Words and Worlds: Transculturalism, Translation, Identity A NORDFORSK Symposium Arranged by the Nordic Network of Literary Transculturation Studies Helsinki, Finland 26-28.8.2011 Book of Extended Abstracts Edited by Jopi Nyman University of Eastern Finland Joensuu 2011 PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME Friday 26 August 9.30 Opening 10.00 Morning coffee 10.30 Keynote Lecture: Professor Harish Trivedi (University of Delhi): Translation and the Postcolonial: Gandhi, Fanon and Rushdie 12-13 Lunch 13-15 Working Groups A and B (PARALLEL SESSIONS) 15-15.30 Afternoon coffee 15.30-17 Work Groups C and D (PARALLEL SESSIONS) Steering Board Meeting 19.00 Dinner (own arrangements) Saturday 27 August 9.30 Morning Coffee 10.00-12.00 Working Groups E and F (PARALLEL SESSIONS) 12-13 Lunch 13-14 Keynote lecture: Professor Stephen Wolfe (University of Tromsö): Here, There and Everywhere: Border Theory and Aesthetic Work 14-14.30 Afternoon coffee 14.30-16.30 Working groups G and H (PARALLEL SESSIONS) 19.00 Conference Dinner. Restaurant Zetor, Helsinki. Sunday 28 August 10.00 Morning Coffee 10.30-12 Working Groups’ Reports and Final Plenary Session 12.00 Close of conference 2 Working groups A: • Eva Rein: Levels of Translation in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan • Rūta Šlapkauskaitė: Displace, Converge, Translate: Maps and Photos in Michael Ondaatje‘s Running in the Family • Jopi Nyman: Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb: Language, Translation, and Identity in Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses • Elita Salina: Voicing the Experience of Contemporary Emigration in Latvian Novel B: • Joel Kuortti: India in Trans-late-it: Tendencies of Representation in Translating Indian Fiction • Tatjana Bicjutko: ”Now tell me whether one can draw any parallels here,/Or worse, concentric circles”: Bilingual Poetry Collections in Latvia • Maija Burima: Oriental Attributes in Early Modernist Latvian Literature • Ene-Reet Soovik: Translating Hybridity: Salman Rushdie’s Novels in Estonian C: • Jakob Lothe: Transculturation and Perspective in Modernism and Postcolonialism: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Aissia Djebars’s So Vast the Prison • Johan Höglund: Skirting Hybridity: Translating Racial Anarchy in Richard Marsh’s The Surprising Husband • Benedikts Kalnačs: Transculturalism and National Identity: The Latvian Case • Sandra Meškova: Joycean Echoes in Latgalian Literature D: • Milda Danyte: Language Purity and Language Imperialism: Why East European Language Cultures of Lesser Use Distrust Translation Practices That Move in the Direction of Transculturation, Hybridity and Globalization • Jena Habegger-Conti: Translating English into English: An Exploration into Academic Publishing and Cultural Standards • Margareta Petersson: Distance and Intimacy on a Transcultural Stage: Letters from India. E: • Pekka Kilpeläinen: Transcultural Encounters in Utopian Spaces: James Baldwin, Paris, and Heterotopia • Amrita Kaur: Relating the Concept of Transculturation to Maxine Hong Kingston’s Novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book • Matthias Stephan: On Transcultural Sites in Science Fiction 3 F: • Eva Birzniece: Identity and Language in the Latvian Literature of Deportation and Exile • Ulla Rahbek: When Z Lost Her Reference: Language, Culture and Identity in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers • Kristina Aurylaite: ”we got the right to take over the city with our very own rez lingo”: Language Games and Troubles in First Nations Canadian Poems and Play • Anne Holden Ronning: Translated Identities in Settler Literature G: • Lotta Strandberg: Generic Hybridity in Githa Hariharan’s First Three Novels: Embedded Storytelling as a Strategy • Kamal Sbiri: Writing Memory: Translating Identities in Transcultural (con)Text in Anouar Majid’s Si Yussef • Maria Beville: ‘It beggars description’: Uncanny History in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea • Lene Johannessen: The Limits of Transculturation in John Sayles’ Lone Star H: • Daniel Olsen: The Discomfortable Read: Literary Otherness and Transculturation in J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country • Maria Olaussen: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism: Language and Transculturation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke • John A. Stotesbury: On Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley • Ashleigh Harris: Robert Mugabe’s Inside the Third Chimurenga and Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys: A Counterpoint 4 Kristina Aurylaite Vytautas Magnus University “we got the right to take over the city with our very own rez lingo”: Language Games and Troubles in First Nations Canadian Texts “[W]e got the right to take over the city / spray paint it / with our very own rez lingo,” says the speaker in “Street Rite,” a poem