The Living Word

In French Caribbean literature, translations from Creole to French, along with the inclusion of Creole orality in novels written in French, constitute a broader form of intracultural translation that expose problematic tensions between sameness and difference. The essay starts by exploring some of the modes of intracultural translation used by the authors of the créolité movement but focuses on Ina Césaire's novel Zonzon tête carrée, where cultural difference is downplayed in favor of another approach to translation developed from an internal Caribbean perspective. Even though Ina Césaire explicitly builds her novel from the tales she has collected in her professional ethnographic research, the art of storytelling is only referred to indirectly and is built into a larger structure based on environment, music, rhythm, dance, and movement. These alliances between literature, nonlinguistic forms, and spatial geography, along with orality, suggest that the author attempts to radically reconsider the way creole folk culture should be translated into writing

Art · Carr · Creole language · Ethnography · Linguistics · Literacy · Literature · Orality · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Migration, Identity, and Health · Philosophy

• Le Romanesque

  Sarah Davies Cordova, Antoinette Sol•Présence Africaine•2021

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