“What’s My ***ing Name?”: Translation and Dis-locatia in Rap Versions of “Toba Tek Singh”
August 3, 2023 2:00 PM CST
Access the lecture via Zoom here (Passcode 718607)
Saadat Hasan Manto’s most famous story, “Toba Tek Singh” (1955) has become a touchstone text exploring the madness and inadequacy of national borders drawn along identitarian lines. In 2020, actor and rapper Riz Ahmed released a series of audio and visual texts that engage with the symbolism of Toba Tek Singh as a metonym for the psychically displaced migrant in a rap song titled “Toba Tek Singh”; a livestreamed Zoom performance of the album in which that song appears, titled The Long Goodbye; and an indie art film titled Mogul Mowgli. Through these multiple versions of the story of “Toba Tek Singh,” Riz Ahmed’s work explores the experience of what Harjeet Singh Grewal has referred to as dis-locatia—an “unmoored listlessness” that, through “the real and implied violence [of migration] places the émigré subject in a perpetual state of uprootedness” (Grewal 99). In my co-authored work with Grewal, we examine dis-locatia as the constitutive impulse that inspires diasporic Sikh subjects to express themselves through rap music; in this paper, I extend that argument to suggest that Riz Ahmed reclaims the experience of dis-locatia as a productively shifting site of infinite translation and self-versioning for South Asian migrants by reclaiming Toba Tek Singh’s gibberish as the rhyming, rhythmic, hidden transcript of rap.
Sara Grewal is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English at MacEwan University in Edmonton, AB, Canada. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 2016. Her areas of teaching and research include South Asian literature, world poetry, race and ethnicity studies, and global hip hop. Her current book manuscripts include a monograph on Urdu literary culture titled, The Urdu Imaginary: Nationalism and the Ghazalization of Urdu, as well as a book on diasporic Sikh hip hop titled, Dis-locatia, Deterritorialization, and Diaspora in Sikh Hip Hop: The Varieties of Sikh Experience. In her spare time, she also teaches Panjabi to young kids.