Immigrants and immigrant suffering

In this very last week of our class we’re assigned to read two articles, one is by Sidonie Simith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler " Introduction: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in the New Europe ” and the other one is by Madelaine Hron “ Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture ” . The first article is very interesting gives a general understanding of the international politics and has a gender perspective but I think it is kind of hard to focus on a single blog post so I’ll be focusing on the latter one.

The article begins by providing some facts from migration todays world. And some very striking statistics mentioned that by 2005 there were around 34 million uprooted people worldwide and roughly 22% of this people are hosted at unstable countries like Iran and Pakistan. Of course the numbers don’t show any suffering of the immigrants but still gives a framework of how big is the issue.

One another important aspect of the article is a clear up attempt of the terminology. At this point I think the quote from Iva Pekarkova is meaningful. She remarks on ‘suffering enough’ to point out the distinction between immigrants and refugees and satirizes this with what she calls the ‘legal language game’ which we’ve also talked a couple of times in class ( also in one of the previous readings there was this men pretending as if to get the asylum etc.)

Academic exile vs. Immigrant I think is also important and we perhaps will be talking over it during the class.

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And on the pain part... There’s again another great quote (this week It seems like I’m on the literature side but there are really great quotes which speak for the issue in a very dense way. Well chosen by the author) , one from Virginia Woolf who observed that literature rarely portrays bodily pain in her essay “On Being Ill”;

“English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,”  “has no words for the shiver and the headache…. but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

How perfectly expressed the hardness of expressing pain for a native, expert on the language...Which brings the hardship of translating (the author takes immigrant expressions as translations) the pain to another language! Do you think Pain really needs to be translated? that it is not something universal?

Through this pain and translation the article also looks to the framework of culture, genre, target language and target rhetoric ... One striking point is about the role of pain in social discourse that as politics of pain which address to Nietzche’s ‘power of the weak’. This I think is a legitimate argument in itself up to a point, but remembering the nasty outcomes of the ideology the motto turns out far repulsive to me.

Above I’ve tried to highlight the parts of the reading which are catchy to me. Some class mates were complaining about last weeks’ Derrida readings but I think this week reading are high loaded and there are many things to focus on even in one piece not something to come up with a few basic ideas. seems like too many things to cover this last week before going on with our proposals.soo see you all on monday....