Interpreters—Enslaving/Enslaved/Runagate

Abstract

The colonial world is a Manichean world. -Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth Big Jim Todd was a slick black buck Laying low in mud and muck Of when sun went down In gold, and buzzards tilted down A windless vortex to black-gum trees To sit along quiet boughs, Devout and swollen, at their ease. . . . . . . . . Past midnight, when moccasin Slipped from log and, trailing in Its obscured waters, broke The dark algae, one lean bird spoke. . . . . . . . . your breed ain't metaphysical. The buzzard coughed. His words fell In darkness, mystic and ambrosial. we maintain our ancient rite, Eat gods by day and prophesy by night. We swing against sky and wait; You seize hour, more passionate Than strong, and strive with time to die- With Time, beak-ed tribe's astute ally. . . . . . . . . Nigger, regard circumstance of breath: 'Non omnis moriar,' poet saith. Pedantic, bird clacked its gray beak, With a Tennessee accent to classic phrase; Jim understood, and was about to speak, But buzzard drooped one wing and filmed eyes. . . . . . . . . -Robert Penn Warren, Pondy Woods Negro folklore . . . [was] not . . . a new experience for me. . . . But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was . . . away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. . . . -Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men I am not unaware that on occasions such as this references to personal and even embodiment are quite rare. Yet I can hardly avoid transgressing in this and likely other regards before end of this address. In spite of what may be testimonies of my remaining parent and other elders, and notwithstanding certifications state may present, my beginnings are not here in this city in sixth decade of twentieth century. In respects more profound and disturbing and poignantly ramifying for professional interpreters, my beginnings should be understood to be in that more expansive period and fraught situations of North Atlantic worlds between fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, moments and situations in which the West and the rest were coming into fateful first contact. With such contact many social and political formations, sentiments and orientations of the West were (re-)forged and (re-)defined. Contact is of course studied euphemy, rhetorical repression meant to veil violence and hegemony of West's large-scale triangular Atlantic slave trading in dark peoples. This is time and situation of my beginning and framework for consciousness that I bring to this podium. And almost all of you have beginnings like my own. The dynamics of this period now still largely determine, even haunt, our sometimes different but also often common positionalities and orientations, practices and discourses, ideologies and politics and social formations. Included in haunting are profound shifts in understandings of self, including ideas about freedom and slavery of self that mark period. Although differently named and tweaked from decade to decade since 1880, those practices and discourses that define this professional Society have always been and are even now still fully imbricated in general politics and emergent discourses of larger period to which I refer. And cultivated obliviousness to or silence about-if not also ideological reflection and validation of-the larger prevailing sociopolitical currents and dynamics marks beginning and ongoing history of this Society (among other learned and professional societies, to be sure). …