Since its inception in 2019, Tkaronto/Toronto-based trace press has published “literature that illuminates, in complex, beautiful and thought-provoking ways, contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, war, displacement, exile, migration, the environment, labour, and resistance.” Re-emerging after a brief hiatus during the pandemic, their first anthology River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023) assembles emergent and experienced feminist translators, scholars, and writers from Palestine to Uganda, from Indonesia to Kashmir—spotlighted by, among others, Khairani Barokka, Suneela Mubayi, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Yasmine Haj. In the foreword, the decolonialist historian Françoise Vergès describes the vestiges of imperialism, the dominance of the languages of Euro-American colonisers, the myths of globalisation, and the “hegemony of national languages” inflicted by neocolonial nation-states. Having read and reviewed the anthology myself, I think of it as a complex re-mapping of literary hemispheres “twisting through the atrocities of literary empires and post-colonial capitalism.”
In this interview, I asked trace press’ founding editor Nuzhat Abbas, a Zanzibar-born writer and critic of postcolonial mobilities and gender studies, about the literary publishing house she has founded; how independent presses can stay true to a transnational, anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist ethos; and writings from her archipelagic birthplace in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Having founded trace press, in what ways do the values of decoloniality, anti-imperialism, feminism, and anti-racism occur as concrete practices in translation and in publishing? And what is the opposite of that?
Nuzhat Abbas (NA): I prefer to pose such questions to my writers and translators—to inquire how they, in their practice, think through such challenges, especially in relation to localized tensions and displacements, both historic and geographical. For example, trace is located on a forcibly white-settled and renamed space where Indigenous and Black resistance and creativity continues to resist and respond to histories of profound violence and displacement. As racialized im/migrant-settlers working with non-European literatures and languages, how do we ‘translate’ and write toward Black and Indigenous readers in the Americas, and toward each other, as people from the global majority, scattered around the globe, displacing each of our certainties? This is a question for me, a beginning question, one that can only be answered in practice—and differently—by each of the books we make and the conversations that emerge. Building space for these kinds of ‘after-publication’ conversations is very much part of what I want to create with trace.
Our workshop series trace: Translating [x] started in collaboration with translators working with Tamil and Arabic in 2022 to 2023 (we hope to continue the workshops with other languages as well), in which we invited participants to think through some of these questions together. The conversations raised as many questions as they answered. Sometimes what is most salient in North American contexts is not the most urgent question elsewhere.
I think this is an important caution around who and what translates, where and how, and within what engines of power and currency. For example, something I’m thinking through these days is how Hindutva supporters in India and in diasporas utilize the languages of decolonialism, anti-racism, and indigeneity to put forward essentialized notions of self, land, and mythical history that are clearly fascist. How do Dalit, Adivasi, and tribal voices then work with and through this contemporary crisis in India, in solidarity with Indian Muslims? As a displaced East African and South Asian Muslim myself—one who has lost a relative to Hindutva mob violence in 1992 Bombay, who came of age within Pakistan’s turn towards a militarized, US-funded Islamist regime, and who, within my own transnational Shia community, has been influenced by the 1979 Revolution in Iran—I’ve always been cautious about how Islam is imagined and translated within different contexts, for different ends. I’m also sad to observe how anti-colonial struggles can sometimes morph into reactionary and nationalist imaginings of self and other. While these things haunt me as a person, I’m always curious to see how writers and translators grapple with such questions in their texts.
And as someone interested in the histories of language, I’m sensitive to the histories of English-centered dictionaries, whether of Urdu, Tagalog, Arabic, or Kiswahili, which have roots in colonial, often Christian endeavors of understanding, extraction, transformation, and translation of the ‘other’ to support imperial interests—but I remain open to their documentary and literary potential.
AMMD: trace press’ first anthology, River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, collates and curates essays—confessions, treatises, reckonings, philosophies—by feminist translators, scholars, and writers like Geetha Sukumaran, Iryn Tushabe, Gopika Jadeja, Lisa Ndejuru, among others. What was the impelling force behind this anthology? And what do you think makes this, along with parallel texts like Tilted Axis Press’ Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation, urgent and necessary in today’s white-dominated literary translation scene?
