Translation matters in the body of a “foreign thing,” הָגָר. And with this bit of text, Hebrew Bible scholar, the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney reminds us all that nobody knows the name of this slave, this woman, in Any-Body’s Mother-Tongue much less in Her Own. (All of us just go along and call her “Hagar.”)
This universal and agnostic (complicit and evading) position that this puts all of us in is my own entry here into an introduction of Wil Gafney’s lessons on translation. Those of us who are not black (or are melanin-challenged as she refers to us humorously) and who are not women may be more caught up in the systems of white supremacy and of the patriarchy than those who are oppressed by them. In other words, some of us may not as easily see or hear why translation matters to a black feminist (or a fem/womanist). We with double (and exponentially doubled, white + male and white x male) privilege are not oftentimes willing to listen or to look. While the Police police Ferguson Missouri and Fourney Texas, the “tone police” police facebook and twitter curbing the looters and protesters. We white males do not like the tables turned on us, just as our white colonizing ForeFathers did not like their wigs snatched off.
And just like when Toni Morrison speaks out, knowingly, tellingly, as a woman (“Or was it an old man?”), old indeed, and blind (and in her version, her telling, “the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town”); Morrison says what we might not be willing to admit:
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
Wil Gafney wonders whether we might imagine Toni Morrison as a Prophet (when many of us priviledged know Moses as Charleton Heston). We can notice how both Gafney and Morrison create a space for new knowledge and the mutual exchange of ideas. Nobody knows the names of the women, enslaved, when translation fails to matter anymore. Something has gone terribly wrong we must all gather. Many have died horrifically most of us can and will willingly acknowledge. And so that’s a start. It’s my starting point for this post. Something most of us will, and can grasp.
Here, then, is the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney’s 7th of 7 Hebrew Bible translation principles (1 of One Black Feminist’s Translation Principles for all, or maybe most, of us):
Before I give the link to her essay from which I’ve excerpted this 7th of 7 principles, let me give you the link to the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney’s talk yesterday entitled “Turning Tables & Snatching Wigs.”
In the middle of this talk, you’ll hear if you listen, she discusses Isaiah 19, and names the players – Assyria, Egypt, Israel, and Judah – having complicated already the notions and qualifications of citizenship and immigration and residency and foreignness bringing the story to the contemporary places we call Syria, Iraq, and Turkey (not even knowing that minutes or hours later war would expand from Iraq to Syria). “Racial justice [in the 'United States' of America] is as likely,” she said, “as peace in the Middle East.” She is being optimistic, but prophetic: “But God is a God of miracles, however, unlikely or unpopular as that might sound.” And “Justice is in our hands.”
So why even bring this talk up in the context of Bible translation principles and why it matters? Three reasons:
First, translation cannot be separated from the body, and both in her talk and during the Q & A afterwards Gafney keyed in on incarnation (both in Jewish and in Christian contexts): “the body,” she says, “is inherently divine, created in the image of God.”
Second, our tradition of translation may just be complicit with our systems of patriarchy and of white supremacy, and her talk squarely addresses that.
Third, I’m interested in starting points where all of us (or most of us) can talk. I’m interested in safe places that permit new knowledge and that also encourage the mutual exchange of ideas towards equality and justice. Gafney’s essay on principles for Bible translation push knowledge that must be talked about openly (even if some are not yet ready for that sort of talk). And the Rev. Dr. Frederick Haynes, who spoke yesterady after the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney did, talked about a very practical move(ment) toward social justice, the national requirement that every police department in this country have mandated race awareness and sensivitiy training. Not everybody is ready for that. We all together start by collecting the facts, he said (quoting Martin Luther King); and Gafney’s essay is a presentation of some of the facts of the Hebrew Bible we all can start with. (Who is threatened by What’s Her Name anyway? Who is threatened by the Foreign Thing, by Hagar? Let’s start there.)
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“Translation Matters: A Fem/Womanist Exploration of Translation Theory and Practice for Proclamation in Worship” by Wil Gafney
“Turning Tables and Snatching Wigs” by Wil Gafney (announced here)
Filed under: Egalitarianism, Feminism, Racism, Sexism, Social justice, Translation, Womanism Tagged: Frederick Haynes, Toni Morrison, Wil Gafney 
