng with the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Bret Harte, and Henry Irving. Her fiction, while celebrated in England, was often ambivalently received in Australia,11 though she was still counted as a notable presence within the Australian literary canon.12 Rosa Campbell Praed died in England in 1935, by which time she had written fifty books. Her two autobiographical works Australian Life, Black and White (1885) and My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life, (1902), both written in London, represent her attempt to translate Australia for a metropolitan audience. By considering Campbell Praed’s writings as translations, there is an implicit disruption of received notions that translation, as Walter Benjamin sug-

9 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny,” Collected Papers, vol. 4, ed. Ernest Jones, tr. Joan Riviere (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919; London: Hogarth Press, 1948): 370. 10 Rosa Campbell Praed, “An Australian Girlhood” (draft of autobiography; Manuscripts of Murray Prior Family, Canberra: National Library of Australia): 265. 11 Patricia Clarke, Rosa! Rosa! The Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1999): 2. 12 Peter Pierce, “The Critical Reception, 1891–1945,” in A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, ed. Martyn Lyons & John Arnold (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2000): 360.

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gests, “ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages.”13 Rather, her writings can be thought of as representing that looser sense of translation as theorized by Willis Barnstone: writing is translation and translation is writing. The essence of the activity of writing is that at every millisecond of the writing processes the writer is simultaneously interpreting, transforming, encoding and translating data into meaningful letters and words.14

The sense of translation I am deploying to decipher Campbell Praed’s work is translation as a failure of transposed Western conceptions of landscape to describe Australia, along with Campbell Praed’s subsequent employment of adaptive strategies. Her communication of the landscape is also a form of acclimatization and, in this sense, a translation. Translation was an important strategy in the colonization of Australia, as processes of naming and categorization which enabled ideological appropriations of space.15 However, according to Paul Carter, the earliest Australian explorers met with difficulties in translating the landscape by using the English language. While the naming process formed an integral part of mapping the new territories, explorers discovered that preconceived nomenclature was problematic; class names such as ‘mountain’, ‘swamp’, and ‘grass’ did not adequately classify the terrains they encountered.16 Campbell Praed’s autobiographical writing similarly suggests that her own interpretative paradigms of scenery are insufficient to make the Australian topography knowable. Campbell Praed describes the location of her childhood as the “unsettled North,”17 a phrase that not only evokes the sense of an ideological terrain to be colonized, but that wilfully elides the presence of the Aborigine inhabitants of Queensland. Her frame of reference for describing the landscape is Western – a product in part, perhaps, of her reading of English novels – where 13

Walter Benjamin, in “The Task of the Translator” (1923), quoted in Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, 8. 14 Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, 8. 15 Here naming should not be understood as entirely commensurate with translation, rather, it is possible to consider naming as a ‘translational strategy’, an imaginative appropriation of space which shaped it through colonial preconceptions. It is also possible to think of naming in relation to settlers’ attempts to posit belonging and stave of dislocation within the new terrain. Unfortunately, it is not within the remit of this essay to extend the discussion to consider how settlers sought to recreate lost homelands. 16 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber & Faber, 1987): 47. 17 Campbell Praed, Australian Life, Black and White (London: Chapman & Hall, 1885): 4.

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Australia is not the norm, but the ‘primeval’, the ‘desolate’, the ‘strange’.18 Her autobiographical writing, in being enacted from London, seems to be a belated attempt to acclimatize English to the unfamiliar landscape, to effectively make the unfamiliar knowable, to designate the ‘reality out there’. However, for Campbell Praed the representation of the Australian bush is difficult. In her 1902 autobiography she writes: Words fail for painting the loneliness of the Australian bush. Mile after mile of primeval forest; interminable vistas of melancholy gum trees, ravines […]. All wild and utterly desolate, all the same monotonous grey colour, except where the wattle, when in blossom, shows patches of feather gold or a belt of scrub lies green, glossy, impenetrable. I knew nothing so strange in its way as to travel for days through endless gum forest. Surely there was never a tree so weird as a […] gum, with its twisted trunk […] and the queer protruberances upon its limbs [… with] red gum [… dropping] like congealed blood.19

Campbell Praed’s description renders the land as “weird,” unhomely, spooky. The guiding principles for her translation of this landscape are European, and by those standards Australia appears as strange, unfamiliar, and grotesque. Translation, for Campbell Praed cannot capture the dislocation of the European in the bush. As a translational framework, English words ultimately fail to render her idea of the ‘reality out there’. Australia appears to defy translation (within European paradigms) due to the seemingly grotesque amalgamation of human and natural, animate and inanimate. The twisted gum trees Campbell Praed depicts seem to be almost mutilatedly human, in their bloodied, twisted state. However, the indescribable loneliness of the Western traveller does not only lie in the ‘monotony’, ‘impenetrability’, and emptiness of the landscape, but also in its apparent over-population with animals. In another extract, she writes: The solitude [of the bush] seems intensified by the strange sounds of reptiles, birds and insects, and by the absence of larger creatures; of which, in the day time, the only audible signs are the stampede of a herd of kangaroo, or the rustle of a wallaby or dingo stirring the grass as it creeps to its lair. But there are the whirring of locusts, the demonic chuckle of the laughing jackass, the screech of the cockatoos

18 According to the draft of the second version of her autobiograpphy, Charles Dickens was a favourite of Campbell Praed (as with Bates), as was Charlotte Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward Bulwer–Lytton and Walter Scott (Murray Prior Manuscripts, National Library of Australia). 19 Campbell Praed. My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life (London: Fisher & Unwin, 1902): 2

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and parrots, the hissing of the frilled lizard, and the buzz of innumerable insects hidden under the dense undergrowth. And then at night the melancholy wailing of the curlews, the dismal howling of dingoes, the discordant croaking of tree-frogs, might well shake the nerves of the solitary watcher.20

Ironically, the sense of loneliness is here intensified by an overwhelming clamour which draws attention to the fact that the traveller is not alone. The sheer variety and specificity of the sounds demonstrate tangible presences. These presences are unseen or concealed, either by night or by dense undergrowth, but can be recognized by stirrings, hissings, and stampedes. But if these noises emanate from invisible entities, how is it possible for Campbell Praed to know their source? Instead, they appear to be signifiers without corresponding signifieds, despite Campbell Praed’s attempts to authoritatively translate the scene for the reader by amalgamating sounds with concepts. However, there is slippage, as the objects of her translation are too well camouflaged, showing Australia, as a notion of ‘reality out there’, to be unamenable to transparency for the translating colonizer. Elsewhere, in her 1891 short story “The Bunyip,” Campbell Praed describes the lagoon setting as “a dreary, uncanny place […] full of ghostly noises, stifled hissings, and unexpected gurglings and rustlings, and husky croaks, and stealthy glidings and swishings.”21 In her unpublished novel “A Bush Philosopher,” the “mournful lingering howls of the dingoes” and the “doleful cry of the curlew” are described as an “uncanny row” that would “drive a man to melancholy.”22 Unfamiliar sounds are uncanny because they once again expose the insufficiency of Western concepts of nature to decode the environment. Australia is a site for Campbell Praed’s mediations about uncanniness nearly thirty years before Freud begins to theorize what he designates as “the uncanny influences of silence, darkness and solitude.”23 There is a silence of Australia in the inability of Western conceptions to put it into words, despite the plethora of noises it presents to the colonizer. In Campbell Praed’s work, linguistic colonization of Australia appears to fail, as no English corollary exists to accurately designate bush sounds. However, Campbell 20

Campbell Praed, Australian Life, Black and White, 7–8. Campbell Praed, “The Bunyip,” in Australian Ghost Stories, ed. Ken Gelder (Melbourne, Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1994): 107. 22 Campbell Praed, “The Bush Philosopher” (unpublished novel, Murray Prior Manuscripts; Canberra: National Library of Australia): 15. 23 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 400–401. One might also suggest that Campbell Praed’s view of Australia as uncanny betrays her sense of homelessness. Unfortunately, space does not permit an elaboration of this theme. 21

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Praed resorts to coining onomatopoeia and neologisms in order to translate these unknown sounds. In her 1893 novel Outlaw and Lawmaker, she describes “the strange pouring-water sound of the swamp pheasant, the little sweet guggle, like water trickling” and the “uncanny ‘gr-rr-s’ and swishes of wings [of…] the waterfowl.”24 Her 1902 autobiography describes the mournful wailing of curlews, the “kr-rsh-kr-rsh” noise of treading through a swamp, and “the gurgling ‘gr-rr’ of a possum up a gum tree, the rustling of rushes making a silky ‘tr-rrse,’ the crack of dead reeds.”25 Here, translation becomes a process of invention, a challenge to conventional expectations that translation inevitably implies loss. Despite this, the overwhelming outcomes of Campbell Praed’s translations were silencings, representing deficient transpositions of Western discourse to the Australian terrain. For Campbell Praed, this marked ‘a failure to paint in words’. The enactment of her translation from within paradigms of Western discourse ensured that excessive and inexplicable noise could only be rendered as a mute clamour, an effective silencing of what was, for the colonizer, an untranslatable reality. Essentially, this failure was an outcome of Campbell Praed’s tacit philosophical belief that the ‘reality’ of Australia was transparent and amenable to unproblematic representation.

IV . Daisy Bates: Translation by Ethnography Daisy Bates’ published work suggests that she also saw Australian reality as ‘out there’ and directly accessible through the objective discourse of anthropology. However, the strategy of representing the Aborigine as ‘primitive’, in positing a gap between colonizer and colonized, also acted as a barrier to translation. Daisy Bates, in her capacity as emissary for the London Society for the Protection of Aborigines, sought to bridge this gap through the accumulation of anthropological accounts of Aboriginal myths and customs. She also attempted to compile a dictionary of the various Aboriginal languages she encountered in Western and South Australia.26 Bates, by her own

24

Campbell Praed, Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893; London, Sydney & New York: Pandora, 1988): 117. 25 Campbell Praed, My Australian Girlhood, 46. 26 Bates was initially employed by the government to collect examples of Aboriginal languages. It was her responsibility to facilitate the compilation of dialects from specific locales by sending four-sided foolscap sheets of vocabulary to local respondents to transcribe the language. She commented to Rev. John Matthews that these results were effectively “waste paper,” as the locals would indiscriminately select any Aborigine to help them complete the form, regardless of that person’s tribal affiliation (13 January 1909). Bates,

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account originally from Tipperary in Ireland,27 migrated to Australia in 189928 to become a permanent resident. Her emigration was prompted by an offer of sponsorship by The Times to investigate the condition of Aborigines. This undertaking resulted in her living intermittently with Aborigines in the bush from 1901 as their ‘protector’, semi-supported by government funding,29 and then later on a permanent basis, scraping together supplies by using money earned from writing journal articles. Bates’ chief concern was with what she termed “The Passing of The Aborigines” – also the title of her only published account of her bush-life (from 1938).30 Yet such an ostensible humanitarian motivation needs to be questioned. As unofficial protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in 1909, Bates was involved in monitoring half-castes, and thereby implicated in assimilation policies.31 Her official equivalent in South Australia was less than compassionate towards the Aborigines. The Protector commented:

during and after her government employment, also made investigations in person, and entered copious observations of language and customs in her notebooks. Despite her efforts, this material remains unpublished (Daisy Bates, Manuscripts, Canberra: National Library of Australia). 27 Bates was either of middle-class Protestant or pooor Catholic extraction (depending on whether the critic is Julia Blackburn or Elizabeth Salter, respectively), See Julia Blackburn, Daisy Bates in the Desert (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994) and Elizabeth Salter, Daisy Bates (London, Sydney & Melbourne: Angus & Robertson, 1983). The Bates’ Manuscripts contain a letter by Father Leon O’Bróin, who investigated records to establish Bates’ birthplace and connections to Tipperary. He wrote to Father Thomas Leen that no “positive information concerning Mrs. Bates” could be found (20 December 1966). 28 Salter argues: “According to Daisy Bates’ own account of her early life she came to Australia in 1884 or even as late as 1885. […] According to the surviving fragments of evidence […] Daisy May O’ Dwyer arrived in Australia in 1883. […] She arrived in Townsville with nothing, no money, no contacts […] and yet somehow she did manage to jump from one stepping stone to another, inventing herself as she went along.” Salter, Daisy Bates, 28. 29 Bates never achieved the coveted appointment of Protector of Aborigines, which she desperately longed for, but chose to remain living among the Aborigines anyway. Here Bates was outside the official government support and sponsorship, and ignored in institutional academic circles (Salter, Daisy Bates, 189, 194). She was however, officially a government employee between 1904 and 1912, sending Registrar-General Malcolm Fraser details of aboriginal vocabulary and customs (Bates, Manuscripts). 30 The book was published when Bates was well into her seventies. According to Salter, Bates “chose” 1939 as the date of her eightieth birthday, and was “semi blind and looking very frail.” Bates’ anthropological findings have been recently published by Isobel White in The Native Tribes of Western Australia (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1985). 31 The Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia and Southern Australian (in Acts of 1905 and 1911 respectively) was also the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and

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The white blood being the stronger must in the end prevail […] from this it is evident that the ultimate end of the Australian aboriginal is to be merged with the modern population, consequently the sooner they are physically and morally improved, the better for the white race.32

Here the gap between the Aborigines and the settlers becomes apparent, and consolidates the settler’s superiority. If the Aborigines cannot translate their lives into ways of living which accord with those of the colonizer, they die out. This, however, was what provided justification and was even necessary for her anthropological project of mapping Aboriginal cultures. According to Niranjana, “ethnography always conceived of its project as one of translation.”33 As such, ethnography and its predecessor, anthropology, are linked to movement and displacement. Not only is anthropological writing engendered by dislocation (i.e. Bates’ displacement from settler society), it also represents a dislocation of the ethnographic subject, who, according to Niranjana, is removed from history and placed within nature.34 Anthropology thus translates observer and observed in conscious and unconscious ways. However, anthropology also derived from unequal power-relations, and was, as Nicholas Thomas explains, “deeply implicated in the practical work of colonialism.”35 While far from being a unified or uncontested discipline,36 anthropology, Homi K. Bhabha contends, provided “knowledges of coloniser

half-caste child under sixteen (Kaye Healey, The Stolen Generation [Issues in Society 91; Australia: Spinney Press, 1998]: 14). One of Bates’ responsibilities was to inform on halfcaste children who could then be removed at will. The publication of The Passing of Aborigines in 1938 came one year after the First Commonwealth-State conference adopted the nation-wide government policy of assimilating Indigenous peoples into the white population 32 Irene Watson, “Nungas in the Nineties: The Impact of Colonialism in Australia,” in Majah: Indigenous Peoples and the Law, ed. Greta Bird, Gary Martin & Jennifer Nielsen (Sydney: Federation Press, 1996): 4. 33 Niranjana, Siting Translation, 68. 34 Siting Translation, 83. 35 Nicholas Thomas argues: “Anthropology[‘s...] interest in the characterization of other’s natures and other’s cultures […] has also been articulated with evolutionary hierarchization, and has implicated anthropology deeply in the practical work of colonialism: if ethnology was in fact often of little practical value for administration, it can be understood at least to reinforce an imperial sense of epistemic superiority.” Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge: Polity, 1994): 6–7. 36 Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (Toronto: U of Toronto P & London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971): 7.

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and colonised which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated.”37 This suggests that any translations were always already contained within Western paradigms. As Niranjana argues, “The language of ‘observing’ and ‘recording’ presupposes a concept of reality as something ‘out there’ that is re-presented by the anthropologist.”38 The premise of anthropological translations producing coherent and transparent outcomes also enabled the creation of a legible colonial subject. For Bates, anthropology possessed a privileged truth-status. She saw herself as an objective observer recording indigenous culture, and thereby translating the ‘primitive’ into modern understanding. However, the objectivity of her work was obfuscated by ‘her story’. Bates’ The Passing of the Aborigines, as idiosyncratic ‘anthropology’, is a subjective account which never permits intersubjectivity, despite her claims to ‘think black’. The study never pauses to deconstruct native customs or analyze language, or to consider the complexities of the lives of the Aborigines. Hers is a translation always already closed off from the possibility of understanding Aborigines. She claims, “I learned […] never to intrude my own intelligence upon him,” suggesting that after a lifetime of blending into to the environment she is able to understand the native’s mind.39 However, this idealistic scenario elides the cultural differences identified in her account, wherein she suggests that the Aborigines are “so savage and so simple” that “native intelligence [is] five thousand years behind” that of ‘the white man’.40 If this is the case, then how can Bates attempt to effectively translate the Aborigine into intelligibility? Bates saw no contradiction in her representation of the Aborigines, as, for her, anthropological discourse provided a means to simultaneously integrate with the indigenes and posit her difference from them. However, while anthropology enabled her to translate Aboriginal lore for a Western audience, such lore was nevertheless erased by being framed within Western discourse. As she reports, “at last, with the utmost simplicity and frankness the old men 37 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 70. Talal Asad writes: “we have been reminded time and again by anthropologists of the

ideas and ideals […] in which the intellectual inspiration of anthropology is supposed to lie. But anthropology is also rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and the third world which goes back to the emergence of bourgeois European, an encounter in which colonialism is merely a historical moment.” Asad, “Introduction” to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Asad (London: Ithaca, 1974): 16. 38 Niranjana, Siting Translation, 71. 39 Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia (1938; London: Panther, 1972): 124. 40 Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, 225.

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disclosed to me little by little their most secret rites and initiations […] just as they disclosed the mythology and allegories of the mind of the primeval black man.”41 Here Bates positions herself as a ‘superior’ (and complex civilized other) to the ‘primeval’ black man. Such a polarization precludes the completeness of the ‘disclosure’ she is attempting to capture. The truth-status of anthropology reconfirms apparent Western certainties, ensuring the incompletion of such translations, which are never fully open to the otherness encountered. For Bates, the Aborigines represented “the […] last remnant of Palaeolithic man.”42 This ‘primitive’ complement to settler civilization is what is always reconfirmed in her account. However, Bates, in seeing the Aborigine as ‘primitive’, makes for herself an impediment to translation which ensures that the indigenous peoples are “not so much deliberately secretive as inarticulate.”43 Bates appears to suggest that in order to understand the Aborigine a translation of the ethnologist is necessary. She writes: to glean anything of value, I must think with his mentality and talk in his language. I pretended that my native name was Kallower, and that I was a […] magic woman who had been one of the twenty-two wives of Leeberr, a patriarchal or ‘dreamtime’ father.44

This identity enabled Bates to be privy to Aboriginal mythology, customs, and ceremonies. However, ‘Kallower’ was not a translation of ‘Bates’ but merely a façade. This was a mimicking of an idea of the other, whereby Bates assumed a Dreamtime persona for the Aborigines. Her impersonation of the other occurs simultaneously with her maintenance of colonial integrity. This she achieved by maintaining austere attire, where she daily donned the uniform of an Edwardian lady during her time in the bush. This elegant outfit, created for Bates by a Parisian tailor in Perth in 1900, apparently endured, unscathed, for thirty-five years.45 Bates’ “leather bound skirt, that was over three yards wide at the hem,” “shoes with decent heels,” and a stiff “opaque blouse, collar and tie,”46 enabled her to convey an image of “scrupulous neat-

41

Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, 47. The Passing of the Aborigines, 43. 43 The Passing of the Aborigines, 44. 44 The Passing of the Aborigines, 45. 45 She describes herself as “in my sober Edwardian coat and skirt, a sailor hat with fly veil and neat high-heeled shoes.” Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, 145. The legend of the indestructible outfit was disseminated by Australian Woman’s Weekly (undated [1939?], Bates Manuscripts). 46 Bates, quoted in Salter, Daisy Bates, 75. 42

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ness” and (colonial) discipline. Her appearance nevertheless caused “unsophisticated” mirth among Aboriginal women.47 If Bates had in fact translated her consciousness to what she describes in her autobiography as “thinking with my ‘black man’s mind’,” could she still have sustained this camouflage of civilization? Ultimately, Bates’ self-positioning within definitive colonial ideas occluded the self-translation necessary for her to understand the Aborigines.48 Her conclusion that the native mind is a “riddle”49 suggests that, for her, Aborigines may have been beyond translation. Indeed, despite spending, in her words, “a life time” with Aborigines, their own stories are a conspicuously marginalized part of her work. Her study includes one specific instance where Bates translates English into Aboriginal dialect for the reader. She transmutes the children’s rhyme ‘Here we go round the Mulberry Bush’ into Aboriginal language (although she neglects to specify the dialect). Ngannana boggada yangula nyinninyi, Boggada boggada yangula nyinninyi, Ngannana boggada yangula nyinninyi, Ungundha nyeenga aaru.50

The resultant verse is presented without gloss, and the reader is ignorant about how Bates formed the Aboriginal dialect into a conceptual or linguistic equivalent of English. Nonie Sharp suggests that Aboriginal languages are not simply an equivalence of words, but are instead layered with metaphoric significations, often carrying several different, non-exclusive meanings.51 In Bates’ account, the language is reproduced as simply words, devoid of contextual meaning or indeed any acknowledgement that English does not provide conceptual corollaries for Aboriginal dialects. (Here Bates’ published account diverges from her notebooks, in which she observes the specificities 47

Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, 40. Bates writes of her painfully precise “toilet”: “every motion of mine, as I laced my corsets and eased my shoes on with a shoe horn, bushed my hair and adjusted my high collar and waist belt, was greeted with long-drawn squeals of laughter and mirrored in action.” 48 The rigidity of this persona as described in her book is somewhat countered by her earlier notebooks which suggest more of an affinity with the Aborigines. However her accounts are overall contradictory and the extent to which she felt she had a connection with the Aborigines is indeterminable. 49 Bates, The Passing of the Aborigine, 124. 50 The Passing of the Aborigines, 222. 51 Nonie Sharp, No Ordinary Judgement: Mabo; The Murray Islanders’ Land Case (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1996): 9.

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of different Aboriginal languages. Due to financial and time constraints The Passing of the Aborigines was a more truncated account than Bates had hoped for, an account which effectively homogenized the indigenous peoples). Bates’ project was one of commemoration and ghosting of the Aborigines. She records “I realised that they were passing from us. I must make their passing easier.”52 While she apparently vehemently objects to the erasure of Aboriginal life, she also appears to accept it as inevitable. Here she is able to establish her translation as irreproachable, as its subjects are in a moribund state. The dualism of civilized (herself) and primitive ensures disconnection and secrecy. As such, the colonial project of knowledge, through its own enactment, keeps its object ‘othered’ and beyond its reach. This object of knowledge can thus be infinitely pursued, but never with complete success. Bates herself records: “Some of the straying threads of my ethnological study are still in mid-air. I shall perhaps never find their source.”53 While Bates is unsuccessful in conveying the impression that she has been translated into thinking with “‘a black man’s mind’,” she is translated in other ways. Bates’ life among the Aborigines, she believed, transformed her physically. She records: the rippling inflexions and the difficult double vowels of their language – a series of vocal gymnastics quite impossible to the average white linguist […] in all my years of juggling with them, have altered the formation of my larynx.54

Translation, whilst occluded in some senses, also occurs in unexpected ways. While her work The Passing of the Aborigines moderates Bates’ transformation for the reader, her papers reveal a different story, a story of translation. Bates reveals to William Hurst: It is curious, but there is another ‘me’ that seems closer to stars and moon and trees and wind than the ‘ego’ of the long trying days. […] That other ‘me’ will hear the voices of [long dead] native dwellers in these flats.55

However, within the context of Bates’ work such a translation is ambivalent. Her manuscripts show that, while she felt an affinity with the Aborigines, she

52

Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, 133. The Passing of the Aborigines, 124. 54 The Passing of the Aborigines, 46. 55 Letter of 18 June 1920, letters to William Peter , in Bates, Manuscripts. According to Salter, Bates writes in her diary: “I am two people, one I like and the other I do not know.” Salter, Daisy Bates, 185. 53

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also recorded contrary sentiments which suggested that for her the Aborigines were a remote other. Her Suggestions for the Treatment of Aborigines and Half-Castes (1934) declares: “All natives are unstable and unreliable from their very nature,” adding: “the aborigines need a benevolent autocratic discipline.”56 Ultimately (publicly), Bates translated the Aborigines to fit into a contemporary rhetoric which saw indigenous peoples as facing extinction, requiring policing, and benefiting from assimilation.

V.

Terra nullius and Colonial Failures of Translation

These different projects of translating Australia can be aligned, as both are implicit projects of colonization. While Campbell Praed seeks to make the Australian landscape legible, her idea that Australia is a reality ‘out there’ ensures that she fails to locate suitable translations into English, a failure which results in her characterization of Australia as illegible. By all accounts, Campbell Praed avoided involvement with indigenous peoples. By contrast, Bates’ translation of Australia in The Passing of the Aborigines ultimately involved a polarization between the Aborigines as primitive and white settlers who were coded as ‘civilized’, a binary that built strategic failure into her project of translation. As Bhabha maintains, “The emergence of the colonial is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself.”57 The same is true of Campbell Praed’s description of the colonial terrain. The translation of Australia is thus a project that is already its own failure, because its representation in the case of both writers is based on a belief that Australia is a ‘reality’ beyond, ‘out there’ and outside its mediation in language. This ensures that the indigenous inhabitants were always already ‘other’, necessarily overwritten and beyond total linguistic and conceptual recuperation. An instance of this is the word ‘Aborigine’. The designation ‘Aborigine’ had no significance to the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, prior to the colonizers’ use of the term to describe them. As a colonial translation, it constitutes a strategic failure. It homogenizes the diversity of the indigenous peoples and represents an over-writing of Aboriginal languages.58 ‘Aborigine’ 56

Bates, “Suggestions for the treatment of Aborigines and Half-Castes” (1934), article in Hurst Papers (Bates, Manuscripts): 26, 29. 57 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 58 Bates was celebrated for her ability to speak 188 Aboriginal dialects (Manuscripts: Australian Women’s Weekly, undated) and devoted much of her life to observing different tribal languages (Manuscripts: Letters to Rev. John Matthew). This does not, however, offset the homogenizing effect of the representation of Aborigines in her published work.

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is a word which is “evidence of a failure to name and [thereby] linked to the politico-legal doctrine of terra nullius.”59 Here the word, as a vacuous signifier, reproduces the edict of the founding legal doctrine of colonization, whereby the land became ‘emptied’ and thus amenable to investment by colonial concepts. The translational term ‘Aborigine’ does, however, signify the history of government and missionary suppression of indigenous dialects and practices: “Kooris [indigenous peoples] were forced to use the language of the invaders, with its racist terminology, to constitute their subjectivity.”60 Australia was emptied of its indigenous languages in order to make the project of colonization effectual. Terra nullius is not only a legal doctrine, but also a paradigm of colonization by translation. This idea enabled the physical and intellectual colonization of Australia, by erasing indigenous significations and creating the notion of Australia as bare, blank, and appropriable. However, this translational strategy, in creating a blank otherness, also created problems, where transposition of Western concepts and linguistic markers proved inadequate to designate what was believed to be a pre-existing reality that was both arcadian and also disorderly and wild. Here Australia became a location of the indeterminable, at the interstices between what was expected and what was encountered. As such, Australia’s translation in the work of Bates and Campbell Praed was never a straightforward, transparent portrayal, because even if reality was ‘out there’ and amenable to conceptualization, it was always already ‘other’. The reluctance of these writers to recognize the possibility of alternative forms of authority and reality in Aboriginal philosophies contributed to their realization of Australia as a reality that could only ever be ‘beyond’. As such, translation became a site of contradiction, confusion, and disorientation, whereby terra nullius stood for what had to remain untranslatable, without definitive status, in order justify the land’s appropriation by the colonial project. The information was collected under the impetus of cataloguing a ‘dying race’. As such, The Passing of the Aborigines ultimately affirms a monolithic character for the Aborigines, because the work suggests that indigenous peoples inevitably die as a result of contact with colonial civilization. 59 Greta Bird, “Koori Cultural Heritage: Reclaiming the Past?” in Majah: Indigenous Peoples and the Law, ed. Greta Bird, Gary Martin & Jennifer Nielsen (Sydney: The Federation Press, 1996): 107. 60 Bird argues: “Koori language was attacked in a number of ways. The complex Australian languages were to be replaced by elementary training in English, to the third or fourth year of primary school, just enough to allow the Kooris to understand commands given by white employers” (“Koori Cultural Heritage: Reclaiming the Past?” 107).

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WORKS CITED Asad, Talal. “Introduction” to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (1973; London: Ithaca, 1974) : 9–20. Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Translation (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1993). Bassnett, Susan, & Harish Trivedi. Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London & New York: Routledge, 1999). Bates, Daisy. Manuscripts (Canberra: National Library of Australia). ——. The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia (1938. London: Panther, 1972). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Bird, Greta. “Koori Cultural Heritage: Reclaiming the Past?” in Majah: Indigenous Peoples and the Law, eds. Greta Bird, Gary Martin & Jennifer Nielsen (Sydney: Federation Press, 1996): 100–28. Blackburn, Julia. Daisy Bates in the Desert (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994). Bolt, Christine. Victorian Attitudes to Race (Toronto: U of Toronto P & London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber & Faber, 1987). Castles, Alex. An Australian Legal History (Sydney & Melbourne: Law Books, 1982). Clarke, Patricia. Rosa! Rosa! The Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1999). Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” Collected Papers, ed. Ernest Jones, tr. Joan Riviere (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919; London: Hogarth Press, 1948), vol. 4: 368–407. Healey, Kaye. The Stolen Generation (Issues in Society 91; Thirroul, N S W : Spinney Press, 1998) : 1–40. Morey, Peter. Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000). Murray Prior Manuscripts (Canberra: National Library of Australia). Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford: U of California P , 1992). Pierce, Peter. “The Critical Reception, 1891–1945,” in A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, ed. Martyn Lyons & John Arnold (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2000): 359–72. Praed, Rosa Campbell. Australian Life, Black and White (London: Chapman & Hall, 1885). ——. “The Bunyip,” in Australian Ghost Stories, ed. Ken Gelder (Melbourne, Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1994) : 102–9. ——. My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life (London: Fisher & Unwin, 1902). ——. Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893; London, Sydney & New York: Pandora, 1988). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991). Salter, Elizabeth. Daisy Bates (London, Sydney & Melbourne: Angus & Robertson, 1983). Sharp, Nonie. No Ordinary Judgement: Mabo; The Murray Islanders’ Land Case (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1996). Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). Watson, Irene. “Nunga in the nineties: The impact of colonialism in Australia,” in Majah: Indigenous Peoples and the Law, ed. Greta Bird, Gary Martin & Jennifer Nielsen (Sydney: Federation Press, 1996): 1–12.

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White, Isobel, ed. The Native Tribes of Western Australia (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1985). White, Richard. Inventing Australia, Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney, London & Boston M A : George Allen & Unwin, 1981).

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T RANSLATION OF THE T RANSCULTURAL S ELF

Swarming With Ghosts and Tūrehus — Indigenous Language and Concepts in Contemporary Māori Writing M ICHAELA M OURA –K OÇOĞLU

‘Don’t get wet, don’t get cold,’ Kui Hinemate called back, not in English. ‘They’ll hear you, Kui. You’re not allowed.’ ‘Maybe that’s right for you, Daughter, but this old woman speaks her very own language wherever she is, wherever she goes. Otherwise who is she?1

W

A Māori grandmother talking to her mokopuna (grandchild) in her mother tongue in front of a Pakeha school ground,2 employing her native language as a determined marker of self-identity. Indisputably, indigenous language represents an essential aspect in the kaleidoscope of Maori identity. In view of the fact, however, that about 90 percent of the Polynesian minority live in urban surroundings and most do not grow up speaking te reo actively, fluency in Maori

1

HO IS SHE, THEN?

Patricia Grace, Cousins (1992). Te reo Maori had been prohibited on school grounds in Aotearoa New Zelaand until the early twentieth century, as Ranganui Walker indicates: “The instruction [to speak only English] was translated into a general prohibition of the Maori language within school precincts [. . . ] in some instance enforced by corporal punishment”; Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matu: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990): 147; see also Mason H. Durie, Te Mana Te Kawanatanga: The Politics of Maori Self-Determination (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1998): 60. 2

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fails to represent the one hallmark for identification.3 Obviously, the exact parameters of what constitutes a Maori identity cannot be easily defined, especially when speaking from a non-Maori perspective. Joan Metge, for instance, postulates that the claim to be Māori can only be based on self-identification, encompassing ancestry, language, and cultural articulations such as symbols and traditions: [Maori] specify descent from a Māori parent or ancestor as the basic requirement and, provided that is fulfilled, accept as Māori those who identify themselves as Māori.4

This view represents a contested stance, particularly from the side of the cultural ‘Other’. One example to elucidate the controversial perspectives is the question of the Aotearoa-New Zealand5 author Keri Hulme. Her claims to Māori identity6 have been rejected by the Pākehā author and critic C.K. Stead, since she is ‘only’ one-eighth Māori and did not have a traditional upbringing. To give the antiquated notion of blood precedence as the defining parameter for personal or national identities is not a convincing stance:7 Today’s global3

Particularly owing to rapid urbanization, the proportion of Māori who were fluent Māori speakers declined markedly over the past century, plummeting to 18 percent in a 1973 census. Only in 1987 did Māori receive the status of official language in Aotearoa New Zealand. Since then, the number has been slowly rising, reaching 25 percent in 2001. See New Zealand Social Report 2004 – te pūrongo oranga tangata 2004, Ministry of Social Development (Wellington, 2004): 90. 4 Joan Metge, New Growth From Old: The Whānau in the Modern World (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1995): 18. 5 In the present essay, the denomination ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’ has consistently been employed to underpin the import and contribution of indigenous tradition to the diverse cultural ramifications that shape the antipodean sslands. The slash that is often inserted between ‘Aotearoa’ and ‘New Zealand’ conjures up a bifurcation of traditions which should form a transcultural whole, and for that reason has deliberately been omitted here. 6 Hulme defines herself as follows: “My tribe is Kāi Tahu, my canoe is Takitimu, but I am also intimately connected with the canoe Te Araiteuru.” See Keri Hulme, “Myth, Omen, Ghost and Dream,” in Te Ao Mārama. Regaining Aotearoa: Māori Writers Speak Out, vol. 2, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Reed, 1993): 29. 7 Indigenous people increasingly advocate self-identification, which Joan Metge puts as follows: “[Māori] specify descent from a Māori parent or ancestor as the basic requirement and, provided that is fulfilled, accept as Māori those who identify themselves as Māori” (Metge, New Growth From Old, 18). Supporting the tenet of indigenous self-identification are prominent Māori authors editing an anthology of contemporary Māori writing, including Witi Ihimaera, D.S. Long, Irihapeti Ramsden, & Haare Williams: They incorporated and identified a text as Māori as long as the writer has Māori ancestry. See Te Ao Mārama. Contemporary Māori Writing, vol. 1: The Whakahuatanga O Te Ao: Reflections of Reality, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Reed, 1994).

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ized world is characterized by the movement and settlement of people with manifold cultural backgrounds, and accordingly by societies that are marked by the coexistence and blending of many diverse cultures. As we can see, identity negotiation increasingly becomes politicized, substantially determining the cultural politics of the antipodean ground where Cook set foot in 1769. The ever-fundamental question of identity haunts a people that continue to struggle against remnant predicaments of former colonial rule. On the one hand, Māori people contest marginalization and disenfranchisement in a society dominated by Aotearoa New Zealanders of European descent; on the other, they fight for the assertion of indigenous rights, a matter that, they claim, was settled by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. This enunciation of cultural identities has understandably turned into a central concern in literature by the Polynesian minority of Aotearoa New Zealand. Māori literature written in English increasingly features a deliberately idiosyncratic use of indigenous language and concepts underpinning indigenous identification, thus creating the means of cultural representation in a vigorously political sense. Against this background, the main concern of this presentation will be to interrogate how the hybrid use of Māori language and concepts in recent publications generates “new possibilities of expression in one language by building creatively upon the signifying capacities of another.”8 I would like to argue that recourse to indigenous traditional resources – whether linguistic, customary or mythological – has become the flagship of identity-formation in contemporary Māori literature. Māori authors increasingly foreground the emergence of such hybrid identities at the intersection of divergent cultures and traditions, which Wolfgang Welsch describes as “transcultural identities.”9 By stating that “we are cultural hybrids,”10 Welsch ascribes an inherent heterogeneity to the notion of identity, owing to diverse internal as well as external cultural ramifications, reinforced by the challenges of modernity and globalization. In his conceptualization of culture, Welsch postulates that “transculturality aims for cultures with the ability to link and undergo transition whilst avoiding the threat of homogenization or uniformization.”11 In the elaboration of contemporary Māori identities, the blending 8

Steve Yao, “Towards a Taxonomy of Hybridity,” Wasafiri 38 (Spring 2003): 31. Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999): 194–213. 10 Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” 198. 11 Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” http: //www2.unijena.de/welsch/Abstracts/transculturality.html 9

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and intertwining of cultural experiences and frameworks substantiate the formation of transcultural mind-sets, according to my reading of contemporary indigenous literature from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Ponaturi and tūhrehu in Keri Hulme’s Stonefish (2004) In Keri Hulme’s latest short-story collection, Stonefish, the author sets ghosts, fairies, and other peculiar creatures centre-stage, intertwining indigenous language, tradition, legends, and mythology with contemporary Māori issues. The short story “Getting It”12 is about the hearing of a council on a landdevelopment project on the West Coast of the South Island, aimed an area called The Neck. In the course of the meeting, the author caricatures stereotypical objectors to the planned development, who try to protect the land from greedy businessmen:13 the animal conservationist and her grotesque concern with spiders losing their habitat; the paranoid resident alarmed by the inherent noise pollution; the inevitable representative of local Māori, ridiculed for his amateur performance at traditional art, misusing his position to underpin his argument: When I went to school with him, he was Paddy O’Shea and he used be rude to my gran behind her back […]. Now he’s Te Paringa Auhei […] doing a chant and stumbling over some of the words.14

The final party that appears consists of mythical creatures who claim The Neck as their ancient place of refuge, and threaten to wage a war against every member of the council should their objection be turned down. The threats remain unheard, and the deal is finalized. As soon as building starts at The Neck, mysterious events occur which lead conspicuously to fatalities among council members. With the negotiation of land rights forming the basis of her story, the author incisively negotiates culture in a vigorously realistic political sense. At the same time, Hulme introduces mythological creatures including tūrehu (fairies), māeroero (fabulous monsters), and ponaturi (mythical creatures sleeping on the land at night but retiring beneath the sea during daytime). 12

Keri Hulme, “Getting It,” in Hume, Stonefish (Wellington: Huia, 2004): 89–104. Hulme developed a markedly ecofriendly touch in her latest collection: “They [investors, land-developers] don’t appear to consider that humans are temporary transient beings and don’t have an intrinsic right to befoul a place, and – especially – that tourist & housing booms – bust. They bulldoze ahead.” See Keri Hulme, guest entry in blog (http ://publicaddress.net/default,993.sm#post). 14 Hulme, “Getting It,” 90. 13

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Depicting a reversed reality, these mythical creatures represent the only objectors to the land-development project that the reader can take seriously. First to speak before the council are the two māeroero, a mythical figure for which Margaret Orbell provides the following definition: These savage, hairy people had long bony fingers and speared their prey with their jagged nails. […] In the hills and mountains of the South Island, where they were numerous, they were known as māeroero. They speared fish, and were expert flute players. Sometimes people who were fishing or cutting flax would hear a voice warning that they had taken enough and must leave some for the māeroero.15

Hulme draws a vivid picture of the mythical creature, portraying a gigantic, red-haired monster whose odour almost overcomes the reader, smelling like “rancid meat” and “ancient sweat.” When the māeroero plays his femur-flute, the council members do not hear anything but can feel the words in their ears. Thus, the author not only draws on established mythology but further develops the picture that legend provides, attributing to the monster the ability to communicate through music. Apart from drawing on mythology, Hulme’s hybrid use of language conspicuously foregrounds her identification with Māoridom. It is important to note that the author attached a glossary for better understanding of the indigenous words integrated into the text. Hulme garnishes her story liberally with Māori words, to such an extent that at times it seems she has to include English words to convey the meaning of a Māori text. This all-too-deliberate incorporation of Māori lexis is deprecated by Yao as “exotic decoration and simple markers of ethnic difference,”16 a view I share in this instance. Conversely, though, Hulme skilfully integrates traditional concepts into her work, requiring the reader to engage with indigenous culture for thorough comprehension. I would like to take as an example the short story “Midden Mine,” in which a group of anthropologists is excavating at a West Coast site: ‘Argh, kōiwi!’ Bea does not sound happy. ‘Ah, kōiwi.’ Cam does. Then I remember – he’s not only takata whenua, and ranked, but he was part of some tribal teach-in that led to him being certified […] as someone fit and fitted to deal with human remains.17

15 Margaret Orbell, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Māori Myth and Legend (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 1995): 94/95. 16 Yao, “Towards a Taxonomy of Hybridity,” 32. 17 Keri Hulme, “Midden Mine,” in Stonefish, 209.

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With one of the characters encountering human bones, the author draws on the complex Polynesian concept of tapu. The direct translation being ‘forbidden’ or ‘sacred’, tapu refers to an intricate system of restrictions, regulations, and obligations encompassing all areas of traditional Māori life.18 Depending on the context, a person, place or thing can be tapu. In the above instance, Hulme refers to a ritual that lifts tapu from certain persons dealing with special tasks.19 In the texts discussed, the author draws a picture of modern indigenous people, creating identity along the trajectory of modernity as well as tradition. Hulme does not convey aspects of indigenous culture as essential to a particularistic Māori identity; rather, she offers a syncretistic view of the modern Aotearoa New Zealander. Thus, the author succeeded in producing an idiosyncratic text that transmits the transcultural realities of the fictional characters.

Hauhau Witches Crocheting the World: Kelly Ana Morey’s Bloom (2003) ‘Tell me three interesting things about yourself.’ ‘Ah, my mother’s boyfriend has a full facial tattoo – you know a traditional Maori moko. My grandmother used to have a penchant for opium and still has one for gin, and […] my sister sometimes, just occasionally, can see into the future […].’20

The above dialogue is symptomatic of the way the story evolves in Kelly Ana Morey’s debut novel Bloom, which is saturated with an overt portion of spirituality. Unravelling in glimpses of a camera’s flashlight, the reader is left to his own devices to develop the complete picture of the characters’ lives. The author makes ingenious use of Māori language, history, and concepts, thus engendering transcultural qualities in the main characters. In the end, the characters succeed in initiating their individual futures by understanding and accepting their past.

18

See Orbell, Encyclopedia of Māori Myth and Legend, 186–88; the meaning and pervasiveness of the concept in contemporary indigenous life is delineated in John Patterson, People of the Land: A Pacific Philosophy (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2000): 49–62. 19 The role of gravediggers will suffice as an example. They have to undergo a ritual called Whakawātea, permitting them to do their business without committing any break of tapu rules when handling the dead, as well as ensuring that they can move without restriction after their work is done. Further examples are in Cleve Barlow, Tikanga Whakaaro. Key Concepts in Māori Culture (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991): 128–29. 20 Kelly Ana Morey, Bloom (Auckland: Penguin, 2003): 15–16.

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At the core of the story is the quest for a sense in life by four women spanning three generations of an Aotearoa-New Zealand family, the Sprys. The story is told by Constant (Connie) Spry, the youngest of the family. Connie is the protégé of a ghost called Nanny Smack, a Hauhau-witch who appears to meander between the spiritual and the real world. In the former, the kuia (old woman) participates in Land Wars and gives advice to Connie in the latter. Just like Nanny Smack, who is crocheting an “everchanging blanket of tomorrow’s sky,” Connie has adopted the role of collecting the threads of all the characters’ stories that will in the end weave the fabric of the family’s enigmatic lives. With the Spry women, Pākehā and Māori elements merge, while both contribute distinctively to forming the characters’ identities. Thus, the author draws a contemporary picture of transcultural subjectivities in Aotearoa New Zealand. All of the Spry women indulge in extreme life-styles marked by alcohol and drug consumption or excessive promiscuity, marking their inherent restlessness and discontent with their lives. The protagonist is an unsuccessful author of crime fiction. Connie/ Constant seems to lead a life of constant escapism, which ends when she returns home to her dying grandmother, who appoints Connie to keep her memories and unearth the true stories of the Spry women. As Nanny Smack puts it, “‘That’s your job, Connie. To remember. To keep the home fires burning’.”21 Eventually, Connie turns her back on the world of fiction and endeavours to tell a real story, unravelling the secretive past of the women in her family. The first in line is her grandmother, Algebra Spry, whose arms are covered with scars and who is interminably fighting to suppress the voices in her head calling her a “murderess.”22 Algebra employs every means to contain these voices, but excessive, indiscriminate sex, alcohol, and finally opium prove

21

Morey, Bloom, 14; Here, the author invokes the concept of ‘ahi kā’, which refers to the “constant flame of domestic fire, keeping one’s title to land warm by occupation. Only when the flame is extinguished is the title of an interloper or conqueror confirmed;” see Ranginui J. Walker, “Māori Sovereignty, Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourses,” in Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada, & New Zealand, ed. Paul Havemann (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1999): 108–22; by referring to ahi kā the author introduces a fundamental notion in the ongoing dispute over ancestral land, but deliberately refrains from providing historical and cultural background. Again, Morey instigates readers to engage proactively with the Māori context in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand society. 22 Her scars result from a punishment for her playing with fire at the age of three, burning down the house with her parents inside.

