Panel: Translating Genres across Personal, Familial, and Collective
Contact Zones
Copanelists: Laura J. Beard and Carina do Carma
In her 1997 memoir, My Brother, Jamaica Kincaid narrates with an unflinching gaze her brother’s life and eventual death from complications caused by HIV/AIDS—perhaps the most politicized disease of the contemporary era. Devon’s illness forces Kincaid to return to her homeland, Antigua, after thirty years as a writer and professor in the United States. Her visit, and the subsequent writing of My Brother several years later, propels her to confront difficult memories and familial secrets as well as the geopolitical and ethical challenge of “translating” her brother’s life-and-death story for a primarily US audience.
The impossible demand to write the death of another elicits difficult questions about the aesthetics and ethics of witnessing, the spectacle of suffering, and the power of auto/biographical testimony. This presentation examines My Brother as a test case for theorizing auto/biographical witnessing as a mode of translation. In the memoir, Kincaid continually confronts the limit—linguistic, cultural, and material—of her ability to write about and for her dead brother. Positioned as an outsider to Devon’s illness, her family’s narrative, and the language and culture of her homeland, Kincaid approaches her brother’s life-and-death narrative from the position of privileged spectator and with the gaze of a First World subject. The gulf between sister and brother evokes both the geopolitical gulf that divides the US and Antigua as well as the gulf between the living and the dead. Each of these limits represents a specific challenge not only to the act of translation, but also to the act of witnessing another’s suffering and death in auto/biographical narrative.
Ultimately, I argue, My Brother poses questions about the ethics of translation and witness that it fails to resolve. However, it raises productive questions for autobiography scholars about the transnational production, circulation, and consumption of narratives of suffering.
Theresa A. Kulbaga is Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate in American Studies at Miami University of Ohio (Hamilton), where she specializes in comparative US literatures, autobiography studies, and transnational feminist theory. Her most recent article, forthcoming in College English, examines Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, in the context of American book club culture. Her other work has appeared in JAC and Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West (U of Utah P, 2004).