Ekomo’s Interventions [María Nsue Angüe]

s Ekomo interventions 179 city to the mission and the mission to the v illage, crossing e thnic and linguistic boundaries] (Lopez Rodriguez 125). A compl ex relation to fro ntier and identity is mirrored in the process of composition. [n writing Ekomo, it was not the Fang language, her mother tongue, that Ma ria Nsue c hose, but rather Spanish, the dominant language of the fo rme r colonial power. 10 It was not in Equa torial Guinea but in Madrid that she entrusted its publication to the Uni versidad Nacional de Educaci6n a Distancia, in 1985, with a re print- unauthori zed - according to the author- in the subsequent months. From that mome nt onwards, the author relates, her rela tionship to the novel has continued to change th rough an indeterminate series of processes of belonging and detachme nt, ma rked by the numerous interventions of copy editors, publishing houses, new pro logues and more-or-less-scholarly introductions, book covers, and marketing and distribution strategies. Some of these interventions have also been characterized by- although not limited to- a concern with lingu istic "correctness" and normativ ity. It is in this context that I re fe r he re to "i nterventions" as a set of practices, of reading and translating (including its Latin etymological cha rge o f trans-latus), w hic h are sensiti ve to the inhe re ntly political d imensions of language and meaning. These interventions a re also, by extension, linked to a po litics of language a nd appropriation that is not reduced to textual operati ons, fo r the work encompasses textual circ ulations as well, incl uding crossi ngs fro m Africa to Spain, France, and beyond. The chai n of interventions has yet not ended; the publication of a translation of the novel into English is under preparati on a t present in the United States. As one of the scholars in volved in th is project, I a m keenly aware of the dimensions of translati on- the act o f reading, thinking, transferring and ultimately (re) produci ng- as a deeply political and historical task, necessarily involving issues of power, ideology, and mediation.11 The proble matics of translation a re, by no means, restricted to language. The dangers are intrinsic in the way that translators inte nd to market a project to potential readers, and to prospective publishers. The preparation of an English edition of Ekomo for a commercial publishing house, aimed for college adoption purposes, poses pressing questions about border crossings in the act of translation, e ntaili ng not just geographical, economic, political and cultural preknowledge, but also other complex d imensions that are assumed in the reade rshi p. 12 What might a text suc h as Ekomo mean in English that is different 10 It is, of course, impo rtant to avoid an essentialized condition of the "native speaker." Languages are not o ne 's own: global lang uages are constitutively intercultural, and "former colonial and now so-called globa l languages, such as French, English, and Spanish, are no longer simply national" (Conley 2 1). T his element, however, complicates the translation process from the start. As Maria Tymoczko clai ms, there are many similarities between postcolonia l writing and literary translation: both are a ffected by the process of relocation. 11 " Translations are always embedded in cu ltural and political systems, and in history" (Bassnett and Tri vedi 6). 12 For a theorization o n border crossing in the Spanish-speaking context see the introduction to Sampedro Vizcaya and Doubleday (2008). Ekomo s interventions •orary Spanish Texts t mean to think about translation, the .exts, beyond the colonial paradigm published, and disseminated? mderscores the primal and formative have been born in jail, in 1948, in the ned for resisting the authority of the c group, she is the only child of Jose >endence leader (known by locals as 1 Spanish colonial rule, on October :al appointments, in the Ministry of s Ambassador to Ethiopia, under the 1e country's first President. Macias was deposed on August 3, 1979, by 1ro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who Jinea. Macias Nguema's regime was described by Donato Ndongo as "la 9), by Samuel Decalo as reflecting a Sundiata ( 1990) as a form of "state {assassinated on February 4, 1976. 