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futile. When she moves from Jerusalem Street to a place called Goshen,23 she finally finds refuge from her torment. Then there is Connie’s mother, Rose. At college, she falls in love with the law student Elias. Their relationship is marked by Elias’ adultery, ignorance of, and violence against, Rose. In time, his behaviour gets worse in spite of the birth of two daughters, Hebe and Constant. A major row on a car ride leads to an accident in which Elias dies and Rose survives. However, she is left amnesiac, not remembering who she is, let alone that she has two children. Her Māori childhood friend Eli brings her and the girls back home to Goshen, where Rose in the end starts to remember – not her past, but the one person that really could make her feel grounded. Finally, there is Connie’s elder sister Hebe, her life also marked by extremes. Prostituting herself by offering free sexual relief for her fellow students, Hebe gets expelled from school on false accusations of having an affair with one of the teachers. Her first marriage ends after only a year when her husband, who frequently uses violence against her, supposedly kills himself. Hebe is left a rich widow who embarks on travels around the globe before returning to Aotearoa New Zealand for good and settling down with a family of her own at last. To have nothing to hold onto seems to be the fundamental problem of the Spry women: in the course of the novel, the characters are required to confront the ghosts of the past and unearth all the skeletons in the closets in order to become grounded or gain a ray of hope. The character most strongly waving the cultural flag is Nanny Smack, the counselling Māori ghost that attaches herself to the protagonist, accompanying Connie from childhood onwards. In this instance, it seems to me that the author is employing the Māori concept of atua. Apart from denoting the gods responsible in indigenous cosmology for the creation of the universe,24 atua also refers to the spirit of the dead: “Every family of rank had a relationship with the wairua of recent ancestors […] who visited them as atua. […] they communicated with, and acted as guardians of, their yet living relatives.”25 Apart from mythological references, the Hauhau-witch’s appearances are laden with historical baggage, telling of the Taranaki Land Wars she is fight-

23

Apparently, this is an allusion to the Old Testament Genesis, where the Israelites in Canaan suffer from drought and ensuing hunger and the Pharaoh offers them refuge in the region of Goshen in Egypt. The author inverts the route to the Promised Land: Algebra and Rose move from Jerusalem Street to Goshen, and Connie lives at a place that housed a convent called ‘Little Sisters of Bethlehem’ before returning to Goshen for good. 24 See Barlow, Tikanga Whakaaro, 10–13. 25 Orbell, Encyclopedia of Māori Myth and Legend, 31.

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ing along with fellow ghosts, implying the need to straighten the historical record when reading Connie’s history books or when looking at old photographs. In this instance, the author introduces a part of Aotearoa-New Zealand history concerned with resistance to European land seizure in the form of protest religions and movements.26 Known as Hauhau27 among Europeans, the Pai Marire (good and peaceful) movement represented a religious movement: This movement was one of the first that seemed to offer Maoris a Maori path to the God of the Bible, without requiring the Europeanisation of beliefs and behaviour that missionaries insisted upon.28

Basically, their leader Te Ua Haumene from Taranaki, claiming that the Māori were God’s chosen people, propagated the unification of the different iwi (tribes) to drive out the Pākehā. The cult spread from Taranaki to the East Coast, where it was transformed into a guerrilla movement by the prophet– leader Te Kooti, who later on founded the Ringatu Church.29 In lieu of providing detailed historical accounts, the story merely offers glimpses of the Aotearoa-New Zealand past. Thus, the story ignited in me an interest in more detailed historical knowledge of the Land Wars, in particular the Hauhau wars from 1864 to 1872, the King movement, and religious movements generally: The King Country, I knew, was where Te Kooti sought sanctuary with Tawhiao, the Maori King. The prophet and his Ringatu followers had built a meeting house and decorated it with painted figures in thanks for the protection the mana of Tawhiao had afforded them.30

26

Historical accounts of prophetic movements can be found in Michael King, Maori: A Photographic and Social History (Auckland: Reed, 1983), King, Nga Iwi O Te Motu. 1000 Years of Maori History (Auckland: Reed, 1997), Daniel P. Lyons, “An Analysis of Three Maori Prophet Movements,” in Conflict and Compromise: Essays on the Maori Since Colonisation, ed. Sir Hugh Kawharu (Auckland: Reed, 2003): 55–79, Gilda Z. Misur, “From Prophet Cult to Established Church,” in Kawharu, Conflict and Compromise, 97– 115, Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, and Walker, “Maori Identity,” in Culture and Identity in New Zealand, ed. David Novitz & Bill Willmott (Wellington: GB Books, 1989): 35–52. 27 The European name for the religious movement derives from the battle chant ‘Hapa Pai Marire Hau! Hau!’ Followers were promised immunity to Pākehā weapons when using this battle cry, as Walker explains in Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 130. 28 King, Maori: A Photographic and Social History, 66. 29 Ranginui J. Walker, “Maori Identity,” in Culture and Identity in New Zealand, ed. Novitz & Willmott, 48. 30 Morey, Bloom, 29.

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Apart from affording historical glances at the fate of the Māori in the latenineteenth century, the author’s transcultural text has another hallmark, its decidedly hybrid play with language. Morey has not attached a glossary, thus requiring non-Māori readers to engage with the context of Māori culture and language in order to comprehend the novel entirely. The author incorporates words in te reo with immediate translation: “My mother’s boyfriend has a full facial tattoo – you know, a traditional Maori moko.”31 Primarily, though, Morey integrates words into her text that depend on contextual understanding. For instance, Nanny Smack’s kete, into which she habitually stows things that she finds an interest in, such as photographs, books, or her crocheting wool, can easily be identified as a handbag or a basket. On another occasion, Connie and Rose are looking at old photographs: ‘Who are they by?’ […] ‘I don’t know nor does the museum. They bought them as a job lot at an assorted estate sale, no whakapapa so to speak.’32

From the above discussion it is quite clear that whakapapa has to do with origin. The direct translation being ‘genealogy’, whakapapa is an essential concept for the formation of indigenous identity in Aotearoa New Zealand: Whakapapa is the genealogical descent of all living things from the gods to the present time. […] Everything has a whakapapa: birds, fish, animals, trees, and every other living thing; soil and rocks and mountains also have a whakapapa.33

The above-mentioned examples are employed conspicuously to reinforce the characters’ Māori cultural background without spelling out the traditional function of the respective concepts. An immanent potential can be attributed to this idiosyncratic play with indigenous language: It transmits the transcultural reality of today’s Aotearoa New Zealand, where indigenous language and concepts are already interlaced with the dominant language of the former colonizer, each culture drawing on the another.34 At random, the author incor31

Morey, Bloom, 15. Bloom, 246. 33 Barlow, Tikanga Whakaaro, 173. 34 Recently, a dictionary was published that introduces more than a thousand indigenous words that are in common use, often blending New Zealand English with the tongue of the Polynesian minority. This represents another proof of the fact that te reo Māori has become manifest as an integral part of Aotearoa New Zealand’s transcultural nature; see John Macalister, A Dictionary of Maori Words in New Zealand English (Auckland: Oxford U P , 2005). 32

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porates Māori words without offering either translation or contextual explanation, thus insistently transmitting her identification with Aotearoa New Zealand’s Polynesian minority. ‘Kia ora,’ I said to Nanny and Pop, pleased to be able to practice making the water language. […] Eli returned with my place setting and joined Nanny, Pop and me for afternoon tea. ‘Homai ki ahau te kapu ti,’ I said triumphantly to the old people, who responded with enthusiasm, patting my hand in a congratulatory manner.35

The author leaves the above conversation without translation; not even contextual analysis yields insight into the protagonist’s practice at “water language.” By having her protagonist ask simply for a cup of tea in Māori, the author uses a “different language in original form without any concessions to potential incomprehensibility such as internal glosses or translations,”36 which is one technique to convey cultural combination. Whether Māori words are left without translation, paraphrased, or directly translated, language represents an intrinsic feature of the novel’s transcultural character. Morey thus succeeds in establishing a cultural context that conveys cross-cultural fusion, with her text signifying a transcultural frame of mind. On a few occasions in the novel, the author additionally succeeds in creatively applying Māori concepts to the language of the dominant culture: Sam set the carton down on the floor gratefully and took off his hat, wiping his forehead with a faded blue handkerchief. ‘Christ that’s heavy,’ he said. ‘What’s in it, rocks?’ ‘Nah, worse,’ I said. ‘Books. At least you can get a decent hangi going with stones’ We both laughed harder than the joke truly deserved.37

This scene leaves the reader – in particular the non-Pacific reader – who does not speak the indigenous tongue nor is familiar with the Māori traditional lifestyle, completely at a loss. Hāngi denotes an earth oven in which food is cooked by hot stones. Again, this passage aims at substantiating the character’s familiarity with Māori language and concepts. This explicit connection

35 36 37

Morey, Bloom, 116. Yao, “Towards a Taxonomy of Hybridity,” 32. Morey, Bloom, 87.

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to indigenous provenance and conjuncture with Māori traditions and values is reinforced throughout the novel: ‘So do you think she’s dying?’ Lydia asked […]. ‘Of course,’ I returned impatiently. ‘She’s so old it’s frightening.’ ‘And you’re okay with that?’ continued Lydia. ‘Well, yeah, why on earth wouldn’t I be? Honestly, Lydia, sometimes you’re such a Pakeha.’38

While never explicitly providing the whakapapa of the family members, who master te reo, obviously thanks to the Māori neighbours’ teaching efforts, the characters’ behaviour implicitly leads to the conclusion that the Spry family is somehow connected with indigenous peoples. As Jolisa Gracewood of the novel puts it in a review, the author “suggests that things are not exactly black or white in Aotearoa.”39 By deliberately leaving open the true origins of the characters, Morey convincingly advocates the formation of transcultural identities in today’s Aotearoa New Zealand.

Water language Watering Down the Crown’s English? As the texts discussed show, contemporary Māori writing engages in weaving hybrid worlds, by deploying not only Māori language as a loom but also threading indigenous traditions, legends, and myth into the literary fabric. In the texts discussed, Standard English40 remains the platform, but is increasingly adjusted to convey a distinctly indigenous perception of contemporary postcolonial life in Aotearoa New Zealand. Thus, the texts conspicuously underpin a cross-cultural, hybrid quality, giving rise to cultural translation, as Susanne Reichl postulates: “Even without the use of a foreign language, the reader is forced to translate the text from the other culture into his / her own

38

Morey, Bloom, 27. Jolisa Gracewood, “By all means buy Kelly Ana and Bronwyn for Christmas,” New Zealand Listener (13 December 2003): online http://www.listener.co.nz/default,1179.sm 40 Andrea Sand and Paul Skandera provide a categorization of the choice of language in postcolonial Anglophone literature, consisting of abolitionists (rejecting English altogether); creole writers (mainly Africa, language held in local creole); adaptationists (appropriating English to syntax of native idiom, for instance); finally, the (near-)standard English writers (writing standard but integrating words from the native tongue). See Sand & Skandera, “Linguistic Manifestations of Hybridity in Literary Texts from Africa and the Caribbean,” in Crossover: Cultural Hybridity in Ethnicity, Gender, Ethics, ed. Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000). 39

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framework.”41 However, determining the stipulations of cultural difference proves somehow insufficient in analyzing postcolonial subjectivities. On a linguistic level, several analytical tools have been introduced to remedy this situation. Steve Yao in his “taxonomy of hybridity,” for instance, proposes various techniques to combine cultural traditions and linguistic systems, focusing on Asian-American cultural production. Reichl suggests the analytical tool of ‘ethnic semiosis’ in her 2002 publication Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature, which focuses on the reader’s reception process. However fruitful both approaches are in dealing with postcolonial texts, the role of analytical tools – such as those mentioned here – can only be a complementary one when examining the negotiation of diverse cultural resources as transparent in minority writing. In my view, it is necessary to reflect on all discernible features that a text provides in order to see the whole picture. Particularly with regard to the Māori writing I have discussed, it is clear that history, tradition, mythology, and cosmology represent essential features that reverberate in Māori fiction. As Ranginui Walker states, Myths and traditions possess the same dynamism as the culture that bears them. […] Not only are myths reworked, but they are continuously being added to from the expanding fund of stories from tradition.42

Whether Māori authors choose to incorporate indigenous language in their texts or not – with some providing a glossary – contemporary Māori literature is always prone to distinctive cultural markings drawing on manifold resources. The deliberately idiosyncratic use of indigenous concepts and /or language, drawing on and blending diverse cultural resources, creates a space to understand better the contemporary negotiation and reinterpretation of Māori cultural identities. According to my reading of Keri Hulme’s Stonefish and Kelly Ana Morey’s Bloom, the formation of transcultural mind-sets is consolidating in contemporary Māori literature, as expressed, for instance, in the use of language. These texts convey clearly the intertwining of diverse cultures that nonetheless retain their distinctive markings – indeed, proving that “new possibilities of meaning arise from the interaction between different cultures.”43 It is precisely at this intersection of cultures that the notion of

41

usanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002): 55. 42 Walker, “The Relevance of Maori Myth and Tradition,” in Te Ao Hurihuri – Aspects of Maoritanga, ed. Michael King (1975; Auckland: Octopus, 1992): 182. 43 Yao, “Towards a Taxonomy of Hybridity,” 31.

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transcultural identities is emerging, corresponding to Welsch’s thesis that “cultural diversity arises in a new mode as a transcultural blend.” As Silja Freudenberger points out, In a transcultural perspective it is realized that most (if not all) people are not members of one distinct culture but are cultural hybrids to a larger or lesser extent. […] In focusing on the in-between spaces, [this concept] brings into view the fact that cultures are not easily (if at all) to be delineated: Where does one culture stop and the next begin?44

I hope that my discussion has made clear this paradigmatic shift to a transcultural perception of identity, one that is, and has always been, prone to change and constantly transgresses (imagined) boundaries. However, I do not wish to imply that the emergence of the transcultural idea represents a simple solution to the challenges inherent in contemporary Aotearoa-New Zealand society, neither for Māori nor for Pākehā. At this point, I would stress the fact that it remains to be seen whether the notion of transculturality can establish a viable identificatory space and form a bridge between universalizing and particularizing tendencies, for Pākehā, Māori, Polynesian Islander, Chinese, Southeast Asian and others ethnic groups who call Aotearoa New Zealand their home. Cultural translation as explored in the texts discussed above seems to be an appropriate trajectory to achieve this.

WORKS CITED Barlow, Cleve. Tikanga Whakaaro: Key Concepts in Māori Culture (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1991). Durie, Mason H. Te Mana Te Kāwanatanga: The Politics of Māori Self-Determination (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1998) Freudenberger, Silja. “Interculturalism, Transculturalism, and the Problem of ‘Meaning’,” in Transculturality – Epistemology, Ethics, and Politics, ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler & HongBin Lim (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004): 39–50. Grace, Patricia. Cousins (Auckland: Penguin, 1992). Gracewood, Jolisa. “By all means buy Kelly Ana and Bronwyn for Christmas,” New Zealand Listener (13 December 2003), http://www.listener.co.nz/default,1179.sm Hulme, Keri. “Getting It,” in Stonefish (Wellington: Huia, 2004): 89–104. ——. “Midden Mine,” in Stonefish (Wellington: Huia, 2004): 181–230. ——. “Myth, Omen, Ghost and Dream,” in Te Ao Mārama: Regaining Aotearoa: Māori Writers Speak Out, vol. 2, ed. Witi Ihimaera (Auckland: Reed, 1993): 24–30. 44 Silja Freudenberger, “Interculturalism, Transculturalism, and the Problem of ‘Meaning’,” in Transculturality – Epistemology, Ethics, and Politics, ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler & Hong-Bin Lim (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004): 39.

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King, Michael. Maori: A Photographic and Social History (Auckland: Reed, 1983). ——. Nga Iwi O Te Motu: 1000 Years of Maori History (Auckland: Reed, 1997). Lyons, Daniel P. “An Analysis of Three Maori Prophet Movements,” in Conflict and Compromise: Essays on the Maori Since Colonisation, ed. Sir Hugh Kawharu (1975; Auckland: Reed, 2003): 55–77. Macalister, John. A Dictionary of Maori Words in New Zealand English (Auckland: Oxford U P , 2005). Metge, Joan. New Growth From Old: The Whānau in the Modern World (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1995). Morey, Kelly Ana. Bloom (Auckland: Penguin, 2003). New Zealand Social Report 2004 – te pūrongo oranga tangata 2004 (Wellington: Ministry of Social Development, 2004). Orbell, Margaret. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Māori Myth and Legend (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 1995). Patterson, John. People of the Land: A Pacific Philosophy (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2000): 49–62. Reed, A.W., ed. The Reed Concise Māori Dictionary (1948; Auckland: Reed, 2001). Reichl, Susanne. Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002). Sand, Andrea, & Paul Skandera. “Linguistic Manifestations of Hybridity in Literary Texts from Africa and the Caribbean,” in Crossover: Cultural Hybridity in Ethnicity, Gender, Ethics, ed. Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000). Walker, Ranginui J. Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou. Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990). ——. “Maori Identity,” in Culture and Identity in New Zealand, eds. David Novitz & Bill Willmott (Wellington: G B Books, 1989): 35–52. ——. “Māori Sovereignty, Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourses,” in Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada, & New Zealand, ed. Paul Havemann (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1999): 108–22. ——. “The Relevance of Maori Myth and Tradition,” in Te Ao Hurihuri – Aspects of Maoritanga, ed. Michael King (1975; Auckland: Octopus, 1992): 170–82. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999): 194–213. Yao, Steve. “Towards a Taxonomy of Hybridity,” Wasafiri 38 (Spring 2003): 30–35.

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Of Serpents and Swastikas — Transcultural Interrogations in Two Poems by Indian Women Writers of the Diaspora C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAM

[…] the Snake Goddess slowly unveils our eyes as the Eve of temptation becomes the eve of creation and shows us ourselves as spiritual beings […] African, European East-Indian-West-Indianess Of our blue-green birth waters […] bursting the net of our inhibitions until the cross is no longer a burden death no longer the end but the bridge with which we cross the blackness of our unfolding universe.1

I

by two women writers of the Indian diaspora, I will focus on issues of cultural translatability in Mama Glo by Ramabai Espinet (an Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian poet and novelist) and Devibhen Pathak by Sujata Bhatt (an Indian-AmericanGerman poet). Both diasporic poets consider Indian culture as constituting

1

N MY READINGS OF TWO POEMS

Lelawattee Manoo–Rahming, “Eve of Creation,” in Curry Flavour (Leeds: Peepal Tree,

2000).

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their pool of cultural resources, which they can access in their creative work. The general questions and theoretical implications of cultural translatability will be explored through two exemplary symbols, the female water spirit and the swastika, in diverse heterogeneous cultural contexts of the Caribbean and India, in the light of a transgressive transcultural literary aesthetic. Both these symbols are significant, in that they are highly ambivalent in their diverse cultural connotations. The water goddess is regarded as both malevolent and benevolent in her facets of autonomous female sexuality and female empowerment through maternal nurturing respectively. The swastika, currently a symbol of a fascist political agenda, was once a benign religious symbol of good fortune, often connected with heliocentric worship in diverse cultures throughout the world. A significant factor connecting both poems is the image of the serpent, which figures both in Indian and in Afro-Caribbean cultural contexts, among others.

“Mama Glo” Espinet’s poem “Mama Glo” is written in the first person; Mama Glo herself speaks of the process of re-creating and reviving the Trinidadian landscape and thus, by extension, herself. Her physical appearance is reminiscent of the Nagini – a female naga – a semi-divine serpent being: half-human, halfserpent.2 In India, the term is used to describe any image of a mythical female who is sheltered or wrapped in the coils of serpents. Indian mythology tells of the serpent goddess Kadru, who gave birth to many naga and nagini. These guarded the great treasures of wealth and books of secret knowledge which they dispensed to the deserving. Thus the figure of Nagini is also seen as a powerful guardian of knowledge, wisdom, and eternal life.3 Nagini could be seen as a close relative of Mama Glo, especially when one takes into account the fact that Indian indentured labourers took their belief in their deities with them when migrating to the Caribbean. Hence Mama Glo speaks for and of

2

The serpent is associated with renewal and fertility. The Sanskrit word for ‘snake’ is ‘nag’, which occurs in the word ‘nagini’, as mentioned earlier. In Indian mythology, ‘naga’ is a word used to describe any kind of semi-divine serpent associated with water and fluid energy; these are deities of the primal ocean, mountain springs, and waterways – here is the throwback to Mama Glo in the Caribbean. ‘Nagas’ are said to bestow wealth and assure abundant crops as well as to revoke these blessings if offended. See also Klaus Klostermaier, The Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998), and “The Dragon King’s Daughter,” http://www.khandro.net/mysterious_nagini.htm 3 http://www.qualityancientart.com/Nagini~ns4.html

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Caribbean women, be they of Indian or of African origin (or even both?) – this is where I see a transcultural connection. The persona of the poem uses the waterways as a metaphor for female memory running through her veins – she is Trinidad, as it were, and she remembers the African slave women and the indentured Indian coolie women who make up a significant part of Trinidad’s history (and that of Guyana). The rivers, where Mama Glo is guardian, meander like snakes through the land, carrying the debris of history as well as the wisdom of women, known and unknown. Like water (in all its states) – an ubiquitous characteristic of the land itself – flooding and nourishing once dehydrated, arid, and desensitized regions, allows for the creation of an autonomous articulation of female experience, thus re-inscribing it in the land through memory. Brinda Mehta observes: “The reconnection with the land assures a complementarity of expression between the flow of rivers and the birth of voice to indicate the inscribing potential of all creative action.”4 Mama Glo finds the quickening memories of all these women speaking through her down the ages: I am fertile now Rivers of memory Running through my veins Finding The streams of my own voice Dread and wise And unknown to me [. . . ]5

In my personal communications with the poet, she explained that the words the poem’s persona finds in the “rivers of memory” are full of dread for her: “Though they are wise because they are full of truth (not wise because they are strategic) they are also ‘laden with apprehension that the poem’s persona feels at experiencing her own utterance which is also ‘unknown’ to her.”6 This also could be read from the Rastafarian perspective of ‘dread’, which, according to Espinet, “initially arose from the desire to inspire fear (and ‘nuff respect’) in the beholder.”7 In Trinidadian folklore, Mama Glo does indeed inspire fear in those who see her. She is one of the lesser-known figures in 4

Brinda Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the ‘Kala Pani’ (Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago: The Press, University of the West Indies, 2004): 189. 5 “Mama Glo,” in Ramabai Espinet, Nuclear Seasons (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1991): 27–29. 6 Email from Ramabai Espinet (19 April 2005). 7 Email from Espinet (19 April 2005).

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Trinidadian mythology and is considered to be a hideous and malevolent goddess (reminiscent of the Gorgon of Graeco-Roman mythology), who is said to trap mortal men who commit crimes against forests and waterways. She is often heard to be slapping her tail on the surface of a mountain pool or lagoon or appears to the unsuspecting in the form of a beautiful woman, “singing silent songs on still afternoons, sitting at the water’s edge in the sunlight, lingering for a golden moment, a flash of green – gone.”8 This description of Mama Glo evokes that of the characteristic image of the mermaid […] emerging from the water combing her […] hair as she gazes at her reflection in a mirror […] the mirror symbolizes the alluring beauty and vanity of this irresistible creature who can lure the unwary or unprepared to their destruction or under other circumstances, can bestow enormous wealth.9

Despite her fearsome, femme fatale reputation, Mama Glo is portrayed by Espinet as a maternal figure returning to the rhythms and images of the Caribbean swamps and waterways on a quest for memory and re-inscription: And I bend Backwards To the source Coming for shelter Coming for knowing Coming to find

Thus a mother’s benevolence and presence are evident in Mama Glo’s selfless and humane mission of handing on her legacy of “female self-assertion through a system of reciprocal maintenance,”10 despite her own very human dread at the words streaming out of her, with the voice the poet has given her. In her re-discovered fertility, she has found the means to rejuvenate her Trinidadian daughters that are and those who will come after.

8 Trinidadian folklore advises: “If you were to meet Mama Glo in the forest and wish to escape her, take off your left shoe, turn it upside down and immediately leave the scene, walking backwards until you reach home”; http://www.triniview.com./TnT/Folklore.htm (2). 9 Henry Drewal, “Mermaids, Mirrors and Snake Charmers: Igbo Mami Wata Shrines,” African Arts 21.2 (1988): 38. 10 Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 189.

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Mami Wata and the Snake Woman in the Caribbean The half-woman, half-serpent water deity Mama Glo in Trinidadian folklore will be read here as a composite of the African and Indian mythological figures Mami Wata and Nagini respectively. Ramabai Espinet focuses on this supposedly malevolent water spirit as a figure of Caribbean female empowerment, or “the symbol of a revised woman-based Caribbean spirituality” who, as Brinda Mehta observes, “promotes an environmentally safe consciousness by protecting rivers, streams and lakes.”11 This guardian of the waterways derives her name from the ‘Mother of the Waters’, the French ‘Maman de l’Eau’, or ‘mammy water’12 – hence Mama Glo. In his essay “Mami Wata: Creolization of a Water Spirit in West Africa, Suriname and Europe,” Alex van Stipriaan examines the figure of Mami Wata (as she is known in a number of West and Central African societies) or Watramama (the water goddess in the Caribbean / South American countries of Suriname and Guyana). This female water goddess is often regarded by her followers and devotees as being of non-African origin.13 Mami Wata-like cults help people, not only Africans for that matter, to cope with great transitions, and with their sense of being uprooted. [. . . ] The Mother of the Waters helped people to find a new individuality and at the same time created a new ‘we’ in a context in which most people were ‘others’, and as a reaction to a dominant culture, be it a colonial or a (westernized) global culture.14

Yet another transcultural dimension can be seen in the fact that the current icon of Mami Wata had its origin in an etching made in Germany as, van Stipriaan points out. The image is of a Samoan girl who worked as a snakecharmer in a circus. This etching was brought by Europeans to Nigeria, sparking off the career of this ultimate icon of Mami Wata. This image also has an Asian connection; it was influenced by posters of Indian gods as a result of the presence of Indian trading communities in East and West Africa since the end of the nineteenth century. Henry Drewal describes the link as follows:

11

Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 189. Diasporic (Dis)locations, 189. 13 Drewal, “Mermaids, Mirrors and Snake Charmers,” 38. 14 Alex van Stipriaan, “Mami Wata: Creolization of a Water Spirit in West Africa, Suriname and Europe,” in A Pepper-Pot of Cultures. Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, ed. Gordon Collier & Ulrich Fleischmann (Matatu 27–28; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003): 330. (my emphasis). 12

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Africans determined that there was a direct connection between these Indian images, the beliefs associated with them and Indians’ success in financial matters, just as mermaids and other European icons have been linked with wealth and power.15

According to Drewal, although Mami Wata’s physical features in the icon associate her with that well-known European female water spirit, the mermaid, Mami Wata is depicted holding a snake, another feature that links her to the Trinidadian Mama Glo, where the serpent is […] an important African symbol of water and the rainbow. […], is a most appropriate subject to be shown surrounding and protecting as well as being controlled by Mami Wata. […] the snake-water-rainbow divinity is dramatically combined with the female foreigner Mami Wata.16

Mami Wata and Watramama are considered to be unpredictable, aggressive, individualistic, and culturally uprooted, while they are especially important to women, for whom these goddesses offer new opportunities for self-definition in sometimes highly sex-segregated societies.17 In the light of her affiliation with Mami Wata, it would be appropriate to note that Mama Glo herself seems to be an empowering figure for Caribbean women; Rosanne Kanhai describes the poem as making “repeated references to birthing and becoming,” hailing Mama Glo as the source of creative energy to all Caribbean women.18 Jennifer Rahim’s short story “On Becoming a Snake Woman” is a narrative instance of such an influence. Told in the first person, it relates a young Caribbean girl’s conversation with her mother doing the laundry at a riverside. The young protagonist reflects on what she hears about Mama Glo from a neighbour: You ever see Mama Dglo, Mama? Miss Germaine say she ugly like sin. In all the time I sneak away, I never see anything but I hear bamboo breaking, loud. Miss Germaine [...] said what I could hear is not bamboo but Mama Dglo striking her tail

15

Drewal, “Mermaids, Mirrors and Snake Charmers,” 40. “Mermaids, Mirrors and Snake Charmers,” 38. 17 van Stipriaan. “Mami Wata: Creolization,” 326. I suppose one could go into a Freudian analysis of the Mama Glo figure and consider the serpent half of her as the traditional phallic symbol, allowing Mama Glo more power than average and seeing the male and female principles being unified. 18 Rosanne Kanhai, “The Masala Stone Sings: Poetry, Performance and Film by IndoCaribbean Women,” in Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women, ed. Kanhai (Trinidad & Tobago: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1990): 221. 16

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on the water. [. . . ] Mama, if Mama Dglo lives way upstream, how come I never see her? You know what on my mind these days Mama? I want to be something Mama. I want to learn more than washing and baking. That is what I’m thinking.19

At times in the story, the protagonist seems to conflate her own mother with the figure of Mama Glo herself, who apparently makes her think about what she can do with her own life. Another interesting narrative depicting the empowering aspect of this serpentine water goddess is Olive Senior’s short story “Arrival of the Snake Woman.”20 The reclusive protagonist of the story, called Miss Coolie, is referred to as the “snake-woman.” The narrator, an Afro-Caribbean schoolboy named Ishmael, hears a friend’s description of this being: That is how they does call them […] from the way their body so neat and trim and they move their hip when they walk just like a snake and they don’t wear no proper clothes just these thin little clothes-wrap, thinner than cobweb, you can see every line of their body when they walk.21

The Afro-Caribbean speaker Moses goes on to explain that these women were from India, exoticizing them as sexual objects while reviling Indian people in general: is some woman they does call coolie-woman […] they bring them all the way cross the sea from a place call India when slavey-days end and they come with their man to work the sugar-cane when black people say no, we naa work with the cane nomore for them little scrumps a-pay. So the government bring in these people from a place call India fe work in the cane fe nutten. Them is the wutless set of people though. Imagine come from so far to tek way black man work. The man them is a wicked set of beast, man. Don’t trifle with them. But the woman them! Whai!22

19 Jennifer Rahim, “On Becoming a Snake Woman,” in Caribbean Writer On-Line Short Fiction: http://rps.uvi.edu/Caribbean Writer/volume10/v10p61.html (4). The protagonist is conscious of the fact that her mother is not satisfied with her own life and is angry and disappointed below the surface, but who carries on with her wifely responsibilities as she always has. The protagonist sees her mother and Mama Glo as opposite sides of the coin as it were – hence the conflating term of address for both ‘Mamas’ – her biological mother and her ‘spiritual’ mother Mama Glo. The girl sees the potential for greater personal agency in her mother as is propounded in the figure of Mama Glo, and reflects on the potential for alternative life realities for herself. 20 Olive Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and other Stories (Trinidad & Jamaica: Longman Caribbean, 1989): 1–45. 21 Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman, 2–3. 22 Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman, 3.

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As the story progresses, the young protagonist strikes up a friendship with the quiet young “snake-woman,” who is regarded with misgiving and distrust by her Afro-Caribbean neighbours, despite her marriage to one of their own men23 and her efforts to remain unobtrusive. By the end of the narrative, the protagonist finally realizes Miss Coolie’s innate intelligence and strength of character, evident in her resilience and ability to adapt to diverse cultural constellations: For she had […] from the start an understanding of the world that the rest of us lacked, a pragmatic drive that allowed her to dispassionately weigh alternatives, make her decisions and act, while we still floundered around in a confused tangle of emotions, family ties, custom and superstition. Her arrival presented a loosening of the bonds that had previously bound her, that bind all of us to our homes. Cut free from her past, she was thus free of the duties and obligations that tie us so tightly to one another, sometimes in a stranglehold. She became a free agent with a flexibility […] that enabled her to do ‘business’ with family, friend or the white men […]. Miss Coolie, in short, is our embodiment of the spirit of the new age […]24

The cultural translations of the female water goddess in the Caribbean, as can be seen in “Mama Glo” and these two short stories, evince connection and commitment to Caribbean women’s empowerment. Sheila Rampersad points out the significance of the historical social positionality of Indian and African women, suggesting that Indian women are accessing African cultural resources to establish a framework of resistance to Indian orthodox patriarchal and class hegemonies: As nationalism debate heightened in India, the Indian woman in Trinidad was constructed according to a five-point Sita model. In contrast the African woman, although oppressed similarly in terms of wages and the middle class ideology of how women should behave, had greater flexibility.[. . . ] African women partici-

23

Among the issues being addressed in the short story is that of mixed-race marriage between Indian women and Afro-Caribbean men and thus, by extension, the notion of douglarization, which was frowned upon. The term ‘douglarization’ is taken from the Hindi word ‘dougla,’ which was considered derogatory – a symptom of animosity between the Indian and Afro-Caribbean communities. ‘Douglas’ were thus the children of mixed-race relations between Indian women and Afro-Caribbean men. ‘Douglarization’, then, would denote the mixing and perhaps the ‘pollution’ of ideas of pure ‘authentic’ Indianness and Afro-Caribbeanness. The ‘snake-woman’ here is seen as a cultural transgressive figure with her own agency, who yet does not necessarily give up her Indian customs. For further discussions of douglarization, see works by Rhoda Reddock, Patricia Mohammed, and Shalini Puri. 24 Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman, 43–44.

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pated, in varying degrees, in resistance movements and organised political agitation in the first half of the 20th century.25

In her analysis of the poem, Rampersad sees Espinet’s Mama Glo as being receptive to African folklore, reaching for it as a framework of resistance and adapting African-derived myths to explain structures and conditions that oppressed Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean women: “The poem makes repeated references to birthing and becoming, hailing Mama Glo as the source of creative energy to all Caribbean women.”26 This makes good sense, especially since, in the current period of what Rampersad calls the Indian Renaissance in the Caribbean, the complexity of Indo-Caribbean experience is being approached by Indo-Caribbean women writers like Ramabai Espinet, Marina Budhos, Narmala Shewcharan, Lakshmi Persaud, and Shani Mootoo. Rosanne Kanhai’s work27 in Creation Fire, an anthology of Caribbean women’s poetry, draws attention to the cultural factors that Indo-Caribbean women writers acknowledge: the heritage of indentureship and plantation labour, male domination within the Indo-Caribbean community, and relations to the dominant African-Caribbean culture.28 Kanhai observes that “Mama Glo” is evidence that Indo-Caribbean women are breaching ethnic barriers to gain a voice, moving into the realm of AfroCaribbean folklore, invoking mythological figures (such as Mama Glo, La Soucoyant, and La Diablesse) familiar to rural Indo- and Afro-Caribbean women in order to explicate the power dialectics that have been instrumental in their oppression. Thus I see Indo-Caribbean women writers, who have access to publishing opportunities, choosing to bring the African elements to the fore which influence their realities; this is instructive of a cultural osmosis that these writers themselves have experienced and which they acknowledge and

25 Sheila Rampersad, Jahaaji Behen? Feminist Literary Theory and the Indian Presence in the Caribbean (Warwick: Centre of Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, 1998). See http://www.uohyd.ernet.in/sss/cinddiaspora/occ2.html (11). The mythological figure of Sita, the wife of Rama, an avatar of the god Vishnu, is taken as the perfect role model of what an ideal wife should be. For further discussions of Sita, see The Essential Writings of Sudhir Kakar (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2001): 14–21. 26 Rampersad, Jahaaji Behen? Feminist Literary Theory, 10. See also Rhoda Reddock. “ ‘ Jahaaji Bhai’: The Emergence of a Dougla Poetics in Trinidad and Tobago,” Identities 5.4 (1998): 569–602. 27 See Kanhai, “The Masala Stone Sings,” 209–37. Creation Fire was published by C A F R A (the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action) in 1990 – a project on which Ramabai Espinet was the editor. 28 Rampersad, Jahaaji Behen? Feminist Literary Theory, 9.

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celebrate in their works; a circumstance that I perceive to be symptomatic of a transcultural literary aesthetic. In the second stanza of Espinet’s poem, Mama Glo herself dreams of a hopeful dawn coming through shuttered lives, and of the sea, bringing new ways of being, both to and from other places. This evokes the journeys undertaken by those from Africa and India, whose shores were points of departure, whose people crossed over to the Caribbean – the Middle Passage for those of African origins, and crossing the kala pani, the ‘black water’, for those of Indian ancestry. Mama Glo returns to memory and its source in order to access the knowledge and the sheltering comfort it can give. Her words are not choked by debris, by the rules and restraints of patriarchy and colonialism. There is a roaring In my head Rivers of words Not blocked by debris Black mangrove water Not dead – but sanguine And still With the sediment Of centuries Of womanthought Dead gossamer dreams And diamond hard as rocksand29

The deep waters she dwells in, though still, harbour the dreams and thoughts of generations of Caribbean women connected to Trinidadian soil, delicate and fragile-seeming as gossamer, but ever-present, tough, and resilient as diamonds. Espinet herself observes that “the image [of ‘Dead gossamer dreams’] came out of the idea of dreams unfulfilled and laid aside, as it were, but still possessing both the lightness, fragility and the strength of gossamer,30

29 “Mama Glo,” in Espinet, Nuclear Seasons, 27–29. “Black mangrove water Not dead – but sanguine and still” could be read as a paean to female menstrual blood, as can be seen in the use of the word “sanguine” with its connection to blood, which is part of the female reproductive cycle. Thus the swamp that is part of Mama Glo’s area of jurisdiction seems to be a repository for female memory passed on down the generations through the female biological characteristic of menstruation, an unattractive, often taboo, subject, but necessary for nourishing further life-cycles, just as the heavy sediment at the bottom of the swamps also give rise to new life and new memory to be passed on. 30 Incidentally, Espinet uses the image of gossamer at the end of her novel The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2003): 304.

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which is only fragile superficially.” These dreams “have the potential for being reawakened”; obviously they have not been cast aside.31 Mama Glo speaks words, telling the stories of the women gone before. She is herself a potentially empowering model for Caribbean women, yet she feels herself to be an intrinsic part of these women; seeing their lives through their eyes and perhaps even engendering new transcultural identities for the future in all their diversity. Her speaking lashes out against the suffering (past and present) inflicted on Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean women by the men of their own communities as well as the colonial masters. My words wash In bright metallic blue The bluemetal madness Of my sisters’ rage Rushing through rivers And crests Of waterfalls Breaking into Storm, snaking To the open sea 32

The colour blue has protective connotations in Caribbean folklore; Espinet explains that “it protects against harmful spirits”; “‘Bluemetal’ is a kind of decorative stone which is obtained by “quarrying deep underground, hence the association with madness, female rage, hardness and sisterly solidarity.”33 Mama Glo declares her solidarity with these women, those gone before, those here and those still to come; she feels their rage and the power apparent in the rushing rivers and waterfalls, now set loose, shaking free of the patriarchal debris of ages past. She tells of how this rage finally breaks out like a storm moving out to sea; “womanthought” speaks; she is no longer silent. Mama Glo knows herself to be fertile again, giving birth to new women selves: And if I am fertile now This birth I bring ... A birthing of My Womanvoice, green

31 32 33

Email from Ramabai Espinet (19 April 2005). “Mama Glo,” 27–29. Email from Espinet (19 April 2005).

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And glowing And faithful to her own Dread truth... Mangrove diamonds Splitting The ascendancy dark With crystal Light.34

Espinet believes that Mama Glo’s words are “as common and as rare as diamonds found in the mangrove or swampland. They break up the darkness which is threatening to overshadow and destroy everything worthwhile, but it seems that the darkness is ascendant.”35 I prefer a more optimistic reading of this last verse: she hears her newborn voice hopeful and vibrant, like crystal splinters of light caught in water sprays, when she rises to the surface of the mangrove swamps. Mama Glo cuts through the darkness and sees the birthing of new “Womanvoice,” the hopeful “green and glowing”36 voice, which she dreams will be taken up by generations of Caribbean women to come – the “glowing” resonating with her own name “Mama Glo.”

“Devibhen Pathak” Moving on to Sujata Bhatt’s poem, I will attempt a transcultural reading of its reflections on the symbol of the swastika in its German, Indian, and Irish cultural connotations. In “Devibhen Pathak,” the poetic persona is engaged in a memory of a day in her grandmother’s life, where she makes an important private decision. The speaker wonders if her grandmother, Devibhen, had been in doubt about the appropriateness of her idea. The speaker’s own mother is a young girl of twelve in 1938 and watches her mother make preparations to dispose of a small inheritance, a valuable piece of gold which she wanted worked into a necklace with a swastika pendant. Devibhen makes this decision, thinking of something permanent to pass on to her daughter and her daughters who will come after. This need for Devibhen, a ‘foremother’, as it were, to pass on an inheritance, a female heirloom, to her female child resonates with Mama Glo’s new ‘womanvoice’, with which she wishes to

34

“Mama Glo,” 27–29. Email from Espinet (19 April 2005). 36 As blue has protective connotations, I presume that the colours white and green here stand for optimism, peace, and growth. 35

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empower her Caribbean daughters in the previous poem. The necklace would lie on her child’s neck, like a small gold snake, undulating in the light. She imagined this necklace of deep Yellow gold, warm around the neck And heavy as a small snake, the links [. . . ] carved full and geometrically rounded To catch the sort of shadows A snake’s spine would invite.37

A devotee of Lord Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu the preserver, one of the divine Hindu Triumvirate), Devibhen is intimately connected to snakes: She who understood snakes, Who respected cobras and would lead Them away [. . . ] with a prayer And a burning lantern; This wise woman, my grandmother Must have remembered snakes While she spoke with the goldsmith.38

Here then is another transcultural link to Espinet’s poem “Mama Glo,” where serpents also hold a special significance in both the Caribbean and the Indian cultural context. Snakes are linked with divinity, owing to their association with the god Shiva, the destroyer, who wears a cobra around his neck, as well as with Vishnu, the preserver, who sleeps on the coils of the giant manyheaded serpent Sesh Naga. Thus, in both poems, serpents have protective and empowering connotations, despite their more dangerous and unpredictable characteristics. However, Devibhen chooses the swastika design for a pendant, a shape sacred to Hindus: for her it was clearly the geometric sun, a wheel for life and luck, a four-petalled flower twisting out of a circle, in turn encircled by a hexagon – for her it was clearly the sacred swastika

37

“Devibhen Pathak,” in Sujata Bhatt, Monkey Shadows (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991):

47. 38

“Devibhen Pathak,” 47.

