Seven Languages

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 2: Seven Languages

Twi was first. Twi was the sound of the house on Cantonments Road in Accra where Amara was born and where she lived until she was eighteen, a house with a corrugated roof that amplified the rain into a percussion that her mother, Akosua, talked through without raising her voice, because Akosua Osei did not raise her voice, not in rain, not in argument, not in the slow disintegration of her marriage to Amara's father, a disintegration conducted over fifteen years in two languages — Twi for the private conversations, the fights that were not fights but erosions, and English for the public ones, the conversations held in front of visitors, colleagues, the Anglican minister who came to the house on Sundays. Twi was the language of the interior. Twi was the language in which Akosua said the things she meant, and English was the language in which she said the things that could be heard.

Amara learned this distinction before she learned the grammar of either language. She learned it the way children learn the important things — not through instruction but through observation, through the body's registration of tone and context, through the understanding that when her mother switched from English to Twi in the middle of a sentence, the switch itself was a meaning, a signal that the conversation had moved from the surface to the interior, from the public room to the private room, and that the private room was where the truth lived, or at least where the truth was permitted to be spoken without the modulations that English required.

Twi. Akan language. Tonal. The meaning of a word changed with the pitch — high tone, low tone, rising, falling. The word papa could mean "good" or "fan" or "father" depending on the tone, and the tones were not musical ornamentation but structural, load-bearing, the way a beam in a house is load-bearing, and if you removed the tone or placed it incorrectly the structure collapsed, the meaning buckled, and the listener heard something other than what the speaker intended, and the gap between intention and reception was the gap that Amara would spend her professional life trying to close.

She spoke Twi to her mother. She spoke Twi to the women at the market in Osu, who sold plantains and tomatoes and ground pepper in wooden bowls and who spoke Twi the way the ocean spoke — continuously, without apparent effort, the words flowing one into the next in a rhythm that was the rhythm of commerce and gossip and the daily negotiation of living. She spoke Twi to herself, in her head, when she was thinking, when she was afraid, when she lay in bed at night in the house on Cantonments Road and listened to her parents not fighting in Twi through the wall that separated her bedroom from theirs.

Twi was the foundation. Everything else was built on top of it.

English came next, or came simultaneously, because Ghana was a country where English was the official language and Twi was the spoken language and the two coexisted in a relationship that was not parallel but layered, English on top, Twi underneath, the way sedimentary rock forms — the newer layer visible, the older layer supporting. Amara attended a school where instruction was in English, where the textbooks were in English, where the examinations were in English, and where the students spoke Twi to each other in the corridors and on the playing field and in the gaps between classes, the gaps where life happened, the life that the curriculum did not contain.

Her English was Ghanaian English, which was English but not British English and not American English, an English that had been in Ghana long enough to acquire Ghanaian cadences, Ghanaian syntax, the particular way Ghanaians constructed emphasis — the repetition, the elongation of vowels, the placement of stress on syllables that British English left unstressed. This English was hers in the way Twi was hers, and the two languages sat inside her without conflict, each occupying its domain — Twi for the home, the market, the heart; English for the school, the office, the world beyond Ghana's borders.

She was good at English. She was good at it the way some children are good at mathematics — not through effort but through an affinity that seemed constitutional, as though the structure of her mind were shaped in a way that received language easily, the way certain soils receive water, absorbing it quickly and completely, the absorption a property of the soil rather than a skill the soil had acquired. Her teachers noticed. They gave her books. She read. She read voraciously, indiscriminately — novels, textbooks, newspapers, the backs of cereal boxes, the fine print on her father's insurance documents, the hymn book at the Anglican church. She read everything that was written in English, and the reading was not study but hunger, the mind's hunger for the specific nourishment that written language provided, which was different from the nourishment of spoken language, which was social and immediate, because written language was solitary and preserved, the words fixed on the page the way insects were fixed in amber, the writer's intention preserved in syntax and diction and punctuation, and Amara, reading, was not just receiving words but studying the preservation, learning how intention survived the passage from the writer's mind to the page to the reader's eye.

