Translating Worlds

Migration, Memory, and Culture

Susannah Radstone, Rita Wilson, Susannah Radstone, Rita Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655999
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This international and interdisciplinary volume explores the relations between translation, migration, and memory. It brings together humanities researchers from a range of disciplines including history, museum studies, memory studies, translation studies, and literary, cultural, and media studies to examine memory and migration through the interconnecting lens of translation. The innovatory perspective adopted by Translating Worlds understands translation's explanatory reach as extending beyond the comprehension of one language by another to encompass those complex and multi-layered processes of parsing by means of which the unfamiliar and the familiar, the old home and the new are brought into conversation and connection.
Themes discussed include:

• How memories of lost homes act as aids or hindrances to homemaking in new worlds.
• How cultural memories are translated in new cultural contexts.
• Migration, affect, memory, and translation.
• Migration, language, and transcultural memory.
• Migration, traumatic memory, and translation.

Part 1

Migrating and translating memory across multiple fields

1 The lost clock

Remembering and translating enigmatic messages from migrant objects

Susannah Radstone

Lying on the table beside me is a small antique clock. Given its size, it might well be a carriage clock—a clock made for travel—which would be fitting given that, like me, the clock has made the long journey from London to my current home in inner city Melbourne. Before something impelled me to write about it, the clock had been hidden—or lost actually—behind the door of a little compartment inside the secretary desk that sits in the corner of the room where I write. Even if this room’s arrangements are makeshift, with my books piled high and haphazardly in one corner and pictures still balanced against the chest of drawers and on the desk top, not everything is as oddly located as this clock had been, when I found it. Inside that dark recess lying close to the clock, there was one more haphazardly placed object, an old and tarnished, embossed silver picture frame, lined with blue moiré silk, which used to contain a photograph of my paternal grandmother—my bubba. Both of these objects—the clock and the empty frame—belonged to my father, and came with me in my packing cases from London. But things don’t just travel. It must have been me who decided to pack the clock and the picture frame and bring them with me to Melbourne, and it was me who, with an as yet inchoate sense of its intimations (Hage 2010), decided to search out the clock to write about it, here. Choice, desire, deliberation, and agency must each have played their part as I packed, misplaced, found, and then placed the clock beside me—actions, aside from the hiding or losing of the clock, that seem to indicate that I wanted to bring the clock with me on my journey to Australia. But why then, if I wanted to keep it with me, did I put the clock out of sight, and how can this oddly located object help illuminate the relations between migrancy, objects, memory, and translation?

Objects/migration/memory

When research on memory and migration turns to ‘memory objects’ (Marschall 2019) or ‘migrant objects’ (Vanni 2013, p. 156), it is on the premise that the significant feelings and memories prompted, elicited, or amplified by the things that we migrants bring with us might illuminate the connections between migrant ‘home-building’ (Hage 2010; and see Levin 2015) and the remembrance and invocation of former homes. Research methods have included tours of migrants’ abodes to show the researcher ‘the valued objects that made their sense of “home” complete’ (Tolia-Kelly 2004, p. 317) and interviews in the home (Christou and Janta 2019). In keeping with the interdisciplinarity of Memory Studies, research on migrant objects has been informed by insights from many disciplines including geography (Tolia-Kelly 2004), mobility studies (Marschall 2019), and anthropology (Hage 2010), and by theories including performativity (Fortier 2000) and cultural materialism (Pahl 2012). In keeping, too, with developments in Memory Studies, much recent research on memory and migration nuances common sense understandings of memory—that memory records, stores, and reproduces the past—with richer, more complex, and less binary accounts of remembering. Memory Studies no longer conceives of memories as fixed, retrievable representations stored in personal or collective archives. Instead, remembering and forgetting are now more likely to be understood as processes forged by the present as well as the past (Radstone 2013, p. 227). As Erll and Rigney argue:

‘remembering’ is better seen as an active engagement with the past, as performative rather than as reproductive. It is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving earlier stories.

(2009, p. 2)

These moves within recent memory research have done much to unsettle the binary opposition between past and present in favour of a view of their mnemonic implication and imbrication. Memory Studies has played its part, too, in unsettling binaries associated with space. Transnational memory research (see, for instance, Cesari and Rigney 2014) has served to shift focus from what it conceives of as an overly static and reified conception of ‘lieux de memoire [sites of memory]’ (Nora 1984–1992) to a more dynamic account of ‘travelling memory’ (Erll 2011). This productive complicating of the opposition between ‘here’ and ‘there’¹ has enabled acts of migrant remembering to be conceptualized as processes forged through movement rather than as retrievals of stable memories ineluctably tethered to a lost home.