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that only appears in red. She had it held together with a ruby to remind us of the goodness within red.39

On being informed of the design, the goldsmith in the poem, who was to work the gold, cautions Devibhen about choosing the swastika and the connotations it held for that era. The swastika had been adopted by Hitler in Germany, as the Hakenkreuz (literally ‘hooked cross’), the symbol of the National Socialist Party.40 Hitler was most likely informed by the works of Guido von List – that the swastika or the Hakenkreuz was reminiscent of the sunwheel (the Sonnenrad) and that it was found not only in northern and central Europe and the Scandinavian countries, but also in India and Japan. However, Hitler decided to appropriate this symbol of luck, protection, the change of the seasons, and the manifestation of life, for his own ends; to be more precise: he transposed it into a new, more malevolent context. Ulrich Krietenbrink highlights this new, more sinister significance of the Hakenkreuz, which served to propagate Hitler’s mission to fight for Aryan supremacy.41

Devibhen’s Swastika However, Devibhen is not to be gainsaid – she dismisses the goldsmith’s worries and sets about reappropriating the swastika for her own purposes, “untouched by history” unfolding in a far-off European country. And in the heart of Devibhen’s mind snakes moved, bluish-black darting through the grass – and in the mind of Devibhen’s heart wheels turned but the swastika remained sacred, beloved,

39

“Devibhen Pathak,” 48. “But it is 1938 and the goldsmith reminds her of the latest news: array bhen, tamnay khabar nathi …? (Oh bhen, don’t you know…?),” see “Devibhen Pathak,” 48. A pertinent question at this point is: would Hitler and his political agenda have been known to a goldsmith in India at that time? 41 “Dem ‘uralten, heiligen Zeichen, dem Sinnbild der Sonne’ [254] gab Hitler eine weitere Bedeutung, nämlich die der ‘Mission des Kampfes für den Sieg des arischen Menschen und zugleich mit ihm auch den Sieg des Gedankens der schaffenden Arbeit, die selbst ewig antisemitisch war und antisemitisch sein wird’ [256].” Ulrich Krietenbrink, “Mythen und Symbole in der nationalsozialistischen Weltanschauung,” http://www.susas.de /mythos/8_graphische_symbole.htm (3). 40

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untouched by history. Who was Hitler? Mahatma Gandhi Was her daily news, her truth.42

Although she is at first troubled by the dark warnings of what the symbol was being used for in Germany, Devibhen places her hopes in Gandhi’s life principles of satyagraha and swaraj, his visions of a united and independent India. For her the swastika is still the much-loved Hindu cultural symbol with its positive connotations: “(swasti, swasti,) they used to say / meaning ‘Be 43 well! Be well!” The poetic persona, though admiring her grandmother’s tenacity in holding onto her own cultural values, engages in transcultural interrogations of her own about the swastika. She is not quite sure of the appropriateness of the swastika necklace, passed down from mother to daughter in her family. Cecile Sandten observes that “the speaker’s own personal experience with the ‘holy’ Hindu swastika is challenged by her present situation: her marriage to a German and the implications this might have for the future of her daughter ‘skyward’.”44 The persona recalls drawing swastikas, triangles, and stars as a child, remembers “Triangular Parvati / pointing earthward, / Triangular Shiva / pointing skyward”45 – shapes which, incidentally, when superimposed on each other, recall the six-pointed Star of David, the Jewish religious symbol;46 a shape which, however, has other, more divine connotations in the Hindu religion: Their (Shiva’s and Parvati’s?) bodies sharp – pared down to pure form. Is that where truth lies? In the shadow of a shoulder blade, the corner of a triangle?47

42

Bhatt, “Devibhen Pathak,” 48. “Devibhen Pathak,” 51. 44 Cecile Sandten, “India, America, Germany: Interhistorical and Intertextual Process in the Poetry of Sujata Bhatt,” in Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English, ed. Wolfgang Klooss (Cross / Cultures 32, A S N E L Papers 3; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1998): 56. 45 “Devibhen Pathak,” 49. 46 The Jews were forced to wear the symbol during the Holocaust for identificatory purposes in Nazi Germany. 47 “Devibhen Pathak,” 49. Lord Shiva was one of the Hindu Triumvirate, besides Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver. He wears a cobra and the river Ganges in his topknot. 43

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Or was she remembering pictures of the skeletal bodies of the Nazi concentration-camp victims, both dead and alive – was the truth in the shadow of those emaciated shoulder-blades? When ruminating on swastikas, she is caught up by the thought that in India the symbol is holy and red, reminding her of the “goodness within red” and the “pure goodness / branching out from the centre,”48 in contrast to the evil persistent in Nazi Germany’s antisemitism. Thus the speaker is “unable to believe the swastika / is untouched by history,”49 as her grandmother had done before her. While she feels herself trapped in searching for the truth in meanings of symbols, especially that of the swastika, she engages in a possible transcultural transgression, while pondering: “didn’t I start wishing / I could rescue that shape from history?”50 This preoccupation acquires an added dimension, when the speaker reflects on her “Lübecker / Baltic-eyed innocent” husband and her “German-born daughter.”51 She turns back to the meaning of the red swastika on Hindu wedding invitations with its implications of arranged marriages along with the dowry system, as well as constrained female agency. Caught up in her reflections on the cultural significance and the actions committed in the name of ideologies connected with the significance of this symbol, she registers that “something is wrong: / [...] / someone’s blood, someone’s money, / someone’s wife, someone’s son / should not have been touched.”52 Yet the persona tries repatriating the swastika, seeing the fearsome Hakenkreuz and then, in an unexpected twist, “when you slant your head / towards the sun,” it becomes “St Brigid’s plaited fancy cross.”53 She remembers her daughter’s birth on February 1, which is also St Brigid’s feast day in the spring in Ireland,54 a time of new beginnings. St Brigid was important to the

His wife Parvati is also known as Shakti, the sacred female life-force, without which the dance of creation would not occur. Shiva is also known as Shiva Nataraja, the “Lord of the Dance of the Cosmos” (see Klostermaier, Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism). 48 Bhatt, “Devibhen Pathak,” 48/49. 49 “Devibhen Pathak,” 49. 50 “Devibhen Pathak,” 50. 51 “Devibhen Pathak,” 50. 52 “Devibhen Pathak,” 50. 53 “Devibhen Pathak,” 51. 54 February 1 is also the pagan Celtic feast of Imbolc. “Imbolc is one of the four principal festivals of the pre-Christian Celtic calendar, associated with fertility rituals, was subsequently adopted as St Brigid’s Day in the Christian period, and in more recent times has been celebrated as a fire festival, one of eight holidays, festivals (4 solar and 4 fire / lunar) or sabbats of the Neopagan wheel of the year. It has been claimed that Imbolc is one of the predecessors of the Christian holiday of Candlemas and perhaps Groundhog Day. Imbolc is

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Irish, and her plaited cross of rushes was said to have played a significant role in the conversion of a heathen Irish king. Like Mama Glo, St Brigid was an ambivalent figure in her pre-Christian persona of the goddess Briga or Brighid, who was also associated with serpents, water, and waterways in Ireland.55 This goddess/ saint spans the worlds of pagan and Christian tradition. Miranda Green observes: In the early Christian period, many pagan deities were downgraded to the status of demons, but occasionally the attributes of a particular divinity were reallocated to an appropriate saint. This appears to have occurred in the case of Brigit.56

Yet Cecile Sandten points out the inherent difficulty in the attempted re-translation of the swastika: This new, or rather different symbol is used to replace the symbol of the swastika, which can’t be passed on to the daughter because both later German history and Indian history and culture (the Hindu religion) cannot be reproduced in one and the same good-luck talisman.57

Despite this attempt to repatriate the symbol of the swastika using the more positive Irish cultural context, it falls short, as the speaker is aware of the inherent ambivalences in the prevalent norms and values of both the German and the Indian cultural reference systems, as was previously pointed out. Thus this attempted transcultural transgression is not without its problems.

conventionally celebrated on 1 February in the Northern Hemisphere and around August 1 in the Southern Hemisphere. In more recent times, the occasion has been generally celebrated by modern pagans on February 1 or 2. Some neopagans relate this celebration to the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox, which actually falls later in the first week of the month. Since the Celtic year was based on both lunar and solar cycles, it is most likely that the holiday would be celebrated on the full moon nearest the midpoint between the winter solstice and vernal equinox. […] In the modern Irish Calendar, Imbolc is variously known as the Feast of St Brigid (Secondary Patron of Ireland) and Lá Feabhra – the first day of Spring. One view is that Christianity, in an attempt to reconcile the popularity of this festival with its own traditions, took over the feast of Imbolc and effectively redesignated it as St Brigid’s day”; “Imbolc,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbolc (accessed 11 August 2006). 55 See Chapter 1, “The Mother Goddess,” in Peter Berresford Ellis, Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature (Grand Rapids M I : William B. Eerdmans, 1995): 21–39. 56 Miranda Green, Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers (London: British Museum Press, 1995): 196. 57 Sandten, “India, America, Germany,” 57.

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Other Cultural Translations of Swastikas and Serpents In “The Swastika and the Nazis,” Servando González comments: A few years ago, voters in Nepal […] expressed their choice by stamping a swastika next to the name of the candidate of their preference. Farmers in Tibet frequently place a swastika on their home doors, so that no evil can enter the place. A similar custom is followed by Irish farmers, where the swastika placed in their doors is called a Brigit’s cross. Cuna Indians in Panama design their blouses with colorful swastikas. Navajo medicine men use colored sand to draw swastikas on the floor while performing their curative rites. As a form of benediction, Indian boys paint a swastika on their shaved heads. The swastika is, without a doubt, an everpresent symbol. A modern author called it the ‘Symbol of the Century.’58

González’s remarks indicate the frequency of the swastika’s occurrence and connotations in diverse cultural contexts, which is relevant to this transcultural reading of both poems. There are other common instances of the cultural links between serpents and swastikas. The swastika was often found on the artefacts of ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as the ancient GraecoRoman pantheon (e.g., Athene, Artemis, and Astarte), representing a variety of goddess figures associated with serpents: The double snake goddess of ancient Crete was synonymous with the serpentine passageway of the labyrinth. The symbol of the swastika came to represent both her and her hidden underground domain.59

Not infrequently square in form, the swastika was often associated with the passageways of the labyrinth, especially in the Tantric sect of Hinduism, where the labyrinth represents Maya, the goddess of illusion and desire, who is the guardian of the god Shiva sitting at its sacred centre. A reinforcement of the swastika’s connection with serpentine female deities is the idea of viewing the swastika as the crossing-over of two serpent symbols – a common symbol in ancient Egyptian lore, depicting the goddess Isis, who is most often associated with the snake. Swastikas consisting of crossed-over serpents are also to be found among First-Nations artefacts on the North American continent.60

58

Servando González. “The Swastika and the Nazis,” http://intelinet.org/swatika/swastika _intro.htm (1). 59 See “The Swastika Goddess,” http://www.swastika.com/goddess.html (4). 60 See Navajo sandpainting mandalas and other American Indian artefacts at http://www .swastika.com/goddess.html (3–4).

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Conclusion In the decontextualization and recontextualization of symbols in these poems, a transcultural transformation has taken place whereby some meanings are passed on and reconstructed, while others are completely cast aside. In my readings of the poems, I hope to have shown that, whether or not the poets were aware of what they were creating, they have engaged in what I call a transgressive transcultural literary aesthetic; a strategy that celebrates the permeability of what were once thought of as unbreachable cultural boundaries. In the end, the persona in Bhatt’s “Devibhen Pathak” turns to her own “German-born” daughter with the same questions implicit in Espinet’s “Mama Glo,” asking, as Mama Glo asks her Trinidadian daughters, with their womanvoices speaking “dread truth”: “What will you say? What colours will you / prefer? In what language / will you speak?”61 Both Espinet and Bhatt have engaged with the symbols of the serpent and the swastika respectively to create a new ‘womanvoice’ in order to establish what Brinda Mehta describes as “a genealogy of female chorals that resonate in polyphonic harmony to create new symphonies of expression.”62 The fact that both women writers are of the Indian diaspora provides the additional aspect of active cultural translation of symbols and their meanings, which acquire new significances in lifesituations which have been translated onto and embedded in new cultural matrices beyond their countries of origin. They avail themselves of the cultural resources they have access to, the use of which has proven to be creatively effective, in that these symbols have lent themselves quite admirably to cultural translation in their poetry, across history, across memory, and across borders.

WORKS CITED Drewal, Henry. “Mermaids, Mirrors and Snake Charmers: Igbo Mami Wata Shrines,” African Arts 21.2 (1988): 38–45. Ellis, Peter Berresford. Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature (Grand Rapids M I : William B. Eerdmans, 1995). Espinet, Ramabai. “Mama Glo,” Nuclear Seasons (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1991): 27-29. González, Servando. “The Swastika and the Nazis,” http://intelinet.org/swastika/swastika _intro.htm Green, Miranda. Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers (London: British Museum Press, 1995).

61 62

Bhatt, “Devibhen Pathak,” 51. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations, 190.

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Kanhai, Rosanne. “The Masala Stone Sings: Poetry, Performance and Film by Indo-Caribbean Women,” in Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women, ed. Rosanne Kanhai (Trinidad & Tobago: University of the West Indies, 1990): 209–37. Krietenbrink, Ulrich. “Mythen und Symbole in der nationalsozialistischen Weltanschauung,” http://www.susas.de/mythos/8_graphische_symbole.htm Mehta, Brinda. Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the ‘Kala Pani’, (Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago: The Press, University of the West Indies, 2004). Rahim, Jennifer. “On Becoming a Snake Woman,” in Caribbean Writer On-Line Short Fiction, http://rps.uvi.edu/Caribbean Writer/volume10/v10p61.html Rampersad, Sheila, Jahaaji Behen? Feminist Literary Theory and the Indian Presence in the Caribbean (Warwick: Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick), http: //www.uohyd.ernet.in/sss/cinddiaspora/occ2.html Reddock, Rhoda. “ ‘ Jahaaji Bhai’: The Emergence of a Dougla Poetics in Trinidad and Tobago,” Identities 5.4 (1998): 569–602. Sandten, Cecile. “India, America, Germany – Interhistorical and Intertextual Process in the Poetry of Sujata Bhatt,” in Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English, ed. Wolfgang Klooss (Cross / Cultures 32, A S N E L Papers 3; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1998): 56. Senior, Olive. Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories (Trinidad & Jamaica: Longman Caribbean, 1989). van Stipriaan, Alex. “Mami Wata: Creolization of a Water Spirit in West Africa, Suriname and Europe,” in A Pepper-Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, ed. Gordon Collier & Ulrich Fleischmann (Matatu 27–28; Amsterdam & New York, 2003): 323–37. “The Dragon King’s Daughter,” http://www.khandro.net/mysterious_nagini.htm http://www.qualityancientart.com/Nagini~ns4.html Entry “Mama Glo” on http://www.triniview.com./TnT/Folklore.htm Entry “Imbolc” on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbolc “The Swastika Goddess,” http://www.swastika.com/goddess.html (1–4).

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Scottish Territories and Canadian Identity — Regional Aspects in the Literature of Alistair MacLeod1 K IRSTEN S ANDROCK

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N A C O U N T R Y with an area of almost ten million square metres, including landscapes as different as the arctic north, the virtually treeless prairies, and the oceanic climate of the west coast, the literary world of Alistair MacLeod’s Nova Scotia may seem a peculiar place to start with when raising the question of the notorious Canadian-identity debate. This is especially true as large parts of the population of the Atlantic peninsula of Cape Breton, which serves as a setting for almost all of the author’s stories, adhere vitally to the Scottish heritage of their ancestors and strive to preserve the traditional culture as much as they can. As for their personal sense of identity, the contemporary inhabitants even appear to find themselves less within their Canadian motherland than within their forefathers’ world of ancient Scotland, as any reader of MacLeod’s celebrated novel No Great Mischief (2001) or of his two short-story collections The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986) will be aware of.2 Yet I would like to argue in this essay that it is possible to understand the nation’s identity better by looking at this seemingly atypical part of the country, not despite, but because of, its local character. Furthermore, the residents’ strong affiliation with their historical roots not only enables them to connect to larger

1

I would like to thank Martin Kuester and Wolfram Keller for their generous intellectual support over the years: this essay draws on their inspiring thoughts in many ways. 2 The short stories from both collections were republished in Island: The Complete Stories (New York: Vintage, 2002), which also includes the previously unpublished works “Island” (1988) and “Clearances” (1999).

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Canada but also to societies and people worldwide, turning the question of unity into one that affects both the national and, even more importantly, the global platform. The theory on which this line of argument is based is that of regionalism, which allows the reader to explore MacLeod’s fictional territories not as limited terrains but, rather, as doorways to the universal landscape of the human mind. One of the key claims that popularized the concept of regionalism in Canadian studies was made by Northrop Frye, who first linked the importance of regional roots with the formation of a cultural as well as personal identity: The question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a “Canadian” question at all, but a regional question. […] Identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in works of culture; unity is national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in a political feeling.3

Although this distinction between the unity of state and regionally formed identities is not a purely Canadian one, the question seems to pertain to this nation more than to others because of its large topographical, cultural, social, and economic range, not to mention its linguistic variety. Following Frye’s groundbreaking statement, numerous scholars have stressed the importance of the region, not exclusively but particularly in relation to the understanding and appreciation of the arts. The critic William Westfall accordingly states that “the region seems destined to rival, if not replace, the nation state as the central construction in Canadian studies.”4 Whereas Westfall observes this ‘rivalry’ between the locale and the national with an impartial if not approving undertone, some earlier critics were not so appreciative of the idea of regionalism developing into a key concept. The Cape Breton-born author Hugh MacLennan (1907–90), for one, regarded a strong identification with one’s region as a hindrance to the formation of a unified national identity. In his article “Canada Between Covers” (1946), he wonders whether Canada’s literature was “doomed to lie half stagnant in the backwaters of regionalism,” fiercely concluding, a few pages later:

3

Northrop Frye, “Preface” to The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971), repr. in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 12: Northrop Frye on Canada, ed. Jean O’Grady & David Staines (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2003): 413. 4 William Westfall, “On the Concept of Region in Canadian History and Literature,” Journal of Canadian Studies 15.2 (1980): 3.

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The obvious, and only, answer to this problem is for Canadian writers to stop writing regional novels, scientifically correct with respect to their own background, and permit themselves only universal themes, if they hope to reach a world audience and take their place in the branch cycle of American literature.5

MacLennan’s underlying assumption that regional topics preempt the possibility of a worldwide readership is certainly more than problematic, not only when considering today’s rising interest in anti-globalization and local patterns of thought. Instead of fostering opposition between the nation and the region, the concepts should be seen as complementary units, since it is only through the synthesis of smaller entities that a nation as large as Canada can be shaped as a whole. This composition of the state is expressed par excellence by the prominent image of the country as a mosaic, which MacLeod himself uses to illustrate the significance of regions in his motherland: “It seems we, as Canadians, find ourselves most vividly in the different sections of the Canadian mosaic rather than in the larger, more bubbling melting pot of the United States.”6 Along these lines, Canada’s integrative character is often seen as a model for other countries, allowing for diversity within unity, and for the preservation of individual, often historically shaped identities as constituents of a modern state. Yet despite the agreement among scholars concerning the significance of the region, there is no such unison in the actual understanding and definition of the concept. The conventional and still most widespread interpretation of the term refers primarily to geographical entities, so that the environment outlines and determines the territories in which individual and cultural identities are formed. A second theoretical approach proposes a more complex perspective by regarding the region as being made up of various functional elements, including political, administrative, economic, and social determinants. The third classification is often referred to as mythical regionalism, as it draws on the specific culture and history of a landscape, thus allowing for much more flexible boundaries than the previous approaches would tolerate. The region here is no longer understood as a concrete entity but is transferred to the dimension of the mental imaginary. By way of these ‘mindscapes’ – as

5 Hugh MacLennan, “Canada Between Covers” (1946), repr. in MacLennan, Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos, vol. 2: 1940–1983 (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1985): 362, 367. 6 Alistair MacLeod, “The Canadian Short Story,” in Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story, ed. Gerald Lynch & Angela Arnold Robbeson (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 1999): 165.

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Francis R. Douglas pointedly calls these incorporeal units7 – people and cultures can be united regardless of their geographical, governmental, or even chronological habitat. As a fourth approach, some scholars have argued for a postmodern version of regionalism, according to which any definition of a region is impossible because of the multiple factors and dynamics that influence all environments every day. This hypothesis, which is based on the postmodern negation of all uniform structures, seems, however, to be incompatible with the concept of regions as such, causing this fourth approach to be of minor importance for the following discussion. With regard to the first three concepts, MacLeod’s stories offer a number of regions to be analyzed, including the geographical territory of Cape Breton, the functional community of Gaelic speakers, and the mythic landscape of Scottish history and legend. Nevertheless, none of these specific terrains by itself accounts for the complex local personality of the characters, as all of them add different facets to the both tangible and intangible territory of identity. In order to do justice to the multifaceted notion of this regional uniqueness, this essay draws on Edward S. Casey’s concept of the ‘Regional Here’, which involves all locations to which one “can in principle move (in person or by proxy) […], however far-flung this part might be.”8 According to Casey, the region is thus not a limited one-dimensional territory but a complex, intertwined system of concrete as well as abstract, geographical, and mental components. It is this notion of regionalism that underlies the following analysis of MacLeod’s fiction, which concentrates on the aspects of language, history, and myth, all of which merge into one to form an abstract, yet all the more real, region of the mind.

Mindscapes: Where Language, History, and Myths Merge With regard to the specific immigration history of the Atlantic Provinces in general and of Nova Scotia in particular, it should come as no surprise that traditional elements of early Scotland are prominent characteristics of Cape Breton and its people even today. When Scottish and Irish immigrants settled on the shore of the eastern Canadian island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they had often been forced to leave their homelands for political and /or economic reasons. Because of this emigration and the deep sense of

7 Douglas R. Francis, “Regionalism, W.L. Morton, and the Writing of Western Canadian History, 1870–1885,” American Review of Canadian Studies 31 (2001): 572. 8 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1993): 53.

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loss they experienced early on, many of them keenly preserved their traditional culture and passed it down to subsequent generations over the centuries. To this very day, numerous festivals, song contests, museums, and archives affirm the ancestral roots of the modern Maritime population.9 Some Canadians have even maintained Gaelic as a first language, and although this part of the population is gradually declining, many descendants of Scottish ancestors feel a special attachment to the traditional tongue. In MacLeod’s fiction, the sound of the language is frequently associated with feelings of home and safety, even by characters whose primary tongue is not necessarily Gaelic, but who have grown up hearing its lilt in their surroundings. In the short story “Island,” for example, three young men, who otherwise speak English, begin to converse in Gaelic when they “were far from home and more lonely and frightened than they cared to admit.”10 Here as elsewhere, the traditional tongue serves the characters as an emotional refuge in situations of uncertainty and isolation. In the novel No Great Mischief, the modes of communication are even more explicitly described by means of geographical metaphors, thus demonstrating how the linguistic region is virtually transformed into physical space. The protagonist’s twin sister Catriona distinguishes between her Scottish ancestors’ Gaelic and modern-day English by using the image of “the language of the heart and the language of the head,”11 which accentuates her intimate emotional affiliation to the Celtic tongue, whereas the association of English with the mind represents, rather, her lack of feeling for the modern lingua franca. By means of this location process, the otherwise intangible nature of language turns into a genuine territory of words. This notion is sustained in yet another passage in the novel, where Catriona reminisces about her first trip to Scotland, from where her forefathers emigrated as a consequence of the Highland Clearances12 in 1779. Once she is in her ancestors’ home country,

9 Throughout the year, a number of ‘Gaelic Events’ are organized in Nova Scotia, including regular Gaelic language classes, commemoration days and festivals, the latter often taking place in the so-called Highland Village, where traditional Gaelic society life can be experienced and visitors can learn about the historical roots of the province. For more information, see the homepage of the ‘Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia’, http://www.gaelic.ca /indexframe.htm 10 Alistair MacLeod, “Island,” in MacLeod, Island: The Complete Stories (New York: Vintage, 2002): 354. Further quotations from the short stories will be referenced to this complete edition. 11 Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief (London: Vintage, 2001): 178. 12 The course of events known as the ‘Highland Clearances’ was set off when affluent authorities strove for an expansion of sheep breeding in the Scottish Highlands during the

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she not only explores the physical places where her great-great-great-grandfather once lived, but she also discovers her forefathers’ terrain. In the past, she had not even known of her command of Gaelic – until she meets an old local woman in the Scottish countryside: .

She said everything in Gaelic, and then I began to speak to her […] in Gaelic as well. I don’t even remember what I said, the actual words or the phrases. It was just like it poured out of me, like some subterranean river that had been running deep within me and suddenly burst forth. […] It seemed I had been away from the language for such a long, long time.13

The image of the language as a river, which also appears in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners,14 is closely linked with another abstract region that recalls the Scottish roots of the characters and the cultural heritage of Cape Breton: a landscape made up of individual as well as collective memories. This region of the mind denies any limits of physicality; in fact, it subverts them by being both time- and bodiless. In MacLeod’s novel, the older brothers of the protagonist Alexander feel very close to a country they have never seen and in fact will never be able to see, for it is a Scotland of times long gone by. Yet mentally they travel to the ancient world of their forefathers as they pass through space and time by envisioning the land they know from the stories they have been told: “Far away on the edge of the Canadian Shield they recreated images of seasons and time separate from them by great distances of physical and mental geography.”15 It is thus in the mind that the boundaries of time and space are transcended and a new understanding of physical and non-physical regions arises.

late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. Under a land-for-sheep policy, many local farmers lost their land. As a consequence, several waves of emigration to Canada and other countries set in, leaving great parts of Scotland depopulated. The actual motives for and causes of the Highland Clearances are still debated: on the one hand, historians refer to general economic and agrarian changes at the time, which led up to the Industrial Revolution and forced many British inhabitants to adjust to new living conditions. On the other hand, a pro-Scottish perspective blames the greediness of the English for the displacement of the Scots – an outlook that many inhabitants of Nova Scotia endorse, although (or maybe because) it has legendary undertones. See esp. John Prebble, The Highland Clearances (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 13 MacLeod, Mischief, 150. 14 Laurence furthermore creates the picture of the “lost languages lurking inside the ventricles of the heart,” which is also used in MacLeod’s Mischief. See Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986): 264; MacLeod, Mischief, 178. 15 MacLeod, Mischief, 160.

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The considerable influence of this mnemonic landscape on the characters’ identities is evident throughout MacLeod’s writings, sometimes creating the impression that the people’s ‘Scottishness’ is more real to them than their ‘Canadianness’. With regard to the mid-eighteenth-century lost Battle of Culloden,16 which forced many Scots to emigrate from their homeland and left them with a sense of loss and defeat, the narrator of No Great Mischief states: “We are probably what we are because of the ‘45. We are, ourselves, directly or indirectly the children of Culloden Moor, and what happened in its aftermath.”17 Similarly, an infamous incident involving the English General James Wolfe (1727–59), whose victory over the French at Louisbourg, Quebec, earned him the title “The Hero of Louisbourg,” constitutes a present source of identity for the novel’s characters. As the reader learns in the course of the story, many immigrants to Nova Scotia from the Scottish Highlands served Wolfe in the battle against the French on the ‘Plains of Abraham’, despite the fact that the general had previously fought against their Scottish countrymen at Culloden. But instead of caring for the loyal Scots, Wolfe showed open disregard for them and wrote the following backhanded line about the Highland natives in a letter to his friend Captain Rickson, which Catriona quotes in the narrative: “They are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall.”18 By choosing words from this disreputable passage as the novel’s title, MacLeod emphasizes how much the world of present-day Nova Scotia’s inhabitants is pervaded by historic and legendary events, and how the characters’ lives are inseparably interwoven with their ancestors’ fate. Apart from being an important part of personal and cultural identity, the territory of historical reminiscence is also a place where the figures meet people who share similar memories. In the short story “Clearances,” the Canadian-born narrator, whose Highland ancestors settled on Cape Breton after being exiled, thinks back to his encounter with a Scottish shepherd, whom he met on his first journey to Scotland, which he undertook while serving in the army during the Second World War. To the narrator’s astonishment, the local shepherd immediately recognizes him as a Scot whose forefathers had to leave the country because of the Highland Clearances, simply by looking at 16 In 1745, Charles Edward (1720–1788), known as “Bonnie Prince Charles,” initiated a rebellion against the English. Many Scottish people supported him, but since the promised support of the French never arrived, the rebels were defeated by the English at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746. 17 MacLeod, Mischief, 192. 18 Mischief, 219.

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the Canadian uniform of the foreigner: “‘You are from Canada? You are from the Clearances?’ He uttered both statements in the form of questions and pronounced the word ‘Clearances’ as if it were a place instead of a matter of historical eviction.”19 The characters thus experience the memorial landscape as a locus communis, which can be accessed by mere remembrance, yet is associated with topographical dimensions. The historical knowledge that is shared by MacLeod’s characters does not, however, always rely on pure facts. Since the reminiscences are dependent on stories that were handed down to modern citizens by previous generations, the mnemonic region represents the collective consciousness of the (fictitious) inhabitants of Nova Scotia rather than a theoretical perspective on historical events. This aspect is addressed several times in the fiction by illustrating the deceitfulness of any historical ‘truth’ – a concept that is denied throughout the narratives. Instead, the reader is made aware of the memory’s natural effect of blurring, thus allowing flaws to enter stories, especially when they have been recited for a number of years and by different people. In No Great Mischief this notion is introduced right at the beginning of the novel, when the narrator talks about his forefather Calum Ruadh, who emigrated from Scotland in 1779 and has been a family legend ever since: “Sometimes it seems we know a lot about him, and at other times very little. ‘It is all relative,’ as they say. No pun intended. There are some facts and perhaps some fantasies that change with our own perceptions and interests.”20 Instead of promoting a homogeneous picture of the past, the narrative thus exposes the authenticity of multiple versions of history. Furthermore, this can be understood as a meta-comment on the legitimacy of fictional accounts of the past, and thus on the author’s own stance as a writer of personal (hi)stories. Apart from the natural unreliability of human memory, the mnemonic region of MacLeod’s characters is strongly influenced by elements of myth. These mythemes often intertwine with personal and /or collective reminiscences of the past, so that a fused landscape of certainty and uncertainty evolves, of which Colin Nicholson writes: “The constructs of memory and the fictions of myth merge to unsettling effect in a scripted territory at once topographically rooted and geographically uncertain.”21 In this land of fact and fiction, matters of rationality and irrationality simply depend on a person’s

19

MacLeod, “Clearances,” in MacLeod, Island, 419. MacLeod, Mischief, 17. 21 Colin Nicholson, “Regions of Memory: Alistair MacLeod’s Fiction,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 7.1 (1992): 136. 20

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beliefs. The short story “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun,” for example, portrays a family that is haunted by the knowledge that the narrator’s great-great-greatgrandfather was killed by the “cù mòr glas,” Gaelic for “the big grey dog,”22 causing various family members to fear a similar death ever since. Even the protagonist’s otherwise rational older brother avoids bus-stops of the Greyhound corporation – of course, “Just in case,”23 as he assures his brother awkwardly. Even though the characters realize the rational absurdity of their fear, the legend manipulates their thoughts and actions, for it has gained power over their minds. In a different example, the character’s fascination with his forefathers’ myths generates a desire to leave this world altogether and to take refuge in the legends of ancient Scotland, which embodies a kind of psychological sanctuary for him. The terminally ill protagonist of the short story “The Road to Rankin’s Point” wishes to take part in the old rituals of his Gaelic ancestors, as he believes in the ceremonies’ potential to cure his cancer. Disillusioned by the limits of modern medicine, he praises the past reliance on natural religion and phenomena: I would want to go farther and farther back through previous generations so that I might have more of what now seems so little. I would go back through the superstitions and the herbal remedies and the fatalistic war cries and the haunting violins and the cancer cures of cobwebs. Back through the knowledge of being and its end as understood through second sight and spectral visions and the intuitive dog and the sea bird’s cry. I would go back to the priest with the magic hands. Back to the faith healer if only I had more faith. Back to anything rather than to die at the objective hands of mute, cold science.24

Regardless of the irrationality of his trust in ancient rites, the narrator envisions the mythic world to be a hypothetical deliverance from his misery: a place of physical and mental regeneration, which is accessible even today despite its chronological and geographical distance. Yet his prevailing rationality fails the protagonist, as it closes the gate of faith that would allow him to enter the legendary space, leaving him merely with the vision of a phenomenal transformation that will never take place.

22 23 24

MacLeod, “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun,” 312. “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun,” 319. MacLeod, “The Road to Rankin’s Point,” in MacLeod, Island, 176.

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Alistair MacLeod’s ‘Regions for Everybody’ The notion of a territory’s direct accessibility by means of mental voyages, as outlined above, not only reveals a new way of understanding the region in MacLeod’s fiction, but it also disproves any suspicion of regionalism’s being a restricting model in itself. Instead, locale is shown to be an open concept that is not limited in its geographical or cultural extent. Yet this interpretation by no means resembles the conventional, more prevalent perception of region, which has been – and frequently still is – associated with the notion of the peripheral and the insignificant. Against the background of this traditionalist point of view, the region represents a marginal place within a larger structure that is categorized by internal hierarchies of power. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out in their still eminent book The Empire Writes Back,25 this stigmatization of the region as being an inferior counterpart to the dominant centre can be ascribed to a long history of authoritarian subjugation of people, cultures, and places by colonizers of any kind. To liberate the theory of regionalism from this colonial heritage means to see the potential of the local setting and to acknowledge its significance for a world that is still struggling with truly postcolonial patterns. With respect to the underestimation that regional writers have often experienced in the past because of the term’s pejorative connotation, Joyce Carol Oates writes in her afterword to MacLeod’s short-story cycle The Lost Salt Gift of Blood: I have always thought the term “regional literature” misleading as well as condescending, for isn’t fiction set in our Western capitals […] regional literature in the most literal sense? […] In this sense, all literature is regional; or conversely, no literature is regional. Alistair MacLeod’s Cape Breton is everywhere. And immediately accessible to us.26

As Oates indicates, the specifics of the portrayed region do not limit the allure of MacLeod’s literature any more than any other setting would. Moreover, as the notion of a terrain in which personal identity is rooted is a universal one, the author’s fiction carries a message for all people, regardless their geographical, linguistic, or historical background. In view of the global relevance that can thus be attributed to MacLeod’s writings, it is especially interesting to consider the role of the artist with

25 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; London: Routledge, 2002): 14–19. 26 Joyce Carol Oates, “Afterword,” in Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood: Collected Short Stories (London: Ontario Review P , 1988): x.

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regard to the region portrayed and its people. Westfall points out that it has become part of an author’s profession to contribute to the development of the cultural region, hence to the identity of its inhabitants as well as that of his or her readership: Writers no longer simply reflect the region they describe; now they help to create the region itself. Art and identity are linked closely together. Regional writers take the cultural material of a place and transform it into a mythology that the people of the region can identify as their own.27

In MacLeod’s fiction, however, the objective of representing and creating cultural territories is developed into a more global understanding of art, as the personal and cultural regions that are depicted also relate to people with very different geographical and epistemological roots. Among other things, this shows in the various connections that are drawn between the Canadian descendants of Scottish Highland immigrants and heterogeneous ethnic groups from all over the world. In No Great Mischief, the narrator recurrently ponders on the destiny of the numerous non-Canadian seasonal workers whom he watches in passing from his car while driving to his brother’s house. These so-called pickers often come from poor countries and try to make some money by helping with the harvest during summer and fall. The seasonal contracts allow them to stay in Canada for a limited time only, while their families have to remain in their home countries, dependent on the money that is sent to them. Alexander imagines the loneliness of these workers and feels connected to them through his own experience of isolation when working in mining camps far from home. Although he does not know the pickers personally, he is able to relate to their strategies of creating mental regions of familiarity and refuge in a foreign world: They do not see their children or talk to them very often. […] Sometimes they listen to music on cassettes, the rhythm and the dialect and the language often being foreign and indiscernible to those who pass by on the larger highways.28

The mental bond that the narrator senses between himself and the seasonal workers would not have developed if Alexander had not suffered when far from his homeland and unable to adjust to his new surroundings. Here, the shared experience of seclusion creates what Janice Kulyk Keefer calls “trans-

27 28

Westfall, “On the Concept of Region,” 11. MacLeod, Mischief, 155.

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national and transcultural solidarity,”29 acting as a vehicle of translation between different individuals and their regional identities. But whereas the unification of diverse communities on the basis of shared experiences still depends on people’s particular backgrounds, there is another, more universal way of translating the personal into the collective. In his fiction, MacLeod, by the sheer act of writing, succeeds in making his readers feel part of the physical and mental landscapes depicted even if they have not experienced the same situations as the characters. In fact, art in general and literature in particular seem to be a key bridge connecting heterogeneous worlds. This idea is explored in the short story “The Closing Down of Summer,” in which the first-person narrator at one point contemplates his relationship with the Zulu people he met while working in an African mining camp. Although he shares neither their language nor their culture, he feels unusually attached to them without really knowing why. While he certainly knows that genuine integration into a community as different as theirs is impossible, he still ponders the basis on which his special affiliation is founded: In the introduction to the literature text that my eldest daughter brings home from university it states that “the private experience, if articulated with skill, may communicate an appeal that is universal beyond the limitations of time or landscape.” I have read that over several times and thought about its meaning in relation to myself.30

This highly positive picture of literature acting as an interregional and even international binding factor is definitely worth being explored in other works, particularly in times when intercultural understanding is increasingly needed. Being rooted within a personal region of identity is a necessary construct that enables the individual to relate to the communal and universal, and literature can be a main avenue of access to this transformation. Accordingly, MacLeod states in an interview with Laurie Kruk that “the regions are there for everyody,”31 thus confirming that the author believes in the global appeal of literature no matter where the fiction is set. The benefit of this policy does not only influence his narratives in theory: after all, readers all over the world are fascinated with the characters and territory of MacLeod’s fiction, which has 29 Janice Kulyk Keefer, “Loved Labour Lost: Alistair MacLeod’s Elegiac Ethos,” in Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works, ed. Irene Guilford (Toronto: Guernica, 2001): 82. 30 MacLeod, “The Closing Down of Summer,” in MacLeod, Island, 196. 31 Alistair MacLeod, “The World is Full of Exiles,” interview with Laurie Kruk, Studies in Canadian Literature 20 (1995): 150–59; http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi ?directory=vol20_1/&filename=Kruk.htm (9 September 2005).

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already been translated into numerous languages of the world. Not only does regionality therefore provide a source of personal as well as national Canadian identity – the latter being as rooted in Nova Scotia as in any other part of a country whose sense of unity is nourished only by its regional roots. But, more importantly, the ‘Regional Here’ of the stories can be entered by a worldwide audience. Even though few speak Gaelic or may feel particularly attached to Scottish history and myth, readers will be able to find the collective truth of human identity within the concrete and abstract landscapes of Cape Breton’s inhabitants.

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; London: Routledge, 2002). Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1993). Francis, Douglas R. “Regionalism, W.L. Morton, and the Writing of Western Canadian History, 1870–1885,” American Review of Canadian Studies 31 (2001): 569–88. Friesen, Gerald. “Homer’s Odyssey and a Region of Rednecks: What Communication History Can Tell Us About Canada as a Country of Regions,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 15 (2002): 27–41. Frye, Northrop. “Preface,” in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971), repr. in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 12: Northrop Frye on Canada, ed. Jean O’Grady & David Staines (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2003): 412–20. Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia, Internet presence (9 September 2005), http://www.gaelic .ca/indexframe.htm Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “Loved Labour Lost: Alistair MacLeod’s Elegiac Ethos,” in Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works, ed. Irene Guilford (Toronto: Guernica, 2001): 72–83. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986). MacLennan, Hugh. “Canada Between Covers” (1946), repr. in Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos 2: 1940–1983 (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1985): 361– 72. MacLeod, Alistair. “The Canadian Short Story,” in Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story. ed. Gerald Lynch & Angela Arnold Robbeson (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 1999): 161–66. ——. Island: The Complete Stories (New York: Vintage, 2002). ——. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood: Collected Short Stories (London: Ontario Review Press, 1988). ——. No Great Mischief (London: Vintage, 2001). ——. “The World is Full of Exiles,” interview with Laurie Kruk, Studies in Canadian Literature 20 (1995): 150–59; http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory =vol20_1/&filename=Kruk.htm (9 September 2005). Nicholson, Colin. “Regions of Memory: Alistair MacLeod’s Fiction,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 7.1 (1992): 128–37. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Afterword,” in Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood: Collected Short Stories, 157–60.

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Prebble, John. The Highland Clearances (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). Westfall, William. “On the Concept of Region in Canadian History and Literature,” Journal of Canadian Studies 15.2 (1980): 3–15. Wonders, William C. “Canadian Regions and Regionalisms: National Enrichment or National Disintegration?” in Canadian Issues / Thèmes Canadiens: Perspectives on Regions and Regionalism in Canada Perspectives sur les régions et le régionalisme au Canada, ed. William Westfall (Ottawa: Association for Canadian Studies, 1983): 16–53. Wyile, Herb. “Historicizing Regionalism as a Critical Term in Canadian Literary Criticism,” Terranglian Territories: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation, ed. Susanne Hagemann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000): 439–46.

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“But who is that on the other side of you?” — Translation, Materiality, and the Question of the Other in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day A GNESE F IDECARO

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N A N I T A D E S A I ’ S Clear Light of Day, a novel published in 1980, certain lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land haunt Bim, the female protagonist, and summon up a ghostly female figure from the past. Desai draws on a text that conveys a Western sense of cultural sterility and spiritual crisis in order to address India’s conflictual multiculturalism and the specific question of the condition of women. Yet as an actualization of the unhomely, this adaptation also brings to light a specific resistance to translation which must be related to the lines’ insistent raising of the question of the other. Desai brings out the workings of otherness within literary language, but the resulting hybridization of English does not propose any easy merging of cultures. Instead, it acknowledges the unspeakable, the voiceless, and the foreign – the untranslatable – at the heart of language, culture, and identity. This untranslatable does from one perspective appear as a traumatic core that threatens to silence and shatter the self. Yet the act of reading also allows it to emerge as that which insistently calls for translation: as a powerful, though deeply ambivalent and unreconciled source of life, language, and community. This essay initially explores the various senses in which the novel deals with the untranslatable, as linguistic, temporal, and spatial untranslatability, as trauma, and as a form of resistance involving, but not reducible to, the (female) body and the material world. Far from espousing any metaphysic of untranslatability, it questions the opposition between movement and immobility, translation, and the untranslatable that structures the novel’s understanding of the translational and transnational crisis associated with Partition. It

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examines how Desai moves away from a sense of deadlock associated with trauma to consider – and, indeed, retrieve from that sense of impasse – a more enabling, if precarious, resistance to translation. The latter may well be akin to the ambivalent transmission Carol Maier has in mind when she warns against too absolute an emphasis on the sense of “loss” connected with translation and against the concomitant “suppression of the disorientation – at time humorous, at times downright frightening – of a familiar language breaking down under the pressure not only to accommodate but also to transmit the unknown.”1 As an attempt at conveying the unknown, Desai’s novel revises the reassuring narrative of spiritual conversion which a modernist poet such as T.S. Eliot has to offer as a response to his own sense of European crisis (which, as Michael North has pointed out, is likewise a crisis of Empire).2 Desai’s use of multicultural references ironically displaces Eliot’s masterful staging of untranslated quotations and the implicit assertion of untranslatability which the ending of The Waste Land entails. It allows the inequality and power-relations upon which translation depends to emerge into the foreground, thus releasing the anxieties attending an attempted translation.3 Underlying this reading of Clear Light of Day is an understanding of translation as a contingent and localizing performance. Although the recitation of poetry seems to refer the meaning of history back to the forms and structures of the colonial past, performance appears as an interpretative moment in which other meanings may also be actualized and the question of the future may be re-opened. This understanding of translation as a performative act will lead me to focus on the irony-laden use which its female protagonist Bim makes of the lines taken from The Waste Land, one of several English literary references she evokes in her attempt to work through her sense of trauma. As the question of otherness raised by the lines becomes the novel’s ethical leitmotif, they eventually encourage a gendered reading of Eliot’s canonical poetry – one that brings to light the disturbing, resistant translatability which his poem represses or attempts to control. I will relate this resistant translatability to the sphere of ambivalent, even abject, materiality with which Mira-masi is associated. The novel does not disavow this materiality, but confronts it with the materiality of surfaces and texts – which is indissociable from a more performative and theatrical, non-essentialist approach to identity 1

Carol Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice for Cross-Cultural Translation,” in Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney & Carol Maier (Pittsburgh P A : U of Pittsburgh P , 1995): 21–22. 2 Michael North, A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford U P , 1999): 7. 3 On translation and inequality see Carol Maier, “Toward a Theoretical Practice,” 29.

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– to then reclaim it in its final act of cultural translation. If Clear Light of Day thus reminds its readers of the irreducibility of those material dimensions, the materiality it brings to attention is always double: the materiality of language, of the ironic displacements, hybridized forms, and misunderstood meanings which interfere with the univocity and universality of communication, on the one hand, and the materiality of bodies, with their spatio-temporal and historical situatedness, on the other. Clear Light of Day, a novel of the remembering and working-through of the partition between India and Pakistan, addresses trauma, the impossibility of forming and stabilizing an experience of an overwhelming event and to translate its impact into words. Yet the untranslatability the novel is preoccupied with does not pertain only to the collapse of the mediating power of language and representation in the face of extreme violence. The characters also face a difficulty that concerns their relation to time and their ability to construct a sense of history. In this perspective, trauma in the novel also involves a temporal untranslatability: it does not allow those subject to it to move harmoniously through time (to translate also means to transfer, to transport); it ties them to a disabling, disconnected moment which they cannot incorporate as a memory into their present lives. Thus, in Bim’s description of her experience of history, trauma causes life to move “in jumps,” a mode of progress in which the counterpart of a sudden, discontinuous leaping-forward is figured as a regression into stagnancy and inertia: ‘Isn’t it strange how life won’t flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood? There are these long still stretches – nothing happens – each day is exactly like the other – plodding, uneventful – and then suddenly there is a crash – mighty deeds take place – momentous events – even if one doesn’t know it at the time – and then life subsides again into the backwaters till the next push, the next flood? That summer was certainly one of them – the summer of ’47–.’4

Trauma, then, is perceived as an attempted but failed displacement or translation. Tied to this perception is the idea that history – and the specific ‘translation’ that should have carried India into a postcolonial condition – has somehow remained abortive, ineffective. In Clear Light of Day, which focuses on the dislocation of communal and family ties in a shabby Old Delhi house, this ineffectiveness, this failure are related to what history seems to have left

4

Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day (London: Vintage, 2001): 42–43. Further page references are in the main text.