14 ; of European colonial cartographers n in which Maria Nsue would spend 1e northeast comer of the Equatorial rdering Cameroon to the north, and -lere, at the age of eight, Maria Nsue ily temporarily assigned to the local cover of the 2007 Spanish edition of onal interviews that I conducted with her me that 1948 was the year of her birth. )rial Guinea (Ndongo and Ngom 2000, e a biographical note indicating that she is introductory essay to the first edition her birth. The first published anthology eloquent metaphor: "naci6 alla cuando n when the century was folding in half] Jose Nsue Angiie Osa, observes: "Named med by Macias' sbirros [cops] at the end ntially correct, the chronology is slightly on on Jose Nsue's wife and daughter: "In hnical director of the State Secretariat for fod to study journalism and is becoming iota during the colonial period, and the nference and the Treaty of Paris) leading f, see Fernandez Duro ( 1900). mission, and it was by this family that she would later be taken to Madrid (the colonial metropolis). As a young woman, she would study journalism and music, spending a great part of her youth under the Francoist regime. She would return to Equatorial Guinea in her twenties, shortly afier the country's independence, in 1971. Having been detached from her roots for so long, it was as the result of the reencounter with her grandfather, Martin Angue Osa- a respected woodcarving artist and owner of a relatively prosperous coffee plantation in Bidjabidjan that she reestablished an emotional and cognitive connection with her Fang cultural heritage, language, oral traditions, and practices. 16 She then moved to Malabo, the newly renamed capital, and was appointed to a government position in the Secretariat of Women's Affairs. 17 Later she worked for the publication Diario Ebano. 18 It was here, at her office in what was at the time the headquarters of Ebano in Malabo, that she conceived and wrote the novel that has widely been perceived as her masterpiece, Ekomo. 19 Asked in a recent interview to describe the period of her life during which she wrote this novel, she responded: "Muy emocionante. Era yo muy joven, en un pais mas joven aun. Guinea se preparaba para resurgir entre sus cenizas y nosotros, los guineanos, estabamos con ella. Ha sido la etapa mas emocionante de mi vida" [Very exciting. I was very young, in a country that was even younger. Guinea was preparing to rise from the ashes, and we, the Guineans, were with her. It was the most exciting stage of my life] (Fra-Molinero 20 I 0). Ekomo narrates the epic joumey,20 through the forest, of a young, recently married Fang woman, Nnanga Aba'a, accompanying her husband, whose name is Ekomo. 2 1 He has a potentially fatal infection-a gangrenous leg-and the two 16 On the woodcarving and artistic heritage preserved and transmitted by the family in Bidjabidjan, which was inherited by Maria Nsue's uncle, Felipe Osa Angiie (her father's younger brother), see the suggestive article by Valenciano Mafle and Picornell Gelabert (2009), describing the "museo sin vitrinas en la selva ecuatorial" [museum without glass cabinets in the equatorial jungle], which he maintains as an example of historical continuity through processes of patrimonialization. 17 The city had been named Santa Isabel during Spanish colonial rule; the first elected President, Macias Nguema, renamed it Malabo in his attempt to replace European names with autochthonous ones. 18 Founded in 1939, during the colonial period, as Ebano: Semanario de la Guinea Espanola [Ebano, Weekly Newspaper of Spanish Guinea], this publication changed frequency from weekly to daily to monthly during certain periods, and altered its name to Diario Ebano [Ebano Newspaper] afler the country's independence. 19 The building is a colonial landmark; inaugurated in 1942 as the lnstituto Cardenal Cisneros, today it is occupied by the Centro Cultural Ecuatoguineano. 20 Limonta rightly states that "Ekomo esta dispuesta a[ ... ] incursionar en la epica, en la novela de iniciaci6n, generos que [ ... ] evitan las escritoras por cstar demasiado unidos a las 'provincias del patriarcado'" [Ekomo is prepared to[ ... ) make incursions into epic, into the initiation novel, genres which [ ... ] female authors avoid because they arc too closely associated with the 'provinces of patriarchy'] (93). 21 'The word Ekomo is, for Zielina [Limontc), not as much a character but a place, a mythological space in which all the characters move" (Ugarte 147). s Ekomo Interventions 185 This, it is worth noting, was the first university ever established in Equatorial Guinea, a branch of the Madrid-based UNED, following the sig ning of the "Tratado de Amistad y Cooperaci6n entre la Republica de Guinea Ecuatorial y Espana del 23 de octubre de 1980" [Treaty of Friendship and Cooperati on between the Republic of Equatori al Guinea and Spain from October 23, 1980).29 Granados proudly notes on his faculty profile of the univers ity portal that he was the editor and author of the prologue of " la primera novela escrita en ecuatoguineano" [the first novel written in ecuatoguineano], Ekomo, as