The translation of pain in immigrant texts.

Abstract

This cross-cultural dissertation examines how the pain of immigration is conveyed in immigrant literature. It compares immigrant texts from the Maghreb, Haiti and Czechoslovakia, written by authors who emigrated to France and North America. Interdisciplinary in scope, this work raises important questions about immigrant psychology, identity politics, minority representation, globalization and multiculturalism. In the traditional immigrant narrative, suffering is marginalized as part of the immigration process and reflects the immigrant's neutralized position in society. My thesis posits that, in order for their sufferings to be heard and heeded by dominant discourse, immigrant writers must engage in a particular rhetoric in which they both reappropriate and resist generic narrative models. My examination of francophone Maghrebi immigrant texts reveals that many Maghrebi immigrants writers (Charef, Mokeddem, Sebbar, Zouari, Zeituni) signify their social dis-ease by explicitly marking wounds or sickness thematically and stylistically into the corpus of the text. I question the limits of such diseased embodiment by alluding to cases of performance or imposture (Smail/Leger). My analysis of Haitian texts considers how different Haitian immigrant authors (Ollivier, Etienne, Pean, Danticat) intimate migrant pain with <italic> vodou</italic> myths and symbols. Pointing to certain socio-political misappropriations, I investigate the limits of translating immigrant alienation through foreign cultural signifiers. My study of Czech exile literature shows that, in these texts, immigrant pain is suppressed for a number of literary, socio-historical and psychological reasons. I contend that this seeming absence of pain had important consequences in the negative reception of returning emigrants after 1989 in post-communism. I explore how, with the use of allusion, allegory and other indirect means, returning Czech emigrant writers (Kundera, Pekarkova, Formanek, Martinek) tacitly translate their return in their fiction. In all, this work explores how the subject in pain or victimization may gain representation, voice and agency in social discourse. It examines the role of the body, language, culture, gender and race, as well as emotions and empathy. It concludes that a particularly performative rhetoric of pain is necessary to grant the e/immigrant minority subject representation in the public forum.