The Dynamics of History and Culture: “Pale Approximations”... Who Can/May Speak? : text of a talk by Tyrone Williams

[the following is the text of a talk given by Tyrone Williams for Nonsite's "Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" curriculum, Sunday, June 1, 2008. See related posts.]

Nurrudin Farah has explored the sedimentation of history as precisely the topsoil from which cultures flower and to which they return. In at least two trilogies—Secrets, Gifts and Maps as one; Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines and Close Sesame as the other—Farah has created a Somali of the imagination that, while Dickensian in its encyclopedic scope, remains very much the Somali of the 20th century. As a “country” occupied by pre-and post-Islamic Arab nomads, Italy and England, the country is a perfect Petri dish in which to observe struggles over the question of “authentic’ or “indigenous’ tribal customs, mores and values. In his first trilogy Farah triangulates Somali, Ethiopian and Italian cultures and languages in order to calibrate the relative values of custom v. freedom, tribal pride v. state loyalty, and so on. In the second trilogy he follows several families as they attempt to unseat a dictator who, while implanting a socialist state apparatus, relies on and uses his powerful tribal loyalties to squelch dissent.

In all six novels, however, the problem of history—in order to change it one mist know it—is inextricable from the problem of language. This dilemma, while implicit in some of the novels, is at the foreground of Close Sesame, the third novel in the second trilogy. What excites Deeriye, a pious Muslim and patriarch of his family, is the way in which translation—fro speech to writing, from Somali to Hebrew, from Islam to English, and so forth—engineers the movement we call history. In the passage I just read Deeriye celebrates translation as an instance of the language-as-window model, as blurless representation. Yet every relationship in this novel, including the ones cited in the passage, is troubled by misunderstanding, secrecy (however a matter of discretion and necessity), deliberate disinformation, and so forth. For example, Deeriye learns that the letters he received in prison, letters written by his son, Mursal, that supposedly convey his wife’s—Mursal’s mother’s—thoughts were, in fact, invented, exaggerated, by Mursal. And Natasha, Mursal’s Jewish wife, complains bitterly about the family speaking Somali after Mursal’s disappearance into the behemoth of the state—like Deeriye at the beginning of the novel, she is made a stranger in her “own” family. Indeed, after one passionate complaint by Natasha, Deeriye, literally at a loss for words, prostrates himself before Natasha, grabbing her hands and begging her forgiveness. This melodramatic moment straight out of a formulaic movie is redeemed by the reader’s awareness of the political and cultural ramifications: Deeriye is a Muslim man prostrating himself before a Jewish woman. Having reached the apparent “end” of translation, the novel opens up onto a gesture toward the classic slave-master dialectic in as much as Deeriye’s act of humility is meant to suggest not debasement on his part but equality between him and Natasha. Only by casting himself at her feet can she enter his family as an equal.

Can we imagine this relationship between two men or, if you will, between two languages? The very act of translation opens up an aperture through which we glimpse the dynamics of history as an endless replaying of the slave-master dialectic—that is, the slavemaster and Master—or Mister—Slave. From one language into another for those who cannot—do not—will not—speak the language of origin. Capability, status and volition straddle the nurture/nature divide aslant—as though one “leg” were shorter than the other, as one though one language were “taller” (perhaps closer to divinity), as though one linguistic system were “normal,” another, “disabled.”

Consider the examples of two men: Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. Among all the accusations and finger-pointing, I want to cite three commentaries that illustrate the ends of translation—and the beginning of the slave-master dialectic (idiots version). In his New Republic essay “Cool We Can Believe In” novelist/poet Paul Beatty attempts to pin down Obama’s apparent invulnerability to closet skeletons, his anti-Tar Baby immunity, to that most ineffable of blues and jazz attitudes-sans-attitude—cool. This updated stoicism, for Beatty, is the very antithesis of translation—it does not convert, change or represent. It is before all morality, outside any ethos. It is the analogue to reading a poem in a language you do not understand. Or as Adam Clark, a theologian at Xavier University, put it: “The language of the black church that conveys this oppositionality [to empire] does not translate well into the arena of presidential politics. It was never intended to.” And so, writes Kofi Natambu, both men should have simply agreed to disagree. Of course, as everyone from the editors of the New York Times to FOX News has recognized, there are no individual black men or women in public. There are only translators who speak at least two languages, and those dead, as dead as Latin, as labor, so goes the story. At the end of Close Sesame, Deeriye gives in to revenge—his son is dead—and just as he is about to pull a pistol on the General, the trigger gets entangled in his prayer beads—his bullet-riddled body, cast aside by the General’s guards, evokes the Colonel at the end of Under The Volcano, thrown into the ditch with all the other dead dogs.