French arrived at the Sorbonne. She was twenty-two. She had won a scholarship — the French government's program for Francophone African students, though Ghana was Anglophone, and Amara's selection was unusual, a recognition of her score on the DELF examination, which she had taken in Accra on a Tuesday in November, sitting in a room at the Alliance Francaise with seventeen other candidates, translating French passages into English and English passages into French with a fluency that surprised the examiners, who noted in their report that the candidate from the University of Ghana demonstrated not merely proficiency but intuition, a word they used advisedly, because intuition in language was rare and recognizable, the ability to know what a sentence meant before the sentence was finished, the way a musician knows where a melody is going before the melody arrives.

Paris. The Sorbonne. The city was gray in a way that Accra was not gray — Accra was gold and red and the deep green of the palm trees and the particular blue of the Gulf of Guinea, and Paris was gray, the gray of stone buildings and zinc roofs and the Seine in winter, a gray that was not the absence of color but a color of its own, the color of European history and European architecture and the particular beauty that Europeans had built from stone and rain. Amara walked the streets and the streets spoke French — the signs, the menus, the conversations overheard in the Metro, the lectures at the university, the arguments in the cafes, the particular French of Paris, which was not the French of Abidjan or Dakar or Kinshasa or Montreal but the French that considered itself the original, the source, the standard against which all other Frenches were measured and found, by Parisians, to be charming but insufficient.

She learned French the way she had learned English — through immersion and absorption, the mind opening to the new grammar like a hand opening to receive something placed in it. But French was different from English in ways that were not merely grammatical but philosophical. French had gendered nouns — every object in the world was either masculine or feminine, and the assignment was arbitrary but binding, and the arbitrariness meant that French speakers lived in a world where objects had gender, where a table was feminine and a book was masculine and the moon was feminine and the sun was masculine, and this gendering was not decoration but architecture, the grammar building a world in which everything had a sexual identity, and the world thus built was different from the world that English built, where objects were neutral, where a table was a table and a book was a book and the moon was the moon, ungendered, unassigned, free from the particular weight that gender placed on things.

Amara noticed these differences. She noticed them because noticing was her skill — not just speaking languages but perceiving the structures beneath the languages, the architectures that the grammar built, the different worlds that different languages constructed for their speakers. She wrote a paper at the Sorbonne about the untranslatability of gendered nouns, about the loss that occurred when a feminine noun in French became a neutral noun in English, the loss not of meaning but of texture, the way a painting loses texture when photographed — the content preserved, the surface flattened. Her professor, a woman named Isabelle Renard who had spent her career studying translation theory, read the paper and told Amara: "You do not think like a linguist. You think like a translator. There is a difference. A linguist studies the bridge. A translator walks it."

Ewe was her grandmother's language. Her maternal grandmother, Mama Dede, lived in Kpando, in the Volta Region, in a house surrounded by mango trees, and she spoke Ewe the way she breathed — without effort, without choice, because Ewe was not a language she had learned but a language she was, the way her body was her body, the way her hands were her hands, the Ewe inseparable from the woman. Amara spent summers in Kpando. She was six the first summer, and Mama Dede spoke to her in Ewe and Amara did not understand and Mama Dede did not switch to Twi, because Mama Dede believed that a child should learn her grandmother's language from her grandmother's mouth, without accommodation, without the intermediary of another language, the way a child learns to walk — not by being told how but by being placed in a world where walking was the norm and not walking was the exception.