we ll as of El hombre y la costumbre [Man and Custom] ( 1990), by Pancracio Esono Mitogo, " la primera obra de teatro de aquel pa is" [the first play from that country]. ln the prologue fo r Esono Mi togo's play, Granados celebrates the role his institution has played in the publication of the two works, while continuing to remind the reader of linguistic otherness, coining a new category of what he terms " la variedad ecuatoguineana del espafiol" [the Equatoguinean variant of Spanish]: a la Univers idad a Distancia le cabe el ho nor de haber ed itado la primera novela de Guinea Ecuatoria l, escrita en la variedad ecuatoguineana del espafiol, no por "descuido" dialectal sino con voluntad puramente artistica. Siempre en vanguardia en todo lo referente a lo ecuatoguineano, la UNED da ahora la primera comedia de Guinea Ecuatorial, con rasgos asimismo ecuatoguineanos. Y yo recibo la alegria de presentar al autor y su obra. [the Universidad a Distancia has the honor of having edited the first novel from Equatorial Guinea, written in the Equatoguinean variant of Spanish, not because of dialectal carelessness but through pure artistic deli beration. Always at the vanguard of every aspect of Equatoguinean culture, the UNED now offers the fi rst play from Equato ria l Guinea, with its equally Equatoguinean features. And I have the pleasure of presenting the author and his work]. (Granados, "Pr61ogo" 6) Granados's most invasive remarks come not from the prologue to Pancracio Esono's play, but from the one that he wrote fo r Maria Nsue's novel. Unashamedly, he makes use of almost 50 percent of the prologue's space to display a list of the novel's grammatical "errores," assuring the potential metropo litan reader that "Maria Nsue ha corregido en su novela los errores de dispersion del sistema vocalico de l espafio l guineano, por eso no aparece la /el cerrada" [Maria Nsue has corrected in her novel the errors in the dispersion of the vocalic system, so the closed /e/ does not appear] (I 0). And, in reference to the consonantic system, he writes: lo mas notable es la neutra lizaci6 n entre Ir/ y tr/ en posici6n intervocalica. Dicha neutralizaci6n se refleja en la escritura por medio de innumerables confusiones. En un recuento provisiona l, encontre en Ekomo mas de cincuenta casos: 29 The offi cial web page of the UNED records its institutional history: <http:// porta l.une d .es/ portal/ page? _ page id= 93 , 12 17 0 3 6,93 _ 205533 4 0 &_ d ad= po rta l&_ schema=PORTAL>. Ekomo s Interventions 187 minimo resentimiento, ni trata ninguna cuesti 6n politica de caracte r panfletario, porque la obra cumple una de las caracteristicas de la literatura guinea na escrita: la ausencia de sentimientos anticolonialistas" [the re is not the slightest resentment in the novel, nor does it address any po litical question in a partisan way, because the work embodi es one of the cha racteristics o f written Guinean literature: the absence of anticolonial sentiments] ( 13). "Granados' introductory remarks are the best example o f how political a nd cultural discourse produced, reproduced and even archived empire, not j ust in pre-Francoist and Francoist Spain, but also in post-Francoist and postco lonial Equa torial G uinea" (Sa mpedro Vizcaya 2008: 352-3) . The novel, then, has been tampered with, altered , subject to intervention; yet the politics of colonial writing do not escape the reader, and the prologue proves itself discursively more powerful than its author inte nded, although for the opposite reasons. When Gra nados claims that "considero una j oya la novela de Maria Nsue; en un medio lingiiisti co hostil, ha escrito la narraci6n g uineana mas importante en lengua espafiola" [I conside r Maria Nsue's novel to be a jewel: in a hostile linguistic medium, she has written the most important Guinean na rrative in Spanish] ( I 0), he is in truth vindicating not just postcolonial linguistic te rritoriality, but the continui ty of a postimpe rial project through linguistic and literary mani fes tatio ns, even w hile c urtailed and intervened from the onset. Starting in the earl y 1980s, and coinciding w ith the country's resurgence to a state o f quasi-normality after the Francisco Macias di ctatorship, and the reestablishment o f connections from the outside world, academic research projects that focused on Equatorial Guinea- with multiple disciplinary approachesbegan to emerge. Amo ng the first (not surprising ly, as they are on the surface less politicall y invested) was a sustained and syste matic fl urry of li nguisti c studies on the various specificities o f the languages spoken in Equatori al Guinea, although the e mphasis lay primari ly on the use of Spa nish in contact with the