Meditations: Shalvi Jaxay Shah on 'Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation'
Wasafiri’s ‘Meditations’ is a series that features creative and personal responses to new literature, asking writers to seek connections with themselves, their own work, and the text they’re reading. Lying between criticism and life writing, each ‘Meditation’ offers a unique angle to view the writer and the reader, and the world around them. In this instalment, Shalvi Jaxay Shah responds to the collection Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation, edited by Dr Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang. We accompany Shah on the visceral experience of reading the essays, 'heart thumping, neurons firing', an experience shot liberally through with memories of family, of language, food, and microaggressions; an experience that culminates, ultimately, in renewed hope. For this collection, 'Gratitude,' says Shah, 'is not enough.'
My great-grandmother Vasu ba, who is ninety-nine, takes a palm-sized rock of jaggery, slowly scraping and slicing until a bowl full of its shreds remains. I could make a whole ASMR video of her process: bony, smooth fingers holding a sharpened knife with a wooden handle, carving brownish-golden bits of the sugarcane sweetener and placing it next to a plate full of sifted wheat flour, midday sunlight pouring from the windows onto the white kitchen counter. We are making sukhdi, a confection originating in the Indian state of Gujarat, a region that she married into at the age of fifteen. We don’t really have an exact birthday for her, but she counts in raashi – a solar calendar system – from the approximate year of her birth. Five years ago, when I left for America to get my MFA, I gave her a notebook and a pen. I asked her to write down all of the Jain recipes and dialectic Gujarati and Marathi idioms and phrases in her repertoire, things that have now almost entirely been lost to a generation whose ‘common masses’ were not highly literate. During her youth, everyday communication was mostly verbal or was written by the one person in a family of fifteen who could write well, because caste, class, and gender systems under British occupation dictated who had access to quality education.
‘Did you write down the recipe for sukhdi in your notebook?’ I ask her now.
‘No, it’s not comfortable, whatever.’
‘What do you mean?’
She lifts a ten-kilo tavo, an iron frying bowl, and places it on the stove.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask her again.
‘I don’t write well in Gujarati. It’s not comfortable for me. I grew up learning Marathi.’
‘Did you write anything in that notebook?’
‘A few things here and there,’ she says, not meeting my eyes.
‘Wait, so did you teach yourself Gujarati?’
‘I only attended school until fourth grade. Everything else I taught myself.’
*
The Director of Translation Studies at an Ivy League university wants me to do well and so she tells me the text I have chosen to translate from Gujarati is ‘too commercial.’ She asks me to pick a woman to translate, one who is ‘preferably lower caste.’ The programme has travel fellowships and specialised workshops for students working with American Sign Language, Arabic, Catalan, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. Working with institutions in the Global Majority, which is what I like to call the erstwhile ‘Global South,’ is apparently too much work for a ‘small' programme. In my first translation workshop at the university, the professor tells us about the ‘incredible' service the Bible and Christians have done for translation. I understand the opinion comes insulated from the real-world events that influenced the translations; still, if there should be prerequisites for teaching classes at Ivy League institutions, coherence should be one of them.
When I get my third translation rejection from a magazine, the editor empathises: ‘I wish the story had been stronger because it was also a diaspora story, which is rare. It was the craft for various reasons. It reads more in the Ghatnavilop modernist style, which the western literary world moved on from ages ago.’ Again, it is astounding, almost violence-inducing, to be informed of the ways in which the west can pick and choose and move on from the rest of the world’s written traditions, all the while being unable to acknowledge the imperialist histories and tendencies that lead to such choices.
*
How can non-western literary traditions be celebrated in the west? One of the answers is through translation. For a book like Violent Phenomena, where the essays on translation as activism outline the exact terms through which colonialist traditions can be violated, gratitude is an inadequate word.
I take a scarlet 1.5mm OTHO ball-pen and freely underline sentences in the book, wildly, with abandon and recklessness I have not felt in years of passive communications with laureled, private institutions of education and the texts on their curriculum.
In the introduction to Violent Phenomena (VP), Jeremy Tiang and Kavita Bhanot write, ‘Oppressive systems must be dismantled rather than negotiated. […] Colonialism is violence, and it is difficult to see how decolonising could be anything other than a violent disruption.’
*
I am writing a body horror story about a woman who gives birth to a fully-grown man out of her back. My father, educated in Gujarati for most of his life, asks me seriously, ‘How are patriarchy and patriotism different?’ and I laugh at the catachresis. Then I tell him the difference. My grandfather, a stoic man with a college degree, asks me to change the language of his smartphone from English to Gujarati, and it takes him less time than it took me to get used to the new terms. Both my father and grandfather can sound things out better with their native language. Sometimes I wonder if I am trilingual or if I even have a native language. In the essay ‘All the Violence It May Carry on its Back: A Conversation about Literary Translation,’ Nariman Youssef writes, ‘The idea of being a professional translator seems strange when it’s a seamless part of what you’ve always done from a young age — back and forth between home (family members) and the world (school, university, doctors, shops, public transport).’
