Interventions

International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

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Minor Literature and the Translation of the

(M)other
Multilingualism and Gender in Najat El Hachmi’s La filla estrangera and
Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer

Núria Codina Solà

To cite this article: Núria Codina Solà (2022) Minor Literature and the Translation of the
(M)other, Interventions, 24:4, 498-515, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2021.1885464

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2021.1885464

Published online: 24 Feb 2021.

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 MINOR LITERATURE AND THE
TRANSLATION OF THE (M)OTHER
Multilingualism and Gender in Najat El Hachmi’s La filla
estrangera and Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer

Núria Codina Solà

English Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium

..................This essay argues that the notion of minor literature, so far conceived as a
linguistic category, needs to be understood in broader, relational terms.
Gender
The essay proposes a definition that takes into account the material
minor literature conditions of literary production. It situates the political contestation
inherent to minor literature not only in the choice and use of language, but
multilingualism
also in the process of representation itself. Minor literature registers the
translation disparities surrounding literacy and linguistic fluency and binds them into
social realities: while laying bare the linguistic and material privileges that
world literature
sustain the literary and stretching the text’s mimetic potential towards its
................. limits, it uses the distance that separates the text from the world to evoke
minorities. My readings of “La filla estrangera” by the Catalan-Amazigh
writer Najat El Hachmi and “Night Dancer” by the Igbo-Flemish-
American author Chika Unigwe put this relational, material understanding
of minor literature to the test. The novels attend to the ways in which our
discursive practices render certain languages and identities marginal.
Leaning on the notion of translation, the essay shows how this powerful
articulation of otherness is necessarily constrained by the gap between

.......................................................................................................
interventions, 2022
Vol. 24, No. 4, 498–515, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2021.1885464
Núria Codina Solà nuria.codina@kuleuven.be
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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what is represented (the subaltern, the oral, the multilingual, the illiterate)
and how it can be represented (the written text, the vehicular language).

Introduction

The notion of minor literature is possibly one of the most contested in the
field of world literature. In Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (1975),
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define minor literature as a political and
collective form of resistance produced by a minority in a major language,
consisting in using the dominant language in an intensive and discordant
way, deterritorializing and stretching it towards its limits (1983, 23). Since
then, the term has been revisited to bring into focus smaller literatures
written in languages that occupy a (semi-)peripheral position in the world lit-
erary system. As outlined by Venkat Mani, the minor is defined according to
the number or “size of speakers of a language, … the site of production of lit-
erature in a specific language and … the selection of language of creation”
(2018, 377), comprising an eclectic range of minority, non-western and
less dominant languages. In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari, these reinter-
pretations revolve less around the political aesthetics of minor literature
and instead have a sociological orientation, aiming to highlight the linguistic
asymmetries in the history of world literature. According to Pascale Casa-
nova, world literature is characterized by successive rivalries resulting from
the process of vernacularization and the formation of national traditions in
Europe from the sixteenth century onwards (2004, 11). While in Casanova’s
Paris-centric account of the world literary space non-western literatures only
start gaining currency in the twentieth century, Aamir R. Mufti demonstrates
the colonial, orientalist genealogy and the “planetary scale” of world litera-
ture since its inception (2016, 145).
In many conceptualizations of world literature, such as Casanova’s, minor
literatures are conceived in opposition to the centre and to major literary tra-
ditions. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s edited volume on Minor
Transnationalism complicates the centre–periphery divide by underlining
the horizontal “relationships among different margins” (2005, 2). By the
same token, Bergur Rønne Moberg and David Damrosch’s introduction of
the term “ultraminor” emphasizes “the fluid relations” (2017, 134) between
the ultraminor, the minor and the major, conveying the multi-layered and
multilingual nature of minor literature. Indeed, as Andrea Bachner demon-
strates, minority and majority are “determined by their margins, by the inter-
stitial, relational spaces flexibly embodied by different links” (2017, 155).
As the different scales and margins encapsulated in the minor unfold, it
becomes necessary to expand its conceptual boundaries and complement the
hitherto dominant conception of the minor as a linguistic formation with a
i nt e r v e nt io n s – 2 4: 4 5 00
............................
relational understanding of the concept that includes different dimensions of
minority and captures their intersections (cf. Helgesson 2018, 8). This essay pro-
poses a definition of minor literature that binds linguistic tensions into material
realities. Using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s interrogation of the represen-
tation of the other in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to expand Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s conceptualization of minor literature, I situate the political contestation
inherent to minor literature not only in the choice and use of language, but
also in the process of representation. Minor literature stretches the mimetic
potential of a text towards its limits by showing how the production of
meaning through literacy is entangled in gender and power dynamics. As
analytical categories, orality and gender are almost absent from world literature
– in the same way that “smaller languages seem to evaporate in highly globalised
scholarly practices” (Leppänen 2018, 89). By interconnecting the linguistic,
material and gendered dimension of minority and looking at the difficulties
involved in the representation of subaltern women, orality and multilingualism,
I discuss the challenges that minor literature poses to world literature.
The essay frontloads gender and orality as key aspects of the minor
through a comparative reading of La filla estrangera (2015) by the
Catalan-Amazigh writer Najat El Hachmi and Night Dancer (2012) by the
Igbo-Flemish-American author Chika Unigwe. Carrying on with the rich
multilingual tradition in transnational and postcolonial writing, these
novels defy the monolingual, often Eurocentric assumption that “a text has
to have one original language, that its writer must be the native speaker of
that one language, and that it is written for a community of native readers
of that language” (Bachner 2017, 153). The multilingual style of the texts
provides a meeting ground for the oral and the written and is key to the rep-
resentation of several women located on the margins of society (illiterates,
migrants, single mothers, servants). My analysis focuses specifically on the
role of written narrations. Both novels illustrate the power of the written
medium to forge bonds between mothers and daughters and unsettle stereo-
typical representations of female identity, while also exposing its limitations.
Unigwe’s text, for instance, suggests that the mother’s written memories
conceal her privileged position with regard to other women, a dynamics
that can be extrapolated to La filla estrangera, since the daughter’s decision
to write about (or for) her illiterate mother “is at once to give voice to her dis-
course and to silence and marginalize her” (Hirsch 1989, 16).