NA: River in an Ocean, originally titled Unsettling Translation, came out of a desire to NOT center whiteness. I wanted to create space for critical and creative conversations amongst ourselves to “draw connections between here and there; now and then… and build solidarity across our many differences” (as we say on trace’s website). I invited feminist translators, poets, and writers of global South origin, many with refugee and migrant histories, to think through their embodied transnational and translational experiences. Our project was accompanied by a transnational, online conversation series among the contributors, which was incredible and joyous to witness, before the book’s official Toronto launch in June.
I received a copy of Violent Phenomena in late 2022, as I was completing edits on River in an Ocean. It’s an extraordinary collection of significant voices in translation, primarily based in the United Kingdom and the United States, and I’m delighted that many people are reading the two books alongside each other! The UK scene, from what I’m learning, as I get to know more writers, translators, and publishers, including Tilted Axis, is both similar and different to Canada. The difference, of course, is that the UK is a former imperial power, with strong links to its former colonies through the Commonwealth, along with ongoing material and often extractive relations—even when mediated by the soft power of art and culture. In Canada, the violence of local and global land and resource (dis)possession, as well as settler colonialism and the exploitation of Black and migrant labour, comes into play, and this is a country which, for a long time, has imagined itself in relation to resisting or complying with Anglo-French colonial histories. The obfuscation of such nationalist self-imagining remains in Canadian literature and publishing, even as it makes room for its so-called ‘multicultural’ others. Meanwhile, indigenous writers, and some (but not all) racialized and im/migrant writers continue to push against such bracketing.
AMMD: In River in an Ocean, Khairani Barokka comments on the politics behind the literary genres that the West recognises: the quintessential divide among poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. It seems that trace press is ardently re-writing this prevailing practice by being open to, and encouraging, genres and forms which are so-called ‘non-Western.’
NA: I’m laughing as I read your question! I think this stance comes from my own inability, as a young immigrant student, to fully understand ‘genres’ as constructed and presented within the canonical English literature courses I was forced to take. I came from an experience of oral, sonic, and written traditions in Gujarati, Kiswahili, Urdu, Arabic, and English; from a family where my parents—and most of the elders I grew up with—did not get the opportunity to finish school; and from structures of feeling built from story, song, protest, recitation, and religious and spiritual texts that leaked into daily life. So I am curious about how we work with English as a material, whether for translation or for writing: how we quarrel with it, mark it, shape it, change it, to fit other meanings. I find the work done by translators, especially those who have fluently lived between two or three languages of the global South and North, deeply generative and interesting. And when done well, this can be destabilizing and quite queer.
AMMD: Your editorial base is Tkaronto (Toronto), traditional land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and is now home to many from the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. How imperative is it for people of the Global Majority who are refugees, im/migrants, and settlers to be in solidarity with Indigenous peoples?
NA: I must admit I arrived in Canada unwillingly, desiring an education and a stable passport—which I used, almost immediately, to leave. I’m amused now by my youthful, very stubborn refusal to swear on the Queen at my citizenship ceremony after having spent hours in the library reading about the ways in which British imperialism had ravaged the African and Asian spaces I came from. In those days, I was shamefully ignorant of Indigenous life and histories in the Americas—this learning has been both an ongoing grieving, a deeper understanding of this land, and a serious commitment to understanding our different yet shared struggles as Indigenous, Black, im/migrant.
AMMD: Let’s revisit your article “Conversing to/with Shame” on the gendered layers in translating the ghazal, published in the Annual of Urdu Studies. Can you speak about your process in translating Pakistani feminist poet Ishrat Afreen from the Urdu, in particular her ghazal “Shattered Mirrors, Broken Bits”?
NA: A recent gift of trace press was that Ishrat and I were able to reconnect and spent beautiful, long hours in conversation. I’ve also committed to publishing new translations of her writing.
