Cultural Translation: Azur et Asmar

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Cultural Translation Azur et Asmar
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Michel Ocelot

• His fourth animated feature film
• His first Kirikou et la sorcière (1998) was a
  great success (Kirikou effect in France)
• Azur et Asmar also set partly in Africa
• Focus on transnational cinema

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Transnational Cinema

• as scores of transnational films have
  illustrated in various generic modes, leaving
  ones homeland entails leaving behind both
  physically and emotionally the familiarity that
  home implies. This leave-taking often entails, to
  use Freuds term, a becoming-unheimlich both to
  oneself and to those who are variously invested
  in the diasporic subjects remaining
  recognizable. (Ezra Rowden, Transnational
  Cinema in the Film Reader)

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Transnational Cinema

• borders are always leaky and there is a
  considerable degree of movement across them . It
  is in this migration, this border crossing, that
  the transnational emerges. The experience of
  border crossing takes place at two broad levels.
  First there is the level of production and the
  activities of film-makers. The second way in
  which cinema operates on a transnational basis is
  in terms of the distribution and reception of
  films. when films do travel, there is no
  certainty that audiences will receive them in the
  same way in different cultural contexts (Higson,
  The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema)

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Ocelot and Transnational Cinema

• Focus in Africa again, which embarks on a
  transcendence of all types of boundaries, a
  perpetual translation or transportation between
  the two cultures, the Orient and the Occident,
  thus promoting a mutual complementarity
• contact between its viewers, mostly children in
  the West, and a different culture
• awareness of the position of the immigrant in
  contemporary societies

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Posters and Titles
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Immigration issues

• Hostility toward immigrants in general in the
  Western, developed world, and toward those of
  Arab origin in particular, (invasion of
  immigrants in the continent).
• Borders are of paramount importance in relation
  to immigrants who are excluded from a process of
  opening up, or even completely eliminating, all
  forms of boundaries when capital and the larger
  economy are concerned.

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Immigration and the West

• such a dual-policy regime is viable when
  it comes to access to the EU on the one hand,
  lifting multiple restrictions on access by non-EU
  firms, investment capital and goods in the
  context of WTO, and the general opening of
  financial markets in the European economies, and
  on the other, building a Fortress Europe when it
  comes to immigrants and refugees (Saskia Sassen,
  Guests and Aliens)

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Developments

• New immigration bill adopted in France in 2006
  (DNA tests, French language tests, other
  biometric tests)
• these provisions are part of the general
  strategy and managerial logic based on the
  rationalization of processes and procedures,
  leading to the fundamental transformation of a
  conception of society once based on mutual trust
  into a situation of generalized suspicion
  (Merzouki, http//www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.20
  /dna-french-immigration-law).

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Transformations in Ocelot

• Ocelots film attempts a reversal of roles.
• The film inhabits Arab culture, embarks on a
  series of boundary crossings literal and
  metaphorical
• Finally manages a reversal of roles, turning the
  Self into the Other

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Cultural Translation

• transferences between cultures be it the
  physical trans-portations of individuals, spatial
  or temporal dis-placements, alternations between
  languages
• in-between space that undermines contemporary
  fixities

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Cultural Translation

• By drawing on more than one culture, more than
  one language, more than one world experience,
  within the confines of the same text,
  postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone
  literature very often defies our notions of an
  original work and its translation. Hence, in
  many ways these plurilingual texts in their own
  right resist and ultimately exclude the
  monolingual and demand of their readers to be
  like themselves in between, at once capable of
  reading and translating, where translation
  becomes an integral part of the reading
  experience (Samia Mehrez Translation and the
  Postcolonial Experience The Francophone North
  African Text)

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Cultural Translation

• authors of French origin, like Michel Ocelot,
  who were born and grew up in Africa, are also
  positioned in this space of in between, of not
  belonging, which makes them assume their
  bilingualism as an effective means with which to
  contest all forms of domination, and all kinds of
  exclusion within their own native cultures and
  their host cultures as well (Mehrez).

