Supporting translation
Second, Warren falls hard for the biracial Sunita. Adamantly refusing to define herself as white or black, she accuses Warren of being a self- hating sunflower: white on the outside, black on the inside, and repressing a more integrated understanding of who he might be.
Spurred by these two new women in his life, Warren begins teaching alongside Sunita at the Mélange Center, a self- styled “mixedrace community organisation” where Tal finishes secondary school. Outraged black friends like Tosha angrily accuse Warren of selling out. “I know you’re beige,” she tells him. “But stay black.”
Warren isn’t so sure he should, and not just because he’s living a romance – which is the least credible part of this novel, by the way, in which the contrived plot and characters aren’t nearly as developed or interesting as the ideas.
Imagining himself as “mixed” rather than “black”, Warren muses, is akin to wearing shoes that actually fit rather than squeezing into shoes one size too small. Instead of changing himself to fit a preconceived idea of himself as black, Warren reflects, calling himself mixed allows him to proactively choose a label that matches his reality.
It’s quite a concept: Instead of being bound by the fiction of race, one might actually become and define oneself. But heady as that ideal is, Johnson is smart enough to recognise its limitations, twice over.
First, the outspoken Tosha reminds Warren that one can’t float free of history: All it takes is a drop of black blood to make one black in America, and denying that reality risks ignoring one’s heritage.
Second and even more insightful is Warren’s justifiable suspicion that what he dubs “Mulattopia” risks creating its own “rigidified” racial mythology, as yet another attempt to create an all- inclusive tribe devolves into an exclusionary cult – true to the history of a country where nearly every promising utopian impulse is eventually coloured and undone by race. – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/ Tribune News Service THE Man Booker International Prize will now celebrate translated fiction.
The Britain- based biennial prize awarded to a body of work emanating from anywhere in the world but published in English will now instead be awarded yearly for a single novel or collection of short stories translated into English. Essentially, the International Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize are being combined into a single £ 50,000 ( RM290,000) award which, starting in 2016, will be split equally between the writer and his or her translator.
The reason for the change, according to the award’s organisers, is that only 3% of all books and 1% of novels published in Britain and the United States every year have been translated from a foreign language. Introducing a new prize specifically to honour translated works will help to boost these figures, helping writers reach the widest possible audiences.
The 2016 prize opened for entries last Thursday. – AFP Relaxnews