On Translating ‘Samahani’: Stepping Outside the Colonial Gaze

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s Samahani is out today from Foundry Editions in team translation by Mayada Ibrahim and Adil Babikir.

Samahani–which means “forgive me” in Swahili, stands “in stark contrast to everything that happens in this novel,” the publisher writes, adding, “Set in 19th century Zanzibar, this is a dark story of slavery, cruelty and vengeance, that depict the agonies of the native Zanzibaris at the hands of both Europeans and Arabs, that turns their apparent island paradise into a living hell of cruelty and exploitation.”

Mayada and Adil talked with each other about how they came to the novel, their process, in translating it, and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s place in the literary landscape.

About the decision to translate Samahani:

Mayada Ibrahim: I heard Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin tell the story of Samahani’s genesis and was immediately drawn to it. He was in Oman researching Omani literature when he encountered the two texts mentioned in the first chapter of this novel: Memoirs of an Arab Princess and An Omani Adventurer in the African Jungles. The princess was Emily Ruete, born Sayyida Salama bint Said Al Said, daughter of Said Bin Sultan who ruled Oman and Zanzibar from 1806 to 1856 and under whose rule Zanzibar became the commercial capital of the Indian Ocean, principally due to the trade of cloves and grains using slave labor.

Emily Ruete fled Zanzibar with a merchant and settled in Berlin, where she wrote this memoir, a nostalgic account of royal life that is sympathetic to slavery and replete with racist depictions of the native African, who is both ‘idle’ and the one whose labor is what built the sultanate.

The other book, the memoir of the slave hunter and ivory trader, Tippu Tip, is a graphic account of the murder and kidnapping of native Africans in order to sell or send them to work on plantations.

It was striking to hear Sakin describe this, because Adil and I had our own encounter with the archive of Zanzibar by pure coincidence. Before the project was on the horizon, we happened to co-translate Barghash Discovers Europe & Egypt: The Rehla of Sultan Barghash, 1875, a travelogue by the Sultan of Zanzibar from 1870 to 1888, first published in 1878 and then republished by the Omani Ministry of National Heritage and Culture in 1958. Soon after he was forced to sign a treaty to stop all slave trade in his region, the sultan visited Europe, and the book is an exhaustive log of state visits starting in Yemen and concluding in England. Throughout the book, there is an emphasis on the West as the vanguard of progress, and the idea that progress is not possible if a society is bent on indolence.

Sakin says that it was the absence in the archive of any account by native Africans that prompted him to write this novel. That resonated with me for obvious reasons and because I had just read and was very moved by John Keene’s “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness” essay, where he writes that the absence of non-Anglophone black diasporic authors in the Anglophone sphere “limits our understanding of the range and complexity of black lives all over the world, and also limits our understanding of forms of living and being, as well as of systems and structures of oppression, based on race (and ethnicity, indigeneity, class, gender, religious affiliation, etc.), have direct parallels globally. To put it another way, we have a truer and fuller sense of the black diaspora, and thus the globe, when we have translations of the vast body of work out there. What might happen if, through our engagement with these translated works, we were able to deepen our understanding of the conversations already underway across linguistic and cultural barriers, while also learning from them new ways to decenter Western and U.S. hegemonic perspectives about blackness and black people, which might include black Americans’ participation in furthering that hegemony. Perhaps not only more translators, but more black translators, particularly from the United States, will step into the breach to undertake this work.”

As for you, you were already very familiar with Sakin and translated his work, and you’re writing from a different vantage point, living and working in the UAE.  

Adil Babikir: Yes, I have been reading Sakin since his early beginnings, attracted by his sympathy for the less privileged and his ability to build powerful narratives out of unusual settings. His seminal work The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth, which I translated in 2016, is set in the extreme southeastern parts of Sudan, on the borders with Ethiopia and Eritrea. I was intrigued by the brilliant narrative and the superb intellectual discourse, which helped establish it as a masterpiece of contemporary African and Arab literature. The protagonist in The Jungo is not an individual but an army of marginalized seasonal workers from Western Sudan. The novel reflects their interaction with a diverse local population and their relationships with their employers, the harvest, women, and alcohol, as well as with the overall economic order. It also offers a deep dive into the souls of this group, exploring their aspirations, crushed dreams, and philosophy of life.

With each of Sakin’s books, I find myself entangled in a different set of intricacies created by Sakin’s experimentalism and his passion for cruising through untrodden paths. That is what continually draws me to his work.

On working together:

Mayada: I have always enjoyed translation most when it was a collaborative endeavor, but neither of us had translated an entire novel that way. Talking to colleagues, it became clear that one of us would need to do more of the writing, and the other more of the revision and feedback.

Adil: Differences in style naturally surfaced at the beginning of the process, but we managed to smoothe them as we went deeper into the work.

I think it’s a very rewarding experience. It’s interesting to compare the translation with how you would have handled it and to engage in such close reading with a partner. It’s always comforting to know that another “expert eye” is there to run through your draft.

Mayada: Yes, I learned a lot from this experience. Of course, the bigger challenge in co-translation, and the reason it doesn’t happen more often, I think, is that it’s difficult to get paid for it adequately. Many publishers will view co-translation as a good bargain and the rate you’ll be paid won’t differ much from a single translator’s rate. Maybe that is something translators can rally around changing industry perspectives on. It’s clear that it could be very enriching for readers and practitioners alike.

What we loved and what we found challenging:

Mayada: It has made me think a lot about what kinds of narratives are palatable and which are not in the Anglophone publishing world. I worried a fair amount, especially at the outset, about how a book with such ribald humor that collapses gender, plays with tropes, and is centered on a love story between a slave and a princess would be received. But speaking to friends who pointed me toward writers like Dany Laferrière (How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired) and reading Kaiama Glover’s essay on translating Haitian literature and navigating racial tropes, especially those related to Vodou, my anxieties were eased and it began to seem like a challenge worth pursuing.

Adil: Stylistically speaking, one of the challenges we faced in rendering Samahani into English was the author’s extensive use of internal dialogue, allowing the inner voice of his characters to run out freely, unbound by quotation marks. We spent considerable time deliberating on the best way to reflect that in the translation without affecting the flow or confusing the reader. There were several stylistic choices like this that we had discussions about.

Mayada: And we spent a fair amount of time on the Swahili words and phrases. Various plants, tribe names, and geographical locations are given their Swahili names. The phrase ‘shauri ya maujudi,’ according to Sakin, is an old saying that means something along the lines of ‘Leave it to God’ or ‘God will provide the answer’. However, old sayings tend to be difficult to track down, and the phrase was not recognizable to Swahili speakers we consulted. We searched and searched and finally had to accept a degree of uncertainty. Maybe readers will shed light on the matter for us.

On Sakin’s place in the literary landscape:

Adil: I think Baraka Sakin has cemented his reputation in the Sudanese and Afro-Arab literary scene as a distinctive voice, deeply connected to the universal human quest for freedom from the shackles of oppression and injustice.

Mayada: Scholar and translator Mona Kareem writes that Samahani is one of few narratives written in Arabic about the East African slave trade told through the point of view of the enslaved. Though the topic of the East African slave trade has been taken up quite extensively in the past two decades, very few novels grant the native African subjectivity. In fact, many of these novels seem unable to step outside their own gaze, stifled by colonial tropes. On the other hand, Sakin transforms the slave into the protagonist, envisions his past, situates him within society, unearths his lost culture, and restores his voice.

His work contributes to a growing body of work of historical fiction. David Schurman Wallace wrote a great essay for The Drift about the apparently urgent need to recover unwritten or lost historical legacies, particularly writers of the diaspora. He writes, “When a historical process unfolding is made visible, even if with just a hint, similarity and difference regain their balance: the past is often utterly unlike the present, but the breadth of a historical novel can help the reader sift through the debris and come to a more complicated understanding of change.”