Kwaku a. Gyasi, The African Writer as Translator

8/13/2019 Kwaku a. Gyasi, The African Writer as Translator

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Journal of African C ultural Studies, outledgeTay or .mncts r upVolume 16 Number 2, December 2003 pp. 143-159

The African writer as tr an sla toc writingAfrican Languages through FrenchKWAK U A. GYASI(Univers i ty o Al ab am a)

A B S T R A C TThe relationship between the African writer and the language of theformer colonial power has often been studied in ideological terms. The classicalapproach has consisted in examining the attitudes and reactions of Africanwriters in the use of an alien tongue rather than the w rite r s re-appropriationof the foreign language in the creative writing process. This paper attem pts tore-orient the rejection on the imaginary, that is, on the creative use of theforeign language, a process that can now be considered under the notion oftranslation. I wish to expand the traditional notion of translation in order todemonstrate how it functions as a creative and critical activity in Africanliterature. M y de jn iti on of translation goes beyond the linguistic process that con-sists in transferring meaning from one lang uage to anothe r to include the entiremedium through which Third Wo rld cultures are transported to and recuperatedby audiences in the West.In angloph one Africa Ch inua Achebe, for instance, uses the potential flexibility ofEnglish to Africanize his style by manipulating rhythm, register and lexicon.Achebe's project to create a new English through Igbo, his mother tongue, iscarried out in French by two Francophone African writers, the Congolese HenriLopes and the Ivorian Ahmadou Kourouma. These writers' language becomes ahybrid code that forces the original French language to refer to the Africanlanguag es for signification. The paper strives to show that the writers' use ofFrench in their novels constitutes a creative translation process that leads to theproduction of texts conveying new African realities through the development ofan authentic African discourse.The issue of language is very central in discussions of African literature sinceliterature is inconceivable outside the context of language. Questions pertainingto language always arise in any discussion of the subject. They assume evengreater importance with regard to African literature than in relation to other litera-tures since the medium of literary expression in Africa is not only the writer'smother tongue but also the dominant, foreign European language imposed overthe indigenous African languages in the process of colonization. Indeed, asChantal Zabus (1991) points out, the m ultiplicity of languages an d the con comitantlanguage contact situation in African hav e always been not only a fertile soil for theISSN 1369 6815 print; 1469 9346 online/03/020143 17 2003 Journal of African Cultural StudiesDOI: 10.1080/13696850500076344


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44 Kwaku A Gyasigermination of linguistic conjectures but also a source of challenge and discomfort.However, if one looks at the language question in Africa, one realizes that theemphasis has especially been placed on the African writer s attitude towards theforeign European language rather than on the creative use of the language. Thisfocus, Katwiwa Mule (2002) argues, elides several important issues. What is therelationship of original texts in English or French by African writers to theforeign language of the colonizer? And what is the relationship of such original

texts to translation? For Mule,these issues are important because to look at the issue of English (or French) assomehow unrelated to the various forms of resistance with which African writershave responded to Europe s claim to cultural authority is to oversimplify the taskat hand (Mule 2002: 5).

In Anglophone Africa Chinua Achebe, for instance, uses the potential flexibility ofEnglish to Africanize his style by manipulating rhythm, register and lexicon. In hisessay The African Wr iter and the English Languag e Achebe declared:

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experi-ence. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestralhome but altered to suit its new African surroundings (Achebe 1975: 62).Many critics have analyzed and demonstrated Achebe s skill in fashioning a newEnglish, while his use of Igbo proverbs and pidgin English has constantlydelighted or dismayed reviewers. This is because Achebe s new English is a con-scious deviation from standard, metropolitan English. It is a new kind of Englishbased on the structures and semantics of Achebe s native Igbo. And it is thisnew reformulation of the European language by the African writer that I havechosen to consider under the notion of translation.

If, as Julio Ortega has suggested,the question of language and reading can be raised as a metaphor for a more complexinquiry about translation (Ortega 2003: 26),

it follows that our reading of postcolonial texts must, of necessity, locate these textswithin the broad perspective of translation. If we understand African literature as aninstrument of cultural production, then we must see translation as a crucial dimen-sion of this literature, especially the part that finds expression in Europeanlanguages. For, to quote Ortega again:

translating is the possibility of constructing a scene of mediation that framesinterpretation as a dialogic exercise I It is the first cultural act that placeslanguages and subjects in crisis, unleashing a redefinition of speakers, a debateover protocols, and a struggle over interpretation (ibid.: 26).I submit that African literature in European languages fits neatly into Ortega stranslation paradigm. It was Rosario Ferri who proposed that in a way allwriting is translation, an attempt to interpret the meaning of life. Fer ri s propositionsomehow recalls Octavio Paz s claim that all texts, being part of a literary system


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145he African wri ter as translatordescend ed from and related to other systems, are translations of translations oftranslations . But whereas Paz pointed o ut the uniqueness of translation:

Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such constitutes aunique text (Paz 1992: 154),FerrC emphasized the critical role of translation. Translation, she contends,is not only a literary task but a historical, social and political one as well. It includesan interpretation of internal history and of the changing proceedings of conscious-ness in a civilization (FerrC 1995: 41).In the colonial era and I believe the situation has not change d translation(together with assimilation and exoticism) was among some of the strategiesWestern scholars and critics used to acc omm odate or com e to terms with alterity.Such representational strategies established the perceived relationship between theWest and the other as they illustrated the politics of pow er that were operative inthose relationships. To this end , the other was sufficiently defined and explainedwithin the Western matrix of understanding. Earlier narratives about Africans bysuch European writers such as Joyce C ary, Joseph Conrad and the Tharaud brotherssought to translate to their audiences an African world and personality as under-stood from a colonial perspective. As Mule has pointed out, Joyce Cary sMr Johnson (the title character of Mister Johnson)

becomes not just a signifier of social disorder and the unteachability of the native butan epitome of the Hegelian peculiarly African character that is difficult to compre-hend (Mule 2002: 7).If Mr Johnson is given a voice on ly to express his happiness to die at the hands of hisWhite master, how different is his voice from the voiceless Africans who inhabitConrad s Heart of Darkness? Jan6s Riesz (1985) has explained how the novel aRandonne'e de Sam ba Diouf ( Sam ba Di ou f s Escapades ) by the brothers JCr6meand Jean Tharaud presents a piece of colonial propaganda in which Africans arecharacterized by a type of Babelic language confusion and by tribal conflictsd antiques rancunes sucrCes avec le lait [age-old feelings of rancour sw eetenedwith milk] (Tharaud Tharau d 1922: 126). In this colonial novel France appearsas the great unifier of a diversity of uncon trollable an d oppose d tribal powers:

