Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation

2. Immigrant Crypto(auto)graphy

93 Chapter 2 Immigrant Crypto(auto)graphy Akemi Kikumura and Apolonja Maria Kojder Anthropology is, of course, the act of translating one language and culture into another. (Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography) Matrilineal Narratives and Ethnographic Translation Once it passes through the ear of the other, ethnic autobiography finds itself in a Babelian double-bind: translate me, do not translate me. The reception of Antin’s and Salverson’s confessions by their respective communities confirms what we have earlier identified as resistance of the source culture to the work of translation undertaken by immigrant subjects . As we have seen, this kind of problem is further compounded by the self-serving behaviour of the target culture, which may exhibit a tendency to swallow up and assimilate the immigrant other for its own enrichment , or to lock up the unassimilable other in a position of romanticized or demonized difference. All these moments of ethnocentric resistance show that there is but a thin line separating borrowing from appropriation , and that in working with borrowed tongues one risks being accused of stealing. Derrida acknowledges that this “gesture of appropriation” is part of the power dynamics in every translation (The Ear 156). However, nowhere are the links between power and translation more pronounced than in postcolonial studies’ interrogation of linguistic and cultural translations performed by Western anthropologists and ethnographers.1 Talal Asad, in particular, expresses concern that linguistic imbalance and social inequalities may drive an unskilful translator to “simplify in the direction 94 Borrowed Tongues of his [or her] own ‘strong’ language” (“The Concept” 158). Furthermore, as Maria Tymoczko observes, the greater the perceived distance between the source language and culture and the receiving language and culture, the more this tendency to simplify increases (“Post-colonial” 23). Similar anxieties about power-knowledge differentials have plagued the field of feminist oral history, a genre that until recently has been marginalized in mainstream autobiography studies. Like anthropology and sociology, women’s oral history relies on collecting, transcribing, editing, framing, and interpreting oral narratives that often reach the audience in the form of texts produced “by” the scholar (Gluck and Patai 2). There is a huge potential for distortion and appropriation when assumptions of unproblematic transparency of access to language, subjectivity, and history are applied to such narratives and when the intersubjective and interdiscursive dimensions of their production are ignored. The politics of authorship and representation gets even more complicated when the scholar has a filial or genealogical obligation towards her subject, as is the case of the two texts studied in this chapter. Akemi Kikumura, the author of Through Harsh Winters: The Life of a Japanese Immigrant Woman (1981), and Apolonja Maria Kojder, the author of “A Mother’s Legacy,” which constitutes the core section of Marynia Don’t Cry: Memoirs of Two Polish-Canadian Families (1995), are both immigrant daughters and academics—an anthropologist and a historian, respectively—who tap and repackage their mothers’ life stories. The former refers to her mother’s narrative as “the life history” while the latter chooses “memoir” as her generic designation, both terms foregrounding their common interest in history.2 These two narratives fit the agenda of feminist oral history as attempts to “repossess our matrimony” (Buss, Repossessing 86), that is, to recuperate our mothers’ and foremothers’ stories . Unlike the narratives in the previous chapter that focused on immigrant children, the texts of multicultural oral history examined here focus on the experiences of mothers, all of them first-generation immigrants. Two daughters-translators facilitate the reception of their mothers’ life stories into the target culture in which they are both well established as cultural brokers. Consequently, in both cases we are dealing with translation from a “weaker” to a “stronger” language (Asad, “A Comment” 330). The question that arises is: How do the daughters’ translations practise “linguistic hospitality” on behalf of the dominant language? In this chapter, I refer to the type of writing produced by Kikumura and Kojder as “crypto(auto)graphy,” playing on the Derridean sense of Immigrant Crypto(auto)graphy 95 autobiography as writing from the crypt, that is, writing from the scene of loss and mourning, and writing beyond the subject (The Ear 57–59). Working from the concept of the crypt formulated by French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Derrida describes the crypt as “the limit-position of the living dead” (The Ear 55). While in successful mourning the lost object...