The influence of memory and migration research on theories of memory can be seen in the proposal that migration rather than location is ‘the condition of memory’ (Creet 2010, p. 9; and see Misztal and Sundholm 2016). ‘Movement’, argues Creet, ‘is what produces memory—and our anxieties about pinning it to place’ (ibid.). On accounts informed by these theories of memory, migrant objects are no longer perceived simply as containers for fixed (and melancholy) memories of lost homes. In place of this somewhat reifying and static conception of memory’s relations with migrant possessions, migrant objects research now emphasizes the dynamics of migrant remembering. This focus on dynamics is evident in studies that reveal how the emplacement of migrant objects in ‘new cultural landscapes’ changes perceptions and feelings about those objects (Vanni 2013, p. 160), in some cases linking them less to the past than with building future lives in migrants’ adopted homes (Hage 2010). The ground shared by this recent corpus on memory and migration includes more, though, than a focus on the fluid qualities of remembering and the malleability of memory worlds by present contexts. Much of the last decade or more’s research on memory and migration is united by a politics of migrant identity. Many of these studies marshal their findings about memory and migration to promote a view of the migrant as ‘creating agentic ways to settle in new host societies’ (Christou and Janta 2019, p. 657) in order to counter the ‘“miserabilist” tendency in the study of migration that wants to make migrants passive pained people at all costs’ (Hage 2010, p. 417). By naming this tendency ‘the amputee model’, one study of refugees has indicated how much there is to be gained by rebutting such a diminishing and reductive view of the migrant and the refugee (Nassari 2007). Studies have sought to counter this amputee model primarily through nuanced accounts of migrant nostalgia that foreground instances of future-oriented agency in migrants’ mobilizations of memories linked to objects from former homes. Ghassan Hage takes up the example of a Lebanese-Australian couple’s discovery in Sydney of a lovingly remembered and much missed food from home—the Lebanese cucumber—to argue that ‘nostalgia should not be conceptually collapsed with home-sickness as it can readily be conceived in a far more positive light as an enabling memory’ (Hage 2010, p. 416; and see Boym 2001), deployed in ‘practices of home-building in the here and now’ (ibid., p. 424). Rather than conceiving of the memories attached to objects as stored inertly within a memory ‘portmanteau’ (Tolia-Kelly 2004, cited in Pahl 2012, p. 306), researchers have made inroads into tracing an ongoing process of ‘homing’² understood as the ‘reclaiming and reprocessing of habits, objects … that have been uprooted—in migration …’ (Ahmed et al. 2003, p. 9). When objects travel and ‘sustain a process of loss of their domestic placement and usage’, argues Vanni, ‘[t]hey become unhomely’ (Vanni 2013, p. 166) but, he continues, ‘[t]hrough usage, objects … create new ecologies of meaning, social relations and new sensoria’ (ibid., p. 167). In response to the question ‘what happens when objects travel?’ (ibid., p. 156) Vanni draws on a cultural materialist view of the autonomous agency of objects—objects ‘create new ecologies’ (ibid., emphasis mine)—while echoing Hage and others’ theme of the agency of migrants who, argues Vanni, through their activities and practices, transform the unhomely into home.