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beyond its reach: the life that remains stuck in the backwaters is associated with the house, that world of stable domestic relations, of women and subalterns that is not perceived as historical, and that partly survives and resists the political events that shatter the lives of those living in it. Bim’s stubborn clinging to her house and its past history, her choosing to stay in it with her young autistic brother Baba, contrast with her brother Raja’s fascinated flight into Urdu, which he sees as the repository of India’s most refined values. It also contrasts with Tara’s diplomat husband Bakul’s joining of a global ‘citizenship’ which allows its members to belong comfortably everywhere while taking a distanced view of their country of birth. The correlative of the temporal and cultural paralysis that characterizes Old Delhi is precisely its inhabitants’ emigration, an international mobility which reinforces people’s perception of it as an immovable world: ‘And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened long ago – in the time of the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Sultanate, the Moghuls – that lot.’ […] ‘And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer, I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away – to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back.’ (5)

In their radical form, both consumption (a consequence of the life of plenty which Raja comes to live in his exile)5 and circulation (associated with Bakul’s and Tara’s life-style) enact a different logic of translation, a wasteless economy of meanings and places which strives either to disembody relations or, vice versa, to radically embody them: both privilege immediacy, resolution, easy conversion, and bracket out or consume whatever may not be assimilated, what is contingent or may slow down the speedy process of moving from one position or place to the other – just as an automatized, technical approach to translation, which aspires to reduce all differences and convert them into marketable value/meaning, is the correlative of the global processes that accelerate economic and cultural exchanges. While this acceleration helps to bring about an increasingly materialistic world, it paradoxically depends upon an ideal of intelligibility, the production of abstract equivalences, and increasingly dematerialized relations. The other side of this production is precisely the untranslatability of trauma, which is perceived as its

5 On Raja’s association with consumerism, see Rajeswari Mohan, “The Forked Tongue of Lyric in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32.1 (1997): 51, 54–55.

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radical other, and through which the materiality of world and body destructively returns to attention: in Clear Light of Day, this is the materiality of the domestic world and sick bodies of which Bim is the custodian, the terror of unspeakable family events, and the hidden traumatic core of that world, the well in which the cow has drowned. Taking one step further a postmodern philosophy of translation that has deconstructed the opposition between the original and the derivative, Rada Iveković questions the dichotomy that opposes translatability and untranslatability as an “insurmountable diad.” She proposes to consider “translation as a primal condition, or rather a condition as such – not that of a place, but that of a primordial move; not foundational, nor inescapable, but preceding us like the language into which we were born without having chosen it.”6 In her view, translation itself is “a vital form of resistance (through the differential critical expression of differences) to the hegemonic lines of imposition of the meaning (of a meaning).”7 Homi Bhabha has, more specifically, linked the idea of a resistance within translation to the liminality of migrant experience considered as a ‘translational’ phenomenon: caught in-between a ‘nativist’, even nationalist, atavism and a postcolonial metropolitan assimilation, the subject of cultural difference becomes a problem that Walter Benjamin has described as the irresolution, or liminality, of ‘translation’, the element of resistance in the process of transformation, ‘that element in a translation which does not lend itself to translation’.8

Clear Light of Day is a translational novel to the extent that its protagonists attempt to negotiate the plurality and conflicts of India. Far from espousing a logic of identity, they make use of a disparate range of literary, religious, and philosophical references which are as diverse as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, anthroposophy, Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali songs, Muhammad Iqbal’s Urdu poetry, American records of the 1940s, German classical music, or English Romantic and modernist poetry. Yet even though both colonization and Partition involve uprooting and the dislocation of identities, the condition Clear Light of Day deals with is not diasporic: the novel lays emphasis on the predicament of those who remain and on their own ways of being displaced, 6 Rada Iveković, “On Permanent Translation (We are in translation),” tr. John Doherty, Transeuropéennes 22 (Spring–Summer 2002): 121. 7 Iveković, “On Permanent Translation,” 121. 8 Homi K. Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and The Trials of Cultural Translation,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 224.

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of becoming part of a translational space. It thus focuses on forms of internal displacement, on gendered conditions of uprootedness which coexist with enforced seclusion and which traumatically lurk at the heart of the materiality of earth, place, and substantial identities. Thus Desai’s move away from the untranslatable does not just consider translation as a form of resistance to a univocal historical meaning (Iveković), according to which the “partition” results in a radical splitting of identities and loyalties that includes the painfully lived split between those who leave and those who remain. It also considers how translation ambivalently resists those ontological narratives that construct the dichotomy of rootedness and rootlessness and that produce the origin as a point of both imaginary plenitude and terror. According to Rajeswari Mohan’s acute analysis of the novel, the characters’ frequent use of literary allusions only reveals the collusion between poetic ideals, aesthetic universalism, and those characters’ political conservatism or escapism. Their translations of English texts into the Indian context appear to be problematic gestures, ridden with ironies that they fail to perceive, and that underscore their entrapment.9 The female characters’ relation to English literature certainly does, as Mohan points out, partake of the double binds in which they are caught. The real is either perceived through distorting literary mediations, or more immediately experienced as a dislocating source of violence and death, as when Bim naturalizes the violence of Partition in her description of it in terms of a catastrophic “flooding.” Yet it is not just that the bourgeois characters tragically fail, as Mohan suggests, to face the demands of history because of their awkward and naive clinging to inadequate eurocentric models of identity. On the one hand, their failure to translate – to construct their identity as the result of an easy transaction or equivalence between actually conflicting spheres of reference – is certainly overshadowed by that sense of critical impasse which is figured by images of trauma in the novel. On the other hand, as we will see, the discrepancies between European references and the context in which they are used bring to light a series of productive ironies and conflicts which a more radical notion of the untranslatable would, paradoxically, tend to level. In the first part of the novel, Bim describes how she used to see in the garden, slipping past the hedge – crossing a boundary – the white ghost of Mira-masi, the destitute and outcast aunt who died an alcoholic in the family

9 See the discussion of the novel’s intertextuality in Rajeswari Mohan, “The Forked Tongue of Lyric in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32.1 (1997): 47–66.

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house in the summer of 1947. A few lines from The Waste Land and an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s own notes to them provide Bim with the language to describe her troubled response to the apparition: ‘I felt like one of those Antarctic explorers T.S. Eliot wrote about in his notes to The Waste Land, to that verse, do you know it, Tara? Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman – But who is that on the other side of you?’ (41)

Pronouncing these lines, Bim unhesitatingly converts the disquieting, uncanny feeling that troubles her – a version of Bhabha’s postcolonial “unhomely”10 – into the figures and meter of the English poem. This is in keeping with her habit of transcending the limitations of her own daily experience by translating them into the language of the English poets she loves and by using their verse as an interpretative grid that helps her relate to them. She thus captures the elusiveness of that experience, giving it a shape that is recognizable and allows her to share it, to domesticate and validate it. The reference to the Antarctic explorers, more specifically, is one instance of a recurrent concern with heroism in the novel. Both Bim and her brother Raja are tempted in their youth by heroic self-definition and aspire to a life of exceptional scope and prowess outside their home. The ability to quote poetry and thus to identify with a cultivated, refined way of life associated with either English or Urdu literacy gives shape to these aspirations (Byron is, for instance, one of Raja’s heroic models), while also resulting from them (Bim and Raja enact their own difference by cultivating an elite taste). Such use of literacy is implicitly criticized through Tara’s failure to recognize the poem. Seen from her perspective, poetry appears as an elite practice that unites Bim and her brother Raja, setting them apart, and excluding her. Bim’s poetic

10 Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31–32.10 (Spring 1992): 141–53; repr. in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 445–55. See Mohan, “The Forked Tongue of Lyric,” 61, where attention is drawn to the depoliticizing reading Bim makes of the apparition. I would add that the unhomely, in its pointing to a conflictual dimension of experience which cannot be processed or assimilated, precisely resists Bim’s domestication of it.

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concern for a haunting third paradoxically leads her to ignore her own exclusion of Tara, who functions precisely as a third in relation to the dyadic relation of the older brother and sister: As a little girl, tongue-tied and shy, too diffident to attempt reciting or even memorising a poem – there had been that wretched episode in school when she was made to stand up and recite ‘The Boy Stood On the Burning Deck’ and it was found she could not proceed beyond the title – [...]. She felt herself shrink into that small miserable wretch of twenty years ago, both admiring and resenting her tall, striding sister who was acquainted with Byron, with Iqbal, even with T.S. Eliot. (42)

Tara’s failure, as a school-girl, to recite Felicia Hemans’ poem of heroic boyhood “Casablanca” – which starts with “The boy stood on the burning deck” – also entails a critique of the Imperialist uses to which poetry is put in the British school system. Tara’s humiliation ironically comments on the heroic pretence of the poem and emphasizes the very discrepancy of context to which Bim remains blind. While this points to a resistance to any easy translation from one context to the other, Bim’s acquaintance with Byron, Iqbal, and even Eliot suggests, by contrast, the existence of a sphere of world literature in which any learned person, regardless of background, could have a share in the spiritual conversation of poets. This ideal of a world literature is questioned by the exclusions upon which it rests. It will come to an end when the adolescent Raja starts playing the qualities of one literary language against another, raising Urdu above English, and dismissing Hindi altogether. The conflict between an atemporal conception of culture and history is a central concern of the novel. It is, for instance, played out in the expatriate Bakul’s refusal of local politics and his concomitant fetishization of the Taj Mahal or the Bhagavad Gita or in his idealization of what he calls “the great, immortal values of ancient India” (35). Desai’s concern for the singular and time-bound gesture that brings literature to life within a specific, local context points to an alternative to that attitude. In that perspective, it is important to underscore how Mira-masi’s ghost, who is the occasion of the remembering of Eliot’s poem, helps to construct a sense of the local in the novel: it tells of the past of the place, of the memories that give it its distinctive identity, as much as it is a reminder of the aunt’s failure to escape the constraints and confinement of her life. That dimension of the local is precarious and contingent: indeed, Bim needs to touch the white-flowering chandni to have the immediacy of physical contact renewed and to confirm her memory of the apparition. Touch counteracts the uprooting of vision which the quotation of poetry might effect. The gesture anchors that vision, even as it is being referred back

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to the seeming atemporality of poetic utterance (to a realm of Western literacy that seems to transcend cultural determination and history because it can so easily be invoked out of its original site of production and be made to offer a comment upon a different reality). Because the whiteness of the chandni evokes the whiteness of the apparition, it is as if the enigma, the haunting timeless question with broader existential resonances that we hear in Eliot’s lines, were being returned to the here and now of its flowering. Touch, then, effects a translation involving a displaced materialization. The performative dimension of Bim’s reading of Eliot’s poem is further underscored when she discards the interpretative context provided by Eliot. She is aware of the relative relevance of the poem, and uses it selectively, reading it in an heroic key which she then claims she is not up to: “‘Only I was not at any extremity like those explorers in the icy wastes who used to see ghost figures,’ she continued. ‘I was not frozen or hungry or mad. Or even quite alone. I had Baba’” (42). Paradoxically, Bim’s emphasis on the lack of fit between her situation and the one the poem refers to is a way for her to deny the full relevance of the lines she has been quoting. In her assertion of autonomy and self-sufficiency, in her denial of loneliness, suffering, and madness, Bim, who will progressively take over Mira-masi’s role as a caretaker of the house and whose increasingly neglected and disordered appearance will cause her to resemble the latter more and more, remains blind to the fact that the apparition points to a hidden kinship beween her own destiny and that of her aunt. At the end of the second part, the anecdote of the ghost is recounted again and Eliot’s lines are once more evoked. This time, the disquieting effect of the apparition is more forcefully highlighted, and the question of Bim’s losing her mind as Mira-masi did is raised, if only as an hypothesis that is immediately repressed. A long way from the detached contemplation of the immortal monuments of India, the poem interpellates Bim and touches a fragility in her self that has to do with her complex positioning as a woman with a plural background and conflicting points of reference. It furthers and echoes her troubled state precisely insofar as the performance of the lines encounters a resistance or a difficulty that cannot be fully acknowledged. Indeed, Bim’s selective use of the literary reference entails a complex negotiation of meaning: on the one hand, it involves an ironically reductive and naive misreading of the poem from the perspective of the interpretative context provided by Eliot’s semi-bogus footnotes. These footnotes, which Bim draws upon, do indeed mock principles of intelligibility based on authorial intentionality, and call into question the anchoring of the poem’s meaning

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in an original site of production or context of understanding. At the same time, Bim’s misreading reinvests the poem from the textually marginal perspective of the footnotes. This is the perspective from which a contextualized answer to the ethical question raised by the poem is sought: Eliot’s poetry is hybridized by a reading that actualizes and gives new weight to the question of the other within it. The problematic translation of the poem thus points to the existence of an untranslatable which has to do with the uncanny spectrality and liminality it thematizes. Eliot’s lines raise the question of the other as that third term which is in excess of all simple oppositions of self and other, identity and difference. All the characters in the novel come to occupy the structural position of such a third, which therefore resists referential readings. However, while this stresses the interchangeability of positions, hence a certain translatability between them, “But who is that third on the other side of you?” is a question that retains a disturbing edge and requests specificity rather than interchangeability. Mira-masi, whose links to a community have been severed, is a figure of female victimization and displacement. She takes over the role of the mother in relation to the children; she becomes a nurturing figure to them, but is progressively destroyed by their vampiric feeding on her. Her motherly desire for plenty, material fullness, organic substance, and growth (as in her identification with an immovable tree, 110) hides the trauma of being an outcast. It is her problematic desire to embody fullness that brings the cow, and thus death, into the domestic enclosure. The cow drowns in the well, and the horror of that well, a figure for the more specific contradictions that entrap women in the novel, exposes the threatening monstrosity of all fantasies of a totalizing mothering, of a source of being that would either suppress lack or make up for it (with obvious ideological overtones of women being implicated in a nationalist discourse that encourages precisely such a conception of substantial and organic identity). The two main female protagonists are confronted with the “horror” and darkness of the well when they are playfully reaching beyond their condition. As they follow Raja through the hedge across which he has been thrusting himself, he escapes, while they are confronted with the abject. The well in which the cow has been left to rot is said to be waiting for the girls; it represents stagnation – what does not move and remains the same, but also what is always there, beyond contingency, as both a point of origin (Mira-masi refers to it as “the navel of the world.” 90) and a final destination. Raja’s crossing of the hedge betokens the dynamism and energy of life, while the girls’ is a

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failed passage into a different condition, a failed translation, one that turns into a dead end and confrontation with the fantasy of a corpse. No translation is allowed to take place: the girls’ derisory attempt to refer to the skeleton as a poetic “ship of bones” is mocked by the failure of such a ship to surface – and it is hard to imagine that the reality of the corpse could confirm such a metaphor that attempts to give poetic shape to what is shapeless. If we, further, think of the scene as a rewriting of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, then one must read it as a plain negation of that text’s discourse on the wonder and magic that make up for the lost mother. It is a figuration of trauma, of the fascination exercised by what cannot be processed into a new form. And yet, trauma as an untranslatable is itself a topos of colonial literature: the dark well is a domesticated heart of darkness, that exotic “horror” which Marlow could not convey to the Intended and which was also Eliot’s initial epigraph to The Waste Land. The untranslatable material core of the domestic sphere is thus also the site of an intensive intertextual transfer and mingling of texts – which I will call an abject translatability. A parallel moment in the novel describes the sisters trying again to reach out for Raja. This time, they search his belongings in his room. Raja appears as a composite but insubstantial, disembodied textual being made up of an array of literary references: There was Raja’s copy of Iqbal – stained, much thumbed, marked and annotated – his scattered papers covered with the beautiful script they could not read and which therefore had an added cachet in their admiring eyes. But today they would have preferred to see an unexpected photograph, a stranger’s handkerchief … What made the two sisters expect such shocking revelations? Somehow they felt that today such secrets should be revealed, would be in keeping. Squatting, they searched along his bookshelves where Urdu verse lay cheek by jowl with American paperbacks – those long thick flapping American army editions that he picked up second-hand on Connaught Circus pavements: Louis Bromfield’s Night in Bombay, Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, The Postman Always Rings Twice; also the enormous green volumes containing Keats and Shelley, Blake and Donne; the verses of Zauq and Ghalib, Dagh and Hali in cheap tattered yellow copies – that odd ragbag of reading that went to make up their romantic and inaccessible and wonderful brother. (131)

Iqbal’s poetry, which the girls cannot read because they have not been initiated into the Urdu script, is all surface to them. Instead of going for some depth of meaning from which they would have been barred, they are looking for quite superficial secrets, and metonymically move from one volume to another, experiencing the materiality of literature, of different types of editions

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and various bindings. This is the materiality that enters the foreground when the books become obsolete and, having fallen out of use, enter a different circuit of exchange which reveals that they, too, are caught in time. A new, desacralizing promiscuity is produced, a disparate yet intimate ‘cheek-byjowl’ lying which is quite different from the lofty imaginary of a world literature consisting of a set of atemporal canonical texts. Far from reaching through to their brother’s romantic secrets and to the hidden source of his vitality, the sisters end up putting on his clothes in a kind of derisorily subversive performance of crossdressing in which they mime and appropriate his masculine posturing. Mimicry, however, appears to be empty, because it acknowledges and confirms the difference it strives to abolish. The sisters’ naivety is a long way from a triumphantly postmodern parodic mood: They pranced about the room in their trousers, feeling grotesquely changed by them, not only in appearance but in their movements, their abilities. Great possibilities unexpectedly opened up now they had their legs covered so sensibly and practically […]. Suddenly they saw why they were so different from their brother, so inferior and negligible in comparison: it was because they did not wear trousers. (132)

At the same time, the sisters’ crossdressing underscores how a change of form carries with it a change in being: even if their frocks are but one of the signs of their subaltern status, the political underpinnings of which they fail to decode, they do feel empowered, if only for a moment, by their performance. In that sense, the outward transformation of form involves more than the binary opposition of appearance and identity. This episode sends the reader back to Eliot’s lines: “whether a man or a woman I do not know.” Tiresias’ double gender is the mark of his prophetic abilities as a seer and connects him with an uncanny and spectral, timeless liminality. This is ironically revised by the sisters’ down-to-earth concern with practical empowerment, which involves the transformation of the habitus, Bourdieu’s idea of the embodied and material nature of gendered power-structures. This circumscribed moment of the carnivalesque recalls a darker moment, the drunken Mira-masi’s own ripping-off of her clothes and bandages and tearing at her own flesh in the struggle with hallucinated rats – a scene in which she theatrically mimes her own relation to an abject she attempts to escape (96). Her exposure of her body – of the empty, slack pouches of her breasts and of the rat-tail-like wisp of her pubic hair in particular – grotesquely brings to view the devaluated female sexuality that patriarchy represses,

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making visible the violence it exercises as well as the “bits and scraps” of subjected womanhood that it tries to hide from sight. Again, the torn materiality of Mira-masi’s body contrasts with the spectrality of the other in Eliot’s poem, while the carnivalesque aspects of the scene offer a counter-image to her former association with organic fullness. When Bim goes through Raja’s old papers – the translations she had once made of his poems – the narrator refers to them as “the litter and rubble left by the human picnic” (169), what one must throw away to clear one’s soul. And yet, Bim also looks for a book that “would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and plait them into a composed and concentrated whole after a day of fraying and unravelling” (167). The desire to clear the soul, to eliminate all waste as spiritual conversion is achieved, does not exclude recycling. The model for that might well be Mira-masi’s creativity: her being compared to a “discarded household appliance” (105) suggests that she no longer is of any use, yet she has oral storytelling and bricolage skills which bring together language and the capacity to improvise with old bits and pieces. The long-delayed performance of music that brings aesthetic closure to the novel and in which Bim’s neighbour Mulk finally sings with his old guru is a final weaving-together of sounds and scenery, of foreground and background, of movement and immobility, into a tapestry that is likened to the timeless beauty of a Moghul miniature (180). Bim, however, hears the sadness, bitterness, passion, and frustration that give the old guru’s verses of love a singular, mocking, and disturbingly harsh edge. The guru’s song is the result of a process of trying and failing that allows the materiality of his voice, which bears the mark of time and experience, to inflect and bend the aesthetic purity of the music: There was about that voice a tinge of snuff, of crimson betel spittle, of phlegm. Also of conflict, failure and disappointment. […] whereas Mulk’s voice had been almost like a child’s, so sweet and clear, […] the old man’s was sharp, even a little cracked, inclined to break, although not merely with age but with the bitterness of his experiences, the sadness and passion and frustration. All the storms and rages and pains of his life were in that voice, impinging on every song he chose to sing, giving the verses of love and romance a harsh edge that was mocking and disturbing. (181–82)

Listening to that voice, Bim is paradoxically reminded of another verse by Eliot, a line from Four Quartets that is itself borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita: “Time the destroyer is time the preserver.” As Mohan has pointed out,

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this evocation of a classical Indian text, mediated as it is by Western poetry, is again ironic.11 Yet the passage also asserts, against Eliot’s selective drawing upon a reductive and spiritualized version of India and its eternal truths, a polyphonic, contingent, and deeply material world. Moreover, Bim’s own assertion of local continuity and tradition literally materializes and historicizes the line’s abstract paradox, which posits the mutual translatability of two incommensurable aspects of time: With her inner eye she saw how her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as well as her whole family with all their separate histories and experiences – not binding them within some dead and airless cell but giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, and food to make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new lives, but always drawing from the same soil, the same secret darkness. That soil contained all time, past and future, in it. It was dark with time, rich with time. It was where her deepest self lived, and the deepest selves of her sister and brothers and all those who shared that time with her. (182)

The figure of the dark soil that provides the substance for open-ended future growth recasts the abject darkness that the well had been associated with, without neutralizing its ambivalence. This recalls Mira-masi’s description of the well in terms of a trope of origin: the navel of the world. However, the fertility of time also summons up the gardener’s “steaming, fetid compost heaps” (117), which lie next to the well and partake of the hybrid, material logic of recycling and translatability. The circularity of recycling displaces the originary, however organic it may seem, and constructs it at a distance from any discourse of purity. The abject is the liminality within which the women in the novel threaten to remain caught in their attempt at crossing the boundaries that confine them. The figure of the dark soil reclaims this abject, which evokes Mira-masi’s decayed corporeality but also represents a significant aspect of T.S. Eliot’s discourse on women, materiality, and the waste which his own untranslated fragments threaten to turn into.12 The destructive liminality of shadows and apparitions, earlier associated with the family violence that terrifies Mira-masi (78), has already been transfigured and aestheticized by its incorporation into a game of lights and shadows: “Bim […] let her eyes rove over the audience that was scattered over the lawn, partly lit by the light that fell through the pillars of the veranda 11

Mohan, “The Forked Tongue of Lyric,” 64. See Maud Ellmann’s feminist discussion of waste and the abject in The Waste Land in “Eliot’s Abjection,” in Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher & Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1990): 179–98. 12

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and partly shadowed by the nervous dancing shadows of the foliage so that they were like pierrot figures in a theatre” (179). Organicity and theatricality are closely intertwined in this staging of a community that only exists in the performance of its contingent gathering. But the figure of the dark soil counteracts its dissolution of identities, returning it to a sense of place and tradition while also projecting an alternative negotiation of its potential violence. Thus, while Mulk and his guru give a performance of male tradition (itself an act of temporal translation), Bim’s marginal position allows her to hear the materiality that, bending the guru’s song, also materializes and spatializes time, opening it up, allowing it to take place, in the interstices between two forms of dissolution: between the abject translatability of soil and substance and the sublime untranslatability of light and shadow identities. At the centre of the novel’s ethical discourse there thus lies, I would claim, a concern for yet another materiality, the materiality of time, which the house harbours. This materiality, which is brought into the foreground by the question of the other, suggests the possibility of subverting the opposition between the origin and history, thus allowing history as translation to take place or to find its place. Homi K. Bhabha’s suggestive analysis of the resistance of translation best describes what this temporality is about: This space of the translation of cultural difference at the interstices is infused with that Benjaminian temporality of the present which makes graphic a moment of transition, not merely the continuum of history; it is a strange stillness that defines the present in which the very writing of historical transformation becomes uncannily visible.13

The linearity of history, which constructs the opposition of future-oriented movement and past immobility, is thus subverted as the work of memory returns to the events and the performance of translation spatializes transition, making available the ethical possibility or promise of community which it harbours.

13

Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World,” 224. Italics in the original.

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WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi K. “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and The Trials of Cultural Translation,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 212–35. ——. “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31–32.10 (Spring 1992): 141–53; repr. in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 445–55. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden (Harmondsworth: Penguin Puffin, 1951). Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. & intro. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990). Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day (1980; London: Vintage, 2001). Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land” (1922), in Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974): 61–86. Ellmann, Maud. “Eliot’s Abjection,” in Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher & Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1990): 179– 98. Iveković, Rada. “On Permanent Translation (We are in translation),” tr. John Doherty, Transeuropéennes 22 (Spring–Summer 2002): 121–43. Maier, Carol. “Toward a Theoretical Practice for Cross-Cultural Translation,” in Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney & Carol Maier (Pittsburgh P A : U of Pittsburgh P , 1995): 21–38. Mohan, Rajeswari. “The Forked Tongue of Lyric in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32.1 (1997): 47–66. North, Michael. A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford U P , 1999).

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Deconstructing the Canadian Mosaic — Heaven by George F. Walker S ABINE S CHLÜTER

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in the idea of their society as a multicultural one, a model that is often referred to as ‘the Canadian mosaic’. The notion of a mosaic implies that, rather than merging into one new culture, the different ethnic and religious groups in Canada exist in a form of tolerant diversity where each part adds to the complex whole. This idea is, of course, a very idealistic one, resting upon two pillars. First, it is implicitly assumed that immigrants in Canada do in fact have fixed cultural roots; an assumption that, though controversially discussed in postcolonial criticism, is an important one to keep in mind when discussing the work of the playwright George F. Walker. Secondly, it must be expected from a mosaic society that the different ethnic and religious groups are tolerant and selfreflexive enough to co-exist peacefully and accept one another as equals. In this context, cultural interaction or an adequate ‘translation’ of different cultural codes must work efficiently between the groups involved. The term ‘translation’ is here to be understood in a broad sense as a means of cultural interaction rather than in a restricted sense of literary translation from one language into another. It implies mutual understanding and acceptance between the different cultural communities that ideally go beyond mere toleration but create a society that, though diverse, is founded on a common base of intercultural understanding and shares certain values and aims. It is a concept which is based on the idea of enrichment through diversity rather than on the merging of different cultures into a single new one and which also rejects the notion of a dominant culture. The concept of the Canadian mosaic has been criticized for not reflecting social reality in Canada. In those cases where it actually seems to work, it is ANADIANS TAKE PRIDE

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mostly put down to an assimilation of the values of the dominant culture. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd argue, in their introduction to a volume of critical essays on minority discourse, that the semblance of pluralism disguises the perpetuation insofar as it is enjoyed only by those who have already assimilated the values of the dominant culture. For this pluralism, ethnic or cultural difference is merely an exoticism, an indulgence that can be relished without significantly modifying the individual who is securely imbedded in the protective body of dominant ideology. […] it refuses to acknowledge the class basis of discrimination and the systematic economic exploitation of minorities that underlie postmodern culture.1

I.

Heaven: Questioning Canadian Multiculturalism

The question in the context of Canadian society is, therefore, whether or not intercultural translation really works. This notion is vehemently doubted by George F. Walker, one of Canada’s most prolific contemporary playwrights. In his recent play Heaven, Walker dramatizes the hybrid fabric of Canadian culture and deconstructs the idea of the Canadian mosaic, as Marc Maufort argues: In Heaven, Walker […] questions the very foundations of Canadian multiculturalism. This new work revises traditional notions of marginality in a postcolonial context; it deconstructs both the white supremacist attitude and the hypocrisy of the discourse about political correctness.2

In particular, Walker depicts the relationships between Christians and Jews, between blacks and whites, between the dominant culture and immigrants from Commonwealth countries, between society in general and social outsiders. Moreover, Walker challenges the concept of political correctness. Walker’s protagonist Jimmy works as a human-rights lawyer for the immigration authorities and is presented as a bleeding-heart liberal who feels torn between his moral allegiance to the world of the disenfranchised and his own white Irish Catholic background. Jimmy is disgusted not only with the hypocrisy of his church but also with the claim of absolute truth in all creeds. He is

1 Abdul R. JanMohamed & David Lloyd, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. JanMohamed & Lloyd (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1990): 8. 2 Marc Maufort, “ ‘ Some Kind of Transition Place Between Heaven and Hell’: George Walker’s Aesthetics of Hybridity in Heaven,” in Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre, ed. Sherrill Grace & Albert– Reiner Glaap (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003): 71.

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married to a Jew, Judy, who at the beginning of their marriage seemed to share his liberal views. In recent years, however, a rift has emerged between the couple that is now compounded by their religious differences, owing to which Judy has returned to her faith and has started an affair with her rabbi, David. Moreover, Jimmy has fallen out with his former childhood friend Karl, a corrupt undercover policeman, who has lost faith in the justice system. Karl blames Jimmy for the suicide of his partner, whom Jimmy had prosecuted for shooting a black youth. Karl kills Judy in revenge; he then kills Derek, a young black petty criminal and drug addict, whom he has been exploiting; finally, he kills Jimmy. Derek’s friend Sissy, addicted to drugs herself, stabs Karl to death. These violent developments put all the characters except Sissy and David in heaven. A few visits of the dead to earth during which they talk about their experiences with the afterlife prove that heaven is as unjust, racist, sexist, and superficial a place as earth. Since Jimmy’s and Judy’s children are left behind as orphans, unprotected and unable to take care of themselves, the two remaining characters, David and Sissy, look after them. At the very end of the play, Jimmy reappears from heaven as some sort of stand-up comedian, presenting his bitter and ironic views on life and death, heaven and earth.

II . Religious Conflicts: Christians and Jews One of the central minefields of intercultural communication in Canadian society dramatized in the play is the relationship between Jews and Christians, represented, in a nutshell, by the example of Jimmy and his wife Judy. Jimmy and Judy live in a mixed marriage that neither of their families looks upon with a friendly eye. It had originally been a point of pride for the two of them that their families were hostile towards their exogamous marriage because the general disapproval made them feel tolerant, modern, reasonable, and unprejudiced. A few years later, however, the marriage goes through a severe crisis. Jimmy’s job has left him bitter and disillusioned, while Judy feels lonely and seeks comfort in her religion. It is at this very point that their different backgrounds surface again and become central to the couple’s difficulties. Suddenly, the religious education and cultural traditions that they used to consider as unimportant at the beginning of their married life have involuntarily but unstoppably become part of Jimmy’s and Judy’s self-image again and, what is even more important, part of how they see each other. What once used to unite Jimmy and Judy against all odds is now the very thing that separates them. The couple no longer see each other as individuals, but as representatives of their respective religious and social group. Religion and culture become the projection-surface of their crisis, and hostilities emerge that once

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used to be unthinkable. The marriage partners blame each other for being a representative of their respective culture of origin, and they blame each other’s religious and cultural roots for the bad patch in their marriage. This mutual feeling of disappointment is compounded when Jimmy accidentally overhears a conversation between his wife and his mother-in-law. Judy is pregnant again but, due to the state of her marriage, she considers having an abortion. It becomes clear that she has already spoken to the rabbi about it, without mentioning a word to Jimmy. The latter feels excluded for two reasons: he is left out of matters pertaining to his own marriage and not fully cognizant of his wife’s private life in general, since the extramarital affair takes place within the Jewish community, to which he is not privy. His sense of exclusion makes Jimmy is hurt and angry. He describes Judaism as a privileged group that only takes on selected people: “It [is] the ‘our people’ thing. It’s like a club. She belonged. […] I couldn’t join. […] from the outside it looks like an exclusive club. It’s just… rude.”3 Jimmy projects all his anger, anxiety, and hatred onto his wife’s religious roots: “I mean he [the rabbi] didn’t say something like it’s too bad we can’t just abort the heathen Irish part and keep the Jewish part [...] just in case the little half breed’s the fucking messiah. Don’t tell me that’s not a concern, Judy. [...] You shouldn’t be talking to anybody about killing it except me” (17–18). The suggestion that an abortion that is made solely for religious reasons implies a notion of racism, or even of a fascist world-view on Judy’s part, is clear here. Jimmy’s interpretation of what Judy thinks here and elsewhere reveals his latent hostility to all kinds of religion while at the same time implicitly highlighting his reflex feeling of the superiority of his own religion by referring to certain Catholic moral standards that his wife, in his opinion, does not possess. He suggests that it is not the crisis in their marriage that triggers her considerations. Thus, Jimmy cleverly absolves himself of any responsibility in this matter. He even makes fun of Judy’s religion by talking ironically about the possibility of their child’s being the messiah. It is therefore hardly surprising that Judy gets very upset and angry and retorts: Yeah, right. It’s not religious. It’s about ‘strong feelings.’ Their long tradition of yacking about the sanctity of life. And all this crap about my religion – it’s not related in any way to your family’s ugly little history of Jew hating through the ages. Oh no. And any time now I guess I’m gonna hear about what that senile old prick in Rome thinks about it all too. (18)

3

George F. Walker, Heaven (Burnaby, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2003): 82. Further page references are in the main text.

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It is interesting to note, however, that she, too, argues on a generally religious level, not a personal one. She accuses Jimmy’s family of having hated Jews for centuries, an argument which is, of course, irrelevant to the problem under discussion. The rift between the couple turns out to be that of a conflict which is much more deeply rooted than their personal misunderstanding. The passage quoted above demonstrates that religion and cultural tradition are, in this play, considered to be a central aspect of self-identification. The definition of oneself is obviously seen in this context as a fencing-off of the cultural Other when it comes to essential questions of world-view and creed. Where, however, the Other is automatically excluded from one’s own cultural identity, real understanding and a common basis for a shared life prove to be extremely difficult at the very least. Judy and Jimmy can be regarded as mere representatives of a problem that, of course, leads to even greater difficulties on a larger scale: i.e. where not only individuals but whole cultural groups are involved in conflicts of opinion and world-view. Also interesting, however, is the fact that the two characters always seem to fall back on prejudices and clichéd thinking when it comes in handy for winning an argument; this may seem unfair, but Walker still obviously sees it as a common practice when it comes to conflict between different ethnic and religious groups. This becomes even more evident in scenes where Jimmy and Judy also use prejudices and clichés that are plainly tasteless and intended solely to hurt the other. An example of this would be the scene in the park where Judy has refused to give the drug addict Sissy money. Jimmy now even resorts to a Holocaust image and combines it with the prejudicial assumption that Jews are stingy, money-fixated people: Take off your shoes and show me those two sad little twenty dollar bills you always put in when you’re going out just in case the Gestapo grabs you and you’ll have something to bribe a camp guard with. All you had to do was take off a shoe. She needs that twenty a lot more than you do. If the Gestapo is coming for anyone these days, honey, it’s her. Not you. (15)

By using Third Reich terminology, Jimmy pokes fun at Jewish history and at the same time dismisses claims of being discriminated against as outdated and selfish, compared to ‘real’ contemporary problems. He realizes, however, that the reference to the Gestapo has gone too far, for, a moment later, he remembers his ‘political correctness’ and apologizes: “I’m sorry I said Gestapo. It just slipped out” (15). Still, this example shows very clearly that in spite of the desire to be politically correct, prejudices and anxiety lurk just below the surface and come to light in situations of conflict.

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Jimmy and Judy represent quite compactly a typical problem of intercultural communication or translation: as long as different ethnic or religious communities share values or have a common aim, diversity does not prove to be a problem. As soon as a common basis is lacking, however, the different groups tend to resort to dissociation from one another, and try to push through their respective interests.

III . The Hypocrisy of Political Correctness The conflict between Christians and Jews is not the only one dramatized in Heaven. While this area of disagreement is one of relative social equality, the relation between black and white people is a confrontation determined by social inequality right from the beginning. This is already mirrored in the very conception of the dramatic characters. Jimmy, one of the representatives of the white class, is a well-to-do lawyer, his former friend Karl a policeman. These two not only represent economic superiority but are at the same time personifications of law and power. Derek, a black youth, by contrast, is a poor drug-addicted homeless petty criminal, which makes the imbalance in social status and political influence obvious. Karl, on the one hand, the representative of the police force, is openly convinced of white supremacy. He regards Derek as an inferior human being and takes advantage of his situation as a representative of the law. He blackmails Derek and even forces the young drug addict to do minor drug and weapon deals for him. In the end, Karl even demands that Derek kill someone for him. When the latter proves unfit to carry out this crime, Karl simply kills him without a trace of bad conscience. Ironically, Karl’s idea of white supremacy is undermined by his own moral inferiority. He is a man without any trace of a bad conscience, a criminal, a brutal murderer, and he enjoys his position of relative power. Derek, by contrast, only steals for reasons of drug addiction and extreme poverty and is incapable of murder. This is not to say that Derek’s petty criminality can be excused, but it definitely has a different, even superior quality compared to Karl’s reckless criminal behaviour. Jimmy, on the other hand, is the prototype of a white Christian liberal who, at least at first glance, believes in the equality of all human beings and in the necessity of intercultural communication or translation. He is an idealistic man who wants to make the world a better place and tries to actively promote integration, not only by working as a human-rights lawyer for immigrants but also by being the originator of an integration programme for coloured school students called “Integration with Power and Integrity.” This class is supposed to provide coloured students with the necessary skills to succeed in a white

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and largely hostile society. Interestingly, by creating a programme for coloured teenagers only, Jimmy automatically reaffirms the supremacy of the white community. This clearly shows that even though Jimmy has the best of intentions, he still does not consider all parts of the social mosaic as at all equal. The only chance of social and economic success for the coloured youths is to assimilate the values of the dominant white majority. This hidden affinity with the idea of white supremacy is reflected very clearly in a conversation with Derek, in which a combination of frustration and alcohol involuntarily opens the gates for racist thoughts which Jimmy has hidden deep within. Jimmy, frustrated and bitter about his job and his marriage, is getting drunk on a park bench when Derek happens to pass by: D E R E K : [. . . ] I gotta think if you finish that bottle you’re gonna be unconscious. J I M M Y : Then what? You steal my clothes and slit my throat? [. . . ] Did I offend you.

[. . . ] I’m sorry. Don’t know where that came from. I mean white guys who dress like me hardly ever get murdered in parks by black kids anymore. [. . . ] Whats your fucking name! D E R E K : Derek. J I M M Y : Spell it! [. . . ] What’s wrong. Can’t you spell your own name, you stupid fucking Nubian. [. . . ] What’s wrong. How come you can’t take a little aggressive provocation. Didn’t they teach you how to deal with that in your “How to Survive as a Visible Minority in a Hostile White Culture” class you took. [. . . ] I designed it asshole. [. . . ] My father never used replacement words. He used nigger, baby. He used nigger, wop, polack, kike. [. . . ] Look I’m sorry I keep saying things like that to you. You know things that suggest you’re a piece of criminal garbage. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. (23–29)

While Derek is only commenting on Jimmy’s drunkenness without being in any way unfriendly, Jimmy reacts with a vehement display of rudeness, contempt, and lack of respect. Even though he, as a human-rights lawyer, is supposed to behave and talk in a politically correct manner, he is no longer able to control himself under the influence of alcohol. It turns out that Jimmy harbours racist thoughts within that he normally suppresses. He calls Derek names and immediately associates his being black with illiteracy and criminality. Jimmy even goes so far as to suggest that Derek might murder him. Although his conscience forces him to apologize, the prejudices he displays are obviously deeply rooted in his subconscious. The relationship between black and white people as represented by Derek and Jimmy is still far from equal, but instead highlights a significant imbalance concerning social status and political power.

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Marc Maufort states in this context: Jimmy himself underlines the linguistic hypocrisy of political correctness, which offers white Canadians the benefit of a clean conscience, without really modifying their racist attitude […]. Despite his indictment of political correctness and essentialism, Jimmy does not deny the existence of ethnic discrimination.4

At the same time, however, Jimmy challenges the concept of political correctness in general. By referring to the discourse of political correctness as “replacement words,” he implicitly questions its efficiency and reduces it to a futile linguistic formality. It is further criticized as mere hypocrisy when the question arises of who can or cannot be called a racist. This question is dramatized in a conversation between David and Jimmy, in which the two men discuss the reason for Judy’s murder. D A V I D : Do you think it was a hate crime, Jimmy. Judy’s murder. There are lots of

blacks around here. A lot of them hate Jews, you know. [. . . ] it could have been a hate crime. J I M M Y : And it probably was. But against women. Not Jews. [. . . .] You planning to take some action here? you planning to call in the Mossad? Maybe do a little ethnic cleansing of the area? [. . . ] You’re a racist, aren’t you. [. . . ] Come on. Admit it. There’s no one around. If you admit it, you’ll feel better. [. . . ] D A V I D : No. You’re a racist. I’m a Jew. [. . . ] [. . . ] I’m a racist. I shouldn’t be. I mean I’m a Jew [. . . ]. J I M M Y : [. . . ] You’re not just a Jew. You’re a rabbi. And you don’t dislike just blacks. [. . . ] You’re not big on Arabs either. (76–78)

David is convinced that any kind of violence against Jews must necessarily be motivated by antisemitism. Jimmy considers this notion to be a form of covert racism, since he suspects the rabbi of trying to reduce the crime to a racist attitude on the part of the black population. It is a very widespread convention to refer mostly to Christians of white European origin when using the term ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’. For historical reasons and on grounds of political correctness, Native Americans, Africans or Jews, to name just three examples, would not normally be mentioned in connection with racism, unless they assume the role of victim. David, the rabbi, perverts this by stating “You’re a racist. I’m a Jew.” He tries to hide his own racist way of thinking behind a widely accepted notion of Jews as victims, shutting out the circumstances under which

4

Marc Maufort, “Some Kind of Transition Place between Heaven and Hell,” 72–74.

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Judy’s murder might have taken place. Walker never ignores the fact that certain ethnic or religious groups have indeed been grievously damaged in the past. In the above-mentioned dialogue, however, he demonstrates that having been a victim in the past still does not excuse racist thinking (in the present), which, according to this dialogue, no one can be said to be above.

IV . Problems of Immigration In Heaven, however, it is not only black people who are treated with patronizing and disdainful behaviour, and not only Jews who have to cope with discrimination, but also immigrants from Commonwealth countries in general. This becomes clear when Jimmy talks about his work as a lawyer for immigrants: On behalf of every person of every colour from every corner of the world I stood and pounded out justice. I arranged for all sorts of companies to be fined for failing to implement pay equity and for unjust dismissal often based, they said, on inadequate language skills. And I’d scream: “You’re fucking right she has a little trouble with English. Whatya expect. Can you speak Farsi? Not a fucking word I bet. So shut up. And sign her paycheque you racist pig!” And of course many of these employers were racists. And lots of other people whose names came to my attention were racists. Cops. Teachers. 911 operators who patronized or ignored anyone with a Jamaican accent. They were all racists to me. And I was a fucking saint. (139)

Jimmy mentions several occasions where racism shows up in a slightly subtler form: being ignored in emergencies, being refused on the job market, being exploited and belittled. On the other hand, by describing himself he makes visible yet another aspect of the immigration problem. Jimmy is the prototype of a bleeding-heart liberal, of a do-gooder who wants to do good regardless of whether it really is good. This becomes evident in the example of the Persian woman being made redundant: if language skills are essential for a job, then dismissing people because of inadequate skills is not necessarily an act of racism. Jimmy’s question of whether or not the employer speaks any Farsi is nonsensical; the demand is disproportionate. One thing, however, is obvious: in such cases, there is no mutual understanding among the parties involved; different demands and expectations prove untranslatable. Political correctness becomes, in this context, a sadly ridiculous pose. Still, it seems that it is not only the relationship between the newly arrived immigrants and Canadian society that is sometimes strained. Many immigrants do not necessarily share the idea of creating a new mosaic-like society

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in the so-called New World, regardless of former conflicts and antipathies. On the contrary, a lot of the newly arrived citizens seem to have imported their conflicts and aversions. Jimmy describes a scene in a school-yard that he has witnessed: This black kid yelling at another black kid in a school yard a couple of months ago. The black kid was yelling “Go home you fucking Paki.” And guess what the other kid yells back “I’m not a Paki. I’m from India.” And I thought oh great, they’re gonna form a bond. The black kid and the kid from India have got something in common now. Neither of them is a Paki. So they can get together and go out and find themselves one. And kick the poor little bastard to death . . . Ah fuck it. I give up. Everybody hates everybody . . . (79)

This example serves to indicate the fact that the newly arrived immigrants have brought their conflicts with them from their home countries. Even their children are brought up in an atmosphere of hatred instead of gradually growing into a peaceful, tolerant, and respectful multicultural society. The above passage also shows that the imported animosities can trigger a strange kind of identity defined by negatives. The children Jimmy is talking about do not yet have an identity as Canadians, but neither do they have an identity that is deeply rooted in their native culture. They are typical examples of postcolonial in-betweenness. So, while trying to find an identity, they can at least identify themselves by things they are not, by negativity. This negativity of identification in return enhances intercultural conflict and undermines the idea of the mosaic. Jimmy’s integration work therefore often seems to dissolve into nothing, which deeply frustrates him. Here, Walker relies heavily on the assumption that cultural identities are somewhat fixed and definite while at the same time demonstrating postcolonial in-betweenness as a state of a notyet-developed identification. As a marginal note, the often latent hostilities between the different groups can also be seen in the way poor people and social outcasts are treated, in which case ethnic or religious background is not necessarily important. As we can see from the examples of Sissy and Derek, society as a whole treats these homeless drug-addicts with contempt. Judy is disgusted and refuses to give money to beggars. David complains about their being unemployed and totally ignores the fact that, even if they wanted, finding employment is next to impossible for homeless people. Karl even abuses his position as a representative of the law and rules over these outcasts at his pleasure. So here again, understanding, or translation, between the different societal groups proves to be a very difficult, if not impossible, task, a task which, in the context of the

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play, ends up in murder and chaos, all the means of communication having proved futile.

