In Conversation: African women poets as translators of the wor(l)d: Conceição Lima, Tariro Ndoro, and Fatoumata Adelle Barry in conversation with Gabriel Bámgbóṣé

The fundamental question of how translation, broadly conceived, constitutes the idea, imagination, and experience of Africa in the world animated the Global Africa and the Humanities symposium ‘Translating Africa/Africa in Translation’, convened by Ousseina Alidou and Alamin Mazrui in April 2021 at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, United States. Highlights of the symposium were the readings, presentations, and conversations by African women poets and storytellers that demonstrate the central role women writers play in translating and shaping the narratives of Africa. The following conversation extends the symposium’s debates on the relationship between translation and African women’s poetic knowledge in different languages. I invited three African women poets who participated in the symposium, Tariro Ndoro, Fatoumata Adelle Barry, and Conceição Lima, to further discuss the task of poets as translators of African knowledge and experience. This conversation explores the role of translation in the poets’ writing, the multiple language worlds they inhabit, and that, in turn, inhabit their heterolingual or multilingual poetic forms. It explores the poets’ experiences of self-translation, their translation of other writers’ work, and the translation of their work by other translators. Moreover, it considers their conceptualisation of translation as a mode of decolonial praxis in terms of the linguistic, epistemic, and cultural insurgency their work embodies. Finally, the conversation invites the poets to reflect on how they negotiate the worlds of their other professions and their commitment to poetry. Ndoro, a Zimbabwean poet and storyteller who writes in English and works as a writing consultant, also trained in epidemiology and molecular biology. Primarily writing in French, Barry is a Nigerien poet and storyteller who works as a medical doctor and public health practitioner. The São-Toméan writer, Lima, writes in Portuguese and works as a journalist and translator.

Gabriel Bámgbóṣé (GB):

Since this space has given us the opportunity to further reflect on the spiritual, meditative, therapeutic, artistic, inspirational, embodied, and philosophical dimensions of translation, let me pose this broad question to you: What does translation mean to you and your poetic practice? Considering that scholars like Oluwole Adejare (1998) and Paul Bandia (2008) have claimed that postcolonial African writing is constituted in translation, and Gayatri Spivak (1993) asks that we consider the translator as a reader and writer, how would you describe your poetry’s relation to translation as a mode of reading and writing? In other words, what modes of translation do you enact in your poetic work?

Tariro Ndoro (TN):

For me, translation is more metaphorical than literal. In my poetry, I am subverting my usage of English rather than taking a Shona text and translating it into an English text. I feel this is important in the postcolonial climate as the colonial space has always brought with it the white gaze. For example, the Rhodesian government was averse to the rest of the world knowing the horrors they perpetuated against African citizens/subjects, so they only allowed the publication of Shona and Ndebele texts, trusting that no one else in the world spoke these languages. We can also think of African texts and histories that were translated and transcribed by early European anthropologists. In such instances, differences in worldview and racial prejudice often coloured these works. When it comes to the modern African writer, much of what the world ‘knows’ about our continent is either demonised or fetishised – either the pitiful image of a fly-ridden orphan or the non-realistic grandeur of Wakanda. These are far-flung binaries that do not truly reflect the experience of the average African. Thus, my own mandate as a writer (and not a translator proper) is to be mindful of how I translate the African experience to the page. I do this through both content and form. For example, I use multilingualism in my text, knowing that linguistic segregation existed to alienate and isolate my people from the rest of the world. How do I combat that? By mixing the language to reflect the cultural hybridisation that we inherited. Before I wrote Agrindada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Ndoro 2019), I read a fair amount of Latin American fiction, and that taught me to be unapologetic in my use of my own languages, and it also taught me that the idea of including the ‘language of the other’ is a textual criticism in and of itself; it forces the reader to think about breaks in English and whether or not we (readers) are entitled to linguistic purity in the texts of postcolonial writers. This becomes a point of departure for discussions around cultural colonisation and the ways we can reject it.