Tous ces gens pour lesquels toute difference quelle qu 'elle soit est une raison d'h os -tilitk, se trouv aient, ce matin-la, rassem blks sur cette route, marchan t au m2me pas,coude 6 coude, par la volontk des Toubabs (ibid .: 206All these people for whom any difference whatsoever is cause for hostilities, gath-ered together that morning on this road, marching side by side to the samerhythm, through the power of the Whites '

Althoug h the term translation is not used, if we agree that literature presents a worldto its readers, then it is not difficult to see how the Tharaud brothers seem to havetranslated, in their own terms, for their Wh ite audience s, African attitudes, Africanspeech patterns, African beliefs and, especially from the quotation above, AfricanAll translations from French into English are mine, unless otherwise indicated.


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146 Kwaku A yasipeoples who are all too eager to submit to the designs of imperial power. AsTym oczko has explained,

Translation is paradoxically the means by which difference is perceived, preserved,and proscribed. Translation stands as one of the most significant means by which oneculture represents another Tymoczko 1999: 17).In the wake of postcolonial studies, translation studies have begun to open up tobroader contexts in an attempt to thoroughly discuss the involvement of variousfactors conditioning the creation of a translation. And a s Dingwan ey argues, trans-lation has also com e to involve the vehicle through which so-called Third W orldcultures are transported or borne across to and recuperated by audiences in theWest. In other w ords, according to Dingwaney,

texts written in English or in one of the metropolitan languages but originating inor about non-Western cultures can be considered under the rubric of translationDingwaney Maier 1995: 4).Although Mary Louise Pratt (2002) contends that translation is a deep but incom -plete metapho r for the traffic in meaning , that it may not in the long run be an a de-quate basis for a theory of cross-cultural mean ing m aking, she doe s adm it thatexploring this metaphor may be a productive way of clarifying what such atheory might look like (2002: 35 . In the African literary scene, ChinuaAc heb e s project to create a new kind of English through his native languag e,that is, his design to translate his culture and langu age in to English, has been a pre-occupa tion of som e Francophone African writers who also attempt to create a newkind of French. This is especially the case with Co ngolese w riter Henri Lopes an dAhm adou Kourouma of C6te d Ivoire. This paper attempts to demon strate howthese writers languag e becom es a hybrid code that forces the original Frenchlanguage to refer to the African languages for signification. It strives to showthat the writers use of French in their novels constitutes a creative translationprocess that leads to the production of new texts, texts that convey new Africanrealities through the development of an authentic African discourse.The analysis of the creative use of European languages in African literatureshows very clearly the im portance of translation. It show s that translation is signifi-cant in African literature in two ways. It identifies the practice whereby texts aretransferred from one culture to another in the ordinary sense of the word. And,more importantly, it demonstrates the process through which, as a result of thepost-colonial legacy, writers in a weakened culture transpose and transformtheir languages and models into the dominant culture.The first sense of translation h as com e to play an impo rtant role in the criticis mand interpretation of African literature since more and more African works (inAfrican or European lan guages) are being translated into other languages. Transla-tors who struggle to translate A frican literary texts enable m any people of differentcultural backgrou nds to know , understand an d appreciate African culture. Howev erit must be pointed out that the translation of African literary texts involvesmore than the possession of a certain linguistic competence. The translator, inaddition to hisfher linguistic competence, must be able to show proof of certain


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147he African writer a s translatorextra-linguistic abilities that consist in analysing and interpreting the context inwhich the African literary text is embedded. The second sense of translation, thesense that I refer to as creative translation by African writers, manifests itself inAfrican writing in forms that have been identified as calquing (see Mak outa-Mbo ukou 1980), cushioning, and contextualization (see Zab us 1991), but alsoin the authors transposition of African oral and traditional literary techniques ofstorytelling into the European written genre. It must be emphasized that a majordifference between the mode rn Europhone African novel and its European coun ter-part is that of narrative form. Many scholars and critics have po inted out the influ-ence of African oral literature on modem African writing. NgGgi wa Thiong o hassuggested that wha t provides the innovative difference in mode m A frican literatureis its relationship to African languages and the great heritage of orature in thoselanguages. According to Ngiigi,

these languages are a reservoir of images, proverbs, riddles, and ballads, storiesfrom which this literature in European languages draws freely and often creatively1999: 6).

