Soa's Version: Ironic Form and Content in The Self‐Account of A Transnational métisse Narrator (original) (raw)
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In this essay I show that texts by early Caribbean women writers, such as the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, reveal and resist the effects of colonial paradigms by leaving textual traces of how such paradigms can effectively be countered and overturned. I arrive at such a reading of Seacole via an analysis of Frantz Fanon's (mis)reading of Mayotte Capécia's turn‐of‐the‐century novel, Je suis martiniquaise, in light of advances in postcolonial and feminist theory. I argue that doing so can bring us to recognize the contributions that early writings by Caribbean women have made to a broader understanding of the nature of being, across differences of “race,” class, and geography. I consider how we might recover in Capécia important models that Fanon himself replicates, yet dismisses, that predate Capécia's own text and that can be located in a text like Seacole's. In the end, I come to contend that Mary Seacole's text is more than a mere record ...
Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego
Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego, 2022
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A Narrative of Identity in Marcan and Franco- African Womanist Study
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Idiolect, Irony & the Trickster as Instruments of Resistance in Indigenous Literature
One Good Story, That One translated, 2015
My dissertation consists of a commented translation of five selected short stories, including the title story, of Thomas King’s One Good Story, That One, and a theoretical and contextual introduction. My commentary, beyond the explanation of my syntactic and vocabulary choices -which I will relate to King’s interfusional use of idiolect, which is to say his uniquely personal use of orality in writing- discusses the use of irony and the Trickster as instruments of anticolonial resistance (based on King’s Godzilla vs. Postcolonial), with which King hopes to both challenge Western paradigms and raise awareness of Natives’ plight. King uses both of these not simply as postcolonial but rather as anticolonial instruments of discursive resistance (based on King’s Godzilla vs. Postcolonial), being in tune with King’s vision that postcolonialism is a concept which only lives in academia and in fact has no real basis in our current society, since we are still, in many ways, living in colonial times. King uses satire, first, to raise awareness of Natives’ physical and psychological plight to this very day, and second, to create a sense of accountability in these same people, to transform them by playfully making them aware of their unwitting complicity in this sordid affair. King's use of the Trickster Coyote as well is an important humorous element which also serves as an instrument of anticolonial discursive resistance and education, and whose mythological significance is crucial to the development of an alternate ideological structure, one which he establishes as a healthy counter-part to the Western religiously inspired one with its traditional Judaeo-christian dichotomy. I explore how King, with his use of the Trickster, satire and orality, contests the validity of Eurocentric paradigms with his literarily and orally established framework of modern Native mythologies and perspectives which expose the flaws inherent in the former. With my translation, my aim was to reproduce King’s own translation of orality and traditional Native storytelling into writing, albeit with a slightly different use of dialect (closer to international French than Quebec French), since translating King's idiolect was no easy feat. And so, my main concern was to stay as true as possible to the original work, its' gaps, repetitions, syntax and phatic (speech used as social function) use of language. In doing so, my goal was to once again arouse the reader’s sympathy for Natives and their plight, establishing an oral bond between them and the translated work. Pertaining to the latter will be a discussion on how translation also ideally bridges the gap between cultures while expanding their horizons, just as King's modern, syncretic Native storytelling breathes new life into traditional spiritual practices and beliefs. However, as King warns us about stories, which can be not only healing but also harmful, translation can adversely widen that gap and harm intercultural relationships when improperly harnessed. When properly harnessed, however, translation re-enacts a narrative to launch it in a new language-culture (Benjamin in Venuti), in the same manner that Native storytelling (both traditional and modern) enacts a performative that not only preserves culture but recreates it anew. Hence my interest in discovering the links between the fashioning of a new world, full of promises, through narrative, and the refashioning of a narrated text through translation into a new language-culture. Exploring the activism at work in King’s own telling of One Good Story, That One, I would further like to delve into the ways in which King's modern Native storytelling and the bleak, satiric humour with which much of it is tinged, continues to combat neocolonialism to this day, even in this so-called postcolonial society. Eva Gruber's Humour in Contemporary Native North American Literature is a very in-depth and informative work on this subject. I would like to elaborate on Gruber's statement that humour, more than just a coping strategy, as many would claim, is also, more importantly, especially to a non-Native audience, a Trojan horse of sorts: “Sneaking up on readers through shared laughter, humour can align their empathy with Native viewpoints, obscuring conflicts and hierarchies and triggering consensus and solidarity instead” (Gruber, “Humour in Native Lit”, p. 118). As well, I examine how in presenting Western history and religion from a humorous angle, the author is exposing its fallacies in a tragi-comical context which blurs the boundaries between reality and myth, and thus alleviates the burden of colonialism upon his Native & non-Native readers, while also encouraging accountability.