Posts featuring Frantz Fanon

Skin Has Two Sides: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Translating Jeferson Tenório

January 11, 2024 | in Interviews | by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . racism and colorism affect all of us . . . there’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it.

In 2023, Bruna Dantas Lobato won a PEN Translates grant for her work on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, a moving, feeling novel of how relationships—between parent and child, between lovers, between a body and a city—change, develop, and intwine against powerful institutions and worldly violences. Through the story of Pedro—which is in turn told through the life of his murdered father—Tenório vividly inscribes the urbanity of Porto Alegre and the generations that move through it, along with the cruelty, the mystery, and the love. In this interview, Lobato speaks on the novel’s treatment of racism, its refractions of Baldwin, and how its author draws on Brazil’s rich aesthetic canon.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): You’ve spoken before about how passionate you are about translating titles from the northeast of Brazil, but The Dark Side of Skin takes place in in southern Brazil—Porto Alegre—and Tenório has spoken about how the racism it describes is one that is expressed more pointedly in regards to the city’s relatively homogenous population. Could you speak a little bit about how geography or regionality works in this novel, and also about what drew you to translate it?

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): The Northeast of Brazil, where I grew up, is very underrepresented in literature both in Brazil and abroad. There are very few authors from that region available in translation, especially compared to the whiter metropoles. I’d love to see a greater range of stories from different parts of Brazil in English, so we don’t keep reading the same versions of Latin America over and over again.

I was drawn to Tenório’s novel for similar reasons, for how it presents the experience of a Black man in a predominantly white city with insight and tenderness. It’s a beautiful and painful book, and to have Tenório join the slate of Porto Alegre authors widely available in English with a different kind of book was important to me. I hope the publishers who often tell me that they already have their one Brazilian author—or one author from a certain region—will see that one voice can’t possibly represent a whole country.

XYS: A significant portion of the novel is written in the second person, which is a literary point-of-view that I think is especially sensitive to each individual language and the culture it stems from (e.g. in terms of interpersonal hierarchies, categories of persons, speech-acts). How was it working with the second person here?

Translating a Powerful Connection: In Conversation with Zahra Patterson

August 19, 2019 | in Interviews | by Sarah Timmer Harvey

. . . the political questions, rather than the success of the translation, became what was more interesting to me.

Zahra Patterson’s Chronology won the 2019 Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Memoir or Biography. Deserving of the accolades, but defiant of genre conventions, Chronology was inspired by Patterson’s friendship with Lesotho writer and activist, Liepollo Rantekoa, and her attempt to translate a story from Rantekoa’s native language, Sesotho, into English. Produced in collaboration with the editorial collective at Ugly Duckling Presse, Chronology is arguably more a box than a book, a capsule of the writer’s personal and political landscape containing so many loose pieces that keeping it intact requires physical care. Personal notes, diary entries, and photos from are interspersed with essays on the politics of translation, post-colonialism, activism, history, and connection, forming a narrative that firmly deconstructs its own relationship to chronological order and time. Following the Lambda Awards, we reached out to Patterson to congratulate her and ask her to about Rantekoa’s enduring legacy, finding and losing mementos and her decision to learn Sesotho in New York’s public libraries.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, July 2019

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Chronology opens with an email exchange between yourself and Liepollo Rantekoa. Can you tell me about meeting Liepollo?

Zahra Patterson (ZP): I met Liepollo during a bizarre exchange at a café in a trendy part of Cape Town. I was a tourist, and she worked at Chimurenga, a pan-African journal whose headquarters were nearby. I was taking a long lunch reading and writing, and I might have been the only customer in the café when she entered. She was supposed to be meeting a friend, and she was late, or the friend wasn’t there, and she needed to use a phone. Then she approached my table to ask me to watch her bags—she was going to use the waiter’s mobile to make the call so had to go and buy him minutes first. Basically, within a matter of seconds of entering the cafe, she had both me and the waiter doing her bidding, but she was also very gracious and generous in her authority.

I had recently purchased Dambudzo Marechera’s novel Black Sunlight and had been reading it while I ate, so it was sitting on my table. She was very excited and confused to realize that I, a tourist whose purpose was to watch her bags, was reading one of Africa’s most controversial writers, who was also one of her favorites. A few days later, we were friends, and I moved into her shared apartment in Observatory, a southern suburb of Cape Town. I lived in her house for three and a half weeks, and then we kept in touch via email, gchat, and Facebook. Our close connection was based mostly on a shared ideology that we accessed through literature.