Interpreters—Enslaving/Enslaved/Runagate

The colonial world is a Manichean world.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Big Jim Todd was a slick black buckLaying low in the mud and muckOf Pondy Woods when the sun went downIn gold, and the buzzards tilted downA windless vortex to the black-gum treesTo sit along the quiet boughs,Devout and swollen, at their ease.. . . . . . . .Past midnight, when the moccasinSlipped from the log and, trailing inIts obscured waters, brokeThe dark algae, one lean bird spoke.. . . . . . . ."Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical."The buzzard coughed. His words fellIn the darkness, mystic and ambrosial.

"But we maintain our ancient rite,Eat the gods by day and prophesy by night.We swing against the sky and wait;You seize the hour, more passionateThan strong, and strive with time to die—With Time, the beak-ed tribe's astute ally. . . . . . . . . Nigger, regard the circumstance of breath:'Non omnis moriar,' the poet saith."Pedantic, the bird clacked its gray beak,With a Tennessee accent to the classic phrase;Jim understood, and was about to speak,But the buzzard drooped one wing and filmed the 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 the personal and even embodiment are quite rare. Yet I can hardly avoid transgressing in this and likely other regards before the end of this address. In spite of what may be the testimonies of my remaining parent and other elders, and notwithstanding the certifications the state may present, my beginnings are not here in this city in the sixth decade of the 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 the North Atlantic worlds between the 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 the violence and hegemony of the West's large-scale triangular Atlantic slave trading in dark peoples.

This is the time and situation of my beginning and the framework for the 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 the haunting are the profound shifts in the understandings of the self, including ideas about freedom and slavery of the self that mark the 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 the general politics and emergent discourses of the larger period to which I refer. And the cultivated obliviousness to or silence about—if not also the ideological reflection and validation of—the larger prevailing sociopolitical currents and dynamics marks the beginning and ongoing history of this Society (among other learned and professional societies, to be sure). With its fetishization of the rituals and games involving books and THE BOOK, its politics of feigning apolitical ideology, its still all too simple historicist agenda (masking in too many instances unacknowledged theological-apologetic interests), its commitment to "sticking to the text," its orientation in reality has always contributed to and reflected a participation in "sticking it" to the gendered and racialized Others. The fragility of the fiction of the apolitical big tent holding us...