When I wrote that essay and translated some of her poems, it was before the time of the Internet. I didn’t even have access to a book of her poems, and chose some from Rukhsana Ahmed’s anthology We Sinful Women: Contemporary Feminist Urdu Poetry (The Women’s Press, 1991). I wanted to retranslate her poems primarily to capture a kind of sound that I felt was missing in the translation I read. I thought of myself more as a careful reader and critic at that time, and not a translator—the kind of role I still play as editor and publisher at trace. When we finally met (over Zoom, in the early years of the pandemic), we were struck by how deeply we liked each other, and how easily we trusted each other, despite differences of age, origins, and life-worlds. We are both Shia women from less privileged class backgrounds, without easy access to centers of power. And our memories, even though we come from different origins and generations, also contain an understanding of gendered Muslim female interiority, of the 70s and 80s in Pakistan, and of political turmoil, militarization, displacement, and migration. We also seem to share a certain poetic sensibility and a commitment to left politics. This understanding seems to have affected my love for one of Ishrat’s earlier ghazals, and its performance of a fiercely intelligent and poetic response to both genre and gender.
AMMD: Your personal essay “21st Ramadhan, 1422 – 8th December 2001,” published in Fuse Magazine’s special issue on war and later anthologised in Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality, was your response to the United States invasion of Afghanistan. You began:
Tonight is a night of anniversaries.
Tonight is said to be one of the possible nights of Laylat-ul-Qadr, that night of glory, fifteen centuries ago, when the Holy Qur’an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Two nights ago, over a decade ago, fourteen women lay dead, murdered by the misogynist rage of a desperate young man called Marc Lepine.
Can you speak more about this essay?
NA: I wrote that essay over a long night of overwhelming grief, sitting on the floor of an apartment I was vacating, my laptop perched on a cardboard box filled with the books I would take with me. It’s hard to speak now about it, when everything I needed to say is in it. That terrible sense of déjà vu that had gripped me since 9/11, knowledge of the violence would inevitably unfurl against us in the name of a ‘Terror,’ and anger at the way the media obscured the United States’ collaboration with Saudi Arabia in funding the rise of extremist Islamism and the Taliban. The essay was my attempt to draw lines across time and space to map what was going on, to grieve the un-nameable, uncountable dead, and the violence yet to come.
AMMD: Ipek Demir, a professor of diaspora studies and indigeneity, makes the case of diaspora as translation and as decolonisation in her 2022 book from Manchester University Press. Being a translator and publisher in diaspora, how has this concretely manifested in your political stance, your writings, and your lived experience?
NA: I haven’t read Ipek’s book as yet, so thank you for introducing me to her work. My own childhood experience of being moved around several times within displaced, multiply dispersed members of our extended family certainly meant translation was something I understood viscerally, including the loss of loved ones, place(s), context(s), and language(s). I certainly don’t identify as a translator in the conventional sense; my knowledge of my originary languages weakens by the day with the effects of time and distance, including those produced by gendered and queered exile. What drives my work at trace is perhaps a desire to destabilize the spaces I was made to enter and reside in, with the interruptions of other texts, other sounds. Perhaps this echoes some of what Ipek Demir talks about. And in another way, as I work these days with translators and writers through various languages and texts, I feel these gorgeous seas of sound finally allow me, in some strange way, to inhabit a different, more expansive sense of ‘home.’
AMMD: Years ago, you reviewed Dionne Brand’s Inventory: Poems for Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing, and interviewed her for Herizons Magazine where she said that “in a world of forgetting … [our] project … is remembering.” What has drawn you towards this poet?