Fatoumata Adelle Barry (FAB):

For me, translation involves a vast field of components, even beyond the word ‘translation’. To write poetry, I have to translate my thoughts, which are most often in a language other than the one I use to write. In this sense, translation then becomes the bridge between the grey matter of my thoughts, my emotions, and the rhymes and prose that I write down on paper. I find this part of the translation much more authentic, even if sometimes I cannot find exact words in French to say certain things that I think in my native language. On the other hand, I find that the translation of the already written text from one language to another might be problematic because I have the impression that the initial expressions of the author take a hit. Any translation is hardly authentic if we refer to Spivak (1993), who considers the translator as a writer and reader because, in the end, we find both the feelings of the author of the ‘original’ work and the translator collide in the translated text. This explains why I think that a translator has a huge task, or a desire, if you want, to offer understandable content to the reader of the translated text while remaining faithful to the author’s initial production.

GB:

I appreciate how you both conceptualise translation in its broad sense, not as a derivative activity, but as the central epistemic framework of your writing process. Tariro, I find it fascinating that you turn to Latin American fiction as a poet rewriting the African historical, social, and cultural experience. To take us back to the theme of the symposium, how do you think your poetry is translating Africa in the world?

TN :

At the symposium, I spoke about the project of colonisation and how it sought to erase languages and, by extension, cultures. Not just in Africa: all countries that have been colonised have had some push or another to lead with European languages as the languages of learning and commerce. This situation is not entirely reflective of the African experience. Although each country was colonised in a different fashion, we all retain pieces of our indigenous cultures to varying extents. In my poetry, I use the form of my work to critique language itself and to portray a sense of Shonglish, which may be more natural to the Zimbabwean speaker than either Shona or English in isolation. By doing so, I attempt to translate the cultural hybridisation of contemporary Africa in my work.

FAB :

Being an African poet means grappling with multiple cultural lives, and often that cultural diversity constitutes the texts. Thus, when my poems can show and express Africa in some forms, then these poems can translate Africa wherever they can be read. I don’t really know if my poetry translates Africa as this is a complex question that I think every African writer grapples with in their literary productions. But if I define myself as an author who comes from Africa, my poetry feels and senses Africa in some ways, and my ideas can have a tinge of Africa. So, in my words, we can read Africa, as we can read the rest of the world. I hope that my poetry translates more than Africa as the issues I explore in my writing have a universal vision. I think of the Canadian Haitian novelist Dany Laferrière (2014) who once said that if a Japanese person reads his work, he automatically becomes a Japanese writer. This might sound rather unrealistic, but it captures the idea that the provenance of an author may be translated in the world by the reader through the reading process. The writer is always a reader, too. The Senegalese essayist and poet Felwin Sarr (2017) said that the authors he reads become part of his imaginary country; Rumi and Khalil Gibran are some authors in this writer’s imaginary country. In this sense, we may think that Sarr’s poetry translates Africa just as it translates the world.

Conceição Lima (CL):

Indeed, this is not an easy question. Let me first say that as a Santomean and African poet, being translated is in itself a reason for joy and a stronger stimulus for writing. This is particularly because poets of the official Portuguese-speaking African countries crave more visibility. Yes, things are changing, but in a gradual and very slow rhythm. São Tomé and Príncipe is a very small country; yet its small literary corpus is constituted by important names such as Caetano da Costa Alegre, Francisco José Tenreiro, and Alda Espírito Santo, among others.

How do I think my poetry is translating Africa in the world? In one way or another, I want to believe that my poetry contributes to translating Africa in the world through the imaginary, the aesthetic legacies and heritages, and the aspirations and collective dreams it embodies. My poetry reconstitutes the places I have been to and the places I have not been to: these are palpable places, places of utopia, dystopia, and resistance with evocations of my spiritual, artistic, and social perceptions of the past, the present, and the future of the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, my country, and of Africa, the mother-continent. As Aimé Césaire, ([(1950) 2017] (1950) 2017, 518–519) once wrote in one of his poems, ‘toute île appelle’ (‘every island beckons’). In my work, the islands appeal to the continent, and this appeal is an evocation of arrivals, departures, and travels in times and spaces. My poems evoke images of the humus, home, sea waves, and porous stones of my African world; they are stubborn birds refusing to give up flight in the face of terrifying weather. They blend feelings of sorrow and hope, personal memories, lived experiences, rivers of resistance and resilience, and the legacy of our ancestors with the forms of knowledge offered by books, movies, and music. The poems I write deal with memories by interrogating historical shadows and ghosts, and the vivid pains that should not be buried, forgotten or erased. Historical episodes should be intimated by the poem so that they can resurface, be remembered, and become a source of strength. This is how I strive to translate the African world in my poetry.

