Kashmir, Palestine, Uganda, Rwanda, India, Singapore, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Saudi Arabia—this anthology of emergent and experienced feminist poets-translators from the Global Majority straddles the literary hemispheres of dominant European languages, even “the hegemony of national languages,” as decolonialist Françoise Vergès writes in the foreword. Edited by trace press’ founding editor Nuzhat Abbas, a Zanzibar-born scholar of postcolonial mobilities and gender studies, the coastal and littoral imagery of rivers and oceans is underpinned by the front cover, featuring art by the late Pakistani pedagogue-activist and artist Lala Rukh. This waterscape metaphor takes on the form of the contributors’ drawing of their own ethos and reconciling these with the philosophies and praxis espoused by thinkers, ranging from Frantz Fanon and Don Mee Choi to the Sri Lankan poet P Ahilan, from Deleuze and Guattari to the formalist poet Agha Shahid Ali and the revolutionary Thamizhini.
river in an ocean : essays on translation. Ed. Nuzhat Abbas. Toronto (Tkaronto), Ontario: trace press, 2023.
Opening the anthology is Modern Poetry in Translation editor and poet-essayist Khairani Barokka’s bilingual letter-essays, “Apa Kabar, Penerjemah? / How Are You, Translator?,” in Indonesian and English. She argues for the importance of caring for one’s jiwa and raga, or soulbody or bodymind, often neglected due to the neoliberal insistence of productivity and the “calculus of ethics versus feeding oneself,” or the necessity of confronting the difficult dilemma that torments translators under imperio-capitalist structures. Barokka also exposes the heinous practice of categorising translators, parallel to the repulsively widespread “Bridge Translation,” based on one’s geopolitical distance from the “center,” one’s heritage language and linguistic “proficiency,” and the genres and texts that the West recognises. While Vergès problematises the very colonial impetus of translation as “the Western injunction to make the world […] immediately comprehensible to Westerners,” Barokka goes into the heart of the matter of a system that
privileges a neoliberal, colonial aesthetic of discovery and openness and all information as accessible—to white and other privileged translators, primarily. When not everyone wants to be translated, not into every language; when indigenous communities are facing life or death situations in which communal knowledge needs to be protected from outside capture, including via a translation into languages such as English.
These ruling European languages, especially English, after all, are “privileged as the language of buyers, of consumers, in many countries.” A Disabled scholar-artist herself, Barokka also advocates for more accessible platforms for communities of blind, D/deaf, and chronically ill translators, resisting the eugenicist ideology that plagues the publishing industry.
Palestinian writer Yasmine Haj’s essay “Rast,” meanwhile, blends history and the mythic in what might be an example of speculative nonfiction. She portrays the complex intricacy and orthographic specificity of translating from and into particular languages. Similar to Barokka (“in Indonesian my body feels different, is alive in a different resonance, compared to how it is in English”), Haj’s begins with an evocative, sensuous homage to the language:
Arabic remains a dreamless jumble of love, melancholy, nostalgia, and an inability to properly express ourselves or anything for that matter—an obsession with accents, stumped travels and halted communal growth, mother tongues and beautiful people that we could never meet […] Arabic is all the jokes we couldn’t tell, the stories we couldn’t share, or co-create. It is all the cities and towns we had to leave and resettle and rebuild. All the places we were forced to call home. […] All the poetry it could have unfolded, but never did.
Haj’s trance-like panegyric to her heritage language summons up how language sculpts worldviews—and that is where the act of translation masochistically falls short.
Also in poetic language, Otoniya J Okot Bitek, a poet and scholar of political memory and literary genealogy, has penned twelve epistolary vignettes entitled “The Meaning of a Song.” The title is addressed to her late father, the esteemed Acholi-language poet Okot p’Bitek, while also alluding to her father’s oeuvre in poetry and in songs, presenting the dualisms of what it means to be a modern-day African. Punctuated within her vignettes are the “complexity around belonging, tradition, and African identity on one hand, and class and social aspirations defined by modernity and urbanity on the other.” (Reminiscent of this is Rahat Kurd’s “Elegiac Moods,” which are dedicated to the New Formalist poet Agha Shahid Ali.) She offers a coup d’œil of the politico-linguistic terrain of postcolonial, urban Africa, particularly as a Ugandan evacuee in Kenya after the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-79. Okot Bitek is at her best when she pummels Western scholars’ “discovery” of her father’s body of work, and its endless packaging and repackaging as the microcosm of African literature for North Atlantic readership’s gaze as well as the gatekeeping of the African literati and intelligentsia’s patriarchal old guard of her father’s legacy. The colonial, imperial layers of translation, she says, manifest in “what might get translated, what might get italicized, [what might be] explained away.” She turns a critical gaze even at herself as a Western-educated woman and as a visitor to Wales, where her “English-trained brain refused to acknowledge Welsh as the language of the land.”
