Accented Futures

Language Activism And The Ending Of Apartheid

Carli Coetzee

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781868147793
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistique

In this wonderfully original, intensely personal yet deeply analytical work, Carli Coetzee argues that difference and disagreement can be forms of activism to bring about social change, inside and outside the teaching environment. Since it is not the student alone who needs to be transformed, she proposes a model of teaching that is insistent on the teacher's scholarship as a tool for hearing the many voices and accents in the South African classroom. For Coetzee, 'accentedness' is a description for actively working towards the ending of apartheid by being aware of the legacies of the past, without attempting to empty out or gloss over the conflicts and violence that may exist under the surface. In the broad context of education, 'accent' can be an accent of speech; an attitude; a stance against being 'understood'; yet a way of teaching that requires teacher and pupil to understand each other's contexts. This is a book about the relationships created by the use of language to convey knowledge, particularly in translation. The ideas it presents are evocative, thought-provoking and challenging at times. Accented Futures makes a significant and important contribution to research on identity in post-apartheid South Africa as well as to the fields of education and translation studies.

Chapter 1

AGAINST TRANSLATION, IN DEFENCE OF ACCENTEDNESS

AGAINST TRANSLATION

Translation would seem to offer much to someone imagining a future different from the apartheid past: it emphasises mutuality, is intent on contextualisation and demands of one to imagine the position of another. Yet in the following pages I make a number of arguments against translation. I show why I prefer accentedness to translation as a description of the activist work of the ending of apartheid, and argue that refusal to translate or resistance to being translated are forms of the activism this book analyses and theorises.

There is a growing literature from within translation studies that is suspicious of itself and of its own good intentions. Translation, Susan Bassnett has written, can be understood as ‘an effect of inequalities’ (2002: 4) rather than as a meeting of equals. In this version of translation work, it can be seen as a suspect activity in which inequalities (of economics, politics, gender, geography) are not only reflected but also reproduced in the mechanics of textual production. Bassnett summarises:

Perhaps the most exciting new trend of all is the expansion of the discipline of translation studies beyond the boundaries of Europe … More emphasis has been placed on the inequality of the translation relationship with writers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Tejaswini Niranjana and Eric Cheyfitz arguing that translation was effectively used in the past as an instrument of colonial domination, a means of depriving the colonised peoples of a voice. For in the colonial model, one culture dominated and the others were subservient, hence translation reinforced that power hierarchy (Bassnett 2002: 4).

The insight that translation features in asymmetrical relations is not new. In a 1986 paper on ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, Talal Asad had this to say on the inequality of languages: ‘I have proposed that the anthropological enterprise of cultural translation may be vitiated by the fact that there are asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant societies. And I have suggested that anthropologists need to explore these processes in order to determine how far they go in defining the possibilities and the limits of effective translation’ (1986: 164). This line of inquiry has been taken up in another context by Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context: ‘Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism’ (1992: 2). Niranjana (1992: 84) argues that it is possible for bilingual translators to ‘challenge earlier Western versions through retranslation’ – to think here of translation as an act of resistance and self-representation. I develop these ideas in this book, and argue that the act of refusing to translate, or to be translated, can be a powerful form of resistance. It is a truism that resisting translation runs the risk that it can be confused with silence – and the complications around the reputed silence of the ‘subaltern’ have received a great deal of attention.

Niranjana concludes her book by writing:

since post-colonials already exist ‘in translation’, our search should not be for origins or essences but for a richer complexity, a complication of our notions of the ‘self’, a more densely textured understanding of who ‘we’ are. It is here that translators can intervene to inscribe heterogeneity, to warn against myths of purity, to show origins as always already fissured. Translation, from being a ‘containing’ force, is transformed into a disruptive, disseminating one. The deconstruction initiated by re-translation opens up a post-colonial space as it brings ‘history to legibility’ (1992: 186).

What this means here is clear: the postcolonial translator (or re-translator) has to resist the homogenised (orientalised, some might say as a shorthand) representations of ourselves/themselves, and offer, instead, heterogeneity and a refusal of essence. This same insistence on heterogeniety is found in debates around varieties of English. Like English elsewhere in Africa (and a vast literature exists around this – see the edited collection by Rajend Mesthrie, Language in South Africa, 2002, for an overview of the scholarship), its identities and uses are complex. The version of translation studies outlined in Niranjana’s work can lead, for South African English, to the disruption of the myth of colonial origin and language purity (see also Rajend Mesthrie’s recent Eish But is it English? Celebrating the South African Variety, 2011).

This in turn means that English is viewed as diverse and accented within itself, a reorientation that is theorised in Njabulo Ndebele’s work. Ndebele shows that what may seem like an openness to the different versions (and accents, my book would add) of English may in the end turn out to be an attempt at benign containment by those keen to keep English ‘standard’ – that is, unaccented. Linked to this risk of containment, or accent loss, is also the question of translation out of African language texts and into English. One might argue for the importance of disseminating more widely texts that are written in African languages; yet translation out of African languages into English can also become a form of containment, a deletion of the accents of the text. In addition, the labour of translation risks remaining invisible, the smoothness of the English-language translation replacing the original utterance, which becomes over-inscribed with the new translated version, rendering the original (in this case the African language text or document) invisibly contained.

