Panel: Colonial Encounters and Problems of Translation
Copanelists: Chris Barry and Deanna Reder
The autobiography writer’s choice to interweave words and phrases of another language into the midst of the English text signifies specific and intriguing reasons for this resolve. The insertion of foreign words carries a meaning that is affixed in human experiences and institutions. These motivations, in turn, allow the reader to understand those experiences and institutions. In this paper, I would like to explore the relationship between Canada’s socio-cultural context and its First Nations writers’ purposeful choice to incorporate a Native language towards the constructions of cultural identity. Specifically, this paper shall analyze Song of Rita Joe, the autobiography written by Mi’kmaq poet and writer, Rita Joe. The important relationship between language and the constructions of identity is uniquely presented in this life narrative. I would thus like to investigate how Joe transmits, translates and defines her ethno-linguistic identity through the textual presentation of distinctive, ‘foreign’ words that are intended to strike the audience by means of their pronounced visibility. With this in mind, I wish to approach these problems through the lens of frame semantics. Such an approach will be advantageous to my examination of the significance of braiding multiple languages for the purpose of identity construction. Indeed, the technique employed in Rita Joe’s autobiographical text is a kind of hybridization of various cultural and linguistic elements that are used to frame the author’s multifaceted identity. Exploring questions of language, identity and autobiography within this framework will likely illuminate the world of Canadian autobiography, as experienced from within the nation’s peripheries.
Joanna Kordus is a Master of Arts student in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is currently completing her Master’s thesis on the autobiographical representations of Polish-Canadian immigrant and First Nations identities. Her interests encompass world literature in the English language, women’s and life history, post-colonial studies, as well as contemporary Canadian minority and émigré writings.