Voicing Darfour’s Hu (Wo)man Memory: Tears of the Desert through World Literature and Collaborative Translation Grid

Abstract

This paper tackles the question of voice retrieval of the Sudanese Subaltern experiences through the authorship/co-authorship of White British male subject, and the implication for collaborative translation into world literature. The paper particularly engages with the questions of whose voice and whose authorship in translating and worlding minority subaltern literature, in the context of the metropolitan powers’ appropriating politics, and the selective access and humanitarianism of Anglo-American (international) publishing industry. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the paper instrumentalizes the sociological turn in Translation Studies (2010) and Dambroush’s take on World Literature (2003) to read the socio-political implication of the production and circulation of Bashir and Lewis’ Tear of the Desert: a Memoir of Survival in Darfur(2008) to the English-speaking readership. The paper specifically examines the conceptual and textual grid (Lefevere 1999) and their underlying ideology through a tri-fold relational scheme: first, the relation between the text and its author, specifically the question of Bashir’s voice in the text; second, the relation between the author and co-author/collaborative translator(S); and third, the relation between the co-author and South-ridden conflict zone. The paper seeks to investigate the political implication of worlding war literature—through peace journalism (Lynch 1997)—for international readership and politics. The paper argues for the following. First, the textual grid of Tears of the Desert (2008) invokes Morrison’s aesthetic poetics of re-memory (Morrison 1988), which takes shape through instrumentalization of the motherhood trope and intergenerational relaying of past memories to work out the meaning of the present. Second is the conceptual reworking of the text in accordance with the ideology of the interlocutor, and the resultant silences and appropriation of the object of interlocution within the horizon of expectation of international readership. Third is the impact of interlocution on the frames in which the text is positioned and through which it garners visibility and acclaim. Finally, the paper argues for opening theoretical repertoire between translation, literature and peace journalism to discern the political and poetical frames for composing the other and the enabling access structures for the subaltern visibility (not voice) within hegemonic discourse.