Discussion Group: Translingual Narrative in Zulu South African and Hispanophone Equatoguinean Novels
Monday 19 October 2026
12:45 - 14:00
Seminar Room 10, St Anne's College
Katherine Helmick (Oxford)
To explore the theoretical and cultural implications of translingualism in African literatures, my research brings into conversation two ground-breaking texts: the Zulu novel Noma nini (1965) by B.W. Vilakazi from South Africa, and the Hispanophone novel Cuando los combés luchaban (1953) by Leoncio Evita Enoy from Equatorial Guinea. Vilakazi and Evita composed these novels during eras of cultural crisis for their respective communities. The forces of modernity not only estranged Zulu and Equatoguinean communities from their traditional practices, but also disadvantaged them in the wake of colonialism. The novels' translingual narratives are inextricable from the complexities of negotiating between two identities: the authors as heirs to their communities’ traditions, and simultaneously participants in modern institutions.
In response to the threatened dissolution of cultural identity, a translingual narrative can act as a bridge, linking the present with the pre-colonial past. The two novels adopt different approaches to translingualism formally and thematically, but they share a common goal: the transmittance of cultural inheritance across multiple generations. Translingualism enables intergenerational bonds by constructing meta-narratives that link separate (and potentially conflicting) sites of cognition. The imaginative re-modelling of a community’s shared identity creates the potential to bridge ruptures along spatial and temporal axes.
As the translingual vector points both backwards and forwards, Noma nini and Los combés address themselves simultaneously to the past and the future. The strict divisions between their eroded cultures and encroaching modernity destabilize, collapsing the unidirectional logic of a temporal metanarrative. Their cultural inheritance thus finds continued expression through inviting participation, which alters and amends even as it receives that inheritance.
Katherine Helmick is currently a candidate for the DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. She completed the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at Keble College, Oxford. Before beginning her doctoral research, she taught with the JET program in Japan and served with the Peace Corps in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her research concentrates on cultural inheritance and intergenerational memory, translingual literatures in South Africa and Equatorial Guinea, and narrative theory in cognitive criticism.
