Toward Afrofluency

KAIAMA L. GLOVER is professor of African American studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021) and of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP, 2011), among other publications, and the prizewinning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone nonfiction. Her scholarly and translation work has been supported by the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the cohost of Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean. My experience of translation has been, for the most part, unburdened. Translating has not been my principal professional occupation, nor has it beenmy field of study. It has become, however, a singularly integral praxis for me over the last decade—one of the most important expressions of what I do with what I know as a researcher and professor. I came to translation organically. In 2013, the editor of a small independent press commissioned me to translate the Haitian Spiralist author Frankétienne’s 1968 novel Mûr à crever (Ready to Burst) from French into English. I had published the first full-length scholarly monograph on Spiralism three years earlier, and so I welcomed the opportunity to return to Frankétienne’s work and to the worlds it had opened up for me. Taking on the translation aligned entirely with the intention that animated the earlier work I had done on Spiralism: to shed greater light on and encourage a wider readership of Frankétienne’s writing and that of the two other authors I considered in my study. I jumped into that first translation project untrained, unstudied, and guided loosely by a confidence that I knew enough about Haitian literature and was proficient enough in French and in Haitian Creole to do a decent job of it. This was true, for the most part, but the experience ultimately was as much one of learning as of doing. In approaching Ready to Burst as a scholar, I had always left the book intact in a certain kind of way; I entered into public conversation, even debated with it, probing and questioning it in the hopes of excavating its layers. But in every aspect of this critical work, Frankétienne remained always and unequivocally The Author and I remained The Reader. In bringing his novel into the academic arena through carefully chosen fragments, with curated elements spotlighted and mined for the formal and conceptual treasures they contained,