The Manuscript

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 26: The Manuscript

She wrote in Twi.

She did not know when the writing began. She did not mark the date, did not record the occasion, did not treat the first sentence as a beginning because the first sentence did not feel like a beginning — the first sentence felt like a continuation, a resumption, the sentence arriving in her hand the way testimony arrived in her ears, unbidden, automatic, the sentence the product of a process she had not initiated and could not control, the process the mind's processing of what the mind had absorbed, the processing producing output, the output not translation but something else, something she did not have a name for, the unnamed the thing she wrote.

She wrote in a notebook. The notebook was small — A5, spiral-bound, the cover a dark blue, the blue not the blue of the witness's head wrap but a different blue, a plain blue, a stationery blue, the blue of a notebook purchased at the Bruna shop on the Keizerstraat for three euros and twenty cents, the purchase unremarkable, the notebook unremarkable, the notebook the kind of notebook that anyone might purchase for grocery lists or phone numbers or the mundane records of daily life. Amara purchased it on a Saturday in October, during the deliberation, during the silence, and she did not know when she purchased it that she would write in it. She knew only that she wanted a notebook, the wanting a physical sensation, the sensation located in the hands, the hands wanting to hold something, to press something, to engage in the particular activity that the hands performed when a pen was placed in them and a surface was provided and the mind released what the mind held.

The first sentence was in Twi. The sentence was not planned, was not drafted, was not the product of deliberation — the sentence emerged the way testimony emerged from witnesses, from a place inside the body that was not the conscious mind but something deeper, something older, something that stored what the conscious mind could not access through deliberate retrieval but that released its contents when the conditions were right, the conditions the notebook and the pen and the Saturday afternoon in the flat and the silence of the deliberation and the particular quality of October light through the kitchen window, the light golden, the light warm, the light the condition.

She wrote: The silence has a weight and the weight has a language and the language is not English.

The sentence was in Twi. The sentence was in the mother tongue. The sentence was in the language that preceded the booth, that preceded the ICC, that preceded the seven professional languages, the language that was the foundation, the bedrock, the language her mother had spoken to her on the porch in Accra while the harmattan wind carried Saharan dust across the yard, the language of the house on Cantonments Road, the language of the interior.

She looked at the sentence. She looked at the Twi words on the page — the handwriting hers, the familiar cursive she had learned at Lincoln Community School in Accra and that she had maintained through decades of note-taking and margin-annotating and the particular script of a person who wrote by hand because the hand's writing was different from the keyboard's writing, the hand's writing carrying the body's participation, the pen an extension of the fingers and the fingers an extension of the mind and the mind writing through the body onto the page.

She wrote another sentence. And another. The sentences came in Twi, came without effort, came the way Twi always came — naturally, gravitationally, the language pulling the thoughts into its orbit, the orbit the orbit of the mother tongue, the orbit she could not escape and did not want to escape, the orbit the home.

She wrote about the booth. She wrote about the glass, the microphone, the headphones. She wrote about the one-way glass — the glass that let her see without being seen, the glass that was the boundary between the interpreter and the courtroom, the boundary transparent in one direction and opaque in the other, the transparency and the opacity the two conditions of her work, the seeing and the not-being-seen the two conditions of her existence in the courtroom.

She wrote about the booth in Twi because the booth in English was the professional space, was the space of the protocol and the translation and the accuracy and the neutrality, and the booth in Twi was something else — the booth in Twi was the personal space, the interior space, the space where the booth's effect on the person in the booth could be described without the professional vocabulary that English provided, the professional vocabulary accurate but insufficient, the vocabulary describing the booth's function (translation, interpretation, simultaneous processing) but not the booth's effect (absorption, accumulation, the weight that settled in the body and did not leave).

The Twi did not have a professional vocabulary for the booth. The Twi did not have words for simultaneous interpretation, for auditory processing, for vicarious traumatization. The Twi had words for carrying, for silence, for the between, for the things that the mother tongue named because the mother tongue named the human rather than the professional, the human the domain of Twi, the professional the domain of English and French and the other acquired languages. And the human was what Amara was writing about — the human experience of the booth, the human cost of the bridge, the human condition of the translator who sat behind glass and carried testimony in her body and was silent about the carrying.

