The stories in here were born through a creative writing and translation workshop that brought together writers and translators working across different languages spoken in Kenya. It was an ambitious project and after four days tucked away in Naivasha, the conversations around language use in Kenyan literature took on a historical and political perspective. We moved from discussions on multilingualism to linguistic and cultural representations in Kenya, from the challenges of writing and translating without an established standard orthography to the challenges and possibilities of languages that exist in different dialects, from the skills of editing across languages to the process of creating local literary markets, among many other topics. Further, as the stories in this volume demonstrate, the writers were engaged with various short story genres such as the folktale, adventure, family drama and history, among others.
The connecting factor in these different approaches was the question of language use, specifically within a localised context. Most of the stories in the two volumes had the authors also serve as their own translators from the original. From a cultural and historical context, most Kenyans are well versed in two or more languages. In this volume, writer/translator Naomi Ndumba Kimonye presented her first draft in Kiswahili and then it was translated into three other languages: Kimeru, English and Ekegusii while Doreen Karimi Nyaga worked with an already published short story, ‘Mama Mkwe’ by Rayya Timmamy and translated it into Kiembu and English. The multilingual nature of the society from where these stories are sourced made it easier for this particular project to further explore the place of language in literature from the point of production and translation. However, we also continued to bear in mind the fact that literary translation is subjective and is also highly shaped by its socio-cultural and political context.
As is already public knowledge, there are more than 2000 spoken languages in the continent of Africa and in Kenya alone, there are more than 42 spoken languages. In this sense, when we talk about literature produced and translated into languages spoken in Kenya, there is always a gap in the number of languages considered. In this writing and translation workshop, for example, we had fourteen languages represented. In a country with more than 42 spoken languages, statistically, the few languages we focused on in the workshop are not representative of the country. However, from the open call for writers and translators that preceded the workshop, the fourteen languages used here represent some of the larger linguistic groups in Kenya and can therefore be used as a map in reading language and linguistic differences in terms of population distribution. This, therefore, allows a discussion on the hierarchy of languages in African writing and translation that has continued to create an imbalanced power relationship across different linguistic groups. The writers in this group were particularly concerned with ensuring that a decision to writing and translating in one Kenyan/African language does not lead to replacing one language with another and end up recreating the kind of power asymmetry they were trying to dismantle.
The multiplicity of the languages used here, therefore, is a conscious effort at dismantling this hierarchy but at the same it also serves to capture the sociocultural and political context of the place of language(s). In the Kenyan context, the fluidity and elasticity of language use in everyday speech is a significant aspect of Kenyan culture that has hardly been captured in creative writings and translations. This writing and translation exercise, therefore, is an attempt to capture the spirit of this age in Kenya.
Doseline Kiguru, University of Bristol