GB:

Let’s further unpack the relation of translation, history, and poetry which you have lyrically initiated in your response, Conceição. When you read your poems during the opening session of the Global Africa symposium, the audience was drawn to the evocation of history and language in your poetry. Some of them were surprised by the historical resonances between the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe and the Caribbean; the question of creolisation and slavery also came up, with people wondering: Why don’t we know much about this African archipelago at the centre of the world, and why are we not making the kinds of historical connections your work evokes? To what extent do you consider your work a way of translating history into poetic form?

CL :

History is intertwined with my poetry. My four books of poetry, O Útero da Casa (The Womb of Home, Lima 2004), A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó (The Painful Root of Micondó, Lima 2006), O País de Akendenguê (The Country of Akendenguê, Lima 2011), and Quando Florirem Salambás no Tecto do Pico (When Salambás Bloom on the Rooftop, Lima 2015), clearly express this inextricable bond with history through the evocation of memory, time, place, and subjectivity. They engage with the history of my archipelagic country, the history of Africa, and the history of the worlds related in one way or another to my country and to Africa. It is not as if I sit down and say: ‘Let’s talk about this historical episode’. My poetic translation of history is not a programmed agenda or a predetermined script. It is more like an inner appeal, need, and demand to remember, to resist amnesia. The lyric mode allows me to dialogue with history with all its horrors, ambiguous realities, and astonishing wonders. The colonial historical formation of the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe calls for a critical engagement with the plantation economy and its bitter fruits, transatlantic slavery and the slave trade, colonialism and its profound legacies, the process of creolisation, resistance, and survival in such an unequal context of existence. In my poems, I write about the painful and difficult archipelagic emergence and catastrophes and, against all the odds, the re-emergence of life.

In poetry, I reencounter my own voice, beautiful in its hoarseness; it is a voice searching for its full harmony and the harmony with other voices making up the history of the place I write from. My work is, therefore, a creative effort to ‘resuscitate’, so to say, the voices erased by the implacability of history. I think a poetic translation of history in this sense is an ethical attempt to reimagine the usurped dignity and the negated humanity of Africans enslaved and forced into plantation labour for many centuries. You can grasp this sense of history in this excerpt from my poem, ‘Afroinsularidade’ (‘Afroinsularity’), brilliantly translated by David Shook:

And the specters melted into

the islander’s clocks – tools of empire

in a structure of ambiguous clarities

and secular condiments,

patron saints and toppled fortresses,

cheap wines and shared dawns.

At times I think of their pallid skeletons,

their hair putrid at the edge of the sea

Here, in this fragment of Africa

where, facing the South,

a word rises high

like a painful flag (Lima 2021).

I would say that the translation of history here is built on temporal entanglements that echo Saint Augustine’s modes of time: the presence of the past, the presence of the present, and the presence of the future.

GB:

Tariro, in your collection, Agrindada, you lure the reader into your poetic universe by calling attention to the problem of erasure and gaps in language, knowledge, and history, using such graphological strategies as redactions, bracketing (especially empty brackets), and the cancelling out of certain lexicons. In a very powerful way, your work stages the epistemic struggle to translate silence into poetic language. Tell us more about this struggle.

TN :

I think I’ve always struggled with speech and silence. I grew up in Zimbabwe, which is a very conservative country, and I was raised by parents who had lived through a vicious and protracted civil war. It was an unspoken rule that certain traumas should never be discussed. By the time I enrolled for my master’s in creative writing at Rhodes University in South Africa, I felt that I was writing against a certain establishment, but I could never quite articulate what this establishment was. A year later, I read Safia Elhillo’s poetry for the first time, and I was finally able to articulate (to myself) my early struggles against the microaggressions of racism and cultural erasure and my later struggles with living in a xenophobic society, along with the struggle of being a young person in a country that was collapsing and not always fully understanding the nature of that collapse.