Towards a relational and material account of minor literature

This essay supplements linguistic conceptions of minor literature with a

material framework. While El Hachmi’s work, written in Catalan (a minority
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language, even within Spain), constitutes an example of peripheral literature

within the world literary system, Unigwe’s Anglophone, postcolonial writing
ties in with Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of minor literature, for it
“indigenizes” English (Zabus 2007) and turns a major language into a “deter-
ritorialized tongue suitable for strange, minor uses” (Deleuze and Guattari
1983, 16). The flexible margins of minor literature as a linguistic phenom-
enon enable us to overcome the “bifurcation of theoretical paradigms into lit-
eratures in marginal languages and the concept of minor literature by Deleuze
and Guattari” (Bachner 2017, 146). A purely linguistic approach to the
minor, however, makes it difficult to pin it down. How can we address
minor literature without taking into account the “material conditions of
world literary dissemination” and the hierarchies between “oral and print cul-
tural conditions” (Mani 2018, 379)? How are these conditions connected to
gender, ethnicity and class? Is it possible to define the status of a language
without looking at the position of who is speaking? What does it mean to
inhabit a language from the social margins? Maria Roca points to these ques-
tions when she writes that “the stress on writers who juggle a multiplicity of
cultural, ethnic, national and gendered attachments brings different concerns
to the fore, which were not the main focus of Deleuze and Guattari’s think-
ing” (2020, 2).
In order to advance towards a broader understanding of the term, we can
define minor literature as those texts that lay bare the linguistic, material and
symbolic privileges that sustain the literary, evidencing a split between the
text and the world. Because minor literature self-reflexively discloses its
incomplete nature and is characterized by its irreducible distance to the
other, it can be understood as a form of translation, in which the source
text is never fully equivalent to the original. Minor literature is constitutively
caught up in a performative contradiction: the act of writing reproduces the
disparities inherent to the production of meaning that the text seeks to reveal
and transcend. Indeed, language and literacy both enable and compromise
the text’s mimetic potential. Language, on the one hand, is not “a neutral
tool”, but a “system for the circulation and exchange of symbols” which
“pre-formats the subject’s field of opportunity” (De Graef 2016, 76). Lit-
eracy, on the other, does not only presuppose a normative understanding
of who counts as literate and what literature is, but is also a privileged site
of enunciation, deeply imbricated with the material inequalities that shape
the world. As Sarah Brouillette argues, “reading and writing literature are
elite activities” (2016, 98), and Venkat Mani similarly remarks that access
to literature is marked by “borrowing privileges” that range from “basic lit-
eracy and the ability to read” to “a specific kind of cultural and linguistic lit-
eracy that readers and authors from one part of the world acquire when they
access literatures from other parts of the world” (2017, 46). Literacy and
access to literature do not only have a class and geopolitical component,
i nt e r v e nt io n s – 2 4: 4 5 02
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but also a gendered one, as Caroline Levine observes: “literacy rates among
women around the world have lagged far behind those of their male counter-
parts” (2013, 220).
Minor literature brings to the fore the contradictions of representing the
other outlined by Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Drawing on
Deleuze and Foucault, Spivak shows how western intellectual attempts to
reproduce the discourse of the other tend to “overlook the category of rep-
resentation in its two senses” (1994, 74): Darstellung (the artistic recreation
of reality) and Vertretung (to speak for, by means of a proxy). By reporting
on the other without analyzing their own position of power, (western) intel-
lectuals are “complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s
shadow” (74), engaging in a form of epistemic violence that essentializes
and thus silences the other. While I agree with Spivak and her critique of
Deleuze’s implicit assumption about the “transparency of the intellectual”
(75) – and I would add of the textual medium –, I would like to mobilize
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature as a form of represen-
tation (Darstellung) that makes explicit its own hegemonic position in
relation to the subaltern. However, this self-awareness should not lead to
the hasty conclusion that the subaltern can speak. As Helga Ramsey-Kurz
notes, literary representations of the non-literate other “refrain from
making illiteracy available as an easily comprehensible condition of other-
ness” (2007, 441). I will show how the characters acting as (vertreten) the
subaltern in Unigwe and El Hachmi’s novels are elusive, fragmented and
mediated. Although they provide no ultimate access to the subaltern experi-
ence, the novels succeed in translating the other, i.e. in conveying an approxi-
mate – yet not exact – impression of what it means to inhabit the world from
its margins. Translation cannot represent the original in its literality, but it
“can help us understand, respect, the subaltern” (Maggio 2007, 435) and
make it “be heard” (419). In her essays on translation, Spivak herself
points to the imaginative possibilities enabled by this practice. By providing