Such acute meta-awareness of one’s own subject-positioning also frequents Nedra Rodrigo’s essay on unsettling tinai, a term that dually signifies landscapes and literary modes/genres, while translating from Tamil-language writings particularly in Sangam literature. Rodrigo questions her “presence as a refugee-settler in Indigenous territories” of the nation-state called Canada, rendering “one landscape while inhabiting another.” In her words, these are the “contradictions and exclusionary meanings that permeate my work,” a point that Vergès echoes when she writes, “I have lived within a contradiction.”
Throughout these essays, the contributors are in constant conversation with and among themselves, confronting not only the contradiction that is the self but also their roles in questioning—or reinforcing—colonialism and its lingering aftermaths (translation included). While Barokka confessed to her heritage language of Indonesian as “colonizing […] in places like Papua, where the Indonesian government are occupiers […] in the Indonesian archipelago’s more than 700 languages,” Iryn Tushabe speaks about spatial and linguistic displacement away from her post-British invasion Western Ugandan hometown and her Rukiga native language, while Gopika Jadeja reflects on how caste and class inequality remain themes in Gujarati Dalit poetry. Elsewhere, Lisa Ndejuru’s “And the Heart Became Child” retraces the political powers that be in Rwanda following the end of Belgian rule in 1962 while referencing and perhaps appropriating the narrativity and historicity of the ibitekerezo—epic poetry of hero’s conquests and dynastic formations. What Norah Alkarashi in “Translating Courageously” calls “structural silencing” also prevails as a deterrent for translators and authors “located at the periphery of the North American and global anglophone literature,” notably for the minoritised Black Haitian American immigrant author Edwidge Dantica, whom she has translated into Arabic.
As a nonbinary, queer translator myself translating a transgender and migrant writer from the Tagalog-based Filipino into English in a literary genre that defies Euro-American categorisation, my favourite among these essays is Suneela Mubayi’s “The Temple Whore of Language.” Raised in New Delhi, mixed race (“neither fully white nor […] fully brown”), and nonbinary/transgender, Mubayi inhabits the liminalities between ethnic origins and gender identities , or as an ābir/a, “one who crosses,” who commits ta῾bīr, “to make something cross from inside yourself to the outside.” The unease that surrounds “correct language” as dictated by the gatekeepers and the struggle in the act of naming are both felt throughout her essay. Mubayi also makes the case of the translator as belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. “To translate, for me, is to experience being an outsider, a trespasser, a poser—and to be able to revel in that condition,” she writes.
While Vergès tells us of how state-imposed “national” languages become colonising on their own, thus recreating the cultural and linguistic genocide perpetrated by European colonisers, Mubayi probes how these supposedly subaltern languages from the Global Majority world, if taken out of North Atlantic contexts, become hegemonic and elite on their own. Arabic, for instance, dominates other languages within the Arab world, such as Kurdish, Amazigh, Nubian, Assyrian, and even dialects within the Arabic language based on ethnolinguistic identity and socioeconomic class. (It was the Arabs who decided that Okot Bitek’s heritage language be named Acholi.) “The same could be said of languages like Bengali, Persian, and Urdu,” she writes. In Mubayi’s essay, the chapter titled “Trans-gendering, Trans-lation, Forming through Trans-Formation” could make a foundational text on the expansive intersectional potentialities between translation theory and transgender studies.
The engaging essays in river in an ocean: essays on translation can also be read as treatises, as they particularise the atrocities of literary empires and postcolonial capitalism. How are literature, translation, and literary translation, embroiled as they are in a neoliberal, imperialist, and neocolonial societies, masked as a “globalisation?” Language, after all, is embedded in myths, in material culture, in ecologies, even in the non-human Other, as Geetha Sukumaran (“a translation of the rhythm of the body as it moves across the land”) and Rodrigo (of mango trees, “a language that I absorbed somehow through the pores of my skin”) remind us. “Histories echo, they leave traces. Some take decades, even lifetimes, to reverberate, transform, and reveal themselves in new formations, new translations,” Abbas writes in the introduction.
Generalists and specialists alike looking for a clear-eyed grip on the questions that haunt the ethnopolitics and geolinguistics of literary translation, written in intriguing, genre-bending prose, would do well to read this book, feasibly in conversation with other parallel texts such as Violent Phenonema: 21 Essays on Translation edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang (London: Tilted Axis Press, 2022). Overall, river In an ocean is a sublime and urgent book that illuminates the heart of the politics of literary translation, makes its inroads and inner workings graspable, and unflinchingly discloses its human face through vivid testimonies which are scholarly and speculative, personal and political—all in varied lenses from human geography to memoir, from cultural poetics to the personal essay, from historical linguistics to reportage. As Barokka writes, “an alternative world is no mere fantasy. It needs to be imagined, and often.” And so the dream lives on for all of us, the Global Majority. Imagine, yes, but also resist and fight—we will.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), a native of southern Philippines, is the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021) and In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: forthcoming). A contributor to The Shanghai Literary Review, their latest poetry, essays, and translation have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Their lyric essay has been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’re editor-at-large at Asymptote, and assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature as well as Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine.