Page 27 [27]
OCR
THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF LANGUAGE USE and political dimensions. In this sense Hammad is “appropriating” English and French, the languages of Sykes and Picot, who divided the Arab Ottoman provinces into British and French mandates during WW and the interbellum, the era in which the novel is set. This can be seen as a way of “the Empire writing back." THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK In what follows, I will discuss the ways in which English, the matrix language, French and Arabic, the imbedded languages, interact in the text on the basis of five salient examples. Theoretically and methodologically, my analysis is inspired by Michelle Hartman’s work." In her analysis of nine French-Lebanese novels by female authors, Hartman discusses the ways in which these authors incorporate Arabic words and expressions into the main text in French in order to comment on gender and class and how the languages interanimate each other, creating a new creative literary language. Hartman describes this interaction between French and Arabic as “gendered interference,” “feminist punctuation,” and “writing as translation.” However, there are some important differences between “The Parisian or Al-Barisi” and the novels Hartman discusses. For one, the authors discussed by Hartman grew up in Lebanon and spent at least a substantial part of their lives there, whereas Hammad has a Palestinian background but was born and raised in Britain. The novels analyzed by Hartman were published between the 1930s and 1990s, while “The Parisian” was published in 2019. In the Lebanese novels “only” two languages interanimate each other, namely French and Arabic, while Hammad extensively incorporates French and Arabic in the English main text. Finally, the novels discussed by Hartman are all feminist novels, commenting not only but foremost on gender and class. Hammad’s novel, though definitely dealing with gender in several ways, is not a feminist novel in particular. Despite these differences, Hammad uses techniques that are similar to the ones described and analyzed by Hartman and they very much yield the same effect as what Hartman describes as “writing as translation,” making the novel resemble a “resistant” or “foreignizing” translation, in which the translator deliberately deviates from the conventions of the target language in order to make the readers aware of the “foreignness” of the text and the fact that they are reading a translated text.’ In combination with the mixing of genres described above, ° Bill Ashcroft — Gareth Griffith — Helen Tiffin: The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, New York, Routledge, 1989. 6 Michelle Hartman: Native Tongue, Stranger Talk. The Arabic and French Landscapes of Lebanon, New York, Syracuse University Press, 2014. ? Lawrence Venuti: The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, New York, Routledge, 1995. «25 ¢