access to unknown literary traditions, translation punctures the “myth of
pure difference” (1996, 269) and reveals the “trace of the other in the self”
(2000, 397), yet does so by applying “violence to the translating medium”
(398), i.e. by highlighting the shifts that take place during the linguistic
and cultural exchange. Translation should resist the “good-willing attitude”
that the other “is just like me” (400), which assimilates linguistic specificity
and renders the source text into a “matter of synonym” (399) or “tedious
translatese” (400). Instead, Spivak proposes a method that attends to the
rhetoricity of the text and the “limits of its language” (400), so that trans-
lation becomes an erotic surrender to the other, an intimate space where
the source and target text melt into each other. As Sherry Simon writes,
this surrender entails an engagement “with the conditions of meaning, not
just the ideas of the work” (1996, 135).
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Similarly, minor literature does not simply mime the other, but highlights
the linguistic and discursive codes that grant us access and simultaneously
separate us from it. By signalling the distance between literature and the
world, minor literature evokes minorities’ experiences of uprootedness and
dislocation. In doing so, it questions the assumptions that conditions of
monolingualism have created around dominant traditions, considered as a
“universal good” that is seldom subjected to “a critical self-examination
about its own conditions of possibility” (Mufti 2016, 13).
In the same way that the seeming orality in El Hachmi and Unigwe’s
works does not exist without the mediation of the written word, minor lit-
erature does not operate outside the culture of literacy or the world literary
system, but registers the material and linguistic conditions that challenge lit-
erary representation, production and circulation. What makes it minor, in
other words, is its liminality, its potential to reveal the limits of the literary
when recoding the world and its impossibility of transcending them. Para-
phrazing Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that minor literature is character-
ized by “the impossibility of not writing” and “the impossibility of
writing otherwise” (1983, 16). While Deleuze and Guattari associate this
impossibility with Kafka’s relationship to German as a Jewish writer
living in Prague, I situate this impossibility before the choice of a particular
language, linking it to the implications of language as a symbolic system, the
meaning of literacy and the act of writing itself. Writing implies the trans-
lation of linguistic instability and fluidity (the audible, the multilingual,
the unwritten, to name just a few) into a system of instantiation – language,
literacy, literature – that alienates the singular, but makes it transferable.
Does this mean that we should not write? No, but it defines this act of trans-
lation as a “necessary impossibility” (Spivak 2005, 105). Stefan Helgesson
observes a similar contradiction when he analyzes “the gap between the
singular and the systemic” in world literature (2016, 23) and shows how
“the writer positions his or her craft in relation to a system that exceeds
yet enables the text” (24).
While world literature is often described by its mimetic qualities (Auerbach
2013), its capacity to travel (Damrosch 2003) and its potential “to shape
people, history, civilization” (in the subtitle of Martin Puchner’s book The
Written World) (Puchner 2017), minor literature unveils the “social, racial,
and sexual dynamics of literacy” (Walkowitz 2020, 328), the realities that
restrict the access of non-literate, non-fluent, non-normative subjects to the
literary field or prevent non-written works from travelling and being
acknowledged as literature. Minor literature turns writing into what
Rebecca Walkowitz calls a “project of affirmative not-knowing” (329). The
term “not-knowing” should not be misunderstood as an illusive detachment
from the historical and political context, but as a strategy to undo dominant
modes of knowledge. Instead of claiming universalism, minor literature
i nt e r v e nt io n s – 2 4: 4 5 04
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incorporates “histories of literacy, language access, and multilingualism”
(324), reminding us that “the conditions of knowing and not-knowing are
social rather than intrinsic” (332). Looking at world literature from the per-
spective of the minor can help refine current debates around the canon, which
often overlook structural issues behind linguistic asymmetries. As Mani
writes, “excessive attention to the conceptual” has overshadowed “the politi-
cal, cultural, and social conditions that initiated, facilitated, even suppressed
the circulation of world literature” (2017, 13). While the majority of material
approaches to world literature focus on the movement of books (Mani 2017)
or look at the literary market from a sociological point of view (Brouillette
2016), this essay aims at a textual analysis of the ways in which the novels
engage, thematically and stylistically, with the inadequacy of literature and
the inequalities of literacy or linguistic fluency – inequalities that are linked
1 Pieter Vermeulen to material realities.1 Although I briefly trace the context of El Hachmi and
(2016) uses a similar Unigwe’s literary production, my main interest concerns the gap between
approach when he
engages in a close
what is being represented (the oral, the illiterate, the multilingual) and how
reading of literature’s it can be represented (by means of the written text and a vehicular language).
saturation by market
forces.

