Transcreating the Myth: “Voiceless Voiced” Migrants in the Queens of Syria Project

Abstract

This study functions within the conceptual and practical framework in which transcreation is located as the natural result of the process of adaptation of migrant Syrian narratives to the ancient myth of the Trojan women. While scrutinising the parallelisms between the Syrian women’s stories and those told by Euripides’s myth about the Trojan women, the real experiences of migration have turned myth into an act of communication, “an experiential act” meant for the construction of human stories that reverse mainstream anti-refugee policies. The dissemination of mythological narratives through adaptations of migrant stories, where myth and translation seem to go hand in hand, has reinforced the connection of myth and translation based on transcreative procedures by means of which migration is reconstructed across cultures and territories. By drawing on Leon Burnett’s concept of accommodation and reflux (2013), I claim that the process of adaptation of migrant stories to mythical settings and lives is turned into a dynamic understanding of translation of stories as a form transcreation, where myth is accommodated to contemporary contexts with migrant stories of exile as the field of discourse. By taking the Queens of Syria project (Fedda 2014, on screen; Lafferty 2016, on the stage) as the case in point, the whole artistic work is scrutinised and depicted as an act of accusation, where translation as an umbrella term functions, on the one hand, at a metaphorical level in terms of re-narration of migrant stories and, on the other hand, at a practical level in relation to translation as adaptation and performance, as well as to audiovisual translation. In this respect, the surtitles in Queens of Syria, which fulfil an ideological and cultural function, are repositories of acts of blame and claim, strategically transformative frames across narratives and modes, whereas the subtitles in the documentary are standardised depositaries of audiovisual translation norms.