Peter Abrahams’s Island Fictions for Freedom

When South African–born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels—This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)—fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest of the black world. This essay traces Abrahams’s thought on questions of race and decolonization through a close reading of his Caribbean fiction and how he came to theorize the literal and conceptual space of the Caribbean—the island—as a strategy for freedom. In so doing, the author asks, What are the limits of the Caribbean novel of the era of decolonization (1960s–80s) in the anglophone Caribbean? What constitutes it? And how does it articulate liberation?

Traduire la créolisation

This article proposes the translatological approach called intracultural translation, that is, translation within the same language-culture, coined by Desrine Bogle (2014), with specific reference and application to the Creole language using H. P. Grice’s conversational implicature, Venuti’s application to translation, and Roman Jakobson’s intralinguistic translation as theoretical frameworks. Mirroring the approach of the translator working within Romance languages who employs the Latin roots of these languages to judiciously resolve difficult translation issues, the concept of intracultural translation reinforces the notion of a Creole world view, product of a shared history, as evidenced through a shared linguistic and cultural heritage or “storehouse” from which translators of Creole texts can freely select elements to undertake their activity of intercultural transfer. In seeking to affirm and maintain the cohesiveness of Creole identity against the homogenizing effect of globalization, intracultural translation, currently underexplored and underexploited, is presented as a viable translatological approach to texts in Creole. Intracultural translation is exemplified through a case study of the English translations of three French Creole proverbs in the French Caribbean novel Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle by Simone Schwarz-Bart.