Throughout their narratives Walker and Angelou define the act of writing as involving the search for change. This means that writing about the voiceless victims are ways in which the author continues to engage with hope and the possibility for change. They not only express their own difficulties in accessing their voices, but they also write about the hard situations in which their protagonists resist to survive and gain a voice. The function ofwriting, as it creates and changes meaning, is like the healing of trauma in which one needs to retell the traumatic events.This highlights the psychological necessity that during the hardest times, the times in which one is rendered the most voiceless, it is of great importance to retell,speak, convey and then come to terms with traumatic past.
2.1. The Color Purple
In The Color Purple Alice Walker creates the character of Celie, a Black immature girl who is sexually abused by her stepfather. Celie reacts to repeated abusive rape by writing letters that are addressed to God but always remain unsigned, indicating her lack of confidence in imagining herself as a person who has the right to own something. As the novel progresses, Celie starts to address her letters to her sister Nettie and the novel begins to include letters from Nettie to Celie, establishing a literary line in which writing becomes a reciprocal exchange among black women. In constructing her novel in the form of letters, Walker makes use of the literary conventions of the epistolary novel to recountpainful sexual assault and at the end of novel by the help of a woman blues singer, Shug Avery, makes Celie to understand sexuality as a source of pleasure rather than victimization.
By creating Celie and giving her the language to tell of her sexual abuse, Walker adds Celie’s voice to muted yet growing discussions of the sexual politics of Black womanhood (Collins 2000). Walker asserts that the American society is a racist, sexist and colourist capitalist societywhich operates on the basis of unnatural hierarchical distinctions.The Color Purple helps the reader to realize the painful experiences of Black women in American history.
Iranian EFL Journal 421 Walker doesn't just describe the injustices against Blacks, but, forces us to become a member of an oppressed race as we struggle to hear the traumatic memories of Celie.
Celie’s journey of self-discovery is symbolic of the “Womanist process” embedded in the Afro-American folk-art tradition of their survival culture. This is a tradition in which the Black American women, despite heavy oppression, expressed their creativity in such crafts as gardening, cooking and quilting (Harris, 2010). To sum up then the journey of Walker’s women in search of an authentic identity is to restate the role of the Black woman as a creator and also to define her relationship with the change in American society.
In an early assessment of Walker’s work, Barbara Christian (1980) noted her attention to the recurring motif of the Black woman as creator and how the black woman’s attempt to be whole relates to the health of her community. A womanist is pro-woman, not anti-man.
Against a binary world view, Walker uses her novels to resist the implication of Western dualism that man should dominate all of nature, including woman.Womanist thought is changing. We can no longer holdon to the old categories that decide who is in and who is out.
If we silence each other’s voices, we will silence ourselves.
Celie dedicates her last letter to God, stars, trees, sky, people, everything and repeatedly to God. She addresses to everything that incorporates godly spirit and thanks for being reunited to her sister and her children. The future looks promising and Celie feels young and energetic. “But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt. Amen (Walker, 1982). This symbolizes a new beginning for Celie. She has survived despite of all the brutality and violence she had experienced and is ready to start a new life. She has developed from being an insecure and inferior girl into a strong and well- balanced woman. She has learned to tear down the restraining identity imposed upon her because of the fact that she is a woman. Walker chooses the traditional happy ending where everyone is united and forgiven for all of their sins. The miserable past is left behind and everybody is entering a bright future. She writes about the states of mind and the pain of the characters, in this regard, she does not avoid her own pain, but seeks to signify it for others, as she does for herself, and survives it.
2.2. I know why the caged Bird Sings
Black women’s autobiographical writing has been featured by a unique literary inheritance.