In the sam e vein, although Eileen Ju lien refutes the idea that there are two distinctworlds, the oral and the written, she affirms: oral elements (in modern Africanliterature) may well be a vestige of oral narrative traditions and will therefore beexperienced as aesthetically African (Julien 1992: 40).And, in his Strategic Transformations Ato Quayson also makes the claim thatthe myths, rituals, songs, stories, and other oral and religious materials of theYoruba people provide resources from which a modem written literature wascreated according to the needs of each period and writer. Although Q uayson sclaim differs from earlier claims of unbroken continuity between oral andwritten literature, the point to note here is that African writers tend to have beeninspired by oral literature and traditions for stylistic and ideological reasons.Thus, oral tradition is undoubtedly one of the abstract commanders of modemAfrican writing; it is a living tradition that has both literary and moral conse-quences. It is a tradition that has helped to shap e the w riter s concep tions of theworld and hisher relationship to the external world. And it is this transportation,transformation or, if you w ill, transmutation of African oral traditional e lementsimagery, proverbs, wise sayings, myths, folktales, dramatic factors, and lyricallanguage into the written Europh one African literature that I wish to call creativetranslation. Of course, as Julien again suggests, a w ork that does not contain, orthat transforms, such elements is not necessarily less African (1992: 40). TheoVincent (1989) has also pointed out that the true significance of oral literature inmo dem African writing does not lie in how m uch of it is abstracted into any oneliterary piece but rather in the deeper (spiritual) atmosphere that it provides for awork an d the meaning and structure that its aggregate presence gives to a particularwork. Thus, to paraphrase Abiola Irele (1993), the major fo rms of the African oraltradition are employed in modem African writing to project structures of the col-lective mind that serve as explicative narratives of the world. Henri Lopes andAhmadou Kourouma are the grand masters in the transposition and re-creation


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148 Kwaku A Gyasiof this verbal art form into the creative translation of Francophone Africanliterature.If, as Lawson-Ananissoh (1996 ) has pointed out, Lopes' narration is the scene ofconfrontation: linguistic, dialectal, stylistic and vocal, it is because Lopes' text is,to borrow an im age from Bak htin, the space characterized by a verbal, semantic andtherefore ideological 'decentralization'. Beyond the narration, the reader isconfronted with languages other than the principal language, with voices otherthan that of the narrator, and even with texts that are foreign to the diegesis. InLe c hercheur d'Afriques [The Seeker of Africas] (1990) Lopes laments:

Ah Comm ent traduire? e frangais n'e st pas toujours la langue au carquois le plusfoumi (Lopes 1990: 200).Ah Ho w should translate? French is not always the most well-equipped language.

and in Sur l'autre rive [On the Other Bank] (1992) he confesses:J'enviai le lingala de Fe'licitk, ses images si dific ile a rendre en r a n p is , sa connais-sance des proverbes (Lopes 1992: 134).

was en vious of Fklicitk's Lingala, her ima ges s o difficult to render into Frenc h, herknowledge of proverbs.These complain ts or feelings of dissatisfaction are not feigned. Even be fore style,language constitutes an object of preoccupation for Lopes for whom it is notpossible to study the poetics of a new African novel in European languageswithout posing the problem of language. Lopes had already said in 1988:

Au de part, je pose et je dis que je vais parler congolais, que je vais parler congolaisen f r a n ~ a i s Maunick 1988: 128).Right from the beginning, I specify that I am going to speak Congolese; that amgoing to speak Congolese in French.

The need to speak 'Congolese' in French finds expression in Lop es' novel,Le Pleurer-rire [The Laughing-Cry]. Although, as the author makes evident, thepolitical objective of the novel:est de donner au lecteur une culture telle que les personnages de Tonton deviennentimpensables duns nos socie'te's,is to provide the reader with a culture such that characters like Tonton will becomeunthinkable in our societies,

it is not difficult, from the quo tations above , to discern the au tho r's real ob jective:imagine a story that resembles reality, translate the seemingly untranslatableLingala images and proverbs into French, and to speaklwrite 'Congolese' inFrench. Lopes himself explains his method of writing in an interview withDenyse d e Saivre (1982):J'ai voulu trouver le ton qu'emp loie le peuple lorsq u'il parle d e sa vie quotidienneaujou rd'hu i en Afrique, et c'est ce ton-la que j'ai essay&d'im iter Le Pleurer-Rire,qu'est-ce que ~a veut dire? C'est presque du petit ntg re. C 'est le fr a n p is cr&olis&avec la saveur que nos peuples savent y mettre. Et c'est la manitre de dire dupeuple que j'ai essaye' d'im iter (Saivre 1982: 122).


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49he Afr ican wr i ter as t rans la torI wanted to find the tone that people use when they are talking abou t their daily life inAfrica today; it is this tone that I hav e tried to imitate The Laugh ing-Cry, whatdoes it mean? t is almost a form of pidgin. It is Creolized French with the flavourthat our people know how to put in. And it is the people s way of speaking that Ihave tried to imitate.Ahm adou Kourouma sees writing as an act of translation, an act that his readersare also expected to perform. The following statement, given in an interview withBadday Moncef (1970) throws light on his procedure:J'a i pense' en malinke' et kcrit en franpzis en prenant une liberte' que j'estime natu r-elle avec la langue classique. Q u'avais-je donc fait? simplem ent donne' libre cours amon tem pkrament en distordant une langue classique trop rigide pour que ma pense'es'y meuve. J ai donc traduit le malink6 en franqais en cassant le fr an ~ ai s our trouveret restituer le rythme africain (Moncef 1970: 7; my emphasis).I thought in Malinke and wrote in French by taking what I considered a naturalliberty with the classical language. What had I done? Simply given free rein tomy temperament by distorting a classical language that is too rigid so that mythoughts can find expression in it. I have therefore translated Malinke into Frenchby breaking the French in order to find and restore the African rhythm.

Kourouma thus provides ample evidence of the process of writing as translation.His novel, Les So le il s des Ind pendances (T he Suns o f Independence) appears tohighlight, among other themes, the betrayal of the promises of independence.Throughout the novel, the misfortunes and sufferings of the hero, as indeedthose of the whole peop le, are linked to wh at is seen by the hero as one un derlyingevil: Independence . It should be understood , howeve r, that it is not precisely inde-penden ce as such that is being ex coriated here; we are witness rather to a profoundsense of disillusionment at the widespread betraya l of its bright promise. As Uwah(1988) has pointed out, the denunc iation of independen ce is not an endorsem ent ofcolonialism, nor is it a denial of the people s right to indepen dence.If in 'L es So le il s . . the fallen world of postcolonial Africa is revealed in thenovel s d iscourse, with Monn2, o utrages et def ies [M onn t, Insults and Challenges]words themselves become, as Kenneth H arrow has pointed out,the subject of a novel whose discourse is animated by the themes and images adum-brated in Les Soleils des Inde'pendances (Harrow 1991: 226).

