Posts filed under 'postcolonialism'

Asymptote at the Movies: Xala

We all have our own tale of independence where we struggle with the past, the otherness, our desires, and our future.

In 1973, author and director Ousmane Sembène published Xala, a searing, polyvalent satire on post-independence Senegal, interrogating the shifting interpretations of tradition and postcolonial modernity, the corruption of new governing bodies, and the inherent divides that are further deepened by varying expectations of a liberated future. Two years later, he would direct the film of the same name, portraying the arrogant businessman El Hadji Abdoukader Beye, who experiences a bout of incurable erectile dysfunction on the eve of his third wedding. Juxtaposing multiple sociopolitical positions—from the rich to the poor, the radicalised to the subservient—the two works target the brute alienations brought on by occupation, resulting in an incisive condemnation against social inequality. In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we take a look at the ways the text and the film play against one another, coming together and diverting against the same incendiary narrative. 

Vincent Hostak (VH): Perhaps aware that Xala as a novel would reach a global audience, Ousmane Sembène seems to go out of his way to frame cultural references with parenthetical asides in service to the global reader; they punctuate the text with explanations of Africanity, Muslim customs, traditions of polygamy, and idiomatic language. In the film, these textual remarks are translated with a specialised cinematic grammar, using numerous audio and visual cues to satirise the state of many in the “new Africa.” Early in the film, the “Businessman’s Group,” as they are known in the text, are seen arriving only in an extreme close-up of their European shoes. Synchronously and wryly during this collection of scenes, African identity is reinforced with the audible chants of griots, trilling ululations, and Mbalax-style band music. Statements are coded into image, sound, costume design, if not direct dialogue, and through them, the viewer learns that colonial behaviors are stubborn and seemingly unerasable, even as the Business Group make a rite of casting out the art and properties of the former white leadership on the steps of the chamber.

As sure as El Hadji thinks he is “cursed” with the titular impotence of “xala,” he and his fellow citizens of a newly free Senegal are cursed by the remnants of colonialism. In the film, this is coded through European dress among the tuxedo-clad men (while women characters are more traditionally dressed), the protagonist’s copious gifts to his third wife, and an air of acquired indifference—transmitted in gestures and facial expressions of the actors. Only the beggars, a servant class, and the film’s women are dressed in apparel that indicates authentic origins and culture.

As original as Sembène is, I think certain contemporaneous satiric films may have influenced his choices, and I find it unavoidable to cite the work of another filmmaker with a revolutionary spirit: Luis Buñuel. Especially poignant in this regard is the black comedy, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. It similarly portrays callous, regional aristocrats in various comic visual tableaux (including, famously, recurring scenes of the self-important protagonists briskly walking the countryside, accompanied by close-ups of their gestures of indignation). It also recounts a party ending with a violent act, staged by complainants, and which results in the execution of the insufferable principals. Sembène echoes the latter with less explicit violence in the surprising ending of Xala, in which El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye and his family are sentenced to a ritual humiliation by the city’s beggars.

Nestor Gomez (NG): In a 1974 interview with the Tunisian film critic Tahar Cheriaa, Sembène shared that he intended his film not only for Senegal but for the entire Third World. Xala is an allegory to cultivate awareness about the bourgeoisie, a new group of individuals rising to power in African society, and the title of both the film and the novel is meant to highlight the fact that this bourgeoisie is impotent and unable to create anything meaningful. READ MORE…

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

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Translating Multilingualism: An Interview with Ros Schwartz

Translation is the deepest form of reading.

Ros Schwartz is an award-winning British translator who has translated over one hundred works of French fiction and non-fiction into English, with a strong emphasis on authors including Dominique Eddé, Aziz Chouaki, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Her most recent translations are Swiss-Cameroonian author Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (Hope Road, 2021) and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside (HopeRoad, 2022), and she is part of the team re-translating the works of Georges Simenon for Penguin Classics. Ros was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.

Earlier this year, I had the honour of interviewing Ros Schwartz to find out about her approaches to literary translation, and in particular, about the art and complexities of translating multilingualism. Owing to histories of colonisation and migration, literatures are increasingly hybrid and multilingual. A work composed in “French” may bear explicit or implicit traces, tones, and vocabularies of other languages, and processes of translation may be embedded within the source text itself. Such linguistic entanglements in source texts challenge the very boundaries of languages and pose distinct challenges for the literary translator. In this interview, Ros Schwartz shares her own experiences about translating multilingualism in creative and innovative ways.

Sheela Mahadevan (SM): Ros, you come from a multilingual background, and you have translated several multilingual works which depict experiences of exile and migration. You also have a Jewish ancestry and have translated a work which relates to this theme, entitled Traduire comme Transhumer (Translation as Transhumance) by Mireille Gansel (Les Fugitives (UK) and The Feminist Press (USA), 2017). How does your own background and experience of migration and multilingualism intersect with your career as a translator, and how does Gansel’s work influence your thinking about translation?

Ros Schwartz (RS): My background has some similarities with that of Mireille Gansel. I too am Jewish—second generation—and my grandparents spoke only Yiddish, so although different from Gansel’s experience, I share that multilingual background common to families descended from exiles. Gansel interweaves her memoir with reflections on the art of translation, constantly interrogating and refining her practice. Her ethos chimes with mine and her approach to translation helped me better articulate my own; by translating the book and being inhabited by it for many months, I was able to engage with Gansel’s ideas in a way beyond that of a casual reader.

SM: You have translated numerous multilingual literatures into English, including the Lebanese Francophone novel Cerf-volant (Kite) by Dominique Eddé (Seagull Books, 2003). The novel depicts multilingual experiences; sometimes the characters speak in French, sometimes they speak in Arabic, and sometimes they translate between the two. The work is also about multilingual writing and casts light on the ways in which another language can haunt the primary literary language. Could you tell us more about your experience of translating this hybrid work? To what extent is it necessary to collaborate with native speakers of the additional language or the author in the translation process?

RS: I worked very closely with the author. We went over the translation together literally line by line, in person, closeted in her Paris apartment. I had her read passages out loud to help me capture the intonations and rhythms. I would never have attempted a translation like this had I not been able to collaborate with the author.

The novel has a different sensibility, and its non-linear narrative took me out of my comfort zone. The reader is plunged straight in and the narrative is a mosaic, which the reader gradually has to piece together. Eddé’s writing functions like an Impressionist painting, with deft brushstrokes that evoke characters, places, and atmospheres. It has disconcerting metaphors: “. . . une bouche à mi-chemin du cœur et de l’oiseau.” Literally: “a mouth half-way between a heart and a bird.” You don’t question it in French, partly because of the music of the language. For the English, I made it slightly more explicit: “a mouth that was shaped like a heart or a bird.” READ MORE…