Writing at the crossroads: multilingualism in the work of Najat El Hachmi and

Chika Unigwe

In order to understand the material realities reflected in El Hachmi and

Unigwe’s multilingual novels, it is fundamental to outline the authors’ lin-
guistic backgrounds. Both writers belong to multilingual cultures in which
the affiliation to a single national language is more than problematic. El
Hachmi was born in the Amazigh-speaking Rif region of Morocco in 1979
and migrated to the Catalan city of Vic (Spain) at the age of eight. Unigwe,
born in Enugu in 1974, moved from Nigeria to the Flemish town of Turnhout
(Belgium) in 1995 and has been living in the USA since 2013. These experi-
ences have shaped the language choices of both authors. For El Hachmi,
Catalan was the first written language to which she was systematically
exposed (2004, 38), so it is not surprising that it also became her main lit-
erary language. At the same time, her writings are strongly influenced by
her mother tongue, Amazigh, and its oral tradition.
While El Hachmi writes mainly in one language, Catalan, and incorporates
sprinklings of Amazigh, Unigwe switches between English, her primary lit-
erary language, and Dutch, in which she has written some short stories and
articles. Additionally, her English and Dutch texts carry a strong presence
of Igbo and other African and European languages. Unigwe’s multilingual
writing provides an interesting example of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls
“born translated” texts. First published in the translated Dutch version
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(instead of the English original), her novels complicate the distinction

between original and translation and challenge “dominant models of literary
sequencing, in which circulation trails production” (Walkowitz 2015, 31). In
addition, as my analyses will show, both La filla estrangera and Night Dancer
are “written as translations, pretending to take place in a language other than
the one in which they have, in fact, been composed” (5) and incorporate the
translator or rewriter as a central character, while highlighting the intricacies
of translating the other into the written medium.
Writing beyond the mother tongue is an important subject of metalinguis-
tic reflection for both authors. In her autobiographical essay Jo també sóc cat-
alana (I Am Catalan Too), El Hachmi discusses her multiple cultural and
linguistic affinities. She describes Catalan and Amazigh as her “mother
tongues” (“llengües maternes”, my translation [2004, 17]) and even intensi-
fies their kinship by calling them “sister languages” (“llengües germanes”,
my translation [27]) due to their shared history of persecution and discrimi-
nation across the centuries. However, El Hachmi is well aware of their differ-
ences; while Catalan has a longstanding written literary tradition and is
taught officially in schools, Amazigh is mostly an oral language that does
2 For more not enjoy the same privileges – at least not until very recently.2 Indeed, the
information on the relationship between them is more conflicted than it seems at first sight, for
sociolinguistic
situation of Amazigh, the better the author speaks Catalan, the more she feels estranged from
see Twohig (2017). Amazigh and Morocco (45).
Asked about her relationship to English, Unigwe calls this language her
“stepmother tongue” (Bekers 2015, 31). Although this metaphor seems to
establish a practical equivalence with Igbo, writing in English is a source of
conflict. Unigwe’s problematic relation with her adoptive language is also
tied to the discrepancies between orality and literacy. In other words, her
writing in English is conditioned by the oral nature of her mother tongue,
with Unigwe arguing that she “wouldn’t find any publisher or have any read-
ership” if she were to write in Igbo (Bekers 2015, 31). As she explains in an
article with the revealing title “Speaking Igbo, Writing English” (2007), Igbo
is seldom used for written purposes: “If your society produces a community
of people who can speak, but cannot read, Igbo without difficulties, then who
are you writing for?” This tension is further complicated by the colonial
implications of English in Nigeria. In order to subvert its dominance,
Unigwe, like other postcolonial writers, appropriates English and adapts it
to the “rhythm” and “cadences” of Igbo (Bekers 2015, 31), challenging the
linguistic boundaries and power relations between both languages.
The linguistic frictions outlined in this section point to the material con-
ditions of production underlying El Hachmi and Unigwe’s work. The close
readings of their texts, to which I now turn, link these tensions with the
social realities of subaltern women and the material aspects of literary
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enunciation, foregrounding the necessity of adopting a relational approach to
the minor.