Amara learned Ewe in that house among the mango trees. She learned it through the daily rituals — cooking, washing, sweeping, walking to the market, sitting on the porch in the evening while Mama Dede told stories. The stories were in Ewe and the stories were old — trickster tales, creation stories, the particular mythology of the Ewe people, who had migrated from the east centuries ago and who carried in their language the history of that migration, the words for places they had left and places they had found, the verbs for walking and arriving and settling, the grammar of a people in motion who had stopped moving but whose language had not, the language still carrying the motion in its rhythms, its cadences, its particular way of constructing the past tense, which in Ewe was not a simple tense but a series of tenses, each indicating not just that something happened but how long ago it happened and whether it was still happening in its consequences, the past not finished but continuing, the past tense not a door closed but a window open.

Amara carried Ewe differently from the way she carried Twi or English or French. Ewe was the language of childhood summers and mango trees and the particular light of the Volta Region in August, a golden light that came through the branches and fell on the porch floor in patterns that changed with the wind, and the changing patterns were the movement of Ewe in her mind — a language she did not use professionally, did not translate into or out of at the ICC, but that lived in her nonetheless, occupying a room in the house of her seven languages, a room she visited in memory and in dreams.

Hausa came from her father. Not directly — her father, Kwame Osei, was Akan, a Twi speaker, but he had worked for the Ghanaian government in Tamale, in the Northern Region, for six years, and in those years he had acquired Hausa, the lingua franca of northern Ghana and of much of West Africa, a language that stretched from Nigeria to Niger to Chad to Ghana's northern regions, a language of trade and Islam and the particular culture of the Sahel, the dry zone between the Sahara and the forest, the zone where Amara's father had lived and worked and learned to speak a language that his daughter would later learn from him, not in Tamale but in Accra, in the house on Cantonments Road, where her father spoke Hausa on the telephone to his northern colleagues and where Amara, listening, absorbed the sounds the way she absorbed all sounds — hungrily, completely, the mind registering not just the words but the structures, the patterns, the particular music of a language she had not chosen to learn but that had entered her through the walls of her childhood home.

She formalized her Hausa at the University of Ghana. She took courses. She read Hausa literature — the poetry of Nana Asma'u, the prose of Abubakar Imam, the oral traditions transcribed by European ethnographers who had recognized the richness of the tradition even as they flattened it into the conventions of European transcription, the way all transcription flattened the oral, the way writing was always a reduction of speaking, the written word carrying the content but not the breath, not the gesture, not the pause, not the room, not the audience, not the living exchange that the oral word existed in and that the written word could only gesture toward.

Hausa was her fifth language. By the time she left the University of Ghana, she spoke five languages fluently, and the fluency was not a skill she had cultivated but a condition she inhabited, the way a person inhabits a house with five rooms, moving from room to room depending on the need, the conversation, the person she was speaking with, the self she was being in each language, because each language made a different self — the Twi self was the home self, the English self was the professional self, the French self was the intellectual self, the Ewe self was the summer self, the Hausa self was the northern self — and the five selves were not contradictions but facets, the way a diamond has facets, each facet reflecting a different angle of the same stone.

Lingala was different. Lingala was not inherited or absorbed or studied. Lingala was learned deliberately, purposefully, in preparation for work. Amara learned Lingala in Kinshasa, where the ICC had sent her for three months during her first year as a staff interpreter. She was thirty-three. She had been hired by the ICC for her combination of languages — the West African languages that few European interpreters spoke, the French and English that the court required — and the ICC had sent her to Kinshasa to learn Lingala, because the court's Congo cases required Lingala interpreters, and Amara had the linguistic aptitude that Isabelle Renard had identified at the Sorbonne, the intuition that allowed her to learn a new language not in years but in months, the mind opening to the new grammar the way it had opened to every grammar before.

Kinshasa. The city was immense — ten million people, or twelve million, or fifteen, the population uncounted and uncountable, a city that sprawled along the Congo River in a vast, heat-struck expanse of concrete and corrugated iron and red earth. Amara lived in the Gombe district, in an apartment provided by the ICC, and she learned Lingala from a tutor named Christophe who came every morning at eight and spoke to her in Lingala for three hours, and from the city itself, which spoke Lingala the way Accra spoke Twi — continuously, everywhere, in the markets and the matatus and the bars and the churches and the street corners where young men gathered and argued and laughed in a Lingala that was faster and looser than the Lingala Christophe taught, a Lingala that had been shaped by the city's particular energy, its density, its music, its commerce, its violence.