The inheritance is a rich one rooted not only in written literary models, but also in the African American oral tradition of spiritual narrative and bearing witness, in traditions of protest, in work song and blues, in Anglo- European aesthetic and linguistic models, and in rich and
Iranian EFL Journal 422 subtle variations of diverse origin (Braxton, 1998). This kind of narrative mode allows the writer to make use of the text as a realm in which she can share her ideas and experiences with the readers; this will result in a kind of testimony that will create self-healing for the writer and bear witness for the reader.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,Angelou recreates her child-self in the persona of Marguerite Johnson. She narratesher story of childhood sexual abuse through a painful autobiographical account of the traumatic impact of rape on an eight-year-old victim, a young girl devastated by a brutal sexual abuse experiences a great psychological disorder and suffers from its aftermath effects. The novelopens with the poignant, halting voice of Marguerite Johnson, the young Maya Angelou, struggling for her own voice under the vapid doggerel of the yearly Easter pageant:
What you lookin at me for?
I didn't come to stay. . . .
These two lines prefigure the entire work. "What you look in at me for. . .is the painful question of every black girl made self-conscious and self-doubting by a white world critical of her very existence. The claim that she didn’t come to stay increases in irony as the entire work ultimately affirms the determination of Marguerite Johnson and, symbolically, all of the unsung survivors of the Middle Passage to do that very thing- -to stay. To stay is to affirm life and the possibility of redemption. (Braxton, 1998). Maya struggles throughout Caged Bird to acquire acceptance, recognition, authentic self, caring, and love. It is also the story of a Black girl's growing up, in a color-coded society that in countless ways had told her "you can't, you won't". It is an affirmation that life, if we have the courage to live it, will be worth the struggle.
Angelou’s writing about being raped as a child was a path breaking work in women’s autobiography, as Caged Bird was published at a time when most rape victims and sexually abused children were encouraged to stay silent; Angelou’s honesty opened the door for other women to share their stories. Despite the tragedy she endured, bitterness does not haunt the work, as Angelou writes about her family and community with love. Critic Sidonie Ann Smith(1973) points out the importance of Angelou telling this story in the form of autobiography: That she chooses to create the past in its own sounds suggests to the reader that she accepts the past and recognizes its beauty and its ugliness, its assets and its liabilities, its strengths and its weakness.
In the act of narrative articulation, the trauma story becomes a public, potentially communal testimony that sets the stage for self-healing. The retelling of unaffordable pain
Iranian EFL Journal 423 gives the survivor a heroic status as the bearer of unspeakable truths. Angelou‘s struggle to find the written words that could contain and communicate what she felt was a historically unspoken and as yet, unspeakable condition for Black women. In Caged Bird, she successfully reconstructs the experience of rape trauma in the form of a coherent testimony, even as she heroically struggles to overcome obsessive-compulsive flashbacks of her traumatic experience. She is articulate and clear about her condition she knows who has silenced her and the Black community, and why. Her search for voice was looking to create a literature that would be able to write honestly about the times in which speechlessness and silence were still the dominant mechanisms of the day.
Angelou’s adult narrative voice recounts the experience of rape in a testimonial tone that relieves psychologically the horror of the child’s terrible pain: The act of rape on an eight- year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot (Angelou, 1970). Marguerite, the stunned rape victim, is so severely traumatized that she tries to keep the abuse a secret even from herself, since the only means she has at her disposal are frank denial [ . . . ] and a legion of dissociative reactions” (Herman, 1992).
Accusing herself of being guilty, a traumatized Marguerite retreats into the post traumatic silence. What he did to me, and what I allowed, must have been very bad if already God let me hurt so much(Angelou, 1970) she reasons. Participation in forbidden sexual activity, Judith Herman (1992) tells us, confirms the abused child’s sense of badness. Any gratification that the child is able to glean from the exploitative situation becomes proof in her mind that she instigated and bears full responsibility for the abuse.
The explicit purpose of Angelou’s autobiographical project is defined in terms of self- conscious narrative recovery in the genre of testimonio. In the healing autobiographical project, the narrator plays both analyst and analysand in a discursive drama of scriptotherapy.