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Ocelot in-between

• Born and grew up in North Africa
• identifies himself with the North African
  immigrant in France and hints at the frustration
  he experienced as an adolescent because of his
  immigrant status when he was transported from
  Africa to France (I was a small hostile Beur,
  with an absurd attitude. I invented a country
  that never existed, a country on cardboard,
  instead of living the here and now).

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Beur

• Beur is the term used to refer to a person born
  in France of North African immigrant parents. It
  is not a racist term and is often used by the
  media, anti-racist groups and second-generation
  North Africans themselves. The word itself
  originally came from the verlan rendering of
  the word arabe (Le Robert Collins
  Dictionnaire Français-Anglais), where verlan,
  in the same dictionary, is a particular kind of
  backsland which consists of inverting the
  syllables of words, and often then truncating the
  result to make a new word.

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Border Subjectivity

• border filmmaking tends to be accented by the
  strategy of translation rather than
  representation (Hicks 1991, xxiii). Such a
  strategy undermines the distinction between
  autochthonous and alien cultures in the interest
  of promoting their interaction and
  intertextuality. As a result, the best of the
  border films are hybridized and experimental
  characterized by multifocality, multilinguality,
  asynchronicity, critical distance, fragmented or
  multiple subjectivity, and transborder amphibolic
  characters characters who might best be called
  shifters (Naficy Situating Accented Cinema).

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The Film

• Two boys spend their first years together, since
  Asmars mother is Azurs wet-nurse and later his
  nanny. This mother-figure, a literally
  life-giving force for Azur who has never known
  his real mother, brings the two boys up with oral
  narratives from her homeland, in particular the
  tale of the Djinn Fairy who awaits the brave
  prince to overcome all obstacles and finally
  deliver her from an evil spell that keeps her
  imprisoned. The two boys, although later
  separated, are at some point reunited and set off
  together to achieve the liberation of the Djinn
  Fairy.

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Film

• Setting
• Dual displacement (temporal and spatial)
• Disorientation of this in-between or beyond
  state, neither here nor there, or both here and
  there at the same time an exploratory, restless
  movement caught so well in the French rendition
  of the words au-delà here and there, on all
  sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and
  forth (Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture).

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Temporal displacement

• The Middle Ages, largely associated with a period
  of darkness for Western humanity, refer to a
  mediating period between the classical
  civilization of Antiquity and Modern times.

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Spatial displacement

• The countries of the Maghreb, or Barbary
• Largely cast in the role of the enemy
• The religion of its inhabitants alone was enough
  to exclude it from Christian Europe. The
  ambiguity of its position thus appears part of
  the known world but irremediably alien, part of
  both Africa, the Mediterranean and the Islamic
  worlds. Hence the difficulty of deciding where to
  classify it, for each of these accepted divisions
  of the globe entailed a certain number of
  characteristics in the European imagination,
  which North Africa did not fit perfectly (Ann
  Thomson Barbary and Enlightenment)
• Barbary a word which is overlaid with adverse
  connotations in European minds that it must
  immediately have provoked hostile reactions among
  most people.

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Discriminations Colonisation

• when an original culture is superimposed with a
  colonial or dominant culture through education,
  it produces a nervous condition of ambivalence,
  uncertainty, a blurring of cultural boundaries,
  inside and outside, a nervousness within (Robert
  Young)
• Example Poisoned by Saracens venom

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Universal Discriminations

• Azur (sky-blue French)
• Curse of blue eyes
• Motherless
• Wealth-poverty

• Asmar (dark Arabic)
• Curse of dark skin
• Fatherless
• Poverty-wealth

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Mother-figure

• Dominant position in the film
• Focal point in the opening sequence
• Breast-feeding (childrens nourishment)
• Childrens acquisition of speech
• Oral tradition
• Only when we have considered the whole scope of
  the basic feminine functions the giving of
  life, nourishment, warmth, and protection can
  we understand why the Feminine occupies so
  central a position in human symbolism and from
  the very beginning bears the character of
  greatness (Neumann The Great Mother).

