Tillsammans Means Overlapping Edges, as in Tiles or Scales: Feeling Translation

Abstract

Tillsammans Means Overlapping Edges, as in Tiles or Scales: Feeling Translation Jennifer Hayashida (bio) But there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m afraid of it all slipping away into: “Ah, yes, I understand you.” —Audre Lorde, “Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich: An Interview with Audre Lorde”1 I started writing in my sophomore year after reading the poet Adrienne Rich and thinking: this is almost right but does not quite say what I want to say . . . —Claudia Rankine2 1 “We were hoping for an essay about Claudia Rankine’s work and tentatively about Citizen. We would love if you would write for ________ regarding this.” For, or together with, a selection from the Swedish edition of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. [End Page 215] A kind of transnational solidarity work, repeated attempts by the editors and I to compare our analyses regarding language, race, and migration, a joint poetics of here and there. It is always a different thing to consider the afterlife of the translated text, how it is read—by whose bodies and for whom? I consider the racialized body an instrument in the work of translation, a potential decolonial saboteur. The translator can be an (un)settler. The translator can be a settler. This is a translation from the Swedish, my translation of a failure, a recycling of the disaster.3 [End Page 216] 2 Racism and xenophobia. Apart and Together. In Sweden—here—the latter is seen as part and parcel of the former. Any distinctions made between the two may be perceived as undermining the political claims of both. Acknowledge the situational imbrication of the two terms. Try to explain how they are weaponized as both together and apart in U.S. antiblack and yellow peril discourse. Use 1996, Bill Clinton’s second term, to illustrate overlapping edges, as in tiles or scales: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act The strategic deployment of overlapping edges against nonwhite bodies within U.S. logics of empire and racial capitalism. “An Dilemma: The Problem and Democracy was, Mr. Myrdal once said, ‘not a study of the but of the American from the viewpoint of the most disadvantaged group.’”4 Swedish concern about the “American dilemma” while Sweden still operated the State Institute for Racial Biology (1922–1958), brainchild of the Swedish Society for Eugenics. [End Page 217] 3 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Nina Mangalanayagam, “Balancing Act,” 2012. Black-and-white still image taken from ten-minute split-screen HD video installation. Translation is the method by which I gather the data of my embodiment.5 Attempt to translate Black Lives Matter into Swedish: a. It’s about Black Lives b. Black Lives Are Important c. Black Lives Affect A BLM solidarity video produced by the political party Feministiskt Initiativ (FI!) transforms the rallying cry into a solemn Black . . . Lives . . . Matter, the protracted enunciation a method of translation.6 [End Page 218] English should not be the language of solidarity. I am twenty-two years old, watching the OJ Simpson trial on Swedish television. One of the LAPD detectives is on the stand. —Did you collect swatches on the crime scene? —Yes, we took Swatch watches, the on-screen captioning (un)translates. The racialized spectacle of the trial reminded me of where and what I came from, my cultural and political heritage, my racist homeland. Swedish liberal claims of tillsammans suddenly more sinister than that LA courtroom. Perhaps what is true for the untranslatability of fuck you is also true for BLM: it’s English-only, even in translation. A language where afrofobi can contain a chasm of antiblack feelings in atonal harmony with afrofili, white Swedes’ delight when they shop at AfroArt. Zora Neale Hurston translated by Glenn Ligon: (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), a piece from Untitled Four Etchings (1992), included in the first section of Citizen. After FI!’s BLM solidarity video, YouTube’s...