Amara's Mother

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 25: Amara's Mother

She called on a Sunday. She called on Sundays because Sundays were the day her mother expected the call, the day that twelve years of calling had established as the calling day, the ritual fixed in the calendar the way the Wednesday evenings at Marcus's were fixed, the fixing a form of structure, the structure the scaffolding of a life lived far from its origins, the scaffolding holding the connection between The Hague and Accra in place despite the distance, the distance not just geographical but temporal — The Hague one hour behind Accra, the one-hour difference a small thing, a trivial adjustment, but the adjustment a daily reminder that Amara lived in a different time zone from her mother, a different position relative to the sun, a different angle of light.

She sat on her sofa. The flat was quiet. The North Sea was audible through the window — the Sunday-morning sea, the waves gentler on Sunday mornings, or seeming gentler, the seeming perhaps a projection, Amara projecting onto the sea the particular calm of a day without work, a day without the booth, a day when the headphones were in the ICC's building and the microphone was dormant and the red light was off.

She dialed. The phone rang. The ring was digital — the sound transmitted from The Hague to Accra through satellite and fiber and the particular infrastructure of international telecommunications, the infrastructure invisible, the infrastructure the bridge between the two cities, the bridge carrying the signal, the signal carrying the voice, the voice the thing the infrastructure existed to transmit.

Her mother answered. She answered in Twi. She said: "Amara."

The name in Twi. The name in the mother tongue. The name spoken by the mouth that had first spoken it, the mouth that had named her, the naming the first act of language her mother had performed for her, the naming the first translation — the converting of a newborn body into a word, the word the name, the name the first language the body received.

Amara said: "Maame."

Mother. The word in Twi. The word that Amara had spoken before she spoke any other word, the first word of her first language, the word that preceded all the other words in all the other languages, the word that was the foundation, the bedrock, the word upon which the seven languages were built.

They spoke Twi. They always spoke Twi. They had never spoken any other language to each other — not English, which both spoke; not French, which Amara spoke; not any of the other languages that Amara had accumulated over the years. They spoke Twi because Twi was the language between them, the language of the relationship, the language that carried the specific history of mother and daughter, the history that began before language and that language had accompanied since, the Twi the sound of the house on Cantonments Road, the sound of the kitchen and the bedroom and the arguments through the wall and the stories before sleep and the particular music of a mother's voice speaking to a child in the language the mother was born into.

Akosua asked about the weather. The weather was the opening — the conventional beginning, the social ritual that preceded the substantive conversation, the ritual a form of warming up, the conversation needing to warm up the way the body needed to warm up before running, the muscles of the conversation loosening, the tone establishing itself, the connection between The Hague and Accra settling into its Sunday rhythm.

Amara said the weather was cold. October in The Hague. She said the leaves were changing — the Dutch trees turning yellow and red, the color a spectacle that still surprised her after twelve years, the spectacle of deciduous trees in autumn a thing that Accra did not have, Accra's trees evergreen, the concept of seasonal change a northern concept, a concept she had learned in Europe the way she had learned French and Dutch, through immersion, through the body's experience of the seasons changing, the body learning what the eyes observed.

Akosua said the weather in Accra was hot. The weather in Accra was always hot, or warm, or humid, the weather a constant, the constant the Ghanaian condition, the condition of living near the equator, where the sun was directly overhead and the seasons were not cold and warm but wet and dry, the distinction a different way of measuring time, a different calendar, the calendar of rain rather than the calendar of leaves.

They talked about family. Akosua described a visit from Amara's cousin Kofi, who had come from Kumasi with his wife and new baby, the baby a girl, the girl named Ama, the name the Akan day-name for a girl born on Saturday, the naming system that connected the day of birth to the name, the name carrying the day, the day a destiny, the destiny a set of characteristics associated with the day, the association ancient, the ancientness the system's authority, the authority unquestioned, the questioning unnecessary because the system worked, the system providing names and meanings and connections between people and time.

Amara listened. She listened to her mother's Twi the way she listened to all language — completely, with her whole attention, the attention trained by twelve years in the booth, the attention a professional tool repurposed for personal use. But the listening was different from booth listening. Booth listening was for the purpose of translation — the ears receiving in order that the mouth might produce. This listening was for the purpose of connection — the ears receiving in order that the heart might respond, the response not a translation but a feeling, the feeling the warmth of hearing her mother's voice, the warmth distinct from the warmth of the rooibos tea or the warmth of the Dutch apartment, the warmth emotional, interior, the warmth of the mother tongue spoken by the mother.