According to Judith Herman, the organized narrative reformulation of traumatic experience can virtually restructure the mind’s obsessive-compulsive processing of embedded personal scripts.As Janet Liebman Jacobs observes,
In this retelling of the rape, Angelou reconstructs the child self who simultaneously experiences the suffering of the victim while responding to the remorse of the victimizer. Immediately after the assault, the perpetrator is [ . . . ] asking that she, the abused child, understand that he did not mean to hurt her. [ . . . ] In that moment of awareness, the physical and emotional boundary violations converge as the child feels
Iranian EFL Journal 424 both her pain and the pain of the abuser. Empathy is thus engendered under conditions of sexual violence. (1994)
Herman's first and second stage, the establishment of safety and remembering occurs for Maya when she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a black Stamps matron who supplies her with books to encourage her love of reading. Mrs. Flowers functions as an appropriate antidote to Maya's poignant self-loathing. The boost in self-esteem is the lifeline that Maya needs to carry her through post-rape trauma. Maya's "lessons in living" with Mrs. Flowers awaken her conscience, sharpen her perspective of her environment and of the relationship between blacks and the larger society, and teach her something about the beauty and power of language. Emotionally and intellectually strengthened by this friendship, Maya begins to compose poetic verses and ring songs and to keep a scrapbook journal in which she records her reactions to and impressions of people, places, and events and new ideas that she is introduced to by books (Braxton 1998).
Another powerful element which helps Maya to recover herself is her connection to the black community. When trauma becomes a shared experience it helps the victim to find a witness to the story, who is also a co-creator of the trauma meaning and reconciliation. Part of what helps Maya survive and feel more confident in herself is her connection to the strong role models offered by her grandmother and Mrs. Bertha Flowers who takes Maya under her wing and coaxes her out of her shell. This mutual communication is therefore of importance in dispelling the sense of isolation which lies at the core of the narrated trauma experiences.
This is done through the involvement of the community in formulating expression, by witnessing, and through personal involvement in victim’s story.
Angelou writes in the tradition of African American authors who, according to Valerie Smith (1973), in their manipulation of received literary conventions [ . . . ] engage with and challenge the dominant ideology. At the conclusion of the first volume of her autobiography, Maya Angelou/ Marguerite Johnson has stopped serving white masters and, in the process, has become an independent woman. She gives birth not only to a healthy boy but to a revitalized sense of herself as an African American woman spiritually empowered and psychologically liberated from the effects of childhood sexual abuse.As Joanne Braxton(1998) reminds us, the Black female autobiographer, unlike the solitary male hero, uses language—sass, invective, impertinence, and ritual invocation— to defend herself physically and psychologically. Angelo’s autobiographical narrative can be considered as an act of scriptotherapy, anarticulation of the traumatic past that allows Angelou to recover
Iranian EFL Journal 425 herself and bring meaning into her own life-story and to reconstruct an enabling, communal testimonio from the shattered memories of childhood tragedy.
3. Conclusion
Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) and Alice walker's The Color Purple (1982), attempt to recover unspoken aspects of the past- principally Black women's sexual exploitation- by reading the silences and oppressions in Black women's histories. An unclaimed experience, as Cathy Caruth calls it (1996), trauma is a phenomenon that is not experienced upon occurrence and thus forecloses witnessing from within the experience itself. It is this inability to witness the traumatic event from the inside that Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) have asserted, lies at the very heart of trauma.
Narratives of trauma always bespeak the inherent conflict in trauma between an untellable event in the past and the necessity to narrate and testify to the experience in the present in an effort to perhaps work through it. Angelou and walkers’ frequent use of the same rape story can be seen as intertextual reenactments of a traumatic return after a period of repression to an unclaimed moment of rape in an earlier source and so demonstrate how trauma is represented not merely through temporal references and repetitions within a single text but also across time in various versions by different artists.
The communal voice of black women possesses the power not only to destroy but also to create. They attempt to break silence around rape through assertions of an alternative feminine voice.They define themselves and their characters differently, disengage them from the cultural scripts of sexuality and gender that produce them as feminine subject. Rape can destroy a woman's autonomy and self-image, yet, Walker and Angelou transform this potentially destructive event into an opportunity to celebrate their resistance to negative stereotypes about the black female body. In each work the author sets into the narrative framework, women who are abused physically, legally, psychologically, and socially by male codes. The central figures in the works are restricted by the lack of free expression and authentic self. These women are considered worthless, without any authentic identity.
