The Cold War regime of translation in Trinidad and Okinawa: Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun and Sadao Shinjo’s tanka poems

ABSTRACT

While the processes of decolonization in the Pacific and the Atlantic regions have been separately analyzed, this paper finds connections between these processes by examining how British and Japanese colonial regimes were reinforced by the US empire and the military, respectively. Here, Naoki Sakai’s concept of translation as the process of creating cofigurative relations can be reframed as the Cold War regime of translation: namely, translating everything suspicious into communism and simultaneously anti-Americanism. This framework, all-encompassing and nebulous enough to arbitrarily create enemies within and without national borders, has served to strengthen the complicities among the empires such as Britain, Japan, and the US during and after the WWII. While the networks of surveillance in the colonial regions were instrumental in enhancing these complicities, the term “anti-Americanism” used by the occupiers at the height of the Cold War has undermined the voices from below and diminished the international nature of democratic movements. Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952) demonstrates how deeply the construction of the US military bases in Trinidad affected its community in the early 1940s. Sadao Shinjo, a tanka poet in Okinawa, highlights the liminality of ideological and racial codes in the US-occupied Okinawa. His works records the presence of the colored GIs in Okinawa in the late 1960s, who participated in the local demilitarization movement. The two instances above stretch the limit of collaborative governance, questioning racialized and gendered selves under duress amidst the Cold War regime of translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• Samuel Selvon
• A Brighter Sun
• Trinidad
• Okinawa
• Sadao Shinjo
• translation
• anti-communism
• anti-Americanism
• the US occupation

Notes

1 See Westad (2007), Horne (2007), Kwon (2010), and Yoneyama (2016).

2 On the interracial solidarity between Okinawa’s anti-war, anti-military base movements and US soldiers who were influenced by the struggles of the African Americans after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, see Nakahodo (2008, 188–203), Tokuda (2013), Onishi (2013, 138–182), Ohno (2014, 185–236), and Murakami (2016, 82–103). Others have questioned the representations of the black soldiers in the Japanese mass media and literature, including Okinawan literature written in Japanese. See Russel (1991) and Molasky (1999, 73–106).

3 The term “East Asia” includes China, but this paper does not specifically probe into the experience of the Chinese laborers who migrated to the Caribbean islands after the formal abolition of slavery in the British territories. On the Chinese indentured laborers, see Lai (1993, 1998). The term “Asia” includes the people of the Indian subcontinent who were also mobilized as indentured laborers (Birbalsingh 1989; Ramdin 2000). I will briefly touch upon Indian indentured laborers in the following section on Selvon.

4 The translations in this article are all mine unless otherwise indicated.

5 Rubinstein and Smith (1985, 1), Chiozza (2009, 36–37), and Katzenstein and Keohane (2007, 12). For a critical assessment of the origin of area and international studies, see Cumings (1999, 173–204).

6 Alan McPherson (2003, 5–6) defines it as the strategic aspect of the masses’ resistance against US foreign policies. Ross and Ross (2004, 1–14) situated anti-Americanism in the US imperial history since the Monroe Doctrine.

7 First, the act enabled the US policy makers to retroactively criminalize and produce “deportable” subjects (Ngai 2004, 239). Second, the act rewrote the immigrants’ racial quota; Japan and South Korea were exempted from adversary statuses, whereas DPRK and PRC were categorized as enemy states (Ngai 2004, 237–238). This escalated racism in the US (Cumings 1990, 637). Third, it prohibited the colored people of the British Caribbean islands from entering into the US, due to the US requirement to reduce their number (Ngai 2004, 238; Paul 1997, 142). The last point hints at the interrelation between the US border regulations and British policies on its colonial peoples.

8 General Records of the Department of State, Central File, 1955–1959 [1957], RG59 Box 3980, Folder 3: 160. Okinawa Prefectural Archives U90006110B.

9 For a general history of surveillance in the US-occupied Okinawa, especially in the 1950s, see Monna (1996).

10 Teachers’ Association of the University of the Ryukyus (2010, 5–6). On the Four Principles, see Toriyama (2003, 406).

11 Some criticize Arakawa’s call for solidarity for re-establishing another racial category, the “Yellow Race,” that was idealized and purified in contrast to the black GIs (Molasky 1999, 100).

12 General Records of the Department of State, Central File, 1955–1959 [1957], RG59 Box 3980, Folder 3:19-20.

13 After the independence of Trinidad and Tobago was achieved and the naval base was reclaimed by Trinidad, Williams’s dubious relations with the US continued. Williams agreed to strengthen “anti-subversive surveillance activities in the Caribbean” and kept a distance from Fidel Castro and Cheddi Jagan (Palmer 2006, 133).

14 Roydon Salick (2001, 15–29) postulates that a recurrent motif in A Brighter Sun is Tiger’s pursuit of knowledge.

15 Lamming (1960, 45) insists that writers like Selvon are “essentially peasant.” Rohlehr (1988, 30–31) in turn, emphasizes “a different outlook between the town people and the rural dwellers.” Peake (2017, 229–236) similarly argues that A Brighter Sun inscribes a cosmopolitan experience, subverting the opposition between the country and the city. However, Peake does not heed the fact that mostly men enjoyed urban experiences and intellectual stimuli.

16 On race and labor in the US bases, see Neptune (2007, 84–89), High (2009, 100–107).

17 Shinjo’s poems also contend that Emperor Hirohito was guilty of war crimes, which is a rare subject for tanka poets (Uchino 1988, 121).

18 The solidarity movement is documented in the film FTA (1972), directed by Francine Parker. I thank Masashi Tokuda for informing me about this film.

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Yutaka Yoshida

Yutaka Yoshida is a Junior Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Science. He completed his PhD at Hitotsubashi University in 2013. His interests include Caribbean and East Asian literature, especially focusing on the comparative critique of decolonization in the Pacific and in the Atlantic regions. Recently, he has published a Japanese translation of George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953). His first monograph, Literary History of the Destitute: Empire and the Crowds in Modernity, will be published by Getsuyo-sha in 2020.