V.

Canada: A Multicultural Paradise?

As for the representation of heaven, one might expect an end to all the hatred and difficulties experienced on earth. Derek, Judy, and Jimmy are murdered and end up in heaven, where Karl joins them later. On their visits to earth they talk about the circumstances in their supposed paradise. At first glance, Heaven seems to be a place of equality, of tolerance, of forgiveness, of a multireligious and multi-ethnic community and of eternal bliss. Judy, as a Jew, and Derek, as a black man, Jimmy the Catholic, and even Karl the murderer – all are equally accepted, or seem to be, at least at first glance. Moreover, as Judy and Derek experience, heaven is also a place of wish-fulfilment where they can be anything they have always wanted to be. Derek becomes a racing driver and Judy a brain surgeon and martial-arts fighter, things they have always wished for. As it turns out, however, heaven, according to one of Judy’s reports, is not such a tolerant, multi-ethnic, and blissful place after all. Even religious segregation takes place: Judy discovers that there is also a Jewish heaven but, having been married to a Catholic for years; her mind seems so influenced by his ideas that she has been put into Christian heaven instead. Marc Maufort states that this “underscores the state of inbetweenness manifest throughout the work and enables Walker to de-authorize the overpowering structures of Christian religious belief.”5 Judy also finds out that heaven is only superficially a place of racial equality and tolerance: Beneath its surface lurk pretentiousness, sexism, racism, and senselessness. The Franciscan monks she meets, for example, absolutely insist on wearing their monastic dress and on singing and praying ceaselessly. They have been informed by the angels on duty that their dress and behaviour are pointless, for they already are in Heaven, but pretentiousness renders these men immune to reason. Moreover, their would-be holiness is deeply hypocritical: Judy complains about “those Franciscan monks staring at my ass” (86). Racist attitudes become obvious even in heaven when Derek appears in slave clothes. Evidently, this version of the Christian heaven reproduces the injustices and prejudices of white society.6 Jimmy is told that what he sees of 5 6

Maufort, “Some Kind of Transition Place,” 75. “Some Kind of Transition Place,” 77.

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heaven may, at least in part, be a figment of his imagination. But if this is the case, then heaven can never be free of racist and sexist attitudes so long as they still exist in peoples’ heads. Moreover, the wish-fulfilment is not what it had originally seemed to be, either. The roles that people can take on at their pleasure may be roles they have long wished for. They then realize, however, that these very roles can only be their dream identities if actually put to use. Judy’s becoming a brain surgeon, for example, is only a futile pursuit, because she cannot actually help anybody. Derek has one car crash after the other just in order to humour her, but operating on him is absurd, because he is never really hurt. The fascination with the job goes as soon as Judy realizes that it is nothing special to be a brain surgeon in heaven. Anyone can be anything without any effort; eternity is just an endless, useless game. This means, of course, that all the liberal ideas which do not seem to work on earth but could possibly function in a better place like heaven are just part of this absurd game. They are, in fact, worth nothing. Heaven thus appears as a grotesquely exaggerated continuation of life on earth, a place of endless postmodernist play. In Heaven, Walker demonstrates clearly that the ‘Canadian mosaic’ is but an idealistic concept that is constantly threatened and undermined by both the clear dominance of one cultural group, the white Christian community, and mechanisms and attitudes cultivated within the minority groups. Jimmy points to the failure of the Canadian multicultural dream, to the impossibility of truly acknowledging the Other. This becomes evident when he summarizes his impression of Canadian society: [. . . ] fuck the Vietnamese-hating Cambodians. And the Cambodian-hating Koreans. And the Jamaican-hating Trinidadians. And the Albanian-hating Serbs . . . hating Croats and whoever else. . . and yes while we’re at it, Jude, fuck the white European male and everyone he hates. And all the Christian-hating Muslims and Muslimhating Jews and Jew-hating Christians and gay-hating Christians and Muslimhating Christians. And black and white and yellow and red and so on and so on. Fuck and double fuck them all. (58)

According to this basically well-meaning but greatly disillusioned character, intercultural communication or translation within Canadian society is far from well-established. Maufort puts it as follows: Walker breaks new ground, seeking to expand his postmodern deconstruction of social and ethical absolutes into the realm of the postcolonial Other. Beyond the dramatic fragmentation of heaven looms the nostalgia of Walker the liberal humanist who laments the impossibility of transcending the throes of postcolonial

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hybridity. [… ] The dramatist clearly links religion, race, and class as the causes of disease of the postmodern/postcolonial inbetweenness [… ]. Whereas a number of postcolonial writers would celebrate hybridity, Walker presents it as problematic.7

The depiction of the Canadian mosaic as a sad illusion is, however, not devoid of humour. On the contrary: the grotesque portrayal of heaven, the exaggerated characters, and Jimmy’s sarcastic comments are highly comical. Yet, like in most of Walker’s plays, it is a very black humour that renders Heaven’s unsettling message bearable while at the same time highlighting the alarming circumstances behind it. Still, life on earth continues and Jimmy’s and Judy’s children lose both parents. Neither of their grandmothers, deeply entangled in the ChristianJewish conflict, feels responsible for the orphans. And now a strange arrangement develops: Sissy, the homeless drug addict, and David, the rabbi, take care of the children. They do not know if this can turn out to be a long-term solution, nor do they do know whether or not this arrangement will work out, but they are determined to try. They are intent on creating understanding and crossing mental borders created by different cultural backgrounds. Thus, although Walker has thoroughly undermined and deconstructed the liberal idealistic idea of the Canadian mosaic, an idea that Jimmy loved and that seemed to break down around him, he does not repudiate it entirely. There may still be what Walker calls “possibility,”8 with which Craig Stewart Walker agrees: Jimmy’s after-death contribution can only offer an ironic commentary upon the inadequacy of the current society. But in the postmodern world Walker shows us it is in such voices as Jimmy’s […] that the true possibilities of human improvement lie. Here, as throughout Walker’s work, humour provides the vital corrective force that the pragmatic moralist requires to maintain a balanced perspective in an absurd world.9

In other words, there will always be people courageous and optimistic enough to take up the Sisyphean struggle and try to create a new society even though it may be practical necessity that compels them to do so.

7

Maufort, “Some Kind of Transition,” 76. Robert Wallace, “Looking for the Light: A Conversation with George F. Walker,” Canadian Drama 14.1 (1988): 22. 9 Craig Stewart Walker, The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2002): 354. 8

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WORKS CITED JanMohamed, Abdul R., & David Lloyd, ed. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1990). Maufort, Marc. “ ‘ Some Kind of Transition Place Between Heaven and Hell’: George Walker’s Aesthetics of Hybridity in Heaven,” in Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre, ed. Sherrill Grace & Albert– Reiner Glaap (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003): 70–80. Walker, Craig Stewart. The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2002). Walker, George F. Heaven (Burnaby, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2000). Wallace, Robert. “Looking for the Light: A Conversation with George F. Walker,” Canadian Drama 14.1 (1988): 22–33.

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P OSTCOLONIAL M ULTILINGUALISM

Functional Equivalence Revisited — Adequacy and Conflict in the Tok Pisin Bible Translation1 T IMO L OTHMANN

“yumi olgeta i harim ol i autim tok bilong ol strongpela wok bilong God long ol tok ples bilong yumi.”2

I.

Introductory Note

T

O K P I S I N (T P ) is a fascinating language – and the Bible is a fascinating book. In what follows, I will highlight the interface between these two entities: namely, Bible translation into T P . Recently, the full Bible has been translated into this pidgin / creole language, which is used as a lingua franca throughout Papua New Guinea. The T P Bible version, devoted, on the one hand, to the theoretical principle of functional equivalence and, intended on the other, for new strata of readers especially, represents a remarkable resource for researchers. In this essay, I will focus on several linguistic and stylistic aspects of this vast work of literature. In the first part, I will deal with an outline of the concept of functional equivalence in general. Subsequently, I will point out how successfully the translators have put this theory into effect in the T P Bible. In order to substantiate my arguments, I will use examples from different levels of discourse.

1

I am grateful to R. Beier, G. Hopps, P.H. Marsden, R. Schreyer, and G.P. Smith for helpful remarks on this essay. 2 Acts of the Apostles 2:11, in Buk Baibel. Standard Edition = The Bible in Tok Pisin: Papua New Guinea (Mosbi: Baibel Sosaiti bilong Papua Niugini, 1996). The passage translates as: “all of us hear them speaking in our own languages about the great acts of God.”

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II . On Translation and Equivalence 1 Many definitions of translation have been offered in the past, and many valuable suggestions for supposedly ‘adequate’, ‘good’ or ‘successful’ translations have been made. In this respect, the concept of dynamic or functional equivalence represents one option that has achieved considerable recognition, both among scholars and among grass-roots translators. In this essay, I will adhere to the key notion of functional equivalence (F E ) as a general framework for translation theory, which was elaborated mainly by Eugene Nida. This theory has been the cause of lively debate since its conception. My position is that I consider it, despite its old age, an outstanding theoretical and methodological basis for purposeful translation activity, particularly with regard to recipients in postcolonial countries such as Papua New Guinea. F E is a qualitative, meaning-based approach which involves the following postulates: As far as the relation between source and receptor language text is concerned, the distinct language codes should be close equivalents in as many dimensions as possible, e.g., lexis, grammar, style, ideology, and response. In order to achieve a translation in accordance with the chief goal of conveying the closest possible equivalent message and the communicative intention of the original author respectively, a quasi-mechanical literalness has to fade into the background. According to the theory, this can be achieved best by taking coherent paragraphs – not words or sentences – as basic translational units. Further, the translatum should be characterized by ‘natural’ linguistic patterns. Such patterns in a text ideally disguise the actual fact of its being a translation as well as possible difficulties during its production. At the same time, semantic content must take precedence over form – assuming that such things can be kept apart. Much more than merely mirroring information, translators should thus take advantage of the functional resources of the receptor language in order to give life and relevance to contexts across cultures. Moreover, the text concerned is to be transferred with a maximum invariance of communicative value: i.e. functions and effect. Thus, the message should by no means remain opaque. Recapitulating, we can say that in this approach, an equivalence of function (sensus) is more important than an equivalence of linguistic structure (verbum). Clearly, certain question-marks surround these rather ideal postulates of F E theory. Though not a hundred percent realizable with regard to their prototypical design, these postulates are not to be seen as strict laws or as mere ivory-tower conceptions. On the contrary: these guidelines are fashioned to enhance a better reception and application of translated texts by the inten-

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ded target audience. In this respect, the theory pays tribute to the cultural aspect of translation in particular. Cultural contrasts or gaps that separate the social realities of original and new receptor groups by, for instance, time, place, experience, customs, world-view, and individual variables hinder the realization of (near-)similar effects of a translation. In spite of this potential for conflict, the long tradition of Bible translation has led to remarkable results. Often, it was F E methodology that helped to bridge such existing gaps when Bible versions for new audiences were produced. 2

Translation has long been one of the identity-markers of the Bible. From late Antiquity onwards, the vast majority of Christians have not used the original Scriptural languages (and their descendants) for worship any more. In spite of this defining characteristic of the Bible,3 its conversion from one language into another has always been a ‘non-usual’ translation of a literary work owing to its distinct ideological background. Bible translations have been carried out in a more form- or more meaningpreserving way, depending on the Zeitgeist. Popular examples of English versions in use today are the King James Version, which is broadly literal and archaic in its wording, the New English Bible, and – last but not least – the Today’s English Version, also known as the Good News Bible.4 In a modern Bible translation which is devoted to principles of F E (such as the Good News Bible), several intricacies prevail, especially when it is intended for new readers. In this respect, adequate communication of the situational and sociocultural contexts is as multi-faceted as the rendering of the linguistic dynamism of the sixty-six individual books of the Bible (plus Apocrypha). Thus, the modern reader has to be led to the normative original message, but we may ask whether today a ‘natural’ and at the same time appropriate reception of the biblical stories is still possible at all. Translators do not only have to bridge millennia of temporal distance – they also have to convey the remoteness of the biblical scenes, as well as the particularity of the peoples and cultural practices depicted. Furthermore, the original reception can hardly be

3

With every translation, there is also new potential for misunderstanding. In this respect, compare the different, much more conservative language policies concerning the Qur’an and the Torah, both of which are deliberately kept in their original ‘classical’ wording and structure. 4 See The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1997); The New English Bible (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1970); Good News Bible: Today’s English Version (New York: American Bible Society, 1976).

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reconstructed for receptor groups without a (long) Christian tradition. With respect to them, the future reception of the translatum is hardly foreseeable. The overcoming of these problems is the yoke of Bible translators. F E may be their plough. This conception of translation by no means implies a deliberately biased account of history or a transculturation of the message(s) contained in the biblical texts. The Bible may be timeless with regard to its message, but not with regard to the persons or events described. This historical particularity has to be captured, even if its ‘exoticism’ may at first be bewildering for new recipients.5 However, the translational task has to be performed in the languages of today. This is ideally to be done without imposing Western traditions on access to the Bible, its understanding, interpretation, or positioning in local contexts. When working with such a conceptual framework for Bible translation, coping with linguistic matters is complex and requires meticulousness. In addition to the aforementioned postulates, different text (or discourse) types such as narrative, the Pauline epistles, poetry, legal codes, or a mixture of these, need to be brought out in the receptor language – if possible. The sensitive implementation of genre variety in a common-language translation is one of the many intrinsic difficulties.6 Finally, the translators’ individual decisions determine the effect of the translatum on the particular socio-cultural setting that is targeted. In this respect, additional keys to the content of the text (e.g., illustrations, glossaries, footnotes, and maps) round off the Scripture translation. 3

It is well-known that interlingual translation as a social act of mediating communication is never mere imitation or restatement, but interpretation, commentary, and filter. This view is not as trivial as it may seem, since Bible translations can fail because of a lack of acceptance by the target group. The translators’ care in striking a balance between implicitness and explicitness leads directly to the domain of exegesis. To what extent does exegesis – being

5

By definition, the eternal nature of the biblical message renders it translatable without significant frictional loss. However, the rootedness in history and culture, as well as the fact that God’s words have always come in the language of man, are impediments to this idealistic account. 6 In a common-language translation, translators choose from the range of possible linguistic signs and structures that are used and understood by a majority of the intended receptor group.

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highly complex and ambiguous itself – have to be contained explicitly in the translatum in question so that the content becomes fully intelligible? In this respect especially: i.e. when Bible translation also becomes an ideological and revelational task, it is open to subjectivity. Translational complexity thus presupposes an ‘ideal translator being’. This being can be defined as an almost ethereal analyzer and decision-maker – competent, conscious, consistent, creative, and critical. It goes without saying that such immaculateness by far exceeds human faculties. Nor can a translator put his/ her subjectivity aside,7 and perfect equivalence on all levels involved (or universal translatability in general) is not achievable at all. The diversity of cultures and languages plus the human factor which constitutes them prevent a result that is characterized by more than just ‘relative equivalence’ (Fig. 1). In my understanding, perfect equivalence is nothing but a subjective objective, as it were: i.e. a flexible and individual aim. In this respect, F E methodology serves as a most valuable tool-kit which has proved its usefulness in practice. In fact, the subjective residuum in translations does not limit their qualitative potential. Quite the reverse – as long as the decisions are well-founded and a maximum semantic load is delivered to the receptor. Successful translation in the vein of F E means successful communication that reflects constant awareness of the cultural contrasts involved. In this respect, a linguistic approach alone cannot cope with the function of the translatum as a link to the ‘real’ world. Source culture’s world (view) Relative equivalence

Translator’s world (view)

Decoding Recoding

Receptor culture’s world (view) FIGURE 1

As mentioned above, Bible translations do not function as intercultural communicative events only, but are traditionally indebted to a certain authoritative, ideological superstructure. The principles of F E are no hindrance to this, though F E translations have often been criticized in this respect. For instance, critics have pointed out that the emphasis on ‘easy’, comprehensible language

7 This subjectivity involves the personal educational background of the translator, as well as his / her character, mentality, attitudes, experiences, preferences, individuality concerning literary style, etc.

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is at the expense of the religious spirit and secrecy of the Bible. However, since Luther’s Bible translation into common German, the possible positive effects of a version in which form does not rule over meaning are indisputable. Luther’s version, which anticipated many characteristics of modern F E methodology, by no means blurred or diminished the sacredness of the biblical content. On the contrary, it even constituted an important milestone in the standardization and development of the receptor language German itself. Equally, a Bible translation for today’s new readers should be in their everyday language. Compare, in this respect, the original Hebrew/ Aramaic of the Old Testament (OT) as well as the Koiné Greek of the New Testament (NT). These languages were widely, at the time of the composition of OT and NT respectively, the everyday languages of both authors and recipients. What is more, these ideologically loaded text collections (including idioms and poetry with overlapping colloquial and literary levels) were written to be read, heard, and, above all, understood not by an elite of whatever kind, but by a majority. Thus, I am intimating that a translation is never absolute or finished (as the original text is). It can, at most, be suitable and relevant for a certain receptor group in a restricted temporal, spatial, and sociolinguistic setting. Furthermore, a text, be it biblical or other, does not allow a single obligatory translation only. Alternatives are always possible, and revisions always necessary.

III . The Bible in Tok Pisin: General Remarks 1 At least one book of the Bible has been translated into more than 2,350 distinct languages so far. The full Bible translation in T P , the Buk Baibel, has been available since 1989 after about thirty years of preparation, including a revision of the NT (Nupela Testamen bilong bikpela Jisas Krais), which first appeared in 1969.8 As a result of an interdenominational effort, the Buk Baibel has been drafted as an ecumenical version under the aegis of the Bible Society of Papua New Guinea.

8

Since 1989, the Buk Baibel has appeared in several editions (including the Apocrypha). It continues the (commercial) success of its predecessor: i.e. of Nupela Testamen bilong bikpela Jisas Kraist = The New Testament in New Guinea Pidgin (Neo-Melanesian) (Canberra: Bible Society in Australia, 1969). By 1996, 250,000 copies of the full Bible had been printed. This supply was possible thanks to the extensive infrastructure established on the spot in Papua New Guine by the different denominationsa.

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2 T P is one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea, spoken by the

majority of the population. This contact language with a mainly Englishbased lexis originated about 120 years ago. It developed into several regional and sociolectal varieties, with an increasing number of first-language speakers today.9 As a language without significant functional deficiencies, it is being used in education, in governmental affairs, in the media, and in everyday life as the most widespread lingua franca, besides the more than 700 local languages and the less-used English. In sum, T P can be called the most important unifying bond of the heterogeneous peoples in this young nation today. Nominally, Papua New Guinea is a Christian country.10 From the 1930s onwards, T P was considered suitable by missionaries to convey God’s word also in written form. Much religious material in T P (with diverging orthographies and content) has since been published, thus putting the language to a new use. The language, as well as having been widely used in, for example, mission schools, soon replaced several other mission linguae francae. Nowadays, T P represents the most important means of communication for the Churches nationwide, especially in regions with a high diversity of local languages. In such a setting, the Bible translators had no easy task to fulfil, since the receptor group aimed at in Papua New Guinea does not form a coherent whole in terms of socio-cultural and linguistic background. In addition to this, neither are the translators first-language speakers of the original biblical languages Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koiné Greek, nor is – as the Nupela Testamen and Buk Baibel translations show – the receptor language T P their mother tongue. With these constraints in mind, plus the fact that the intention of the biblical authors obviously is – from our modern viewpoint – in places ambi9

Since both first- and second- / third-language speakers form the T P language community, T P can currently be classified as a pidgin-cum-creole. By definition, the term ‘pidgin’ refers to a type of contact language that has prototypically come into existence in colonial contexts as a basic means of intercultural communication in a limited set of domains. Occasionally, and this applies to T P as well, pidgins become functionally elaborated and gradually develop into creoles. One of the prominent characteristics of creole languages is their functioning as (fully-fledged) native languages. In this respect, the dynamic negotiation of patterns of prestige and prejudice influences, among other factors, their long-term survival vis-à-vis other languages in use. 10 Existing figures indicate up to 95 percent as the nationwide rate of christianization. However, the de facto Christian faith of the more than five million inhabitants of Papua New Guinea is difficult to assess and must be separated from the sheer number of baptisms. Moreover, intradenominational fluctuation is high at present. Many Papua New Guineans choose certain denominations for a host of variable pragmatic reasons relating to their social position.

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guous and elusive, a multiple communication problem for the translators of a T P Bible in the Papua New Guinea setting prevailed. When the translators started their work, an even more basic problem had to be faced: which T P variety was to be chosen? In the event, the translator teams of Nupela Testamen and Buk Baibel11 chose the rural lect of adult speakers of the Momase12 region as an artificially created standard, as it were. In the absence of a consistent governmental language policy, a concerted missionary effort resulted in a fixed, phonemic orthography for T P , relying on the modern Roman alphabet.13 This non-officially standardized orthography became established via the Nupela Testamen and subsequent publications. With hindsight, the choice of a rural, more conservative (but not archaic or old-fashioned) variety was quite a wise choice. In contrast to the more unstable decreolizing varieties: i.e. the heavily anglicized lects of the larger settlements of the country, the highest possible degree of nationwide intelligibility could be achieved by means of a rural variety.14 Thus, this lect, equipped with full functional possibilities, was considered as possessing enough potential to serve as the basis of a common-language translation of the Bible. In settings such as Papua New Guinea, Christianity is not as rooted as in the Western world. Also, an indigenous written literary tradition in T P is still about to be established. These facts make a common-language translation of the Bible based on F E highly recommendable. In this respect, ‘common language’ does not equal ‘trivial language’ – for example, the different types of text contained in the original must not end up in a stylistically monotonous

11

With respect to the Buk Baibel, the translator team consisted mainly of Papua New Guineans, who were assisted by expatriate missionaries and linguists. 12 ‘Momase’ stands for the Morobe, Madang, and Sepik provinces, which are situated on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. 13 Without the letters c, q, x, z. With respect to this standardization effort, Peter Mühlhäusler criticizes the lack of adequacy in the paternalistically fashioned writing system; see Mühlhäusler, “Attitudes to Literacy in the Pidgins and Creoles of the Pacific Area,” English World-Wide 16.2 (1995): 267–69. I do not actually share Mühlhäusler’s pessimistic view that the writing system used in the above-mentioned T P Bible translations is unlikely to meet the needs of the diverse T P -speaking community and, moreover, to expand the literary function of T P as a whole. 14 This includes the urban population, for which the understanding of rural T P varieties is not problematic. Outside the large urban settlements, however, urban lects are hardly ‘decoded’ easily by the population. Thus, by choosing a rural variety for the Bible, the translators raised the status of the lect and, at the same time, forestalled the trend towards anglicization that accompanies the ongoing urbanization process. Nevertheless, since the totality of (individual) idiolectal preferences of rural T P speakers could not be considered in the T P Bible translation, the existing versions are by no means fully representative.

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nor in a hotchpotch translation.15 Above all, however, the Bible must remain receptor-focused. With respect to the Papua New Guinea context, this means the composition of a powerful version which, ideally, is not characterized by eurocentrism and /or a (post)colonialist attitude. 3

The Bible in T P as it is available today is intended for “ol manmeri bilong kantri bilong yumi”:16 i.e. ‘the people of our country’. The perspective is clear: this Bible is being given from inside Papua New Guinea (i.e. not from Europe, the U S A , or elsewhere) directly to the whole population. Thus, every individual nationwide, Christian or not, becomes part of translational discourse.17 This non-paternalistic act of communication as well as the definition of the receptor group are preliminaries to the launching of a F E translation. In the following, I will cast some light on how the more or less abstract principles of F E have been translated into reality in the Buk Baibel. In the discussion of selected examples from different discourse levels, I will use qualitative assessment criteria. Here, I will discuss place-names and units of money, as well as several ways of expressing Christian concepts, including illustrations.

IV . Exemplification 1 Names On the word level, proper names contained in the Buk Baibel are borrowed from the English Good News Bible. These names are spelt according to T P pronunciation rules: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Iv < Eve Matyu < Matthew Pol < Paul Saimon < Simon

Place names, however, are explained in the text itself by adding the respective geographic characteristic:

15

In addition, Bible translators should avoid – with regard to the demand of the Bible and its authority – certain stylistic ‘devices’ such as slang words, vulgarisms, etc. 16 Buk Baibel (1996), 1. 17 In view of the heterogeneity of the addressees in Papua New Guinea, the publishers of the Bible must have been aware of this being an optimistic if not an idealistic aim.

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taun Saidon < (the town of) Sidon (Acts 27:3) maunten Sainai < (the mountain of) Sinai (Acts 7:30) ailan Saiprus < (the island of) Cyprus (Acts 13:4) distrik Arebia < (the district of) Arabia (Acts 2:11) provins Esia < (the province of) Asia (Acts 16:.6)

These examples from the Acts of the Apostles show that the names themselves are disambiguated in the Buk Baibel: i.e. the context in which they are used becomes clearer ad hoc. For instance, “Saidon” is clearly indicated as a town in the translation, whereas “Esia” is not the continent, but, according to historical correctness, a province. This service by the translators, as it were, is especially important for new readers. By thus raising the degree of explicitness, readers – and listeners as well – are enabled to distinguish the large number of (formerly unknown and occasionally similar-sounding) personal names from geographical ones. Compare in this respect “Saimon,” “Saidon,” and “Sainai,” for example. Thus, this translational strategy, in combination with the maps included in the Buk Baibel, makes direct access to the text easier and helps to prevent possible confusion – not only with regard to the Acts of the Apostles. 2 Units of money A further challenge for F E is the appropriate translation of units of length, weight, or money. In the source texts, these very often differ considerably from those in use today. Again, this is a cultural matter – units of measurement have been different from society to society at all times. An example from the Gospel of Mark (6:37) shows that ‘home-grown’ designations have been considered by the translators of the Buk Baibel: (10a) Ating yu laik bai mipela i go baim bret long 200 kina na Maybe you like [F U T ] I[-P L ] [P A R T ] go buy[-Vtr] bread [P R E P ] 200 Kina and givim long ol, a? give[-Vtr] [P R E P ] they [T A G ] ‘You want us to go and buy bread for 200 Kina in order to give it to them, isn’t it?’

We can compare the rendering of tupela handet kina (200 Kina) in the Good News Bible, the modern English translation devoted to F E principles and at the same time the main source of the Buk Baibel. There, we find “two hundred silver coins,” which involves a slight difference in meaning: (10b) Do you want us to go and spend two hundred silver coins on bread in order to feed them?

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Assuming that a silver coin was the daily wage of a rural worker in the ancient Middle East, the use of the Kina, which is the currency of modern Papua New Guinea, must seem strange. In view of average wages and current inflation rates, for instance, these numbers do not match reality. In such instances, the F E translation is stretched to its limits. Although readers are being given a vivid impression, the historical integrity of the (ancient) original is distorted. 3 Christian concepts

Several words have been included in the Buk Baibel which form a separate register of religious-content words. I will classify such words, which relate to concepts and practices firmly connected to Christian ideology, under the heading of Church Tok Pisin. These words must be rendered intelligible (or become semantically filled, as it were). However, explaining the exact meaning of these words in the main text would take too much space and distract from the (ancient) original: (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

aposel [N] < apostle baptaisim [Vtr] < to baptize disaipel [N] < disciple ensel [N] < angel god / God [N] < god / God

This means that words like disaipel, ensel, but also God – a word theologians have been trying to explain for millennia – have to be made clear individually by the clergy on the spot in order to ensure an adequate understanding on the receptor side. As a whole, words like these enlarge the vocabulary of T P , especially in the nominal and verbal word classes. Church Tok Pisin words are mainly direct loans from the lexifier language English. They were used in mission and Church service before the composition of a T P Bible. However, the words contained in the ecumenical Buk Baibel replace many possibly confusing loanwords from Latin or Greek which had been inconsistently used by the different denominations. Thus, a standardized Church T P register has been built up. However, in order not to overload the translation with words from that register, the translators have additionally made use of circumlocutions, which have been a very common word-formation strategy of rural T P varieties. These periphrastic expressions indeed contribute to a more immediate understanding of the text, but occasionally result in cumbersome, lengthy clusters. For example, the concept of ‘Easter’ is expressed by the following semantic unit:

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Bikpela De Bilong Tingim De God I Larim Ol Israel Big [-A D J ] day [P R E P ] think[-Vtr] day God [P A R T ] grant[-Vtr] [D E T .P L ] Israelite I Stap Gut [P A R T ] [D U R ] good ‘feast-day to remember the day God granted the Israelites a good existence’

4 Illustrations

Since the composition of the earliest Bibles, illustrations have been an important contextualizing element. However, the visualization of the content is never merely a neutral addition to the text. Bible illustration is not a decorative gimmick – it is interpretation like translation itself, commonly reflecting the Zeitgeist (in artistic style and intention). In fact, illustrations are able to contribute effectively to translational communication, as well as to the overall aesthetic impression. As in the composition of text paragraphs, illustrations are to be chosen according to the maxim of comprehension. They should reflect what is important to the receptors. Only then is illustrating a translatum in line with F E methodology. The Buk Baibel and its predecessor Nupela Testamen are illustrated Bible versions. In this respect, the illustrations contained in the Nupela Testamen exemplify the difficulties which can arise. The simple, iconic line drawings depict minimalistic, though emotional body language rather than attempting a realistic depiction of ancient life.18 Although this style is intended to be universally intelligible, it leaves much room for interpretation. Consequently, an appropriate ‘deciphering’ may be a problem for new readers, especially in settings without a long Christian tradition, such as Papua New Guinea.19

18 The highly praised illustrations by the Swiss artist Annie Vallotton – see, for example, Eugene A. Nida, Good News for Everyone: How to Use the Good News Bible (Today’s English Version) (Waco T X : Word, 1977): 32 – are included in several editions of current Bible translations worldwide. Among these are the Good News Bible and the modern French version Bonnes Nouvelles d’Aujourd’hui (see Bonnes Nouvelles d’Aujourd’hui: Le Nouveau Testament, Traduit en français courant d’après le texte grec [Paris: Alliance Biblique Universelle, 1973]). 19 Examples from Bible translations into African languages confirm this. If even accompanying illustrations are not understood by the receptors, how can they be sure that the text itself: i.e. God’s message, is really intended for them?

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F I G U R E 2: Baptism and Holy Spirit20

The above example from the Nupela Testamen shows the Holy Spirit descending from heaven during baptism. The form of representation must cause problems with regard to unambiguous understanding. Neither the bird, which cannot even be recognized as a dove, nor the person below helps to decode the complex symbolism of the depicted situation. Such illustrations are used without any comment in the Nupela Testamen. Here, explanations would be absolutely necessary. Perhaps it is to avoid such difficulties that the choice of illustrations and visual aids (such as maps, etc) in the Buk Baibel is different. When we compare both drawing styles (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 overleaf), it becomes evident that the Buk Baibel illustrations far exceed those of the Nupela Testamen in their degree of realism. Although neither was intended for recipients in Papua New Guinea in the first place, the more naturalistic, but not overloaded style of the drawings21 increases the amount of immediate information, not only for new readers. With illustrations like these, F E is potentially higher – particularly when these include captions relating to a text passage as in the Buk Baibel. Thus, the choice of illustrations in the Buk Baibel can be considered more felicitous with respect to the intended recipients and their understanding of the content respectively.

20 Nupela Testamen (1969), 305. The drawing refers to John 1:32. The size of the illustrations contained in this essay is suited to formatting; captions have been added by me. 21 Mainly by John Lear. Since the 1960s, his drawings have been included in many editions of the Bible worldwide.

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F I G U R E S 3–4: Letting a paralyzed man down through a roof22

In addition to many black-and-white illustrations (depicting events, persons, and objects), several colour photographs are included in the Buk Baibel.

22

Fig. 3: Nupela Testamen (1969), 210. Fig. 4: Buk Baibel (1996), NT, 67. The drawings refer to Luke 5:19 and Mark 2:4 respectively.

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F I G U R E 5: People, sheep, and donkey23

Photographs can be instrumental in providing impressions of the fauna, flora, and landscape of biblical settings, which are unknown to most new readers. With photographs, the temple of Jerusalem or a camel, for example, become vivid and ‘real’. However, when anachronisms creep in, the historical integrity of the translation becomes highly questionable. If this happens, its quality is diminished in the end. An example of such a blurring of temporal distance would be plastic containers carried by a donkey (Fig. 5). All in all, the choice of photographs in Bible translations remains debatable. Nevertheless, illustration in general can be a suitable additional key to understanding. At best, illustrations enhance the attractiveness of a translation. To better include the receptors, publishers would do well to take indigenous (Christian) art forms into consideration, not only in Papua New Guinea (Fig. 6 overleaf). This further option would link the content of the Scripture directly to the spheres of life of the recipients. At the same time, such illustrations might promote better text-recall. Of course, my selection of examples cannot do justice to the multidimensionality of the Buk Baibel. Further aids for readers of the T P Bible version contributing to F E which are worth discussing elsewhere are: idioms, poetry, reading instructions, introductions, annotations, glossaries, chronologies, maps, and formatting.24

23

Buk Baibel (1996), NT, 378[a]; original in colour. Reprinted with kind permission of the United Bible Societies. 24 For a full account of these aids, see Timo Lothmann, “God i tok long yumi long Tok Pisin”: Eine Betrachtung der Bibelübersetzung in Tok Pisin vor dem Hintergrund der

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F I G U R E 6: Sepik crucifix25

V. Conclusion 1 We may conclude that the Buk Baibel meets the following prerequisites for a F E translation:

a) Essential meaning is given priority over form or literal translation. b) The lectal variety used does not lack communicative and stylistic functions. c) There is a high degree of faithfulness to the (original) textual content. d) It is geared towards a previously defined target group. The explicitness which has been added by the translators to clarify the content does not replace further necessary interpretation on the part of the receptor. The cultural distance to the original is bridged, but still perceptible. In doing so, the translators did not try to produce a mere copy of a popular modern F E version such as the Good News Bible, but tried to create a self-sufficient work

sprachlichen Identität eines Papua-Neuguinea zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), esp. ch. 5.5. 25 Taken from Theo Aerts, Christianity in Melanesia (Port Moresby: U of Papua New Guinea P , 1998): 248.

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for Papua New Guinea. References to the receptor culture can be witnessed in the main text as well as in the supplementary aids for new readers.26 With regard to this, occasional shortcomings within the Buk Baibel are outweighed by the quality of the overall composition. It is the recipents who give final form to the quality of the Bible translation offered to them. Only if they accept the translatum as a whole, only if they can actively participate in the text and perceive its authority, only then does the translation process come to an end. It is the use, not the mere existence, of a translation that yields its success. Thus, a translation without readers cannot be called successful – rather, translation is a social performance. In the Buk Baibel, the linguistic potential of a ‘common-language’ T P has been adequately instrumentalized by the translators. The vocabulary (and grammar) used is conservative, though not archaic in nature. What is more, a Church Tok Pisin register supplements the versatility of style. In this respect, the sacredness of the content is hardly distorted, if at all. As one of the consequences of the F E approach, the Buk Baibel is a linguistic as well as cultural statement, both energetic and complex. In fact, it is a literary work as well. The Buk Baibel will definitely have an impact on the development of T P in general. This standard offers an option for education as well as for future literary movements (as regards orthography, functional possibilities, etc.).27 Via the deliberate lectal choice and the avoidance of literal translation in favour of F E , this Bible hides its status of being an imported (and imposed) book.28 Thus, the audience is at least theoretically enabled to open up the Scripture for themselves and to make it function, as it were, within the existing community networks in Papua New Guinea. Nevertheless, the Buk Baibel is no substitute for the guidance of the clergy on the spot. Indeed, it should not be. If one aim of this ecumenical translational effort is the emergence and the establishment of a vital, truly indigenous Church, this Church will be formed primarily on the basis of members sharing an active, constructive dialogue. In this way, the Bible becomes implanted in the spheres of life of Papua New 26 As additional keys to comprehension, Bible comics, explanatory notes, and educational books have been published as well. 27 From this point of view, the Buk Baibel represents a factor of considerable social and economic relevance; compare its possible influence on the degree of nationwide literacy, for instance. 28 The history of Bible translation teaches us that this was, and still is, in fact, a rare achievement and by no means an inevitable side-effect. With regard to (post)colonial settings in particular, many counter-examples exist; compare, for instance, the first efforts to translate the Bible into Haitian creole; see Eugene A. Nida, “Translating the New Testament into Haitian Creole,” The Bible Translator 18.1 (January 1967): 27–30.

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Guinea and, thus, will also be a matter of interest to the illiterate.29 Ultimately, the Buk Baibel may become culturally contextualized. The fulfilment of the paradigm shift from a theology imposed by the West to home-grown, systematic ecumenical theologies will be one of the most difficult tasks in postcolonial countries in the years to come. This means focusing on local problems and related spiritual / religious insights without suffocating traditional world-views. Within the currently existing social networks in Papua New Guinea, a process of self-discovery is taking place. There, the individual is caught between two worlds which seem incompatible: their own cultural heritage (including the traditional beliefs, myths, customs, etc.), on the one hand, and Western-orientated modernity (including the monetarization and industrialization of the economy, urbanization, secularization, striving for goods, etc.), on the other. As a matter of fact, the conflict of these entities is causing a rapid change in social structures today and, thus, a redefinition of values. In this respect, the Churches on the spot might be able to function as mediators: i.e. as a catalytic link between the networks nationwide.30 In the event, the Buk Baibel might serve a possible, formative instrument. 2

In principle, the Buk Baibel is in line with the recommendations for basic procedures for Bible translation published by the Forum of Bible Agencies.31 In fact, the implications of the Buk Baibel are too far-reaching to form an estimate for the future.32 The literary potential of T P manifests itself in the 29 A recent estimate puts the literacy rate in Papua New Guinea at 66 percent. The implications of the transformation from orality to literacy by means of Scripture translations have been discussed, for instance, in Susanne Mühleisen, “ ‘ How is it that we hear in our own languages the wonders of God?’ Vernacular Bible Translations in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts,” Colonies – Missions – Cultures in the English-Speaking World: Comparative Studies, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001). 30 In fact, reality still cannot keep up with this noble ideal of an ecumenical Church which connects the various opinions and pluralistic interests. In view of omnipresent socioeconomic dislocatory problems, government mismanagement, and religious splinter groups (e.g., cargo movements, syncretistic cults, etc.), the future of the nation belongs to pessimism in this respect (Fua Singin, Secretary General of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea, personal conversation). 31 See Forum of Bible Agencies, “Basic Principles and Procedures for Bible Translation,” Notes on Translation 13.2 (1999). 32 Cf. the possible influence of the Buk Baibel on existing and future translations of biblical books into the local languages of Papua New Guinea, for example. What is more, several local languages are in danger of being replaced by T P – some have already died out.

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decisiveness and self-confidence of the Buk Baibel, which is, at the same time, the largest T P book to date. As a whole, its high potential for culturespecific prestige is able to effect a certain sense of common identity among its recipients.33 Moreover, it is not only a fruitful source for readers / listeners, but also a horn of plenty for religious instruction and interdisciplinary research.

WORKS CITED Aerts, Theo. Christianity in Melanesia (Port Moresby: U of Papua New Guinea P , 1998). The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1997). Bonnes Nouvelles d’Aujourd’hui: Le Nouveau Testament, traduit en français courant d’après le texte grec (Paris: Alliance Biblique Universelle, 1973). Buk Baibel. Standard Edition = The Bible in Tok Pisin: Papua New Guinea (Mosbi: Baibel Sosaiti bilong Papua Niugini, 61996). Forum of Bible Agencies. “Basic Principles and Procedures for Bible Translation,” Notes on Translation 13.2 (1999): 1–3. Good News Bible: Today’s English Version (New York: American Bible Society, 1976). Lothmann, Timo. “God i tok long yumi long Tok Pisin”: Eine Betrachtung der Bibelübersetzung in Tok Pisin vor dem Hintergrund der sprachlichen Identität eines PapuaNeuguinea zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006). Mühleisen, Susanne. “‘How is it that we hear in our own languages the wonders of God?’: Vernacular Bible Translations in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts,” Colonies – Missions – Cultures in the English-Speaking World: Comparative Studies, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001): 247–263. Mühlhäusler, Peter. “Attitudes to Literacy in the Pidgins and Creoles of the Pacific Area,” English World-Wide 16.2 (1995): 251–71. The New English Bible (London: Oxford U P , 1970). Nida, Eugene A. Good News for Everyone: How to Use the Good News Bible (Today’s English Version) (Waco T X : Word, 21977). ——. “Translating the New Testament into Haitian Creole,” The Bible Translator 18.1 (January 1967): 27–30. Nupela Testamen bilong bikpela Jisas Kraist = The New Testament in New Guinea Pidgin (Neo-Melanesian) (Canberra: The Bible Society in Australia, 1969).

FURTHER REFERENCES Aerts, Theo. “Indigenising a Theological Language?” Melanesian Journal of Theology 11.1– 2 (1995): 8–68. Cornelius, Izak. “Aspects of Contextual Bible Illustrations,” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 19 (1993): 59–77. Leana, Amos. “What Should the Melanesian Church of the Future Be Like?” Melanesian Journal of Theology 19.1 (2003): 102–17.

33 This recalls of Luther’s translation. The elevation of a fragmented language as regards lectal variety to a common standard – be it sixteenth-century German or modern T P – might be comparable to some extent.

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Mihalic, Frank. The Jacaranda Dictionary and Grammar of Melanesian Pidgin (Milton: Jacaranda, 1971). Mühlhäusler, Peter. “Pidgins and Translation,” Papiere zur Linguistik 47.2 (1992): 103–14. Mundhenk, Norm. “Linguistic Decisions in the Tok Pisin Bible,” in Melanesian Pidgin and Tok Pisin: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Pidgins and Creoles in Melanesia, ed. John W.M. Verhaar (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 1990): 345–73. Nida, Eugene A. “Principles of Correspondence,” The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000): 126–40. ——. Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translation (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964). Smith, Geoff P. Growing Up with Tok Pisin: Contact, Creolization, and Change in Papua New Guinea’s National Language (London: Battlebridge, 2002). Stoffel, Alura M. “Drawing and Selecting Biblical Illustrations,” Notes on Translation 8.3 (1994): 34–41. Taber, Charles R. “Problems in the Translation of Biblical Texts,” in Fachsprache – Umgangssprache: Wissenschafts-theoretische und linguistische Aspekte der Problematik, sprachliche Aspekte der Jurisprudenz und der Theologie, maschinelle Textverarbeitung, ed. János S. Petöfi, Adalbert Podlech & Eike von Savigny (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1975): 289–302.

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The History and Future of Bilingual Education — Immersion Teaching in Germany and its Canadian Origins1 C HRISTINE M ÖLLER

I.

Introduction

W

H I L E I N M A N Y P A R T S O F T H E W O R L D bi- or multilingualism is a natural part of life, Europe was allowed to retain an essentially monolinguistic stance during the twentieth century.2 Growing linguistic diversity through a variety of immigrant groups was ignored just as effectively as the linguistic necessities of looming globalization. Foreign languages were taught in the Latin tradition3 and children from minority-language backgrounds were simply drilled in the majority language.

