Mimicry or Translation?

Drawing on theories of culture and translation, this article explores the relationship between migrancy and translation within the discursive mode of storytelling in two novels by East African writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence (1996) and By the Sea (2001). Gurnah uses storytelling to explore the discursive strategies open to migrants in their efforts to negotiate a place of belonging. The East African narrators of the two novels tell different stories, and their choice between mimicry and translation as possible strategies determines their ability (or otherwise) to create a home – however tentatively – in their new English environment. The narrator of Admiring Silence mimics the voice of the westerner, thus exposing and unsettling the discourse of imperial control and authority. Yet the narrative space recreated in mimicry is a site of ambivalence. The narrator is stripped of identity and remains unable to translate the past into the present, while mimicry is ultimately shown to be insufficient to sustain meaningful cross-cultural relationships. In By the Sea, it is translation, rather than mimicry, that affords the characters a life where past and present connect, offering hope for the future: two East African narrators meet in an English seaside town and their mutual storytelling leads them to translate their painful histories into a shared present, thus resisting self-pity and isolation. This fictional storytelling mirrors the real process of migrancy, where the exile’s life is “taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule” (Said 1994:144). In By the Sea, Gurnah suggests that this ‘new world’ is at least partly a translation of the past.