Akosua asked about Amara's work.

The question arrived in the conversation the way it always arrived — after the weather, after the family news, after the pleasantries, the question placed in its position in the conversation's structure, the position mid-conversation, the position after the warming up and before the cooling down, the position where the substantive was expected.

Amara said: "I translate."

The answer was the answer she always gave. Two words. The two words a reduction, a compression, the entire complexity of her work — the booth, the headphones, the seven languages, the testimony, the sponge, the window, the bridge — compressed into two words, the compression necessary because the expansion was impossible, because the expansion would require explaining the ICC and the courtroom and the protocol and the testimony and the weight and the silence, and the explaining would be a translation, a translation of her professional life into the language of a Sunday phone call, and the translation would be inadequate, the way all translations were inadequate, the content carried but the weight lost.

Akosua said: "You have always translated."

The sentence was not a response to Amara's answer but a statement, an observation, a mother's observation about her daughter, the observation reaching back before the ICC and before The Hague and before the Sorbonne, reaching back to the house on Cantonments Road, to the childhood, to the time before the professional life, the time when Amara was not an interpreter but a child, not a mechanism but a daughter, not a bridge but a person who happened to live between languages.

Akosua said: "Between your father and me. You translated between us. When he spoke in English and I wanted Twi, you translated. When I spoke in Twi and he wanted English, you translated. You were the bridge between us. You were always the bridge."

Amara listened. She listened to her mother describe a childhood she had not thought about in these terms — the childhood as interpretation, the child as interpreter, the family's linguistic complexity managed by the daughter who moved between the languages, who carried the words from the father's English to the mother's Twi, who bridged the gap between the parents, the gap linguistic and emotional, the gap that the child traversed without knowing that the traversing was a skill, without knowing that the skill would become a profession, without knowing that the bridge she built between her parents was the prototype of the bridge she would build between witnesses and courts.

Akosua said: "Between Twi and English. Between what people say and what people mean. You translated the said and the unsaid. You knew what your father meant when he said one thing and meant another. You knew what I meant when I said nothing. You translated the silence too, Amara. You have always translated the silence."

The sentence entered Amara's ear in Twi, in the mother tongue, in the language of the interior. The sentence was spoken in the language that Amara associated with truth, with the private room, with the things that were said without the modulations that English required. And the sentence was true — Amara had translated silence, had translated the silence between her parents, the silence that was not peace but tension, the silence of a marriage in which the two people spoke different emotional languages and the daughter was the interpreter, the daughter carrying the weight of both languages and both silences.

The daughter carrying. The daughter had always carried. The carrying was not the booth's invention. The carrying predated the booth. The carrying was the condition Amara had been born into — born between Twi and English, born between the mother's language and the father's language, born in the space between, the between her first home, the between her original architecture.

Akosua said: "You were born between languages, Amara. The between is where you live."

The between. Amara held the word — or rather, held the concept, the concept expressed in Twi but resonating in all her languages, the concept the between, the space between languages, the space where translation happened, the space that was not one language or another but the movement between them, the movement her skill and her burden and the thing she had done since childhood, since the house on Cantonments Road, since the time when she stood between her parents and carried the words from one to the other and carried the silence from one to the other and was the bridge.

She said: "Yes, Maame. The between."

She said it in Twi, and the Twi was the language of agreement, of acknowledgment, of the daughter receiving the mother's observation and confirming it, the confirmation a form of gratitude, the gratitude for the naming, the mother naming the thing the daughter had not named, the naming the mother's gift, the gift of a word for the condition, the word not in English (where the condition had no word, where the condition was described in paragraphs, in Marcus's metaphors, in Dr. Brandt's clinical terminology) but in Twi, in the mother tongue, in the language where the word had always existed, the word the between, the word the mother's word.

They talked about other things. They talked about Kofi's baby. They talked about the new pastor at the Anglican church. They talked about the mango trees in Kpando, which were bearing fruit, Akosua said, the fruit abundant this year, the abundance a blessing, the blessing spoken of in Twi with the particular gratitude that Akosua brought to all blessings, the gratitude not performative but constitutional, the gratitude the way Akosua inhabited the world, the world a place of blessings and difficulties and the blessings to be acknowledged and the difficulties to be carried.

