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History, Cultural Memory, and the Tasks of Translation in T. Obinkaram Echewa's I Saw the Sky Catch Fire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Bella Brodzki
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Abstract

Across a range of disciplines and discourses, translation has become a central concern for many scholars working in the humanities. Indeed, the notion of translation has begun to inflect the most compelling and consequential debates on meaning and representation. My essay gives attention to Walter Benjamin's redemptive and generative notion of translation as survival and to postmodern currents in translation studies alongside a contemporary Nigerian diasporic novel written in English, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. Framed by a passing on of the story of the Women's War (the Igbo women's tax revolt against the British in 1929), Echewa's narrative critiques the complicitous practices of translation, colonialism, and anthropology. In this exemplary instance of a type of hybrid postcolonial textuality, processes of intergenerational and intercultural transmission, conceived as both acts of translation and instruments of historical consciousness, perform as well as disrupt the work of cultural memory.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 2: Reenactments of Memory's Power , March 1999 , pp. 207 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

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