by First Nations Canadian poet and Vancouver resident Gregory Scofield (116). The pun in the tile suggests both ceremony and licence through which the poem’s “we” declare their insubordinate presence in a contemporary multicultural North American city. The poem further details a range of critical issues important to this particular urban setting: the ethnic segmentation of the city space, the aggression of a specific ethnic group, First Nations people, and their disturbing presence. This disturbance is manifested in such familiar subculture techniques as provocative graffiti, public drinking and faulting passers-by. The poem insists: We got the right to speak/ slurred unrefined English if we want to/ yell in a back alley or talk tough to a pawn broker […] if we want take out around the clock that’s up to us / when I want sushi that means now not later. (116) But, in Scofield’s poem, this defiant behaviour transcends juvenile rebellion as the text counters a set of linguistic labels that have categorised, stereotyped and colonised Canada’s indigenous people as primitive, unrefined and not even human drunks and junkies. However, the impulse in Scofield’s poem is not to undo, deny or subvert these labels, but to pose the confrontational question, “so what?” The poem celebrates these people’s difference, their deviance from the norms of the dominant white society. It applauds their rejection of the advantages of assimilation and integration into the politically propagated dominant white culture. Furthermore, the poem aims almost ceremoniously to secure a space for the First Nations among Vancouver’s numerous ethnic neighbourhoods and, more generally, within Canada’s multicultural mosaic. For a long time the indigenous people were the “the invisible minority” (McMillan 327) in this mosaic, silent by implication. Language plays a significant role in the First Nations’ “street rites.” English, imposed upon the colonised indigenous people in order to deracinate their culture, is now used by the poem’s “we” to announce their exuberant presence. Simultaneously, they twist, distort and fuse English with words from the indigenous languages. “Slurred,” “unrefined” and potentially subversive, the aberrant English 5 becomes an ethnic marker which is profusely used in contemporary texts by various ethnic minority writers, both indigenous and immigrant. The earlier generations of First Nations writers intended to make the stories of their debasement as comprehensible as possible in order to reach wider audiences; consequently, their autobiographical and testimonial texts were often accused of being simplistic. Now, minority writers eagerly engage in various language “games” and “troubles” (Castillo 145, 157). The present paper explores some of the linguistic strategies that multilingual First Nations Canadian writers use in their texts. My aim is to illuminate the ways they, as Shackleton puts it, “appropriate the language of the imperial centre and use it for [their] own expressive purposes,” making it “essentially resistant” in their defiance of the values and practices of the dominant culture (215). As emphasised by Gilbert and Tompkins, the choice of a language or languages in this context is always a political act that determines not only the linguistic form of a text but also its implied audience (168). I also aim to show how the various language games in such texts govern and, quite frequently, manipulate their audiences by controlling their access to a text as well as the culture behind it. Thus these texts can resist the homogenising powers of the mainstream culture and, as Scofield’s poems, seek to (re)claim a space for the First Nations people in today’s world. They aim “to take over the city” as Scofield announces, mock-echoing the colonial project of appropriation, and it is through language that this space is (re)claimed: Scofield’s “spray painting” the city with “our very own rez lingo.” The word “lingo” means a group language and in the poem becomes an ethnic marker, “essentially resistant,” as Shackleton puts it (215), connoting difference and a specific group identity. Moreover, this lingo, made of “slurred unrefined” English that is fused with First Nations words, celebrates its speakers’ appropriation and exploitation of the colonial language. This allows not only for “upsetting” what is accepted as normative “proper” English, but also for crossing an imposed border — both spatial and linguistic — of the First Nations space, for which the infamous skid row serves as a metaphor. Deleuze and Guattari propose that a mother tongue is “a power takeover by a dominant language, within a political multiplicity” and that language “stabilises” around a political/ideological centre (7). They evoke a spatial image of language that covers and controls a territory. In this context, multi- language awareness and linguistic competence parallel cultural