They talked for forty-five minutes. The conversation followed its Sunday structure — the weather, the family, the work, the other things, the conclusion. The conclusion was the same conclusion it always was — Akosua saying she loved Amara, Amara saying she loved Akosua, the love spoken in Twi, the Twi carrying the love the way it always carried it, without decoration, without emphasis, the love a fact spoken in the language of facts, the language of the interior, the language of truth.

Amara said goodbye. Akosua said goodbye. The connection ended. The signal ceased. The bridge between The Hague and Accra closed.

Amara sat on the sofa. She held the phone in her hand. The phone was warm — warm from her hand, warm from the call, the warmth a physical fact that she associated with the call's emotional fact, the warmth and the emotion linked in the body, the body not distinguishing between physical and emotional warmth, the body feeling both as warmth, as the opposite of cold, as the condition of connection.

She thought about her mother's words. The between. She thought about the between as a place — not a geographical place, not a point on a map, but a linguistic place, a place that existed in the space between languages, the space that Amara had inhabited since childhood and that she inhabited now, at forty-five, in a flat in Scheveningen, in a city in the Netherlands, the space the same space it had always been, the between unchanged despite the changes in the languages it stood between.

The between was where the testimony lived. The testimony lived between the witness's language and the court's language, between the Lingala and the English, between the speaking and the hearing. The testimony lived in the space where Amara worked, the space of translation, the space where the words crossed from one side to the other, the crossing conducted by the interpreter who lived in the between, who had always lived in the between, who was born in the between.

And the between was where Amara lived. Not just professionally but personally. Between Accra and The Hague. Between Twi and English. Between the mother tongue and the professional language. Between the childhood on Cantonments Road and the career at the ICC. Between the mango trees and the North Sea. Between the warmth of Ghana and the gray of the Netherlands. Between the home she left and the home she made. Between.

The between was not a deficiency. The between was not a lacking — not a lacking of belonging, not a lacking of home, not a lacking of the rootedness that people who lived in one language and one place and one culture possessed. The between was a condition. The between was her condition. The between was the thing her mother had named, the thing her mother had seen since Amara was a child translating between her parents, the thing her mother recognized as Amara's particular nature, the nature of a person who lived in the space between and who made the space between habitable, who furnished the space between with skill and purpose and the particular grace of a person who could move between languages and between worlds and between the horror and the justice and between the sponge and the window without breaking.

Without breaking. The not-breaking was the between's gift. The between allowed the not-breaking because the between was the space of movement, and movement was the thing that prevented breaking, the movement between languages keeping the translator in motion, the motion the opposite of the fixity that breaking required, the translator not fixed in one language or one emotion or one testimony but moving between them, the moving the skill, the skill the gift, the gift the between.

Amara set the phone down. She stood. She walked to the kitchen. She made tea — rooibos, the taste of South Africa, the taste of neither Ghana nor the Netherlands but somewhere between, the tea itself a between, a beverage from a third place, a neutral territory, a space that belonged to neither home.

She drank the tea. She stood at the kitchen counter and she looked out the window at the street below, the Sunday street, quiet, the tram not running at its weekday frequency, the city resting, the city in its Sunday mode. She looked at the street and she thought about her mother and the between and the testimony and the silence.

She thought about the testimony living in the between. She thought about the testimony's weight, the weight of seven months of translation, the weight that the sponge held, the weight that lived in the space between the ears and the mouth. And she thought that the between was not just the space where the testimony lived but the space where she lived, and the two livings — the testimony's and hers — coexisted in the same space, the space capacious, the space holding both the testimony and the translator, the carrying and the carrier.

The between was where she lived. The between was where the testimony lived. The between was where the silence lived — the translator's silence, the silence that was not empty but full, the silence that held everything the translation carried and everything the translation could not carry.

Her mother had named it. The between. The word was in Twi, was in the mother tongue, was in the language of the interior.

And the interior held the between. And the between held the silence. And the silence held the testimony. And the testimony held the witness. And the witness held the grief.

And Amara held them all. In the between. In the silence. In the seven languages and the one silence. In the space where she had always lived. In the space her mother named.

The between.