Kourouma poses the question of languag e at the outset of MonnZ by hypothesizinga scene in which the central figure, Djigui, a Malinke patriarch, learns of theimpossibility of translating 'monnd ' into French. Th us, the issue of language is pre-sented simultaneou sly with that of translation both as central to the experience andits narrative representation.Les Solei ls des Ind pendances ope ns with the death of KonC Ibrahima, an even tthat is expressed in euphemistic terms in clear Malinke rhythm:I1 y a a vait une semaine qu'a vait j n i duns la capitale Kone' Ibrahima, d e racemalinke', ou disons-le en malinke': il n'av ait pas soutenu un petit rhumeComme tout Malinke', quand la vie s'e'chappa de ses restes, son ombre se releva,graillona, et partit par le long chemin pour le lointain pays malinke' . . (Kourouma1970: 7)


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150 Kwaku A. GyasiIt had been a week since Kone Ibrahima, of the Malinke race, had finished in thecapital, or to put it in Ma kinke: he could not withstand a little cold .Like everyMalinke, when life left his remains, his shadow rose up, cleared his throat, andleft on the long road for the distant Malinke country

Right from the very first sentence, the reader is presented with the Malinke projectthat will inform an d sustain the autho r s discourse. Thu s the use of the phrase avai tfini ( had finished ) to expres s Ibrahima KonC s death is a direct translation from theauthor s native language. The fact that the author chose this expression instead ofFrench co lloquial expressions like il a casse' sa pipe ( he has broken his pipe ) or ila passe' l'arme a gauche ( he has pegged out ) shows that Kourouma wanted hisMalinkC world-view to dominate his novel.The word ombre ( shado w ) in the same quotation is a calquing of the Malinkeconcept of spirit or soul. It is believed among some African peoples that when aperson dies, his or her spirit continues to live on and move from place to place.Thus , those who claim to have seen KonC Ibrahima may have seen his spirit orsoul and not his person. Because a spirit or a soul in African religious beliefsis not to be confused with the Christian or Islamic notions of the same concepts,the author chose to use ombre which does not have a Christian or Islamic con-notation. However, faced with the difficulty of making readers understand what hemeans by this term, Kourouma eventually has recourse to the Malinke d ja , theexact word in his native language whose equivalent term he could not find in theFrench language. In Henri Lopes Le Pleurer-rire, whole sentences in the locallanguage are inserted into the narrative and then translated into French. Forexample, the phrase B o k a t a s s a d o u n k o u n e is introduced into the textbefore it is translated as R e ~ o i s e pouvoir des anct tres [Receive the power ofthe ancestors] (Lopes 1982: 47 . In the same w ay, the reader comes across Manaf o l e m a m an a t o u k a r e o w i s so n a i n a before its French translation:Nous lutterons rLsolument contre le racisme [We are fighting resolutely againstracism] (ibid.: 191).It is known that proverbs are probably the most com mon form manifesting theuse of translated mother tongue into the European lang uage. In Les Soleils de s Inde'-pendances we com e across proverbs such as:

A ren ije r avec discre'tion le pet de l' eff rontk, l vous juge sans nez(Kourouma 1970:12If you sniff with discretion at the fart of a sha meless pe rson, he will think you have nonose

andL'hy2ne a beau re e'dente'e, sa bouche ne sera jamais un chemin de passage pour lecabri (ibid.: 16)No m atter how edentate a hyena is, his mouth will never be a way for the kid.

Henri Lopes writes in Le Pleurer-rire that:a souris qui vous mange la plante des pieds n'es t autre que celle qui vit sous votrelit.


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151he African writer as translatorThe m ouse that eats away at the sole of your feet is none other than the o ne that livesunder your bed

andLe le opard qui veut vous attaquer ne fait pas de bruit (Lopes 1982: 168)The leopard that wants to attack you makes no noise.

As A chebe (1964) points out,The good orator calls to his aid the legends, folk-lore, proverbs . of his people; theyare some of the raw material with which he works (1964: viii, cited in ChinweizuMadubuike 1983: 263).

Thus, the use of proverbs by the authors points to the fact that if the stylistic fea-tures of African oral narrative are to be captured in the African novel written inEurop ean langu ages, then the full range of linguistic resources of African prose tra-ditions must be rendered in the European languages. By making their charactersoften express their thoughts in proverbs, these writers empha size their involveme ntin African culture and wisdom. Moreover, the profusion of proverbs on the part ofthe writers denotes a deeper knowledge of their heritage and linguistic resources,and these elements are given new shape and form in the imported medium ofexpression.Another translation technique employed by African writers, a technique thatmay be considered a form of calquing is the use of sema ntic shifts. sem anticshift occurs when known lexical items in the target language are assigned featuresof meaning from the source language such that the derived meaning preserves theAfrican content of the source text, even though the new mea ning is not native to thetarget language. When a writer uses a semantic shift, the European w ord is assigneda new meaning that can only be understood within the context in which it is used.In Kourouma s Les soleils des Indip end ance s, there are semantic shifts like theuse of honte not so much to connote shame, which is its meaning in French, butrather to mean reserve, bashfulness and modesty in the Malink6 context. Weremember that when Fama came out of prison, Bakary informed him about his(Fam a s) w ife s infidelity while he w as in prison. In Bakary s opinion this was

une honte aussi e paisse que celle qu i a conduit le varan de riviere a se cacher dunseau (Kourouma 1970: 185).a bashfulness as thick as the one that drove the big saurian lizard to hid e in the water.