1

The original title of my talk was “Canadian Immersion Translated to Germany – The Kiel Project.” I wish to thank Henning Wode, Petra Rüdiger, Petra Burmeister, and especially Thorsten Piske for their critical comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 2 This is not to say that the European countries are linguistically homogeneous; to my knowledge, they all have more than one autochthonous linguistic group. In countries with linguistic groups of approximately equal status, this usually led to geographical separation (e.g., Switzerland, Belgium). In countries with minority language groups, these minorities and their language(s) were very often suppressed and the general use of the majority language enforced – for example, in Catalonia up to the 1970s. As a result, most people in Europe remained monolingual in their mother tongue, although their country would have to be considered bi- or multilingual. 3 From the Renaissance on, Latin was taught mainly analytically with the help of grammar rules, declinations and conjugations, translation etc., a method which was often taken over for language teaching in general. Claude Germain, Evolution de l’enseignement des langues: 5000 ans d’histoire (Paris: C L E International, 2001): 54–60, 101–102.

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This essay will take a brief look at the history of bilingual education in order to show that European monolingualism is a comparatively new trend. It will then look at the language-learning situation in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century and its implications for language teaching. In continuation, an alternative to ‘traditional’ foreign language teaching as practised in the twentieth century will be presented: immersion (I M ), a type of bilingual education, which has been prominent in Canada since the 1960s in reaction to Canada’s postcolonial linguistic situation. The last part of this essay will give an example of how I M can be successfully implemented in Europe by taking a look at a project in northern Germany which combines a bilingual preschool, an I M elementary school, and bilingual wings at secondary schools.

II . The Historical Background of Bilingual Education Any historical overview of bilingual education4 will have to be aware that it is only since the beginning of writing, ca. 3300 B C , that there has been formal evidence for the existence of schools and thus for the teaching of or in a second or foreign language (L2). Bilingual education is certainly a much older phenomenon, since “polyglottism is a very early characteristic of human societies, and monolingualism a limitation induced by some forms of social change, cultural and ethnocentric developments.5” The oldest evidence of bilingual schooling goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, around 3000 B C .6 In scribal schools in Sumer (today’s Baghdad), Akkadian-speaking student scribes were taught to read and write in Sumerian. At the same time, such subject-matter as geography and mathematics was also taught in Sumerian. Evidence for bi- or even multilingual schooling for scribes has been found almost continuously through ancient times, e.g., multilingual tablets discovered in Egypt, which date back to the New Empire, ca. 3000–2100 B C ).7

4

Only historical examples of bilingual education – i.e. where at least two languages were used as the medium of education or the language of schooling was different from the students’ first language (L1) – will be examined. For a detailed description of the history of foreign-language teaching in general, see Germain, Évolution de l’enseignement; and E. Glyn Lewis, ”Bilingualism and Bilingual Education: The Ancient World to the Renaissance,” in Frontiers of Bilingual Education, ed. Bernard Spolsky & Robert L. Cooper (Rowley M A : Newbury House, 1977): 22–93. 5 Lewis, “Bilingualism,” 22. 6 See Germain, Évolution de l’enseignement, 21–29; E. Glyn Lewis, “Bilingualism,” 30–33. 7 Germain, Évolution de l’enseignement, 33.

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In the Greek Empire, the use of Greek was widespread in the schools of the colonies, since access to important administrative or political positions was only possible with a thorough knowledge of that language.8 The importance of Greek continued well into the Roman Empire, where instruction in Greek was considered a cornerstone of the Roman child’s education.9 Children of the aristocracy were usually educated by a Greek slave or servant; from 2 B C on, they entered a bilingual school system, where they first learned to read and write in Greek and then in Latin. In higher education, law was taught in Latin; philosophy, natural sciences, and medicine in Greek only. All other subjects were apparently taught in both languages. At the same time, Latin was the dominant school language in the territories of the Roman Empire, since it was believed to promote unity in the otherwise culturally and linguistically diverse colonies.10 Latin continued to be the language of formal instruction in Europe until far into the Middle Ages and beyond, although it increasingly became a foreign language for students, as opposed to the new vernacular varieties.11 The growth of nationalism from the Renaissance on and awakening consciousness of the ethnic and national associations of a language in the Age of Enlightenment,12 which culminated in the nation-states of the nineteenth century, brought about a reorientation towards monolingualism. In twentiethcentury Europe, proficiency in one language – the mother tongue – was seen as normal, and foreign languages were reduced to mere school subjects. This is reflected by the language-learning situation in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which will be looked at in the next section.

III . Europe in the New Millennium:

The Language-Learning Situation As part of the Special Eurobarometer “Europeans and their languages” conducted in all member-states of the European Union in 2005,13 Europeans over

8

Fred Genesee, Learning Through Two Languages: Studies of Immersion and Bilingual Education (Cambridge M A : Newbury House, 1987): 1. 9 See Germain, Évolution de l’enseignement, 43–49; E. Glyn Lewis, “Bilingualism,” 59–63. 10 See Genesee, Learning Through Two Languages, 2. 11 See Germain, Évolution de l’enseignement, 59–60. 12 See E. Glyn Lewis, “Bilingualism,” 24–25. 13 T N S Opinion & Social. Special Eurobarometer 243 – Wave 64.3: Europeans and their Languages. Survey requested by the Directorate General for Education and Culture and coordinated by the Directorate General Press and Communication (Brussels, 2006).

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fifteen years of age were asked about foreign-language learning and proficiency. It was found that 44% of them know only their mother tongue and only 28% speak more than one foreign language.14 The languages most widely known were English (38%), French (14%), German (14%), Spanish (6%), and Russian (6%).15 When Europeans were asked how they had learned or improved foreign languages, secondary school proved to be the single most important setting, followed by primary school (Table 1). The third most important setting for learning foreign languages were “holidays abroad,” which points to the popularity of a ‘natural’ approach where the results of learning can be put to immediate use, and emphasizes the overall importance of the communicative aspect of language learning. All other settings were significantly less important. Setting

1st foreign

2nd foreign

language

language

At secondary school

59

55

At primary school

24

17

On holidays abroad

20

23

T A B L E 1: How Europeans learned foreign languages (%)16

Europeans – whether they had said that they spoke one or more foreign languages or not – were also asked what could motivate them to learn a language or improve their language skills (Table 2). Economic considerations were in the foreground: free lessons were considered the highest motivating factor;

The study was conducted in the 25 E U member countries as well as in the acceding and candidate countries. For a study covering exclusively the fifteen old member-states, see I N R A (International Research Associates) Europe for the European Commission’s Education and Culture Directorate-General, Eurobarometer 54 Special: Europeans and Languages (Brussels, 2001). Even though the results of the two studies are not directly comparable owing to the large difference in the number of participating countries, they show the same general trends. 14 T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 8. 15 T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 12–13. No distinction was made with respect to whether the language in question was the L2, L3 or L4. Differences to 2000 arise mainly in the knowledge of languages other than English and are attributable to the new member-states (see I N R A, Eurobarometer 54). 16 Adapted from T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 21. Europeans speaking at least one foreign language were given 15 statements to choose from. Table 1 shows the E U average for the three highest rated answers.

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related aspects included being paid for taking language lessons, and career opportunities.17 The second most important factor in language learning proved to be the time aspect: i.e. how to fit lessons into the daily schedule. Similarly, lack of time was given as the most important factor when Europeans were asked about their reasons for not studying languages.18 If lessons were free

26

If they could find a course which suited their schedule

18

If they were paid for it

17

If they had the opportunity to learn it in a country where the language is spoken

17

If their employer allowed them time off work for lessons

16

I do not want to learn or improve any language (S P O N T A N E O U S )

15

If it would lead to a promotion/ better career prospects

15

T A B L E 2: Incentives for learning foreign languages (%)19

In 2000, a full 21% of Europeans replied that they did not wish to improve their language skills or to learn any foreign language.20 Very encouragingly, this number had dropped to 15% by 2005 (Table 2). At the same time, the results obtained as part of Eurobarometer 54 in 2000 as well as of Special Eurobarometer 243 in 2005 show that learning languages has to start early in order to profit from a more positive attitude: Europeans who do not speak any foreign language are more likely to say they do not wish to improve their language skills or learn new languages21 and motivation is especially low among the elderly.22 Moreover, all Europeans – regardless of whether they want to improve their own knowledge of foreign languages or not – agree that learning foreign languages is important for young people,23 and the great majority of Euro-

17 The importance of the financial aspect was confirmed by the reasons Europeans gave for learning languages (see T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 35–36). 18 T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 37. 19 Adapted from T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 39. Participants were given 11 statements to choose from; table 2 lists the E U average for the eight highest rated answers. 20 I N R A , Eurobarometer 54. 21 I N R A , Eurobarometer 54. 22 T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 39–40. 23 T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 44. Similarly, in 2000 only a small percentage of European parents said they did not find foreign languages important for their children:

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peans believes that learning an L2 should start before twelve or even five years of age (Table 3). Age

1st foreign language

2nd foreign language

0–5

39

17

6–12

55

64

13–19

2

11

20+

0

0

T A B L E 3: Best age to start learning foreign languages (%)24

When Europeans were asked about why young people should learn other languages (Table 4), they named job opportunities in the first place: i.e. once again an economic factor. Although there were some differences between countries, e.g., 58% of importance in the Netherlands vs. 84% in Germany, it was the highest-rated answer in all European countries. The second most important factor proved to be the usefulness of the foreign language as a lingua franca – be it around the world or at least in Europe. To improve their job opportunities

73

Because the language is widely spoken around the world

38

To feel more comfortable when going on holiday to a region where the language is spoken

30

To be multilingual

28

Because the language is widely spoken in Europe

28

T A B L E 4: Why young people should learn other languages (%)25

The Eurobarometer data presented strongly suggests that a high level of proficiency in at least one foreign language has to be achieved before entry into working life: first of all, in order to actually be able to improve job opportunities; secondly, to still have a daily schedule flexible enough to easily

i.e. parents seem to highly support their children’s language learning, even if they themselves do not want to improve their knowledge of foreign languages or learn new ones (see I N R A , Eurobarometer 54). 24 Adapted from T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 41. Participants’ spontaneous answers were grouped as shown above. 25 Adapted from T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 44. Participants were given 10 statements to choose from; table 3 lists the E U average for the five highest-rated answers.

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accommodate time for language learning; and thirdly, to profit from a more positive attitude towards language learning then and later on. At the same time, language lessons should not cause extra costs. All of this points in the same direction: European policy makers are right to put emphasis on improving language-learning possibilities in school.26 Table 1 shows that the school setting is already the most important factor in foreign-language learning. In school, language lessons are a fixed part of the curriculum – no extra time is required and they are usually free. At the same time, owing to the obligatory nature of formal education, all Europeans can be reached. The compulsory teaching of a foreign language has to start earlier, though. While in the majority of European countries at least 50% of the children are learning a foreign language in primary school, foreign-language teaching at pre-primary level remains an exception.27 At the same time, the number of hours recommended for teaching foreign languages in primary education – and thus one of the factors responsible for a programme’s effectiveness – is most often small.28 Moreover, it varies greatly among member-states: in Lithuania, for example, the recommended minimum for teaching languages as a compulsory subject during the notional year 2003 was 13 hours compared to 351 hours in Luxemburg.29 ´ Still, neither an early start, a large number of hours, nor long duration guarantees good results. The methodology of teaching has to be looked at, too. The high percentage of Europeans saying they had learned a language “on holidays abroad” points in the right direction: a more natural approach needs to be taken, , one that places emphasis on language as a tool for communicative purposes. A return to bilingual education would be the most desirable option, since it can provide effective opportunities for pupils to use their new language skills now rather than learn them now for use later. It opens doors on languages for a broader

26 For example, the Commission of the European Communities, Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004–2006 (Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: COM(2003) 449 final, 24.07.2003). 27 Eurydice, the information network on education in Europe, Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe (Brussels: Eurydice, 2005): 24, 39. See also T N S , Special Eurobarometer 243, 21. 28 Eurydice, Key Data, 70. On average, European countries recommend only about 50 hours for a notional year. 29 Eurydice, Key Data, 70. The number of hours given refers to foreign languages as a compulsory subject at the primary level.

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range of learners, nurturing self-confidence in young learners and those who have not responded well to formal language instruction in general education. It provides exposure to the language without requiring extra time in the curriculum.30

The next section will take a look at Canada, where immersion (I M ), a form of bilingual education, has been very successful since the 1960s.

IV . Immersion – Canada’s Contribution

to Foreign Language Teaching31 While Europe remained in an essentially monolinguistic attitude, Canadian educational authorities were forced to adopt alternative ways of foreign-language teaching from the 1960s on, in order to do greater justice to Canada’s postcolonial language situation. This was the result of contemporary political developments.32 Although French-Canadian culture and language were wellrooted in Canada, the British North America Act (1867), which legally constituted the Canadian confederation, affirmed linguistic duality only in Quebec, and up to the 1960s, the inferior status of French was evident in many ways.33 Even in areas with a large francophone population, English predominated as lingua franca, and in both linguistic communities popular opinion assigned an inferior status to French. French-speaking Canadians wanted to eliminate some of these linguistic disadvantages. This led to political, social, and even militant action in the early 1960s, e.g., demonstrations against public institutions not able or willing to communicate in French, which came to be called the Quiet Revolution.

30

The Commission of the European Communities, Promoting Language, 8. The first systematic attempts at immersion (I M ) in modern times were made in Europe in the twentieth century: namely, in Wales. I M has been well-established in Europe since then, e.g., in Luxemburg and Catalonia, or in the form of European Schools, although always on a small scale. The country whose I M programmes had the greatest repercussions is Canada, because Canadian I M was thoroughly evaluated from the very start and the results widely distributed. For more information on I M in Wales, Luxemburg, and the European Schools, see European Models of Bilingual Education, ed. Hugo Baetens Beardsmore (Clevedon & Philadelphia P A : Multilingual Matters, 1993); for Catalonia, see Joaquim Arnau & Josep Maria Artigal, ed. Els programes d’immersió: Una perspectiva Europea / Immersion Programmes: A European Perspective (Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1998). 32 Genesee, Learning Through Two Languages, 5–9. 33 For example, in legislation: French was recognized as an official language only in Quebec and New Brunswick; it did not become an official language on the national level until 1969 (Official Languages Act). 31

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The events of the Quiet Revolution caused growing concern among some English-speakers in Quebec.34 In the early 1960s, a group of English-speaking parents in St Lambert, a suburb outside Montreal, began to meet informally to discuss the situation: They felt that English alone would no longer secure social and economic success in the province and that both linguistic groups had very little contact – despite the fact that St Lambert was at that time approximately 50% French and 50% English-speaking.35 It was apparent that the school system did not help in acquiring sufficient skills in French. The parents themselves had experienced that 12 years of L2 instruction with 20– 30 minutes per day brought virtually no results for real-life situations. What the St Lambert parents wanted for their children was the “immersion in a ‘language bath’.”36 Since research results at that time seemed to suggest that a high level of proficiency in an L2 could only be accomplished if language education started at an early age, they also wanted the immersion to start as early as possible. After years of lobbying, the St Lambert school district set up the first kindergarten French immersion (I M ) class in September 1965, a success right from the beginning. By 2000, French I M programmes existed in all provinces, although the percentage of students enrolled varied greatly: from 2% in British Columbia to 32% in New Brunswick.37 1 What is Immersion? Something all programmes of bilingual education have in common is that at least one subject other than language arts is taught in a language which is not the students’ mother tongue.38 The terms used to describe this type of instruction are manifold, e.g., content-based second language instruction39 or content

34

See Wallace E. Lambert & G. Richard Tucker, The Bilingual Education of Children: The St. Lambert Experiment (Rowley M A : Newbury House, 1972): 219–36. 35 Lambert & Tucker, The Bilingual Education, 220. 36 Lambert & Tucker, The Bilingual Education, 225. 37 Mary Ellen, “French Immersion 30 Years Later,” in Education Matters: Insights on Education, Learning and Training in Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, June 2004). 38 See Henning Wode, Lernen in der Fremdsprache: Grundzüge von Immersion und bilingualem Unterricht (Ismaning: Hueber, 1995); Colin Baker, Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (1993; Clevedon & Philadelphia P A : Multilingual Matters, 1996): 172–97. 39 For example, Wode, Lernen in der Fremdsprache.

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and language integrated learning.40 The idea behind them is the same: in a naturalistic approach to language learning, proficiency in a foreign language is enhanced through increased input and use due to students’ communicative needs in the L2 academic subject classroom. But how can I M programmes be characterized? Johnson and Swain identified eight core features of I M programmes, which are listed in Table 5.41 Core feature

Explanation

The L2 is a medium of instruction.

True for all bilingual programmes; it differentiates them from the L2 being taught as a subject.

The I M curriculum parallels the local L1 curriculum.

Content subjects are taught through the L2, although academically they are the same as if taught in the L1.

Overt support exists for the L1.

The students’ L1 is at least taught as a subject at some stage in the curriculum and to advanced levels; often it is also used as a medium of instruction. School personnel show a positive attitude towards the students’ L1.

The programme aims for additive bilingualism.

L2 proficiency does not develop at the expense of the L1.

The exposure to the L2 is largely confined to the classroom.

Contact with the L2 outside school is rare.

Students enter with similar (and limited) levels of L2 proficiency.

The L2 is more or less unfamiliar to all students.

The teachers are bilingual.

Students can communicate with the teacher in their L1 when necessary; the teacher is able to maintain the L2 as medium of instruction.

The classroom culture is that of the local L1 community.

The classroom culture is not that of a community where the target language is the L1.

T A B L E 5: The core features of immersion programmes

As Table 5 shows, the goal of I M is to enable students from a majority language and culture to achieve a high level of proficiency in an L2 by teaching subject-matter in the L2 at no expense to the academic curriculum or L1. This 40 For example, Learning Through a Foreign Language: Models, Methods, Outcomes, ed. John Masih (London: Center for Information on Language Teaching and Research [C I L T ], 1999). 41 Robert Keith Johnson & Merrill Swain, “Immersion Education: A Category within Bilingual Education,” in Immersion Education: International Perspectives, ed. Robert Keith Johnson & Merrill Swain (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1997): 1–16.

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means that programmes aiming for L2 proficiency at the cost of the L1 (e.g., the integration of speakers with L1 Spanish in mainstream English education in the U S A ) do not fall under Johnson and Swain’s definition; they are labelled ‘submersion’ instead. In addition to the eight core features of I M , Johnson and Swain identified some ten variable features which have implications for programme administration, teaching methodology and learning outcomes, but do not define I M as such.42 Two of the variable features are generally used to identify differences between I M programmes: the level within the educational system at which I M is introduced (early, delayed, late), and the extent of I M provided (total vs. partial). In Canada, programmes are only labelled I M if at least 50% of the curriculum is taught in an L2; other programmes are regarded as enriched second language programmes.43 Further distinctions in I M programmes can be made according to the number of languages involved (e.g., double I M )44 and the make-up of the student body (e.g., two-way I M ).45 Additionally, all bilingual programmes – including I M – can be classified by their overall goal, e.g., encounter language, partner language, lingua franca, or heritage-language programmes.46 2 Research Results in Canada

A multitude of studies documents the excellent results of French I M in Canada.47 In French language skills, I M students clearly out-perform core

42

Johnson & Swain, Immersion, 8–12. Genesee, Learning, 1. This is due to the fact that government funds are only given to programmes using an L2 as the medium of instruction in at least 50% of the curriculum, see Henning Wode, “A European Perspective on Immersion Teaching: The German Scenario,” in Els programes d’immersió: Una perspectiva europea / Immersion Programmes: A European Perspective, ed. Joaquim Arnau & Josep Maria Artigal (Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1998): 46. 44 See Fred Genesee, “Immersion and Multilingualism,” in Els programes d’immersió: Una perspectiva europea / Immersion programmes: A European perspective, ed. Joaquim Arnau & Josep Maria Artigal (Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1998): 151–61. 45 See Nancy Rhodes, Donna Christian & Susan Barfield, “Innovations in Immersion: The Key School Two-Way Model,” in Immersion Education: International Perspectives, ed. Robert Keith Johnson & Merrill Swain (Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 1997): 265–83. 46 Wode, Lernen, 53–54. These individual types should not be seen as mutually exclusive. For heritage language programmes, see Genesee, Learning, 19. 47 See, for example, overviews in Genesee, Learning, and Marjorie Bingham Wesche, “Canadian Early French Immersion: A Retrospective Analysis,” in An Integrated View of 43

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French students. At the same time, their English-language skills are in no way jeopardized and their academic performance does not suffer in any of the I M varieties: i.e. French I M students perform as well as mainstream pupils. I M in no way leads to any cognitive deficits. There is even evidence of cognitive benefits, especially in skills that are transferable from one L to the other such as reading skills,48 and even children with learning difficulties seem to benefit from I M . These results have inspired I M programmes in other countries such as Germany.

V.

Foreign Language Teaching in Germany:49 The Kiel Project

In Germany, the provision of foreign-language teaching differs among the sixteen different states (Länder), since responsibility for the education system is determined by Germany’s federal structure. Until recently, the first foreign language was obligatory only in secondary school, where it was introduced in grade 5. By 2006, all Länder had introduced foreign languages at elementary schools in third and fourth grade, five Länder as early as first grade.50 The number of languages offered at the elementary-school level varies, but the usual choice is English. On average, two hours per week are dedicated to a foreign language, whether blended in with the academic subjects (integrative) or as separate language classes with their own curriculum. 1 The Kiel Project

In Schleswig–Holstein, Germany’s northernmost Bundesland, a project called into life by Henning Wode from Kiel University has been going much further. It seeks to realize what EU policy makers have called for on various

Language Development. Papers in Honor of Henning Wode, ed. Petra Burmeister, Thorsten Piske & Andreas Rohde (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002): 357–79. 48 For examples, see Mary Ellen, French Immersion, and Merrill Swain, “The Evolving Sociopolitical Context of Immersion Education in Canada: Some Implications for Program Development,” paper presented at the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik, Wuppertal, September 23–25, 2004; appears in the proceedings; Lambert & Tucker already found evidence for this phenomenon: The Bilingual Education, 67, 152. 49 For an overview of Europe in general, see Eurydice, Key Data; Eurydice, The Position of Foreign Languages in European Education Systems (1999/2000) (Brussels: Eurydice Focus, 2000). 50 K M K (Sekretariat der ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland), Fremdsprachen in der Grundschule – Sachstand und Konzeptionen 2004. Beschluss der Kultusministerkonferenz vom 10.02.2005 (Bonn: K M K : 2005).

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occasions:51 namely, a coordination of language teaching in primary and secondary education by combining a bilingual preschool, an I M elementary school, and bilingual wings at secondary schools. Through the introduction of the L2 in preschool and very intensive contact with it throughout elementary school, additional time is created for intensive contact with a third foreign language at secondary school. Thus, a 3+ language formula can be realized, which corresponds to the European Commission’s call for every European to “have meaningful communicative competence in at least two other languages in addition to his or her mother tongue.”52 As a first step, English–German bilingual classes53 were implemented at five Gymnasien in Schleswig–Holstein in 1991. By 2004 there were already 26 such programmes at secondary schools in Schleswig–Holstein.54 The bilingual-wing classes all follow the same basic model: In grade 5: i.e. at entry into secondary school, bilingual-wing students start learning English as an L2 just like their peer classes, usually with additional booster periods. From seventh grade on, the L2 is used as the medium of instruction in one or two subjects, e.g., history, geography or biology.55 In a second, more radical step, a bilingual preschool (ages 3–6) was set up in Altenholz near Kiel in 1996,56 where at least one group per year is attended

51 For example, The Council of Europe, Committee of Ministers, Recommendation No. R (98) 6 of the Committee of Ministers to Member States Concerning Modern Languages (Brussels, 1998). 52 The Commission, Promoting Language Learning, 4. For details on the 3+ formula, see Wode, ”A European Perspective,” 45. 53 In twentieth-century Germany, bilingual education was first (re-)introduced in the form of German–French wings, which initially resulted from a treaty of friendship and cooperation between Germany and France in 1963. The popularity and the success of the German–French wings led to the establishment of German–English bilingual schools, which in 1991 already outnumbered the German–French schools; see Wode, Lernen, 112– 27; John Klapper. Foreign-Language Learning Through Immersion: Germany’s Bilingual-Wing Schools (Lewiston N Y ; Queenston, Ontario; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1996): 89–176. 54 F M K S (Verein für frühe Mehrsprachigkeit in Kindertageseinrichtungen und Schulen), Umfrage bilinguale Schule in den Bundesländern: Übersicht der Bundesländer (Kiel: 2003). 55 See, for example, Petra Burmeister & Angelika Daniel, “How Effective is Late Partial Immersion? Some Findings from a Secondary School Program in Germany,” in An Integrated View of Language Development: Papers in Honor of Henning Wode, ed. Petra Burmeister, Thorsten Piske & Andreas Rohde (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002): 499–515; Wode, ”A European Perspective,” 16–29. 56 See Henning Wode, “Mehrsprachigkeit durch Kindergarten und Grundschulen: Chance oder Risiko?” Nouveaux Cahiers d’Allemand 19 (2000): 157–78; Petra Bur-

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to by a German- and an English-speaking caregiver by adhering to the one person – one language principle. In 2005, the preschool had two caregivers from Britain and one from the U S A , and three of the five preschool groups were taught bilingually.57 In recognition of its landmark character the bilingual preschool was awarded the European Language Label for Early Language Learning in 2003. As the latest and most innovative step in the Kiel project, the Claus Rixen elementary school in Altenholz started a partial English I M wing in August 1999.58 Regularly, one I M class per school year is offered, even though two first-grade I M classes started in the 2005/2006 school year in response to high demand.59 The I M elementary school continues L2 English education for children from the bilingual preschool, but it is also open to children from monolingual preschools. All subjects except German language arts are taught in English: i.e. 70% of the curriculum, while the academic curriculum corresponds to that of the monolingual peer classes. In first grade, the children are allowed to talk in German, although the use of English is highly encouraged; from second grade on, the children are expected to use English only. Formal correction of errors and grammar explanations are kept at a minimum. Similarly, subject-matter tests are taken in the L2, although only the academic content is graded.

meister & Ruth Pasternak, “Früh und intensiv: Englische Immersion in der Grundschule am Beispiel der Claus-Rixen-Grundschule Altenholz,” Mitteilungsblatt F M F –Landesverband Schleswig–Holstein (August 2004): 24–30; Kristin Kersten, Christine Imhoff & Bianca Sauer, “The Acquisition of English Verbs in an Elementary School Immersion Program in Germany,” in An Integrated View of Language Development: Papers in Honor of Henning Wode, ed. Petra Burmeister, Thorsten Piske & Andreas Rohde (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002): 473–97; Andreas Rohde & Christine Tiefenthal, “On Lexical Learning Abilities,” in An Integrated View, ed. Burmeister, Piske & Rohde: 449–71. 57 Personal communication Mrs Devich–Henningsen. 58 For more details on the elementary-school I M programme, see Henning Wode, U. Fischer, Ruth Pasternak & V. Franzen, “Frühes Englisch lernen im Altenholzer Verbund von Kita und Grundschule: Erfahrungen aus Praxis und Forschung zum Ende der 4. Klasse,” in Fremdsprachen auf dem Prüfstand: Innovation – Qualität – Evaluation, ed. Bernd Voss & Eva Stahlheber (Berlin: Pädagogischer Zeitschriftenverlag, 2003): 139– 49; Burmeister & Pasternak, “Früh und intensiv”; Kersten, Imhoff & Sauer, “The Acquisition of English Verbs in an Elementary School Immersion Program.” 59 The success of the I M project also shows in the increasing number of elementary schools in Schleswig–Holstein and the neighbouring Bundesland of Hamburg, which set up immersion wings on the Altenholz model. See overview in F M K S , Umfrage bilinguale Schule.

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Owing to the German teacher-training system, all I M teachers in Altenholz have a teaching certificate for elementary and secondary school,60 although they are specialized in English for secondary school. Native-speaker input comes from assistant teachers61 and from a changing number of English L1 students whose parents work in Kiel for some time. Most of the teaching material has to be designed by the teachers – for instance, by translating German text-books or creating new teaching materials with the help of pictures and corresponding English texts, since L1 English text-books are linguistically too difficult at the beginning and do not correspond to the German academic curriculum. 2 Research Results from the Kiel Project

All phases of the Kiel project have been evaluated by Henning Wode and his group at Kiel University. The secondary-school bilingual programmes were covered from 1992 to 1998. A communicative test design (“A Difficult Decision”) was used to assess speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills through tasks like describing a map, writing a letter, or discussing a difficult situation.62 Especially the students’ L2 discourse abilities and the lexicon profited from bilingual education. They were more eager to talk, needed less guidance in a discussion than their controls, and out-performed the latter in, for example, the intelligibility of ideas. Students from the bilingual programme also activated more words in their discussion, which points to a larger and more differentiated vocabulary. The preschool project was evaluated from 1997 to 2001. Among other things, hand-puppet tests, where the children acted as translators, and fastmapping picture tests were conducted.63 Observations showed that after about six weeks the preschool children are able to follow the daily routine in English. After about three months they start to integrate some English words into their German utterances, e.g., ‘Ich habe einen dog’. The first complete utterances learned are formulaic expressions referring to routine activities such as

60 That is, Hauptschule: German secondary schools which prepare their students for vocational training. 61 One assistant teacher per year is shared by all grades, teaching 14 hours per week. 62 For more details on tests and results, see Burmeister & Daniel, “How Effective”; Wode, “Language Learning” and “A European Perspective.” 63 For details, see Andreas Rohde, Lexikalische Prinzipien im Erst- und Zweitsprachenerwerb (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005), Rohde & Tiefenthal, “On Lexical Learning,” and Wode, “Mehrsprachigkeit durch Kindergarten und Grundschulen.”

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‘tidy-up time’. Even at the end of preschool, the children hardly use the L2, since there is no real necessity: All caregivers, even those with L1 English, understand German. Nevertheless, the L2 input in preschool is important, since it is responsible for the development of strong receptive abilities, which seem to form the basis for the rapid increase in productive abilities in grade 1 when classroom activities strongly encourage the use of the L2. At the elementary school, a picture-elicited retelling task for L1 and L2 has been administered once a year since 2000. It documents the development in language proficiency in different structural areas, e.g., lexical acquisition and inflectional morphology. The test results show the following general developmental pattern for the L2 English.64 During the first year of elementary school, there is an impressive improvement in the children’s productive abilities; verb morphology is dominated by -ing forms. At the end of second grade, predominantly simple past forms are used and overgeneralizations like ‘felled’ show that the general rule for the formation of the simple past has been learned. At the end of third grade, most verb forms are produced targetlike, even many irregular past forms, e.g., ‘fell’, ‘took’. At the end of fourth grade, few non-target-like verb forms remain. The children’s stories have become longer and their syntax quite complex; a broad range of conjunctions and function words is used. The children are able to communicate freely and effectively in English. L1 tests65 at the elementary school show that at the same time the L1 suffers in no way – for example, in an orthography test the I M class scored grades ranging from 1 to 3 (‘1’ is the highest grade), while in the control classes the range was from 1 to 6. Similarly, in H A M L E T (Hamburg reading achievement test) the I M class out-performed all monolingual control groups.66 Even though the higher L1 achievements in comparison to monolingual peer classes at the same school could have been attributed to an unintended pre-selection, the fact that the I M class also out-performed all classes from other monolingual schools in H A M L E T shows that this cannot

64 For more details on test design and results, see Wode, Fischer, Pasternak & Franzen, “Frühes Englisch”; Burmeister & Pasternak, “Früh und intensiv”; Kersten, Imhoff & Sauer, “The Acquisition.” 65 See Wode, Fischer, Pasternak & Franzen, “Frühes Englisch.” 66 See Jessica Bachem, “Lesefähigkeiten deutscher Kinder im frühen englischen Immersionsunterricht” (MA thesis, Kiel University, 2004); Anna C. M. Zaunbauer, EvaMarie Bonerad & Jens Möller, “Muttersprachliches Leseverständnis immersiv unterrichteter Kinder,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie 19.4 (2005): 263–65.

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be the case. Rather, the results point to general cognitive advantages through bilingual education, as found in the Canadian studies (see section III.2 above).

VI. Conclusion Research, especially from Canada and the studies conducted in Kiel, documents the excellent results I M programmes have in foreign-language proficiency. Contemporary fears of detrimental effects of bilingual education have to be seen in contrast to the popularity of using an L2 as the medium of instruction throughout history. Similarly, disappointment with I M results is most often the consequence of exaggerated expectations. The starting-point should be to achieve better results than in traditional foreign-language teaching, an objective I M exceeds by far. The question that has not been tackled so far is whether I M is suitable for children from non-majority-language backgrounds. Submersion programmes in the U S A (often labelled I M ) have had disastrous effects: neither the children’s L1 nor their L2 developed fully. However, these programmes aim at high proficiency in the L2 English at the expense of the L1. Additive I M programmes can easily be adapted to the context of societies characterized by different immigrant populations – as in Canada and Europe. Swain’s review of the eight I M core features in 2004 shows that this is mostly a matter of terminology.67 The immersion language, not the L2, is the medium of instruction, since for most immigrants I M is actually L3-learning. The use of the immersion language is still largely confined to the classroom and all students still enter with similar levels of proficiency in the immersion language. The most drastic changes concern the support for the L1 and the classroom culture: The latter is now made up of the cultures of the multiple immigrant communities to which the students belong. Thus, overt support has to be ensured for a great variety of home languages.68 If this is accomplished, children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds can profit from I M – whether in Canada or in Europe.

67

Swain, “The Evolving Sociopolitical Context.” Swain describes a promising approach: In a dual-language book project, students and their parents become involved in a storytelling task making use of L1 and L2 (“The Evolving Sociopolitical Context,” 19–21). 68

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WORKS CITED Arnau, Joaquim & Josep Maria Artigal, ed. Els programes d’immersió: Una perspectiva Europea / Immersion Programmes: A European Perspective (Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1998). Bachem, Jessica. “Lesefähigkeiten deutscher Kinder im frühen englischen Immersionsunterricht” (MA thesis, (Kiel University, 2004); Baetens Beardsmore, Hugo, ed. European Models of Bilingual Education (Clevedon & Philadelphia P A : Multilingual Matters, 1993). Baker, Colin. Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (1993; Clevedon & Philadelphia P A : Multilingual Matters, 1996). Bingham Wesche, Marjorie. “Canadian Early French Immersion: A Retrospective Analysis,” in An Integrated View of Language Development, ed. Burmeister, Piske & Rohde, 357–79. Burmeister, Petra, & Angelika Daniel. “How Effective is Late Partial Immersion? Some Findings from a Secondary School Program in Germany,” in An Integrated View of Language Development, ed. Burmeister, Piske & Rohde, 499–515. ——, & Ruth Pasternak. “Früh und intensiv: Englische Immersion in der Grundschule am Beispiel der Claus–Rixen–Grundschule Altenholz,” Mitteilungsblatt F M F – Landesverband Schleswig–Holstein (August 2004): 24–30. Available at: http://www.fmfsh.de /MB2004/24-30%20Englische%20Immersion%20in%20der%20 Grundschule.pdf (accessed 28 April 2005). ——, Thorsten Piske & Andreas Rohde, ed. An Integrated View of Language Development. Papers in Honor of Henning Wode (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002). The Council of Europe, Committee of Ministers. Recommendation No. R (98) 6 of the Committee of Ministers to Member States Concerning Modern Languages (Brussels, 1998). The Commission of the European Communities. Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004–2006 (Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: COM (2003) 449 final, 24.07.2003). Ellen, Mary. “French Immersion 30 Years Later,” in Education Matters: Insights on Education, Learning and Training in Canada (Ottawa, Ontario: Statistics Canada’s Internet Site, June 2004). Available at: http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/81-004-XIE/200406 /imm.htm (accessed 3 March 2005). Eurydice, the Information Network on Education in Europe. Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe (Brussels: Eurydice, 2005). ——. The Position of Foreign Languages in European Education Systems (1999/2000) (Brussels: Eurydice Focus, 2000). F M K S (Verein für frühe Mehrsprachigkeit in Kindertageseinrichtungen und Schulen). Umfrage bilinguale Schule in den Bundesländern: Übersicht der Bundesländer (Kiel: F M K S , 2003). Available at http://www.fmks-online.de (accessed 1 May 2005). Genesee, Fred. “Immersion and Multilingualism,” in Els programes d’immersió / Immersion Programmes, ed. Arnau & Artigal, 151–61. ——. Learning Through Two Languages: Studies of Immersion and Bilingual Education (Cambridge M A : Newbury House, 1987). Germain, Claude. Évolution de l’enseignement des langues: 5000 ans d’histoire (Paris: C L E International, 2001). I N R A (International Research Associates) Europe for the European Commission’s Education and Culture Directorate–General. Eurobarometer 54 Special: Europeans and Lan-

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guages (Brussels, 2001). Available at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies /lang /languages/barolang_en.pdf Johnson, Robert Keith, & Merrill Swain. “Immersion Education: A Category within Bilingual Education,” in Immersion Education: International Perspectives, ed. Johnson & Swain (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1997): 1–16. Kersten, Kristin, Christine Imhoff & Bianca Sauer. “The Acquisition of English Verbs in an Elementary School Immersion Program in Germany,” in An Integrated View of Language Development, ed. Burmeister, Piske & Rohde, 473–97. Klapper, John. Foreign-Language Learning Through Immersion: Germany’s BilingualWing Schools (Lewiston N Y ; Queenston, Ontario; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1996). K M K (Sekretariat der ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland). Fremdsprachen in der Grundschule – Sachstand und Konzeptionen 2004. Beschluss der Kultusministerkonferenz vom 10.02.2005 (Bonn: K M K , 2005). Available at: http://www.kmk.org/doc/beschl/fremdsprachen_in_der_grundschule .pdf (accessed 12 April 2005). Lambert, Wallace E., & G. Richard Tucker. The Bilingual Education of Children: The St. Lambert Experiment (Rowley M A : Newbury House, 1972). Lewis, E. Glyn. “Bilingualism and Bilingual Education – The Ancient World to the Renaissance,” in Frontiers of Bilingual Education, ed. Bernard Spolsky & Robert L. Cooper (Rowley M A : Newbury House, 1977): 22–93. Masih, John, ed. Learning Through a Foreign Language: Models, Methods, Outcomes (London: Center for Information on Language Teaching and Research [C I L T ], 1999). Rhodes, Nancy, Donna Christian & Susan Barfield. “Innovations in Immersion: The Key School Two-Way Model,” in Immersion Education: International Perspectives, ed. Robert Keith Johnson & Merrill Swain (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1997): 265–83. Rohde, Andreas. Lexikalische Prinzipien im Erst- und Zweitsprachenerwerb (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005). ——, & Christine Tiefenthal. ”On Lexical Learning Abilities,” in An Integrated View of Language Development, ed. Burmeister, Piske & Rohde, 449–71. Swain, Merrill. “The Evolving Sociopolitical Context of Immersion Education in Canada: Some Implications for Program Development,” paper presented at the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik, Wuppertal, September 23–25, 2004. Appears in the proceedings. T N S Opinion & Social. Special Eurobarometer 243 – Wave 64.3: Europeans and their Languages: Survey requested by the Directorate General for Education and Culture and coordinated by the Directorate General Press and Communication (Brussels, 2006). Wode, Henning. “A European Perspective on Immersion Teaching: The German Scenario,” in Els programes d’immersió / Immersion Programmes, ed. Arnau & Artigal, 43–65. ——. Lernen in der Fremdsprache: Grundzüge von Immersion und bilingualem Unterricht (Ismaning: Hueber, 1995). ——. “Mehrsprachigkeit durch Kindergarten und Grundschulen: Chance oder Risiko?” Nouveaux Cahiers d’Allemand 19 (2000): 157–78. ——, U. Fischer, Ruth Pasternak & V. Franzen. “Frühes Englisch lernen im Altenholzer Verbund von Kita und Grundschule: Erfahrungen aus Praxis und Forschung zum Ende der 4. Klasse,” in Fremdsprachen auf dem Prüfstand: Innovation- Qualität- Evaluation, ed. Bernd Voss & Eva Stahlheber (Berlin: Pädagogischer Zeitschriftenverlag: 2003): 139–49.

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Zaunbauer, Anna C.M., Eva–Marie Bonerad & Jens Möller. “Muttersprachliches Leseverständnis immersiv unterrichteter Kinder,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie 19.4 (2005): 263–65.

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Transperipheral Translations? Native North American / Scottish Gaelic Connections S ILKE S TROH

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instances of transcultural translation between the various Native North American peoples, on the one hand, and an intra-European minority culture, the Scottish Gaels, on the other. While this combination may at first sight appear somewhat far-fetched, there is in fact a long-standing discursive tradition of constructing parallels and alignments between these cultural worlds.1 The main basis of these alignments is a parallel (or perceived parallel) between their experiences of marginality, with Native Americans being victims of European overseas colonialism and postcolonial white hegemonies, and the Scottish Highlands being one of the former British colonizer’s ‘internal’ peripheries ‘at home’. Such transperipheral parallels were first constructed in ‘colonial’ discourses by ‘outsiders’ from the anglophone mainstream who located the same features of ‘barbarism’ and ‘premodernity’ in both internal and external peripheries. Naturally, these links were significantly complicated by the eventual accession of many ‘internally colonized’ Gaels to the status of overseas colonizers, a role which often brought them into conflict with the Native North American peoples to whom they were so frequently compared. Nonetheless, these ambiguites and conflicts did not forestall the adoption of transperipheral alignments with Native Americans by Gaelic discourses, especially since the discrediting of the colonial ethos after the mid-twentieth century. 1

HIS ESSAY AIMS TO EXPLORE

For the purposes of the present study, all Native North Americans will be treated as one and the same ethnic group. However, this is not to suggest any lack of awareness of the various distinctions between them; it merely reflects the fact that such distinctions are largely ignored by the primary sources on which the present analysis is based.

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The present analysis aims to delineate some of these transcultural alignments and their limitations through texts from the last three centuries, including examples from anglophone British discourses, colonial and ‘anticolonial’ Gaelic literature from Scotland itself and from the Gaelic diaspora in Canada, and the anglophone Canadian writer Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners. Celtic-speaking populations were often textualized – and marginalized – as ‘internal barbarian Others’ in a British nation-state aiming simultaneously at internal homogenization and external colonial expansion overseas. Thus, both ‘Celtic’ and overseas ‘barbarians’ (such as Native Americans) were often described in similar terms. Among the negative features frequently ascribed to both groups were disorder, ignorance, rudeness, historical stasis, excessive warlikeness and violence, moral corruption, untrustworthiness and treacherousness. Images of ‘noble savagery’ likewise occurred in both contexts, as romantics and primitivists praised both ‘Celts’ and ‘Indians’ for their allegedly uncorrupted moral virtues, their simple and ‘natural’ life-style, and their bravery in war. Moreover, both Gaels and Native Americans have often been romanticized as a ‘dying race’ – which has, of course, very obvious ‘colonizing’ overtones, as it implies the unfitness of such ‘primitive’ peoples for modern life, and often sanctions their replacement by other, ‘fitter’, societies in the inevitable course of progress. A very direct connection between the applications of this trope to Scottish Gaelic and Native North American contexts can be identified in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writing: in Scotland, two of the most prominent literary works to popularize the image of Gaeldom as a ‘dying race’ were James Macpherson’s collections of Ossianic poetry (first published in the 1760s) and Walter Scott’s Waverley (first published 1814). The latter, moreover, more than once explicitly likens Scottish Gaels to Native Americans.2 In the nineteenth century, Scott’s Waverley novels were among the most widely circulated British books throughout the Empire, and it is widely recognized that the descriptions of the Gaels in Macpherson’s and Scott’s works were a direct influence on ‘dying race’ literature in more ob-

2 On such transperipheral comparisons in Waverley, see also Silke Stroh, “The Long Shadow of Tacitus: Classical and Modern Colonial Discourses in the Eighteenth- and EarlyNineteenth-Century Scottish Highlands,” Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze–Engler et al. (A S N E L Papers 12; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2008). 339–54.

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viously colonial contexts overseas – for example, on James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826).3 Further examples of transperipheral comparisons in ‘colonizing’ texts can be found in the work of John Pinkerton (1758–1826, fl. 1780s–90s), an early exponent of a long tradition of British teutonist discourses which constructed a binarism (often with racist overtones) between allegedly inferior ‘Celtic’ (or Gaelic) and an allegedly superior ‘Germanic’ (i.e. ‘Anglo–Saxon’) element in the British population. Thus, Pinkerton asserted that the ancient Celts had been to the Gothic incomers “what the savages of America are to the Europeans.”4 He also wrote: the Celts had no monuments any more than the savage Americans […:] their […] mythology [...] in all probability resembled that of […] the rudest savages, as the Celts anciently were, and are little better at present, being incapable of any progress in society.5

Somewhat more neutral in tone, but with a similar transperipheral outlook, the early-nineteenth-century historian David Stewart of Garth described the arrival of kilted Highland regiments in New York in the 1750s as follows: they were caressed by all ranks and orders of men, but more particularly by the Indians. […] Indians flocked from all quarters to see the strangers who, they believed, were of the same extraction as themselves, and therefore received them as brothers.6

Of course, it would be difficult to ascertain whether this (white) summary of the Indian point of view is accurate, or whether the observer perceived a

3 See Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994): 232–33, 238–39, 259; Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997): 246–47; and Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (1992; Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 182–83, 187–90, 192–94. 4 John Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths: Being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe (London: George Nicol, 1787): 45. 5 Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, 68. 6 Col. David Stewart of Garth, Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland: With Details of the Military Service of the Highland Regiments (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable; & London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown; & Hurst, Robinson & Co. 1822; 2nd ed., 2 vols., Edinburgh 1977), vol. 1: 296; quoted from James Hunter, A Dance Called America: The Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada (Edinburgh & London: Mainstream, 1994): 236.