Najat El Hachmi’s La filla estrangera: writing the mother

El Hachmi’s La filla estrangera (The Foreign Daughter) tells a story about

“the ‘other woman,’ the mother, in relation to the ‘other child,’ the daughter”
(Hirsch 1989, 2). The focus on this overlooked female constellation, the
migrant identity of the protagonists, the use of language and the engagement
with the exclusions of literacy are thematic and stylistic concerns that lend
themselves to the study of minor literature and resonate with Unigwe’s
work, as I will demonstrate. Like in many mother–daughter plots, the
relationship between the Moroccan-born mother and her Catalan-raised
daughter is fraught with tension due to their different understandings of
gender roles. While the mother is eager to see her daughter married and
has arranged her to be wed with her cousin, the daughter and narrator of
the story is a brilliant school student dreaming about going to college.
Since she is afraid of disappointing her mother and putting her honour at
risk, she gives in to marriage and assumes the role of perfect housewife for
which she has been trained.
Their differences are aggravated by the language gap between them. The
mother is an illiterate and religious woman. Her traditional lifestyle is associ-
ated with the mother tongue, an oral language that remains unspecified, but,
by inference, can be identified as Amazigh. In contrast to the illiterate, mono-
3 The mother is less lingual mother,3 the daughter is a voracious reader. She is multilingual but
monolingual than
suggested in the feels more at ease in the language of her new surroundings than in the
novel. Some of the mother tongue. Although her main language is not named explicitly (nor
religious expressions are the setting and the names of the protagonists), it can be recognized as
she uses in
conversation with
Catalan, the language she uses to narrate the story.
her Moroccan friends Alienation from the mother (tongue) is instantiated at several points. For
are borrowed from example, the daughter sometimes uses unidiomatic phrases coined from
Arabic (El Hachmi
literal translations of Catalan (El Hachmi 2015, 47) and lacks the words to
2015, 27).
express her feelings in the mother tongue. Vice versa, and in spite of being
more fluent in Catalan, her narration is constantly permeated with “hetero-
lingualisms” from the mother tongue (Grutman 1997). These mostly refer
to cultural or religious concepts that have no exact translation in Catalan,
showing the limits of language to articulate reality.
The untranslatable also evidences the different worlds that separate
mother and daughter from each other. Notions related to female sexuality
are considered taboo in the culture of the mother (37). Even though there
are no words for the pleasures of the body, the mother tongue is mediated
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through the women’s body. Women are the main storytellers and are there-
fore in charge of handing down the oral tradition and family history to the
next generation. Moreover, the importance of the female body as a linguistic
medium becomes clear in the tradition of covering the upper female body
with henna tattoos, now considered sinful and on the verge of disappearing.
According to the daughter, these designs constitute “the last vestiges of a
language that for centuries has only been written on the women’s skin (“els
darrers vestigis d’una llengua que fa segles que només s’escriu a les seves
pells”, my translation [24]). Interestingly, El Hachmi chooses the word
“written” to refer to this non-verbal language inscribed on the female
body, implicitly opening up the meanings of literacy. By pointing to corporeal
modes of knowledge, she detaches female identity from the negative conno-
tations associated with illiteracy – a realization that lies at the core of the
daughter’s gradual reassessment of the mother.
In contrast to the orality of Amazigh, Catalan – as a written language –
provides access to literacy and literature. The daughter often alludes to pas-
sages from the books she reads, mostly by Catalan women writers such as
Mercè Rodoreda, Maria Mercè Marçal, Carme Riera or Montserrat Roig.
Female characters trapped in unhappy relationships become her point of
reference, almost replacing the mother and taking over her guiding function.
The differences between mother and daughter, or between Amazigh and
Catalan, are equated with the cultural divide between orality and literacy.
In contrast to illiterate women like her mother, who appear readily content
with their disadvantageous situation, the daughter believes that literacy
helps her escape from subjugation and imagine a different reality than the
one dictated by tradition:

La diferència principal entre les dones que s’acostumen al destí que els ha tocat
viure i no protesten si no és en veu baixa amb les amigues, que se senten
còmodes en la seva vida matrimonial, i jo, la diferència principal és que elles no
han llegit i jo sí, i al costat del cos ja adormit del meu cosí-marit veig que, tot i
els esforços per deixar enrere la meva vida anterior, segueixo sense poder pensar
com una analfabeta.
The main difference between the women who get used to their fate, who only com-
plain under their breath and with their friends, who are comfortable in their marital
life and me is that they haven’t read as I have. And while lying next to my cousin-
husband I realize that in spite of all my efforts to move on from the past, I am still
unable to think like an illiterate. (El Hachmi 2015, 175, my translation)