NA: I put myself through undergrad by working at various bookstores in Toronto. Canadian literature to me, then, was an alienating zone of whiteness. I still remember the day I opened a box of books holding Dionne Brand’s No Language is Neutral—a book that I still love. A decade later, on my return to Canada, I interviewed Dionne for Herizons. Those who’ve heard Dionne read know the incantatory impact of her voice. Once, while listening to her recite from Inventory, my partner, who had spent some years as a human rights worker in Sri Lanka during the war, started to weep silently. Later, she said Dionne’s reading opened up something in her, that until then she had been unable to access, think through, or grieve. I am always stunned by Dionne’s accuracy in language, how she connects acute, rigorous, political thought with a profound lyric love of beauty.
AMMD: Speaking of translation, can you name some works from South Asia and East Africa, modern or from antiquity, which deserve another look—and therefore, retranslation?
NA: There is so much but I would hesitate to start naming. In terms of South Asia, I know I’d love to see fresh new translations of classical and modern poets like Mirza Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Ahmad Faraz, and even Faiz Ahmad Faiz (who has been translated so beautifully by Agha Shahid Ali and others), as well as creative responses to such poetry.
At trace, we are currently working with a noted Ghalib scholar, Mehr Farooqi, on an experimental memoir that juxtaposes her writing alongside her translations of Ghalib and other poets. I find Meena Kandasamy’s translation of Tirukkuṟaḷ a marvellous example of what is possible when a brilliant feminist translator engages powerfully with an ancient text. There are a lot of women poets and novelists that I’d love to have translated and to publish.
In terms of East Africa, it’s sad to observe that literary translation and scholarship, for the most part, continues to be dominated by white academics from Europe and the United States. The reasons for this has to do with our poverty (especially in Tanzania), with East Africa’s specific histories of colonialism, and the material conditions that enable academic and literary access—something that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and more recently Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, speak eloquently on. Nonetheless, I do have a list of classical and contemporary Kiswahili texts that I’d love to see translated and re-translated, focusing on literariness, but also taking into account Kiswahili’s historical imbrication in histories of trade and slavery, and contemporary political struggles of mainland and coast, neo-liberalism, tourism, ongoing resource extraction and land grabs by various global actors, including those from the global South. Such kind of translational work would need to be delicate, nuanced, deeply informed.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Zanzibar Literature in the local languages (Arabic, Swahili, Gujarati, and English, among others) and/or in translation into English, who are the writers, classic and contemporary, whom you feel should be in the syllabus? Are there books and works you think that should be incorporated in it?
NA: To teach such a course (or perhaps publish such a book) would be a dream come true (even though I stopped teaching a few years ago)! I’d include 19th century German in that list as well, since Salma bint Said, whose complex writing and legacy I’ve written about (and struggle with), used her migrant tongue. I’d include contemporary poets as well as novelists like Adam Shafi (whose work, in translation, I very much want to publish, in partnership with a Tanzanian press), as well as genres of horror, news, religious poetry, proverbs, oral histories, memoirs, and song, especially the great women singers who I love. The 1964 Zanzibar Revolution would, of course, occupy considerable space in such a syllabus, with conflicting narratives of that event (in various languages/ translations), alongside its larger historical context—what the great English language novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah explores so beautifully in his writing.
Nuzhat Abbas is the founder and director of the decolonial, anti-imperialist, and feminist publisher trace press, for which she edited their debut anthology, River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation. Born in Zanzibar in Tanzania and now based in Tkaronto/Toronto, she holds an MA Women’s Studies from Ohio State University, an MA Comparative Literature from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MFA Creative Writing from University of Guelph. She has more than two decades of teaching transnational literature and film, peace and conflict studies, migration and culture, and women and gender studies in schools, colleges, and universities in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She has facilitated art and writing projects for refugee and immigrant women and girls; curated cultural events and festivals; and worked with feminist, anti-racist, and independent bookstores and non-profit organisations. Her creative and critical works have appeared in Wasafiri, The Oral History Review, The Globe & Mail, Fuse, THIS magazine, Herizons, CV2, The Annual of Urdu Studies, Znak, and the anthology, Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality (ed. Sarah Husain, Seal Press, 2006).
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023) and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). 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 have been widely published, from South Africa to the Netherlands, from Australia to Canada. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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