After reading Safia Elhillo’s (2017) The January Children, I decided that I liked her formalism and use of space and definitions in her poetry, and I began to search for other poets using form in unique ways. Along the way, I found George Abraham (2017), who uses redactions and space in his collection, al youm, and Hayan Charara (2016), who in Something Sinister plays around with definitions, pronunciations, and slips with words. Finally, I read Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1982) and Under the Tongue by Yvonne Vera (1996), and I had a clear understanding that poetry is not only in the words we put on the page, but also in the words we leave out and the words we erase. I found this style to be useful to portray the Zimbabwean condition because, indeed, there are traumas we don’t speak of, and leaving spaces or redacting them is a way of translating them to the page, the way a film director might instruct an actor to sigh. It may also just be a matter of personal preference; I love formalism and will use its devices at the slightest excuse.

GB:

You write about quotidian violence with careful attention to the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and the border in the southern African postcolony. I wonder if you see your poetry as working through the traumatic and therapeutic dimensions of translation.

TN :

Certainly, Agringada forced me to examine my own history and my own genealogy as I was writing. A few readers have expressed similar sentiments and, more surprisingly, I have had readers from South Africa and Botswana express their own feelings about migrations and xenophobia, which encourages me that at least the conversation around that awful topic is triggered by my work. I would, however, like to steal into the minds of more readers to ascertain how much of an impact or how much of a therapeutic tool Agringada is. Sadly, that’s the part where an author lets go and has faith that their work is appreciated and sends the right message.

GB :

Let’s talk about how you translate silence, trauma, and gender in your poetry, Fatoumata. Like Tariro and Conceição, you deal with questions of silence, erasure, and trauma in your forthcoming collection, Les Déchues: dire ce qui ne se dit pas (The Fallen: Saying that which is not said). And you deal with this important question from a feminist perspective. I wonder if you could speak more about the experiences that inspire this work. Why do you write this collection? What are the unsayable experiences you want poetry to say? And why do you choose poetry as the literary form for translating the voices of the fallen?

FAB :

This collection of poems was born out of an urgency to talk in order not to sink. But talking about sorrow and violence is something you cannot do openly in my community. Saying that you feel the pain of being violated either physically or psychologically is seen as a sign of weakness. So, the chance I had was that I am a poet, and I am able to bring out this kind of inner poison on paper. I was going through a difficult period, experiencing moments of sadness that were lasting, and I needed a medication that wasn’t a drug. I just wanted to pump it all out. Being familiar with such internal pain enables me to listen to and connect with so many women around me who were experiencing similar emotional pain in their relationships because of the rules established by patriarchy within a society that seems to resist change. This shared experience formed the basis of the collection. I wrote the poems in the collection while processing this experience. After an obstetrics & gynaecology exam in my 5th year of medical studies at Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey, I was collecting the course’s papers and made a huge discovery. There were bits of poems written in pencil on each page of my obstetrics notes. I sat and read them and realised that all the poems were on the same topic of being and feeling psychologically violated. The poems appear to be saying all the things you cannot say loudly as a woman in a patriarchal world. And as I started to compile them, I realised the power of writing poems in ‘saving’ me from the wounds and pains I have never openly expressed. I chose poetry because, in this literary genre, I find it easy to express emotions without having to completely say things that feel painful.

GB :

I wonder if any of your powerful work has been translated into other languages. I know you’ve had to translate your work many times to reach an anglophone audience. How would you describe your experience of self-translation? How does it feel to find yourself moving your work between languages and cultures? Do you think about your target audience when translating? Does that in any way inform your translation strategies or the decisions you make in the process of translation?

FAB :

I translated some of my poems into English precisely to address an English-speaking audience for the Global Africa Symposium. Self-translation is an experience that I find thorny because my writing comes from my gut, and such a deep intimacy can only be expressed in my first language. So, I often prefer not to translate myself, especially because translation is a profession in its own right, and it takes additional skills to translate someone else’s text.

I always find that in translation, something is kind of missed. For this reason, I learned the English language because I love the work of authors writing in English, and sometimes I don’t want to read translated versions of their texts. It all started with the poem ‘Phenomenal Woman’ by Maya Angelou (1994), which I read initially in French and later in English, and I found that I needed to better understand the text in its original language. So, I set the goal of learning English so that I can read Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and William Ernest Henley in their original composition. As a reader, I want to almost ‘drink’ the whole text without missing anything. Even though I cannot learn all the languages in the world to read every text in its original composition, I always have a preference for reading the original texts.