She wrote for an hour. She wrote without stopping, without revising, without the editorial attention that professional writing required — the writing not professional but personal, the writing not for an audience but for the self, the self the only reader, the reading the self's encounter with its own interior, the interior made visible on the page, the page the mirror, the mirror reflecting what the self had not known it contained until the pen moved and the Twi emerged and the words accumulated on the page the way testimony accumulated in the sponge.

She wrote about the witnesses. She wrote about Witness 247 — the small body, the blue head wrap, the voice that came from deep inside, the voice quiet, the voice carrying the village and the attack and the ditch and the prayer. She wrote about the witness in Twi, and the writing in Twi was different from the translating in English — the translating in English was the professional act, the conversion of the witness's Lingala into the court's English, the conversion conducted with fidelity and accuracy and neutrality. The writing in Twi was the personal act, the expressing of what the translating had done to the translator, the expressing not a translation but an original, the original the interpreter's own testimony, the testimony of what it was to sit in the booth and hear the witness's voice and carry the witness's words and be silent about the carrying.

She did not write the testimony. She did not record the witness's words, did not reproduce the three sentences or the five-minute pause or the untranslatable word. The confidentiality protocol prohibited this, and Amara observed the prohibition not from obedience alone but from understanding — the testimony was the witness's, was the witness's property, was the thing the witness had given to the court and not to the interpreter, the interpreter a conduit, the conduit not retaining what passed through it. Or the conduit retaining — the sponge retaining — but the retention private, interior, the retention not to be externalized, not to be written, the written testimony a violation, a breach.

What she wrote was her own. What she wrote was the interpreter's experience of the testimony — not the testimony itself but the effect of the testimony on the person who translated it, the effect the carrying, the carrying the weight, the weight the thing she wrote about in Twi, the Twi the language that could hold the weight because the Twi was the language of the self and the self was where the weight resided.

She closed the notebook. She placed the pen on the kitchen counter. She stood at the window. The October light was fading, the golden light becoming amber, the amber becoming gray, the day's color cycle reaching its evening phase, the phase the transition from light to dark that the Dutch autumn enacted every day with the gradual and methodical progression that was the Dutch character even in the behavior of the light.

She did not open the notebook the next day. She did not open it for a week. The notebook sat on the kitchen counter, beside the thermos and the pens and the rooibos tea box, the notebook an object among objects, the notebook unremarkable in its physical form, the blue cover the same blue as a hundred other notebooks in a hundred other kitchens in Scheveningen, the notebook's significance entirely interior, the significance in the words inside, the Twi inside, the self inside.

She opened it again on a Thursday evening, a week after the first writing. She opened it because the hands wanted to write — the wanting the same wanting that had produced the purchase, the wanting physical, located in the fingers, the fingers seeking the pen and the pen seeking the page and the page receiving the Twi the way the headphones received the Lingala, the receiving automatic, the receiving the condition.

She wrote about the North Sea. She wrote about the running — the morning runs along the water line, the feet on the sand, the breath in the lungs, the silence between the languages that the running provided. She wrote about the sea's gray, the gray the constant, the gray the one thing that did not change in translation because the gray was the same in every language, the gray the universal, the gray the thing that the between and the booth and the seven languages could not alter.

She wrote about her mother. She wrote about the Sunday phone calls, about the Twi flowing between The Hague and Accra, about the between that her mother had named, the between the space where Amara lived, the between the word her mother had given her in Twi, the word the naming, the naming the gift. She wrote about the gift and the writing was a form of receiving the gift again, the gift renewed in the writing, the gift the word, the word the between, the between the Twi.

She wrote about Marcus. She wrote about the sponge — Marcus's metaphor, Marcus's naming, the sponge the word that Marcus had given her in English, the English the professional language, the word professional, the word clinical, the word accurate and insufficient the way all English words for the interior were accurate and insufficient, the accuracy and the insufficiency the condition of the professional language, the professional language equipped for the professional and not for the personal.

In Twi, the sponge was something else. In Twi, the sponge was not a metaphor but a description, was not a clinical term but a household word, was the thing her mother used in the kitchen to wash dishes and that absorbed water and that released water when squeezed and that retained a residue of moisture even after the squeezing, the residue the permanent dampness that the sponge carried, the dampness the sponge's condition. In Twi, the sponge was domestic, was daily, was the object of the kitchen rather than the object of the psychologist's office, and the domesticity was the Twi's gift — the gift of making the clinical into the ordinary, the professional into the personal, the abstract into the concrete, the concrete the material of the mother tongue, the mother tongue the language of concrete things, of brooms and sponges and mango trees and the dust the harmattan carried.