The M alinke reader who knows the precise anecdote that serves as the basis for thismetaphor can judge the nature of the honte in question. It can be seen that evenwithout the use of proverbs and other more de tailed forms, the desire to describe theAfrican ima ginary world in a satisfactory way p ushes the w riter to resort to culturalpresuppositions that are unfamiliar to the m onolingual reader. Thus , when Djiguiasks (on page of MonnB ): Est -ce cela la totalite du train? ( Is that thewhole train? ) he is referring to a whole set of cultural and historical context thatis not obvious to the non-Malinke reader. According to Ahmadou Kon6 (1992)Djigui s question is an expression that marks a great surprise in M alinke. It is


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152 Kwaku A Gyasiintended to mean: 'C e n ' e st que ce l a? ' ( Is that all there is to it? ). To understandthis expression one has to consider all the miseries and hardships b rought abo ut byforced labour during the construction of the railway line. In Djigu i s m ind the trainis supposed to be a gigantic monster. In reality, however, the actual train turns outto be very disappointing. Another example of a semantic shift occurs when D jigui sson Bema boasts of having the support of the whole country behind him in his bidfor power. And the narrator comm ents: C e qu i n 'e'tait pas un e parole [That was nota speech] (ibid.: 270). Here also, the expression com es from M alinkC and it mea nsthat what has been said is a blasphemy and a silly remark. For the Malinke reader,the expression ce n 'es t pas une parole is certainly more intensely significant thanits neutral French translation.In addition to calquing, by far the most com monly used translation technique byAfrican writers, according to Ch antal Zabus (199 1), is the twin m ethods of cushion-ing and contextualization. By cushioning is meant the translation strategy wherebythe African writer tags an explanatory word or phrase in the European language toexplain the African word or phrases. Contextualization, as the name implies,involves the provision of areas of im mediate context for African words and phrases.Ahmadou Kourouma cushions the MalinkC a with ombre [shadow], double[double] (1970: 116 and 120) or with principe vital [vital force] (1990: 200).Monnk or monnew is translated as le temps des ressentiments , [the time of resent-men t] (ibid.: 155) and is repeatedly con textualized s o that the expression les saisonsd 'amer tume [seasons of bitterness] (ibid.: 193) refers back to the word monnk.Through this strategy, Kourouma underscores the lexical and semantic inabilityof French to render the density and richness of the MalinkC vocabulary. As theToubab points out in the introductory part of the novel:En ve'ritk, il n'y a pas chez nous, Europe'ens, une parole rendant monnk malinke(ibid.: 9).In truth, we Eu ropean s do not have any word that translates the M alinke word monn2.Certainly, if the French language is incapable of fully expressing the Malinkeworld-view the n on e understand s the difficulty in describing a feeling in a languag ein which this feeling does not even have a name . Thus , the need to filter the Africanimagination through the European medium of expression comp els the writer to useexpressions and conventional forms that derive from African languages.

Faced with the difficulty of describing the intolerable political climate ofMoundiC under Ton ton Bwakam abC in standard French, and in an effort tocapture the African language-based French that is spoken in his society, HenriLopes also resorts to the strategy of cushioning and contextualization. InLe Pleurer-rire, certain African words are introduced and then cushioned orcontextualized. For example:Le griot entonna le fameux PouCna Kanda, un air triste et lent qui dit que le pays desDjabotama s'ktiole car le tr6ne est vacant, puisque l'ennemi a tue' par traitrise tousles hommes capables de le protkger comme un p2re son$ls (Lopes 1982: 46) .The griot sang the famous Poukna Kanda, a slow and sad tune which says that theland of the Djabotama is weakened because its throne is vacant, since the enemyhas killed by treachery all the men capable of protecting it like a father his son.


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53he Afr ican wr i ter as t rans la torThrough the use of this technique Lopes explains to the reader the meaning ofPoue'na Kanda, or at least gives an idea of what it signifies.Also, in an effort to explain the Lingala word tassaHenri Lopes cushions itwith the French word pouvo ir [power]. How ever, since pouvo ir is not an adequatetranslation for the Lingala tas a e resorts to contextualization:

A la ve'rite', le m ot litassa re nfe m e plus de sens que le mot fr an pi s pouvoir. C'est ala fois le pouvoir de comm andem ent, l'inte'lligence pour dom iner les autres et lapuissance aussi bien physique du taurea u qu'extra-terrestre. Ainsi est-i l possibled'agir griice a ces moyens auxquels les Oncles ne veulent pas croire et qui vousmettent a l'abri de l'ennemi. Qui a reGu la litassa communique suns interme'diaireavec les ancgtres. I1 lira dans toutes les consciences comm e dans l 'e au de la fontaine.Nulle femme ne lui re'sistera. I1 pourra marcher sur l' on de et voler par-dessus lesmontagnes. I1 sera rbsistant a la morsure du serpent. Les balles changeront dechem in l'app roch e de sa poitrine (ibid.: 47).In truth, the word litassa is more meaningful than the French word for 'power'. It isat the same time the power to command, the intelligence to dominate others, andstrength, both extraterrestrial and the physical strength of a bull. Thus it is possibleto act thanks to these means that the Uncles do not want to believe in and w hich hideyou from the enemy. Who has received the litassa communicates directly with theancestors. He can see through people's conscience like water from the fountain.No wom an will resist him. He can w alk on wa ves and fly over mountains. H e willbe im mu ne to serpent bites. B ullets w ill chan ge course a s they approach his chest.It is obvious from the above quotation that it is only by creating a context for theAfrican word that its full meaning can be comprehended in the narrative. Eventhough the meaning or significance of most of the African words introduced inLe Pleurer-r ire is explained in its context as soon as the word is introduced, asfor example:

le tounka, une chaine defer avec de nombreux pendentifs (ibid.: 47 )tounka, an iron chain with numerous pendantsor

la loukita, qui est a l'origine une danse de guerre (ibid.: 48)loukita, which was initially a war danceelsewhe re, the meanin g of an African word is not evident until several pages later.For example, we are told right at the beginning of Le Pleurer-r ire that

le damuka s'e'tait re'uni dans une venelle de Moundie' (ibid.: 14).the damuka took place in a small alley in Moundie.How ever, because damuka is not directly translated, the non-Lingala reade r has towait until page 56 to clearly understand the word damuka:

Quel que soit son sort, elle danse et chante, pour se distraire, pour sbduire unefemme, pour oublier, pour pleurer un m ort au damuka (ibid.: 56) .No matter people's lot in life, they dance and sing, in order to relax, to seduce awoman, to forget, to mourn the dead during the damuka.Th e title of Kouroum a's Les so lei l s des Indkpendances itself offers an articulate andsymb olic rendition of the process of writing as an act of translation. It is a title thatshocks by the use of an unusual plural noun: 'soleils ' (suns). According to


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154 Kwaku A. GyasiN Guessan Kotchy (1977) while the w ord soleil is presented as a unique naturalphenomenon, it quickly loses its astrological meaning and becomes a symbolicimage with this plural. Its use in the title may be traced to Malinke t l whichmeans day , or when used with a plural marker 1G era or time . It thereforedesignates in Kourouma s title: era, period, or year. In addition, without recourseto the old myth s of the sun, suns in the sense of beauty and life is in oppositionto the obscurantism of colonization. The very fact that the title of the novel isunusual in French attests to the bilingual nature of the text since one has to referto Malinke to understand the mean ing of 'soleil' in this con text. It is also significantto note that whenever Kourouma has to nam e elements connected w ith the meta-physical or the abstract, he uses M alinke words to make up for terms that cannotbe adequately expressed in French.Even m ore than Les Soleils, the title of Kourouma s second novel, MonnB, out-rages et dL s offers ample evidence of the process of creative writing in Africa astranslation and attests to the bilingual nature inherent in modern African fiction.Abiola Irele (1993 ) points out that the novel s prologue

undertakes to explicate the meaning of the novel s title in terms of both the affront toconsciousness which the narrative is about to do cum ent and of the disparities in race,religion and world view as codified in language.Within the novel itself, Irele adds,

the concept of monne is elucidated more succinctly in the expression les saisonsd amertume [season s of bitterness] which re curs seve ral times as a kind of leitmotifby w hich its theme is constantly restated throughout its narrative developm ent 1993:166).

Even so, it is obvious that this bilingual title remains semi-readable for the mono-lingual reader, just as the text itself would b e, if the reader fails to dec ode its plur-ilingual strategies. Furthermore, the comp lete m eaning of ou trages et d& s [insultsand challenges] can only be understood in its relationship with the first Malinkeword in the title. While the phrase outrages et dt;Jis is a partial explanation ofmonne t does not translate it wholly since the meaning of monne s more thanjust outrages et d& s. The French and Malinke parts of the title are therefore notexplanations o r substitutions of one term fo r the other, neither are they interchange -able; rather, they are interdepend ent because the M alinke word monne informs andelucidates the outrages et d& s in the French language.Tog ether, what these translation strategies seek is a certain form of aesthetics inAfrican writing that is accomplished through the violation of the French languageat the level of the novels theme s and structure. At the them atic level, it is signifi-cant to note that all these nov els present political leaders an d their acts of violenceperpetrated against the people. In MonnB for instance, (where the cruelty oftraditional African kings is mentioned), the destructive violence exercisedagainst albinos, dwarfs, and the weak who are captured and sacrificed seems tosanction the end of a culture, that is, the end of a certain Africa. At the structurallevel all these novels play another role in the account of violence. They presenta humane attempt to control and overcome violence. Th at is why in som e instances


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The African writer a s translatorthe treatment of violence is done with a certain detachment and humour. Theincreased terrifying descriptions in the novels create an effect of a distortingimage and provocation in the scenes in which one joyful repression followsanother at a breathtaking rhythm. In Le Pleurer-Rire, violence against the peopleseems to have become a way of life. Although it can be said that an exaggerationin the details of cruelty sometimes harm s the credibility of these stories, what mu stbe noted is that the authors seek a certain aesthetic quality in the hyperrealism thatcharacterizes the detailed descriptions of violence. In other words, the detaileddescriptions of the violent scenes lead to a literary expressionism that accountsfor the originality of these African novels. Th e most violent scenes in which hyp er-realism, expressionism and humour go together, are also naturally those throughwhich we enter the text. Monn2 begins with the account of the bloody sacrificesmultiplied in an excessive rage in order to prevent the threats of the colonialconquest which hangs over the future of Djigui, king of Soba, and his people. Asa stylistic device, plunging the reader right into this violent universe creates aneffect of shock, and produces a violent rupture w ith the reader s daily languageand universe.Scenes of violence also occur in the search for an aesthetic composition. InLe Pleurer-rire, for example, the account of the mutilation of the hungry thieveswhose hands are cut in the presence of the diplomatic corps convened for thisoccasion, to a background of music, contrasts with tender and calm sceneselsewhere in the novel. The violence of the abortive coup d etat (Lopes 1982:144 ), followed by the v iolence of the repression of the D jakissinis by theDjabotamas (ibid.: 192), serves as a counterpoint to the interminable discussionsat the presidential palace. In conn ection w ith the other parts of the nove l, the vio-lence becomes a motif in a symphonic composition. Aggressive passages conflictwith relaxed scenes in fragmented stories and the discontinuity materializes rightdow n to the no vel s typograph y (italics, capital letters, large blank spaces).Public an d private scen es, political and intim ate sess ions, flashbacks and reflectionson the present, follow each other to constitute a structural unity. What is mostimportant is that these novels fall within an aesthetic where violence is done notonly to the narrative continuity but also to the language of narration.Furthermore, as Chantal Zabus (1991) has demonstrated, the translation of ahistorically repressed langu age into the dom inant one entails som e textual violence.In the African context, since this violence is directed against and via the dominantlanguage, the repressed African language struggles to surface in and inhabit theEuropean language. As she puts it,

the African morphemes and etymons thus gnaw at the target language whosehegemony is thereby subverted (Zabus 1991 152).Th e European language is pushed and forced to the position of minor languag eand in that sense ceases to be an instrument of domination. To the extent thatAfrican writers privilege their African languages to occupy the position thatinforms the European language, to the extent that they force the European languageto refer back to the African language for understanding and signification, African