GB:

Conceição, tell us about your work in translation and, if any, the implications seeing your translated work has on your writing experience. In other words, do you think of the translation that your work will invite when you write, or does seeing your work in translation stretch your poetic imagination in any way?

CL :

I have been lucky enough to have my books and poems translated into a few languages: Arabic, Czech, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Turkish. If this can be seen as a reflection of some recognition, it also reinforces my will to carry on writing.

When I write a poem, I don’t think about the kind of translation my work will invite. In fact, I do not think about the translation at all. My thoughts about translation emerge when I face the work of translation already done. And I must say that to see one’s poem or book translated is always a unique experience. In each translation, I imagine how the translator reads the poems, the challenges faced when confronted with the submersed roots of the text, when confronted with the threat of desolation, the colourfulness inside childhood memories, the house of memories, the resonance of the creole words planted without italics in the body of the poem written mainly in the Portuguese language. I would say that my poetic imagination gets stretched when I observe, with wonder, the resources required to deal with specific toponyms, geographical, cultural, and linguistic references, and when I see the reiteration of translation as creation itself. For example, I have a poem that has been translated by six different people into three different languages: English, German and Spanish. Although I cannot read German, reading each version of the English and Spanish translations filled me with a sense of wonder. I find the different strategies and aesthetic options used in each version striking, all giving the poem back to me in different forms.

GB:

It is fascinating that you think about the challenges a translator confronts when dealing with a poetic text written in one language yet embodying other language worlds. Could you speak a little bit more about how you handle this fundamental relation of poetry to multilingualism and translation?

CL :

That is a critical question. In my poetry, you will find creole words, especially words from Santomean Creole, better known as Forro, which is the first spoken creole language and the second most spoken language in São Tomé. São Tomé and Príncipe is a small multicultural and multilingual country with a long history of slavery and plantation economy. There are five major languages spoken in the archipelago, four of which are creoles. The languages include Portuguese (which has its own dominant local variety), Forro, Cape Verdean Creole, Angolar (a language spoken in the far South and far North), and Lungu’yé, which is spoken on Príncipe Island. In addition to Forro, in my work, you will find French and English words, for instance, in poems from A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó. You will also find some words from the local variety of Portuguese (expressively different from the official form) and Lungu’yé. I also draw linguistic resources from the Portuguese varieties spoken by the Angolans and Mozambicans brought in the recent past to the islands as indentured labourers (the serviçais or contratados) to work on coffee and cocoa plantations. For instance, I feel compelled to use Forro words to capture the flora and fauna of the archipelago; I invoke the names of species in this language as I have learned them from my grandmothers and old aunties. I feel that when I use a Forro word to conceptualise things in the ways that I have heard them in my environment since I was a child, these things attain a form of life that no other language can capture, and like trees and flowers, they flourish in the ecology of another language.

GB:

What you have just described is a clear demonstration of how you enact the translation epistemology Édouard Glissant (1997, 119-120) in Poetics of Relation has brilliantly designated ‘internal multilingualism’, which creates ‘new multiplicity’ and ‘interlexicality’ in the text. Myriam Suchet (2012; 2013) has also argued that this translation epistemology constitutes a ‘heterolingual’ text that denaturalises the ‘logic of homogeneity and exclusion’. Tariro, you also play on multiple languages in poems largely written in English. You mentioned Shonglish earlier. But I think there are echoes of other languages in this Shonglish. Ketleho Kano Shoro is right to note on the blurb of your book that your poetry ‘wields many tongues’ to articulate a ‘testimony of human survival’. If I may ask, what specific tongues do you weave into this text? What does this internal multilingualism or heterolingualism as a translation epistemology built into your poetry enable you to achieve?

TN :

Agringada is mostly written in English but includes liberal doses of ChiShona, SeSotho, Afrikaans, Spanish, Latin, and a little French. They have slightly different uses. I have included ChiShona, SeSotho, and Afrikaans because I grew up around them. They are a part of my experience. I grew up around ChiShona and most white Zimbabweans peppered their English with myriad Afrikaans phrases. I got in contact with SeSotho on the television because most Zimbabwean families watched South African television shows, and when I went to South Africa to complete my tertiary education, I was surrounded by isiXhosa, isiZulu, Setswana, Sepedi, and Tshivenda. It is a pity I couldn’t include all these languages or even all of Zimbabwe’s official languages. However, the three languages I did include gave me an authenticity I could not have achieved through proper translation or English substitutes. While I know most non-Shona speaking readers will have to go by the glossary, readers from Zimbabwe will have an enriched reading of the text, and possibly (hopefully) Agringada will provide a point of departure for discussion around language and linguistics. Frantz Fanon, ([1952] 2008) has posited that to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. Therefore, the only way that I could translate the coexistence of all these cultures was by way of heterolingualism. It is my hope to see more writers play with language in a way that reflects our lived experiences. This in no way implies that I am the first to do this, just that I would like to add to the conversation.

