Orality, trauma theory and interlingual translation: A study of repetition in Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah n'est pas obligé

Abstract

The use of stylistic devices based around repetition in Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah n'est pas obligé is usually taken as one of the markers of the novel's link to oral storytelling traditions. It is, however, equally feasible to read such devices as markers of trauma, linking them, for example, to therapeutic storytelling and to the development of inner schemata adequate to the traumatic experience. This article presents a reading of Allah n'est pas obligé that seeks to combine the concepts of translation-of-orality and translation-of-trauma, thus contributing to ongoing discussions around the postcolonializing of trauma theory. It also explores the implications of such a reading for postcolonial translation theory, and particularly the theorization of the translation of orality-inflected literature.

Keywords:

• Kourouma
• repetition
• orality
• trauma
• translation
• postcolonial

Note on contributor

Kathryn Batchelor is Associate Professor of Translation and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. Recent publications include Decolonizing Translation (2009), Translating Thought/Traduire la pensée (special issue of Nottingham French Studies, co-edited with Yves Gilonne, 2010) and Intimate Enemies: Translation in Francophone Contexts (2013, co-edited with Claire Bisdorff). Kathryn is a member of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) and chair of the Advancing Research in Translation & Interpreting Studies (ARTIS) Steering Board.

Notes

1. Throughout the article, where the English translation is adequate for the purposes of the immediate discussion, I have cited it directly; where it is not, I have cited the French original and provided my own translation in square brackets.

2. Kourouma's own insistence on the testimonial nature of all of his novels, as well as his biographer's account of how Kourouma wrote Allah n'est pas obligé in response to the pleas of Djiboutian child-soldiers and researched it by listening to the stories of children involved in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean conflict, indicate that there is also strong potential for reading the novel as a fictionalized testimony based on an amalgamation of real-life testimonies, or even as Kourouma's own effort to engage in therapeutic storytelling in response to becoming a witness of trauma. See Ouédraogo (2000, 1338) and Jean-Michel Djian (2010, 160–161).

3. On the other hand, the excess of words that characterizes the narrative, and, more specifically, the repeated foregrounding of the need to define and explain (notably through the bracketed explanations developed apparently with the help of various dictionaries), could be linked to the aporetic current in the sense that this tends to promote the view that “testimony is never adequate … it can never bridge the gap between words and experience” (Tal 1996, 2).

4. Such Eurocentric formulations are summarized by Craps and Buelens (2008, 5): “Within trauma studies, it has become all but axiomatic that traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental, (post)modernist textual strategies.” For a cogent summary of Craps and Buelens' project and of the issues at stake more generally in an attempted move towards postcolonial trauma theory, see Visser (2011).

5. Herman is drawing here on Robert Lifton (1980).

6. See Kourouma (2000, 39, 137).

7. It should be noted, however, that there is some variance in the degree to which Birahima appears to “own” the three belief statements: while “Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth” and “that's the way it is with tribal wars” appear to be his own formulations, “Allah never leaves empty a mouth he has created” is repeatedly attributed to other people, notably to Yacouba and, in adapted form, Marie-Béatrice.

8. Such beliefs are epitomized in Birahima's summary of the villagers' response to his mother's death: “They all said maman would go straight up to heaven to be with Allah because of all the hardships and sufferings she'd had down here on earth and because Allah didn't have any more hardships and sufferings left to give her” (Kourouma 2006, 25).

9. Gyasi (1999, 82) pursues a similar line of thinking to that put forward by Bandia and Irele, arguing, for example, that “African writers are creative translators in the sense that in their works, they convey concepts and values from a given linguistic, oral culture into a written form in an alien language”.

10. The wording on the inner title page of the German translation runs as follows: “Aus dem afrikanischen Französisch von Sabine Herting” [translated from African French by Sabine Herting] (Kourouma 2004).