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similarity between these peoples and put this opinion into the ‘Indians’’ mouths to give it greater credibility. But whatever the Native American view was, at least this white observer seems to see a certain plausibility in Gaelic/ American parallels, or else he would probably not have recounted the anecdote. Similar connections were drawn by another historian, Justin McCarthy, in a description of the state of the Highlands in 1745: i.e. shortly before the British state destroyed the traditional Gaelic clan system and other elements of the feudal social order: “The whole of the Highlands were wild, unfrequented, and desolate, [… & the ] clansmen [were] as savage and as desparately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees.”7 ‘Celtic’/ Native American parallels were also constructed in the journal The English Race, which was published by the Royal Society of St George (founded in 1894), an association aimed at preserving the self-awareness and ‘superior’ position of the English ‘race’. In 1894, the journal proclaimed: “So far as the U K and the Empire are concerned, the knell of the pure-blooded Celtic race as a distinct element has sounded. The Celt will continue to undergo a process of gentle absorption, or share the fate of the aboriginals of America.”8 Thus, the first kind of transperipheral translation which seems to be at work in this context is the translation of ‘colonial’ discourse patterns from one periphery to another, even across continental and ‘racial’ boundaries. But for a long time, such transperipheral translations were almost exclusively performed by anglophone discourses. To the various ‘colonized’ or ‘peripheral’ peoples, themselves, such alleged mutual commonalities were often far from obvious, since they had been defined from a purely metropolitan standpoint, with the un-Englishness and alleged ‘primitivism’ of these different cultures functioning as the decisive criterion, next to which all existing differences seemed to pale into insignificance. This inability of the ‘fringe-dwellers’ to perceive commonalities between their own culture and that of other peripheries (which were often rooted in completely different parts of the globe) is, for instance, illustrated by historical and literary evidence from the Gaelic world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Evidence suggests that most people from the ‘Celtic fringe’ who lived and worked in Britain’s overseas colonies treated the ‘natives’ just as ruthlessly as

7

Justin McCarthy, A History of the Four Georges (London: Chatto & Windus 1884–

1901): vol. 2 (1890): 276. 8

Quoted from Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (1977; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1981): 258–59.

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other European colonizers did.9 The impression that many Gaelic colonizers did not seem to feel any scruples about displacing indigenous peoples is also borne out by their literature. Although there was a considerable tradition of quasi-‘anticolonial’ Gaelic literature from at least the seventeenth century onwards: i.e. a literature which criticized the ideological, cultural, and social marginalization of the Gaels within the U K ,10 for a long time these critical Gaelic voices did not yet declare any transperipheral solidarity with overseas colonized peoples. Whereas anglophone texts often did construct such parallels, Gaelic discourses often reflected an eagerness to embrace the opportunity to rise from the position of intra-British colonized to the status of overseas colonizer – a transition open to them because they were, after all, white Europeans. Some have suggested that the emigration of Scottish Highlanders was enforced through ‘clearances’ (i.e. evictions of unprofitable ‘surplus’ tenants to make way for a more commercial system of agriculture), and that they were thus in the unusual position of having become colonizers against their will. Against this, one might argue, first, that the same also applies to many nonGaelic colonizers, such as convicts deported to Australia, or non-Gaelic paupers driven by crushing poverty which left few alternative options for survival. Secondly, the involuntary element of Gaelic overseas migration, especially regarding the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, has been considerably over-stated by later commentators.11 By contrast, earlier Gaelic texts on colonial emigration paint a different picture: while also presenting emigration as an act prompted by unwelcome pressures at home, such as

9

See, for example, T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: 1700–2000 (1999; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000): 474, and Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003): 282, 289, 314–15, as well as James Hunter, Glencoe and the Indians (Edinburgh & London: Mainstream, 1996): 110, and A Dance Called America, 241. 10 Examples can be found in Iain Lom (c. 1620–1710), Orain Iain Luim: Songs of John MacDonald, Bard of Keppoch, ed. Annie M. Mackenzie (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1964); Highland Songs of the Forty-Five / Òrain Ghàidhealach mu Bhliadhna Theàrlaich, ed. John Lorne Campbell (1933; rev. repr. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P & Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1984); and Iain Mac Codrum (c. 1700–79), The Songs of John MacCodrum, ed. & tr. William Matheson (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd for the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1938). 11 For historical background information, see, for example, James Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community (1976; Edinburgh: John Donald, 2000): 123; Michael Kennedy, “ ‘ Lochaber no more’: A Critical Examination of Highland Emigration Mythology,” in Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia c. 1700–1990, ed. Marjory Harper & Michael E. Vance (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood & Edinburgh: John Donald, 1999): 280–93; and Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 214.

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overpowering landlords and clearances, these texts also stress a voluntaristic element and identify positive features of colonial emigration. Poets like Micheil Mór MacDhòmhnaill (who migrated to Canada in 1772),12 Anna Gillis (who moved to Canada in 1786),13 Iain MacCodrum (late-eighteenth century),14 and Rory Roy Mackenzie (early-nineteenth century)15 praise Canada as a land of opportunity for Scottish eviction victims. For instance, MacCodrum’s “Song to the Fugitives” presents America as “dùthaich gun ghainne,” “dùthaich a’ bhainne, / […] dùthaich na meala / […] an ceannaich sibh / Fearann gu ‘r n-àilgheas” (“a land without famine,” “the land of milk and honey […] where land can be bought at your will,” ll. 98, 101–104). Interestingly, this and other poems give the impression that Canadian soil and resources are simply there for the taking, without saying even a single word about the existence of a Native American population whose dispossession was a necessary precondition for European settlement. Thus, the authors of these Gaelic poems effectively silence the negative impact which the betterment of their own lot was bound to have upon other colonized cultures. Another poet of the Gaelic diaspora who, at least initially, displayed a much more critical attitude towards his new home was Iain MacGhillEathain (John MacLean, c. 1787–1848),16 who emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1819 and found the realities of pioneer life much more difficult than expected.17 These feelings are reflected in his poem “Am Bàrd an Canada” (“The Poet in Canada,” also known under the title “A’ Choille Ghruamach” / “The Gloomy

12 The poet lived c.1745–1815. See, for example, “O, ‘s àlainn an t-àite” (“Fair is the Place”), which is quoted bilingually in Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 214. 13 “Canada Ard” (“Upper Canada”), for instance, in Devine, ibid., 217–18. 14 See, for example, “Oran do na Fogarraich” (“Song to the Fugitives,” 1773) in The Songs of John MacCodrum, 196–203; or (with tr. by William Neill) in The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English 1380–1980, ed. R. Watson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 1995): 284–91; here quoted from the latter. 15 “An Imrich” (“The Emigration”), for instance, in Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 215–17. 16 He is also known as Am Bàrd Thighearna Cholla (‘the bard of the lord of Coll’) and Am Bàrd Mac Ghill’Eathain (‘the MacLean bard’). Some information about this poet can be found in Derick S. Thomson, An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry (1974; Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 1989): 220–21; and Kennedy, “ ‘ Lochaber no more’,” 280–81. 17 After the initial phase of homesickness was over, MacGhillEathain apparently began to see Nova Scotia in much more positive terms. This new regard for life in Canada is also reflected in two of his later poems, “Am Bal Gàidhealach” (‘The Gaelic Gathering’) and “Seann Albainn agus Albainn Ùr” (‘Old and New Scotland’). Thus, these later poems seem much more in line with the relatively positive attitudes to migration characteristic of many other Gaelic texts of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.

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Woodland”).18 One of the down-sides of colonial migration which prominently features in this poem is the climate: conventional European strategies for coping with bad weather are clearly not enough in this new, over-powerful environment: “ge maith an triùbhsair chan dean i feum, / Gun stocain dhùbailt ‘sa mhocais chlùdaich” (‘no matter how good the trousers are, they will not do without double stockings and clouted moccasins’19). While the usefulness of these Indian garments is clearly appreciated, these new fashions also appear to evoke other feelings which are less positive: the European’s fear of ‘going native’. This trope is, of course, familiar from many other texts produced by nineteenth-century colonizers, and the use of such a ‘colonial’ motif by a Gaelic author seems to sit rather uneasily with various writers’ attempts to lump Gaels and Native Americans together as equally ‘marginal’ or ‘colonized’. The fear of ‘going native’ also surfaces in MacGhillEathain’s repeated emphasis on Canada’s insufficiently developed monetary economy, a problem which frequently throws its inhabitants back on the direct exchange of one kind of goods for another: Na dolair ghorma chan fhaic mi falbh iad, […] Ma nìtear bargain chan fhaighear airgead, […] Ma gheibhear cùnnradh air feadh nam bùthan Gu’m pàighear null e le flùr no ìm. (“I’ve never handled a silver dollar […]. A deal is made, but […] no coin passes, […] they’ll take your gear but they’ll pay no money, for flour and butter is all their trade,” stanza 13). B’e am fasan ùr dhuinn a cosg le fionntach Mar chaidh a rùsgadh de’n bhrùid an dé (“our latest fashion is to pay with raw hides freshly ripped off an animal’s back,” stanza 7).

18

The poem can be found, along with an English translation by William Neill, in The Poetry of Scotland, ed. Watson, 466–73. It should be noted, however, that Neill’s translation sometimes privileges form and poetic effect over accuracy of content. Moreover, Neill makes the poem appear even more nostalgic in tone than it is in the Gaelic original. Further references to this poem will be given in brackets in the main text. 19 I have replaced Neill’s translation here and below with my own for greater exactness of content.

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Paying with furs was, of course, exactly what many Native Americans did when they wanted to trade with Europeans. These lines suggest that MacGhillEathain had internalized the opinion, widespread in Europe’s capitalist mainstream, that a monetary economy represented a higher stage of civilization, far superior to the direct barter practised in more ‘traditional’ societies. This tenet was a widespread element of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theories of social development. Only a few decades before the composition of this poem, Britain’s anglophone mainstream had used the same teleology of economic history in order to expound upon the civilizational inferiority of Scottish Highland society, where cash had been relatively rare even as late as the second half of the eighteenth century. By MacGhillEathain’s time, some Gaels had obviously internalized capitalist principles and, upon emigration to the colonies, felt anxious about the possibility of losing their recently acquired badges of ‘progress’ and again descending further downward on the civilizational ladder. However, this traditional self-image of Gaels as colonizers taking pride in their difference from (and perceived superiority to) Native Americans was to undergo radical transformation in the twentieth century. An important factor in this transition (another ‘translation’) was the decline of the British Empire. Ever since the eighteenth century, the Empire had been vital in creating Scottish identification with the British state, not only through the material benefits it generated in terms of economic profits and careers, but also on the ideological level: imperial Britain offered Scots the gratifying opportunity to proudly identify themselves as members of the most successful colonizing power in the world, and (along with the English) as the topmost members of a global civilizational hierarchy. As Scottish identification with the British state had always so strongly depended on overseas colonial foundations, the loss of the empire in the twentieth century destabilized Scottish loyalties to the U K and contributed to a new rise in Scottish political nationalism, especially from the 1960s onwards.20 In this context, Scottish and Gaelic identity could be redefined to fit post-Imperial international moral standards: while ‘Britishness’

20

On the links between the downfall of Empire and the rise of Scottish nationalism, also see, for instance, Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (1991; London et al: Pimlico, rev. ed. 1992): xx, 446; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992; London: Pimlico, 1994): 6–7, 374–75; and Devine, The Scottish Nation, 578–79, 582–83. For a contrary view, see Jack A. Brand, “Nationalism and the Noncolonial Periphery: A Discussion of Scotland and Catalonia,” in New Nationalisms of the Developed West: Toward Explanation, ed. Ronald Rogowski & Edward A. Tiryakian (London & Boston M A : Allen & Unwin 1985): 289, 291.

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and ‘Englishness’ seemed more obviously ‘tainted’ by historical associations with the now discredited role of the colonizer, those asserting their own ‘Scottishness’ now came to place a markedly greater emphasis on the ‘victim’ side of their nation’s historical experience as yet another country ‘colonized’ by England. At the same time, the other (‘British’) side of the Scots’ history as overseas colonizers is often suppressed. The claim to ‘victim’ status can be made to appear more plausible through alignment with much more obviously marginalized populations,21 such as Native Americans. Significantly, most Scottish declarations of transperipheral solidarity with overseas postcolonial nations and cultures date from the time after the British Empire had been lost. While the first kind of transperipheral translation discernible in the connections between Gaels and Native Americans was accomplished by colonizing discourses produced by anglophone onlookers translating colonial stereotypes from one periphery to another, a second kind of transperipheral translation is constituted by the more recent phenomenon of Gaels taking up these transperipheral alignments themselves. This also entails a third kind of ‘translation’, in that these modern Gaels ‘translate’ or re-interpret their historically ambivalent position as both colonized and colonizer into a one-sided self-representation as colonized victims. One of the fields in which such new transperipheral translations take place is modern Highland historiography22 – for instance, in the work of James Hunter, who writes: The Highlands [… were] one of the last parts of Europe to have had an Indian-like tribal structure23 It was certainly no difficult thing for eighteenth-century Highlanders to adapt to Indian lifestyles which, during that period, were not so very different from their own.24 The reservation’s Indian residents are grappling with issues of a kind which, in essence [. . . ], are recognisably akin to issues with which Highlanders have long been familiar.25

21 For instance, see James Shaw Grant, “Highland History – A British Asset,” Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 52 (1980–82): 460–79, especially 461, 463, 468– 70, 472, 477–78; James Hunter, “Preface to the New Edition,” in The Making of the Crofting Community (1976; Edinburgh: John Donald, 2000): 9–10; and Hunter, Glencoe and the Indians (Edinburgh & London: Mainstream, 1996), dedication, 34, 189. 22 For instance, see J.S. Grant, “Highland History – A British Asset,” especially 461, 463, 468–70, 472, 477–78; Hunter, “Preface to the New Edition,” in The Making of the Crofting Community, 2002, 9–10, and Glencoe and the Indians, for example: dedication, 34, 189. 23 Hunter, Glencoe and the Indians, 110. 24 A Dance Called America, 236. 25 Glencoe and the Indians, 189.

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Examples of such shared problems identified by Hunter include aspects of cultural identity, culture, and language revival, and the struggle to enhance the role of native culture in the education system.26 Hunter explicitly acknowledges the influence of postcolonial theory on his own rewriting of Highland history – for example, regarding the emphasis of many postcolonial academics on a politically critical outlook, sympathy with the marginalized, the use of oral and demotic sources to unearth the history, outlook, and voices of the oppressed, as well as their celebration of indigenous historic achievements to instil confidence in contemporary emancipation struggles.27 Further transperipheral alignments have come from Gaelic language activists in both Scotland and Canada, who link their own efforts to preserve and revive the Gaelic tongue to the situation of other minority-language groups, including Native American ones.28 Other transperipheral alignments with Native Americans can be found in recent Gaelic poetry – for instance, Ruaraidh MacThòmais’s (alias Derek Thomson’s) poem “Aodannan” (“Faces”).29 The speaker ponders on the “broad faces / of the Micmacs and Eskimos” which seem “hard to eradicate” in spite of their marginalization (“aodannan leathainn / nam Micmac ‘s nan Eskimo / duilich am mùchadh”). For the speaker, these facial features appear to reflect a native right of belonging to the country and a very physical connection with their native land – in MacThòmais’s metaphor, they have the land’s “blubber on their cheeks” (“a blonaig air an gruaidh”). The ‘colonizers’: i.e. the representatives of white settler culture, are claimed to lack this “blubber,” and are thus, it is implied, ‘alien’ to the land. Accordingly, their right to be there and determine the fortunes of that land is questioned: “aodannan / nan Ameireaganach […] / chan ionnan an gaol / ris an dùthaich seo” (“the faces / of the Americans […/…] don’t relate in the same way / to this dour land”). In the English text, the use of the word ‘dour’ with reference to 26

Hunter, Glencoe and the Indians, 189–90. Also see ibid., 194; as well as his A Dance Called America, 28, 96, 189, 236, 242–43; and Glencoe and the Indians, 34, 40–41, 47, 52–53, 57, 59–60, 66–67, 73, 106–107, 109, 115, 118, 123–24, 126–27, 129, 159, 167, 182– 83, 186, 189. 27 Hunter, “Preface to the New Edition,” The Making of the Crofting Community, 9–10. 28 Examples of such alignments in Gaelic discourses include Frances MacEachen’s review article on Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief in the periodical Am Bràighe (geamhradh / Winter 1999): 11; and Rob Dunbar’s article “The Basque Example,” Am Bràighe (samhradh / Summer 2000): 14. Similarly, the “Iomairtean Gàidhlig” internet newsgroup has repeatedly circulated information on efforts to revive Native American tongues – for example, a feature on the Cherokee case appeared on 7 September 2003. 29 MacThòmais, Creachadh na Clàrsaich / Plundering the Harp, 256–57.

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North America is also significant: it is usually associated, rather, with Scotland, as a stereotypical trait of ‘Scottishness’. Thus, it anticipates a transition of focus which becomes more explicit in a later passage: Uime sin cuiridh mi m’aghaidh air mo dhùthaich fhìn, air a bheil an aghaidh-choimheach, gun fhios nach gabh i uair no uair-èiginn suathadh dhan a’bhlonaig (So / I shall turn my face my own country / that wears the foreign face (mask), / in case it accepts / sometime or in some extremity / an application of blubber).

Thus, Scotland, too, is presented as a colonized country whose colonizers attempt to eradicate the country’s ‘native’ face – in this case through cultural anglicization rather than through large-scale American-style foreign settlement. The latter changes the physiognomy and ‘face’ of the conquered country in a more literal sense: namely, through changes in the gene-pool. In Scotland, however, the ‘genetic’ face is still largely unaltered, but wears the mask of a foreign culture. MacThòmais’s reference to the application of blubber to Scotland’s face implies hope for a ‘re-nativization’ of Scottish culture, a shedding of anglocentrism and a return to its own ‘indigenous’ roots. The poets Maoilios Caimbeul and Aonghas MacNeacail likewise display considerable interest in Native American themes. For instance, Caimbeul’s poem “James Bay, Quebec”30 meditates on the extermination of traditional indigenous ways of life by the ascendancy of a more recently imported (in this case, white) culture, a theme which is reminiscent of similar concerns raised in his Gaidhealtachd-related poems. Caimbeul’s poem on James Bay also juxtaposes indigenous and white perspectives on the land and on placenames, and highlights the continuing neglect of Native American issues in a mainstream-dominated education system. Native American themes also resurface in Caimbeul’s “Fiosaiche nan Sioux” (‘The Sioux Diviner’),31 and MacNeacail’s long poem Sireadh Bradain Sicir / Seeking Wise Salmon, part of which draws expressly on Native American imagery.32 Moroever, Mac-

30

Caimbeul, A’ Gabhail Ris (Gairm Leabhar series, vol. 12; Glasgow: Gairm 1994): 30–31. Caimbeul, A’ Gabhail Ris, 32. 32 The Native American image in question is that of ‘rainbow’s children’. See anon., “Introduction” to MacNeacail, Sireadh Bradain Sicir / Seeking Wise Salmon, 5; and the main text of the poem, 12. 31

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Neacail’s book an seachnadh agus dàin eile / the avoiding and other poems contains a brief section of Gaelic translations of texts from different Native American cultures,33 thus constituting a fourth kind of transperipheral translation: namely, the literal translation of Native American literature into Gaelic – a hitherto rather unusual combination which bypasses the traditional ‘roundabout way’ via the English language of the ‘colonizing’ mainstream. Another field where transperipheral comparisons between Gaels and Native Americans have been constructed is white anglophone Canadian literature, as in Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners. Here the link is mainly accomplished through the juxtaposition and partial intertwining of two personal and family histories. The first of these histories is that of the main protagonist, Morag Gunn, who is of Scottish Highland descent. After the early death of her parents, Morag is raised by a friend of her father’s, the local scavenger Christie Logan, who is likewise of Scottish Highland origin. Morag’s and Christie’s personal, ancestral, and mythic backgrounds constitute the Gaelic side of Laurence’s transperipheral equation, while the ‘Native American’ side is represented by Morag’s schoolmate – and later lover and friend – Jules Tonnerre, who is a Méti (i.e. of mixed French and Native Canadian heritage). The initial reason why Morag and Jules begin to bond, however, is not a shared sense of ethnic marginalization: while both of them are outsiders at school,34 in Morag’s case this is clearly owing to her low class status, not her Gaelic ancestry. In fact, a considerable number of people in Morag’s home town who have Scots or Gaelic ancestors are situated in the middle and upper echelons of local society. Thus, Morag and Jules’s initial sense of kinship is based on two different kinds of marginality. However, once this initial bond is established, they (and the reader) also come to perceive parallels in their ethnic histories. Thus, both Jules and Morag bear the names of legendary ancestors (59– 60), which underlines the general importance of ancestry and history in the context of this novel. Frequent emphasis is placed on how long America’s native peoples lived on the land before they were dispossessed by (white) incomers. A similar point is made by Christie about the Gaels and their dispossession during the clearances by incoming southerners (or anglicized local elites). There is also a sense that both the Gaels and the Native American

33

MacNeacail, an seachnadh agus dàin eile / the avoiding and other poems, 127–32. Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (1974; repr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993): 50–51. Further page references are in the main text. 34

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heritage are gradually submerged by the anglophone mainstream culture: Christie no longer speaks Gaelic, and Jules speaks neither French nor Cree (113). Christie still remembers a few words of Gaelic from his childhood in Scotland, affectionately calls it “the old language,” and regrets that he cannot speak it fluently. By contrast, when Morag says “our words” (53), she means English, not Gaelic – a contrast which highlights a generation gap that reflects a continual process of cultural decline. Vain desires to stem such decline and marginalization are identified in both cultural groups: in one of the novel’s ‘ancestry’ stories, Morag’s legendary forefather Piper Gunn, by then an old man, tries to exhort his people (Gaels who had settled in the Red River area in Manitoba) to fight for their interests at a time when their formerly famed warlikeness has slackened. Criticizing their ‘decline’ into non-warlike farmers, Piper Gunn likens them to gutted herring. A parallel story is told about Jules’s legendary ancestor, Rider Tonnerre: he, too, is described as an old man who attempts to incite his people to recover their warlike heritage. However, they, too, have ‘declined’, in this case into hunters and drinkers. In response, Rider Tonnerre likewise resorts to a fish metaphor when he likens his companions to gutted jackfish (119). The parallelism is also reinforced through a similar composition of the two men’s names: both names state the men’s occupation or main skill (piper/ rider), combined with the family name. However, this is where the commonalities end: the occasion of Rider Tonnerre’s exhortation was the Riel Rising, when the British settlers led by Piper Gunn and the Métis headed by Rider Tonnerre stood on opposite sides. Thus, the ancestry tales which deal with nineteenth-century European settlement in Canada also reveal various clashes in the ‘Gaelic’ and in the Métis perspective on these issues. But in spite of this awareness of clashes and conflicts, the novel never entirely abandons the idea that the commonalities might eventually outweigh the differences. Thus, Morag and Jules seem to learn from each other, thus also gaining insight into the respective Other’s mind-set. Once she has learnt this, Morag even manages to convince Christie that he needs to modify his one-sided, eurocentric perspective on history, which used to present Gaelic pioneers as ‘heroes’ while vilifying the Métis as villains (107). Moreover, Morag and Jules eventually have a child together, who, it is implied, will unite both strands of heritage and might be able to strike a balance between the two perspectives. Thus, the novel seems to propose a somewhat utopian vision of mutual negotiations of historical meaning and cultural identity in which the commonalities, but also the one-time clashes, of European and non-European dispossessed ethnicities play a major part.

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With this idea of fusion, Laurence’s vision is much less essentialist than that of MacThòmais, since the latter’s poem “Faces” dreams, rather, of a return to ‘unspoilt’ native (or nativist) authenticity. This dream of a desired state springs from a Scottish context before being projected (rather problematically) onto the Native Americans. Laurence’s ‘natives’, by contrast, are already hybridized, since her representative of the Native American heritage is a Méti. Nonetheless, it is also possible to identify a certain ‘colonial’ perspective in her use of Gaelic/ Native American parallels. For instance, there seems to be an element of a ‘white guilt complex’, and an attempt to assuage this sense of guilt by stressing that the Scottish pioneers had been colonized and dispossessed victims themselves before they came to settle in Canada. Laurence’s embrace of both white and ‘native’ histories of victimization thus seems to appropriate Native American experiences for incorporation into a white agenda: namely, that of re-rooting the settlers on the new soil and giving them, through a narrative of shared victimhood and ultimate reconciliation, a legitimate place in Canadian history and on Canadian territory. In conclusion, it might be said that several elements of transperipheral translation are discernible between the Gaelic world (both in the U K and in North America), on the one hand, and Native Americans, on the other. Such parallels have been constructed for various motives, including colonial interests, nationalist politics, tactical cross-inspiration, and the mutual imitation of promising strategies among minority-language movements, as well as the search for ethnic essences, and a white Canadian desire to establish historical and moral roots on the land. However, the limitations of such ‘transperipheral translations’ are highlighted by the fact that they seem restricted to ‘white’ discourses, which reflects inter-peripheral power imbalances as well as a persistent lack of genuine dialogue with Native American perspectives. It is also quite telling that I have not yet been able to trace a single Native American source dealing with this subject, neither in affirmative nor in critical terms – they simply do not seem to see a difference between Scots (several of whom consider themselves as intra-European, intra-white ‘colonized’ subjects) and other (e.g., English) white ‘mainstreamers’.35

35

There is, however, some evidence of a critical reaction of Native North Americans towards postcolonial or ‘indigenous’ alignments by people from other parts of the ‘Celtic fringe’: i.e. from Wales – the second Indigenous People’s Theatre Celebration, which took place in Canada in 1982, brought together delegates from various minority and ‘colonized’ cultures around the world, e.g., Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans, and Maoris. A Welsh delegate, however, was initially greeted with suspicion and protest on the part of

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Thus, there is little mutuality in this translation, and certain experiences and stereotypes seem only partly translatable from one culture into the other. Even though several authors who construct Gaelic/ Native American alignments also occasionally acknowledge the Highlanders’ ambivalent historical role as both colonized and colonizer,36 they nonetheless often downplay this ambiguity, while other authors even silence it entirely. The tendency in Scottish postcolonial discourses to obscure complicity in white racism relates not only to the conduct of Scots in the Imperial past but also to recent and present-day Scottish popular opinion, which, of course, has not been free from racism against postcolonial immigrants from overseas. These limitations notwithstanding, such transperipheral comparisons have interesting disciplinary implications, since they entail the possibility of transcending traditional boundaries of postcolonial studies by highlighting the fact that certain postcolonial tropes and strategies are also translatable to other fields. At the same time, they show that such translatabilities have their limits, and that in each individual case we need to look carefully at the underlying motivations, and the political implications, of such alignments, to determine where they can offer analytically enlightening and politically liberating insights, and where they are, rather, spurious and forced constructions made for merely propagandistic reasons, and with sometimes re-colonizing rather than decolonizing implications. Thus, such extensions of perspectives – and of the discipline of postcolonial and transcultural studies – have both positive and negative potential, but the careful analysis of each individual instance is necessary in order to determine which of the two side prevails.

WORKS CITED Anon. “Introduction” to Aonghas MacNeacail, Sireadh Bradain Sicir / Seeking Wise Salmon (Nairn: Balnain, 1983): 5. Brand, Jack A. “Nationalism and the Noncolonial Periphery: A Discussion of Scotland and Catalonia,” in New Nationalisms of the Developed West: Toward Explanation, ed. Ronald Rogowski & Edward A. Tiryakian (Boston M A & London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).

several Native Canadian participants, though after some explanation concerning the marginalized situation of the Welsh language in Britain, the Welsh participation in the event apparently met with greater acceptance. See Ray Conlogue, “Indigenous Celebration Delightful, Disturbing: Can Theatre Groups Overcome Mistrust of Each Other?” Globe and Mail (5 August 1982): 17. I am grateful to Henning Schäfer for this reference. 36 See, for example, Joni Buchanan, Christopher Carrell & Malcolm MacLean’s annotations to the pictures on pp. 92, 94; Murray’s essay “Whistlers in the Dark,” 88–91; Fry, The Scottish Empire, 398; as well as the aforementioned passages in Laurence’s The Diviners.

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Caimbeul, Maoilios. A’ Gabhail Ris (Gairm Leabhar series, vol. 12; Glasgow: Gairm, 1994): 30–31. Campbell, John Lorne, ed. & tr. Highland Songs of the Forty-Five / Òrain Ghàidhealach mu Bhliadhna Theàrlaich (1933; rev. repr. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press & Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1984). Carrell, Christopher; & Malcolm Maclean, ed. As an Fhearann / From the Land: Clearance, Conflict and Crofting. A Century of Images of the Scottish Highlands (Edinburgh: Mainstream; Stornoway: An Lanntair; Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1986). Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992; repr. London: Pimlico, 1994). Conlogue, Ray. “Indigenous Celebration Delightful, Disturbing: Can Theatre Groups Overcome Mistrust of Each Other?” Globe and Mail (5 August 1982): 17. Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1992; repr. with new afterword Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000). Devine, T.M. Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003). ——. The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (1999; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Dunbar, Rob. “The Basque Example,” Am Bràighe (samhradh/Summer 2000): 14. Fry, Michael. The Scottish Empire (Phantassie: Tuckwell; & Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001). Grant, James Shaw. “Highland History – A British Asset,” Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 52 (1980–82): 460–79. Hunter, James. A Dance Called America: The Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada (Edinburgh & London: Mainstream, 1994). ——. Glencoe and the Indians (Edinburgh & London: Mainstream, 1996). ——. The Making of the Crofting Community (1976; Edinburgh: John Donald, 2000). Kennedy, Michael. “ ‘ Lochaber no more’: A Critical Examination of Highland Emigration Mythology,” Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia c. 1700–1990, ed. Marjory Harper & Michael E. Vance (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood & Edinburgh: John Donald, 1999): 267–97. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners (1974; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1993). Lom, Ian. Orain Iain Luim: Songs of John MacDonald, Bard of Keppoch, ed. Annie M. Mackenzie (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1964). Lynch, Michael. Scotland: A New History (1991; London: Pimlico, rev. ed. 1992). McCarthy, Justin. A History of the Four Georges, 4 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus 1884– 1901; vol. I : 1884; vol. I I : 1890; vols. I I I & I V co-authored by Justin Huntly McCarthy, bearing the subtitle “and of William I I I ”, both publ. 1901). MacCodrum, Iain. The Songs of John MacCodrum, ed. & tr. William Matheson (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd for the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1938). MacEachen, Frances. Review of Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief, in Am Bràighe (geamhradh/Winter 1999): 11. MacNeacail, Aonghas. an seachnadh agus dàin eile / the avoiding and other poems, Lines Review Editions (Edinburgh: MacDonald, 1986). ——. Sireadh Bradain Sicir / Seeking Wise Salmon (Nairn: Balnain 1983). MacThòmais, Ruaraidh (alias Derick S. Thomson). Creachadh na Clàrsaich: Cruinneachadh de Bhàrdachd 1940–1980 / Plundering the Harp: Collected Poems 1940–1980 (Edinburgh: MacDonald, 1982). ——. An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry (1974; Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 1989). Murray, John. “Whistlers in the Dark: The Hielan Picture Postcard,” As an Fhearann / From the Land, ed. Christopher Carrell & Malcolm MacLean (Edinburgh: Mainstream; Stornoway: An Lanntair; Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1986): 88–91.

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Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (1977; London: Verso, rev. ed. 1981). Pinkerton, John. A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths: Being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe (London: George Nicol, 1787). Stafford, Fiona The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Stroh, Silke. “The Long Shadow of Tacitus: Classical and Modern Colonial Discourses in the Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Scottish Highlands,” Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze–Engler et al. (A S N E L Papers 12; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2008). 339–54. Thomson, Derick S. See MacThòmais, Ruaraidh. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997). Watson, Roderick, ed. The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English 1380–1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 1995).

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Translation Shifts in African Women’s Writing — The Example of Nigeria T AIWO O LORUNTOBA –O JU

Introduction

T

R A N S L A T I O N S H I F T S O C C U R obligatorily in African literature, not just as a consequence of differences in the formal features of languages in contact, but also owing to radical semantic and cultural differences. This essay is, however, concerned with non-obligatory translation shifts occurring in the process of socio-psychological negotiation of the gendered space within African literature and culture. The essay considers representative translations in Nigerian writing. Many emerging works, particularly by women writers, attempt to counter established socio-cultural paradigms associated with predominant, male-authored, texts with literary-stylistic and socio-textual implications that are often unexamined. This esay looks at such implications within the context of the different translation strategies applied to similar source texts in male- and female-authored texts. The investigation demonstrates the complex dynamics involved in translation, as hardly a neutral or disinterested communicative activity. It also suggests that the concept of obligatoriness in translation may sometimes need to be broadened to accommodate peculiar cultural and ideological situations.

Translation Shifts in African Women’s Writing Even without the complication of gender-related ideology, translation in the African literary context is already a complex phenomenon. The African writer, irrespective of sex or gender, carries a textual burden that both complicates and differentiates the process of writing on the continent. In Western monolingual societies, the language of thought and that of expression are

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often coterminous, but the African writer is confronted with a gap between experience and medium of expression. In constructing the African text, there ensues an interaction in the classical, Bakhtinian, sense of dialogism between the different languages and cultures, which leaves palimpsestic traces of all in the new translation text. The textual intersection occurs at “a dia-logic place for at least two different logics meet in it: those of two different languages.”1 In African writing, the dialogue starts pre-textually. The writer engages willynilly in the contemplation of translation possibilities at the earliest point of creative engagement. If there appears to be no translation possibilities, or translation would diminish the creative-aesthetic essence of potential texts, the originating thought or idea aborts prematurely. Niyi Osundare notes, in the context of language and style, that, for the African writer, the “text” is not always there, ready-made, in the indigenous language and culture, awaiting an uneventful transposition into English. He has to create the “story,” the idea, the vision, in his indigenous experience […] before devising and working out 2 the best way of mediating his experience in English.

The case here is not one of translating another author or an existing text outside oneself, but of translating self – translating one’s thoughts and one’s creative being into a language that seems to distort that being and that experience. Irrespective of sex or gender, the African writer has to adopt some of the strategies that have been described variously as “translation” and “transference” (Young,3 Osundare and others), and, within the concept of postcoloniality, as “appropriation and abrogation”4 or “hybridization.”5 These strategies are not necessarily “timid practices designed to protect translators from attack,”6 but, within the African context, unavoidable manoeuvres designed to convey the nuances of African thought and culture.

1 Margherita de Michiel, “Mikhail M. Bakhtin: Prologomena to a Theory of Translation,” European Journal for Semiotic Studies 11.4 (1999): 687–98, 695. 2 Niyi Osundare, “Caliban’s Gamble: Aspects of the Stylistic Repercussions of African Literature in English,” C O M C A P : Journal of Communication, Culture and Society 2 (September 1997): 26–51, 28. 3 Peter Young, “The Language of West African Literature in English” (1970), in The English Language in West Africa, ed. John Spencer (London: Longmans, 1971): 165–90. 4 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge 1989). 5 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). 6 Doug Robinson, “22 Theses on Translation,” Journal of Translation Studies 2 (June 1998): 92 –117, 93.

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However, the African woman writer in particular tends to bear a triple burden, as she is confronted, first, with this general problem of translating personal and creative experience from mother tongue into anOther language of expression; second, with the need to establish authenticity through exploration in African oral forms; and third, with the need to skirt land-mines of language and culture in those indigenous texts in which what we might call a sign of gender occurs. The choice for the translator is almost an impossible one, as one choice leads virtually to the death of meaning and the other to the death of indigenous aesthetics. This Catch-22 situation also plays itself out at the level of the gendered text in African orature, as in the two Yoruba proverbs below: Àsejù ní í mú ewúré bá oko rè hu’rùgbòn (‘Extreme behaviour is what makes the she-goat sport a beard like her husband’) Pàsán tí a fi nà’yálé n be lájà (‘The whip used to flog the elder spouse is still in the loft’)

The problem of translating such texts without either losing their aestheticological construct or appearing to endorse their sexist slant constitutes an added complexity in the African context. Translation shift is one of the linguistic-stylistic markers of this unending tension between indigenous African cultural experience and English or other foreign expression. The shift manifests itself primarily as an obligatory element, demonstrating the absence of formal correspondence between the languages and the cultures. However, the shift may also appear as a non-obligatory element, either as a literary-stylistic shift or as an interpretational shift signalling an ideological intervention. Within the context of the present essay, such a shift may constitute a mark of difference in Nigerian women’s literature. The translation samples from female and male African writing highlighted in the essay show the relevant translation shifts as, on the one hand, evidence of a cultural obligation and corresponding stylistic predilection within African texts and, on the other, a possible encryption or sign of genderrelations in female- and male-authored writings. In both instances, we would argue, the situation obliges us to expand our view of obligatoriness in translation within the African setting.

Obligatory and Non-Obligatory Translation Shift within the Context of African Literature John C. Catford defines translation shift simply as “departures from formal correspondences in the process of going from source language to target lan-

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guage.”7 More recently, an attempt to “redefine” the phenomenon “positively” did not turn out so differently, as “the consequence of the translator’s effort to establish translation equivalence (T E ) between two different languagesystems: that of the S L and that of the T L .”8 Translation itself is described generally as “replacement of textual material in one language (S L ) by equivalent textual material in another language (T L ).”9 Differences in phonetic and syntactic patterns of languages ensure that units of expression in one language can only be realized through different formal or surface structures of another language, with the degree of difference corresponding to the degree of formal and structural differences between the languages. Such shift is unavoidable. As an example, the English nominal group “white house” with the sequence M H (modifier + head) translates to ile funfun in Yoruba, with an obligatory shift reversing the nominal sequence to become H M (head + modifier).10 Classically, obligatory shifts are those that occur as a consequence of translation constraints. Non-obligatory shifts also occur at various levels. Here the shifts are not due to a translation constraint within the syntactic and semantic fields of language, but to a wilful operation on the part of the translator. This occurs typically as a dialogic interface between existing indigenous texts and the creative idiosyncrasy or ideological bent of the author, who deliberately alters the situation-features or aesthetic orientation of the source text for a specific aesthetic or ideological purpose. This happens in female and male African writing alike.11 We shall return later to the question of whether their translations can therefore be analyzed or distinguished in terms of gender relations. The view of obligatory shifts as only those shifts governed by translation constraints accords with the tendency to see the preservation of meaning as

7

John C. Catford, A Linguistic Theory of Translation (London: Oxford U P , 1965): 73. Mohammad Q. R. Al-Zoubi & Ali Rasheed Al-Hassnawi, “Constructing a Model for Shift Analysis in Translation,” Translation Journal 5.4 (2001): 1; http://accurapid.com /journal/18theory.htm (5 March 2003). 9 Catford, A Linguistic Theory, 20. 10 Taiwo Oloruntoba–Oju, “Rhetorical and Semantic Shifts as Stylistic Element in Soyinka’s Translations,” in Language and Style in Nigerian Drama and Theatre (Ibadan: Ben-el Books, 1998): 70–71. 11 For example, Flora Nwapa, a leading Nigerian woman novelist, hardly gives “the exact rendering of Igbo proverbs”; Ikonne, quoted in Susan Arndt, African Women’s Literature: Orature and Intertextuality (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1998): 159. Shifts in Soyinka also tend to serve discourse and aesthetic purposes. His “most important concern is apparently not contextual verisimilitude but enhancement of aesthetic quality” (Oloruntoba– Oju, “Rhetorical and Semantic Shifts,” 83). 8

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the main function of translation. The following description by Mohammad Q.R. Al-Zoubi and Ali Rasheed Al-Hassnawi, which I quote at length, illustrates this view: Meaning should be the main preoccupation of all translation. However, the amount of this interest varies according to the type of meaning conveyed by the lexical items of a given text. As far as translation is concerned, the translator has to do his best to transfer as much of the original meaning as he can into the TL. But since we know that the process of meaning transfer is not a straightforward process, the translator, therefore, is often called upon to make some semantic adjustments in order to accomplish this task. In our case, such semantic adjustments are analyzed as semantic shifts, which can be obligatory or optional. The former are dictated by the unavoidable semantic gaps between the SL and TL. Such gaps are mainly caused by some cultural and conceptual differences between the two languages. The latter in turn arise when the translator attempts to maintain the gist of the original meaning while practicing some means of semantic polishing.12

Such a view obviously begs expansion within the context of African literature where the preservation of orature is seen as a mark of aesthetic authenticity and translation shifts sometimes occur, not just to avoid a “semantic gap” but also to avoid an aesthetic gap. As Luise von Flotow also remarked, some of the theoretical considerations which translation studies would need to grapple with include questions of history, identity, and cultural transfer, specifically the question, “how does our largely Anglo-American ‘gender’ apply in other cultures and their texts?”13 There are many local complexities in translation which cannot be ignored, even if this tends to “unsettle or unseat large universalized patterns or paradigms, which are by definition reductive.”14 The concept of obligatoriness in translation should be related to the specific cultural contexts in which the translations occur. Significantly, the view of obligatoriness above seems not to consider the ideological framework that governs much of translation, either. The relationship between translation and ideology is axiomatic. Since translators frequently have their own purpose, termed ‘skopos’ by Hans J. Vermeer, the exercise of discretion is crucial to the success of their set aim. Translation therefore occurs at the intersection between ideology and text: i.e. “between texts and practices, between empirical and theoretical practices, between science and 12

Al-Zoubi & Al-Hassnawi, “Constructing a Model,” 5 (my emphasis). Luise von Flotow, “Gender in Translation: The Issues Go On,” http://orees.concordia .ca/archives/numero2/essai/Von%20Flotow.html (10 April 2005). 14 Robinson, “22 Theses on Translation,” 104. 13

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ideology.”15 The translator’s choices are informed by “the use to which the subsequent target text is put” or “the interests, aims, and objectives of social agents.”16

Translation Shifts and Gender Relations The ideological framework is particularly relevant in the context of gender relations. The awareness of gender has led to the examination of the role of language in the gendering or degendering of texts and examination of the conscious or unconscious ideology behind the construction of certain texts. The issues raised include the connections between “social stereotypes and linguistic forms [.. .] politics of language and cultural difference [and] the cultural context in which the translation is done.”17 A view of translation as ideology helps to accommodate ideologically oriented categories such as gender within the rubric of translation. In our context it allows the analysis of certain translation shifts in works by women as possible indication of women’s language or style. In Africa, female and male writers hunt in the same aesthetic forest, and this means the forest of orality. Africa has continued to be the “oral continent par excellence,” where orality is not necessarily “the absence of literacy” but a constitutive and continuous cultural practice.18 It is through continuous integration of oral forms that African literature maintains, sustains, and insists on the homogeneity or relative homogeneity of its culture, its continued difference (or relative difference) and distinction in a progressively globalized world that threatens the annihilation of cultural specificity. This orality “has not disappeared but has often adapted itself in its many different forms to become a vehicle for the expression of the fears and hopes of new generations of Africans.”19 Karin Barber notes, in specific regard to Yoruba oral forms, “some of them of great antiquity,” that they “continue to flourish and evolve.”20

15

De Michiel, “Mikhail M. Bakhtin,”3. Christina Schäffner, “Third Ways and New Centres: Ideological Unity or Difference?,” in Apropos of Ideology, ed. M. Calzada–Pérez (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2003): 23. 17 Luise von Flotow, Translation and Gender (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1997): 14. 18 Liz Gunner, “Africa and Orality,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, vol. 1, ed. Abiola Irele & Simon Gikandi (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2004): 1. 19 Gunner, “Africa and Orality,” 12. 20 Karin Barber, “Literature in Yoruba: poery and prose, travelling theatre and modern drama,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, vol. 1, ed. Abiola Irele & Simon Gikandi (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2004): 357. 16

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In the words of Daniel S. Izevbaye, translation from oral sources constitutes a continuous source of “literary renewal.”21 The oral source that is most readily resorted to by female and male writers is proverbs, whose value in the authenticating of African discourse is a matter of communal and literary critical consensus among writers and critics.22 Such consensus among enlightened African writers, including those inclined towards a radical feminist perspective, may well collide with Lori Chamberlain’s assertion that the notion of fidelity to ancient texts, including sacred texts and proverbs, was always a matter of upholding the gendering of the original texts and of extracting continued submission to phallic constructs. In African literature, there is a felt need to employ these ancient materials in a close enough form to enhance the authenticity of the new texts, even when some of the materials are ‘provocative’ from the point of view of gender. The manner of integration of the proverb or ancient material is a separate order of question which can only be answered in relation to specific texts and specific translations. The point here is that the need to convey indigenous thought, culture, and experience often comes up against the need to re-gender or subvert the ideological basis of some African texts, resulting in translation shifts which are not governed by translation constraints in the classical sense. Within our context, the gendered text is any expression in any form in which a sign of gender relations occurs. This includes explicit reference to gender terms (e.g., gender pronouns and explicit lexical items, e.g., ‘woman’, ‘man’); non-gender terms used in generic context, and any term or statement describing a gender relationship or a related thought, idea, situation or activity – in short, any “representation of male and female in texts through word or action” or aspects of text “which appear to be dealing with gender issues.”23 We also include in this category elements that are not marked for gender on the surface but have potential to be appropriated for use in gender-marked contexts. Some examples are presented in the Nigerian proverbs below,

21 Daniel S. Izevbaye, “West African Literature in English: Beginnings to the Mid Seventies,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, vol. 1, ed. Abiola Irele & Simon Gikandi (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2004): 479. 22 Arndt cites Akachi Adimora–Ezeigbo as insisting that “proverbs and songs in my novels are a question of authenticity,” and, of Ifeoma Okoye, that she “often [uses] proverbs” as “one of the marks of an articulate man or woman is to use proverbs frequently”; Arndt, African Women’s Literature: Orature and Intertextuality, 100. 23 Sarah Mills, Feminist Stylistics (London: Routledge, 1995): 17.