I included Spanish and Latin entries because I wanted to tell two stories concurrently. The first ‘storyline’ in my poetry collection is the obvious trajectory of a girl growing up in postcolonial Africa and her experiences of racism and xenophobia. The concurrent ‘storyline’ is a story about language and the way it evolves with time. As formerly colonised peoples, we inhabit a third space (Bhabha 1994) which could be better described as what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls a borderland culture. In this space, languages and cultures interact, and hybrid linguistic and cultural forms emerge. We should not forget the violence that constitutes this colonial process. Take for example the way Latin words became Spanish words, and somewhere along the way, the Spanish colonised Mexico and their language became Mexicanized. When Mexican immigrants cross over to the US, the language evolves again. This process is incredibly similar to many so-called Shona words that were originally Dutch words that became Afrikaans and then were absorbed into English and finally embellished into Shona. Paying attention to heterolingualism in poetry allows me to indirectly comment on postcolonial languages and, by extension, languages.

GB:

Fatoumata, what is your take on this idea of multilingualism? Do your poems written in French carry the lifeworld of other languages?

FAB :

Absolutely. I speak Fulfuldé as my first language and learned French when I went to primary school. In my community, I learned Zarma and Hausa. Of course, I draw on the resources of these languages in my work. I agree that my poetry exhibits what Glissant (1997, 119) has rightly called ‘internal multilingualism’ because the French I write is often ‘dressed’ in several other languages. For example, this heterolingual phenomenon is predominant in the writing of the Senegalese novelist Ken Bugul, and she agrees with the critical assessment that her French has a flavour of Wolof. Since we cannot separate the languages that coexist in the psyche of the author, we must acknowledge the internal multilingualism that shows up in written texts because they are drawn from that same multiple language space the writer writes from. Often, there are local language expressions bursting into the verse of my poem, and they hold such a significant space in the text that I feel obliged to let them be and add explanatory or translational footnotes if highly necessary. I believe that this complex language phenomenon brings a unique beauty to the text.

GB:

Tariro, during the symposium, you wore the cap of both poet and critic. In your presentation, you thought through Alice Notley’s ([1998] 2010) concept of disobedient poetics and the fundamental question of language in African literature. What does disobedient poetics bring to this language debate? How does it relate to your heterolingual poetics and decolonial aesthetic vision?

TN :

In her essay, ‘The Poetics of Disobedience’, Notley ([1998] 2010) discusses her writing style and some of the thought processes that inspired it. She wrote about not fitting into any of the poetry enclaves of her contemporaries and not particularly wanting to fit in. She also discussed writing against limitations:

I’ve spoken in other places of the problems, too, of subjects that hadn’t been broached much in poetry and of how it seemed one had to disobey the past and the practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literarily around one … What are we leaving out now? Usually what’s exactly in front of the eyes ears nose and mouth, in front of the mind, but it seems as if one must disobey everyone else in order to see at all. This is a persistent feeling in a poet but staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience, sense and reason is a huge task.

(Notley [1998] 2010)

I have already mentioned that the colonial agenda pushed for purity of language. This persisted in my schooling years. One could be punished for speaking in ‘vernacular’ languages, and European languages were touted as the languages of intelligence and gateways to the outside world. Thus, writing purely in English for me was obeying the literary past while denying my hybrid tongue was an instance of being coerced into silence. For as long as I could not freely write in a language that reflected my lived experience, a part of me was being silenced or erased.