By emphasizing migrants’ active homemaking practices with memory objects, the research discussed above seeks to restore to migrants an agentic subjectivity put under threat by the amputee model’s emphasis on passive suffering and loss. Yet along with gains come losses, for in seeking to restore agency to migrants, these studies risk producing an account of migrant subjectivity from which memory’s least transparent, least biddable and yet most enriching and life-sustaining aspects have been excised. When researchers invite migrants to discuss the mnemonic connections between their migrant objects and their former homes, their questions reveal three underpinning assumptions: that the primary axis of migrants’ object-related memories will run between their former and adopted homes; that the associations prompted by migrant objects can be fully accounted for in terms of that axis and that memory’s associations are biddable—that an object’s associations will be to those memories that we wish to remember. Memory research suggests, however, that all three of these assumptions are grounded in a reductive and diminishing account of how memory works. As Richard Terdiman (2003) has argued, memory’s associations can neither be fully contained nor controlled. Rather than working in support of pre-determined or intended connections, for Terdiman, memory is at the same time ‘responsive’ (2003, p. 195), ‘unrestrainable’ (2003, p. 188), and ‘ungovernable’ (ibid., p. 192). Far from tying us to any fixed spatial (or other) axis, memory’s ‘blasé incongruities’ (ibid., p. 192) and ‘fluky links’ (ibid., p. 186) can lead us in unexpected rather than predictable directions. To assume or expect that the memory prompts exerted by migrant objects will always and inevitably lead back to former homes is to misconstrue memory as modelling the ‘logic of logic’ rather than the ‘logic of rhetoric’ (ibid., p. 195). As Terdiman puts it, ‘[w]e truncate our faculties if we forget [this]’ (ibid.). Research interviews on memory and migrant objects risk several further truncations of memory. The assumption that migrants have full access to chosen, transparent, and communicable memories linked with objects produces a version of memory—and therefore of subjectivity—shorn of involuntary and sought memory’s complexity, opacity, multivalency, and unpredictability. This is a version of memory that erases its unbiddable illuminations and obscurities in the interests of granting to migrants the capacity to be active homemakers in their adopted lands, here, now, and into the future. As I will go on to argue, one irony of this confabulation lies in its subtraction from memory of that temporalizing force that orientates us towards the future (Fletcher 1999, p. 190). All of this leaves us with the question of whether migrant remembering can be conceived of as active and subject to memory’s enlivening, unbiddable, and opaque aspects and it is here that the concept of translation proves helpful.

Migrating/remembering/translating

One gesture towards retaining rather than amputating memory’s richness while continuing to model migrant subjectivity as active and agentic can be found in the introduction of the concept of translation into memory research on migrant objects. Writing in 2012, Polezzi had already noted the frequency with which the trope of translation was being deployed as a metaphor across multiple disciplinary studies of migration (2012, p. 345), before going on to argue that ‘[a]gency is a crucial issue in the encounter between translation and migration’ (ibid., p. 347). ‘Migrants, then, may also become translators’ argues Polezzi, ‘as well as or instead of requiring (or being posited as requiring) translation. They may have the opportunity to shift from objects of translation to active subjects, to agents in the process’ (ibid., p. 348). The translation trope and the construal of migrants as active translating agents mark studies of memory and migrant objects, including Vanni’s research on Italian migrants to Australia. Drawing on De Martino, Vanni describes how the removal of homely objects and their associated activities from their ‘“homeland of action”’ (De Martino 1977, cited in Vanni 2013, p. 163) detaches them from the ‘“vast repositories of buried memories”’ (ibid., p. 164) with which they are associated, rendering them unhomely. Following De Martino, Vanni understands the ‘becoming unhomely’ of migrant objects as a form of cultural apocalypse or ‘crisi della presenza’ (ibid., p. 162), constituted by ‘the loosening of things from familiar contexts and linguistic networks and their subsequent loss of familiarity and operability and loss or excess—and therefore ambiguity—of meaning’ (ibid.). Through usage, however, argues Vanni, ‘objects recover their everydayness and create new ecologies of meaning, social relations, and new sensoria … enabling habits and translating memories and pasts into the present’ (ibid., p. 167). Even though the ‘geography of home recreated by these objects is by no means a faithful translation, copy or substitution of the “home back home”’ (ibid., p. 160), it is ‘[o]bjects [that] offer the possibility of translating the everyday into a new cultural grammar, and of re-establishing connections between latent cultural memories, language, usage’. Through their use by their migrant owners, Vanni concludes, ‘[o]bjects become domestic, homely, again’. (ibid., p. 167). As with the memory research on migrant objects discussed earlier, Vanni seeks to rescue migrants from an eternity of passive loss by emphasizing the agency of objects and of migrants’ use of objects in future-oriented homemaking. But if Memory Studies-influenced work on migrant objects divests memory of its less amenable yet defining elements, Vanni’s argument does something similar to the concepts of translation and the unhomely. In the case of translation, the likening of migrants’ use of objects to a process of translation through which objects recover their everyday ‘obviousness’ (Vanni 2013, p. 163) of meaning in their new locations seems to endorse a ‘translatability assumption’ (Apter 2013) that detracts from Translation Studies’ insights regarding the inevitable limits of translatability (ibid.). In the case of the unhomely, the positing of migrant objects as becoming fully homely again through use loses ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Series Editors Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Translating Worlds: Approaching migration through Memory and Translation Studies
• PART 1: Migrating and translating memory across multiple fields
• PART 2: Translating and migrating languages, ideologies, and identities
• Index