However, at the end of stories they become authentic figures with the power to possess and live their own lives.
References
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Iranian EFL Journal 426 Barbara, Christian. (1980). Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Bloom, Harold.(2007).Alice Walker (Bloom's Modern Critical Views).USA: Chelsea House Publication.
Braxton, M.Joanne.(1998).Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook. USA:
Oxford University Press.
Caruth, Cathy.(1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press.
Collins Hill, Patricia.(2000).Black Feminist Thought. New York and London: Routledge.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori, Laub.(1992). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature.
Psychoanalysis and History, London: Routledge.
Griffin, Susan.(1986). Rape: The Politics of Consciousness. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Harris, M.L. (2010). Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker, and Womanist Ethics. USA: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Walker, Alice.(1982). The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Iranian EFL Journal 427 Title
Is Reading Mistreated in a Translation Class?
Authors
Behzad Ghonsooly (Ph.D.)
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran Maryam Golkar Hamze'ee (Ph.D.) Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
Mohammad Reza Hashemi (Ph.D.) Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
Samira Abaszadeh (M.A.)
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran Mehdi Mirlohi (M.A.)
Sheikh Bahaii University Biodata
Behzad Ghonsooly is a Professor at Department of English, Faculty of letters, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran. He has presented numerous articles in national and international conferences.
Maryam Golkar Hamze'ee is a faculty member at Department of English, Faculty of letters, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran. She has presented numerous articles in national and international conferences.
Mohammad Reza Hashemi is an associate professor at Department of English, Faculty of letters, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran. His areas of interests are discourse analysis and translation. He has presented numerous articles in national and international conferences.
Samira Abaszadeh has her M.A. in translation from Department of English, Faculty of letters, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
Mehdi Mirlohi M.A. from Sheikh Bahaii University, Iran.
Abstract
Reading is the initial act and the essential part of any L2 to L1 translation bustle. In spite of its importance, it has not received due attention it deserves for much attention has been paid to the act of translation at the cost of developing necessary reading skills. This study attempts to examine this effect through comparing the
Iranian EFL Journal 428 reading time of two groups of undergraduate students who study in two different departments, i.e., English language and literature and translation departments. Using a TOEFL reading text, this paper has found a significant difference in the reading speed of the two groups. As the results show, Literature students have done much better than Translation students in terms of reading speed. In addition, we have scrutinized those aspects de rigueur of reading comprehension from the cognitive perspective and suggested ways of enhancing reading comprehension in translation classes.
Keywords: Reading speed, Reading comprehension, Translation, English Literature, Cognitive Psychology
1. Introduction
To a reader who is fairly cognizant of the nature of translation and its required underlying skills, it sounds axiomatic that translation has some shared areas with other important language skills, notably reading comprehension. But surprisingly enough, reading, as Mitchell (1995, p:95) rightly argues, is only rarely mentioned in books on translation theory.
It nearly requires little comment that to be able to translate is to be able to read (Steiner, 1975, p: 189; Simpson, 1975, p:257; Picken, 1983, p:282; Wills, 1982, p:87; Bell, 1987, p:407; Hatim and Mason, 1990, p:39). Reading comprehension seems to play a central role in translation to the extent that without proper understanding of the text and the required encoding ability, translation, if viewed from the perspective of reception, would cease to operate. It is interesting to note that translation proper is a dual enterprise drawing upon both reception as well as production (Newmark, 1981, p:246; Edwards, 1992, p:202). In fact, it is the former ability that precedes the latter and functions as prerequisite for production. Hence, whatever is produced when a text is actually rendered depends fundamentally on correct reception of the text. This becomes more evident when translation begins from a foreign language to the first language.
In the face of the centrality of comprehension in translation, translation practice is thought to directly affect reading comprehension skills. To illustrate this effect, one needs to examine some principles upon which reading comprehension operates. I would tentatively begin with the important principles governing reading comprehension skills from the view point of cognitive psychology. The problem is that while reading comprehension is a heavenly gift to the practice of translation, the reward it receives is not often worth taking.
To the best knowledge of the present writer, this inappropriate trade-off has not so far