She wrote in the notebook over the weeks of the deliberation. She wrote irregularly — sometimes every day, sometimes with days between, the writing following its own rhythm, the rhythm not the rhythm of the booth (which was the rhythm of testimony, of speak and translate and pause and speak again) but the rhythm of the self, the self's rhythm irregular, unpredictable, the rhythm determined by the interior's readiness to be expressed, the readiness not summoned but arrived at, the arriving the condition.

She filled pages. She filled them with Twi — with the cursive script that was hers, with the tonal language that required diacritical marks she did not always include because the marks were for readers and she was the only reader and she knew the tones without the marks, the knowing the native speaker's privilege, the privilege the ownership of the language, the language hers in a way that English and French and Lingala and the other acquired languages were not hers, the ownership the difference between the language you learned and the language you were born into.

She did not show the notebook to anyone. She did not show it to Marcus, did not mention it to Dr. Brandt, did not describe it to her mother. The notebook was private — private in the way the booth was private, the one-way glass creating a private space in a public building, the notebook creating a private space in a private life, the privacy doubled, the doubling the interpreter's condition, the condition of a person whose professional life was conducted behind glass and whose personal life was conducted behind the additional glass of solitude and silence.

The notebook was not therapy. The writing was not the processing that Dr. Brandt recommended — the mindfulness, the somatic work, the clinical techniques for managing vicarious traumatization. The notebook was something else. The notebook was expression — the self expressing itself in the language of the self, the expression not a treatment but a function, the function the same function as the booth's function but in reverse, the booth converting the external (the testimony) into the internal (the absorption) and the notebook converting the internal (the absorption) into the external (the writing), the two conversions mirror images, the notebook the booth's mirror, the mirror reflecting the booth's process from the other direction.

The booth received. The notebook released. The booth absorbed. The notebook expressed. The booth was silent. The notebook spoke — spoke in Twi, spoke in the mother tongue, spoke in the language that was not the language of the court or the language of the testimony or the language of the protocol but the language of the self, the self the thing the protocol could not govern, the self the ungoverned, the self the writer.

She did not think of the writing as a manuscript. She did not think of the notebook as a document, as an artifact, as a thing that existed beyond the act of the writing itself. The writing was the act. The act was the purpose. The act was the pen on the page and the Twi on the page and the self on the page, the three the same thing, the thing the expression, the expression the release, the release not the squeezing of the sponge (which was Marcus's act, Marcus's departure, Marcus's shampoo bottles) but something different, something quieter, the release conducted not by leaving but by writing, not by changing the work but by changing the relationship to the work, the relationship altered by the act of writing about it in the language that was not the language of the work but the language of the self.

The eighth language — the silent language, the language of the between, the language without words — had found a ninth. Or not a ninth but a return to the first. The Twi was the first language. The Twi was the language before the silence. And the writing in Twi was the silence finding voice — not the voice of the microphone, not the voice of the English channel, not the professional voice that carried the testimony across the bridge, but the personal voice, the interior voice, the voice of the self speaking to the self about the thing the self carried.

The notebook filled slowly. The blue cover became worn — the corners softened, the spine creased, the notebook acquiring the particular patina of an object that was used regularly and handled with the unconscious care of a person who valued the object not for its material form but for its function, the function the holding of the Twi, the Twi the holding of the self, the self the holding of the silence.

She kept the notebook on the kitchen counter. She kept it beside the thermos and the pens and the rooibos tea box. She kept it in the domestic space, in the kitchen's space, in the space where the sponge lived and the broom lived and the mango from the Indonesian market lived. She kept it among the ordinary objects because the notebook was an ordinary object — a blue notebook, A5, spiral-bound, three euros and twenty cents — and the ordinariness was the point, the ordinariness the Twi's gift, the gift of making the extraordinary into the ordinary, the unspeakable into the spoken, the silence into the word.

The word was in Twi. The word was on the page. The word was hers.

The manuscript. The notebook. The mother tongue.

The silence finding voice. The voice finding the first language. The first language holding what the seven languages carried.

The writing continued. The silence continued. The two coexisted. The coexistence was the between.