Translating culture in West African drama

Abstract

West African drama helps to redefine the concept of cultural translation as it has been understood in translation studies via postcolonial and feminist theories. In looking at the tradition of Ghanaian and Nigerian anglophone playwrights we come to a richer understanding of the concept as it has been theorized in plays by both early playwrights like Joe DeGraft and Wole Soyinka and later playwrights like Jacob Yirenkyi and Tess Osonye Onwueme, who continue the tradition. Not only do the West African texts show the value of translation and the translator to the cultures represented, but they also demonstrate the function of intra-cultural translation as a method to highlight and critique power differentials based on gender and class within their cultures. Ultimately, while West African drama theorizes cultural translation to comment upon local cultures, it can also help to reshape global discourses within translation studies to enrich the debates that define the field while adding to our knowledge of the innovation and complexity of the West African literary tradition.

Keywords:

• cultural translation
• Ghanaian playwrights
• Nigerian playwrights
• West African drama
• translation studies
• feminist theory

Notes

The call for papers reads: ‘According to contemporary critical thought, it is no longer possible to think of the “local” simply as a fixed entity within a nested global hierarchy or as an enclosed space, event, or cultural expression, just as it is impossible to imagine the “global” without recognizing (at least) its “partial embeddedness” (Saskia Sassen 2003, 4) in the “local”, which itself is complex, specific, and “thick” with its own particular conditions and histories of “struggles” (Samir Amin 2002).’ 37th Annual African Literature Association Call for Papers. Ohio University, http://www.ohio.edu/conferences/ALA_CFP.cfm. This endeavour of making the global and local speak to one another embodies the ethic of this article.

Christian writes: ‘For people of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms [. . .] because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking’ ([1987] 2000, 281).

The plays under study in this article come from Ghana and Nigeria, the two West African nations that have shown a most prolific production of plays written in English. Although the term West African is used here as a convenience, the playwrights all come from these particular nations and their ethnic groups vary. Expanding this study to other West African, or even African, nations would likely enrich the study and produce telling variations based on local conditions.

The orthography for this word varies from text to text. For this article, I use ȯkyeame to refer to the position in the general sense, and I capitalize it when it refers to a particular person. In quotations, I follow the author's format in writing the word.

Alessandra Riccardi draws attention to the ways that interpreters and translators are distinctive and yet overlap in their functions, noting that interpreters are more tied to highlighting cultural elements of the various parties, as they are often charged with clarifying possible ‘misunderstandings or cultural misinterpretations, to interpret beyond the words. [. . .] The skills of the interpreter therefore extends beyond the linguistic and include the capacity to internalize and transmit the many nuances of a particular situation’ (2002, 87). I agree with Riccardi's conclusions about the differences between interpretation and translation, yet it is clear that both actions are closely enough connected to offer insight from one sphere to another. See Michael Cronin's 2002 essay ‘The Empire Talks Back’ for more on the increasing attention to interpretation in translation studies.

Talal Asad brings in the idea of power even earlier, pointing out that, ‘the process of “cultural translation” is inevitably enmeshed in conditions of power – professional, national, international’ so that we must examine, ‘how power enters into the process of “cultural translation”, seen as both a discursive and as a non-discursive practice’ (1986, 163).

He writes: ‘The role of interpreters throughout history has been crucially determined by the prevailing hierarchical constitution of power and the position of interpreters in it’ (2002, 58–9).

For a more detailed analysis of Sons and Daughters, a very early play that features a female translator figure, see ‘Translating the Transatlantic: West African Literary Approaches to African American Identity’, wherein I argue that Sons and Daughters helps to establish a tradition of West African drama that puts cultural translation at its center metaphorically, and provides a basis for future playwrights to follow.

Kachru addresses the problem of translating various languages that would be used in reality into one English language that would be used in a creative piece (1992, 317). He notes the creative approaches that writers take to the dilemma of how to represent multi-lingual cultures in one language, noting that, ‘in contact literature, then, we see that deviation acquires a meaning at each level and reveals itself like a spectrum. The lexical deviation acquires meaning at the sentential level, and a deviant sentence is meaningful in relation to other sentences. But the appropriate functional meaning is part of the text type, within the context of the situation’ (1992, 318).