Every time I learn something new about Vasu ba, it takes my breath away. I cannot begin to understand where she stands in history, how her story takes her from schoolgirl to lathi-wielding freedom fighter, to someone who reads thousands of lines of Pali, Prakrit, and Sanskrit sutras, to matriarch.
‘I learned how to make sukhdi from my mother,’ Vasu ba says. ‘She was more educated than her daughters. She attended school until eighth grade. What a bad woman,’ she giggles.
One of my friends in New York, Aaron, who used to work at a college counseling centre, tells me he was instructed by a senior counselor to advise South Asian students against highlighting their multilingualism in college application essays. She said three or four Indian languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil — languages as different and related to each other as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French — didn’t really make them stand out from other South Asian students, because, well, their competition was primarily South Asian. The white applicants, I assume, had their multilingualism valued and earned their acceptances via unofficial affirmative action.
*
My copy of Violent Phenomena now has more red ink than black. I find myself jumping up and pumping my fists whilst reading these essays — decorum forgotten, heart thumping, neurons firing. The text is wonderfully and liberally interspersed with Ngugi wa Thiong’o quotes. There is a healthy, entirely justified, disgust showcased by many of the translators for Thomas Babington Macaulay, who infamously opined that one shelf of English (here, British) literature was worth more than the combined canons of Asia and Arabia. There are justified, if regrettably long, discussions about the many bridge-related translation metaphors, because I believe the metaphor should be retired and canonised, the intersectional possibilities of translation long having outgrown it.
*
During my undergraduate years, brown Americans used to tell me how great my English was, despite the ‘fobby’ (fresh-off-the-boat) accent. More privileged fellow-Indian international students used to tell me my English accent sounded ‘ghāti’, or provincial — certain words lacking a refined, wealthier polish. Let’s say more people in the world speak in a fobby accent than not, considering demographics in the Global Majority. Let’s realise that there are more Englishes in the world than people know about.
In the essay ‘Preserving the Tender Things,’ Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi writes, ‘There is a further implication here, possibly, or a question at least, of whether, in fact, certain native elites inhabit a positionality closer to whiteness than certain members of diasporic communities.’
In every sphere dominated by whiteness, I am told my English is ‘very good.’ At some point I started responding to this backhanded compliment by relaying a fact: by virtue of sheer numbers, India has more English-speaking people (as primary or lingua franca) than the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and about ten other countries combined. In each of these places, more women buy books than men.
*
‘We lived hard lives back then,’ my great-grandmother says. ‘Tea was so expensive that my mother and I would wait for the local merchants to scrape the excess leaves off the lining of their wooden crates and buy those exposed ones. They cost much less. Our cha looked almost white, not the beautiful brown kadak that you drink today. And milk was cheaper.’
‘Is that why your family decided to move to Gujarat? For opportunity?’
'Oh no. My neighbours and cousins used to be punished by the British for the smallest infractions and breaks of curfew. The white soldiers posted in our town used to hammer horseshoes to the soles of their feet. The women lived in constant fear of being raped. Our town was at the centre of some of the more covert independence uprisings, so the security was tight, and we couldn’t continue to live there, so we moved.
Dangers came from within our extended family too. My aunt’s husband used to keep her in chains at home because her brain worked a little slowly. My uncles had to abduct her and take her to the police station to have her marriage annulled, but her husband stole a lot of our family jewels.’
Vasu ba attacks the bubbling mixture in the tavo with a steel spatula. She says, ‘You must keep it moving so it doesn’t stick to the bottom,’ then watches for a moment, and adds more ghee.
What is it about sacrifice that makes the women in my family talk about it so much, I wonder? How do they wipe it off, like water from skin? If I wish to pass it to the next generation, how do I translate the trauma? What is it about feminine trauma that makes for hungry readers?
‘Move past it and it’s gone, you’ll have to start anew,’ Vasu ba says.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘The final mixture for sukhdi. Let it stay on the stove for too long and it will burn,’ she adds, taking the steel thaali I offer her and asking me to lift the tavo so she can pour the contents into it.
I remember when one of my brown peers at university expressed how she was tired of reading South Asian books where all the grandmotherly characters ever did was cook. If there existed a world where retrospective retorts were still possible, I would have liked to ask her how else women like me were supposed to connect to our grandmothers, unless it was in the one space where they were generally allowed to be free.
I turn the stove off.
*
I am in the middle of a six-month internship at an established independent publishing company known for printing prestige translations. It is a balmy fall afternoon in New York City. Another intern and I are coming back from our lunch break when we hear the poetry editor ask the white intern to research black voices — to expand their diversity roster. The other intern, if you must know, is black — as I am brown.
‘What is the measure of a good sympathizer?’ Aaron Robertson asks the reader in his essay ‘The Lion of the Tribe of Judah is Dead!’