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Mother-Father

• Primary
• Open
• Soft
• Good
• Other
• Unity
• Orient

• Secondary
• Closed
• Hard
• Evil
• Self
• Division
• Occident

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Travel to the Land of the Other

• Crossing of the sea
• Africa
• Utopia
• Blindness
• Difference

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Transformations

• Divesting of previous identity
• Angel Demon
• Angelic eyes Evil eye
• Self Other
• Native Immigrant/Alien/Unwanted
• Sight Blindness
• Wealth Poverty
• Speech Silence

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Transformations

• Familiar land Unknown territory
• Bright Dull
• Childhood stories Frightful reality
• Beauty Ugliness
• Example Meeting between Azur and Asmar

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• 1st merchant (addressing Azur)
• ???? ???? ?????
• Azur (Gives the merchant the money he earned
  from begging)
• ????? ??? ???!
• 1st merchant (takes the money)
• ???? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ???? ???? ???? ?? ???
  ??? ????? ?????
• 2nd merchant
• ???????! ?? ?????!
• 1st merchant
• ?? ?????? ????? ??????? ???? ?? ?????????!
• 2nd merchant
• ????? ??? ???? ???? ??????? (Says something in a
  different language)
• 1st merchant
• ???? ???????? ? ??? ??????????!

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• 1st merchant You miserable imbecile! Look what
  youve done!
• Azur Im sorry.
• 1st merchant What do you want me to do with
  that? What have I done to good god to fall on
  such a cretin!
• 2nd merchant He didnt do it on purpose.
• 1st merchant Not on purpose? They have started
  to annoy us, these foreigners!
• 2nd merchant And you, youre not a foreigner?
  (In Kabyle) Here, it is our home.
• 1st merchant Speak Arabic, not Kabyle!

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(No) Translation

• Deliberate absence of translation
• Gaps in understanding
• Sharing of alienation with main character
• Position of immigrant
• Exclusion
• Translation becomes part of the process of
  domination, of achieving control, a violence
  carried out on the language, culture, and people
  being translated. The close links between
  colonization and translation begin not with acts
  of exchange, but of violence and appropriation,
  of deterritorialization (Young). See
  Niranjana.

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Reactions

• The only drawback to this movie is that part
  of the conversation that is made in Arabic has no
  subtitle (fyi language used in the movie is
  French and Arabic but it has English subtitle).
  http//mettysays.blogspot.com/search?updated-min2
  007-01-01T003A003A002B073A00updated-max2008-
  01-01T003A003A002B073A00max-results34
  The story was presented in French and Arabic and
  I found it a shame that they didnt give subtitle
  for the Arabic dialogue http//whiteka.blogspot.c
  om/2007_09_01_archive.html).

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Power of Hybridity/Liminality

• Knowledge
• Inside/Outside
• Mediation
• No boundaries
• Power of the disempowered
• Example Jénane / Princess Chamsous-Sabah

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Space of Victory

• Myth
• Utopia (all characters displaced/misfits)
• End of Film

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Translation/Appropriation

• the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon
  of difference, never the active agent of
  articulation. The Other is cited, quoted, framed,
  illuminated, encased in the short/reverse-shot
  strategy of a serial enlightenment. Narrative and
  the cultural politics of difference become the
  closed circle of interpretation. The Other loses
  its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its
  historic desire, to establish its own
  institutional and oppositional discourse. However
  impeccably the content of an other culture may
  be known, however anti-ehtnocentrically it is
  represented, it is its location as the closure of
  grand theories, the demand that, in analytic
  terms, it be always the good object of knowledge,
  the docile body of difference, that reproduces a
  relation of domination and is the most serious
  indictment of the institutional powers of
  critical theory (Bhabha)

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False dilemma

• If we must translate in order to emancipate and
  preserve cultural parts and to build linguistic
  bridges for present understandings and future
  thought, we must do so while attempting to
  respond ethically to each languages contexts,
  intertexts, and intrinsic alterity. This dual
  responsibility may well describe an ethics of
  translation or, more modestly, the ethical at
  work in translation. Indeed, without more
  refined and sensitive cultural/linguistic
  translations and, above all, without an education
  that draws attention to the very act of
  translation and to the interwoven, problematic
  otherness that it confronts, our global world
  will be less hospitable in fact, it could
  founder (Bermann, Nation, Language and the
  Ethics of Translation)