Thus, Notley critiques her own work, and in the essay, she is looking at one literary work. Nevertheless, when I think of disobedient poetics, I am not only thinking of the poetics of one literary work. I am thinking of it as a broader poetics of resistance – I am thinking of Yvonne Vera and Dambudzo Marechera. It is not only about including Shona words in a text; it is fundamentally about writing in a way that appropriates and subverts the colonial language to accommodate the African experience (or Asian or Latin American). Chinua Achebe (1975, 9) once said ‘let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard things with it’. Critics of Marechera accused him of decentring English even though that was the primary language he wrote in. Thus, disobedient poetics is an attitude of shirking limitations.

GB:

Thank you, Tariro. Let’s talk about your experience as a translator, Conceição. When we met some years ago, you passionately discussed the need to invest in translation in Africa to facilitate the process of truly knowing each other beyond colonial borders. Do you want to speak more on this significant issue? What works have you translated, and does the practice of translating other people’s work enrich your poetry in any way?

CL :

Yes, I am deeply convinced that investment in translation in Africa can facilitate the process of knowing each other beyond colonial borders. If it is true that translation can give more visibility to an author’s work, increasing both prestige and recognition, it is also true that literary translation in Africa is necessary because of its potential to facilitate and reinforce connections. The sense of African pride surrounding names like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka or Chimamanda Adichie is not a diffuse or distant feeling. It is fed by a sense of intimacy with their literary imaginary made possible by translation into several languages. You may ask: Why do I refer to three Anglophone writers as a Lusophone writer? It is precisely because the prominence and projection of Anglophone African authors in and beyond African borders cannot be denied. The fact that all African Nobel laureates are Anglophone writers speaks to this global prominence, which cannot be achieved without translation.

To define myself as a translator is a hyperbole. Yes, I translated a handful of poems, mainly by Nigerian poets. I was living in London and some Santomeans had created a Yahoo group for discussion of several issues, including the relationship between São Tomé and Príncipe and Nigeria. I realised how much the exchanges were dominated almost exclusively by the oil issues and how our knowledge of a country like Nigeria was, sometimes, badly informed. So, one night I sat down and said to myself: ‘Let’s introduce a new subject. Let’s try to reveal the richness of Nigerian poetry’. I chose John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Christopher Okigbo, Toyin Adewale Gabriel, Ifi Amadiume, Femi Fatoba, Aig Higo, and Niyi Osundare, and I translated some of their poems into Portuguese. The reception was very enthusiastic, and I felt motivated. My goal was achieved because the translation I introduced changed the dynamics of the group’s conversation about Nigeria. I also translated the Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam'si and some Spanish and Colombian poets, including Rafael Alberti and Luz Helena Villamizar.

I must say that I do love to translate poetry as an exercise of revelation because it offers remarkable illuminations about the inner force of poetic texts. When I translate, I feel my semantic and aesthetic imagination enlarged and even challenged. The exercise of translation establishes a deep connection with the poetry I am translating, and this enriches my poetic imagination. When I translated the poem ‘An African Elegy’ by Ben Okri (1997), the impact of both the original poem and the process of translation lasted for a long time. I felt it added something difficult to describe, something very special, to my literary being, to my whole being. I felt something similar when translating other poems, but the feeling in ‘An African Elegy’ was stronger.

GB :

My final round of questions will ask about how you all translate your other professional experiences into your poetic work (if you ever do). Fatoumata, reading these lines in your poem, ‘Les Déchues’ (Barry 2017, 61), makes me wonder how your professional experience as a health worker gets transferred into your poetic contemplation on social issues in Africa: ‘Il paraît qu’il y a assurance maladie là-bas/Haa Ébola et sida on s’en fout/Ici I’hôpital c’est la morgue/Et la morgue un reposoir’ (‘It appears there is health insurance over there/Ah Ebola and AIDS don’t care/Here the hospital is the morgue/And the morgue a resting place’). Clearly, you deploy the registers of your profession in fashioning the image of social malady here. Could you speak to this relationship between poetry and medicine/health?

FAB :

Poetry and words existed in my life before medical school. The medical world is a profession for me, and writing words is my essence as a human being. So, my profession can, from time to time, express itself in my writing and often provides the imaginative resources for what Christian Dufour (2005) calls ‘les mots qui disent les maux’ (the words that speak the evils) in my poetic diagnosis of social life. And this doctor’s world offers me the language to articulate the ‘disease’ in society and to find the cure in the realm of the imaginary. While the mission of the writer might not necessarily be to find actual remedies for the ills of society, imagining and writing about social diseases and cures helps me to lay issues out on paper to free myself from pain. And then, the reader can take ownership of that pain to the extent that they can connect with it and do what they want with it. In the same way, when I have deep joy, I translate it into the text, and I give it away to the reader. It is this movement between the literary production and the reader that allows us to maintain a rather unique connection between the literary and the social world.