Robertson ends his essay, ‘My worry is that I have lingered in tepid bathwater for too long, watching the suds fizzle away as elsewhere, bombs drop.’ It should be noted that one of the first things to be eradicated in places where bombs are about to be dropped is agency. The next, civility, by eradicating basic necessities and education. This is the fizzling. The bombs must be stopped before this happens. The people who are impacted by decisions must be given the agency to make them.
*
I am watching the problematic film The Help. Octavia Spencer’s character says, ‘Eat. My. Shit!’
Khairani Barokka, in her essay ‘Right to Access, Right of Refusal: Translations of/as Absence, Sanctuary, Weapon,’ describes a Cok Sawitri performance in Bali, recited in Indonesian and Balinese to a group of travelers, where Sawitri describes how locals have shat in breakfast banana pancakes before serving them to the tourists. The whole performance, which has not a single word in English, is indecipherable to the foreign viewers.
Barokka writes, ‘[…] translation can always be, in myriad ways, absence, sanctuary, and weapon.’
*
I am sharing a Zoom screen with a relatively new, elite, independent publishing house, courtesy of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). We are networking with editors and fellow translators. I ask the editor-in-chief, a blond man with a French last name, why there is a lack of publication of books which are written by the global majority on their catalogue. He says it is a problem of ‘space’. They can only publish so many authors due to their limited budget. I wonder what the logic is in publishing more books for fewer readers.
In his essay ‘The Mythical English Reader,’ Anton Hur writes, ‘I am the true English reader.’ I realize I am one, too. The feeling ties into the decisions publishers make about targeting certain English readers versus others. If I read in English, aren’t I automatically an English reader? Why must the preferences of people like me not matter to those deciding what is publishable?
‘You’ll find your footing eventually, as is the case with any journey into a space that has flourished before your arrival.’ – Hamid Roslan, in the essay ‘Translation for the Quaint but Incomprehensible in parsetreeforestfire,’ speaking words I want to regurgitate and echo to scared publishers who have tunnel vision.
In her essay ‘Seeking Hajar: Decolonising Translation of Classical Arabic Texts,’ Sofia Rahman asks, ‘What or who is threatened by this possibility and the implications of its reality?’ I want to add to this question; what or who is threatened by evidence of more female English readers within the Global Majority, and why do publishers complain of finances when they have part of the solution smacking them in the face?
Approximately a hundred pages into Violent Phenomena, I come across the word ‘linguicide’ for the first time in an essay titled ‘The Combined Kingdom: “Decolonising” Welsh Translation’ by Eluned Gramich. Are western publishers participating in linguicide by denying the publication of more anti-colonial works from countries that are decolonising? While being recognised in the west makes a writer or translator more famous, I am not sure it is by any measure a more important milestone than writing good books, but at the same time, current imperialistic and colonial practices dictate that scholars fare better once the west acknowledges them. This is not a solution.
*
When I choose makeup at American stores, I have to suppress revulsion. When it comes to choosing foundations and concealers especially, I have to tell myself to breathe. My skin tone is often advertised on their bottles with sandy or caramel adjectives.
The geographical area of the entire United States of America can comfortably fit inside the Sahara Desert. The fetishisation of myself as food and exotica is ringing in my head as a black man calls me ‘sand-nigger’ on the street when I don’t respond to his catcalls.
In Paris, as I try on some burgundy shoes, a random fellow shopper, who is white, comments uninvited on how beautiful that color looks with my skin-tone.
*
At some point I must stop wondering and start doing. I once founded a now-defunct magazine called The Subaltern Word. One of my Ivy League-educated, athletic, Indian friends told me he abhorred the word. That it reminded him of a gutter. He may have decided that he, like a lot of upper-caste Indian men, was above such dialogue on anti-colonialism. Trying to cure the colonial hangover is, I believe, an operose and Sisyphean fight in my part of the world.
In an essay titled ‘Considering the Dystranslation of Zong!’ which also includes a conversation between M NourbeSe Philip and Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, Philip says that looking at archaeological ruins of empires comforts her. Empires always fall. I want to believe that post-colonial empires will also fall.
*
Gratitude is an inadequate word, and I haven’t quite found one that is adequate yet. Violent Phenomena arrived when I was very close to giving up.
‘My mere existence as a brown body in this winter wonderland is an act of disruption in itself. Every. Single. Day.’ – Sawad Hussain, in her smart and hilarious essay, ‘Why Don’t You Translate Pakistanian?’
Sometimes it is good to know that I can change global paradigms merely by existing and continuing my work — the significance of it aside. It has been the luckiest of phenomena to have my voice heard in a white world, navigating as a writer and translator of colour. But the fact is, it should be a norm and not a phenomenon. And it cannot be a norm without the process of change being violent.
You can read more of our 'Meditations' series here.
Featured image by Ilse Driessen on Unsplash.