The daughter seems to associate orality with “the absence of elaborate ana-
lytic categories” (Ong 2002, 42) that enable speakers to distance themselves
from their immediate reality. Although this one-sided understanding of
orality has come under attack, the evolutionary march from orality to literacy
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is deeply ingrained in “the institutions of world literature that we have inher-
ited” (Levine 2013, 224). In fact, the daughter’s fascination for books reflects
the fetishization of writing promoted by the institutions of world literature,
which perceive literacy as the “the mark of progress and civilization”
(223). Along these lines, Michael Allan remarks that the “story of the
relationship between literature and critical thinking is seemingly intrinsic
to the world republic of letters” (2016, 136). While not reading is dismissed
as “being entrapped within a hidebound worldview, not thinking critically
and ultimately being mindlessly subordinate to authority” (136), literary edu-
cation implies “the cultivation of critical-thinking skills essential to informed
participation in a modern state” (8).
In spite of the sharp distinction between orality and literacy that is at work
in world literature and reiterated in La filla estrangera, literature becomes the
means of smoothing this dichotomy and building bridges between mother
and daughter and, consequently, between languages. In her quest for her
own voice and language beyond that of her mother, the daughter decides
to write a novel about her mother. Writing helps her to articulate her identity
and to empathize with her mother (tongue), since it forces the daughter to
confront the conditions that put her in a privileged position. Consequently,
El Hachmi’s subsequent and most recent novel, Mare de llet i mel (Mother
of Milk and Honey, 2018), simulates the book written by the daughter. It
gives voice to the mother, who narrates her own story. Instead of being sub-
missive and uncritical, the mother now appears as a courageous woman,
capable of challenging tradition and starting a new life in a city she does
not know. Together, both works provide an illuminating example of minor
literature’s complex articulation of otherness and the material conditions
that push the other to the margins of literature and society.
By revisiting the mother, La filla estrangera and its sequel Mare de llet i mel
amend the negative connotations initially attached to the illiterate, the
mother tongue and oral culture. El Hachmi’s work suggests that writing
facilitates the translation between the self and the (m)other, inspiring a
feeling of identification that is more powerful than actual kinship. In doing
so, it demonstrates the crucial role of translation in minor literature. It is
through writing in Catalan, the language the narrator speaks best but is
not her native tongue, that she establishes a relation of familiarity with her
mother and ceases to be a foreign daughter. The distinctions between
native and foreign language, between the oral and the written, become
blurred: the native language loses its oral quality and takes a written form,
becoming closer to Catalan.
Is this vindication of orality through the written medium a way of suppres-
sing the oral? Rather than nurturing the fantasy of a perfect instantiation of
orality and reinforcing its antithetical identity with regards to writing, I argue
that La filla estrangera highlights the intertwinement of both worlds, yet
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without withholding the limitations involved in the representation of the oral

and the (m)other. The novel succeeds in making visible the traces of orality in
literature and in the written language, which at the same time constitutes
another language. Aware of our “understanding of language as a code”
(Allan 2016, 14) and of the “material basis of reading” (41), El Hachmi
offers the possibility to “decipher, entextualize and read” (Allan 2016, 42)
Amazigh and its oral tradition. By making it legible, she situates orature
within the domain of what is recognized as literature, changing the terms
with which we read subjects and traditions outside our conventional literary
frameworks. As pointed out by the author in her essay “The Language of
Dreams”, La filla estrangera aims to highlight the importance of orality as
“literature in its most primitive form” (El Hachmi 2018, 81). The novel recre-
ates the oral stories of her childhood, a world El Hachmi believed she “had
irretrievably lost” (80). This rediscovery does not only enable her to
combine her two “literary roots” – Catalan and Amazigh – (81), but also
“to create the ties once again to those women I’d lived with and from
whom I’d distanced myself” (80). Multilingualism is thus tied to the ethical
responsibility of giving illiterate women a voice, of translating their stories
into Catalan and into a written medium. By filling the linguistic gaps in the
written text and retrieving the silenced voices that remain illegible and intel-
ligible for the (western) reader, La filla estrangera elucidates the linguistic and
material dimension of minor literature, showing how its revolutionary poten-
tial lies not only in the languages it mobilizes, but also in the excluded sub-
jects it brings to the fore.
Apart from exploring the emancipatory possibilities enabled by trans-
lation, El Hachmi also hints at its limitations. By translating the mother,
her original voice gets lost. Her experience is always mediated (and silenced)
by the daughter, who is both the narrator of the story in La filla estrangera
and the author of the mother’s account in Mare de llet i mel. Along similar
lines, the foreign language and multilingual reality are facilitated – and con-
strained – by the vehicular language of the novel, Catalan. Although La filla
estrangera contributes to a more plural understanding of the world by attend-
ing to the ways in which our discursive practices render certain languages and
identities marginal, one could also argue that the novel uses orality and non-
European languages “in a strategically centripetal way, one that eases the
process of translation” (Gramling 2016, 135) and ensures universal literacy.
It is no coincidence that the traces of the oral mother tongue disappear almost
completely in Mare de llet i mel, in which, supposedly, the story narrated by
the mother is pre-emptively translated by the daughter into Catalan. This
absence suggests that the figuration of the (m)other (the oral, the illiterate)
is only possible through interaction with its dominant counterpart (the
written, the literate, the daughter), through a discourse that encodes it and
makes it communicable. This mutual embeddedness troubles the opposition
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between the major and the minor. In that respect, El Hachmi’s work enacts
the constitutive paradox of minor literature: without mediation, the other
becomes unreadable, yet by translating it, the other is deprived of its singu-
larity. As a result of this displacement, linguistic deterritorialization
becomes a central feature of minor writing, emerging not only (or not exclu-
sively) from transcultural exchange, but also from the “disjunction between
content and expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 19).

Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer: rereading the mother

Unigwe’s Night Dancer also pivots on a generational conflict between

mother and daughter, which is negotiated through the written medium, nar-
rated across different languages and used to bring to light the realities
excluded from literary discourse. The story, situated in Nigeria, depicts the
discrepancies between Ezi and her daughter Mma. Brought up in “a house
where there was no visible male presence” (Unigwe 2012, 32), Mma longs
for a father who puts an end to the social stigma of being raised by a
single mother and being perceived as a “whore’s daughter” (16). Ezi, who
separated from her husband when he betrayed her with her former maid,
lives “by the rule that men were dispensable” (67).
The differences between them are articulated through language, albeit in a
less unequivocal way than in La filla estrangera. Mma tries to become “the
exact opposite of her mother”, even in the way she speaks: “Where her
mother’s voice was so loud it was not certain whether she was shouting or
just plain talking, Mma’s voice was low and demure” (67). Their emotional
distance is expressed through silence, i.e. through the absence of language:
“She and her mother were all ‘talked out’. They had nothing new to say to
each other” (38). Reconciliation comes about after Ezi’s death and is
mediated, as in La filla estrangera, through the written medium.
Ezi leaves a bundle of letters as a posthumous legacy to her daughter,
entitled “My Memoirs; The Truth about My Life” (43). The letters offer a
counternarrative of Mma’s initial perception of Ezi. Indeed, the first part
of the novel juxtaposes the mother’s first-person account with the daughter’s
perspective, provided through the third-person narration in the frame story.
In doing so, Night Dancer captures Mma’s evolving impression while reading
her mother’s memoirs. Although the letters create stronger bonds between
both women than the oral conversations, the oral–written divide and
language gap that characterizes La filla estrangera is absent from Unigwe’s
fiction as an explicit thematic device. In terms of style, however, Night
Dancer demonstrates that the language commonly spoken in the represented
world (Igbo) is different from the one in which the text is written (English).
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Linguistic difference is neutralized through the homogenizing convention

(Sternberg 1981, 223). Therefore, situations in which the characters switch
into a language other than Igbo are marked: “He had switched into
English, as if he could make his points more persuasive by articulating
them in another language” (Unigwe 2012, 248). Alongside the numerous
Igbo terms included in the text, these metalinguistic references remind Anglo-
phone readers that the universality of English is not a given. Because they
point to the “gap between the mother tongue and the other tongue” (Zabus
2007, 7) – or the disparity between the textual and the non-textual world –
these postcolonial strategies can be seen in analogy with minor literature’s
function of rendering transparent the text’s own hegemonic position. As
Chantal Zabus puts it, postcolonial literature is marked by a “struggle
waged against, yet via, the foreign language” (2). Indeed, the intricacies of
representing the local, postcolonial culture in a global, former colonial
language go hand in hand with the ambivalence inherent to the act of
writing the other, in which the struggle against the exclusions of the text is
expressed via the text, as I show now using Ezi’s account.
More than a passive reader of Ezi’s text, Mma becomes its rewriter and
engages actively in the process of retelling her mother’s past, since the letters
only contain “half-told stories” (Unigwe 2012, 13). She seeks out her
mother’s best friend, Madame Gold, to find out more about her life. In the
third part of the book, she even travels to Kaduna to meet her actual father
(Ezi’s ex-husband). After uncovering Ezi’s story, Mma realizes that her
mother defied the social norms and men’s privileged position in Nigeria in
order to raise her daughter as an independent woman (245). If, at the beginning
of the novel, it is mainly the differences between them that are at stake, towards
the end it is their similarities that come to the fore. As in La filla estrangera, the
written narration serves to create stronger bonds and to question the tropes of
victimhood or blind obedience associated with female characters. Ezi is depicted
as an emancipated woman, a value that becomes clear through her written
legacy and is implicitly facilitated by her literate education.
The link between female emancipation and literacy is recognizable through
the contrast with Rapu, Ezi’s former semi-literate maid, who ends up marry-
ing her husband. Her story is narrated in the second part of the novel, the
only one set in the past. It constitutes an independent intermezzo between
Mma’s discovery of the letters in the first part and her encounter with her
father in the final chapters. Rapu is described as a simple woman with a
deprived background. Whereas Ezi is urban, cultivated and multilingual,
Rapu is poorly educated, only speaks Igbo and barely understands Hausa
or English. In the rural village where she comes from, no woman would
dare to confront her husband as Ezi does: “In Lokpanta women did not
speak to their husbands like that. If they disagreed they saved their anger
and their words for when they were with their fellow women” (151).
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Rapu’s docile nature becomes apparent when Ezi’s husband Mike seduces
her: “And it seemed like destiny when she did not fight him, … as if she had
waited her entire life for this” (199). When Mike takes Rapu as a second wife
because she is expecting a son of his, Ezi, as a literate and hence “modern
woman” (211), has the means to walk out and start a life of her own, but
Rapu has no other choice than to stay and patiently endure her husband’s
humiliations: “Besides, where would she go? She did not have Ezi’s advan-
tages. She would not survive alone” (223).
Despite its implicit celebration of the emancipatory potential of literacy
and the reconciliatory force of the written word, Night Dancer simul-
taneously reveals the limits of writing to represent the plurality of the
world. Although Ezi’s memoirs break down the deep-seated prejudices sur-
rounding single mothers, they only contain part of the “truth” they claim,
since they present Ezi as a victim and opponent of patriarchy, but eclipse
the power relations that make her complicit with the system. When Ezi
first visits Rapu in order to hire her as a maid, she treats the girl as an
object, unable – or unwilling – to empathize with someone of her condition:
“Aunty Ezi’s only comment had been on Rapu’s size: ‘She’s small. I’m not
sure she’ll do’” (156). She exploits her, making her work insanely long
hours without ever thanking her, instead humiliating her when she once
makes a mistake and eats a fish head that she was supposed to serve to
someone else:

Aunty Ezi looked her up and down and when she spoke it was to ask her if anyone
in her family could afford to buy such a fish, to ask if she wanted to go back to the
poverty she escaped, to say she did not tolerate thieves. (170)

When she finds out that Rapu is pregnant and the latter refuses to reveal the
identity of the child’s father, she forces her to undress and calls her “Ashawo!
Whore!” (207), hence replicating the same attitude that other women will
have towards her when she raises Mma on her own.
Without the intercalated intermezzo that interrupts the frame story of Ezi
and Mma’s reconciliation, part of the truth about Ezi would be lost. Fiction
becomes thus a “means of rescuing such accounts from oblivion and asserting
them as counter-visions to approved reconstructions of past events” (Ramsey-
Kurz 2007, 92), evidencing minor literature’s attempt to include the stories of
those situated outside the material and social confines of literacy. At the same
time, though, Night Dancer presents writing as “being an inadequate means of
reproducing the experiences of the illiterates” (92). Ezi’s memoirs are “half-told
stories” in the sense that they constrain the realities and voices that are heard.
They function as a metaphor for world literature. In the same manner in which
the letters facilitate access to the mother’s past but only convey part of the
larger story, world literature enables “a detached engagement with worlds
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beyond our own place and time” (Damrosch 2003, 281), but only authorizes
certain subjects and aesthetic objects as literary.
If Ezi remains an ambivalent, multifaceted character, so does Rapu.
Although the reader might feel sympathy for her when reading the second
part, the perspective shifts towards the end, when we see her through
Mma’s eyes. Rapu, who resents Ezi’s daughter from the start, comes across
as a coolly calculating person. Like her former boss Ezi, she adopts an
elitist, hostile attitude when she wrongly accuses Mma of being after her
father’s money. Who are Rapu and Ezi in fact? Is there a character truly
able to embody (vertreten) the oppressed? Both the letters and the novel
itself only offer fragmented insights into the women’s lives, disclosing the
written medium’s own incapability to represent (darstellen) the other.
Through its elusive portraits, Night Dancer precludes full knowledge of the
subaltern. Yet it is precisely this experience of “not knowing” (Walkowitz
2020), this displacement between the original and its representation, that
enables a partial identification and resistant translation of the other.

Conclusion

By attending to the material dimensions of representation, this essay articu-

lates a postcolonial, gendered rereading of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
of minor literature and theorizes it as a form of translation that attempts to
negotiate the difference between “speaking in one’s own name versus speaking
for someone else” (Hermans 1996, 44). If translation incorporates the transla-
tor’s voice as an inevitable “discursive presence” constantly “shadowing,
mimicking and … counterfeiting the Narrator’s voice” (43), minor literature
shadows the textual and linguistic medium by reflecting on its conditions of
production and weaving multiple languages into the narrative voice. By chal-
lenging the celebration of circulation underlying world literature without yet
disparaging the possibility of translation, minor literature contributes to a criti-
cal approach to the discipline and opens a much-needed dialogue between
world literature, postcolonialism and translation studies.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues at the English Literature Research Unit at

the University of Leuven, especially Ortwin de Graef and Pieter Vermeulen,
for their careful reading of my work and generous help. I would also like
to thank the participants of the “Minor/Small Literature(s)” academy
i nt e r v e nt io n s – 2 4: 4
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organized by the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and the anonymous
reviewers at Interventions for their constructive and valuable feedback.
Funding
This work was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: [grant
number 12T5120N].
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