GB:

Tariro, you work as a writing consultant, and you are trained in epidemiology and molecular biology. I wonder if you see any connection between your training and your poetic work.

TN :

Earlier in my career, I tried to compartmentalise and keep these as separate silos. However, I have been told that my precision in the naming of things in poetry gives me away as a scientist. You see, scientists prefer concise and precise narratives, and I often feel that I am too verbose and fanciful as a scientist. Poetry and fiction, on the other hand, are not exact sciences, and I sometimes feel held back because the tradition of ‘scientific writing’ makes creativity slightly harder when I am working on my own creative projects. So, I often feel frustrated when I have to move from one form of writing to the other. It is sometimes difficult to exist as both a creative writer and a scientist, yet as a writing consultant, my scientific background often helps. I can edit different types of work because I can understand creativity, but I also appreciate technical language, and technical ideas don’t scare me too easily.

GB :

Finally, Conceição, I remember our first meeting was at TVS (the State Television in São Tomé) in 2019. Could you tell us about your experience as a journalist and how you think it crosses with your artistic vision as a poet?

CL :

In both spheres, language is the main tool of engagement. While in journalism, subjectivity is not, generally speaking, regarded as an asset, the journalistic lens can deepen the poet’s social eye and subjective recreation of events. I often translate journalistic materials into poems, and this allows for a different kind of engagement with experiences, episodes, stories, and reports in ways that only the poetic word can grasp or even transfigure. For example, there is a certain correspondence between the documentary I produced with Gerson Soares in 2016, Witches: Beliefs, Stigmatization, and Ostracism, and the poem ‘A Lenda da Bruxa’ (‘The Legend of the Witch’) in A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó, which you so craftily translated into English. However, if the root of both journalistic and poetic language can emerge from the same source, the breath of imagination they reveal or allow about a subject can never be the same. The feelings they ignite can be related, yet their process of giving soul and substance to feelings differs remarkably.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriel Bámgbóṣé

Gabriel Bámgbóṣé is an Assistant Professor of African and Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is a poet, literary critic, and translator. His interests in scholarship include poetry and poetics, Black/African modernisms, African women’s literature, and Black/African feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial thoughts. Bámgbóṣé’s work has appeared in African Literature Today, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Contemporary Humanities, Ake Review, and Ideas & Futures, among other venues. His research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Fatoumata Adelle Barry

Fatoumata Adelle Barry is a medical doctor, public health practitioner, and Fulbright & Alfred Sommer scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is an award-winning poet and author of the short story collection, En attendant minuit. Her short story 'La quête' won the Niger National Prize in 2012. She is the founder of @LivresNiger, a nonprofit with a vision of promoting excellence through reading. She has an interest in feminist literature, travel literature, and writings that come at the intersection of health sciences and literature.

Tariro Ndoro

Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean author. Her debut poetry collection, Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner, was the recipient of the inaugural NAMA Award for Outstanding Poetry Book. Her work has been shortlisted for the BN Poetry Prize, the DALRO Poetry Prize, and the Intwasa Short Story Prize. Tariro has read her work at numerous festivals and her work has appeared in Best New African Poets, The Kalahari Review, New Coin Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Puerto del Sol among other venues. Tariro was an International Writing Program Fellow in Spring 2022.

Conceição Lima

Conceição Lima is a Santomean poet, journalist, chronicler, and translator. A founding member of the National Union of Writers and Artists, she has authored four books of poetry: O Útero da Casa (2004), A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó (2006), O País de Akendenguê (2011), and Quando Florirem Salambás no Tecto do Pico (2015). For a long time, she worked as a journalist and producer for the Portuguese Service of the BBC World Service in London. She currently works at TVS, the State Television in São Tomé. Lima’s poems have been translated into many languages and have appeared in several periodicals, magazines, and anthologies, including Metamorfoses, Prometeo, Antologia da Poesia Feminina dos PALOP, El Camino, World Literature Today, and The Literary Review, among others.