She learned Lingala, and the learning was colored by the knowledge of what she would use it for. She would use it to translate testimony. She would use it to carry the words of Congolese witnesses from Lingala into English, to bridge the distance between the village and the courtroom, between the massacre and the judgment. The knowledge affected the learning — she paid particular attention to the vocabulary of violence, the words for gun and fire and death and flight and hiding, the words she would need, the words she did not want to need but that the work required, and the requirement was not negotiable, because the work was the translation of horror and the translation required that she possess the vocabulary of horror in every language she translated.

Lingala entered her differently. It entered through the knowledge of what it would carry. Every word she learned in Lingala was shadowed by the testimony it would eventually translate, the way a bridge is shadowed by the weight it is built to bear. And this shadowing — this pre-knowledge of the words' purpose — made Lingala heavier than her other languages, denser, the grammar weighted with the future testimonies that would pass through it, the future horrors that would be spoken in it and translated out of it, the future silences that would interrupt it when a witness could not continue.

Dutch was the seventh. Dutch was The Hague. Dutch was twelve years of living in a city whose language she had not intended to learn but that entered her through proximity, through daily commerce, through the particular politeness of Dutch shopkeepers who switched to English when they detected her accent but who spoke Dutch among themselves, and whose Dutch she overheard and absorbed the way she absorbed all languages — through the ears, into the body, where it settled and structured itself without conscious effort. She took lessons. She read Dutch newspapers. She watched Dutch television. She became fluent in Dutch, and the fluency was different from her other fluencies because Dutch was the language of her adopted home, the language of the supermarket and the dry cleaner and the neighbor who said good morning on the stairs, the language of daily life in a country that was not her country but that she had lived in for twelve years, longer than she had lived in any other place except Accra, and the duration had made the language hers in the way duration makes anything ours — not through choice but through accumulation, the slow accretion of daily usage.

Seven languages. Seven architectures. Seven ways of constructing the world in sound and syntax. Amara lived in all seven simultaneously, and the simultaneous habitation was not a confusion but a richness, the way a musician who plays seven instruments is not confused by the seven instruments but enriched by them, each instrument opening a different relationship to sound, a different possibility of expression. But the richness had a cost. The cost was that no single language was entirely home. Each language was a room in a house, and the house was large, and Amara moved between the rooms with ease, but the moving itself — the constant transition from one architecture to another, one grammar to another, one self to another — was work, even when it did not feel like work, even when it felt like the natural condition of her mind. The moving was work because each transition required a micro-adjustment, a recalibration, the mind shifting from the tonal structure of Twi to the gendered nouns of French to the compound words of Dutch to the particular grammar of Lingala, each shift invisible to the outside observer but felt by Amara the way a driver feels the shift from one gear to another — a small change in the engine's register, a brief moment of neither-this-nor-that before the new gear engages.

She sat in the booth at the ICC and she thought about her seven languages and the seven selves they had built and the particular self that the booth required, which was not any of the seven but an eighth — the translator self, the self that existed between the languages, the self that was neither Twi nor English nor French nor Ewe nor Hausa nor Lingala nor Dutch but the space between all of them, the space where translation happened, the space that was not a language but the movement between languages, and the movement was her skill and the movement was her burden and the movement was, today, beginning again, because the trial of Colonel Jean-Pierre Mukiza was beginning and the testimony would be spoken and the translation would be needed and Amara would sit in the booth and move between her languages the way she had always moved between them, with fluency, with precision, with the particular grace of a woman who had been born between languages and who would live between them until she stopped.