JOLGORIO FLASH DELUXE
https://soundcloud.com/alegriarampante/un-cuarto-mas-pequen-o
Monday, December 24, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
Translating Latina/o Studies in the Classroom with Ricky Ricardo and Babalú Ayé
(Comments presented on October 2,
2012, in a panel on New Ways to Engage Students in Interdisciplinary Learning:
Pedagogies of Translation at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Also published in the University of Michigan Translation Theme Semester Blog.)
I want to talk to you about
untranslatability, about living between cultures and the distinctions between
insider and outsider knowledge, about authenticity and appropriation and
subaltern power and artistry and skill and how you translate or transmit these in
a classroom. The teacher is the ultimate translator, although never
unaccompanied or unchallenged, and of course, her or his goal is precisely to
transmit not simply the specific knowledge but also the technique, the critical
ability or hermeneutics, the ability to carry out that same
type of interpretation or translation on your own. To teach by example and
model, but also, ideally, to create situations that allow reciprocal modeling
or dialogism to occur. In other words, to avoid practicing what Paulo Freire in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed calls the
banking model of education: the idea that students are empty vessels that are
to be filled with the knowledge that the professor transmits (or in this case,
the mechanical competency to translate like a machine or software program
without cultural nuance).
I teach U.S. Latina/o and Latin
American and Caribbean literature and culture in English and Spanish here at the
University of Michigan and face constant challenges and opportunities for
translation, broadly defined. In this scenario, linguistic competence is a
crucial knowledge but frequently is not enough. It is not enough to simply know
the meanings of a standard set of vocabulary items that correspond to a vaguely
defined “neutral Spanish” as it is called in the studios of major
Spanish-language TV networks such as Univision and Telemundo according to news
anchor Jorge Ramos, and that comes closer to the Spanish undergraduates learn
in their first and second year of language training. Clearly, study abroad
opportunities serve to widen students’ linguistic repertoires and help them familiarize
themselves with specific regional or national dialects, most frequently Spanish
or Chilean but sometimes Mexican and even Cuban. It is never enough. Even
native speakers can spend a lifetime recognizing linguistic variation in more
than 20 countries where a wide variety of languages and dialects are spoken,
not to mention the challenges of cultural variation and diversity. How, then,
should one approach teaching U.S. Latina/o and Hispanic Caribbean studies in
English or Spanish in a U-M classroom?
The Dominican American Pulitzer
prize-winning and MacArthur genius grant recipient Junot Díaz begins his 1996 debut collection of fiction Drown
by quoting Cuban American poet and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat in an epigraph:
The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else.
Pérez Firmat’s sentiment, echoed by
Díaz, speaks to us of the incommensurability of language and experience for individuals
who live between languages and cultures (those of the Hispanic Caribbean and
the United States, in their case) and who have self-chosen or been molded by
the dominant hegemonic language, English. It speaks of belonging to English
while being profoundly aware of its falsification, that is to say, of one’s
exclusion and outsider status, of the incompleteness of monologic
communication. To say something in English clearly transmits the message but
leaves much out.
In his landmark volume Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way
Pérez Firmat privileges the figure of the musician and performer Desiderio (Desi)
Arnaz, best known as the husband (and then ex-husband) of Lucille Ball, with
whom he starred in I Love Lucy in the
role of Ricky Ricardo. One of his most memorable musical numbers (a veritable
American classic) is “Babalú.”
There is a lot going on in this clip. At one level, we have
the lyrics of the song:
Yo quiero pedir
Que mi negra me quiera.
Que tenga dinero
Y que no se muera.
Ay, yo le quiero pedir a Babalú
una negra bembona como tú
que no tenga otro negro
Pa' que no se muera.
¡Ea! ¡Caballos!
¡Babalú!
¡Babalú!
¡Babalú ayé!
¡Babalú!
¡Arriba!
¡Olé olé olé olé! (x2)
Yeah yeah yeah yeah!
¡Arriba con las congas!
Yeah!
Most Americans of a certain
generation know this song and enjoy it, dismissing it as light, exotic
entertainment; they certainly don’t see it as an authentic manifestation of
religious devotion or as sacred music and don’t recognize this religion
(Santería or the Yoruba worship of the Orishas) as such, but rather as
superstition or backwards heathen belief. The act of translation here has to do
with enabling religious tolerance or awareness, a consciousness raising about
the validity of Afro-Caribbean religion: sharing knowledge of Santería and its
relation to Cuban popular music, the fact that Babalú Ayé is the orisha or
divinity of illness, syncretized as Saint Lazarus. Conveying the complexity of
this scene also entails explaining the metaphor of caballos (horses): the
invocation for spirit possession (to be mounted by the orisha, be ridden by him
or her, to serve as a tool or mechanism for his manifestation and communication
on earth).
Translation of this song and
performance also has to do with Caribbean racial vocabulary (bemba, bembón,
negra), with the specificity of black Afro-diasporic experience, and also with recognizing
the hybridizing mixture (a type of “anything goes” attitude), where the Cuban
invocation of African divinities is accompanied by the Spanish interjection of “olé!”
(a standard of bullfights and flamenco in the Old World) and by the American “yeah”:
a veritable melting pot, or rather, ajiaco (stew), as the Cuban
ethnographer Fernando Ortiz would say, using this metaphor as a sign for the
coexistence of diverse elements in Cuban culture.
At the performative level, it is
important to recognize Arnaz’s musical skill and the intensity of his musical
execution, which is captured well through the alternation of camera angles. Also
noticeable are the idiosyncrasies of the band, located in the background: their
flashy rumba costumes and instruments, particularly the use of the harp—not
unusual in Veracruzan Afro-Mexican music, but not common in Cuba.
In teaching this clip, it is valuable
to discuss Arnaz’s race, personal biography, and migratory status, some of
which are analyzed by Pérez Firmat. Here, one is advised to resist
idealizations of Arnaz as an exemplary (and unproblematic) performer, who does
not embody his own contradictions and exclusions. “Babalú” allows for a
discussion of Latina/o culture in the U.S. as a hybrid mix (translation as an
act of inclusion) but also of its inherent marginalizations.
Finally, this clip invites an
argument precisely against translation, pointing to the risks or limitations of
engaging particular cultural performances that are overdetermined by their
previous circulation. This song and performance have long been part of a
process of exoticization, appropriation, and tropicalization of Afro-Caribbean
culture by Anglo-American and white Hispanic Caribbean audiences and artists,
as discussed more broadly by scholars such as Frances Aparicio and Susana
Chávez-Silverman. English-language versions such as the one available here
partake of limiting views:
Babalu
Babalu
Babalu aye
Babalu aye
Babalu
Jungle drums were badly beating
In the glare of eerie lights:
While the natives kept repeating
Ancient jungle rites.
All at once the dusky warriors began to
Raise their arms to skies above
As a native stepped forward to chant to
his Voodoo Goddess of love.
Ah!
CHORUS
Great Babalu!
I 'm so lost and forsaken
Ah, great Babalu.
Teaching this song in an
English-dominant university in the United States inevitably invokes (even if
only marginally) the hegemonic vision captured in the above-cited translation.
Perhaps one could argue that the performance in itself and the fifty years of
cultural associations it has accrued are profoundly tainted, and that the best
strategy would simply be to move on.
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