Translation at the checkpoint

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the contemporary theoretical and artistic landscape related to the material borders of state sovereignty. It opens by exploring Palestinian multimedia artist Khaled Jarrar’s At the Checkpoint (2007, 2009), an exhibition of photographs physically installed at the Howarra and Qalandia checkpoints in the West Bank. With reference to the aesthetic refunctioning in Jarrar’s work of such sites of control, the article draws a distinction between the “harder borders” that literary cartography often ignores in favour of the “soft, hospitable border” of flows, migrations and hybridity. Assessing Antoni Muntadas’s conceptual art projects On Translation: Warning (1999) and On Translation: Die Stadt (1999–2004), Claire Denis’s films Nenette et Boni (1996), Beau Travail (1999) and L’Intrus (2004), and various Palestinian cultural texts, I argue that by foregrounding the laws of linguistic circulation and mobility, such works also inscribe the possibility of a multilingual, translational community beyond borders and checkpoints. I conclude, very much in the spirit of my book, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), that translation theory must pay closer attention to the linguistic checkpoints erected by states to maintain their sovereignty, and rethink translation as a counter-hegemonic practice.

Keywords:

• translation
• checkpoints
• Palestine
• Khaled Jarrar
• Antoni Muntadas
• Claire Denis

Notes

1. As Gil Hochberg (2013) notes in an unpublished manuscript: “‘At the Checkpoint’ took place at the checkpoint: originally at the Hawara checkpoint (from noon to approximately 4 p.m. on Saturday, 3 February 2007) and, two years later, following a similar model, at the Qalandia checkpoint (during the summer of 2009).”

2. Khaled Jarrar and Alistair George, “Stamping Palestine Into Passports”, November 21, 2011, http://palsolidarity.org/2011/11/an-interview-with-khaled-jarrar-stamping-palestine-into-passports/.

3. Spivak’s opening chapter titled “Crossing Borders” focuses on the difficulty of mapping Comparative Literature as a discipline: “Without the support of the humanities, Area Studies can still only transgress frontiers, in the name of crossing borders; and without a transformed Area Studies, Comparative Literature remains imprisoned within the borders it will not cross” (2004, 385).

4. David Fieni and Karim Mattar, seminar description for panel “The Global Checkpoint: ‘Rights’ of Passage, Performances of Sovereignty.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, March 29–April 1, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

5. It is for this reason that Helga Tawil-Souri ironically “mourns” the loss of old-style Qalandia when she revisits it in 2011. Gone is the ragtag community that had grown up around it the “merchants who still loiter around but seem more like beggars, the bus drivers and even the soldiers behind their bullet-proof glass, mirrors and databases” (2011). Reduced to a tangle of stone slabs and garbage, Qalandia no longer functions to the degree that it once did as a volcanic marker of “the shared experience of “tension over spatiality and mobility” and the “constant sense of unbelonging in our host countries, or the continued forced exile in our own backyards” (73). See Tawil-Souri (2011).

6. “Wittgenstein’s reflection on the way a model was able to illustrate legal language”, Weizman writes, “might help shed some light on the story that follows, a story that is itself engaged with acts of translation, undertaken in court, from reality to its representation on a physical model, and vice versa” (2011, 65; my emphasis).

7. Bishara (2004); translation from French my own.

8. This reference to “watching” as a check to the checkpoint recalls Machsomwatch, an organization of Israeli women activists who, since 2001, have conducted “daily observations” at major crossings, out-of-the-way routes and military courts. See www.machsomwatch.org/en.

9. Keenan (forthcoming) qualifies the notion of war as a discourse paraphrasing Eyal Weizman's contribution to the Dictionary of War project as follows: “we do need to understand war as a discourse, but more precisely a threatened one, a self-erasing one, a language endangered by its own capacity to destroy and hence destroy itself”. See also Weizman (2006). See also a shorter version, Ophir, Givoni, and Hanafi (2009).