In this version of translation, the burden of labour falls on those who speak languages other than English; that burden is to translate into English, allowing English to remain the standard and the norm. This might also allow monolingual English speakers to remain monolingual, benefiting from the work of those who translate. In her essay (or rather the English language translation) ‘Consecration and accumulation of literary capital: Translation as unequal exchange’, Pascale Casanova writes: ‘Far from being the horizontal exchange and peaceful transfer often described, translation must be understood, on the contrary, as an “unequal exchange” that takes place in a strongly hierarchised universe’ (2009: 86). Casanova is mostly interested in the role translation can play in the consecration of authors and texts, and how literary ‘capital’ is generated and transferred through the work of translation. My interest is not so much in the status of the texts and authors as ‘capital’, but rather in the work of translation, the labour, itself.

Recent work on interpreting and witnessing in war and conflict situations has much to offer us in this resistant understanding of translation. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter (2006) pays attention to metaphors of war and regionality, and wants to bring to the surface the potential political meanings of translation and its limits:

The book aims to rethink translation studies – a field traditionally defined by problems of linguistic and textual fidelity to the original – in a broad theoretical framework that emphasises the role played by mistranslation in war, the influence of language and literature wars on canon formation and literary fields, the aesthetic significance of experiments with nonstandard language … (2006: 3).

Apter is also interested in what she terms ‘nontranslation, mistranslation, and the disputed translation of evidentiary visual information’. Mistranslation here refers to ‘a concrete particular of the art of war, crucial to strategy and tactics, part and parcel of the way in which images of bodies are read … It is also the name of diplomatic breakdown and paranoid misreading’ (2006: 15). For Apter, it would be accurate to regard war as, in fact, ‘a condition of nontranslatability or translation failure at its most violent peak’ (2006: 16).

In the South African context, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the way its work has been reported provide a fascinating example of such a translation failure. Some might argue that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the opposite of war, a commission that has as its intention the unification of a nation after civil war. Yet insisting on mistranslation and non-translatability has been one strand in the critical response to the TRC. Understanding, in this version, risks containment; for to understand means to forgive. For an illustration of the effects of a refusal to forgive, one may think of Nkosinathi Biko’s resistance (2000: 193-8) to the TRC process. The literature on the TRC is vast (some useful academic responses include Posel and Simpson’s, Villa Vicenzio’s and Wilson’s), but I want here to highlight just one aspect of this literature, what Apter might call ‘translation failure’. I am interested, in particular, in the ways in which this translation failure can be interpreted as a form of accented resistance. Failure to translate, in this argument, can be read as resistance to be included in a particular version of the past.

Debates around the TRC also provide excellent examples of the ways in which translation into English is not neutral, and in which the direction of translation itself has a history. Interpreters and translators laboured to translate the testimonies of victims and survivors into English, the translated version being taken up as the official version. Richard Wilson’s (2001) chapter ‘Technologies of truth: The TRC’s truth-making machine’ in The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa provides a rich discussion of the ways the statement taking was set up, and how English came to replace the original language version. The essays collected in Deborah Posel’s and Graeme Simpson’s (2002) Commissioning the Past pay attention to the language of the TRC, and the impact of language and terminology choices on its search for ‘truth’. In his Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of the Truth Commission, Mark Sanders (2007: 155) provides the most sustained reflection on the languages of the TRC:

Repeated reference is made to the translation apparatus at the hearings, and to the policy of taking statements in the language chosen by the witness (Truth Commission Report 5:2-8, III; I:146-147, 298-299). The crucial fact that these statements were then ‘record[ed] in English’, (Truth Commission Report 5:5) is not, however, underlined. I will underline it: the fact that the report and the eleven million pages of transcripts are in English, and the original language less easily accessible on audio- and videotape housed at the National Archives of South Africa in Pretoria, means, once again, that the decolonising impulse to restoration and restitution is an equivocal one.

Sanders makes, in passing, the point that I want to develop more completely: that translation into English may at times not serve the best interests of those who are translated, nor of those who perform the labour.

Translation nowadays, in official contexts in South Africa, predominantly happens into English, out of other South African languages. The border crossings enrich English, the labour is performed by heteroglots for the benefit of monolingual English-speakers, who can thus ‘afford’ (to extend the economic metaphor) to remain monoglot since the work of heteroglossia and translating is performed by someone else. A further inequality of this situation is that many monolingual South Africans tend to be English-speakers, and tend to be the beneficiaries of racially and linguistically determined privileges. When translation takes place out of other South African languages into South African English, this monolingual privilege can be confirmed and extended. Here we see translation serving an agenda of neutralising accents and diluting heteroglossia.

