Christine Imperial: On Translating Memory and History

Christine Imperial is a PhD student in cultural studies at the University of California in Davis, where she was awarded the Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Her first book, Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues, won the 2021 Gournay Prize from Mad Creek Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press, where it was published in April.

Her work has appeared in American Book Review, Inverted Syntax, Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. Find her on Instagram or at CImperial.com.

In this post, Christine discusses how a class assignment became her new creative nonfiction book, Mistaken for an Empire, the importance of having a support system, and more!

Name: Christine Imperial
Book title: Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues
Publisher: Mad Creek Books, Ohio State University
Release date: April 7, 2023
Genre/category: Creative Nonfiction/Hybrid/Poetry
Elevator pitch for the book: Beginning with an attempt to translate into Tagalog Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”—Kipling’s ode to American imperialism after the U.S. takeover of the Philippines—Imperial reflects on and writes against Kipling’s poem as she unspools her fractured family’s story. By interrogating the many intricacies of individual and national identity and the legacies that shape them, Imperial grapples with the tangled nature of allegiance, whether it be to family, to country, or to self.

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This book began as a project in Gabrielle Civil’s Translated Bodies class—a class that explored translation and its many articulations. The prompt for this assignment was to write a healing/wounding text, incorporating translation in some way.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” came to mind as I encountered it while in high school as a companion to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Not knowing anything about Kipling’s poem and inspired by Achebe’s post-colonial critique, I had read the former as a satire of imperial ideology and filled out a worksheet with that in mind.

When my teacher discussed the poem and had us check our answers, I was really confused that the poem was not satire, but a call to America to continue the legacy of the British empire. It was a moment of mistranslation (that led to me “failing” the assignment) and a recognition of being “the half-devil, half-child of the poem.”

It’s not a good poem, but it’s a poem that had such political and ideological weight. It was a poem used as rationale, which feels antithetical to poetry. I embarked on a translation of the poem into Tagalog and spliced my translation with excerpts from Philippine-U.S. history as my assignment for Gabrielle’s class. I wanted to explore what meaning emerges from the ruptures of this translation.

Initially, it was going to be a shorter piece included in what I thought would be my thesis—a rumination on my last name “Imperial—” but as I talked with faculty such as Gabrielle and my mentor Jon Wagner, and brought the text into workshops, I realized that the Kipling project would be my thesis. Each time I worked on it, it subsumed all the other poems I had worked on, and the conceit of translation really became an anchor for a larger exploration of nationhood, citizenship, language, family, and self.

The whole book is a process of asking not only how to translate one poem from another, but how does one translate memory and history, how does one take accountability for translation, how to translate these things without making them totally transparent or easily categorizable? Another anchoring question was “Who is the translator?” What happens to a text when both the readers and the translator, themselves, shift the focus on the translator’s subjectivity?

Writing the manuscript took about two years. Before beginning this specific project, I was already working on poems and hybrid work that explored my last name, Imperial, and its interlocking histories, as I mentioned earlier. During my MFA, I was really deep into exploring critical theory, post-colonial theory, film theory, and poetry, so a lot of my thinking emerged from those disciplines.

The project came into its initial form during the final weeks of my first spring semester at CalArts. My second year, I wrote the bulk of my manuscript during my fall semester and brought sections into thesis workshop every three weeks, getting feedback from my mentor and members of my cohort, and really bringing those conversations into the writing process. The following semester, which was my final semester at CalArts, was refining the sequencing and adding about 40 more pages. I wanted to have a complete and roughly publishable manuscript I could send out by the end of my residency at CalArts, so having that goal in mind gave me direction.

After graduating, I revised the text each time a little bit and sent it out. For a year, it was a process of revision then submission then rejection then revision, submission, rejection so on and so forth. After my manuscript was accepted by OSU, formatting took up the most time both on my end and my publisher’s. I learned to make compromises, not to be precious about leaving every single thing I wrote in.

Kristen, my editor, really understood the vision of the book and homed in on what was necessary, and we worked together when it came to sections that I insisted on keeping. I have a problem with wanting to put everything in and almost taking it to its extreme, and Kristen helped with curbing those sections where my impulse to do everything simultaneously was getting in the way of coherence and readability.

Alongside editing with Kristen and the like, having my partner take the time to read and reread passages and support me throughout both the writing and publishing process was really important. When what I wanted to keep in and what Kristen wanted to reduce clashed, my partner was sort of a mediator between those two points.

Yes, there were a lot of learning moments for me. One was the difficulty of replicating the crazy formatting work of the 8x11 pages of the manuscript into a book page, and how it wasn’t just a matter of copy pasting from a word document, printing it out, binding it, and calling it a book.

When I would work on edits and go back to pages of my book that had really chaotic formatting, it was difficult to go back to the headspace of when I wrote it or my own process in making these pages, especially without any markers or guides—another thing I also learned is labeling every text box or knowing exactly how many spaces I’m using rather than pressing the “Enter” tab and going by gut feel.

The most important lesson I took away from it was the understanding of the collective labor of publication and having an awareness of their time and effort. “If I’m having a hard time trying to translate the manuscript page onto a book page, then what more of the editing team?” I learned how to articulate process alongside vision and vice-versa, so that when the editing team received my notes, they could understand what I was doing.

The biggest surprise while writing it was how personal it got. It began as a very conceptual and historical project with the personal being less pronounced. Critiquing Kipling, English language hegemony, the state, and imperialism also meant critiquing myself and the ways in which I’ve been complicit in perpetuating dominant systems. Once I started writing more toward complicity, the more the personal broke through.

Rejections are hard and more frequent than acceptances. It’s important to sit with rejection, but not let it dictate your writing practice or the trajectory of your career. I forgot that a lot when I was submitting my manuscript and other writing. It almost broke me.

Having a support system (my fiancé, my mentors, my friends, and family) as strong as the one I have really got me through it too.

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