local languages. As a result came the publicati ons by Germa n de Granda, John Lipski, Anton io Q uilis, Celia Casado Fresnillo, and Justo Boleki a Boleka among others.30 Vicente Granados's contributions to this field were, as might have been expected, "circ umscribed within the notion of ' incorrect' usage rather than the pote ntial formation o f a uniquely Guinean dialect of Spanish" (Lipski 85). In short, the same claims tha t he had made in Ekomo's prologue were applied to the field at large. John Lipski, perhaps the most personally distanced fro m the subject of study a mong the scholars, responded directly to Granados's interpellation on Ekomo with the authori ty of one linguist to a nothe r: "The novel is not writte n in 'Guinean Span ish,' but is composed in literary Spanish devoid ofobvious regional features except for Fa ng names a nd a few terms for Guinean flora a nd fauna. The characters' di alogues are set in unremarkable Spanish, presumably because they would be flue ntl y conversing in Fa ng, thei r native language" (86). While Lipski 's appra isal may be linguistically accurate, his observation that the novel is "devoid of obv ious regional features" calls to mind other adscriptio ns in regards to both 30 See Lipski, "The Spanish of Equatorial Guinea," for a fu ll bibliographic summary. s Ekomo Interventions 189 is pressing. Works in translation always- and inevitably- have a life o f their own. Divorced from the language in which they were originally written, a nd the country in which they were originally published, they are conditioned- although not determined- by the new cultural and geopolitical context in which they are to be permanently shaped a nd reshaped. Yet given Ekomo's embodiment of fe male resistance to both ethnic tradition and colonialism, how can this English translation be useful in attempting to continue this interpellation? Responsive to the p itfalls of co lonial inscriptio n, my co-translator and I have asked Maria Nsue he rself what Spanish words such as selva, curandero, or tribu- terms, images, and c ultural markers that reach us substantially resignified by the colonial process, as well as by postcolonial sensibilities-signi fy for he r in Fang. Furthermore, what does she intend in her deployment of an array of similar concepts heavily marked by the colonial ethnographic tradition of the West? I am aware that perhaps more releva nt than my own personal, contingent, answers to these questions might be the invitation 1 ma ke here to reflect on the questions the mselves, as they e nable a di ffe rent, relational, approach to the text and its circulati on. However, some textual decisions are inevitably in order. Footnotes in our translation are deliberately intended to minimize inte rference w ith the reading (we therefore avo id plot interpretation, fo r instance) and instead o ffer occasional cultural, local, or historical po inters that may provide add itional context for the novel. Our translation of Ekomo w ill seek to foster a community with fo reign cultures and cross-contine ntal communication through the domestic inscription of the foreign, even if we a re aware tha t this w ill perhaps always be "partial, both incomplete and inevitably slanted towards the receivi ng situation" (Ve nuti 18). The ho pe, at the very least, is that- as Bernard McG uirk has written- "transla ti on intervenes [ ... ] as an intensifier, of fo rce, conte mpt, sex, obscenity, tra nsgression" (396-7). This article aspires to o ffer a preliminary reflection on, rather tha n a comple te resolution of, the problematic interventions gene rated when texts suc h as Ekomo cross the divides between Equatorial Guinea, Spain and, in the near future, the Eng lish-speaking world. Works Cited Aponte Ra mos, Lo la. " Los territo rios de la ide ntidad. Transgenero y transnacio nalidad e n Ekomo de Maria Nsue Ang i.ie." La recuperaci6n de la memoria. Creaci6n cultural e identidad nacional en la literatura hispanonegroafricana. Ed . M ' bare Ngom. Alcala de He nares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Uni versidad, 2004. 101 - 13. Print. Balboa Boneke, Jua n. El reencuentro. El retorno de f exiliado. Malabo: Ediciones Guinea, 1985. Print. Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Tri vedi. " Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals a nd Vernacular." Translation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Susan Bassne tt and Ha ri sh Tri vedi. Lo ndon a nd New York: Routledge, 1999: 1- 18. Print. Boletin Oficial de f Estado. "Tra tado de Amistad y Cooperaci6n entre la Republica de Guinea Ecuatorial y Espana, de 23 de octubre de 1980." <http://www.boe. es/buscar/doc. php?id= BOE-A-198 1-1 6874>. We b. 20 Jan. 201 3.