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156 Kwaku A yasiwriters use translation as a strategy of literary decoloniza tion. How ever, as Am adouK on t (1992 ) points out, the success of the effort to translate on e s native languageand to re-appropriate the foreign language in a meaningful way depends on theability of the novelist to master hisker mother tongue and the language ofwriting. It depen ds also on the w riter s ability to cons truct a system in w hichcontext, culture and language are harmonized.According to Bassnett-McGuire (1988) the change in the nature and method-ology of literary studies since its developmen t outside Euro pe has ma de it possiblefor notions of translation to lose their overly Europ ean focus. Jus t as literary studieshas sought to shake off its Eurocentric inheritance, she writes,

so translation thinking is branching out in new ways, because the emphasis on theideological as well as the linguistic makes it possible for the sub ject to be discussedin the wider term s of post-colonial discourse 1988: xiv).Oswald de Andrade, a Brazilian writer, has introduced a new metaphor, one thatmay be a pplicable to the African situation: the image of the Brazilian writer as can-nibal, devouring the colonial language in a ritual that results in the creation ofsomething completely new. As Bassnet-McGuire explains, De Andrade s metaphorof the post-colonial writer as cannibal is

based on a revised notion of what cannibalism signifies, considered not from theperspective of the European colonizer, but from the perspective of those peopleswhose cannibalistic practices derive from an alternative vision of society (ibid.: xv).Applied to the African context, the cannibalistic notion of writing involves achanged idea of the place and value of the colonial language in relation to itsplace in the production of African discourse. The African writer no longer con-siders the European language as the only viable means of narrative constructionand expression.Faced with the charge (such as the one by NgQ giwa Thio ng o) that by writing inEurop ean languag es that is spoken, let alone read, by just a few million spe akers inAfrica, African writers are in effect participating, however inadvertently, in thefurther canonization of European-language literature, contemporary Africanwriters wh o write in the Europea n languages are seeking new w ays to sustain a dis-course that can be called African. Their act of writing in the dominant Europeantongue is therefore both linguistic and political. This form of writing reveals thestakes, conflicts, tensions and the power struggles between the European andAfrican languages. By choosing to translate their languages and models into theEuropean language the African writers question the historically established auth-ority of the European language and establish their languages as equally viablemeans of producing discourse.In this perspective, it can be seen that creative translation is mobilized for the sak eof the reaffirmation, re-appropriation, and re-examina tion of African cu ltural iden-tity, and as a means of differentiating one s self from the Other. Th at is, just as thecolonial discourse marginalized African languages and institutions, so the A fricantranslated novels seek to reveal the otherness of the European languages. In otherwords, as Zabus argues, in the post-colonial m oment, the act of appropriating the


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57he Afr ican wri ter as translatorEuropean languag e leads to a reversal of roles that relegates the coloniz er s langu ageto the position of m inor, so as to dom inate it.In this respect, for the Francophone African writers, the act of writing is theexperiment of blending African models with European models while subvertingor violating them at the same time. The distortions imposed on syntax, theintroduction of an unfamiliar vocabulary, borrowings from local languages trans-lated or not, in the form of a col lage, expressions of traditional orality, the useof French spoken in the suburbs of African capitals, the insults, songs and pro-verbs introduced into the story all these techniques interrupt the narration inFrench and force the reader to reconstruct the text. In certain instances, under-standing is denied the monolingual reader who is then forced to recognize theimportance of the other language in the narrative reconstruction of history andreality.In an effort to decolonize the African text in the European language of writing,the authors draw from the vocabulary registers of the different African languages.They conjugate transitive verbs in the absolute, abuse nominal adjectives andinvent adverbs. As Senghor (1961) had earlier written in Nocturnes:

Que meure le po me,se dLsint2gi-e la syntaxe, que s'abi'ment les mots qui ne so ntp asessentiels.May the poem die, syntax disintegrate, may the words that are not essential beswallowed up.Th e result of this initial destruction is the re-creation of a rich an d original languag ethat has to be considered in its own right. In other words, if these writers violatethe academic or standard French, they do so in order to create works which areenriched by their respective mother tongues and whose poetic value can beeasily recognized.As a corollary to the decolon ization of the African text, the violence inflicted onthe language and the violence represented in the exercise of power by Africanleaders can also be seen as the only possible respo nse by the writers to the violencethat permeates the African post-colonial un iverse. According to E Mudimbe-Boyi(1991) while the excesses of power lead to the underdevelopment and humiliationof Africans and their countries, the violence in the lang uage of w riting ca rries posi-tive values. The writings of the new generation of African writers cannot be ana-lysed only in terms of the kind of socio-ethnological, historical, and culturalreadings that characterized critical approaches to earlier African fiction. Withthese writers one now needs to place the emphasis on the creative process itself,that is, on the politics and process of writing.At this momen t in Africa s history, Francophone African literature, which arisesfrom the need to reaffirm and reclaim African original orality, and springs from awill to assert itself in relation to the West, actualizes the African imagina ry w orld ina time of crisis. The violence that it sometim es exalts should not be taken as an en din itself but rather as a conscious process for understanding the African imagin-ation. Thus, at odds with the colonial literature in its beginnings, and drawingfrom the traditional culture and the mother tongue in its mod em formulation,


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158 K w a k u A . Gya s ithe Francophone novel in its most recent actuality, is constructed in conformitywith an aesthetics of translation, violence and rupture, where violence, ruptureand translation are enacted through language.KWAKUA . GYASIs a pro fessor o f French and rancophone s tud ies a t the Depar tmen t

of Fore ign Langu ages and Li teratures , Univ ers i ty o f Alaba ma in Huntsvi l le;Mor ton Hal l 308 Hu n ts v il le , A L 3 5 8 9 9 , US A . ema i l: gyasik@email .uah.edu.