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which, for reasons of language competence, are drawn largely from the Yoruba (Oyo) dialect.24

Some Gender-Marked Proverbs in Translation in African Writing The proverbs in this section are gender-marked and are often employed within the context of gender relations, though they are also employed in other contexts. For example, (1) below is also an analogy for abandoning the old for the new even outside the context of matrimony (for example abandoning an old friend, a favourite dress, car or club for a new one). 1. Arí’yàwó kò’yálé

‘One [who] rejects the senior wife on account of the new bride’ 2. Àsejù ní í mú ewúré bá oko rè hu’rùgbòn

(‘Extreme behaviour is what makes the she-goat sport a beard like her husband’) 3. Ilonwani nwgwuwu ihe totara gewere

(‘Marriage is a parcel you open and take from’) 4. Nwayne Iwo-diabuo ma haro nke kaya mma

(‘If a woman marries twice she knows the one better’) 5. Bí obìnrin kò bá tí ì tó ilé oko méjì wò kò ní mo èyí tó dára níbè

(‘If a woman has not tasted the homes of two husbands, she would not know which one is better’) 6. Pàsán tí a fi nà’ yálé n be l’ájà (‘The whip used to flog the elder spouse is still in the loft’)

24

The Oyo dialect is the standard Yoruba dialect. Different renditions in the indigenous language should remind us of the caveat about the heterogeneity of oral sources which may be occasioned by dialectal differences. Secondary indigenous sources, particularly indigenous written literature, film and indigenous music also offer variations that need to be distinguished from original oral sources. This is because writers and artists in indigenous languages also strive to stamp their own creative ingenuity on the texts. One of the Yoruba proverbs exhibited below, Pàsán tí a fi nà’yálé n be lájà (‘the whip used in flogging the elder spouse is still in the loft’) is rendered in Adebayo Faleti’s Basorun Gaa (the film), as: “Àgbókù àtòrò tí a mú s’onígbàjé ìyálé, níjó t’ólómoge bá wolé oko tán, ó lè wá gbó m’ólómoge lára” (‘the nearly spent whip used on the senior wife; when the young woman becomes a bride; it may well become totally spent on the young woman’). Here there is obvious aesthetic expansion which is not contained in the original. It is instructive that his own English translation in the film’s subtitle is “The whip used in thrashing the first wife may be used on the first wife when the time comes,” which retains the basic form of the oral source.

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Some Unmarked Proverbs Extended to Gender Relations The proverbs in this section do not have explicit gender reference but are frequently generalized to the context of gender relations. For example, (7) has meaning extension that can be related to the need for marital compromise; (8) and (9) have pragmatic import relating to marital conflict, and (10) implies the need for patience in difficult situation, which matrimony often is. 7. Egwuragwu nkita bu daharam ka n daharage

(‘Two dogs playing is a matter of “fall for me I fall for you” ’ ) 8. Àgbó méjí kò lè mu omi nínún koto kan

(‘Two rams cannot drink [simultaneously] from the same calabash’) 9. Àgbò méjì kìí kàn kí òkan má yè

(‘Two rams cannot knock heads together in a fight without one giving way’) 10. Ohún gbóná n bò wà tutù n’ìdun fi n wàásù s’ómo è

(‘Whatever gets hot will get cold, says the bedbug to her children’) 11. Aféfé ti fe, a ti rí’di adìye.

(‘The wind has blown; we have seen the rump of the chicken’)

It is interesting to observe the manner in which these proverbs have been translated in male- and female-authored texts. Three of the such translations are given below which derive from (6) above (see Appendix for more samples from Nigerian literature). 6a. “The whip used in thrashing the first wife may be used on the first wife when

the time comes.” (from Basorun Gaa by Adebayo Faleti) 6b. The whip that flogged the elder spouse Is it ever flung out of the house? (from Losses, by Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju, 46) 6c. The same whip that raged up the back Of the undeserving senior wife Is simmering patiently In the thatched roof of his bedroom Ready to bruise the pride Of the young blooded wife (from So All the Time I Was Sitting On an Egg, by Lola Shoneyin, 62)

Analysis What is clear from the samples is the pervasive importation of proverbs dealing explicitly or implicitly with gender relations. The authors, irrespective of gender, feel the need to integrate these proverbs into their work as a measure

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of authenticity, as noted earlier. It is also observable, even if cursorily, that shifts have been introduced into the translations. The sheer graphological volume of the translations shows that changes have taken place. The translations can be analyzed on lexical, syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical levels to show the type of shift. However, what is not immediately apparent is whether there is any difference in the shifts in the translations by the female and male authors. A close comparison of the relevant texts in terms of their semantic, syntactic, and rhetorical elements may reveal such a difference. We consider below the one source text in the above samples which, fortuitously, has been translated by a female and two male authors in the samples. The proverb in question is: Pàsán tí a fi nà’ yálé n be l’ájà (‘The whip used to flog the elder spouse is still in the loft’)

The proverb by itself indexes certain ramifications of gender relations within Yoruba culture. What we have is a set of cultural normatives. First is the situation of polygyny, which the proverb implicitly views with approval or with tolerance. In other words, a situation in which a man would have two or more wives within the same homestead is assumed to be normal. Second is the power-relation between the spouses. Although the base proverb itself is silent about who actually uses the pàsán (whip) on the other, it is evident from the context that it is the man, since the known and potential victim of the whip are the (senior and the junior) wives. The man is cast as overlord with the power of discipline over the wives, which he apparently exercises routinely and with physical brutality. The women exist literally under the man. The key or central lexical items in the source proverb are four: pàsán (‘whip’) nà (‘beat’) ìyálé (‘senior wife’) àjà (‘loft’ / ceiling / rafters)

These items have direct and functional equivalents in the two male translations (m1) and (m2) and the female translation (f), as italicized below. Notice that (m1) does not have any equivalent for ‘aja’. (m1) The whip used in thrashing the first wife may be used on the second wife when the time comes. (m2) The whip that flogged the elder spouse Is it ever flung out of the house? (f) The same whip that raged up the back

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Of the undeserving senior wife Is simmering patiently In the thatched roof of his bedroom Ready to bruise the pride Of the young blooded wife

The distribution of direct and functional equivalents across the samples is as follows: pàsán nà

“whip” (in all the samples) “flog” (m2)

functional equivalents: ìyálé

nà àjà (loft / ceiling / rafters) -

“senior wife” (f) “frst wife” (m1) “elder spouse” (m2) “trash” (m1) “rage up the back” (f) “house” (m1) “thatched roof of his bedroom” (f)

The shifts above result from structural, semantic, and cultural differences in the languages involved. For an item like ìyálé “senior wife,” which is ordinarily unproblematic in the local language and culture, the translators have given varied translations that represent semantic shifts from the original in the attempt to convey the appropriate sense. Attention had been drawn to similar examples in the literature which have no parallel terms in English and for which a functional equivalent has to be found, often in the form of word compounds.25 The term ìyálé can be represented componentially but some components may require illustration: +female +spouse 26 +hierarchy (1st)

The terms “senior wife” and “first wife” occur frequently in translations as in the above samples. The term “elder spouse” (in m2) is also a functional equivalent in the context, but its success within a global communication context

25

See Osundare, “Caliban’s Gamble.” See Oloruntoba–Oju (“Semantic Shifts”) for related componential analysis based on Geoffrey Leech. 26

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may be limited, as it does not indicate the gender of the spouse. It can only be taken for granted within a ‘knowledge of the world’ context that the flogged spouse is more likely to be the woman. There is greater difficulty with the lexical item àjà, which is an item in traditional architecture. The term is silent in the sample (m1), which evades the problem posed by the word’s untranslatability, but which then signals a deletion shift in the translation. The item is realized in the other translations metonymically, as in (m2), which employs a general or inclusive term, “the house,” and (f), which tries to approximate the original term through associated lexes in “the thatched roof of his bedroom.” The item “thatched roof” brings the expression closer to the original text because of its spatial referent (“roof,” like ‘loft’ or ‘ceiling’, refers to an “upper compartment”); and also ‘thatch’ is also closer to traditional architecture. With the item nà, we again have a shift in the componential features in (m1) and (f) which results in a heightened intensity of the action. The original lexical term means ‘beat’ or ‘flog’ but is varied for intensity in “trash” (m1) and “rage up the back” (f). It is difficult to speculate at this point on the motivation for this shift in both samples. Also, the semantic (situational) feature of the original is expanded in (m1) and (f) with the inclusion of a referent (“new bride”) that is silent in the original text. This referent is pragmatically recoverable through an inferencing operation. The original proverb, “the whip that flogged the senior wife is in the loft,” is an indirect speech act. The missing information is that the new wife may fall victim if she is not careful or if she does not conform. This threat is ‘hidden’ by being lexically and syntactically absent, but ‘open’ by its pragmatic or inferential presence. It is the absent lexical and syntactic agent that the two translations supply, thus activating a shift on the lexical and syntactic levels of operation. What we have seen so far are shifts occurring within the componential features of language which are both obligatory and optional. The terms ìyálé and àjà provoke obligatory shifts due to translation constraints: namely, the absence of parallel terms, or terms with corresponding referents, in the target language. Optional shifts occur in the deletion of the referent àjà in (m1) and the variation of componential features of nà in (m1) and (f). However, the optionality of the latter may be subject to re-examination. On the one hand, it may be argued that since the item is silent in the original, this can only mean that the overall pragmatic import of the proverb can be achieved without its inclusion. This is, however, true only within the indigenous communicative system with an indigenous ‘readership’. African authors writing in foreign

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languages are frequently constrained to insert for the benefit of an international readership sequences that are otherwise superfluous in the indigenous mode. Within such a context, optionality or obligatoriness may not be so clear-cut. Variation in the semantic component as highlighted above also leads to syntactic shifts. On the syntactic level, the proverb is a declarative sentence representable as the structure S P A (Sentence Predicator Adverbial): S Pàsán tí a fi nà’ yálé The whip used to flog the senior wife

P n be is

A l’ájà in the loft.

This has yielded to varying syntactic structures in the translation samples. In (m2) it is an interrogative sentence. In (m1) and (f) the structure also varies as drawn below. S P A The whip used in thrashing the first wife may be used on the first wife A when the time comes. S P The same whip that raged up the back of the undeserving senior wife is simmering A A patiently in the thatched roof of his bedroom (and) S P The same whip that raged up the back of the undeserving senior wife is C ready to bruise the pride of the young blooded wife

There is also an introduction of modality in the nominal structure and the verbal structure in (m2) and (f) respectively. In (f) “The whip” (M H ) becomes “the same whip” (M M H ) and “the senior wife” (M M H ) becomes “the undeserving senior wife” (M M M H ). In (m1) the original verb is deleted and substituted with a complex verb (“may be used”). This is partly in consequence of the deletion of the term ‘aja’ and its replacement by the term “second wife” which introduces or exposes a situation feature that appears absent in the original text. The semantic and stylistic shifts noted above all add up to an alteration of the rhetorical and stylistic features of the original proverb. As noted, the translation of (m2) changes the proverb into a rhetorical question which differs significantly from the original declarative. This is an optional shift, made for a stylistic purpose. The lexical choices are aimed at achieving rhyme (spouse/ house) and assonance (flogged/ flung). The shifts in (f) are also

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stylistically significant. The semantic expansions and stylistic extensions are aimed at achieving poetic tone and rhythm which the original does not possess. One has gone so far in describing the translation shifts in these three examples in order to show the range of analytical possibilities. Translation shifts certainly occur in a demonstrable fashion in the samples, and the analytical parameters can be applied to all the other proverbs. However, the question that still remains is whether the shifts in the translations can be related in any way to gender relations or whether there is any ideological motivation for the shifts. The answer is yes. The shifts in the male-authored translations tend to preserve the essential semantic and pragmatic features of the original, thus provoking no serious considerations outside the fixed pragmatic import of the proverb. This import, it will be recalled, is that the new wife must be careful and conforming in order to avoid the whipping fate of the senior wife. The numerous shifts highlighted above in the male-authored texts lead to no rupturing of this moral or of the legal authority of the male or patriarchal figure in the proverb whose station it is to apply discipline on wives, senior or junior. The male-authored translations seem only to embellish the proverbs and retain the pragmatic status quo. However, the text by Lola Shoneyin (f) introduces a modality that ruptures the situation-substance, at least to some degree. It seems a small shift in modality but it is tantamount to an intrusion, in the nature of ‘voice-throwing’ or ‘talking back’ to patriarchy. As noted, with the shift in modality, “the senior wife” in the original text becomes “the undeserving senior wife.” The item introduces a substantial questioning of the moral authority of the original proverb, which the male-authored translations use without question. The questioning is not total. The man can still have the wives, but the rational for the beating is questioned; the beginning of the rupturing of absolute male authority. Further interrogation is bound to follow. The Igbo example, Nwayne Iwo-diabuo ma haro nke kaya mma (‘If a woman marries twice she knows the one better’) has the Yoruba equivalent: Bí obìnrin kò bá tíì tó ilé oko méjì wò, kò ní mo èyí tó dára níbè (‘If a woman has not tasted two matrimonial homes, she would not know which one is better’). In both instances, traditionally, there is a veiled warning to the woman to stick to the husband that she already knows. However, this pragmatic understanding, which is often interpreted as upholding patriarchal stricture, is subverted in the translation by Akachi Adimora–Ezeigbo, where it is rendered as: Ogori luo di abuo, omara nke ka nma. There are dialectal differences with

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the other rendition above (omara – maharo; nke kanma – nke kayanmma) which are not semantically significant. What is interesting is the translation in the text: “It is after a woman has tasted two marriages that she is in a position to say which is better,” coupled with the authorial re-interpretation, which is rhetorically inscribed: “Which is better: to be able to love once and only once or to be capable of loving again and again? To rise from the ashes of a dead love soar again to a new life, a new love?”27 The translation shift seems occasioned by the author’s ideological intention. There seems to be a trend in translation here that ought to be examined closely in African women’s writing.

Conclusion This essay has not proposed an absolute or invariable notion of the nature of difference between male and female African writing. The difficulty of distinguishing male and female language is legendary even in global feminist discourses. One limitation within the context of this essay is the absence in large numbers of translations by female and male writers of the same source texts and similar contexts. As noted earlier, the examples analyzed above are fortuitous. A related problem is finding recurrent usage by the same authors. This is a key question in stylistics, since only recurrent usage can point assuredly to a stylistic predilection. However, the foregoing analysis shows that by looking at such elements as the modal structure of translations of ancient indigenous texts such as proverbs, in female- and male-authored texts, we may well be led into the secrets of gender differentiation in this particular kind of data within African literature. Another question that the foregoing raises is whether the definition of ‘optional’ or ‘obligatory’ translation shift is not subject to cultural specificity. In African writing, the retention of the aesthetico-logical form of ancient texts such as proverbs is considered desirable as a mark of authenticity, while, particularly with regard to the gendered text, their subversion is also frequently imperative from the ideological, especially feminist / womanist, perspective. The resulting translation shifts tend to obey different rules owing to this combination of cultural and ideological factors. It seems necessary in this context to introduce such factors into the consideration of optionality or obligatoriness in translation.

27

Adimora–Ezeigbo, Akachi: Children of the Eagle (Lagos: Vista Books, 2002): 128.

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WORKS CITED Adimora–Ezeigbo, Akachi. Children of the Eagle (Lagos: Vista, 2002). ——. “Ubaaku,” in Rhythms of Life: Stories of Modern Nigeria (London: Karnak, 1992), 67–86. Al-Zoubi, Mohammad Q.R., & Ali Rasheed Al-Hassnawi. “Constructing a Model for Shift Analysis in Translation,” Translation Journal 5.4 (2001): http://accurapid.com/journal /18theory.htm (5 March 2003). Arndt, Susan. African Women’s Literature: Orature and Intertextuality (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1998). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge 1989). Basorun Gaa, dir Tunde Kelani; perf. Adebayo Faleti & Akinwumi Ishola (Mainframe Productions, 2002). Berber, Karin. “Literature in Yoruba: Poetry and Prose, Travelling Theatre and Modern Drama,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, vol. 1, ed. Abiola Irele & Simon Gikandi (Cambridge U P , 2004), 357–78. Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Cultures (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Catford, John C., A Linguistic Theory of Translation (London: Oxford U P , 1965). Chamberlain, Lori. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” in Rethinking Translation, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 1992), 57-74. De Michiel, Margherita. “Mikhail M. Bakhtin: Proglomena to a Theory of Translation,” European Journal for Semiotic Studies 11.4 (1999): 687–98. Flotow, Luise von. “Gender in Translation: The Issues Go On,” http://orees.concordia.ca /archives/numero2/essai/Von%20Flotow.html (10 April 2005). ——. Translation and Gender (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1997). Gunner, Liz. “Africa and Orality,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, vol. 1, ed. Abiola Irele & Simon Gikandi (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004): 1–18. Izevbaye, Daniel S. “West African Literature in English: Beginnings to the Mid Seventies,” in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, vol. 1, ed. Abiola Irele & Simon Gikandi (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004): 472–503. Leech, Geoffrey. Semantics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Mills, Sarah. Feminist Stylistics (London: Routledge, 1995). Nida, Eugene A. Toward a Science of Translating (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964). Nwapa, Flora. Efuru (London: Heinemann, 1973). Oloruntoba–Oju, Taiwo. Losses (Lagos: Academia Publications, 1993). ——. “Rhetorical and Semantic Shifts as Stylistic Element in Soyinka’s Translations,” in Language and Style in Nigerian Drama and Theatre (Ibadan: Ben-el Books, 1998): 69– 84. Osundare, Niyi. “Caliban’s Gamble: Aspects of the Stylistic Repercussions of African Literature in English,” C O M C A P : Journal of Communication, Culture and Society 2 (September 1997): 26–51. Robinson, Doug. “22 Theses on Translation,” Journal of Translation Studies 2 (June 1998): 92–117. Rotimi, Ola. Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again (Ibadan: Oxford U P , 1977). Schäffner, Christina. “Third Ways and New Centres: Ideological Unity or Difference?,” in Apropos of Ideology, ed. M. Calzada–Pérez (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2003): 23–42. Shoneyin, Titi Alexandra. So All the Time I Was Sitting On an Egg (Ibadan: Ovalonian House, 1998).

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Sofola, Zulu. Wedlock of the Gods (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1972). Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975). Vermeer, Hans J. “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action,” tr. A. Chesterman, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000): 221– 32. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998). Young, Peter. “The Language of West African Literature in English” (1970), in The English Language in West Africa, ed. John Spencer (London: Longmans, 1971): 165–90.

APPENDIX Some textual realizations of gender-marked proverbs in female and male texts a) from female texts “Marriage is like picking a parcel from numerous parcels. If you are lucky you pick a valuable one” (Efuru by Flora Nwapa, 119). “Marriage is like a parcel; when you open it, you have to make do with what you find inside – good or bad” (“Ubaaku” by Akachi Adimora–Ezeigbo, 72). “It is after a woman has tasted two marriages that she is in a position to say which is better” (Children of the Eagle by Akachi Adimora–Ezeigbo, 128). “When two dogs are playing, there is a tacit agreement between them by which each allows itself to be thrown, alternately, lest their play degenerates into a fight” (Children of the Eagle by Akachi Adimora–Ezeigbo, 351). “The harassed bedbug counselled her children with the comforting words that whatever is hot will get cold” (Children of the Eagle by Akachi Adimora– Ezeigbo, 94).

b) from male-authored texts “Because the man approaches a brand new bride, he forgets the long faithful mother of his children” (Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, 9). “It is too much indulgence that makes the she-goat grow a long beard like her husband, the he-goat” (Our Husband has Gone Mad Again by Ola Rotimi, 58). “Two bulls can’t drink from the same bucket at the same time, they will lock horns” (Our Husband has Gone Mad Again by Ola Rotimi, 44). “I know the women will cover you in damask and alari but when the wind blows cold from behind, that is when the fowl knows his true friends” (Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, 9). a

Translation, Multilingualism, and Linguistic Hybridity — A Study of The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda M ARIE C HANTALE M OFIN N OUSSI

Introduction

A

as the ‘rainbow nation’, South Africa is a mosaic of peoples, cultures, and languages. Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness straightforwardly brings up, through stories pertinent to the meeting of the Western and South African cultures, the issue of multilingualism and the linguistic hybridity of South Africa. In this novel, Mda shows that an enriching cohabitation between, for instance, the languages of Xhosa and English is possible. The author goes about this essentially through the africanization or, more precisely, the ‘Xhosa-ification’ of the English language, which confers a stylistic particularity on the novel. This africanization of the English language is achieved through the techniques of glossing, leaving words untranslated, relexification, and the insertion of Xhosa proverbs in an anglophone written text. From these translation processes as revealed in the novel, linguistic hybridity appears as the standard towards which South African populations and South African writers must aspire in order to promote the much-desired linguistic and socio-political reconciliation. LSO KNOWN

The Issue of Language in Africa The issue of language in Africa has been the subject of much debate. In the South African context, the problem of language was initially a political one. In their struggle for power, the English and the Afrikaners wanted to impose a discriminatory linguistic system on all South African people – English for the former, and Afrikaans for the latter. During the English colonization of the

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Cape region, one of the main objectives of the colonizers was that “the ruder language shall disappear, and the tongue of England alone shall be heard all around.”1 After the abolition of apartheid, the issue of language choice seemed crucial for the future of the country. Thus, in an effort to integrate the community, eleven official languages2 were selected and the country’s motto translated into the language of the San, these being the first to settle in South Africa. This is the political situation within which the contemporary South African writer has to operate. The triumph over the old failed policy of linguistic colonization can be felt in South African literature, where, for example, the use of individual vernaculars has become widespread. The linguistic and political nature of writing in South African literature is also observed in the hybridity of Mda’s The Heart of Redness, where stylistic africanization serves linguistic, literary, social, and political functions. The hybrid language of The Heart of Redness has an ideological function in the sense that it opposes the invasion of the world by one language only or one dominant language. Instead, it promotes plurality and variety. The English language is no longer a dominant language for the postcolonial writer. Through the process of hybridization, the formerly hegemonic tongue is now contaminated by formerly excluded languages. As Bill Ashcroft states, By adapting the alien language to the exigencies of a mother grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and by giving a shape to the variations of the speaking voice, such writers and speakers construct an “English” which amounts to the very different linguistic vehicle from the received standard colonial “English.”3

Ashcroft adds that language in postcolonial societies is characterized “by complexity, hybridity and constant change, code switching which can be described by the colonial distinction of ‘standard’ and ‘variant’.”4 The English language thus undergoes a series of modifications through linguistic hybridity. In The Heart of Redness, linguistic hybridity is thus a process of abrogation and appropriation of the English language and therefore an essentially subversive strategy.5 The use of words in the vernacular by Mda takes 1

Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (2000; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002): 237. Further page references are in the main text. 2 Official languages of South Africa: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, North Sotho, English, seTswana, seSotho, siTsonga, siSwati, isiVenda, isiNdembele. 3 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge 1989): 284. 4 Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 46. 5 “Abrogation is the refusal of the categories of the imperial culture, its aesthetics, its

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threefold form. Xhosa words in an English text allow the author to embed the novel in its socio-cultural context and consequently to project the universe of the characters. With respect to this function, Chinua Achebe muses: Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is other choice. I have been given the language and intend to use it. […] I felt that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit the new African surroundings.6

Similarly, the method enables the writer to establish a cultural distinction. This mainly involves words that have not been translated. Once in an English written setting, these words now enable the text to show explicitly the presence of otherness. Finally, the use of words in vernacular in a text written in a European language is a way of linking the two languages (hence two cultures). Through glossing, Zakes Mda calls for understanding and cooperation even on the level of languages, which is why he not only mixes them up in one text but also takes time to explain them. In his novel, linguistic hybridity is thus part of a dialogue about differences in the interest of achieving a new humanity, and part of an affirmation of resistance to the linguistic apartheid set up by the Bantu Education Act of 1953 which mainly served to keep the tribal groups linguistically separated. Mda’s strategy goes beyond the scope of the language issue to bridge the gap between cultures. In the following sections I will elaborate on the manner in which Zakes Mda has used textual means to achieve literary and political objectives in his novel.

Africanization of the English Language Peter Childs and Patrick Williams claim that “language and culture are inseparable.”7 As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains, language and culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible

illusory standard of normative or correct usage, and its assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning inscribed in the words”; Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 38. “Appropriation is the process by which the language is taken and made to bear the burden of one’s own cultural experience”; Ashcroft et al, The Empire Writes Back, 38. 6 Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1975): 93. 7 Peter Childs & Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf & New York: Prentice Hall, 1997): 196.

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its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next.8

The africanization of European languages enables African writers to express African cultural realities. This transformation of the language of the colonizer allows the colonized to colonize in turn the imported language and to take it over. Ashcroft notes that “postcolonial writing defined itself by seizing the language of the centre and replacing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonised place.”9 In a country like South Africa, where there are eleven official languages, it is difficult for a committed black writer to write as an Englishman without referring to principles peculiar to his culture. This is what Mda does in The Heart of Redness, where africanization is achieved through three translation processes: glossing and the use of untranslated words; relexification; and the use of proverbs.

Glossing and Untranslated Words Glossing is a writing technique which consists in making interpretations, commentaries or translations with respect to some words of the text. In The Heart of Redness, we note an abundance of Xhosa words and expressions that are followed by their explanations. Notable exceptions include the words lobola and makhulu, which are left untranslated. It is important here, for an understanding of these Xhosa words and their meanings in English, to offer a comprehensive list, as given in the Appendix at the end of this essay. The words and expressions in the Appendix can be grouped into seven broad sets: — humans with regard to their social situation — animals — foodways — songs and dances — clothing — tools — plants These words encompass all fields in the life of the amaXhosa. In comparison to the technique of glossing, when Xhosa words are used for the first time in

8

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1981): 15–16. 9 Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 38.

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the text, they are written in italics and followed by their definitions. Most of the time, the narrator gives the meaning of a Xhosa word its English referent. The untranslated words in The Heart of Redness prompt the reader to dig deep into Xhosa culture. Taking, for instance, the term makhulu, with regard to its context (after fire occurred at NoGiant’s place, Camagu asked her “what happened makhulu?”) and to its prefix ‘ma’ (used when referring to women), we can say that makhulu can be a praise-word or an affective expression addressing a woman. With regard to the word lobola and the two contexts where it is used, we can conclude that it would mean bribery, money, or material property. The techniques of glossing and ‘untranslation’ employed in The Heart of Redness have nothing exotic about them. Rather, they reinforce the concern of the author to link the English and the Xhosa languages while pointing out the fact that these are distinct entities.

Relexification Chantal Zabus defines “relexification” as “the making of a new register of communication out of an alien lexicon.”10 Relexification is a recurrent technique in postcolonial literatures, involving the denial of the standard rules of the language of the master, thus allowing it to convey the cultural experience of the former colonized. In the sentence “he ‘worked it’ with his medicine” (41), the quotation shows that though the expression “worked it” is in English, it does not have a ‘normal’ meaning. The use here is similar to the case of “see the moon” in “lovers have run away from her because whenever she tries to know a man in the biblical sense – that is she sees the moon” (41). When these expressions are not put in their cultural context, it is difficult for the reader to understand, since by taking them literally they mean something quite different from what the author would like them to mean. This technique shows that the African author who thinks in his mother tongue wants to translate into the written text all the significations, realities, and feelings of his culture. To conclude, relexification is a sort of africanization of the English language, giving rise to a new language that promotes the cohabitation of the English and Xhosa languages. It is also a way of writing to a modern standard while rooting a literary work in the oral tradition.

10 Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (1991; Cross / Cultures 4; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, rev. ed. 2007): 112.

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Proverbs Another characteristic of postcolonial literature is the use of proverbs as a part of orature. A proverb can be defined as a pithy saying in common use that expresses some common truth or familiar experience. Proverbs are not for anybody in society. They are most often used by elders, the custodians of wisdom in a society, for whom they have a functional role, to teach, warn, encourage, and advise. It is for this reason that they form an important part not only of the African community but also of its literature. Chinua Achebe terms them “the palm-oil with which words are eaten,”11 which view points up their aesthetic dimension: they are the element that gives flavour to the language. The goal of this section is to show how proverbs are enlisted in The Heart of Redness as elements of linguistic hybridity for didactic purposes and to forge a union between the oral and written traditions. The proverbs in the novel are used to communicate the cultural values, attitudes, and beliefs of the amaXhosa. They teach values such as patience: “don’t be in hurry for the gravy before the meat is ready” (53). Through this proverb, Mda advocates that, for South Africa to be transformed, the people need to exercise patience and be tolerant of one another. Proverbs in the novel are also used to teach the message of humility and discipline, as in “fortune is like a mist. It can disappear anytime” (61). This proverb can, alternatively, be rendered by the aphorism of being kind to the person you meet on your way “upstairs” because you might meet him “downstairs” one day. Further, proverbs have been used to bring out the message of solidarity and concern for one another irrespective of tribe and race – for example: “death is the daughter-in-law of all homesteads” (62). These proverbs are important in the sense that they function as a key to the philosophy of the people the author depicts, affording the reader access to the ethics and aesthetics of the amaXhosa people.

Conclusion From the above, it can be seen that the africanization of the English language in The Heart of Redness undergoes four main processes: glossing; the use of untranslated words; relexification; and the use of proverbs. All these writing techniques play an important role in Zakes Mda’s novel. More broadly, the writing occurs within the framework of multilingualism, hybridity, and postcoloniality. Mda exploits what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes as

11

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958): 5.

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the “dual character” of language, “both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.”12 Hybridity is normally what results when animals or plants are subjected to crossbreeding, which, in an extended sense, also takes place between human individuals and different races. A culture formed out of two other different cultures can be designated as hybrid. Within the African context, hybridity, according to Homi Bhabha, deconstructs the polarizations created by colonialism. John Beverly has elaborated on Bhabha’s “forceful” argument for ‘hybridity’ as a central concept in postcolonial studies. Bhabha sees hybridity as one of the effects of colonial power, it is the space in which the colonial or the subaltern subject can ‘translate’ and ‘undo’ the binaries imposed by the colonial project itself.13

Mikhail Bakhtin earlier defined linguistic hybridity as a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by a social differentiation or by some other factor.14

As shown in the above discussion of The Heart of Redness, the novel is not about hybridity but about a postcolonial process. According to Bart Moore– Gilbert, postcolonial criticism can be seen as a more or less distinct set of reading practices if it is not understood as preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination – economic, cultural and political – between (and often within) nations, races or cultures, which characteristically continue to be apparent in the present era of neo-colonialism.15

In The Heart of Redness, Zakes Mda not only challenges the dominance of the English language but also shows that an enriching coexistence between the English and the Xhosa languages is possible. The author goes about this essentially through the africanization of the English language, which imparts 12

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind, 93. John Beverly, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1999): 16. 14 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. Michael Holquist, ed. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981: 358. 15 Bart Moore–Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices Politics (London & New York: Verso, 1998): 12. 13

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to the novel its stylistic particularity. It follows from this process that linguistic hybridity is a standard towards which South African writing might well generally aspire in the interest of fostering linguistic and socio-political reconciliation.

WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). ——. Morning Yet on Creation Day (Garden City N Y : Garden City, 1975). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge, 1989). ——, ed. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995). Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. Michael Holquist, ed. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). Beverley, John. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1999). Childs, Peter, & Patrick Williams. An Introduction to Postcolonial Theory (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf & New York: Prentice Hall, 1997). Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1981). Mda, Zakes. The Heart of Redness (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). Moore–Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London & New York: Verso, 1998). Zabus, Chantal. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (1991; Cross / Cultures 4; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, rev. ed. 2007).

APPENDIX Table of Xhosa Words in Zakes Mda’s Novel Words and expressions in Xhosa language

Meaning

1.

Ghiya

Clothe

2.

Nkamkam

3.

Xhego

Old man

4.

Ityala

Credit

5.

Umphokoqo

The maize porridge that is specially eaten with sour milk

6.

Amabhinga

Women

7.

Umtshotsho

A dance

Old-age pension

Translation, Multilingualism, and Linguistic Hybridity

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8.

Amakhankatha

299

Men who taught initiates how to be men

9.

Ingcibi

The doctor who cut the foreskin

10.

Ukukreza

Having lovers outside marriage

11.

Ubuthi

Evil charms that were poisoning the nation

12.

Iqungu

Vengeful force generated by war medicines An aromatic herb

13.

Buchu

14.

Lawukazi

15.

Makoti

Someone from Khoikhoi tribe Daughter-in-law

16.

Toyi-toyi

17.

Umsintsi (tree)

Coral tree

Freedom dance

18.

Amahobohobo

Weaverbirds

19.

Igqirha

20.

Isidanga

A diviner Loose strands of beads Those who look beautiful and pride themselves on being fashionable

21.

Amahomba

22.

Isikhakha

Dress

23.

Amatikiti

Type of bead

24.

Uphalaza

Type of bead

25.

Icangei

Type of bead

26.

Amacici

Beaded earrings Backwardness and heathenism

27.

Ubuqaba

28.

Amagqobhoka

29.

Ingqawa

Enlightened people Blanket which is tied around the waist

30.

Idiliza

31.

Isiqweqwe

Type of bead Headbands made of very colourful beads

32.

Obubomvu

Backward practices, superstitions

33.

Imbhizo

34.

Ubugqobhoka

Public meeting Civilization Those who have not seen the light and who still smear themselves with red ochre

35.

Amaqaba

36.

Amagqiyazana

Young girls who have not yet reached puberty

37.

Umqo

Girls who have not yet reached puberty

38.

Umphokoqo

39.

Ingoli

40.

Amarheuvu

Porridge Soft porridge of fermented sorghum Soft porridge of fermented maize

300 41.

MARIE CHANTALE MOFIN NOUSSI Imiyolelo

Formal commands

42.

Inkundla

43.

Ikhamanga

Meeting at chief’s court

44.

Amasiko

The customs and cultural practices of the amaXhosa

45.

Ulugxa

Pieces of metal used to harvest mussels and oysters

Wild banana trees

46.

Imbhaza

Mussels

47.

Imbhatyisa

Oysters

48.

Abakhwetha

49.

Isivivane

50.

Umbhororho

Songs

51.

Amangquba

Abalone or mother-of-pearl

52.

Imiphefumbo

53.

Izitibiri

54.

Umrhubhe

Initiates Cairn

Souls A song Isixhosa musical instrument made of a wooden bow and a single string

55.

Tyityimba

A dance

56.

Amaqongwe

Cockles Khoikhoi

57.

AmaLawu or amaQheya

58.

Uzidla ngemali

59.

Ing’ang’ane

Hadehah ibis (bird)

60.

Uthekwane

Brown hammerhead (bird)

61.

Thithiboya

Caterpillar

‘money has made you proud’

62.

Umga

63.

Isomi(bird)

64.

Umzi uyatsha!

65.

Jacaranda

66.

Uxomoyi

Giant kingfisher Young woman

67.

Intombi

68.

Ikoyi

69.

Umgqusho

70.

Tsiki

Mimosa tree Red-winged bird A homestead burning! Shipwreck

The room where the newlyweds will sleep Maize samp cooked with beans Goat slaughtered for sacrifice

71.

Amafaca

Emaciated people

72.

Amasi

Creamy sour milk

73.

Umbhaco

Material used to make isiXhosa costumes

a

a

Translation, Multilingualism, and Linguistic Hybridity

74.

Ukunqanqatheka

Burning desire for tobacco

75.

Ecela indlela

Eternal place where the ancestors live

76.

Igqwirha

An evil diviner who only causes harm

77.

Isizathu

78.

Umxhentso

79.

Panga

301

Ceremony of the dead A dance in memory of the dead, performed by men and women Knobkerrie

80.

Lobola

[No definition]

81.

Kwedini

Stupid boy

82.

Makhulu

[No definition]

83.

Wak-wak-riririri!

Bird’s laughter

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Notes on Contributors

M O N I C A B O T T E Z is a Professor of English literature at the University of

Bucharest. She is one of the initiators of the Canadian Studies MA Program at this university (1997), where she teaches the course “Representations of Identity in English Canadian Literature.” She has translated Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale into Romanian (1995; second edition 2006). Her study Infinite Horizons: Canadian Fiction in English appeared in 2004. J O A N N A C O L L I N S teaches at the University of Kent at Canterbury, U K . Her doctorate examined the use of gothic tropes in colonial literature and travel writing. In 2008 she co-edited (with John Jervis) Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. T O B I A S D Ö R I N G is a Professor of English Literature at the L W U Munich, specializing in early-modern and postcolonial studies. His books include Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (2008) and Caribbean-English Passage: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (2002), as well as the edited volumes A History of Postcolonial Literatures in 12 1/2 Books (2007), London Underground: Prose and Poems about the Tube (2003), and, with Susanne Mühleisen, Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food (2003). A G N E S E F I D E C A R O works in the field of French and English contemporary literature and teaches gender studies at the University of Geneva. She works on women writers and authorship, violence and the body, cross-cultural identity, and gender. She co-edited a special issue of Equinoxe 23 (2002), “Le Genre de la voix,” and Profession: créatrice: La place des femmes dans le champ artistique (2007). K O N R A D G R O S S studied English, political science, and cultural anthropology at the University of Marburg, Germany, where he obtained a teaching degree in 1968. In 1970 he took his doctorate in English literature at the University of Cologne, and completed his postdoctoral thesis in 1977 at the University of Freiburg in 1977. He was professor of American and Canadian Literature at Christian

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Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany, from 1978 to 2005. Among his recent publications (all 2008) are Kanadische Literaturgeschichte (co-editor, 2005) and articles on Frederick Philip Grove, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, and Quebec terrorism in English-Canadian fiction. U R S U L A K L U W I C K is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Bern. She holds a doctorate from the University of Vienna and has published on postcolonial literatures, Victorian literature, Shakespeare, and ecocriticism. Her book Exploring Magic Realism: The Case of Salman Rushdie is forthcoming (2009), and she is currently working on a monograph dealing with the representation of water in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. E V A M A R I A K N O P P read English, German, and music at the universities of

Cologne and Lancaster, and has taught English linguistics at the University of Cologne and German language and contemporary culture for the D A A D (German Academic Exchange Service) at Edinburgh University and St Andrews University. She currently teaches German at King’s College London and is D A A D programme co-ordinator in London. Her main research interests are postcolonial theory, diasporic and contemporary literatures in English and German, and cultural theories on humour and laughter. T I M O L O T H M A N N studied English linguistics, history, and economics at Aachen University, where he received his doctorate in 2006. Currently he is a lecturer and

academic assistant in the Department of Linguistics of his alma mater. His research interests include pidgin and creole languages, linguicide, translation, cross-cultural studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics in general. He is the author of several contributions to academic journals and textbooks. M A R I E C H A N T A L E M O F I N N O U S S I is currently a doctoral student and French instructor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of New Mexico. She wrote her MA thesis on southern African literature at the University of Yaounde 1 (Cameroon). Her areas of interest include African literature with emphasis on francophone literature and ecocriticism, gender, animal, and cultural studies. C H R I S T I N E M Ö L L E R studied English and Spanish literature and linguistics at

Christian Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany, and the University of Granada. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation at Christian Albrecht University on the development of L2 English learners’ narrative abilities in an early immersion programme at an elementary school near Kiel. Her main research interests are (second) language acquisition, bi- and multilingualism, text / discourse, and bilingual education.

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Notes on Contributors

305

M I C H A E L A M O U R A – K O Ç O Ğ L U has a MA in English from Johann Wolfgang

Goethe University, Frankfurt, and recently completed her doctoral dissertation there on “Narrating Indigenous Modernities: Transcultural Dimensions in Contemporary Māori Literature” (2008). Her research focuses on indigenous women’s studies, Maori writing, lusophone and anglophone African literature, multicultural children’s fiction, and literature from Oceania. She lives with her family in the U S A and is a Visiting Scholar at the Florida International University in Miami. O M O T A Y O O L O R U N T O B A – O J U studied English and theatre at the University of Ilorin and the University of Ibadan. She has taught communication and theatre at the University of Ilorin since 1989, was involved in a five-year British Council Communication Skills Project (C O M S K I P ) in Nigeria, where she is currently a senior lecturer at the Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba. Her research is in theatre aesthetics (cross-cultural transformations, particularly in African and the Caribbean), on which she has published extensively. T A I W O O L O R U N T O B A – O J U has taught stylistics, drama, and creative writing at

the University of Ilorin in Nigeria for over two decades. He is the author of Language and Style in Nigerian Drana and Theatre (1998) and has also contributed to international research in Africanity, language, and the politics of culture, as well as gender and sexuality in African literature, culture, and aesthetics. Recipient of grants from the British Council, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Nordic African Institute, he is also a published poet and playwright and has written for film and television. P E T R A R Ü D I G E R is assistant professor of North American Literature at Christian Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany. She is also a member of the North American Studies Programme at the University of Bonn, where she held seminars on Canadian literature and culture. Her main research focus has been on contemporary Anglo-Canadian literature, in particular literary representations of the Canadian North (Literarische Kartographien des kanadischen Nordens, 2005). She is currently working on a post-doctoral study on gender and entrepreneurship in American literature. K I R S T E N S A N D R O C K studied English and German at the universities of Newcastle and Marburg, completing her doctoral dissertation at the latter in 2008. She is now a research assistant at Georg August University, Göttingen, where she is pursuing a post-doctoral project on Romanticism in Scottish travel writing. Her most recent publications include articles on Wayne Johnston and translations of English-Canadian titles into German. S A B I N E S C H L Ü T E R holds an MA degree in English and Scandinavian Studies

and a doctorate in English / North American Studies from Christian Albrecht University, Kiel, Germany, as well as a secondary teaching degree in English, Danish,

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and French. She has worked and studied in England, France, Denmark, and Canada. Her published doctoral dissertation (2007) was on the grotesque and neoexistentialism in the plays of the Canadian dramatist George F.Walker. S I L K E S T R O H teaches English literature and postcolonial studies at the Univer-

sity of Münster. She studied anglophone literatures, German literature, political science, and Celtic studies at the universities of Aberdeen and Frankfurt (MA 2000; doctorate 2005). She has taught British and postcolonial studies and Gaelic language classes at the universities of Frankfurt and Giessen. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, black British, Asian British, and African literature and culture, Scottish and Celtic studies, English literature, film and T V , and transcultural competence in English as a foreign language. J O S E P H S W A N N studied philosophy and German in Rome, Canterbury, and Lon-

don, and has taught at the University of Wuppertal for many years. He has published extensively on African, Indian, Australian, and New Zealand literature, with a special focus on poetry. C H R I S T I N E V O G T – W I L L I A M taught at the Department of New Anglophone

Literatures and Cultures at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt and took a doctorate on Indian diasporic literature at the University of York, where she was a Marie Curie Fellow. Her research interests include Indian diasporic literature, Bollywood films, and food cultures. She currently lives in the U S A .

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