Translation and lack of translation are themes running through many of the chapters in this book, most clearly in the chapter on the collaborative research project written up as There was this Goat, itself a reflection on translation, and on its value and its limitations. The discussion traces the many ways in which translation is used figuratively in There was this Goat; but also draws out the underlying tensions in the collaborative project. My own reading of There was this Goat seeks out moments where the project is questioned or where the collaborators are in conflict over the meaning of their work. Translation is best seen, I argue, as a site of conflict, rather than as a path to reconciliation and understanding.

In the chapter on teachers (‘He places his chair against mine and translates’) we read of teachers whose accented teaching practices make material understandable to their students. These HIV educators, who travel around the country with their mobile cinema, screen an autobiographical film in which their own vulnerability is very clearly to be seen. In their discussions with their audience (the viewers who come to see the film and to be educated) we see an excellent example of a teacher who speaks in the accent of his (they are all men) students. He is attuned to what he needs to know about them in order for them to learn. Another gifted teacher in the same chapter is the man we know as ‘Sizwe’ from Jonny Steinberg’s (2009) book Three Letter Plague. Sizwe reveals himself to be a teacher who facilitates the learning of his pupil, Steinberg, but whose own relationship to language and to education is a darker theme in the book. The inequalities of access to education and to English skews what Steinberg and Sizwe can make of the knowledge shared between them.

A different approach to translation failure is that found in the chapter on early histories of translation in South Africa. Early colonial histories of South Africa contain many references to translators and interpreters, yet these linguistic transactions did not lead to situations of equality or mutuality (as those who use translation as a version of equality and learning about others may want to promise us). Instead, these early African translator figures were conscripted and viewed as agents of European mercantilism and colonial expansion. In this chapter we see most clearly the arguments against translation, as the discussion traces a continuing trend in the translational encounter in South Africa, where translation is done at the cost of African languages.

TOWARDS ACCENTEDNESS

I want this book to move beyond translation as a way of thinking about discourses of transformation, and instead develop the concept of accentedness. The term ‘accent’ is not used in this book in the strictly linguistic sense, not taken to be the auditory features of pronunciation which enable one to place the speaker socially and regionally (Crystal 1991: 2). The literature on accent is intent on differentiation and stratification, both of phonemes and of the ways in which we are placed and grouped in the world. The way in which it is used here is instead to denote the acknowledgement of a specific, even a ‘local’, orientation or field of reference; it is a figurative use of the term which is sometimes at odds with the ways in which the term is defined in linguistics. The way in which accent is used here is closer to that of Hamid Naficy in An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001), but Naficy wants the concept to do very different work from the way I use it. For Naficy, accented discourse is a feature of displacement, a form of communication favoured by those whose work and lives are inflected by the experiences of diaspora and exile. In my work, the accent is, on the contrary, a way of thinking about ‘home’, and finding ways of reading and teaching that aim to understand and bring local meanings to bear on interpretation. My own use of the term also emphasises conflict and discord as features of accent, whereas Naficy’s term is marked with diasporic longing and loss.

In the chapters that follow, accentedness is developed as a theoretical concept, through an examination of a range of texts, artworks, images and artefacts. Accent is, in the first place, understood as resistance to absorption. Njabulo Ndebele’s challenge to the English Academy is a key text in this understanding of accentedness. I discuss Ndebele’s work for a strand of ideas around accent, mother tongue and resistance to what he calls ‘benign containment’, framing the analysis of his work by an account of a staff seminar in which the seminar presenter, Tlhalo Raditlhalo, describes and performs not being understood. Instead of trying to show that Raditlhalo had in fact been ‘understood’, I argue that this resistance to being understood is what one needs to ‘understand’; and discuss suspicion and mistrust as important components of accented discourse. Accentedness is thus not seen as a drive to reconciliation and homogeneity; instead it is an attitude that challenges and defies those in power and aims to bring to the surface conflictual histories.

In the third chapter, I analyse the work of artist and academic Thembinkosi Goniwe. An open letter to the South African National Gallery, written as a young academic, provides a way of approaching Goniwe’s project of resistance. I use Goniwe’s theoretical work on representation to develop the concept of accentedness further, here focusing on language and the orientation of knowledge. Goniwe’s work of art is interpreted as a visual form of accusation, forcing the viewer to adopt the position of someone who refuses to meet his gaze – even when one is doing precisely that. I discuss the performance of being misunderstood, and the insistence on misunderstanding, as a form of resistance and as a version of accentedness.

Another way of approaching resistance is theorised through the concept of address, understood in the first place as location (either from where something or someone comes or to where it goes), but also in the related sense of speaking or writing with a listener or reader in mind. In all the chapters of this book, intertextuality as a way towards interpreting a text is seen as potentially activist work. Making our thinking accented is a way of thinking about who we are addressing, and what they might know (and we ourselves might need to know). An important theoretical insight underpinning this argument is what Simon Gikandi calls ‘reading the referent’: to know which referent to invoke when reading a text. Gikandi reads a text by Dambudzo Marechera, including references to Shakespeare and also to Lobengula, the last king of the Matabele people. Gikandi shows that a particular reader will ‘r...