REFEREN ESAchebe, C. 1975. The African writer and the English language. In his Morning Yet onCreation Day: Essays, pp. 55- 162. London: Heinemann.. 1964. Foreword to A Selection of African Prose, I: Traditional Oral Texts, ed. byW.H. W hiteley, pp. vii-x. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Cited in ChinweizuMadubuike 1983: 263).Adiaffi, J.-M. 1980. a Carte d'identitk. Paris: Hatier-Monde Noir Poche.Andrade, 0 1979. Manifeste anthropophage: le m odernisme brtsilien. Europe (mars1979): 43-49.Bassnett-McGuire, S. 1991. Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge.Cary, J. 1952. Mister Johnson. London: M . Joseph.Chevrier, J. 1979. L'Ccrivain africain devant la langue fr an ~a is e. 'Afrique Littkraire etArtistique 50: 49.. 1985186. Naissanc e d 'une littkrature: une nouvelle race d'Ccrivains. Jeune A frique1303- 1304: 150- 155.Chinw eizu, O.J. and I. Ma dubuike. 1983. Towa rd the Decolonization of African Literature.

Washington, D.C.: Howard University.Conrad, J. 1910. Heart of Darkness. New York: New American Library.Dingwaney, A. and Maier, C. (eds.). 1995. Between Languages and Cultures: Translationand Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.FerrC, R. 1995. On destiny, language, and translation; or Ophelia adrift in the C.0 Cana l. In Dingwaney M aier 1995: 39-49.Harrow, K.W. 1991. Monnb, outrages et dkjs: translating, interpreting, truth and liestravelling along the Mobius strip. Research in African Literatures 22 (2): 225-230.Irele, A. 1993. Narrative, history, and the African im agination. Narrative 1 (2): 156- 172.Julien, E. 1992. African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press.KonC, A. 1992. Le romanc ier africain devant la lang ue d7Ccriture.Francofonia 22: 75-86.Kotchy-N'Guessian, B. 1977. Signification de l'oeuvre. In Essai sur Les Soleils desIndkpendances, ed. by Joseph M'Lanhoro, pp. 81-94. Abidjan: Nouvelles EditionsAfricaines.Kourouma, A. 1970. Les Soleils des Indkpendances. Paris: Le Seuil.

. 1990. Monn2, outrages et dkjis. Paris: Le Seuil.Lawson-Ananissoh, L.E. 1999. Le roman 'nouveau' en Afrique francophone (H enri Lopes,Sony Labou Tansi): klkments d'une poktique. Villeneuv e d' Ascq: Presse s Universitairesdu Septentrion.Lopes, H. 1982. Le Pleurer-Rire. Paris: Prksence Africaine.1990. Sur l'au tre rive. Paris: Seuil.1992. Le chercheur d'Afriques. Paris: Seuil.Makouta-Mboukou, J.-P. 1980. Introduction l'ktud e du roman nkgro-africain de languefrangaise (Problbmes culturels et littkraires). Abidjan: Nouvelles Editions Africaines.Maunick, Edouard. 1988. Le territoire d'Henri Lopes [interview with Henri Lopes]. NotreLibrairie 92/93: 128- 131.
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The Afr ican wr i ter as t rans latorMehrez, S. 1992. Translation and the postcolonial experience: the Francophone NorthAfrican text. In Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. by Lawr-ence Venuti, pp. 120-138. London and New York: Routledge.Moncef, S.B. 1970. Ahmadou Kourouma, Ccrivain africain. Afrique litte raire et artistique10: 2-8.Mudimbe-Boyi, E 1991. Langue volCe, langue violCe: pourvoir, kcriture et violence dans le

roman africain. In La deriva delle francofonie: Figures et fantasmes de la violence dansles litte ratures rancophon es de 1 Afrique subsaharienne et des Antilles, I: L Afriq uesubsaharienne, ed. by Franca Marcato-Falzoni, pp. 101 118. Bologna: UniversitariaEditrice Bologna.Mule, K. 2002. Translation, mistranslation, and cultural theory: African inflections,challenges, and prospects. Metamorphoses 10 (1): 1-22.Ngiigi wa Thiong o. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in AfricanLiterature. London: Heinemann.1999. Europhonism, universities, and the Magic Fountain: the future of Africanliterature and scholarship. Research in African Literatures 31 1 ) : 1 11.Ortega, J 2003. Transatlantic translations. Proceedings of the Modem LanguageAssociation of America 118 (1): 25-40.Paz, 0 1992. Translation, literature and letters. In Theories of Translation: An Anthologyof Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.Pratt, M.L. 2002. The traffic in meaning: translation, contagion, infiltration. Profession(2002): 25-36.Quayson, A. 1997. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History inthe Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri. Bloo-mington: Indiana University Press.Riesz, J 1985. The first African novels in French a problem of authenticity. In TowardsAfrican Authenticity: Language and Literary Form, pp. 5-30. (African Studies 2).Bayreuth:Saivre, D. 1982. Entretien avec Henri Lopes. Recherche, PMagogie et Culture 59-60:120- 122.Senghor, L.S. 1961. Nocturnes. Paris: Seuil.Tharaud, J et J 1922. La Randonne de Samba Diouf. Paris: Librairie Plon.Tymoczko, M. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature inEnglish Translation. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing.Uwah, Godwin 0 1988. Waiting and disenchantment in contemporary FrancophoneAfrican fiction. Comparative Literature Studies 25 (4): 3 18-334.Vincent, T. 1989. Approaches to the teaching of African literature: consideration of somepedagogical issues. In The Teaching of African Literature, ed. by Thomas Hale andRichard Priebe, pp. 111 116. Washington, D C: Three Continents Press and AfricanLiterature Association.Zabus, C. 1991. The African P alimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the We st AfricanEurophone Novel. Amsterdam Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.

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Kwaku a. Gyasi, The African Writer as Translator